Posts Tagged ‘futurity’
Ring in the New Year the Gerry Canavan Way with New Year’s Eve Eve Eve Links!
- ArtReview asked me to write up something about the state of sequels and franchise culture for their year-in-review roundup: “Is the Blockbuster Sequel Worth Saving?”
- 13 new SF/F books to enjoy this December, and I’m one of them! Uneven Futures is out!
- Extrapolation 63.3 is out too!
- Wisconsin 46. MLG 2023.
- “Spaceman,” a short comic strip by US illustrator Marc Hempel (born 1957, Chicago) that was published in Questar magazine in 1980.
- This is maybe my favorite viral image of all time: a handout said to be from the Moral Majority in the 1980s warning people not to take my classes.

- It’s still Christmas somewhere.
- Higher Ed’s Prestige Paralysis. Reading after the University. Lit Crit after Lit Crit. Land-Grant or Land Grab Universities? Fewer jobs at SLACs? What Should We Do About Undergrads Who Want to Pursue a Humanities Doctorate? Capitalism (more precisely, the neoliberal version that currently reigns) has destroyed the humanities, and we should not pretend otherwise. The Rich Get College Subsidies While the Student Debt Debate Goes On.
- The Largest Strike in the History of American Higher Ed. University of California faculty join teaching assistant strike. Canceled lectures, no grades: University of California students face chaotic finals as academic workers strike. Skipping meals to scrape by: A striking UC student worker shares his story. UC graduate student workers ratify labor agreement, end historic strike with big wage gains. Many Rank-and-File UC Grad Student Workers Are Unhappy With Tentative Agreement. What’s at Stake in the University of California Graduate Worker Strike. California Medical University Apologizes For Experimenting On Prisoners. New School Strike: Students Occupy University Center Over Longest US Adjunct Strike. Blue Collar/White Collar: Reflections on The New School Strike. After 30 Years, Yale Graduate Students Are Finally Unionizing.
- A Rare Survey of Faculty Morale Shows That the Pandemic’s Effects Continue to Ripple. Higher Ed Is a Land of Dead-End Jobs.
- China Mieville on Why Capitalism Deserves Our Burning Hatred. Merry Christmas! We’re All Being Murdered by Capitalism.
- Will Children’s Books Become Catalogs of the Extinct?
- Astra Magazine Had Creative Freedom and a Budget. It Wasn’t Enough.
- Rethinking ‘Run, Hide, Fight’: Our mass-shooting guidance may be woefully out of date.
- The AIs are coming for what make us truly and most distinctly human: Human-level play in the game of Diplomacy by combining language models with strategic reasoning.
- Amazon Alexa is a “colossal failure,” on pace to lose $10 billion this year.
- Dystopia for Realists. Chatbots: they’re just like us! Teachers are on alert for inevitable cheating after release of ChatGPT. Update Your Course Syllabus for chatGPT. The viral AI avatar app Lensa undressed me—without my consent. Trendy Portrait App Lensa Is Accused of Creating Nonconsensual Nudes, Child Abuse Content. The Automation Charade. Jobs you can’t automate: Assistant Professor in the History of Artificial Intelligence.
- Nightmare Blizzard in Buffalo. After deadly Buffalo blizzard, families scramble to find food and essentials.
- Officials fear ‘complete doomsday scenario’ for drought-stricken Colorado River.
- A startup says it’s begun releasing particles into the atmosphere, in an effort to tweak the climate. Now, I’m just a pointy-headed literature professor, but it seems like this should be MASSIVELY illegal!
- El Niño Is Coming—and the World Isn’t Prepared.
- The US is a rogue state leading the world towards ecological collapse.
- Effective altruism takes an L.
- It is at this point that we get our bizarro world inversion of the comic book nerd. The fan of comic book movies is now something of a “sore winner,” who continues to act the victim, marginalized, even in his dominance. I would argue that this “sore winner” idea is integral to our contemporary version of the majority, and even fascism to recall the quote about Faulkner. We are far from Deleuze and Guattari’s image of a majority that is all the more powerful in being unstated, in being assumed, now dominance, cultural, political, and economic, focuses on its apparent marginalization in order precisely to reassert its dominance. The inversion is not just that comic books have gone from margins to mainstream, but that marginalization has gone from being the basis of empathy to an expression of dominance. Victimhood is the language of domination. The bizarro world that we are living in is not just that what was once the obsession of a few has become the culture of many, that Moon Knight is now practically a household name, but that grievance against perceived marginalization has become the language of the majority.
- An ‘Imperial Supreme Court’ Asserts Its Power, Alarming Scholars.
- to save some nickels Hertz mindlessly reported 1000s of cars stolen a year and got dozens of people arrested and jailed. Their punishment is to settle a lawsuit, none of the Hertz execs responsible for ruining lives and getting people kidnapped and caged will see a day in prison
- Once You See the Truth About Cars, You Can’t Unsee It. A driver killed her daughter. She won’t let the world forget. Inside Cleveland’s plans to become a 15-minute city. The Case for Guerrilla Crosswalks.
- Southwest cancels 5,400 flights in less than 48 hours in a ‘full-blown meltdown.’
- Gloomhaven in the New Yorker! Sci-Fi Board Game Terraforming Mars Has Been Optioned for Film. (Stan Robinson, call your lawyer.) We’re in a golden age of board games. It might be here to stay.
- The U.S. Needs More Housing Than Almost Anyone Can Imagine. The Homeownership Society Was a Mistake. You Should Probably Wait to Buy a Home. Millions of US Millennials Moved in With Their Parents This Year. Millennials are stuck in the world boomers built.
- America solved child poverty by accident and immediately gave itself a lobotomy to forget.
- They Called 911 for Help. Police and Prosecutors Used a New Junk Science to Decide They Were Liars. Florida’s Child Welfare System Is Found to Be Complicit in Sex Trafficking.
- Why the crypto crash hit black Americans hard.
- If I pay that much for a car I expect to get the whole thing.
- Twitter king Dril on Musk’s chaotic reign. Elon Musk claims Neuralink is about ‘six months’ away from first human trial. Elon’s Twitter Enters the Red Zone. Tesla’s Stock Is Burning Faster Than a Lithium Battery. Twitter brings Elon Musk’s genius reputation crashing down to earth. We’re in Denial About the True Cost of a Twitter Implosion. When you’ve lost the worst degenerates on Earth.
- Scrolling alone. Men have fewer friends than ever, and it’s harming their health.
- Just in time! TWO YEARS LATER, Jan. 6 panel to vote on urging DOJ to prosecute Trump on at least 3 criminal charges.
- Finally a political movement I can get behind: Is It Toxic to Tell Everyone to Get Therapy?
- Enough With the Sad, Put-Upon Woman Essay.
- The Dark History of Hysteria.
- Did the Mother of Young Adult Literature Identify as a Man?
- We Might Have Long COVID all wrong. The Power and Peril of the ICU.
- The Failed Plot to Kill 6 Million Germans in the Wake of WWII.
- Scientists Are Investigating Signs of Ancient Human Civilization Underwater.
- Physicists Create ‘the Smallest, Crummiest Wormhole You Can Imagine.’ I like this energy, scientists.
- With historic explosion, a long sought fusion breakthrough.
- If Future Humans Terraformed a New Earth, Could They Get It Right?
- The rise and fall of peer review: Why the greatest scientific experiment in history failed, and why that’s a great thing.
- So little of what defines our lives seems to be in our control.
- I meet someone; we talk; I explain that Martian colonists will live in structures extracted from their own blood, sweat, and urine; they leave.
- LIGO may be able to detect alien warp drives using gravitational waves.
- Testing LEGO Investments.
- Working on my screenplay for Muppets to the Lighthouse.
- Domesticating Barbie: An Archaeology of Barbie Material Culture and Domestic Ideology.
- Film History According to Tarantino.
- The expanding orbit of Seattle science fiction writer Octavia Butler. Caliban, His Woman, and the Gendered (In)humanism of Wild Seed. Lesson Plan: “Octavia Butler’s Science Fiction Predicted the World We Live In.” How to Survive in Broken Worlds: Jesmyn Ward on Octavia Butler’s Empathy and Optimism.
- Star Trek showrunners vow to kill again. Avengers’ Anti-Oedipal Endgame. Ryan Coogler shares his original plot for the Black Panther sequel, beat by beat. Star Wars Will Never Escape The Last Jedi. Rian Johnson’s Primal Scream. Police and Thieves: On Tony Gilroy’s “Andor.” The Grown-Up Art of Andor. The Perfect Show for the Era of Disappearing TV. When you stan Ana de Armas so hard you change the course of film history. Ke Huy Quan’s True Hollywood Comeback. The piece of mass culture I’m most excited for. Unless it’s this. Or this.
- It is easier to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of attempts to adapt The Dark Tower.
- I decided not to write a review of Cormac McCarthy’s latest dual release The Passenger and Stella Maris in the end, but I did read a bunch of other good reviews when I was thinking about it: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
- A Fifth of American Adults Struggle to Read. Why Are We Failing to Teach Them?
- Oh: Thousands of Teens Are Being Pushed Into Military’s Junior R.O.T.C.
- A Century of Serious Difficulty.
- Is It Art?
- So You Want to Start Reading (or Writing) Fanfic.
- MKE 101: Why the Cream City has it all. Just don’t have to go to a hospital!
- I think we’re not rushing it fast enough. We’re rushing the use of psychedelics as medicine, researchers say.
- Fitting.
- And always remember: if the opposition party somehow does win an election, simply strip them of their powers!

March Links!
- SFRA Review 51.1 is out! SFFTV 14.1 is out!
- Congratulations to the winners of the 2021 Peter Lang Young Scholars Competition in Science Fiction Studies! I’m so excited to work with Michelle Clarke on From Wilderness to Anthropocene: The Frontier in African Speculative Fiction.
- My presentation for ICFA42 is up at YouTube.
- I have an episode on the new Novel Dialogues podcast dropping April 8. I speak with Aarthi and the great Kameron Hurley.
- My work on Butler has had a nice second life since the release of the first Library of America volume, with reviews in the New York Times Review of Books, Harper’s, and LRB.
- Marquette English is doing March Movie Madness.
- And if Seuss news is what you choose, my Lorax article is free to read right now at Science Fiction Film and Television.

- CFP: Tolkien and Diversity. CFP: SFF and Class. CFP: 50+ Shades of Gothic: The Gothic Across Genre and Media in US Popular Culture.
- A substack we can believe in: 50 Years of Text Games. 1977’s entry is a personal favorite, Zork.
- How to Build a World.
- How to Land on Mars.
- Who Is R. A. Lafferty? And Is He the Best Sci-Fi Writer Ever?
- “Octavia Butler: Visionary Fiction” at NPR Throughline. And a little OEB love from JPL.
- The unpublished Lord of the Rings epilogue is lovely in comics form. And some more Tolkien content: Lord of the Rings tabletop RPG The One Ring is getting a second edition. Everything You Need to Know About Lord of the Rings‘ Second Age. Tolkien’s Orcs: Bolg, Shagrat, and the Maggot-folk of Mordor. Making or Creating Orcs: How Thorinsmut’s Free Orcs AU Writes Back to Tolkien. As a Black Lord of the Rings fan, I felt left out of fantasy worlds. So I created my own.
- Is Wanda’s ‘paradox’ of control not central to the forms of decentralized control that the suburb seeks?
- I went on my own Wandaverse journey on Twitter and I think this is where I landed.
- An abusive reckoning for “Buffy,” a badass, occasionally feminist show created by a monstrous man. The Quiet Misogyny of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” Joss Whedon’s ‘feminist’ shows all concealed toxic ideas about women. What It’s Like to Be a ‘Buffy’ Fan In the Wake of These Joss Whedon Revelations.
- From the archives: The Assassination of Cordelia Chase. And once more with feeling: Whedon Studies after Whedon.
- The Lies Hollywood Tells About Little Girls.
- The Resurrection of Kelly Marie Tran: On Surviving ‘Star Wars’ Bullying, the Pressures of Representation, and ‘Raya and the Last Dragon.’
- President Superman, coming from Ta-Nehisi Coates and J.J. Abrams?
- The Dr. Doom Podcast, only on the Voice of Latveria.
- Stan Lee and the Dotcom Disaster.
- Five game mechanics legally protected by the companies that made them.
- New Retro-Style ‘Star Trek: Kobayashi Maru’ Web Game Promises To Be “Nearly Impossible” To Beat.
- Just when you thought it was safe to go back to Johannesburg: here comes District 10.
- The demise of secure work and the rise of ‘precarity’ is a theme of the modern world – and now, it’s finding its way onto the big screen.
- ‘This Crap Means More to Him Than My Life’: When QAnon Invades American Homes. ‘I Miss My Mom’: Children Of QAnon Believers Are Desperately Trying To Deradicalize Their Own Parents. QAnon and the Cultification of the American Right. The Democratic Party Has a Fatal Misunderstanding of the QAnon Phenomenon. Where the Far Right Goes After January 6.
- When will the US reach herd immunity? Can I gather with friends and family after getting the COVID-19 vaccine? Can I travel? Here is what health experts say. A Quite Possibly Wonderful Summer. Massive 1-Year Rise In Homicide Rates Collided With The Pandemic In 2020. ‘What’s the Point?’ Young People’s Despair Deepens as Covid-19 Crisis Drags On. David Graeber: After the Pandemic, We Can’t Go Back to Sleep.
- The Great Art Behind Hunter S. Thompson’s Run for Sheriff.
- English departments rethink what to call themselves.
- A New Beginning in Shared Governance at Marquette University. But the struggle goes on.
- Are Endowments Damaging Colleges and Universities? Citing budget issues, John Carroll University fundamentally alters tenure — to the point that professors say it and academic freedom no longer exist. Former professors file lawsuit against Canisius, citing “breach of contract.” Disaster Capitalism for Higher Education: A Farewell to Ithaca College. A Governance Investigation Update from the AAUP. Michigan’s small liberal arts colleges are in fight for survival. The “Amazonification” of Higher Education Has Arrived. It’s Not Pretty. Can Higher Ed Save Itself? The Great Contraction.
- Fired for Tweeting? A Professor Says She Was Cut Loose in Retaliation. US universities hit by protests over cuts, tuition, right to unionize. Two-thirds of New York City’s Arts and Cultures Jobs Are Gone.
- What We’ve Lost in a Year of Virtual Teaching: Our professional identity has suffered, and so have our students. But we’ve learned, too. Faculty Members Are Suffering Burnout. These Strategies Could Help.
- Electricity needed to mine bitcoin is more than used by ‘entire countries.’ Fight Carbon. With Coin. Sci-fi carbon coins could actually save our planet.
- More Ministry content: Catastrophe and Utopia: Kim Stanley Robinson’s ‘Ministry for the Future.’
- The enormous risk of atmospheric hacking. In the Atlantic Ocean, Subtle Shifts Hint at Dramatic Dangers. Mars Is a Hellhole. Shifting baseline syndrome: causes, consequences, and implications. Love in the time of climate change: Grizzlies and polar bears are now mating.
- ‘I don’t have money for food’: millions of unemployed in US left without benefits. Millions of jobs probably aren’t coming back, even after the pandemic ends. The Democrats are blocking a $15 minimum wage.
- Kazuo Ishiguro: ‘AI, gene-editing, big data … I worry we are not in control of these things any more.’
- Voyager’s Native American consultant was a fraud. Well, you’d never be able to tell from the series’s careful, authentic treatment of Native identity…
- Why we (still) can’t have nice things. The situation is not good.
- The Cost of Miscarriage is High — Not Just Emotionally, But Financially. Cedarburg woman fighting cancer and insurance after they cover removal of one breast but not other.
- Parents of daughters are more likely to divorce than those with sons.
- The Tyranny of Parents.
- Are You Smarter Than a Cephalopod?
- A brief history of the bizarre and sadistic Presidential Fitness Test.
- Kentucky bill would make it a crime to insult police officers. Alabama Senate committee votes to criminalize treatment for transgender minors.
- Deepfake porn is ruining women’s lives. Now the law may finally ban it.
- The realest tweet.
- Chess is bad now. This is good.
- Statement of Teaching Philosophy. Deconstruction.
- The Problem With the Postcolonial Syllabus: Against a peculiarly Western allergy to the pleasure of the text.
- Finally, someone is making sense.
- Scientists Have Proposed a New Particle That Is a Portal to a 5th Dimension.
- Bring back the nervous breakdown!
- Is This the End of Tipping?
- The Sadism of Eating Real Meat Over Lab Meat.
- I really need you to read Vladmir Nabokov’s Superman poem and understand that it was accompanied by a hilariously serious exegesis by the Times Literary Supplement.
- All 17 base Twilight Imperium factions, ranked by number of war crimes (Updated).
- And there’s just one rule that I know of, babies.
And a Very Merry Election’s Night’s Eve To You Too
- ICYMI: My Ministry for the Future review has been most-read at LARB for a few days straight, and the new episode of Grad School Vonnegut on the Slaughterhouse-Five graphic novel might be the best one we’ve done. Catch Canavan Fever! There’s no cure.
- How to give the climate story a happy ending: KSR goes on the Fiction Science podcast.
- Trump advisers said their best hope was if the president wins Ohio and Florida is too close to call early in the night, depriving Mr. Biden a swift victory and giving Mr. Trump the room to undermine the validity of uncounted mail-in ballots in the days after. Have a great Election Day, everyone!
- Keep the Pundits Off the Air Until There’s a Winner.
- America is a failing state. And establishment politics can’t solve the crisis.
- A Possible Majority.
- Sanctions and Suppression. A Medium post from the student demonstrator Marquette has singled out for punishment for opposing the budget cuts.
- Meanwhile, OurMarquette has extended its dread reach to Facebook.
- Extremely normal country: Police use pepper-spray on protesters — including children — marching to Alamance polls.
- U.S. detained migrant children for far longer than previously known.
- KSP training slideshow quotes Hitler, advocates ‘ruthless’ violence.
- Absolutely deranged: CDC lifts ban on cruises and paves way for return to sailing.
- White men are doing mostly fine without more economic relief from Washington, but just about everyone else is suffering.
- Scientism, the coronavirus, and the death of the humanities.
- Can a Video Game Express Modernist Values?
- Respectfully disagree.
- Thish ish shuch schad newsh, Pusshy. But maybe not as sad as I first thought.
- Dibs.
- How Long Can Gyms Survive?
- And I’m listening…
Saturday Night Links!
- Call for Applications: SFRA Support a New Scholar Program. Call for Papers: How Literature Understands Poverty. CFP: Decolonising Science Fiction. CFP: Special Issue of Supernatural Studies on Jordan Peele. CFP: Symposium on Black Lives Matter and Antiracist Projects in Writing Program Administration.
- IAFA 21 will be online.
- A Message from the Future: The Years of Repair.
- The Realism of Our Times: How Science Fiction Works. More KSR: We Made This Heat, Now We Cool It.
- New Climate Maps Show a Transformed United States. Disasters are pushing Americans out of their homes for longer, new data suggest, a worrisome new sign of the human toll of climate change. The 2020 Hurricane Season Is a Turning Point in Human History. In secret tapes, mine executives detail their sway over leaders from Juneau to the White House. Harm’s Way: On “Katrina,” Disaster, and America’s Possible Future.
- How Humanity Came To Contemplate Its Possible Extinction: A Timeline.
- Cixin Liu on the edge of cancellation. Netflix faces call to rethink Liu Cixin adaptation after his Uighur comments.
- Marquette bracing for layoffs as COVID-19, projected enrollment declines dictate major changes. Faculty, staff host press conference in response to university proposed layoffs.
- Rising positivity rates and lack of testing frustrate faculty, students. Marquette reports highest number of cases in a single day. Reopening for In-Person Classes May Have Caused Thousands of Covid-19 Cases a Day, Study Finds. Writing through quarantine at Marquette.
- Off-campus parties raise questions from Notre Dame students about double standards.
- Undergraduate enrollments are down 2.5 percent compared to last fall, with the biggest losses being at community colleges, where enrollments declined by 7.5 percent, according to preliminary data on fall enrollments from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
- UW-Stevens Point first-year enrollment rises 25%. Xavier welcomes second-largest class in university history. UW-Madison posts strong fall first-year enrollment numbers despite pandemic. Wisconsin Lutheran Sets Records.
- In higher education, the pandemic has been especially cruel to adjunct professors. Staff Get Little to No Say in Campus Governance. That Must Change. Is the Managed Campus a Graveyard?
- The New Order: How the nation’s partisan divisions consumed public-college boards and warped higher education.
- AAUP Investigation into Governance Issues Raised by the Pandemic.
- How to Use University Holdings to Survive a Downturn Intact.
- When it comes to workplace organizing, there’s no such thing as a “privileged” worker. You’re either with your coworkers or you’re against them. Why Won’t the US’s Largest Labor Federation Talk About a General Strike?
- Gov. Evers warns of ‘near-exponential’ COVID-19 growth; more people in Wisconsin now hospitalized with virus than ever before. Wisconsin sets single-day record. ‘People are just being dishonest’: Parents are sending coronavirus-infected kids to school, Wisconsin officials warn.d
- The election that could break America. The Terrifying Inadequacy of American Election Law. The Nightmare Scenario That Keeps Election Lawyers Up At Night — And Could Hand Trump A Second Term. Trump readies thousands of attorneys for election fight. The attack on voting. How to fix America’s broken democracy. RBG, the 2020 election, and the rolling crisis of American democracy. I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There. “Own the Libs” Is Gradually Morphing Into “Kill the Libs.” Democrats Need to Wake Up: The Trump Movement Is Shot Through With Fascism. The Deeper Struggle.
- Why Milwaukee could determine Joe Biden’s fate in November’s election. American Suburbs Are Tilting for Biden. But Not Milwaukee’s.
- Over 860,000 Americans Have Already Voted, Compared to Fewer Than 10,000 by This Point in 2016.
- The case for ending the Supreme Court as we know it.
- We were so close to a second stimulus. So close!
- The insufferable hubris of the well-credentialed.
- During the pandemic, some of the people I grew up with got sucked into QAnon and the Q-adjacent “Save the Children” movement. We Need to Talk About Talking About QAnon.Two weeks ago, I spoke to someone who told me they’ve figured out who’s in control of Q-Anon. And after a lot of reporting, I believe them.
- A Portrait of the Breakdown of Hope and Meaning in America.
- The Cut visits r/unemployment. Elderly and Homeless: America’s Next Housing Crisis. Airlines Face Desolate Future as Attempts to Reopen Crumble. Meet the Customer Service Reps for Disney and Airbnb Who Have to Pay to Talk to You. Bird Is Quietly Luring Contract Workers Into Debt Through a New Scooter Scheme. Gig Economy Company Launches Uber, But for Evicting People. Love 2 have a Democratic supermajority. No Job, Loads of Debt: Covid Upends Middle-Class Family Finances. How the Monthly Economic Crisis Support Act could end poverty in the U.S. We Need a Radically Different Approach to the Pandemic and Our Economy as a Whole.
- My wife and I got the virus. I got better. We had to say goodbye over FaceTime. The strangest thing about the pandemic is that it isn’t strange anymore. How The Pandemic Has Exacerbated The Gender Divide In Household Labor. We totally knew this was coming, but this month is a disaster for working women. What if all covid‑19 deaths in the United States had happened in your neighborhood? Signs of depression have tripled in the U.S. since the COVID-19 pandemic got underway. ‘I cry before work’: US essential workers burned out amid pandemic. Alarming Data Show a Third Wave of COVID-19 Is About to Hit the U.S. How We Survive the Winter.
- I’m an On-Set ‘COVID Person,’ Whatever That Means.
- Fossil Free Marquette holds divestment protest. New mural celebrating diversity to be painted on Marquette University campus.
- Cars have hit demonstrators 104 times since George Floyd protests began.
- The battle over dyslexia.
- Pope says autistic kids are beautiful, unique flowers to God.
- Absolutely done in by this German political compass.

- Reprogramming a Game By Playing It: an Unbelievable Super Mario Bros 3 Speedrun.
- 1994: Hunter S. Thompson eulogizes Richard Nixon.
- The elusive peril of space junk.
- Strange Research Paper Claims There’s a Black Hole at the Center of the Earth. Wasn’t this a David Brin novel?
- Star Trek Tarot.
- Understand Your Conspiracy Theory.
- Just when I thought I was out: WandaVision.
- My Watchmen class gets a late boost.
- Leftism and comics.
- I’d never seen the Walter Benjamin memorial before. Stunning.
- Judith Butler on the culture wars, JK Rowling and living in “anti-intellectual times.”
- My statement of teaching philosophy.
- Wanna feel old? This was a week ago.

Monday Morning Links!
* CFP: Living in the End Times: Utopian and Dystopian Representations of Pandemics, Cappadocia University, Thu, Jan 14, 2021 – Fri, Jan 15, 2021. CFP: Science Fictions, Popular Cultures.
* New issue of MOSF Journal of Science Fiction, on Environmental SF.
* ExoTerra is an online collaborative research role-playing game (RPG) community, in which students from all disciplines, from physics to literature, pool their expertise to design a new world. Participating students play the crew of a space colony ship traveling from Earth to a newly-terraformed exoplanet, and must work together to design the new world they will create: its ocean biosphere, its capital city, its educational system, its power grid, its laws. Over the three quarters of the 2020/21 school year, students will explore the new solar system, unlock its mysteries, and debate and decide the foundations of their new civilization. All students at the university can participate as an extracurricular, but each quarter a selection of courses in many fields (Social Sciences, Humanities, Arts, STEM) will offer ExoTerra as an integrated course component, guiding the class through researching and producing a design for the new world as part of the class itself.
* Students, faculty, staff raise concerns about Marquette’s reopening plan. Milwaukee County Currently Suppressing COVID-19. ‘I can’t afford tuition’: College students face financial strains, health concerns from pandemic ahead of fall semester. Notre Dame sees spike in COVID-19 cases. Entire OSU sorority house in quarantine after 23 sisters test positive for coronavirus. UNC faculty call special meeting as fourth COVID-19 cluster among students reported.
* People Are Struggling To Cope With The Physical Manifestations Of Their COVID Stress.
* Inside the Prison Where California’s Coronavirus Outbreak Exploded.
* “This is the first Fire Tornado Warning we are aware of in history.” In Derecho’s Wake, More Than 250,000 in Midwest Struggle Without Power. California Braces for More Blackouts as Heat Wave Persists. Greenland’s ice sheet has melted to a point of no return, according to new study. Just thinking about how virtually shutting down the entire world economy wasn’t enough to lower carbon emissions by the amount necessary.
* Biden Dems simply cannot wait to screw over their voters. And everybody else.
* Milwaukee’s Lost Mega-Event: ‘It’s the Ghost Convention Now.’
* The Mayor Is Ready for School to Open. The School Buildings Are Not.
* QAnon Promotes Pedo-Ring Conspiracy Theories. Now They’re Stealing Kids.
* Get in on the ground floor of this exciting coronavirus cure.
* Congress finally moving on the USPS crisis. Once more with feeling, Sara Nelson for president.
* Gun Enthusiasts Celebrate Man Who Shot Himself in the Balls as Their King.
* Video games and French fries ftw, again.
* Going viral: NYC Is Dead Forever. Here’s Why.