BeijingPalmer
@beijingpalmer.bsky.social
Deputy editor at Foreign Policy, China nerd, gaming nerd, reads a lot
Pinned
BeijingPalmer
@beijingpalmer.bsky.social
· Aug 10
(the Great Games Recommendation Thead, part 3, only another 500 plus games to go, you bastards)
201: Brindlewood Bay. Incredible game of improvised deduction where you are the Golden Girls but investigating a Cthulhoid murder cult in a small town through Monk-style quicky/cosy stories.
201: Brindlewood Bay. Incredible game of improvised deduction where you are the Golden Girls but investigating a Cthulhoid murder cult in a small town through Monk-style quicky/cosy stories.
Reposted by BeijingPalmer
The better you’ve become at curating what the internet looks like to you, surfacing the valuable and filtering out the rest, the less it resembles what “normal people” see. It’s like using a new computer without all your personal tools and tweaks. This is obvious, but easy to lose sight of.
January 6, 2026 at 8:38 PM
The better you’ve become at curating what the internet looks like to you, surfacing the valuable and filtering out the rest, the less it resembles what “normal people” see. It’s like using a new computer without all your personal tools and tweaks. This is obvious, but easy to lose sight of.
Reposted by BeijingPalmer
In short, every shithead you don't ban costs you ten other customers.
"A [potentially regular] customer doesn't say anything but never comes back" doesn't register with you as An Event the way that kicking someone out (temporarily or permanently) does, so it's extremely easy to miss it.
"A [potentially regular] customer doesn't say anything but never comes back" doesn't register with you as An Event the way that kicking someone out (temporarily or permanently) does, so it's extremely easy to miss it.
January 6, 2026 at 8:09 PM
In short, every shithead you don't ban costs you ten other customers.
"A [potentially regular] customer doesn't say anything but never comes back" doesn't register with you as An Event the way that kicking someone out (temporarily or permanently) does, so it's extremely easy to miss it.
"A [potentially regular] customer doesn't say anything but never comes back" doesn't register with you as An Event the way that kicking someone out (temporarily or permanently) does, so it's extremely easy to miss it.
Reposted by BeijingPalmer
Synopsis: You need to kick more people out.
You will actually have a larger base of customers/attendees if you kick more people out. You will make more money. I am dead serious.
You will actually have a larger base of customers/attendees if you kick more people out. You will make more money. I am dead serious.
January 6, 2026 at 8:09 PM
Synopsis: You need to kick more people out.
You will actually have a larger base of customers/attendees if you kick more people out. You will make more money. I am dead serious.
You will actually have a larger base of customers/attendees if you kick more people out. You will make more money. I am dead serious.
Reposted by BeijingPalmer
I spent an excessive number of years moderating a gaming forum and I learned a great deal about community spaces and cultivation, whether I wanted to or not. I have critical advice for anyone who runs a game store or gaming convention. Please share this thread with people who run those things.
January 6, 2026 at 8:09 PM
I spent an excessive number of years moderating a gaming forum and I learned a great deal about community spaces and cultivation, whether I wanted to or not. I have critical advice for anyone who runs a game store or gaming convention. Please share this thread with people who run those things.
Reposted by BeijingPalmer
In the five days that I've been monitoring this stuff on X, I've not detected any significant slow-down.
January 6, 2026 at 8:07 PM
In the five days that I've been monitoring this stuff on X, I've not detected any significant slow-down.
Reposted by BeijingPalmer
This is one of the reasons why I’m bullish on Zohran - he’s a mayor of a blue state city that is coming in like the mayor of a red state city and relatively unbeholden to the underlying machine
January 6, 2026 at 8:15 PM
This is one of the reasons why I’m bullish on Zohran - he’s a mayor of a blue state city that is coming in like the mayor of a red state city and relatively unbeholden to the underlying machine
I think one of the reasons these are so much red state cities is because Democrat leaders in red states tend to be far more competent than Democrat leaders in blue states - and almost every mayor here of the cities here is a Democrat.
A heck of a chart: in every single one of the 10 major US cities that built the most housing between 2017 and 2023, rents for older, existing units fell—often by quite a bit.
January 6, 2026 at 8:12 PM
I think one of the reasons these are so much red state cities is because Democrat leaders in red states tend to be far more competent than Democrat leaders in blue states - and almost every mayor here of the cities here is a Democrat.
this is so common a 'new broom' mayoral tactic that it's a plot point in the fourth season of the Wire after Carcetti is elected.
It's funny how Zohran's tactic appears to be showing up to things that are well-known problems and going "wait why haven't we fixed this yet"
January 6, 2026 at 8:08 PM
this is so common a 'new broom' mayoral tactic that it's a plot point in the fourth season of the Wire after Carcetti is elected.
someday a future generation of Chinese media will be able to climb the Great Firewall to inform Americans about what really happened on Jan 6.
January 6, 2026 at 7:54 PM
someday a future generation of Chinese media will be able to climb the Great Firewall to inform Americans about what really happened on Jan 6.
Reposted by BeijingPalmer
Newsnight, The Moral Maze, and How The Light Gets In all invited this guy on as a public intellectual. Why is gatekeeping and its enforcement of basic intellectual and ethical standards so fundamentally broken? Such signals and norms matter.
Curtis Yarvin has written a very long screed in defense of his post in which he said, “Hitler spoke the truth.”
A sampling of select portions is below and includes, in reference to Jewish people, the words:
“The only way to tell is the name and the nose.”
A sampling of select portions is below and includes, in reference to Jewish people, the words:
“The only way to tell is the name and the nose.”
January 6, 2026 at 7:35 PM
Newsnight, The Moral Maze, and How The Light Gets In all invited this guy on as a public intellectual. Why is gatekeeping and its enforcement of basic intellectual and ethical standards so fundamentally broken? Such signals and norms matter.
Reposted by BeijingPalmer
Venezuela’s government is arresting journalists and sending paramilitary forces to suppress anyone who is too happy about Maduro's removal
giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... via @FT
giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... via @FT
Venezuela launches wave of repression after US seizure of Nicolás Maduro
Armed militias patrol the streets and journalists arrested as government crackdown on dissent widens
giftarticle.ft.com
January 6, 2026 at 3:57 PM
Venezuela’s government is arresting journalists and sending paramilitary forces to suppress anyone who is too happy about Maduro's removal
giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... via @FT
giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... via @FT
Reposted by BeijingPalmer
Good day to share one of my finer moments online.
January 6, 2026 at 7:05 PM
Good day to share one of my finer moments online.
Reposted by BeijingPalmer
Nina Power, for those that don’t know, is perhaps one of the few people alive in the UK you can openly call a Nazi without any fear of her suing you for libel, since she lost her suit and through legal discovery was revealed to be obsessed w/ Hitler. She still writes for the newspapers, though!
Whenever British journalists talk about including more GC voices on Bluesky, what they fail to account for is that many GCs would rather meet with open racists who agree with them on gender neutral toilets than with centrist liberals who don’t. This is from Maya Forstater’s review of the last year.
January 6, 2026 at 7:21 PM
Nina Power, for those that don’t know, is perhaps one of the few people alive in the UK you can openly call a Nazi without any fear of her suing you for libel, since she lost her suit and through legal discovery was revealed to be obsessed w/ Hitler. She still writes for the newspapers, though!
Reposted by BeijingPalmer
I don't know how to describe it, but there's this profound brokenness in the American body politic where nobody can take the implications of anything seriously. People keep saying things that should be existential threats to the political system, and then everyone just keeps going on as normal.
fuck outta here
January 6, 2026 at 6:28 PM
I don't know how to describe it, but there's this profound brokenness in the American body politic where nobody can take the implications of anything seriously. People keep saying things that should be existential threats to the political system, and then everyone just keeps going on as normal.
Reposted by BeijingPalmer
it's not even a "chat bot", it doesn't chat. It's a new feature on the X app where you can type "@grok take off her clothes" and a picture is posted a few seconds later.
January 6, 2026 at 7:38 PM
it's not even a "chat bot", it doesn't chat. It's a new feature on the X app where you can type "@grok take off her clothes" and a picture is posted a few seconds later.
Reposted by BeijingPalmer
how to report this accurately
January 6, 2026 at 7:36 PM
how to report this accurately
Reposted by BeijingPalmer
Just the BBC, the national broadcaster, mainstreaming a fascist blogger. I guess this is normal now.
January 6, 2026 at 12:11 AM
Just the BBC, the national broadcaster, mainstreaming a fascist blogger. I guess this is normal now.
Reposted by BeijingPalmer
This March Violet is now the No. 3 official at the Pentagon and he’s joined the War on China on the side of China.
January 6, 2026 at 6:10 PM
This March Violet is now the No. 3 official at the Pentagon and he’s joined the War on China on the side of China.
americans always respond to this with 'but we have amazing sandwich shops' and yes, if you live in the, oh, five percent or so of the country within walking distance of these that's great.
January 6, 2026 at 6:02 PM
americans always respond to this with 'but we have amazing sandwich shops' and yes, if you live in the, oh, five percent or so of the country within walking distance of these that's great.
new yorkers, imagine a bodega but it's good.
US society just needs Tesco Expresses on every street and its society would be substantially fixed. (I am aware Tesco once held this view and was rejected by America.)
January 6, 2026 at 5:43 PM
new yorkers, imagine a bodega but it's good.
'British food is bad' has been untrue for like a generation and a half at this point but really sticks around in the U.S. U.S. supermarkets are inferior to their U.K. counterparts!
January 6, 2026 at 5:33 PM
'British food is bad' has been untrue for like a generation and a half at this point but really sticks around in the U.S. U.S. supermarkets are inferior to their U.K. counterparts!
Reposted by BeijingPalmer
This is frankly why the key is not necessarily fancy new drone tech - although some of that is valuable - but rather having a plan for rapidly pushing up to producing something like 200,000 155mm shells per month.
Not to replace anything. On top of everything else.
Not to replace anything. On top of everything else.
It's just a reminder that there is overwhelming shadow haunting pretty much all of military commentary: the shadow of innumeracy. If you can't stop and work out the math that the resource expenditures in this war are measured in NATOs, then you are incapable of saying anything meaningful.
January 6, 2026 at 4:22 PM
This is frankly why the key is not necessarily fancy new drone tech - although some of that is valuable - but rather having a plan for rapidly pushing up to producing something like 200,000 155mm shells per month.
Not to replace anything. On top of everything else.
Not to replace anything. On top of everything else.
Reposted by BeijingPalmer
Until it became a liability during Me Too, Taibbi's response to criticisms of the Exile book used to be...
...throwing coffee at the interviewer & then following them down the street.
...throwing coffee at the interviewer & then following them down the street.
January 6, 2026 at 3:52 PM
Until it became a liability during Me Too, Taibbi's response to criticisms of the Exile book used to be...
...throwing coffee at the interviewer & then following them down the street.
...throwing coffee at the interviewer & then following them down the street.
Reposted by BeijingPalmer
*goose meme* how did the Canadian centre-left recover from heading for a decisive electoral defeat to winning another term? how, Keir?
Cabinet this morning discussed centre-left revivals in Australia, Norway and Canada as inspiration for Labour
There must “keep a relentless focus on the cost of living, show relentless delivery of change people can feel and bring relentless clarity to drawing the choice ahead”, the PM said
There must “keep a relentless focus on the cost of living, show relentless delivery of change people can feel and bring relentless clarity to drawing the choice ahead”, the PM said
January 6, 2026 at 3:22 PM
*goose meme* how did the Canadian centre-left recover from heading for a decisive electoral defeat to winning another term? how, Keir?
Reposted by BeijingPalmer
observer.com/2000/06/from... I have never seen any of these guys give a convincing reason why Taibbi and Ames gave this interview where they insist the book is true and say other horrid shit, instead of saying "you misunderstand us, this is satire"
From Russia With Lust
Two American journalists, Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi, founded eXile to introduce Hunter S. Thompson’s “gonzo” style of journalism to 25,000 Moscow readers.
observer.com
January 6, 2026 at 3:42 PM
observer.com/2000/06/from... I have never seen any of these guys give a convincing reason why Taibbi and Ames gave this interview where they insist the book is true and say other horrid shit, instead of saying "you misunderstand us, this is satire"