Our Spring 2026 update has now gone live - featuring the correspondence of physician, naturalist, and paragon of the Midlands Enlightenment - Erasmus Darwin - as well as 63 letters from the Bernardin de Saint Pierre project and 98 new or updated biographies. www.e-enlightenment.com

Started reading Ayu Utami's Saman (trans. Pamela Allen) - and cannot recommend it enough - the way it constructs Indonesia as a deathworld haunted by the events of 1965–66 without ever engaging with them directly is incredibly powerful - even the natural world feels complicit: (context in alt text)

I'm sorry, what? In writing my first monograph, I spent six weeks trying to track down a citation in TWO languages I didn't know. And good thing too, because the citation was wrong. That's scholarship. That's research. You know, the thing we're trained to do?!?

#DHOxSS2026 poster competition! Apply by 12 June: tinyurl.com/35armf8e Posters will be displayed in our opening reception at Schwarzman Centre: tinyurl.com/3m3j6mzh Don't forget to register by 1 June for Early Bird rates! tinyurl.com/yd9f9mjz @aadh.bsky.social @nationalcollection.bsky.social

We live in a very strange cultural moment - 80.lv/articles/fac...

ikea has this new storage chest for kid's rooms that looks like a mimic, and I applaud this kind of thinking. it's good to teach children about the dangers of mimics early, so they don't fall prey to one the first time they go adventuring

Congrats :) and thank you so much for the shoutout :)

After our Games Preservation online event on the 12th March we have made the full day of recordings available on YouTube. You can find the full playlist of recordings here:

On first glance in my timeline this looked like a very rules-heavy alt-border Magic the Gathering Card 😂

A grasshopper of the past. What a monster flying through the 1540s ...

Doing some revisions on a historical games article and had cause to go remember that time Paradox accidentally did a socialism :) - www.pcgamer.com/victoria-3-c...

Picked myself up and managed to do something - didn't get any work done obvs, but did manage to watch Hiroshima, Mon Amour, which has been on my list for forever but not exactly a film to watch with a 3 year old - that opening montage is one of the most powerful pieces of cinema I've ever seen.

Listening to Kawika Guillermo's 'Of Floating Isles' on audible - it is everything that Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow failed to be - it is an account of how games transform people and become structures for seeing the world and processing emotion, grounded in lived and heartbreaking experience.

Random question - if you were gonna list 3 games that support the 'games are good at building empathy' argument - which ones would you pick? *I know this is a controversial topic, so I'd be extra interested in cases where people know the issues, but have games they still think fit the bill

Feeling very vindicated in my ability to recognise Pip Torrens on the basis of a split second in-motion shot half in shadow :) The Favourite this will not be I fear, but it looks interesting

A24 are making a film adaptation of the Backrooms? The canon of videogame->film adaptations is going to look so weird in a few years time - it's going to be all weird indie horror like Iron Lung, Backrooms or FNAF getting surprisingly glossy hollywood treatment at one end, or Super Mario/Minceraft?

Wednesday 🎬 #filmsky #moviesky #cinema

Heya #skystorians - can anyone help me? I'm away from my library atm and looking for Jenny Graham's The Nation, The Law, and the King, Volume 1 - specifically Appendix A, which seems to be around p. 913? If it's not too long and someone wouldn't mind sharing photos that'd be amazing tysm!

So what the hell have I been teasing with those screenshots? I wrote a book about the history and evolution of the Metroidvania genre! I'm proud to present, as published by @lostincult.co.uk, A Communal History of Metroidvania Video Games! youtu.be/XtyItrRaG9c?...

Can the common people be enlightened? How should cultural elites and political leaders embark on the task? A new article on the 18thC debate, re-assessing Gadamer's claim that the Enlightenment harboured a “prejudice against all prejudices.” doi.org/10.1017/S147...

The wonderful collection Games That Haunt Us, edited by @mutanttheorist.bsky.social is out today! Couldn't be prouder to be included in an absolutely wonderful collection that really demonstrates just how interdisciplinary and innovative our field can be! www.bloomsbury.com/uk/games-tha...

Apropos of nothing very much - other than having seen this GIF come up on Bsky recently - I'm wondering if the pixel art from Agony (1992), on the Commodore Amiga, might just be the apex of the form for its generation - truly awe-inspiring: amiga.lychesis.net/games/Agony....

Happy March 15. Here is my favorite Ides of March meme:

Game rewards after spending 200+ hrs to finish them Breath of the Wild: Congrats you saved Zelda and Hyrule God of War: Congrats you killed all the gods mass effect: Congrats you resolved the Reaper crisis and saved the galaxy Blue Prince: Well done you, here's a card with "Blue" written on it

HAPPY 23RD ANNIVERSARY TO THE GREATEST GAME OF ALL TIME

The uncomfortable alignment of the games industry with the military industrial complex, ideologies of empire and extractive capitalism, and fascist ideology is a deep and nuanced issue going back decades - I can't think of an example more stupid than this: www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/iran...

[clapping like a seal] #GDC2026

Are you joining our Videogame Preservation Online event today? Tell us what you're hoping to hear about #vgpres26

I wrote a book and it has a cover now! (Pre-order up, available Feb 5, 2026) www.bloomsbury.com/us/fractured...

Just 2 days to go before 'Videogame Preservation: Practices and Approaches: An Online Symposium'! www.digitalscholarship.ox.ac.uk/event/videog...

Ok - throwing out this query to the world in case anyone can help - there is a long narrative poem about an informatic fantasy of the world - where you can "right click" any object and get a drop-down menu with its properties - I thought Sianne Ngai talked about it in her Gimmick book but maybe not

Christ I need to branch out my genres a bit:

Elizabeth Montagu's Correspondence Online project @montaguletters.bsky.social has announced their next round of paid internships, focusing letters from Montagu to Classicist and poet Elizabeth Carter - emco.swansea.ac.uk/project/inte... @bsecs.bsky.social @bars.bsky.social @oxford18thc.bsky.social

I'm delighted to be keynoting next Thursday at the Online Symposium "Videogame Preservation: Practices and Approaches" organised by the Bodleian Libraries @bodleian.ox.ac.uk. I will present on "Play It Again" & the #AusEAASI network. @aarnet.edu.au www.digitalscholarship.ox.ac.uk/event/videog...

Just a week and change before Videogame Preservation: Practices and Approaches, an Online Symposium on 12 March - free Registration open now: www.digitalscholarship.ox.ac.uk/event/videog... #gamehistory #gamepreservation #digitalpreservation #digitalhumanities

For all the others learning Welsh out there! Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus!

For your mental health, please stop doom scrolling for ten minutes. If you decide you need to come back to it, you can, but if you see this post, take a ten minute break

WE NEED YOU! Would anyone like to do a review of Series 4 of Bridgerton for the BARS Blog? Does the current series tie into any tropes of the Romantic-era novel? How often do masquerade balls happen in Romantic-period works? Drop us a message or email us!

Last chance to submit a lightning talk for this - but registration will be open right up to the day

Having a look at Open Lab's Becoming Saint, mostly out of interest in the premise, which seems well handled so far, but wanted to flag a lovely little UX feature which I've not seen in a game like this before...feedback on specific game actions in the tactical sequences...

📢 INDIE DEVS WHO ARE IN NEXT FEST! If you're participating and would like your demo/store page reposted to 37K+ Bluesky followers then drop it in the replies below* *No games that use Gen-AI please and thank you.

I have an unerring ability to develop timely research interests, only to be too slow to actually produce anything to meaningfully engage with the zeitgeist :(

You really do have to take dating sims/romances seriously. Not love them. Not know everything about them. Not even play them. But take them seriously. They're a legitimate, influential, long-running genre, and the lack of awareness and acceptance in English-speaking circles should be embarrassing.

iambic tetrameter ass stick

it must suck to be a cat. you are born into this world, no one feeds you. you live a long life, but no one feeds you. you have never been fed, not once, not ever, never ever

A reminder that the Call for Papers for this event is open until Thursday 26th Feb. If you have a games preservation story that needs telling, we want to hear it!

I may be floundering in writers-block-procrastination-imposter-syndrome-hell but I am feeling good about successfully outsmarting Gmail's refusal to make email forwarding actually work 😅 - rather than just 'forward all emails' I had to 'forward all emails which contain: 'the' or 'my' or 'I'!

Are we in an epidemic of systematisation, or is it just me? It feels like for any experience to be meaningful it has to be the foundation for something better - a good experience needs to be the first in a series - a good work day has to be the model for future work days...

They did what now? youtu.be/bLrr1z1gRgo?...

If you care about pixel art as a medium and want to learn more about how to detect if it is genuine or AI-generated, please refer to this writeup that I created with the help of the community. Read, download, share and support real creators.