iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

(10/12) Sexuality in gaming/nerd spaces stays permitted and monetizable, until it's sex workers themselves enacting it, not just occupying peripheral "sexiness." Then it gets disallowed and distanced. Safety is a continuous practice of communication and transparency, never a given, in any space.

(9/12) Actual play was an early, legible bridge between tabletop culture and the erotic/affective/gendered labour. That parasexual distance mechanism hasn't gone anywhere, mainstream AP (Critical Role, Dimension20) still takes the hype sex work adjacency built while keeping the product "all-ages."

(8/12) Table-topless streaming show where this history lands: sex work and AP have normalized their intersection by splitting across platforms. Twitch on one side, Joystick TV/Fansly on the other. On mainstream platforms, the content is rule-constrained; off them, it's regulated as sex work.

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(7/12) By 2018, a cast member of IHiWMA was accepting a Diana Jones Award on behalf of the entire actual play movement, that award moment is the industry openly celebrating parasexual glamour as the engine of AP's growth, as long as it stayed contained. #shitty

(6/12) IHiWMA (2010) helped launch actual play with a cast of adult performers — its DM was discovered to be an abuser, and swiftly cut loose by WotC, Gen Con, and his publisher. Those same institutions had happily banked the credibility his "edgy," sex-worker-inclusive show gave them. #shitty

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(5/12) Senft argues camgirls built intimacy through perceived authenticity (home footage, daily chats, "family"-like fan communities) while still holding viewers at a distance, never letting closeness become contact. Same balancing act as Bailey's barmaid, just running on dial-up not a countertop.

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(4/12) Bailey's concept of parasexuality (defined as sexuality that's staged and monetized rather than suppressed, and kept at a controlled distance from the audience) describes the Victorian barmaid behind her bar. The livestream interface does similar structural work.

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(3/12) A quick warning: some of the people in these case studies are genuinely shitty. @copperkeerthi.bsky.social prepared a reading list at the end for those who want to know more. We're focusing on the role contain sex worker parasexuality had in building the actual play scene.

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(2/12) We'll be discussing actual play in relation to sex work through the lenses of parasexuality, labor, and platform ethics. We argue that the success of AP livestreaming was supported by skills that came from online sex work.

keerthi sridharan🌻🇵🇸 @copperkeerthi.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

(1/12) A short thread based our (@copperkeerthi.bsky.social and me) base on our talk for #GenerationAnalog2026 GREEN "Performing the Dungeon"

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Reposted by Tom Apperley

talking sex, actual play, and barmaids (yes, really) with @t0mm7.bsky.social at this delightful romp of a conf next month!

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Tom Apperley @t0mm7.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

Dang I better get my shit together :)

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Tom Apperley @t0mm7.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

New collection "Cultural Game Studies" edited by @fransmayra.bsky.social and Raine Koskimaa - discount code attached. Book will be available early next month. #gamestudies

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Reposted by Tom Apperley

🇺🇲💥🧨‼️🦅Diana🦅‼️🧨💥🇺🇲 @citiesbydiana.bsky.social · 22/02/2026

#alysaliu WOKE IS BACK BABY MAKE OAKLAND CALIFORNIA THE US CAPITOL NOW!

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Reposted by Tom Apperley

ProPublica @propublica.org · 09/02/2026

6/ “When I arrived every night I cried and now I don’t sleep well, I felt that being here was my fault and I only wanted to be on vacation like a normal family.” 9-year-old Maria Antonia Guerra Montoya, detained on her way to Disney World, spent 113+ days at Dilley.

Page 1 of a child’s handwritten letter, written in pencil in Spanish. Colorful doodles of a rainbow and hearts are found throughout the page. Translation: “I am Maria Antonia Guerra Montoya and I have been 113 days in detention I miss my friends and I feel they are going to forget me. I am bored here. I already miss my country and my house, I came on vacation for 10 Days and they took me into an ice office an officer interrogated me 2 hours without my mom, I was traveling with flight attendant because my mom lives in new york, they only wanted to arrest my mom, because my mom didn’t have documents to live in U.S.A., I always traveled with my tourist visa but ice used me to catch my mom and now I am in a jail and I am sad and I have fainted 2 times here inside. When I arrived every night I cried and now I don’t sleep well, I felt that being here was my fault and I only wanted to be on vacation like a normal family.”

Page 2 of a child’s handwritten letter, written in pencil in Spanish. Translation: “They don’t give me my diet I am vegetarian, I don’t eat well, there is no good education and I miss my best friend julieta and my grandmother and my school I already want to get to my house. Me in dilei [Dilley] am not happy please get me out of here to colombia.” Below the text is a drawing of the girl and her mother in the government-issued gray sweatsuits of the detention center.

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Tom Apperley @t0mm7.bsky.social · 04/12/2025

JustDance* has a fascinating metaphorical role in the narrative conclusion of the film "She Rides Shotgun" (Rowland 2025). collider.com/taron-egerto... *this interview reports that its 'tiktok' which does not seen right at all

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Tom Apperley @t0mm7.bsky.social · 03/12/2025

New Zealand Trading Company: www.audioculture.co.nz/profile/new-... A part of Aotearoa's music history I had missed until now. Previously known as the Maori Hi-Quins, they recorded an album in Memphis in 1970 and had a US tour before splitting up.

audioculture.co.nz

New Zealand Trading Company - AudioCulture

The New Zealand Trading Company album was released in the US in 1970, but only a few copies made it to New Zealand. On the back of the album the musicians stand beside the Mississippi River, resplende...

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Tom Apperley @t0mm7.bsky.social · 28/11/2025

Introduce yourself with five concerts you've seen: *Red Hot Chilli Peppers ´92 *The Lemonheads '93 *African Head Charge '94 *Beastie Boys '95 *Ben Harper ´96

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Tom Apperley @t0mm7.bsky.social · 25/11/2025

Darshana Jayemanne and my 2012 article "Game Studies Material Turn" from Westminster Papers In Communication just hit 200 citations on google scholar www.westminsterpapers.org/article/id/1... #gamestudies

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Tom Apperley @t0mm7.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

Tiresome "liberal" Bill Maher licks chocolate off artist Karen Finley in this July '99 feature in Playboy.

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Reposted by Tom Apperley

Mobile Media & Communication @mobilemediacomm.bsky.social · 03/11/2025

📞🎮 Sidetalking: Nokia’s playful design gone sideways Heikki Jungman, @t0mm7.bsky.social, Niklas Nylund & @sotamaa.bsky.social revisit the N-Gage’s sideways-calling feature. 💡 The article shows how cultural misalignment, not tech flaws, doomed it. 🔗 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

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💡Sidetalking reveals how technological “failure” exposes the fragile negotiations between design intent, user practice, and cultural meaning. What counts as "Innovation" or "failure" depends on negotiations over time between designers, organizations, and publics.

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🔄 (Back to the article) Sidetalking exposes how design, culture, and use are interdependent and negotiated through discourse, identity, and everyday practice. More contemporary narratives are calling the NGage “ahead of its time.” And framing sidetalking as a "making do" design innovation.

(Quick aside) Nokia is based in Tampere, and local sensibilities dictated that my research on 'booth babes' be presented behind a curtain at the exhibition. Example below:

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🇫🇮 In Finland (home of Nokia) , sidetalking became a question of national identity as much as design. Local media balanced confusion with loyalty, reflecting how domestication operates not only in households but within national imaginaries of technological success.

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😂 Users made sense of the design through ridicule and parody—posting memes of bananas, alarm clocks, and consoles.

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🗣️ Widely ridiculed as a technological misstep. Our analysis of contemporary Finnish media indicates that this stemmed from a lack of communication. Nokia never explained sidetalking’s purpose; without a story, consumers filled the gap with ridicule.

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🏗️ Marketers wanted the sideways hold for distinctiveness and branding, overriding practicalities and problems engineers anticipated, revealing how internal hierarchies within organizations can shape technology.

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🎮 Sidetalking symbolized the ambition for Nokia to shift from phones to a “convergent multimedia” paradigm, where phones were both media devices and symbols of youth 'cool' identity. Nokia’s first big attempt to redefine the mobile as a multimedia device.

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🧩 Nokia’s designers worked with strong assumptions about the cool, tech-savvy youth they believed would use it, and embedded these assumptions into the phone’s form—showing how design encodes social imaginaries.

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📱 Sidetalking was a deliberate design choice, not an accident. Our archival/curatorial research demonstrates that Nokia engineered sidetalking to appeal to, and embody a playful, youth-oriented identity.

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A Fantastic Failure - Tekniikan museo

The article emerged from the exhibition 'A Fantastic Failure' (Fanhtastinen Floppi - in Finnish), which was exhibited at Museokeskus Vapriikki from October 2023 to December 2024, and is now at Tekniikan Museo/Museum of Technology in Helsinki (until 8.11.25): www.tekniikanmuseo.fi/en/exhibitio...

tekniikanmuseo.fi

The exhibition “A Fantastic Failure” tells a story about failure that sowed the seeds of the next success. Even though the N-Gage crashed and burned, it helped to build the foundation for the later su...

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Co authored with my @coegamecult.bsky.social college @sotamaa.bsky.social and two curators from The Finnish Museum of Games at Museoskus Vapriikki in Tampere: Heikki Jungman and Dr Niklas Nylund.

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