iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr @raethr.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

I think that anyone who wants to use "larp" should have to go join an actual live action role play group AT LEAST ONCE! Super weird that people are using it as any kind of roleplay, acting, or inauthentic performative behavior.

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Bree (half of Kit Rocha) @mostlybree.kitrocha.com · 08/07/2026

Thinking today about how often SFF folks scoff at the idea that romance requires worldbuilding when we're out here daring to build societies where consent exists and is even tangentially understood, which is a task more ambitious than any magic system.

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Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr @raethr.bsky.social · 16/04/2026

Every time Frieren is part of popular anime discourse again, I have to bite my tongue and avoid turning every conversation into a lesson on the thermian argument and the rhetorics of world building.

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Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr @raethr.bsky.social · 29/01/2026

I often think about the things that are lost when we invite audiences into our performance spaces. It's hard to emphatically gas up the value of the intimate home game in an industry space driven by audience and hypervisibility, but I do think that the narrative space shifts when a watcher arrives.

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Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr @raethr.bsky.social · 15/10/2025

I do worry that the overarching focus on the environmental impacts of AI comes at the cost of conversations about the human, cultural, economic, and artistic costs. Like, the attempt to substitute human-made sentiments about truth for meaning-ignorant technical synthesis should be more troubling.

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Latinx In Gaming @latinxingaming.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

🎉 The Latinx in Gaming 2025 Grants are officially OPEN! 🎮 Apply between August 5 – August 31 Whether you're a content creator, streamer, student, gaming professional, or involved in any gaming-related field—this grant is for you.Let us support your journey in the gaming industry!

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Indie Book Spotlight @bookspotlight.bsky.social · 17/07/2025

Let’s freaking gooooooo 💪

A California federal judge ruled Thursday that three authors suing Anthropic over copyright infringement can bring a class action lawsuit representing all U.S. writers whose work was allegedly downloaded from libraries of pirated works.

The filing alleges that Anthropic, the Amazon-backed OpenAI competitor behind the chatbot Claude, “violated the Copyright Act by doing Napster-style downloading of millions of works.” It alleges that the company downloaded as many as seven million copies of books from libraries of pirated works.

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Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr @raethr.bsky.social · 17/07/2025

This is a reminder to myself and all the other thinks-about, writes-about, creates-through TTRPG folks, the work we do is not trite, vapid, or meaningless because the material stakes of the world seem higher than ever. TTRPGs are narrative form given scaffolding, and that shapes imagination.

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Rise Up Comus @riseupcomus.bsky.social · 08/07/2025

Time once again to post the meme

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Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr @raethr.bsky.social · 26/06/2025

Students blatantly using gen AI makes me deeply and overwhelmingly sad. Like, do you have no value in your self growth? Is 250 words too much? If capital burdens are pushing you to the edge, then you can have an extension. It's easy. Just like, let me know. Anything but the gen AI....

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Pookleblinky @pookleblinky.bsky.social · 22/06/2025

Congress has not formally declared war since 1942, 83 years ago. Look at all the war the US has done in the past 83 years. Very obviously, it long long ago stopped requiring congressional approval for war according to its own constitution.

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Sheryl Weikal says Prosecute ICE @leftistlawyer.com · 22/06/2025

If you're arrested in Illinois protesting against Trump's war on Iran for Israel, I can represent you pro bono. Email me at sheryl@weikallaw.com.

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Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr @raethr.bsky.social · 19/06/2025

I feel like convos about GenAI surrounding accessibility are always a little fraudulent, because they are always interested in bringing certain people up to the bar of 'surviving while creating', rather than lowering/removing the bar.

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Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr @raethr.bsky.social · 11/06/2025

Laws are made up and fluid. What is legal today can change tomorrow. Every person is precarious. The leopards will eat your face, regardless of how you ended up in the United States.

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Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr @raethr.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

No nation is healthy, but the least healthy of them employ military violence against citizens

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Phil Lewis @phillewis.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

“Trump is using military forces to stop a protest — I want y'all to consider what kind of government it appears to be when every time we exercise our democratic right to protest, the military is deployed against us.” Doechii at the #BETAwards

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Kye @gxldsociety.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

Real photo from 1937 LA found in the LA Times

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Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr @raethr.bsky.social · 10/06/2025

While it's far from unexpected, it's still very weird to see solidarity break down over something as trite as 'vandalism', 'public disturbances', and 'property destruction'.

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Rachel Navarre @rnavarre.bsky.social · 08/06/2025

Also point this out to anyone you can. These were not planned protests. These were normies getting the supplies for their weekend projects or at a restaurant and saw their servers getting hauled off and were like this is some bullshit.

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unraveled @unraveledpress.com · 09/06/2025

Again, this isn't Los Angeles. This is happening right now outside an ICE building in SF:

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Melissa Hung @melissahung.bsky.social · 07/06/2025

With alt text

Photograph of a protester in Hong Kong, who is dressed in black, covered nearly head to toe, and wearing glasses and various gear including a yellow construction helmet. Title says: Hong Kong Protest Gear Summer 2019. There are various blocks of text and arrows pointing to the various gear the protester is wearing.

- Yellow construction helmet: Protects against rubber bullets, tear gas canisters, flying bricks
- Broad face cover: To counter facial-recognition technology
- Backpack Typically holds snacks, water, change of clothes, tools and sometimes laser pens to shine in officers' eyes.
- Elbow & knee pads: For for falling, crawling and scuffing on city streets
- Loose change: For subway fare, to avoid being tracked through electronic transit passes
- Goggles: For flying debris
- Gas Mask: Protecting against tear gas, which Hong Kong police use liberallv
- Black t-shirt: Uniform adopted by Hong Kong protestors, in contrast to white Ts, worn by Beijing supporters
- Lycra skin covers: To protect against tear gas effects
- Umbrella: Protection against rain and pepper spray
- Heat-resistant gloves: To throw hot tear gas canisters back at police
Photo: Sasa Petricic/CBC

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Karen Attiah @karenattiah.bsky.social · 08/06/2025

The crackdowns on civilians and the threat of the national guard being sent to LA should be *the* most important story right now-- not the Trump/Musk feud or whatever the f**k that was. People are being terrorized all over the country. News outlets need to get it together.

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Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr @raethr.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

Kind of obsessed with the fact that I could fit all the text from this image into the alt-text. Kind of epic. Kind of accessible and based and stuff.

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Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr @raethr.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

An excerpt from a short paper I wrote, but never got around to fleshing out enough for a proper academic publication. It was inspired by the combat wheelchair, and uses that to interrogate ableist sentiments about linear growth, healing, and "correct bodies".

Conclusion: Ultimately, this rhetorical exploration of the statistics of Dungeons & Dragons is far from the whole of the conversation. Decolonial concepts of temporality, critical (dis)ability theories of health and healing, and critical deconstructions of cartesian duality could each be applied with greater depth to each of D&D’s ability scores to further discuss the ways that pre-existing colonial and cultural perspectives and ways of understanding the world format storytelling as it is processed and brought into being through D&D. TTRPGs function as lenses for storytelling, whose rules afford some narrative directions and obscure others. When taking these games as rhetorical texts, it is essential to consider how they are informed by their contexts; in the case of D&D, those contexts are grounded in colonial logics and animated by ongoing hegemonic mindsets. The ways that each of the statistics are cohered together into singular facets of personhood, placed on linear spectrums, and propelled into foundational structures of storytelling are situated not only in the monopoly D&D holds on the cultural imagination of TTRPGs, but also in the widespread colonial imagination that stories are told in.
All TTRPGs create claims about personhood through their character sheets—or lack thereof. However, not all TTRPGs claim universality in the storytelling machine of the game. It is there that D&D stands out, from the attempt to extend the game into different settings and genres to the broad attempt by fans to construe characters through the lens of a D&D character sheet. As TTRPGs continue to explore ways to craft that personhood as a storytelling artform, it is essential to continue interrogating the claims which motivate foundational gameplay mechanics and narrative aesthetics.

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Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr @raethr.bsky.social · 04/06/2025

There are some really important performance studies sentiments about how performance is rehearsal for real life. This is especially true when your performance is close to your heart, in the way that TTRPGs are. I think we could all use some rehearsal in resistance and solidarity.

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sarah jeong @sarahjeong.bsky.social · 27/05/2025

I actually have an answer to why it was different. It was different because the Napalm Girl photograph did not actually end the war. A year before the photo was taken, a majority of Americans already believed it had been a mistake to send troops to Vietnam. www.theverge.com/cs/features/...

“The Terror of War” is sometimes credited with ending the war through sheer emotional impact, swinging American public opinion toward military withdrawal and eventually bringing about the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973. The photograph was indeed powerful. (US President Richard Nixon can be heard wondering whether the photograph had been doctored in a White House audio recording. In another, he encouraged Henry Kissinger to “think big” and suggested the nuclear bomb.) But in truth, the tide of public opinion had already turned years prior. A year before the photograph was taken, 61 percent of American respondents to a June 1971 Gallup poll answered that it had been a mistake to send US troops to Vietnam; only 28 percent maintained that it had not. Six years earlier, in August 1965, only 24 percent had believed involvement to be a mistake, while 61 percent had not.

In On Photography, Susan Sontag mused on whether the American public would have more vociferously opposed the Korean War if had been confronted with the photographic barrage that came with Vietnam. Sontag ultimately dismissed the possibility, concluding instead that the Vietnam War had already been “defined by a significant number of people as a savage colonialist war” and that the photographs — many of which had a military origin and “were taken with quite a different use in mind” — were published by the media in a preexisting social context and narrative. No photo could launch an antiwar movement; rather, the movement captioned the photo.

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Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr @raethr.bsky.social · 28/05/2025

Vampirism Sinners 2025 :handshake: Stormtroopers Star Wars Representations of oppressive systems, embodied by people who are victims themselves, taken on in a lighthearted manner because the aesthetics are sexy/cool or because individual members are relatable/sympathetic/sexy.

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💥 @dynamoe.bsky.social · 29/12/2024

Stop Forcing A.I. Into Every Fucking Thing!

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Alex Kirshner @alexkirshner.com · 16/05/2025

this is a letter to the editor from a high school track runner who came in second to a trans girl in a race. her state house rep in maine started talking about it. so she wrote this: www.pressherald.com/2025/05/14/r...

Rep. Laurel Libby, R-Auburn, recently used my second-place finish in the 1,600-meter run, and that of my teammate in the 800-meter run, to malign Soren Stark-Chessa, the trans-identified athlete who finished first.

One of the reasons I chose to run cross-country and track is the community: Teammates cheering each other on, athletes from different schools coming together, and the fact that personal improvement is valued as much as, if not more than, the place we finish.

Last Friday, I ran the fastest 1,600-meter race I have ever run in middle school or high school track and earned varsity status by my school’s standards. I am extremely proud of the effort I put into the race and the time that I achieved. The fact that someone else finished in front of me didn’t diminish the happiness I felt after finishing that race. I don’t feel like first place was taken from me. Instead, I feel like a happy day was turned ugly by a bully who is using children to make political points.

We are all just kids trying to make our way through high school. Participating in sports is the highlight of high school for some kids. No one was harmed by Soren’s participation in the girls’ track meet, but we are all harmed by the hateful rhetoric of bullies, like Rep. Libby, who want to take sports away from some kids just because of who they are.

Anelise Feldman
Freshman, Yarmouth High School
Yarmouth

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Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr @raethr.bsky.social · 14/05/2025

I wish I remembered to take more photos at PAX, so that I can put together a real post about it, or something

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Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr @raethr.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

This isn't my area of research, but as someone who frequently gets read as non-Asian through his voice (and acting), I think that there is something to think through the ways that vocalics encode kinship relationships, histories, and oppressive structures.

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NPR @npr.org · 11/05/2025

Putting together a go bag doesn't have to be daunting or expensive. Here's how to create a functional kit that doesn't require much money, time or effort.

npr.org

Cheap and easy ways to stock your emergency go bag

Putting together a go bag doesn't have to be daunting or expensive. Here's how to create a functional kit that doesn't require much money, time or effort.

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IMANI! ✍🏿 CREATING STUFF & THINGS ✒️ @kaoscryptid.asalwaysimani.com · 10/05/2025

Juneteenth Black TTRPGer Stream Producer Interest Check It's happening and that means Imma need help producing the games You must be able to run live streams via OBS and arrive 45min before scheduled game time! Happy to teach those interested in learning live production! forms.gle/9x3PiCwpfzRf...

forms.gle

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John Lee Brougher @johnbrougher.com · 13/12/2024

Hey #TTRPG folks! I didn't see one already, so I created an Asian American / Pacific Islander (AAPI) in tabletop roleplaying games starter pack to build community, and added the minimum to get started. If you'd like to be added (or removed), just let me know! go.bsky.app/AP6Shtn

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Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr @raethr.bsky.social · 11/05/2025

After the my panels at PAX this weekend, I feel like there is a really important conversation to be had about the differences between representation as "political tactic" vs as "reflection of lived experience"

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Dr. Catherine Strickson @brigitteempire.bsky.social · 08/05/2025

transphobes go to the shadow realm

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Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr @raethr.bsky.social · 03/05/2025

Today, we're writing through TTRPGs and the rhetorical force (and empty promise?) of queer legibility

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Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr @raethr.bsky.social · 02/05/2025

I think its interesting (read "Wack") how often conversations about 'the human condition' or any sense of innate human philosophy turn into unspoken gestures at a fascism/libertarian freedom dichotomy, as if that's the only ways to format social spaces?

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Kevin Maxon @sonofbadru.bsky.social · 22/04/2025

We have removed Tenderfoot Tactics from sale on @xbox.com in solidarity with @bdsmovement.bsky.social . We call on others in our community to do whatever they can to fight this historic injustice. Free Palestine 🍉

The Tenderfoot Tactics team has decided to remove our game from sale on Xbox in solidarity with the Palestinian-lead Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaign, which added Xbox to their priority boycott list earlier this month.

We hope that Microsoft will listen to the voices of their workers and customers and stop all business with the criminal Israeli military, which we have all watched conduct an open genocide in Gaza over the last 18 months.

We hope that the broader community will join in the pressure campaign and fight for an end to occupation and apartheid in Palestine and across the world.

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Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr @raethr.bsky.social · 27/04/2025

I totally forgot to say, I'm going to be at PAX East! If anyone is also there who happens to think I'm cool, let's chat!

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Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr @raethr.bsky.social · 25/04/2025

Nothing frightens me more like a straight man recognizing my body. Please do not talk to me about how big you think my biceps are. Please do not hail me into your imagined relationship through toxic masculinity.

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Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr @raethr.bsky.social · 05/04/2025

Kind of epic of me to get a liddol grant for performance work within my department. Even more epic of me to put that aside to pay some people to do an actual play TTRPG as a performance of queer kinship, grief, and mourning.

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Vengey 🦉🍇 @itsvengey.live · 28/03/2025

People are excited for Inzoi because 😱*GASP* new Sims-like BUT PLEASE DON'T SUPPORT IT, IT HEAVILY uses gen-AI, from AI generated 3D objects, to AI generated images (not just textures, but decorations and more), even the steam banner is AI If you are against AI, don't give this game your money!

Inzoi released on steam in early access with very positive reviews, but the positive reception of this game just fuels the Generative AI dumpster fire.

As stated DIRECTLY from the devs:
inZOI uses on-device generative AI technology to provide creators with additional customization options for an intuitive creative experience.

Enter text prompts to generate custom patterns and images to customize outfits, props, and furniture to your liking. Transform 2D images into in-game 3D objects or create character motions by uploading your video files.

Bring your imagination to life with these powerful tools! With limitless creative freedom, the possibilities are endless!
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Steam also has to show the AI generated content disclosure as well for this game:

Players can generate unique textures for character outfits and various items based on text input. They can also create 3D objects from image input, which can be used as interior decorations or accessories, and add distinctive motions to their Zoi using video input. Additionally, the actions and thoughts of Zois are controlled through sLM technology, enabling more engaging and intuitive interactions.

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Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr @raethr.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

Shout out to the writer comrades at ICFA for affirming that I'm actually just 7 romantance genre tropes rolled into one man Boyfriend-husband coded, frankly

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Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

I guess with all the other open-air graft going on it's easy to overlook, but the U.S. Commerce Secretary using his official position to go on cable news to tell people to buy the stock of his boss's largest campaign donor is just astonishingly corrupt.

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SeroRPG @serorpg.com · 20/03/2025

Authors and publishers of fiction and TTRPGs: there is a class action lawsuit being put together against Meta who are using the Libgen database to mine content to train their AI with. It is possible that your work is in there, I know mine is, if so and you're in America, contact the lawyers listed.

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Kaitlin Is Just Getting Started @gothamgirlblue.com · 20/03/2025

It’s important to understand that when a white person says “this has never happened before” or compares some oppressive behavior to a foreign regime, but it *did* happen here to Black/brown people for years/decades/centuries, it represents a massive blow to solidarity. It’s selfish.

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