Kanji discovery of the day : 淀 (よどむ, yodomu) “to stagnate”, made from 氵 (water) and 定 (fix).
Interesting phrase: 言い淀む, “hesitate to say” (literally, words stagnate and falter).
I see why Yodobashi Camera went for ヨドバシ in katakana, “backwater bridge” doesn’t scream bleeding edge of technology” 😅
🧵 @jburnmurdoch.ft.com is spot on about the conditions in his FT piece. Liberal democracy held it together thanks to growth, good demographics, and the promise of a better future. Those days are gone, and that’s the "why" behind the erosion. However...
Welcome, Twitter escapees/new Bluesky users. Four quick tips:
1. Starter packs are awesome. I made a game dev one here -> go.bsky.app/RxQCsKS
2. Bluesky's block is much more potent. Do not quote, or dunk. There's no pay-to-win so silence does remove nasty people. Blocks and move on copiously.
I put together a detailed collection of useful patterns I've collected after vibe-coding 150 different single-file HTML tools over the past couple of years simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/10/...
A graph titled Scope of video games according to Hushcrasher Classification System. The Y axis shows Game Size (from 10 MB to 100GB), the X axis shows Credits count (sourced from Mobygames). The clustered dots on the graph represent 4 distinct scale categories of games - Kei, Midi, AA, AAA. The larger correlation between the size and the credits means larger category of a game.
I love this analytical take on video game categorization from Antoine Mayerowitz and Julie Belzanne:
hushcrasher.substack.com/p/taxonomy-o...
Instead of trying to vibe-intuit the definition of an "indie" game, the authors analyzed the data from the perspective of game size and credits length
“The question is easy: how on earth are we going to save Earth? Do we content ourselves with continuing to watch the painful spectacle of the past decades? Or do we draw hope and inspiration from global experiments that show that everyday people want so much more action?” aeon.co/essays/we-ne...
The conditions that have led to what’s happening in the US today exist in democracies around the world.
They are an inevitable outcome of our collective failure to adapt to fundamental changes in the information ecosystem on which our democracies were originally built.
The Dispossessed, by Ursula Le Guin!
Data from Marriage For All Japan showing coverage for marriage equality
As we're in Pride Month, it remains ridiculous that Japan's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) continues to block progress on marriage equality. According to Marriage for All Japan, Over 92% of the population is already covered by "separate but equal"-style partnership systems.
It's time.
Brian Eno tore Microsoft a new one www.instagram.com/p/DJ6ySBKNpE...
META BOOK THIEVES - They Must Do The Write Thing The Society of Authors are protesting Meta’s HQ today This image shows illustrations of authors holding placards saying “make it fair” and “do the write thing”
Today UK authors are protesting against Meta for stealing our work to train their AI model. Authors earn an average of £7000 per year, we are not rich, and yet a trillion dollar company decided it didn’t want to license our work fairly as it was “too expensive”
Theft is not a valid alternative.
“The result is a media environment that keeps us in a state of debilitating fear and anger, endlessly reacting to our oppressors instead of organizing against them.
To that end, the age of corporate social media has been a roaring success.”
“Researchers have found that the viral outrage disseminated on social media in response to these ridiculous claims actually reduces the effectiveness of collective action.”
www.404media.co/you-cant-pos...
Word of the day is one I may have mentioned (frequently): a ‘snaccident’ is the inadvertent eating of an entire packet of biscuits.
When will it be available on the Japan PS Store? I absolutely loved the first one and can’t wait to play Starward Vector! Expat problems 😅
Twitterで流れてきたけれど、これは天才的だと確かに思った。
“They're in their pomp right now. (…) They are savouring the sense of chaos and panic in their enemies.
But you can defend against it. (…)
Most of all: you can resist the myth of powerlessness. History has no direction. Their victory is not preordained.”
This article awoke all sorts of memories of my gaming childhood: friends huddled over a console with one controller, PvPing Flash games in a dorm talking through the night, guessing my way through indecipherable games in Japanese on strange emulators… Games come in all forms and they’re beautiful!
Neva is such a beautiful and ingenious game, I’m constantly in awe
The Eco Jurisprudence monitor is a fascinating & hopeful resource: an interactive database of Earth-centred legal initiatives (eg river-rights) as their number & consequences grow & grow.
Cartography as imagining otherwise; a glimpse of a geography of hope.
Here: ecojurisprudence.org/dashboard/?m...
Here’s a quick roundup of highlights from research we published in 2024, on unequal exchange, ecosocialism, and post-capitalist transformation.
As always, free PDFs are available via the link at the end of the thread. 🧵
“Less Is More” by by Jason Hickel! Breaking my 1-year fiction streak with this great reflection on capitalism and degrowth.
Unexpected physics/cooking crossover: is risotto a wave or a particle?
A good risotto should be creamy enough to make a “wave” when you give the pan a shake, but also al dente enough to feel the individual grains…
I’ll see you at my IgNobel acceptance speech.
