Thanks so much for your interest! Totally agree - some videogames are incredibly rich for linguistic landscapes. A nice challenge that raises different concerns too - TLOU's landscapes are virtually monolingual, so it pushes us away from the traditional focus on multilingualism in LL. Enjoy! ☺️
Barrera said her husband said the smell of human feces in the toilet caused a fellow detainee to vomit and, in turn, created a chain of people vomiting. She said her husband is asthmatic and has not received medication to treat his condition. The lack of medicine and the stress of the overcrowded holding cell has left him short of breath and teetering on the edge of an asthma attack, Barrera said. ICE did not immediately respond to questions on April 10 about the conditions of the Mesa or Phoenix facilities. After the publication of this article, Barrera told The Arizona Republic her husband was transferred to the ICE facility at San Luis Regional Detention Center at about midnight. The San Luis Regional Detention Center is in Southwestern Arizona and has the capacity to hold 700 people.
This is horrific. A U.S. citizen describes the facility in Arizona that her husband was brought to while he waited to be put on a deportation flight. Dozens of people were crammed into tiny cells, there was a "chain of people vomiting" from filthy toilets, no medical care, and only one meal per day.
Many, many brave people are fighting to stop this, and also—our collective failure to stop it from getting this far will haunt us for the rest of our lives.
The paper is intended to push forward debates in semiotic/linguistic landscapes, critical applied linguistics, ideology critique, and of course game studies.
Link to the open access article below 👇🔓
Hope you enjoy!
#GameStudies #DigitalHumanities #AcademicSky #LinguisticLandscapes
Image shows various motivational poster from a domestic space in The Last of Us, the most legible reading 'better days are coming'.
I then trace these landscapes to labour relations in the production process: crunch, exploitation, insecurity, and long-overdue unionisation in the videogame industry.
Counter-hegemonic signs suggest resistance, I argue - and are even possible sites for building a politics of worker solidarity.
Image shows a corkboard community board in The Last of Us, with a poster on the bottom right titled 'worker rights'.
This raises intriguing questions about the role of mainstream videogames in ideology critique, their internal complexity, and the political importance of semiotic landscapes.
TLOU is not ideologically coherent, it turns out, and its spaces tell a very different story to its dialogue.
Image shows a bank in The Last of Us, with an advert for a black credit card that reads "experience luxury".
Reading these signs, I argue that TLOU asserts the existence of capitalist exploitation and domination through spatial and semiotic modes. Its landscapes invite players to critically reflect on the present - and to recognise that 𝗮𝗯𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝗶𝘀 𝗮 𝗰𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘀 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲, not simply an American one.
Image shows collected workplace posters from The Last of Us, covering multiple topics including compliance, workplace fraud, and employee rights and protections.
Players of The Last of Us explore spaces dense with signs - and intriguingly signs of work.
The most common is the Federal Minimum Wage poster, drawing attention to the $7.25 per hour guaranteed for American workers. Other signs discuss profit, brand identities, and worker compensation fraud... 💵🚫
This is the on-record politics of The Last of Us, articulated primarily through character dialogue.
But in my latest article, published today with @openlibhums.org, I argue that a more radical, anticapitalist perspective is unfurled through its semiotic and linguistic landscapes.
Image of Laron's fashion boutique, The Last of Us. Image shows Joel and Ellie looking at an advert for a fall collection, featuring a slim model.
It's 2033 and the apocalypse is here.
An advert in the ruins of a fashion boutique sparks a conversation, and a longing for the abundance of capitalism. The past seemed to be an era of food, fashion, coffee, and - of course - the lesbian paperback.
The message is clear: 𝘤𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘵 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘣𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴.🧵👾
Individually one cannot, but it is striking (in a way that really advocates the old Marxist in me) that socially we can only really see a technology that saves a bunch of labour without generating replacement level jobs as a disaster. This is because we are *so* sure the profit will be privatised.
Very interesting analysis - at least partially the result of obsessive austerity policymaking since 2008, and the straightjacket provided by the political economic discourse on debt and investment.
I don’t think most people realize just how little the United States has traditionally spent on public media.
A court has ruled that the government's authoritarian ban on Palestine Action was unlawful.
Time to stop criminalising the people protesting a genocide - and start ending the UK's complicity.
The first article in our collection 'Gaming & the Humanities: Interdisciplinary Essays on the Last of Us' is out! Bob Yeates deftly critiques the biopolitics of race in #TLOU. It will be followed by work on objects, muscles, infrastructure, linguistic landscapes, and more! 🧟♀️ Congrats Bob👏🏼
Very happy to say my article on The Last of Us and race has been published by @openlibhums.org, part of their special collection on Gaming and Humanities edited by @katespowage.bsky.social and Adrienne Mortimer: doi.org/10.16995/olh...
Congratulations Bob! It's a great piece 👏🏼
Dear Labour:
Not all women are transphobic. I'm not sure why your party has such difficulty with this very basic concept.
AOC: I want to remind you where the real crime is. It's in the oligarchs taking $170 billion of our money from health care and food assistance and public programs and taking that and funneling it into a secret police program.
Starbucks’ CEO makes 6,666x what the average @sbworkersunited.org barista does.
It’s unconscionable.
As baristas at corporate stores fight for a fair contract and against Starbucks’ union-busting and greed, they have the solidarity of all 15 million members of America’s unions.
Write like no one will read it.
Edit like everyone will quote it.
You'll be unstoppable! 🚀
#WritingCommunity #AmWriting #AmEditing #BookSky #WriteSky
I have also to say, again, shame on the UK Supreme Court. Whatever led us here, it is absolutely not its apolitical application of the law.
Am increasingly with the very senior UK barrister who is telling her colleagues: "at least with the US Supreme Court you know what their politics are."
Once every 20 years or so, the director-general of the BBC is forced to resign for being insufficiently rightwing. Alastair Milne in 1987. Greg Dyke in 2004. Tim Davie in 2025. The great irony is that the BBC was in all cases profoundly biased towards established power. But just not biased enough …
11. Regaining the freedom we’ve lost is much harder and less likely than defending the freedom we already possess. We must do all we can to stop governments with autocratic tendencies from winning elections and reasserting the old order. Lose it once, and it might be gone forever.
A family friend was telling us about what her husband shared about his experience in Broadview before he was deported back to Mexico. She's been sharing to friends and family because she's just in disbelief & horror what her husband told her. She wasn't able to talk to him until he was in Mexico.
"An organized urban wing of the [Underground] railroad called vigilance committees focused on protecting, supporting, and learning from fugitives."
Jesse Olsavsky for @hammerandhope.bsky.social's latest, just released issue
hammerandhope.org/article/unde...
The university is not a skills machine and neither should politicians think of themselves of oiling the gears of economic performance. Politics is not just about adapting populations to fit labour market demands.
Polanski is talking nonsense about wealth taxes.
The Spectator (owned by GBNews owner Paul Marshall - estimated wealth of £800 million) doesn’t like taxing wealth fairly.
I wonder how they got to this editorial decision?
Let’s tax wealth fairly, fund front line services & make hope normal again.
join.greenparty.org.uk
To be effective, protest must be noisy, obstructive, annoying. No longer is this allowed. Now the last attribute of effective dissent – persistence – is also to be banned. But the moment protest ceases to be effective is the moment democracy dies. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
