Check it out: a NEW BOOKS NETWORK podcast with punctum editors of the #OpenAccess book, HISTORIOGRAPHIES OF GAME STUDIES! #gaming #GameStudies #MediaStudies #DigitalHumanities

Enable #OpenAccess books to fly around the world & be accessible to everyone, no matter their means, by becoming a subscriber! For $10, $15, $20 or $25/month, you can help power punctum's flying book machine. Help make the MAGIC happen! punctumbooks.com/support/ #GIVE #DONATE

Why has the #OpenAccess community not mounted a collective response to the armies of bots scraping open repositories for content to feed to large-scale language models (LLMs) owned by mega-AI corporations? How open is open, anyway? Read our response to Bartz v. Anthropic: tinyurl.com/yp55364c

Insisting that present knowledge is sustained in asymmetrical relations of power, THE MEDITERRANEAN QUESTION casts a critical light on the deeper African & Asian Mediterranean(s) that have been obscured in Western histories & archives. PUBLISHED #OpenAccess! DOWNLOAD: tinyurl.com/yv9svw25

WATCH our screening of 2 films by punctum author Sarah Rosenthal, "Lizard Song" & "We Agree on the Sun." Download Sarah & Valerie Witte's book ONE THING FOLLOWS ANOTHER: Experiments in Dance, Art, and Life here: tinyurl.com/4vx9tnt4 #SimoneForti #YvonneRainer vimeo.com/999679791?fe...

New bookmarks! We’ll be giving these away at Charleston Conference in Nov. 2025, MLA meeting in Toronto in Jan. 2026, and AWP meeting in Baltimore in March 2026. #OpenAccess #books

Essential reading: “AI Scraping of OA Content Warrants a Collective Response” doi.org/10.21428/ae6... from @punctumbooks.bsky.social

"We expect publishers like Taylor & Francis to be non-transparent with NDAs flying around; we expect uni presses like Johns Hopkins UP to be more transparent when making 'deals' around the use of their authors' work." Read our response to Bartz v. Anthropic here: tinyurl.com/yp55364c #OpenAccess

Insisting that present knowledge is sustained in asymmetrical relations of power, THE MEDITERRANEAN QUESTION casts a critical light on the deeper African & Asian Mediterranean(s) that have been obscured in Western histories & archives. OUT TODAY #OpenAccess: tinyurl.com/yv9svw25

Join us this Saturday 9/13, 7pm for a book launch x3! @shellthief.bsky.social & I will read from One Thing Follows Another, new from @punctumbooks.bsky.social, & share stunning broadsides w/art by Nancy Larsen, free w/ book purchase; Jennifer Hasegawa & Faith Adiele will share new books as well.

The advent of AI bots trawling for vast datasets for LLMs is setting into motion new battles over intellectual property. & OA publishers need to be more attentive to the symbiosis between what is open & what is proprietary. Read our response to Bartz et al. vs. Anthropic here: tinyurl.com/yp55364c

‪ GRATEFUL to University of Nottingham Library @uniofnottingham.bsky.social for supporting us via @openbookcollective.bsky.social! This is #library funding for #OpenAccess #books in action. It takes a community & every book we publish is a gift from libraries! 🎉🥳 tinyurl.com/4nfh3wep #LibraryLove

enshittification | noun | when a digital platform is made worse for users, in order to increase profits

THREE reading & performance events in NYC to celebrate @LynneSachs1 & Lizzie Olesker's HAND BOOK: A Manual on Performance, Process & the Labor of Laundry: SEP. 8: Unnameable Books SEP. 13: Printed Matter @MOMA, PS1 SEP. 28: Torn Page Download FREE #OpenAccess book here: tinyurl.com/um49y59n

Congratulations @emmavphd.bsky.social, @sparklebliss.bsky.social, @cmejeur.bsky.social, and @onlyalishak.bsky.social! And thanks to @punctumbooks.bsky.social for publishing! 👾 Find "Historiographies of Game Studies" on JSTOR here: bit.ly/3JDOha2

"Pathways" to #OpenAccess has always been a delaying tactic. Death by a million incremental incrementals. Are we there yet? Did we get there yet? Huh, huh ... did we? Like, is it where you end up, or how you got there, that matters? Journey? Destination? Chicken, egg, money money money.

Found in dumpling soups & remembered from childhood, ants trail through the “industry of survival,” exploring interfaces of love, ambition & strategy. PUBLISHED #OpenAccess: THE ANTS: the distance, the break & the tenuous wilderness between exoskeleton & endoskeleton! tinyurl.com/bdhatcxk

“This is part of the reality of Black life in this country: We must make a record of those forces that seek to erase us and erase our histories so that future generations know we did not simply accept it. Our ancestors’ words remind us that we never have.”

"With deadpan humor and the Surrealist’s combination of clarity and incongruity, Sawako Nakayasu’s book of prose poems, THE ANTS, makes a tiny insect the center of the world." Published #OpenAccess & FREE to download: punctumbooks.com/titles/the-a... Wes Anderson meets insect body horror!

🧵 In celebration of the publication of Adam Staley Groves's new book on Wallace Stevens's possible encounters with UFOs & extrahuman poetics -- FREE #OpenAccess download here: tinyurl.com/yu8nz8yc -- we're featuring other EXTRAHUMAN titles in our catalogue. #UFOs #posthuman #aliens #poetry

Came in from mowing the yard to find my editor copies arrived! She’s here, and she’s CHONKY. So much great game studies content past, present, and future in this collection. Get your free open access ebook or order a physical copy at @punctumbooks.bsky.social website!

Once again, the US government demonstrates even more ways it can exercise its cruelty against those most in need of our loving attention. #FreePalestine

Is it possible that Wallace Stevens experienced significant "missing time"? That he was abducted by aliens? 👽 And is his poetry evidence of contact with extrahuman intelligences? 👉👉👉👉👉 PUBLISHED #OpenAccess: Adam Staley Groves's THE POET AS EXPERIENCER 🥳 🛸 🪐 punctumbooks.com/titles/the-p...

It is, indeed, a VERY BIG BOOK. 780 pages and FREE to download here: punctumbooks.com/titles/histo... #gaming #GameStudies

Throwback #Caturday.

A very cool project: alt-text-as-poetry.net #AccessibilityMatters

Interesting..

Challenging Wallace Stevens scholarship & our understanding of poetics, Adam Staley Groves presents Stevens’s oeuvre as a coded testimony of contact with nonhuman intelligence: #UFOs. PUBLISHED #OpenAccess: THE POET AS EXPERIENCER: Wallace Stevens & Nonhuman Intelligence tinyurl.com/yu8nz8yc

"Black America is under assault by a serial predator, and nothing is stopping him or even seriously rebuking his behavior and rhetoric." ~ Oliver Willis @owillis.bsky.social www.oliverexplains.com/p/donald-tru...

After 5 years of hard work by @sparklebliss.bsky.social, @cmejeur.bsky.social, @onlyalishak.bsky.social, myself, our contributors, and the lovely people at @punctumbooks.bsky.social Historiographies of Game Studies is out NOW! You can read all 780 pages for FREE. 🔓 punctumbooks.com/titles/histo...

punctum books approves of this. Going forward, all of our books will be radioactive.

"Role-play scenarios for your own community. Get a crew together and practice now what would you do if federal forces took over your city. Doing this planning alone makes us feel alone — we need to be connected with others to make our best plans." choosedemocracy.us/blog/5-thing...

PIXELLATE THIS! 780 pages of the HISTORIOGRAPHIES OF GAME STUDIES: Where It Has Been, What It Could Be & #OpenAccess to boot, which = FREE to read! This book lays bare how a field gets made & who gets to decide & who & what is repelled. This is also a blueprint for change. tinyurl.com/2ucxjy8a

also started reading this today on stream and the chapter by Emma Vossen made me cry. "I hope that the future of game studies looks completely different. I hope that marginalized scholars no longer have to fight to be accepted. I hope that people see the work we do has value." <3

When did game studies start? And what & WHO is at the core of game studies? Fields are defined as much by what they are NOT as by what they are & their borderlands can be hotly contested spaces. Download for FREE this 780-page BRICK of an #OpenAccess book & press PLAY. tinyurl.com/2ucxjy8a

So many of us have benefited from Fobazi's work. Here's a chance to give back.

ICYMI - Historiographies of Game Studies: What It Has Been, What It Could Be from @punctumbooks.bsky.social has released, featuring contributions from an incredible lineup of scholars. 780 pages of #GameStudies goodness entirely for FREE! Just one of many stories in this week's Newsletter 👇

I know some of you will be very excited to check this out.

When did game studies start? 👾👾👾 And what & WHO is at the core of game studies? 🎱 Fields are defined as much by what they are NOT as by what they are & their borderlands can be hotly contested spaces. 🕹️🎲 Download for FREE this 780-page BRICK of a book & press PLAY. 🎯 tinyurl.com/2ucxjy8a #gaming

A psychiatrist in Gaza, Dr. Bahzad al-Akhras, is seeing 50+ patients a day, mainly children. Amidst the devastation, he does what he can to help others through this trauma. Simply put, to be of service: there is no higher calling. 🧡🇵🇸🫂 tinyurl.com/yc2bxbmb

#SanFrancisco and #BayArea folks, I'm going to talk about fighting #censorship at the August 20th Nerd Nite San Francisco! Help spread the word and hope to see some of you there! #DefendResearch sf.nerdnite.com/2025/08/01/t...

When did game studies start? & what & WHO is at the core of game studies? Fields are defined as much by what they are NOT as by what they are & their borderlands can be hotly contested spaces. Download for FREE this 780-page BRICK of an #OpenAccess book & press PLAY. tinyurl.com/2ucxjy8a

Appropriate. #FreePalestine

When did game studies start? & what & WHO is at the core of game studies? Fields are defined as much by what they are NOT as by what they are & their borderlands can be hotly contested spaces. Download for FREE this #OpenAccess 780-page BRICK of a book & press PLAY. tinyurl.com/2ucxjy8a

Growing solidarity with Gaza is perceived by so many as a threat to Western values precisely because it purports to extend moral concern to the “wrong” victims. It is no coincidence that 17 of 20 countries that have joined South Africa’s case charging Israel with genocide are from the Global South.

I'm very happy to have a chapter in this beautiful collection! it's a critical examination of the academic politics of game studies in the Netherlands, and of which kinds of game/play research get uplifted or sidelined during the process of institutionalization in the neoliberal university:

Extremely grateful to @exeterunilib.bsky.social for joining our Supporting Library Membership Program! This is #library funding for #OpenAccess #books in action. It takes a #community & every book we publish is a gift made possible by libraries! 🎉🪩🥳 tinyurl.com/3n4ubsku #LibraryLove

Please, we need more of this: talks at punk clubs! And yes, send Lisa your testimonials about the negative impacts of censorship. We have a positive one: Moms for Liberty called out one of our books in an EBSCO database & it went from relative obscurity to over 1M downloads within one month.

PUBLISHED #OpenAccess! HISTORIOGRAPHIES OF GAME STUDIES: What It Has Been, What it Could Be 780 pages of disciplinary self-care, otherwise known as intellectual history. Come for the pixels, stay for the resolutions. #VideoGames #MediaStudies @cmejeur.bsky.social @emmavphd.bsky.social

There's truth in this thread, but having published with various small presses, Bloomsbury Academic (awful experience), and @punctumbooks.bsky.social, for me it's punctum's approach to funding and open access that feels most invigorating and important, esp in these times of censorship & fascism.