Tactical Doll Historian
@theetceteras.bsky.social
Enthusiast of the arts, mostly popular ones these days.
They/them. Reposts usually mean "take a look at this."
They/them. Reposts usually mean "take a look at this."
Pinned
"She had a garden hose but she did not drink from it and did not allow her kids to drink from it and this was the difference, less in lost things than in knowledge become suspicious and alert." - Don DeLillo, Underworld
There's a TON of tension in the aesthetics of the far right - much of the administration Twitter team prefers straight-up Nazi symbology and VDARE-ish winks, while Trump himself loves gold and the worst font you can find. Pretending it's a unified aesthetic is itself an ideological project.
It's just doing what I find so objectionable about a ton of other writing about Trump("ism"), assuming or constructing a plan around his personal idiosyncracies. He already fired his own architect for the thing, but it's a coherent expression of "their" politics?
December 18, 2025 at 10:28 PM
There's a TON of tension in the aesthetics of the far right - much of the administration Twitter team prefers straight-up Nazi symbology and VDARE-ish winks, while Trump himself loves gold and the worst font you can find. Pretending it's a unified aesthetic is itself an ideological project.
This article, from the short list I reposted, is generally great but really gets at something I've been fixated on for a bit: the obsession with "studios" and formalization in game dev and how it erases or obscures a lot of history.
felipepepe.medium.com/the-gentrifi...
felipepepe.medium.com/the-gentrifi...
The Gentrification of Video Game History
We’re not all suburban kids who got a Nintendo 64 for Christmas
felipepepe.medium.com
December 16, 2025 at 4:49 PM
This article, from the short list I reposted, is generally great but really gets at something I've been fixated on for a bit: the obsession with "studios" and formalization in game dev and how it erases or obscures a lot of history.
felipepepe.medium.com/the-gentrifi...
felipepepe.medium.com/the-gentrifi...
Reposted by Tactical Doll Historian
LRT: Folks, here's your Short List for the 2025 Games Journalism Award nygamecritics.com/the-games-jo...
The Games Journalism Award
By Nick Capozzoli, NYVGCC Journalism Chair The Games Journalism Award is given to one journalist or critic for distinguished contributions to the field during the voting year. The selected journali…
nygamecritics.com
December 15, 2025 at 5:21 PM
LRT: Folks, here's your Short List for the 2025 Games Journalism Award nygamecritics.com/the-games-jo...
This this this - just like in games production, only the workers themselves can effectively bargain for the terms of their employment, and they can only have the power to do so in a union (or something that looks just like one).
My figuring is that the beginning of an answer involves unionization.
December 15, 2025 at 5:55 PM
This this this - just like in games production, only the workers themselves can effectively bargain for the terms of their employment, and they can only have the power to do so in a union (or something that looks just like one).
Inside baseball here but it is wild to me how quickly and comprehensively the datacenter market has turned with the memory issues. From warnings of price increases to zero availability for months out for pretty significant swathes of the sales book, since mid-November.
December 15, 2025 at 4:04 PM
Inside baseball here but it is wild to me how quickly and comprehensively the datacenter market has turned with the memory issues. From warnings of price increases to zero availability for months out for pretty significant swathes of the sales book, since mid-November.
Once again, if you are talking about candidates or elections in 2025 in a policy-first way, you are worse than useless, whether your advice is to moderate or become a communist. Trump did not win on his policy positions! Democrats haven't gotten a 15-point swing in one year out of policy changes!
December 10, 2025 at 5:42 PM
Once again, if you are talking about candidates or elections in 2025 in a policy-first way, you are worse than useless, whether your advice is to moderate or become a communist. Trump did not win on his policy positions! Democrats haven't gotten a 15-point swing in one year out of policy changes!
With Playstation putting streaming on the Portal, I decided to give it a try, and after a few dozen hours it's exceptionally good for 1080p gaming. For a 4K display you probably still want local hardware, but VERY easy to see this becoming the norm as networks improve.
December 8, 2025 at 8:15 PM
With Playstation putting streaming on the Portal, I decided to give it a try, and after a few dozen hours it's exceptionally good for 1080p gaming. For a 4K display you probably still want local hardware, but VERY easy to see this becoming the norm as networks improve.
I think US politics is in a pretty terrible state, but I can't imagine the despair I would feel if I lived in the UK.
December 8, 2025 at 4:39 PM
I think US politics is in a pretty terrible state, but I can't imagine the despair I would feel if I lived in the UK.
Humans really struggle to think clearly about automation, productivity and how they actually work. So much of the AI discourse, pro and anti, is people thinking it replaces humans rather than giving them new and better tools. And that's a separate conversation than how the gains are distributed.
My brother in Christ, reindustrialization is based on international capital flows, not dumbass ideas to move down the value chain by turning colleges into vocational schools. You do realize that modern industry is almost always *high* skilled automation?
Read your Michael Pettis, you utter clown.
Read your Michael Pettis, you utter clown.
No reindustrialising? Our academic institutions are a part of the problem, overproducing elites and funnelling them into bullshit unproductive jobs. Half the universities need to close or become vocational colleges. You didn't even mention productivity.
Brexit is in the past. That ship has sailed.
Brexit is in the past. That ship has sailed.
December 5, 2025 at 9:28 PM
Humans really struggle to think clearly about automation, productivity and how they actually work. So much of the AI discourse, pro and anti, is people thinking it replaces humans rather than giving them new and better tools. And that's a separate conversation than how the gains are distributed.
Reposted by Tactical Doll Historian
The impacts of this decrease in both the number and amount of NIH and NSF funding will be felt for generations, but props to the NIH and NSF program managers and support staff who got this many grants and this much funding out the door under very difficult circumstances.
The U.S. Is Funding Fewer Grants in Every Area of Science and Medicine (Gift Article)
A quiet policy change means the government is making fewer bets on long-term science.
www.nytimes.com
December 2, 2025 at 8:49 PM
The impacts of this decrease in both the number and amount of NIH and NSF funding will be felt for generations, but props to the NIH and NSF program managers and support staff who got this many grants and this much funding out the door under very difficult circumstances.
Good article, and indirectly this also gets at why I will always use a non-Steam platform to buy a game if I can. Valve is a terrible steward for the art form that makes them so much money, and we need to nurture all of the alternatives.
aftermath.site/valve-steam-...
aftermath.site/valve-steam-...
Steam Is For Products, Not Art
A machine (not) for Horses
aftermath.site
December 1, 2025 at 7:54 PM
Good article, and indirectly this also gets at why I will always use a non-Steam platform to buy a game if I can. Valve is a terrible steward for the art form that makes them so much money, and we need to nurture all of the alternatives.
aftermath.site/valve-steam-...
aftermath.site/valve-steam-...
These numbers make perfect sense, when you consider that the things consumer-focused LLM software is decent at now are traditional "secretarial" tasks - note-taking, letter drafting, summarization. Some rote data-cleaning for basic Excel, that kind of thing.
The numbers in here are hilarious.
Do you use AI on the job?
Execs: 87%
Managers: 57%
Workers: 27%
Planned investment by 2030: $5T
"Necessary" annual revenue to justify that spend: $650B
Current annual revenue: $50B
Do you use AI on the job?
Execs: 87%
Managers: 57%
Workers: 27%
Planned investment by 2030: $5T
"Necessary" annual revenue to justify that spend: $650B
Current annual revenue: $50B
Three years into the generative-AI wave, demand for the technology seems surprisingly flimsy
December 1, 2025 at 3:51 PM
These numbers make perfect sense, when you consider that the things consumer-focused LLM software is decent at now are traditional "secretarial" tasks - note-taking, letter drafting, summarization. Some rote data-cleaning for basic Excel, that kind of thing.
Wild amounts of confirmation bias going on in this thread and replies. I work with a lot of grad students and while media habits change, I see no meaningful reduction in serious engagement with their education. Do some people? Probably.
An issue we're seeing at all levels of university is that many students are simply refusing to do *anything*. They aren't reading the syllabus, aren't following assignment guidelines, aren't engaging with material, ignoring deadlines. And this might seem like old news, but it truly has ramped up.
November 29, 2025 at 3:52 PM
Wild amounts of confirmation bias going on in this thread and replies. I work with a lot of grad students and while media habits change, I see no meaningful reduction in serious engagement with their education. Do some people? Probably.
Side note but thinking about gacha mechanics early in games made me realize that 1E D&D and Wizardry are mechanically "reverse gachas" - you make a ton of characters and RNG determined which ones survive long enough to grow and become "heroes".
Funny enough, Genshin Impact is the first game that I've bounced off of mostly because of the gacha and how badly it interacts with the world and combat design. I think I was unlucky in the early stages and so much of the game requires specific builds and elements, it felt bad to play.
November 27, 2025 at 4:18 PM
Side note but thinking about gacha mechanics early in games made me realize that 1E D&D and Wizardry are mechanically "reverse gachas" - you make a ton of characters and RNG determined which ones survive long enough to grow and become "heroes".
Funny enough, Genshin Impact is the first game that I've bounced off of mostly because of the gacha and how badly it interacts with the world and combat design. I think I was unlucky in the early stages and so much of the game requires specific builds and elements, it felt bad to play.
November 27, 2025 at 3:49 PM
Funny enough, Genshin Impact is the first game that I've bounced off of mostly because of the gacha and how badly it interacts with the world and combat design. I think I was unlucky in the early stages and so much of the game requires specific builds and elements, it felt bad to play.
MY labor is honest, deserving work. YOUR labor is petit bourgeois theft and is just your way of supporting global capital. Obviously, when I steal your wages I do it for Marxism (and maybe as a revolt against settler colonialism)
it's also bad to steal from small business owners.
We’re not small business owners, ffs - we’re independent contractors, and we are routinely robbed by the world’s dumbest dingbats.
November 26, 2025 at 6:28 PM
MY labor is honest, deserving work. YOUR labor is petit bourgeois theft and is just your way of supporting global capital. Obviously, when I steal your wages I do it for Marxism (and maybe as a revolt against settler colonialism)
Crucial when interpreting stuff like this to remember that models do not have "intentionality", they don't have long-term motives, and they have extremely limited context when viewed in human mental terms. A car does not "want" to transport you.
i'm fascinated when it says things like this bc i don't think "hacking into anthropic's servers" is something it's even remotely capable of doing, and i am half-convinced that what it's doing here is playing the role of an evil computer based on sci-fi stories that went into its training set
November 24, 2025 at 5:35 PM
Crucial when interpreting stuff like this to remember that models do not have "intentionality", they don't have long-term motives, and they have extremely limited context when viewed in human mental terms. A car does not "want" to transport you.
The loss of Red War and other early Destiny 2 content is such a disaster for preservation, and would be such evidence of mismanagement, it's hard to believe. Reminds me of when the BBC erased much of the early Dr Who library. Seems we need pirates to preserve our own history from "ownership".
November 21, 2025 at 1:56 PM
The loss of Red War and other early Destiny 2 content is such a disaster for preservation, and would be such evidence of mismanagement, it's hard to believe. Reminds me of when the BBC erased much of the early Dr Who library. Seems we need pirates to preserve our own history from "ownership".
Joyce Carol Oates is of course right about Elon, but she's also identifying a strain that runs throughout some of our worst and richest people today - unable to enjoy life for life's sake, unable to imagine life without work or power or money, like money isn't for anything besides counting.
November 14, 2025 at 10:47 PM
Joyce Carol Oates is of course right about Elon, but she's also identifying a strain that runs throughout some of our worst and richest people today - unable to enjoy life for life's sake, unable to imagine life without work or power or money, like money isn't for anything besides counting.
LOL this list has Ro Khanna, Graham Platner, and Seth Moulton twice.
UPDATE — With Rep. Pramila Jayapal (Chair Emerita of the Congressional Progressive Caucus), there are now at least 12 congressional Democrats, 15 Democratic-aligned organizations, and 8 Democratic candidates calling for Chuck Schumer to resign as leader:
November 13, 2025 at 4:26 PM
LOL this list has Ro Khanna, Graham Platner, and Seth Moulton twice.
Reposted by Tactical Doll Historian
We've added 100 new CDs to our collection of press CDs from GamePro magazine, with thousands of pieces of game art, screenshots, and more
So, what's the GamePro press CD collection? We put together an explainer
So, what's the GamePro press CD collection? We put together an explainer
The art of GamePro | VGHF Library Highlights
YouTube video by The Video Game History Foundation
www.youtube.com
November 10, 2025 at 6:02 PM
We've added 100 new CDs to our collection of press CDs from GamePro magazine, with thousands of pieces of game art, screenshots, and more
So, what's the GamePro press CD collection? We put together an explainer
So, what's the GamePro press CD collection? We put together an explainer
There were a lot of positive things that happened during and in the wake of COVID - people acted more considerately WRT disease spreading, we implemented a huge remote work program, governments gestured to UBI and we made a vaccine in less than a year. Amazing how much reaction all that provoked
November 11, 2025 at 4:23 PM
There were a lot of positive things that happened during and in the wake of COVID - people acted more considerately WRT disease spreading, we implemented a huge remote work program, governments gestured to UBI and we made a vaccine in less than a year. Amazing how much reaction all that provoked
Here's a great use of language models, in conjunction with real live journalists and novel reporting, to attempt to inform the public.
www.texastribune.org/2025/11/07/t...
www.texastribune.org/2025/11/07/t...
Your questions about Texas’ water supply answered
You asked our AI chatbot about Texas’ water supply. We answered some of the questions that it couldn’t.
www.texastribune.org
November 7, 2025 at 6:48 PM
Here's a great use of language models, in conjunction with real live journalists and novel reporting, to attempt to inform the public.
www.texastribune.org/2025/11/07/t...
www.texastribune.org/2025/11/07/t...