Tom Apperley

#alysaliu
WOKE IS BACK BABY
MAKE OAKLAND CALIFORNIA THE US CAPITOL NOW!

Page 1 of a child’s handwritten letter, written in pencil in Spanish. Colorful doodles of a rainbow and hearts are found throughout the page. Translation: “I am Maria Antonia Guerra Montoya and I have been 113 days in detention I miss my friends and I feel they are going to forget me. I am bored here. I already miss my country and my house, I came on vacation for 10 Days and they took me into an ice office an officer interrogated me 2 hours without my mom, I was traveling with flight attendant because my mom lives in new york, they only wanted to arrest my mom, because my mom didn’t have documents to live in U.S.A., I always traveled with my tourist visa but ice used me to catch my mom and now I am in a jail and I am sad and I have fainted 2 times here inside. When I arrived every night I cried and now I don’t sleep well, I felt that being here was my fault and I only wanted to be on vacation like a normal family.”

Page 2 of a child’s handwritten letter, written in pencil in Spanish. Translation: “They don’t give me my diet I am vegetarian, I don’t eat well, there is no good education and I miss my best friend julieta and my grandmother and my school I already want to get to my house. Me in dilei [Dilley] am not happy please get me out of here to colombia.” Below the text is a drawing of the girl and her mother in the government-issued gray sweatsuits of the detention center.

6/ “When I arrived every night I cried and now I don’t sleep well, I felt that being here was my fault and I only wanted to be on vacation like a normal family.”

9-year-old Maria Antonia Guerra Montoya, detained on her way to Disney World, spent 113+ days at Dilley.

These are documented
massacres of First Nations
people between 1788-1930

Happy Australia Day

JustDance* has a fascinating metaphorical role in the narrative conclusion of the film "She Rides Shotgun" (Rowland 2025).

collider.com/taron-egerto...

*this interview reports that its 'tiktok' which does not seen right at all

New Zealand Trading Company - AudioCulture The New Zealand Trading Company album was released in the US in 1970, but only a few copies made it to New Zealand. On the back of the album the musicians stand beside the Mississippi River, resplende...

New Zealand Trading Company: www.audioculture.co.nz/profile/new-...

A part of Aotearoa's music history I had missed until now.

Previously known as the Maori Hi-Quins, they recorded an album in Memphis in 1970 and had a US tour before splitting up.

As record numbers leave New Zealand, why are most people choosing Australia? A weak economy is pushing more New Zealanders across the ‘ditch’ in hope of a better life – and higher wages

Sharing this in case people are confused about why a New Zealander is not living in New Zealand.
www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

Introduce yourself with five concerts you've seen:

*Red Hot Chilli Peppers ´92
*The Lemonheads '93
*African Head Charge '94
*Beastie Boys '95
*Ben Harper ´96

DiGRA 2026 Conference | Maynooth University, Ireland Join the DiGRA 2026 conference at Maynooth University, 14–18 June 2026. Theme “Intersectional Pleasures.” A global hybrid event for game research, culture, design, and industry.

DiGRA deadline extended until 8th December for abstracts and full papers.

www.digraconference2026.com

Darshana Jayemanne and my 2012 article "Game Studies Material Turn" from Westminster Papers In Communication just hit 200 citations on google scholar

www.westminsterpapers.org/article/id/1...

#gamestudies

Tiresome "liberal" Bill Maher licks chocolate off artist Karen Finley in this July '99 feature in Playboy.

📞🎮 Sidetalking: Nokia’s playful design gone sideways

Heikki Jungman, @t0mm7.bsky.social, Niklas Nylund & @sotamaa.bsky.social revisit the N-Gage’s sideways-calling feature.
💡 The article shows how cultural misalignment, not tech flaws, doomed it.

🔗 journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

💡Sidetalking reveals how technological “failure” exposes the fragile negotiations between design intent, user practice, and cultural meaning. What counts as "Innovation" or "failure" depends on negotiations over time between designers, organizations, and publics.

🔄 (Back to the article) Sidetalking exposes how design, culture, and use are interdependent and negotiated through discourse, identity, and everyday practice.

More contemporary narratives are calling the NGage “ahead of its time.” And framing sidetalking as a "making do" design innovation.

(Quick aside) Nokia is based in Tampere, and local sensibilities dictated that my research on 'booth babes' be presented behind a curtain at the exhibition.

Example below:

🇫🇮 In Finland (home of Nokia) , sidetalking became a question of national identity as much as design. Local media balanced confusion with loyalty, reflecting how domestication operates not only in households but within national imaginaries of technological success.

😂 Users made sense of the design through ridicule and parody—posting memes of bananas, alarm clocks, and consoles.

🗣️ Widely ridiculed as a technological misstep. Our analysis of contemporary Finnish media indicates that this stemmed from a lack of communication. Nokia never explained sidetalking’s purpose; without a story, consumers filled the gap with ridicule.

🏗️ Marketers wanted the sideways hold for distinctiveness and branding, overriding practicalities and problems engineers anticipated, revealing how internal hierarchies within organizations can shape technology.

🎮 Sidetalking symbolized the ambition for Nokia to shift from phones to a “convergent multimedia” paradigm, where phones were both media devices and symbols of youth 'cool' identity. Nokia’s first big attempt to redefine the mobile as a multimedia device.

🧩 Nokia’s designers worked with strong assumptions about the cool, tech-savvy youth they believed would use it, and embedded these assumptions into the phone’s form—showing how design encodes social imaginaries.

📱 Sidetalking was a deliberate design choice, not an accident.
Our archival/curatorial research demonstrates that Nokia engineered sidetalking to appeal to, and embody a playful, youth-oriented identity.

A Fantastic Failure - Tekniikan museo The exhibition “A Fantastic Failure” tells a story about failure that sowed the seeds of the next success. Even though the N-Gage crashed and burned, it helped to build the foundation for the later su...

The article emerged from the exhibition 'A Fantastic Failure' (Fanhtastinen Floppi - in Finnish), which was exhibited at Museokeskus Vapriikki from October 2023 to December 2024, and is now at Tekniikan Museo/Museum of Technology in Helsinki (until 8.11.25):

www.tekniikanmuseo.fi/en/exhibitio...

Co authored with my @coegamecult.bsky.social college @sotamaa.bsky.social and two curators from The Finnish Museum of Games at Museoskus Vapriikki in Tampere: Heikki Jungman and Dr Niklas Nylund.

New #openaccess article in @mobilemediacomm.bsky.social

"Sidetalking: Domesticating Nokia's playful designed identity"

On the Nokia mobile gaming platform: the Nokia NGage, released 2003.

A THREAD.

Download: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

#gamestudies #platformstudies

DiGRA 2026 Conference | Maynooth University Join the DiGRA 2026 conference at Maynooth University, 14–18 June 2026. Theme “Intersectional Pleasures.” A global hybrid event for game research, culture, design, and industry.

The CFP for DiGRA 2026 is now live! 🎉
www.digraconference2026.com
Submissions (papers & abstracts) are open until 1 Dec 2025.

ping @perulainen.bsky.social ht @nicklalone.com

How many Tamperes you got?

@sturrock.bsky.social @doktornick.bsky.social @charstevens.bsky.social 2/2

UK Gamescenes Symposium will take place in Tampere/Hybrid on 16th September. Program and details for joining are attached. 1/2

Features work from skypeeps @digdems.bsky.social @nitessine.bsky.social @merilainen.bsky.social @rosgakori.bsky.social @vkankainen.bsky.social

Fuckin' legend!