Dr. Christine H. Tran

@thechristinet.bsky.social

3074 Followers 744 Following

✨Retired tech model writ(h)es about the Internet (they/she) ✨Tenure-Track Assistant Prof @ Alberta University of the Arts ✨Researcher of digital work, play, livestreaming & the creator economy ✨PhD U of Toronto iSchool ✨ https://thechristinet.wordpress.com

description for Hot Girl Eugenics panel on how technoscientifice ideas about beauty create the social body
Kirk from the Simpsons with a pictionary board of... a potato with a scalene triangle at the corner?
An array of PC games on the sidewalk, including Tomb Raider, Quake, Star Craft, Doom 3, Half Life and so many others!
Homer eating in bed.
Kirk Van Houten and the big race car bed.
YTV’s Mystery Hunters, the kooky Canadian mythbusting science show
Regency beauty ideal with blonde lady wearing modern makeup in a sheep field.
family guy death pose.
the no it's too late i already died cat from wifiskeleton.
A series of Asian-looking women and a dog categorized as “dog pretty.”
Lionel Messi bathing a baby Lamine Yamal.
Associated Press releasing the “photo kill” of the edited Princess of Wales image.
My Favorite Actress Is Not Human Tilly Norwood doesn't need a hairstylist, has no regrettable posts, and if you wish to see a virgin on-screen, this is one of your better chances. That's because she's Al. By Tyler Cowen 10.02.25 —Tyler Cowen Must Know Tyler Cowen is Holbert L. Harris Professor of Econc FOLLOW COLUMN A
Bart Simpsons punching wall.
Simpsons screenshot of the UK flag burning in a man’s teary eyes.
Cop Sim on thumbnail: What happens if I arrest Sims for ridiculous crimes? (Arrest a todder; Imprison a horse)
I Think You Should Leave "Tables" sketch.
Homer Simpson wrapped in bed like a big, toasty cinnamon bun.
Yeonmi Park on Joe Rogan podcast meme.
Fat Tony from the Simpsons: "I don't get it. Everyone loves rats, but they don't wanna drink the rat's milk?"
dril tweet: "This Whole Thing Smacks Of Gender," i holler as i overturn my uncle's barbeque grill and turn the 4th of July into the 4th of Shit”
Al of Al's Toy Barn in his chicken suit.
OP presenting a slide titled "Dressing Against Code: How Twitch Plays with/on Green Screen Shorts."
Smiling Friends "you kiss your dad on the mouth?" meme edited to be about moms.
Homer in the rafters.
OP drinking a pink cosmo.
Marge Simpson sitting anxiously on air.
Two folks making out as someone in a punk shirt and with white balloons stands 2 feet away.
are you wining son meme but with the Paliacci guy.
Metaverse Mark Zuck with his disquieting green eyes.
Cartoon Luigi giving u a glare.
NEW RESEARCH IN NEW MEDIA & SOCIETY: 2026 Contextual Governance & Androcentric Hegemony on Twitch.tv BRANDON C. HARRIS CHRISTINE H. TRAN CHRISTOPHER J. PERSAUD or how where platforms make exceptions for nudity, violence & "edgy" humour in livestreaming
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has an interesting new idea to help those struggling financially. He calls it "universal basic compute." "Everybody gets like a slice of GPT-7's compute," he said on the "All-In" podcast. "They can use it, they can resell it, they can donate it to somebody to use for cancer research."
Northeastern University College of Arts, Media and Design 1 Panelists: Christine Tran, John Wihbey, Seo Eun "Sunny" Yang Description: Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the creator economy and influencer culture at lightning speed. From hyper-real virtual influencers to Al-generated video content that's populating TikTok and Instagram, Al influencers erase the distinction between human imagination, machine automation, and promotion. This webinar explores how synthetic content creators are redefining authenticity, labor, and identity online. With critical and creative lenses, we'll explore how these trends unveil deeper questions regarding gender, race, and power in the generative media era-who gets represented, who gets erased, and how algorithmic aesthetics are globalizing new forms of digital labor and desire. This event is part of the Center for Transformative Media's Al Webinar Series.
Webinar: AI Influencers and the Future of the Creator Economy DATE AND TIME Wednesday, Apr 15, 2026 2:00 - 3:00 pm LOCATION Online.
Belle Delphine gamer girl bathwater for sale.
Spongebob shielding Bubble Buddy from a pop-happy, angry beach mob.
The Simpsons Barney Gumble "It Begins!" gif.
Clueless White Guy Orders in Perfect Chinese, Shocks Patrons and Staff meme.
Buffy Summers’s grave, years marked 1981-2001.
In his Manifesto for the Ludic Century, Eric Zimmerman (2004) positioned games as the defining, archetypal media of the 21st century. This was because of their ability to engage people with systems in new and playful ways. He writes: "As more people play more deeply in the Ludic Century, the lines will become more blurred between game player and game designer." Unfortunately, this gamified blurring of player/designer has been called upon to support systems of extraction, exclusion, and control. These problematics are not new as the formal cultures of digital and analog games have long participated in exclusions based on race and gender (Fickle, 2022; Trammell 2023), and monopolized ludic economics grounded in "precarious playbour" (Kucklich, 2005). These trends have been further intensified through reactionary technopolitics and platform power. We can see it in the troubling insertions of gamified and gamblified logics into news media through Polymarket. Elon Musk's consolidation of GamerGate's "toxic technoculture" (Massanari, 2014) and demand for visibility (Hewa & Tran, 2023) on Twitter/X into gamified, misogynistic harassment through its GrokAl. Simultaneously, digital workers, creators, and audiences alike are called to play games structured by capitalism, heteropatriarchy, and other oppressive systems that overdetermine who has real agency or power. These problematic playsites have also emerged as fields of contestation and alterity, from trans and queer speedrunning leagues (Brewer, 2023) to multiplatform networks for Black feminist resistance to toxic technoculture that provides its own grammar of play (Gray, 2020; Fletcher, 2022). Thus, we ask how we can use games to speculate on or build better futures separate from systems
CFP poster featuring WarGames reference.
The I abandoned my boy scene from There Will Be Blood.
Kent Brockman before a mugshot of the Queen: “The queen will be held without bail until the samples are returned.”
Homer Simpson’s with his brain poking out the back of his skull.
Gwin Ashford from A Knight of the Seven Kingdom, which everyone just calls Dunk & Egg.
opening slide for Lansdowne lecture, featuring Vivian James, "Amelia," and AI Elaine from Seinfeld.
Headline: My Favorite Actress Is Not Human Tilly Norwood doesn't need a hairstylist, has no regrettable posts, and if you wish to see a virgin on-screen, this is one of your better chances. That's because she's Al. By Tyler Cowen 10.02.25 - Tyler Cowen Must Know
Tilly Norwood the AI "actress."
The athlete guest stars of “Homer at the Bat” after their comedic, simultaneous misfortunes.
Nothing, Forever: the AI generated Seinfeld parody on Twitch.
Vivian James.
Were we having fun yet? The promised convergence of passively paid leisure has failed to materialize for many on Amazon’s Twitch. From sleep streams and hot tubs to riots and the doomed project of Seinfeld AI, non-gaming cultures have come to the fore of a livestreaming platform that built itself on cults of “gamer identity” or “bleeding purple.” As a new epoch of techo-promise in the form of GenAI rears its head for the broader game community, it has come time to re-witness how games push us into futures of our unmaking. This talk speculates on the false starts and real anxieties about GenAI and other emerging technologies making themselves known on gaming sites such as Amazon’s Twitch.tv. It situates Twitch as a site to witness the struggles for technology and autonomy in a world where cultural workers’ ownership over the means of cultural production is eroding. I draw upon a decade of critical and ethnographic work on Twitch and livestreaming cultures, primarily from the perspective of those outside the hegemony of play: women and racialized people whose intelligences in games have long been constructed as “artificial” rather than authentic. We will look at the failed experiments of integrating GenAI into the livestreaming experience within the longer struggles of marginalized player communities as objects of techno-solutionism. We will situate the ascent of game livestreaming (and its uncertain future) in larger trends about the creator economy and the promise of being paid to play what you love that threatens to enclose the means of cultural production for us all.
Benny Sadie to play Bowser Jr. in the Super Mario Galaxy Movie.
Bridgerton season 4 poster featuring Asians in so many sequins of the 1800s?
Aidan Delbis as Don in Bugonia.