People who abdicate their willpower, their decision-making, their cognition to AI and LLMs are in the thrall of a kind of mass techno-delusion. They're thralls.

Flier for an author event/book club discussion, showing the cover of DARKHEARTS (featuring two teenage boys about to kiss) plus James's face. James L. Sutter Author of Darkhearts April 24 5:30pm at Ashley's Pub in Bremerton, WA

BREMERTON! Come hang out this Friday with me and @ballastbookco.bsky.social's Reading the Rainbow book club! I'll be chatting and answering questions about DARKHEARTS, writing, gaming, or anything else. Meet at 5:30 at Ashley's Pub, right beneath the bookstore!

www.ballastbookco.com/events/20260...

Force the Oppressor to make a Lose/Lose Choice Social Change Toolkit: Dilemma Actions

Today in social justice toolkit:

A dilemma action is a strategic action that forces your opponent into a lose-lose situation.

You've given them only bad options.

I give some examples

& then we talk about how to design them.

This one's pretty important.

Read and share, please?

The Page Museum is the best! Glad I got to sneak in another visit before it closes for two years (!!!) of renovations in July.

Highly recommend paying it a visit before then if you can!

Love this definition of "elevating"

A positive story about Last Flag practically writes itself. Here's a famous person (singer from Imagine Dragons) who really likes videogames and helped found a studio to make games he wants to play. They made a multiplayer shooter that isn't F2P and is only $15 with no hidden fees.

And 2 has the baked in assumption that devices designed for human operation are efficient in the first place.

A lot of wild, amazing art is made by extremely normal people.

Writing advice thread re: first drafts!

1. From my writing pedagogy teacher in college: hot water can't flow if the faucet isn't on. Might take a minute for things to get to the temp you want, but that's okay!

Look, for my money the absolute game changer technologies right now are batteries and biosciences, not statistically modeling a mid conversation, but you do you.

Hartzog said lawmakers need to create more specific rules tailored to the unique threat posed by the combination of facial recognition and nearly undetectable surveillance technology before it becomes ubiquitous. Those laws need to target not only people using the technology, but also the companies behind it, he said. “A lot of these conversations tend to focus on, ‘is it OK to use these glasses or this tool to surveil other people?’” he said. “What often gets lost in this conversation is, ‘is it OK for companies to design these really socially hostile tools in ways that will foreseeably lead to massive violations of privacy?’”

🛎️🛎️🛎️

I'm not joking when I say mRNA technology is more important than "AI" and it's a tragedy we're throwing billions into one while our government is aggressively defunding the other.

Ideal relationship dynamic

Everytime you think "ah finally, a good use for AI", you should step back and realize that such a response is exactly the kind of wedge corpos are trying to drive between laborers

Everyone's expertise and craft is "finally a good use for AI" to those outside the field.

Learn solidarity please

Bonus answer from me on this one. Okay... the Steel Battalion controller is cool (and was one of the inspirations for this question, obvs).

BUT HAVE YOU EVER BEEN IN A MECH COCKPIT?!
www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCHU...

This was a REALLY cool experience.

It was and still is wild how this guy got to be an open Gater, changed or apologized for none of it, and everyone chose to ignore or make defenses for it with KCD2.

If the end result of this is, "the president tipped the country into a recession while he and his cronies insider-traded on it" - well, there'd be a lot of political careers to be made nailing them to the wall for state crimes related to that, since the public would be *furious* about it.

This apple? To the fairest

Studios laying off hundreds and thousands of employees with the excuse that they can move production to the UK and not have to pay for healthcare because the UK has socialized medicine should be humiliating to the US government.

an underrated game dev skill IMO is being able to realize “this person and I have been discussing (thing) for months, and yet i think we have slightly different versions of (thing) in our heads. let’s get together and talk about that in excruciating detail”

Think of how many games where the verb is violence. How many games (including the ones nominated for tonight’s BAFTA awards) where you shoot, fight, kill.
But when games want to explore the topic of violence in a meaningful way, that’s the issue?

That's an incredible title

The real fun is seeing how many of these I could line up before any of the reasons overlap

Are you interested in an idiot dumbing down Moby Dick?

I am very capable of being that idiot for you.

I think it's a law that the illustrated covers for this story *have* to go that hard.

I've been experimenting with narrative or storytelling through graphics, and came up with this one.

My own life with Y as temperature.

See here for a broader essay on the links between data and story, which ends with this chart reportearth.substack.com/p/life-is-an...

Sad to hear about Ludum Dare beginning to wind down, but I think it's maybe good for people to be reminded how many of the things they consider indispensable institutions are really a single-digit number of people (often a single person) working very long & hard for little to no money

No, that's JD Vance

i’m gonna be thinking about this for a while

Isn't that from the Orange Catholic Bible? Means it's a Bible passage :P