Jay Allen
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amaninblack.bsky.social
Jay Allen
@amaninblack.bsky.social
1K followers 85 following 16K posts
nobody that you know unless you've heard of him.

deeply curséd combo of IR, tabletop wargaming, far right extremism in fandom spaces, and video game/industry crit. hell is empty and all the posts are here.

old writing: https://jayallen.contently.com
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amaninblack.bsky.social
September 15, 2025 at 1:54 AM
amaninblack.bsky.social
Murasaki, a young woman, bemoans the fact that nobody will let her kill them, to the other characters' confusion
September 8, 2025 at 5:32 PM
amaninblack.bsky.social
it's a zero-budget adventure comedy series about four heroes going to defeat the demon king by wandering around the wilderness on the advice of the great buddha who appears in the clouds
a bandit is hoist by his own petard by licking his knife, coated in a deadly poison. he shouldn't have licked it. the heroes look on, bemused.
September 2, 2025 at 4:38 PM
amaninblack.bsky.social
this man made beard choices
a series of what can best be described as creative variations on a soul patch
August 22, 2025 at 4:17 AM
amaninblack.bsky.social
this year is and isn't special in how everything feels so hollowed-out.
The shovelling comes up short partly thanks to a lessening of this end of the industry itself. As the AAA market contracts towards a singular, exploitative point, and the wider market grows ever-reliant on a mass of vulnerable, independent developers starved of both funding and support, the servings of big games that used to fill these announcement shows grow ever thinner. But the shows are still there, and still yearn to be satisfied, so we try to replace the licensed EA games and 2K shooters of yesteryear with hundreds of indie games pitted against each other for the audience's attention and, in a trend far too on the nose for the occasion, what feels like an endless run of re-releases of yesterday's hits. The vibes also feel a little off because of what's happened to the media. Or what's left of it. E3 used to be partly about the big stage events, yeah, but it was also about the days of subsequent coverage from outlets jostling to get their hands on the latest blockbusters and interview the big names from the big games, passing along these harried impressions and juicy quotes as free marketing. As empty-calorie as that coverage was, it still contributed to the overall structure of a week like this, as well as serving as a focal point for so much of the community’s excitement. In 2025, what little media there is left in this age of layoffs, closures, sales and an advertising market collapse will play a few things here and talk to a few people there. This coverage will take the same basic shape it always has, only now in a greatly reduced form. The same goes for the Switch 2, a console that wasn’t even sent to most press ahead of time, leading to a surprising dearth of day-one coverage, where once that coverage would have been inescapable.
June 4, 2025 at 10:48 PM
amaninblack.bsky.social
noted

here is a meme for your radicalizing pleasure
an orange rock monster man is bracketed on the top and bottom by "HERE'S THE THING" and "BOTTOM TEXT" respectively
May 27, 2025 at 6:36 PM
amaninblack.bsky.social
May 20, 2025 at 1:08 AM
amaninblack.bsky.social
the main logo is based on the original games' logo, going back to 1994.
the marathon title screen, from the 1994 game
May 17, 2025 at 2:58 AM
amaninblack.bsky.social
from that ny magazine article:
The ideal of college as a place of intellectual growth, where students engage with deep, profound ideas, was gone long before ChatGPT. The combination of high costs and a winner-takes-all economy had already made it feel transactional, a means to an end. (In a recent survey, Deloitte found that just over half of college graduates believe their education was worth the tens of thousands of dollars it costs a year, compared with 76 percent of trade-school graduates.) In a way, the speed and ease with which AI proved itself able to do college-level work simply exposed the rot at the core. “How can we expect them to grasp what education means when we, as educators, haven’t begun to undo the years of cognitive and spiritual damage inflicted by a society that treats schooling as a means to a high-paying job, maybe some social status, but nothing more?” Jollimore wrote in a recent essay. “Or, worse, to see it as bearing no value at all, as if it were a kind of confidence trick, an elaborate sham?”
May 7, 2025 at 11:03 PM
amaninblack.bsky.social
March 31, 2025 at 6:02 PM
amaninblack.bsky.social
alternately alternately:
a beggar. here in ultima: quest of the avatar, but ultimately all of them
March 25, 2025 at 2:58 AM
amaninblack.bsky.social
alternately:
fuck the police in disco elysium
March 25, 2025 at 2:45 AM
amaninblack.bsky.social
oh this was all a misunderstanding, it turns out he was distributing assorted sour gummies
March 12, 2025 at 11:03 PM
amaninblack.bsky.social
John Brown, with a speech bubble pointing to the quote tweet
February 18, 2025 at 8:19 PM
amaninblack.bsky.social
the comments and quotes on this are killing me
February 4, 2025 at 10:25 PM
amaninblack.bsky.social
A screencap of the X-Men arcade game. Wolverine stands amid the ruins of a city street. A pink "MOVE ON!" and yellow arrow point to the right-hand edge of the screen.
December 30, 2024 at 7:29 PM
amaninblack.bsky.social
Batman is breaking a shotgun over his knee, in a panel from Dark Knight Returns. "THIS is the weapon of the ENEMY. We do not NEED it. We will not USE it."
December 24, 2024 at 2:50 AM
amaninblack.bsky.social
like, look at this shit. it's an incomprehensible crime against english to avoid saying "lie"

"introduced a new premise for doubting" is just some incredible prose, don't you think?
screen cap of text: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump introduced a new premise for doubting the election results in advance on Wednesday, turning routine professional revisions of government economic statistics into a baseless allegation of political manipulation. Trump portrayed revised job creation numbers the Bureau of Labor Statistics released publicly on Wednesday as an accidental disclosure. Without presenting any evidence, he accused the Biden-Harris administration of “manipulating job statistics” and trying to prevent the disclosure of the updated figures until after the election. The independent agency announced that the economy had created 818,000 fewer jobs between April 2023 and March 2024 — the biggest revision in federal jobs data since 2009. “There’s never been any revision like this,” Trump said incorrectly, during a speech here that his campaign intended to focus on national security. “They wanted it to come out after the election, but somehow it got leaked.”
December 20, 2024 at 8:10 PM
amaninblack.bsky.social
huh
two images, from final fantasy tactics and metal gear solid, respectively, of characters saying "are you such a dreamer, to put the world to rights"
December 8, 2024 at 8:56 PM
amaninblack.bsky.social
i am familiar with the concept of gulp shittos in Extended multimedia Universes but this one is so weird because the original gulp shitto was basically plagiarist and pretty contemporary! like this is not lucas ripping off wwii films and dr zhivago, this shit came out in like 1992.
the cover of hard boiled, by frank miller and geof darrow. the protagonist is holding the bizarre half-revolver, half-automatic pistol in question
December 7, 2024 at 12:49 PM
amaninblack.bsky.social
at risk of explaining the joke, rob zombie
December 7, 2024 at 2:15 AM
amaninblack.bsky.social
you need to have a word with this kid, not me
December 1, 2024 at 12:14 AM
amaninblack.bsky.social
also it has led to this
a bust with a penis sculpted onto the plinth.
November 30, 2024 at 2:16 AM
amaninblack.bsky.social
November 27, 2024 at 9:46 PM
amaninblack.bsky.social
nvm found it
November 27, 2024 at 9:46 PM