Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr ➡️ PAX East
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raethr.bsky.social
Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr ➡️ PAX East
@raethr.bsky.social
180 followers 280 following 64 posts
He/Him/His || Viet American || Bi
Occasional Voice Actor and Singer
Frequent TTRPG Person
Communication PhD Student
Looking @ Race, Gender, and Rhetoric in (TT)RPGs
BLM. Free Palestine.
Posts Replies Media Videos
raethr.bsky.social
I do worry that the overarching focus on the environmental impacts of AI comes at the cost of conversations about the human, cultural, economic, and artistic costs. Like, the attempt to substitute human-made sentiments about truth for meaning-ignorant technical synthesis should be more troubling.
October 15, 2025 at 9:56 PM
Reposted by Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr ➡️ PAX East
latinxingaming.bsky.social
🎉 The Latinx in Gaming 2025 Grants are officially OPEN! 🎮

Apply between August 5 – August 31

Whether you're a content creator, streamer, student, gaming professional, or involved in any gaming-related field—this grant is for you.Let us support your journey in the gaming industry!
August 5, 2025 at 5:17 PM
Reposted by Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr ➡️ PAX East
bookspotlight.bsky.social
Let’s freaking gooooooo 💪
A California federal judge ruled Thursday that three authors suing Anthropic over copyright infringement can bring a class action lawsuit representing all U.S. writers whose work was allegedly downloaded from libraries of pirated works. The filing alleges that Anthropic, the Amazon-backed OpenAI competitor behind the chatbot Claude, “violated the Copyright Act by doing Napster-style downloading of millions of works.” It alleges that the company downloaded as many as seven million copies of books from libraries of pirated works.
July 17, 2025 at 5:12 PM
raethr.bsky.social
This is a reminder to myself and all the other thinks-about, writes-about, creates-through TTRPG folks,

the work we do is not trite, vapid, or meaningless because the material stakes of the world seem higher than ever.

TTRPGs are narrative form given scaffolding, and that shapes imagination.
July 17, 2025 at 9:15 PM
Reposted by Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr ➡️ PAX East
riseupcomus.bsky.social
Time once again to post the meme
July 8, 2025 at 1:18 AM
raethr.bsky.social
Students blatantly using gen AI makes me deeply and overwhelmingly sad. Like, do you have no value in your self growth? Is 250 words too much?

If capital burdens are pushing you to the edge, then you can have an extension. It's easy. Just like, let me know. Anything but the gen AI....
June 25, 2025 at 11:04 PM
Reposted by Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr ➡️ PAX East
pookleblinky.bsky.social
Congress has not formally declared war since 1942, 83 years ago.

Look at all the war the US has done in the past 83 years. Very obviously, it long long ago stopped requiring congressional approval for war according to its own constitution.
pookleblinky.bsky.social Pookleblinky @pookleblinky.bsky.social · Jun 18
Fun fact: the US has been at continual war since 1945 and *not a single one of these wars*, from the Korean War to Vietnam to Iraq to Iraq again, was ever declared war by Congress.

The last time the US Congress declared war was 1942. 83 years ago.
juddlegum.bsky.social Judd Legum @juddlegum.bsky.social · Jun 18
A lot of people are talking about whether Trump is going to go to war with Iran but not enough people are talking about the fact that Trump has no legal authority to do so without Congressional authorization
June 22, 2025 at 2:55 PM
Reposted by Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr ➡️ PAX East
leftistlawyer.com
If you're arrested in Illinois protesting against Trump's war on Iran for Israel, I can represent you pro bono. Email me at sheryl@weikallaw.com.
June 22, 2025 at 12:38 AM
raethr.bsky.social
I feel like convos about GenAI surrounding accessibility are always a little fraudulent, because they are always interested in bringing certain people up to the bar of 'surviving while creating', rather than lowering/removing the bar.
June 19, 2025 at 10:04 PM
raethr.bsky.social
Laws are made up and fluid. What is legal today can change tomorrow. Every person is precarious. The leopards will eat your face, regardless of how you ended up in the United States.
June 11, 2025 at 5:30 PM
raethr.bsky.social
No nation is healthy, but the least healthy of them employ military violence against citizens
June 10, 2025 at 6:11 PM
Reposted by Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr ➡️ PAX East
phillewis.bsky.social
“Trump is using military forces to stop a protest — I want y'all to consider what kind of government it appears to be when every time we exercise our democratic right to protest, the military is deployed against us.”

Doechii at the #BETAwards
June 10, 2025 at 1:01 AM
Reposted by Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr ➡️ PAX East
gxldsociety.bsky.social
Real photo from 1937 LA found in the LA Times
June 10, 2025 at 1:31 AM
raethr.bsky.social
While it's far from unexpected, it's still very weird to see solidarity break down over something as trite as 'vandalism', 'public disturbances', and 'property destruction'.
June 10, 2025 at 4:04 AM
Reposted by Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr ➡️ PAX East
rnavarre.bsky.social
Also point this out to anyone you can. These were not planned protests. These were normies getting the supplies for their weekend projects or at a restaurant and saw their servers getting hauled off and were like this is some bullshit.
reichlinmelnick.bsky.social Aaron Reichlin-Melnick @reichlinmelnick.bsky.social · Jun 8
This is a fever dream. The city is not under migrant occupation. This whole thing kicked off because ICE began an intense operation across the city to raid Home Depots and nail salons and places where random undocumented immigrants might be going about their day working a job.
atrupar.com Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · Jun 8
The president exists in a dystopian fantasy world with no connection to reality
June 8, 2025 at 10:51 PM
Reposted by Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr ➡️ PAX East
unraveledpress.com
Again, this isn't Los Angeles. This is happening right now outside an ICE building in SF:
jwcroxton.bsky.social James Croxton @jwcroxton.bsky.social · Jun 9
There is now a full-on stand off.
June 9, 2025 at 2:04 AM
Reposted by Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr ➡️ PAX East
lexialex.bsky.social
Everybody in the world, including every government, knows there were no weapons on this boat, just food for starving people in Gaza. Everybody saw with their own eyes what just happened. Now the world's governments will either act or don't act...and the people will either rise up or they won't
June 9, 2025 at 2:38 AM
Reposted by Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr ➡️ PAX East
melissahung.bsky.social
With alt text
Photograph of a protester in Hong Kong, who is dressed in black, covered nearly head to toe, and wearing glasses and various gear including a yellow construction helmet. Title says: Hong Kong Protest Gear Summer 2019. There are various blocks of text and arrows pointing to the various gear the protester is wearing. - Yellow construction helmet: Protects against rubber bullets, tear gas canisters, flying bricks - Broad face cover: To counter facial-recognition technology - Backpack Typically holds snacks, water, change of clothes, tools and sometimes laser pens to shine in officers' eyes. - Elbow & knee pads: For for falling, crawling and scuffing on city streets - Loose change: For subway fare, to avoid being tracked through electronic transit passes - Goggles: For flying debris - Gas Mask: Protecting against tear gas, which Hong Kong police use liberallv - Black t-shirt: Uniform adopted by Hong Kong protestors, in contrast to white Ts, worn by Beijing supporters - Lycra skin covers: To protect against tear gas effects - Umbrella: Protection against rain and pepper spray - Heat-resistant gloves: To throw hot tear gas canisters back at police Photo: Sasa Petricic/CBC
June 7, 2025 at 9:25 PM
Reposted by Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr ➡️ PAX East
karenattiah.bsky.social
The crackdowns on civilians and the threat of the national guard being sent to LA should be *the* most important story right now-- not the Trump/Musk feud or whatever the f**k that was.

People are being terrorized all over the country. News outlets need to get it together.
June 8, 2025 at 1:14 AM
raethr.bsky.social
Kind of obsessed with the fact that I could fit all the text from this image into the alt-text. Kind of epic. Kind of accessible and based and stuff.
raethr.bsky.social Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr ➡️ PAX East @raethr.bsky.social · Jun 4
An excerpt from a short paper I wrote, but never got around to fleshing out enough for a proper academic publication. It was inspired by the combat wheelchair, and uses that to interrogate ableist sentiments about linear growth, healing, and "correct bodies".
Conclusion: Ultimately, this rhetorical exploration of the statistics of Dungeons & Dragons is far from the whole of the conversation. Decolonial concepts of temporality, critical (dis)ability theories of health and healing, and critical deconstructions of cartesian duality could each be applied with greater depth to each of D&D’s ability scores to further discuss the ways that pre-existing colonial and cultural perspectives and ways of understanding the world format storytelling as it is processed and brought into being through D&D. TTRPGs function as lenses for storytelling, whose rules afford some narrative directions and obscure others. When taking these games as rhetorical texts, it is essential to consider how they are informed by their contexts; in the case of D&D, those contexts are grounded in colonial logics and animated by ongoing hegemonic mindsets. The ways that each of the statistics are cohered together into singular facets of personhood, placed on linear spectrums, and propelled into foundational structures of storytelling are situated not only in the monopoly D&D holds on the cultural imagination of TTRPGs, but also in the widespread colonial imagination that stories are told in. All TTRPGs create claims about personhood through their character sheets—or lack thereof. However, not all TTRPGs claim universality in the storytelling machine of the game. It is there that D&D stands out, from the attempt to extend the game into different settings and genres to the broad attempt by fans to construe characters through the lens of a D&D character sheet. As TTRPGs continue to explore ways to craft that personhood as a storytelling artform, it is essential to continue interrogating the claims which motivate foundational gameplay mechanics and narrative aesthetics.
June 4, 2025 at 4:04 AM
raethr.bsky.social
An excerpt from a short paper I wrote, but never got around to fleshing out enough for a proper academic publication. It was inspired by the combat wheelchair, and uses that to interrogate ableist sentiments about linear growth, healing, and "correct bodies".
Conclusion: Ultimately, this rhetorical exploration of the statistics of Dungeons & Dragons is far from the whole of the conversation. Decolonial concepts of temporality, critical (dis)ability theories of health and healing, and critical deconstructions of cartesian duality could each be applied with greater depth to each of D&D’s ability scores to further discuss the ways that pre-existing colonial and cultural perspectives and ways of understanding the world format storytelling as it is processed and brought into being through D&D. TTRPGs function as lenses for storytelling, whose rules afford some narrative directions and obscure others. When taking these games as rhetorical texts, it is essential to consider how they are informed by their contexts; in the case of D&D, those contexts are grounded in colonial logics and animated by ongoing hegemonic mindsets. The ways that each of the statistics are cohered together into singular facets of personhood, placed on linear spectrums, and propelled into foundational structures of storytelling are situated not only in the monopoly D&D holds on the cultural imagination of TTRPGs, but also in the widespread colonial imagination that stories are told in. All TTRPGs create claims about personhood through their character sheets—or lack thereof. However, not all TTRPGs claim universality in the storytelling machine of the game. It is there that D&D stands out, from the attempt to extend the game into different settings and genres to the broad attempt by fans to construe characters through the lens of a D&D character sheet. As TTRPGs continue to explore ways to craft that personhood as a storytelling artform, it is essential to continue interrogating the claims which motivate foundational gameplay mechanics and narrative aesthetics.
June 4, 2025 at 4:03 AM
raethr.bsky.social
There are some really important performance studies sentiments about how performance is rehearsal for real life.

This is especially true when your performance is close to your heart, in the way that TTRPGs are.

I think we could all use some rehearsal in resistance and solidarity.
June 4, 2025 at 3:53 AM
Reposted by Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr ➡️ PAX East
sarahjeong.bsky.social
I actually have an answer to why it was different. It was different because the Napalm Girl photograph did not actually end the war. A year before the photo was taken, a majority of Americans already believed it had been a mistake to send troops to Vietnam.

www.theverge.com/cs/features/...
“The Terror of War” is sometimes credited with ending the war through sheer emotional impact, swinging American public opinion toward military withdrawal and eventually bringing about the Paris Peace Accords in January 1973. The photograph was indeed powerful. (US President Richard Nixon can be heard wondering whether the photograph had been doctored in a White House audio recording. In another, he encouraged Henry Kissinger to “think big” and suggested the nuclear bomb.) But in truth, the tide of public opinion had already turned years prior. A year before the photograph was taken, 61 percent of American respondents to a June 1971 Gallup poll answered that it had been a mistake to send US troops to Vietnam; only 28 percent maintained that it had not. Six years earlier, in August 1965, only 24 percent had believed involvement to be a mistake, while 61 percent had not. In On Photography, Susan Sontag mused on whether the American public would have more vociferously opposed the Korean War if had been confronted with the photographic barrage that came with Vietnam. Sontag ultimately dismissed the possibility, concluding instead that the Vietnam War had already been “defined by a significant number of people as a savage colonialist war” and that the photographs — many of which had a military origin and “were taken with quite a different use in mind” — were published by the media in a preexisting social context and narrative. No photo could launch an antiwar movement; rather, the movement captioned the photo.
May 27, 2025 at 7:34 PM
raethr.bsky.social
Vampirism Sinners 2025 :handshake: Stormtroopers Star Wars

Representations of oppressive systems, embodied by people who are victims themselves, taken on in a lighthearted manner because the aesthetics are sexy/cool or because individual members are relatable/sympathetic/sexy.
May 28, 2025 at 12:57 AM