Gerry Canavan

the smartest kid on earth

Posts Tagged ‘Rick and Morty

Fall Break Links? In This Economy?

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I’ve been very busy! It might not get better anytime soon! But at least I’ve closed all my tabs...

Baldwin: The defunding of public education has accelerated all the public universities’ forays into the realm of what they call “becoming entrepreneurial,” which I described above—land grabs, leveraging tax-free real estate, public-private partnerships, capturing intellectual property, and more. This story has to begin with the Higher Education Act of 1965. That legislation failed to directly fund higher education and instead offered indirect funding in the form of “student assistance” for tuition—a few grants but mostly loans, most of them private. Only through tuition, paid by most students through loans and debt, could institutions receive federal funds. This prompted a drive toward skyrocketing tuitions, the competition for higher-paying out-of-state and international students, and the debt financing of amenities to draw those students, which has created the massive national student-debt crisis. But even more, this strategy of raising tuition, funded through debt, wasn’t enough to offset decreases in public spending. So, at the same time, colleges and universities ramped up their participation in revenue-generating, community-destroying practices.

Written by gerrycanavan

October 24, 2022 at 9:00 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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Thursday Links!

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* Call for Papers: Trans-Indigenous Science Fictions. CFP: Activism and Resistance at the London Science Fiction Research Community. And don’t forget about the mini-ICFA in October!

* In a lousy year, Phil Wegner’s Invoking Hope was something that made me feel really good about the work I do, and gave me hope for the possibilities of the university (despite its managers). Read my review at Ancillary Review of Books!

* On the other side of things: The Hopeless University: Intellectual Work at the end of The End of History.

* The New Republic has another review of the Butler LOA volume.

* Science Fiction & … Economic Crisis! with Sherryl Vint, Hugh O’Connell, and Malka Older.

* While I’m recommending stuff: my 21C students loved Zadie Smith’s 2020 mini-memoir Intimations — it was their favorite book of the semester — and I’ve had great fun playing Clank: Legacy and Scooby Doo: Escape from the Haunted Mansion with my third-grader lately.

* I also wanted to buy every game listed in this fun YouTube study of Tomb of Horrors, because I’m just that game-crazed right now.

* Gloomhaven sequel Frosthaven will change to address cultural bias.

* Teen Vogue: Colleges are right-wing institutions.

Conservatives continually cite statistics suggesting that college professors lean to the left. But those who believe a university’s ideological character can be discerned by surveying the political leanings of its faculty betray a fundamental misunderstanding of how universities work. Partisan political preferences have little to do with the production of academic knowledge or the day-to-day workings of the university — including what happens in classrooms. There is no “Democrat” way to teach calculus, nor is there a “Republican” approach to teaching medieval English literature; anyone who has spent time teaching or studying in a university knows that the majority of instruction and scholarship within cannot fit into narrow partisan categories. Moreover, gauging political preferences of employees is an impoverished way of understanding the ideology of an institution. To actually do so, you must look at who runs it — and in the case of the American university, that is no longer the professoriate.

* To whit. Exhibit B.

* new demographic cliff just dropped

* First the U. of Vermont Announced Cuts. Then Enrollment Spiked. Now What?

* North Carolina schools are re-segregating. A Wisconsin county completely loses its shit at the very idea of equality.

* The shocking MOVE bombing was part of a broader pattern of anti-Black racism.

* Can Climate Fiction Writers Reach People in Ways That Scientists Can’t?

* Cory Doctorow has been having some 🔥🔥🔥 threads on Twitter lately: 1, 2, 3…

* The Secret Life of Deesha Philyaw (or, why we need university presses).

* How Much Money Do Authors Actually Earn?

* Krakoa as libertarian haven. A Clockwork Orange and #MeToo. Fear of a Black Superhero. Putting an animated series on the blockchain seems like a Rick and Morty bit, doesn’t it? Apparently the Brontës all died so early because they spent their lives drinking graveyard water.

* For some Navy pilots, UFO sightings were an ordinary event: ‘Every day for at least a couple years.’

* Ominous: Alien life looks more and more likely. Catholics are ready.

* Africans in Space: The Incredible Story of Zambia’s Afronauts.

* The Strange Story of Dagobert, the “DuckTales” Bandit.

* Colson Whitehead and Margaret Atwood Discuss The Underground RailroadThe Handmaid’s Tale and the Challenges of Adaptation.

* Randall Kennedy and Eugene Volokh have the case for allowing the use of the n-word and other slurs in the classroom.

* they say your first Amazon order defines your future

* Now you’re just being rude.

* Dick Van Dyke at 95.

* When you’re cancelled, you’re cancelled.

* At only $20,000/month, you’d be a fool NOT to rent it.

* Just 12 People Are Behind Most Vaccine Hoaxes On Social Media, Research Shows.

* How the world missed more than half of all Covid-19 deaths. Is this the end?

* Meet the Nun Who Wants You to Remember You Will Die. No, I don’t think I want to!

* The Darkness.

* Decolonization is not a metaphor. Imperialism: A Syllabus.

* But on the miracles and wonders beat: 1st Group Enrolled in Trial of uniQure’s AMT-130 Gene Therapy for Huntington’s Disease.

Accidentally Closed a Bunch of Tabs and Can’t Get Them Back But Regardless Here Are Links

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* Coming soon! Paradoxa 31: Climate Fictions. There’s a ton in this gigantic issue; my contribution is called “The Legend of Zelda in the Anthropocene,” based off the presentation on Breath of the Wild I gave at ICFA last year…

For 60 years, Americans poisoned themselves by pumping leaded gasoline into their cars. Then Clair Patterson, a scientist who helped build the atomic bomb and discovered the true age of the Earth, took on a billion-dollar industry. The Most Important Scientist You’ve Never Heard Of.

* Scenes from the class struggle at Marquette. Colleges Hoped for an In-Person Fall. Now the Dream is Crumbling. Universities that lived by the market model during the boom years face an extinction event as the bubble bursts and their business model pushes them to make perverse decisions about campus opening. ‘Ethically troubling.’ University reopening plans put professors, students on edge. Frat parties, bars could ruin fall 2020 college reopening plans.  The Humanities after COVID-19. Iowa. UNC. Akron. UMass. For First-Generation Students, a Disappearing ‘College Experience’ Could Have Grave Consequences. Colleges Are Getting Ready to Blame Their Students. Last Change for Universities? And the piece that made literally everyone mad last week: Struggle / Perish / Survive / Thrive.

* On a Knife’s Edge.

* Rethinking MLA 2021.

* The time for reform is now. If we want truly public education at a reasonable cost, the state and federal governments need to step up to help with funding and to insist on proper reforms to refocus our institutions on the academic mission. After this pandemic, our institutions need to have backed away from these destructive corporate-style approaches and to have restored focus on the academic mission. Instead of describing and accepting every academic loss as “the new normal,” our colleges and universities need to emphasize that higher education is a public good, not a private commodity. This means a return to investment in students, full-time faculty, research, and all aspects of the academic mission that have been overlooked for far too long.  

Exploit U: The Secret Underworld of College Athletics. Lost football season would crush Big Ten schools, including Ohio State, Michigan, Penn State. Rutgers professors sue over $100 million shifted to athletics.

* How Afrofuturism Can Help the World Mend. Insurgent histories and the abolitionist imaginary. The Argument of Afropessimism.

* The Man Whose Science Fiction Keeps Turning Into Our Shitty Cyberpunk Reality. How Fantasy Literature Helped Create the 21st Century. How Cyberpunk Saved Sci-Fi. Why We Need Dystopian Fiction Now More Than Ever.

* From Cixin Liu to Octavia E. Butler: An Interview with EN to CN Science Fiction Translator Geng Hui.

8 Anti-Capitalist Sci-Fi and Fantasy Novels.

* Three Ways of Diversifying a Philosophy Syllabus.

Top Scientists Just Ruled Out Best-Case Global Warming Scenarios.

* The Last Giraffes on Earth.

* Men who call their colleagues “fucking bitches” in public hallways are making a threat and it should not be tolerated. PS: Don’t read the New York Times.

Vaccine Reality Check. Hygiene Theater. 16 states set single-day coronavirus case records last week. White House document shows 18 states in coronavirus “red zone.” Virus activity remains ‘high’ in 80% of Wisconsin counties. State reports 900 more COVID-19 cases and six Wisconsin children who got rare inflammatory condition that the coronavirus can trigger. New coronavirus cases in Wisconsin top 1,000 for the second time in three days. America’s coronavirus reopening falls apart. We’re Talking About More Than Half a Million People Missing from the U.S. Population. And some good news: Overall COVID-19 intensive care mortality has fallen by a third. Oxford scientists believe they have made a breakthrough in their quest for a Covid-19 vaccine. Can You Get Covid-19 Again? It’s Very Unlikely, Experts Say.

How Much Should You Worry About Air Conditioning and COVID-19?

There Are Literally No Good Options for Educating Our Kids This Fall. I Am Definitely Panicking. Teachers unions in largest districts call on Tony Evers to require schools start virtually. Fed up with remote education, parents who can pay have a new plan for fall: import teachers to their homes. Citing Educational Risks, Scientific Panel Urges That Schools Reopen. To Be a Parent Right Now Is To Be a Liar. They Come to Mommy First.

* Once again: against homework.

The Dark Obsessions of QAnon Are Merging With Mainstream Conservatism. Twitter bans 7,000 QAnon accounts, limits 150,000 others as part of broad crackdown. American Death Cult. What Could Happen If Trump Rejects Electoral Defeat? Previewing 2024.

* August is shaping up to be ‘ugly.’ Renters brace for evictions as moratorium ends. Mass Evictions Set To Begin – Communities Of Color To Be Hardest Hit. Here’s how the eviction crisis will impact each state. Millions of Americans Are About to Lose Their Homes. Congress Must Help Them. More Than Half of U.S. Business Closures Permanent, Yelp Says. Almost half of the U.S. population does not have a job. Child care industry ‘approaching a catastrophic situation’ due to COVID. Layoffs are growing again. More state spending cuts coming in Wisconsin. Many families in Wisconsin are ‘close to becoming homeless’ as effects of pandemic continue and help dries up. Home Prices May Be Dropping Soon. Here’s Why. How Remote Work Divides America. U.S. Capitalism Is in Total Meltdown. Gimme that stimmie.

* America ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids — in fact, it’s cold as hell

* Your Predominantly White Academic Organization (Yes, Even Yours) Is Exactly One Live-Tweeted Racist Event Away from Public Disgrace.

U.S. newspapers have shed half of their newsroom employees since 2008.

* My friend the brilliant Jillian Weise on Metafilter! You love to see it.

How the Child Care Crisis Will Distort the Economy for a Generation.

* There is just so much corruption in the justice system. I wish it were still shocking. Elsewhere on the justice beat: The 15-year-old Black girl who was incarcerated for not doing her homework has been denied release by a Michigan judge.

A British Skin Care Brand Pressured Asian Influencers To Promote Its Skin Whiteners. They Fought Back.

* The Racist History of Tipping.

* The Rick and Morty shorts are a whole thing, man.

* The best new Twitter account out there: @accidental_left.

* You’re not allowed to stop. You can never stop. The Existential Horror of Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

Why Children of Men haunts the present moment.

* Anti-Blackness in The Last of Us, Part Two.

J.K. Rowling and the Limits of Imagination.

The Inescapable Whiteness of AVATAR: THE LEGEND OF KORRA, and its Uncomfortable Implications.

Capitalism is the Parasite; Capitalism is the Virus.

What We Know About the Austin BLM Protest Shooting. Official Garrett Foster Memorial Fund.

* The fight against racism starts at home.

* John Lewis: Photos from a Life Spent Getting into Good Trouble. One of his last interviews.

* Ta-Nehisi Coates: The Nib Interview.

* Infinite Hyperobjects on Infinite Earths.

* Don’t tease us Doc.

* one of the kids at my job made this and i haven’t known peace since

* tinker tailor soldier spy if it was adapted today

* cat in the furnace, check

* wow ok I’m feeling personally attacked

* Two Americas.

* always has been — always has been

* just an update for all you non-biologists out there that biology twitter is currently in meltdown because a journal editor said some worms are overrated

* Even Highlights magazine is a grim read these days.

* I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well as you fucking deserve

* Obviously they should have changed their name to the I Don’t Care If You Have Purple Skins, but doing a Prince-style malicious rebrand to an unusable euphemism that keeps the old name at the foreground of everyone’s minds forever is clever too.

* Why is science fiction more prone to attracting ‘literary’ writers than, say, fantasy?

* What’s considered trashy if you’re poor, but classy if you’re rich?

* Yeah, I mean, I’m unnerved and I’m not even a commuter.

* “As shooting slowly resumes, your porn is about to look a lot different.”

* Yet another Watchmen sequel.

* And even if I don’t believe it, I believe it: Explosive UFO Report In NYT Mentions ‘Off-World Vehicles Not Made On This Earth.’

Written by gerrycanavan

July 27, 2020 at 7:30 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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suNDaY ReAdiNG

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* College students want answers about fall, but schools may not have them for months. The Big ‘If.’ What If Colleges Don’t Reopen Until 2021? College Campuses Must Reopen in the Fall. Here’s How We Do It. Public Colleges Lose State Funding, Effective Immediately. I Teach at Rutgers and I Don’t Know If I’ll Have a Job This Fall. Rising expenses, falling revenues, budget cuts: Universities face looming financial crisis. ‘Pressure Is Turning Way Up’: College Presidents Plan Layoffs, Budget Cuts Due to Coronavirus, Says Survey. College Closures in the Wake of COVID-19: A Need for Forward-Looking Accountability. Pandemic Hits College Sports. Finding Real Life in Teaching Law Online. The New Tenured Radicals. For the recovery, we need to spend like our lives depend on it.

* And at home: Faculty express concerns over university furloughs, financial decisions.

* NYU is not kidding around. Stanford Health Care to cut workers’ wages by 20%.

Women academics seem to be submitting fewer papers during coronavirus. ‘Never seen anything like it,’ says one editor.

Young and middle-aged people, barely sick with covid-19, are dying of strokes. Life After Ventilators Can Be Hell for Coronavirus Survivors. Even Palliative Care Doctors Have Never Experienced Anything Like This Before.

A Stanford Professor’s Wife Recruited People For His Coronavirus Study By Claiming It Would Reveal If They Could “Return To Work Without Fear.”

* Zoom as “The Gift of the Magi.”

* Here are the unambiguous rules for what to do in this pandemic.

* ‘Immunity Passports’ Could Create a New Category of Privilege. These epidemiologists say let’s think about reopening daycares and elementary schools. After Coronavirus, Nearly Half Of The Day Care Centers In The U.S. Could Be Gone. You’re Not Homeschooling — You’re ‘Crisis Schooling.’ To Access Online Services, New Jersey Students With Disabilities Must Promise Not To Sue.

* Liberals just seem incapable of accepting that New York is a coronavirus disaster because Cuomo and de Blasio did a bad job.

* America gets back to work: My Family Was Denied a Stimulus Check Because My Husband Is an Immigrant. My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore? The end of bars and restaurants. Trump Donor Hired Trump-Tied Lobbyists, Then Raked in Coronavirus Relief Cash. GOP Governors Will Push Workers off Unemployment by Reopening Early. A Step-by-Step Plan to Reopen California. Can We Really Make a Safe Vaccine in 18 Months? ‘No Evidence’ Yet That Recovered COVID-19 Patients Are Immune, WHO Says. Just 14% of Americans support ending social distancing in order to reopen the economy, according to a new poll. The Left Can’t Just Dismiss the Anti-Lockdown Protests. Coronavirus is spreading fast in states that may reopen soon, study finds. We Cannot “Reopen” America. What Reopening Georgia Might Really Be About. Reopening Has Begun. No One Is Sure What Happens Next.

“If the state narrowly defines suitable work and doesn’t include the implications of the virus and what that means for a workplace, then that might put those workers who are drawing unemployment insurance in a precarious position, where they would have to either lose their unemployment insurance or go back to work in an unsafe environment,” Camardelle says.

The Media’s Coronavirus Coverage Exposes Its Ignorance About the Working Class. Understanding media bias.

* American billionaires have gotten $280 billion richer since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Small Business Rescue Earned Banks $10 Billion In Fees. With Millions Unable to Pay for Housing Next Month, Organizers Plan the Largest Rent Strike in Nearly a Century. 71 percent of jobless Americans did not receive their March unemployment benefits. Wheeeeeeeeee!

Study: Elderly Trump voters dying of coronavirus could cost him in November. Most people dying from Covid-19 are old. Don’t treat them just as statistics.

Internal Documents Reveal Team Trump’s Chloroquine Master Plan. Twitter names Trump the ‘Tide Pods’ president after he suggests disinfectant injections. Say It Loud, Say It Clear: Donald Trump Needs to Resign Over His Handling of the Coronavirus. And for the people in the back: The President Is Mentally Unwell — and Everyone Around Him Knows It.

* All the Reasons This Will Be a Bleak Summer for N.Y.C. All Children.

How I Knew It Was Over.

* Tread *very* carefully, Joe — there are a lot of perverts in swing states.

* Pelosi’s Playing Hardball, Charlie Brown.

* Well done everyone.

* A Candidate in Isolation: Inside Joe Biden’s Cloistered Campaign. They didn’t even let him get interviewed for this!

It’s not because his politics are so far out of the mainstream—if they were, he wouldn’t be president. Rather, his personality clashes with what moderates stand for—the emotional register they operate on. This is an unwritten yet fundamental rule of American politics: Moderation is not a political persuasion but a mood.

How the Supreme Court’s Progressive Minority Could Prevent a Stolen Election. Or the conservative majority could steal it! Who knows, really.

* We will not stand for the erasure of Wisconsin’s proud Confederate history. Or Michigan’s!

40 Coronavirus Cases In Milwaukee County (So Far) Linked To Wisconsin Election, Health Official Says.

* Planet of the Humans pulled from Netflix.

Amazon Scooped Up Data From Its Own Sellers to Launch Competing Products. This would be an open and shut case if we actually had a government.

* The world is a vast hellscape right now, but remember, the Mandarin word for “penguin” literally translates to “business goose.”

* Parks and Rec is back, baby!

* This fall on Netflix: Man Who Died Ingesting Fish Tank Cleaner Remembered as Intelligent, Levelheaded Engineer.  Stay till the twist!

Dolly Parton secretly producing Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the 90s version of Lucille Ball throwing her weight behind Star Trek: TOS.

* Great, one more thing to worry about.

* Kim Yo Jong leans in.

* And for your consideration: another Bible as D&D thread.

Thursday Doesn’t Even Start Links

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* Free issues of Extrapolation and Science Fiction Film and Television at LUP include the suburbs, the superheroes, utopia, dystopia, Octavia Butler, my piece on the Lorax and apocalypse as children’s entertainment, and more! Sarah Schaefer also reminded me today of the piece I wrote on Hogarth, The World’s End, and China Mieville’s apocalyptic take on Utopia for a recent Haggerty Museum exhibition, so check that out as well…

* Three PhD positions + One Postdoc in Science Fiction & Contemporary Futurisms (CoFutures & Science Fictionality).

* “Speaking of Chip Delany, yesterday on his Facebook page he posted video of this amazing event with Octavia E. Butler. It was held at the Smithsonian in D.C. on November 19, 2004.”

Record 6.6 Million Americans Sought Unemployment Benefits Last Week. Online Unemployment Benefits Systems Are Buckling Under a Wave of Applications. Unemployment benefits for gig and self-employed workers stalled by confusion, delays. The list of those who won’t get a $1,200 stimulus check is growing — and includes some surprising groups. Nearly 60 Percent of U.S. Workers Won’t Be Able to Meet Their Basic Financial Needs Under One-Month Coronavirus Quarantine, Survey Shows. Coronavirus job losses could total 47 million, unemployment rate may hit 32%, Fed estimates. CBO Does Not Assume a V-Shaped Recovery.  It’s time for a massive wartime mobilization to save the economy. A coronavirus recession will mean more robots and fewer jobs. General Electric Workers Walk Off the Job, Demand to Make Ventilators. Whole Foods Employees Are Staging a Nationwide ‘Sick-Out.’ The long reach of insecure gig work in America. There’s Never Been a Better Time for Us to End Private Health Insurance Than Right Now. Our Health Insurance System Was Not Built for a Plague. Imagining a Better Life After the Coronavirus. How a debt jubilee could help the U.S. avert economic depression. Notes towards a general strike.

Why is the US so exceptionally vulnerable to Covid-19?

Why has the American response to COVID-19 been so exceptionally bad? Because American capitalism uses the withholding of care to workers as a growth sector in an otherwise stagnant economy.

* Governors plead for medical equipment from federal stockpile plagued by shortages and confusion.

* In other words: 166,000 people are being put in solitary confinement for the next two weeks.

* This Is Not the Apocalypse You Were Looking For. Why We Need Utopian Fiction Now More Than Ever. No, xkcd, I simply refuse to look on the bright side of this. Ted Chiang Explains the Disaster Novel We All Suddenly Live In. This almost could have been my list: The Best Books to Last You Through Social Distancing.

* The One with the Coronavirus.

* Thousands of emergency medical technicians in New York City have been enlisted in the fight against the new coronavirus. Granted anonymity, one of them shares the frustrations and fears, the tough decisions, and the devastating realities of a single tour. A crying doctor, patients gasping for air and limited coronavirus tests: A look inside a triage tent in Chicago.

* Ports around the globe are turning cruise ships away en masse amid the coronavirus pandemic, leaving thousands of passengers stranded even as some make desperate pleas for help while sickness spreads aboard. The coronavirus may sink the cruise-ship business.

* The sea of blue mats is part of a temporary shelter for the homeless, who will be spaced at least six feet apart.

Army Warned in Early February That Coronavirus Could Kill 150,000 Americans. Covid vs. US Daily Average Cause of Death. Bleak figures from Western Europe may offer a preview of what coronavirus death tallies will look like in the United States. Mortality data suggest that much of the world is undercounting the true toll of covid-19. How Does the Coronavirus Behave Inside a Patient? Outside the box solutions. I know the day we got it.

The Internet Archive Chooses Readers. Divorce, co-parenting, and the coronavirus. What Happens When Both Parents Get COVID-19. A Couple Drove 5,000 KM to Yukon to Escape Coronavirus. Locals Were Furious. Loneliness and coronavirus.

* Ain’t that America?

* College after COVID-19. What’s lost in the rush to online learning. Time to teach teaching the virus. Zoom is malware. The university in a moment of intersecting crises. Cash Flow and Financial Exigency in Post-Pandemic Higher Ed. The show must go on.

Remote learning is turning out to be a burden for parents.

* For victims of domestic violence, stay-at-home orders are a worst-case scenario.

* You think you’re going nuts during quarantine? Astrophysicist gets magnets stuck up nose while inventing coronavirus device.

Why Games Have Always Obsessed Over Pandemic Authoritarianism.

* So much of reading journalism critically is finding out where the outlet is saying to its smug readers “ha ha aren’t other people stupid” and then trying to uncover the reason why that’s wrong. This time it’s about the toilet paper.

* Elon Musk, ridiculous clown.

* All the Democrats, ridiculous clowns. But for real. But for real. For real.

* Democrats postpone presidential convention until Aug. 17.

* Seconded.

Free Comrade Britney!

* Did not see that coming: Pablo Escobar’s Hippos Fill a Hole Left Since Ice Age Extinctions.

That one time Felix Guattari tried to sell a script in Hollywood.

* Nisi Shawl’s crash course in black science fiction.

How Big Oil and Big Soda kept a global environmental calamity a secret for decades. While you were busy.

Looming Global Condom Shortage Spurs Thai Firm to Ramp Up Output.

America’s political dysfunction is rooted not in ideological polarization, but in the Republican Party’s conviction that it alone should be allowed to govern. They don’t even think we should be allowed to vote, unless of course voting might kill some of us.

* Originalism was bullshit! The whole time! Who could have seen this coming!

* Policing and the English language.

* Great to see my old MFA pal Dan getting the last-name-only treatment for this quarantine-friendly poem: “Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale.”

* A thousand r/DaystromInstitute posts are blooming in the wake of the failure of S1 of Picard; I liked this one as a possible alternative character motivation for Admiral Picard.

* Computer, on screen.

* Being Greta Thunberg.

* Even Lab-Grown Meat Won’t Save Us From a ‘Terrible Reckoning.’

* Francis Ford Coppola Is Ready to Make His Dream Sci-Fi Project.

* Nailed it.

* Coming soon to the Switch: Star Wars Episode I: Racer and a whole truckload of Mario games.

* The return of Rick and Morty.

* And Polygon rightly hypes Gloomhaven after the Frosthaven Kickstarter crosses $5M in a single day.

Written by gerrycanavan

April 2, 2020 at 6:33 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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It’s Monday Everywhere But In Your Heart Links

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* Very regrettably, SFRA 2020 has been cancelled. The 2020 Science Fictions, Popular Cultures conference at HawaiiCon might be our next chance…

* The Best Solo Board Games, or Welcome to the Gloomhaven Century. And while we’re on the subject: the Frosthaven kickstarter starts this week!

* I’ve been debating about whether to ‘go public’ on having coronavirus – which I kind of did inadvertently this morning. So, now I may as well share my experience(s) with you in order to help those who are worried about it or who are thinking they might have it. Here goes…

‘Since I Became Symptomatic.’

* Teachers’ Herculean Task: Moving 1.1 Million Children to Online School. With Coronavirus Disrupting College, Should Every Student Pass? Marquette goes pass/fail (if you want it). Forced off campus by coronavirus, students aren’t won over by online education. Coronavirus threatens the UW system. If the Coronavirus Collapses State Budgets, What Will Happen to Public Colleges? Will Coronavirus Close Your College for Good? Liberty University once again finds a way to do the worst possible thing. It will only get weirder. After Coronavirus, the Deluge. And I’ll look down and whisper… no.

* How the World’s Richest Country Ran Out of a 75-Cent Face Mask. Pandemics Show How the Free Market Fails Us. The Lockdown Is an Opportunity to Redefine What Our Economy Is For. Coronavirus May Add Billions to the Nation’s Health Care Bill. Canada’s Coronavirus Response Shows Why We Need Medicare for All to Fight This Pandemic. ‘White-Collar Quarantine’ Over Virus Spotlights Class Divide. Rural Towns Insulated From Coronavirus Now May Take A Harder Hit Later. This Crisis Has Exposed the Absurdities of Neoliberalism. That Doesn’t Mean It’ll Destroy It. Workers Are More Valuable Than CEOs.

The Curve Is Not Flat Enough. Illinois reports death of infant with coronavirus. Teachers’ Herculean Task: Moving 1.1 Million Children to Online School. Doctors And Nurses Say More People Are Dying Of COVID-19 In The US Than We Know. Zoochosis. Who’s to blame. Some U.S. Cities Could Have Coronavirus Outbreaks Worse Than Wuhan’s. The U.S. Now Leads the World in Confirmed Coronavirus Cases. 13 Deaths in a Day: An ‘Apocalyptic’ Coronavirus Surge at an N.Y.C. Hospital. Inside a Brooklyn Hospital Right Now. How the Pandemic Will End. A 9/11 Every Day for a Month.

* The World Needs Masks. China Makes Them — But Has Been Hoarding Them.

* Having cancelled the Olympics, Japan discovers that it too is awash in coronavirus.

* Study ‘Clearly Shows’ Putin Did an Amazing Job Secretly Brewing Up the Novel Coronavirus.

* More Americans Should Probably Wear Masks for Protection. Blood from people who recover from coronavirus could provide a treatment.

EPA suspends enforcement of environmental laws amid coronavirus.

People With Intellectual Disabilities May Be Denied Lifesaving Care Under These Plans as Coronavirus Spreads.

A record 3.3 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits as the coronavirus slams economy. Record-breaking unemployment claims may be vast undercount. Coronavirus unemployment benefits. Here’s who qualifies and how much they get. How do 3 million newly unemployed people get health care? Why Is America Choosing Mass Unemployment? Coronavirus Shock Is Destroying Americans’ Retirement Dreams. MLMs are using the coronavirus to recruit new sellers. Billionaires Want People Back to Work. Employees Aren’t So Sure. Inside Trump’s risky push to reopen the country amid the coronavirus crisis. Trump Wants to ‘Reopen America.’ Here’s What Happens if We Do. Our Political System Is Hostile to Real Reform.

* Now that’s what I call setting expectations. The Real Donald Trump Is a Character on TV. Inside Joe Biden’s bizarre coronavirus bunker. He’s gonna lose, folks. The amazing thing. The tough choice. Andrew Cuomo’s Coronavirus Response Doesn’t Mean He’s Crush-Worthy. Report: Fox News is worried about legal action after misleading viewers about coronavirus.

* That time Hemingway was quarantined with his sick kid, his wife, and his mistress. Animal Crossing and social distancing. Abbey Road restored to original glory while everybody and their cameras are stuck indoors.

* Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance.

* Life after COVID-19.

* Coronavirus pandemic could inflict emotional trauma and PTSD on an unprecedented scale, scientists warn.

* Once is misfortune; twice looks like carelessness.

* A story of the twentieth century.

This is not to say there is no such thing as biopolitics nor any power to make live and let die. Clearly there is; clearly it is this that is wielded by all the Trumps great and small. Nonetheless it is apparent that the sovereign is not sovereign. Rather he is subordinated entirely to the dictates of political economy, that real unity of the political and economic forged by capital and its compulsions. Make live and let die is simply a tool among others in this social order whose true logic, from Trump’s tweet to Dan Patrick to the Senate bill, is the power employed always as a ratio of make work and let buy.

We must take this fact with the utmost seriousness: that Foucault’s new regime of power appears in the late eighteenth century, which is to say, alongside the steam engine and the industrial revolution, which is also to say, alongside the liftoff of anthropogenic climate change. We need to stop fucking around with theory and say, without hesitation, that capitalism, with its industrial body and crown of finance, is sovereign; that carbon emissions are the sovereign breathing; that make work and let buy must be annihilated; that there is no survival while the sovereign lives.

Massive online library project is venturing into uncharted legal waters: Internet Archive offers 1.4 million copyrighted books for free online.

* A sexual assault allegation against Joe Biden has ignited a firestorm of controversy.

* #actually there’s at least one more copy of Data’s engrams still in B4 so this is definitely not over. Elsewhere on the Picard beat: Star Trek: Picard is the dark reboot that boldly goes where nobody wanted it to. Star Trek: Picard, Fancy Sheets, and the Meaning of Home.

* These Researchers Want You to Live In a Fungus Megastructure.

* Rick and Morty Just Released a Short Samurai Film and It’s Awesome.

* The Dispossessed, Part II: May You Get Reborn on Anarres!

* The only good Twitter account is this Third Amendment memes one.

* Polarized Near-Infrared view of Saturn, processed using Cassini data taken in November 2012. NASA Data Shows Something Leaking Out of Uranus.

* And in a time without heroes, people are skipping Zoom meetings by looping videos of themselves paying attention.

Monday Night Links!

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* A good start! Grinnell Forfeits Football Season.

* Boomers, man.

* This photo of a Bengal Tiger is composed of only 2500 pixels. That’s the number of Bengal Tigers that are still alive.

We need to start talking about seemingly drastic approaches to the climate crisis, such as sun-dimming aerosols, right now — or we risk losing democratic control of the process. It’s Time to Talk About Solar Geoengineering.

Police have taken pre-emptive action against environmental protesters who are planning to cause disruption in Westminster.

I study collapsed civilizations. Here’s my advice for a climate change apocalypse.

I work in the environmental movement. I don’t care if you recycle.

Bad ancestors: does the climate crisis violate the rights of those yet to be born?

* Big tech is a black box.

* US to step aside for Turkish assault on Kurds in Syria. Top Military Officers Unload on Trump. Sounds like my man is on the brink of self-impeaching. Trump at serious risk of losing the mandate of heaven. Ohio GOP Sen. Rob Portman: Trump wrong to seek help from Ukraine, China. ‘Out on a limb’: Inside the Republican reckoning over Trump’s possible impeachment. Trump allies sought Ukraine gas deal. Trump’s Not Richard Nixon. He’s Andrew Johnson. Nine scenarios.

Last Week, Warren May Have Won The Democratic Race.

Political Operatives Are Faking Voter Outrage With Millions Of Made-Up Comments To Benefit The Rich And Powerful.

* Bronx Prosecutors Release Secret Records On Dishonest Cops.

Slain witness Joshua Brown was expected to testify in lawsuit against Dallas police.

* How the Prison Economy Works.

* Sacramento Amazon Workers Are Protesting after Woman Was Allegedly Fired for Spending Extra Hour with Dying Mother-in-Law.

Journalist says a CBP officer withheld his passport until he agreed he writes ‘propaganda.’

Robots to Cut 200,000 U.S. Bank Jobs in Next Decade, Study Says.

* America is a failed state.

* For real though.

* Finally, some good news.

* I like this.

24 Reasons “Angel” Was Perfect, and one pretty big reason why it wasn’t.

Joker and the vacuity of influence. Joker and white male resentment. (I liked what Noah Berlatsky had to say on this subject, too; I thought a lot about it while I was watching.) Joker Is a Viewing Experience of Rare, Numbing Emptiness. ‘The Greater Danger to Society May Be If You Don’t See This Movie.’ My own meager contribution to The Discourse: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

* I think I linked this once before, but I saw it on Twitter and wanted to link again: Ida Yoshinaga’s Disney’s Moana, the Colonial Screenplay, and Indigenous Labor Extraction in Hollywood Fantasy Films.

* This tweet got inside my fucking head.

In an effort to deter other gymnasts from trying skills they are not physically capable of doing, the International Gymnastics Federation watered down the value of a new element Biles plans to do at the world championships. That’s right. Penalize the reigning world and Olympic champion, who is almost cautious when it comes to adding difficulty, for the potential recklessness of others.

* They say America’s best days are behind it, but Someone Beat Minecraft Without Mining Any Blocks.

* Of course you had me at hi-rez, open-licensed recreation of the 1968 Disneyland souvenir map.

* Ours is a fallen world.

* But at least Rick and Morty‘s coming back. Everything’s coming up Canavan!

Surprise! Tuesday Night Links!

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* CPF: JOSF Special Issue on Disability Studies. CFP: Walking in Other Worlds: Fantastical Journeys of Children’s Agency. Enter for the Nine Dots Prize and Win $100,000 and a Book Deal. io9 Wants Your Short Fiction on the Future of Death.

* Job alert! Assistant Professor, Science Fiction and/or Fantasy Lit.

* SFFTV 11.3 is here, with a special section on Orphan Black!

* What Makes The Good Place So Good? The Good Place and Prison Abolition.

A Premature Attempt at the 21st Century Canon.

* Decanonizing R. Crumb.

* The Sokal hoax squared. Trumpeted to the skies by exactly the sort of people you’d expect, we’re stuck with this silliness for the next twenty years despite the fact that it proves absolutely nothing about anything.

Banksy painting shreds itself moments after being sold for $1.4 million at London auction.

The UN report envisions 116 scenarios in which global temperatures are prevented from rising more than 2°C. In 101 of them, that goal is accomplished by sucking massive amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere—a concept called “negative emissions”—chiefly via BECCS. And in these scenarios to prevent planetary disaster, this would need to happen by midcentury, or even as soon as 2020. Like a pharmaceutical warning label, one footnote warned that such “methods may carry side effects and long-term consequences on a global scale.”… Today that vast future sector of the economy amounts to one working project in the world: a repurposed corn ethanol plant in Decatur, Illinois. Which raises a question: Has the world come to rely on an imaginary technology to save it?

* Trump administration sees a 7-degree rise in global temperatures by 2100. Unbelievably, we have leapfrogged from “climate change doesn’t exist” to “it’s so bad there’s nothing we can do about it” without spending even an instant in the middle.

The Unequal Burden of Climate Change. Marx and the Two Crises in New York 2140. Why Growth Can’t Be Green. How San Francisco rebuilds its beaches every year to make you think San Francisco still has beaches. Geoengineering is inevitable.

Seven endangered species that could (almost) fit in a single train carriage.

* The suffocation of democracy.

* The president sure did some crimes.

* How Will Police Solve Murders on Mars?

* And how will they solve securities fraud?

* KSR: The Daring Journey Across Antarctica That Became a Nightmare.

The Bosses’ Constitution: How and why the First Amendment became a weapon for the right.

NC’s Rev. William Barber wins a MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ and its $625K prize. Kelly Link, too!

The Banality of Brett Kavanaugh. Brett Kavanaugh and the Cruelty of Male Bonding. The Things Males Do for Other Men. Brett Kavanaugh Is A Poster Child For The American Aristocracy. Kavanaugh and Trump are part of a larger crisis of elite accountability in America. The SeaWorld Case. The Stolen Memos. A Sham. The High Court Brought Low. The Judge From Central Casting. The Unbearable Dishonesty of Brett Kavanaugh. The Supreme Court Is Headed Back to the 19th Century. In Defense of Court-Packing.

A new authoritarian axis demands an international progressive front.

Canceling Student Debt Would Stimulate the Economy—and Voter Turnout.

Underwater Yet Again, the Carolinas Face a New Reality. Climate Change Wrought Hurricane Florence, This Freak of Nature. Millions of Chickens Have Drowned in Florence’s Floodwaters. Poop. Most of Florence’s victims have died in vehicles, on the road during the storm. For small-town Carolinians, the question isn’t when they’ll rebuild — but whether they will at all. Nearly One Month After Hurricane Florence, This Campus Is Still Picking Up the Pieces. Hurricanes as unveiling. The unequal distribution of catastrophe.

Puerto Rico Has Not Recovered From Hurricane Maria.

* Mike Davis, The Last Man to Know Everything.

* Deaf, disabled Detroit immigrant in US for 34 years faces deportation. Detention of Migrant Children Has Skyrocketed to Highest Levels Ever. U.S. Loses Track of Another 1,500 Migrant Children, Investigators Find. Migrant Children Moved Under Cover of Darkness to a Texas Tent City. The US Claims It Has A Database To Track Immigrant Kids And Parents. But No One Will Talk About It. ICE arrested undocumented immigrants who came forward to take in undocumented children. Judge’s ruling may force Kansas Army officer’s adopted Korean daughter to leave US.  ICE Agents Arrested Miami Dad After They Found His Lost Wallet, Family Says. A 2-Year-Old’s Day in Immigration Court.

Mr. Weiner, who is married with four children, rebuts the claim. But he acknowledges that he was not a perfect boss. “I’m sad that I might have caused people anguish in the job, or made people unhappy,” he said. “Might have? I did.”

* Somewhere near the bottom of the Star Trek hope-dread hype cycle, but here you go.

* On the plus side, I’m near the top of the Twilight Zone hype cycle.

* Put her in charge. Rules are rules.

How Oregon Trail Took Over the World.

* The short, unhappy careers of NFL place-kickers.

I stopped writing when we saw the new, bad MRI. Rob Delaney on the loss of his two-year-old son, Henry, to cancer.

Geological time versus capitalist time.

The Radical Dissent of Helen Keller.

The Woman Who Made Aquaman a Star.

‘I Work 3 Jobs And Donate Blood Plasma to Pay the Bills.’ This Is What It’s Like to Be a Teacher in America.

* The Case for Unionizing Comedy.

Weeks after opening near San Diego, a model town for treating dementia is set to be replicated around the U.S.

In 2000, a Haitan American man named Patrick Dorismond was standing outside a bar in midtown Manhattan.

“The comic book industry is made up of freelancers. I think a lot of readers don’t understand the extent of that reality,” Cain says. “Certainly any comic book by Marvel or DC, those are the work of freelancers: Colorists, inkers, pencilers, letterers, cover artists, and writers. The editors work for the company. The freelancers don’t. Maybe some of them have exclusive contracts, which means that they get a little bit more money per page, and absolutely no benefits or protections, plus they don’t get to work for anyone else — but basically, every comic you pick up has been made by someone without health insurance. But these freelancers are still expected to behave like employees. They are told what to say and when to say it… I’ve said it before, but this whole industry is a class-action lawsuit waiting to happen. It’s astonishing.”

On Outgrowing David Foster Wallace.

* On raising a non-neurotypical child.

The film’s real heroes are the people, the modern Levellers and Diggers—the gravediggers of capitalism. Robin D. G. Kelley on the greatness of Sorry to Bother You.

* Rick and Morty and the Damaged American Male.

* I’m here only to present the facts.

The Love Song Of Dril And The Boys.

* Breaking: you just can’t win. Everything you know about obesity is wrong.

* Today in our total surveillance dystopia.

* You’re Probably Not Getting That Loan Forgiveness You’re Counting On: Out of almost 30,000 people who applied for a forgiveness program, just 96—less than 1 percent—had their debt erased. And it gets worse.

How I Quit Drinking in a World That Wants Me Drunk.

* From the Archives: the Dungeons and Dragons Epic Level Handbook.

* Of course you had me at Scuba Diving Magazine’s 2018 Underwater Photo Contest Winners. These are really, really good.

* And honestly I think we just can’t accept any visitors right now. We’ve got a lot going on.

Written by gerrycanavan

October 9, 2018 at 5:39 pm

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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Monday Afternoon Links!

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* Call for Applications at the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts: Division Heads of Children’s and Young Adult Literature (CYA) and International Fantastic Literatures (IF).

In very broad strokes, colleges and universities have four main revenue streams: state appropriations, research funding, gifts and endowments, and student tuition. The first three come with serious restrictions regarding their use. Generally speaking, state appropriations can only be used for educational expenses, research funding is largely spent on specific research projects, and endowments go toward the pet projects of wealthy donors. Only student tuition can be used for anything university administrators want—construction projects, real estate, interest payments, administrative salaries, football coaches. In recent decades, university administrators have sought, like all entrepreneurial institutions, to maximize their revenues, but they have sought above all to maximize their unrestricted revenues—and have even been willing to sacrifice state funding in order to bring in more tuition. The Tuition Limit and the Coming Crisis of Higher Education.

The University and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Play is organized to prevent children from sorting themselves by gender. A gender-neutral pronoun, “hen,” was introduced in 2012 and was swiftly absorbed into mainstream Swedish culture, something that, linguists say, has never happened in another country.

* Hobbes, the Science Fiction Writer: Part I, Part II. Part II wades into Star Trek: Discovery and Black Panther…

* A Political History of the Future: Iain M. Banks.

* How White American Terrorists Are Radicalized.

“The Workplace Is Killing People and Nobody Cares.”

* Neoliberalism and the family.

* If Tim Kaine can keep John Bolton off the National Security Council, all is forgiven.

* Surely one of the most depraved things any politician has ever said.

* The United States is doomed.

* The Stormy Daniels scandal is not gossip. Why the Stormy Daniels story matters, in one paragraph. And everyone needs to face it: Stormy Daniels’ Legal Strategy Strongly Suggests She Has Photos of Donald Trump.

‘Rick and Morty’ and The Rise of The ‘I’m a Piece of Shit’ Defense.

* From the archives! Superpowers and the ADA.

Loneliness is deadlier than obesity and should be considered a public health risk, experts have warned.

* Presenting Effectively.

* Facebook: definitely bad.

* Borneo Lost More Than 100,000 Orangutans From 1999 to 2015.

* And here’s the robot future I’m worried about.

Time Travel Will NEVER Be Canon on gerrycanavan.wordpress.com, and Other Tuesday Links

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* Dialectics of Black Panther: By sliding between the real and unreal, Black Panther frees us to imagine the possibilities — and the limitations — of an Africa that does not yet exist. Ultimately, “Black Panther” does what all superhero movies do: It asks us to place faith in the goodness of individuals rather than embracing revolutionary structural change. In effect, the Wakandan Kingdom is caught between two bleak visions of America: walling itself off, or potentially imposing on other nations. The Afrofuturistic Designs of Black Panther. ‘Black Panther’ offers a regressive, neocolonial vision of Africa. Africa is a country in Wakanda. What to Watch After Black Panther: An Afrofuturism Primer. I was asked to write a short piece for Frieze building on my blog post from the weekend, so look for that as early as tomorrow…

* Adam Kotsko’s talk on Rick and Morty and BoJack Horseman is now streaming from mu.edu.

* Major nerd news: Star Wars: Rebels just introduced time travel into the main canon for the first time. There were minor, often debatable incidents before, but never in the “main plot,” and never as a key incident in the life of a character this important to fans. I’m surprised: I used to use “no time travel in Star Wars” as an example of how franchises police themselves — though as I was saying on Twitter this morning the recent introduction of true time travel to both Star Wars and Harry Potter suggests it may in fact be what happens to long-running fantasy franchises when they grow decadent. Now Tolkien stands alone as the only major no-time-travel SF/F franchises, unless I’m forgetting something — and Tolkien considered a time travel plot for a long time, and actually promised CS Lewis he would write one, but abandoned it…

Leaving Omelas: Science Fiction, Climate Change, and the Future.

Half of world’s oceans now fished industrially, maps reveal. North Pole surges above freezing in the dead of winter, stunning scientists. What Land Will Be Underwater in 20 Years? Figuring It Out Could Be Lucrative. Scott Pruitt’s EPA.

In order to do this I propose a test. A favorite trope among the administrative castes is accountability. People must be held accountable, they tell us, particularly professors. Well, let’s take them at their word and hold themaccountable. How have they done with the public trust since having assumed control of the university?

Lecturers on Strike.

Disaster Capitalism Hits Higher Education in Wisconsin.

Anonymous faculty group threatens to take down Silent Sam.

West Virginia Teachers Walk Out.

Markelle Fultz — along with a slew of huge names and top college basketball programs — have been named in a bombshell report into NCAA hoops corruption involving illegal payouts to players. The Real Lesson of the Weekend’s NCAA Scandals Is That College Basketball Coaches Should Be Dumped in the Ocean.

* Meanwhile.

What directional school is the most directionally correct? A case study.

* The Yale student who secretly lived in a ventilation shaft.

How the Activists Who Tore Down Durham’s Confederate Statue Got Away With It.

The teenagers from Stoneman Douglas are fearlessly reimagining how to effect change in the Trump era.

* Coming soon: Muppet Guys Talking.

Disney’s Frozen musical opens on Broadway: ‘More nudity than expected.’

* Greenwald v. Risen re: Russia.

“What happens when anyone can make it appear as if anything has happened, regardless of whether or not it did?” technologist Aviv Ovadya warns.

* Despite the NPR’s handwringing about threats and vulnerability, the United States already possesses the most responsive, versatile, and deadly nuclear strike forces on the planet. In essence, the Pentagon now proposes to embark upon an arms race, largely with itself, in order to preserve that status.

* Simulating nuclear war.

* The case against tipping culture.

The Tipped Minimum Wage Is Fueling Sexual Harassment in Restaurants.

* Monica Lewinsky in the Age of #MeToo.

Life Without Retirement Savings.

Americans’ reliance on household debt ─ and poor people’s struggles to pay it off ─ has fueled a collection industry that forces many of them into jail, a practice that critics call a misuse of the criminal justice system.

Inside the Deadly World of Private Garbage Collection.

* Gerrymandering a 28-0 New York.

On Being a Woman in the Late-Night Boys’ Club.

In the article, Sally Payne, a pediatric occupational therapist, explains that the nature of play has changed over the past decade. Instead of giving kids things to play with that build up their hand muscles, such as building blocks, or toys that need to be pushed or pulled along, parents have been handing them tablets and smartphones. Because of this, by the time they’re old enough to go to school, many children lack the hand strength and fine motor control required to correctly hold a pencil and write.

* Understand your user feedback.

Switzerland makes it illegal to boil a live lobster.

* The U.S. Border Patrol’s violent, racist, and ineffectual policies have come to a head under Trump. What can be done? Mother and daughter are now at detention facilities 2,000 miles apart. Warning of ICE action, Oakland mayor takes Trump resistance to new level.

The City & The City coming to TV in 2018 (again).

* BoJack Horseman and modern art.

* Legitimately teared up.

* The future sucks.

* Let’s see what else is in the news. Wisconsin exceptionalism. Mister Sun, why do you wear sunglasses?

Happy Valentine’s Day Links!

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* Very excited to welcome Adam Kotsko to Marquette later this week for his talk “Animated Nihilism: Rick and Morty, BoJack Horseman and the Strange Fate of the Adult Cartoon.”

* There was a nice interview with me at the ArchivesAWARE! site, kicking off a new series on Archives and Audiences.

* SFRA Review #323 is out! Check out the details on the upcoming SFRA conference in Milwaukee.

* CFP: The Journal of Dracula Studies. CFP: Žižek Studies special issue on “Žižek: What Went Wrong?”

* The Simpsons: What Went Wrong?

* A science-fiction narrative imagining an alternate universe in which Donald Trump never became President: he’s just a regular guy in New York City.

The Problem With Annihilation’s Messy Release.

Fantastic Beasts and What Could Have Been. They’re really not nailing this.

* Kim Stanley Robinson: The Radical Philosophy Interview.

KSR: Capitalism is still very feudal in its distribution of wealth. One of the great triumphs of Marxist historiography is to describe accurately the transition from feudalism to capitalism, why it happened and the differences. At a presentation I once gave with Jameson, I said something like capitalism is just feudalism liquidified. In the break he said, ‘Kim, it’s actually a big accomplishment for Marxists to be able to describe the change from feudalism to capitalism.’ I then brought up something he had taught me, Raymond Williams’s concept of the residual and the emergent, and said, ‘but there’s a lot more residual than people have imagined.’ That’s one of the only times I saw Fred startled by something I said. Although I think there’s an exchange of ideas between us, mainly he’s the teacher, I’m the student. He’s explained things that I never would have understood, and I treasure him for that. So it was nice to see him think, ‘Mmm, that’s an interesting thought.’

The residuals out of feudalism would be the power gradient and the actual concentration of wealth per se. In the feudal period, kings might not even have been as proportionally rich as top executives are now in relation to the poor. And if peasants weren’t murdered by passing soldiers, they were living with their food source at hand and working a somewhat decent human life. That isn’t largely true now of the dispossessed. So, capitalism is like feudalism in that, but worse.

* The Good Place and Divine Justice. Meet the Philosophers Who Give ‘The Good Place’ Its Scholarly Bona Fides. TV’s Dystopia Boom. Breakfast and Groundhog Day. Rod Serling: human rights activist as science fiction showrunner. Why the Culture wins. Netflix created a monster with its Cloverfield stunt, and Altered Carbon won’t be the last victim. Reproductive Futurism and Its (Dis)contents. Why I barely read SF these days. Against dystopia.

* My Butch Lesbian Mom, Bruce Springsteen.

* The Sublimated Grief of the Left Behind. How Academe Breeds Resentment. International Grad Students’ Interest in American Higher Ed Marks First Decline in 14 Years. Columbia University Gets In Bed with Trump. I’m a Stanford professor accused of being a terrorist. McCarthyism is back. How Hard Do Professors Work? Shameless and Hypocrisy at the MLA. And meanwhile, on the Singularity beat: Teaching assistant robots will reinvent academia. Universities in the Age of AI.

Humanities Grads Gainfully Employed and Happy.

White Supremacists Are Targeting College Students ‘Like Never Before.’

* The Olympic hero for our time.

* To U.S. Border Patrol, the Canadian border is 100 miles wide. A good overview of how Trump’s ICE differs, and doesn’t, from Obama’s; the major distinction seems to be empowering street-level officer to make policy-level determinations about enforcement. A Short, Brutal History of ICE. ICE Wants to Be an Intelligence Agency Under Trump. ICE Grants Stay To Arizona Father Whose 5-Year-Old Son Is Battling Cancer. Kansas chemistry instructor arrested by ICE while taking his daughter to school. ICE detains man at traffic court after DACA status expires, then frees him after outcry. Public Defenders Walk Out Of Bronx Courthouse After College Student Detained By ICE. Cuban immigrant awaiting removal dies in ICE custody. Green card veteran facing deportation starts hunger strike. Trump administration considered testing “abortion reversal” on unwilling prisoner. Give all immigrants the right to vote.

* Know your police rape loopholes.

* How not to die in America. I Had to Bury My 26-Year-Old Son Because He Couldn’t Afford Insulin. Texas Woman Dies Because She Couldn’t Afford $116 Copay. What Aetna did here might not even be illegal.

* America: (Still) Not a Democracy. That’s not to say things still can’t get worse.

* In the richest country in human history.

FEMA Contract Called for 30 Million Meals for Puerto Ricans. 50,000 Were Delivered.

* Even the Democrats (still) won’t talk about climate change. Democrats’ ‘Resistance’ to Trump Is Eroding, and So Are Their Poll Numbers. What Happened To The Democratic Wave?

A map of the world after four degrees of warming. There’s even more good news below the map!

An Urgent Crisis of Leadership, Climate, and Water is Unfolding in South Africa.

* And in Kentucky: Sometimes they get no water. Other times just a trickle. Often, they say, their water is so discolored it resembles milk or Kool-Aid or beer.

The African Anthropocene.

* Floods and pollution.

* Just six months from victory in Afghanistan.

Fitness tracking app Strava gives away location of secret US army bases. Podcast listeners are the advertising holy grail. A Driver’s Suicide Reveals the Dark Side of the Gig Economy. slavery.amazon.com. Whole Foods as Amazon Hell. What Amazon Does to Poor Cities.

I’m the Wife of a Former N.F.L. Player. Football Destroyed His Mind. Concussion Protocol.

Here’s Everything We Used to Know About Han Solo’s Early Years. A Primer on All Things Wakanda.

* Monopoly: Cheaters Edition.

Arizona Man Sells His $6.5 Million Ranch Because Of Constant, Violent Alien Attacks.

Supercut of Instagram travel photo clichés. Photos of Total Strangers Pretending to Be in Serious Relationships.

Why is Civilization 5 still more popular than Civilization 6?

* The arc of history is long, but Hot sauce king Billy Mitchell is in danger of having his Donkey Kong records stripped away.

Why Woody Allen hasn’t been toppled by the #MeToo reckoning — yet. This Is Why Uma Thurman Is Angry.

* Suicide and the opioid epidemic.

* Cancel student debt and grow the economy. Let’s Stop Normalizing Student Debt.

* College compiles first-ever index of slaves and their enslavers in NY. Slavery and the American University.

* Nation of Second Changes: Stories of people who received a pardon from Barack Obama.

* The Alt-Right Is Killing People.

The Median Young Family Has Nearly Zero Wealth.

* #NeverTweet.

Why Antonio Gramsci is the Marxist thinker for our times.

* I call it my brand: Marxism as Organized Sarcasm.

Worf’s Dad Is Repeatedly Disgraced When Predictive Text Writes Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Nintendo’s new cardboard extensions for Switch are blowing users away.

* Case Western in the news!

* Can’t stop the signal: here come the Firefly novels.

* Pets allowed.

‘Speaking’ orca is further proof they shouldn’t be kept captive.

* The mutant crayfish that ate Europe.

* And this guy gets it: Nigel, the world’s loneliest bird, dies next to the concrete decoy he loved.

Written by gerrycanavan

February 13, 2018 at 10:01 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Christmas Eve Eve Links Links

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* There’s a lovely review of my Butler book by Nisi Shawl in the new Women’s Review of Books. It’s not available online so you’ll have to take my word for it, unless your library subscribes…

* And I’m so happy to report that Extrapolation 58.2-3 is finally out, the special issue on “Guilty Pleasures: Late Capitalism and Mere Genre” I edited with Benjamin Robertson. Check out the intro to see what it’s all about, and then check out articles on Dragonlance, the Star Wars and Star Trek expanded universes, Sweet Valley High, Blondie, The Hunger Games, and Game of Thrones and fantasy roleplaying games…

CFP: Academic Track at the 76th World Science Fiction Convention, San José, California. CFP: Punking Speculative Fiction. CFP: Histories of the Future: Proto-Science Fiction from the Victorian Era to the Radium Age. CFP: Chapter Proposals for “Ecofeminist Science Fiction.” CFP: Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards.

An Incomplete Timeline of What We Tried.

* I thought this was great.

* Consider: Who pursues their goals with monomaniacal focus, oblivious to the possibility of negative consequences? Who adopts a scorched-earth approach to increasing market share? This hypothetical strawberry-picking AI does what every tech startup wishes it could do — grows at an exponential rate and destroys its competitors until it’s achieved an absolute monopoly. The idea of superintelligence is such a poorly defined notion that one could envision it taking almost any form with equal justification: a benevolent genie that solves all the world’s problems, or a mathematician that spends all its time proving theorems so abstract that humans can’t even understand them. But when Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holds-barred capitalism. Ladies and gentlemen, the great Ted Chiang.

Science fiction when the future is now. With appearances from Kim Stanley Robinson, Ken Liu, and Lauren Beukes.

* The best anti-Last-Jedi piece I’ve seen is Alyssa Rosenberg’s at the Washington Post. And the best pro-Last-Jedi piece from Dan Hassler-Forest at LARB. Somewhere in the middle is Abigail Nussbuam’s excellent piece at Asking the Wrong Questions.

* Lightsabers, by the numbers. Secret history of the porgs. Star Wars from below. Thank goodness somebody realized how terrible this would be. The Last Jedi and the necessary disappointment of epilogues. The films that inspired The Last Jedi. Behind the scenes. In defense of Canto Blight. Anti-nostalgia and anti-salvation. Star Wars without the Empire. How to Read Star Wars.

* Winter Is Coming: Climate Change in Westeros.

* How the Sesame Street Puppeteers Play Their Characters. It was only a year or three ago that I realized that on a basic level I’d still believed Big Bird was real; I had never thought or processed the fact that his lips were being moved by a puppeteer’s hands.

* So old I can remember when Sweet Briar was an inspiring story about a college being saved.

* On faculty and mental illness.

Study finds humanities and social science Ph.D.s working outside academe are happier than their tenure-track peers.

* Podcast alert: how does Samuel R. Delany work?

* Bang. Pow. To the Moon.

* Comedy writers name their most influential episodes: 1, 2.

* SHOCK REPORT: The tax bill is bad.

This Congress’s clear priorities: corporations, not children.

* It’ll also tax large endowments. Meanwhile in the academy: We Will Not Be Your Disposable Labor: Graduate Student Workers’ Fight Goes Beyond the GOP Assault. ‘A Complete Culture of Sexualization’: 1,600 Stories of Harassment in Higher Ed.

* Defund every agency that had any part in this. Murder Convictions Overturned, Two Men Are Immediately Seized By ICE. What happens to children whose parents are deported? 92 Somali immigrants deported in “slave-ship” conditions. ICE is abusing immigrant detainees with strip searches and threats. Shock of shocks, it turns out legal immigration is bad too.

The majority of US workers live in “employment monopsonies” where there is little or no competition for workers.

Why Doug Jones’s narrow win is not enough to make me confident about American democracy.

* Ghosts of 2012.

* First #J20 defendants found not guilty.

* The media wealth of African Americans in Boston is $8.

* People are using Uber instead of ambulances.

* The New York Times oddly reports on a Harry Reid boondoggle in a way that makes it sounds like aliens might be real.

* The Fred Moten century.

The Adult Bodies Playing Teens on TV.

* Monopolies are bad, no matter how much you like the brands involved. Avengers vs. monopoly.

“Neoliberalism” isn’t an empty epithet. It’s a real, powerful set of ideas.

* The madness of prison gerrymanders.

* Desegregation never happened.

* Climate refugees in Louisiana. Disability and disaster response in the age of climate change. Losing the wilderness.

* The FoxConn boondoggle gets worse and worse.

* The Next Crisis for Puerto Rico: Foreclosures.

* Revising agricultural revisionism.

* Against optimism.

* Against being born.

* On the sadcom.

Your Favorite Superhero Is Probably Killing the Planet.

* Professor X Is a Jerk!

* The Daily Stormer’s style guide.

* Opoids and homelessness. 3,000,000 pills to 3,000 patients in two years. The Opioid Crisis Is Getting Worse, Particularly for Black Americans. What happens after an American city gives a homeless person a one-way ticket out of town.

* The US gymnastics scandal somehow gets worse and worse.

‘The World’s Biggest Terrorist Has a Pikachu Bedspread.’

* The Forgotten Life of Einstein’s First Wife.

* The Ghost Economy.

* WHAT YEAR IS IT: How to prepare for a nuclear attack.

Lumberjanes’ Noelle Stevenson is Rebooting She-Ra for Netflix. Sir Ian McKellen Would Totally Play Gandalf In Amazon’s TV Tolkien Adaptations. The Next Bechdel Test.

* “Paradox,” by Naomi Kritzer.

* The Journal of Prince Studies.

* 80% of workers think managers are unnecessary. The other 20% mistakingly think they are managers.

* It’s not a perfect system, but it’s the one our Founders built: The Donald Trump droid is live at Disney World’s Hall of Presidents.

‘Trump, Trump, Trump!’ How a President’s Name Became a Racial Jeer. 55 Ways Donald Trump Structurally Changed America in 2017. Fascism has already come to America. Life expectancy declines for the second straight year. On brand.

* Heartbreaking interview with Heather Heyer’s mother.

* Jordan Peele, auteur.

* Dilbert: A Reckoning.

Still, it does make you ponder all the ways this industry works in service of power, and by extension those who abuse it. So many of comedy’s institutions are, at their core, PR machines. Branded content is Funny Or Die’s bread and butter. Every week SNL promotes someone’s new movie or TV show or album. Late night talk shows, with few exceptions, use jokes to bookend celebrity press tours. Comedians host awards shows because otherwise we might see them for the rituals they are—the wealthy and famous celebrating their own wealth and fame. Comedy normalizes power; it’s so successful at normalizing power that it feels weird to even write that as a criticism. Well, what’s wrong with normalizing power? Lots of things, but to start it lets monsters play the straight man in comedy sketches. It makes them relatable, which makes them less threatening. But power is always a threat, even more so when it seems innocuous, even more so when it seems… funny.

* 2018 is already terrible: there’ll be no more Zelda DLC.

* And remembering the reason for the season: Behold the official policy for destroying the head of Chuck E Cheese.

Written by gerrycanavan

December 23, 2017 at 10:06 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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Happy Trumpsgiving

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* From our family to yours, now more than ever: a Thanksgiving prayer.

Turkeys Are a Nightmare from Which We Are Struggling to Awake.

* How Donald Trump Ruined Thanksgiving.

* The CFP for the Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference is up: Asymmetry.

* More scenes from the end of the university.

Science fiction triggers ‘poorer reading’, study finds.

By providing the working class with the absolute bare minimum, universal basic income becomes doomsday prep for the tech billionaire.

ICE Says It Separated Immigrant Father From Infant Son Because He Couldn’t Prove Relationship. New York couple set to be deported to different countries, tearing apart family before Thanksgiving. DACA Twins Are Spending Thanksgiving Fighting Their Parents’ Deportation. ICE officials have invited tech companies, including Microsoft, to develop algorithms that will track visa holders’ social media activity.

* As metaphors go, this is a little on the nose.

* “By 2040, about 70% of Americans are expected to live in the 15 largest states.” That means 30% of the country will have more than a supermajority in the Senate.

The Dam of Congressional Sexual-Harassment Claims Cracks Open.  Two more Franken accusers emerge. Democrats are facing an important test with Al Franken. They’ve failed it before. ‘You’ll never work again’: women tell how sexual harassment broke their careers. How Our Broken Justice System Led to a Sexual Harassment Crisis. How rape culture makes women poorer. I find the cognitive dissonance required to process what was done to that U.S. gymnastics team in the moment of their assent to global fame almost too much to bear.

* Understand false rape accusations.

* Women surgeons are punished more than men for the exact same mistakes, study finds.

* Unreal: Virginia Mother Charged With Felony After Putting Recording Device in Daughter’s Backpack to Catch Bullies.

The forgotten history of Milwaukee’s police station bombing, the largest single loss of police life until 9-11.

* This company truly has everything: Uber Paid Hackers to Delete Stolen Data on 57 Million People. Oh, Uber. Facebook (Still) Letting Housing Advertisers Exclude Users by Race. And with tech companies this good, why not end Net Neutrality?

* Management openly looting their institution? Gasp!

When they interviewed me and my young trans daughter, both reporters seemed sympathetic to us and claimed to be trans-friendly.  So why did they turn around and write such transphobic articles?  

A transgender professor just won a major court case. Seriously, it’s a big deal.

Alex Azar, Trump’s HHS Pick, Has Already Been a Disaster for People With Diabetes.

In fact, price gouging from Eli Lilly and other insulin manufacturers has already had deadly consequences. Shane Patrick Boyle, a founder of Zine Fest Houston, died on March 18 after his GoFundMe campaign to pay for insulin came up $50 short. Alec Raeshawn Smith, age 26, was found dead in his apartment on June 27. He was rationing his insulin after he aged out of his parent’s insurance coverage. The sad fact is more people would be alive today if insulin was affordable for all Americans.

* Now that’s commitment to a bit.

* Trump’s supporters backed a time-honored American political tradition, disavowing racism while promising to enact a broad agenda of discrimination.

* By the end of all this they’re going to rename trump cards in bridge.

The Jobs You’re Most Likely To Inherit from Your Parents. I had no idea “college professor” was a congenital condition. March for the cure today.

Teen Mom 2 Asks an Important Question: Is It OK to Shoot Down Drones?

* Disney just does not understand Star Wars fans.

* The story of Star Trek: The Animated Series.

* You’re messing up your kids years before you think you are.

* No one has yet given a full accounting of how deranged this essay is.

And, at last, Rick And Morty reveals Mr. Poopybutthole’s backstory. I still think he’s a parasite.

Fall Break Links! Every Tab I Had Open Is Closed!

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* New open-access scholarship: Star Wars and the History of Transmedia Storytelling. My contribution is on Rogue One and the crisis of authority that seems to have plagued all the post-Lucas Star Wars productions. Check it out!

* Science Fiction Film and Television 10.3 is also available, a special issue all about Mad Max and guest-edited by Dan Hassler-Forest, including a great piece by one of my former graduate students, Dr. Bonnie McLean!

* My book was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement! That’s wild. There’s a really nice review coming in the next issue of Science Fiction Studies, too, though I don’t think its online yet…

* By far the absolute best thing I’ve found on the Internet in years: Decision Problem: Paperclips.

* Call for Papers: Critical Disaster Studies.

* It’s been so long since I’ve posted that it’s still news Kazuo Ishiguro won the Nobel Prize. With all due apologies to Margaret Atwood.

* Tom Petty was still alive then. Puerto Rico wasn’t in ruins, then. The worst mass shooting in American history perpetrated by a single individual hadn’t happened then. California wasn’t on fire quite to the apocalyptic extent that it is now then. I still had hope for The Last Jedi. And the GOP wasn’t all-in for Roy Moore.

* There are no natural disasters. The Left Needs Its Own Shock Doctrine for Puerto Rico. Disaster socialism. Many Trump voters who got hurricane relief in Texas aren’t sure Puerto Ricans should. After the Hurricane. Someday we’ll look back on the storms from this year’s horrific hurricane season with nostalgia.

* Page of a Calvin and Hobbes comic found in the wreckage of Santa Rosa, California.

This is the horror of mass shootings. Not just death that comes from nowhere, intruding upon the status quo—but a death that doesn’t change that status quo, that continues to sail on unchanged by it. You may be a toddler in a preschool in one of the richest zip codes in the country; a congressman playing baseball in Alexandria, Virginia; a white-collar office worker in a business park; a college student or professor on some leafy campus; a doctor making your rounds in a ward in the Bronx; a country music fan enjoying a concert in a city built as a mecca for relaxation and pleasure: the bullet that comes for you will not discriminate. It knows no racial bias, imposes no political litmus test, checks no credit score, heeds no common wisdom of whose life should or shouldn’t matter. It will pierce your skin, perforate your organs, shatter your bones, and blow apart the gray matter inside your skull faster than your brain tissue can tear. And then, after the token thoughts and prayers, nothing. No revolutionary legislation or sudden sea change in cultural attitudes will mark your passing. The bloody cruelty of your murder will be matched only by the sanguine absence of any substantive national response. Our democracy is riven by inequality in so many ways, but in this domain, and perhaps in this domain alone, all American lives are treated as equally disposable.

Having achieved so many conservative goals — a labor movement in terminal decline, curtailed abortion rights, the deregulation of multiple industries, economic inequality reminiscent of the Gilded Age, and racial resegregation — the right can now afford the luxury of irresponsibility. Or so it believes. As we have seen in the opening months of the Trump presidency, the conservative regime, despite its command of all three elected branches of the national government and a majority of state governments, is extraordinarily unstable and even weak, thanks to a number of self-inflicted wounds. That weakness, however, is a symptom not of its failures, but of its success.

* Freedom of speech means professors get fired for their tweets while universities rent their facilities to open Nazis for $600,000 below cost. Meanwhile, college administrations continue to look to Trump to save them from their graduate students.

The science of spying: how the CIA secretly recruits academics.

Death at a Penn State Fraternity.

* UPenn humiliates itself.

* Octavia Butler: The Brutalities of the Past Are All Around Us.

* African Science Fiction, at LARB.

* The new issue of Slayage has a “Twenty Years of Buffy” roundtable.

Image Journal Exclusively Publishes Flannery O’Connor’s College Journal.

* Honestly, I prefer it when the NCAA doesn’t even bother to pretend.

* One of the classic signs of a failing state is the manipulation of data, including its suppression.

* Internal emails show ICE agents struggling to substantiate Trump’s lies about immigrants.

* ICE Detainee Sent to Solitary Confinement for Encouraging Protest of “Voluntary” Low Wage Labor.

This Is What It Looks Like When the President Asks People to Snitch on Their Neighbors.

A 2-year-old’s kidney transplant was put on hold — after his donor father’s probation violation.

* The arc of history is long, but Federal Judge Rules Handcuffing Little Kids Above Their Elbows Is Unconstitutional.

Body cameras and more training aren’t enough. We need to divert funding for police into funding for human needs.

“Childhood trauma is a huge factor within the criminal justice system,” said Christopher Wildeman, a sociologist at Cornell University and co-director of the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect. “It is among the most important things that shapes addictive and criminal behavior in adulthood.”

They thought they were going to rehab. They ended up in chicken plants.

When Colleges Use Their Own Students to Catch Drug Dealers.

* The Democratic district attorney of Manhattan openly takes bribes, and he’s running unopposed.

Here’s How Breitbart And Milo Smuggled Nazi and White Nationalist Ideas Into The Mainstream.

How We Found Tom Price’s Private Jets.

What DNA Testing Companies’ Terrifying Privacy Policies Actually Mean.

Rigged: How Voter Suppression Threw Wisconsin to Trump. Counterpoint: The case that voter ID laws won Wisconsin for Trump is weaker than it looks.

* Conflict in literature.

‘Our minds can be hijacked’: the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia. Close that barn door, boys!

Mass Shootings Are A Bad Way To Understand Gun Violence. The stats are clear: the gun debate should be one mostly about how to prevent gun suicides. 1,516 mass shootings in 1,735 days.

* The secretive family making billions from the opioid crisis.

* University of Hawaii’s creepy email subject line to students: “In the event of a nuclear attack.”

* Marvel’s movie timeline is incoherent nonsense, too.

We have a pretty good idea of when humans will go extinct. No spoilers!

* Tokyo Is Preparing for Floods ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen.’

* Cape Coral, Florida, was built on total lies. One big storm could wipe it off the map. Oh, and it’s also the fastest-growing city in the United States.

An Oral History of Batman: The Animated Series.

* Why is Blade Runner called Blade Runner?

* How free porn enriched the tech industry — and ruined the lives of actors.

Middle-Earth: Shadow of War Is the Bleakest Lord of the Rings Fan Fic I’ve Ever Seen.The best way to beat Shadow Of War’s final act is not to play it. Are Orcs People Too? And a trip down memory lane: How ‘Hobbit Camps’ Rebirthed Italian Fascism.

* The Digital Humanities Bust.

We can’t eliminate the profit motive in health care without eliminating copays.

* Twitter as hate machine.

* They’re good dogs, Brent.

* Burn the Constitution.

* Violence. Threats. Begging. Harvey Weinstein’s 30-year pattern of abuse in Hollywood. Study finds 75 percent of workplace harassment victims experienced retaliation when they spoke up. Collective action is the best avenue to fight sexual harassers like Harvey Weinstein. Will Fury Over Harvey Weinstein Allegations Change Academe’s Handling of Harassment?

* A tough thread on ethical compromise under conditions of precarity and hyperexploitation. I think many academics will relate.

* Major study confirms the clinical definition of death is wildly inadequate.

Death just became even more scary: scientists say people are aware they’re dead because their consciousness continues to work after the body has stopped showing signs of life.

That means that, theoretically, someone may even hear their own death being announced by medics.

Dolphins recorded having a conversation ‘just like two people’ for first time.

Here Are the Best Wildlife Photos of 2017.

Meat eaters are destroying the planet, says report.

The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.

In A Post-Weinstein World, Louis CK’s Movie Is a Total Disaster.

Let this battle herald a return to our roots: tax the rich so much that they aren’t rich anymore — only then can the rest of us live in a decent world.

* Civil-Rights Protests Have Never Been Popular.

Every Rick and Morty Universe So Far.

* Ready for #Vexit.

The world’s first “negative emissions” plant has begun operation—turning carbon dioxide into stone.

I Have Been Raped by Far Nicer Men Than You.

* They’re bound and determined to ruin Go.

I think I’m on my way. I’ve deposited my first check in a savings account and, as and if I sell more, will continue to do so until I have the equivalent of one year’s pay at GE. Four more stories will do it nicely, with cash to spare (something we never had before). I will then quit this goddamn nightmare job, and never take another one so long as I live, so help me God. On Vonnegut’s “Complete Stories.”

An Anatomy of the Worst Game in ‘Jeopardy!’ History.

* Is your D&D character rare?

* Tolkien’s Map and the Perplexing River Systems of Middle-earth.

The Worst Loss In The History Of U.S. Men’s Soccer.

The Rise And Rise Of America’s Best-Kept Secret: Milwaukee!

* Galaxy brain.

* And RIP, John Couture. A tremendous loss for Marquette English.

Written by gerrycanavan

October 21, 2017 at 9:00 am

Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet

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#SFRA2017 Links for All Your #SFRA2017 Needs!

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* Watch #SFRA2017 for all the tweets from SFRA2017! I’ll be presenting this afternoon in the 4 PM session: “No, Speed Limit: Hyperspace in the Anthropocene,” mostly talking about John Scalzi’s The Collapsing Empire but also hitting Octavia Butler, Cixin Liu, Kim Stanley Robinson, Margaret Atwood, H.G. Wells, and others.

* And just in time for #SFRA2017, SFFTV 10.2 is now available! A special issue on the SF films of Stephen King.

* From Canavan’s Razor to Kotsko’s Hammer: If you believe that you have caught your enemy in a contradiction, you are mistaken. At best, you have misjudged their real priorities and goals. At worst, you have fallen for a deliberate smokescreen, designed to confuse and distract you.

* CFP: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein at 200 (Science Fiction Studies, Special Issue).

Emma Watson has been hiding copies of Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale around Paris, with a handwritten note inside each one.

The City University of New York picked the worst time to raise the salaries of its top administrators to as much as $402,700 — the same day it cut the operating budgets of its four-year colleges and raised tuition.

* Can’t you see? Star Wars needs mediocrity.

* Return of the travel ban. Return of the lawsuits. The travel ban going into effect would have saved zero lives from terrorist attacks in the last 20 years. It’s going to get worse.

* This seems normal and fine.

Gun Sales Are Plummeting and Trump Wants to Help.

GOP Operative Sought Clinton Emails From Hackers, Implied a Connection to Flynn.

Republican Health Care Bill Cuts Medicaid 24 Percent By 2036. Trumpworld’s push to get a Senate health deal. Senate GOP Health Care Surrender Watch.

* “California decided it was tired of women bleeding to death in childbirth”: The maternal mortality rate in the state is a third of the American average. Here’s why.

The Case for Paying Less Attention to Donald Trump. And Now the Trump Presidency Begins to Fail for Real. MSNBC hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski say President Trump and his White House used the possibility of a hit piece in the National Enquirer to threaten them and change their news coverage.

* Hell yes, Rep. Barbara Lee.

* Normally I’d say “teach the controversy,” but these allegations are simply too serious to treat flippantly: NASA Denies That It’s Running a Child Slave Colony on Mars.

* Cyberattack attacks Chernobyl radiation monitoring station.

* On desistance and detransition.

* Global warming will intensify regional inequality in the United States, according to a revolutionary new economic assessment of the phenomenon.

* Two brothers, two deaths.

Illinois Approaches 3rd Year Without Budget.

US quietly publishes once-expunged papers on 1953 Iran coup.

SCP-3008-1 is a space resembling the inside of an IKEA furniture store, extending far beyond the limits of what could physically be contained within the dimensions of the retail unit. Current measurements indicate an area of at least 10km2 with no visible external terminators detected in any direction. Inconclusive results from the use of laser rangefinders has lead to the speculation that the space may be infinite. SCP-3008-1 is inhabited by an unknown number of civilians trapped within prior to containment. Gathered data suggests they have formed a rudimentary civilisation within SCP-3008-1, including the construction of settlements and fortifications for the purpose of defending against SCP-3008-2.

* Just what is happening at Disney?

* Rick and Morty season three, at last, by God.

And Jurassic Park but with the dinosaurs from the 90s TV show Dinosaurs, forever and ever amen.