If you're interested in Roguelike Celebration it is a near certainty you'd be interested in The Banished Vault. I even gave a talk on how space travel is carefully abstracted a few years ago! www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSJA...

To the great relief of most everyone around me, I have finished reading that book and will no longer be reading passages from it to them in the kitchen, the hallway, the bedroom, etc.

"When that tribal knowledge departs, you're left having to reinvent an awful lot of in-house expertise that didn't want to participate in your RTO games, or play Layoff Roulette yet again this cycle. This doesn't impact your service reliability — until one day it very much does…"

It's difficult, when sharing a link to something on the web, not to direct others into a store—in which they are to buy, or their attention and activity is to be sold. Everywhere a market.

Don't miss today's conversation with @olgaravn.bsky.social. Witches, folk magic, alchemy, the fear of women gathering, animating the archive through ritual & the imagination, & much more Audio📻: tinhouse.com/podcast/olga... @ndbooks.bsky.social @bookhugpress.bsky.social @vikingbooksuk.bsky.social

ICYMI, I’m writing a quarterly column on collections of weird fiction. So far we’ve got an intro, one on Steve Rasnic Tem, Ananda Lima, and Christi Nogle, and another on John Langan, Rebecca Campbell, and B. Catling. There’s a lot of weird theorizing and words like “apophatic” and “genric”.

How likely is it that you would recommend Net Promoter Score to a friend or colleague? Really? With that dirty mouth of yours?

Plantin on a screen looks—cute? Somehow quite different than on paper, or, esp., a Magic card.

"Oh! They got this all screwed up." [pen squeaking] Na𝒉: 𝙄 No Wri, Mo

Setting up a PC nowadays makes me feel like Harry Caul in his apartment at the end of "The Conversation": get rid of notifications, sweep for bugs, take apart the furniture, keep only what you truly need. www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEo7...

🎙️ NEW EPISODE ALERT 🎙️ 🌍 The ESA’s 2025 Global Games Report drops 💬 and Laine + Joost have some thoughts 🎂 PLUS: 40 years of the NES! Tune in here 👉 buff.ly/vN4lyND

"You must have… the schooling… the physical readiness… but also a hardon of resolution… The angels at the doorways will try to con you, threaten you, play all manner of cruel practical jokes, to turn you aside. The Qlippoth… will use all your love for friends who have passed across against you."

Not letting aid in means the genocide is still ongoing.

The elite can be happy only when they have the power to make others suffer.

The paper in close-ups is so toothy. You watch and can feel the damned things.

ALERT! ALERT! We're in the last days of being able to preorder my book EVERYTHING IS PERMITTED: ON ASSASSIN'S CREED, which is a book about the Assassin's Creed franchise and how games reflect and impact the real world! Click this link and use the code MN93450 for 30% off! z.umn.edu/14943

Eyes propped open with dollar signs.

We recoil from taxing the rich, yet they tax us.

I had a great time on Aftermath talking about how you can use Assassin’s Creed as a method of tracing the pathway to the world we live in.

How do I explain to offline people that my favorite Japanese mascot said "we can only be liberated from queer oppression if we are truly seen as human" and then started wielding fireworks like a rocket launcher on the side of a mountain without sounding like I've totally lost it? Chiitan forever

My grandfather's memoirs are trapped in .LWP files—that will not be read nor converted by any software I can find online! Any help or ideas? (CloudConvert and others fail; LibreOffice does not open them.)

"Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted the panel 'Nederlandse Spreekwoorden' including on it literal illustrations of more than a hundred Dutch language proverbs. "We've created this interactive version of the analog painting so you can playfully discover the tons of popular wisdom buried on it."

Voices From the North: @jbarchivist.bsky.social reviews AS THE EARTH DREAMS: BLACK CANADIAN SPECULATIVE STORIES, edited by Terese Mason Pierre (@houseofanansi.bsky.social) ancillaryreviewofbooks.org/2025/10/10/v...

15-year-old's thoughts expanding suddenly, like when one pops the pressure in one's ears.

Because when you burn down a house and nobody ever rebuilds it, someone is still forced to live in the ashes

I am hundreds, probably actually thousands, of hours into Slice & Dice and I am *still* encountering totally novel, exciting situations. For sure my all time fav turn-based roguelike. (My strong rec on how to play: Cursed Hyper mode w/ 20% wild modifiers on) tann.itch.io/slice-dice

I have a book on Assassin’s Creed coming out and I would like to be on your podcast / show / stream to promote it!

"While working Canadians are paying higher rates than their ultra-wealthy fellow citizens, and while wealth inequality has exploded to historic levels, the government is currently considering a so-called 'austerity budget' that is almost certain to make these problems worse."

AI is two projects. The first is willfully degrading definitions to create a void of meaning (any algorithm is AI). The second is projecting propaganda into that void (AI can replace labor, is sentient). This creates a space where you can claim "the Pac-Man ghosts are sentient" to sell products.

"Antler River RPG Trade, a zine that caters to role-playing enthusiasts [in London, Ontario]… Proceeds from the zine goes to the fight against homelessness."

Hesitant to order books from the States to Canada after I had to pay 100% border-clearing fees for the latest ones. Imagine that: me, hesitant to order books. I thought it'd never happen…

Sick of computer asking to see my papers.

“What sea is it you have plunged more than once to the bottom of, alerted, full of adrenalin, but caught really… in this steel pot, softening to devitaminized mush inside the soup-stock of your own words, your waste submarine breath?”

That's right.

lawn sign design for Scarborough Loves Palestine/Scarborough For Palestine neighbourhood group

The Chatelaine Thecla "was taller even than I had expected, nearly too tall to stand upright in the cell […] She picked up a leek, and then as if she did not know what else to do with it dropped it down her throat like a mountebank swallowing a viper."

"Pressures of startup culture leave little time for such existential musings […] the team is eager to bring their product to market before voice-box plushies sour parents on the entire concept of AI for kids […] "'Post-launch, we’ll probably bring on an AI ethics person to our team,' he said."

Hard cutting back on caffeine—but Tim's or McD's being the only options on the way to work makes it easier to avoid coffee.

"We've got a captured population. There are only two of those, BTW, students and prisoners. And frankly, the student data is richer, more diverse, [..] in ways that make it more valuable." -- @tressiemcphd.bsky.social

“'Severian,' she said. 'It can't be.' Hanging over the city like a flying mountain in a dream was an enormous building… I tried to speak, to deny the miracle even as I saw it; but before I could frame a syllable, the building had vanished like a bubble in a fountain…”

Full books Weighty books Ample books Avoirdupois books Zaftig books

Please just develop the literacies and dispositions to play old games just like you can watch old movies.

I've been blocked by many AI "artists" replying with this image 😂