Very ecocritical of you

seeing people hit by the layoffs today who have worked in the industry for DECADES. one guy had worked on fucking STAR WARS GAMES FOR THE SNES, another had been at blizzard since starcraft.

that kind of continual experience in the industry is like gold dust, and MS are just throwing it in the bin

OpenAI's Studio Ghibli meme factory is an insult to art itself Sam Altman is promoting his new image generator by appropriating the work of one of the greatest living animators—who is "disgusted" by AI.

OpenAI is using Studio Ghibli-style memes as an ad hoc promotional campaign for its new image generator—despite Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki's famous hatred of AI. Sam Altman made his X avatar a 'Ghiblified' portrait.

Disgracing Miyazaki is part of the point: It's more proof to them tech has won.

Great week to write about environmental catastrophe

So deserved!! 👑

Lovely presentation, congrats Max!

I am in Adelaide for DiGRA Australia’s national conference the next three days! There probably won’t be any liveposting because no one really does that any more but here is the great program: digraa.org/post/digraa-...

Sad to see that the GDC State of the Games Industry '25 confirm what I have suspected for a while: narrative roles particularly hard-hit by layoffs in the industry. Narrative is sometimes seen as expendable on a project: when the reviews of our story come out, are we still on the team?

Writing a paper using ChatGPT is therefore a crime against (the author’s own) humanity

as LA is burning, a swath of the country is recovering from an ice storm, Alabama is preparing for up to 6” of snow and I’m praying for the TX power grid, a reminder:

we don’t need climate action just for future generations, we need it now.

the climate crisis is here, all around us

Occasional reminder that there’s no, “it’s too late, its over” for anthropogenic climate change. Every molecule of CO2 that doesn’t go into the atmosphere makes a difference. Preventing 0.1 degree of warming makes a difference. Every bit of climate resilience we build together makes a difference.

Academic Work Tracker Template v2.2 (2025)

I have updated the Academic Workload Tracker for 2025. I strongly encourage all academics to track how long you actually work, and at what tasks. It's a crucial way to counter the deliberate wage-theft of obfuscatory university workload models.

docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Video Games Can’t Afford to Look This Good The gaming industry spent billions pursuing the idea that customers wanted realistic graphics. Did executives misread the market?

Know there’s been discourse about this article but it’s great to see this very real problem facing the game industry in a mainstream outlet: the industry’s silver bullet for always creating more consumer demand and higher profits simply doesn’t work anymore.

web.archive.org/web/20241228...

To rule or not to rule? An experimental study of the electoral ramifications of claims to (not) rule with radical right populist parties - Laura Jacobs, Jean-Benoit Pilet, 2024 In a between-subjects experiment (n = 3270) conducted in Flanders (the Dutch-speaking part of Belgium), we examine the electoral ramifications of claims by a ri...

Super important experimental study by @lcjacobs89.bsky.social and @jbpilet.bsky.social showing that mainstream parties signaling willingness to govern with radical right legitimize these parties with higher propensity to vote for radical right as a result
journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1...

Stop using generative AI as a search engine Sometimes ChatGPT spits out something original — and wrong, like fake presidential pardons.

“ChatGPT is a woefully bad way to explore the historical record.”
www.theverge.com/2024/12/5/24...
And much else.

I know we all realize this, but to underline the point: AI is predicated on exploitation, environmental degradation, and financial speculation. It should be the antithesis of everything we stand for as professors.

Also, how the fuck are you going to ask your students to do their work if you won't?

ANU deans hauled in for ‘change management’ meetings Three of the Australian National University’s seven college leaders were summoned to meetings this week where they were told the governing council had lost confidence in them.

Universities in Australia have undergone a seismic shift, moving from public institutions dedicated to knowledge and community to entities run increasingly as private businesses. Central to this change is the rise of the vice chancellor as a highly paid executive figure.
www.afr.com/work-and-car...

Every dollar spent on exec salaries is a dollar drained from the labour of university workers and the quality of teaching and researching. Corporate parasites, the business world’s anti-intellectual proxy agents, that contribute nothing of value to the academy.

To The Lighthouse text from chapter 17 of part 1 that describes Mrs Ramsey's feeling at dinner that paying attention to various conversations is like light stealing underwater and revealing various details, some equally fascinating, so it is difficult to keep one's attention on any individual thing.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf is the best novel I have ever read.

I feel like videogames actually do provide a pretty accurate representation of real life right now because a lot of videogames are like “THE WORLD IS ENDING” and then you just collect herbs and pretend nothing is wrong

Justice

It's really hard to overstate how many world-leading experts on digital media and social media are at Australian universities (I work with many of them!), and the overwhelming majority of them will tell you the social media ban is a bad and counterproductive idea.

We made a starter pack of researchers affiliated with the QUT Digital Media Research Centre