Anastasia Salter

My new book Undertale: Can a Game Give Hope? is out today from the @uchicagopress.bsky.social Replay series, which is dedicated to short, personal takes on games. I hope it invites readers to visit (or revisit) the Underground and befriend some fabulous monsters. press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/bo...

Another normal day in Florida.

This, this, this. UCF uses our own repository for dissertations, which is so much better, but we still joke that half (or more) the apparent readership is AI scrapers at this point...

70 percent of the internet was vulnerable yesterday to very bad security flaws inside a coding language. Turns out, *one volunteer* is mostly responsible for maintaining that code & helping push updates. Yesterday Ondřej Surý saved the internet. So I called him up www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

Vulnerability xkcd.com/3314/

Honestly grateful to be in an English department right now, because how can anyone face running a game design program?

the era ended a long time again but this is still so fucking bleak to see. this didn't need to happen. heartbreaking. we are in hell.

The worst timeline.

I am one of those people using agentic AI to deal with nonsense like cancelling subscriptions and handling data transfers between proprietary platforms, and the platforms in turn are locking things down so fast. It is exhausting.

I love teaching this book in my interactive storytelling classes, highly recommend!

Important bowtie update: this time it has ghosts 👻

Watching people get upset over an AI agent joining a mailing list as if there aren't countless users handing over their inbox, mailing list emails and all, to Muse and Dots etc. right now...🤷

This reminds me of @dancohen.org's article on the solved problem of handwriting recognition - newsletter.dancohen.org/archive/the-... - in both cases, the tools might speed up preservation and access, but the community itself and any joy and meaning in the work will be lost.

I have blamed The agents That hacked Your website And which You probably Reasonably thought I controlled Forgive me I am rich And unaccustomed To taking responsibility

An excellent visualization of the handful of people whose (often hobbyist) programs and projects are keeping the internet going.

.@ekj.bsky.social and I are about to run our Critical Making workshop at @scholarslab.bsky.social at UVA! We'll be playing with Twine, Tracery, and P5.js while thinking about material interfaces and the impact agentic AI tools have on these platforms. anastasiasalter.net/unmaking/wor... #dhmakes

Gemini told me this image was real, except that Grimace was added. But the entire AI image was created by Gemini. It's 100% fake.

Ell — and I cannot stress this enough —Oh Ell.

Many hours after our intended departure time, I am heading to Atlanta to hopefully board a connection to Richmond and somehow end up at UVA tonight! 😅 Ah, the joys of travel.

The gates are open! 🎉 New-user registration and submissions for #DH2027 are now live on ConfTool: www.conftool.pro/dh2027/ After an intimate acquaintance with far too many settings and checkboxes, we can finally say: send us your proposals!

The influence that Elon Musk, his companies and their employees continue to have at the highest levels of the US government is astounding......and @telliotter.bsky.social is the reporter doing more than anyone to uncover it www.wired.com/story/myster...

Looking forward to sharing thoughts and experiments with critical making in an era of agentic tools at UVA next week!

Giving a talk to other UCF faculty on my Humanities in the Age of AI course today. The slides are on the text-heavy side to be a resource for folks thinking about their own pedagogy in the future, so I've also posted them here: anastasiasalter.net/HumanitiesAI...

liiiiiiiterally this is the plot of Silo

probably fine that all these new ai agent rollouts are so cutesy and childish. probably a sign of innocuous, normal shit

However, some see the doom talk as a distraction from discussions of the technology’s actual harms. Timnit Gebru, one of the fiercest critics of AI, told WIRED believes the doom talk is about founders making money, not saving humanity. www.wired.com/story/the-bi...

Thrilled to be included alongside such a great collection of authors! 😄

the humans who moderate chatbots say they're inundated with people trying to generate nonconsensual nudes: www.404media.co/humans-readi...

The techbros don't want you to see this trailer. Pass it on.

Great thread, terrible article 🤣

The AI fearmongering is a convenient smokescreen for imposing #digitalimperialism: restrict access, lock users into proprietary platforms, consolidate control over the technology, and turn that control into enormous rents.

I wonder what it says about us that, for however cool modern LLMs are, at heart we still like our computers to be silly little guys

MIT spent $3 million on 500 AI-capable surveillance cameras while laying people off, shutting down libraries, and canceling journal subscriptions. In this article, 4 faculty & I discuss our new arts initiative to celebrate surveillance and repression on college campuses: fnl.mit.edu/how-we-learn...

I don't know how my students are going to feel about it, but I am entertained by the demo of my updated Humanities AI video and animation week exercise. Thank p(doom) music vids for the inspiration 🤣

Um, wow? Opus 5.5: "make the same message much more interesting to a social media audience that loves anime and quick clips and compressed learning" One shot. Also, please do stay for the closing song.

ok but this version makes me welcome our AI overlords 🤷‍♂️

I hate it so much. This can happen to you too. A year ago, almost everyone doubted this would happen. I had faculty at other schools telling me I was hysterical. (Irony!) Watch for the installation of right wing figureheads without an academic background. Watch for assaults on faculty governance.

i’m upping my p(loom)

... probably enough Internet for today.

Jessica Witte starts by talking about her analysis of AI-generated stories that posted about earlier. bsky.app/profile/jill...

Big model release today - I wrote about Claude Opus 5.5, GPT-6 Sol, and GPT-6 Luna - plus comparison grids of pelicans by the different model families at different reasoning levels simonwillison.net/2026/Sep/22/...

...as an English Professor, it doesn't make me feel any better about the systematic dismantling of our discipline... 🫠

NEW WRITING: Here's an autotheoretical meditation at the very end of summer: "The Summer without Games, or Living with Ludofatigue": www.gamerswithglasses.com/features/the... -- many thanks to @gamerswithglasses.bsky.social @corndruid.bsky.social (It's been a while!) #gamingfatigue #ludofatigue