This is a linkblog written by Dante.
You can find my main blog here.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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?
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.
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.
Maybe still my favorite song from crazy arms. just a beautiful, beautiful track.
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's gonna be a #MedievalSummer
I have been playing this a lot on repeat. Beautiful song.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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.