Tiota Sram / is on Nostr

#ComputerScience instructor at Wellesley College who researches #games & #AI (he/him; cis). Current #research is on exploration in #Metroidvania games. I build #PCG demos like:

https://cs.wellesley.edu/~pmwh/labyrinfinite/

and games like:

https://cs.wellesley.edu/~pmwh/chlorophyll/

The intertwining problems of racism, ablism, queermisia (including specifically transmisia), sexism, classism, capitalism, and colonialism must be opposed everywhere.

Profile picture: colored lines converging along different paths on a square grid.

tfr

Last Notes

2025-05-26 18:16:42

- reply

@nprofile…vdjy hi.
I'm a college CS instructor (non-tenure-track) who teaches labs for intro CS and for computer systems (basic digital logic + assembly & C). I've always been interested in security so your writing in that is interesting to me, and a lot of it is accessible to me as a non-expert (I've got a CS PhD but never took a whole security class).
I do technical game studies research, with two focuses right now: first, trying to understand exploration poetics in Metroidvania & related games, and second, investigating modding as a vehicle for trying to rewrite colonialist myths in Minecraft.
Besides research I work on fun games & demos in my "spare" time, with my current project being a pseudo-infinite minesweeper-like.
Oh and I've got two young kids that I spend most of my time with.

2025-04-23 09:48:58

- reply

@nprofile…twud there's a whole unit in "US history" we're taught in highschool about world war 2, and I remember the textbook emphasizing how the nukes were so necessary, because of course without them "the war would have dragged on" and "an invasion of the Japanese mainland would have cost so many lives" and I don't remember if this was then or later but "the firebombing of Tokyo actually killed more civilians so the nukes weren't so bad if you think about it."
I've been to the Hiroshima memorial museum when I was on a trip to Japan. Those are all horrific lies. At *minimum*, there was nothing achieved by nuking population centers that couldn't have been achieved by nuking military bases. Those nukes were by far the most concentrated war crime in history in terms of decisions made vs horrors inflicted, and there's been absolutely no historical reckoning for them in America to this day.
The question "why isn't dropping nukes on population centers remembered with even a bit of shame?" Is definitely part of what cracked my American Imperial indoctrination. How we talk about Columbus is probably the other biggest contradiction that's easy to point out. Truly vile.

2024-04-25 00:09:58

- reply

@npub1nnh…v3dt video description: cops in riot gear marching onto a college campus in two rows.

2024-03-14 01:19:48

Just in case someone here happens to have one: anyone have a link to a post-COVID union contract that has COVID-19 safety provisions in it, bonus points if it's at an academic institution?
Boosts appreciated for reach.

2024-01-16 00:41:26

Always worth repeating on this day that the FBI spied on MLK in a government-sanctioned effort to derail the civil rights movement, and they attempted to blackmail him by sending evidence of his infidelity to his wife.
Hopefully, you already knew that, but it's worth thinking about a bit more... did a judge sign a warrant to blackmail King? Almost certainly not (though judges probably did approve the wiretapping). Was the blackmail attempt a punishment as a result of criminal proceedings? Obviously not. So the FBI just... decided to target a private citizen for arbitrary extralegal harassment, then went ahead and did it. All because this man was (checks notes)... leading a peaceful protest movement for civil rights?
America is a pretty messed-up place, and if you're paying attention, you can see that the roots of that behavior haven't really changed, even if conditions are better in some ways. Things like child separation at the border under Trump, or the brutal suppression tactics against the Atlanta Forest Defenders, or similar suppression of Water Protectors at Standing Rock: the state and police departments in particular constantly bend or simply outright ignore the laws they're supposed to enforce, and they do it for the worst reasons imaginable, which usually boil down to defending their monopoly on power and/or defending the profits of planet-destroying corporations (two sides of the same coin).

2024-01-02 18:06:09

- reply

@npub10k3…7au2 feel like this is too simplistic: AI has several other typical harms, notably when it replaces more-reliable or less-biased systems. For example, I'd definitely hesitate to say that medical AI is "mostly good" when we'd expect such systems to typically do a lot of harm through bias.

2023-12-25 22:07:48

- reply

@npub1zh7…wjwg image ID: a smiling woman with long brown hair wearing a red coat.

2023-12-20 19:51:52

- reply

@npub19fc…ay3c an alternate verse as I sing it to my two-year-old:
Twinkle twinkle little star,
how I wonder what you are.
Shining bright up in the sky,
are you fire or an eye?

2023-09-16 10:49:54

- reply

@npub1zh7…wjwg Image ID: a tweet from Ruksen Mihamed @mohamedroxana1: On the anniversary of Jîna Amini's murder, we remember all women killed by the male mentality. We emphasize the importance of a united struggle & the principle of legitimate self-defense. We salute the resisting women in Rojhilat, Iran & all over the world. Women, life, freedom.

2023-07-13 13:12:40

One of the most pervasive myths is that modern capitalist societies are "more advanced" or "more civilised" than the societies they're still trying to compete the genocide of.
If you are having trouble thinking outside of this myth, consider one simple metric for comparing societies: will they have any descendants 10,000 years from now, and what kind of resources will be available to those descendants?
Note that many of the standard metrics capitalists like to point to don't really matter if you fail this metric. You can supply the best healthcare in the world (not that we do) but if the price is everyone will be dead in a century, that's not exactly a deal I want to take. Three are really deep structural problems with even the idea of "comparing societies," but the point is: modern capitalist/imperialist (and yes, also fascist & "communist") fail alarmingly at this metric. They are collectively on pace to trash the entire planet in a mere handful of centuries, let alone millennia, and their sci-fi promises of some kind of miraculous reversal of that sound increasingly like a con.
Once you stop accepting the idea that capitalism is "advanced," you'll have a much richer space to imagine what you'd like society to look like. One of the next steps is to start disentangling positive and negative technologies, and to think about how both physical and social technologies might advance in a lot of different ways. What kind of society would invent the MRI machine but not the bullet, for example (and if you think that's impossible, why are you so sure and who told you so)?
All of that to say: #LandBack

2023-06-25 21:52:29

#MetaMeta
Different people want different things for the Fediverse. In fact, there is already a schism over basic human decency (and it's a good thing; the likes of Gab absolutely shouldn't be welcomed by most). There is a very real racism problem where many people's idea of "nice" tends to push out non-white participants. And there are also some usability issues, where tech-savvy users (myself included) don't acknowledge or address UX concerns because we can easily work around them, ultimately excluding those wit different skillsets to our own detriment.
But.
For everyone saying that the Twitter migration "failed" or that we must accept federation with Meta because they will bring enormous numbers of users and/or the mythical "mainstream acceptance," I think there's a serious basic disagreement that goes unspoken. Most of these people seem to define success as growth and/or reaching some arbitrary large scale (sometimes while also pointing out the technical roadblocks to that). But I think a lot of others (myself somewhat included) see success as meeting existing users' needs for information and social connection, and reject a growth/death dichotomy.
"Mastodon will never be big enough to be a competitor to Twitter or Facebook unless we federate with Meta." is just not a convincing argument to me, because "being big enough" is not a goal I care about (do remember my above disclaimers about inclusion here; my stance is not "works for me, no improvements needed"). In fact, I think that federating with Meta will be a fatal mistake for those that do it in terms of the goals I care about, even if it leads to more growth for those servers (and that's even without assuming a full EEE outcome).
I'd like the fediverse to be more inclusive, and to attract a broader audience in terms of technical ability and cultures, but I don't think it needs to grow exponentially to do that, and I think that either explicitly or implicitly viewing growth/scale as a necessity is harmful, as it tends to push out a lot of other priorities.

2023-06-25 21:52:29

2023-06-11 12:29:02

- reply

@npub1hwm…wrcz was this supposed to say "singing" or "signing?"