Ludus—Ludeme Last month, I mapped a working definition of game (ludus) and ludeme (conceptual units of a game and play) in preparation for an upcoming article on ludemes and programming video games. I went through many of the better known attempts for a definition and asked myself where my own perspective differs and what my approach needs to express.
Last week, the Wikidata and Sister Projects event tooks place. The presentations are recorded, and I strongly encourage you to check the schedule. One presentation I liked (there are more), was the one by Mike Peel with the title “Best practices for reusing Wikidata’s data in the Wikimedia Projects”. At some point he walks us through the {{Cite Q}} template, around 26:07.
This week the 13th International Conference on Chemical Structures took place (see also this Scholia overview or this overview of the full ICCS history). This is the conference I first joined 20 years ago as a PhD student presenting a poster (see these past blog posts). Of course, I am actually co-organizer nowadays (actually, co-treasurer). Organizing a meeting with just over 200 participants, and I like to thank Gerard and Willem in
I was having a pretty good week last week, until we got to the closing minutes of play. At that point, I learned that Amsterdam University Press (AUP) had been acquired by the for-profit corporate publishing behemoth Taylor & Francis. This is not really a surprise in some ways. AUP had been transformed into a private, for-profit enterprise in 2019. So who cares? What’s the big deal?
tl;dr: Inspired by this conversation started by Ethan Marcotte, I’ve gone ahead and added a small link blog to this website too. Instead of having links of interest disappear into the stream of time that is my Mastodon timeline, I thought it would be nice to collect them also here, in a more findable way.
The Star Wars franchise is perhaps best known for its rather Manichean outlook on good and evil as expressed through the ‘Dark (evil) Side’ and ‘Light (good) Side’ of the Force (similar to 气, qi, or breath/spirit in Daoism) expressed through the Jedi, a type of warrior-monk.
The AHRC What’s On? Project Team: Beth Johnson, Dave O’Brien, Laura Minor, Anna Viola Sborgi What’s Class Got to Do With It? Rethinking TV from the Inside Out School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds 19th September 2025 Keynote : Philip Ralph, award-winning writer of screenplays for television and film and plays for stage and radio Closing plenary panel A One-Day
This week the Rogue Scholar science blog archive experienced major upgrade pains, and Rogue Scholar search became unavailable from Tuesday until Thursday. I tried to upgrade to a pre-release version (13.0.0b4.dev0) of the InvenioRDM repository software, and ran into multiple issues. Going back to the previously installed v12.1.0 took longer than anticipated, mainly because of issues with the Opensearch index.
Tom recently emailed me this question: Do you know how to find out how many of the compounds that appear in the chemical literature are mentioned just once? Intrigued, I first set out to find out how many substances, as Chemical Abstracts refers to the them, there were as of 5 June, 2025.
The first time I saw real snow, I panicked. Not because it was cold, my body knew cold better than breath, but because it was finally real. It wasn’t the polymeric white fluff they sprayed from ceiling nozzles to “simulate seasonal cues” inside the dome. This was actual ice crystal, drifting from a slate sky outside the controlled perimeter, collecting in stillness on a field of grasses no longer extinct.
Im April erschien an der Universität Hamburg eine sehr interessante Untersuchung und Dissertation zu Open Access im Wissenschaftsfeld der Volkswirtschaftslehre. Kristin Biesenbender wertete aus, wie sich das Publikationsverhalten der in diesem Feld Publizierenden vor dem Hintergrund einerseits von Open Access und andererseits von wissenschaftlichen Rankings verändert.