Hello 2026. I have fairly high personal expectations of you. Cheers.

"Academics literally cannot make genAI go away" we also can't make underage drinking go away and we're not advocating for installing bar carts in every classroom.

The USA will be Russia's closest ally by 2030, unless something quite radical happens to stop it.

Visiting Sydney. Specifically wanted to take the metro to Chatswood today. So naturally, trackwork :(

Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams shouldn't be a shocking read, but it is anyway. Just layer after layer of I guess misanthropy? Absolutely casual disregard for anything but the extremely narrow set of priorities they got to choose.

Warp Drive-Thru Burgers & Fries Klingon Fried Chicken Intergalactic House of Pancakes Main Deflector Buffet O'Brien's (Japanese food) Kiera's Temptation (gourmet jello) Make it So (French, obviously) Qo'nos Roadhouse Risa'n Shine Raktajino

Make a Bond movie casual: Tiny Tim Never Dies Wait.

Ugh ok what exactly happened to Xtwitter today? A link to a readable article would be fine!

Watching Parts Unknown and feeling every single minute of the past 12 years in my bones...

I haven't gotten public transport in and out of Sydney in ~10 years. Gotta say, the metro line is an absolute home run.

DayZ mod > DayZ standalone > PUBG > Fortnite. Is that a straight line, broadly speaking? Is there another massive scale battle-royale that should be part of this lineage?

No one who follows me actually needs this information, but I feel compelled to say it anyway: More guns in your community will not make you more safe, nor will you even *feel* more safe.

I didn't know until just this second that Stranger Things S5 had used Queen's Who Wants to Live Forever in the dramatic trailer and, friends, I am not happy about it.

Digging through some best practice stuff as I try to account for AI in my assessment design for next year. Found a doc from TEQSA in 2022, in which I've come across this absolutely white-hot take:

What's the logic behind this Disney OpenAI deal? Sora can use the characters but not their likenesses? Why would Disney pay OpenAI for this and not the other way around?

Honestly the claim that Fuentes is 27 is more shocking to me than that he's a virgin.

WRT the social media ban: I remember the campaign for an R18+ rating for videogames in Australia. The way this country decides what is and is not for kids, then feels compelled to legislate around it, is, to put it mildly, a bit odd. But also, what's the slogan? "Adult time for adult crime"?

The videogame industry being bought by Saudi Arabia while the US captures Venezuela(n ships) for oil is an interesting inversion. How powerful will SA be in the next 30 years? They are doing a remarkable job of capturing Western culture thus far.

you gotta admit “GDC moving from San Francisco to Saudi Arabia” is pretty funny

Look, Australia has some great features, but its gleeful parochialism ain't one.

I would like to relax and play a fun videogame. Do y'all remember those?

I would also like to know this.

When I moved to CA, I wanted to like Newsom, but my admittedly short time there has soured my outlook dramatically. The level of inequity throughout the Bay Area is astronomical. Shanty towns are built within walking distance of Facebook HQ. Is that the cultural norm he's shooting for?

Find me someone who has spent less time learning to talk with their hands and more time learning how to speak meaningfully.

It's time for me to spruce up the reading list for my "Games & Play" general intro to game studies course for 2026. Is there a (necessarily undergraduate-friendly) article or chapter that jumped out at you in the last little while? It's a pretty broad course so many things might be relevant.

No, and not in a "lulz videogames" way either. He's in an even greater position of linguistic authority now than as a broadcaster and so feels he has the power to set the meaning of words. He can bend reality to fit the narrative by stating it emphatically. *This* is what the fog of war is:

Pop-pop's new meds kicked in.

Some kids are going to see a whole lot of really outlandish shit as they swim deeper and deeper looking for a platform that hasn't been banned.

I've followed @familyjules7x.bsky.social on YouTube for a long time and always loved his video game covers. The 2025 edition of Replay might be his masterpiece. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pq2u...

You are not wrong about this.

Reading Adrienne Massanari's "Gaming Democracy" and feeling some kind of way. Very much a book that needed to be written.

Although Australia doesn't celebrate Thanksgiving, with the year ending it's still a good time to reflect. I'm almost indescribably thankful that I am here, in Aus, to be saying this. It's still a bit surreal for me to have picked up my family and left the instability of the USA.

All of this. And more, because I think this was well underway before AI, and that AI is really only a symptom of the greater problem which Jes does touch here: inability to relate to others. Nothing *means* anything in the sense of communication to another person.

Been writing this afternoon and now my fingernails are too long. Oh look a piece of chocolate. Better post about that on Bluesky!

Dream Theater A Perfect Circle Devin Townsend Muse Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Fireflies.

*STRONGLY* Agee. Worked hard not to do this in class this year. "Content" elides the work and focuses on the box that it's filling. It's an unironic "say we make widgets" for corpos.

Need to start drafting a chapter. Step 1 is logging on to Bluesky right?

It's stuff like this that feeds my theory about how much of modern society works via deception. Like, just constant, pervasive lying is the default.

This is equally hilarious and concerning. If you ask an LLM to do something it would normally refuse (say, give instructions on how to create weapons-grade plutonium) using poetic verse, it is much more likely to bypass safety protocols and give you an answer.

Say I'm subscribed to WIRED as an example (I am). Is there really still no way to use RSS to read entire articles, rather than load the whole page complete with deluge of ads? My RSS 'complete content' is still only a fraction of the article.

Oh no.

In light of Congress voting on the Epstein files today, I am looking forward to the new definitions for "classified", "files", and/or "released" in the next couple days.

Oh wait, we have a name for programs that install other programs to the detriment of our machines' functionality - especially without permission. Shit what did we call that kind of malignant, malicious software again?

It’s the universities encouraging students to use AI that really gets me. All this “we need to accept it’s here and teach them to use it” does not help students learn to think. Writing is for thinking and communicating, not just producing words.

Does anyone have a recommended workflow for cleaning up scanned book pages? Delete artefacts like shadows, page edges; deskew, and ideally separate facing pages into one page each?

Offering customers a best in class 2-for-1 opportunity to boycott.

Thought of a snarky aphorism about things and decided to google it before sending it into the world. Found an essay I rather like. On humanity, writing, and digital dead malls share.google/vmQLzhjUwkUe...

I am once again contemplating moving my website to another server and platform rather than finishing a piece of writing. AMA