Scott Starkey

What's next, you ask?

Selfie of a white dude with a yellow No Kings bandana and a sparse early crowd in Lebanon, but it got bigger fast!

I attended in Lebanon!

Hey #HoosierSky - I stopped by lovely Lebanon on my way to am Indianapolis magic gig. Come out and say hi. It's a wonderful, positive, and patriotic event! 🤩 Also, check out Hoosier.Social for a friendly buncha Hoosiers.

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hoosier.social A small, independent Mastodon server focused on serving Indiana residents.

For those of you in #HoosierSky, hoosier.social is a great on-ramp to the Mastodon experience, with a friendly local community made by and for Hoosiers.

As a treat?

The Personal, Political Art of Board-Game Design What can board games say that other art forms can’t?

Amabel Holland has designed board games that tackle the struggle to end slavery, women’s suffrage, and the highly personal topic of gender transition, referring to them as “political art.” What can board games say that other art forms can’t?

Trump probably has a meeting with Vance, too. Let's not forget to count that angle.

We need a "wealth tax" in coordination with income tax.

A diagram showing the REAL "Gulf of America": in which the wealthiest 1% of Americans own 31% of America's wealth, and the poorest half have only 2.5%. A call to action reads "TAX THE RICH". A footnote indicates that the wealthiest 1% are those with an income > $500K &/ a net worth > $12M.

Too elaborate for a Labor Day protest sign, but worth sharing again.

A picture of me with former Purdue Men's Basketball coach Gene Keady!

Yesterday at my gig, I performed magic for a local celebrity, and former colleague at Purdue Athletics. (I was his computer guy about 20 years ago.) He said, "You're a really good magician!"

#LafayetteIN #Purdue #mbb #HoosierMast #Indiana #TippecanoeCo

Magician near a sign that says "Dumb Tricks, 1 dollar."

Hey #LafayetteIN, what dumb mischief can we get into today? At the #MoseyDownMainStreet.

#hoosierMast #Indiana #magic #Magician #MagiciansOfMastodon #TippecanoeCo

Generative Al is being marketed as a tool designed to reduce or eliminate the need for developed, cognitive skillsets. It uses the work of others to simulate human output, except that it lacks grasp of nuance, contains grievous errors, and ultimately serves the goal of human beings being neurologically weaker due to the promise of the machine being better equipped than the humans using it would ever exert the effort to be. The people that use generative Al for art have no interest in being an artist; they simply want product to consume and forget about when the next piece of product goes by their eyes. The people that use generative Al to make music have no interest in being a musician; they simply want a machine to make them something to listen to until they get bored and want the machine to make some other disposable slop for them to pass the time with. The people that use generative Al to write things for them have no interest in writing. The people that use generative Al to find factoids have no interest in actual facts. The people that use generative Al to socialize have no interest in actual socialization. In every case, they've handed over the cognitive load of developing a necessary, creative human skillset to a machine that promises to ease the sweat equity cost of struggle. Using generative Al is like asking a machine to lift weights on your behalf and then calling yourself a bodybuilder when it's done with the reps. You build nothing in terms of muscle, you are not stronger, you are not faster, you are not in better shape. You're just deluding yourself while experiencing a slow decline due to self-inflicted atrophy.

re: generative AI

I have finally fully and accurately explained my problem with how it’s marketed and used.

And now, you can use it, too.

ICE is a government jobs program for sociopaths

Joined. 😎

Thank you for this. TIL about Bonhoeffer's Theory. Very poignant.

Everyone deserves a safe place to sleep.

If you're take is that it's ok to celebrate harm done to people with the justification that some X percentage of them have bad ideas then you and I definitely aren't fighting to build the same kind of world and I don't think I want to be in your movement or to have you in mine.

Tomorrow I'll be representing @ttgda.bsky.social and @gamaofficial.bsky.social on a lobby day on tariffs. Feel free to share your stories with me about how you've been affected by tariffs on games.

A little good news for your scrolly-scroll.

I just turned in my final project for #GradSchool at #PurdueGlobal. Which means I'm all done except for the shouting. I have sufficient points to #graduate with my #MSIT, however the grade lands.

I also feel like an incredible weight has been lifted […]

If you find Indiana too far away, and still wanna do #BoardGameDesign with a great crowd at home, check out #ProtospielOnline - the same weekend May 16-18. Yes, the same cool community of #Protospiel fun, packaged up into a gamified online experience and it literally attracts gamers testing […]

I'm generally ok with businesses being in social media, as long as they don't intrude in the community. These people evidently don't care about that.

Stoppage: Flat River Group has decided not to attend Gen Con 2025 as originally planned, so its booth will (I imagine) go up for grabs to other publishers still interested in attending...assuming that they have goods to sell. (FRG had placed its productions on hiatus in mid-April 2025.) —WEM

If your social network can "go down" than it is not decentralized.

The number of people I know who want to do fascist things in order to "fight" fascism is pretty disturbing.

Sadly, anything is pardonable, past and future.

If you're not on mastodon you're missing out on my thread where I livetweet my experience playing Tears of the Kingdom

Just saying

hoosier.social

Hey #Indiana folks - I should also say: I'm now a member of the governing committee of Hoosier.Social. If you live in Indiana, or have ties to Indiana, you'll be welcome.

It's a local Mastodon server, which is a little like PBS/NPR for social media - owned an operated by local volunteers. #Mastodon