I added the Brontes in this year when my course was moved from “Technology, Literacy, & Culture” to “Intro to Literary Studies” — & when I took @kierongillen.bsky.social DIE (game & comic) as an organizing text (& includes Glass Town & Angria in its understanding of the history of TTRPGs)

I used to give a lectures on the history of (TT+C)RPGs and would dutifully start in the 70s because that's what was expected, but then open the last third with this map of Angria and ask if anyone knew what it was. The shared universe of the Brontë siblings! (this is mentioned downthread.)

zero seems reasonable, no matter how pedantically you want to read the rubric

People need to start caring about others & not only those directly related/affected, & not only when it's transactional. We *have* to have empathy beyond ourselves & immediate orbit of family, friends, neighborhood, & community. We have to care about total strangers who are in harm's way & in need

via The New Yorker, Ellis Rosen cartoon

There is excellent work in this issue and you should read it!

If you're interested in longue durée RPG history, this from @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social is worth your time.

So you’re telling me that when your country welcomes talented people from around the globe, and brings them together in world-class universities, they make discoveries that save lives? Interesting. UM researchers make breakthrough to treat form of leukemia www.detroitnews.com/story/news/l...

watching the CECOT 60 Minutes segment that CBS suppressed, it’s striking that Weiss specifically called out as unnecessary some of the most rigorous investigative work in the segment, including an explanation of how it was done (by human rights researchers)

To no one’s surprise, the secret history of RPGs has always been women innovating ideas that men “discover” anywhere from 10-400 years later! Fantastic thread from one of the hobby’s coolest academics.

When I look back at blue skies, when it has retired to the great MySpace-hole in the past, the definitive feeling will be of when you see a response to a post and you can't see it, and then that slight confusion that you have no idea if it's someone who you've blocked or vice versa.

Hot thread on origins of #ttrpgs

To paraphrase the title of @leighalexander.bsky.social too-relevant piece from a decade ago: “all the women [and folks who study them] I know in [analog] games are tired”

If you read enough hagiographical work about very specific men gamers in the 1970s and couple it with a lifetime of people dismissing your (freeform larp / "storygame" / Erzählspiel) game tradition as "not really games" in part due to their community's gender, then you see where I'm coming from.

As someone who’s probably on Bluesky blocklists for saying something other than "burn it all down" about AI, it also seems clear that asking for more nuance in these discussions in Dec 2025 is like asking for more nuanced discussion of immigration as masked ICE agents toss people in unmarked vans+

I think this is a really important point. When folks say "no AI" they often don’t mean "I can conceive of no possible use for AI"—they mean "the use cases I’ve been shown do not begin to justify the harms"—that’s not something you respond to by offering another narrow use case

If research impact on social media actually mattered to employers, I would be quids in. It doesn't. Nothing from my public outreach has mattered to hiring committees compared to a) big funding and b) high profile journals. Research impact isn't measured in actual impact as far as I can see.

Loving the new flyer for next year's (50th anniversary) Magic Lantern Society convention

Parlour games were feminized, Freeform/Nordic/Parlour larp was feminized, Forge/Post-forge/Indie/Storygames were (and often still are) feminized... the list goes on. I contend that this feminization is the main cause for animosity from a camp of OSR-aligned peeps and "storygamers".

I think you @friede.bsky.social and @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social are both awesome! Certainly expanded my world. And hey it's looking like I'll finally drive the 5ish miles to hang out with Dr. Evan a few times in 2026!

I spent my early career in very specific ways, let's put it that way. I strongly believed that the hobbyist-specific as well as marginalized views were being ground out of game studies in real time, and joined with a coalition of fellow scholars to push back.

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.