Posts Tagged ‘Episode 9’
2020 Links for 2020
* I had another short book review at Los Angeles Review of Books the other week, on Chris Ware’s Rusty Brown, a book of this arbitrary amount of time if ever there was one: “Does Chris Ware Still Hate Fun?” When you’re done with that, check out these: “Bedlam and Baby: Parables of Creation in Jack Kirby and Chris Ware” and “’Red People for a Red Planet’: Acme Novelty Library #19, Color, and the Red Leitmotif.”
* And just yesterday at this very site I was hyping the CFP for the relaunch of the World Science Fiction Studies series at Peter Lang, which I am now co-series-editing!
* CFP: SFFTV Call for Reviewers 2020. CFP: Creature Features & the Environment. CFP: English and American Studies in the Age of Post-Truth and Alternative Reality. CFP: Current Research in Science Fiction 2020. CFP: Imagining Alternatives.
* It’s 2020 and you’re in the future.
FUCK THIS https://t.co/CRJ63cnMu7
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 2, 2020
* The 2010s, the decade of sore winners. Will the 2020s Be the Decade of Eugenics?
* The most insightful vision of the future at CES came from HBO’s ‘Westworld.’
* The only word on the coming Iran war. Stop the War. Stop US Empire.
* I Read Airbnb Magazine So You Don’t Have To.
* Visual art and film and TV list from the World Science Fiction course at Bowdoin. A climate fiction syllabus. Rain, Rivers, Resources & Ruin: A Critical Analysis of the Treatment of Resources in Ecocritical Science Fiction [cli-fi] Works from 1965 to 2015.
* Dr. Manhattan is a Cop: “Watchmen” and Frantz Fanon. Black, White, Blue: To Understand Where HBO’s Watchmen Succeeded, We Need to Understand How Moore’s Watchmen Failed. Project for the TV Criticism of the Future.
Thinking about @adamkotsko’s TV criticism post from the other day and wondering how much of the critical impasse he describes originates in an inability to simply accept, like Adorno did, that essentially all mass cultural entertainment is bad.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 2, 2020
* Read an English translation of new Cixin Liu short story, 2018-04-01.
* The problem with bringing back blogs is.
* The past five years are the five warmest years on record, the past six the warmest six, the past nine the warmest nine. Oceans are warming at the same rate as if five Hiroshima bombs were dropped in every second. Thousands Flee to Shore as Australia Fires Turn Skies Blood Red (Video). Trump Rule Would Exclude Climate Change in Infrastructure Planning. The Concession to Climate Change I Will Not Make. This is fine.
* Maybe we should look at doing something about the rest of the air, too.
300 carbon ppm https://t.co/IlWRXllZ5a
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) January 1, 2020
* Prime Minister Of Iceland Calls For Prioritizing “Well-Being” Of Citizens Over GDP. Finlands Sanna Marin: 4-day-week and 6-hour-day could be the next step. Taiwan’s single-payer success story — and its lessons for America.
* Meanwhile: the High Cost of Having a Baby in America.
* The Palace of the Future Is Nearly Complete.
* By itself, fascist infotainment might just be the hobby of millions, alone together, silently despairing of their lives, sporadically generating ‘lone wolf’ murders and occasional armed shitstorms. “We are living in the middle of a fascist takeover.” NPR’s sanitizing of Trump’s Milwaukee rally shows how he’s broken the media.
* Three shifts at the Scrabble factory.
* Take a look at F-Stop, the Portal sequel you’ll never play.
* The Walking Sim Is a Genuinely New Genre, And No One Fully Understands It.
* Inside the College Football Game-Day Housing Boom.
* Higher Ed’s Dirty-Money Problem.
* The 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade.
* Liberal Arts Pay Off in the Long Run: A liberal arts education may not have the highest returns in the short run, but a study finds that after 40 years, liberal arts institutions bring a higher return than most colleges.
* University of Iowa associate dean appointed weeks after arrest.
* Student debt increased by 107% this decade, Federal Reserve data shows.
* Fresh from its laundering pedophile money scandal, MIT welcomes ICE.
they're killing the humanities because they don't want the humanities; make any case you want, the problem is that they have different values and want to destroy you
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) January 12, 2020
* The Catholic Church as organized crime family.
* The rise of the permanent protest.
* Gen Zers vs. Millennials in the Workplace. Why an internet that never forgets is especially bad for young people. Why Are Young Americans Killing Themselves? Falling without a net. Baby boomers face more risks to their retirement than previous generations. Almost none of the S&P 500’s blockbuster rally in 2019 can be pegged to rising earnings, and that’s a problem.
* Med Students Are Doing Vaginal Exams on Unconscious, Non-Consenting Patients.
* Welcome to the Era of the Post-Shopping Mall.
* Colin Trevorrow’s Episode 9 script is better in some ways and worse in others, as you might expect. Star Wars Fans Furious JJ Abrams Gave Role to Dominic Monaghan Over a Soccer Bet. Star Wars: What Went Wrong?
Star Wars’ insistence that killing a fascist leader is unambiguously an evil act while killing his minions is morally good is part of the civility trap enforced by the elite that is more outraged by rudeness to the rich than it is the deaths of the poor. In this essay I will
— Matthew Buckley (@physicsmatt) January 11, 2020
* Jeri Ryan’s latest Picard interview makes me worried that I accidentally wrote the Picard series bible.
* When AI runs the entertainment industry.
* When business people run the Olympics.
* The Okorafor century! ‘Binti’ Adaptation From Michael Ellenberg in the Works at Hulu (Exclusive).
* Bad news y’all, seven more years of winter.
* Slaughterhouse-Five is getting a graphic adaptation, and Sami Schalk has been reading the new Parables graphic novel on Twitter.
OMG loving & dying over this dynamic depiction of Lauren writing about Earthseed for the first time. This makes me want to go get my prose copy & be reading the texts of this side by side. This is a moment where you can really appreciate this visual medium. #parablegraphicnovel pic.twitter.com/asXwWVC21s
— Sami Schalk (@DrSamiSchalk) January 15, 2020
* Time travel baby. Coffee baby. Babies baby. Memory baby.
* How Negativity Can Kill a Relationship. Come for the life advice, stay for the weirdly unethical psychological research!
* The decolonization of Miles Morales.
* Despite Scorsese’s attacks on superhero films, what links his film (and Tarantino’s) with the various superhero movies is a certain mood: nostalgia. As the theorist Svetlana Boym once put it, “nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy.” This is true of all of these films. Boym continues, noting that, “nostalgia appears to be a longing for a place, but it is actually a yearning for a different time — the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams.” Tarantino has explicitly mentioned that the year 1969 — when he was six — was the year that “formed” him; Tarantino sees his latest film as a sort of “love letter” to the year (for another, quite different, perspective on this period, see The Stooges classic “1969”). The yearning for childhood should require no explanation in the case of superhero films, but it might require a bit more explanation in the case of The Irishman. Turning to that film allows me also to frame the exact way in which I want to pursue my discussion of Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.
* Lord of the Rings appendices alignment chart. Alignment chart alignment chart.
* ‘We are not alone’: Confirmation of alien life ‘imminent and inevitable.’ Top-Secret UFO Files Could ‘Gravely Damage’ US National Security if Released, Navy Says. A list of solutions to the Fermi paradox.
* One of my favorite archives to think about and teach: nuclear semiotics.
* Lord Byron used to call William Wordsworth “Turdsworth,” and yes, this is a real historical fact.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 16, 2020 at 2:11 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2020, academia, academic jobs, actually existing media bias, Adam Kotsko, administrative blight, Airbnb, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, aliens, alignment charts, America, artificial intelligence, Australia, Baby Boomers, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Binti, blogs, boondoggles, capitalism, China, Chinese science fiction, Chris Ware, Christopher Tolkien, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, climate fiction, coffee, college football, college sports, comics, Curb Your Enthusiasm, DC, deportation, depression, domestic violence, Donald Trump, ecology, ed tech, empire, English departments, Episode 9, eugenics, F-Stop, fascism, film, Finland, fraud, futurity, games, Generation Z, graphic novels, HBO, health care, Hollywood, How the University Works, I grow old, ice, Iceland, immigration, intergenerational struggle, Iran, Isaac Asimov, Jack Kirby, Larry David, Lord Byron, Lord of the Rings, malls, Martin Scorsese, Marvel, MCU, medicine, memory, Middle-Earth, Miles Morales, millennials, misogyny, MIT, MLA, money, my media empire, my scholarly empire, negativity, Nnedi Okorafor, nostalgia, nuclearity, Octavia Butler, organized crime, Parable of the Sower, pedagogy, Picard, poetry, police, politics, Portal, post-truth, protest, public domain, Quentin Tarantino, race, racism, relationships, retirement, Rusty Brown, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, Science Fiction Film and Television, science fiction studies, Scorsese, Scrabble, sexism, sexual harassment, single pager, Slaughterhouse Five, small liberal arts colleges, sports, Star Trek, Star Wars, student debt, suicide, superheroes, syllabi, Taiwan, Tarantino, teaching, television, the 2010s, the 2020s, the Arctic, the Catholic Church, the humanities, the long now, the Olympics, The Rise of Skywalker, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, The Wonder Years, they say time is the fire in which we burn, time, time travel, TNG, truth, Twitter, UFOs, ultracrepidarians, Unexpected Stories, University of Iowa, University of Wisconsin, Utopia, Vermont, Vonnegut, walking simulators, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on education, Watchmen, Westworld, wildfires, William Wordsworth, World Science Fiction Studies, zunguzungu
End of Month, End of Year, End of Decade Links
* Steve Shaviro has his favorite science fiction of 2019. I can definitely endorse the Chiang, Hurley, and Tchaikovsky entries, and hope to report in on some of the rest soon… Meanwhile Sean Guynes has a roundup of the best books of the decade in science fiction studies, fantasy studies, American studies, and comics studies.
* Kim Stanley Robinson: “What the Hell Do We Write Now?”
* Tolkien, Lewis, and The Enchantments of Escape.
* Abigail Nussbaum has some questions for The Rise of Skywalker. I thought the Blank Check episode was terrific, too.
* I wanted more ‘Star Wars.’ I got my wish, and ‘The Rise of Skywalker’ made me regret it. The Rise of Skywalker: Memorabilia without Memory, a Misunderstanding of Hope. Welcome to the Star Wars zoo. We Can’t See ‘Star Wars’ Anymore. Will “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker” rebalance Disney’s universe? I’ve heard worse ideas. Improv. Disney produced an unprecedented 80 percent of the top box office hits this year. The Decade Disney Won. And one last time, for old time’s sake: The 10 Best Stories In the Star Wars Expanded Universe.
the full corporate takeover of fan culture has turned fans from a subculture whose creativity stems from overidentification with commodities into guardians of IP, enabling the transition of ‘their’ franchises into a series of expensive but low-risk technical updates
— traxus4420 (@traxus4420) December 29, 2019
& to shift the political horizon of fan ‘resistance’ away from from IP theft & toward minor gains in representation
— traxus4420 (@traxus4420) December 29, 2019
repeating to my self in the mirror "Star wars is for adults" before seeing the final one & having a violent reaction like ingesting a poison
— wint (@dril) December 22, 2019
still the best star wars story produced in any medium cc @mattthomas pic.twitter.com/cfllpuBDzT
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 28, 2019
* Huh: They’re gonna make a movie out of “Coyote vs. ACME.”
* Ed Solomon reflects on the greatest work of science fiction he’s been associated with, the profit statement for Men in Black (1997).
The greatest work of science fiction I’ve ever been involved with – my Men in Black profit statement – arrived for the holidays. Sadly it lost 6x what it lost last period. Impressive for a movie that hasn’t been out in 22 years. Unless it’s been *sneaking* out. Yeah, that’s it. https://t.co/fE3bFMRJvb
— Ed Solomon (@ed_solomon) December 27, 2019
* The Outer Worlds isn’t quite a socialist video game. But it’s close. Class War on the Final Frontier. Coming to the Switch in 2020! Meanwhile, on the nostalgia front: Star Trek: 25th Anniversary has so much to teach modern games.
* Watchmen, season two: Americans are retiring to Vietnam, for cheap healthcare and a decent standard of living. The article even offers up a point of view character perfectly sociopathic for prestige tv:
After his military career, Rockhold worked as a defense contractor, operating mostly in Africa. He first returned to Vietnam in 1992 to work on a program to help economic refugees. He settled in Vietnam in 1995, the same year the United States and Vietnam normalized relations. He married a Vietnamese woman in 2009.
…
“The Vietnamese were extremely nice to me, especially compared to my own country after I came back from the war,” Rockhold said at a coffee shop recently inside a polished, air-conditioned office tower that also houses a restaurant and cinema.
* The New Yorker on Watchmen. Whitewashing ‘Watchmen.’ Who’s Watching HBO’s Watchmen? (Parts 1, 2, and 3).
Not to be all Everything Is Connected, but an inability/unwillingness to think hard and carefully about Society–and an insistence on individuals as the only thing that's real–is why Star Wars, Watchmen, and Bret Stephens are obsessed with genetics
— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) December 28, 2019
* A quirky exploration of sci-fi and masculinity. Science Fiction’s Wonderful Mistakes. And some more hot Shaviro sf content: “Defining Speculation: Speculative Fiction, Speculative Philosophy, and Speculative Finance.”
* Can you racebend Little Women? I imagine the next adaptation will, or at least will try too.
* What happened to Dudley Heinsbergen?
* ‘Streaming has killed the mainstream’: the decade that broke popular culture.
* Meme formalism. Secularization and the death of the humanities. And Christopher Newfield reviews the book giving everyone who works for a college nightmares, Demographics and the Demand for Higher Education. The disgusting new campus novel. Radical academics for the status quo. Can literary studies survive?
* Arundhati Roy: India: Intimations of an Ending.
* What the Prison-Abolition Movement Wants.
* The invention of ethical AI: how Big Tech manipulates academia to avoid regulation.
* One of Amazon’s first employees says the company should be broken up.
* The system works: The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the richest families in Florence. Must be nice!
terms like 'financial crisis' and 'bad economy' are propaganda obfuscating the fact that the point of capitalism is to bleed working people
for the vast majority of humanity there's no such thing as a good economy, and there's no such thing as a crisis for the ultra rich
— Saladin Ahmed (@saladinahmed) December 27, 2019
You have to be really dumb to trust the government. Instead I trust Company, whose stated primary purpose is to maximize profits at any cost, and who gets caught committing fraud every 5 years
— Raging Dull (@InternetHippo) December 27, 2019
* We Should Recapture the Optimism of the 1960s.
* James Harris Jackson went to New York with a Roman sword and an apocalyptic ideology. He stabbed a stranger in the back and left him to die. Iowa woman admits she hit 14-year-old with SUV because the girl ‘is Mexican.’ Senate removes phrase ‘white nationalist’ from measure intended to screen military enlistees.
* Washington state lawmaker accused of “domestic terrorism” refuses to resign.
* Deaths in custody. Sexual violence. Hunger strikes. What we uncovered inside ICE facilities across the US. Under secret Stephen Miller plan, ICE to use data on migrant children to expand deportation efforts. Trump’s Tent Cities Are on the Verge of Killing Immigrant Children. The Pacific Northwest vs. ICE.
* America’s self-destructive love affair with electronic voting machines, continued.
In a somewhat healthy polity the fact that the president is pardoning, championing, and hanging out with this monstrous war criminal would be treated as a massive scandal and have serious consequences. But America is not healthy, and its political and civic elites are failing. https://t.co/vJdnrU69bT
— Thomas Zimmer (@tzimmer_history) December 23, 2019
* So you automated your coworkers out of a job.
* MetaFilter has your oral history of Y2K. The New Republic has your recap of the decade from hell. National Geographic has your top twenty scientific discoveries of the decade. The 84 Biggest Flops, Fails, and Dead Dreams of the Decade in Tech. The Guardian’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century. The 15 most awe-inspiring space images of the decade. How Did This Get Played’s Top 10 Games of 2019.
* Crisis Looms in Antibiotics as Drug Makers Go Bankrupt.
* The geoengineering question. “The three hottest days on record in Australia are now Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday of this week.”
more seriously tho it's striking what these two franchises, which are immense cultural productions and supposed testimonies to the limitlessness of imagination and possibility, implicitly posit as immutable – war, class stratification, various ideologies of gender and sex, etc
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) December 19, 2019
* Pete Buttigieg’s Wikipedia Page Has a Very Attentive Editor.
* Democratic insiders: Bernie could win the nomination. What Would the Bernie Presidency Really Look Like?
* The Obama Years, or, A Decade of Liberal Delusion and Failure.
* Why Trump’s Second Term Will Be Worse.
SANDERS: I was the only senator in 1999 who opposed Fat Bastard wanting to eat a baby, whereas my colleague Joe Biden was in favor of it
BIDEN: Look I’ve been friends with Fat Bastard for a long time, and I told him Fat, you gotta stop this talk about eating a baby, its not right— cj (@currentvictim) December 20, 2019
* Finland is winning the war on fake news. What it’s learned may be crucial to Western democracy.
* Women are filing more harassment claims in the #MeToo era. They’re also facing more retaliation.
* But there is another kind of memory that develops considerably later in human children, and never (as far as we know) in nonhuman animals. This is called autobiographical memory. What is the difference between episodic and autobiographical memory? In autobiographical memory, you appear in the frame of the memory. Not only do you remember how you felt on the first day of school, you see yourself going to school and having those feelings. It’s not just a matter of what happened, as with episodic memory; it’s a matter of what happened to me.
* Chaos at the Romance Writers of America. The Implosion of the RWA.
* Hallmark Movies Are Fascist Propaganda.
* Promise me I’ll never forget this moment as long as I live. It’s bad, Zeus. Welcome to hell. Santa. Soulmates. Superintelligence. Policy. Physics. Doom.
* Oracle, how can I live forever?
* 21 Gravity-Defying Sculptures That Messed With Our Heads.
* When Salvador Dalí Created Christmas Cards That Were Too Avant Garde for Hallmark (1960).
* Peace on Earth, Good Will Towards Men: To Make Girl Who Is Deaf Feel At Home, Dozens Of Neighbors Learn Sign Language.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 29, 2019 at 2:12 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, academia, ACME, Amazon, America, American Studies, antibiotics, art, artificial intelligence, asylum, Australia, autobiography, automation, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Blank Check, books, C.S. Lewis, campus novels, capitalism, CBP, Chewbacca, Christmas, class struggle, college, comics, comics studies, corporations, crisis, Cthulhu, deafness, demographics, deportation, disability, Disney, domestic terrorism, Donald Trump, Dril, enchantment, Episode 9, escapism, ethics, fake news, fantasy, fantasy studies, fascism, film, Finland, franchise fiction, Freaks and Geeks, games, geoengineering, gravity, Hallmark movies, Harry Potter, holidays, Home Alone, How the University Works, ice, immigration, India, J.K. Rowling, Joe Biden, Judith Butler, Kamala Harris, Kim Stanley Robinson, kindness, lists, literature, Little Women, loneliness, Looney Tunes, masculinity, Matt Shea, memes, memory, Men in Black, migrants, Monopoly, neoliberalism, Netflix, nostalgia, optimism, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, PAW Patrol, Pete Buttigieg, politics, pretty people, prison abolition, race, racism, radicalism, retirement, rich people, romance novels, Romance Writers of America, Salvador Dali, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, secularity, secularization, settler colonialism, socialism, Star Trek, Star Wars, Star Wars Expanded Universe, Steve Shaviro, streaming, television, TERFs, the 1960s, the 2010s, the deaf, the humanities, The Outer Worlds, The Rise of Skywalker, The Royal Tenenbaums, the university in ruins, Tolkien, trade wars, Utopia, vacations, Vietnam, voting, Wakanda, war crimes, Watchmen, Wes Anderson, white nationalism, white supremacy, Wile E. Coyote, writing, Y2K
Submitted for Your Approval, A Spoiler-Free Star Wars Hot Take Accidentally Composed on Twitter
With Episode 9 Star Wars is finally unveiled as a multigenerational, nearly century-long saga of every major character trying to kill themselves with one grand gesture that solves all their problems. There are so many characters trying to kill themselves in the final third of The Rise of Skywalker it’s actually hard to keep track of which are the good suicides and which are the bad ones. (This might seem like a joke, but it’s truly a description of the last two acts of the film.) Just like Infinity War/Endgame was about there being too many Marvel movies now, TROS is very much about Star Wars as a franchise wanting to, but being unable to, die.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 20, 2019 at 10:06 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with Avengers, Disney, Endgame, Episode 9, franchise fiction, franchises, Infinity War, MCU, Star Wars, suicide, The Rise of Skywalker
Happy Star Wars Eve, One… Last… Time
* Not that anybody has asked, but if I had to come up with a definitive ranking of all the “Star Wars” episodes — leaving out sidebars like the animated “Clone Wars,” the young Han Solo movie and the latest “Mandalorian” Baby Yoda memes — the result could only be a nine-way tie for fourth place. A dismal farewell to the trilogy. Even Solo got a better reception. The Rise of Skywalker—and the Fall of Fun. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is what happens when a franchise gives up. ‘The Rise Of Skywalker’ Is A Convoluted And Clumsy End To The Star Wars Saga. The Rise of Skywalker Is So Bad It Actually Makes the Trilogy Worse. The Most Incoherent Star Wars Movie Ever Made. watching the rise of skywalker is like telling an acquaintance you ate potato salad once and enjoyed it, and then having that acquaintance break into your home in the middle of the night, tie you to a chair, and mash potato salad into your face and eyes for 2+ hours
Probably the least realistic thing about the Star Wars Universe is the speed and convenience of air travel. Probably the most realistic thing is that when you get down to it there are really only three kinds of job, viz, Employee of a Military State, Peasant, and Criminal.
— Kieran Healy (@kjhealy) December 18, 2019
"It's an epic that charts an endless dialectic of democracy and authoritarianism in a universe where the only real constant is war. Billions die but only a few families actually matter. Too real, huh? OK. It's in space now – and they have swords. Fuck you."
– George Lucas, 1977
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) December 18, 2019
No idea who made this originally but if they're out there somewhere I want them to know I love them pic.twitter.com/CtMrFyZpKT
— Joab Gilroy (@Joabyjojo) December 17, 2019
* Of course the real content of Episode 9 discourse is The Last Jedi nostalgia.
"You can see Laura Dern say 'pew' when she fires the gun, which she could never not do every time she shot it." — Rian Johnson, Star Wars: The Last Jedi Commentary pic.twitter.com/Wkr803BQte
— ellie (@theriseofsoIo) March 13, 2018
* How ‘Watchmen’s’ misunderstanding of Vietnam undercuts its vision of racism.
* Don’t Hold Your Breath for That Quentin Tarantino Star Trek Movie. “In a strange way, it seems like [‘Hollywood’] would be my last. So, I’ve kind of taken the pressure off myself to make that last big voilà kind of statement,” Tarantino told Consequence of Sound. “I mean to such a degree there was a moment when I was writing and went, ‘Should I do this now? Should I do something else? Is this the 10th one?’ No, no don’t stop the planets from aligning, what are you, Galactus? If the Earth is saying do it, do it…But in a weird way, it actually kind of freed me up. I mean, I have no idea what the story of the next one’s going to be. I don’t even have a clue.” Kill Bill 3 confirmed.
* Netflix and the monoculture.
WORLDWIDE REVENUES
Film Box Office
2018: $41B (+5%)
2015: $39BVideo Gaming
2018: $138B (+50%)
2015: $92BThis has not yet sunk in.
— Matthew Ball (@ballmatthew) September 24, 2019
* Click Here to Kill: The dark world of online murder markets.
* Living through the era of school shootings, one drill at a time.
* Why did my sweet 5-year-old become so stormy when she started kindergarten? The Miseducation of the American Boy.
* A New (Jesuit) Model for Community Colleges.
* You Shouldn’t Have to Be Good at Your Job.
* The World The Economist Made.
* Why Naomi Klein Has Been Right.
* The Oil Age Is Coming to a Close.
* A Future with No Future: Depression, the Left, and the Politics of Mental Health.
Regardless, the point is obviously not to get out of depression so that we can get back to the work that caused the depression to begin with. The point must be, rather, to destroy the material conditions that make us sick, the capitalist system that destroys people’s lives, the inequalities that kill. Thus, creating another world together. But to do that, to get to where that becomes possible, what is called for is not competition among the sick, but alliances of care that will make people feel less alone and less morally responsible for their illness. In alliance with each other, people might eventually be able to get up and throw some bricks.
* The 2010s Killed Off the Polite Climate Change Conversation.
* Trump’s Plan to Criminalize Homelessness Is Taking Shape. Police officer admits he told homeless man to lick public urinal to avoid arrest.
* How Families Cope with the Hidden Costs of Incarceration for the Holidays.
* Devin Nunes lives on a congressman’s salary. How is he funding so many lawsuits?
* Memo: the Senate is an irredeemable institution.
* Insulin prices double since 2012.
* Self-Driving Mercedes Will Be Programmed To Sacrifice Pedestrians To Save The Driver. For an extra $50,000 it’ll kill a poor person every time you turn it on just because.
* 15 major cities around the world that are starting to ban cars.
* America is still innovating.
* An Oral History of the Folgers Incest Ad.
* John Mulaney Made a Kids’ Special. We Sent a 10-Year-Old to Interview Him About It.
* ‘Civilization’ and Strategy Games’ Progress Delusion: How strategy games have held on to one of colonialism’s most toxic narratives, and how they might finally be letting it go.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 18, 2019 at 3:02 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, adjunctification, adjuncts, advertising, America, apocalypse, Beauty and the Beast, capitalism, civilization, class struggle, climate change, college, Colonization, comedy, comics, Devin Nunes, diabetes, disability, Donald Trump, ecology, Episode 9, ethics, eugenics, film, Folgers, games, homelessness, How the University Works, incest, insulin, J.J. Abrams, Jesuits, jobs, John Mulaney, kids today, Kumail Nanjani, labor, Laura Dern, Marvel, MCU, monoculture, murder, Naomi Klein, Netflix, parenting, police, police corruption, police violence, politics, prison-industrial complex, progress, Quentin Tarantino, Rian Johnson, school shootings, self-driving cars, standup comedy, Star Trek, Star Wars, streaming, The Economist, the Eternals, The Last Jedi, The Rise of Skywalker, the Senate, toilets, true crime, Vietnam, Watchmen, work
Monday Monday Links!
* The EdgeEffects year in review includes my interview with Kim Stanley Robinson from last spring. Check it out if you missed it then!
* Well, the reviews are in! Jaimee’s latest published poem, “The Utopologist’s Wife.”
* I have covered sports in New Jersey for a decade, crisscrossing the state for as many incredible stories as I can find. But for all the tales that made their way into my notebook, one stayed elusive, even though it seemed to stand above all the others. The 1990 Montclair-Randolph game.
* Very extremely cool site: The Deep Sea.
* Keynes was wrong. Gen Z will have it worse.
* CFP: Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations Beyond the Anglocentric Fantastic, 28th-29th May 2020. CFP: Special Issue of the Journal of Fandom Studies on Archives and Special Collections. CFP: Creature Features & the Environment. CFP: Hindsight is 20/20: How Popular Culture Writes, Rewrites, and Unwrites History.
* Ghosts of the future. What Green Costs. Congressional Democrats’ last, long-shot attempt at climate progress this year. Greenland’s ice losses have septupled and are now in line with its highest sea-level scenario, scientists say. Last Remaining Glaciers in the Pacific Will Soon Melt Away. The Arctic didn’t used to emit carbon. Something like 14% of public housing in this country is at risk from sea level rise. Young people can’t remember how much more wildlife there used to be. Climate change and depression. Irreversible Shift. Even Greta Isn’t Radical Enough. Just ask Goldman Sachs.
The two most salient facts of our reality are ecological collapse and income inequality, and the response by every person with authority is a chaotic swing among denial (“it isn’t real”), defeatism (“it can’t be helped”), and sneering rationalization (“only the unworthy suffer”).
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 13, 2019
younger voters would also prefer that civilization not collapse within their lifetimes by an almost 7-to-1 margin
older voters simply dngaf https://t.co/ekyoZhKDGu
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 11, 2019
* It’s 2071, and We Have Bioengineered Our Own Extinction.
* Scientists Are Contemplating a 1,000-Year Space Mission to Save Humanity. Would be nice if someone look at the next 25 years, too.
* How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real.
* San Francisco’s Sci-Fi Renaissance.
* The allure of science fiction.
Some intriguing trends in the responses to this Very Informal Thing:
-Black Mirror got the most votes/mentions/whatever
-KSR's climate future 'New York 2140' proved *very* popular
-lot of nods to Her, 3 Body Problem, Ex Machina, Infomocracy, Broken Earth + Sorry to Bother You https://t.co/MdhijGUBg4— Brian Merchant (@bcmerchant) December 9, 2019
* This Professor Was Accused of Bullying Grad Students. Now He’s Being Banned From Teaching. Followup on ‘I Was Sick to My Stomach’: A Scholar’s Bullying Reputation Goes Under the Microscope.
* Harvard Faculty Have a Rare Chance to Act in Solidarity With Striking Student Workers. ‘The Administration Is Assuming That We Are Going to Do Their Dirty Work.’
* Grad school is worse for public health than STDs.
* No, Humanities Degrees Don’t Mean Low Salaries. The Humanities Must Go on the Offensive.
* These Students Want to Create a Required K-12 Racial Literacy Curriculum.
* Fall Enrollments Still on the Decline.
* ‘Adulting’ is hard. UC Berkeley has a class for that.
* One-book classes have been some of the best I’ve taught. I love it as a model and it works so much better than the cram-it-all-in method I started out using.
* Perhaps the greatest free speech mystery of them all: Trump Targets Anti-Semitism and Israeli Boycotts on College Campuses.
* The Decade Comic Book Nerds Became Our Cultural Overlords. Why do they have to be such sore winners?
* Speaking of Disney there’s a pretty good discussion on this episode of Podcast: The Ride about Disney claiming all cinema in a way I haven’t seen discussed anywhere — literally going back and rebranding Fox properties like Miracle on 34th Street as Disney’s Miracle on 34th Street.
* What’s Up With J.J. Abrams Seemingly Shading The Last Jedi? The Last Jedi didn’t break Star Wars. It Saved It. John Boyega just having an incredible week.
I’d go further and point out that everything these people are complaining about was the inevitable consequence of decisions JJ made when he set up the new trilogy in TFA. If you’re mad because Luke lost it’s JJ’s fault, not Johnson’s. Johnson just tried to make sense of it. https://t.co/Qj5dUG6GWv
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 11, 2019
* A People’s History of Lube Man. If HBO makes a second season of ‘Watchmen,’ it should be about Vietnam.
* So, when thinking about “Blue Monday” in context of the genre/format New Order basically helped found (i.e., post-punk and modern rock), the sixteenth-note/machine gun trope recalls the fact of lots of bad, imperialist things the U.S. did in the 80s and early 90s. But the whole point of this trailer is to provide audiences with the image or feeling of an American-ness that is actually grounded in something like truth and justice. Setting up a not-at-all-thinly-veiled ersatz Donald Trump as the film’s villain, this trailer gives audiences a scapegoat for the nation’s present and past wrongs: then as now, the problem lies in a really dastardly bad apple, not the system itself.
* Pete Buttigieg makes his Jacobin debut.
* How consulting companies like McKinsey optimized American inequality.
* Joe Biden Still Can’t Answer Basic Questions About Hunter and Burisma.
* Self-help gurus all the way down: on Elizabeth Warren.
* Why Trump’s path to reelection is totally plausible. On Depoliticization. Et Tu, U.K.? I’m Crying, You’re Crying. But Our Day Will Come. No False Consolations.
I did around 120 hours of canvassing in London, Bedford and Milton Keynes. I didn’t expect this result but here’s how I can make sense of it from what I encountered on the doorstep. 1/
— Luke Pagarani (@LukePagarani) December 13, 2019
What’s tragic but also revelatory about figures like Bernie and Corbyn is that genuinely principled, honest politics get sandbagged by their nominal allies, who really would prefer open fascists to someone slightly to the left.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 13, 2019
* Finland forms government of five parties all led by women, with youngest prime minister in world.
* Trump’s children must undergo mandatory training to learn how to avoid defrauding charities.
* People in the U.S. Are Buying Fish Antibiotics Online and Taking Them Themselves. Congress can’t get its act together on lowering drug prices or eliminating surprise medical bills. Insurance companies aren’t doctors. So why do we keep letting them practice medicine? AOC compares average paid family leave in US to time dogs stay with puppies. And this is a little on the nose.
Paradigmatic example of this for me is the bit in KSR’s SCIENCE IN THE CAPITAL where one company has the patent on a cancer cure and one company has the patent on the delivery mechanism so they both go out of business and the cure is never distributed. https://t.co/2Cba7MvxiG
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 14, 2019
* You’d think after a story like this the adults involved would simply die of shame.
I guess "Five-year-old girl performs child labour to pay the debt accumulated by 123 other children who couldn't afford to eat" doesn't accomplish whatever ghoulish "feel-good" tone you're going for here https://t.co/EKbcomSvci
— Elizabeth May (@_ElizabethMay) December 15, 2019
* These 91 companies paid no federal taxes in 2018.
* House Democrats To Rich People: We Love You.
* Always money in the banana stand.
* These moderators help keep Google and YouTube free of violent extremism — and now some of them have PTSD. TikTok Admits It Suppressed Videos by Disabled, Queer, and Fat Creators. Artificial intelligence will help determine if you get your next job.
* Understanding The U.S. Economy: Lots Of Rotten Jobs.
* People in Japan are wearing exoskeletons to keep working as they age.
* Stealing the election in plain sight: 234,000 voter registrations get tossed in Wisconsin after Republican lawsuit, overwhelmingly in Milwaukee and Madison. Whatever shall I do with this power?
* Mario Maker is a blessing we never deserved.
why am I so excited about Link in Mario Maker? *this* is why I'm so excited about Link in Mario Maker pic.twitter.com/0qvQYp9Cnz
— Patrick Klepek (@patrickklepek) December 11, 2019
* Perhaps the best example of how radical and reactionary horror tropes sprout from one another is John Carpenter’s 1988 classic They Live. In the movie, John Nada (Roddy Piper), a virtuous, optimistic, working-class protagonist, discovers that cadaverous aliens are living among us, controlling us with television messages that turn us into obedient, consuming drones. The movie is widely considered a critique of Reagan-era neoliberalism, and it is that. But it’s also a story about the virtues of genocide. A white guy discovers aliens who don’t look like him living in his town, and his first impulse is to murder them. Foreign shape-shifting immigrants, like vampires, are a standard anti-Semitic stand-in for Jews, and They Live can be read as a fascist conspiracy theory, in which brave working Americans finally recognize their racial oppressors, and respond with righteous cleansing violence.
Reading @nberlat on THEY LIVE I’m reminded on my own article on the movie, which plays out some similar problems with the ending (and gets into some other Body Snatcher fiction I like as well): https://t.co/Va68iiGOiz Feels pretty relevant today. pic.twitter.com/4nZG6mj1Lf
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 14, 2019
* Boots Riley Critiques ‘Joker:’ “These Superhero Movies are Cop Movies.”
* Another trainwreck behind the scenes of American Gods.
* Millennials Are Leaving Religion And Not Coming Back. False Idol — Why the Christian Right Worships Donald Trump. The Evangelical Mind.
* Shocking slander of a female reporter in the Richard Jewell movie.
Paw Patrol's operations consistently violate principles of emergency assistance, from do no harm to local input. Pups regularly endanger civilians with reckless driving and utterly lack accountability or learning mechanisms. In this essay I will
— Doctora Malka Older (@m_older) December 15, 2019
* Second verse same as the first.
* Second verse same as the first but in a good way.
* UNC’s self-inflicted humiliation just gets worse.
* Stephen Miller is a white supremacist. I know, I was one too.
* No one could have predicted: Charter Fraud And Waste Worse Than We Thought.
* Ectopic Pregnancies Are Not Viable Pregnancies, Period.
* Hardt and Negri: Empire, Twenty Years On.
* What we know about you when you click on this article.
* U.S. lab chimps were dumped on Liberia’s Monkey Island and left to starve. He saved them.
* I’m Honestly Fed Up With All The Bad News, So I Illustrated 50 Of The Best Ones From 2019.
* Focus on a different kid every time you watch.
focus on a different child every time you watch 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/gGpowtXKGP
— Ree 🍯🍭 (@TTPrettyInPink) December 13, 2019
* And The Atlantic presents The Year in Volcanoes.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 16, 2019 at 2:26 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2019, abortion, academia, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, American Gods, animal experimentation, anti-Semitism, Antonio Negri, apocalypse, artificial intelligence, BDS, Berkeley, Bernie Sanders, Boots Riley, Brexit, bullshit jobs, Burisma, CFPs, charity, charter schools, chimpanzees, Christmas, class struggle, climate change, comics, Confederate monuments, corporations, critical thinking, cyborgs, dark side of the digital, Democrats, disability, Disney, Donald Trump, ecology, ectopic pregnancies, Elizabeth Warren, empire, Episode 9, extinction, fandom, fascism, fatphobia, Finland, futurity, gay rights, gender, Generation Z, glaciers, Goldman Sachs, Google, grad student nightmares, graduate student movements, graduate students, Greenland, Greta Thunberg, HBO, health insurance, high school football, How the University Works, HR, Hunter Biden, ice sheet collapse, Infinite Jest, Instagram, intergenerational struggle, interviews, Israel, J.J. Abrams, Jacobin, Jaimee, Japan, Jeremy Corbyn, Joe Biden, Joker, kids, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Labour, Lube Man, lunch debt, Mario Maker, McKinsey, medicine, Michael Hardt, military-industrial complex, millennials, monkeys, my media empire, neoliberalism, New Jersey, Nietzsche, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, one-book classes, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Paw Patrol. Hillary Clinton, Pete Buttigieg, podcasts, poems, poetry, politics, privacy, Proxima Centauri, PTSD, public health, race, racism, Randolph, religion, rich people, Richard Jewell, San Francisco, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, Science in the Capital, self-help, SFFTV, Silent Sam, socialism, Space Force, Star Trek, Star Trek Picard, Star Wars, Stephen Miller, superheroes, taxes, Terminator, the 2010s, the archives, the Arctic, the economy, the fantastic, the humanities, The Last Jedi, the oceans, the university in ruins, They Live!, TikTok, Ukraine, UNC, United Kingdom, Utopia, Vietnam, volcanoes, voter suppression, war on education, Watchmen, web comics, white supremacy, William Gibson, Wisconsin, Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman 1984, YouTube
Monday Morning Links That *Will* *Not* *Make* *You* *Sad*
* Caroll Spinney, puppeteer who gave life to Big Bird of ‘Sesame Street,’ dies at 85. My own mini Twitter thread. Meanwhile, in the other universe…
Such was the appeal of Big Bird that NASA asked Mr. Spinney to fly into orbit in costume, to interest young people in space exploration. Mr. Spinney agreed to go, but it was ultimately determined that the space shuttle was too small to accommodate the Big Bird suit. A New Hampshire teacher, Christa McAuliffe, went in his stead and was killed along with the rest of the crew when the Challenger shuttle exploded in 1986.
Caroll Spinney operating Oscar the Grouch, while wearing his Big Bird legs https://t.co/AUMQFtqeID pic.twitter.com/ehlJFPmNfn
— Masque of the Red Death (@doctorow) December 9, 2019
The original Big Bird Caroll Spinney has passed away at 85. On the outside, he made it all look simple. On the inside, Big Bird was incredibly complex. This look gave me a new appreciation inside his genius. pic.twitter.com/BjRZI752PU
— Darren Rovell (@darrenrovell) December 8, 2019
And from the archives…
BREAKING: Zoey just saw Big Bird for the first time and completely lost her shit.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 5, 2012
* Ali Sperling: On Futurity and Futility: Jeff VanderMeer’s Dead Astronauts.
So, what does it mean to fight for a future you know may already be lost? In such a context, questions underlying our relation to futurity become less about whether or not one can maintain hope for a failing planet and its deeply corrupted social and political structures; instead, the novel explores other forms of responses to the problem of the Anthropocene. One could argue that this isn’t a book about any particular future at all; instead, it’s about a present that has already come to pass. For many, there is already no other option but to fight fate, an imperative that suggests the strange paradox that structures both Dead Astronauts and the seemingly impossible political and ecological challenges faced at this moment around the world. The novel suggests that even something broken can be useful: “They had failed in the last City, and the one before that, and the one before that. Sometimes that failure pushed the needle farther. Sometimes that failure changed not a thing. But perhaps one day a certain kind of failure might be enough.”
* CFP: Posthuman Global Symposiums.
* ‘I’m working until I’m 75’: Factory worker describes family’s student debt nightmare.
* The Class of 2000 ‘Could Have Been Anything’: The high school yearbook is a staple of teenage life. But for some, it reflects the devastating toll of the opioid crisis.
* Tinder, but for the master race.
* Why US is still bad for working parents.
* It’s not thanks to capitalism that we’re living longer, but progressive politics.
* Biden! Biden! Biden! Buttigieg! And my global take on politics, more or less.
An underappreciated aspect of media bubbles: Democrats simply do not know and cannot understand Republicans consume media telling them they will soon need to murder liberals 16 hours a day. There is no “oh, if only we could just go back to being friends” on AM radio, or on Fox.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 8, 2019
me watching TV pic.twitter.com/ABUt2Y9TZt
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 8, 2019
* Service, and sacrifice and heritage.
* “Blackness is a superhero origin story.” The Performative Horniness of Dawn of X.
In short Watchmen is maybe the best demonstration ever of how thin the line is for me between “so good I can’t stop thinking about it” and “so bad I can’t stop thinking about it.”
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 9, 2019
* Counterpoint: every city, town, village, and hamlet in the United States is a universe unto itself.
* Disney warns Episode 9 may have an epilepsy risk.
Just learned about this letter K.A. Applegate wrote to fans about the end of Animorphs, and it is good. pic.twitter.com/zG2Xqm1kVn
— Matt Crowley (@MatthewPCrowley) December 6, 2019
Written by gerrycanavan
December 9, 2019 at 11:11 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with Ali Sperling, America, Animorphs, artificial intelligence, Big Bird, capitalism, CFPs, Challenger, Dead Astronauts, debt, Democratic primary 2020, disability, drugs, epilepsy, Episode 9, eugenics, games, I grow old, Jeff Vandermeer, Joe Biden, Kate Hayles, kids today, labor, maps, mortality, Muppets, obituary, opioids, Oscar the Grouch, parenting, Pete Buttigieg, post humanism, Sesame Street, Star Wars, student debt, takin' 'bout my generation, Tinder, Watchmen, work, YA literature
Liiiiiiiiinks
* frieze asked me to write them an end-of-decade reflection on franchise culture, so here it is: “Disney’s Endgame: How the Franchise Came to Rule Cinema.” It bounces off the Scorsese brouhaha, but with an eye towards what I see as the key problematic there (monopoly), as opposed to fretting about spectacle or sequels as such. Check it out!
* Had an amazing time doing the keynote at the UC Speculative Futures Collective Symposium on Speculative Futures and Education this week. Look for more from this group soon!
* I was also on the Gribcast podcast talking about Parable of the Talents, something we’d planned for nearly a year before finally making it happen.
* I was elected president of the Science Fiction Research Association last week, too. It’s been weird!
* CFP: Ecopedagogies for the Anthropocene. CFP: Midwestern Science Fiction and Fantasy. CFP: AU: Alternate University.
* The agrocapitalist sublime: The first map of America’s food supply chain is mind-boggling.
* These 8 Men Have As Much Money As Half The World.
* Ken Liu in the Times: How Chinese Sci-Fi Conquered America. The China Science Fiction Research Institute.
* ASAP Journal has a cluster on Latinx SF.
* Accelerationism: how a fringe philosophy predicted the future we live in. Come for the SF-fueled theory, stay for the celebration of Mark Fisher…
* Now, novelty is to be found in the refusal of communicative capitalism’s false promises of smoothness. If the nineties were defined by the loop (the ‘good’ infinity of the seamlessly looped breakbeat, Goldie’s “Timeless”), then the 21st century is perhaps best captured in the ‘bad’ infinity of the animated GIF, with its stuttering, frustrated temporality, its eerie sense of being caught in a time-trap.
UMD majors update at UMD: Selected majors, 2011 and 2019. Not trying to be dramatic so I'll just say, it's a massacre. pic.twitter.com/jiN8NyG3zR
— Philip N Cohen (@familyunequal) December 5, 2019
* My university is dying. And soon yours will be too. The end of Title IX. The other college debt crisis: Schools are going broke. Academe as the Dystopian Workplace. My god, UNC. One of the smartest and most prescient things I’ve read about current higher education was written in 1974, by the great education editor Fred Hechinger, who predicted splitting aid by income would create a “class war over tuition.” -22.8% per student, inflation adjusted. As Universities See State Funding Threatened, Will They Be Less Outspoken About Climate Change? A strike at Harvard. I told my mentor I was a dominatrix.
He saw taking higher-education tuition (which, I can't stress this enough, was a brand new thing in 1974) and mitigating it by providing aid to poorer families, with those with more covering themselves, would cause latter to react with vindictiveness and further retrenchment. /2 pic.twitter.com/izRI3QH5dh
— Mike Konczal (@rortybomb) November 29, 2019
* 63 Up.
* Are podcasts a disaster waiting to happen?
* Was ‘Oumuamua a cosmic dust bunny?
* Farming and the United Federation of Planets.
* Climate tipping points — too risky to bet against. Nine climate tipping points now ‘active,’ warn scientists. A Grave Climate Warning, Buried on Black Friday. ‘Bleak’ U.N. Report on a Planet in Peril Looms Over New Climate Talks. Global Warming Prediction Sounds Alarm for Climate Fight. Climate Change Is Accelerating, Bringing World ‘Dangerously Close’ to Irreversible Change. Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming. I decided to do a bit of a close read of one particular part of a 1965 report sent to Lyndon Johnson, on atmospheric carbon dioxide. Because I hate myself, you see.
* ‘It is raining plastic’: Microplastics found in Colorado rainwater. US may face French fry shortage due to poor potato crop: report. Forget ‘developing’ poor countries, it’s time to ‘de-develop’ rich countries. California bans insurers from dropping policies in wildfire zones. Will Buffalo become a climate change haven? Meet Julian Brave NoiseCat – the 26-year-old shaping US climate policy. Exxon and the carbon tax. And what could possibly go wrong? This Bill Gates-funded chemical cloud could help stop global warming. The Failure of the Adults.
Stopping climate change is only expensive compared to an imaginary world where climate change doesn't exist. It's *incredibly cheap* compared to the actual cost of a 3 degree warmer world.
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) November 27, 2019
Imagine trying to explain to people 50 years from now that in 2019 leftists and other environmentalists were very afraid of sounding too sanctimonious.
— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) November 27, 2019
I think we should be thinking less about how to convince people that our agenda is the only way out and more about how to transform the world such that people can't pretend what's happening isn't happening to them.
— Malcolm Harris (@BigMeanInternet) November 27, 2019
My main issue with climate change rhetoric is that it seems to imply some apocalyptic event, while in reality the transition to climate apartheid is gradual and already in process https://t.co/LifFvaVY7D
— colleen (@collnsmith) November 29, 2019
* Indict Jair Bolsonaro over indigenous rights, international court is urged.
* Border Patrol threw away migrants’ belongings. A janitor saved and photographed them.
* ICE set up a fake university, then arrested 250 people granted student visas. Truly the worst of these cases I’ve seen, no public good rationale whatsoever.
To recap: the feds created a scam school to entrap Indian immigrant-visa students, accredited it so it would look legit, took their money, then deported them for not knowing better, INCLUDING students who transferred out after realizing it was a scam. https://t.co/rdzVvAJSSn
— Matt Pearce 🦅 (@mattdpearce) November 27, 2019
the government is trying to put this person in prison https://t.co/rdzVvAJSSn pic.twitter.com/5Avr1TTq1I
— Matt Pearce 🦅 (@mattdpearce) November 27, 2019
The ICE fake university thing makes no sense if you see them as ‘law enforcement’ and perfect sense if you see them as what they really are.
— David Kaib (@DavidKaib) November 30, 2019
* This gets reported every few months as if it were new or shocking information: DHS never had technology needed to track separated migrant kids.
* Inside the Cell Where a Sick 16-Year-Old Boy Died in Border Patrol Care.
* A staggering one-in-three women, experience physical, sexual abuse.
* What is going on? Fears of school shootings hit eight Wisconsin high schools in three days.
* Wisconsin Republicans can completely transform the state’s system of governance on the fly, but the Foxconn deal is sacred writ now and forever.
* Trump’s Turkey Corruption Is Way Worse Than You Realize. I predicted Trump would win in 2016 — and I’m predicting the same for 2020. Here’s why liberals don’t understand what he represents. How Trump could lose by 5 million votes and still win in 2020. And it will always get worse: Trump Tells Allies He Wants Absolved War Criminals to Campaign for Him.
what is most horrifying about Trump is precisely how easy it would have been, and will still be, for someone with just a little more self-control to completely transform this country, with effectively no resistance https://t.co/SUYW58umE5
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 1, 2019
If it is deadly serious and makes you blink extra hard? It’s something that has always happened but now it’s being done under the cover of Trump’s administration.
— Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) December 3, 2019
I don’t think anyone has yet processed the level of lawbreaking we’re going to see once McConnell and the Senate Republicans formally declare that Trump is absolutely above the law. https://t.co/SllfwUWRSW
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 6, 2019
* If you want to beat Trump, be honest about Biden.
* Waiting for Obama. Let’s hang ourselves. The Real Barack Obama Has Finally Revealed Himself.
current state of the Dem primary: beloved previous president working to make sure the nomination doesn’t go to one of only two candidates who even pretend to give a damn about normal people (both topping out around 19% each), while multiple billionaires straight up try to buy it
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 26, 2019
I know “Great Man of History” thinking is banned now but I really wonder how much of the history of the 2010s ultimately redounds to Obama’s incredible personal magnetism against his failures as a leader
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 26, 2019
the only contradiction is between the fantasies people still have about him and the person he actually is https://t.co/h7m5ExpRnn
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 27, 2019
“The GOP’s incumbent is a vile, universally loathed creep! Now our only choice is whether to run a senile pervert or an absolute psychopath”
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 27, 2019
* Anthony Weiner and the butterfly effect.
* The case for Bernie Sanders.
* ‘A distinctly American phenomenon’: Our workforce is dying faster than any other wealthy country, study shows. It’s Not Just Poor White People Driving a Decline in Life Expectancy. Income inequality in America is the highest it’s been since Census Bureau started tracking it, data shows. Unemployment is low only because ‘involuntary’ part-time work is high. Nearly 700,000 SNAP Recipients Could Lose Benefits Under New Trump Rule. In a small Vermont city: heroin, bullets, and empathy.
* Why Rent Control Works. Highways Give Way to Homes as Cities Rebuild. Against self-driving cars. Today’s Socialist Revival Began on the Streets of Seattle 20 Years Ago. Welcome to the Global Rebellion Against Neoliberalism. Even rich kids need free college.
* Millennials weren’t the only ones gutted by the recession. Gen X has never recovered.
* True crime: Indiana manipulated report on Amazon worker’s death to lure HQ2, investigation says. Google fires four employees at center of worker organization efforts. Away’s founders sold a vision of travel and inclusion, but former employees say it masked a toxic work environment. Uber Office Had Separate Bathrooms for Drivers and ‘Employees.’ Uber’s new loan program could trap drivers in cycles of crushing debt. Uber Says 3,045 Sexual Assaults Were Reported in U.S. Rides Last Year.
* “Nearly every Revver who spoke with The Verge said they were exposed to graphic or troubling material on multiple occasions with no warning. This includes recordings of physical and verbal abuse between intimate partners, graphic descriptions of sexual assault, amateur porn, violent footage from police body cameras, a transphobic rant, and, in one instance, “a breast augmentation filmed by a physician’s cell phone, being performed on a patient who was under sedation.” Transcribers for the gig economy service Rev hate the recently slashed rates, but the disturbing content they deal with is even worse.
* Watched “The Irishman” and wondered, hey, what happened to those Teamsters pension funds in the end? Turns out that once Rudy Giuliani made a big splash getting the mob out, he handed management over to Wall Street with no oversight, and they wrecked it.
the subtext of all of Scorsese's mob films is the gradual subsumption of the mob's rackets to finance capital, who run them at even greater profit https://t.co/rSqTtppMKz
— giorgio (@stungusbungus) December 1, 2019
* The final word on should you go to grad school, from 1987.
* But his bosses didn’t like him, so they shot him into space.
* Starlink vs. the stars. Even more here!
* Airlines damage or lose an average of 26 wheelchairs a day, report finds.
* What happens after you abandon an entire amusement park?
* You can’t have it both ways.
I hope you all got good advent calendars today… pic.twitter.com/TIOA23iqLM
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) December 1, 2019
‘My Reading Year’ (for yesterday’s @guardianreview) pic.twitter.com/u4oat6jVtA
— Tom Gauld (@tomgauld) December 1, 2019
* This is a mistake and we should not accept it.
* New book claims Albert Camus was murdered by the KGB.
* The color of the year is… blue. Just — blue.
UNCLE: I say this every year but-
ME: not this again
MOM: we’re NOT talking politics this thanksgiving
UNCLE: without luigi there is no waluigi, therefore he is responsible for waluigi’s many sins
ME: ARE YOU SAYING WALUIGI HAS NO FREE WILL
UNCLE: I SAID WHAT I FUCKING SAID
— Ben Rosen (@ben_rosen) November 28, 2019
* Pretty sick dude. The prequels were close to a good story. I did stand-up last night as “1990s Jerry Seinfeld Doing Bits About His 17-Year-Old Girlfriend.” It Happened to Me: Sinclair Bought My Hometown News Channel and Now It’s Deranged. Bleakest shit I’ve ever seen. The Fire Was Good, Actually. That’s good content. That’s my secret. Inigo Montoya’s Guide to Networking Success. The self care serial killer. Every city has a “guy” they all know about. Give me fucking strength.
* Mikhail Gorbachev’s Pizza Hut Thanksgiving Miracle.
* Why Elsa from Frozen is a queer icon — and why Disney won’t embrace that idea.
* The Incendiary Aims of HBO’s Watchmen. HBO’s Watchmen Reveal Unmasks Homophobia and Fetishization. Move over, Joker – it’s time for the OG Superman.
* So the new Ghostbusters sequel follows in the classic franchise legacy mold and is about the original generation of Ghostbusters failing to prevent a disaster that destroyed New York. I really feel like our culture needs some therapy.
* Hands down one of the worst living Americans, virtual lock he’ll be president someday.
* I too can’t wait for December 20th.
can’t wait for dec. 20th pic.twitter.com/EWLG7qrztp
— porky thee pig (@faithwithanf) November 26, 2019
* Mark Z. Danielewski drops three new House Of Leaves teleplays, is definitely up to something.
* In 1969, a group of boys played a Thanksgiving football game. 50 years later, they’re still at it.
* “There Is An Entity That Cannot Be Defeated”: Former Go champion beaten by DeepMind retires after declaring AI invincible.
* And rest in peace, D.C. Fontana. There’s almost no one more directly responsible for what Star Trek became than her.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 6, 2019 at 2:12 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 63 Up, 7 Up, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, accelerationism, agricultural civilization, air travel, Albert Camus, Amazon, America, amusement parks, Anthony Weiner, apocalypse, assassination, astronomy, austerity, Avengers, Avengers: Endgame, Baby Yoda, Bernie Sanders, Bill Gates, billionaires, blue, Bolsonaro, books, Brack Obama, Brazil, Buffalo, butterfly effect, California, capitalism, CBP, CFPs, children, China, Chinese science fiction, cinema, class struggle, climate, climate change, college closures, college majors, color, Colorado, comics, concentration camps, Confederate monuments, corruption, D.C. Fontana, dark side of the digital, debt, delicious French fries, Democratic primary 2020, deportation, DHS, disability, Disney, Donald Trump, drug addiction, dystopia, ecology, electoral fraud, Elon Musk, English majors, Episode 9, Exxon, fantasy, farming, fascism, film, football, forever war, Foxconn, franchise fiction, free college, Frozen, games, general election 2020, Generation X, geoengineering, George Zimmerman, Ghostbusters, GIFs, global south, Go, Google, Gorbachev, graduate student movements, Great Recession, guns, Harvard, HBO, House of Leaves, How the University Works, I grow old, ice, immigration, income inequality, insurance, intergenerational struggle, Iraq, Joe Biden, KGB, kids, Latinx, Latinx science fiction, life expectancy, Life in Hell, Lyndon Johnson, maps, Mark Fisher, Mark Z. Danielewski, Martin Scorsese, Marvel, mass shootings, Matt Groening, McKinsey, MCU, mentors, micro plastics, migrants, millennials, Milwaukee, Monopoly, my media empire, my scholarly empire, Mystery Science Theater, neoliberalism, Netflix, New Orleans, New York, Octavia E. Butler, Oumuamu, outer space, Ozymandias, Parable of the Talents, parenting, Patreon, pedagogy, Pete Buttigieg, Pizza Hut, podcasts, politics, potatoes, poverty, public universities, race, racism, rape, rape culture, rent control, ruin, Samuel Beckett, school shootings, science fiction, Science Fiction Research Association, science fiction studies, Scorsese, Seattle, SFRA, Should I go to grad school?, social media, socialism, spheres, Star Trek, Star Wars, Starlink, strikes, student debt, Super Mario, Superman, Thanksgiving, the Amazon, the Anthropocene, the Census, the courts, the Federation, the flu, the humanities, The Irishman, the law, the recession, the stars, the sublime, the university in ruins, time loops, Title IX, Tom Gauld, true crime, tuition, Turkey, Twitter, Uber, UC Riverside, UNC, unemployment, unions, United Nations, Vermont, Waluigi, war crimes, war huh, Watchmen, water, wheelchairs, white people, wildfires, Wisconsin
The Return of Sunday Reading! Just Kidding!
* I have a short piece on resistance to automation in the forum of the new issue of ASAP/Journal. Check it out!
* I’m really stunned to see that the Tiptree Award is on the verge of being renamed. The details of the end of her and her husband’s life are definitely troubling — but decanonizing Tiptree over this single ambiguous incident at the end of her life seems to me to be of a completely different order than the Campbell or the Lovecraft renamings, where the entire body of creative output is being reevaluated.
* Faith in science fiction and fantasy.
* 64% of Americans support labor unions but membership is at a record low.
* In academia we need unions more than ever—whether one is an adjunct or tenure track. Our higher education system is being hollowed out by administrators who see institutions of learning as businesses, and are making money at students’ & workers’ expense.
* How Far Does Your Tuition Dollar Go?
Marquette University
This institution spends $0.49 on instruction for every dollar it collects in tuition.
This is a Private Nonprofit Four-Year College, University, and/or Professional School and the tuition collected per full-time student or equivalent is $22,584.
How does this school stack up?
The average public institution spends $1.42 on instruction for every dollar collected in tuition.
The average private nonprofit institution spends $0.84 on instruction for every dollar collected in tuition.
The average for-profit institution spends $0.29 on instruction for every dollar collected in tuition.
* A Brief History of Academic Mysteries, Campus Thrillers, and Research Noir.
* Meritocracy Is Killing High-School Sports.
The book posits an Iron Law of Meritocracy, in which meritocratic systems will collapse in on themselves because eventually inequality of outcomes grow so vast, it's impossible to provide equality of opportunity. What you then get is something like aristocracy and oligarchy.
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) August 30, 2019
* Adjunct Faculty in an Adjunct Country. Beatriz Llenín Figueroa on the situation at the University of Puerto Rico.
* Syllabus: Critical Algorithm Studies.
* Dialectics of the new Popeye’s chicken sandwich. Panera is losing nearly 100% of its workers every year as fast-food turnover crisis worsens. Waffle House has an official poet laureate.
* Amazon Is Looking More and More Like a Nation-State. Amazon is lying about Ring and facial recognition. Amazon’s Next-Day Delivery System Has Brought Chaos And Carnage To America’s Streets — But The World’s Biggest Retailer Has A System To Escape The Blame.
* YouTube reinstated these extremist and white nationalist channels, apologized to them.
* How 9 People Built an Illegal $5M Airbnb Empire in New York.
* The Plan to Use Fitbit Data to Stop Mass Shootings Is One of the Scariest Proposals Yet.
* “Hey, Google! Let me talk to my departed father.”
the idea that Omega Point aliens will someday be able to resurrect me on the basis of my public writing is 89% of the reason I’m still on Twitter https://t.co/l348wObaXp
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 31, 2019
to be perfectly honest I have a little bit of a Roko’s Basilisk fear that I’ve *already* been resurrected on the basis of my social media posts in some techno-gnostic simulation scenario and that’s why absolutely everything is garbage
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 31, 2019
* Twitter’s promise vs. Twitter’s reality.
* Immigration panic: how the west fell for manufactured rage. Trump administration seeks to deport children with life-threatening illnesses.
* It Is Very Bad That Our President Reportedly Lied About Trade Negotiations With China. Let’s Compare Donald Trump’s Week to the Impeachment Articles Brought Against Nixon, Clinton, and Johnson.
* There’s no FEC anymore. There’s not really an NLRB, either.
* Dear America, universal health care is what real freedom looks like.
* How Slavery Shaped American Capitalism.
* Capitalism Is Making Us Sick: A Q&A With Emily Guendelsberger About Her New Book, On the Clock.
* 7 ‘Left Wing’ Ideas (Almost) All Americans Can Get Behind.
* Liberalism in Theory and Practice.
Basically our – very neoliberal – plan for everything these days is to dump the consequences for contradictions we refuse to resolve on the most vulnerable, the over-stretched, and the future itself, and monetize every miserable step of it all the way down.
— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) August 30, 2019
* The Children’s Crusade: This Colorado charter school is teaching 6th graders how to fight back against shooters.
* Well guys, I’m about to walk out the TNR office doors for the last time. But before I do, I want to share some hard truths about climate change I’ve learned in the last 2.5 yrs reporting here.
* North Carolina’s Climate Change Blind Spots Make Dorian More Dangerous. Rising seas ‘could displace 280m people,’ draft UN report warns. New Miami Hurricane Hazard: Dockless Scooters as Projectiles.
* On pregnancy in the Anthropocene.
* How to Win Wisconsin. And elsewhere on the Wisconsin beat: Wisconsin workers embedded with microchips.
* The rape charges were dropped because the victim’s credibility was “seriously, seriously questionable” and the charges could not be proved beyond reasonable doubt, said Justice Danny Chun. The agreed-upon facts are inarguably rape.
* Good news: Sacklers could hold on to most of personal fortune in proposed Purdue settlement.
* On the greatness of Peanuts (when it was good).
* In the age of the psychonauts.
* “Brain-reading tech is coming. The law is not ready to protect us.”
* First is third. Second is first. Third is second.
* The Longest Walkable Distance on Earth.
* Here’s a thing that no one asked for but that I think we all need: the style guide alignment chart.
Okay, folks. Here's a thing that no one asked for but that I think we all need: the style guide alignment chart. pic.twitter.com/fuqglnUEE6
— Jonathon Owen (@ArrantPedantry) August 30, 2019
* Compulsory homosexuality in Ireland! Marxist-lesbianism is the state ideology!
* DeepMind Can Now Beat Us at Multiplayer Games, Too.
* The Slinky was invented by accident.
* Jordan Peele drops a surprise flick.
* Donald was the first child ever diagnosed with autism. Identified in the annals of autism as “Case 1 … Donald T,” he is the initial subject described in a 1943 medical article that announced the discovery of a condition unlike “anything reported so far,” the complex neurological ailment now most often called an autism spectrum disorder, or ASD. At the time, the condition was considered exceedingly rare, limited to Donald and 10 other children—Cases 2 through 11—also cited in that first article.
* On precocious puberty, the hell you didn’t even know was possible.
* Sing to me, muse, of the man of twists and turns…
* My five-alarm-fire Star Wars 9 and Notorious RBG predictions, for the record.
* We’re all rooting for you, sweetie.
* And science has finally found the secret to happiness.
But, doctor, I am the Joker
— Andrew Ferguson (@epiktistes) September 1, 2019
Written by gerrycanavan
September 1, 2019 at 9:17 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic jobs, accelerationism, adjunctification, adjuncts, Africa, Airbnb, algorithms, Amazon, America, animals, apocalypse, autism, automation, awards, capitalism, CBP, Charles Schultz, cheating, chicken sandwiches, children's crusade, chimpanzees, China, class struggle, climate change, comics, critical algorithm studies, dark side of the digital, deportation, Dicey Dungeons, Donald Trump, Dungeons and Dragons, ecology, Episode 9, faith, fantasy, fast food, FEC, Fitbit, Florida, games, Google, grades, guns, happiness, health care, Hell, high school sports, homosexuality, horror, hurricanes, ice, immigration, immortality, impeachment, Ireland, James Mattis, James Tiptree Jr., labor, liberalism, Luddites, Marquette, Marxist-lesbianism, mass shootings, Mel Gibson, meritocracy, monkeys, morally odious monsters, myth, neoliberalism, neurocapitalism, NLRB, North Carolina, NYPD, Odysseus, Omega Point, Oregon Trail, Panera, Peanuts, politics, Popeye's, precocious puberty, pregnancy, psychedelics, puberty, Puerto Rico, rape, rape culture, religion, resistance, rising sea levels, Roko's Basilisk, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, science, science fiction, slavery, slinkies, Snoopy, social media, sports, Star Wars, style guides, surveillance society, tenure, the 1970s, the Anthropocene, The Joker, the Left, the Singularity, the wisdom of markets, Theranos, toys, true facts, tuition, Twitter, unions, Waffle House, walking, Wisconsin, work, writing, YouTube, zoos
Tuesday Morning Links!
The essence of our magical thinking. https://t.co/7isFUdm35f
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 15, 2019
* Fire at Notre Dame. Fire was the scourge of medieval cathedrals. But they rebuilt from the ashes. Conspiracies and hoaxes. A warning from 2017. What’s Been Saved and What’s Been Lost. Rebuilding Notre Dame.
I'm still shell-shocked from Brazil's museum fire and the realization that between corrupt, incompetent governments and climate change, we're going to be watching irreplaceable cultural treasures burn for the rest of our lives.
— David Klion🔥 (@DavidKlion) April 15, 2019
As a refugee I can tell you that the things you've lost can never be rebuilt. You can only build for the future.
We are all refugees now. It's just not evenly distributed yet.
— Jenka 🌱🌿🍄 (@babiejenks) April 15, 2019
There won't be room to mourn everything we're going to lose. Pace yourself.
— Jenka 🌱🌿🍄 (@babiejenks) April 15, 2019
Everyone helplessly watching something beautiful burn is 2019 in a nutshell.
— Ryan McGee (@TVMcGee) April 15, 2019
* Palpatine post-ROTJ in the new EU.
* 17 Writers on the Role of Fiction in Addressing Climate Change.
* If you want a vision of the future, imagine having a runny nose — forever.
* ICE deports spouse of U.S. soldier killed in Afghanistan. Their daughter is now left parentless.
* A new policy proposal by the Trump administration calls for the surveillance of disabled people’s social media profiles to determine the necessity of their disability benefits. The proposal, which reportedly aims to cut down on the number of fraudulent disability claims would, monitor the profiles of disabled people and flag content that shows them doing physical activities. When it comes down to it, the policy dictates that disabled people shouldn’t be seen living their lives for fear of losing vital financial aid and, possibly, medical care. Veterans too.
* United States added to list of most dangerous countries for journalists for first time.
* Artist Reimagines David Bowie Songs as Old Pulp Fiction Book Covers.
* I’m afraid the Dewey Decimal System… is cancelled.
* Scandals. Backstabbing. Resignations. Record profits. Time Bombs. In early 2018, Mark Zuckerberg set out to fix Facebook. Here’s how that turned out.
* I think Bernie should boycott Fox, but it couldn’t have gone better for him.
* Shoot a ninth season, you cowards. broke: Bran ruined the story. woke: Bran is the story.
Written by gerrycanavan
April 16, 2019 at 8:48 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, adjunctification, adjuncts, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, allergies, America, Bernie Sanders, Bill Weld, cathedrals, class struggle, climate change, David Bowie, deportation, Dewey Decimal System, disability, don't mention the war, Donald Trump, Episode 9, Facebook, fast food, fire, Fox News, France, free speech, Game of Thrones, games, Gene Wolfe, George R. R. Martin, grief, guns, Homestuck, How the University Works, ice, Impossible Burger, journalism, kids today, mass shootings, mourning, Notre Dame, obituary, Paris, passwords, pedagogy, politics, Pulp Fiction, refugees, Republican primary 2020, retirement, science fiction, Star Wars, teaching, the Emperor, The Rise of Skywalker, the VA, the Yankees, vegetarianism, veterans, webcomics
Take a Long Lunch on Me with these Monday Afternoon Links
* CFP: Paradoxa 32, Comics and/or Graphic Novels.
* CFP: Energy Pasts and Futures in American Studies.
* A City on Mars Could Descend Into Cabin Fever and Nationalism. Just because that’s what happened on Earth doesn’t mean it would happen on Mars!
* Philip K. Dick’s Unfinished Novel Was a Faustian Fever Dream.
* Some timely content for my games class: can colonialism and slavery ever be game mechanics?
* Reading ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ in Baghdad: What Vonnegut taught me about what comes after war.
One of his legacies is a famous passage in “Slaughterhouse-Five.” It’s about planes flying in reverse, where shrapnel flies out of people, back into the bombs and the planes take off backward from their runways, and so on, until everyone is just a baby again.
Vonnegut is saying it would be nice if the wisdom learned from a war could be used to reverse engineer the entire thing and keep it from happening at all. That is a nice thought.
* The bargaining phase of climate crisis: why don’t you just move to Duluth?
* This Is How Human Extinction Could Play Out.
* Matthew Dean Hindman is reporting from the neoliberal gutting of the University of Tulsa.
We hear about liberal students & faculty. But oversight boards (trustees, regents) tend to be far more conservative & more inclined to treat the university as a business. Sometimes they are politically appointed, sometimes not, but rarely a diverse bunch. Here is #utulsa's pic.twitter.com/e6pxEXU1lO
— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) April 14, 2019
* Faculty, students and community members rally for unionization at Marquette. More from Wisconsin Public Radio.
* How College Professors Turned Into Uber Drivers.
* A new study confirms that fraternity men and athletes are committing more sexual assaults than are those in the general student population — and that repeat offenders are a major problem.
* I have a hunch, which is that professors are considerably less good at teaching than they think they are. And the hunch is based on the fact that we don’t train teaching assistants to teach, that we select and hire professors without any regard to their ability or potential as teachers, and that we don’t then give them further training or professional development. A hunch you say.
* Georgetown Students Agree to Create Reparations Fund.
* Faced with an unprecedented moral emergency in the Trump presidency, the Democrats have wisely decided to… play chicken with their base.
It is truly amazing that we are only able to discuss how the country wound up run by a sunsetting racist authoritarian as long as there’s never any indication that a Democrat ever made a single mistake
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 15, 2019
In the last 24 hours we've seen a distinction emerge between candidates who believe their path to the presidency lies in accommodation to GOP rhetoric and those whose strategy is to run straight at the beast swinging a sword.
— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) April 13, 2019
* Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile. Meanwhile.
(1) seen by (2) many (3) as apparently (4) increasing (5) the use of tactics (6) usually employed.
That's SIX caveats standing in the way of "Trump is an autocratic president." Six. https://t.co/QWmF785rKW
— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) April 14, 2019
* ‘Fox News brain’: meet the families torn apart by toxic cable news.
* Yemeni bodegas boycott New York Post over attacks on Ilhan Omar.
* Inside One Woman’s Fight to Rewrite the Law on Marital Rape.
* David Perry talks about antidepressant withdrawal.
* Anti-beardism: the last acceptable prejudice?
* LARB considers Born in the USA.
* Can we build non-sexist and non-racist cities?
* Bird scooters last less then a month and each one costs the company an average of $300.
* Played as anything but a goof, Quidditch is incredibly dangerous.
* The Dunbar number is probably wrong.
* Today in dialectics: Are Plastic Bag Bans Garbage?
* Today in 21st century news: How to Scan Your Airbnb for Hidden Cameras.
* How Do Hospitals Stop the Spread of Drug-Resistant Superbugs Like C. Auris?
By ripping out floor tiles, reconfiguring pipes, and maybe deploying a hydrogen peroxide–spraying robot. Plus, a lot of bleach.
* Online trolls are harassing a scientist who helped take the first picture of a black hole. And you’ll never guess why!
* YouTube and racism, part a million.
* Hmm, weird, but I’m sure it’s fine.
* “Fewer clearer examples of Mark Fisher’s assertion that capitalism now only exists to block the emergence of common wealth than the fact that Google have apparently digitised every book in the world, and made them accessible to everyone, only with half the pages missing.”
* How ‘Game of Thrones’ linguist David J. Peterson became Hollywood’s go-to language guy.
Eight seasons of buildup was worth it just for this moment! pic.twitter.com/3uEonceVVs
— pixelatedboat aka “mr tweets” (@pixelatedboat) April 15, 2019
big weekend for our most popular incest-themed fantasy franchises
— Dave Itzkoff (@ditzkoff) April 15, 2019
game of zzzzzz am I right
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 15, 2019
* Now that’s commitment to a bit.
* And I have a bad feeling about this.
Wow Star Wars is having the best media day in history nothing could possibly go wrong, let's go check Twitter and. . . . pic.twitter.com/jwbu1r9MSy
— Jordan Hoffman (@jhoffman) April 12, 2019
Personally, I can't wait for
X: God Emperor Skywalker
XI: Heretics of Skywalker
XII: Chapterhouse Skywalker— Mark Bould (@MarkBould3) April 14, 2019
(2) But the reintroduction of Palpatine and claim that it was always the plan to bring him back for IX makes me think there’s a decent chance they are going to throw a curveball and have Kylo *always* have been good after all, acting dark to get close enough to Palps to kill him.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 14, 2019
(2 cont) This has been speculated since TFA came out and there’s def stuff in the films that can support it (“I will finish what you started,” the Han death scene, but also the Rashomon stuff around the destruction of Luke’s academy in TLJ). The best chance left for a true twist.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 14, 2019
(and so on)
Of course the other problem is that episode nine has to be the end of something literally no person on the planet believes will ever be allowed to end.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 12, 2019
Disney will accomplish what George Lucas himself attempted but could not achieve: running STAR WARS into the ground and forcing fans to give up on it
— Gavin Mueller (@gavinmuellerphd) April 13, 2019
what a doofus, it's episode ix https://t.co/q4yA3GQuID
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) April 15, 2019
Written by gerrycanavan
April 15, 2019 at 11:03 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, academia, actually existing media bias, adjunctification, adjuncts, advertising, Airbnb, American Studies, anti-beardism, antibiotic resistant bacteria, antidepressants, apocalypse, austerity, authoritarianism, bargaining, beards, Beto O' Rourke, black holes, bodegas, books, Born in the USA, boycotts, Brown, CBP, CFPs, cities, class struggle, climate change, college sports, college textbooks, colonialism, comics, commitment to a bit, dark side of the digital, Democrats, deportation, disruption, Donald Trump, Duluth, Dunbar number, Dune, empire, endings, energy, Episode 9, fascism, Fox News, fraternities, Game of Thrones, games, George Lucas, Georgetown, germs, Google, Google Books, graduate student movements, graphic narrative, How the University Works, human extinction, ice, Ilhan Omar, immigration, incest, invented languages, IQ, Kylo Ren, Latin America, Mark Fisher, Marquette, Mars, martial rape, misogyny, Nancy Pelosi, NCAA, neoliberalism, New York Post, obituary, oil, outer space, Paradoxa, pedagogy, Pepsi, Philip K. Dick, plastic bags, plot twists, politics, pornography, post-antibiotic bacteria, psychopharmacology, Quidditch, racism, rape, rape culture, reparations, science fiction, scooters, sexism, Slaughterhouse Five, slavery, sports, Springsteen, standup comedy, Star Wars, stochastic terrorism, superbugs, surveillance society, teaching, tenure, the courts, the law, The Owl in Daylight, The Rise of Skywalker, the university in ruins, trolls, trustees, Uber, unions, University of Tulsa, VALIS, VAPs, Vonnegut, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, YouTube
Exactly the Right Number of Finely Curated, Carefully Selected Links from Around the Time My Computer Crashed Last Week to Around the Time I Got It Back This Week
* CFP: “TechnoLogics: Power and Resistance.” CFP: Blade Runner 2049 and Philosophy.
* I have an essay in this new open-access book, Materialism and the Critique of Energy: “Peak Oil after Hydrofracking.” It’s a bit of a departure from my usual work but I thought it came out well… Check it out!
* Kim Stanley Robinson makes the left’s case for geoengineering. And from Peter Frase: Geoengineering for the People.
* The Buffy Not-a-Reboot: A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come.
* How author Nnedi Okorafor found her identity.
* Fascinating presentation on the SF writing market. Lots to think about here.
* Inside the World of Racist Science Fiction. What can we learn from the utopians of the past?
* Why are there so many staircases in space?
* We were halfway through 2018 when the drugs began to take hold.
* Brexit: That Sinking Feeling. This is what a no-deal Brexit actually looks like.
* Reading Your Problematic Fave: David Foster Wallace, feminism and #metoo. And a report from the 2018 David Foster Wallace Conference, partially a profile of my college classmate Ryan Edel.
* Most academic books aren’t written to be read—they’re written to be “broken.” That should change.
* How to Prepare a Diversity Statement.
* When you’re the only person in your department.
* When your students (might) record you. A good thread on the subject from Angus Johnson.
* Teaching in a red county after Trump.
* Now he tells us! Mea culpa: there *is* a crisis in the humanities.
* We now live in a country where it is seen as abnormal, or even criminal, to allow children to be away from direct adult supervision, even for a second. Motherhood in the Age of Fear.
* Nintendo announces Labo Kit #3.
* Astounding finalist images for Astronomy Photographer of the Year.
* How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions.
* Where the Super-Rich Go to Buy Their Second Passport.
* Time to Take Sexism in Post-Secondary Education Seriously.
* So much of our culture has been shaped by predators.
* Federal judge allows emoluments case against Trump to proceed. Trump’s ‘emoluments’ battle: How a scholar’s search of 200 years of dictionaries helped win a historic ruling.
* These Three Immigrant Families Were Just Reunited After Months Apart. Here Are Their Stories. A Migrant Boy Rejoins His Mother, but He’s Not the Same. A 6-Year-Old Girl Was Sexually Abused in an Immigrant-Detention Center. A child has died following her stay at an ICE Detention Center, as a result of possible negligent care and a respiratory illness she contracted from one of the other children. Immigrant Youth Shelters: “If You’re a Predator, It’s a Gold Mine.” Deportations take unique toll on blended American families. Hundreds of separated parents potentially deported. Deleted families. ICE agents pressured parents to be deported with their children — then separated them again when they refused. Suicide in ICE Custody. ‘Like I am trash’: Migrant children reveal stories of detention, separation. ICE snatches 25-year Minnesota resident from his family in harrowing video. A Father and Son Were Finally Reunited. Later that Day, the Government Ripped Them Apart Again. ‘Why Did You Leave Me?’ The Migrant Children Left Behind as Parents Are Deported. They were warned. It’s happening here. Don’t doubt it for a second. The Number Of Parents Who Were Deported Without Their Children Keeps Growing. Separated Parents Were “Totally Unaware” They Had Waived Their Right To Be Reunified With Their Children. Baby took first steps, spoke first words while in US custody: report. Florida Cops Ship 24-Year-Old Mom to ICE After She Paid Traffic Ticket. This Immigrant Returned To Her Dangerous Home Country — Where She’d Been Raped — After Having A Miscarriage In A US Detention Center. A mother and her son turned up for a domestic-violence case. Then ICE arrested them. A Philadelphia immigration judge was removed from a high-profile case and replaced with a judge who would order the man in the case immediately deported, a move that smacks of judicial interference by the Trump administration, according to a letter signed by a group of retired judges this week. From Crib To Court: Trump Administration Summons Immigrant Infants. Activist judges up to their old tricks. ICE Raids in New York. Philadelphia won’t share information with ICE in big win for activists. Pizza Delivery Man Pablo Villavicencio Freed From Immigration Detention. Protests and petitions call on universities to end their contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
A male US officer falsely told a 10-year-old she could see her mother for an hour at 6:00p. The child was held in a windowless, constantly lit facility where she couldn’t determine the time of day. When she asked the officer for the time, he said he wasn’t permitted to tell her. https://t.co/ufNCH1rpfr
— southpaw (@nycsouthpaw) July 19, 2018
17 y/o girl, separated from her mom, on a 2 y/o girl being held in the same "cage": "When I came back the little girl was crying and needed a new diaper. No one was helping her. The guards treat her like any other older kid. They call her name and expect her to get in line." pic.twitter.com/g0IpAyM5xP
— Emma Platoff (@emmaplatoff) July 19, 2018
* Swedish student stops deportation of Afghan man with protest streamed on Facebook.
* The Trump administration is bullying trans kids, and it’s up to us to stop it. Transgender women say the US government is revoking their passports. Documenting the Trans Generation: Kids, Families and the Fight for Rights.
* Q is a massively successful, deranged conspiracy/entertainment brand/game with roots in prior vile conspiracies like Pizza- and Gamergate. And many Trump supporters LOVE it. Flashback: What Is QAnon? The Craziest Theory of the Trump Era, Explained.
* I’m stuck in Guantanamo. The world has forgotten me.
* They still haven’t fixed the water in Flint.
* Scenes from the class war in New York City, NYDN edition.
* MSNBC has done 455 Stormy Daniels segments in the last year — but none on U.S. war in Yemen.
* Brett Kavanaugh’s Legal Opinions Show He’d Give Donald Trump Unprecedented New Powers. Brett Kavanaugh Thinks Undocumented Workers Aren’t Really Employees Under The Law.
* Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?
* Undaunted Democratic Centrists Ready to Fight Trump and Bernie at Same Time.
* The Expressive Function of the Russia Freakout.
* Gasp! Portugal Dared to Cast Aside Austerity. It’s Having a Major Revival.
* Unidentifiable fossils: palaeontological problematica.
* The world’s first trillionaire may be an asteroid miner.
* Science fiction design after cyberpunk.
In all these cases we see a de-saturated view of the world, no longer neon on black, just a pall gray. Gone is the “Coolness” of Cyberpunk, now replaced by the “coolness” of a color palate that ranges from a flat blue to an olive drab with only slightly less than 50 shades of gray in between.
* The Architecture of Evil: Dystopian Megacorps in Speculative Fiction Films.
* Sure, 1,000,000% inflation sounds bad.
* Why ‘Sorry to Bother You’ Is 2018’s Sharpest Political Satire. “Crazy” Anticapitalism.
* In 2016, China imported two-thirds of the world’s plastic waste. So when China stopped buying the world’s discarded plastics, it threw markets into turmoil. Meanwhile: The Dirty Truth Is Your Recycling May Actually Go to Landfills.
* The Hidden Environmental Cost of Amazon Prime’s Free, Fast Shipping.
* The Carr Fire Is Officially One of the 10 Worst Wildfires in California History. California is burning (again). The common thread in California’s wildfires: heat like the state has never seen. If you want a vision of the future. If you want a vision of the future. If you want a vision of the future. How Did the End of the World Become Old News? It’s a big problem.
* Climate change is supercharging a hot and dangerous summer. Arctic Circle wildfires rage on as blistering heat takes hold of northern Europe. Crop failure and bankruptcy threaten farmers as drought grips Europe. Scandinavia Is on Fire. In Greece, Wildfires Kill Dozens, Driving Some Into the Sea. Dozens Dead in Japan. Climate change means bigger Arctic spiders — but don’t worry, that could be a good thing.
* I suppose there’s just no one to blame.
If you only learn one thing about climate change from all these northern hemisphere extreme heat incidents:
2C of warming doesn’t mean “like now, but 2C warmer”.
— Kate Mackenzie (@kmac) July 27, 2018
In fact this one is better as (c) shows change in variance. pic.twitter.com/qn8FT0fIDy
— Kate Mackenzie (@kmac) July 28, 2018
Capitalism has existed for less than 1% of recorded history and we might literally destroy the planet under it, but it's the only system that "works" and we have to keep doing it forever
— Shuja Haider (@shujaxhaider) July 30, 2018
* Cows, trees, corn, and golf – how America uses its land.
* In America, land votes. More election maps! Emails show Michigan GOP bragged about cramming ‘Dem garbage’ into gerrymandered districts. Why the argument for democracy is now working for socialists rather than against them.
* “Cooking Them to Death”: The Lethal Toll of Hot Prisons.
* We’re Living a Constitutional Crisis. And despite this, there’s no way out.
* Libertarianism and white supremacy.
* “I’m No Donna Reed”: Postfeminist Rhetoric in Christian At-Home Daughterhood Texts.
* It’s hard realizing that you’re the bad guy, because then you have to do something about it. That’s why the most aggressive players on the gory stage of political melodrama act in such bad faith, hanging on to their own sense of persecution, mouthing the plagiarized playbook of an oppression they don’t comprehend because they don’t care to. These people have a way of fumbling through their self-set roles till the bloody final act, but if we can flip the script, we might yet stop the show.
* Uber and Lyft Are Overwhelming Urban Streets, and Cities Need to Act Fast. Pave Over the Subway? Cities Face Tough Bets on Driverless Cars. Yes, the scooters are fun, but.
* Mortgage, Groupon and card debt: how the bottom half bolsters U.S. economy.
* EPA staff worried about toxic chemical exposure — for Pruitt.
* NJ governor bought a women’s soccer team to inspire his daughter, but ran it into the ground.
* There’s a New Scholarly Take on Mizzou’s Race Crisis, and Its Former Leaders Don’t Fare Well.
* A case involving professors at Plymouth State U raises questions about when it’s OK to speak up for colleagues or students accused of sexual misconduct, if ever. In this case, professors defended former student who admitted to sexually assaulting a 14-year-old. The description honestly doesn’t do it justice; these letters of support are completely eye-popping under the circumstances.
* Number of patients suing USC over sex abuse claims tops 300 as faculty push for Nikias’ exit.
* Ex-Trump staffers should not get plum jobs at elite universities.
* Is Elizabeth Warren Running for President?
* How a Swiss Army Knife is made.
* The latest in the stadium scam.
* What would motivate a company to give away 52,000 tablet computers for free? Can you crack this case, gumshoe?
* A new report finds that big companies could have given their workers thousands of dollars’ worth of raises with the money they spent on their own shares. Are Stock Buybacks Starving the Economy?
* Let the computers be the doctors, they said.
* You don’t know me, computer!
* They’re real good at memes though.
* The anarchist roots of writing.
* Today in Sheriff Clarke news.
* Truly the Devil can quote Scripture for his purposes.
* She Gave Millions to Artists Without Credit. Until Now.
* The Bayeux Tapestry with knobs on: what do the tapestry’s 93 penises tell us?
* Game Studio With No Bosses Pays Everyone The Same.
* Conservative Think Tank Says Medicare For All Would Save $2 Trillion.
* Angelo Secchi, the Jesuit father of astrophysics.
* Wariness and wonder at a conference devoted to “Ancient Aliens.”
* Conversation is impossible if one side refuses to acknowledge the basic premise that facts are facts. This is why engaging deniers in such an effort means having already lost. And it is why AskHistorians, where I am one of the volunteer moderators, takes a strict stance on Holocaust denial: We ban it immediately.
* Locke & Key Has Been Ordered To Series. Flight of the Conchords is coming back. Disney’s Next Heroine Will Be an African Princess. Carrie Fisher Will Appear in Star Wars: Episode IX Via Unused Footage. Shazam looks 90s-cable-level bad, though maybe I’ve just been persuaded that the character is irredeemable. In the First Trailer for Star Trek: Discovery Season 2, the U.S.S. Enterprise Boldly Arrives. And they’re making a Parable of the Sower graphic adaptation.
* Inside J.R.R. Tolkien’s Notebooks, a Glimpse of the Master Philologist at Work.
* Uneven, but finding its voice: @moviegoofs.
Spartacus (1960)
Plot holeIn the scene where the Romans try to locate the rebel leader Spartacus in the captured slave army, most of the other slaves also identify themselves as being named "Spartacus". The movie never explains this coincidence.
— movie_goofs (@movie_goofs) July 30, 2018
* A People’s History of the Greatest Music Video of All Time, Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough.
* The Grim Conclusions of the Largest-Ever Study of Fake News.
* When factchecking backfires.
* History in an Age of Fake News.
* When a stranger decides to destroy your life.
* We must not just ask what a contemporary slave rebellion would look like—we must be on its side.
* A biological intelligence, a machine intelligence, and a god intelligence walk into a bar. Ethics and the self-driving car. Heaven. Can I interest you in a happy ending? From hell’s heart I stab at thee.
* We’ll probably never know what really makes people happy.
* Every Circle In This Image Is The Same Color And It’s Breaking Our Brains.
* Mr. Rogers was my actual neighbor. He was everything he was on TV and more.
* Dungeons & Dragons is having its best year ever, Hasbro CEO says.
* Great thread about New York City’s grid layout, with a great punchline.
* And the guy who slated classic Star Trek takes was unfazed by the whole thing. It’s a living…
Written by gerrycanavan
August 1, 2018 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #MeToo, 2018, a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies, abolition, abortion, academia, academic jobs, actually existing media bias, Afghanistan, Afrofuturism, air travel, Amazon, Amazon Prime, America, anarchy, ancient aliens, apocalypse, architecture, art, artificial intelligence, asteroid mining, asteroids, astrology, astronomy, astrophysics, austerity, Bayeux Tapestry, Beach Boys, Bernie Sanders, Bigfoot, Bird, Black Panther, Blade Runner, Blade Runner 2049, books, Brett Kavanaugh, Brexit, Buffy, bullshit, California, capitalism, Carrie Fisher, cars, Case Western, cats, centrism, CFPs, Charles Stross, child abuse, China, Chuck Schumer, class struggle, climate change, communism, conspiracy theories, corruption, crisis, cyberpunk, David Foster Wallace, debt, democracy, Democrats, denialism, deportation, design, disability, Disney, diversity, doctors, Donald Trump, driving, Dungeons and Dragons, dystopia, ecology, Elizabeth Warren, emoluments, EPA, Episode 9, ethics, Europe, evangelical Christianity, Facebook, fact-checking, fake news, Far Side, film, Flight of the Conchords, Flint, fossils, four-day work week, fracking, futurity, games, geoengineering, gerrymandering, ghosts, Goonies, Goonies never say die, Greece, Groupon, Guantánamo, Guardians of the Galaxy, hacking, happiness, happy endings, Heaven, history, How the University Works, Hugo awards, hydrofracking, ice, immigration, Infinite Jest, inflation, infrastructure, James Gunn, Japan, Jesuits, Joss Whedon, journamalism, justice, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kokomo, labor, leftism, libertarianism, Locke and Key, Lyft, machine learning, maps, mass transportation, McDonald's, Medicare, medicine, memes, Michigan, misogyny, Mizzou, Moby-Dick, moderation, Monopoly, moral panic, mortgage, motherhood, Mr. Rogers, MSNBC, music, my scholarly empire, New Jersey, New York, New York Daily News, New Zealand, Nintendo, Nintendo Labo, Nintendo Switch, Nnedi Okorafor, Octavia Butler, oil companies, optical illusions, Orwell, our brains don't work, outer space, paleontology, Parable of the Sower, parenting, passports, Peak Oil, pedagogy, Peter Jackson, philanthropy, philosophy, plastic, Plymouth State, politics, Portugal, postfeminism, princesses, prison-industrial complex, prisons, QAnon, race, race culture, racism, rape, recycling, rich people, Roe v. Wade, Russia, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, satire, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, scams, Scandinavia, science fiction, scooters, security state, self-driving cars, sex, sexism, Shazam, Sheriff Clarke, Shuri, slave revolts, slaves, soccer, socialism, Sorry to Bother You, spiders, sports, stadiums, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Stormy Daniels, Supreme Court, surveillance society, survivalism, Sweden, Swiss army knives, Talking Heads, teaching, the Arctic, the Constitution, the courts, the Devil, the discourse, the economy, The Hobbit, the Holocaust, the humanities, the law, the Left, the stock market, Tolkien, Topher Grace, trans* issues, trillionaires, trolls, Tronc, Uber, USC, Utopia, Venezuela, victimization, voting, vulture capitalism, water, white supremacy, wildfires, wiretapping, women, work, Worldcon, writing
Spooooooooky Friday the 13th Links!
* Exciting new anthology alert! A People’s Future of the United States.
New anthology project free to announce widely at last: A PEOPLE'S FUTURE OF THE UNITED STATES, edited by me and @victorlavalle! (Coming Feb. 2019) pic.twitter.com/XOxhVkgPT4
— John Joseph Adams (@JohnJosephAdams) July 12, 2018
* Cool job at UCSD in Media and Popular Culture.
* Hamilton and Laurens. As I mentioned a bit on Twitter, we actually talked about this quite a bit in my Hamilton class, including how some elements in the show point to queer possibility here and the likelihood that performances in the future will likely play the relationship as explicitly queer. And just for fun, also via Twitter: A countervailing view!
* A Theory-Fiction Reading List.
* Medieval studies groups say a major conference is trying to limit the number of diverse voices and topics. The debate is part of a bigger fight over whether medieval studies should remain a fundamentally European field. Whose Medieval Studies?
* Unpacking Murad Osmann’s #FollowMeTo Instagram Travel Series.
* Facebook Proves It Isn’t Ready To Handle Fake News.
* As the GOP base tries to find new ways to funnel money to its white, bougie, suburban base, bonkers tax policy like this proposed tax break for gym memberships will become more and more common.
* Marvel has run out of options and is finally going to do a Black Widow movie.
* This franchise keeps getting worse all the time.
* These woodchucks are heroes.
* There’s a reason employees stay at the Pantry for a lifetime: it’s one of the few restaurants in Los Angeles where the workers are represented by a union. Peña-Suarez is one of the 23,000 members of Unite Here Local 11, the service-workers’ union behind the Pantry and a number of iconic LA restaurants: Langer’s, Nate ’n Al Delicatessen, Philippe the Original, La Golondrina, and La Scala.
* Solid thread from Corey Robin on the political meaning of Kavanaugh’s debts.
5/ And once you go on to read about the assets of the other justices—Gorsuch's net worth is in the neighborhood of $10 million, Breyer's is about $16 million—you can see what a scandal little ole' Brett, with his $15k in savings and his $200k in credit card debt, really is.
— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) July 12, 2018
* How the New Supreme Court Could Halt Climate Action.
* Forty-year-old Efrain De La Rosa, a Mexican national who was held in an ICE detention facility in Georgia, committed suicide and was pronounced dead late Tuesday evening, making him the eighth person in ICE custody to die in the 2018 fiscal year.
* ACLU: Fed Gov’t Not Giving Promised Notice As Immigrant Families Reunited.
* Asylum seekers, even those who do not present themselves at points of entry, are not “illegal”; under international law they are “irregular” and subject to an array of rights and protections, including immunity from punishment.
* Today’s US-Mexico ‘border crisis’ in 6 charts.
* Hey is it me or does this guy sound like a white supremacist?
Trump to The Sun
“Allowing the immigration to take place in Europe is a shame.
“I think it changed the fabric of Europe and, unless you act very quickly, it’s never going to be what it was and I don’t mean that in a positive way."
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) July 12, 2018
“So I think allowing millions and millions of people to come into Europe is very, very sad."
“I think you are losing your culture. Look around. You go through certain areas that didn’t exist ten or 15 years ago.”
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) July 12, 2018
* Since Trump was elected, more than 1,400 mayors have agreed to shift their cities to 100-percent renewable energy by 2035, in line with the goals of the Paris Agreement. Last fall, St. Louis became one of the biggest cities so far to set that lofty goal. The city of Berkeley, California, went even further recently, declaring an “existential climate emergency” and aiming for net-negative emissions by 2030.
* The real reason the sound of your own voice makes you cringe.
* “I refuse to let Hollywood #whitewashout the Thai Cave rescue story.”
* Want to feel old? Jared Kushner still lacks security clearance level to review some of the nation’s most sensitive intelligence in White House role.
* When Trump’s dumb obsession with CNN accidentally leads to good policy.
* Leaked report exposes how unprepared FEMA was for Maria. I want to see the leaked report detailing all the many ways they’ve failed Puerto Rico in the year since the storm.
* Another #TheResistance rando turns out to have serious personality problems, first and foremost a pathological need for attention. Not unrelatedly: Liberals playing detective are missing an opportunity to engage in meaningful politics.
* Plastic straw bans are the latest policy to forget the disability community.
It has been a true education to watch this ban-plastic-straws thing happen over the last few weeks over the pleas of disabled people begging for someone to listen to them say why they need them.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 10, 2018
* The latest in the search for humanity’s origins in Africa.
* Why freelance writers are a fucking pain in the ass with broken brains.
* Can your god explain it? Marx can.
* Dark Horse Is Turning William Gibson’s Alien 3 Script Into a New Comic.
* Dune references signal shared knowledge to those in the know, and that’s about it. Dune fandom is an un-fandom.
* And I linked this yesterday, but do keep your eye on this. I’m officially calling shenanigans.
Written by gerrycanavan
July 13, 2018 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #TheResistance, academia, academic jobs, ACLU, Africa, Alexander Hamilton, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Alien, America, anthologies, apocalypse, asylum, Black Widow, books, Brett Kavanaugh, class struggle, climate change, CNN, Corey Robin, corpocracy, debt, Democrats, deportation, disability, Disney, Donald Trump, Dune, ecology, elections, Episode 9, evolution, Facebook, fake news, fandom, FEMA, film, freelance writing, futurity, Goofy, gym memberships, Hamilton, Heroes, Hollywood, humanity, Hurricane Maria, ice, immigration, Infowars, Instagram, Jared Kushner, Joe Crowley, John Laurens, Jordan Peterson, Lando Calrissian, liberalism, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Los Angeles Review of Books, Marvel, Marx, mayors, MCU, medieval studies, medievalism, mergers, Mexico, monopolies, Paul Ryan, pedagogy, photography, plastic straws, Pluto, politics, prison, Puerto Rico, Republicans, restaurants, retirement, Russian literature, savings, science, science fiction, Star Wars, Supreme Court, taxes, teaching, Thailand, the courts, the gym, the law, there, travel, UC San Diego, unions, voting, white people, whitewashing, William Gibson, Wisconsin, woodchucks, writing, y fiction
Thursday Afternoon Links!
* Mark Z. Danielewski has written a pilot for a potential House of Leaves TV series. It’s good! The question of adapting the novel wound up being a minor subtheme in our discussion of the book in my summer grad class last month, so I was gratified to actually get to see the script — and directly incorporating the novel into the storyworld of the TV series seems like an intriguing solution to the book’s basic unfilmability. I think I hope someone makes it!
* I haven’t had a chance to see Ant-Man and the Wasp yet, so I’m gratified someone went ahead and wrote my triennial rant about franchise fictions and narrative closure on my behalf.
* Texas Studies in Literature and Language has a special issue on Wes Anderson.
* CFP for the SFRA guaranteed panel at ASLE 19. ASLE 19 (in Davis, CA) is a week after the planned dates for SFRA 19 in Hawaii, so if you’re going to the West Coast anyway it could be almost like a two-for-one…
* The second issue of Fantastika Journal is now available.
* That the things that gave my life meaning growing up have all become vectors for recruitment to misogynistic and white nationalist hate groups is the bitterest surprise of my middle age. That and Trump. Two bitterest surprises.
* Nominations Are Open for the 2018 Brittle Paper Awards.
* Ken Liu Presents Broken Stars, A New Anthology of Chinese Short Speculative Fiction.
* The Fall of Wisconsin. How to win Wisconsin back.
* Shakespeare in the state parks.
* The Self-Helpification of Academe: How feel-good nostrums cover up the university’s cruelty.
* Another piece on searching for work outside academia.
* Professor Faces Fraud Charges for False Job Offer. Reading the confession letter just makes me cringe.
* His University Asked Him to Build an Emoji-Themed Parade Float. Then It Fired Him.
* Why Donald Trump Nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Brett Kavanaugh Will Mean Challenging Times For Environmental Laws. The Vice Report. The Coming Era of Forced Abortions. The end of net neutrality. The imperial presidency 2.0. Trump’s Supreme Court Pick Could Spell a Fresh Hell for Workers’ Rights. Brett Kavanaugh Ruled Against Workers When No One Else Did. The issue with Kavanaugh is that he seems completely reactionary, bouncing from one indefensible position to another, without applying any judgment whatsoever. Liberal media in full effect. The Liberal Case for Kavanaugh Is Complete Crap. He’s a very normal Republican pick — that’s the problem. Establishment Extremist. What’s coming. It’s bad y’all. Someone investigate precisely how this deal was made and what the terms were. And from the archives: The Three Alitos.
* The Supreme Court: still bad.
* Capitalism is ruining science. The Business Veto: The demise of social democracy shows the precariousness of any project of reform under capitalism.
* Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams: A.I., Shame and Lots of Cameras.
* Technoleviathan: China, Silicon Valley, and the rise of the global surveillance state. How Artificial Intelligence Will Reshape the Global Order.
* Silicon Valley Is Bending Over Backward to Cater to the Far Right.
* How Silicon Valley Fuels an Informal Caste System. Rule-Making as Structural Violence: From a Taxi to Uber Economy in San Francisco.
* Former Obama Officials Are Riding Out The Trump Years By Cashing In.
* The end of NATO. ‘They Will Die in Tallinn’: Estonia Girds for War With Russia.
* Trump is set to separate more than 200,000 U.S.-born children from their parents. Trump’s Office of Refugee Resettlement Is Budgeting for a Surge in Child Separations. ‘Don’t You Know That We Hate You People?’ ICE is lawless, racial profiling edition. Where Cities and Counties Are Detaining Immigrants. Pregnant Women Say They Miscarried In Immigration Detention And Didn’t Get The Care They Needed. Government Told Immigrant Parents to Pay for DNA Tests to Get Kids Back, Advocate Says. As Migrant Families Are Reunited, Some Children Don’t Recognize Their Mothers. Deported after Trump order, Central Americans grieve for lost children. ‘What if I lose her forever?’ Undocumented Grover Beach mother deported despite community rallying in her support. Facing a Tuesday deadline to reunite about 100 migrant toddlers with their parents, feds say they’ve reunited 2. Inside The Courts Where Some Immigrants Plead Guilty Without Knowing What’s Happening. Now they’re coming for grandmas.
So that's 50 kids matched and reunited in two weeks. At that pace we're looking at OVER TWO YEARS to match and reunite the approximately 3000 children in its custody that have been taken from their parents.
Not acceptable.
— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) July 9, 2018
They have been extremely clear: there is no nonwhite migration of any sort that is legitimate. They’ve attacked asylum seekers, visa applicants, DACA recipients, green card holders, naturalized citizens. Any status, legal or illegal, is purely contingent. It’s ethnic cleansing. https://t.co/djp8cpiZz9
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 11, 2018
And as the cruelty ramps up we are seeing the justifications becoming more freeform and loose, closer and closer to unapologetic racism. They are dropping any pretense this is about following rules.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 11, 2018
| ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄ ̄|
SEEKING ASYLUM IS A
RIGHT PROTECTED IN
INTERNATIONAL LAW. THIS
PROTECTION INCLUDES
A PROHIBITION ON
PENALTIES FOR IRREGULAR
ENTRY.
|__________|
(__/) ||
(•ㅅ•) ||
/ づ#HistorianSignBunny— Steven Schwinghamer (@s_schwinghamer) July 12, 2018
If you are not among the groups being targeted and demonized and attacked by this administration and its lackeys and minions, you have a moral duty to stand with those who are.
— Angus Johnston (@studentactivism) July 9, 2018
* Woman arrested in assault of 91-year-old Mexican man who was told to ‘go back to your country.’
* There’s been a spate of violent far-right extremism since the 2016 election.
* If you’re anti- antifa, that must mean…
* It’s Not Civil Disobedience if You Ask for Permission.
* Liberalism, legitimacy, and loving the Parkland kids.
* Why Marx’s Capital Still Matters.
* Nixon’s $7B carbon tax forms centerpiece of energy agenda.
* The Industrial Age May Have Actually Been Kind of a Bad Idea.
* An interview with Julia Salazar. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, In Her Own Words. Cynthia Nixon: I’m a democratic socialist. Meanwhile our old pal Joe Crowley looks like he’s trying to get away with something.
* We Should Embrace the Ambiguity of the 14th Amendment.
* Alan Dershowitz is ALL IN on Trump. But he’s not the only person with some truly around-the-bend ideas of what lawsuits can do.
* Weird science: Girls sometimes inherit almost two full sets of their dad’s genes, which seems to cause rare cancers.
* An Arkansas man complained about police abuse. Then town officials ruined his life.
* Did… did Milwaukee write this?
* Jeff Bezos Is Now $50 Billion Richer Than Anyone Else on Earth.
* All 12 Thai Boys Successfully Rescued from Cave after Third Dangerous Mission. The only person unhappy is Elon.
* WHO’s Language on Breastfeeding Really Is Flawed. This was our experience with breastfeeding for sure; I’m sure it’s great for a lot of people but we needed formula as a supplement from the first night on. That said, the corporate forces that promote formula over breastfeeding are utterly gross.
* When the relationship status truly is complicated.
* Scotland’s official plan if the Loch Ness Monster is found.
* Japan and the stay-at-home dad.
* Reality Winner and the espionage act.
* My Best Friend Lost His Life to the Gig Economy.
* When your child reveals sexual abuse from your parent.
* The Socialist Case for School Integration.
* Your town tomorrow: Kure residents cut off from outside world due to flooding.
* I knew wearing a tie was making me stupid.
* Bad subtitling is a daily problem for deaf viewers.
* How swimming pools became a flashpoint of racial tension in America.
* California brings emissions down below 1990 levels. But it’s not all good news.
* Feminist Apparel CEO Fires Entire Staff After They Learn He’s An Admitted Sexual Abuser. RIP, Papa John.
* There is too much uncertainty in sports; even if you bribe the officials, something unaccounted for could still cause the “wrong” result. It can be a bad idea to gather large crowds opposed to your team (and, by extension, your dictatorship). During Franco’s rule, Barcelona FC’s stadium was the only place the Catalans could wave their flag and sing their songs. Dictators are better off with tyranny and oppression. Football is for people who can accept a loss.
* David Graeber’s new book argues that many of us are toiling in dummy jobs with no ostensible purpose. Any poll will show you he has a point. But his thesis is built on scant evidence and dubious claims of a ruling class conspiring to keep us busy. Bullshit jobs exist not due to orchestrated oppression but because of something altogether simpler: bad managers.
* An even tougher review of a book that seems like a big step down from Debt.
* The SAT, constantly innovating new ways to make teenagers unhappy.
* Through such characters, Muluneh’s work explores the layered psychic realms of blackness and womanhood that the African-American science fiction writer Octavia Butler, whom she cites as a major influence, explored through her otherworldly prose. In the process, Muluneh’s work has helped reorient the way black women are perceived. “As women, especially as African women,” Muluneh said, “we forget—and the world forgets—our positioning in history and religion and culture.”
* And amusing ourselves to death: 12 theme parks where the danger is real.
I sort of feel like I’m taking the bait on this, but: Can you imagine the copy they *rejected* for this Handmaid's Tale pinot noir? https://t.co/QPHkYWsBw6 pic.twitter.com/fT86HGhirx
— Lauren Kelley (@lauren_kelley) July 10, 2018
well, back to the grind pic.twitter.com/PLL7F66DGI
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) July 9, 2018
Written by gerrycanavan
July 12, 2018 at 1:34 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #dads, 14th Amendment, 3D printing, academia, academic jobs, Air Force One, Alan Dershowitz, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Amazon, America, Amitav Ghosh, and they said my work was useless, Andrew Cuomo, Ant-Man, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Anthropcene, antifa, apocalypse, Arkansas, art, artificial intelligence, ASLE, asylum, authoritarianism, autism, Barack Obama, billionaires, Billy Dee Williams, Bobcat Goldthwait, border patrol, brains, branded content, breastfeeding, Brett Kavanaugh, Brexit, Brittle Paper, bullshit jobs, California, capitalism, carbon, caste systems, CFPs, China, Chinese science fiction, civil disobedience, civility, class struggle, climate change, closure, comics, conferences, corruption, cryptozoology, Cynthia Nixon, David Brooks, David Graeber, debt, deportation, dictators, dictatorships, domestic terrorism, Donald Trump, dramatic rescues, dreams, dystopia, ecology, Elon Musk, emissions, Episode 9, espionage, Estonia, fact-checking, Fantasika Journal, fascism, flooding, franchise fiction, Gamergate, games, gaming, gig economy, government, governmentality, grandmas, guns, hate, House of Leaves, How the University Works, I grow old, ice, immigration, impeachment, industrialization, integration, it's complicated, Japan, Jeff Bezos, Julia Salazar, Ken Liu, kids today, KKK, Kure, Lando Calrissian, liberalism, literature, Loch Ness Monster, Mark Z. Danielewski, Marquette, Marvell, mass shootings, MCU, Miami, Milwaukee, misogyny, modernity, Monument Ave, my scholarly empire, my teaching empire, Nabokov, narrative, NATO, Nazis, neoliberalism, New York, non-academic jobs, NRA, NSA, Octavia Butler, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Papa John, parenting, Parkland, pedagogy, police brutality, police corruption, police state, politics, race, racism, rape culture, Reality Winner, relationships, Richmond, Russias, SAT, science, science fiction, Scotland, Scott Walker, self-help, sexism, sexual abuse, SFRA, Shakespeare, Silicon Valley, small-town corruption, soccer, social democracy, socialism, someone in the club tonight is stealing my ideas, special issues, spiders, sports, Star Wars, Supreme Court, surveillance society, swimming, taxis, teaching, technoleviathan, teenagers, tenure, Thailand, the Constitution, the courts, the deaf, the disappeared, The Handmaid's Tale, the law, theme parks, totalitarianism, Uber, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, wearing a tie, weird science, Wes Anderson, white nationalism, white supremacism, WHO, Wisconsin, World Cup, World War III, writing, Zoey
Sunday Links!
* Nintendo Labo looks amazing. I’ve already preordered both kits…
* From the AAUP: A New Reality? The Far Right’s Use of Cyberharassment against Academics.
* Among the first-time nominees for the 1967 prize, writes M.A. Orthofer for Literary Saloon, are “future winners Saul Bellow and Claude Simon, as well as Jorge Amado, Jean Genet, György Lukács — and the (as best I can tell) last surviving nominee, Hans Magnus Enzensberger.” Other names on the list include “Auden, Beckett, Ionesco, Kawabata, Mishima, Montale, Moravia, Neruda, Katherine Anne Porter, Anna Seghers, Simenon, and J.R.R.Tolkien.” Also on the list, writes Alison Flood for The Guardian, is “Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata, who would win the following year,” 1968.
* The drought-stricken city announced on Thursday that it will begin marking 200 collection points where its 3.7 million residents will be required to queue for a rationed supply of water on “Day Zero” – currently forecast to be April 21. If it happens, Cape Town would become the first major city in the world to shut down entirely the supply of running water in all of its homes.
* Kylo Ren destroying the Millennium Falcon in the trailer is a pretty cool idea, I have to admit.
* Break your phone addiction by turning your screen to grayscale.
* The sexual assault backlash is coming. Here’s how to respond.
* 14 on MSU staff got Nassar warnings over 2 decades.
* Why Did Two-Thirds of These Weird Antelope Suddenly Drop Dead?
* Charter schools can never fail, they can only be failed.
* Too late, Delta tries to put the “comfort animal” genie back in the bottle.
* US border patrol routinely sabotages water left for migrants, report says. Deputy shoots, kills 16-year-old boy during scuffle at courthouse. This Is What a White Supremacist Department of Justice Looks Like.
* Within Reach: The transgender community fights for health care.
* New AI System Predicts How Long Patients Will Live With Startling Accuracy.
* Porn and the bomb, by the numbers.
* It has been 33 years since the last month that the globe was cooler than normal, according to NOAA.
* How Sierra and a Disgraced Cop Made the Most Reactionary Game of the 90s.
* De Witt Douglas Kilgore reviews Race and Popular Fantasy Literature: Habits of Whiteness at LARB.
* 9 Times People Were Actually Murdered By Their Clothes.
* What radicalized you? Calvin and Hobbes.
* And a happy, happy birthday to the Dax symbiont, born in 2018.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 21, 2018 at 10:47 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with AAUP, academia, academic freedom, addiction, animals, artificial intelligence, backlash, Black Mirror, books, Calvin and Hobbes, Cape Town, cellphones, charter schools, class struggle, climate change, comfort animals, Dax, Day Zero, Deep Space 9, Delta, Donald Trump, drought, Episode 9, fantasy, freedom, games, gymnastics, Hang the DJ, harassment, Hawaii, How the University Works, ice, immigration, Jeff Sessions, labor, Larry Nassar, literature, love, medicine, mortality, Nintendo, Nintendo Labo, Nintendo Switch, Nobel Prize, police violence, politics, pornography, race, racism, rape, rape culture, Sierra Police Quest, Star Trek, Star Wars, transgender issues, Trill symbionts, true crime, war on education, white supremacy, work
Nothing Changes on New Year’s Day Links
* Call for Papers: Fantasy and Myth in the Anthropocene.
* People that found their doppelgängers in art museums.
* We are often told that we need to articulate the case for the humanities in order to survive the current budgetary and political landscape. Many of us stutter and stumble when confronted with such requests, mumbling some barely audible phrases involving “skills,” “relevance,” “a changing economy,” “engagement,” and “values.” The reason it does not come out as something coherent or articulate, much less compelling, is that the ideas behind the words are just as hollow, and we know it. Somewhere inside we all know that there is no case for the humanities.
* George Ciccariello-Maher Resigns: “We are all a single outrage campaign away from having no rights at all.” Iowa senator proposes bill decried as ‘political litmus test’ for universities. A note to tenured faculty.
* Meet the black architect who designed Duke University 37 years before he could have attended it.
* J.R.R. Tolkien, Beyond Good and Evil.
* What was Leia supposed to do in Episode 9?
* Teach the controversy: the legend of Mark Hamill’s face.
* Another profile of the worst job on the Internet.
* NANO issue 12, a special issue on The Force Awakens.
* Ada 12, radical speculation and Ursula K. Le Guin.
* What if Parents Loved Strangers’ Children As Much As Their Own?
* Anomie. Quantum Mechanics. Love. Stotting. Zeno. Choice paralysis. Frosty. Melville. Poetry. Keep scrolling!
* Unearthing the Capitalocene: Towards a Reparations Ecology.
* Why Is a Small Montana Town a Hotbed of Far-Right Activity? Emboldened white nationalists? Look no further than this liberal Oregon college town.
* Price of 40-year-old cancer drug hiked 1,400% by new owners.
* US nuclear tests killed far more civilians than we knew.
New research suggests that the hidden cost of developing nuclear weapons were far larger than previous estimates, with radioactive fallout responsible for 340,000 to 690,000 American deaths from 1951 to 1973.
* Obamacare and the survival test.
* How the baby boomers — not millennials — screwed America. Extreme poverty in America. World’s richest 500 see their wealth increase by $1tn this year. The U.S. without pensions. No ‘Easy Answer’ To Growing Number Of Stray Dogs In The U.S., Advocate Says. Long after Trump is gone, we’ll still be fighting him. As Wildfires Raged, Insurers Sent in Private Firefighters to Protect Homes of the Wealthy. Escaping Poverty Requires Almost 20 Years With Nearly Nothing Going Wrong. Death in an Amazon dumpster. The homeless and the coming cashless economy.
* Why Has Science Only Cured One Person of HIV?
* Same: Young American Men Are Choosing Video Games Over Work in Staggering Numbers. WHO to recognize gaming disorder as mental health condition in 2018.
* I’m starting to take this stuff personally: Poor social skills may be harmful to health.
* I mean really. Why Are Smart People Usually Ugly?
* Academics ‘face higher mental health risk’ than other professions.
* Atheism is caused by poor breath control.
* The Rise and Fall of the Racist Right.
* Every Black Mirror. Against SNL. Against Star Wars. Disney Apparently Expects ‘Solo: A Star Wars Story’ To Bomb. How Star Wars Was Saved in the Edit.
* When Michael Jackson Almost Bought Marvel.
* Climate Change Is Happening Faster Than Expected, and It’s More Extreme. How We Know It Was Climate Change. And just because there can never be a single moment’s peace from toxic masculinity: Men Resist Green Behavior as Unmanly.
* Can humanity make peace with its death?
* Seinfeld: The Point and Click Adventure.
* The Most Expensive Mile of Subway Track on Earth.
* Private Prison Companies Are About to Cash In on Trump’s Deportation Regime.
* Marquette in the ne — oh no, this again?
Written by gerrycanavan
January 1, 2018 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, addiction, AIDS, alt-right, America, anomie, apocalypse, architecture, art, atheism, automation, Baby Boomers, Big Pharma, Black Mirror, cancer, cashless economy, choice paralysis, class struggle, climate change, conspiracy theories, content managers, deportation, Disney, dogs, Donald Trump, dopplegangers, Drexel, drugs, Duke, ecology, editing, Episode 7, Episode 9, Eugene, evil, fantasy, film, Frosty the Snowman, games, George Ciccariello-Maher, good, Han Solo, health, HIV, homeless, How the University Works, ice, Iowa, John McAdams, KKK, labor, love, Mark Hamill, Marquette, Marvel, Melville, Michael Jackson, midichlorians, millennials, Montana, murder, myth, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, Obamacare, Oregon, parenting, pensions, politics, poverty, Princess Leia, prison, private prisons, quantum mechanics, race, racism, radical speculation, rich people, robots, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science, science fiction, Seinfeld, smart people, SNL, social skills, Solo, special issues, species extinction, Star Wars, subways, SWAT teams, tenure, the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, The Empire Strikes Back, The Force Awakens, the humanities, the Internet, the Jedi, the prequels, Tolkien, toxic masculinity, true crime, ugliness, Ursula K. Le Guin, video games, water, Whitefish, wildfires, work, Zeno