my mac doing its best to telephone a seventeenth century ecclesiastical record 🗃️

Academics in Assyria in the 7th c BC complain that admin is preventing them from doing research and teaching

A Kimono decorated with skeletons, from Japan, 1840-1860 CE, now housed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London

Very excited to share that on November 10 @discoxford.bsky.social are hosting a hybrid roundtable on Videogame preservation practices with @carrythezero.bsky.social, Alex Habgood, digital archivist at Rebellion studios, and @emarlow.bsky.social: digitalscholarship.web.ox.ac.uk/event/video-...

*FIFTEEN THOUSAND JOBS LOST*. If this were in a sector in which the PM could go and do a photoshoot looking like One Of The People, we’d have had a government intervention by now.

yesterday a student said something about chatgpt in my hearing, and without working out if it was a positive or dismissive comment I said "oh don't sully the air of my classroom with that name" and continued with my slide. the way the group murmured in response sounded like they were on my side 🤞

There's something very "Ford Prefect" about a process that arrives at "Harper Collins" as a sensible name for a pornbot

thought i'd be kind as an editor and quickly drop the proper in-text references in place of this chapter's "ibid." and "op. cit", but halfway through it i am: i) regretting my choices, ii) firmly opposed to the use of "ibid." and "op. cit" by anyone ever, and iii) stopping for lunch

Having studied #digitalID in depth for my PhD and written a book about this way before anyone had even flagged it as a problem - this a TERRIBLE idea. We have been warning the UK government about the dangers of digital ID for years. No one listened. #digitalidentity www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

The CfP for the 1st themed issue of our journal Fandom | Cultures | Research is out & I'm especially excited for this one, since it combines two of the things I'm most interested in: #fanstudies & #memorystudies. Added bonus: a workshop in Marburg in Feb 26. journals.uni-marburg.de/fcr/announce...

it's the Friday before teaching starts next week, aka the perfect time for the summer's last mint Cornetto from the freezer as a pre-dinner snack

My friend and colleague @lerelle.bsky.social needs research participants for their PhD project. The research focuses on intersectionally minoritised queer people's experiences using dating apps. So could you please take a look at this and share it if you can? (1/3)

I did hesitate before deleting (change is scary?), but I've done it

I wish more people would call this what it is: a lie/scam to increase unpaid labour. Management know many of us won’t give crap feedback, so instead we work evenings/weekends or let other work slip. Their spreadsheet is happy, students still get decent feedback. All the burden is on the Lecturer.

I know just the book for you

I'm also looking forward to this, which starts tomorrow and is why I just speed-walked across FRA make my connection

Looking forward to this!

Our publication for VGC 2023 is on its way! You can already check out the wonderful cover and website here: www.sidestone.com/books/explor...

Are you curious what's behind the presentation titles for VGC 2025? Here's a little sneak-peak (also known as abstracts 😉): videogamecultures.org/2025-abstrac... #videogames #gamestudies #academia

added my ISBNs/details to the list last week 💪

the to-do list is overwhelming, but hopefully knuckling down to get through some screening (11 episodes left of this current case study!) will make me feel like i'm making progress

Happy Clearing, for all who celebrate.

🗓️ Abstracts for Cine-Excess 2025, REANIMATED! REVIVING CULT FILM’S DEAD OBJECTS, are due this Friday

Sunk-cost fallacy and cheating students are the only things keeping AI in business at this point. Just look at how usage of ChatGPT plummets as soon as the semester ends.

In addition to this, I'm always slightly put off by the product makers claiming something has PhD level intelligence when personally I see my PhD as a marker of obsession, endurance, and spite

Upon receiving her BAFTA award, Yoko Shimomura gave an interview to The Guardian in which she stated that Capcom's sound divisions (one per department: arcade and consumer) in the late 80s were not only composed mainly of women; they were led by women. www.theguardian.com/culture/2025...

Generative AI by definition is conformity. It is an averaging of anything you ask of it - quite literally guessing what the most likely version of a thing might be. It is, by definition, mainstream, as is everything it creates old and deeply ideological, as every model trains on similar data.

So you’re telling me the Wizard of Oz presented itself as a towering force of overwhelming technology, only to be unmasked as just some guy, off-screen?

Planning your stay for the VGC in Prague? Here's some important information for you! videogamecultures.org/vgc-2025-upd...

Board game company fucks around (announcing new Harry Potter game), finds out (when fans revolt and media announce boycotts): aftermath.site/harry-potter-j...

Got paid the biggest compliment today: sent a published chapter of mine to a friend (relevant to her own work), and came back to a series of DMs enthusiastically quoting bits back 🥰

People do not understand the impact these data centers have on the environment and everytime I hear someone using AI for a completely mundane task they could do themselves, I think about what we're giving up for this "convenience."

Made this cute little website over the past month in my spare time. So many fish have been drawn!!! No idea where they're all coming from. A real field of dreams moment :)

I saw somebody on TikTok using the word 'slopper' as a slur for people who use ChatGPT, and that's a thing we should start doing.

A very cool technology that allows students to interact with John Maynard Keynes’ ideas as he develops them is called a book

I wrote something new for History Respawned today. It's a review of a new book about Red Dead, but it's really about academic writing and historical game studies as a field. Please read, but also know, I really really really really REALLY didn't want to write this review.

this is extremely fucking funny but also i cannot stress enough that LLMs are just outputting stuff that looks kinda like the stuff they've been trained on and when you ask them why they did something, they're just outputting even more stuff that looks kinda like the stuff they've been trained on

*If you're a writer or journalist, this is probably the most reasonable denunciation of LLMs as a grave social evil that you're likely to see this season www.404media.co/the-medias-p...

Normal person: It’s a tapestry Tapestry expert: It’s an embroidery! Me, banging table: IT’S A COMIC

CFP Hybrid Symposium: The UK Tabletop Role-Playing Game Scene – Histories, Cultures, and Legacies - 16th September, @coegamecult.bsky.social Tampere University, Finland (and online) Full details in attachments. #ttrpg #boardgames #wargames #minatures #gamebooks #videogames #history #gamestudies

Turn this off if you still have an Academia.edu account.

funny how the lesson we can learn is always 'low regulation' and never 80% of residents live in subsidized public housing on.ft.com/3G1We7i

It's me, I'm game researchers! I talked about a chapter for the book I'm definitely writing, focused on how engaging with VR games (as represented in recent Chinese dramas) is framed as transgression

I told you guys

I have tweeted many variations of this over the years, but that is because it is true. The best writing advice I ever got was when my PhD supervisor told me "Matt you are not Derrida" and gave me a shortbread biscuit

Small update from us at Furry Studies! 🦉 The deadline for the Call for Papers has been extended until Monday 30th June to give you all a little more time to get your abstracts in! More info: furrystudies.org

On the 25th anniversary of the show @paranoidstylist.bsky.social uploaded his in-depth article on BUGS and its position as "an unacknowledged influence on a later generation of stylish, issue-led thriller series of the 2000s"

JOB KLAXON: teaching fellow in film studies (fixed-term 1 year), U of Birmingham. closes 24 June. www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DNI241/t...