You cannot separate the technology from the ways in which it has been deployed to, in seemingly every facet of life, make society measurably worse. It's killing us. One does not admire the sharpness of a murderer's knife as it stabs us. One does not critique the stitching on the executioner's hood.
I am reminded of Katz's famous article "The Ethic of Expediency," wherein he examined technical memos from Nazi Germany about trains used for facilitating the Holocaust.
Excellent read.
I've definitely noticed an uptick in this sort of writing style of late, and this is great advice for copy editors on how to approach it.
Plus, we get this gem: "No point in picking fights one is almost certainly going to lose. One is not, after all, Jake Paul or Andrew Tate."
This is 100% correct.
Source: I have a PhD in writing studies.
Corax: I'm suing you for giving me an F on my rhetoric term paper!
Tisias: You didn't meet the assignment criteria. If your lawsuit shows an understanding of rhetoric, I'll change your grade.
Administrator: I've changed the grade. Tisias, you're fired.
The Center for Digital Play at the IT University of Copenhagen is organizing a new conference: Playing Futures. The conference will take place from May 20th to 22nd at the IT University of Copenhagen. You can read more about it here: playingfutures.today
I reject the AI booster insistence that you must understand any and everything about the tech to make even the tiniest critique, if they can be vibe coders I can be a vibe hater
Cagle is the truth and does great work yall should read
Clawlining enemies gives you a slight elevation lift, from which you can jump and dash. There are safe refuge spots along the route, some with warmth, others with silk to heal up. It forced me to get good at using clawline, which I appreciated for the rest of the game (and wished I had done sooner!)
Prepping to discuss Benjamin in Game and Media Studies tomorrow. Get to talk about aura, rizz, genAI, NFTs, vidyja games, and VFX. Now I just hope students show up to their last class before break! 😅
A screenshot of two tweets. One says": "How much of this is dressing appropriately vs just staying stuck in the old ways? How/ went does fashion evolve?" The other tweet says: "Who decides 'wrong' here? All of this is made up anyhow. Just because somewhere along the line, someone said it should be a certain way, doesn't mean it always has to be that way."
Since my tweet about Jeff Bezos, I've been getting a lot of replies such as these. "Where do these dress rules come from?" "When do they change?"
These are very good questions, so let me answer them. 🧵
The webpage for our upcoming book has the cover on it now which is enough of a milestone for me to write another post about the book we have coming out soon. www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?b...
As a reminder, proposals for the 2026 ACM Special Interest Group on Design of Communication are due in two months!
We are looking forward to welcoming you to SIGDOC 2026 at Metropolitan State University in St. Paul, MN. The Call for Proposals is live: sigdoc.acm.org/conference/2....
1/2
Your favorite RPG freelancers and many indie devs are, in America at last, allowed to have this job because of the ACA. Your games will get worse if it's killed. The brain drain will be immense.
I got this useful bon mot from a middle school teacher recently.
In response to, “I DONT UNDERSTAND,” he calmly said, “okay what steps have you taken to understand?”
And that’s when I realized that a lot of folks have no steps.
I understand why people think grinding Mandalia Plains in Final Fantasy Tactics is a bad idea that sucks the life out of the game, but I simply disagree. aftermath.site/final-fantasy-...
Cover for Undermining Risk and Technical Communication: Extractive Industry, Cascading Disaster, and the Global Climate Crisis (SUNY Press). It features in the background an image of a precious metals mine pit. Authors: Timothy R. Amido , Ehren Helmut Pflugfelder, Daniel P. Richards, and Donnie Johnson Sackey.
Tell all your friends. It's coming in June 2026.
More evidence that we have already been cyberpunk for some time.
Man I loved the pivot from “virtual school during the pandemic was amazingly destructive and caused so much learning loss we should have let COVID rip through the schools instead of closing them” to “the wave of the future is your kids’ education being 90% chatbots- sign up or be left behind!”
“America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, 'It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.' It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: 'if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?' There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register. Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.”
reading slaughterhouse 5 for the first time and i was absolutely knocked senseless by this passage, which is so true and relevant that it feels like it was pulled from a history book
To be clear:
LA County has declared a state of emergency BECAUSE OF the federal government.
The Feds, LA County is (correctly) saying, have CAUSED the emergency.
This is a striking political moment of internal collapse. Local govts feeling compelled to protect their ppl from … their own govt.
My latest: "Numerous studies show that majors in the humanities—typically, in departments of English, history, philosophy, religious studies, classics and languages—lead students to employment and life satisfaction outcomes as positive as those for majors traditionally championed as 'practical.'”
Excellent point! I think there's an important comparison between this and the mascot dance protests as a form of playful resistance.
“We could hear them laughing” 😧
Aaron Trammel argued in “Repairing Play” that playfulness can be a tool of subjugation. Has anyone tried applying ludological frameworks to how ICE is behaving? It seems like there might be a “there” there.
This is the next iteration of “participants were 138 undergrads looking for extra credit it psych 102”
If a government tells you that you can’t call it authoritarian, it’s authoritarian.
I hope you're proud of this poetic line, @mattcolville.bsky.social
"Victories are glass,” the bright faerie spake.
Her brother nodded. “While tragedies are fingerprints.”
It will live in my heart forever.
Déjà vu: Trump, far-right.
Totalitarianism, neo-fascists, neo-Nazis ...
As someone who worked at a Nexstar station, this would be a 5 alarm all hands on deck fire for even one account
Political violence disproportionately hurts people with less power, not people with more power. Political violence will disproportionately hurt people of color and women and LGBTQ people. It’s not fair, but that’s the way it works. Celebrating political violence means at best indifference to that.