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Reposted by Paul Roquet

nilay patel @reckless.bsky.social · 26d

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

onion person @junlper.beer · 26d

the entire media ecosystem is just not built or ready for events like this and far right billionaires like larry ellison buying news orgs will only make this worse

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Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · 29d

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

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Will Oremus @willoremus.com · Sep 8

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...

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.

www.washingtonpost.com

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Luke Stark @lukestark.bsky.social · Sep 4

Shocked, shocked, I tell you

Annalee Newitz @annaleen.bsky.social · Sep 4

Aaaaand the main business case for consumer LLMs is revealed. It's for gathering data on users, creating profiles, and targeting us with ads and propaganda. Hooray -- it's Web 2.0 with chatbots!

Faine Greenwood @faineg.bsky.social · Sep 4

feels significant that mass-market LLMs like ChatGPT are now capable of generating extensive natural-language dossiers about a given user's interests, location, preferences, identifying information, and more

simonwillison.net/2025/May/21/...

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Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · Aug 30

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

Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · Jul 10

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

Cultural Politics of the Computational Image: CFP – Global Mediations Lab

globalmediations.mit.edu

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Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · Aug 27

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)

Venice Immersive 2025 - If You See A Cat

YouTube video by BiennaleChannel

youtu.be

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Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · Aug 11

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

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Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · Aug 6

The real 2.5D

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...

news.mit.edu

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Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · Jul 23

A movie made of dust and mold (complimentary)

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

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Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · Jul 23

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)

"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

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Sam Biddle @sambiddle.com · Jul 22

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...

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Pau Pitarch @paupitarch.bsky.social · Jul 12

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.

Intersectional Incoherence | University of California Press

Intersectional Incoherence stages an encounter between the critical discourse on intersectionality and texts produced by Korean subjects of the Japanese empire and their postwar descendants in Japan,...

luminosoa.org

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Jeffrey J. Hall @mrjeffu.bsky.social · Jul 18

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...

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...

edition.cnn.com

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Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · Jul 10

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

Cultural Politics of the Computational Image: CFP – Global Mediations Lab

globalmediations.mit.edu

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Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · Jul 10

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

Cultural Politics of the Computational Image: CFP – Global Mediations Lab

globalmediations.mit.edu

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Reposted by Paul Roquet

Dan Hassler-Forest @danhf.bsky.social · Jul 9

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.

Vinzenz Hediger @vinzenzhediger.bsky.social · Jul 9

The time has come to reinvent academic publishing. Over the last years conglomerates have bought up once respectable publishers and turned them into rent extraction machines, generating obscene profits from tax-payer funded research and unremunerated academic labor./
mediastudies.hypotheses.org/6850

Sale of the Amsterdam University Press (AUP) film, media and communication list to Taylor & Francis – Resignation of series editors and editorial board members

It is with great dismay that we, the undersigned, learned that the film, media and communication list of Amsterdam University Press (AUP) has been taken over by Taylor & Francis, a subsidiary of Infor...

mediastudies.hypotheses.org

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Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · Jul 9

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

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · Jul 9

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

Randi Weingarten 🖇️📚✊🇺🇸 @rweingarten.bsky.social · Jul 8

Today we launched the National Academy for AI Instruction with UFT, Microsoft, OpenAI & Anthropic to offer free, high-quality AI training to educators. Some of you have expressed legitimate reservations about AI and tech companies. I want to speak to you directly. 🧵

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Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · Jul 9

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?

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Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · Jul 9

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

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Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · Jul 3

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

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Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · Jul 3

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

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Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · Jul 2

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

"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/

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Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · Jul 1

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🤦🏻‍♂️

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Paul Roquet @inqualia.bsky.social · Jul 1

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?

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