cmrn knzlmn 🎯 PAX U

We ARE the Weeping Gorilla.

SHELVED BY GENRE travels to the very cusp of imaginative possibility today in our Alan Moore unit, covering part one of PROMETHEA, a Y2K fable about art, history, and magic that also introduces one of the greatest characters in comics history: rangedtouch.com/2025/11/21/p...

Catch me at PAX U this weekend!

You know I gotta say it…go birds

we talked about the comic book that is about one guy thinking about another guy who wrote some stuff that ruined the world

I login to that platform about once a month to check messages and every time my “for you” page is absolutely drowned in right wing culture war slop and moral panics from the most fringe voices on earth. While thing is cooked to a degree that’s impossible to really think through.

say what

going to the paint and take at PAX Unplugged and spending four and a half hours putting nonmetallic metal on a goblin

Heads up that CMRN will be at PAX U this weekend at SATURDAY at 5:00PM there will be an impromptu Ranged Touch meetup there. He will post the location at 4:30PM that day here on bsky over at @ckunzelman.bsky.social

shelved by genre is a good podcast

Zork now has an open source license, so someone can finally fix all the cases where the game describes a thing but the parser doesn’t recognize what the player means when you use the same description right back: opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2025/11...

A tower over top of an arched bridge

A castle-like tower with lots of windows

A castle gate with trees on either side

A town square made up of buildings touching each other with a building with an arch going through it at the end

I've added about 50 new images + variations to my public domain art pack.

This set of images are all edits of the work of Johann Wagner and are mostly castles, ruins, and a few other structures like arches, bridges and towns.

seedling.itch.io/modified-pub...

Coming soon: Realis A new tabletop roleplaying game by Austin Walker

Surprise, we're getting pretty close to the final version of REALIS!

ICYMI: I've been making a TTRPG about mystical moons and living spaceships and sentences that can kill you. A preview is available now (see my pinned post), but the full version draws near!

www.kickstarter.com/projects/cru...

this is why I’m saying it has to be mediated by other people talking about this stuff as “cutscenes” — it’s rare to get a document that implies what the discourse was at the time so clearly

This thing took so much work, from so many people - RPGs have so many little working parts, and we did so much to try to make this world feel alive. The team is just vibrating right now, seeing how this all goes, but for now it's great to just have it out there, in people's hands.

I think your point still stands but I thought it was pretty interesting!

I went looking because I honestly had no idea and an interesting thing is that Rouse was calling those parts of the games cutscenes before the game was even out (which implies to me that it was being mediated by the press or other devs as cutscenes) dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1...

gotta bring this back for ezra klein proceduralist types en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_D...

do what now

psst, no one is struggling with this - we are trying to create singular things that resonate with a huge audience or resonate hugely with a specific audience. We "struggle" with how tech and VC funding has broken almost every creative economy we have. So thanks but no thanks

Tier list updated.

I read ALL OF THEM and you’re right. Well there’s one cool idea but overall they’re not good.

I regret reading all those issues of Stormwatch.

I had a great time talking about The Authority with the guys! An influential, smooth ride.

Coming soon: Realis A new tabletop roleplaying game by Austin Walker

Realis is coming sooner than you think! Sign up to be notified at launch when the print edition of @austinwalker.bsky.social's TTRPG goes live in 2026, and start bracing yourself for all the additional art, player options, and GM resources being added to the game: www.kickstarter.com/projects/cru...

Massive Leak Shows Erotic Chatbot Users Turned Women’s Yearbook Pictures Into AI Porn Chatbot roleplay and image generator platform SecretDesires.ai left cloud storage containers of nearly two million of images and videos exposed, including photos and full names of women from social me...

This is a nuts story. An AI chatbot and image platform left millions of images exposed. They show what people are actually using the AI for: taking random women's yearbook, graduation, and social media photos and making super realistic hardcore porn with them
www.404media.co/ai-porn-secr...

I’ve had several conversations recently about fully withdrawing my labor from non-university press academic publishers and I think I will complete that process in 2026.

This is the importance of buying the books we write and teach from university presses. The same administrations that don’t care about the humanities would be just as happy to have academic publishing handled by these companies. We can save our own publishing ecosystem- but we have to do it.

had to cancel a vacation last week due to illness and shutdown concerns, so started a vacation about murders and precursor civilizations courtesy of @ckunzelman.bsky.social instead

lots of great thinking in here, particularly re: conspiracy as a mode of franchise engagement

📣 TT job at UGA: Assistant Professor of Film Studies www.ugajobsearch.com/postings/458...