Gerry Canavan

the smartest kid on earth

Thursday Morning Links

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* This is an extremely cute personalized book for a little kid and I’m not ashamed to admit I bought two.

* This is not an SF postdoc per se, but Liverpool has a tremendous SF archive and it would be a great opportunity for an SF scholar.

* Some impressive student journalism from Marquette undergrads: “Marquette’s reporting to the federal government misses just less than half of sexual assaults on campus.”

* Really interesting piece on how not to build a Star Wars MMORG. MetaFilter mostly hated it, but I thought the idea of limiting the Jedi to a minigame where you inevitably get hunted down and murdered by Darth Vader was brilliant.

* Louisiana State University on the brink. More here and here. This really is the end of the university system — or at least tenure — in America. I can’t believe it’s happening so quickly.

* I mean, the LSU thing is so terrible I can barely even be bothered to get upset about the ASU MOOCs.

* One of the Original X-Men Is Gay, And It Matters More Than You Think. It’s a nice piece by Rachel Eddidin and a bummer that it’s at playboy.com. I’m amazed that they don’t maintain a SFW skin of their site for prose writing that goes viral.

Tell Us About the First Time You Realized Dudes Were Checking You Out.

Fugitive Turns Himself In After 40 Years So He Can Get Health Care.

* The rise of zero-tolerance policies strips school officials of the ability to exercise common sense.

* How to think about the risk of autism.

* Clickhole’s Oral History of Mad Men.

The disturbing world of bootleg Disney’s Frozen games.

* Star Trek 3 is apparently Star Trek Beyond, and Idris Elba is the villain. I’m okay with the title — I like the ethos if not the continued insistence on reading “trek” as a verb –but wish they could do one that doesn’t have a “villain” for a change.

The good news is: this civilization is over. And everybody knows it. And the good news is: we can all start building another one, here in the ruins, and out of pieces of the old one. 

* Happy Earth Day, everybody!

* DC is going to try to attract girl readers of comics with a special Super Hero Universe Designed Just For Girls, where, I presume, sex and sexual violence are somewhat less of an overriding focus.

* Good work nerds.

Pseudoscience in the Witness Box: The FBI faked an entire field of forensic science.

* DID YOU KNOW that academic departments use curricular requirements to encourage enrollment in courses that don’t just automatically fill by themselves? It’s true!

The Story of Class Struggle, America’s Most Popular Marxist Board Game.

* And from the genius behind the art in Braid and one of my absolute favorite web comics of all time, A Lesson Is Learned but the Damage is Irreversible, comes Zelda pastiche Second Quest. Man I miss that web comic.

lesson022

 

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