Posts Tagged ‘cartoonish supervillainy’
Oops, Forgot a Title Links
* I have a review out today of Aurora and Seveneves (both great!) in The Los Angeles Review of Books. My review actually has a lot in common with two other reviews they’ve run recently, one from Tom Streithorst on Mad Max: Fury Road and the other from Sherryl Vint on Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife.
* I always said the point of the five-year Ph.D. was “produce more adjuncts,” but UC Irvine has gone and formalized it.
* RT @cnewf: USC fundraising staff: 450. USC TT faculty in Arts & Sciences:460.
* Scenes from the class struggle at Arizona State.
* University of Iowa Receives 18,000 Volume Science Fiction Library.
* The Toast interviews @AfAmHistFail.
* Sweet Briar lives. Joy Over Sweet Briar’s Reopening Is Tempered by Questions About the Road Ahead. Lessons from Sweet Briar. Sweet Briar Savors the Promise of Revival, but Fund-Raising Challenge Is Vast. Sweet Briar’s ‘No Nonsense’ New President Faces a Tall Task. Reinventing Sweet Briar. I just want someone to look into all their weird investment losses and figure out what was happening there.
* How to Teach Your White Kids to Fight Racism.
* The flag might actually come down.
* Rhodesia and American Paramilitary Culture.
* “Sanders surge is becoming a bigger problem for Clinton.”
According to the RealClearPolitics average of polls, she leads Sanders by 47 percentage points.
Surge!
* But set Obama’s impressive electoral victories aside and the Democrats look less like an emerging majority and more like a party in free fall: Since Obama was sworn in six years ago, Democrats have suffered net losses of 11 governorships, 30 statehouse chambers, more than 900 statehouse seats, and have lost control of both houses of the U.S. Congress. They’re certainly finding every possible way to blow it.
* Scenes from the charter school scam: Milwaukee Public Schools edition.
* For as long as women have been doing time, prisons have had to contend with the children they carry.
* The Martian Author Andy Weir Explains All the Ways Mars Wants to Kill You.
* Erasmus Darwin, supervillain.
* Think Progress on suicide and trans* identity.
* Use/Mention distinction really hits the big time.
* What happens when the sea swallows a country?
* It’s just impossible to elect anyone who is actually on the left. Look what happens.
* It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of McDonalds.
* Amazon developing exciting new ways to destroy publishing.
* Clash of Clans is made by the Finnish game studio Supercell. It launched in August 2012 and rapidly became one of the top five highest-grossing titles in Apple’s App Store. In 2013, when Yao and his invitation-only clan, North44, were at their peak, Clash of Clans helped create $555 million of revenue for the company. The next year, Supercell’s revenue tripled to $1.7 billion — a seemingly inexplicable sum produced by a roster of games that, like Clash, are free to download and can be played without spending a dime. So how is Supercell generating all that money? By relying on players who don’t simply want to enjoy the game but who want to win. Players who, like Yao, are willing to spend a great deal of cash.
* Against porn. May have spoken a bit too directly to me given that I read it while watching the Rashida Jones documentary Hot Girls Wanted, which is utterly, soul-crushingly depressing.
* ‘Star Trek’ Fan Invited to Pitch ‘Star Trek Uncharted’ TV Series to Paramount. The best part: it actually sounds like a good idea.
* And the arc of history is long, but Walter White From ‘Breaking Bad’ Will Appear in a Future Episode of ‘Better Call Saul.’
Neil deGrasse Tyson, Supervillain
Read between the lines. They’re setting up a classic heel turn.
Off to Boston
We’re heading up to Boston today so I can do just a little more research for the chapter. Links to celebrate:
* A writer for Futurama cooked up a math theorem just for use in the show.
* From A to Zzzaxx: An Alphabet of Marvel’s Unfortunate Supervillains. Also at io9: SF movie posters from an alternate universe.
* Has Paul the psychic octopus sold out?
* I really feel like I’ve done this one before: Silent Star Wars.
* Time to panic! The moon is shrinking.
* And of course I’m utterly powerless to resist adorable Calvin & Hobbes mashups. Below: Calvin & Hobbes and Christopher & Pooh. I think the only one of these silly College Mindset Lists that will ever get me will be the one that reads “Calvin & Hobbes has never been in newspapers.” The strip ended in December 1995, when this year’s freshmen were 3 years old—so in terms of lived experience we’re probably already there…
I still have photos from my trip to put up, which will happen sometime, perhaps even this week. The summer of terrible blogging will continue for just a little bit longer; once we’re settled in our new apartment I may find I have something more to say again.
Thursday Night
Thursday night, how I love you.
* Jason Zengerle at the Plank undertakes a much more full-throated defense of Letterman than the one I offered last night, reminding us about Bristol Palin’s recent publicity tour (which I guess I’d blocked out) and questioning the logic of the Palins making their own joke about their daughter being assaulted. For what it’s worth, I still think the joke was borderline and shouldn’t have been told, but it was plainly not about the fourteen-year-old.
* The headline reads: ‘Tiny chance’ of planet collision.
* Game theory and Batman villains. Isn’t it well-established by now that the Joker would never kill Batman?
* New element added to the periodic table. Canavanium?
Guantánamo and the Reality-Based Community
On Guantánamo: Matt Yglesias has a great post summing up the various absurd turns the Guantánamo debate has taken since Obama has taken office. For me it begins and ends with the new ‘supervillain’ line, the notion that the people currently imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay are so cunning and all-powerful that we dare not trust them to any domestic prison for fear that they will somehow escape, Joker-like, and run amuck.
I think it’s time to start bringing that “reality-based community” line back.
Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog
I thought for sure that the Joss Whedon Web project Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog was doomed to absolute unfunny failure—but then I watched the teaser and now I don’t know what to think. Oh Doogie, you devil.
Gerry Canavan 