Posts Tagged ‘Terminator’
Monday Monday Links!
* The EdgeEffects year in review includes my interview with Kim Stanley Robinson from last spring. Check it out if you missed it then!
* Well, the reviews are in! Jaimee’s latest published poem, “The Utopologist’s Wife.”
* I have covered sports in New Jersey for a decade, crisscrossing the state for as many incredible stories as I can find. But for all the tales that made their way into my notebook, one stayed elusive, even though it seemed to stand above all the others. The 1990 Montclair-Randolph game.
* Very extremely cool site: The Deep Sea.
* Keynes was wrong. Gen Z will have it worse.
* CFP: Glasgow International Fantasy Conversations Beyond the Anglocentric Fantastic, 28th-29th May 2020. CFP: Special Issue of the Journal of Fandom Studies on Archives and Special Collections. CFP: Creature Features & the Environment. CFP: Hindsight is 20/20: How Popular Culture Writes, Rewrites, and Unwrites History.
* Ghosts of the future. What Green Costs. Congressional Democrats’ last, long-shot attempt at climate progress this year. Greenland’s ice losses have septupled and are now in line with its highest sea-level scenario, scientists say. Last Remaining Glaciers in the Pacific Will Soon Melt Away. The Arctic didn’t used to emit carbon. Something like 14% of public housing in this country is at risk from sea level rise. Young people can’t remember how much more wildlife there used to be. Climate change and depression. Irreversible Shift. Even Greta Isn’t Radical Enough. Just ask Goldman Sachs.
The two most salient facts of our reality are ecological collapse and income inequality, and the response by every person with authority is a chaotic swing among denial (“it isn’t real”), defeatism (“it can’t be helped”), and sneering rationalization (“only the unworthy suffer”).
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 13, 2019
younger voters would also prefer that civilization not collapse within their lifetimes by an almost 7-to-1 margin
older voters simply dngaf https://t.co/ekyoZhKDGu
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 11, 2019
* It’s 2071, and We Have Bioengineered Our Own Extinction.
* Scientists Are Contemplating a 1,000-Year Space Mission to Save Humanity. Would be nice if someone look at the next 25 years, too.
* How William Gibson Keeps His Science Fiction Real.
* San Francisco’s Sci-Fi Renaissance.
* The allure of science fiction.
Some intriguing trends in the responses to this Very Informal Thing:
-Black Mirror got the most votes/mentions/whatever
-KSR's climate future 'New York 2140' proved *very* popular
-lot of nods to Her, 3 Body Problem, Ex Machina, Infomocracy, Broken Earth + Sorry to Bother You https://t.co/MdhijGUBg4— Brian Merchant (@bcmerchant) December 9, 2019
* This Professor Was Accused of Bullying Grad Students. Now He’s Being Banned From Teaching. Followup on ‘I Was Sick to My Stomach’: A Scholar’s Bullying Reputation Goes Under the Microscope.
* Harvard Faculty Have a Rare Chance to Act in Solidarity With Striking Student Workers. ‘The Administration Is Assuming That We Are Going to Do Their Dirty Work.’
* Grad school is worse for public health than STDs.
* No, Humanities Degrees Don’t Mean Low Salaries. The Humanities Must Go on the Offensive.
* These Students Want to Create a Required K-12 Racial Literacy Curriculum.
* Fall Enrollments Still on the Decline.
* ‘Adulting’ is hard. UC Berkeley has a class for that.
* One-book classes have been some of the best I’ve taught. I love it as a model and it works so much better than the cram-it-all-in method I started out using.
* Perhaps the greatest free speech mystery of them all: Trump Targets Anti-Semitism and Israeli Boycotts on College Campuses.
* The Decade Comic Book Nerds Became Our Cultural Overlords. Why do they have to be such sore winners?
* Speaking of Disney there’s a pretty good discussion on this episode of Podcast: The Ride about Disney claiming all cinema in a way I haven’t seen discussed anywhere — literally going back and rebranding Fox properties like Miracle on 34th Street as Disney’s Miracle on 34th Street.
* What’s Up With J.J. Abrams Seemingly Shading The Last Jedi? The Last Jedi didn’t break Star Wars. It Saved It. John Boyega just having an incredible week.
I’d go further and point out that everything these people are complaining about was the inevitable consequence of decisions JJ made when he set up the new trilogy in TFA. If you’re mad because Luke lost it’s JJ’s fault, not Johnson’s. Johnson just tried to make sense of it. https://t.co/Qj5dUG6GWv
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 11, 2019
* A People’s History of Lube Man. If HBO makes a second season of ‘Watchmen,’ it should be about Vietnam.
* So, when thinking about “Blue Monday” in context of the genre/format New Order basically helped found (i.e., post-punk and modern rock), the sixteenth-note/machine gun trope recalls the fact of lots of bad, imperialist things the U.S. did in the 80s and early 90s. But the whole point of this trailer is to provide audiences with the image or feeling of an American-ness that is actually grounded in something like truth and justice. Setting up a not-at-all-thinly-veiled ersatz Donald Trump as the film’s villain, this trailer gives audiences a scapegoat for the nation’s present and past wrongs: then as now, the problem lies in a really dastardly bad apple, not the system itself.
* Pete Buttigieg makes his Jacobin debut.
* How consulting companies like McKinsey optimized American inequality.
* Joe Biden Still Can’t Answer Basic Questions About Hunter and Burisma.
* Self-help gurus all the way down: on Elizabeth Warren.
* Why Trump’s path to reelection is totally plausible. On Depoliticization. Et Tu, U.K.? I’m Crying, You’re Crying. But Our Day Will Come. No False Consolations.
I did around 120 hours of canvassing in London, Bedford and Milton Keynes. I didn’t expect this result but here’s how I can make sense of it from what I encountered on the doorstep. 1/
— Luke Pagarani (@LukePagarani) December 13, 2019
What’s tragic but also revelatory about figures like Bernie and Corbyn is that genuinely principled, honest politics get sandbagged by their nominal allies, who really would prefer open fascists to someone slightly to the left.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 13, 2019
* Finland forms government of five parties all led by women, with youngest prime minister in world.
* Trump’s children must undergo mandatory training to learn how to avoid defrauding charities.
* People in the U.S. Are Buying Fish Antibiotics Online and Taking Them Themselves. Congress can’t get its act together on lowering drug prices or eliminating surprise medical bills. Insurance companies aren’t doctors. So why do we keep letting them practice medicine? AOC compares average paid family leave in US to time dogs stay with puppies. And this is a little on the nose.
Paradigmatic example of this for me is the bit in KSR’s SCIENCE IN THE CAPITAL where one company has the patent on a cancer cure and one company has the patent on the delivery mechanism so they both go out of business and the cure is never distributed. https://t.co/2Cba7MvxiG
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 14, 2019
* You’d think after a story like this the adults involved would simply die of shame.
I guess "Five-year-old girl performs child labour to pay the debt accumulated by 123 other children who couldn't afford to eat" doesn't accomplish whatever ghoulish "feel-good" tone you're going for here https://t.co/EKbcomSvci
— Elizabeth May (@_ElizabethMay) December 15, 2019
* These 91 companies paid no federal taxes in 2018.
* House Democrats To Rich People: We Love You.
* Always money in the banana stand.
* These moderators help keep Google and YouTube free of violent extremism — and now some of them have PTSD. TikTok Admits It Suppressed Videos by Disabled, Queer, and Fat Creators. Artificial intelligence will help determine if you get your next job.
* Understanding The U.S. Economy: Lots Of Rotten Jobs.
* People in Japan are wearing exoskeletons to keep working as they age.
* Stealing the election in plain sight: 234,000 voter registrations get tossed in Wisconsin after Republican lawsuit, overwhelmingly in Milwaukee and Madison. Whatever shall I do with this power?
* Mario Maker is a blessing we never deserved.
why am I so excited about Link in Mario Maker? *this* is why I'm so excited about Link in Mario Maker pic.twitter.com/0qvQYp9Cnz
— Patrick Klepek (@patrickklepek) December 11, 2019
* Perhaps the best example of how radical and reactionary horror tropes sprout from one another is John Carpenter’s 1988 classic They Live. In the movie, John Nada (Roddy Piper), a virtuous, optimistic, working-class protagonist, discovers that cadaverous aliens are living among us, controlling us with television messages that turn us into obedient, consuming drones. The movie is widely considered a critique of Reagan-era neoliberalism, and it is that. But it’s also a story about the virtues of genocide. A white guy discovers aliens who don’t look like him living in his town, and his first impulse is to murder them. Foreign shape-shifting immigrants, like vampires, are a standard anti-Semitic stand-in for Jews, and They Live can be read as a fascist conspiracy theory, in which brave working Americans finally recognize their racial oppressors, and respond with righteous cleansing violence.
Reading @nberlat on THEY LIVE I’m reminded on my own article on the movie, which plays out some similar problems with the ending (and gets into some other Body Snatcher fiction I like as well): https://t.co/Va68iiGOiz Feels pretty relevant today. pic.twitter.com/4nZG6mj1Lf
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) December 14, 2019
* Boots Riley Critiques ‘Joker:’ “These Superhero Movies are Cop Movies.”
* Another trainwreck behind the scenes of American Gods.
* Millennials Are Leaving Religion And Not Coming Back. False Idol — Why the Christian Right Worships Donald Trump. The Evangelical Mind.
* Shocking slander of a female reporter in the Richard Jewell movie.
Paw Patrol's operations consistently violate principles of emergency assistance, from do no harm to local input. Pups regularly endanger civilians with reckless driving and utterly lack accountability or learning mechanisms. In this essay I will
— Doctora Malka Older (@m_older) December 15, 2019
* Second verse same as the first.
* Second verse same as the first but in a good way.
* UNC’s self-inflicted humiliation just gets worse.
* Stephen Miller is a white supremacist. I know, I was one too.
* No one could have predicted: Charter Fraud And Waste Worse Than We Thought.
* Ectopic Pregnancies Are Not Viable Pregnancies, Period.
* Hardt and Negri: Empire, Twenty Years On.
* What we know about you when you click on this article.
* U.S. lab chimps were dumped on Liberia’s Monkey Island and left to starve. He saved them.
* I’m Honestly Fed Up With All The Bad News, So I Illustrated 50 Of The Best Ones From 2019.
* Focus on a different kid every time you watch.
focus on a different child every time you watch 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/gGpowtXKGP
— Ree 🍯🍭 (@TTPrettyInPink) December 13, 2019
* And The Atlantic presents The Year in Volcanoes.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 16, 2019 at 2:26 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2019, abortion, academia, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, American Gods, animal experimentation, anti-Semitism, Antonio Negri, apocalypse, artificial intelligence, BDS, Berkeley, Bernie Sanders, Boots Riley, Brexit, bullshit jobs, Burisma, CFPs, charity, charter schools, chimpanzees, Christmas, class struggle, climate change, comics, Confederate monuments, corporations, critical thinking, cyborgs, dark side of the digital, Democrats, disability, Disney, Donald Trump, ecology, ectopic pregnancies, Elizabeth Warren, empire, Episode 9, extinction, fandom, fascism, fatphobia, Finland, futurity, gay rights, gender, Generation Z, glaciers, Goldman Sachs, Google, grad student nightmares, graduate student movements, graduate students, Greenland, Greta Thunberg, HBO, health insurance, high school football, How the University Works, HR, Hunter Biden, ice sheet collapse, Infinite Jest, Instagram, intergenerational struggle, interviews, Israel, J.J. Abrams, Jacobin, Jaimee, Japan, Jeremy Corbyn, Joe Biden, Joker, kids, kids today, Kim Stanley Robinson, Labour, Lube Man, lunch debt, Mario Maker, McKinsey, medicine, Michael Hardt, military-industrial complex, millennials, monkeys, my media empire, neoliberalism, New Jersey, Nietzsche, Nintendo, Nintendo Switch, one-book classes, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, Paw Patrol. Hillary Clinton, Pete Buttigieg, podcasts, poems, poetry, politics, privacy, Proxima Centauri, PTSD, public health, race, racism, Randolph, religion, rich people, Richard Jewell, San Francisco, science, science fiction, science fiction studies, Science in the Capital, self-help, SFFTV, Silent Sam, socialism, Space Force, Star Trek, Star Trek Picard, Star Wars, Stephen Miller, superheroes, taxes, Terminator, the 2010s, the archives, the Arctic, the economy, the fantastic, the humanities, The Last Jedi, the oceans, the university in ruins, They Live!, TikTok, Ukraine, UNC, United Kingdom, Utopia, Vietnam, volcanoes, voter suppression, war on education, Watchmen, web comics, white supremacy, William Gibson, Wisconsin, Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman 1984, YouTube
*ALL* Your Tuesday Links!
* CFP: Climates of Crisis: Life, Power, and Planetary Justice in the Capitalocene (Binghamton, 7-8 February 2020). CFP: ASAP/Journal special issue on speculation. CFP: CFP: Caliban no. 63 “Dynamics of Collapse in Fantasy, the Fantastic & SF.” CFP: Extrapolating Nostalgia: Special issue of Science Fiction Studies. CFP: Childhood and Time.
* Mainstream economists nowadays might not be particularly good at predicting financial crashes, facilitating general prosperity, or coming up with models for preventing climate change, but when it comes to establishing themselves in positions of intellectual authority, unaffected by such failings, their success is unparalleled. One would have to look at the history of religions to find anything like it. To this day, economics continues to be taught not as a story of arguments—not, like any other social science, as a welter of often warring theoretical perspectives—but rather as something more like physics, the gradual realization of universal, unimpeachable mathematical truths.
* I’ve been digging the new Watchmen show, completely despite my own expectations and intentions. I’ve even tweeted about it a few times, in this thread and then once or twice more. A few think pieces after this week’s game-changing episode. which you should see before you read: HBO’s ‘Watchmen’ tackles criminal justice and race, but can’t see past the hero black cop trope. The Timeliness of Watchmen. Watchmen dares to imagine a [SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER]. I like the show so much I even like listening to Struggle Session dunk on it.
Alan Moore, never one to mince words. HBD Uncle Alan! h/t: https://t.co/ZXsXXuq3l5 pic.twitter.com/jpRc13FXqh
— Kyle (@kylepinion) November 18, 2019
The other tweet’s deleted now, but someone pointed out that this is very clearly the brief for the HBO show.
I can’t believe this Watchmen show is good. I truly hate this state of affairs, and myself.
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 21, 2019
* Hopepunk and Solarpunk: On Climate Narratives That Go Beyond the Apocalypse.
* The Nearly Forgotten Art of Old Sci-Fi Books.
* Sucker bet (a thought experiment).
* Yes we can! Evers signs bill making it a felony to trespass on pipelines.
* The latest Keystone Pipeline oil leak is almost 10 times worse than initially thought.
Sorry the climate crisis isn't happening because the fossil fuel industry is corrupt it's because its entire business model and most of our economic system revolves around fueling it
— Kate Aronoff (@KateAronoff) November 21, 2019
* The Gulf Stream is slowing down. That could mean rising seas and a hotter Florida.
* Ramping up Repression as the Australian Continent Burns.
* Generation snowflake: Frozen II and the quest for climate justice. Frozen 2’s Bizarre Storyline About Reparations, Explained. Climate Change Is So Real There’s A New Pokémon Based On Dead Coral. “OK boomer” isn’t just about the past. It’s about our apocalyptic future. Wherever a rich person is abusing children — I’ll be there.
You little shit pic.twitter.com/HKtcEw7DpP
— Sean Bartley (@SeanBartley) November 17, 2019
* Ten Arguments for Open Borders, the Abolition of ICE, and an Internationalist Labor Movement.
* This Solar Energy Company Fired Its Construction Crew After They Unionized. Brazil Admits It Has a Deforestation Problem and Vows to Fix It. The climate crisis has sparked a Siberian mammoth tusk gold rush. Planes Are Ruining the Planet. New, Mighty Airships Won’t. Climate Change’s Great Lithium Problem. What We Can Learn From the Near-Death of the Banana.
The cybertruck is us, clumsy & afraid, wanting to both do something about & be protected from climate change but falling down, with our late 1900’s mementos our only touchstones from which any shred of creativity springs, one giant single player game of doom. In this essay I will
— Costa Samaras (@CostaSamaras) November 23, 2019
* Big Calculator: How Texas Instruments Monopolized Math Class.
* The Education Department for the first time has released earnings data for thousands of college programs at all degree levels. What do they show?
* A Recession Is Looming. Even Harvard Is Uncertain About What That Means for Higher Ed. Then Enrollment Fell Off a Cliff: How Beloit College Is Trying to Regain Students. Number of Enrolled International Students Drops. A College Prepares to Close Its Doors as Students and Alumni Mourn — and Scheme.
* The end of the tour: Updated academic job numbers for English Lit (with data scraped from Academic Jobs Wiki). Since last posting on Oct 13th, 88 new TT jobs have been added. But that still leaves us at an all-time low, pretty far into the season. More here.
Updated academic job numbers for English Lit (with data scraped from Academic Jobs Wiki). Since last posting on Oct 13th, 88 new TT jobs have been added. But that still leaves us at an all-time low, pretty far into the season. pic.twitter.com/4hYPcAHgV9
— Ryan Heuser (@quadrismegistus) November 18, 2019
Jobs in C20- and C21-US Lit have dropped from 63 in 2011 to 5 today. Field collapse in under a decade. https://t.co/sqR9lm3gZh pic.twitter.com/ilxB2R8VEq
— 𝙹.𝙳. 𝚂𝚌𝚑𝚗𝚎𝚙𝚏 (@jd_schnepf) November 18, 2019
* The collapse of the profession across all fields.
10) I'll end on a personal note: when I was in a non-tenure-track position at Georgetown, the demand for my courses was regularly 100-200% over the cap. My courses were banking Gtown half-a-million/year. Is that kind of demand ever rewarded in the 'marketplace'? No.
— Aaron Hanlon (@AaronRHanlon) November 14, 2019
12) If you want to understand the decline in tenure-track jobs, look at the decline in funding for public higher ed, and the management strategies of casualization applied in higher ed *just as they're applied outside of it*. /end
— Aaron Hanlon (@AaronRHanlon) November 14, 2019
* Paying for a ‘Toxic’ Postdoc.
* Watch this story: Indiana University condemns professor’s racist and misogynistic tweets in strongest terms but won’t fire him over views alone.
* He Violated Sexual-Misconduct Policy. He’s Back in the Classroom. What Should the University Do Now?
* N.J. college professors are fed up. So they are staging a mass protest. Strikes Rock British Universities as Pension Crisis Deepens.
* College Kids Are Not Your Problem.
* Podcast episode that might be interesting for friends in gaming studies or native studies to use in the classroom: “How Did This Get Played? #23: Custer’s Revenge (w/ Joey Clift).” Guest unexpectedly calls out bonkers booking logic that brings a native comedian on to talk about a native-raping and -killing simulator for the Thanksgiving episode.
* Pete Buttigieg Is a Lying MF. Moderate Democrats (Like Pete Buttigieg) Should Stop Pretending That Free College Is a Giveaway to Rich Kids. Stop Blaming Poor People for Their Poverty. Because you demanded it! There’s Only One Way the Patrick and Bloomberg Campaigns Make Sense. Democrats fear a long primary slog could drag into summer. The Corporate Media’s War Against Bernie Sanders Is Very Real. “In Moments of Crisis, Behind Every Moderate Liberal, There’s a Fascist.” When you work extra hard and turn Virginia blue. Why We Confronted Joe Biden on Deportations. Barack Obama, conservative.
Not content with saddling an entire generation with upwards of £30k of debt before they’re even 21, the Lib Dems are now tackling the housing and rising rent crisis by suggesting you take out *squints* LOANS FOR YOUR RENT https://t.co/EYjnkDtX1j
— Heather Parry (@HeatherParryUK) November 20, 2019
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 19, 2019
* I Don’t Know Why I Should Care What the Constitution Says.
* Stop Assuming Republican Senators Will Do the Right Thing. Making Impeachment Matter.
It's amusing, in an apocalyptic sort of way, that people are still asking "what will the Republicans' defense be to this," when the defense is and always has been "fuck you."
— IWantNothingHat (@Popehat) November 20, 2019
* Why Hasn’t Rudy Giuliani Been Disbarred Yet?
* The Atlantic dives in to Joe Biden’s stutter.
* The Mr. Rogers no one saw. Mister Rogers And The Dark Abyss Of The Adult Soul.
Tired: Mister Rogers was nice to everyone.
Wired: Mister Rogers was a radical whose actions worked in direct opposition to a culture of commodification and devalued human dignity. https://t.co/xDVeqjvGLS
— Jason P. Woodbury (@jasonpwoodbury) November 21, 2019
* Eurafrica and the myth of African independence.
* Nearly All Mass Shooters Since 1966 Have Had 4 Things in Common.
* White nationalists are openly operating on Facebook. The company won’t act.
* Leaked Documents Say Roughly 2,000 NY Prisoners Affected By Erroneous Drug Tests. Multiple Illinois prisoners say they have been denied eye surgery because of a “one good eye” policy that only entitles them to have one functioning eye. Half of Wisconsin’s Black Neighborhoods Are Jails. Appalachia vs. the Carceral State. Abolish active shooter drills.
Quite a lede https://t.co/ZEviyN7NVM pic.twitter.com/DUso2dQFzm
— Brett Anderson (@BrettEats) November 19, 2019
* Nation’s Biggest Charity Is Funding Influential White Nationalist Group.
* “Man living in bunker along Milwaukee River may have been there for years.”
* Why are people getting worse at “The Price Is Right”? Science investigates.
* Every so often, something happens that is not completely horrible. Humanitarian volunteer Scott Warren reflects on the borderlands and two years of government persecution.
* Being a Law Firm Partner Was Once a Job for Life. That Culture Is All but Dead.
* Legalizing same-sex marriage leads to big drop in gay suicide rate. Scientists Have Carried Out the Biggest Ever Study on Transgender Children — Here’s What They Found.
* New York City’s best places to cry in public, mapped.
* The aliens are going to be super pissed that we trashed their airport.
* Things have gotten so bad even Alan Moore is voting.
* Autism, anti-vax movements, and the changeling myth.
* Isolation rooms and child abuse in Illinois.
* Can the Terminator franchise be saved?
* Amazon’s Lord of the Rings Series Has Already Gotten a Second Season.
* I’m embarrassed how glad I am to hear about this: Star Trek 4 Is Back On, This Time From the Maker of Legion and Fargo.
what was Brainiac like when he was bullied at his dead-end job I wonder https://t.co/V8AtJG0TCy
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) November 20, 2019
* Abigail De Kosnik on Netflix time vs. fandom time.
* The story of Squirrel Girl, told by those who brought her to life.
* Where is that sweet, sweet Baby Yoda plush?
* The Man in the High Castle: Swastikas used in Amazon series ‘proudly destroyed’ after filming.
* How NBA executive Jeff David stole $13 million from the Sacramento Kings.
* That Uplifting Tweet You Just Shared? A Russian Troll Sent It.
* hot take on the hot take economy
just as netflix's valuation depends on everyone pretending they're not just making up viewer numbers, so does the hot take economy depend on the suspension of judgement re: all claims of influence, wider significance, etc.
— traxus4420 (@traxus4420) November 18, 2019
* Tesla tried to have a whistleblower SWATted, arrested, and placed on involuntary mental health hold. WeWork pivots to classification fraud. Consumer DNA Testing May Be the Biggest Health Scam of the Decade. Worker who raised alarm before deadly New Orleans hotel collapse to be deported.
* Former Valley CBP Immigration Officer Facing Possible Deportation.
* Physicists discover evidence of a new force of nature.
* A Blind Man Sees His Birthday Candles Again, Thanks to a Bionic Eye.
* Earthquake Conspiracy Theorists Are Wreaking Havoc During Emergencies.
* The Overuse of ‘Emotional Labor’ Turns All Relationships Into Work.
* In a Chaotic World, Dungeons & Dragons Is Resurgent. The Top 10 Fantasy Books That Inspired Modern Dungeons & Dragons.
* The 9-year journey to explore each of EVE Online’s 7,805 solar systems.
Thinking about Bowie's mugshot, which might accidentally be one of the great portraits of the 20th century, and how photographers work their entire lives and will never capture anything as great as some dumbass cop in Rochester. pic.twitter.com/VkSD8DJCIT
— John Frankensteiner (@JFrankensteiner) November 23, 2019
* I wish I didn’t know about your anus-brain, Flash. Good for you, buddy! What if humans are just adding comments to sloppy code? I’m immortal, it doesn’t even require patience. God that’s bleak.
* You’re not going to believe what I’m about to tell you.
* You’re not going to get away with it.
* statement of teaching philosophy
* How to save money before 40.
* and on the pedestal these words appear
Written by gerrycanavan
November 26, 2019 at 12:45 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 23 and me, academia, academic jobs, active shooter drills, Africa, airplanes, airships, Alan Moore, aliens, Amazon, America, apocalypse, Appalachia, Australia, autism, backlash effect, bananas, Barack Obama, Beloit, Bernie Sanders, Big Calculator, Bowie, Brainiac, Brazil, centrism, CFPs, changelings, Charlie Stross, child abuse, childhood, climate change, college closures, colleges, comics, conspiracy theorists, cybertruck, David Bowie, David Graeber, death, decolonization, deforestation, Democratic primary 2020, Democrats, deportation, Disney, DNA, Dungeons and Dragons, earthquakes, ecology, economics, Egypt, Elon Musk, emotional labor, English majors, equality, EVE Online, Facebook, fandom, fans, fantasy, fascism, film, Florida, free speech, Frozen, Frozen II, futurity, games, gay rights, Greta Thunberg, grief, Harriet Tubman, Harry Potter, Harvard, HBO, hopepunk, hot takes, How Did This Get Played?, How the University Works, humanitarianism, ice, Illinois, immigration, immortality, impeachment, Indiana University, indigenous peoples, internationalism, isolation rooms, Joe Biden, Joker, Joker 2, Julia Roberts, justice, Keystone Pipeline, kids today, labor, lawyers, liberalism, lithium, Lord of the Rings, marriage equality, Marvel, mass shooters, medicine, Milwaukee River, MLA, mortality, Mr. Rogers, mugshots, Nate Silver, Native American issues, Nazis, Netflix, New York, nostalgia, OK Boomer, pensions, Pete Buttigieg, physics, pipelines, Pokémon, police brutality, police corruption, police state, postdocs, poverty, prison-industrial complex, punkpunk, pyramids, race, rape, rape culture, recession, rent loans, reparations, Republicans, rich people, rising sea levels, Rudy Giuliani, Russia, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, saving money, science fiction, science fiction studies, science is magic, Scott Warren, SFRA, Siberia, solar power, solarpunk, speculation, spoilers, Squirrel Girl, Star Trek, Star Trek 4, Star Wars, statement of teaching philosophy, strikes, student evaluations, stuttering, superheroes, swastikas, tenure, Terminator, Tesla, the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, the Constitution, the courts, the humanities, the law, The Man in the High Castle, The Mandalorian, The Price Is Right, the truth is out there, the university in ruins, theory, TI-85s, time, Title IX, tokenism, Tolkien, Tony Evers, transgender issues, true crime, turning 40, Twitter, United Kingdom, vaccinations, Watchmen, web comics, WeWork, whale watching, whale-hunting, whales, whistleblowers, white nationalism, white supremacy, wildfires, Wisconsin, woolly mammoths, Yoda, zeppelins
Happy First Day of School Links!
* The Japanese have a word for blogs that have fallen into neglect or are altogether abandoned: ishikoro, or pebbles. We live in a world of pebbles now. They litter the internet, each one a marker of writing dreams and energies that have dissipated or moved elsewhere. What Were Blogs?
* Phew, that was a close one: In a new book, conceptual poet Kenneth Goldsmith argues there’s no such thing as time wasted online.
* …successful universities – surely including the University of Chicago – are congeries of safe spaces that factions of scholars have carved out to protect themselves from their intellectual enemies. More concretely – the University of Chicago has both a very well recognized economics department and a very well recognized sociology department. There is furthermore some overlap in the topics that they study. Yet the professors in these two departments protect themselves from each other – they do not, for example, vote on each other’s tenure decisions. They furthermore have quite different notions (though again, perhaps with some overlap) of what constitutes legitimate and appropriate research. In real life, academics only are able to exercise academic freedom because they have safe spaces that they can be free in.
I honestly wonder, given their sneering at students/young people/etc, why a lot of teachers are even teachers in the first place.
— William Patrick Wend (@wpwend) August 27, 2016
* Graduate Students Are Workers: The Decades-Long Fight for Graduate Unions, and the Path Forward.
* Median income vs. public university tuition, 2000-2016.
* What Colleges Can Do Right Now to Help Low-Income Students Succeed.
* Secrets of my success: Yes, Students Do Learn More From Attractive Teachers.
* Health Experts Recommend Standing Up At Desk, Leaving Office, Never Coming Back.
* The long, strange history of John Podesta’s space alien obsession.
* With a shift in martial arts preferences, the rise of video games — more teenagers play Pokémon Go in parks here than practice a roundhouse kick — and a perception among young people that kung fu just isn’t cool, longtime martial artists worry that kung fu’s future is bleak.
* The Rebel Virgins and Desert Mothers Who Have Been Written Out of Christianity’s Early History.
* All Mixed Up: What Do We Call People Of Multiple Backgrounds?
* Paris Is Redesigning Its Major Intersections For Pedestrians, Not Cars.
* Vice: All the Evidence We Could Find About Fred Trump’s Alleged Involvement with the KKK.
* Louisiana, for instance, made headlines earlier this summer when it was revealed that the state had spent more than $1 million of public funds on legal fees in an attempt to defend its refusal to install air conditioning on death row at Angola prison — even though the air conditioning would cost only about $225,000, plus operating costs, according to expert testimony. That astonished U.S. District Judge Brian Jackson. “Is this really what the state wants to do?” Jackson asked, calling the bill “stunning.” “It just seems so unnecessary.”
* The deep story of Trump support. The New York Times And Trump’s Loopy Note From His Doctor. Donald Trump has a massive Catholic problem. Trump might already be out of time. It’s Too Soon For Clinton To Run Out The Clock.
* When Steve Bannon ran BioDome.
* The Welfare Reform Disaster.
* Obama the Monument Maker. Obama Just Quadrupled The World’s Largest Natural Sanctuary.
* Tumblr of the year: The Grad Student. Keep scrolling! School hasn’t started yet.
* The Average Joe Accused of Trying to Sell Russia Secrets.
* The short, unhappy life of the Soviet Jet Train.
* The first theory of evolution is 600 years older than Darwin.
* Forget about drones, forget about dystopian sci-fi — a terrifying new generation of autonomous weapons is already here. Meet the small band of dedicated optimists battling nefarious governments and bureaucratic tedium to stop the proliferation of killer robots and, just maybe, save humanity from itself.
* They say the best revenge is a life well-lived. There’s a study out this year that suggests Frenchmen can feel pain. I don’t wanna be one of those people who think everything got worse around the time he hit his mid-twenties.
* My statement of teaching philosophy.
* Happy 101st, Alice Sheldon. Kirby’s 99th.
* Ursula Nordstrom and the Queer History of the Children’s Book.
* “No Man’s Sky is an existential crisis simulator disguised as a space exploration game.”
* Great moments in FOIA requests.
* Colin Kaepernick Is Righter Than You Know: The National Anthem Is a Celebration of Slavery.
* Big data, Google and the end of free will.
honestly, this was my best tweet, goodbye folks https://t.co/XhfEb1VnKM
— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) August 27, 2016
* The logistical sublime: A Map Showing Every Single Cargo Ship In The World.
* Why There’s a Media Blackout on the Native American Dakota Oil Pipeline Blockade.
* Year-Long Simulation of Humans Living on Mars Comes To an End.
They must feel how Charlton Heston felt at the end of PLANET OF THE APES. https://t.co/GrASrteo4j
— devin faraci (@devincf) August 28, 2016
* Replication projects have had a way of turning into train wrecks. When researchers tried to replicate 100 psychology experimentsfrom 2008, they interpreted just 39 of the attempts as successful. In the last few years, Perspectives on Psychological Science has been publishing “Registered Replication Reports,” the gold standard for this type of work, in which lots of different researchers try to re-create a single study so the data from their labs can be combined and analyzed in aggregate. Of the first four of these to be completed, three ended up in failure.
* Under pressure to perform, Silicon Valley champions are taking tiny hits of LSD before heading to work. Are they risking their health or optimising it? I reject the premise of the question.
* A special issue of Transatlantic devoted to “Exploiting Exploitation Cinema.”
* So last night, on a whim, I started collecting links to doctoral dissertations written by members of the House of Commons, and posting them on the Twitter.
* The Guardian reviews the new edition of Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the New Millennium.
* Missed this somehow in June: rumors of the four-point shot in the NBA. I’m not much of a sports person, but this fascinates me just as a lover of games.
* Le Guin honored by the Library of America (while still alive).
* King Camp Gillette introduced his safety razor, with disposable double-edge blades, around the turn of the 20th century. But before he was an inventor, Gillette was a starry-eyed utopian socialist. In 1894, he published “The Human Drift,” a book that, among other things, envisioned most of the population of North America living in a huge metropolis powered by Niagara Falls. Production would be fully centralized, making for the greatest efficiency, while all goods would be free to everyone. That’s the only way Gillette saw to ensure that the benefits of technological development would be shared. “No system can ever be a perfect system, and free from incentive for crime,” he wrote, employing a prescient metaphor, “until money and all representative value of material is swept from the face of the earth.” His blade was a model socialist innovation: Gillette replaced toilsome sharpening labor with the smallest, most easily produced part imaginable. The very existence of the Gillette Fusion is an insult to his memory.
* The Big List of Class Discussion Strategies.
* Soviet sci-fi movies in English online.
* Your one-shot comic of the week: Ark.
* And, finally, my story can be told.
Written by gerrycanavan
August 29, 2016 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, academic freedom, air conditioning, algorithms, Alice Sheldon, aliens, America, Ark, astronomy, at-risk students, autonomous robots, Barack Obama, basketball, Baton Rouge, beards, Big Data, Bill Clinton, BioDome, blogs, books, Bruce Lee, Captain America 3, cargo ships, Catholics, children's literature, Christianity, Chuck Tingle, cinema, Civil War, class discussion, class struggle, climate change, Colin Kaepernick, comics, content notes, Darwin, dissertations, Donald Trump, drones, drugs, ecology, elites, espionage, evolution, existential crisis, exploitation cinema, FAFSA, film, finally my story can be told, FOIA, four-point shot, games, general election 2016, Google, grad student nightmares, graduate student movements, graduate students, Hillary Clinton, How the University Works, institutionality, institutions, Italo Calvino, Jack Kirby, Japan, jet trains, John Pedestal, Kenneth Goldsmith, killer death robots, KKK, kung fu, labor, language, LEGO, Library of America, logistics, looksism, Louisiana, low-income students, LSD, Maine, maps, Mars, Marvel, medicine, Milwaukee, misogyny, monuments, my teaching empire, NASA, National Anthem, Native American issues, nature preserves, NBA, No Man's Sky, nostalgia, oil, open apple left, outer space, over-educated literary theory PhDs, overthinking it, pedagogy, pipelines, poetry, politics, polls, prison, prison-industrial complex, prisons, psychology, public health, public universities, quit your job, race, racism, razors, replication, Republicans, revenge, riots, Russia, safe spaces, sanctuaries, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, science fiction, secrets of my success, shaving, shipping, slavery, Soviet Union, sports, spying, Steve Bannon, teaching, teaching philosophies, teaching philosophy, Terminator, the Internet, The Onion, the sublime, the truth is out there, the tuition is too damn high, Thor, torture, trigger warnings, true crime, Tumblr, UFOs, unions, University of Chicago, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ursula Nordstrom, USSR, Vikings, welfare reform, what it is I think I'm doing, women, work
Sunday Links!
* With the newborn and the consequent sleep deprivation I’ve been in sort of a weird place mentally, but if you find yourself in a similar state of consciousness I can recommend Andy Weir’s The Martian, April Richardson’s Go Bayside! podcast, and Rachel and Miles X-plain the X-Men as just the thing. I’ve also been going through the Comedy Bang! Bang! DVD Season 1 and 2 extras, which are truly prodigious — essentially a few bonus weeks of the podcast hidden as episode commentaries. The Martian will be a movie in 2016 and I suspect it’ll be a good one.
* Marquette team heads to RoboCup — the World Cup for robots.
* Kacy Catanzaro winning American Ninja Warrior is the best thing I’ve seen in weeks.
* The Sawyer Seminar at UCR: “Alternative Futurisms,” which will launch in September 2015, will bring together African American, Latino, Native American, and Asian American scholars, artists and writers to examine the colonial roots and legacies of science fiction and the power of speculative fiction as a tool for social change.
* Cli-Fi watch: Mother Jones reviews Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future.
* Superpower as disability: Fantastic Four could be either really great or really, really awful.
* …a black superhero who just does the superhero thing of fighting criminals or anti-American spies or traditional bad guys can seem like a capitulation. Fighting against crime in the U.S. means, way too often, putting black men behind bars. Will a black Captain America serve as a kind of “post-racial” justification for that law-and-order logic? Or will he, instead, open up a space to question whether law, order, and superheroics are always, and for everyone, a good?
* Black Internationalism as a Critique of U.S. Foreign Policy.
* Today in police brutality: Man Dies After Being Put In Choke-Hold By NYPD.
* Federal Judge Blasts ATF For Luring Man With No Criminal Record Into Trafficking Cocaine.
* The tanks, which serve as the heart of the assault force, received an order to open fire at anything that moved. “Self-genocide” is not a thing. Unanimous consent. What if Iron Dome is a bluff?
* Twenty-five years ago today, a plane went down in Sioux City. Nobody was expected to survive. Somehow, 184 people did.
* Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann found that voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic disorders are shaped by local culture – in the United States, the voices are harsh and threatening; in Africa and India, they are more benign and playful.
* “People need to understand,” he says, “that there’s tons of money in nonprofits, first of all. Second, nonprofits can kind of become containers for for-profit organizations . . . and a lot of that is tax money going into rich people’s pockets.” Pushed into the marketplace, higher education managers pay themselves vast sums for wrecking one of the UK’s few globally respected sectors.
* Terminator: An Oral History.
* Results from a study published in the latest issue of Cognitive Science suggest that 5- and 6-year-old kids from religious backgrounds judge fact from fiction differently than those with non-religious upbringings.
* And is it possible that man was not meant to ingest infinite quantities of mozzarella sticks? Of course, Andy Daly was there first.
Written by gerrycanavan
July 20, 2014 at 9:00 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with academia, Afrofuturism, air travel, airplanes, all you can eat, America, American Ninja Warrior, Andy Daly, Andy Weir, apocalypse, austerity, baby brain, Barack Obama, Bitcoin, black superheroes, books, Captain America, climate change, comedy, Comedy Bang Bang, comics, Cthulhu, culture, digital currencies, disability, drill baby drill, dystopia, ecology, Fantastic Four, fantasy, film, free fire zones, futurity, Gaza, genocide, H.P. Lovecraft, Hollywood, How the University Works, indigenous futurism, Iron Dome, Israel, Kacy Catanzaro, kids today, Marquette, Mars, Marvel, mental illness, military-industrial complex, misogyny, money, neoliberalism, NYPD, oil, Palestine, pancakes, parenting, plane crashes, podcasts, police brutality, police state, police violence, prison, prison-industrial complex, privatize everything, psychology, religion, Review, robots, Russia, Saved by the Bell, schizophrenia, science fiction, self-genocide, sexism, Sioux City, superheroes, Terminator, terrorism, TGI Friday's, The Martian, the Senate, UC Riverside, Ukraine, unanimous consent, war huh good god y'all what is it good for? absolutely nothing say it again, war on drugs, war on education, war on terror, X-Men
All This Weekend’s Links at Half the Price
* Michael Lovell, Marquette, and Milwaukee. MU’s students are on board.
* Turns out academic freedom isn’t free: Michigan State University could risk losing $500,000 if it does not stop offering courses that allegedly promote unionization.
* “They call us professors, but they’re paying us at poverty levels,” she said. “I just want to make a living from a skill I’ve spent 30 years developing.”
* NCAA in Turmoil: Why UNC Can’t Get Past Its Fake Classes Scandal.
* In Silicon Valley there really is a class war going on, a wage-fixing cartel that’s pitting the one percent against everyone else.
* LAX Baggage Handlers Took Whatever They Wanted From Bags for Months. I’m actually pretty sure they stole our camera, which we haven’t seen since we left California.
* The typographical sublime: Switching from Times New Roman to Garamond could save the government almost half a billion dollars.
* End of an Internet Era: Television Without Pity Gets Shuttered. It’s Hard To Imagine The Internet Without Television Without Pity. Raised on Television without Pity. MetaFilter mourns. The real tragedy here is the absolutely unnecessary closing of the forums; there’s a valuable decade of Internet TV writing and fan commentary, lost overnight.
* Dialectics of Stephen Colbert: We Want To #CancelColbert. What We Can Learn From the Embarrassing #CancelColbert Shitstorm. A profile of Suey Park.
* In Praise of Odd Children’s Books.
* Facebook Is About to Lose 80% of Its Users, Study Says.
* If You Support The Death Penalty, You Are Probably White.
* Rebecca Schuman on The Most Important University in St Louis. More from the new, Serious™ Schuman: Save Fulbright!
* The Case for Making Revenge Porn a Federal Crime.
* Free speech having a tough time tonight: Arrest Climate-Change Deniers.
* io9 has a visual history of prosthetics.
* Unpaid Interns In New York City Are Now Protected From Sexual Harassment. Well, obviously, of course they would be, what could be more obvious — wait, now?
* Oh, America empire, you’re incorrigible! As our troops pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan, we’re abandoning fixers and translators to the dangerous countrymen who view them as traitors. Asylum in the U.S. could be their last hope. If only we’d let them in.
* Scott Walker Signs Early Voting Restrictions Making It Harder For Low-Income Voters To Vote.
* Wisconsin also having a tough time tonight: BP Admits To Spilling Even More Oil In Lake Michigan.
* Come back here, we’re not done getting bummed out yet: The Pacific Ocean Is Turning Sour Much Faster Than Expected, Study Shows. Texas Oil Spill Is Killing Birds, Threatening Fishing Industry.
* How The Justice System Is Rigged Against These Cheerleaders Suing The Raiders For Wage Theft. Federal Judge Tells Women Lawyers Not To Dress Like ‘An Ignorant Slut.’ Virtually the entire judiciary is made up of former prosecutors and corporate lawyers.
* Tumblr of the weekend: Shit Settlers Said.
* The 1897 Petition Against Annexation That More Than Half of All Native Hawaiians Signed.
* The ASA is now asking for $100,000 in donations to defend itself from attacks resulting in its decision about how to spend a few hundred. Well done, everyone!
* So old I can remember when teaching was a career. Standing Up to Testing. New York Schools Are the Nation’s Most Racially Segregated. And if you only count the best-performing schools, charter schools are doing great!
* This is a land of peace, love, justice, and no mercy: Shanesha Taylor, Homeless Single Mom, Arrested After Leaving Kids In Car While On Job Interview.
* A year to make a game, a weekend to rip it off.
* This is a generic brand video.
* And at least it’s almost all over for humanity: Crazy Stone computer Go program defeats Ishida Yoshio 9 dan with 4 stones.
Written by gerrycanavan
March 29, 2014 at 6:27 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with 2048, academia, academic freedom, adjunctification, adjuncts, America, American Studies, apps, artificial intelligence, austerity, Barack Obama, BDS, books, BP, brands, California, cartels, charter schools, cheerleaders, children's literature, class struggle, climate change, Colbert, college basketball, college sports, cyborgs, death penalty, denialism, Digital Dark Ages, Don't mention the war, ecology, empire, Facebook, fan communities, fan culture, fandom, fonts, free speech, Fulbright Program, games, Go, Hawaii, homelessness, How the University Works, Internet writing, internships, Iraq, Israel, judges, labor, Lake Michigan, LAX, Marquette, mass extinction, Michael Lovell, Michigan State University, Milwaukee, misogyny, NCAA, neoliberalism, New York, ocean acidification, oil, oil spills, Orientalism, Palestine, pedagogy, petitions, politics, polls, pornography, poverty, prosthetics, race, racism, revenge porn, Scott Walker, segregation, settler colonialism, sexism, sexual harassment, Silicon Valley, St. Louis, standardized testing, status update activism, Suey Park, teaching, television, Television without Pity, Terminator, Texas, the courts, the law, Threes, true crime, Twitter, UNC, unions, voter suppression, wage theft, wage-fixing, Wisconsin, work, workers' collectives
Placing a Group of Skilled Snipers to Hunt the Drone
Al-Qaeda’s list of 22 tips for dodging drone attacks – including at least one believed to originate with Osama bin Laden – has been found hidden inside a manila envelope in a building abandoned by Islamists in Mali.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 21, 2013 at 9:56 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with drones, Terminator, war on terror
Wednesday!
* It isn’t the law that is struggling to catch up to drone technology; it’s us. Like it or not, the NextGen computerized autonomous national airspace is coming. It’s not a joke, and it’s not science fiction. Coming to terms with that is important. Disbelief won’t help at this point. The coming shift in our national airspace will push our boundaries. We’ll be able to mount legal challenges against particularly egregious uses of the technology — it’s unlikely that the sheriff of Montgomery County, Texas, will get much mileage out of his wet dream of a remote-controlled aircraft armed with tear gas and rubber bullets — but we won’t be able to imagine every permutation this technology will take. This is going to be some Minority Report–level shit.
* James Cameron: Avatar was always imagined as a six-picture hexalogy. Stick around for a fun Doctor Who spoiler/rumor if that’s your thing.
* Rethinking depression in teenage girls: “Depression? Really? How About Anger and Powerlessness?”
* No! No! I won’t believe it! Military expert says there’s no way Batman’s TDKR ‘Bat’ could fly.
* Battle Royale is an obvious can’t-miss hit for a post-Hunger-Games, post-Walking-Dead TV landscape. Just about the only way it could miss is if network executives changed it so the kids weren’t killing each other, just beating each other up…
* And you can take it to the bank: Human immortality could be possible by 2045, say Russian scientists. Guaranteed!
Written by gerrycanavan
August 1, 2012 at 11:30 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with anger, Avatar, Barack Obama, Batman, Battle Royale, depression, Doctor Who, drones, feminism, futurity, girls, Hunger Games, immortality, interference from the suits, James Cameron, just make something new, longevity, military-industrial complex, Minority Report, misogyny, politics, powerlessness, science fiction, spoiler alert, Statue of Liberty, teenagers, television, Terminator, The Dark Knight Rises, Walking Dead, Weeping Angels, you and I are gonna live forever
Wednesday Night!
* Duke Lit is now advertising for a one-year postdoc in Marxist theory.
* Jim Henson, 1969: How to Make a Muppet. Also on Muppetwatch: A 1979 profile of Henson in anticipation of The Muppet Movie.
* The secret history of “Mahna Mahna”: “How a ditty from a soft-core Italian movie became the Muppets’ catchiest tune.”
* “Ninety-Nine Weeks”: an Occupy Wall Street fairy tale from Ursula K. Le Guin. Here’s another.
* More on the extraordinary syllabi of David Foster Wallace.
* Almost literally the least they could do: Davis Will Drop Charges Against, Pay Medical Bills of Pepper Spray Students.
* I’ve seen this movie: The Air Force “has asked industry to develop a new heat and motion sensor capable of detecting enemy gunfire from 25,000 feet over the battlefield — and then swiftly directing a bomb or missile onto the shooter.” I believe Terminator suggests the name HKs…
* The full congregation of Raleigh’s Pullen Memorial Baptist Church voted Sunday to prohibit the church pastor from legally marrying anyone until she can legally marry same-sex couples under North Carolina law.
* Michael Bailey and Forrest Maltzman say their poli-sci model shows the Affordable Care Act will be upheld. Scott Lemieux says there’s no reason to think they’ll confine themselves to precedent and that it still all comes down to what Anthony Kennedy has for breakfast.
* Mother Jones reads Newt Gingrich’s dissertation.
* Google greets Thanksgiving (outside the US) with the mother of all interactive doodles.
* Massachusetts becomes 16th state to protect transgender people from discrimination. Google benefits now include transgender employees.
* Honestly, anyone who invested a dime in Groupon should have their investing license taken away. This thing was barely ever a company.
* And speaking of obvious scams: Is a Law Degree a Good Investment Today?
Written by gerrycanavan
November 23, 2011 at 7:56 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with "Is Health Care Reform Constitutional?", Anthony Kennedy, colonialism, David Foster Wallace, dissertations, drones, Duke, gay rights, Google, Groupon, health care, Jim Henson, law school, legal realism, marriage equality, Marxism, Massachusetts, Muppets, my particular demographic, Newt Gingrich, North Carolina, Occupy Cal, Occupy Wall Street, pepper spray, police brutality, politics, pornography, science fiction, Stanislaw Lem, student movements, Supreme Court, syllabi, Terminator, the Congo, The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, transgender issues, UC Davis, Ursula K. Le Guin, white man's burden
God, It’s So Weird, Parts of What You’re Describing Are So Elegantly Simple and Confident and Then Other Parts Make Me Feel Like I’m Locked in an Elevator with a Spoiled, Unimaginative Child
Suggested Dialogue Revisions to Original Terminator for Special Edition, from Community creator Dan Harmon.
Written by gerrycanavan
February 13, 2011 at 1:17 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with community, Terminator
Sunday Night Lights
* The Wrong Side of the Heart: this weekend’s dose of vintage movie poster greatness.
* AskMetaFilter has all the huge-nerd podcasts I crave.
* Dr. Metzinger first proposes his thesis: there is no such thing as the self. The subjective sense of being a conscious person – the sense of being a self that is distinct from the body and present in a single, unified reality – is not a separate, coherent brain function but rather the result of many different systems running at the same time. I was telling you people this years ago!
* Four lesser-known members of the Fantastic Four. I’d never even heard of She-Thing.
* Pension war update: “…public employees and their dominance of blue states is going to be the biggest issue in this country for the next several years.”
* Marco Roth vs. the “neuronovel.”
The last dozen years or so have seen the emergence of a new strain within the Anglo-American novel. What has been variously referred to as the novel of consciousness or the psychological or confessional novel—the novel, at any rate, about the workings of a mind—has transformed itself into the neurological novel, wherein the mind becomes the brain. Since 1997, readers have encountered, in rough chronological order, Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (de Clérambault’s syndrome, complete with an appended case history by a fictional “presiding psychiatrist” and a useful bibliography), Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (Tourette’s syndrome), Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (autism), Richard Powers’s The Echomaker (facial agnosia, Capgras syndrome), McEwan again with Saturday (Huntington’s disease, as diagnosed by the neurosurgeon protagonist), Atmospheric Disturbances (Capgras syndrome again) by a medical school graduate, Rivka Galchen, and John Wray’s Lowboy (paranoid schizophrenia). And these are just a selection of recently published titles in “literary fiction.” There are also many recent genre novels, mostly thrillers, of amnesia, bipolar disorder, and multiple personality disorder. As young writers in Balzac walk around Paris pitching historical novels with titles like The Archer of Charles IX, in imitation of Walter Scott, today an aspiring novelist might seek his subject matter in a neglected corner or along some new frontier of neurology.
Via MeFi, which also links to the Jonah Lehrer’s response.
* And what Harlan Ellison makes, the world takes. Also via MeFi.
Written by gerrycanavan
January 2, 2011 at 10:51 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with brains, comics, Cormac McCarthy, Fantastic Four, good news for nerds, Harlan Ellison, movie posters, neuroscience, novels, pensions, plagiarism, podcasts, politics, science fiction, She-Thing, Terminator, the illusion of self, The Road, you don't exist
Pass. The. Bill. You. Idiots.
Krugman to House Democrats: Do the right thing. Bonus points to Matt Yglesias, who writes of the equally terrible Senate:
I was in the Russell Building yesterday and kind of wanted to run around the halls grabbing Democratic staffers and yelling at them, like Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2, “You’re already dead! Everybody dies!”
Written by gerrycanavan
January 22, 2010 at 10:45 am
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with health care, House of Representatives, idiots, politics, Terminator, the Senate
Thursday Night Links
* James Randi responds to the criticism he received yesterday for his stated climate change “skepticism.”
* The emissions cuts offered so far at the Copenhagen climate change summit would still lead to global temperatures rising by an average of 3°C, according to a confidential UN analysis obtained by the Guardian.
* The physics of space warfare.
* It turns out Joss Whedon significantly overbid for Terminator; James Cameron originally sold the franchise for a dollar.
* Avatar poised for a $200-million weekend.
* Point and counterpoint on Massachusetts as a model for health care reform.
Written by gerrycanavan
December 17, 2009 at 11:25 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with Avatar, climate change, Copenhagen, ecology, health care, James Cameron, James Randi, Joss Whedon, Massachusetts, nerd physics, outer space, politics, science fiction, skepticism, Terminator
Sunday Sunday
* The bizarre part is that the only people being asked to Seriously Question Their Motives and Practices, or who are facing scrutiny for what they did, are the climate scientists who just got robbed, even though there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that they have actually done anything clearly unethical. (The worst bit is the suggestion as to deleting emails, something that everyone concedes is pretty bad and nobody is defending, though there’s no proof anything was ever deleted.) More important, nothing in all this nonsense even approaches a challenge to the science that shows the reality of global climate change, at least to a reasonable person.
* The Gambler Who Blew $127 Million. (via Eric Barker)
* Also from Eric’s blog: The Rise and Fall of MySpace.
* Casino capitalism: the foolproof path to prosperity. Via Atrios.
* The mayor of Arlington, Tennessee, is today’s douchebag of liberty.
Russell Wiseman (R), the mayor of Arlington, Tenn., posted an item to his Facebook page with a theory about the timing. Wiseman wrote:
Ok, so, this is total crap, we sit the kids down to watch “The Charlie Brown Christmas Special” and our muslim [sic] president is there, what a load…..try to convince me that wasn’t done on purpose. Ask the man if he believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and he will give you a 10 minute disertation [sic] about it….w…hen [sic] the answer should simply be “yes”
This guy seriously believes the White House could have picked any date for the speech, but officials picked Tuesday because of an animated Christmas program.
The mayor added that the United States is now a “Muslim country,” and then pined for the days of yore. “[Y]ou know, our forefathers had it written in the original Constitution that ONLY property owners could vote, if that has [sic] stayed in there, things would be different,” Wiseman wrote.
Palin/Wiseman ’12?
* Another publication has realized that the problem is the Senate. Via Yglesias.
* The headline reads, “McG Announces Two More Terminator Movies, Reality May Have Other Plans.”
Written by gerrycanavan
December 6, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Posted in Look at what I found on the Internet
Tagged with Barack Obama, casinos, climate change, douchebags of liberty, ecology, film, gambling, health care, McG, MySpace, Peanuts, politics, Terminator, the CRU hack, the house always wins, the Senate
The World’s Most Perfect Comic?
Saw this in the Dawn Treader while waiting for Vu’s flight to get in, had to get it. Could this be the world’s most perfect comic? Superman vs. Terminator.
Written by gerrycanavan
October 8, 2009 at 11:59 pm
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged with Ann Arbor, comics, crossovers that just make sense, Superman, Terminator
T:SSC
Don’t give up hope for more Sarah Connor?
Written by gerrycanavan
September 26, 2009 at 10:16 pm
Posted in Uncategorized
Tagged with Terminator