starting tomorrow @friends-table.bsky.social is hosting fundraising stream marathon and they brought me on to draw a limited run merch design. all proceeds from their shop sales through March will be donated to the Immigration Law Center of Minnesota tune in, lend a hand twitch.tv/friendsatthetable

This is going to happen... a lot. Not just because things like the Steam Deck encourage a minimum viable hardware spec, but because a growing portion of our players cannot and will not be able to access major leaps in hardware. RAM and GPU prices are making the cutting-edge player more rare!

Thinking about the ”rule of three” today in terms of the setup of the first two creating an expectation, a vector through conceptual space seeming to point somewhere, and the third creating the surprise by breaking that expectation.

a stat i always cite is the number of anti-trans articles in the press went from 60 in a year, to 7,500

4th day of the strike and the district supervisor isn’t budging yet. Please consider picking up my music or some of my games!

nobody wants another f2p multiplayer shooter but its the only thing capital will invest in because of how big the two (2) multiplayer shooters that anyone plays are so you just repeat launch dead games forever because capital is dumb as (black)rocks

When I say OpenAI is deep in the red I think people don’t understand just how crimson the hue is.

i used twine to make an interactive fiction game for casio calculators :) (and i made a tool so you can too <3) adamledoux.net/blog/posts/2...

My new article on Canada's recent AI strategy consultation. Lightning-fast engagement, dubious data protection measures, black box analysis, & AI-generated summaries from made-in-USA LLMs are not a winning strategy for building public trust betakit.com/canadas-new-...

This year for #secretsamol I had rosehipsister who requested "tender sky or another character working through the levels of the by-and-by", so I made a little (barely) visual novel about moving up the layers of the By-and-By! mguzdial.itch.io/ascending-th...

So it's Black History Month and that means I think it's a good time to get familiar with Mike Pondsmith, if you're not already. When you see R. Talsorian Games, that's him. When you see Cyberpunk 2077, that's his world. Mekton, Castle Falkenstein, also him. cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Mike_Po...

Fully autonomous? No you misheard. This is my wage slave: Philly Autonomoose.

Ahahahahahahahahah www.reddit.com/r/LegalAdvic...

Once again, it turns out “fully autonomous” means “a guy in the Philippines.”

Remembering the time I played @sniperserpent.bsky.social's Anomaly in an intro to game dev class (on Halloween!), only to find that roll20 updated at some point and ate all my old game setups, what the heck!

PhD admissions visits/open houses are starting to happen, and I got a comment on an old Reddit post where I was offering advice, and realized that it's actually really good advice. So here it is! (And this applies whether you've already been admitted to the program or not.) 🧵

Caves of Qud mutates onto the Nintendo Switch, February 16th!

Meet the unconventional publishers trying to unfuck the games industry: aftermath.site/indie-game-pub...

This has been a very tough semester for a bunch of reasons BUT I just got to spend the evening hammering out a generic Deep Q notebook for an assignment where students have to make their own grid worlds. Look at em goooooo

1,265 kWh have been burned to date on MoltBots posting on MoltBook. Might not be a huge amount in the grand scheme of things but it’s a complete waste of energy on AI agents role-playing cringy sci-fi tropes and attempting to crypto-scam each other. www.linkedin.com/posts/sashal...

Announcing the 2026 @gendesignmc.bsky.social Minecraft Settlement Generation Competition! Make PCG systems in Minecraft, where the challenge is to write an algorithm that generates a settlement that dynamically adapts to any terrain. More info + Discord link: gendesignmc.wikidot.com/wiki:2026-se...

I am recruiting a postdoc in HCI & AI!
 Interested in augmenting human thinking and learning, futures of work & education, participatory AI, collective intelligence, or related topics? Please get in touch! This 2-year position will be based at a top university in Europe (email or DM for more info)

I regret to inform everyone that the smartest money people out there are, overwhelmingly, dumb as a rock www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/...

This month on PAPER LABYRINTHS, @nictringali.bsky.social and I talk with @meredithgran.com about her new game Perfect Tides: Station to Station, as well as making comics, satisfying endings, and the power of time and place. sites.libsyn.com/568595/site/...

New from 404 Media: an exposed Moltbook database let anyone take control of any AI agent on the site www.404media.co/exposed-molt...

“We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery.” Props to Anthropic for studying the effects of their creation and reporting results that are not probably what they wished for www.anthropic.com/research/AI-...

With these training weights (read: tiny rainbow sparkles) off I finished my grants at a rate of 10 minutes per page today. Don’t tell the funding agency.

Step 1. Forget you have an astigmatism giving lights rainbow halos Step 2. Get your eyes dilated Step 3. Remember as it makes the astigmatism 10x worse Step 4. Get no work done as your screen looks like a magical girl transformation

Can you hear that? That ghastly wheeze? That wet thump? That can only be the sound of LAST RITES and ICHOR-DROWNED being added to the Rowan Rook & Decard website shop for digital purchase!

My ancient cat (came off street, unknowable age, likely ~20) has been waking me up at 5am so I can walk him down and show him that there's food in his bowl (sometimes he also pees on the floor by the bedroom door as an added surprise). This has not been doing wonders for my sleep schedule.

just saying this is exactly the article I would write if I wanted to point out the very real limitations of this tech while attracting the attention of the famously litigious Nintendo

On Friday and Saturday, the Twin Cities were the center of global news. A day of solidarity. A horrific murder of a good man by masked federal agents. A city that rallied with peaceful fury. And then, as of Monday, a scapegoat sent packing. A neat story all wrapped up. Reporters all fly home.

Oh good I was worried I wouldn’t have a new example of a Genetic Algorithm for my Game AI class this term.

Time to dump ChatGPT! The latest model of ChatGPT has begun to cite Elon Musk’s Grokipedia as a source on a wide range of queries, including on Iranian conglomerates and Holocaust deniers, raising concerns about misinformation on the platform.

Nonviolence is, in fact, working. This administration is weaker than it was a year ago. More and more of the public is becoming galvanized against it; its agents are being impeded.

It's the Polaris 2025 reports! They've come! They're here! It's a bumper crop of five, count'em FIVE papers! We got comedy, we got death, we got cringe, we got trust... something for the whole team. Piping hot game design knowledge and insight await: polarisgamedesign.com/reports/

NEW: I spoke to Jonathan Blow about his ambitious new puzzle game and why it took ten years to make. Then, days after the announcement, three designers came out denouncing Blow for his views on Trump (pro), vaccines (anti), and more. Here's the whole messy story: www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...

This year's Polaris game design papers are up and our group worked on Mechanical Comedy in Games, as in games where the comedy comes from players performing the jokes. Really pleased with what we learned (and glad I thought to pitch the topic). polarisgamedesign.com/2025/mechani...

Update: Now 120 cities are holding Minneapolis General Strike solidarity actions paydayreport.com/minneap/

Are low-quality survey respondents bots? Five years of mixed methods research reveals problematic respondents are often humans trying to get paid for surveys that they do not quality for (based on language proficiency, location, experience, etc.): doi.org/10.1177/1745...

The disconnect between management and employee on AI usage is big. At the same time, CEOs are reporting they aren't seeing any revenue growth from AI. 🤷 www.wsj.com/lifestyle/wo...

Hey folks, I am looking for more illustration and character design work this year. I have over a decade of experience freelancing for tabletop, card and video games. You can check out more work and client testimonials on my website: www.sifsweetman.com Contact: [email protected]

Patronize as many of these businesses as you can before and after Friday.

A senior professor years ago told me they were doing “metaverse” research, and I cautioned against it as it was obviously doomed. But they were bullish, saying how could Zuckerberg spend all this money if there was nothing to it.

Would love to speak to any regular international GDC attendees who are skipping this year's show (or were going to attend and have now cancelled) due to the current political climate. DMs here or [email protected], thank you!

Shared my thoughts on Canada's AI strategy for this new piece in @thewalrus.ca The tendency to frame AI as inevitable & autonomous "obscures what we’re really talking about, which is people—in business, in government, in civil society—and the decisions they make." thewalrus.ca/evan-solomon...

It’s fun to spend the morning with a journalist correcting all the popularly-believed lies about AI. It’s wild to be reminded that some people don’t know we’re in an AI bubble/summer or that it has happened before.

Something else that really struck me in this report is this paragraph. "AI is doing things for students that they used to enjoy."

The only answer to crunch is building worker power through unions. Executives would crunch even if they 100% believed it was bad for business because executives are motivated by wanton cruelty and a desire to exercise power as much as anything.

Literally gave a talk yesterday and this was my final slide. There are two paths. One is to teach LLMs to do proper reasoning & planning. Can't rule this out. Another is to leverage known, powerful reasoning and planning algorithms and make them work in language space. Can't rule this out either.