Sunday Morning Links!

* Announcing the 2017 Nebula Awards Winners!

* Austerity is a discipline. Conform, or be disciplined.

* This is relatable content.

* Star Trek: The Next Generation: Reimagined.

The Voyager and the TOS ones are also inspired.

* Is it weird for conservatives to like Star Trek?

* Janelle Monáe’s body of work is a masterpiece of modern science fiction.

* The Dark Forest and Its Discontents: Cixin Liu’s “Death’s End.”

* But no matter what, this happened to Gamora. A lifetime of torment and victimhood, all leading up to the horror of her final moments—her horrified realization that her tormentor is able to use her broken body as the gateway to his ultimate desire because what he feels for her is truly love. The film accepts this, never questions it, even creates its own tortured reasoning for it, and asks you to trust that reasoning. It’s Time to Talk About Marvel’s Gamora Problem.

* Arrested Development’s Mitch Hurwitz addresses why Jeffrey Tambor is staying on the show. Well that should lay all questions to rest. And elsewhere in apologetics for things that probably can’t be defended: Deadpool 2 Writers Defend Treatment of Female Characters.

* Michigan State Just Agreed to Pay $500 Million to Settle Sexual-Abuse Claims. Where Will It Find the Money? Meanwhile they’re using the settlements to bully survivors into silence.

* The current situation of the United States is obscene, insane, and incredible. If someone had pitched it for a thriller novel or film a few years ago, they would’ve been laughed out of whatever office their proposal made it to because fiction ought to be plausible. It isn’t plausible that a solipsistic buffoon and his retinue of petty crooks made it to the White House, but they did and there they are, wreaking more havoc than anyone would have imagined possible, from environmental laws to Iran nuclear deals. It is not plausible that the party in control of the federal government is for the most part a kleptomaniac criminal syndicate. The Coup Has Already Happened.

* It’s never going to end.

* Yes, Donald Trump Is Making White People More Hateful.

* A bug in cell phone tracking firm’s website leaked millions of Americans’ real-time locations.

* Seems about right.

* The Most Popular Board Game the Year You Were Born.

* What Stories Could An Aragorn-Driven Amazon Series Tell?

And it’d be fun to see Gandalf arriving as a young wizard and getting into scrapes, maybe a story or two set in other campaigns during the War of the Ring. But we saw the main story already, there isn’t a ton of narrative space for another epic.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) May 17, 2018

* The Handmaid’s Tale was a documentary.

I guess I've lived long enough to see sexist stereotypes of women go from "desperate to trap commitment-phobic men into marriage" to "shallow sluts who need enforced monogamy."

— Rebecca Cohen (@GynoStar) May 19, 2018

* Just imagine how unwatchable the Marvel Cinematic Universe would have been in the 1990s.

* Everything you ever wanted to know about Donkey Kong. Everything.

* How Onscreen Sex Sounds Are Made, From Kissing to Hand Jobs.

* “The iconic scent of Play-Doh is now an officially registered trademark.”

Cmon put him in the game pic.twitter.com/ggrPZgRQKM

— Nick Wiger (@nickwiger) May 20, 2018

* What Explains U.S. Mass Shootings? International Comparisons Suggest an Answer. The problem is guns. It’s the Guns. This Is School in America Now. 2018 has been deadlier for schoolchildren than service members. Siri, summarize a failed state in three sentences.

why don't young people trust the institutions and processes that have exclusively brutalized them every waking moment of their lived reality? opinions differ

— abolish ice. send homan to the hague. (@SeanMcElwee) May 19, 2018

TFW the country with more guns and people in prison than any other nation in the planet, and that's been at war on "terror" for two decades, builds schools that look like prisons and still is terrorized by kids on rampages with infantry rifles

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) May 18, 2018

* That this executive is being charged with fraud rather than attempted murder just says so much.

* The Greensboro Massacre of 1979, Explained.

* Being Frank R. Paul.

* By late next year, bitcoin could be consuming more electricity than all the world’s solar panels currently produce — about 1.8 percent of global electricity, according to a simple extrapolation of the study’s predictions. That would effectively erase decades of progress on renewable energy.

* A mere 400 months in a row.

* And on the pedestal these words appear.