Kamal Boullata - THERE IS NO I BUT I

Kamal Boullata (كمال بلاطة), There is No I but I, (silkscreen), 1983 [Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah. © Kamal Boullata] link: https://www.barjeelartfoundation.org/collection/there-is-no-i-but-i/

A People's History of Slavjank

Loving these videos about Slavic shovelware games of the early 2000’s and I can’t wait for the book they’re building up to. I stumbled into this when I was researching early Czech games and then wandered into reading about bizarre Russian and Crimean treasure hunters and associated weird slav worldbuilding/conspiracy theory/alternate reality fictions. This stuff wasn’t part of my original thesis writing but its been slowly creeping in to the stuff I’ve been writing since, because this sort of werid magic-circle alternate past stuff exemplifies the politicized, luddic, grey-zone-horizon between history and fantasy that I’m interested in lately.

What Autocrats Want From Academics: Servility

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IGF 2025 winners include Caves of Qud, Vinny Roca and Consume Me

Some much deserved accolades at IGF awards this year for very longterm projects Caves of Qud and Fantastic Arcade alum Consume Me (Jenny Jaio Hsia and AP Thompson) as well as a best student game win by my friend and UCLA DMA co-cohort Vinny Roca for Slot Waste

The Baffler- What’s the Matter with Abundance?

“If there are not enough homes, can we make more?” the authors ask. “If not, why not? If there is not enough clean energy can we make more? If not, why not?” Their solution is for politics to take technology and innovation “more seriously” and to relieve them from the encumbrance of bad policy. “To have the future we want,” they helpfully summarize their case, “we need to build and invent more of what we need.” It’s hard to argue with that. Abundance is mostly hard to argue with, by design: Klein and Thompson have written a super-partisan sales pitch for a politics of new construction rather than a rigorous, methodical inquiry regarding the causes of national stagnation. The authors lament that America is “stuck between a progressive movement that is too afraid of growth and a conservative movement that is allergic to government intervention.” This third way is well trod, by everyone from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama to today’s Democratic Party insiders, and Klein and Thompson’s offering is among the most approachable attempts to map it of late. But their collation of columns is less than the sum of its parts, like a clip-show episode of a 1990s sitcom. […] Link

Teletext Art – An Overview

If you describe teletext as obsolete, you couldn’t be more wrong. It is one of the most popular media in Scandinavia. Here in Sweden for example, teletext is still the #1 public service medium, and commercial channels still sell plenty of advertising for it. […] Link

inside the ancient art of Japanese carpentry

Do you know your ant’s head from your shell mouth? Or your cogged lap from your scarfed gooseneck? These are just some of the mind-boggling array of timber jointing techniques on display in a new exhibition spotlighting the meticulous craft of Japanese carpentry. […] Link

the tiles of GOAL!

I’m looking at some of the formal qualities of the GOAL! tiles, which are one of the materials I’m working with for Soccerthon88.

Soccerthon88

This is my first public post for Soccerthon88, a game project.

LSA Statement Against Designating English as the Official Language

March 2025 Four Reasons Why English Should Not be the Official Language of the United States: Statement Against White House Executive Order “Designating English as the Official Language of The United States” The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) strongly opposes the White House Executive Order […] Link