Posts Tagged ‘Scooby Doo’
Far Too Many Monday Morning Links, Sorry
* The Imaginary Worlds podcast did a recent episode on the legacy of Octavia Butler.
* N.K. Jemisin has a plan for diversity in science fiction.
* The best McSweeney’s link in years, maybe ever: “A Poem about Your University’s Brand New Institute.”
* The value-added English major: Book up for a longer life: readers die later, study finds.
* Cloud Atlas ‘astonishingly different’ in US and UK editions, study finds.
* Group projects in the college classroom from Ramzi Fawaz.
* Call for applications: The James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Award.
* China Miéville and the Politics of Surrealism.
* Violence Breaks Out in Milwaukee Following Officer-Involved Shooting. More details. Sheriff Clarke and Scott Walker Call in the National Guard. And from the archives: Wisconsin named worst state for black Americans. Wisconsin Prisons Incarcerate Most Black Men In U.S. Wisconsin graduation gap between white and black students largest in the country. ‘Back in time 60 years’: America’s most segregated city. Why Is Milwaukee So Bad For Black People? Milwaukee County and the Unelectable Whiteness of Scott Walker. And a message from MUPD.
Overnight totals:
4 injured officers
17 arrests
7 squads damaged, 2 totaled
48 ShotSpotter activations
6 businesses set on fire— Milwaukee Police (@MilwaukeePolice) August 14, 2016
* Unprecedented flooding, again, this time in Louisiana (again).
This is fine. pic.twitter.com/uJawEv7mo7
— John Overholt (@john_overholt) August 11, 2016
* Everything is fucked: The syllabus.
* The Republican War on Public Universities.
* Uber U.
* So Your Kid’s A Medieval Studies Major? Relax.
* The discovery of Hawaii Sign Language in 2013 amazed linguists. But as the number of users dwindles, can it survive the twin threats of globalisation and a rift in the community?
* One in seven U.S. households has a negative net worth.
* The Average Black Family Would Need 228 Years to Build the Wealth of a White Family Today.
* Meanwhile, on the Trump beat: The Entertainment Candidate. My Crazy Year with Trump. Here’s how I’ll teach Trump to my college students this fall. A Republican intellectual explains why the Republican Party is going to die. On Decency. Inside the Failing Mission to Tame Donald Trump’s Tongue. Former supporters describe their ‘last straw’ when it came to Trump. The Ten Point Line. Even if Polling Tightens, Where Is Donald Trump’s 270th Electoral Vote? Presidential candidates leading polls at this point in the campaign have almost always won. What A Clinton Landslide Would Look Like. What would it take for the House to flip? News Organizations Ask NY State Supreme Court to Unseal Trump’s 1990 Divorce Records. Secret Ledger in Ukraine Lists Cash for Donald Trump’s Campaign Chief. I didn’t blog for a few days and the “Second Amendment People” thing already seems like a million years ago. It’s unreal.
* Twitter, or, a honeypot for assholes.
* Polls suggest Iceland’s Pirate party may form next government.
first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then they google to make sure it’s actually THAT pirate party
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 13, 2016
* The four basic personality types, by way of the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
* Why Did a University Quarter Police and Soldiers in Its Dorms? Stay for the paean to the Third Amendment. It’s making a comeback, my friends!
The drug war has enabled civilian police forces to militarize their tactics and technology up to the level of the armed forces. Police departments are now standing armies of “warrior cops” that largely crusade against Black low-level drug dealers and their Black consumers, with little regard for their non-Black suppliers. These militarized police officers are Third Amendment “soldiers” by any reasonable construction.
* New detail emerge on Star Trek: Discovery. I’m really not in love with the pre-TOS prequel angle — didn’t they already make that mistake? — but the rest seems reasonably promising. Meanwhile, in the next universe over: The Star Trek TV Shows That Never Happened.
* The researchers calculated that the ship could reach five percent the speed of light (0.05 c), resulting in roughly a 90-year travel time to Alpha Centauri. The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which forbade nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, and the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which forbade nuclear explosive devices in space, effectively ended Orion.
* An Earth-like Planet Might Be Orbiting Proxima Centauri.
* NASA unveils 6 prototypical deep space human habitats for Mars and beyond.
* A mysterious object has been discovered beyond Neptune with an inexplicable orbit. I’ll be honest: I’m all in on Niku.
* All alone in No Man’s Sky, an incomprehensibly vast universe simulator.
* It’s So Hot Out Cockroaches Might Start Flying in NYC.
* This “proton radius puzzle” suggests there may be something fundamentally wrong with our physics models. And the researchers who discovered it have now moved on to put a muon in orbit around deuterium, a heavier isotope of hydrogen. They confirm that the problem still exists, and there’s no way of solving it with existing theories.
* Dystopia now: The latest technological innovation for data-hungry hedge funds is a fleet of five dozen shoebox-sized satellites.
* The Invisible Labor of Women’s Studies.
* Perhaps it might be time to abandon altogether the idea of childbirth as a moral experience? Resisting the application of prospective and retrospective judgment, appraisal, and categories of “good” and “bad” altogether: can we imagine birth outside of these assignations? Is there a way for us to hold on to the monstrosity of childbirth? To look directly at Winthrop’s descriptions, refuse his hateful moralizing yet cradle those monstrous lumps?
* Lawns are a soul-crushing timesuck and most of us would be better off without them.
* Study Links Police Bodycams to Increase in Shooting Deaths.
* “When you realize that *all* faculty meetings follow the CIA’s Sabotage Field Manual.”
* Politeness and the end of democracy.
* Rethinking family leave policies in academia.
* Chernobyl in the Anthropocene.
* Ice and American exceptionalism.
English has a specific verb for tricking people into listening to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" https://t.co/6Inp9xNJ4n
— AllThingsLinguistic (@AllThingsLing) August 14, 2016
* Olympics minute! Saluting race-walking. Why Aren’t Long Jumpers Jumping Longer? The Olympics and climate change. This Is Why There Are So Many Ties In Swimming. There’s never been a state-controlled doping system that we know of, of this size. Why does Puerto Rico have its own team? Why bronze medalists are happier than silver medalists, and other things the Olympics teaches us about human emotions.
* Prime real-estate on the Moon (and how to seize it).
* But even as new insights emerge from both the physical and social sciences, a longstanding argument over whether or not addiction is a disease prevents researchers from identifying effective treatment strategies. The “disease model” remains dominant among medical researchers as well as in the treatment community. But it is not universally embraced, and some researchers think it gets in the way of fresh ideas about how to help people.
* An Open Letter to My Future Daughter.
* 8/11 is 72 cents on the dollar, please cite me in all future thinkpieces.
CONSPIRACY THEORY:
AUSTRALIA IS SCOOBY DOO pic.twitter.com/BJvqgK8USd— anna (@ttylgay) August 10, 2016
* Cost of Lead Poisoning in Flint Now Estimated at $458 Million. It was reported last year that the problem could have been entirely avoided with water treatments on the order of $100/month. Millions Of Americans May Be Drinking Toxic Water, Harvard Study Finds.
* I’m a notorious Jessica Jones Season Two skeptic, but this is promising.
* A Brief History of the Traffic Stop (Or How the Car Created the Police State).
* Is God Transgender? Fascinating op-ed.
* The Ballad of Merrick Garland.
* The Ballad of Mayor McCheese.
* The Man Who Created Bigfoot.
* The secret life of a trade union employee: “I do little but the benefits are incredible.”
* Your Coffee Table Needs This Lavish Collection of Retro UFO Pulp Fiction Art.
* Unsung Architecture Of 1990s Anime.
* The Chimera Quandary: Is It Ethical To Create Hybrid Embryos?
* Eight low-populated U.S. states as boroughs of New York City, or, abolish the Senate.
* Some Editions Of The First Harry Potter Book Contain A Valuable Mistake. I’m a two-wand truther. This is canon and explains everything.
* Making a Murderer‘s Brendan Dassey’s conviction gets tossed, pending the State requesting a new trial.
* MetaFilter vs. the PT Cruiser.
* ‘Hot’ Sex & Young Girls at the New York Review of Books.
* Generate your own random fantasy maps. @UnchartedAtlas.
* Six Proposals for the Reform of Literature in the Age of Climate Change.
* The Moral Machine is a website from MIT that presents 13 traffic scenarios in which a self-driving car has no choice but to kill one set of people or another. Your job is to tell the car what to do.
* Why does DC Comics hate Lois Lane?
* Why has this summer blockbuster season been so bad?
* ‘Suicide Squad’ suffers major drop in second weekend, still wins box office. And a perverse provocation: Suicide Squad is an artistic statement, “The DC Cinematic Universe Finding Its Voice.”
* Ghostbusters sequel unlikely as studio prepares to eat $70 million loss.
* This Open Letter by an Alleged Former Warner Bros. Employee Rages at Top Executives.
* The Three-Body Problem Play Adaptation is a 3D Multimedia Spectacle for the Stage. More here.
* I Made a Shipwreck Expert Watch The Little Mermaid And Judge Its Nautical Merits.
* Paul McCartney: The Rolling Stone Interview.
* The Thiel saga continues: Ex-Gawker Editor On The Verge Of Bankruptcy After Hulk Hogan’s Lawyers Freeze His Assets.
* Years late, this week I finally finished reading Chris Ware’s The Last Saturday, which I loved (of course).
* On Moirai, the experimental mini-game of the moment.
* Listen, man, animals have a lot of problems.
* Some people just see farther.
* And it’s all I think about now, too.
I saw this yesterday and I've been thinking about it ever since pic.twitter.com/S2RVoBswyJ
— sam (@SamSt3bbins) May 16, 2016
Written by gerrycanavan
August 15, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #BlackLivesMatter, abolish the Senate, abuse, academia, addiction, alcoholism, aliens, American exceptionalism, anagrams, animals, anime, architecture, austerity, Australia, Barack Obama, Bigfoot, body cameras, books, bronze medals, Bryan Fuller, Case Western, CFPs, cheating, Chernobyl, childbirth, chimera, China, China Miéville, Chris Ware, CIA, Cixin Liu, class struggle, climate change, Cloud Atlas, cockroaches, comics, CWRU, David Mitchell, DC Comics, deafness, decency, democracy, disease, Disney, diversity, divorce, Donald Trump, doping, drugs, dystopia, ecology, Electoral College, English majors, epistemic closure, ethics, faculty meetings, family leave, fantasy, feminism, film, Flint, flooding, FMLA, game theory, games, Gawker, general election 2016, girlhood, God, group writing assignments, groupwork, guns, Harry Potter, Hawaii, Hawaii Sign Language, Hillary Clinton, homelessness, How the University Works, Hulk Hogan, human-animal hybrids, ice, Iceland, immortality, institutes, James Tiptree Jr., Jessica Jones, karate, Kenny Baker, language, lawns, lead, lead poisoning, license plates, linguistics, literature, Lois Lane, long jump, Louisiana, mad science, Making a Murderer, maps, Marquette, Mars, mass extinction, Mayor McCheese, McDonald's, McSweeney's, Mebane, medieval studies, mental health, mental illness, Merrick Garland, MetaFilter, Michigan, Milwaukee, misogyny, MIT, Moirai, money, monstrosity, movies, Mr. Burns, muons, music, N.K. Jemisin, NASA, neoliberalism, New York City, Niku, No Man's Sky, North Carolina, nuclear weapons, nuclearity, NYC, Ocean's Eight, Octavia Butler, Olympics, online harassment, Orion, outer space, Paul McCartney, pedagogy, personality, Peter Thiel, physics, Pirate Party, podcasts, poetry, police, police violence, politeness, politics, polls, pregnancy, prisoner's dilemma, protons, Proxima Centauri, PT Cruisers, public universities, Puerto Rico, pulse drive, R2-D2, race, race-walking, racism, Ramzi Fawaz, Ray Kurzweil, reading, real estate, refrigeration, religion, Republican National Convention, Republicans, revenge, rickrolling, riots, sabotage, science fiction, Scooby Doo, segregation, self-driving cards, self-driving cars, sex, sexism, shipwrecks, silver medals, sports, Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery, Star Wars, street signs, suicide, Suicide Squad, superheroes, Supreme Court, surrealism, surveillance society, syllabus, teaching, television, tenure, the Anthropocene, the Beatles, The Last Days of New Paris, The Last Saturday, The Little Mermaid, the Moon, The Night Of, the Senate, The Simpsons, the Singularity, The Three-Body Problem, the truth is out there, the Universe, Third Amendment, this is fine, ties, totality, traffic stops, trans* issues, Twitter, Uber, UFOs, Ukraine, unions, violence, voting, water, wealth, weather, white privilege, whiteness, wilderness, Wisconsin, women's studies, words, writing
Thursday Links!
* 2015 CFP for the MRG: “Enthusiasm for Revolution.”
* Reminder: Call for Postdoctoral Fellow: Alternative Futurisms.
* The Long, Wondrous Interview with Junot Díaz You Have to Read. By the great Taryne Taylor! From the same issue of Paradoxa that has my essay on Snowpiercer in it.
* Ellen Craft, the Slave Who Posed as a Master and Made Herself Free.
* Having paddled so hard to avoid the Scylla of hyperprofessionalization in English studies, some promoters of alternative careers may not notice that they are in the grip of Charybdis’s hyperprofessionalization of everything else. The harder they paddle, the harder the whirlpool pulls us all down. Great piece from Marc Bousquet addressing a number of key issues in academic labor.
* Universities without Austerity.
* A History of the MLA Job List.
* The headline reads, “UMass Ends Use of Student Informants.”
* Loved Your Nanny Campus? Start-Up Pledges Similar Services for Grads.
* These Two States Will Revoke Your License If You Can’t Pay Back Your Student Loans.
* These World Leaders Are a Worse Threat to Free Press Than Terrorism.
* Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Newspaper Edits Female World Leaders Out of Charlie Hebdo March.
* What’s Missing From the Debate on Obama’s Free Community-College Plan.
* The end of the university in Louisiana.
* Malcolm Harris: The Small Miracle You Haven’t Heard About Amid the Carnage in Syria.
* Report: Duke Ignored Warnings on Research Fraud.
* 53 Historians Weigh In on Barack Obama’s Legacy.
* Back to the Future, Time Travel, and the Secret History of the 1980s.
* To be clear, late-night votes might be a bit of a problem for Joseph Morrissey, the newly sworn-in Virginia House delegate who must report to his jail cell about 7:30 each evening.
* Muslim Americans are the staunchest opponents of military attacks on civilians, compared with members of other major religious groups Gallup has studied in the United States. Seventy-eight percent of Muslim Americans say military attacks on civilians are never justified.
* $1 Million Prize for Scientists Who Can Cure Human Aging. Sure, I’ll go in for a few bucks on that.
* Too real: Woman’s Parents Accepting Of Mixed-Attractiveness Relationship.
* What If We Could Live In A World Without War But Way More Famine?
* Blue-eyed humans have a single, common ancestor.
* A Cybernetic Implant That Allows Paralyzed Rats To Walk Again.
* In 2014, Florida recorded at least 346 deaths inside of their prison system, an all-time high for the state in spite of the fact that its overall prison population has hovered around 100,000 people for the five previous years. Hundreds of these deaths from 2014 and from previous years are now under investigation by the DOJ because of the almost unimaginable role law enforcement officers are playing in them.
* Last week: The City Is Reportedly Losing $10 Million a Week Because the NYPD Isn’t Writing Enough Tickets. This week: NYPD Slowdown Turns Into “Broken Windows” Crackdown.
* The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Time to Shut it Down.
* Albuquerque cop mistakenly guns down undercover narcotics officer during bungled $60 meth bust. Elsewhere in Albuquerque.
* 1 In 3 College Men In Survey Said They Would Rape A Woman If They Could Get Away With It.
* Danny Boyle Having “Serious” Conversations About 28 Months Later. I’m in as long as it’s the first step towards Years.
* Radically unnecessary Avatar sequels reportedly having script problems. What could explain it?
* Frozen in everything, forever and ever amen.
* Seems legit: NASCAR driver says his ex-girlfriend is a trained assassin.
* This Computer Program Is ‘Incapable Of Losing’ At Poker.
* Scholar and activist Glen Coulthard on the connection between indigenous and anticapitalist struggles.
* This seems like glorified Avengers fan fiction but I’m on board. Meanwhile, in Fantastic Four news.
* Ah, there’s my problem: iPhone Separation Anxiety Makes You Dumber, Study Finds.
* I’m you, from the future! At the 16th most popular webcomic.
* They say time is the fire in which we burn.
* The Marquette Tribune is following the ongoing McAdams suspension at the university.
* Study says we prefer singers who look like big babies during good times. This research must be stopped. Some things mankind was never meant to know.
* Community get a premiere date.
* whothefuckismydndcharacter.com.
* And Cookie-Based Research Suggests Powerful People Are Sloppier Eaters. Of course the sloppy among us have always known this.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 15, 2015 at 8:30 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with #FreeCommunityCollege, 1985, 28 Months Later, 28 Years Later, academia, academic freedom, academic labor, addiction, adjunctification, adjuncts, Adnan Syed, Afrofuturism, aging, Albuquerque, altac, assassins, austerity, Avatar, Avengers, Back to the Future, Barack Obama, Big Data, blue eyes, broken windows, cancer, CFPs, Charlie Hebdo, civilians, class struggle, community, computers, Cookie Monster, cookies, cultural preservation, Danny Boyle, Duke, Dungeons & Dragons, Ebola, Ellen Craft, Elvis, famine, Fantastic Four, fantasy, film, flashbangs, Florida, free range parenting, free speech, Frozen, gambling, games, genetics, grenades, How the University Works, indigenous futurism, indigenous peoples, informants, interviews, iPhones, Islam, Islamophobia, James Cameron, jokes, Judaism, Junot Díaz, kids today, Kojave, labor, longevity, looksism, Louisiana, love, LSU, Marquette, Marvel, Marxism, medicine, misogyny, MLA, moral panics, murder, music, Muslims, my media empire, NASCAR, Nixon, Nnedi Okorafor, NYPD, orgasms, over-educated literary theory PhDs, pandemic, paralysis, parenting, peace, platinum-coin seigniorage, poker, police, police brutality, police state, police violence, politicians, politics, prison, prison-industrial complex, rape, rape culture, research, revolution, satire, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, science is magic, Scooby Doo, Serial, sexism, slavery, socks, Sofia Samatar, Spider-Man, startups, strikes, student debt, teaching pedagogy, tenure, the rich are different, the sublime, theory, they say time is the fire in which we burn, This American Life, time travel, true crime, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, University of Texas, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on drugs, Won't somebody think of the children?, zombies, zunguzungu
Monday Night: Scooby-Doo, Stalin’s Daughter, and More
* “You can’t regret your fate,” Ms. Peters once said, “although I do regret my mother didn’t marry a carpenter.” Josef Stalin’s daughter has died. More at MeFi.
* Occupy the Mystery Machine: The very first rule of Scooby-Doo, the single premise that sits at the heart of their adventures, is that the world is full of grown-ups who lie to kids, and that it’s up to those kids to figure out what those lies are and call them on it, even if there are other adults who believe those lies with every fiber of their being. (via)
* Behind the scenes of Planet of the Apes.
* No second acts in America: The life and times of Chris Hardwick. (also via)
* Terry Gilliam, the heir of Fellini and the enemy of God. (you know what I’m gonna say)
On his flight to Los Angeles, Gilliam tried to watch the $1-billion hit “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” and he felt battered and sullen by the time the landing gear came down. The old wizard says it’s the stage magicians who rule Hollywood now.
“You just sit there and watch the explosions,” Gilliam said. “I couldn’t tell you what the movie was about. The movie hammers the audience into submission. They are influenced by video games, but in video games at least you are immersed; in these movies you’re left out. In films, there’s so much overt fantasy now that I don’t watch a lot because everything is possible now. There’s no tension there. People can slide down the side of a building that’s falling and they don’t get ripped to shreds? The shots are amazing, but if there is no consequence, no gravity, what’s the point? I can’t watch Hollywood movies anymore. There’s no room for me.”
* Safe, reliable, and too cheap to meter: Japan’s science ministry says 8 per cent of the country’s surface area has been contaminated by radiation from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant.
* “For our brewery, growth depends on abundant clean water and quality barley and hops—and climate change puts those ingredients at risk. Our supply chain—including barley, hops and water—is especially vulnerable to weather in the short-term and to climate change in the long-term,” Orgolini told Forbes.
* Medicine and “never events.”
* Nearly half (48%) of all Americans say that the U.S. is the greatest country in the world, and another 42% say that it is one of the greatest countries in the world. Fewer than one-in-ten (8%) Americans say that the U.S. is not one of the greatest countries in the world.
There are sharp generational differences on this question. Millennials are the least likely to say that the U.S. is the greatest country in the world, with just 32% holding this view. This number rises with each successive generation, culminating in nearly two-thirds of Silents (64%) expressing the view that the U.S. stands above all other nations. Within the Silent generation, it is the oldest members who feel most strongly about America’s greatness – fully 72% of those ages 76 to 83 say the U.S. is the greatest country in the world. About half of members of Generation X (ages 31 to 46) and the Baby Boomer generation (47 to 65) believe that the U.S. is the greatest country in the world.
* “Berkeley Police Defend Actions by Sensationistically Claiming Protestors Could’ve Used Lethal Violence.” That’s good enough for me!
* The engineers behind Russia’s failed Mars attempt could face criminal charges.
“Recent failures are a strong blow to our competitiveness,” explained Medvedev. “It does not mean that something fatal has happened, it means that we need to carry out a detailed review and punish those guilty.”
* Speaking of punishing the guilty: The Walker recall is already almost halfway there. @wi_defender: One signature every 3.456 seconds for 12 days. #WIRecall #RecallWalker #damn
* Corporate synergy watch: Staples is launching Dunder Mifflin brand paper.
The North Carolina Senate voted (27-17) Monday to repeal the Racial Justice Act, sending SB 9 off to Governor Bev Perdue. The Senate’s approval came just hours after the Judiciary Committee heard emotional testimony on both sides of the legislation.
Johnston County District Attorney Susan Doyle told legislators that DAs were “fearful” that the two-year-old law had the potential to parole death row inmates.
One shudders to think!
Written by gerrycanavan
November 28, 2011 at 11:25 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with American exceptionalism, beer, Chris Hardwick, climate change, counterfactuals, death penalty, film, Fukushima, gremlins, growing up, intergenerational warfare, invasive species, islands, Japan, justice, lies and lying liars, Mars, medicine, Nerdist, North Carolina, nuclear energy, nuclearity, obituary, Planet of the Apes, police brutality, police state, politics, race, radiation, recalls, Russia, science, Scooby Doo, Scott Walker, Stalin, synergy, takin' 'bout my generation, Terry Gilliam, The Office, Transformers, Wisconsin, World War II
They Don’t Do Much Forming of Captain Planet These Days
Written by gerrycanavan
August 28, 2010 at 11:50 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with Captain Planet, cartoons, Flintstones, Jetsons, Johnny Quest, nostalgia, Scooby Doo, welcome to my past
Tuesday Links
Tuesday links.
* I do feel a bit like my characters from one movie could walk into another one of my movies and it would make sense, whereas people from other peoples’ movies would probably feel a bit uncomfortable there. Wes Anderson interviewed in Interview. There’s also a profile in this week’s New Yorker, apparently, though it’s not online. (via Rushmore Academy)
* Case Studies of Comic Book Medicine. More here.
* Graduating during a recession can have a lifelong impact on your earnings.
* Also from Yglesias: Cable monopolies are killing your internet access.
* Infinite Thought has Engels on entropy.
Millions of years may elapse, hundreds of thousands of generations be born and die, but inexorably the time will come when the declining warmth of the sun will no longer suffice to melt the ice thrusting itself forward from the poles; when the human race, crowding more and more about the equator, will finally no longer find even there enough heat for life; when gradually even the last trace of organic life will vanish; and the earth, an extinct frozen globe like the moon, will circle in deepest darkness and in an ever narrower orbit about the equally extinct sun, and at last fall into it. Other planets will have preceded it, others will follow it; instead of the bright, warm solar system with its harmonious arrangement of members, only a cold, dead sphere will still pursue its lonely path through universal space. And what will happen to our solar system will happen sooner or later to all the other systems of our island universe; it will happen to all the other innumerable island universes, even to those the light of which will never reach the earth while there is a living human eye to receive it.
The quote is from 1833’s The Dialectics of Nature, and goes on to suggest a kind of eternal return:
It is an eternal cycle in which matter moves, a cycle that certainly only completes its orbit in periods of time for which our terrestrial year is no adequate measure, a cycle in which the time of highest development, the time of organic life and still more that of the life of beings conscious of nature and of themselves, is just as narrowly restricted as the space in which life and self-consciousness come into operation; a cycle in which every finite mode of existence of matter, whether it be sun or nebular vapour, single animal or genus of animals, chemical combination or dissociation, is equally transient, and wherein nothing is eternal but eternally changing, eternally moving matter and the laws according to which it moves and changes. But however often, and however relentlessly, this cycle is completed in time and space, however many millions of suns and earths may arise and pass away, however long it may last before the conditions for organic life develop, however innumerable the organic beings that have to arise and to pass away before animals with a brain capable of thought are developed from their midst, and for a short span of time find conditions suitable for life, only to be exterminated later without mercy, we have the certainty that matter remains eternally the same in all its transformations, that none of its attributes can ever be lost, and therefore, also, that with the same iron necessity that it will exterminate on the earth its highest creation, the thinking mind, it must somewhere else and at another time again produce it.
* And Boing Boing has your Scooby Doo/zombie apocalypse mashup of the day.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 27, 2009 at 1:36 pm
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged with apocalypse, cable companies, comics, Engels, entropy, futurity, Internet, Marxism, medicine, monopolies, recession, Scooby Doo, Wes Anderson, zombies
Hitting the Big Time
Satisfactory Comics honors me with some Doodle Penance after a Google Search for “dan clowes -canavan -daleks -ghostwriter -scooby -grantbridge” brings what I can only imagine was a very disappointed searcher to their site.
There’s a story here somewhere, possibly involving my ghostwriting Dan Clowes’s issue of Scooby Doo vs. the Daleks. But perhaps I’ve said too much.
Written by gerrycanavan
May 4, 2009 at 5:52 pm
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged with comics, daleks, Dan Clowes, Ghostwriter, Google, my media empire, Scooby Doo