Cosmic Microwave Backgammon

Senior Curator @critdistance, previously EIC @FPSWeekly, bylines @ places. PhD candidate UW. Privileged AF, Nonbinary Xジェンダー Padawan queerdo. They/them.

[Cosmic Microwave Backgammon @QuipsLawrence]

Trans rights pin tweet

[Cosmic Microwave Backgammon @QuipsLawrence]

You have no fucking idea how angry it makes me to see the ZA/UM devs take regular beatings in the press from outlets who SHOULD KNOW BETTER, all to prop up the mythos around a trio of entitled assholes.

[Cosmic Microwave Backgammon @QuipsLawrence]

Bad take. Also, kindly get off your favourite tortured auteur's dick long enough to remember actual worker solidarity, or is that too much for you guys these days

[The Mary Sue @TheMarySue]

If you’re at all interested in the video game Disco Elysium, you’ve probably seen a whole lot of homoerotic fanart lately surrounding the game’s two protagonists, Harry Du Bois and Kim Kitsuragi.

https://t.co/EI1UOUwv2x

[Cosmic Microwave Backgammon @QuipsLawrence]

It's not a noble sacrifice that I'm not playing the Wizard Game. It's not a thing I'm Giving Up; it's just impossible for me to see any joy in it amidst its circumstances. I don't understand the view that people play it to escape when just reading about it reminds me of cruelty.

[Cosmic Microwave Backgammon @QuipsLawrence]

Watching the back-and-forth between Activision, Microsoft, Sony, and Several Governments is sort of like watching glaciers argue.

[Cosmic Microwave Backgammon @QuipsLawrence]

i think by the time you're the CEO of Activision or whatever you're not really a sentient individual anymore. you're more like a vestigial lump of flesh at the bow of a great lumbering machine, and your entire being is bent to its purpose. i feel similarly about Mitch McConnell

[Cosmic Microwave Backgammon @QuipsLawrence]

i genuinely do not recognize beings this wealthy/powerful as still being human
https://t.co/VxIPTgY4Hx

[Cosmic Microwave Backgammon @QuipsLawrence]

i think this is the most formally immaculate video game review i have ever seen

[Cosmic Microwave Backgammon @QuipsLawrence]

IGN publishing a laughable utilitarian excuse for not putting criticism in conversation with context and Troy Baker rebloging nonsense devaluations of criticism as a whole because people on the internet were mean about TLOU 2 are different facets of the same problem.

[Cosmic Microwave Backgammon @QuipsLawrence]

maybe it's a spell

[Cosmic Microwave Backgammon @QuipsLawrence]

When I think of who would write a good trans character, I definitely think of a team who (checks notes) put their hands in their pockets and just mumble the word "diversity" over and over every time they're given a direct line of questioning about JK Rowling

[Cosmic Microwave Backgammon @QuipsLawrence]

I think it's a compound tragedy that we're all wringing our hands about thinly veiled and incurious marketing copy a few weeks after a whole lot of more thoughtful writers across culture writing were laid off

[Cosmic Microwave Backgammon @QuipsLawrence]

@DigiFantastic Every time I make a pop culture reference to my students I feel it's even money whether one of them finally does the right thing, stands up and shows me the decrepit portrait I keep locked away which bears a mark for every joke I've ever made that didn't land.

[Cosmic Microwave Backgammon @QuipsLawrence]

Dan Stapleton's remarks a week ago articulating a narrow view of reviews as informing a consumption/purchasing decision make perfect sense given a readership that buys wholly into the fantasy of reviews as an objective genre above the untidy edges of the lives impacted by media

[Cosmic Microwave Backgammon @QuipsLawrence]

I do wonder what's the point in IGN making even a half-hearted attempt to situate a game review in context when the comments below said review are two steps past "I want to separate art and artist" and fully into "I support the art *because* of the artist and her vile politics"

[Cosmic Microwave Backgammon @QuipsLawrence]

@juno_stump i think there's a subset of unhappy men who just very generally resent the suggestion that with time, care, and discipline, they could become someone they themselves like more than the person they are right now

[Cosmic Microwave Backgammon @QuipsLawrence]

Maybe she was always this way, maybe she just got old and rich and paranoid. It matters little. What matters is that she no longer recognizes, if she ever did, her own culpability in the prejudicial hatred she once dimly understood was a thing to be resisted.

[Cosmic Microwave Backgammon @QuipsLawrence]

For all of the problems with JKR's books, Fascism was still the villain. It was a deeply flawed, white establishment liberal's idea of fascism, but fascism nonetheless. Her refusal to recognize even that pale shade of fascism in her contemporary practice is genuinely tragic.

[Cosmic Microwave Backgammon @QuipsLawrence]

I want to articulate very clearly that this is not a recupration of the books. If magic were real and Voldemort rode into town today, JKR would carry on entirely undisturbed in her cozy Ministry post. She would pivot from pushing papers to processing people with an empty shrug.