Sam B. Nguyen | Sometimes Called Raethr ➡️ PAX East

I often think about the things that are lost when we invite audiences into our performance spaces. It's hard to emphatically gas up the value of the intimate home game in an industry space driven by audience and hypervisibility, but I do think that the narrative space shifts when a watcher arrives.

I do worry that the overarching focus on the environmental impacts of AI comes at the cost of conversations about the human, cultural, economic, and artistic costs. Like, the attempt to substitute human-made sentiments about truth for meaning-ignorant technical synthesis should be more troubling.

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There is nothing so serious as the ability to imagine a more meaningfully kind world, or at least a world where meaningful kindness matters.

This is a reminder to myself and all the other thinks-about, writes-about, creates-through TTRPG folks,

the work we do is not trite, vapid, or meaningless because the material stakes of the world seem higher than ever.

TTRPGs are narrative form given scaffolding, and that shapes imagination.

Time once again to post the meme

Students blatantly using gen AI makes me deeply and overwhelmingly sad. Like, do you have no value in your self growth? Is 250 words too much?

If capital burdens are pushing you to the edge, then you can have an extension. It's easy. Just like, let me know. Anything but the gen AI....

Congress has not formally declared war since 1942, 83 years ago.

Look at all the war the US has done in the past 83 years. Very obviously, it long long ago stopped requiring congressional approval for war according to its own constitution.

If you're arrested in Illinois protesting against Trump's war on Iran for Israel, I can represent you pro bono. Email me at sheryl@weikallaw.com.

Beyond that, the use of GenAI in any creative endeavor really only seeks to make the art 'better' along an imaginary scale towards an imaginary goal.

Creating 'good' art is only relevant when 'good' is the bar for survival (or a paycheck), but that's no measure of ethics *or* art.

We should not measure each others' poetry by some manufactured universal sense of aesthetics. Like, I don't care about the poetry because it's good. I care because it's yours, and you're my homie, and I value your thoughts and the art by which those thoughts are shared.

I feel like convos about GenAI surrounding accessibility are always a little fraudulent, because they are always interested in bringing certain people up to the bar of 'surviving while creating', rather than lowering/removing the bar.

Laws are made up and fluid. What is legal today can change tomorrow. Every person is precarious. The leopards will eat your face, regardless of how you ended up in the United States.

No nation is healthy, but the least healthy of them employ military violence against citizens

“Trump is using military forces to stop a protest — I want y'all to consider what kind of government it appears to be when every time we exercise our democratic right to protest, the military is deployed against us.”

Doechii at the #BETAwards

Real photo from 1937 LA found in the LA Times

While it's far from unexpected, it's still very weird to see solidarity break down over something as trite as 'vandalism', 'public disturbances', and 'property destruction'.

Also point this out to anyone you can. These were not planned protests. These were normies getting the supplies for their weekend projects or at a restaurant and saw their servers getting hauled off and were like this is some bullshit.

Again, this isn't Los Angeles. This is happening right now outside an ICE building in SF:

With alt text

The crackdowns on civilians and the threat of the national guard being sent to LA should be *the* most important story right now-- not the Trump/Musk feud or whatever the f**k that was.

People are being terrorized all over the country. News outlets need to get it together.

Kind of obsessed with the fact that I could fit all the text from this image into the alt-text. Kind of epic. Kind of accessible and based and stuff.

Conclusion: Ultimately, this rhetorical exploration of the statistics of Dungeons & Dragons is far from the whole of the conversation. Decolonial concepts of temporality, critical (dis)ability theories of health and healing, and critical deconstructions of cartesian duality could each be applied with greater depth to each of D&D’s ability scores to further discuss the ways that pre-existing colonial and cultural perspectives and ways of understanding the world format storytelling as it is processed and brought into being through D&D. TTRPGs function as lenses for storytelling, whose rules afford some narrative directions and obscure others. When taking these games as rhetorical texts, it is essential to consider how they are informed by their contexts; in the case of D&D, those contexts are grounded in colonial logics and animated by ongoing hegemonic mindsets. The ways that each of the statistics are cohered together into singular facets of personhood, placed on linear spectrums, and propelled into foundational structures of storytelling are situated not only in the monopoly D&D holds on the cultural imagination of TTRPGs, but also in the widespread colonial imagination that stories are told in. All TTRPGs create claims about personhood through their character sheets—or lack thereof. However, not all TTRPGs claim universality in the storytelling machine of the game. It is there that D&D stands out, from the attempt to extend the game into different settings and genres to the broad attempt by fans to construe characters through the lens of a D&D character sheet. As TTRPGs continue to explore ways to craft that personhood as a storytelling artform, it is essential to continue interrogating the claims which motivate foundational gameplay mechanics and narrative aesthetics.

An excerpt from a short paper I wrote, but never got around to fleshing out enough for a proper academic publication. It was inspired by the combat wheelchair, and uses that to interrogate ableist sentiments about linear growth, healing, and "correct bodies".

There are some really important performance studies sentiments about how performance is rehearsal for real life.

This is especially true when your performance is close to your heart, in the way that TTRPGs are.

I think we could all use some rehearsal in resistance and solidarity.

I actually have an answer to why it was different. It was different because the Napalm Girl photograph did not actually end the war. A year before the photo was taken, a majority of Americans already believed it had been a mistake to send troops to Vietnam.

www.theverge.com/cs/features/...

Vampirism Sinners 2025 :handshake: Stormtroopers Star Wars

Representations of oppressive systems, embodied by people who are victims themselves, taken on in a lighthearted manner because the aesthetics are sexy/cool or because individual members are relatable/sympathetic/sexy.