Posts Tagged ‘fantasy sports’
Please Enjoy Weekend Links!
* Get your abstracts in! CFP: Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling. And a CFP for a special issue of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies on “The Intersections of Disability and Science Fiction.”
* The schedule of classes for Marquette English is up at Spring 2017. I’ll be on research leave, if you’re wondering why I’m not listed…
* Best Tumblr in forever: Sad Chairs of Academia.
* How to Live Less Anxiously in Academe.
* How Skin-Deep Judgments of Professors Might Influence Student Success.
* The extent to which Trump is floating absolute gibberish cannot be undersold. Even Costanza is superseded in his time. Once more with feeling: On Bullshit.
* What did Trump lie about at the debate, mondo-hugeo chart edition. Donald Trump’s first presidential debate confirmed he has no idea what he’s talking about. Prince Georging, Meflection, and Gobbing: A brief guide to Trump’s rhetorical tricks. A Trump Glossary. You’ll get ’em next time, buddy. What It’s Like to Be a Female Reporter Covering Donald Trump. This May Be The Most Horrible Thing That Donald Trump Believes. When Trump said that not paying taxes ‘makes me smart,’ undecided voters in N.C. gasped. How Donald Trump Set Off a Civil War Within the Right-Wing Media. How to bait Donald Trump. Gray’s. Sports. Almanac. How to evade your taxes the Trump way. More. Even more! Trump Foundation lacks the certification required for charities that solicit money. Cuba! I sold Trump $100,000 worth of pianos. Then he stiffed me. Donald Trump and the truth about race and real estate in America. America is already great. There’s still heroes in the world. And then there’s what happened just this morning.
* The most American-democracy thing that’s ever happened: But Republicans said the White House didn’t make a forceful case, putting themselves in the awkward position of blaming the president for a bill they enacted into law over Obama’s veto.
* Beyond Clinton or Trump: Nuclear Weapons and Democracy.
* Wisconsin Is Systematically Failing to Provide the Photo IDs Required to Vote in November. What a shocking and unexpected consequence of these well-intentioned, commonsense laws.
* Note: The original headline for this piece was “George W. Bush is Not Your Cuddly Grandpa. George W. Bush can rot in hell.”
* Five questions we need to answer before colonizing Mars. Elon Musk’s spectacular plan to colonise Mars lacks substance. Fun and exciting, not boring and cramped! Is Elon Musk’s Crazy Mars Plan Even Legal?
* What could possibly go wrong? UVM Medical College to Eliminate Lectures.
* No Punishment for ‘Run Them Down’ Tweet.
* Baltimore vs. Marilyn Mosby.
* Why New Jersey’s Trains Aren’t Safer.
* Nicholson Baker goes to school. Reader, I bought it.
* Another review of Alice Kaplan’s book on The Stranger.
* “Liberalism is working”: Teen accused of stealing 65-cent carton of milk at middle school to face trial.
* Measles are gone from the Americas.
* On Premier League Fantasy Football.
* How ‘Daycare’ Became ‘School.’
* The 25 Best Superpowers in the Superpowers Wiki.
*Wonder Woman Writer Greg Rucka Says Diana Has ‘Obviously’ Had Relationships With Women. She was on an island of only women for millennia! So yeah.
* The world passes 400ppm carbon dioxide threshold. Permanently.
* And yet, looking back at The Jetsons intro sequence today, I wonder where the icecaps are in that little illustration of earth. Is some land missing from Central America? Has the North gained land mass? Such questions become more troubling in the context of current concerns about global warming and, once asked, open the floodgates for similar observations. In the intro sequence, flying cars convey the Jetsons and other families from their floating bungalow to other floating buildings like The Little Dipper School, Orbit High School, Shopping Centre, and Spacely Space Rockets Inc. What was once a cute innovation—why not live in floating cities?—becomes troubled by its energy costs and its purpose. Why do the Jetsons and other families live in orbit? What has happened below to force them into the skies?
* Today in on-the-nose metaphors: NASA Is Sinking Into the Ocean.
* Every society gets the post-apocalypse it deserves.
* There were no casualties in the landslide which occurred earlier this month, but the facility’s new rock climbing facility was completely wiped out. Yes, I suppose they would be.
* Codex Silenda, A Handcrafted Puzzle Book With Pages That Must Be Solved to Unlock the Next One.
* Cheating in school as communism.
* Today in neoliberal consumerism: Want to Make Ethical Purchases? Stop Buying Illegal Drugs.
* The Dark, Gritty Tick goes to series. Spoon! But like a dirty, chipped spoon, a spoon that really reflects the darkness of our society and our souls.
* Emulator lets you turn NES games 3D.
* U.S. owes black people reparations for a history of ‘racial terrorism,’ says U.N. panel.
* Striking Prisoners Say Their Guards Have Joined In.
* The Longreads Reading List on Utopias.
* Die a hero, or… Has Whedon Changed, Or Have We Done Changed?
* It’s Official: The Boomerang Kids Won’t Leave. I wonder how many are actually caring for or financially supporting un-, under-, and unable-to-be-employed parents and siblings.
* Let’s Stop Talking About Stranger Things Season Two Before We Ruin It. Friends, I have some terrible news.
* There’s bad luck, and then there’s: Man Bitten On Penis By Spider For The Second Time This Year.
* Today in terrible ideas I could not denounce more strongly: Is it time for Star Trek: The Next Generation to go Kelvin?
Weekend Links!
* Coming soon in DC: Anthony Thwaite and Jaimee Hills.
* The Nobel Prize in Literature 2015 was awarded to Svetlana Alexievich “for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.” The MetaFilter thread is almost always the best resource for these things. And here she is on Chernobyl.
* Please, though, don’t champion work. That is, not a sense of academic life as just work. Work is everywhere in the age of neoliberalism. Advocate for something bigger. Push for community.
* Don’t believe what you read at the Wiki or at the Chronicle: there are basically zero fake searches.
* CFP: Paradoxa 29: “Small Screen Fictions.”
* Who Speaks at Meetings? Find Out with GenderTimer.
* Third Annual MLA Subconference: Between the Public and Its Privates.
* Coming this month to the Milwaukee Ballet: Dracula.
* You Are Still Being Lied To: Howard Zinn’s “Columbus and Western Civilization.”
* This isn’t a fairy tale. Economic historians call the post-war years, 1950 to 1973, the Golden Age because those were the years the US and world economy grew faster than ever before or since. Neoliberalism’s dirty secret is that its policies don’t work that well. It isn’t just since the financial crisis that growth has been stagnant. Even the boom was mediocre. The best year since the election of Ronald Reagan was 1999, when the economy grew an impressive 4.8 percent. Sounds good until you realize that economic growth was higher in 1950, 1951, 1955, 1959, 1962, 1964, 1965, 1966, 1968, 1972, 1973, 1976, and 1978. Even the 1970s, a byword for stagflation and economic turmoil, saw better growth than any decade since.
* Miserablism and Resistance at the American Studies Association.
* Great story for my Lives of Animals class: Uplift, Inc.
* Here’s Why Sea World in San Diego Can’t Breed Killer Whales Any Longer.
* The Secret History Of Myers-Briggs.
* Matt Yglesias: Hillary Clinton Is Our Cheney, and That’s Okay. More on this subject here. In some sense I don’t even disagree with him; American democracy really is doomed, and the project of the liberal-left at this moment (as I’ve said before!) should be actively and deliberately seeking to build its replacement through the construction of a new constitution.
* The problem with the Old Republic was the lack of a strong minority party. No, the problem with the Old Republic was the Jedi.
* What Does My Brain Tumor Mean for My Life as a Mother?
* Rick Moranis Isn’t Retired (He Just Doesn’t Know How to Change His Wikipedia Page).
* Beautiful study of UFO sightings from ancient history.
* Jacobin: Want to improve animal welfare? Focus on bettering the conditions of the people who work with them.
* She was checking on her sons — then ages 11, 9 and 5 — by looking out the window every 10 minutes, she said. But when a passer-by saw the Felix kids, along with a 9-year-old cousin, she assumed they were unsupervised and called the state’s Department of Children and Family Services hotline.
* Class action lawsuit filed against DraftKings and FanDuel. How Daily Fantasy Is Changing the Game. You Aren’t Good Enough to Win Money Playing Daily Fantasy Football. Why I’m Quitting Fantasy Baseball.
* Playing in the Dark: On Gaming’s Blind Protagonists.
* Unsung songs of the Golden Age of Television: Space Ghost Coast to Coast.
* Study Links Fracking To Premature Births, High-Risk Pregnancies.
* How Video Games Are Becoming University-Approved Sports.
* I want to believe: Fargo season two.
* New Civilization: Beyond Earth Expansion Finally Feels Like Sciene Fiction.
* What financializing pensions hath wrought: California Teachers Have Been Financing Evictions.
Tuesday Links!
* Events coming up at Marquette English: tomorrow’s Mad Max: Fury Road discussion and next week’s reading from visiting poet Carolyn Forché.
* SFFTV 8.3 is out! With:
Kathleen McHugh, “Seeking a film for the end of the world”
Mark Young, “Xenochrony: aural media and neoliberal time in Shane Carruth’s Primer”
Lars Schmeink, “Frankenstein’s offspring: practicing science and parenthood in Natali’s Splice”
J.P. Telotte, “Sex and machines: the ‘buzz’ of 1950s science fiction films”
* Great stuff coming from the UCR Sawyer Seminar on Alternative Futurisms:
October 6: Panel on Asian American Speculative Fiction
October 15: Science Fiction Studies symposium on Retrofuturism(s)
October 16-17: Revising the Past, Remaking the Future Conference
* Nightmare in Oregon. Nightmares everywhere.
* Make. Good. Work. (or, On the Academic Job Market).
* And elsewhere on the academic job market watch: how long am I marketable?
* The Humanities at the End of the World.
* Humanities majors’ salaries, by the numbers.
* USC has an exciting fix for contingent employment in academia: contingent employment in academia.
* How pregnant women and mothers get hounded out of higher education.
* Steven Salaita: Why I Was Fired.
* Marina Warner on the history of the fairy-tale.
* The Amazing Inner Lives of Animals.
* The Decline of Play and Rise in Children’s Mental Disorders.
* A Centre for Laziness Studies.
* Conversely, my research indicates you should never text your students.
* I just had to do one of these with my daughters’ preschool. The twenty-first century is awful.
* Ranking Milwaukee: The 6th Most Dangerous City in America, and the #1 Worst for Black People.
* The politics of the campaign mixtape.
* DraftKings Employee With Access To Inside Info Wins $350K At FanDuel. This is an insane story.
* MSF Response to Spurious Claims That Kunduz Hospital Was “A Taliban Base.”
* Toshi Reagon’s Parable of the Sower.
* What Happens When a Super Storm Strikes New York?
* Well here’s a story I’m certainly hoping is a hoax.
* First, they came for my assault rifle.
* Nihilistic password security questions.
* The end of the Perkins loan.
* “Few forces are better positioned to fight the corporate university than graduate student workers.”
* Ta-Nehisi Coates leads diverse group of MacArthur ‘genius’ grant recipients. Academics Win MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowships.
* On Rules, Cheating, and Deflategate.
* ‘Workers’ or slaves? Textbook maker backtracks after mother’s online complaint.
* Our economy is broken. Could a universal basic income, child allowances, and worker-owned cooperatives fix it? I’m so old I can remember when “New New Deal” was Obama’s brand.
* If it’s good enough for Zappos…
* These students were ruined by predatory colleges. Now they’re getting even.
* “Whole Foods To Stop Profiting From Prison Labor.” You know, in these tough times, most companies would be happy to just break even with prison labor.
* This is the official signal that a nuclear war could be about to break out.
* An Environmentalism for the Left. Environmentalism as a religious idea.
* The Plot Against Student Newspapers.
* Weird coincidence: Alabama, Which Requires ID to Vote, Stops Issuing New Licenses in Majority-Black Counties.
* Noncitizens and the census. This is a really interesting problem for which the proper solution — let noncitizen permanent residents vote — is of course entirely off the table.
* It’s been 4 years since Stephen Colbert created a super PAC — where did all that money go?
* Recycling may not be worth it. “Plastic Bags Are Good for You.”
* Justine Siegal Becomes First Female Baseball Coach In MLB History. That’s… recent.
* Breathtaking The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings illustration by Jian Guo.
* This Abandoned Wasteland Was Once America’s Largest Mall.
* Hydrofracking ruins everything.
* “Bangalore’s lake of toxic foam – in pictures.”
* Someone bought Google.com for $12 and owned it for a literal minute.
* End zero-tolerance school discipline.
* A tumor stole every memory I had. This is what happened when it all came back.
* The law, in its majestic finality…
* Masters of the Universe: An Oral History.
* Tesla’s new Model X has a ‘bioweapon defense mode’ button. “This is a real button,” Musk says.
* NASA Has Already Hired Someone To Make Sure We Don’t Destroy Mars, Too. Teach the controversy: does Mars even exist?
* Here comes the gender-bent Twilight. I’m actually fascinated by this project.
* Ethiopian Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi Film ‘Crumbs’ Is Headed To Theaters.
* Uber, but for canceling Comcast.
* Yelp, but for destroying the very concept of sociality.
* The Algorithm and the Watchtower: “The form of power that Big Data employs is not so much panoptic as it is pan-analytic.”
* If you want diabetes, pal, you’ve got to pay for it.
* What’s the most American ______ ever made?
* “We’re one step closer to a working lightsaber.”
* And I don’t want to take all the credit, but…
Sunday Links!
* Did you notice my post last night? Isiah Lavender’s Black and Brown Planets is out! My essay in the book is on Samuel Delany.
* Sketching out a table of contents for Pink Planets: highlights from the history of feminist SF.
* The US has killed hundreds of thousands of people in the name of fighting terrorism. The war is all too real. But it’s also fake. There is no clash of civilizations, no ideological battle, no grand effort on the part of the United States to defeat terrorism. As long as terrorism doesn’t threaten core US interests, American elites are content to allow it — and help it — flourish. They don’t want to win this war. It will go on forever, unless we make them end it.
* The United States and the “moderate Muslim.”
In each of these, I merely concede the Maher and Harris definition of moderation as a rhetorical act. That definition is of course loaded with assumptions and petty prejudice, and bends always in the direction of American interests. But I accept their definition here merely to demonstrate: even according to their own definition, American actions have undermined “moderation” at every turn.
* Fox News, asking the real questions. “What are the chances that illegal immigrants are going to come over our porous southern border with Ebola or that terrorists will purposely send someone here using Ebola as a bioterror weapon?”
* The Most Ambitious Environmental Lawsuit Ever.
* “Social Justice Warriors” and the New Culture War.
* As selective colleges try to increase economic diversity among their undergraduates, the University of Chicago announced Wednesday that it’s embarking on an unusual effort to enroll more low-income students, including the elimination of loans in its aid packages.
* In search of an academic wife.
* “Yes Means Yes” at campuses in California and New York.
* A model state law for banning revenge porn.
* Let the children play: Homework isn’t linked to education outcomes before age 12, and not really after age 12, either.
* Enslaved Ants Regularly Rise In Rebellion, Kill Their Slavers’ Children.
* Ebola Vaccine Delay May Be Due To An Intellectual Property Dispute. This was a bit in Kim Stanle Robinson’s Science in the Capitol series: one company has the cure for cancer and the other company has the delivery mechanism, so both go out of business.
* Elsewhere in the famous efficiency of markets: Marvel will apparently cancel one of its longest-running series out of spite for Fox Studios.
* This Is The First High-Frequency Trader To Be Criminally Charged With Rigging The Market.
* Prison bankers cash in on captive customers.
* The time Larry Niven suggested spreading rumors within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs in order to lower health care costs.
* Suicide, Unemployment Increasingly Linked, Paper Suggests.
* Perfectionism: Could There Be a Downside?
* I’d be really interested to see if this use of eminent domain would survive a legal challenge.
* Data centers are wasting electricity so excessively that only “critical action” can prevent the pollution and rate hikes that some U.S. regions could eventually suffer as a result of power plant construction intended to ensure that the ravenous facilities are well-fed, a report from the Natural Resources Defense Council and Anthesis warns.
* From the archives: Lili Loofbourow on the incredible misogyny of The Social Network.
* Moral panic watch: ‘Back-up husbands,’ ‘emotional affairs’ and the rise of digital infidelity.
* Look, a shooting star! Make a wish! Also at Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: Superman, why are you lying about your X-ray vision?
* Fantasy sports and the coming gambling boom.
* And this looks great for parents and kids: B.J. Novak’s The Book with No Pictures.
Friday Everything
* Ralph Nader has found an awesome new way to troll the nation: he will campaign to kill athletic scholarships.
* Fox has renewed Fringe. This is great news—but I still haven’t forgive them for Firefly.
* Vermont’s not green, it’s red: Vermot House passes single-payer health care bill. It’s also expected to pass the state senate, too, which means things are about to get very interesting.
* I haven’t put up anything about Fukushima in a while, but suffice it to say things still sound very bad. (UPDATE: More here.) Nuclear power advocates—who I seem to recall assuring me that nothing bad could possibly happen at Fukushima because of updated, failsafe reactor designs—have now begun assuring me that what happened at Fukushima could never happen again because of updated, failsafe reactor designs. Okay, that ship turned out to be sinkable. But this one…
* Great moments in abuse of power: A deputy prosector in Johnson County, Indiana, has resigned his job after it was revealed that in February, during the large protests in Wisconsin over Gov. Scott Walker’s anti-public employee union bill, he e-mailed Walker’s office and recommended that they conduct a “false flag operation” — to fake an assault or assassination attempt on Walker in order to discredit the unions and protesters. Josh Marshall catches the most interesting angle: “the fact that he lists his 18 years of experience working in GOP politics as his experience for doing this sort of stuff.”
* Cheating scandal in the game of kings.
* Incomprehensible Shouting Named Official U.S. Language. It drives me crazy when people don’t speak it.
* And from Inside Higher Ed: Who’s in your fantasy research institute this season?
Fantasy Soccer Imminent
The Premier League starts in a week, which means you need to sign up for FPL in the next week or risk missing out on the greatest fantasy sports experience on the planet. Email me or leave a comment for our league codes.
Fantasy Sports Don’t Ever Need to End
The World Cup may be over, but fantasy sports don’t ever need to end. Duke Lit is doing its usual Fantasy Premier League this fall and you should too. As I’ve mentioned, any sports-related competition in which I regularly place in the top three is one anyone can easily win. Even you. Join us… join us…
Email me or leave a comment to get our league codes.
Alas, 2014
The World Cup is over and I was able to watch only a few minutes of the final (though I did see the goal). Spain’s win salvaged my showing in the ESPN bracket to a still-disappointing 6th place, while in the McDonald’s Cup I managed a heartbreaking second in both regular and tournament modes. I will be sad forever. See you in 2014.
3/16.2
* Update from yesterday: running marathons will also kill you. Don’t do that either!
* Update from two weeks ago: a New Jersey appeals court has ruled Tea Party supporters in New Jersey can try to recall Robert Menendez despite the fact that no recall procedure exists for federal legislators under the Constitution.
* NBC polls puts health care support at 46-45. Some day, I suspect, this bill may actually pass.
* Related: By this time next week we’ll have seen huge headlines about health care. These headlines will either read “Democrats do it!”, followed by various Republicans and their apologists complaining that what the Dems did wasn’t nice, or “Democrats — losers again”, followed by Republicans going bwahahaha.
And it’s up to a handful of Democrats to decide which headlines we get. They’re out of their minds if they don’t choose door #1. (via)
* Also related, some breaking news: Major legislative breakthroughs are always controversial!
* If you ever watched the This American Life TV show, you might remember Mark Hogancamp, who built a replica World-War-II-era village in his backyard as a means of dealing with being brutally assaulted outside a bar. His story is now a feature-length documentary. (via)
* Wow: Two sources at the Science Times section of the New York Times have told me that a majority of the section’s editorial staff doubts that human-induced global warming represents a serious threat to humanity. So this is why we can’t have nice things. (via)
* More actually existing media bias: CNN hires goat f**king child molester.
* FantasySCOTUS: Who will replace Judge Stevens if he retires?
* And Greensboro in the news! An “equipment failure” caused preview clips for adult programming to appear on two channels dedicated for kids in North Carolina, a spokeswoman for Time Warner Cable Inc. said today.
Thurs.
* If you were offered a true statistic about an alien civilization, but only one, what would it be? MR, true to form, wants information about “the real rate of return on capital.” I’d want a measure of the class inequality in their society; “infant mortality rate” is suggested in the comments, but of course we don’t know what their lifecycle is like so that answer might not tell us anything. “How many other civilizations have you exterminated?”, also from the MR comments, seems a good choice too…
* David Foster Wallace, Viking Poet.
* All six hours of The Staircase, a true-crime documentary set right here in Durham, is now available on Google Video. Jaimee and I watched this a few years ago and quite enjoyed it. The discussion in the MetaFilter thread is preoccupied with the documentary’s veracity, but this aspect doesn’t really trouble me; I don’t think the film presents itself as an objective or dispassionate approach to “the facts,” which is not something I think documentaries are really capable of achieving in the first place. The film is very engaging and not deceptive, which is good enough for me.
* This Indexed fantasy league is incredibly flawed. There’s no way a single zombie could defeat a werewolf, a vampire, an elf, and a ghost to win the championship; I believe the word you’re looking for is zombies.
* Anarchism and science fiction: a reading list. Via MeFi.
* Two more Civ V previews from Gamespot and IGN.
* And please be advised your doomsday seed vault is functioning perfectly.
Gerry Canavan 