At the end of last year, a group of researchers thought that they had a great idea for solving a common problem in social media research. I usually try to avoid calling out specific researchers when I discuss problems in research. I’m making an exception here, because it’s hard to discuss this topic without going into the details. This is not an invitation to harass these individuals. They made a mistake, and have hopefully learnt from it. Mistaken research gets published all the time. That’s why we make more of it. ...

Posthuman studios has always been confident in how they sell their books: they licensed Eclipse Phase with Creative Commons, meaning that the files are free to legally share with others. You get everything free, and they hope that it turns into you buying their books. It’s a tactic used by some other book publishers that are convinced that the problem today is not to get buying customers, it’s to find customers in the first place. In role-playing games the challenge is still to stand out from the shadow of Dungeons & Dragons. Even if your game is not about killing orcs and stealing their stuff, you still have to convince people that whatever you’re offering is preferable to that. Giving away your books and then hoping that the people playing the game also want to buy them is a possible approach, one that seems to be working for Eclipse Phase, which is now in its second edition. ...

I recently came upon a philosophy paper that seemed to tackle a problem I didn’t know existed and had a convincing argument for identifying and perhaps fixing that problem. Good papers – especially good philosophy papers – are like that. They force you to look at the world in a new way, even if you don’t agree with what they say. They also tend to be easy to read without extensive knowledge of the domain they are contributing in, because they go less into the details of previous perspectives. ...

I’ve recently seen more academic talks where the author has been reading out their paper out loud in front of the audience. I’ve heard a couple of different reasons why people do so: they have problems staying on time; they are nervous about giving presentations; they need help to stay on track. Staying on track and on time is definitely important, so these are important things to focus on and reading a pre-written talk can help with these. ...

A bunch of role-playing game scholars wrote a handbook for role-playing game studies. It’s published by Routledge, but as an academic handbook, it’s fairly expensive. For Free RPG Day, the editors suggested that the authors would share their authors copies of the chapters they wrote – according to the publishing agreement, authors can share their own versions of the texts, but only the their own chapters and only the versions that precede the professional layout. So if you are interested in what we wrote and don’t care about how pretty it looks, here’s most of the chapters as author’s copies. ...

I will soon need a new phone. My previous one was released in 2015 and I’ve been using it for three years. That doesn’t sound like a long time, but in the current phone-per-year era of planned obsolence that’s an eternity. Because the phone is a Fairphone 2, I’ve upgraded the phone multiple times since getting it. It was running Android 5 when I got it, but now has Android 7. I’ve replaced the battery and the back cover. I’ve also upgraded the front and back cameras. ...