Andrew Alan Johnson

#CivGive2025 kicks off with a little preliminary stream today where your favorite @civilization.2k.com creators reveal details of our game for December 14th, while playing a game of Among Us!

Live at 12pm EST on #twitch & #YouTube

@paisley-trees.bsky.social and I will appear during one of the breaks, way into the cast (of course you should stick around for the whole thing).

Promotional poster for CivGive 2025, with a bunch of cartoon faces and the contact info: Dec 14, 10am EST, twitch.tv/thecivshow.

Each year, the #CivGame streamer community puts on a livestream for charity. As in the last few years, they've invited me to make a guest appearance and talk about history and gaming! The show will be on Sunday Dec 14, and will start at 10 EST.

www.youtube.com/@TheCivShow

The thing I’m most proud of working at Firaxis is pushing this partnership toward.

clios.com/winners-gall...

I turned it over and some sliced celery (Hemköp ekologisk, 1 bitar) came out. This is not good.

(internal laptop keyboard - Lenovo Legion, Swedish, NOT MECHANICAL - works fine).

I was moving to lean one arm over the back of my chair (gaming roller chair). I slipped, and the whole table (IKEA mass produced) wobbled, sending some soup (salt, water) and one (1) noodle into my letters (specifically cC อฮ).

Some people are thrown into existential dread from their car breaking down. Some people lose their mind if their phone dies. Me, I poured soup into my keyboard.

Shio ramen, sweet potatoes, celery.

Thai-English mechanical, lit letters.

Sometimes, Charlie Brown, dead is better.

Thanks!

I teach medical anthro! These aren’t things we talk about for the most part. Critical medical anthro would ask “why are health issues compounded by politics/economy”? Ethnomedicine we might be interested in the logics. But not saying “this is good / bad”. That question is just not interesting.

The problem is distributing free pdfs of the readings for groups of senior faculty, or for grad seminars, as if there was someone else who was buying the books, while "we" get them for free. When "we" don't buy the books, there isn't anyone else to pick up the cost of publishing them.

Autocorrect has become our worst enema.

MOUNTAINHEAD (Armstrong, 2025)

Oh. So this is what wrecked my reading group.

"All major game studios are using generative AI" the fact this is a lie aside, the ones that are using it aren't doing so willingly. It's meddling managers and CEOs with no understanding or attachment to game development forcing it on devs who end up not using anything it outputs anyway.

trust is neither given nor earned. it forms naturally between people who share the experience of having listened to Skinny Puppy at or after 3 am in the dark by themselves

At least 500,000 dead and that many more imprisoned by Soeharto though the number could be much higher. This was a genocide of right-wing militarism enabled by the US, UK, other Western powers and fostered by the political climate of the Cold War. Not a hero.

Ce qui disparaît avec un journal local : « On ne sait plus ce qui se passe » Un an après la disparition de « La Tribune républicaine », hebdomadaire fondé en 1899, les habitants de Valserhône mesurent le vide laissé par leur journal. Entre souvenirs de papier et fil d’actualit...

« On ne sait même plus qui est mort. La dernière fois, j’ai appris par hasard qu’un collègue était décédé depuis quatre mois. Avant, je l’aurais su dans La Tribune. » Quand la presse locale disparaît... larevuedesmedias.ina.fr/presse-quoti...

You have to imagine it’s delivered with a kind of awed conviction.

A screenshot from Civilization 7. The story asks: "Sailors whisper as Edward Teach passes: 'Hark ye to yon beard. What's 'e got under that, ye wot?" The choices are: "Daggers", the other replies. "A chin o' gold, says me" "Another, smaller beard"

Q: "How was writing Blackbeard for #Civ7?"
A: I got to put the below in the game.

It has seven chambers, each with its own color, and in the center a great ebony clock.

This is beautiful-looking exhibition about my favorite neighborhood in Bangkok!

Large Language Muddle | The Editors The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the ...

“And for what? A cankerous glut of racist memes and cardboard essays. Not only is the ratio of AI’s resource rapacity to its productive utility indefensibly and irremediably skewed, AI-made material is itself a waste product: flimsy, shoddy, disposable, a single-use plastic of the mind.”

It’s a good example of a very common and terrible misuse of data. It’s not active disinformation, just awful design.

Mandy Patinkin and Kathryn Grody promoting Zohran

POV you’re still not married and your grandparents just found the nicest boy with a good job they want you to meet

This quiz is terrible:

The subtext is “we cannot know from demographic or three data points someone’s political choice”

But we already knew that. And the data presented is often misleading. So stop giving uninformative surveys if they don’t predict behavior.

None of this is relevant to the NYPost story, which is a combo of “monolinguals don’t know anything about comparative kin terms” and “racists don’t know anything about non-white communities”. And, of course, “can we find a story about Mamdani that makes him not look like an absolute hero?”

In Chinese, part of this specificity has to do with patrilineality, whereas Thai society is more loose (some areas were matrilineal, whereas elite groups and official records today are patrilineal).

I don’t know how one refers to a general family friend in eg Cantonese. In Thai, there are different terms for mother’s and father’s side, and you generally use mother’s side terms for people who are not blood relations. Ta/yai, lung/pa, na, phi, nong for grandparent, auntie, young auntie, siblings.

#Auntgate is still deeply annoying. But linguistically interesting. There are some languages (esp Chinese languages) where kinship terms are very specific - mother’s older sister is different from mother’s younger sister is different from father’s sister.