As @tressiemcphd.bsky.social knows, I almost didn’t write my book because of years of threats against me and my family. I wrote the book and I’m happy about it, but this kind of harassment takes a toll.

Important correction: it shouldn't be Prufrock. It's Prufrock Lobster!

Thinkin’ about this a lot.

Folks who create videos about games on the internet: I have questions for you if you'd be so kind. I'm trying to determine the relationship between traditional media and those who create videos about games and have never worked for the games press. Sharing is appreciated! forms.gle/cG3BEkGqwuoh...

I think a lot about the colleagues whose work I most respect — who put themselves on the line in ways that so few of their colleagues will ever be called to do.

Baby’s got a pub date! And some juicy catalog copy. MIDDLEMEN coming your way on April 26! (Cover reveal soon!)

I am grateful for the support on a hard day—not my first—when, as my beloved calls it, “Roopsi’s life intersects with the news.” I am in my favorite hotel near work writing up material for a digital Du Bois project, filled with special bad words per the U.S. government, and so we keep going.

Roll with Advantage: Creative, Collaborative, and Critical Responses to Dungeons & Dragons (Play Story Press 2025) edited by Suzanne Richardson & Edmond Y. Chang: playstorypress.org/books/roll-w... - in print or open access PDF! #analoggamestudies #creativewriting #dungeonsanddragons #dnd

TFW your new 3RM (3 rep max) exceeds your old 1RM. Squat 160 lb/72.5 kg 3x3, for estimated 1RM of 169 lb (nice) /76.8 kg

Book Announcement: I just published an OER textbook for Introduction to Popular Culture classes (or any other class that addresses popular culture) called "Keepin' Up with Popular Culture" It is free, open-access. Please let me know what you think! uta.pressbooks.pub/keepinupwith...

Congratulations to all the big winners from the 2025 #NJWebFest! Check them out here: Audio: www.newjerseywebfest.com/2025-award-n... Video: www.newjerseywebfest.com/2025-award-n... Both pages have links to laurels!

A story by Piyumi Kapugeekiyana, exploring cultural ownership through the eyes of a museum curator has won this year’s 4thWrite prize Charitha, a Sri Lankan curator, gets backlash after staging an exhibit on a replica of Tārā, in the British Museum Her story: www.theguardian.com/books/2025/o...

RIP Jane Goodall. There's so much to say about her career, her activism, her science. Primatology was the home of so many bigoted approaches to race, gender, and animality when she arrived and the field became more humane because of her. A truly transformative figure.

Looking for an SF Bay person available for a short-term job cataloguing a large collection of immersive/ARG materials for donation to a museum. You’d be paid as a contractor, expected to take a couple weeks. You’d be working out of my home, so not being allergic to cats would be ideal.

tomorrow at @scholarslab.bsky.social we will be talking about setting reasonable expectations for teaching people to read (not write) code - a meta discussion for my in-person workshop here on reading python for beginners next week

This should also be how universities reply to the AI thing btw

*Sees the most Catholic person in the world doing the most Catholic thing there imaginable*: goddamn Pagans!

i know a lot of ttrpg folks got started in a major way during lockdown, but i can't remember specific names. can anyone think of names? or maybe you are that person? i might have an interview opp

Can we just admire Jane Fonda, please? She is a true patriot, inspiration, and role model. "When I feel scared, I look to history. I wish there were a secret playbook with all the answers — but there never has been. The only thing that has ever worked — time and time again — is solidarity."

Literature is the weird shit!

aaaaaaaaaaand we're crying in the office. Please read this though. What a beautiful meditation on the never-ending need to defend democratic education and the refusal to relent even when final victory is not guaranteed or even unlikely.

I'm not complaining about my own pay or situation, but this essay did make me think about all the things I haven't written over the years, and all the pitches I didn't make, because I just wasn't up for dealing with the harrassment.

People think they’re taking down a rich intellectual sinecure but they’re mostly terrorizing committed public servants who make $58,000 a year after 15 years of experience at a school that has to budget creatively so students can access textbooks.

Jane Goodall's work insisting, with evidence from her brilliant and tenacious fieldwork, that we were not so separate from animals, and they were much more like us than the Eurocentric theorists asserted, was so important.

Jane Goodall, from a March 2020 Paste Magazine interview: www.pastemagazine.com/article/jane...

Today marks the first day in public media’s history without federal funding. And we’re not going anywhere. Listeners like you keep our mission alive. Protect one of the last places where America comes together to hear itself. Stand with us today. Donate at this link: n.pr/46wamAj

14,292 games released on Steam in 2025 alone. 1100 new board games at SPIEL. The sheer number of games being released now, all over the world by all these different sizes of teams, really boggles the mind, but what *really* boggles the mind is still having to *defend game studies* despite all that.

'Graeme Atherton, head of the Ruskin Institute for Social Equity (Rise) at the University of West London, said the policy “is giving with one hand and taking with another” and will “exacerbate” the problems being faced by humanities and arts departments and disadvantaged students.'

Today’s the day, which is neat.

YO

You know, an underrated skill in the workplace is developing a very clear sense of who is the boss of you and who is not the boss of you

Submissions now open! We want to send your actual play on a world tour, putting it in front of audiences and judges on four continents. But you can't be selected if you don't apply!

Somehow I was even in that volume, which is sort of wild because I’m not a nerd enough for DeFoe parties.

almost halfway through the semester and my students are still super engaged & doing the reading. I wonder if the assault on higher ed is having an opposite effect: students are re-valuing their college education & reenergized about being in the classroom.

Not entirely on-topic, but sometimes I just think if I go to every DM and say “you are enough just as you are, and you don’t have to make anyone love you” the entire DM/GM Industrial Complex would collapse.

Does anyone care is almost never the right question. People care. The issue is that people don't know what to do.

I love this book btw.

COVER REVEAL AND PREORDER: The Public Scholar - A Practical Handbook. "Perry focuses on the practical details of how to approach public scholarship. How do you pitch a piece to an editor? When should you follow or ignore the rules of the genre? And what happens once your piece is out in the world?"

Age 5: Hi! Wanna be friends? :D Age 14: Hi! Wanna be friends? :D Age 23: People will always leave. And as an adult, you have no place in others' lives. You need to steel your heart to survive the bleak reality of human condition: we're born alone, and die alone. Age 36: Hi! Wanna be friends? :D

I really appreciate the times I’ve been quoted by name as a critic, especially in moments like now, having just learned a comic blurbed me and attributed my words namelessly to a website I’ve never written for.

Join us on 20 November for the Annual Digital Lecture, a partnership between The National Archives, UK and the School of Advanced Study. The wonderful @nannathylstrup.bsky.social will be speaking about ‘When saving becomes loss: archival memory in the digital age’. Free to register!

hey! I'm on one of my favorite podcasts!

Some true things (a non-exhaustive list): --Kindness is never a mistake. --Libraries are wonderful. --You should drink more water than you are. --If you're grouchy, eat something. --No one is perfect. Pedestals are not safe for anyone. --Love is the answer to a lot of questions. --You are valuable.

i wrote a small (one-page) game on my patreon about three types of truth produced during play www.patreon.com/posts/140112...

I love Actual Play, in all its emergent visceral discovery. But I love the old-school meaning of AP, where one’s specific experience of play is brought to a reader as a snapshot of play experience, a moment in time. You understand both game & person better — vital in an artform so MADE of people.

On the day that commences my 50th year on this planet (and the 40th of playing RPGs), I start my list of my favourite 101 RPGs that I've played. It's in order. So we begin with my least favourite RPG of all time. Drumroll...

Many of you have asked about gifts to us during a shutdown, mainly doordash types of things. No. Instead, donate to local food banks like Manna in MoCo, Capital Area Food Bank in DC, Find Food in PGC, and Food for Others in Fairfax. These serve everyone. Please repost. #fedstrong #shutdown

Come work with us! We are hiring 3 postdoctoral researchers working in cultural game studies from the beginning of 2026 until the end of 2027. Read more and apply by 31.10.2025 (at 23.59.00 EET / UTC+2):

I write and delete a lot more posts lately, mostly because I am trying not to post anything unprofessional or that could affect my personal safety, and also because the world is hard enough as it is without adding my own stress and anxieties

Excited that longtime Viral Texts collaborator Avery Blankenship’s *American Literature* article is out—stemming from a chapter of her diss, it outlines her research using infrared spectroscopy to analyze food stains in C19 cookbooks—interesting for DH, book history, bibliography, and foodies alike