Paul Roquet

Just to be blunt, if you want Wired and 404 and The Verge to employ reporters who understand the memes on bullet casings and can connect them to gaming culture while having the legal and support resources to deal with waves of harassment when we do it… you have to subscribe and pay for the work

Conversely, if you taught classes approaching AR/VR critically, that learning is just as relevant today ; )

Meta suppressed research on child safety, employees say The company’s lawyers intervened to shape research that might have shed light on risks in virtual reality, four current and former staffers have told Congress. Meta denies the allegations.

A German teen told Meta's child safety researchers his under-10 little brother had been sexually propositioned multiple times on its VR platform.

Meta deleted the evidence.

New internal whistleblower docs indicate that was part of a broader cover-up: www.washingtonpost.com/investigatio...

Shocked, shocked, I tell you

2 weeks left on this (no idea why I put the deadline on a weekend)

YouTube video by BiennaleChannel Venice Immersive 2025 - If You See A Cat

Someone at Kodansha keeps inviting art animators to make VR films and it's great (newest one is a Wada Atsushi critique of mental health care in Japan/defense of imaginary cats)

Campaign train poster

Tokyo Metro doing an escape room tie-in for Exit 8 is a little on the nose, but why not I guess

MIT tool visualizes and edits “physically impossible” objects The “Meschers” tool from MIT CSAIL represents “physically impossible” objects commonly found in M.C. Escher’s illustrations by converting both images and 3D models in 2.5-dimensional objects. The tool...

The real 2.5D

Poster for SANITORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS (Quay Brothers, 2024)

A movie made of dust and mold (complimentary)

"Big tech’s deployment of AI has been both relentless and methodical, the study finds. By inserting AI features onto the top of messaging apps and social media, where it’s all but unignorable, by deploying pop-ups and unsubtle design tricks to direct users to AI on the interface, or by pushing prompts to use AI outright, AI is being imposed on billions of users, rather than eagerly adopted." From https://open.substack.com/pub/bloodinthemachine/p/how-big-tech-is-force-feeding-us

I wonder if one legacy of the VR/metaverse etc. hype cycle is companies have given up hoping people will *voluntarily* adopt new tech

(excerpt from @bcmerchant.bsky.social newsletter)

All I can think about is all the AI startups working as we speak to essentially ruin Reddit on behalf of the advertising industry x.com/SavannahFede...

Cindi Textor's wonderful _Intersectional Incoherence: Zainichi Literature and the Ethics of Illegibility_ is available for free download. With chapters on Yi Kwangsu, Kim Saryang, Kim Sokpong, Yi Yangji, Yu Miri and others.

Why has Japan set up a task force to deal with foreigners? | CNN Japan has worked hard to attract foreigners to boost its sluggish economy but now the perception there are too many has prompted the creation of a new task force, as competition for votes heats up ahe...

I spoke to CNN about Japan's new Office for the Promotion of a Society of Harmonious Coexistence with Foreign Nationals and also the rise of Sanseito: "Why has Japan set up a task force to deal with foreigners?"
edition.cnn.com/2025/07/17/a...

Building on the great papers from our Global Mediations workshop this past April, we're launching a CFP for additional contributions to an anthology on the global contestation of computational imaging. Details below; proposals due 9/13

Building on the great papers from our Global Mediations workshop this past April, we're launching a CFP for additional contributions to an anthology on the global contestation of computational imaging. Details below; proposals due 9/13

An open letter of resignation from myself and many other book series editors at Amsterdam University Press, following its recent acquisition by the notoriously exploitative academic publishing conglomerate Taylor & Francis.

My sense is GPS *does* have something to do with AI, but in the sense of training people to do what a computer tells them to do rather than trust what they see in front of them. Technologies against situational awareness

This is a laundry list of rhetorical strategies to defend the adoption of a given technology for the purposes of advancing an ideology & economic regime: inevitability, unquestioning praise of “innovation,” buy-in from concerned stakeholders, assurances that partnership is not capitulation. 1/n

Conversely, I really appreciated the interviews in the book noting how an album someone might only ever play once can still be incredibly important to them. Made me realize at some point I had internalized the idea of replay value as some kind of inherent good. But good for who?

Finished @lizpelly.bsky.social’s fantastic MOOD MACHINE. The part on the re-muzakification of ambient really tracks with frustrations I’ve heard from musicians lately. If you only go online, it’s as if the history of ambient music has been rewritten to foreground more background-friendly styles

(to clarify, incomprehensible as in some drivers get very confused, not why they're there in the first place)

Rotaries are great when they work as intended. The real problem with these is they are operating at like 5x the traffic they were designed for

"If you literally just yielded there until there was a gap, you might be sitting at the roundabout for two hours," said Bauchwitz, who studies the self-driving car industry. "Just go out to Fresh Pond and drive around there, and you'll see what I mean." From https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/07/01/business/waymo-self-driving-boston-drivers/

Will be circling the incomprehensible rotaries with newfound respect now that I know they can keep out self-driving cars

I mean I get it but also, yeah. Somehow this reminded me of Werner Herzog’s flex about his low shooting ratio, so I googled it and… of course someone has shared it on LinkedIn as ‘lean working’ inspiration🤦🏻‍♂️

Working here in a more neutral sense of being at work all day, but I sense her book (a big bestseller in Japan last year) was mainly aimed at office workers under pressure to advance their careers but who felt guilty about not reading as much—so closer to your latter group?

Posted about this before but this is basically Miyake Kaho’s argument about why working people stop reading novels—if you’re trained to skim for action items/takeaways then all that other novely stuff just becomes inefficient noise

a, Institutions and nations that have produced the most CVPR papers with downstream surveillance-enabling patents. For each institution or nation, most patented papers have been used in surveillance-enabling patents. b, Percentage of patented papers used in surveillance-enabling patents, stratified by institution, nation and subfield. For each institution, nation or subfield that has published at least ten papers with downstream patents, we show the percentage of these papers that have been used in surveillance-enabling patents (vertical grey bars) (n = 13,804, n = 18,272 and n = 19,413, respectively). We found a pervasive norm: if an institution, nation or subfield authors papers with downstream patents, most are used in surveillance-enabling patents. (Vertical grey bars are frequently above the 50% threshold; orange line). Whiskers represent the standard deviation.

We also looked at institutions & nations that are producing the most surveillance.
Top inst:
1.MSFT
2.CMU
3.MIT
4.Chinese Univ of Hong Kong

Top nations:
1.USA
2.China
3.UK

If an institution, nation or subfield authors papers with downstream patents, most are used in surveillance patents.

6/

Don’t sleepwalk from computer-vision research into surveillance The output of computer-vision research is overwhelmingly aimed towards monitoring humans. The potential ethical implications need more scrutiny.

The output of computer-vision research is overwhelmingly aimed towards monitoring humans

https://go.nature.com/45HQI4f

Creative writing assistant prof. position in our department now taking applications - fiction of any or many sorts! cmsw.mit.edu/applications...

Signs to police 'negative' history went up at Manzanar. Historians are nervous. "It sends a pretty clear message that your story is not welcome here."

The regime has posted signs at Manzanar, the WWII concentration camp for Japanese Americans, asking visitors to report "negative" historical interpretations. Hard to imagine a positive interpretation but it's probably just an excuse to shut down the park.

www.sfgate.com/california-p...