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liam liwanag burke

@thoughtfulemoji.bsky.social
231 followers 367 following 234 posts

Author of Dog Eat Dog. Filipino-American. Doctoral student at UH Mānoa. Your favorite game designer’s favorite game designer. He/him

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Reposted by liam liwanag burke
Central Michigan University Press @cmichpress.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
We LOVE the way the covers of Dog Eat Dog and Princess with a Cursed Sword flash in the sunshine, so we took the manufacturing prototypes for a walk. Stay tuned for shipping updates! #dogeatdogrpg #princesswithacursedswordgame #liamliwanagburke #samuelarayaart #annaanthropy #evlynmoreau
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Black, queer, radical, female, femme people & orgs literally diagnosed the problem so well that "them goons are coming" became accepted wisdom and so now everyone thinks THEY had the idea and don't need to acknowledge the work that so-called Woke Movement damn near killed themselves to teach you.
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liam liwanag burke @thoughtfulemoji.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
A small business owner’s family complicates her tax audit.
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Jo Wolff @jowolff.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
Grete Hermann (1901-1984), brilliant philosopher of maths and quantum mechanics and first student of Emily Noether. Hermann was co-founder of the journal Ratio, and turned to political philosophy later in her career, writing in 1947:
Whoever lives in the Third Reich or otherwise comes to terms with it, but isolates themselves from the political events around them in order to occupy themselves with other, in themselves beautiful and worthy subjects, is lending their name and their work to this system. There is no neutrality towards the legal and cultural decline in public life. Whoever does not oppose it is complicit in it. Whatever beautiful and good things they may create otherwise are devalued by this participation in the social injustice with which it is burdened.
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liam liwanag burke @thoughtfulemoji.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
the imputed habitus of iPhone autocorrect
A hilarious autocorrect text mishap.
A: I just finished teaching!
B: How did it go?
A: Aw it went really well
A: I like teaching upper class mentors
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RPG Roots @rpgroots.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
Another of our guests for RPG Roots Season 1, “Narratives of Oppression and Resistance,” is @thoughtfulemoji.bsky.social, a doctoral student in sociology at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and the author of the incredible “Dog Eat Dog” - currently being republished by @cmichpress.bsky.social
This is a poster for a guest of the podcast, Liam Liwanag Burke, showing a picture of Liam and the cover of the new edition of the game "Dog Eat Dog" against a gray background.
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jay Dragon is unstoppable @jdragsky.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
SEVEN-PART PACT, my fantastical ornate TTRPG about powerful wizards, asymmetrical board games, and the pressures of masculinity is now launching on kickstarter! www.kickstarter.com/projects/sjg...
kickstarter.com
Seven-Part Pact
A fantastical, ornate TTRPG from Possum Creek about the might and folly of powerful wizards bound by a venerable Pact.
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Evan Torner @guyintheblackhat.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
The cover of Julia Bond Ellingboe's Steal Away Jordan: Stories from America's Peculiar Institution.
The photo is of a group of Black Americans in the 19th Century, presumably slaves or former slaves.
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Morgan Finnsiö ⤦⤦⤦ @morganfinnsio.bsky.social · 21/05/2026
In two paragraphs, a perfect snapshot of the willful refusal of some security officials – in this case, predictably, in Trump's FBI; but this also happens in Europe – to see and name racist and far-right terror for what it is. It is not "indiscriminate" hatred, or "nihilism"; it is modern nazism.
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Dr. Mike Sell @profmikesell.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
I've been teaching Twine storygame design in middle and high schools for over a decade. Every time I do, I hear from my teacher-partners about a student who is never engaged, never asks questions, never shares their writing doing exactly that. The design mindset revolutionizes the writing classroom.
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kat @katbamkapow.bsky.social · 13/05/2026
heard a guy say "you have to access it through the portal" and i was momentarily struck by how sad it is that what he said is so boring :( "accessing it via the portal" should be wonderful. we deserve that at least. it should be cool to access it via the portal and instead it sucks shit
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liam liwanag burke @thoughtfulemoji.bsky.social · 12/05/2026
"Most people won't benefit from education." This used to be a more explicitly held view among elites! Now it is more implied.
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Neil Lewis, Jr. @neillewisjr.bsky.social · 29/04/2026
One of the most clarifying passages I've ever read on what "polarization" actually means in the U.S."
Excerpt from the book How Democracies Die. 

"America's democratic norms, then, were born in a context of exclusion. As long as the political community was restricted largely to whites, Democrats and Republicans had much in common. Neither party was likely to view the other as an existential threat. The process of racial inclusion that began after World War II and culminated in the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act would, at long last, fully democratization the United States. But it would also polarized it, posing the greatest challenge to established forms of mutual tolerating and forbearance since Reconstruction."
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Quinn murphy @gamefiend.bsky.social · 28/04/2026
Something I found myself talking about a bit at Somercon that might be a useful lens for folks: A brilliant fact about TTRPGs is that they can incorporate ANYTHING in them. RL actions, environmental elements, other games. All you need is narrative input and output.
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Hakeem Jefferson @hakeemjefferson.bsky.social · 20/04/2026
Our paper, “The Politics of Black Classification: Sociopolitical Cues and Racial Perception” (w/ Lauren Davenport & @hrendleman.bsky.social), has been conditionally accepted at Perspectives on Politics! Sharing abstract below. Long time coming, but we are really proud of this paper. More soon!
Title page of our paper, “The Politics of Black Classification: Sociopolitical Cues and Racial Perception,” with Lauren Davenport (Stanford) and Hunter Rendleman (UC Berkeley), dated April 14, 2026.

Abstract: What makes someone Black in American society today? From Donald Trump questioning Kamala Harris’s racial identity to Joe Biden’s claim that hesitant Black voters “ain’t Black,” American politics frequently brings questions of racial authenticity and belonging to the surface. Yet political science often approaches race as a fixed attribute rather than a social construction. Here, we seek to understand how Americans define blackness in social and political life. Using a conjoint experiment with a racially diverse sample that includes Black, white, and mixed race Black-white respondents, we evaluate how ascribed and acquired traits influence perceptions of blackness. The results show that inherited characteristics—particularly parentage and skin tone, which are the strongest determinants of racial classification—play a central role, while sociopolitical cues such as partisanship, neighborhood context, and spousal race also influence racial classification. Using a continuous measure, we also show that respondents make graded assessments of blackness rather than purely binary classifications, with some individuals perceived as more Black than others. Black respondents are more likely than white respondents to classify a broader set of profiles as Black, consistent with a more inclusive understanding of racial membership, yet they also place greater emphasis on shared political identity. These findings clarify how racial categories are socially constructed and why that construction carries real political and social consequences.
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David J Prokopetz @prokopetz.bsky.social · 13/04/2026
TTRPG with old-school "you can die in character creation" mechanics, except most terminal events are stuff like "reached adulthood with no major traumas" or "found a love of carpentry", so your goal is to make enough bad life choices that your character is a big enough loser to become an adventurer.
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Nandita Sharma @nsharma101.bsky.social · 09/04/2026
More deaths in US immigration camps this fiscal year than over the past 2 decades!!! #NoBorders
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Sheryl Weikal says Prosecute ICE @leftistlawyer.com · 04/04/2026
Actually we should just give citizenship to every undocumented person in the United States who wants it. Walking over an imaginary line isn't some great moral atrocity. Making people live in the shadows as a permanent underclass absolutely IS.
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Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò @olufemiotaiwo.bsky.social · 03/04/2026
you may not like it but this is what peak performance looks like
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David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social · 03/04/2026
Let's do this one time in good faith: Wealthy private universities in blue states should be bastions of humanistic education (including basic science), fully protected from the anti-education laws being passed in red states that afflict private and public schools alike. But instead .... /1
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liam liwanag burke @thoughtfulemoji.bsky.social · 31/03/2026
not everybody has to play
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liam liwanag burke @thoughtfulemoji.bsky.social · 30/03/2026
candyland is well designed
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Central Michigan University Press @cmichpress.bsky.social · 23/03/2026
Thanks to everyone who came to our Break Our Games night last Friday! We heard some great stories being told and watched some quality playtesting, too. Check out these photos for a surprise at the end... See you all for the next BOG on April 10th! #playtesting #ttrpgs #thebluewaygame
Gold text on a maroon background reads Break Our Games March! Below is a strip of film divided into four sections, each which has a photograph inside. The first is a photograph of a filled-in character sheet. The second is two young people sitting at a round tabel with paper and writing tools in front of them. The next picture is the printed text of Dog Eat Dog with a collection of clear tokens on top. The last picture is cut off but it shows more young people sitting at a table with cards and tokens.A film strip graphic divided into four strips, each filled with a photograph. The first is a photograph of a partially-filled in character sheet. The second picture is a young person wit blond hair and glasses setting up a game at a tabletop. The third picture is a printed copy of Princess with a Cursed Sword with a few maroon dice on top. The four picture is a section of another picture featuring young people sitting at a table.Maroon background with two photographs in diagonal corners and a long diagonal banner between them which reads The Blue Way Prototypes in light blue letters. The photograph in the top left shows a deck of cards fanned out. The backs of the cards feature a portrait of a king with his eyes blurred out and his open mouth prominent. The photograph in the opposite corner shows a grid of six character sheets which have various portraits beneath a layer of text.
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liam liwanag burke @thoughtfulemoji.bsky.social · 26/02/2026
"Friends" is a beloved American sitcom that aired from 1994 to 2004, following six young adults—Rachel, Ross, Monica, Chandler, Joey, and Phoebe—living in New York City. The show explores their friendships, romances, careers, and personal growth over ten seasons.
The d4, d6, d8, d10, d12 and d20
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Mezentine @mezentine.bsky.social · 20/02/2026
If you are skeptical of the goal of abolition I'm always going to recommend this piece, which is shorter and more digestible than it looks. Its probably not going to make you a convert, but its a very clean framework working through thorny questions I think about all the time:
harvardlawreview.org
The Dangerous Few: Taking Seriously Prison Abolition and Its Skeptics - Harvard Law Review
Prison abolition, in the span of just a few short years, has established a foothold in elite criminal legal discourse. But the basic question...
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liam liwanag burke @thoughtfulemoji.bsky.social · 03/02/2026
cat jumped from a cat tree onto my wife’s throat
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Jesspooka Kant 🎃 @jessdkant.bsky.social · 28/01/2026
Just started doing new data analysis and I know I keep saying this, but: I really, really don't think people appreciate how much this moral panic was a deliberate and extremely expensive invention.
news articles about trans people based on keyword, left is cnn, right is fox. fox has  10x as many
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Avery Alder, Buried Without Ceremony @lackingceremony.bsky.social · 26/01/2026
The Quiet Year is now back in stock no matter where you live! The Quiet Year is an award-winning map-making game about building community after the collapse. It comes in a little box with everything you need to play. And it's back in stock in the US! store.buriedwithoutceremony.com/products/the...
store.buriedwithoutceremony.com
The Quiet Year (box set)
The Quiet Year is a map game. You define the struggles of a community living after the collapse of civilization, and attempt to build something good within their quiet year. Every decision and every a...
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liam liwanag burke @thoughtfulemoji.bsky.social · 22/01/2026
Sid Meier’s SimGolf
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utopia deferred @utopia-defer.red · 19/01/2026
it’s just so crazy to see it happen in real time

Politics
Yet to regain the majority, Democrats would need to run more competitively among White voters without a four-year college degree — the mostly widely accepted definition of the working class — than they typically have done in the Trump era.
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thoughtcrimegames @thoughtcrimegames.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
Get Ready for Five Fires! Follow the BackerKit page and help take this #ttrpg of DJs, breakers, MCs, and graffiti writers from PDF to Print.
backerkit.com
Get Ready for Five Fires
From Thoughtcrime Games LLC - Get Ready for Five Fires
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🐔 Brian Bucklew 🐔 ₑͤ>∿<ₑͤ ∞🌮 @unormal.bsky.social · 01/01/2026
look. yeah qud has procedural systems that are sometimes hamfisted. we are at the start of understanding the form; but ultimately games is an *interactive* media, and algorithmic systems with traversal for the player are the entire difference between an interactive system and a movie.
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liam liwanag burke @thoughtfulemoji.bsky.social · 22/12/2025
The doctor’s office I’m in understands that it is conventional to have magazines in the waiting room but the state of print media is that they instead have a health care supplier catalog with a cover that alludes to the fake sitcom in bojack horseman
A health care supply catalog that says Horsing Around with a picture of some horses dressed as healthcare professionals engaging in horseplay with health care supplies
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Chris Geidner @chrisgeidner.bsky.social · 18/12/2025
The extreme attack on transgender youth we are witnessing from a governmental stage was enabled by The Atlantic and The New York Times.
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Nandita Sharma @nsharma101.bsky.social · 18/12/2025
Or they will do what they are doing to immigrants now- just kidnap us, throw us in a detention center, move us back and forth across the US so we can’t contact lawyers and our people, and then summarily deport us and say, “oops.” Stand up against the “mass deportation” campaign now!
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I Travel Like Sound Dog @chadstanton.blacksky.app · 17/12/2025
The fact that it at least anecdotally seems to be a semi-regular practice to tell white people a minority got the job in order to soften the blow of rejection really should put the elite woke panic into perspective.
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liam liwanag burke @thoughtfulemoji.bsky.social · 15/12/2025
a tweet from Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson saying “Just got word that will shock the world - land of the free…home of the brave DAMN PROUD TO BE AN AMERICAN”
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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 06/12/2025
To propose that GenAI can compensate for "archival silences" perverts Trouillot's work. It's is a contradiction to say that a product whose logic exacerbates power imbalances--creating a most-likely guess based on the existing record--can restore absences that are the product of those imbalances.
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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 01/12/2025
I have come to the idea that we have to collectively, brutally, ritualistically kill Target just to show capital that we truly aren’t fucking around.
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Juliet Turner @juliet-turner.bsky.social · 17/11/2025
POV: you are a young woman celebrating a recent academic success
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Prof Sandy O’Sullivan (Wiradjuri, trans they/them) @sandyosullivan.bsky.social · 07/11/2025
🧵 Our new QUEER AS… website Exploring queer Indigenous creativity. With: Blaqademics/Indigiqueers Queer as…a podcast (Jazz Money is first up). Indigenous Creatives Queer Museums Queer Tv - deep dive Our pubs and info queer-as.org
queer-as.org
Queer As...
Exploring Queer Indigenous Creativity
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Katie Chironis @kchironis.bsky.social · 14/11/2025
friday soapbox: as a designer, if you want something to be a skillful action for players, and you want growth in this skill to be very deep/meaningful, then you need to also let players be bad at it. sometimes horrendously bad. players hate this pain, and designers often want to mitigate it away.
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liam liwanag burke @thoughtfulemoji.bsky.social · 06/11/2025
salmon is best cooked steamed
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Kat Abughazaleh @katmabu.bsky.social · 05/11/2025
Good things are possible and we don’t have to settle.
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Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · 01/11/2025
We have progressed from data collection to data analysis.
My 11-year-old sitting with her pile of Halloween candy, sorting it into a bar graph
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Zedeck Siew @zedecksiew.bsky.social · 31/10/2025
ALL PLACES ARE NEIGHBOURHOODS Last night, for @newnaratif.bsky.social , I ran a workshop about what we need to think about, when we tell stories of the environment. Did some conceptual & ideological framing. The point of this slide is simple: there is no such thing as a land without people. 1/
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Central Michigan University Press @cmichpress.bsky.social · 30/10/2025
Just under THREE HOURS left to pledge for your copy of Dog Eat Dog, Princess with a Cursed Sword, and/or The Mountain Witch before our BackerKit campaign closes! bit.ly/4mIpcbG
Maroon graphic with collaged image of the three game covers taped the background. White text Last Day to Support on BackerKit. Thank you for an astounding campaign!
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William B. Fuckley @opinionhaver.bsky.social · 30/10/2025
something weird I've noticed over the past couple of years: college students used to be adults, but are now children. it's strange. I'm even seeing grad students, who used to be adults, now be children. whereas people who used to be old, like postdocs, are now normal? maybe TikTok is to blame.
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Justin Baragona @justinbaragona.bsky.social · 29/10/2025
This was just posted by a CBS News producer on their Instagram stories.
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Nandita Sharma @nsharma101.bsky.social · 29/10/2025
We need a Special Legislative Session in Hawaii! Sign!!! The Leg + the Gov must protect Hawaiʻi by immediately pass: ● NO Masking/NO Secret Police ● NO Closing of Community Health Centers & Hospitals ● NO Hungry Keiki, Kupuna & Families. We need state funding to help fill the gap left by Trump.
c.org
This campaign needs you now
Call for a Special Session of the Hawai‘i State Legislature
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