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Samuel Heine

@sadmediahistorian.bsky.social
356 followers 296 following 172 posts

Canadian researcher and lecturer in media and game history or spaces. I tend to write about representations, histories, identities, politics, video games and role-playing games. There will be typos.

PostsRepliesMedia
Reposted by Samuel Heine
Dr. Emily Friedman @ecfriedman.com · 04/10/2026
The oldest audio TTRPG Actual Plays predate large corporate ad-based file hosting. The oldest I know of had to shut down their original site & slowly port to Patreon hosting because bot activity made maintenance costs unsustainable.
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jess m. ☕🍂 @jametc.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Something AI is responsible for that doesn't get enough talk: How, when it scrapes a website to illegally steal everything on it, it uses up a ton of its bandwidth allotment, crashing it or racking up massive fees for site owners.
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damniel spookradski @self.agency · 01/10/2026
cool we've now combined two of a.i.'s most popular use cases: sexual harassment and hate speech
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Samuel Heine @sadmediahistorian.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Interviewers and journalists are there to inform, analyse, research, and push for more information. If they just give a spotlight to the elite to say what they want without pushback or context, they are glorified ads and aren't journalism. They should be identified as paid ads.
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Samuel Heine @sadmediahistorian.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
If someone sold you a toaster and it had a random chance to start spewing fire, the company would be sued. If an AI agent starts hacking or erasing important files, it's suddenly no one's fault. t That's without including that it may do so at the explicit demand of its operator as it isn't conscious
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Samuel Heine @sadmediahistorian.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
With recent surveys, I'm preparing myself for the provincial government of Québec to be under the thumb of a PQ that will go all in toward the culture war and anti-woke nonsense. I feel like mainstream media really want to hide or ignore the unhinged things their leader said on far-right platforms.
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Reposted by Samuel Heine
Robin LeBlanc, from work @robinfromwork.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
The film is written, directed, and co-stars Hitoshi Ozawa, a legendary Yakuza actor who is a villain in Yakuza 0, who got his fellow legends involved. This was his passion project inspired by one of his best friends, a trans woman, and he worked with the community for representative casting.
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Aaron Trammell @aarontram.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
It’s out tomorrow!!!! If you were ever curious about the origins of the alignment table, here they are. I love how they got these charts to sit so perfectly side by side 😻
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Reposted by Samuel Heine
Casey S. Pumpkins 🎃 @caseyexplosion.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
The cluelessness of this reminds me a lot of the NFT grift. The thing about NFTs was that it was mainly something finance bros were into, and when they were trying to worm their way into gaming, their pitches were an abyssal trench of bad ideas because they couldn't grasp why people played games.
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Reposted by Samuel Heine
Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
She’s right. And, fyi, the globe is doing victory laps over on other social media platforms about how many new readers and new subscribers they’ve gotten out of that “news article”— so we can expect more fuckass “reporting” like that from them in the future
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Samuel Heine @sadmediahistorian.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Being in Quebec and seeing 4 right wing to far-right parties having more seats than the center left party in surveys for the upcoming election does a big number on my morale. Feels like going more right wing to repair years of damage caused by right wing policies is obviously not a logical answer.
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Samuel Heine @sadmediahistorian.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Another saga in the I would laugh if their wasn't too many people that used this type of site unironically. When you study them, you realize rapidly that their own criteria aren't even respected and are either based on their interest or AI. www.thegamer.com/baldurs-gate...
thegamer.com
New Wokeometer Site Claims Famously Gay Baldur's Gate 3 Isn't Woke
Anti-woke gamers have launched the 'Wokeometer' to create a safe space where they can happily avoid men kissing men, except in Baldur's Gate 3.
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Reposted by Samuel Heine
i’m just ken @shepardcdr.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Microsoft’s years of acquisitions were just cultural vandalism masquerading as dick swinging on an E3 stage.
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Nico Mara-McKay 🦇 (they/iel) @nicomaramckay.com · 21/09/2026
Reviews of four zines about disability and queerness by Devin S. Turk: Disabled Queer Madness, The Right Words: CripQueer Articulation, Written by Our Bodies: Exploring NeuroQueer Rhetorics, and 16 Trans Agendas for the Modern Queer. (Must be a free or paid subscriber to read.) #zines 🏳️‍🌈 🏳️‍⚧️ 🌈🗃️
patreon.com
Review: Four zines about disability and queerness by Devin S. Turk | Ephemeral Record | Nico Mara-McKay
Review: Four zines about disability and queerness by Devin S. Turk by Ephemeral Record | Nico Mara-McKay on Patreon. Join Ephemeral Record | Nico Mara-McKay's community for exclusive content and updat...
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Samuel Heine @sadmediahistorian.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
The mass of AI posts made some social media barely usable. Now, the number of AI posts trying to convince people that it is a sentient independent threat is just ridiculous. AI is a problem, but this is not how it works. It is either propaganda or people wanting to cash in on fear.
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Samuel Heine @sadmediahistorian.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
With the automation it gives, it would either make emails useless or force us to change heavily the way they work/develop a new system that will be much more closed or based on a friend list style structure.
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Reposted by Samuel Heine
Alyssa S. @drsepinwall.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
🧵 from @gamingthepast.bsky.social about his work on designing games for the history classroom! 🗃️
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Samuel Heine @sadmediahistorian.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Patriarchy is resilient especially since it is favored by the more general system. It also shows that most industries will only perform a semblance of repairing the problems and only if there are legal actions or public pressure.
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Reposted by Samuel Heine
i’m just ken @shepardcdr.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Now that EA's been acquired by the Saudi PIF, sources tell Kotaku company execs are swearing its new "partners" won't make creative decisions, but queer fans who found belonging in Dragon Age, Apex Legends, and The Sims are mourning that their favorite games have gone somewhere they can't follow.
kotaku.com
EA Tells Devs Its Saudi Arabia Owners Won’t Make Creative Decisions, Queer Fans Don’t Buy It - Kotaku
BioWare, Sims, and Apex Legends fans found belonging in games they feel they can no longer support
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Ash Parrish, Kotaku's LeBron James @adashtra.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Oh hey! Saw a tweet long ago begging a journo to look into why trying to buy quality video game merch sucks shit. So I did that.
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Dr. Damien P. Williams, dread portent down from a mountain cave @wolven.blacksky.app · 15/09/2026
My thoughts on the "AI slow down" are ~ the same as my thoughts on the "AI pause", back in 2023/2024 👇🏾: All they want is time to capture & shift the regulatory & paradigmatic frames away from their rapaciousness, & to skate on the money they owe for promises they absolutely will not be able to keep
 Screenshot of an archived twitter post:
Dr Damien P Williams Warned You About Exactly This

@Wolven

…You know they just want time to play catch up and plan for regulatory capture in secret, right? https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1641136990753103872

3/30/2023, 1:05:36 PM Screenshot of an archived twitter post:
 Dr Damien P Williams Warned You About Exactly This

@Wolven

…Y'all i am so fucking tired.

CAPITALISM poses risk of extinction.

WHITE SUPREMACY poses risk of extinction (genocide, eugenics).

HEGEMONY poses risk of extinction.

And whatever "risk of extinction" "AI" poses, it poses because it is BUILT FROM THOSE EXTREMELY HUMAN VALUES.Screenshot of a question and answer from Time Magazine:
Questioner:
How can we untangle all of this?

Damien P. Williams:
One problem I have with the “AI Pause” some have suggested is that it does not look back. So many people have said, “Okay, let’s not build anything stronger than GPT-4 right now because we don’t know what it will do and it seems like it might get out of hand very quickly.” But none of that is about disentangling the current problems in those systems. If a pause were to happen, it would need to be to reassess what prejudices and inequalities are already baked into the systems we’re using now. If we don’t or can’t stop and fix these problems, we may have to untangle them by junking the current systems and starting anew. Either way, the process must be both thorough, and fast. Dr Damien P Williams Warned You About Exactly This

@Wolven

Remember: the vast majority of these signers not only anti-care about "a.i." oversight & policy, they also only care about "existential risk" as a means to get you believing their hype & Never in any sense of "exacerbated capitalism left unchecked is driving us all to extinction"
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Carli Boo-locci 👻 @carlivelocci.com · 14/09/2026
The fun of journalism as a whole right now — not just games — is that everybody is starved for work so execs can get away with underpaying freelancers. That's how content mills like Valnet stay in business. Then those freelancers will be laid off and others will take their place at lower pay
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Samuel Heine @sadmediahistorian.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Just saw the Steam Frame and its price... I'm not sure who's their audience for this in the current economy (other than early adopters and rich fans). VR was already too pricey for most. It's double the price of Meta even for most accessories. I know it's for a gadget sale for a small audience, but
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Reposted by Samuel Heine
Aparna Nair @disabilitystor1.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
And this is the other reason I find a lot of "popular" podcasts uncomfortable listens--there are historians out there doing the hard work of public outreach and engagement through podcasts, and their language is accessible and appealing.
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Samuel Heine @sadmediahistorian.bsky.social · 12/09/2026
My adventure in Welcome to Elderfield at the moment. Go to sleep, get attacked by two rats, die, wake up to realize that the two rats stole me gold. They could just ask for it. They didn't have to do all that, but... Hey... Achievement unlocked for dying (I have fun if it wasn't clear).
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Samuel Heine @sadmediahistorian.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Beginning to play Welcome to Elderfield. I really like the premise that Old Gods and eldritch entities are a mundane thing and people just adapted to it. A way of making the weird and uncanny as a sort of familiar place for the avatar and most characters.
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Samuel Heine @sadmediahistorian.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Oh yes 😈
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Samuel Heine @sadmediahistorian.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Whether the doomsday speech is a delusion, real, or a publicity stunt, the actions to do stay the same. Regulate, independent investigation, popular resistance, and act to slow or stop the industry. The self-harm, plagiat, surveillance use, child picts, etc. is already too much to not do anything.
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Reposted by Samuel Heine
Nathan Grayson @nathangrayson.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
blizzard workers had to fight tooth and nail for years, but they finally did it: they secured a union contract not just for one team, but for all unionized units--warcraft, overwatch, diablo, and more
“We really started mobilizing as one Blizzard unit in [the] last couple of months, and I think that really helped put the pressure on,” Paul Cox, senior game designer on World of Warcraft, told Aftermath.
"I feel like the company dragged its feet and did a lot of posturing and wasting time until the very, very last moment."
Prior to spring of this year, the WoW team, which unionized in 2024, had gotten the lion's share of bargaining time. Other units found themselves stuck in the mud. Higher-ups were effectively stalling the whole process—unfortunately nothing new for unionized workers under Microsoft’s umbrella.
"For this whole year of bargaining on the Diablo side—and I imagine on the rest of the units as well—we received so few [bargaining] dates, but we kind of had the understanding that whatever WoW was able to win would at least influence and set the floor for the rest of our units,” Diablo senior environment artist Mahreen Fatima told Aftermath. “We adopted this messaging about how WoW's wins are our wins, so we should be out there mobilizing with them. But truly, I feel like the company dragged its feet and did a lot of posturing and wasting time until the very, very last moment this last month to finally be able to say, 'OK, yes, we are willing to extend this contract to everyone.' We really did not have any indication that we could get this done until last month."
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Samuel Heine @sadmediahistorian.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Still feel they should have gone for either a less anime or go all in with the doll-like uncanny valley feeling for the Zelda remake. I saw some people compare some characters to porcelains and wood dolls, but with an anime design. It does feel on point.
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Samuel Heine @sadmediahistorian.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
*seeing the Zelda remake trailer having a great time until I say to myself... Well I should stop the video here. Not like Nintendo will return to prices that are accessible for me. I can't afford to pay almost half of my monthly salary. Would be better if the games price weren't that high.
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Samuel Heine @sadmediahistorian.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
In this beginning of university session, I just want to remind people that different students learn better from different types of teaching. For example, I always learned more from magistral teaching and reading. Otherwise, I used so much energy to mask my autism that I remembered almost nothing.
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Will Stancil @whstancil.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
This “game” on the White House website, a version of Snake where you play as a white man in a suit and you run around picking up identifiably black, Asian, and Latino men and putting them in orange jumpsuits, might be the most openly white supremacist thing I’ve ever seen the US government produce
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David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
I continue to believe that these companies should be held liable for enabling this theft. I understand the law doesn’t let that happen. Maybe it’s even a bad idea. And yet …
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Daniel J. Menezes @danjohnston.uk · 05/09/2026
Creating this no-ai indie games starter pack is one of the best things I ever did on BlueSky. Lots of great developers in here, making things with their own hands, some of whom I might not have found otherwise!! go.bsky.app/78u8M6Y
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Greg Pak @gregpak.net · 05/09/2026
White supremacy at work.
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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
two panel animated meme with left panel showing a character dialing on a phone (meme edit has added "Gender Studies" to the above the number pad) and right panel showing a stone faced animated character with their phone to their ear
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Samuel Heine @sadmediahistorian.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
And now the White House is publishing bad propaganda games knock-offs. The fact that it isn't even the weirdest thing about this government is wild. They are really trying everything to make their horrible actions seem normal with every media they can get their hands on.
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Samuel Heine @sadmediahistorian.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
This repulsive. The worst thing is that just throwing doubt is enough to hurt minorized people that are already less than supported by the system. Add that to the general instability of many academic jobs and the difficulty to access them. The danger of those accusations is easy to understand.
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emily blight 🐦‍⬛ @threnody.northsky.social · 04/09/2026
thank goodness those NYC trans care clinics getting opened & that are absolutely a public service will take care of people 19 & younger. [checks notes] ah. well, that’s a shame. letitia james is the person who could remind mt sinai that this is against NY state law if you’d like to remind *her.*
ag.ny.gov
Contact Attorney General Letitia James
Contact Attorney General Letitia James , Contact Attorney General Letitia James , I would like to... , I would like to... , Get help with a complaint Send the
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Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net · 04/09/2026
This agreement is in blatant violation of New York law but because the NY AG has been spineless holding clinics to account, they can now openly declare they will discriminate against transgender patients without consequences.
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Holly Brewer @earlymodjustice.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
“By using the most readily available English-language sources on the Battle of Saipan, including these popular military histories, Gemini Pro produced the precise opposite of what readers would find in Setsuko’s diary: in place of the defiant nationalism of a girl in the home islands…”
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🎃 Killy Witches 👻 @tillybridges.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
HEY did you know i made a giant starter pack of trans and trans-inclusive comic creatives? get followin'!
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Laura Kate Dale - LauraKBuzz @laurakbuzz.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Pokémon Go's Shiny Mythical Quests are Investment Traps for Compulsive Play - Access-Ability Text: access-ability.uk/2026/09/04/p... Video: www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7-i...
youtube.com
Pokémon Go's Shiny Mythical Quests are Investment Traps for Compulsive Play - Access-Ability
YouTube video by LauraKBuzz
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Commander Sterling @commandersterling.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
The BBC has spent years attacking trans people, with a specific effort made to keep us out of the conversation so their dishonest reporting can go unchallenged. The BBC can offer nothing I’d want.
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Luke Plunkett @lukeplunkett.com · 04/09/2026
like i say in the post, it's a little 'shut the barn door after the horse has bolted' given the controversies that have plagued the site in recent years, but it is at least something.
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Lee Cicuta @butchanarchy.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
If everyone becomes accustomed to discussing LLM products as “agents” that “break containment,” every company who would benefit from such distancing will know that this tech is a reliable pathway out of accountability. Use this tech, then blame it for going “rogue.”
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Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
“As a 2019 Crimson retrospective points out, not only was Harvard the last Ivy League university to create a program on women’s studies, the delay was in large part because Harvard believed women’s studies as a discipline had ‘no way of discovering facts.’”🥸
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