The writing I do for a game is our writing, not my writing; it's the game's writing. Its strengths and weaknesses emerge not from the strengths and weaknesses of my soul, but from the strengths and weaknesses in the relationships I have with the team.

laura putting it excellently of course, since she is a great writer.

"It's like being in an abusive marriage... I'm sitting here dealing with somebody that isn't living in reality."

I truly believe this is happening on a level greater than we would imagine. The boss/executive classes are getting their brains absolutely fucking fried by this shit.

I believe that if you have a security camera setup in your home, even with some precautions in place, you are opening yourself up to potential surveillance from the companies providing the service, the government, and hackers/scammers.

Good article with a list of alternatives to 'standard' home camera solutions. I only have a single camera at home, a simple Reolink that is set via homeassistant to turn on whenever I'm not home. It's Reolink, which means it can be completely cut off from the internet (which I have done) and still talk to my homeassistant, so it does all I need. Good to see it's getting a rec here.

It's a webring! And a website!

A webring in 2026... this is a good kick in the pants for me to revamp my RSS reader situation. It's been stagnating lately.

It is now well understood that the Chinese Communists have interpreted and carried out a continuation of the struggle for national liberation in order to cause this neo-colonial project to fail: there is no political independence without economic independence. At least those who declare themselves Marxist should understand this truth clearly!

The great Domenico Losurdo on China and Chinese Socialism. A great in-depth analysis of China's economic socialism. Loved this.

Bluntly speaking, Bachelard said back in 1958 that games are not just graphics. They are architecture that create an experience. He would have made an excellent level designer.

communist construction under siege in a different twentieth century.

i made a video game. I will likely write about it on the Big Blog in the future

Dark Scrolls is a fantasy-themed action platformer that fuses shmup-style chaos with roguelite progression and is packed with charm, challenge, and secrets.

Dark Scrolls was made by some friends of mine! Check it out!

Switched backend from isso to comentario, now using the same server I use to power comments on my blog. The code is very simple, and should be pretty much plug-n-play, so I've uploaded it to github. Enjoy!

How I found that anyone could register on FIFA's public Agent Platform, gain access to the Football Data Platform's Streaming Management panel, and get RTMP ingest URLs and stream keys for every live FIFA World Cup 2026 camera feed. I then spent hours calling FIFA, MediaKind, HBS, CISA, and the FBI trying to get someone to pick up the phone.

FIFA web security not ideal, as it turns out

Perhaps pro-AI developers didn't want to talk to me or I just didn't run into any during my survey, because I heard an overwhelmingly negative assessment of generative AI's origins, capabilities, and risks. By the end, I'd heard dozens of developers make a case against using gen AI at all.

Surprise surprise, no one wants this shit who actually works in games.

AI "assisted" Code is still generative AI and it's weird how people try to justify that it's not.

Good breakdown of a current messy situation regarding SpryFox and generative AI.

If the policies of a socialist state are not based on the material conditions of that very society, it will undoubtedly fail. This is, without question, crucial to the success of socialism. The material conditions of each society differ, so of course we need to study and act upon them carefully.

Readers really despise and distrust articles that seem shaped by AI. They not only stop reading, but also block and punish the author. Non-native English speakers get little mercy. Readers overwhelmingly prefer imperfect-yet-authentic writing over LLMified prose.

Good!

Muslim delegates and attendees hoping to participate in the state Republican convention were shunned and rejected by members as they espoused themes of party unity ahead of the November election.

Look, man. Come on. Come on, lmao

If such a completely unsophisticated “attack” can break the supply chain of software development, what can intentional attackers with malicious or financial interests achieve?

Amusing little story about an attempt to foil and sabotage AI agents. I appreciate the author's bile for the tools.

We show that a tiny snippet—just 13 words—of retrieved text on a UGC website like Reddit, Wikipedia, Quora, or Facebook can change AI agents to output spam / scam content pretty consistently.

GenAI is dumb, untrustworthy, and not inevitable.

Against the madness, Israelis reach for equanimity through their bodies. They control their breathing to control their persons; the body is the first site of control. The colonizer understands this better than most.

Beautiful, venomous writing about the modern fascist ideology of Israel.

A doctor knows better than to blame a diabetic for their poorly controlled blood sugar or a soldier who looks down the barrel of their gun, locks in on a woman older than the Zionist state, pulls the trigger, then, months later, wets his bed or abuses his partner.

Cyberpunk 2077 at 1080p with FSR3 Quality and frame generation averaged 88 fps, compared with 232 fps on an RTX 4060 and 243 fps on Intel's Arc B580. Black Myth: Wukong reached 56 fps, while Forza Horizon 5 managed 48 fps on the Low preset.

Really strange framing on this article where the bottom line is that it offers 3060-level quality for $450, which in this current hardware market is perfectly good.

It is undeniable that Jewish history hurts, that it leaves lasting wounds on its victims that reverberate through the generations, turning the family into a site of remembrance for a tragic history that is deeply felt, yet can never be truly known. But history is ultimately a narrative form, and its utility lies in how that narrative is constructed. In other words, what we are calling trauma is more likely a collective story with a discrete political function. To place our faith for defeating Zionism in the demand to heal is to treat politics as a pathology, and obscure politics as the method we must use to fight.

The creeping nature of "trauma" as a complete explainer for most/all modern problems is something that I simultaneously feel is adequate and wholly inadequate. On the one hand, yes, trauma is real and can affect (in many cases severely affect) one's way of living in the world. On the other hand, to use 'trauma' as a single, be-all-end-all explanation for worldly concerns is to misunderstand its nature.

This is a piece about Jewishness, which I don't have any familial history of to my knowledge. But similar frameworks around "ancestral trauma" are common in Black circles, and this is something that I have to be very delicate about: yes, of course, trauma due to racism exists. But I quibble a bit at the idea of "ancestral trauma" as something immaterial, something "intrinsic to the soul/body" or something like that. There is systemic injustice, which can certainly shape a culture, and thus the culture can shape the self, but I think that is often misdiagnosed as "ancestral trauma", if that makes sense.

Rubin even goes so far as to argue that Jews constitute a “collective body”—a “whole and unified organism” or “soma” that can act in concert in the way that redwood trees “shape their bodies to support and heal together” when one tree experiences an injury.

Yeah, like that sort of thing, exactly. That is a fiction. It is a narrative. There is use in that narrative, but it is not true (I am nearly echoing word-for-word one of the things that I praise Umineko for teaching me, so this is, I guess, also an advertisement for Umineko (??))

The reality is that humans are not redwood trees, and—as the historian Saul Friedländer observed in a 2013 lecture about the enduring prominence of the Holocaust in Israeli national consciousness—trauma changes form when it moves from the individual to the collective. While individual trauma typically takes root in the family or a similarly “closed emotional field,” Friedländer noted, collective trauma comes about through the communal process of giving meaning to such an event, turning an “incomprehensible occurrence” into a coherent narrative. This resulting story serves a “social function,” providing an “empowering mandate for the community.” Jewish collective trauma, of course, has been transformed into a mandate for Zionism’s crimes, and progressive Jewish trauma discourse is at its most cogent when it acknowledges this as a social and political process.

Also, as always, free Palestine.

It is trauma, [Firestone] argues, that “often complicates Israel’s military policies in the West Bank,” leading to disproportionate responses among soldiers facing down children with rocks. By this logic, Israeli violence toward Palestinians is not the outcome of brutal state policies, but an organic expression of collective Jewish suffering that disrupts an otherwise “healthy” instinct for self-defense. Politics, here, is fully subsumed by the psychological. Healing opens a path to redemption for the perpetrators, while relegating the victims’ claims back to the margins.

I've become very interested in the way that American Capitalism managed to make so much progress -- genuine, real progress -- in the 20th century and then stalled out so dramatically in the early 21st. This is a great video analyzing the rise of American power (which dovetails with American worker power in the early 20th century) and how the process of dismantling that worker power in favor of capitalist power has led to our current state of bloated neoliberalism.

Rosa Luxemburg coined the phrase “socialism or barbarism” in 1916, in the middle of the first world war, as a general statement about humanity’s choices. In the Caribbean in 2026, it is a concrete question on the table.

Carlos J. Martinez knocking it out of the park here. Viva communist Cuba.

This is what makes the Russia case still valuable for a global left: the trace of the desire for collective social reproduction is still damp, still excavatable. It has not yet fossilized.

No one is ever fully lost to the cause, if you can figure out how to leverage them.

What is now visible in the provincial factories and metalworking plants of post-2022 Russia is, I argue, an attempt to reconstruct something functionally analogous — not by the state but by individual firms, not through the mechanisms of Soviet paternalism but through an uneasy combination of Soviet idiom and neoliberal discipline. [...]

This sceptical realism is, in E. P. Thompson’s terms, a form of moral economy: an operative understanding of what is fair and what is not, what obligations employers owe to workers, what the minimum terms of dignified employment consist in. It draws on the Soviet legacy not as nostalgia but as a set of standards — imperfectly realized, often betrayed, but remembered — against which present conditions are assessed and found wanting. The vernacular socialism that others have traced in Russian working-class culture is not gone; it is simply subterranean, surfacing in the calibrations of people like Misha rather than in explicit political contestation.

emphasis mine.

To put it another way: An observation doesn’t become a convincing piece of evidence because of any specific detail in what’s observed; the context in which that observation takes place is also essential.

Ted Chiang, once again, gets it.

archived

Happy pride month!

Planning documents for "Scout" say the plan is to "make people addicted" to the tool before adding new features.

I truly feel like complete abstinence from these tools is the most practical option. Avoid as much as possible. You don't have "just a little" of an addictive substance like this! Just avoid it! Stay away!

You can comment directly on linkposts now! Yay!

The NYPD plans to hire 580 additional uniformed officers by the end of the year, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch said Monday, revealing an unexpected staffing increase given Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s vow to keep police headcount flat.

I feel like I am simultaneously more critical of Mamdani and more sympathetic these days. Of course he's making these concessions, they are concessions that (unlike most DNC representatives) actually are allowing him to get things done in other ways. But that doesn't excuse the fact that since he is working within the current system, the compromises he makes will be to the fascist elements of our ruling class.

The police in America I think functionally act as an arm of the ruling capitalist-fascist class. The desire of the capitalist-fascist class is to maintain stable rule over the populace and they see the expansion of the police forces as the way to do that. That is not going to change unless those class elements are purged from power in America, which is not going to happen without a comprehensive revolution.

So like, yeah I mean, I get it. Mamdani is able to execute quite well in his office -- better than many other Democratic representatives -- and that's praiseworthy! It's understandable for him to make these sort of concessions/compromises. Also, these compromises fucking suck and I wish he was not in this position, because the sort of charisma that he has could really be useful to an actually revolutionary organization/position.

His purpose was pure. This isn’t to say it was innocent. Pure purpose is madness. Purity of any kind is intolerant to us. Either we besmirch it with our meddling, or it dissolves us.

Whether a state is socialist should be judged by real-world outcomes rather than rigid ideological purity.

I wrote about it a bit on the Big Blog already, but Deng Xiaoping and the 1980s China period (that was the immediate precursor to China's current era of Xi Jinping leadership) was a huge influence on THE REVISIONIST. I like this post.

With a bipartisan acceptance of innocent death as the cost of doing business in the Muslim and Arab world, it is not a surprise that a kind of casual contempt for its leaders and peoples oozes from the orifices of both Republican and Democratic administrations.

Excellent piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates about Kamala Harris' awful record on Gaza and her unceasing support of Israel. Naturally, it is the opinion of this author that Harris' stance on Gaza absolutely tanked her popularity among her own base, something that a functioning political party would probably take into account.

archive

Maybe still my favorite song from crazy arms. just a beautiful, beautiful track.

It's gonna be a #MedievalSummer

I have been playing this a lot on repeat. Beautiful song.

In this post, I’ll be discussing some games that pull off tragic storylines, with varying degrees of success, and how they fit into strategies for addressing the wrong ending problem.

I still think this is one of the best pieces on how endings function in games and narrative more broadly.

More specifically, gamification is marketing bullshit, invented by consultants as a means to capture the wild, coveted beast that is videogames and to domesticate it for use in the grey, hopeless wasteland of big business, where bullshit already reigns anyway.

Been poking through my old link docs from college. Will be posting a few classics. This is one of my favorite Bogost pieces -- he goes into why gamification is, most importantly, a method of ‘bullshit’. Not as just a generic slur, but as a method of obscuring labor with ‘games’.

Everything around you is ads and it's only getting worse. I have lost so much patience for advertisements lol

The Afro-American struggle is not only a struggle waged by the exploited and oppressed Black people for freedom and emancipation, it is also a new clarion call to all the exploited and oppressed people of the United States to fight against the barbarous rule of the monopoly capitalist class.

Thinking on 1960s radicalism in a global context after watching Malcolm X the other day. Happy Juneteenth I suppose.

I had never heard this before and this song slaps

Rolodex and infohub for DIY HRT materials and resources, if that's something you're looking for. Formerly known as 'diyhrt.market'.

Isaac Chotiner interviews Shimon Riklin, an anchor on Israel’s right-leaning Channel 14, and a Benjamin Netanyahu ally, who feels stabbed in the back by Trump’s Iran deal.

🚨🚨🚨NEW CHOTINER ALERT🚨🚨🚨

A final Community thing is that over the past five or so years, Mozilla has been turning away from its powerhouse, the Community. I have no idea why, but I can say that it's a top down decision. At some point, some folk at a high level decided that Mozilla got to where it did on it's own. It did not.

Good rumination on leaving Mozilla from a now-former Mozilla employee.

The Chinese worker who slices a finger has access to a public health system; everyone in China today has guaranteed food, housing, clothing, education, healthcare, clean water and modern energy. That is not a quantitative difference in degree of suffering. It is a qualitative difference in the nature of the society: the difference between a state oriented towards the pursuit of private profit at all costs and one oriented – however imperfectly – towards common prosperity.

Jacobin's brand of socialism is increasingly annoying to me, and this article gets at part of why. There's a surface-level nature to a lot of the critiques ran in Jacobin, focusing on the aesthetics of things rather than their actual nature.

What the review offers, in the end, is an example of what Michael Parenti called “pure socialism”: measuring actually existing socialist construction not against the real alternatives available to a poor, encircled, formerly colonised or semi-colonised country, but against an imagined frictionless utopia.

With the backdrop of South Korea’s ascent into an information society, we present a rare firsthand account of Asadal’s design mall—and thus a huge part of “Frutiger Aero”—straight from one of its sources.

Fascinating interview with a figure prominent in graphic design in the early 2000s, in what we'd call the "Frutiger Aero" design space. Unfortunately he's entirely AI-brained now, but there's some really fascinating tidbits about the tech world in East Asia around the turn of the century.

Heidi Blake reports on how the defining figure of the manosphere built a fortune—and became a political force—by systematically exploiting women.

Well-written and horrifying. I was particularly struck by the bit about how the ineptitude of police in investigating the Tates arguably set all this in motion. Of course the police wouldn't give a shit, half of cops love the shit that Tate does.

I am always a bit suspect of stories that position individual right-wing figures as Great Men, and I think in the grand scheme of things Tate is less of a central figure than he is a smooth operator in a Western political environment that has little cause to fight him.

His base in Romania is, of course, pertinent here -- a post-Soviet state plundered by capital in a revenge drive against the population for daring to attempt a more equitable way of life. Of course the Tates flourish there, the goal of American policy of the last hundred years has been to carve up the Eastern European nations for precisely this sort of horror and human rights abuse. This is what the United States has created.

Which again is why I think if I have any major qualms with this (incredibly in-depth) work of biographical journalism it is the fact that the author does not seem to grasp the political dimensions here, at least not fully. Tate is not a leader of a new movement, he is a beneficiary of a very old one -- anticommunism, at the hands of the United States.

Tate's particular brand of hyper-misogyny, right-wing agitprop, et cetera -- this is what the last century has been set up to create. Horrors upon horrors.

Slovenian “national reconciliation” during capitalist transition rehabilitated fascist collaborators, weakened anti-fascist memory, consolidated new elites, and legitimized capitalist restoration.

you will never hate the capitalist enough.

The intended conciliatory discussion between (former) partisans and their associations on the one hand, and the Catholic Church and representatives of the new state parties on the other, remained rooted in cultural struggle and did not actually deal with the past. Instead, the logical consequence was the rehabilitation of fascist collaborators as equal – if not more morally worthy – actors of World War II.

U.S. oligarchs desperately want to build the biggest right wing propaganda and infotainment machine ever constructed. One that pummels the misinformed plebs with soggy class warfare and divisive culture war agitprop. But they're all profoundly stupid, wildly overconfident, and drunk on sycophancy.

Good, stirring writing with only one head-scratching implication of Evil China, which I have to call out because it is stupid. Rest of the piece is good though. I appreciate the anger!

I am not suggesting we should be paranoid about the tools we use, but I think this sudden interest is indicative of how people are aware that art production is a social activity. Our peers and fans are increasingly familiar with the way we create stuff, and this level of scrutiny is both welcoming and debilitating.

Good piece on the recent Ren'Py generative AI debacle. For what it's worth, I'm making a game in Ren'Py and have no intentions of stopping doing that, but this sucks in a very particular way. I hate the modern age sometimes, you know.

Write branching dialogue games with RPG elements in plain text, with skill voices, 2d6 checks, equipment, and fail states, and share them with a link.

Web based gamedev tool for making Disco Elysium style diceroll text rpgs. Intriguing. I hope there's a downloadable version one day, I like the simplicity here but hate that it's cloud-tethered.

We created fake profiles as young people. We then went and asked it a series of structured questions, with a child who is thinking about killing themselves. Within two minutes we were able to get ChatGPT to tell us how we can [harm] ourselves safely.

Kind of ridiculous that the rest of the article exists when this passage is in it, but even the bourgeois press sometimes lets some true things slip through.

Here is the thing I want to say to the brilliant people in Singapore’s conference rooms — and I say it with genuine affection: the transition is not coming. It is here. The countries of South and Southeast Asia are not waiting for a cleaner technology to arrive at scale. They are building it, deploying it, and in some cases, leading the world in doing so.

Some good news.

To condemn an anti-imperialist state that is actively improving the Global South and other oppressed peoples’ material conditions is to condemn internationalism itself. This is akin to tying a weight around your ankle before running from a predator. Iran has done more for Palestine and Sudan than any “nonviolent protest” ever could.

When sexual harassment allegations against Thomas by Anita Hill, a Black woman, came to light, Crenshaw found herself watching what she called an intersectional failure unfold.

Reading Kimberlé Crenshaw's work in college was one of the first eye-opening experiences I had about structural racism in the United States. I'm happy to hear that she is also somewhat critical of the way that "intersectionalism" has become a thought-terminating cliche in the world of left-liberal work.

Our relationship to the Soviet Union is simple. The USSR was the first country to build socialism, and we believe that we should analyze the Soviet experience in order to prevent the restoration of capitalism in the future, as it happened in the Soviet Union. Therefore, there is no reason to idealize or, on the contrary, try to abandon the Soviet legacy, as many “leftists” like to do. This is a wrong approach and has no practical utility.

Really deeply well-told interview with members of the Worker's Front of Ukraine, an explicitly Marxist-Leninist organization within Ukraine that is working against the current war. I very much appreciated the RFU representatives clear-eyed analysis of the current war as an imperialist conflict between NATO and the (imperialist, post-Soviet) Russian State.

I cannot imagine how hard and brave it is to be an avowed Marxist-Leninist in Ukraine these days. It's scary enough in the United States, but we are not quite yet at the stage where the state is killing you in the streets for it. The notes about international solidarity with underground and aboveground groups in Russia was also fascinating -- I think this is a great blueprint for how to organize in imperialist nations. Build the party, educate the people, refuse to participate in nationalist-chauvinist activity.

In fact, fascism is an open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of financial capital. Different fascists may think differently about women, gender, and LGBTQ+, but that doesn’t change the essence of fascism. As for us, we consider all those issues as parts of the issue of the proletariat. No more no less. You cannot free women without freeing the working class. Period.

The Ukrainian delegations in the early Soviet union were some of its most ardent supporters. I wish one day that we will see that again.

Therefore, to truly defeat imperialism, we must carry out a socialist revolution and defend our military-industrial complex, which has been destroyed by the capitalist regime in 30 years of “independence.” Precisely when private ownership of the means of production is abolished and the dictatorship of the proletariat is established, only then will we be able to truly defeat imperialism, both Russian and Western.

A map of the 2026 Los Angeles mayoral primary through its political geographies: Conservative LA, Liberal LA, and Left LA.

Beautiful website with some claims I find a bit presumptive but still educational. I agree with the authors that there are effectively three cities voting in LA, I am not so sure about the projected turnout in races.

None of the three front-runners I believe will be substantively different than Bass in running Los Angeles -- Raman is a compromised candidate with a spotty voting record especially on public housing, Bass is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative liberal, and Pratt is a fascist. I have no faith that Raman will not fold immediately to conservative interests, Bass already has folded to conservative interests, and Pratt... is a fascist. The biggest scam in Los Angeles' city budget remains the LAPD, and I do not believe any of the three front-runners have the power to dismantle the funding apparatus of the LAPD.

Anyway, that's my opinions. I recommend reading the piece regardless -- my commie griping aside, I do think this is a well-argued article with some really lovely data visualization work. Where I am fully in agreement with the authors is the fact that this sort of power mapping is crucial to understanding how and why LA is the way it is.

This is a linkblog written by Dante.

By 'linkblog' I mean this is a blog consisting of links to other sites or posts that I find interesting, noteworthy, or generally of interest. Occasionally I'll include my own thoughts on the links as well. You can subscribe by RSS to get all posts including commentary, or get daily, weekly, or even monthly updates if that is more your speed.

All links include comments sections, and you're welcome to leave your thoughts as well.

You can find my main blog here.

What disturbs the sensible center of American political discourse most is that, should somebody succeed, it is very likely that a huge number of Americans would only find fault with the assassin for provoking a potential backlash, if they found any fault at all.

Scathing and brilliant criticism of Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young: A Fugitive Family in the Revolutionary Underground by Zayd Ayers Dohrn, son of two Weather Underground members. The younger Dohrn has grown up a liberal, well-indoctrinated (and, to be fair, traumatized) to hate and question his parents actions. The author of this piece rightfully interrogates this assumption on the part of Zayd Dohrn.

“I was in a rage,” Dohrn told her son decades later in an interview for his book, “at the absolute stench of American life.”

Any serious accounting of the Weather Underground must take into consideration that they were young, idealistic, and a bit naive. But those are not unreasonable faults. You could say the same about the Bolsheviks, and I would. The USSR was full of naive dreamers. What the Bolsheviks had that the Weather Underground did not was numbers and training.

One must imagine if the Weathermen had killed a million people in the New York Tristate area with a decade’s worth of bombs. Would it have been better if the Weathermen had worn medals and planned their actions from the Pentagon?

I think a lot about the American New Left. An attempt, however flawed, to bring about an apocalyptic (in the original Greek definition) reckoning with American society, tragically splintered and rife with infighting, both genuine and manufactured.

I learned recently that my grandmother's brother was part of the SDS, and was jailed for it. Why, she didn't know. But it happened, at least. That era is not so far from us.

If you are reading this, sweaty with the worry that I am “normalizing” or “justifying” political violence, consider that I am only asking why you find so many forms of political violence so normal, so justifiable, so adequately met with well, it’s a shame, of course, while the specter of old radicals looms like a nightmare. Sometimes you must stand athwart history, yelling Are you fucking serious? Is it only that you get used to that stench of American life after a while? Is it worth it?

What is to be done?

LastPass users are once again being warned about stolen personal data, though this time the breach happened through one of the company’s outside partners.

Boy am I glad I got off of LastPass and onto 1Password last year, lol.

A PDF scan of a beautiful 1986 collection of Soviet art from and about the Great Patriotic War, also known as WW2.

Climate action is increasing its reliance on completely avoidable new fossil fuel infrastructure, and what it gets in return is more lies, less trust and direct participation in big tech’s attempt to destroy access to reality.

Turns out that recent "Bezos quote" about humans drinking too much water was entirely made up, likely an AI hallucination, and reported by an Indian news outlet as fact. Never underestimate the lack of care of the modern overworked/underpaid journalist.

"The last couple of years at Xbox have been quite messy, people start openly questioning Game Pass and saying it's cannibalizing sales," Schreier continued, referencing the hundreds of millions of dollars reportedly lost by putting Call of Duty in the subscription. "What might be good for the Game Pass folks may not be so good for the studios and revenue brought in for individual games."

Game Pass (and broader 'game subscription' models in general) are, in this dev's opinion, awful and parasitic and poisonous. In the metaphor of a 'race to the bottom' on pricing, for all intents and purposes they are the bottom. There is no cheaper option, which means that studios are not generating ongoing money which means that studios are actively putting themselves in danger by taking these Game Pass deals, which they also cannot afford not to do.

It's long past the time that we should be criticizing these models, and criticizing them extremely harshly, for what they are doing to the already-difficult games market.

Some Chinese module makers are turning their backs on the big three RAM suppliers.

Economist-brained take I know but I do think it's kind of inevitable that manufacturers will figure out eventually that Chinese-made computer hardware does the job just fine. And hopefully that means that RAM/HDD/SSD prices can start going down again, because good lord.

But the reality of a leaderless and structureless movement started by 50 people is, who decides who’s in and who’s out? When millions are now joining you, how do you centralize messaging? How do you stay on target for what you are organizing? In a running theme of this era, the political explosion that MPL created against not a fascist military dictatorship, but a progressive, left-leaning democratic administration, gave open ground for the far-right to take control.

I think that it would be understandable for people to take issue with my growing feelings around needing strong, verticalized, centralist structures to build movements on, but it comes from the same feelings that motivate this piece. Horizontalism is a deeply frustrating way to organize an entire movement, or even worse an organization. Best case scenario is things are slow. Worst case scenario, you are destroyed by the same fascist forces you are hoping to defeat.

It is obvious we have seen consecutive ‘biggest protests in human history’ to little global systemic change. Spontaneous uprisings have been a feature of the 21st century. In some places, one political elite was simply replaced with another. In other places, the states and capitalists cracked down on the movement so hard it hasn’t recovered. Other places were broken by the political vacuums created with no real, organized working class movement to fill that gap.

Imagine for a minute, the ICE uprisings keep scaling upwards. Millions and millions are shutting down the country. Rolling General Strikes from state to state. Then mass marches on the capital, and Trump’s goons flee to Epstein’s Island or some other far hideaway. Who, or what groups, will take over the political power of the country? How will the next decision get made? Did classes disappear? Did the social ills created by US settler colonial society disappear?

This is the key question and my greatest frustration with the modern American left. I am tired of "street protests". I am tired of "calls to action". Not because these things are bad, or even unnecessary, but because in order to work they have to be backed up by concrete organization, something that I feel we are terribly lacking.

So when looking at the vast field of lost revolutions of the 21st century, and the gravestones of all the martyrs we lost along the way, we have to ask ourselves, did we organize correctly? And the answer from the available evidence in most cases says we didn’t. Now we are facing an even worse ecological crisis, rising fascism, a new state of imperialist world order, and mass fascist violence in the streets of the capitalist hegemon—the U.S.. What changes have been made? Are we organizing differently from 2011? Because if we wish to succeed, we must.

It’s 1178 BCE and the sun never sets on the Ugaritic Empire/Kassite Federation/Old Babylonion Empire/Ugaritic trade network! And it’s all thanks to bronze, the hardest and most durable metal to ever come down the pike. Yes, whether you’re looking to smelt or cast, whether you need an ingot or a rhyton, a double-headed Cretan axe, some grave goods for your strongest grandmother, or a brazier-fitted statue of Kronos to give just the right finishing touch to your tophet, you simply can’t do better than bronze. And demand isn’t likely to die down anytime soon!

I think this is one of the funniest things I have ever read and I need to make sure I keep track of it.

Agency and choice are slippery devils, and people are not always very good at pinning down and articulating their real concerns about them. Like ‘freedom’ in politics, I think that when people talk about ‘choice’ or ‘agency’ in games, they are often not talking about the same thing, or even about any single thing, and therefore don’t convey their concerns clearly enough to allow useful discussion.

We're very much in the 'radium underpants' stage of the surveillance economy. A lot of the hype is silly, some of what we're doing is useful, and some of it is downright harmful.

On surveillance, data, and the military-industrial complex.

There's been chatter for the better part of a decade about "wholesome" as a marketing term. Small groups of people online criticize it, then participants in that scene are outraged. It continues, apparently, to attract an audience of people who believe that the term "wholesome" reinforces their sense of self.

Laura makes a great argument for "nurturing" as a genre title and opposed to the morally weighted (& politically fraught) term "wholesome".

Voluntarism, programmatic idealism, and strategic moralism are typically treated as separate mistakes. This essay argues that there is one error in three domains—the substitution of an ideal political form for material analysis—and that only reversing the direction of determination can correct it.

Don't agree with 100% of this piece but found it an interesting, if deeply academic-brain written, read. Loved this little tidbit from the American analysis section:

The absence of an American labor party is not a contingent historical lacuna waiting to be filled by the right organizational initiative. It is a structural feature of American class politics that has shaped the forms in which class interests can be expressed and the terrains on which they can be contested. The two-party system is not simply an obstacle to socialist politics but a terrain through which class forces are organized. The question of what engagement with that terrain can produce is a strategic question requiring analysis, not a moral question requiring a verdict.

Where I principally break with the analysis is with takeaways like this:

The democratic and electoral terrain is not, as the abstentionist position maintains, simply a mechanism for reproducing ruling class hegemony without remainder. It is the primary terrain on which the political consciousness of tens of millions of American workers is being actively shaped, and the question of whether the left engages with that process or withdraws from it in principled disgust is not a moral question but a strategic one with determinate political consequences.

To which I would say: Is it? Did the Sanders campaign make actual waves in the American proletariat? Is Mamdani a win for socialists, or is he an absorption of New Deal liberalism into the Democratic Party program? From within the borders of the States, I don't think these are easily-answered questions. Working within the electoral frame has some advantages, but I truly doubt the easy answer of "a lot of people vote, therefore that is where power lies and where we must strive". American voting is a complete mess -- both in terms of participation as well as upper class capture. Not to mention the number of institutions in the American government that are not beholden to any mass politic (like the Supreme Court, or in a broader sense the American military). It's things like that that make me doubt the so-called "democratic route to socialism".

[The No Kings website] then goes on to cite the anti-China protests in Hong Kong, where demonstrators used yellow umbrellas and yellow ribbons used to represent resistance to Russia in Ukraine, as its two specific examples to align the movement with. Both of these examples are in line with the US foreign policy interests shared between the Democratic and Republican parties. In the case of the Hong Kong protests, in both 2014 and 2019, the US government was accused of directly interfering and helping to direct the demonstrations, especially through its CIA-linked soft-power projects like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

I have so much suspicion around No Kings and this article gets at one of the main reasons why.

What the heck's a Game Dad?

A cheap little handheld games console that plays every game you grew up with and all the ones you never got the chance to play. It has a proper D-pad and buttons and a good bright screen, and sometimes it has one or two analog joysticks as well.

Love this terminology and will be using it from here on out. Game Dad.

The legal right to defend oneself has always proved far more fragile when exercised by the very people who most need protection.

The on-paper legality of carrying arms is irrelevant compared to the social legality of carrying arms, which will always be illegal for the targeted classes. We live under a dictatorship of capital, and capital has strong reasons to discriminate against social minorities. Trans freedom to live is non-negotiable in a true progressive future.

The US, then as now, remains committed to undermining and destroying Chinese socialism, and has relied heavily upon thinly veiled, CIA-sponsored bodies like Radio Free Asia, National Endowment for Democracy, and the fanatical anti-communist and fantasist Adrian Zenz, with the sole objective of bringing about the fall and disintegration of China, much as happened to the former USSR and Yugoslavia.

I find the propaganda project of the United States around the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 to be a really useful example of truth-twisting. Yes, there were legitimate grievances with the protests -- often centered around the dangerous repercussions of the 1980s Reform and Opening Up period and the lessened rules around capitalist development in China. Also, mass chaos in the streets is not like, good. The nature of the PRC and the CPC in general is one of holding onto power as the ruling class and party of Chinese society, thus it is in their interest to quell uprisings. I don't see this as contradictory to the mission of any proletariat-ruled society, because part of ruling a society involves making hard decisions about how to handle internal unrest.

The fact that China managed to fend off -- then and now -- attempts to replace the CPC with a more capitalist government should be seen as a massive achievement.

COVID-19 infections have plummeted in recent years. In 2022, there were around 1.5 infections per person, meaning almost everyone was infected once and many people had more than one infection. In 2023, the number was around 1. In 2024, we stopped recording really good statistics on the number of infections, but every indicator we had showed another huge decline. By 2026, we are looking at record low rates of COVID-19 across hospitalizations, deaths, wastewater data, and cases.

Some good news, at least.