This selective application of the term “authoritarian” reveals that Western discourse on “freedom” is designed to delegitimize resistance while legitimizing empire. By treating anti-imperialist struggle as equivalent to fascist tyranny, the so-called “collective West” erases the distinction between liberation and oppression.

So, you may notice things look a bit different around here.

Bruno moved his blog to a proper selfhosted option instead of Bear, which is something I am also considering, so this was a great read of what I should expect.

Anti-transparency is a fundamental pillar of right-wing politics. The right of powerful people to do as they please is only useful if it’s free of consequences, and the only way to assure that is if no one knows what they’re doing.

When I think of the undercurrent of gravity moving this buoyant, lively poem, somehow I imagine one of those plums of the first line bobbing in a river.

It's funny and entertaining, sometimes, to play something terrible and weird or not-quite-fun. And there are people in my personal life whom I can talk to about that kind of thing, in face-to-face conversation. That's better than posting about it.

Making art, making culture, has always involved some sort of dark deal with the infernal machinery of capital, but the rise of big tech and venture capital in the early 2010s changed the terms of the deal.

Do I feel robbed by being a millennial? Yes, in some ways. I don't believe in generational allegiance per se, but it is hard to say that I don't feel mad -- frustrated, underserved, et cetera -- by the 2010s and what happened to the 2010s. So much excitement, fervor, energy that was completely cratered by fascism, capitalism, imperialism. Was it "better" in the 2000s? No, I reject that framing. But there are new monsters now.

For the worldbuilder then, thinking about fictional armies (or the student of history thinking about real ones), be sure to think about the entire military-leadership life-cycle.

Neverclick uses on-device computer vision to label everything clickable with keyboard hints, so you can navigate any app without touching a mouse.

intriguing. and I appreciate the dev being honest about the AI usage (sounds like extremely minimal). The program itself does not use any LLMs as far as I can tell, no phone-homes. as a big fan of "hands stay on keyboard" I like this idea.

Really fun technical breakdown of all the computers in Jurassic Park (1993). I love this stuff.

The great African American poet and Harlem Renaissance figure, Langston Hughes, wrote two poems about V.I. Lenin in the 1930s. They reflect the tremendous spirit of hope that the Russian Revolution breathed into the national liberation struggles of Black people in the U.S. and all oppressed peoples around the world.

Thus the video game writer is by nature a very political animal, whose job involves not only writing story but advocating for it and adapting it to changing circumstances as the project evolves. Often the role of producers and team leads in video game studios is to shield their teams from having to throw out work because of iteration; narrative really is no different.

Great post from Bruno about game narrative and how it functions. Highly recommend reading if you're interested in any of this.

Everything is so evidently handcrafted, giving it the energy of a high school production (complimentary). A small orchestra, manned by people dressed in Pride regalia, sits off to one side. Behind them, a table holds 10 different zines covering everything from how to get off Spotify to the role of surveillance technology in schools to “Why GenAI Sucks.”

The kids are alright?

Once you notice a ChatGPT flyer, you will see them everywhere if you keep your eyes open.

These have been fucking destroying me. They are EVERYWHERE. They are EVIL

Had a great depressing afternoon reading all of this and flicking through a couple different wikipedia pages. When I say things like "the destruction of the USSR was a genocide", this is why. The destruction of Yugoslavia, the ethnic genocides on its former lands, the utter lack of response from NATO or the so-called peaceful forces of Europe -- this is what the USA wanted. This is what the end of the USSR meant: death, killing, massacres of people who once were united. This was the victory of the Nazis.

The LAPD is ending its agreement with Flock Safety, a company that operates surveillance cameras throughout the city.

huzzah!

The idea is that for the average person visiting LA, using a car to exit the airport won't be necessary at all. It won't be anywhere near as convenient as Chicago, but it will be a massive improvement.

God, I can't wait until this thing opens. If it ever opens!! ha ha! public transit in America is a nightmare

Terry Thompson lost $1.5 million on bets he placed with FanDuel. The company gave him VIP treatment — including a personalized video message from the Phillies' All-Star first baseman.

Genuinely stomach turning. Sports betting needs to be banned and these people deserve so much worse than what I want to say publicly online.

The opportunist is most dangerous because they appear as dedicated, loyal comrades, and it isn’t their loyalty that we call into question! It is their inconsistent, short-sighted, and unprincipled strategies that sacrifice the long-term project of proletarian revolution by getting lost in reacting to the current moment.

Los Angeles is built on a grid much like Toronto’s. Its suburbs have a population density similar to Toronto’s, which is considerably higher than that of the suburbs of the eastern cities we tend to view as friendlier to transit. A grid of buses is an ideal transit system for a decentralized city like L.A., and the city has already built much of the rapid transit backbone the model calls for. But what Los Angeles has never had, and what turns out to be the most essential element, is the unglamourous bus frequency on which Toronto’s success actually rests.

I'll admit that as a Transit Enthusiast I am, of course, predisposed to the noble Train. But the humble Bus has advantages -- the easiest to nail of course is adaptability and usability on streets without infrastructural modification. I think this is an intriguing take! I have some concerns, especially since LA's traffic patterns make buses almost as liable to slowdown as cars (bus lanes help, of course, but can only help so much), but more regular and reliable transit is always good.

The AMD BC-250 was built to act as a crypto-mining device, but as that scam is winding down there are a bunch on the market for reasonable prices. As crypto miners often have similar performance needs to gaming PCs, gamers & devs are collaborating on a simple path to make the BC-250 into a relatively simple DIY mini gaming PC. I love stuff like this -- it's basically e-waste at this point, and giving it a second life as a reasonably capable linux PC is a great move.

The neoliberal austerity regime has left no shortage of opportunities for alternative and counter institutions to fill the gaps left by the state, and capital continues to chase exponential returns on worthless scams rather than providing for many basic human needs. Those gaps, along with the social alienation inherent to capitalism, are the lowest hanging fruit for a dual power approach.

well-reasoned materialist analysis of how dual power can work, looking at examples from social democratic Sweden and islamic nationalist Palestine. I appreciate very much how this keeps the grounding of dual power not as an endgoal but as a tactic.

The important thing (again I stress IMHO) to remember is that all revolutionary orgs started out small, and had to earn the trust of the people as Fidel Castro said "I began revolution with 82 men. If I had to do it again, I'd do it with 10 to 15 and absolute faith. It doesn't matter how small you are if you have faith and a plan of action”. The Communist Party of China just celebrated its 105th birthday and they began with 50 people. The Bolsheviks started as a book club.

The point is that artistic mediums have different possibilities and limitations and if you try to make your novel a series of transcriptions of imagined TV scenes, it will fail at being either good TV or a good novel.

Very good article on narrative progression and pride. I know that I often find myself falling into "camera mode" when writing prose, and this is a good counter to that instinct.

I do find myself wondering what this looks like for games, given how different games narrative is from project to project. How I write for a VN is often very different than for an extended prose artifact of some sort like an audiolog.

I still think their latest album is probably their best overall but 'Beast of Carthage' is constantly stuck in my head and is an amazing track.

Although reality shouldn’t be up for debate, the question is what happened in 2020. Even though we all lived through it, our current medical establishment doesn’t want you to remember most of it.

It's a nice idea that "This Land Is Your Land" should be our national anthem, a wonderful song full of generous and idealistic sentiment that's actually easy to sing. [...] But the truer one, the one that speaks to our collective inability to stop repeating the sins of our forebears and the ultimate inadequacy of even the brightest and boldest among us when it comes to making our long violent history actually past, is "John Henry."

A well laid out, interactive map of the current Trump administration's connections with crypto. Really cool artifact.

What combat motivation studies have tended to show is that morale will get a soldier to the battlefield, but will not keep him on it; it is cohesion instead, the ability of a unit to stay together under pressure that is essential for enduring the terror of combat.

Sinon’s story, to me, feels like a warning. Abandoning the trans community has a price. We aren’t a shame that can be buried forever. The pendulum will swing, and we have long memories.

Love this reading, even if I'm not sure I agree that it was an intentional move by Nolan. I think the beauty of any creative work is that some meanings come only through the act of creation.

A textbook-like anthology of classic essays and articles about video game narrative design.

Amazing resource for games narrative and storytelling techniques.

Announcing a curated, thematic link page of important essays and articles about video game narrative.

Amazing resource from Bruno. Will link in upcoming post.

When I say that First Light is built for genre, I mean that every moment of the game feels like it is perfectly contoured over the model of the James Bond concept, folded and starched over the bodily form in ways that hundreds of professionals managed to accomplish over the course of several years. When I see the developing city emerge from the desert and the labyrinth of corporate managerial space capped with natural stone, I am prepared for genre to erupt at any moment.

Spectacular piece on First Light, James Bond, genre, and the current moment of IP acquisition and exploitation by Cameron.

Child labor is very “useful” if you want cheap labor. It’s 100% deplorable to use it or accept it. Child labor is a monstrosity. But if “useful” is enough, do we need to accept child labor? [...] Usefulness is a very weak argument in support of something.

The year baseball died and took everything else with it.

A beautiful little VN. Well worth your time. Gay and labor-interested and historical and heartbreaking.

One man's website all about the stickers that you can find on fruit. Astounding. h/t to Laura.

Behind the curtain of war propaganda, the Ukrainian working class is suffocating under the weight of increasing state violence and corruption.

Getting reasonable analysis of the war in Ukraine is a total pain in the ass in the United States, at least. I appreciate this piece for being a straightforward and well-argued analysis of the class aspects of the war.

The modern Russian federation is no worker's state. Modern Ukraine is neither. I don't see a way to interpret this war as a fight that Leftists (& especially Marxists) need to 'support' on either side. However, also and importantly, this is not a case of entirely imperialist adventure -- the government of modern Ukraine is explicitly right-wing and interested in maintaining a relationship with the imperial core. The government of modern Russia is explicitly right-wing but not interested in maintaining a relationship with the imperial core (favoring the modern coalition of BRICS, which has fair things to critique but is definitively not part of the global imperialist core).

This robbery of the working class in Ukraine is of course no new phenomenon. Just as in Russia, since the reintroduction of capitalism, “big business [has] turned the state into an institutional tool for realising the interests of oligarchic groups. There [has] emerged a peculiar phenomenon of ‘state capture’”. However, the development of full scale war has led to a shift in the nature of capture, away from local oligarchs and instead in favour of internationalised (western) capital.

It is nearly impossible to overstate how much the current political terrain of the former Soviet nations was explicitly the goal of the American-led crusade to destroy the USSR. This war would not be happening if the USSR was still around. That is not a paean toward a past that we lost as much as a statement of reasonable fact! When I see the peoples of 'Ukraine' and 'Russia' fighting each other, it is heartbreaking precisely because we have living memory of a time when these lines of identification did not bring about warfare. It was in the time of the USSR.

Although many opposition parties have experienced wartime repression in Ukraine, anti-communist and anti-socialist repression has been widespread since 2015, when a number of authoritarian laws were passed following the victory of the far right during the Euromaidan.

I do not care for the modern Russian federation, the same as I do not care for the government of the United States. It is a tragedy what happened, and it is a tragedy that continues to unfold. But to support the Ukrainian state uncritically is also deeply fraught, and I would argue not any more defensible as an ideological position.

New laws banned the Communist Party and its publications, along with any communist symbols. Singing the Internationale, the international song of worker’s solidarity, was made punishable by up to five years in prison. The use of the state to persecute the left followed severe and bloody street violence perpetrated by fascist paramilitary groups in Ukraine during the Euromaidan. Just a year before the ban on communist party activities, on the 2nd of May 2014, around a thousand fascist thugs under the banner of Right Sector (a Neo-Nazi paramilitary group) surrounded the House of Trade Unions in Odessa, setting fire to the premises where dozens of terrified workers had sought sanctuary. Right Sector members, barricaded exits and beat the men, women and children who threw themselves out of the windows of the building trying to escape. A total of 48 people were burnt alive that day, in what Right Sector proudly described as “yet another bright page in our fatherland’s history.”

To put it in a metaphor, when it comes to a topic, a trained professional historian’s knowledge is often like a swimming pool that smoothly slopes from the shallow end to the deep end, while the autodidact enthusiast is sometimes more like a shallow puddle with really deep potholes. [...] But the chuds... it’s just a puddle. Not especially wide or deep.

Really good blog post about the nature of the "chud history guys". You've definitely seen them before, on X The Everything App or other places. People who believe the value of Roman society was its Power or Culture or whatever. As a definitely not-rightwing Roman History Fan myself, I have always found this not only exhausting but, well, dumb. It's a tremendously shallow and ignorant understanding of history in general and Roman history specifically.

They mostly begin with the modern ideology, which as I document in The Bulwark piece, is generally a mix of authoritarian-inflected bigotry, with the core beliefs being a mix of white supremacist (often expressed as a hatred of non-white immigrants) and homophobia, often with a decent amount of misogyny and antisemitism thrown in. The precise elements are generally negotiable because the commitment is emotional and irrational, because – as Umberto Eco famously noted – that is the nature of fascism as an ideology: it is an emotional rejection of the universalizing principles of the Enlightenment and liberalism first which searches for rationalizations second.

Romans were a weird, warlike people with a strong sense of civic tradition, which had different manifestations and transfigurations throughout their long, nearly three-thousand year history. They are a complex people to pin down. Their periods of greatness were all bookended by great tragedies, and even their "great times" were marked by scathing, brutal repression and oppression of their lower classes. There were progressive and regressive elements of Roman society, from their beginnings as a class revolt all the way to the early modernists of Constantinople. They were violently homophobic and had deep traditions of homophilia in various forms. They were contradictory, in other words, in the ways that long-standing societies often are.

The strategic aim of the “democratic” imperialist states was to turn Hitler against the Soviet Union; in a few words, to use the Nazis as a weapon against the construction of Socialism in the USSR. That was the initial aim of the so-called “allies”.

The USSR saved Europe from fascism, and they never forgave the USSR for it.

A parallel web updated through physical media.

This looks very cool! Interesting idea. Sort of like a federated... internet? I think? seems cool.

The ninth console generation will be defined by corporate greed, mismanagement, and anti-consumer practices that could very well alter the course of the games industry itself.

Appreciate this piece a lot.

I truly don't know what the future holds for this industry if we continue down the path of the last five years, but I can tell you it won't be good.

Three weeks ago, I watched you walk off a stage at the Lambda Legal National Liberty Awards, and I thought: she already knows who she is. That’s the hardest thing. Most people spend their whole lives trying to figure it out. You’re sixteen, and you’ve got it.

I play a game like Vampire Survivors, and I think… where is the “play”? where is the joy, the creativity, hell, the “series of interesting decisions”? The time between level ups is just the time the reels spend spinning. After the first few, every level up is as automatic as pushing “spin again.”

You know, finally enough I had the exact same feeling as this author when I played Vampire Survivors. I knew I wasn't losing money but after a while it still felt slimy. The game relies on a LOT of stereotypical Dark Patterns, specifically those in the gambling space, to work.

I think the formula is not entirely unsalvageable -- imo, Terratech Legion iterates on it quite well and much more interestingly. But the raw, simple nature of Vampire Survivors just left a bad taste in my mouth.

It’s one thing to hate software, but that hate takes on new dimensions when you have to use it for your job. To choose software and have it fail is unfortunate; to be chained to it for sustenance and be unable to walk away is torture. Because of this, I have nothing but hatred for Adobe. They are one of tech’s greatest villains, the software has gotten worse to use, and if you don’t like it fuck you there’s the door.

Some honesty, please. Of course it feels good to own a car; sometimes it is even necessary to own a car, because enough people have decided that it feels good to own and drive a car.

Excellent article about Los Angeles and transit and cars and American culture. I do honestly believe that the car is an evil machine, and this country's reliance on the car is a sign of our general backwardness and social myopia. It is a wretched deal that was struck before my time but I still must deal with. Ain't that being a millennial.

I abhor the fatalistic pessimism that regards American public transit as unfixable, and I extend that to Los Angeles. But while increasing ridership through coverage and frequency is in the hands of LA Metro and funding, the broader experience of getting around is a bit more complicated. A lot of my complaints fundamentally boil down to a desire for there to be fewer cars.

GDID is the persistent Windows ID that helped FBI trace a Scattered Spider hacker despite VPNs. Here's how it works and how to limit it.

Another great reason to use Linux.

The reality is thus: the people in charge either have no plan, or see no path forwards other than keeping their heads down. [...] The world’s organisations have been captured by people in the throes of frothing excitement, and saner people who now live in a state of constant commingled fear and frustration.

Not much to say here other than "yeah, I have felt the same for quite a while now."

Executives that tell the press that their company has gone insane will quickly find themselves removed from their positions. Employees who are honest will find themselves fired in short-order, or “randomly” selected for a round of layoffs. In fact, it is in the interests of almost every actor in the space – boards, executives, employees, vendors, consultants – to obfuscate and misrepresent the success rate of AI projects. Many publicly traded companies are putting out announcements about their AI productivity gains when I know for a fact that the businesses have done nothing other than purchase Copilot licenses and declare victory.

A long read but extremely worth your time.

It has become outright dangerous to even raise the possibility that AI might not be the solution to a problem, let alone be the sole focus of a company’s entire strategy.

In every sufficiently large business we have observed (say, with 500+ employees), we have noted that continued advancement, and increasingly continued employment, has started to require repeated professions of belief in the transformative power of AI for said business. I am not talking about providing ideas about how to use AI in the business – I mean religious profession, declarations of faith.

The final section of the essay -- "Navigating AI Mania" is, imo, crucial reading in this era of, well, AI mania. Funnily enough, I'd call a lot of this pretty bog-standard labor organization tips, but tailored for the AI regime. It's good reading -- if you don't want to read this whole thing, at least read that final bit.

Self-reform is how the CPC answers the oldest question in Chinese statecraft: how to escape the historical cycle of rise and decline. Its answer is to never stop struggling, and never let up on its fighting spirit in order to improve and to better represent the interests of the people.

Funny that I ran into this right after posting (positively!) about this piece on Ukraine from Fight For A Future, which is a publication that I do not agree with about their views on China (though I will admit they are not the rabid anti-China sort like many other worse members of the commentariat).

Carlos Martinez is one of my favorite writers on modern China not just because he is a fanboy (which I think is completely fair given the state of modern China compared to most of the US-aligned global West) but because he is a skilled writer and arguer about the ways that the CPC is specifically utilizing Marxist-Leninist thinking in their operations. Not shying away from fair criticisms, but taking the stance that adaptation is crucial to any ongoing communist project.

Where I think the PRC, and the CPC specifically, excels is the understanding that progress will take a long time, and thus it is imperative that a socialist project survive, even if that means taking some Ls along the way (and for what it's worth, I think the PRC has made a lot of mistakes, both historically and contemporarily! I just also think those mistakes do not change the progressive direction of CPC leadership). Or, to quote Martinez:

Ultimately, however, the test on these new battlefields is the same test the CPC has passed before, in a new form: Whether it can keep identifying the principal contradiction of the period and mobilizing society to resolve it, without either capitulating to external pressure or abandoning the peaceful, people-centered and win-win character that has defined Chinese modernization. On the record of the last 105 years, I would not bet against the CPC and the Chinese people surmounting these new challenges.

2016 games media was clumsy. 2026 games media is a fucking disaster.

I started writing in games about 2015. Jay Castello and I are thus the same "class" so to speak. I'm sure I've seen them at some event or something back in the day.

This piece feels so familiar to me in many ways. I wasn't as attracted to Overwatch as Jay was, but I remember liking it at one point. Getting into games writing at that time was not completely amazing but it did, at least, feel like it had some sort of potential.

I left press writing in 2019 to go into the industry proper. At that time, I thought "well, I'll do this for a bit but I'd like to go back to writing eventually". I made the mistake of assuming that the games press would remain some degree of stable. It didn't.

So in the wake of that I don't regret my choice, but it does feel painful to think about some times. It feels like a completely different world now.

Instead of a one-size-fits-all block, all customers can now easily distinguish and manage Search, Agent, and Training bots, alongside the new ability to protect ad-monetized pages.

Not a bad move from Cloudflare, honestly.

A new book claims that Mystery, who teaches awkward men how to hit on women, had sex and smoked weed with an AI chatbot named Miss Shira Always.

Mystery has fallen in love with Grok!

Each laptop tells a story through its stickers.

Fun little internet curiosity. I love the different ways that people customize their laptops. I should post an update to my own on the big blog sometime soon...

The theory is known as "three cueing." The name comes from the notion that readers use three different kinds of information — or "cues" — to identify words as they are reading.

It has been a constant refrain among my friends that when someone egregiously misinterprets something online, there is a real possibility that they literally do not know how to read. This is a bit of a joke, but also it's not, given the prevalence of three-cueing techniques used in American schooling. I recommend everyone read (REALLY READ) this page. They are not teaching 'reading'! It's guessing!

There are examples on this page of educational tools that tell kids to skip words that are hard! This is not teaching reading! This is teaching skimming!

Margaret Goldberg, a teacher and literacy coach in the Oakland Unified School District, remembers a moment when she realized what a problem the three-cueing approach was. She was with a first-grader named Rodney when he came to a page with a picture of a girl licking an ice cream cone and a dog licking a bone.

The text said: "My little dog likes to eat with me."

But Rodney said: "My dog likes to lick his bone."

AAAA!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Goldberg realized lots of her students couldn't actually read the words in their books; instead, they were memorizing sentence patterns and using the pictures to guess. One little boy exclaimed, "I can read this book with my eyes shut!"

"Oh no," Goldberg thought. "That is not reading."

I don’t know if it’s coming from this wishful thinking that’s taken hold again that “neurodivergent people’s communication is honest and clear and direct, but neurotypicals’ is deceptive and unnecessarily vague,” but if it is— From the bottom of my heart, please get off of Twitter for a little bit.

The plain fact is that the climate crisis cannot be addressed within capitalism. This may be difficult for some to come to terms with, but it is vital that we understand this fact and develop our strategies accordingly, otherwise we are headed for certain failure. And on this issue, failure is not an option.

Jason Hickel, as usual, right on the money.

I want to talk about games through crises and mass extinctions.

Outstanding piece from Paolo Pedercini analyzing the history of video games through an explicitly materialist lens of markets and populational trends. Pedercini makes the argument that games must be, ultimately, decommodified if we want the art form to survive, and moreover that that process of decommodification may already be underway. Excellent analysis and writing.