Edwin Evans-Thirlwell

If you work at Microsoft and are participating in No Azure for Apartheid, I'd love to interview you as an anonymous source. My email is in my bio: www.rockpapershotgun.com/authors/edwin-evans-thirlwell

Thank you!

We need to reclaim software's wishing well from the cruelty of generative AI A personal essay on the poetics and psychology of generative AI "companions" such as ChatGPT and Copilot.

I wrote about Big GenAI and the scaresome poetics of generators, in what is also a "show of human disparity and ugliness straining against smooth synthesis". www.rockpapershotgun.com/we-need-to-r...

metal & flesh

British? (ew) follow this one easy trick to access the sexual horny robot cum games of metal + flesh metalflesh.neocities.org

The Sunday Papers The Sunday Papers is our weekly roundup of great writing about (mostly) videogames from across the web.

We're finally getting rid of the miserable old bastard, with his funny ideas about "not preordering" and being "honest about your feelings". www.rockpapershotgun.com/the-sunday-p...

Your Guide on How to Support Mutual Aid Groups in Palestine as Humanitarian Crisis Deepens As we speak, up to two million people in Gaza are being threatened with starvation, as the state of Israel, backed by the US government, continues to blockade humanitarian aid into Gaza, attack basic ...

Two million people are being threatened with forced starvation in #Palestine, as the US government continues to support ongoing ethnic-cleansing.

We've created a list of on-the-ground mutual aid groups in #Gaza that you can support, amplify, and follow. itsgoingdown.org/your-guide-o...

Major Indie Marketplace Itch.io Shadowbans NSFW Content, Trans Authors Impacted A dangerous escalation against free speech and literary preservation from a longtime haven for transfeminine literature.

🚨🚨🚨 BREAKING: In a dangerous evening escalation of the anti-porn war on the gaming industry, indie platform @itch.io has banned a number of NSFW titles and delisted thousands of others.

Trans authors are caught in the crossfire.

MasterCard, Visa, and anti-porn group Collective Shout drove the ban.

MAYOR OF LONDON The absolutely harrowing scenes of suffering in Gaza are being made worse by the day, with no sign of the crisis abating. Starving children searching hopelessly for food in the rubble. Family members shot dead by Israeli soldiers as they search for aid. In heartbreaking scenes, innocent lives are being torn apart before the eyes of the world. The international community - including our own government - must do far more to pressure the Israeli government to stop this horrific, senseless killing and let vital life-saving aid in. Nothing justifies the actions of the Israeli government. The UK must immediately recognise Palestinian statehood. There can be no two state solution if there is no viable state left to call Palestine. Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan

London mayor Sadiq Khan, one of the most powerful Labour politicians in the country, has called on the UK government to immediately recognise the Palestinian state.

VICE 404 page. "Not Found: We're sorry, the page you're looking for could not be found. Please use your browser's 'Back' button or use one of the navigation links on this page."

VICE's owner Savage Ventures has requested the removal of my Collective Shout articles. This is due to concerns about the controversial subject matter—not journalistic complaints

Effective immediately, I will no longer contribute to Waypoint. I suggest letting VICE's owner know if this upsets you

Killing Our Gods: Essays on Religion, Christianity, and Video Games - ebook by graceinthemachine criticism and rambling on digital media and its divine discontents.

Hi! you can buy the ebook for Killing Our Gods on itch RIGHT NOW. It's a collection of essays on Christianity, religion, and video games! @dialacina.com wrote a introduction for it! It's good!
graceinthemachine.itch.io/killing-our-...

The Media's Pivot to AI Is Not Real and Not Going to Work AI is not going to save media companies, and forcing journalists to use AI is not a business model.

"Betting that this time, hinging the future of our industry on massive, monopolistic tech giants will work out is the most Lucy with the football thing I can imagine." www.404media.co/the-medias-p...

Thanks for being our lighthouse, Graham - you are both a brilliant editor/writer and the keeper of an important critical tradition in RPS specifically. I would quite like to download your brain, if at all possible

After 12 years, I'm leaving RPS at the end of this month. This also brings to an end 8 years with Gamer Network, during which I was lucky enough to manage several websites, help with events like EGX, PAX and MCM under ReedPop, and more. Now it's time for someone else to lead RPS in a new phase.

Subscribe - Unwinnable Monthly subscriptions are $5. Annual subscriptions are $55. Subscriptions rebill automatically unless cancelled. Exploits comes out on or about the 1st of the month. Unwinnable comes out on or about t...

There's a lot of talk about online publishing dying, as if it was an external thing outside our control.

But really, we get the internet we work for. I want an internet with Unwinnable on it, and it will be here as long as I am.

What do you want?

You can subscribe here: unwinnable.com/subscribe/

Petition: Legally enshrine the right of adults to physically transition using NHS services Introduce a law to legally protect the right of those aged 18 and over to transition using NHS services. This should specifically cover physical transition, including hormone treatment and surgery, as...

Under the header of this specific e-petition,(if we get a debate, we can brief MPs to raise:
-The PB ban / PB trial
-Conversion practices ban
-Cass report
-Levy review
-Sullivan review
-GIC wait times
-segregation on NHS wards
-Withdrawal of GP/shared care
petition.parliament.uk/petitions/70...
2/

Towards a political economy of algorithmic capitalism - Martyn Egan, 2025 The emergence of large language models such as GPT3 has prompted intense debate about the transformative potential of generative AI to ‘revolutionise’ knowledge...

A good exploration of gen AI from the perspective of a Marx and Baudrillard-inspired political economy - "the knowledge worker is united with the manual worker: from both the use-value of their labour is... returned to them by capital as the property of capital" journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Congrats Ed!

AI Is Already Taking Jobs in the Video Game Industry A WIRED investigation finds that major players like Activision Blizzard, which recently laid off scores of workers, are using generative AI for game development.

"Job automation rarely happens evenly or cleanly. Historically, much of its impact is felt through deskilling, as more tasks are handed over to a machine or program, or attrition, as employees who are laid off, quit, or retire, don’t get replaced or hired back." www.wired.com/story/ai-is-...

The rise of Whatever This was originally titled “I miss when computers were fun”. But in the course of writing it, I discovered that there is a reason computers became less fun, a dark thread woven through a number of eve...

down with Whatever eev.ee/blog/2025/07...

Sorry to hear you've been in hospital - hope you get back home today.

Endless Mode: It's the New Thing Welcome to Endless Mode: infinite possibilities in games, anime, theme parks, and a whole lot more--like, uh, pinball.

Welcome to Endless Mode: infinite possibilities in games, anime, theme parks, and more. www.endlessmode.com/video-games/...

Congrats! Thoroughly well-deserved

this year’s summer game fest took place against the backdrop of LA’s anti-ICE protests, which proved impossible to ignore. this forced a reckoning for many in attendance: what is the point of the show, and as american society crumbles, what is the point of games?

Summer Game Fest logo

My feelings covering Summer Game Fest, in LA, as the daughter of a Mexican immigrant.
pentopixels.com/article/summ...

They Will Call You Violent

Donate to Stop ICE Raids Alert System: Urgent Support, organized by Sherman Austin The Stop ICE Raids Mobile Alert System allows individuals to send and recei… Sherman Austin needs your support for Stop ICE Raids Alert System: Urgent Support

You can send and receive app-free information about ICE raids here: www.stopice.net

Donate to the developer of this service here: www.gofundme.com/f/stop-ice-r...

know your civil rights: www.ilrc.org/resources/co...

Commentary: ICE arrested a California union leader. Does Trump understand what that means? Unions in California are different from many in the U.S. because they are predominately people of color and immigrants. The arrest of a union president in L.A. will likely activate these unions to bec...

The arrest of union leader David Huerta is galvanizing a new element—solidarity:

“Right now, just in the last 14 hours, labor unions are joining together from far and wide, communities are reaching out in ways I’ve never seen,” Orr told me. “Something is different.”
www.latimes.com/california/s...

Thanks for passing it on! I neglected to credit you - have done so now.

it's that time again: i'm looking for work! my current main freelance gig at RPS is unfortunately likely coming to an end soon, so if anyone needs an on the ball news writer, you can count on me
as always, open to PR roles and other forms of work too (and reposts appreciated as well)