In two paragraphs, a perfect snapshot of the willful refusal of some security officials – in this case, predictably, in Trump's FBI; but this also happens in Europe – to see and name racist and far-right terror for what it is. It is not "indiscriminate" hatred, or "nihilism"; it is modern nazism.

I've been teaching Twine storygame design in middle and high schools for over a decade. Every time I do, I hear from my teacher-partners about a student who is never engaged, never asks questions, never shares their writing doing exactly that. The design mindset revolutionizes the writing classroom.

heard a guy say "you have to access it through the portal" and i was momentarily struck by how sad it is that what he said is so boring :( "accessing it via the portal" should be wonderful. we deserve that at least. it should be cool to access it via the portal and instead it sucks shit

"Most people won't benefit from education." This used to be a more explicitly held view among elites! Now it is more implied.

One of the most clarifying passages I've ever read on what "polarization" actually means in the U.S."

Something I found myself talking about a bit at Somercon that might be a useful lens for folks: A brilliant fact about TTRPGs is that they can incorporate ANYTHING in them. RL actions, environmental elements, other games. All you need is narrative input and output.

Our paper, “The Politics of Black Classification: Sociopolitical Cues and Racial Perception” (w/ Lauren Davenport & @hrendleman.bsky.social), has been conditionally accepted at Perspectives on Politics! Sharing abstract below. Long time coming, but we are really proud of this paper. More soon!

TTRPG with old-school "you can die in character creation" mechanics, except most terminal events are stuff like "reached adulthood with no major traumas" or "found a love of carpentry", so your goal is to make enough bad life choices that your character is a big enough loser to become an adventurer.

More deaths in US immigration camps this fiscal year than over the past 2 decades!!! #NoBorders

Actually we should just give citizenship to every undocumented person in the United States who wants it. Walking over an imaginary line isn't some great moral atrocity. Making people live in the shadows as a permanent underclass absolutely IS.

you may not like it but this is what peak performance looks like

Let's do this one time in good faith: Wealthy private universities in blue states should be bastions of humanistic education (including basic science), fully protected from the anti-education laws being passed in red states that afflict private and public schools alike. But instead .... /1

not everybody has to play

candyland is well designed

Thanks to everyone who came to our Break Our Games night last Friday! We heard some great stories being told and watched some quality playtesting, too. Check out these photos for a surprise at the end... See you all for the next BOG on April 10th! #playtesting #ttrpgs #thebluewaygame

"Friends" is a beloved American sitcom that aired from 1994 to 2004, following six young adults—Rachel, Ross, Monica, Chandler, Joey, and Phoebe—living in New York City. The show explores their friendships, romances, careers, and personal growth over ten seasons.

If you are skeptical of the goal of abolition I'm always going to recommend this piece, which is shorter and more digestible than it looks. Its probably not going to make you a convert, but its a very clean framework working through thorny questions I think about all the time:

cat jumped from a cat tree onto my wife’s throat

Just started doing new data analysis and I know I keep saying this, but: I really, really don't think people appreciate how much this moral panic was a deliberate and extremely expensive invention.

The Quiet Year is now back in stock no matter where you live! The Quiet Year is an award-winning map-making game about building community after the collapse. It comes in a little box with everything you need to play. And it's back in stock in the US! store.buriedwithoutceremony.com/products/the...

Sid Meier’s SimGolf

it’s just so crazy to see it happen in real time

Get Ready for Five Fires! Follow the BackerKit page and help take this #ttrpg of DJs, breakers, MCs, and graffiti writers from PDF to Print.

look. yeah qud has procedural systems that are sometimes hamfisted. we are at the start of understanding the form; but ultimately games is an *interactive* media, and algorithmic systems with traversal for the player are the entire difference between an interactive system and a movie.

The doctor’s office I’m in understands that it is conventional to have magazines in the waiting room but the state of print media is that they instead have a health care supplier catalog with a cover that alludes to the fake sitcom in bojack horseman

The extreme attack on transgender youth we are witnessing from a governmental stage was enabled by The Atlantic and The New York Times.

Or they will do what they are doing to immigrants now- just kidnap us, throw us in a detention center, move us back and forth across the US so we can’t contact lawyers and our people, and then summarily deport us and say, “oops.” Stand up against the “mass deportation” campaign now!

The fact that it at least anecdotally seems to be a semi-regular practice to tell white people a minority got the job in order to soften the blow of rejection really should put the elite woke panic into perspective.

To propose that GenAI can compensate for "archival silences" perverts Trouillot's work. It's is a contradiction to say that a product whose logic exacerbates power imbalances--creating a most-likely guess based on the existing record--can restore absences that are the product of those imbalances.

I have come to the idea that we have to collectively, brutally, ritualistically kill Target just to show capital that we truly aren’t fucking around.

POV: you are a young woman celebrating a recent academic success

🧵 Our new QUEER AS… website Exploring queer Indigenous creativity. With: Blaqademics/Indigiqueers Queer as…a podcast (Jazz Money is first up). Indigenous Creatives Queer Museums Queer Tv - deep dive Our pubs and info queer-as.org

friday soapbox: as a designer, if you want something to be a skillful action for players, and you want growth in this skill to be very deep/meaningful, then you need to also let players be bad at it. sometimes horrendously bad. players hate this pain, and designers often want to mitigate it away.

salmon is best cooked steamed

Good things are possible and we don’t have to settle.

We have progressed from data collection to data analysis.

ALL PLACES ARE NEIGHBOURHOODS Last night, for @newnaratif.bsky.social , I ran a workshop about what we need to think about, when we tell stories of the environment. Did some conceptual & ideological framing. The point of this slide is simple: there is no such thing as a land without people. 1/

Just under THREE HOURS left to pledge for your copy of Dog Eat Dog, Princess with a Cursed Sword, and/or The Mountain Witch before our BackerKit campaign closes! https://bit.ly/4mIpcbG

something weird I've noticed over the past couple of years: college students used to be adults, but are now children. it's strange. I'm even seeing grad students, who used to be adults, now be children. whereas people who used to be old, like postdocs, are now normal? maybe TikTok is to blame.

This was just posted by a CBS News producer on their Instagram stories.

We need a Special Legislative Session in Hawaii! Sign!!! The Leg + the Gov must protect Hawaiʻi by immediately pass: ● NO Masking/NO Secret Police ● NO Closing of Community Health Centers & Hospitals ● NO Hungry Keiki, Kupuna & Families. We need state funding to help fill the gap left by Trump.

Only TWO DAYS LEFT to make your pledge for Art & System: Games for Expanded Play! Back it for your hardcover copy of Dog Eat Dog, Princess with a Cursed Sword, and The Mountain Witch: https://bit.ly/4mIpcbG

Went back to Santa Cruz on October 17 and picked up the 2025 UC Santa Cruz Distinguished Graduate Alumni Award! Back in September they sent a camera crew to @unhresearch.bsky.social to interview me. Here's the video they made about my journey as a physicist/astronomer and my time as a banana slug.

one of the interesting thing i have seen in the platner discourse is a refusal to confront a thing on its own terms. to his pundit supporters, platner isn’t a novice candidate with perhaps questionable judgment to be evaluated on his ability to win, but a symbol to wield against rivals

Periodically over ~25 years I’ve seen concern erupt over one variety of structured, playful interaction or another, questioning whether some kinds of “gameplay” might be inherently flawed (regardless of context or ends). Even after much thought I’ve never found these critiques cogent or accurate

Six percent of *all children* in the United States—all people in America under 18—are US citizens with at least one parent who is an unauthorized immigrant. Mass deportation is a vast military action against *millions of US citizens*.

cars should be illegal

More fun on reddit. My fellow game designers do not like this answer. I wonder why.

so the idea is the inversion of the magic circle. to talk about this i have to define what the magic circle is so please be kind to me and my cursory definition. when you play a game, you enter a space where certain rules apply and others are suspended. it is not a wall, it is a soft demarcation.