Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Emilia (halloween name) @lazerwalker.com · 2h

I love this because it does absolutely nothing to explain to newcomers what GDC (or the "festival of gaming") is or why they should attend, while also deeply alienating anyone who has gone in the past who just wants a professional conference for networking.

Game Developers Conference @officialgdc.bsky.social · 4h

🎮 PIXELS → POWER-UPS → PURE MAGIC ✨
Next week changes everything.
GDC Festival of Gaming 2026 registration launches!

2 2 26

Emilia (halloween name) @lazerwalker.com · 3h

Even more than the US election, this mental shift from “we’re all in this together” to “you do you (and
also you must be making it up)” feels like the biggest right-wing philosophical victory of the 2020s so far.

1 5

Emilia (halloween name) @lazerwalker.com · 3h

(I suppose we also use physics sims to make Steam games, but those are clusters of genres that are *about* playful exploration of physics systems, where genAI-augmented game dev is typically about cost savings instead of creating a sandbox playground to explore ideas of linguistics or cognition)

1

Emilia (halloween name) @lazerwalker.com · 4h

This is aligned with how I’m starting to view LLMs.

It’s also trivially true that we do not use complex physics simulations for daily tasks “in the field”, they are specialized tools used by academics and experts for planning and design tasks, several steps removed from tangible application.

ellie lockhart (she/they) @eleanor.lockhart.contact · 1d

in a lot of ways it would be more informative to demystify LLMs by presenting them as higher-dimensional physics simulations. I don't think people had trouble understanding that we were able to make real physics discoveries by simulating particle physics; LLMs are that, but with language

1 8

Emilia (halloween name) @lazerwalker.com · 18h

hell yeah!!

1 4

Emilia (halloween name) @lazerwalker.com · 20h

I have unpaired my keyboard, and will need to re-pair it when/if I need to use it in my phone again, which is… not how a phone OS in 2025 should behave.

7

Emilia (halloween name) @lazerwalker.com · 20h

okay, I finally hit my “oh fuck can I downgrade from iOS 26” moment. It seems to have killed the ability to show the on-screen keyboard if you have a BT keyboard attached, which is miserable if you have a ZMK board passively connected but transmitting to a different device. (It worked fine on 18!!)

1 7

Reposted by Emilia (halloween name)

Jack de Quidt @notquitereal.bsky.social · 1d

there are four key texts as far as i'm concerned and they are The Sims, Dwarf Fortress, Caves of Qud, and Crusader Kings 3. lots of other seminal games out there but you play those four and you've unlocked the magical door

Sex on The App Store 🔞 @bucklerparry.bsky.social · 1d

caves of qud is probably the best game ever idk, it's just the best one

5 25 250

Emilia (halloween name) @lazerwalker.com · 22h

It is obviously a *very* different game from Disco Elysium in nearly every regard, but strikes me as similar in this precise way

2

Emilia (halloween name) @lazerwalker.com · 22h

For the two he did not sign, were those active vetoes, or merely “not today”? i.e. how much value is there in continuing to put pressure on?

1 1

Reposted by Emilia (halloween name)

Prisonculture @prisonculture.bsky.social · 1d

I thought this was lovely.

"A few years ago I received a DM from Zohran Kwame Mamdani. Only recently did I discover its existence. It was a very unusual DM—especially coming from a local assemblyman who would soon be running for higher office. He had very little name recognition at the time, and could have benefited from publicity. But unlike the thousands of messages I’ve received from people with something to promote, Zohran did not ask to be featured on Humans of New York. Instead he asked if he could introduce me to taxi drivers that were struggling beneath the burden of debt. Coming from a man with political ambitions, this self-denying request was so strange as to be almost singular. I don’t endorse politicians on Humans of New York. But I’ll endorse a good man. And it was a good man who cleared 30 minutes from his schedule yesterday to swing by Grand Central and visit Dear New York’s Vanderbilt Hall Exhibition. Nearly fifty-student artists were visiting that day with their families, and I thought a surprise visit from this widely-loved future mayor would be a special memory for all of them. Before Zohran’s arrival I was convinced I’d made a terrible mistake. The exhibit was filled to capacity with adult visitors. Dear New York is self-funded so there was very little staff and security for crowd control. In the crush of people I was almost certain this special day for the kids would devolve into thirty minutes of selfie requests. But everyone rose to the occasion."

black text on white background

"Hundreds of adults quickly cleared the room and stood outside the exhibit. Eleven very notable adult photographers are also featured in the show, but even they took a step back, so that these students could briefly have the stage to themselves. Each child stood by their work and Zohran was able to meet all of them, one at a time, and honor their contributions to the most-visited art show in New York City. Thanks to everyone who ceded the stage yesterday to make this moment possible. Thank you Zohran for literally sitting down on the floor so that these young artists could feel so tall. Thanks for continually centering other people in your life and work. And thank you, for being such an important part of Dear New York."

A large group of children and adults pose together indoors in front of a sign reading "DEAR." A man in a suit sits cross-legged in front, surrounded by smiling kids. The background features an ornate architectural detail.

22 510 2K

Emilia (halloween name) @lazerwalker.com · 1d

If you are neurodivergent, you (like me) may struggle with forms of meditation or mindfulness that center open awareness as opposed to focused attention.

For the latter, I've been really appreciating this guided meditation focused on your morning beverage.

web.plumvillage.app/item/coffee-...

Coffee or Tea Meditation

This short meditation is part of a set of contemplations and guided meditations to help you cultivate more awareness while eating. This time, Brother Phap Li...

web.plumvillage.app

1 3

Reposted by Emilia (halloween name)

tef @tef.bsky.social · 1d

it's kinda weird that all the software i am expected to use for work are all written by distributed teams, go, python, postgres, linux, chrome, k8s etc

and despite being told "the best teams work in an office together" i don't know of any software i use that's actually written that way

20 270 1.1K

Emilia (halloween name) @lazerwalker.com · 1d

(Not having read The Hero With A Thousand Faces myself, I imagine this is most likely more a critique of how creative industries use Campbell rather than of his actual work!)

1 4

Emilia (halloween name) @lazerwalker.com · 1d

The Hero’s Journey is an explicit attempt (per Campbell’s study of Jung) to consciously tap into structures and archetypes from the collective unconscious.

What’s funny is Jung would frame that as ego-inflation, a lack of trust in subconscious to understand implicit structure better than ego.

Mary Robinette Kowal @maryrobinettekowal.com · 1d

My hot take is that none of these are structure. These are all recipes that describe structure.

Structure is the Salt, Fat, Acid Heat of writing.

3-Act/Hero's Journey etc are recipes.

You can make great meals without using a recipe if you understand the principles of structure.

Mx. D. D. Ward (they/them) @ddwardiswriting.bsky.social · 2d

So #WritingCommunity how do we feel about structure?

Do you use the 3 act structure? The 5 act?

Hero's Journey? Save the Cat? Super Structure Method? Story Genius Method?

Something else?

What have you got?

1 10

Reposted by Emilia (halloween name)

Alex Blechman @alexblechman.bsky.social · Sep 3

The Coca-Cola Freestyle machine is an echo chamber. Good luck finding nuanced debates about hot button issues on that touch screen. It’s just soda names and flavored syrups

26 610 3.2K

Reposted by Emilia (halloween name)

danielle taphanel @treelet.bsky.social · Aug 15

Anger is a poison, and like many poisons, it can also be made into medicine.

A digital pencil drawing of a face obscured by smoke and fire. A snake with its fangs bared and several red blooms surround the image of the person.

6 110 370

Emilia (halloween name) @lazerwalker.com · 2d

If you sign up for AI-powered fleet management services and want to cancel your contract, I wonder how easy it is to escape Samsara

1 3

Reposted by Emilia (halloween name)

Elise Wang @elisewang.bsky.social · 2d

For those not fluent in Catholic: refusing the Monstrance is not denying prisoners the Eucharist, it is refusing Christ himself, since Christ is present in the Monstrance.

If Portland’s blow up animals are the right language for Portland, this is the right language for Chicago.

Rich Raho @richraho.bsky.social · 3d

Chicago priest Fr. Larry Dowling describes procession to ICE facility: “No one had the courage to speak directly to us. No one from Homeland Security could stand in the presence of the Monstrance holding the Blessed Sacrament. No wonder. Evil is repelled, recoils in the presence of Christ.”

30 720 2.5K

Reposted by Emilia (halloween name)

jason grinblat @jfg.land · 2d

I've called the process of designing a system from an inspiration set "story interpolation" (middling term, admittedly). I love to use this slide from a talk Tarn gave at Northwestern's Progression Mechanics to illustrate the concept

A slide from Tarn Adam's talk at Northwestern's Progression Mechanics, giving a systemic diagram to the sentence "A flock of sparrows landed and ate most of the pill bugs, but one managed to survive to lay some eggs."

4 12 57

Emilia (halloween name) @lazerwalker.com · 2d

going forward I will be describing all videogames as being "played entirely in cyberspace"

A screenshot of Wikipedia.

Batoo is a Korean variant of the board game Go. The name stems from a combination of the Korean words baduk ("Go") and juntoo ("battle"). It is played entirely in cyberspace, and differs from Go in a number of ways, most noticeably in
the way in which certain areas of the board are worth different point values.

1 12

Emilia (halloween name) @lazerwalker.com · 2d

(I’ll be curious to see how much of a misinterpretation of her idea of “infrastructure” that is, but it does strike me as there being a recursive property to “informal play patterns layered on top of the base rules producing more ways for players to express a unique voice”)

1

Emilia (halloween name) @lazerwalker.com · 2d

I love this! Excited to dig into the Mattern piece.

What I’m describing feels akin to friend groups playing the same game over time and developing a meta or shared context beyond “the game’s rules enacted”. Wheel ruts organically formed over time as an extension of formal dirt road infrastructure.

1 1

Reposted by Emilia (halloween name)

rahaeli @rahaeli.bsky.social · 2d

This is a really, really good act of protest that uses a protest language that has a chance of reaching people who would otherwise dismiss the issue. You can tell by how many former Catholics are seeing it here and having like entire full-body shudders despite having left the church decades ago.

11 100 1.2K

Emilia (halloween name) @lazerwalker.com · 3d

A Polar H10 chest strap and the Elite HRV app

2