Ian Bogost 🍔
@ibogost.bsky.social
32K followers 3.1K following 610 posts

Professor at Washington University in St. Louis, Writer at The Atlantic. https://linktr.ee/ibogost

Ian Bogost is an American academic and video game designer, most known for the game Cow Clicker. He holds a joint professorship at Washington University as director and professor of the Film and Media Studies program in Arts & Sciences and the McKelvey School of Engineering. He previously held a joint professorship in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication and in Interactive Computing in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he was the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts Distinguished Chair in Media Studies. .. more

Political science 28%
Sociology 26%
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ibogost.bsky.social
This is a technician’s response. It is not how organizational life operates today.

ibogost.bsky.social
Word and Gdocs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

ibogost.bsky.social
Corporate ownership and closed-sourcing don’t bother me. Only functionality. And I can‘t work with colleagues via LibreOffoce. It’s an ecosystem.

ibogost.bsky.social
LaTeX is a layout system, not a writing tool.

ibogost.bsky.social
Probably, but I'm writing, and I'm a writer, so I'm thinking about word processing.

ibogost.bsky.social
Not really, tho? People say this but Word used to be 'fine' at base.

ibogost.bsky.social
Word used to profoundly beat Gdocs in handling revision tracking, notes, and other editorial tools. It's also become far less adept at handling large documents. Microsoft seems to have focused on making Word an Office365 Suite Gdocs office-document competitor. It's only vestigially good for writers.

ibogost.bsky.social
Gdocs is not for writing, it is for making workplace documents.

Word can no longer support the activity of writing, especially as a collaborative one (which it always is, professionally).

Scrivener etc. are really murder maps, not word processors—you have to do the writing elsewhere.

ibogost.bsky.social
Almost a half century after the invention of the word processor, we are living at the tool's nadir.

Gdocs has improved while Word has become worse, but both are horrific tools that actively frustrated the practice writing.

The few alternatives are Wes Anderson or `make` parodies, like Scrivener.

ibogost.bsky.social
New Street Fighter is wild.

ibogost.bsky.social
Stick to white beans you monsters.

Reposted by Rosemary A. Joyce

ibogost.bsky.social
It’s almost like George Lakoff has been right for the last (checks watch) 29 years.
ifycomedy.com
I think we really should stop using antifa and just fully say anti-fascist and get them saying they are against anti fascism. Using antifa is giving them some distance and I genuinely think some of their base don’t even know that’s what it stands for.
ifycomedy.com
I think we really should stop using antifa and just fully say anti-fascist and get them saying they are against anti fascism. Using antifa is giving them some distance and I genuinely think some of their base don’t even know that’s what it stands for.

ibogost.bsky.social
This is a version of where I landed. "Congrats [TO ME]."

ibogost.bsky.social
I suppose I know the answer to the original question, which is that "congrats" is an obsequious lie meant to reward a person for conforming with the expectations or demands of the agent issuing the fake congratulatory message. It means, "Your compliance is my accomplishment."

ibogost.bsky.social
To be is to be authenticated.

ibogost.bsky.social
This is of a piece with the inflation of "experience."

We once aspired for an "experience economy" in which encounter would take the place of ownership. The implication was that experiences, like congrats-worthy acts, were notable, substantial, rare.

Now everything is one. "The login experience."

ibogost.bsky.social
What is the meaning of a message of "congratulations" anymore?

This one was offered after I re-registered for a payment account—as required of the bank, which changed its account infrastructure. Congratulations?

ibogost.bsky.social
I don't think it's conspiratorial to hold that NYT logs me out of my session only so that they can show me this upsell screen when I log back in?

ibogost.bsky.social
I don't envy university presidents, who now occupy the worst job in America, managing the most difficult personalities (truculent professors, wealthy donors/boards, bananas legislatures).

But MIT's response to the "Compact" legitimates it in a foolish way.

orgchart.mit.edu/letters/rega...
Regarding the Compact | MIT Organization Chart
orgchart.mit.edu

ibogost.bsky.social
Sometimes it has a slice of cheese.

ibogost.bsky.social
I received direct email marketing from a company that has previously sold me goods. I clicked to see the promotion but didn't add anything to a cart or even view a product detail page. Within an hour the company sent this "you forgot to buy our shit" nag. Email is the enemy and must be eradicated.

ibogost.bsky.social
Premise: Cinnamon gum and candies (Big Red, Red Hots, etc.) have now been fully supplanted by sour-flavor alternatives.
Big Red Commercial
YouTube video by commercials818
youtu.be

ibogost.bsky.social
Apple Watch has all these health features that maybe sort of work but are fairly imprecise by design. So Apple says “Talk to your doctor” and then if you talk to your doctor they're like “Huh, yeah, I dunno keep an eye on it” as they type frantically into Epic MyChart during your 8-minute visit.

ibogost.bsky.social
I am sick of the thresholded swipe gestures that make it so you have to flick hard to “move” a smartphone interface (for example, to go back by flicking toward the right). This is a paradigm that needs to end.