Gary
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garywells.bsky.social
Gary
@garywells.bsky.social
PhD UC Irvine • University of Edinburgh • UC Santa Barbara • GameBoy.
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Get some sleep, stay hydrated, support your friends.
“And while those numbers were associated largely with the far right” is doing a lot of work here.

What I consider to be bad faith framing aside, surely journalism should be more than “I don’t know what this means, but it could be bad”? Isn’t finding out what it means the entire point?
November 13, 2025 at 7:59 PM
Reposted by Gary
Discovering computer as an adult makes you go crazy. Discovering computer as a baby makes you go crazy. In all of human history, there will only ever be one generation to discover computer at the correct age: 13
The problem with every post-Millennial generation is they got to go straight to high speed internet. Of course you'll get computer madness that way. Make them start with those old screeching modems and work their way up
September 12, 2025 at 8:58 PM
Reposted by Gary
New: There's a reckoning on Roblox. The company is facing at least 7 new child safety suits over the last 2 weeks -- including one from Louisiana's Attorney General. Shares fell 11% today. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
Roblox Shares Fall After Louisiana Attorney General Files Suit
Roblox Corp. shares fell as much as 11% Friday after the company, which operates an online video-game service popular with children, was accused in two lawsuits of failing to sufficiently protect youn...
www.bloomberg.com
August 15, 2025 at 5:02 PM
Reposted by Gary
please meet Alex the Great, a therapy bunny who works at the San Fran airport and now Giants games to help people who are overwhelmed

LOOK AT HIS TINY BALLCAP. LOOK AT IT.
July 16, 2025 at 1:49 PM
There’s a sophistication to Mario Party, a structured chaos that rewards those who understand its intricacies deep enough to strategize around the randomness.
Mario Kart is a nonsense game for monsters.
June 29, 2025 at 1:07 AM
Reposted by Gary
🚨 ACCELERATE APPLICATIONS ARE NOW OPEN! 🚨

Looking to level up your career in mental health & games? Apply for Accelerate Season 2! Applications are open until July 13.

Enormous thanks to our sponsors,
@riotgames.com & @unlikelycollaborators.com

More info & how to apply ➡️ takethis.org/accelerate
June 16, 2025 at 4:48 PM
Reposted by Gary
Awesome thread of protests across the country.
Dallas turned out with at least 10,000 marching for #NoKingsDay
June 15, 2025 at 12:07 AM
Reposted by Gary
❗ Reminder ❗
Applications open NEXT MONDAY, JUNE 16th!

Check out our website for details about the program & the application process. Applications will remain open through July 13th.

Lead funder @RiotGames.com and @UnlikelyCollaborators.com power Accelerate Season 2, keeping it free and accessible
Take This 🔜 Pokemon Internationals! (@takethis.org)
Accelerate Season 2 applications open JUNE 16! If you're looking to level up your career in mental health & games, check us out! More info about the program & how to apply is available on our…
bsky.app
June 13, 2025 at 6:15 PM
Reposted by Gary
Are you looking to level up your career? We've got good news.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝗰𝗰𝗲𝗹𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗴𝗿𝗮𝗺 𝗶𝘀 𝗴𝗲𝘁𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮 𝘀𝗲𝗰𝗼𝗻𝗱 𝘀𝗲𝗮𝘀𝗼𝗻! 🎉 🥳

Learn more about the program at takethis.org/accelerate. More information regarding application details and deadlines coming soon.
May 23, 2025 at 10:01 PM
Reposted by Gary
On being called DEI and why it isn’t the burn they think it is
April 24, 2025 at 5:07 PM
Reposted by Gary
Looking to help level up mental health care & awareness in the gaming community? Good news!

Introducing PIXEL PATRONS, our new monthly giving community! Your membership helps sustain the critical work of Take This all year long. Get more info & join the community at TakeThis.Org/Pixel-Patrons
April 23, 2025 at 7:01 PM
Reposted by Gary
No Super Smash Bros. Melee on Switch 2's Gamecube.. can only assume it's because it would be hard to improve on Sl***i
April 2, 2025 at 1:46 PM
This is what I find to be the most heartbreaking part of this tragic situation. Bad faith actors and hate groups co-opted Hax’s story to launch harassment campaigns in their own interest, and at some point he had lost control of his own narrative.
there is so much misinfo re: hax that TOs could not address over the last two years because of the toxic online environment following the 2021 summer. by the time hax tried anything to fix the situation, it was too late; the toothpaste was let out of the tube.
March 28, 2025 at 9:20 PM
Reposted by Gary
My point is that humanity achieved its pinnacle with the creation of the Nintendo GameCube and it’s been downhill ever since
March 22, 2025 at 1:40 PM
Reposted by Gary
they are talking this way about gamers because they know that without modern gaming online culture, starting out with gamergate, the current cultural rightwing movement wouldn’t be what it is. without gamergate there wouldn’t be paid ads for adolf hitler on twitter
Can you imagine explaining this to 1960s rightwingers?
March 7, 2025 at 4:59 PM
Reposted by Gary
Loving the posts and likes on this article!

I think people would get even more out of reading it.

This is no basic explainer on Gamergate. I go deep into the psychology, tactics, and limits of troll tantrums as fascist movements.

www.salon.com/2025/02/24/w...
What Musk's war on federal workers owes to Gamergate, the long-ago troll tantrum
Culture war for the stupid era kicked off with video gamers mad at ladies who have sex
www.salon.com
February 24, 2025 at 1:34 PM
Reposted by Gary
I wrote this bit that is entirely unrelated to current things
Voting for the Mayor Who Promised to Blow Up the City Doesn’t Mean I Approve of the Mayor Blowing Up the City
It’s so easy to label people these days. From the way folks have been talking, you’d think everyone falls into two buckets: those who voted against...
www.mcsweeneys.net
February 10, 2025 at 6:46 PM
Hello hello games folks 🙂 I’m working on a project looking at codes of conduct for online games, so if you or someone you know helped with the development of one, I would love to connect!
February 5, 2025 at 9:06 PM
Reposted by Gary
Begging the legacy media to hire journalists who have logged on just once in their life
December 10, 2024 at 3:27 PM
Everyone should play fantasy football at least once, just to experience the complex emotional journey of spending 4 months studying player data only to be brutally taught that “regression to the mean” sometimes means every other team in the league will have their best week of the season against you.
December 3, 2024 at 8:15 PM
Reposted by Gary
😬
Trump has vowed to crack down on universities involved in misinformation research, or what he dubs the "censorship cartel" - e.g. by curbing funds to those that have "flagged content for removal”, or legal threats

“I'm pretty fucking scared," one professor tells me.

www.ft.com/content/bfb4...
Donald Trump’s return sends shivers through the anti-misinformation world
Vow to crack down on the ‘censorship cartel’ has researchers worried — and Big Tech is on notice
www.ft.com
November 25, 2024 at 5:42 PM
Recently shared some info (a postmortem?) about DoomScroll, our Among Us mod misinformation training intervention!

Github: github.com/WellsGA/Doom...
Short paper: dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1...

More to come 🙂

www.linkedin.com/posts/garris...
November 20, 2024 at 6:02 PM
Get some sleep, stay hydrated, support your friends.
November 14, 2024 at 7:26 AM