Up now: Todd Anderson, tapping in for the OG Magic computer game experience, Magic: The Gathering (Microprose, 1997). Hourly Raffle: Copies of Jon Peterson's Playing at the World, Volumes 1 + 2, courtesy MIT Press!! Donate for a chance to win.

A MN protester accused of assaulting ICE officer had case dropped after vids showed no assault. LA protester accused of assaulting ICE w/ “hat” had case dropped; judge said govt acted in “bad faith” In Chicago, 92 ppl were arrested for assault/impeding ICE; 0 convicted DOJ keeps lying and losing:

Let's try this again 👋 Hi Bluesky - I'm Massachusetts' Attorney General. You might know me from suing President Trump nearly 50 times, beating Uber and Lyft in court, or being the first woman of color elected to statewide office in MA. I officially left X today - help me find my MA people?

Now THAT's a headline. "The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents" fortune.com/2026/02/21/l...

I need a dildo shaped like a bald communist chairman… A Mao Ze-Dong if you will

Hey! At 1PM PST/4PM EST I'm playing a modular synth set focusing on house music and samples of home themes for the @romchip.bsky.social fundraiser! Learn more at donate.romchip.org and watch the stream (live now) at www.twitch.tv/romchipjournal

Live now and it's pretty rad!

in 15 mintues we've got @halfrobot.com streaming cult disaster Cosmology at Kyoto #cosmologyatkyoto join us! www.twitch.tv/romchipjournal

This too, is a form of social Darwinism; one that always accompanies fantasies about leaving the weak "behind." I encountered this eugenicist futurism in early primatology, when ppl speculated whether primates could be used to circumvent child labor and anti-slavery laws. bsky.app/profile/x2y....

expecting self-reflection from recovering libertarians is like expecting honey from a wasp. if they'd been capable of self-reflection, odds are 10k-1 they'd never become libertarians in the first place.

Doctorow has coined some widely-used concepts, but his arguments have always felt elusively shallow and anemic to me, and this really snaps the reason into focus: It's because they're always and entirely focused on the consumer.

Magic the Gathering of the Juggalos

This 53 year old man who lived in my neighborhood w/no criminal record & who had been in the US for 30 years, was detained and thrown into a cold cell for days, caught pneumonia and COVID there and deported. He finally died. I am so angry. www.kptv.com/2026/02/21/n...

So many people I adore are showcasing some wild stuff on @romchip.bsky.social's annual Twitch charity stream today! If you want a lovely stream to chill to this Saturday or would like to support this titan of open source game histories please check it out! www.twitch.tv/romchipjournal

"Find someone who loves you the way Guins loves to examine even the smallest details of the creation story of video games." @washingtonpost.com reviews "King PONG," a history dedicated to Atari’s first video game: www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

An exciting winter day for live tv, gonna be first screening @romchip.bsky.social fundraiser & second screening the 1st Mets broadcast of the spring.

We're 25 minutes from our opening ceremony!

On Saturday at 3 PM ET I'm going to be streaming a game I haven't thoroughly played since the mid-90s -- Cosmology of Kyoto, the early game that blew Roger Ebert's mind with the possibilities of an "open world." Also you can get molten metal poured into your ass and out of your mouth! Be there.

Are gamers okay? The fact that video games are competing with porn and online gambling says a lot about their place in culture. kotaku.com/why-the-vide...

this is how i witnessed an ICE kidnapping in western mass, i paid a $250 bail for a woman accused of trespassing (right...) and ICE snatched her as soon as we got out the door

I get major Never-Nude vibes from RFKjr.

who wore it better

"Nazis were just regular people" is not a statement meant to evoke empathy or to excuse their crimes. It is a statement of warning. The capacity to be part of and perpetrate atrocities is not limited to "monsters," it is wholly human. It is what we must always be aware of.

An old comic style of a woman looking out her window at a city skyline. The bubble says, “What a stupid time to be alive.”

I was disappointed to read Cory Doctorow's post where he got weirdly defensive about his LLM use and started arguing with an imaginary foe. @tante.cc has a very thoughtful reply here: tante.cc/2026/02/20/a... A few further comments, 🧵>>

damn, LARB had the best book review coverage for a while there but then really fell off, had heard dark mutterings from folks over the years but nothing on quite this scale

holy shit face/off has a zip drive in it

You want to read this, trust me! 🗃️

They locked up a Colombian child coming to go to Disney World with her family. What the hell are we doing? And why in the world would anyone come here for the World Cup/Olympics? www.miaminewtimes.com/news/immigra...

We're two fundraising cycles away from having a @romchip.bsky.social dunk tank, but in the meantime, if we hit our $10k target tomorrow, we'll have ROMchip pie in the head honcho's face!

To my mind, this is the single tweet that explains 95% of the energy behind the MAGA movement.

Why are so many commercial toys made of plastic? My new essay for The Strong National Museum of Play shows how safety concerns have alternately fueled and slowed the spread of plastic toys since the 1950s. www.museumofplay.org/blog/problem...

just read a story about a little boy in SC who just learned to ride a bike but he was unvaxxed and got measles and got really sick and got a spinal tap and then pumped with medicines and then his brain swelled anyway and now he won't ever walk or eat on his own and he definitely won't ride a bike

Yesterday I taught 100 young people that capitalism is a social relation of production, that capital is the asset owning class, that labor creates all surplus value, and that the state is the instrument mediating that relation.

if you've played clair obscur, you know that its first act ends on a twist that's hugely impactful in both narrative and gameplay senses. how do you make a moment like that satisfying and resonant without players seeing it coming from a mile away? I asked the game's lead writer

Remember, these guys fired all the people who actually know what they're doing because "DEI" and then hired the absolute dumbest people imaginable because of "meritocracy" and... then they do stuff like leaving comments enabled in their "this is how we concentration camp" PDF.

You busy April 9-10? There's going to be an amazing conference at Rutgers celebrating the (beta) rollout of the Black Bibliography Project database. Here's the agenda: globalracialjustice.rutgers.edu/sites/defaul... Registration can be found here: globalracialjustice.rutgers.edu/event/networ...

I am sorry but this is still the core problem with trying to parse anything he says about tariffs.

IAMX presents its new song and music video “Artificial Innocence,” which marks the beginning of a new musical era.

disappointing but not surprising. Cory’s libertarian ideals have always been what gave me pause about him and his work. this is an excellent rebuttal and rebuke of Cory’s posturing on LLMs. the neologism seems to have come for the neologist.

FOMO www.eventbrite.com/e/the-cambri...

This is exactly the « vectorialist class » described by McKenzie Wark that exploits both creators and users by owning and controlling the vectors (the means to access data, information, etc.) instead of manufacturing anything truly of value.

will the prices that went up because of tariffs now go right back down? or are we now living with higher prices on some goods because of this unconstitutional decision?

"Here let us help you unshoot your dick, we're worried our party's about to get slaughtered in the midterms" effectively explains the decision.

Fuck these people. "He should be in prison" these fucking pathetic tattletales. These assholes decided to put themselves in charge of our country so that they could rape children

Last night, I was notified that another person has died in ICE custody. That’s 39 people who have died on ICE’s watch during Trump’s second term. We cannot grow numb to this. There must be immediate oversight and accountability.

How much stock did the SC justices buy before issuing today's ruling?

His blood pressure has got to be through the roof right now, so if anyone has a chance to ask him an aggressive question about the Epstein files, that really could make It happen today. Come on, reporters. We'll build statues in your honor.