Kirsten R. 🏳️‍🌈♿ (Disabled Academic)
LightNews LightNews
banner
ringwraith10.bsky.social
Kirsten R. 🏳️‍🌈♿ (Disabled Academic)
@ringwraith10.bsky.social
220 followers 640 following 290 posts
M.A. in Literature | Blogger on "Video Games as Literature" and "My Forest Library" | I am ♿🏳️‍🌈. She/Her.
🔜 #SciFiMonth November
♿: CFS, Endo, Autistic, many other dx.
See also @videogamesaslit.bsky.social
Posts Replies Media Videos
Pinned
ringwraith10.bsky.social
Kirsten R. 🏳️‍🌈♿ (Disabled Academic) @ringwraith10.bsky.social · Jul 16
If you're interested in my blog, Video Games as Literature, you can follow it or click the link below 👇
ringwraith10.bsky.social
I went ahead and started a list on my blog that I can share when people ask for recommendations of magic kid books that aren't HP.
myforestlibrary.com/2025/11/06/b...
Book Recommendations: Magical Kid Books for Children
People regularly ask me for book recommendations in a variety of genres, but one specific genre that comes up frequently is Magic School books — specifically, readers want alternatives to tha…
myforestlibrary.com
November 7, 2025 at 1:04 AM
Reposted by Kirsten R. 🏳️‍🌈♿ (Disabled Academic)
ringwraith10.bsky.social
Off the top of my head, if I'm recommending children's books about magic schools or magical kids I'd start with these:

Witchlings by Claribel Ortega
Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan
Goddess Girls series by Joan Holub
Franchises Winx Club, Ever After High, My Little Pony also have good books!
November 6, 2025 at 8:27 PM
Reposted by Kirsten R. 🏳️‍🌈♿ (Disabled Academic)
videogamesaslit.bsky.social
Also in keeping with today's #SciFiMonth prompt ("Previously, on SciFi Month"): can you believe I've been participating in SciFi Month since 2014?! It's hard to believe we've been doing this for over a decade! Here's a history of my SciFi Month blog posts:
www.videogamesaslit.com/search/label...
Video Games as Literature: Essays by Kirsten Rodning
An academic approach to analyzing video games in a literary context.
www.videogamesaslit.com
November 2, 2025 at 2:35 PM
Reposted by Kirsten R. 🏳️‍🌈♿ (Disabled Academic)
scifimonth.bsky.social
Happy #ScifiMonth when we share our love of a favourite genre. It’s a casual cruise across galaxies and timelines this year, and we can’t wait to see where your travels take you!

As always we have daily prompts and Friday Fives plus a picture bingo and a read along of Ancillary Justice 🚀
November 1, 2025 at 8:29 AM
Reposted by Kirsten R. 🏳️‍🌈♿ (Disabled Academic)
videogamesaslit.bsky.social
I'm planning 🤞 to read The Weight of the Stars by K. Ancrum and Light from Uncommon Stars by Ryka Aoki. In terms of video games, I've already started playing Slime Rancher 2, and I'll be playing Outer Wilds with the Literary Game Club. #SciFiMonth #SciFiMonth2025
scifimonth.bsky.social SciFiMonth @scifimonth.bsky.social · 14d
Day 1: put your suits on! What will you be reading this month? #SciifiMonth

Full challenge: adancewithbooks.wordpress.com/2025/10/21/a...
30 days of prompts for SciFiMonth - link with full details
November 1, 2025 at 7:13 PM
Reposted by Kirsten R. 🏳️‍🌈♿ (Disabled Academic)
abeldelorenzo.bsky.social
"The two listed here are the clearest examples of women reporting such crimes, but they are by no means the only ones..."

theconversation.com/written-acco...
Written accounts reveal how sexual assault claims were dealt with in the middle ages
Written medieval records clearly show that women publicly and successfully reported men to the local authorities for sexual assault.
theconversation.com
November 1, 2025 at 10:09 AM
Reposted by Kirsten R. 🏳️‍🌈♿ (Disabled Academic)
themrneutron.bsky.social
Well he should march right down to the Anti Fascist HQ and explain to them why being Pro Fascist is the better position.
November 1, 2025 at 10:46 AM
Reposted by Kirsten R. 🏳️‍🌈♿ (Disabled Academic)
portalbookshop.bsky.social
Here to support the heterosexual community at @worldfantasy2025.bsky.social

I'm an ally 🫡
A tiny box of sci-fi books on the floor next to a bookcase, with a handwritten sign on the box reading "Heterosexual books! 10% off!"
November 1, 2025 at 10:50 AM
Reposted by Kirsten R. 🏳️‍🌈♿ (Disabled Academic)
hollynielsen.bsky.social
If you did paid work for a game you shouldn’t be in “special thanks”
caraellison.bsky.social Cara Ellison @caraellison.bsky.social · 17d
‘Special thanks’ is for people’s dogs and cats. Not for people who spent five years of their lives actively developing a videogame for you
November 1, 2025 at 10:52 AM
Reposted by Kirsten R. 🏳️‍🌈♿ (Disabled Academic)
mostlybree.kitrocha.com
I hate/love this. I need a new word for that mix of horror and hope.
November 1, 2025 at 12:17 AM
Reposted by Kirsten R. 🏳️‍🌈♿ (Disabled Academic)
mostlybree.kitrocha.com
I gotta be real, I did not suspect we would reach "roving mobs of white folks chanting "shame" at ICE" within 9 months, and it really feels like a sign of how much more horrifying it must be on the ground than those of us not there can even imagine.
alexhairysun.bsky.social Alex Harrison @alexhairysun.bsky.social · 14d
Video taken by Jay Shefsky at 12:20 p.m. after the crash happened, Oakton Street/Asbury Avenue in Evanston, IL
October 31, 2025 at 9:36 PM
Reposted by Kirsten R. 🏳️‍🌈♿ (Disabled Academic)
zintlion.bsky.social
Chloe was not as cooperative with her Halloween costume as I'd hoped (popped her head up out of full ball pose), but still she's rocking the soot sprite outfit
A fluffy black cat curled up with her head upright, and two white pieces of paper colored in to look like eyes are placed on her back
November 1, 2025 at 12:02 AM
Reposted by Kirsten R. 🏳️‍🌈♿ (Disabled Academic)
sesmith.lol
Big fan of conservation cemeteries and this is a delightful read about this slice of the death and conservation movements! (I like to think that there's an alternate world version of me running a pet and human cemetery with cake emporium.)
Life Beyond the Grave
These morticians are both conservation heroes and undertakers
www.sierraclub.org
November 1, 2025 at 12:18 AM
Reposted by Kirsten R. 🏳️‍🌈♿ (Disabled Academic)
merrittk.com
every couple of days the official white house website says "we want to kill you. we want to destroy everything you love. we are the living incarnation of death and we shall sweep life from this earth like an unstoppable whirlwind" and its like oh. ok. do i still have to pay taxes
October 30, 2025 at 8:04 PM
Reposted by Kirsten R. 🏳️‍🌈♿ (Disabled Academic)
dratcl.bsky.social
The City of Boynton Beach is ending free little libraries and food pantries when they are needed most. Please speak up and support these hundreds of community support outreaches in neighborhoods next door.

www.change.org/p/amend-city...
Sign the Petition
Amend City Code to Protect Boynton Beach's Little Free Libraries
www.change.org
October 31, 2025 at 12:50 AM
Reposted by Kirsten R. 🏳️‍🌈♿ (Disabled Academic)
kateelliottsff.bsky.social
I am required to show off this spectacular cover (artist: Juan Bernabeu) for my near future political novelette coming on @reactorsff.bsky.social on Nov 5.

An older medic with scant resources fights to support her community as they survive life behind the company wall.
Barnacle, Kate Elliott. Washed up on a beach, a big cluster of barnacles holds together while crows flock down from the sky, trying to pry them loose from each other. A truly stunning image by Juan Bernabeu.
October 31, 2025 at 1:05 AM
Reposted by Kirsten R. 🏳️‍🌈♿ (Disabled Academic)
duckvalentine.bsky.social
I have been playing Stray Children ahead of launch. I'm not as far into it as I'd like to be due to being bogged down in other obligations. But I love it so far and am also fascinated by it.

If you liked Moon, Earthbound, Undertale, and other "oddball games" as it were, this is for you.
oniongames.bsky.social Onion Games @oniongames.bsky.social · 15d
Small release-day housekeeping note:

The Steam version... is alive! You can get it right now!

store.steampowered.com/app/3649490/...

The eShop page for the Nintendo Switch version will be up in 1 hour and 45 minutes!

Please hold the champagne uncorking until then!
Save 10% on Stray Children on Steam
“The Olders, they come to eat the Children…” All of the adults have become monsters, the rumors say. Nowhere is safe outside these walls. Welcome to Stray Children — a bittersweet, fairy tale RPG.
store.steampowered.com
October 30, 2025 at 8:33 PM
ringwraith10.bsky.social
We should all wear "Urban Decay Desperation" eyeliner and make J.D. Vance most famous for starting a huge makeup trend.
October 31, 2025 at 1:22 AM
Reposted by Kirsten R. 🏳️‍🌈♿ (Disabled Academic)
bookjockeyalex.bsky.social
If you want a perfect example of the aging up of YA fiction to appeal to adult readers at the exclusion of teen readers, it's getting rid of any references to the specific ages of the teen characters in the Six of Crows duology. www.tumblr.com/vilecemetery...
Post by @vilecemetery · 2 images
💬 70  🔁 987  ❤️ 1691 · leigh bardugo has massively edited and rewritten the six of crows books and no one has noticed · or has for some reason decided not to mention it at all or let anyone else kn…
www.tumblr.com
October 30, 2025 at 11:27 PM
Reposted by Kirsten R. 🏳️‍🌈♿ (Disabled Academic)
olivia.science
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues. Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA). Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe. Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
September 6, 2025 at 8:13 AM
Reposted by Kirsten R. 🏳️‍🌈♿ (Disabled Academic)
polaris-pens.bsky.social
“I read it to find out what the fuss was about, and remained somewhat puzzled; it seemed a lively kid’s fantasy crossed with a school novel, good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited.“ -Le Guin

She had JKR read from day one
October 27, 2025 at 1:03 PM
Reposted by Kirsten R. 🏳️‍🌈♿ (Disabled Academic)
elierlick.bsky.social
A portion of every dollar spent on Harry Potter merchandise goes to anti-transgender campaigns.
October 25, 2025 at 5:54 PM
Reposted by Kirsten R. 🏳️‍🌈♿ (Disabled Academic)
wolvendamien.bsky.social
Genuinely begging you to re-up your MMR & get your kids vaccinated if you can. Between this & Kennedy talking about breaking it up into separate vaccines thus providing opportunities for missed inoculations &, thus, increased infections, public health policy is not looking great, for the foreseeable
propublica.org ProPublica @propublica.org · 19d
South Carolina schools recently sent home unvaccinated kids to stem a growing measles outbreak. It turned out 5 of them were infected and, if they'd been at school, could've unwittingly spread it to their classmates for days.

That kind of precaution is now illegal in Idaho.
Idaho Banned Vaccine Mandates. Activists Want to Make It a Model for the Country.
The Idaho Medical Freedom Act makes it illegal to require anyone to take a vaccine or receive “medical intervention.” Leslie Manookian, the activist behind the law, hopes to make it a “societal norm” ...
www.propublica.org
October 30, 2025 at 2:02 PM
ringwraith10.bsky.social
If you've wondered why I give a huge raised eyebrow 🤨 to anyone who still uses the website formerly known as Twitter, this is the reason. You're on a website that accepts with open arms the people mentioned in this article. It's time to let it die, no matter how many followers you once had.
popecrocodylus.bsky.social The Space Pope @popecrocodylus.bsky.social · 17d
From an article about the man in the SS uniform arrested for attacking the woman in Georgia. Just wild that we've accepted that there's a huge social media platform where an account called "@GasChambers" is allowed to openly do Nazi fundraising and that's fine, in fact all the reporters post there.
There are signs that Morgan is becoming a cause célèbre for neo-Nazis in the United States. The white supremacist Paul Miller, who gained notoriety for making hate-filled videos while wearing Nazi garb, said on social media that he was working to secure Morgan’s release and directed followers to a crowdfunding campaign that he said was from Morgan directly. “I am in contact with @GasChambers_,” Miller tweeted on Sunday, referring to an X account that says it has raised money for Morgan. “We are going to pay the bail for Kenneth in the next few days he will be free. Gaschamber was very kind and gracious. We just spoke on the phone. We are going to get kenneth out very soon.”
October 29, 2025 at 7:29 AM
Reposted by Kirsten R. 🏳️‍🌈♿ (Disabled Academic)
letitmelo.bsky.social
I legitimately didn't know they were competing with Steam and it's crazy to me that they burnt so much money on what sounds like something with very little (or wildly misguided) market research.
Ethan Evans, former Amazon VP As VP of Prime Gaming at Amazon, we failed multiple times to disrupt the game platform Steam. We were at least 250x bigger, and we tried everything. But ultimately, Goliath lost. Here's why: The 15+ year long attempt to challenge Steam started before I was VP of Prime Gaming, but we never cracked the code. Not under my leadership or anyone else's. The first way we tried to enter the online-game-store market was through acquisition. We acquired Reflexive Entertainment (a small PC game store) and tried to scale it. It went nowhere. Then, after buying Twitch, we created our own PC games store. Our assumption was that gamers would naturally buy from us because they were already using Twitch. Wrong. Finally, we built "Luna," a game streaming service that let people play without a high-end PC. Around the same time, Google tried the same thing with their product "Stadia." Neither gained significant traction. The whole time, Steam dominated despite being a relatively small company (compared to Amazon and Google). The mistake was that we underestimated what made consumers use Steam It was a store, a social network, a library, and a trophy case all in one. And it worked well. At Amazon, we assumed that size and visibility would be enough to attract customers, but we underestimated the power of existing user habits We never validated our core assumptions before investing heavily in solutions. The truth is that gamers already had the solution to their problems and they weren't going to switch platforms just because a new one was available We needed to build something dramatically better, but we failed to do so. And we needed to validate our assumptions about our customers before starting to build. But we never really did that either. Just because you are big enough to build something doesn't mean people will use it
October 28, 2025 at 10:23 PM