iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Evan Torner @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social · 2h

This is why I am on this website

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Evan Torner @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social · 4h

Mad Max: Fury Road for certain

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Evan Torner @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social · 14h

I am very happy, for example, at the success of OVER/UNDER a year ago. It is also enriched by prior histories of text-based RP and larp, rather than separate from them.

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Dr Rebecca Williams @augustaquarius.bsky.social · 14h

Looking forward to this new collection in 2027. I wrote a chapter on "Themed Immersive Attractions: Play and Branding in Transmedia Game Experiences" and I can't wait to read the rest of the book! www.routledge.com/The-Routledg...

routledge.com

The Routledge Companion to Immersive Arts and Media

The Routledge Companion to Immersive Arts and Media is an essential guide to one of the most dynamic and rapidly evolving sectors within the contemporary creative cultural industries. Bringing togethe...

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Evan Torner @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social · 14h

We are saturated in disinfo rn and would like to warn others about what we're fighting against (and what's being spread anyway). The distinction between "Americans" and "their current regime" has become quite sharp.

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Laborjournal @laborjournal.bsky.social · 15h

Viel zitiert – und trotzdem unglücklich? Eine Studie mit mehr als 2.400 Forschenden findet Überraschendes: Mit steigendem bibliometrischen Impact sinkt tendenziell die Lebenszufriedenheit von Forschenden. Woran das liegen könnte: 👉 www.laborjournal.de/blog/?p=15189

Gezeichnete Illustration eines niedergeschlagenen Forschers vor einem Diagramm mit steigender Zahl wissenschaftlicher Zitationen.

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Evan Torner @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social · 21h

Yes! Niesz and Holland address this point precisely. He anticipated the Internet, because it was necessary to brake the one-way radio communications chain that enabled propaganda of all kinds.

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Evan Torner @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social · 21h

10 years means I myself and the folks whose indie TTRPGs I wrote about are now in our 40s and 50s, so the flash & novelty have faded understandably. I look forward to every hotshot young thinker transforming into a wild-eyed old curmudgeon. I rely on it, in fact!

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Evan Torner @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social · 22h

Oh look! A Brecht reference. There have been quite a few of us who have invoked Brecht to discuss the sorta basic alienation effects that games create with their strange rituals. Brecht has been invoked on games and interactivity since at least the 1980s (See: Niesz & Holland 1984).

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Evan Torner @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social · 22h

My free essay "The Self-Reflexive Tabletop RPG" turns 10 years old this year! "[These] games reinforce the idea that collaboration and what Karl Bergström (2012) calls “playing for togetherness” allow TRPGs to look at their own processes with analytic precision." www.gamejournal.it/torner-the-s...

gamejournal.it

The Self-Reflexive Tabletop Role-Playing Game

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Ryan Stauffer @ryanswx.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Haha, this fucking sucks.

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Rebecca Colesworthy @rcolesworthy.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Spoiler: Very, very, very good things happen when students—all students!!—and literature converge. I love this book so much and I am such a fan of Rambsy’s.

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Natalie Weiner @natalieweiner.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

“Education should be about exploration,” the letter reads. “We want to go to school to connect with people, discover things, and learn....We can’t now, because of the rigidity of the new lesson plans and rules makes it almost impossible to explore new ideas...”

star-telegram.com

Hundreds of Fort Worth ISD students sign petition against scripted lessons

A student-written petition has been signed by more than 900 Fort Worth ISD students as of Tuesday morning.

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Ben Robbins is launching M2 @lamemage.com · 06/10/2026

The kickstarter for the new Microscope is live! I can't wait to see what you make with the new edition www.kickstarter.com/projects/lam...

kickstarter.com

Microscope (2nd Edition)

The award-winning game of epic fractal histories

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RPG Roots @rpgroots.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Some of the organizing work behind Session 0, selecting and connecting snippet from @megueyb.bsky.social @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social and @aarontram.bsky.social. Session 0 will be already split into Part 1 (general intro) and Part 2 (Session 1 intro)... so many interesting ideas. Stay tuned!

A screenshot of a Lucidchart document with brainstorming and flowcharts to organize quotes for Session 0 of RPG Roots.

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Evan Torner @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

When you cross the late 1970s--- an era of excellent parties & subcultures before AIDS took it away from us---with the late 1990s---an early Internet era of surreal tech & goofy cultural mash-ups before 9/11 took it away from us---you get a joke that's greater than the sum of its parts.

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Evan Torner @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Although my first love is Euro electronic music, my DJ rep is actually as a "world music" person, because I love everything else too! This one was from a request list a few years back. I was hooked from the first listen.

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Evan Torner @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

People should sit down and play it if there's a copy nearby! Or just spend $30-$50 on eBay.

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Yarn Spinner @ MIGW @yarnspinner.dev · 06/10/2026

Absolutely brilliant talk looking at narrative barks from @parkeranniemay.bsky.social at #GCAP26

A lady sids at a podium and delivers a talk about barks in video game narrative

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Elizabeth Nolan Brown @enbrown.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

There's been a fair amount of commentary on how social media has become less fun, less interesting, etc. And there's a ton on how it's become more passive—"everything is TV". But I haven't seen much on these things tie together? And I think they clearly do. reason.com/2026/10/05/t...

reason.com

The end of social media

Algorithms and short-form video drove engagement. They also made it easier to quit.

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The Haunted Bookshop @thehauntedbookshop.com · 05/10/2026

It's Banned Books Week. One of our favorite activities is to go through the list of frequently-banned books to see what our totalitarian gerontocracy doesn't want us to read. Another is to try to figure out which right-wing group was mad at each book and why. libro.fm/collections/...

libro.fm

Banned books

Libro.fm is dedicated to ensuring representation in books and resisting book bans, exclusion, and censorship. From classics by Toni Morrison,...

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John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 05/10/2026

This is your occasional reminder that generative "AI" in particular could have been developed on public domain materials and/or licensed and compensated works but the major players intentionally, methodically and systemically chose to steal labor from working creative folks instead

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James Wallis @jameswallis.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

The final episode of Ludonarrative Dissidents season 3 is up, and it's been worth the wait. We present a three-hour actual play of classic map-based community game The Quiet Year, with two special guests: @ecfriedman.com and the game's designer @lackingceremony.bsky.social. This is an absolute treat

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Evan Torner @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

"Faming" in 2026 is a lot to unpack, but certain baselines like "not collapsing and destroying most food security" seem like they should be attended to.

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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 04/10/2026

The Cornell report on the Future of the American University is a disaster, mainstreaming and endorsing profoundly reactionary right-wing diagnoses of higher education that have no business in a serious report on what higher ed is or should become.

Compare, for example, the Progressive Policy Institute’s report on The Distortion of American Studies
with a similar study of American political science from the Goldwater Institute: Richard D. Kahlenberg
and Lief Lin, “The Distortion of American Studies: How the Field’s Leading Journal Has Embraced a
Worldview as Slanted as Donald Trump’s,” Progressive Policy Institute, January 22, 2026,
https://www.progressivepolicy.org/the-distortion-of-american-studies; Timothy K. Minella, “Peer Review
Gone Wild: Flagship Political Science Journal Shows How Academic Gatekeepers Promote Ideology Over
Scholarship,” Goldwater Institute, December 2, 2025, https://www.goldwaterinstitute.org/policy-
report/peer-review-gone-wild/.

12 Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey, “Five Reasons Viewpoint Diversity Makes Academic Sense,”
American Enterprise Institute, January 26, 2026, https://cfau.aei.org/five-reasons-viewpoint-diversity-
makes-academic-sense.
13 Richard D. Kahlenberg and Lief Lin, “The Distortion of American Studies: How the Field’s Leading
Journal Has Embraced a Worldview as Slanted as Donald Trump’s,” Progressive Policy Institute, January
22, 2026, https://www.progressivepolicy.org/the-distortion-of-american-studies

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Evan Torner @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

"George Lucas, Master Of Fear" apparently!

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The Golden Cobra Challenge @goldencobra.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Our "long tail" is now fixed! Ssearch hundredss of Golden Cobra gamess in our interactive archive sstarting with 2014 and ending with 2025. "I wonder if there's a Golden Cobra game about...." Well just go ahead and look it up! www.goldencobra.org/GCInteractiv...

goldencobra.org

Golden Cobra Challenge

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Evan Torner @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

OK but it definitely did for me, and I was 10. (Hmmm -- I seem to have a nearly 10 year-old son here....)

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Evan Torner @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

As an Iowan, I understand farms to be both (a) businesses run by a rural upper-middle class and (b) how literal food gets to everyone's table at scale, especially during times of transit and trade uncertainty. Fragile systems placed in the hands of narcissistic megalomaniac politicians.

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Evan Torner @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

So I've been told. Once they deleted my account over two decades ago, I've been slow to restart.

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Evan Torner @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I think Hegemony is a very hopeful game!

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Evan Torner @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

To this day, I *highly resent* that the tools we all contributed to have now transformed into instruments of algorithmic-political suppression: HTML, UNIX/Linux, TCP/IP, Java, "cookies," JPEG, GUI. These were *supposed* to help bring us all together, not become a cord tightened around our neck!

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Evan Torner @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

This meant that, to me, cyberpunk and the literal "hacker" ideals of The Matrix, etc. were more-or-less dead after 9/11. The Internet had been targeted for colonization, with PayPal & other financial transaction services on the horizon, Google and YouTube on their way, and the old nerds were fired.

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Evan Torner @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

1999-2000, with the DotCom crash, was a wake-up call on multiple fronts. When I was in IT, that was when all the corpo-trained drones were exported via layoffs from failed companies into our university & K-12 tech infrastructure. They replaced the cyber-inventor freaks I had come to love.

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Evan Torner @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

When the World Wide Web arrived on the scene in 1993 or so, we treated it as another homegrown component of this homegrown Internet world, even as Microsoft steadily built its monopoly and the corporate world gradually sharpened their meathooks for us all.

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Evan Torner @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

Flamewars, trolls, creepos, and janky server crashes were also there, but they'd be opposed by capable mods who could read the room, call in adult convos, and Keep. The. Nazis. Out.

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Evan Torner @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

I am literally a product of the early text-based Internet. Who I am is inseparable from it, the dial-up screeching of it all. As a 11 year-old, I could instantly access knowledge communities composed of people *intelligent enough to get on the Internet back then*, a reasonable bar.

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Evan Torner @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

USENET, GOPHER, ISCA BBS, DIKU MUD 4 EVA

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The Asheville Blade @avlblade.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Two years after Helene, we are still two cities The second anniversary of the storm sees a deeply divided city, between struggling communities still surviving the crises and an elite that's made the aftermath far, far worse. @davidforbes.bsky.social, with our latest: ashevilleblade.com?p=5399

A Blade graphic with the words "Two years after Helene, we are still two cities" over a photo of a flooded river.

In smaller text: Behind the marketing, Asheville remains deeply divided two years after Helene, marked by worsening inequality and a government that has made the aftermath far, far worse

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Evan Torner @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

For nearly two decades, Vimeo was THE "serious" platform a filmmaker could use to privately circulate their work without losing control of the video files in question. Now it appears to be putting on clown make-up like everyone else.

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