all this is both foolish and unnecessary

Frog and Toad looked into a mirror. “We look brave,” said Frog. “Yes, but are we?” asked Toad.

Pretty funny that the 12-months of credit monitoring and identity theft protection I'm receiving because of a hack of my employer's HR data doesn't have 2FA.

I knew we were cooked as a country the first time I heard "Born in the U.S.A." appropriated as a patriotic, nationalistic song. Approximately 10 minutes after the song was released in 1984.

this is what ye have shipped for, men! to chase that white whale on both sides of land, and over all sides of earth

I have questions about the fifa peace prize

Maybe some country can return the favor to the U.S.A.

I've been to the past few NarraScope narrative games conferences, and they're great. Great size, great talks, great people, great networking!

Never forget: The Cars’ “Good Times Roll” and “Just What I Needed” are OLDER than Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York.”

I did that thing where I list a lot of things from 2025. A roundup of my work from the past year...

I SAW WHAT I SAW

You know what? Probably worth putting into dialogue the two most high profile pieces of banned media of the past two weeks: the video game Horses and the 60 Minutes report on the U.S.'s use of the CECOT prison in El Salvador.

Good torrent link here (from the Internet Archive) archive.org/download/60m...

Random shoutout to Tailscale, which creates an encrypted mesh network between your devices. Pretty much changed my workflow for everything, especially after installing on my home router (an Asus router with the aftermarket Merlin firmware).

I'm working on something so cool that only a handful of other people will also think it's so cool. Again.

Taper #15 is out. Each issue contains tiny computational poems centered around a theme. The complete code must be under 2Kb. One of my pieces in the issue is an interactive erasure of Shakespeare's Sonnet 15, in which only half the poem can ever be visible at once. taper.badquar.to/15/sonnet15....

Fuck these apps with their end-of-year "wraps" and "reviews." They're all just algorithmic data points designed to make us feel so very unique and special as the machine swallows us whole and obliterates everything truly unique about the world. Plus, you know what? I don't want to relive 2025.

Come work with me! My institution is hiring a new library systems/digital services specialist. And what a place to be—we're in the midst of a $100 million library renovation and good things are happening here.

Check out the latest issue of Taper. I've got two minimal (2Kb) code poems in there, something to do with Shakespeare and something to do with Tarot...

I only went and bloody did it. Made a little spot to write about it, too: hetconned.substack.com “Hetconning (n.) — the deliberate retroactive straight-washing of history to frame queerness as a modern intrusion. A pretext for justifying attacks as a “return” to a world that never existed”

already there, tyvm

13 ways of looking at a gun. 🧵

Every once in a while I revisit @everest.bsky.social’s awesome directory of tiny tools for creative coding. Instant inspiration: pick a random tool and just play around with it. tinytools.directory

Hey, look at that, the 2026 site for @iftechfoundation.org's annual @narrascope.org conference on narrative games is live narrascope.org

A web port of Jason Rohrer's 2007 game "Passage"—heralded by some at the time for its expressive power. Criticized by others for its gender and cultural assumptions. Either way, a lot happens in the 5 minutes and 8 bit game.

Fuck. RIP Raul Malo, one of the greats. www.rollingstone.com/music/music-...

Object like uprooted tree drifting over Arizona desert.

Looking at the comments on Itch and GOG for HORSES reminds me that one of the biggest problems with video games is video game players.

"Horses, the indie game that is too scandalous for either Valve or Epic, is only beyond the pale if you're not familiar with any other art form."

I finished Horses, and pretty much agree with every thing here. I would add that most Americans seem to be missing the Italian context. Giallo films, Pasolini, and the historical collusion between the church, business, and fascist regime. The game turns out to be a pretty run of the mill critique.

7 cigar shaped objects in the sky early monday morning

Weekend post has animating sprites and Midjourney styles, web arty proc gen and fun ( @samplereality.bsky.social's great 1 Million Random Acts, for instance), game article links, some narrative AI papers (new creative writing bench, couple on style), infovis/ds. arnicas.substack.com/p/titaa-73-a...

every single report is found poetry

One of the many problems with LLMs is that they obscure just how much found text written by humans is out there in the wild, raw text veined with indelible traces of authentic human experience. Like these UFO sightings, as collected by ufologists. (Yes, I made a bot.)

Schools filling more than two-thirds of their admissions slots through early decision? Fucking ridiculous. ED has got to go.

New fellowship opportunity at the University of Bergen in Norway for an early career scholar of electronic literature. Check it out!

This podcast could’ve been a listicle is the new This meeting could have been an email.

"The real poverty line—the threshold where a family can afford housing, healthcare, childcare, and transportation without relying on means-tested benefits—isn’t $31,200. It’s ~$140,000."

pre-thanksgiving verso splurge

What, no bamboo?

It's National Novel Generation Month. LLMs have drained much of the original creativity and impetus for NaNoGenMo, but I gave it a go this year anyway. I took "No Time to Discourse," my interactive web-based speculative atlas of climate disaster, and turned it into a ~400-page book.

oh, the bamboo was a *metaphor*

apparently there was some magic the gathering news tonight?

Now at least 3 of the sources for @youarecarrying.bsky.social will not put me in legal jeopardy!

Hey, I bet you didn't hear that Zork 1, 2, and 3 were open-sourced today! …Oh, you have heard. Yeah. Way ahead of me. :) Here's my comments, and some details that you might not have seen. blog.zarfhome.com/2025/11/zork...

I keep hoping to catch glimpses of the coyotes that I know come around the back yard, but instead I got this little feller.

Someone recommended Task, and besides the fact that little bums me out more than Mark Ruffalo in sad sack mode, I'm having trouble with the plot holes so big you could drive a semi through them.

Unsettling data viz and reporting on how billionaires with state-like powers are building a fully privatized "regime where corporate boards, not public law, set the rules."

A Google Doc from Miriam Posner at UCLA with the pros and cons of different strategies for dealing with students using ChatGPT for writing