In light of a recent story about Wizards of the Coast openly boasting that Dungeons & Dragons is better viewed as a live service, I'm sharing the text of my presentation at the 2026 UNC-Greensboro Game Studies Conference. It's partly about this, even if it'
A debate kicked off on Bluesky today about what the official song of the Millennial generation is. I don't link to posts as a rule because it's been my experience that even a meager amount of added attention can make social media intolerable, but the initial
I don't generally like to write about annoying things on the internet, but I want to make an exception because this particular instance patched into something else which annoyed me on the internet. There's a bad piece in Jacobin about how rock is back, the nails
The talk of the town this past week has been the Coachella set which Nine Inch Noize put on. A hybrid project of Nine Inch Nails and Boys Noize, birthed from their tour together last year, the set was blistering. It set the internet alight. Perfect choreography, perfect lights, perfect
Someone I was friends with 30 years ago has started a farm commune. From the outside, it also looks a little like a cult. The farm in question consists of one (1) shack, one and a half (1.5) gazebos, one (1) tractor, and one (1) patch of flowers. If
In 2008, I tried to buy the film score to the legendary in some circles (mostly MST3K fans) Joe Don Baker film Mitchell. I was not successful. A new MMO called All Points Bulletin was in beta. It was an action RPG in which you played either cops or criminals,
I'm doing a second playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077. I beat it when it came out and found it engaging even with its buggy release, but I never got around to doing its Idris Elba saturated DLC. I was taken by a short side quest this go round which
When I was Vice's pro wrestling columnist, I interviewed Hangman Adam Page. As I recollect, it was after his 2018 moonsault at Ring of Honor's Manhattan Mayhem, one of a series of dangerous, highly circulated moonsaults at the time which heralded him as the next big
There's a genre of short form video which runs variations of the following: we need white guys to get back to playing some form of rock music. The message has a double edge. One, the world sort of misses rock music, which has been mostly dead as a
In olden times, back on Google+ (RIP), I used to post my favorite music of 2025. I stopped doing that awhile ago, but I'm reviving the form. Some of these are albums, some are just songs, none of them are in any particular order. YARD - YARD II
Judging from my social media, which contains a lot of academics furiously sharing posts by other academics, some sort of dam feels like it's cracking on academia and AI. Not that academics were primed to use it (administration, well...), but there's a certain indignance and anger
I watched Netflix's Diddy documentary and it's as well put together and terrifying as the reviews indicate. Meticulously, ruthlessly, methodically made to indict its subject. It's shocking that the production team scored so much footage from people so willing to speak, at length, about
I read a free, meticulously written collection of essays today about removing anthropocentric considerations from discussions of AI. It really was good. It also, in my opinion, felt like the exact same series of traps the broad swathe of post/anti-humanist analysis seems to fall into: what else is there?
Someone on Bluesky recently said that we really need a return to decency. I apologize to that forgotten person for not linking that thought here, but it got my gears turning about decency (what we probably should be cultivating) vs. empathy (what we keep saying we should be). And I
My presentation at the Games Workshop Research Day last weekend was on the Chapterhouse case. Very, very briefly: Games Workshop lost (most of) a lawsuit against a small manufacturer of conversion "bits" and miniatures for units without rules. They lost because they were triggerhappy with lawsuits at the
This is the first half of a two parter, the other being about what happens when your academic talk is drastically altered in real time when you're not watching your phone. I was invited to put something together for the Games Workshop Research Day, a now annual event
When I teach my Intro to Media Studies course, I have a taster week for cultural studies centering on identity, representation, and music. I structure the class to have regular screenings of something or other, and I pair this week with the BBC's 2022 documentary on the Hacienda
I'm 48. I'm Gen X and I'm allowed to say that finally, begrudgingly, we are indescribably lame. We whine. We clutch our pearls. We moan. I'm not speaking about the cultural output, which at its peak was and is some of the
This is almost certainly going to be the sort of post which my lefty friends (i.e. almost all of them) will consider wishy-washy but I feel like I'm going a little nuts. Everyone needs to shut up. I don't mean this in a chastising way
I realized this month that it's been 25 years since I started DJing. Possibly down to the month, but I can't quite be sure of that. I DJed in small goth/industrial (what my friends at I Die:You Die call "our thing") nights
One of my tertiary hobby horses is the way academic discourses filter down into broader public discourse as commonsense in winnowed form (and I'm going to somewhat ironically conclude this piece by doing just that). Psychiatric terms being used to pathologize perfectly ordinary unhappiness on social media is
I was going to post weekly, at least. But then I started teaching again, a bit last minute and entirely unexpectedly, and it was the first week of the new semester and I was behind and, well, I didn't post last week. I came to all of this,
I've had a nearly lifelong obsession with what I've locally taken to calling pop music's interstitial period. It's a small window starting in about 1988 and definitely ending with the 1991 release of Nirvana's Nevermind and NWA breaking up (followed
I finally watched Euphoria but I don't think I'm interested in it for the reasons a lot of people are. Two caveats precede this post. One, I am generally late on television pop culture "moments". That's why, in 2025, someone (me) is