Posts Tagged ‘trailers’
Christmas Eve Eve Links
* I was on On Point on NPR last week to talk about Star Wars. How to tell if someone read the EU novels. What We Talk About When We Talk about Star Wars. Medieval Star Wars. Smash the Force. Humorless Marxist Reviews: The Force Awakens. Starkiller Base: The Contractor Memos. Star Wars as Pastiche. “We now have something like proof that life for the average citizen in the Star Wars universe would have been better off if the rebellion had failed.” The Force Awakens as Jedi rewrite. Star Wars and the monomyth of Silicon Valley. George Lucas’s Secret Weapon. The only element that actually got me excited about what another galaxy might look and feel like was Rey’s instant bread. We Need to Make Room For This Gingerbread Darth Vader in the Smithsonian. This Lifesize BB-8 Cake Is Almost Too Beautiful To Eat. ‘Star Wars,’ if it were directed by Ken Burns. #WheresRey. An inversion of stakes so monstrous that it makes the film actually despicable. Please Stop Spreading This Nonsense that Rey From Star Wars Is a “Mary Sue.” Anyway, it did okay. And from the archives: “Hobbits in Space,” 1977.
* Another classic 1980s property gets a dark, gritty reboot.
* MLA Watch: 10 Years Gone But Change Goes On: Octavia E. Butler’s Public Legacy.
* A nine-month, non-tenure position teaching “What Is The Good Life?” to up to six hundred students. I’m not sure I know what the good life is but I think I can rule out at least one thing.
* Here’s Why the SpaceX Rocket Landing Is Such a Big Deal.
* What It’s Like to Be Noam Chomsky’s Assistant.
* In short, Orcs aren’t monsters. We are.
* Better Management Through Belles Lettres.
* Simon Pegg ‘Didn’t Love’ the ‘Star Trek Beyond’ Trailer, Asks Fans to ‘Hang in There.’
* “yes Virginia, there is a left-wing reform movement.”
* World’s largest Star Wars cosplay association says new Star Wars villains are not evil enough.
* Marquette falls behind its peer institutions.
* That’s right. The same educational policies that are pushing academic goals down to ever earlier levels seem to be contributing to—while at the same time obscuring—the fact that young children are gaining fewer skills, not more.
* Would you support or oppose bombing Agrabah?
* Racebending Hermione, now canon.
* Historians often undermine the hopes that activists live on.
* The Star Wars Holiday Special Was The Worst Thing on Television Ever. Look for it on How Did This Get Made? this week.
* Immediately greenlit: Quentin Tarantino Almost Made A Luke Cage Movie And Wants To Create His Own Superhero.
* And I say teach the controversy: ‘Bleeding’ Communion Wafer Caused By Mold, Not A Miracle.
Tuesday Links!
* CFP: Palgrave Macmillan’s Studies in Science and Popular Culture.
* “If time is money, then sleep is theft.”
* Life in the 21st Century, Part One: Reporters From Nevada’s Largest Newspaper Demand To Know Who Owns Their Company.
* And Part Two: Threats Made To Spoil Star Wars: The Force Awakens Unless Demands Are Met. The Chrome Anti-Star-Wars-Spoiler Extension Will Be With You, Always. (It actually pings the first link, but I think it was just seeing the words “Star Wars” and “spoil” in close proximity.)
* In Flint, Michigan, there’s so much lead in children’s blood that a state of emergency is declared.
* Why today’s long STEM postdoc positions are effectively anti-mother.
* While we all take courses “outside” our field at some point, we generally sort ourselves into two groups pretty early: people who study American literature and people who study British literature. And, by the end of graduate school, we have become people who teach Introduction to American Literature and people who teach Introduction to British Literature. Finally, we become people who apply for jobs in American literature and British literature.
* Tracy even sent us a certified letter demanding proof that Noah once lived, that we were his parents, and that we were the rightful owner of his photographic image. We found this so outrageous and unsettling that we filed a police report for harassment. Once Tracy realized we would not respond, he subjected us to ridicule and contempt on his blog, boasting to his readers that the “unfulfilled request” was “noteworthy” because we had used copyright claims to “thwart continued research of the Sandy Hook massacre event.” More here.
* The sad economics of internet fame.
* The Chicago Teachers Union has authorized a strike.
* Here’s What We Can Piece Together About the Plot of Star Trek Beyond From the Trailer.
* More movie trailers! Synchronicity! High Rise!
* Emory Students Want Professors Evaluated on Number of Microaggressions They Commit.
* Josh and Jessica review “self defense” under Common Law and the Model Penal Code in analyzing whether Han Solo was legally justified in shooting Greedo first in the original Star Wars (Episode IV).
* The Star Wars bit part actors who are now more popular than ever.
* “We must get to Mars before World War Three kicks off.” Well there’s a rallying cry!
* And enjoy it: it’s the last good day to be a Star Wars fan.
Thursday Morning Links
* This is not an SF postdoc per se, but Liverpool has a tremendous SF archive and it would be a great opportunity for an SF scholar.
* Some impressive student journalism from Marquette undergrads: “Marquette’s reporting to the federal government misses just less than half of sexual assaults on campus.”
* Really interesting piece on how not to build a Star Wars MMORG. MetaFilter mostly hated it, but I thought the idea of limiting the Jedi to a minigame where you inevitably get hunted down and murdered by Darth Vader was brilliant.
* Louisiana State University on the brink. More here and here. This really is the end of the university system — or at least tenure — in America. I can’t believe it’s happening so quickly.
* I mean, the LSU thing is so terrible I can barely even be bothered to get upset about the ASU MOOCs.
* One of the Original X-Men Is Gay, And It Matters More Than You Think. It’s a nice piece by Rachel Eddidin and a bummer that it’s at playboy.com. I’m amazed that they don’t maintain a SFW skin of their site for prose writing that goes viral.
* Tell Us About the First Time You Realized Dudes Were Checking You Out.
* Fugitive Turns Himself In After 40 Years So He Can Get Health Care.
* The rise of zero-tolerance policies strips school officials of the ability to exercise common sense.
* How to think about the risk of autism.
* Clickhole’s Oral History of Mad Men.
* The disturbing world of bootleg Disney’s Frozen games.
* Star Trek 3 is apparently Star Trek Beyond, and Idris Elba is the villain. I’m okay with the title — I like the ethos if not the continued insistence on reading “trek” as a verb –but wish they could do one that doesn’t have a “villain” for a change.
* The good news is: this civilization is over. And everybody knows it. And the good news is: we can all start building another one, here in the ruins, and out of pieces of the old one.
* DC is going to try to attract girl readers of comics with a special Super Hero Universe Designed Just For Girls, where, I presume, sex and sexual violence are somewhat less of an overriding focus.
* Pseudoscience in the Witness Box: The FBI faked an entire field of forensic science.
* DID YOU KNOW that academic departments use curricular requirements to encourage enrollment in courses that don’t just automatically fill by themselves? It’s true!
* The Story of Class Struggle, America’s Most Popular Marxist Board Game.
* And from the genius behind the art in Braid and one of my absolute favorite web comics of all time, A Lesson Is Learned but the Damage is Irreversible, comes Zelda pastiche Second Quest. Man I miss that web comic.
Sunday Night Links! Probably Too Many!
* Upcoming appearances: I’ll be speaking at the Environments & Societies workshop at UC Davis next Wednesday. And of course we’ll be debating whether Harry Potter is a dystopia (it is) this Wednesday here at Marquette.
* This is nice: Green Planets is a finalist for the ASLE book prize.
* CFP: The Contemporary: Culture in the Twenty-First Century.
* CFP: Jim Gordon as Batman is dumb.
* The Dolphin Trainer Who Loved Dolphins Too Much.
* The cult of the Ph.D. I suppose I’m a hopeless curmudgeon on this at this point, but I just don’t see how any attempt to reform graduate schools can ignore the fact that “the primary, overarching purpose of doctoral programs is to produce professors.” Alt-ac can save a few, but it can’t save everyone, or even most.
* Everything We Learned About The Force Awakens At Star Wars Celebration. Look, I’m not made of stone.
* And then there was (sigh) DC. Double sigh.
* There still aren’t any states where women earn as much as men.
* Did Yoda And Obi-Wan Screw Princess Leia Over?
But in choosing a hero to defeat Vader, they sent Luke to Dagobah, not Leia. They sent the whiny uneducated hick whose greatest ambition until very recently had been to *join the Empire* instead of the smart, sophisticated, and well-educated woman with the political connections and Rebel cred?
It was only the last time I watched Return of the Jedi that I finally realized “that boy is our last hope / no, there is another” refers to Anakin, not Leia. So I’m pretty on board with this, especially now that the possibly exculpatory Expanded Universe context has been retconned out of existence.
* Citi Economist Says It Might Be Time to Abolish Cash. This is a truly stunning document: the argument is that we need to abolish cash because otherwise bankers won’t be able to force everybody to accept negative interest rates.
* New from the new TNR: We’re Checking the Wrong Privilege.
* America’s wealth grew by 60 percent in the past six years, by over $30 trillion. In approximately the same time, the number of homeless children has also grown by 60 percent.
* 155,000 New York kids boycott standardized tests.
* Preserving the Ghastly Inventory of Auschwitz.
It is a moral stance with specific curatorial challenges. It means restoring the crumbling brick barracks where Jews and some others were interned without rebuilding those barracks, lest they take on the appearance of a historical replica. It means reinforcing the moss-covered pile of rubble that is the gas chamber at Birkenau, the extermination camp a few miles away, a structure that the Nazis blew up in their retreat. It means protecting that rubble from water seeping in from the adjacent ponds where the ashes of the dead were dumped.
And it means deploying conservators to preserve an inventory that includes more than a ton of human hair; 110,000 shoes; 3,800 suitcases; 470 prostheses and orthopedic braces; more than 88 pounds of eyeglasses; hundreds of empty canisters of Zyklon B poison pellets; patented metal piping and showerheads for the gas chambers; hundreds of hairbrushes and toothbrushes; 379 striped uniforms; 246 prayer shawls; more than 12,000 pots and pans carried by Jews who believed that they were simply bound for resettlement; and some 750 feet of SS documents — hygiene records, telegrams, architectural blueprints and other evidence of the bureaucracy of genocide — as well as thousands of memoirs by survivors.
* There’s jobs, there’s dirty jobs, and then there’s being Joseph Goebbels’s copyright lawyer.
* Ewald Engelen, a professor of finance and geography at UvA who spoke about the perils of the financialization of higher education at the Maagdenhuis occupation, explained in a coauthored article, published in 2014, how rendementsdenken became the ruling logic – and logic of rule – at his university. After a 1995 decision transferring public ownership of real estate to universities like UvA, he and colleagues argued, education and research considerations started taking a backseat to commercial concerns regarding real estate planning. The state’s retreat from management of real estate demanded tighter account of “costs, profits, assets and liabilities” at the university, setting “in motion a process of internal reorganization to produce the transparent cash flow metrics that were required to service the rapidly growing real estate debt,” the academics wrote.
* Neither the Brostrom or the Campos side focuses on the fact that privatization increases expenses as well as revenues. In reality, privatization forces the mission creep of multiplying activities, “businesses,” funding streams, capital projects and other debt-funded investments, which increase all sorts of non-educational costs and also administration. Private partnerships, sponsors, vendor relations, and so on bring in new money but also cost money, require institutional subsidies, and in many cases lose money for the university.
* The Education Department Is Working On A Process For Forgiving Student Loans.
* Sweet Briar didn’t die, it was put down. If he puts his mind to it, Jamshed Bharucha has the ability to effectively destroy whatever future remains for Cooper Union.
* I really wish we could get famous people to stop talking this way about autism.
* Towards a disability version of the Bechdel Test.
1) There’s a disabled character visible2) Who wants something, and tries to get it,3) Other than a) Death, b) Cure, or c) Revenge.
* Cuomo’s master plan to turn SUNY into a startup factory has created 76 jobs.
* Large Pile Of Cash Announces US Presidency Bid.
* The BBC has adapted The Left Hand of Darkness.
* I’m very much in favor of “they” as a generic singular pronoun, but “they are,” please, not “they is.”
* Private Company Conspired With Police To Hold Poor People For Ransom, Lawsuit Charges.
* Ex-Drug Cop: Drug Squad Stole Cash And Planted Drugs Too Many Times To Count.
* Only for certain values of “justice”: The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.
* It seems like the deputy isn’t the person who should be charged with Eric Harris’s murder. This person never should have been working as a cop, for myriad reasons.
* The only way this can work: California Assembly panel approves legislation preventing police from viewing body camera footage.
* White parents in North Carolina are using charter schools to secede from the education system.
* Racism in schools is pushing more black families to homeschool their children.
* All 3 Oregon Basketball Players Suspended Over Sexual Assault Find New Teams.
* Shocked, shocked: Leaked videos suggest Chevron cover-up of Amazon pollution.
* The Atlantic covers graduate student unionization.
* Los Angeles school district demands multi-million dollar refund from Apple.
* Centuries of Italian History Are Unearthed in Quest to Fix Toilet.
* “All I know is the end is coming for all of us.”
* On not hate-watching, but hope-watching.
* George R. R. Martin: Once More, into the Kennels.
* The Atlanta teachers’ trial: A perfect example of America’s broken justice system.
* How Israel Hid Its Secret Nuclear Weapons Program.
* The Quest to Boot Old Hickory Off the $20.
* Why the Vatican’s crackdown on nuns ended happily. Pope Francis’s Populist War on the Devil.
* Latchkey children age restrictions by state. Wisconsin, you’re probably asleep at the switch here. But Illinois, you guys relax.
* A Scan Of 100,000 Galaxies Shows No Sign Of Alien Mega-Civilizations. Okay, but let’s scan the next 900,000 just to be sure.
* That aliens would have imperial ambitions is taken as natural. Far from being the historical outcome of a specific organization of capital in the latter half of the second millennium, these signatories assume that the ideology of capitalist imperialism is inevitable across the galaxy. To be fair, though, the Fermi Paradox is a “it just takes one” claim, not a “all societies are alike” claim.
* If you’re so smart, why aren’t you terrified all the time?
* Chase nightmares with behind-the-scenes photos from Return To Oz.
* The Photo Hitler Doesn’t Want You to See.
* More on how Game of Thrones deviates from the books. And a fun flashback: The first pilot for Game of Thrones was so bad HBO almost passed on the entire series.
* It’s almost like Batman didn’t think this thing through.
* Dumb, but maybe my favorite Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal of all time.
* And teach the controversy: Tim Goodman says the Waitress arc on Mad Men might not be stupid and pointless.
Gerry Canavan 