Posts Tagged ‘Scooby Doo’
Thursday Links!
* 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.
* 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.
* 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
* 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!
* 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.
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.
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.