this is a turn of events that delights me. i was just reading a piece by one of your colleagues at lawfare saying how he and you were glad for the dismissals but disappointed the fight about those files (among other fights) was on pause indefinitely. a real "meats back on the menu boys!" moment

"the essay sucks ass" is no doubt true, couldn't be bothered to read it, but consider that the essay may have been written to receive an F in order to instigate a campaign against the trans TA. in any case it's not a great dunk because this isn't about the essay, it's about purging trans ppl

additionally, a university psych class is an inappropriate forum for airing your religious beliefs when those beliefs contradict the modern medical consensus. In preparing people to be future doctors and therapists, it is a matter of public interest that harmful antiscience views not go unchecked

this. we dont know how many similarly awful papers this student turned in already, nor all of the TAs measured responses that came before this one. If the TA had done what Peter recommends the student would have just turned in something even worse next time. she was trying to provoke a response

what do we want to bet that University of Oklahoma admin has been desperate for an excuse to fire their (maybe only) trans employee?

its just another version of wanting to censor other people's stories because you hate seeing Black people and women and queers on your screen. Its just complaining about Coco and Soul and the lesbians in Lightyear, but directed at a hyper-niche 100% indie genre of media instead of Disney 3/3

but complaining about a couple of specific DMs creative choices for their games does not a threat-to-the-hobby make. so they find some tortured reason to refocus on Wizards, that its *the new rules* or *a single Pride poster* that is actually what they are upset about 2/3

honestly pointless to even nitpick the logic bc its just a lie. the *actual* grievance of ppl complaining about woke DnD is that some visible faces of the hobby are now queer ppl, women, and PoC via Actual-Play shows like D20, and that the most popular APs include queer romances sometimes

"focus-grouped into oblivion" is a funny way to say "after polling the opinions of the majority of players" when you are a journalist trying to make a point that it only appeals to a minority of players. Focus groups are far from perfect, but its a nonsense claim.

its the fascist "the enemy is simultaneously impossibly strong and impossibly weak" logic. the queer woke ppl are taking over dnd! but also they are a tiny minority and the woke is going to push all the Real Players who hate woke away from the hobby.

first of all, how dare you
(this is very good)

bsky.app/profile/lite...

The games explicitly tell you, with dialogue, why you should kill civilians. When I say "This book is by someone who learned about war crimes from CoD" I mean "these ideas are paraphrased from dialogue in CoD". It should be extremely scary that someone that delusional is in charge of a real military

In the Modern Warfare series, battlegrounds are usually in cities and populated areas. In one mission you shoot people in an airport terminal. These environments are more interesting as playgrounds than a traditional battlefield, and people who seem like civilians are often actually combatants

For the product to be successful they must keep the player from feeling any internal conflict about the hero of the story killing other humans. The solution is to use the narratice scaffolding between missions to dehumanize the enemy humans. Often these are racialized humans.

CoD is a game that is trying to be a product more than it is ever trying to tell a story. Fun and frictionlessness are paramount. CoD games are also about wars between humans on Earth. There is no sidestep, nor is there narrative space for moral reckoning. That would make it less fun.

2) reckon with the morality in the story. there are a million ways games have done this, some reveal the player is actually the "bad guy", or give the player choices (Undertale), or create morally gray situations and show characters dealing with the gravity of killing other sentient beings

1) sidestep the morality: if the enemies are non-sentient threats, robots or monsters, you can have the player kill them with conscience intact. this is part of why zombies r popular. some make the PC non-sentient (Ape Out), or make respawns diagetic, so enemies are never "killed", just defeated

a lot of modern video games that have "killing enemies" as their main play mechanic recognize that there is an inherent ludo-narrative dissonance there between making the player the "hero" of the story, and also having them constantly killing. There are two main ways stories cope with this: