i am actually working on an article right now about how the vast majority of the world's information - and so many current events - are not at all legible to LLMs, a fact that a startling number of people never seem to think about

Even when women were the academics doing the documentation! Blanche Trilling was collecting “social games” & “parlor games” in the 19-teens while a professor at the University of Wisconsin, and is basically unknown in the game design world today. ia801509.us.archive.org/25/items/soc...

Also in the mix, Cindy Thornburg’s wildly popular “How to Host a Mystery” series starting in 1983, which arguably builds more directly on the earlier parlor role playing games of the 15-1800s than D&D does.

Truthfully, this is good practice for y'all. People need to get in the mindset that important stuff is gonna disappear. So, what are we gonna do about it? Stand up. There are always clever ways. Find them. And, do your bit.

Oh hey! It’s my best selling game

I am SO PROUD of the organizers at Production Assistants United. People have been saying that unionizing PAs in Hollywood is impossible for DECADES. They are proving them wrong! Incredible. www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/bus...

I was offered archival snuff to inhale.

If you’re naming me in the same breath as TTRPG studies then you should be following and listening to and citing Professor Torner who has done more for analog game infrastructure than any one person can comprehend. (Any number of us shine from reflecting Evan’s light)

@adhdessentials.bsky.social and @caineswritings.bsky.social -- I am dramatically condensing the work, but @wobbupalooza.bsky.social has been very helpful in assembling references and even translations of primary sources for us all to read.

So: *yes* there is a direct line we draw from chess variants to Kriegsspiel to wargaming & D&D. But also *yes* women cross-dressing as satyrs, or applying complex rules to dance games (as in 19th C. shtetls), were also engaged in story-and-rule-based role-play worthy of our analysis.

In other words, D&D-like imaginative play became possible during certain periods, often among women, and much of its history has been barely noticed in favor of the wargaming that bloomed *among only men* during the hyper-reactionary 1820-1848 period.

Artifacts such as the Brontës' Angria merge child's play with the seriousness of sub-creation and fictive histories. The girls + Branwell were able to toy with new imaginative horizons post-Napoleonic era. But of course women had been "building worlds" since Beatriz Bernal in 1545.

Indeed. The purchaseable *product* we call the TTRPG begins in the 1970s with Western Gunfight, Chainmail, and D&D. Yet role-playing "parlor games," simulations, and similar are centuries old and draw from a well that resembles all the positive stuff about D&D. Parlor games were feminized...

In the late 1970s, Carolyn Lougee of Stanford was doing early digital history work, creating a database of her research. In 1980, Stanford's IT dept *erased* her database. #Oops. And they couldn't restore it. (how do I know this? from a paper archive at Stanford. don't just worship the digital!) 🗃️

just incredible samizdat times to be living in here in the US

Regular reminder that the majority of the people who dreamed up the stories you love are, like, BROKE broke, and that most of the money spent on their work was given to Some Guy™️ instead.

I have been thinking a lot this year about how to bring folks to games — especially TTRPGs. There’s lots of paths, & most of them require a lot of patience — the long game, as it were. I know many folks who are connoisseurs, restless maximizers. But love people first, & meet them where they are.

My longtime love of physical media is only increasing as algorithms & AI seep into everything online like toxic runoff in groundwater, so I love this @coyotemedia.org story about a librarian in SF starting a vinyl collection for middle schoolers: www.coyotemedia.org/a-bay-area-l...

for my PhD exams I spent months reading 300+ books in European intellectual history, modern European history, modern Jewish history, medieval Jewish history, and critical theory. There is a huge difference between the style of reading that accommodates this, and having a computer "summarize" books.

Archivists/librarians please share the coolest thing in your collections that will never be digitized.

When I was a librarian at Purdue, an archivist colleague showed me a standard foil blisterpack of antinausea pills where 1 pill had been removed—by an (Apollo?) astronaut while they were in space (Purdue Archives has great flight+space stuff!)

Back when Twitter was useful, I asked historians and archivists about the things they found in the archives that made them go 'wut?' and wrote this piece about it. theconversation.com/i-asked-hist...

Klaxon! New on Bundle of Holding is our own DIE RPG - the award-winning core book, plus the three scenario books and the quickstart for $15. Purchasing also includes a 15% off voucher for buying the physical books from @rowanrookanddecard.bsky.social. #ttrpg #indiettrpg

You want to know how bad the use of AI tools in publishing can be? This is a case where you definitely must read the comments.

There's some stuff I won't discuss in here due to ignorance across broad #'s of Bluesky folks... not interesting in self cancelling so I keep my mouth shut. Random dudes ask me all the time why I don't discuss my research more. I need my peace.

I learned about Type:Rider at @rarebookschool.bsky.social eons ago (when I met @ryancordell.org ) & my Small Nephew (age 10) has basically played it his entire life — first watching me, & now playing as his sister watches. My history in games is admittedly very weird, y’all.

🚨 @jenguiliano.bsky.social and I are happy to share the December issue of Reviews in DH. We bring you projects from our open submissions that focus on women. We hope you enjoy. See you next year! #ReviewsInDH reviewsindh.pubpub.org/v6-n12

It’s a reminder that handwriting recognition — even without this kind of crossed letter writing — is a holy grail, but enormously complex compared to OCR (itself still not 100% as we know). Projects like Transkribus are getting close, but lots of caveats & complexities.

I don’t often recall dreams, but this one had an immersive theatre/film/theme park ride depicting literal descent into a drowning dystopia, rating of every participant with a number system. Then I dreamt I was attending an open TTRPG table event at a castle-like college & that was the real horror.

I do think this is true. I'm often guilty myself of underplaying what the work I do looks like or how much time and effort it takes. Research isn't 'just reading' or a question of sucking up summaries others have created. It's knowledge creation. So let me go through the process with an example 1/

I'm still looking for examples of this kind of mechanic out in TTRPG-land. Let me know if you know anything!

New in the Cambridge Elements series, and free to read and download until 15 January: The London Foundling Hospital and Eighteenth-Century Objects of Charity Recovering the Digital Archive by Hilary E. Wyss. www.cambridge.org/core/element... #History #DigitalHistory

I once dated someone who later wrote in an Acknowledgments that the very concept was stupid & only read by grads. That was not the first nor last time I felt I’d dodged a bullet. (I also keep an Acknowledgments section in my draft from the jump)

Reliance on chatbots and proliferation of fake, fraud, and frippery academic text is creating a huge amount of labour. There’s no extra pay for it. bsky.app/profile/cjpo...

Betty Reid Soskin, the National Park Service’s oldest ranger, has died. She was 104.

Hoard: small art, letterpress, games, perfume Weakness: limited ability to reach high places Charmed by: sincere enthusiasm or praise (very short effect), personal vulnerability & shared vision (much longer effect), consistent showing up, relieving burdens before being asked (keys to the kingdom)

Small Nephew (10) & Niece (7) have grokked social deduction, pulling off a truly astounding victory. They then watched the rules & a full @goodtimesociety.com playthrough of @bloodontheclocktower.com which I expect they will be ready to play in a worryingly-short span of time.

As a humanist, the work I produce is reflective of not only my own laborious research pathways, but the gifts and reflections of the people who trained me, who I teach, who I talk to, who I read. Maybe AI could shortcut that but then my community becomes me and a machine. And thats not why I do this

E. M. Forster left a diary to King’s College, Cambridge that is basically all his notes about sex with the rule that anyone could come read it for research in person, but it couldn’t be published. You have to make an appointment and be there.

So many things to add to this, but I’ll just give the example of the Mark Twain Project, which has been digitizing for nearly three decades, fairly well-resourced, with a sizable full-time staff. And they are, optimistically, maybe half done.

I am sure this is on these professionals' minds, but I want to say it out loud: sometimes the digging you want to do is related to the actual physical form of the object! Digitizing things is a 'lossy' operation! You also have to make certain those digital records remain available, which is work!

Oh, and I should add that I carry what I know & learned into my current work: I know the manuscripts (statistically, barring major catastrophe) will be there for me or whoever takes up that work, even a century or more from now. Actual Play? TTRPGs? It’s already vanishing. No disaster needed.

*laughs in archivist* anyone who thinks it's all been digitized is out of their goddamn mind. We don't have the staff, resources, or digital infrastructure to digitize, store, check, and maintain at preservations standards a digital copy of every single item in our collections.

Wishing y’all a mellow Winter Solstice. Found elsewhere, sharing here

This is the bit about digitization that I always come back to: we already didn't want to spend money to maintain paper libraries, which are essentially just storage buildings with other uses. Digital infrastructure is expensive AND super fragile!

This, for goodness sake! The amazing Boston Public Library does a great job locally, but it still takes staff hours that have to come from somewhere!!

You have got to check out the link.

So when the AHA says it's OK to use AI to summarize scholarship, the greatest risk this guideline poses isn't simply to the quality or accuracy of research; the hazard it poses is to the communal nature of the knowledge production. A pursuit that puts people across time & space into conversation 4/n

When I was working on never-printed manuscript fiction, I WAS the digitizer of dozens of manuscripts, by standing & photographing them page by page. The one exception? In one memorable case, I raised funds to match with the NYPL to pay the $7500 digitization costs for this single manuscript.

When we say "no, everything hasn't been digitized," I need you to understand that we really mean is that virtually nothing has been digitized. This is because the realm of primary sources that historians use is incomprehensibly large.