Charles J Pratt

Okay, I like this onehttps://twitter.com/vontheodore/status/1352447201549701120 …

It helps that I was in the right. My cat was objectively the cutest pet in the community. Though there was a rat that lived in someone's ceiling that I thought was pretty cool. Was definitely the 'outsider' candidate.

Last semester my department ran a tournament where faculty/students could vote on the cutest pet from the community Some were *horrified* when I traded votes for my cat. They said I was "what was wrong with this country" That's what democracy is, people! Sorry you find it grodyhttps://twitter.com/MattGlassman312/status/1350151312428703748 …

Also, I need to update the Selected Posts section. Frank's been writing a lot!

For the half dozen of you that were wondering GDA is back online: https://gamedesignadvance.com/  Some notes: had to change the theme, since that's what got hacked. Also, we lost all the header images, so the site is even more austere!

It's fun to watch movies from the 90s about teenagers. They often have a character that's mischievous, rebellious, destructive, and a bit cruel, but is on the right side of all the conflicts. Now you see that character and think "they definitely grew up to be a QAnon person."

I swear, it's always frustrating to run into folks that got taught that all indigenous North American culture was nomadic and just "lived in balance with nature". Believe me, anything that the Greeks did was done by societies in the Americas and Africa as well

Last semester I went on a mini-rant (around Civ VI) that even a lot of progressive people aren't aware that Africa and the Americas had giant cities and empires, with monuments and extensive networks of trade throughout their history, *just like the rest of the world*https://twitter.com/brettachapman/status/1349101118895366152 …

When I talk to the students in my game studies class about citations I often use the phrase "show your receipts" and this semester they're talking about having "two receipts from Juul, and one from Caillois."

I guess what I'm saying is: A more frequent portrayal of law enforcement as being bumbling idiots, cowards, or corrupt brutes in media would be more of a reversion to an American mean than you might expect from contemporary discourse.

Whereas as if you go back and watch Dirty Harry, one of the templates for this kind of thing, the reason he goes bad is because all the other cops are completely corrupt or incredibly incompetent! Not because they're too pure for this corrupt world.

Last thought on this: What's interesting about the contemporary 'single cop is just a little corrupt in order to get the job done' shows is that their conceit is all the other cops are just too naïve and by the book for this cruel world. Still a 'positive' portrayal!

I just wonder how durable the current 'police are valiant and maligned public servants' image in popular culture turns out to be. There's a deep well of 'police are, at best, lazy buffoons' tropes that have a long history in American cinema and TV

To be sure, there were also hero cops and detectives, but even there an impediment to their progress was often the incompetence or corruption of a huge portion of their colleagues There wasn't much of the Dragnet or Law & Order, everyone's doing their best, style of police work

This past summer Adi I watched a lot of classic noir films from the 30s through the 60s, and we noticed is that cops were very frequently portrayed as corrupt, malevolent, and/or totally useless. Someone has to have written a media history about the portrayal of police, right?

I would argue, even if we're talking about PC and mobile, there are a few different game industries that exist on each of those platforms.

When folks ask me "how do I get a job in the industry?" my first bit of advice is usually to radically expand the scope of their search. There a lot more game dev jobs out there once you remember that games exist in places beyond consoles and PC.

I don't know if <15% is the right number, but this sentiment is part of why I keep telling students that the 'game industry' as they understand it doesn't really exist. There are lots of game *industries* and what we think of AAA isn't even the biggest one anymore.https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1343322749033394182 …