Whether designing a game, shooting a movie, or writing an article, research to "see what's already out there" is useful to a point, but your deep connection and analysis of the source material is what's ultimately going to drive your project to greatness. Human connections between source & audience.

Just out…

"Overstuffed Walrus" is actually a band name I could get behind

CfP: "Vom Staat der Amazonen bis Praios‘ Zorn – Die politische Ideengeschichte der Welt von Das Schwarze Auge" @eugenpfister.bsky.social und ich bereiten einen Sammelband zur Ideengeschichte von Das Schwarze Auge vor. Ihr wollt dabei sein? Siehe hier: www.falkenhagen.de/2025/09/23/c...

Call for Papers: “Vom Staat der Amazonen bis Praios’ Zorn – Die politische Ideengeschichte in der Welt von Das Schwarze Auge”. Die @lenafalkenhagen.bsky.social und ich wünschen uns da schon länger einen Sammelband und freuen uns auf Eure Zusendungen. #GameStudies spielkult.hypotheses.org/8311

Things can, and do, get better.

Long read on why the AI boom looks more like shipping containerization than personal computers … joincolossus.com/article/ai-w...

My goodness, this article is bleak as hell. scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/08/26/g...

Crowdfunding soon: Princess with a Cursed Sword (bound edition) by game designer, author, and educator @cyborgurl.bsky.social. Catch up with her actual play of Thaumaturge, the edition's new RPG, at https://bit.ly/4pByJUC in Dev log. BackerKit: https://bit.ly/4mE1Ncn Art: @evlynmoreau.bsky.social

Stellar new scholarship on analog games is now at your fingertips!

The school car drop-off line sucks, so people take great pains to avoid it, causing angry commnications from the school about their avoidance strategies, and people grudgingly return to the car drop-off line. But then: they re-discover that the line sucks and so....

Or, how games *really* get made. My newest blog post is about keeping momentum going to get your game done: entrogames.substack.com/p/how-to-kee... #momentum #gamedesign #boardgamedesign #tabletopdesign

Hell Gate joined Austrian Vice-Chancellor Andreas Babler—leader of the country's Social Democratic Party—on a recent tour of Brooklyn rent-stabilized apartments, where he had some advice for New York lawmakers (and a warning for his fellow Austrians)

🔴 This week, Russia hit Ukraine with 1,500 drones, 1,280 bombs, and 50 missiles. Zelenskyy says they contained 132,000 foreign parts from Europe, the US, China, Japan, and more.

My late-graduate career was defined by me posting an article of mine (I won't say which) to Academia [dot] edu, only to discover 8 months later that it was becoming *the* resource for students in UK and China to answer a specific exam question. But then the site's IP praxis drove me away!

I liked (and laughed at) KJ Parker's Making History -- a tyrant requires a bunch of ancient history profs to fake an archaeology find to justify a border war. Lots of academic jokery (linguistics too). It's a fast read. torpublishinggroup.com/making-histo... #booksky #books

Busy parents and convention demo GMs salute this

As part of our reboot of the @videogamecultures.bsky.social conference series, we have our first book coming out, of papers from the 2023 conference in Klagenfurt, Austria. It should appear in the wild on 6 November. Details here: www.sidestone.com/books/explor...

Higher education in the USA is in a death spiral: ludicrous tuitions, defunding, censorship, repression, and a looming demographic cliff. That's a huge opportunity for English-language universities worldwide. www.cbsnews.com/news/college...

Microsoft Teams

Power is the rock on which truth founders. The mainstream media, with a few exceptions, is a single-issue lobby group, whose purpose is to assert the rights of capital. Here's what I've learnt about the industry in 40 years in journalism. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Last Transmissions came from my love of disaster movies and character-driven sci-fi. Seeing players discover how their characters' stories weave together, even as the clock ticks down, has been incredibly rewarding. #TTRPG solsroles.itch.io/la...

Defending the Earth is deadly work. A new report illuminates how much. Nearly 150 land and environment defenders were killed or disappeared last year, most for standing up to mining and logging grist.org/global-indig... #Indigenous #climate #Mining #Logging #Environment #Tribes #Landback

When one primarily attains power via moral panics, *everything* (and that definitely includes normal people just livin out their lives) will become a nascent moral panic. It's a governance structure! It has the capacity to produce mass murder. We choose to reject fear and panic for this reason.

Many years of teaching & presenting media have meant that I am now *less* judgmental than ever if someone hasn't played a particular game or watched a certain film. Oh joy! They now get to experience it for the first time and let me know what they think. This first encounter can work wonders.

Reading Droste-Hülshoff for tomorrow's class and reminded of the comical notion we have of people in the 1800s just wandering into the woods and felling trees whenever needed. (Much of Karl Marx's radicalism emerged from forest wardens' over-criminalization of timber theft in the early 1840s!)

This academic article I'm writing will definitely exceed the economic output of the entire Earth, a statement I make with full confidence in my powers of prediction.

I told a colleague this, and he said, "My problem is finding an arcade."

🥀 Rose-tinted glasses have thorns, too. #retrogames #retrogaming #nostalgia #videogames — talk at OASIS centre at Tampere University’s @gameresearchlab.bsky.social

John Linnell standing on his famous pillar of wah wah pedals. #NewAlbum

an important thing about Kate Bush as an artist and maybe the reason she is my favorite musical artist is that at no point is she ever trying to look cool. nothing she does is informed by the need to look cool. and sure, people have over time decided she is cool - but that never motivates her music.

I’ve had this on my shelf for a long time …

The game that I've been doing PR for since the beginning is Annalise, the Gothic vampire game by @ndpdesign.com from nearly 2 decades ago. It's a TTRPG in the best, collaborative sense: your initial sessions hint at the vampire, and then you get slowly drawn in for good reasons until... "Wait, no!"

If you're into movies like this, I have a curated playlist for you here: B Movie Bonanza boxd.it/Gug06

"There always comes a time in history when the person who dares to say that 2+2=4 is punished by death. And the issue is not what reward or what punishment will be the outcome of that reasoning. The issue is simply whether or not 2+2=4." --Albert Camus, The Plague

I wore a shirt with a shredded armpit today and was like Oh Yeah my professor chic is "Who let this strange homeless guy in --- Wait, he's in charge??" Anime and wuxia movies have taught me well.

My entire career, I've been fighting for the relevance and power of TTRPGs and larps. Now, at this point in history, it's not so bad to be (a) largely ignored by the state, and (b) involved with a medium that cannot die, that relies on human interaction and creativity. But the $$$ are an issue.

Independent media is the only media we will have that will not be beholden to The State This means it will not have the same reach, influence, or attention as traditional models developed. This will like be both very good and extremely difficult to maintain.

France announced Wednesday that it has selected the Iranian director Jafar Panahi's Palme d'Or-winning drama "It Was Just An Accident" as its submission to the Academy Awards.

American media has been manufacturing parasocial reactionaries for decades. Limbaugh, Beck, Shapiro, Jones, Carlson, Hannity, etc. The importance of these figures is not ideological purity, consistency, inventiveness, etc. It’s that they keep you company in your cab, your cubicle, on your commute.

Because EVERY KID IN MY TOWN HAS WATCHED IT, my take on the absolute phenomenon that is K-Pop Demon Hunters (2025) is that Korean animation has been with us a while (look at Netflix credits!), and that Sony's genre-loving hyper-self-aware style has overtaken the clean, emotive Pixar style.

Distracting myself momentarily with one of the OG ARGs, Kit Williams' Masquerade (1979)

Hey look at this -- we r visible

#MarkFisher locates the “eerie” in everyday settings. #TTRPGs, esp #WarHammer ‘s eerie, empty towns? Unlived but clearly once a home. @rosgakori.bsky.social argued this gets players to engage with, and hopefully, critique history. Also, the “Empire” is temporary both in the game and the real-world.

This week's Unbundled is Orizuru: a half-formed thing by @phophos.bsky.social from the TTRPGs for Trans Rights in Texas bundle.

If you're at the German Studies Association next week in DC, come to Arts Night and experience the first-ever GSA Games Night featuring a cash bar and Kathryn Hymes of Thorny Games!

Still kinda thinking that the affect turn was kind of a parallel to the sonic episteme: a way to mark scholarly progress/innovation/repair while keeping all the old hierarchies in new terms...

Many feelings about icons passing away today.

"Jack to the beat" means something ummm different in 2025 than 1992

"Qu’on me donne six lignes de la main du plus honnête homme, j’y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre" --Cardinal Richelieu