Joshua Foust 🎮 / is on Nostr

Dude on the go. PhD research into queer and gender stuff, militarism, and video games, mostly. Suuuuuper gay 🏳️‍🌈. Former ngo comms exec and think tank nerd with a real knack for angering military pundits. Frumious bandersnatch.

Last Notes

2024-11-06 13:42:02

1) In the 1988 version of The Female Complaint, Lauren Berlant wrote: “women are expected to live with and to desire the parties who have traditionally and institutionally denied them autonomy.” This flattens women to a set of attributes to be policed, rather than people to be understood. In doing so, women end up not only having little agency but are forced into defending the boundaries of those attributes. We saw that in the $200m Trump spent on anti-trans ads.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/466188?seq=2

2024-10-30 21:26:53

Today my students analyzed Jeff Bezos’ PR strategy at the Post and could not figure out what his end goal was. They were open to the idea that editorial endorsements were bad, but found him so anti-persuasive they rejected the idea entirely. After all, if he’s is really so worried about trustworthiness, how can the billionaire owner not see his own corruption?
These aren’t lefties: most want corporate comms jobs and love supporting brands on social media. So it was unexpected, in the best way.

2024-10-13 14:28:47

SpaceX accomplished a truly remarkable feat this morning as it caught a hovering rocket. It’s technically very impressive.
However. These feats aren’t as exciting anymore, not even because of how appalling Elon Musk is, fully embracing his fascist roots, but also because of the land theft, toxic dumping, corruption, their ruining the night sky, and all the labor abuses that went into it.
SpaceX is just not fun, if you bother to account for everything they cost. We need to count the cost.

2024-08-03 01:07:20

Had to deal with an unpleasant mob on another social media site today. The designers of these systems don’t build for this very well, though I do like Mastodon’s capacity for domain blocks but that’s still inadequate if you don’t want to nuke a whole domain.
There is a broad tendency in tech to design systems for good faith usage and to neglect malign usage. I wish there was more of a culture of red teaming services so they can be more robust.

2024-08-03 01:07:20

2024-07-30 18:00:02

What a contrast a headline makes
https://cdn.masto.host/appdotnet/media_attachments/files/112/876/740/931/931/600/original/c9aa41131b7a8071.jpeg
https://cdn.masto.host/appdotnet/media_attachments/files/112/876/741/023/295/997/original/8e75d17bc05e1f8f.jpeg

2024-07-14 00:11:28

About that incident today: after the last two weeks I see the speculation machine is well oiled and pumping out hot takes at peak efficiency. Given how hard Jan 6 is being retconned by conservatives, I’m curious if we will ever have a non-contested version of events here, or whether it’ll be some eternal Squeaky Fromme thing. Either way, no one knows what will happen next, but keep in mind there is a rager of a fight over who gets to set the terms of debate. Watch who is granted space to do so.

2024-07-09 02:32:55

“Higher education should rush as quickly as it can into this technology Goldman Sachs just rejected as empty promises,” says prominent SF-based venture capitalist, as another insists on calling students “customers.”
Just in case you weren’t clear how this scam works. No one cares about learning, only extraction.
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-innovation/artificial-intelligence/2024/07/08/mary-meeker-urges-higher-ed-lead-ai

2024-07-07 16:09:46

Most we sites nowadays seem to break and force-reload my phone’s browser. The surveillance tech embedded also somehow breaks reader view many times as well. Advertising is turning the internet unusable, it’s really shocking that I had an easier time reading websites on a Palm Treo 18 years ago.

2024-05-24 23:04:48

I have recently used the word “technicalia” to describe a group of technical details, minutae, and expectations, kind of like how “marginalia” is about scribbles in the margins… and apparently it doesn’t exist??? How does this not exist? And can we make it a thing?

2024-05-07 19:35:35

Rare moment of me smiling because I passed my dissertation defense and now have a PhD 🥰
https://cdn.masto.host/appdotnet/media_attachments/files/112/401/483/689/863/241/original/eea591e61516281b.jpeg

2024-02-16 14:43:56

Joe Rogan is now doing AIDS denialism and shifting into more explicit homophobia to do so.
They just renewed his contract for $250m but fired thousands of staff, despite record profits.
They pay, by far, the least to artists of any streaming service.
If you’re still paying for Spotify, you are an active participant in the degradation of our society.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/jg543y/joe-rogan-and-bret-weinstein-promote-aids-denialism-to-an-audience-of-millions