My Students: We're considering building a point-and-click adventure game. Me: Cool. What are your opinions on puzzles? Students: Erm we don't... Me: Ancient aliens? Mad scientists? Meta-commentary and references? Crowbars & tire irons? Students: We wanna tell visual stories! Me: Mwahahahahaha

"Starbucks baristas are struggling to make ends meet. Many rely on SNAP and Medicaid because they don't receive enough hours to pay their bills or access benefits... [T]he average barista receives just 19 hours of work per week, leaving them one hour short of the cutoff to receive company benefits."

Here’s a thread to talk a little more about my games! I’ve been making and self-publishing ttrpgs since 2004. My design approach is to use rules that matter to drive play that satisfies the promise of the game. You can find all of these at www.ndpdesign.com

Translators work hard to make sure that the translated words, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, etc, not only convey the author's meaning, but also the author's *style.* Translators are alchemists. They are artists, and poets, and researchers, and editors. They are magicians and wizards.

I really miss talking games (and playing games!) with Sarah. I wish all those old tapes were available somewhere somehow.

"There’s really nothing quite so counter-productive to the goal of having useful conversations about role-playing technique and theory as One True Way zealotry. Sadly, there does seem to be an awful lot of it still floating around." --Sarah Kahn (2006) web.archive.org/web/20060629...

this is something I think about a lot vis a vis observability. people have a pretty good instinct but pretty poor outcomes when it comes to telemetry design; we know when we’re at our own “context window” but its tricky to promulgate that at scale aicoding.leaflet.pub/3may5niwoyk2...

10 ttrpgs I want to play/run in 2026! - Girl Frame - City of Flesh - a|state - Hot War - Undead Paradise - Exile - In Dreaming Avalon - Tribes in the Dark - Zephyr - City of Winter

🔴 28 people were injured, and one person was killed as a result of the Russian attack on Kyiv. UNITED24 Media reporter Amira Barkhush reports from the scene.

“Algeria's parliament has unanimously passed a law declaring France's colonisation of the North African state a crime, and demanding an apology and reparations.” Colonialism is not an artifact. It still takes shape through global politics today and restitution should be made to address its effects.

163 years ago in Mankato, 38 Dakota men were hung in the largest mass execution in our nation’s history. I’m grateful to the riders who continue to remind us the importance of fighting for accountability and healing for the Dakota people. www.mprnews.org/story/2025/1...

We at AGS experienced this a few years back and it has honestly shaped a substantial part of our perception of our subfield. With all our human foibles, it still does matter how we treat one another, and for years onward.

Trauma studies reminds us of how trauma freezes time: trigger effects keep bringing us back to specific moments and memories, which are experienced as if on repeat. No addressing the source via this repetition, and yet we are compelled to return to traumatic moments, time and time again.

campuses have learning opportunities, social space, entertainment, and universities ARE healthcare. multigenerational access is net social good.

Monolog for a Taxi Driver (1962), an East German existential journey that takes place one Christmas Eve....

Oak Lawn Methodist Church Nativity in Dallas, TX

Young People Aren’t Abandoning Democracy — They’re Waiting to Be Invited In | They are routinely asked to vote, volunteer, or participate, but rarely invited to shape priorities, language, or direction, writes Yardley's Stu Faigen.

Happy Chrismukkah to all, esp. those of us with interfaith families and complicated arrangements. My Christmas Eve duties were to keep the fire going (12 hours!) and to entertain the children while [redacted] happened. Every year I know less & less what to do this season, except "be kind."

Morning all. Over the last few days, while I should have been taking a break, I put together a revised version of my first book, Play Unsafe. Here it is on my Patreon. Hope you enjoy it. And have a great day. www.patreon.com/posts/gifts-...

The Embassy staff of Germany, France and the United Kingdom sing Schedryk in the Kyiv underground. Wonderful!

I actually put my son to sleep on Christmas Eve with the final chapter of Wanderstop, and I expect that both that experience and the game itself will linger with me awhile. It's a game that's absolutely aware of what video games -- and modern life itself -- do to us, and holds space as we heal.

No one says to legit business owners, "hey I see there's an underground market selling toxic knock-offs of your product: how will you incorporate the toxic product AND protect your customers against its harms?" But apparently it's fine to make this suggestion to educators with respect to AI.

Public discourse on this subject has utterly failed to direct citizens' attention to the actual problem, which is that a commercial industry is assaulting education. So every week we get another thoughtless op-ed on blue books or the death of the college essay, etc etc.

It is EXHAUSTING not only being made responsible for coming up with new kinds of assignments for our students; it's also tedious reading op-eds that suggest the core problem is a crisis in teaching. But, as Chris and I lay out here, this isn't a crisis in teaching; it's an attack on learning.

Commodity speculation in Soda Jerk! Exploring how Soda Jerk by Chris Yi uses hidden information, stock manipulation, and influence vs. control in a game about combining soda flavors. Also, a reminder to complete the reader survey! www.skeletoncodemachine.com/p/soda-jerk #boardgames #ttrpg 🎲✂️

Who's doing the new media scholarship on the Roblox "brainrot" phenomenon?

Tacklebox is kinda blowing up at the moment, thanks to Quinn's Quest (~1500 copies & counting). Just in case anyone's interested, I would also be open to co-publishing some of my other games (Geiger Counter, Planarch Codex, Restless, Tomb Priestesses, Lofty Beacons, Metrofinal, Last Kings, etc).

I added the Brontes in this year when my course was moved from “Technology, Literacy, & Culture” to “Intro to Literary Studies” — & when I took @kierongillen.bsky.social DIE (game & comic) as an organizing text (& includes Glass Town & Angria in its understanding of the history of TTRPGs)

I used to give a lectures on the history of (TT+C)RPGs and would dutifully start in the 70s because that's what was expected, but then open the last third with this map of Angria and ask if anyone knew what it was. The shared universe of the Brontë siblings! (this is mentioned downthread.)

I think linked to this is the way that women's involvement in what are seen as men dominated genres is frequently overlooked. The way that megagames (at least in the UK) have shifted from 98% older men to a much more diverse hobby is fascinating and largely overlooked outside the scene.

There is excellent work in this issue and you should read it!

To paraphrase the title of @leighalexander.bsky.social too-relevant piece from a decade ago: “all the women [and folks who study them] I know in [analog] games are tired”

I think you @friede.bsky.social and @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social are both awesome! Certainly expanded my world. And hey it's looking like I'll finally drive the 5ish miles to hang out with Dr. Evan a few times in 2026!

you wanna see a dead body

If you read enough hagiographical work about very specific men gamers in the 1970s and couple it with a lifetime of people dismissing your (freeform larp / "storygame" / Erzählspiel) game tradition as "not really games" in part due to their community's gender, then you see where I'm coming from.

I spent my early career in very specific ways, let's put it that way. I strongly believed that the hobbyist-specific as well as marginalized views were being ground out of game studies in real time, and joined with a coalition of fellow scholars to push back.

Wildly different things, tasks, techniques, subspecialties being lumped into "AI" and then being conflated with each other, doesn't help. Different types of models vs the techniques to train them vs the tasks they are supposed to accomplish, all under "AI".

Revisited All that Heaven Allows and admittedly Im just in the bag for Sirk, for a multitude of reasons, not the leastof which is how much he values emotional ostentation as a logical result of offending and oppressive societal modifications on the soul... boxd.it/cbwkdX

Undying Fortress has been released into the world! During the worst of my long covid I really didn’t think this day would come so this is super surreal for me. It’s been a long, long journey. The game is 40% off until December 25th. youtu.be/ix1iH1rnrrE?...

Advent of Swords, Day 6: I've probably miscounted in there, somewhere, but it matters not! Here's a thing, by design, you can write an entire Swords scenario on a notecard. www.kickstarter.com/projects/unw...

Pluralism is antithetical to Christian nationalism. If Jews (or other religions minorities) have an equal right to the mantle of Americanism it knocks over the whole sordid house of cards. This same fact also explains why anti-Blackness is so central to the movement as well.

“It turns out that banishing the slur from public discourse was, in fact, important. Because now it’s back and it turns out that it does matter when subtext becomes actual text, when terrible people enable open hatred and bigotry, encouraging others to emulate them, degrading us all.”

The idea that autistic people lack empathy is still depressingly prevalent, partly because people conflate 'caring about other humans' wellbeing & wanting them to be happy' with 'reliably able to infer a stranger's motivation & emotional state based off observing a few external nonverbal clues'.

One of my favorite Shadowrun covers!!

Hoard: Spices Weakness: Sheer exhaustion Gain Trust: Knowing and citing others' thoughts

I know, anecdotally, that many game devs have quietly incorporated *some GenAI* into their workflows, and this is going to rub up against the current popular opinion among gamers themselves that GenAI sucks. Truly the interregnum right now. blog.lauramichet.com/the-gamers-h...

"We educated no murderers. The contents of the articles which I wrote could not have educated murderers. No murders took place, and that is proof that we did not educate murderers. What happened during the war -- well, I certainly did not educate the Fuehrer." --J. Streicher, Nuremberg testimony

The Trump administration's threat to close NCAR over "climate alarmism" endangers vital research impacting weather forecasts, air safety and our daily lives.