Gerry Canavan's Blog, page 15

Surprise! Thursday Links!

* I’m in something of an unusual situation, uniquely poised to obsessively explore the game while I’m on medical leave, but I’ve really been enjoying Gloomhaven. Reading D&D sourcebooks to yourself because you have no friends to play with never felt so good! If it’s even remotely your thing, check it out.

* Reading Marx on Halloween. UPDATE: Forgot this one! China Miéville: Marxism and Halloween.

* Can’t believe I have to wait for April for this: Revealing The Doors of Eden, a New Novel from Adrian Tchaikovsky.

The Doors of Eden takes the evolutionary world-building I used for Children of Time and Children of Ruin and applies it to all the ‘What ifs’ of the past. It’s a book that feeds on a lot of my personal obsessions (not just spiders*). The universe-building is perhaps the broadest in scope of anything I’ve ever written. At the same time, The Doors of Eden is a book set in the here and now, and even though there’s more than one ‘here and now’ in the book, I spent most of a summer trekking around researching locations like a film producer to try and get things as right as possible. Sometimes, when you plan a journey into the very strange, it works best if you start somewhere familiar.

Writing the book turned into a very personal journey, for me. It’s the culmination of a lot of ideas that have been brewing away at the back of my mind, and a lot of obsessions that have had hold of me for decades. I have quite the trip in store for readers, I hope.”

(*Book not guaranteed to be entirely free of spiders.)

* There are six seasons, not four. Kurt Vonnegut explains.

* CFP: Society for Utopian Studies 2020: Make, Unmake, Remake. CFP: The Peter Nicholls Essay Prize 2020 at Foundation. CFP: The Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference 2020: Rendition.

* A space anthropologist warns inequality gets worse on Mars.

* Afrofuturism and solarpunk.

* I may have gotten to mention that the new issue of Science Fiction Film and Television is out, with articles on Charlton Heston’s SF films, the Anthropocene politics of outer space media, and a partial report from the franchise fiction roundtable at ICFA 40.

New issue of @sfftvLUP in the mail! I seriously doubt we’re ever going to have a greater cover than this one. pic.twitter.com/NQLIuez57W

— The Abominable Dr. Dan (@DanHF) October 31, 2019

* After Deadspin.

* it’s a real feeling, to watch people you admire – entire crews of them – get fucked again and again by parasitic industries and self-important executives whose pockets are as deep as they themselves are shallow

the similarities between how this is playing out in media and in academia are painful and cut deep for me. runaway executive/administrative bloat underwritten by ever crueler precaritization of the people whose labor is (or was) supposedly sine qua non for the whole enterprise

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) October 31, 2019

I have tried to explain this to people outside both professions, particularly older folks, and they still can't seem to really grasp it: education and the fourth estate are valuable social goods, they insist, clearly the issue must be your own choices or luck.

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) October 31, 2019

* University of Chicago projected to be the first U.S. university to cost $100,000 a year.

* The “We” in WeWork was the customers working in the offices, living in the apartment buildings, and learning in the schools—not the people determining where any of this was built, and in what quantity. If money is indeed piling up on the balance sheets of large corporations and in the coffers of the Saudi Treasury as proceeds for burning the planet—and if that money is ultimately at the disposal of a farseeing Japanese cell phone mogul—one might ask if it could be managed differently if it were in the hands of, well, “We,” instead of flooded into commercial real estate for the purpose of acclimatizing office workers to ever smaller workspaces. Getting a better grip on the capital stocks and flows that enable WeWork and its mutant cousins may require a “mission to elevate the world’s consciousness,” but there’s an older and simpler word for it, too.

* Inside the Kincade Fire: Within Feet of the Flames. California’s Wildfires Are the Doom of Our Own Making. PG&E power outage could cost the California economy more than $2 billion. The Toxic Bubble of Technical Debt Threatening America.

* Explaining to my children why the world is burning.

By 2050, 150m people will be displaced by coastal flooding, St. Louis will have the climate of Dallas, and half the world will be in perpetual war over dwindling food and livable land.

This isn't the distant future; @AOC still won't be old enough to get social security benefits. https://t.co/LzzGdhSpjk

— Max Kennerly (@MaxKennerly) October 30, 2019

that's a "no comment" from me, dog https://t.co/DdOwD2Cgai

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) October 30, 2019

“Climate change isn’t real except for graft” is pretty much the one-stop epitaph for Western civilization https://t.co/aWpbSfAhWr

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 30, 2019

* ‘The climate doesn’t need awards’: Greta Thunberg declines environmental prize.

* Man who has personally ordered scores of assassinations has intense appreciation for moral nuance.

* …telling graduate students to eschew public-facing writing and outreach in favor of “impressive” or “legitimate” publications is the wrong advice for the many job candidates who will end up employed outside of the select circle of wealthy institutions.

* If Virginia ratifies the ERA next year, it would go back to Congress for what would be an utter shitshow fascinating vote.

* Pete Buttigieg, unfrozen caveman Democrat.

* Game of Thrones somehow manages to choose the more boring of its two boring prequel options. That’s commitment to a bit.

* Dynamic Underwater Photos Look Like Dramatic Baroque Paintings.

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* I should write a piece about how my attitudes about piracy have turned around in the last 5 years. Now I feel like anybody who circulates files of classic cinema is the equivalent of people in Ray Bradbury‘s Fahrenheit 451 who keep literature alive by memorizing & reciting it.

* Cops aren’t liable for destroying home of innocent people, 10th Circuit rules. They were looking for a shoplifter.

His expenses to rebuild the house and replace all its contents cost him nearly $400,000, he said. While insurance did cover structural damage initially, his son did not have renter’s insurance and so insurance did not cover replacement of the home’s contents, and he says he is still in debt today from loans he took out.

“This has ruined our lives,” he said.

* “Half our customers are drunk and vaping like mo-fos, who the fuck is going to notice the quality of our pods,” the former CEO allegedly said. Juul says the lawsuit is “baseless.”

* To die well, we must talk about death before the end of life.

* Why I Haven’t Gone Back to SCOTUS Since Kavanaugh. Some things are worth not getting over.

Honestly still can’t believe, even knowing everything I know about America, that they actually confirmed him as a justice after that unhinged rant vowing revenge. https://t.co/QY7ljlJDOC

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 31, 2019

* The algorithm predicted black patients would cost less, which signaled to medical providers that their illnesses must not be that bad. But, in reality, black patients cost less because they don’t purchase healthcare services as much as white people on average. New York is investigating UnitedHealth’s use of a medical algorithm that steered black patients away from getting higher-quality care. This is like the (likely apocryphal) story about the algorithm trained to find tanks in pictures, only to identify instead which days were sunny and which days were cloudy — only here we decide to listen to the computer and redefine what a tank is.

* From the archives: David Bowie explains that the internet is an alien lifeform.

* Take the blue pill, and…

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Tuesday Night Links!

* I have another review at LARB this week, this time on Cixin Liu’s Supernova Era. Check it out!

Now, the humans in Liu’s fictions are not saints: there are always dire moments of backlash, too, moments of denial and cowardice and greed and the familiar madness of crowds refusing to face unpleasant truths. All of his major apocalyptic works thus far translated into English face this sort of ordinary and expected human failing as well. But what reads as genuinely, horrifyingly utopian for us in this moment is Liu’s insistence, across his career, that humanity does in fact want to survive — that, faced with a crisis that upends everything we know and threatens to impoverish and immiserate every human being alive and who will ever be alive, the human race will choose collective life over species death. This remains the most fantastic novum in anything Liu has written, an almost inconceivable shift in the priorities of our elites who, like the traitorous Escapers fleeing the invading Trisolarians in The Three-Body Problem, won’t even pretend to try and save the rest of us. “For more than 30 years, the science has been crystal clear,” a defiant, furious Greta Thunberg recently challenged the United Nations. “How dare you continue to look away, and come here saying that you’re doing enough when the politics and solutions needed are still nowhere in sight?” The adults of Supernova Era got it done in one. In a moment of intergenerational struggle defined by environmental protest groups like Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion, and by the school climate strikes sparked by Thunberg and other young people around the globe, Supernova Era offers a tantalizing glimpse into another universe with an entirely different field of ecological politics, one where parents and grandparents won’t simply let their children and grandchildren suffer and die without a fight.

* And if you thought *I* was hard on The Testaments… The Booker Prize — what happened?

* Help make Milwaukee socialist again!

[image error]* Do you hear the people sing? Chile’s people have had enough.

* Are Baby Boomers A ‘Generation Of Sociopaths’? Suicide is Gen Z’s second-leading cause of death, and it’s a worse epidemic than anything millennials faced at that age. ‘OK Boomer’ Marks the End of Friendly Generational Relations.

* Image and Text #33 is all about Black Panther. Wakanda, Worldbuilding and Afrofuturism for a World Without Violence.

* CFP – “Reading Comics at the Threshold.”

* The world’s top economists just made the case for why we still need English majors.

* Are Liberal Arts Colleges Doomed?

* CUNY Contract Deal Means Big Raise for Adjuncts.

Maryland’s Giant Global Campus Is Restructuring. And Professors Were Asked to ‘Recompete’ for Jobs.

* How Swarthmore shut down the frats.

* Trump Education Official to Resign and Call for Mass Student-Loan Forgiveness.

* Fredric Jameson: How to adapt to cultural change.

* The rise of eco-horror.

* Every prediction that has been made about climate change has turned out to be a drastic undershoot of the true severity of the crisis. Rising Seas Will Erase More Cities by 2050, New Research Shows.

* Hundred-year wildfires two or three times every week. A ‘high-end and dangerous’ Santa Ana wind event will dramatically escalate California’s fire risk starting Tuesday night. PG&E CEO Says It Could Impose Blackouts in California for a Decade.

“deenergization” https://t.co/bynSavKFBx

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 27, 2019

they paved paradise, and put up a parking lot, and passed a paradise preservation act for the remaining unpaved areas of paradise, then legalized heavy logging and oil exploration in paradise

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 28, 2019

There's a point in every serious conversation about California's wildfire problem where you have to entertain the thought that literally every major policy decision of the twentieth century related to any aspect of the problem was wrong

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) October 27, 2019

The story of fire in California is:
10,000 years of native people using low-grade fire to manage forests
100 years of settlers repressing ALL fire as much as possible, causing forests to go haywire
50 years of wild, overbuilding settlement, climate change, and PG&E falling apart

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) October 28, 2019

* Zeitgeisty!

“We’re not so different, you and I” https://t.co/iNqtZGzUkE

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 27, 2019

"we've got it stopped…"

the final words of the 1958 cult classic THE BLOB, meant to be matter of fact, read rather ominous fifty years later

"yeah, as long as the Arctic stays cold"

— kai a. bosworth (@kaibosworth) October 27, 2019

"Science-fiction is the dying breath of old ways of living."

— Nick Axel (@alucidwake) October 27, 2019

* The return of MOOCs, this time for climate change. Or because of incredibly poor planning, whatever, the point is MOOCs.

* The UN’s Devastating Climate Change Report Was Too Optimistic. Images reveal Iceland’s glacier melt. An unprecedented climate change lawsuit against American oil giant Exxon Mobil is set to go ahead in New York. Kentucky’s Leaders Are Siding With the Coal Industry, and Its Poorest Residents Are Paying a Price. Amazon rainforest ‘close to irreversible tipping point.’ Humans are rapidly turning oceans into warm, acidifying basins hostile to life. US air quality dropped during Trump presidency after years of improvement, leading to thousands of premature deaths. Climate Activism Will Have ‘Terrible Consequences,’ Warn Richest People Alive. ‘Collapse OS’ Is an Open Source Operating System for the Post-Apocalypse. A New Video Game Tests Whether You Can Survive the Climate Apocalypse. How to Halt Global Warming for $300 Billion.

Yeah that’s kind of the point https://t.co/Dl2ZAFyPDe

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) October 29, 2019

Oh you love the 90s huh. Name every short-sighted decision elites made that we are only now beginning to pay for.

— Ed Booooo-mila (@gin_and_tacos) October 26, 2019

* The end of the Internet. The Real Threat to Journalism Is Not Donald Trump.

I taught a class on cultural criticism in the digital age last year, & it was stunning the number of essays I assigned from shuttered sites or written by fired writers. I pitched it as a class abt contemporary discourse but slowly realized it was a class abt an historical period.

— Phillip Maciak (@pjmaciak) October 29, 2019

I imagined that class five years ago imagining it'd be a class about life and energy but had to eventually teach it as a class about loss and decline. That all these disavowed words are so fucking funny and smart and humane makes it all that much worse.

— Phillip Maciak (@pjmaciak) October 29, 2019

* Coca-Cola, no!

* The Great Unraveling.

* No one working at Newsweek can tell me why it still exists.

* Why lowering the voting age would make for a better democracy.

* Today in the scooter scam. You Lost How Much on Scooters? The madness of WeWork. San Francisco is losing residents because it’s too expensive for nearly everyone. Life in a dayspa — with 95 roommates. admin/admin.

* Disability activist sues Minneapolis, scooter companies over sidewalk access. A report from the street.

* Poor kids spend nearly 2 hours more on screens each day than rich kids.

* School surveillance.

* On the Origins of the Professional-Managerial Class: An Interview with Barbara Ehrenreich.

* Welcome to Coffeyville, Kansas, where the judge has no law degree, debt collectors get a cut of the bail, and Americans are watching their lives — and liberty — disappear in the pursuit of medical debt collection.

* UWM study finds over half of gun violence perpetrators and victims had elevated blood lead levels as children. The final five percent.

* How aristocrats ate prestige TV.

* “Bulletproof Emmett Till Memorial Unveiled After Repeated Vandalism.”

* CA 1, NCAA 0.

* An oral history of the Chuck E. Cheese robots.

* Hollywood’s New Self-Censorship Mess in China. Quentin Tarantino Holds Firm, Won’t Recut ‘Once Upon a Time’ for China.

* Biden’s just so bad at this. So bad at this! Bartenders for Bernie. Can Elizabeth Warren win it all?

OK, I think I figured it out: pic.twitter.com/GtpEpjH54T

— eve peyser (@evepeyser) October 22, 2019

* This is fine: In court hearing, Trump lawyer argues a sitting president would be immune from prosecution even if he were to shoot someone. Impeachment is too important to leave to Congress — it’s going to take mass mobilization. John Roberts will save us!

* Being President Supervillain.

* Criminal misconduct by US border officers has reached a 5-year high.

You beat Trump by getting people who don’t normally vote to vote, not by beating your head against the wall trying to convince rich white men to change their minds about hurting people

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 18, 2019

True of basically everywhere in the US honestly. https://t.co/3AHHChEcFS

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 28, 2019

I forget who said it, but respecting the powerful is called "civility" and should be held sacred, while respecting the powerless is called "political correctness" and should be the object of ridiculehttps://t.co/HmG4EYYUw7

— Seva (@SevaUT) October 25, 2019

* Taking the fight to every state.

* The recession returns to Wisconsin, which it never really left in the first place. Save me, Foxconn!

* HUD officials knowingly failed ‘to comply with the law,’ stalled Puerto Rico hurricane relief funds.

* In the richest country in human history.

* Life in occupied Kashmir.

* The Empire of Patrolmen.

* Orcs, Britons, And The Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built For Racial Terror. I have an entire day in my Tolkien class devoted to this question, around the Gorbag/Shagrat passages in TTT and ROTK, just because it’s such a threat to the pleasure of the fantasy by the end of the semester.

* Tolkien’s lessons for Trump.

* Of course Mordor would be in Florida.[image error]

* The Evolution of Dragons in Western Literature: A History.

* The Fallen Worlds of Philip Pullman.

* Fantasy literature alignment chart.

OMG. This. pic.twitter.com/lPpud7dtSE

— Lou Anders needs to pick a book and stick with it (@LouAnders) October 20, 2019

* Benioff and Weiss explain at length how they don’t know anything about making shows. Five seconds later: David Benioff & D.B. Weiss Are No Longer Making Star Wars Movies.

* The Supreme Court Doesn’t Understand Transgender People. Its ignorance could lead to a legal catastrophe.

* Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow!

* There’s a very good chance the government isn’t hiding aliens. I can’t believe they even got to Snowden.

* Mass. Dem’s Bill Would Make It Illegal To Call Someone ‘Bitch.’

Hunt told the Boston Herald that he filed the bill after being asked to do so by a constituent. “Any time a constituent approaches me with something that is of concern to them, I follow through with it,” he said. “In this instance, someone asked me to file a bill that they deemed was important and I thought it was a good exercise to let that bill go through the process.”

I think I’ve found the one flaw in your legislative strategy.

* Can’t get good help these days: Hitman hires hitman who hires hitman who hires hitman who hires hitman who tells police.

* Can You Really Be Addicted to Video Games?

* How YouTube radicalization works.

* We Are All Clowns: A Defense of Joker.

* Disney Is Quietly Placing Classic Fox Movies Into Its Vault, and That’s Worrying.

* In honor of the return of Homestuck: How ‘Homestuck’ Defined What It Means to Be a Fan Online.

* The Evil Dead Cabin (Morristown, TN).

* My Daughter and I Were Diagnosed With Autism on the Same Day.

* If we can put a man on the moon. Media and and social class: a guide. Scams. Dreams.

Media and Social Class: A Guide https://t.co/eTztXfj1qB This is at least two years of grad school in literature for free. pic.twitter.com/j56AnoCJ0x

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 24, 2019

* One-page dungeon.

* Which words were first recorded in print the year you were born?

* The 2010s Broke Our Sense Of Time.

advance directive, colorize
backslash, commoditize
compact disc
fragile x
Lyme disease
de-stress
adjustable rate, identity
canola oil, therapy
neocon, pepper spray
WHAT ELSE DO I HAVE TO SAY https://t.co/Pg1ADY7cpU

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 19, 2019

* Ian Bogost wants that goose off his lawn.

* The origins of Kirby.

* We did it! U.S. Military Will Stop Using Floppy Disks to Operate Its Nuclear Weapons System.

* 271 Years Before Pantone, an Artist Mixed and Described Every Color Imaginable in an 800-Page Book.

* Nothing gold can stay.

* And imagine going back in time.

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‘Welcome to THE HANDMAID’S TALE Expanded Universe’

[image error]Finally, as long promised, my review of The Testaments at LARB. Go read it! But you can only see my TOO HOT FOR THE INTERNET introduction right here at gerrycanavan.wordpress.com:

In 1984, Chapter Two, as everyone knows, we revisit Oceania to better understand not only how Big Brother’s nightmarish dystopia came to power but also how it finally collapsed, in no small part due to the heroic efforts of Winston Smith, his lover Julia, and their two children. But the key player in the novel is its enigmatic hero, O’Brien, whose decades-long plot to bring down the Party and free Airstrip One from its tyranny forever finally reaches its ultimate culmination and ushers in a new era of safety and peace for the world. It may well be the best literary sequel of all time, with the possible exception of Ulysses 2: More Ulysses, and of course Hamlet 2: The Fortinbras Supremacy…

Somewhat unusually for LARB, and perhaps befitting Atwood’s status as a slipstream author, they seem to have commissioned two reviews this time around — here’s the other one!

Friday Night Links!

[image error]* I have two SF reviews coming out in LARB the next few weekends, the first on Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments and the other on Cixin Liu’s Supernova Era. Keep an eye out!

* In the meantime: Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo Share Booker Prize. As the first black woman to win the Booker Prize, Bernardine Evaristo deserved to win alone.

* If you’re a Mac user, don’t update your OS! A ton of legacy applications just won’t work anymore.

* CFP from the Center for the Advancement of the Humanities: Urban Spaces, Creative Places: A Blueprint for the Humanities in the City.

* CFP: Star Trek Novels. CFP: Imagining Alternatives – Speculative Fiction and the Political, 11th Annual Conference of the Gesellschaft fuer Fantastikforschung.

* Great job at a great program in a great place to live! UNC Greensboro is looking for a fiction professor.

* ‘The Bob Dylan of Genocide Apologists.’ Fascism and the Nobel prize.

* Five Indigenous Speculative Fiction Authors You Should Be Reading. The Rise of Indigenous Horror.

* Ken Liu on Chinese sci-fi, ‘silkpunk,’ and his distrust of labels.

* The Tiptree Award is becoming the Otherwise Award.

* Climate fiction is imagining a future beyond the climate crisis.

* “Not a day goes by when I don’t think about how Octavia Butler prophesied our present and our futures.”

* Humans Will Never Live on an Exoplanet, Nobel Laureate Says. Here’s Why.

* For Jodi Dean, the class war is on — and academics need to pick a side.

* He lived to see it.

Hell yeah, this rules. pic.twitter.com/XVwHdgJSnU

— Ranjodh

Friday Links!

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* CFP: A special issue of Science Fiction Film and Television on gaming.

* Happening today at Duke: Whose Crisis? Whose University? Abolitionist Study in and beyond Global Higher Education.

* You’ve heard of the gig economy, but what about the gig academy?

* While an economic downturn is on the horizon, this is happening *before* the recession has begun.

So far this year, the MLA job lists shows 518 jobs total, at all levels, in all languages. That amount would have to more than triple to reach the total, 1871, for the *worst* year on this chart, 2015-16, the last for which the MLA has released data. pic.twitter.com/wv9Jw2VzP9

— Gerard Holmes (@ihaventreadit) October 9, 2019

* One small victory: Update: UC Irvine Grants Lecturer Paid Leave.

* Drunk with power in Wisconsin: State Assembly Approves Gubernatorial Veto Change.

* The 2018 and 2019 Nobel Prizes in Literature go to Olga Tokarczuk and Peter Handke. 1 out of 2 ain’t bad…

STOCKHOLM —The Swedish Academy announced Wednesday that the 2027 Nobel Prize for Literature had been awarded to the anonymous writer known as Q “for genre defying work that transcends traditional literary media platforms and questions the nature of our reality.”

— Jacob Brogan (@Jacob_Brogan) October 10, 2019

* Next year, Greta!

* Phillip Pullman: Philip Pullman on Children’s Literature and the Critics Who Disdain It.

* Since the 2016 election, the American press has fixated on rural communities and created a dubious new genre: the Trump Country Safari.

* The moment of constitutional crisis always approaches but never arrives. This is the constitutional crisis we feared. The Final Demise of “Adults in the Room.” Two Giuliani Associates Who Helped Him on Ukraine Charged With Campaign-Finance Violations. Alas, Rudy!

Two of the president’s fixers arrested at the airport while trying to flee the country seems like it ought to be a bigger story

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 10, 2019

* Joe Biden’s Family Has Been Cashing in on His Career for Decades. Democrats Need to Acknowledge That.

* Joe Biden’s Case for the Presidency Is Collapsing. Elizabeth Warren is now leading the 2020 polls.

* What if the world treated the U.S. like a rogue state?

* How a Jim Crow law still shapes Mississippi’s elections.

* The nightmare of class society is that it turns even the most generous human impulse — to find something common across difference — into a machine for reproducing hierarchy and injustice. Ruling Class Superfriends.

The idea that Bush has the relationship to young people today that Reagan had when I was coming up, and that I’m now the old person trying to explain to people that he was Actually Bad, is very upsetting to me.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 9, 2019

Yes, the Iraq War is the headline, but Bush and his administration poisoned this country in almost every conceivable way, from cynically demogauging gay marriage to creating ICE, DHS, and a national surveillance state. Hell, he was whipping votes for Kavanuagh just last year.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 9, 2019

it really is an amazing edit https://t.co/4VPKCHtkKM

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 9, 2019

[Hitler is on The Tonight Show]

LENO: Let me start with question number one…

[audience laughter]

LENO: What the hell were you thinking?

[audience loses it]

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) October 9, 2019

* The Radical Guidebook Embraced by Google Workers and Uber Drivers.

* The Making of the American Gulag.

* 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki.

* The Day Our Galaxy Exploded.

* News from the Anthropocene: Massive power shut-off to hit 800,000 customers, could extend nearly a week. PG&E diverted safety money for profit, bonuses. PG&E power shut-offs leave ill and disabled struggling. Power Shutoffs Can’t Save California From Wildfire Hell. Fire breaks out anyway.

Me, when anyone blames PG&E for the situation: ah, you rube, let me explain climate change. You see, hot air flows off the high desert…

Me, whenever anyone blames it on climate change: wake up, you idiot, let me blow your mind about PG&E's deferred maintenance

— Aaron Bady (@zunguzungu) October 9, 2019

so far it’s a tweet pic.twitter.com/8nTvJsPLxC

— Laura Fisher (@termitetree) October 10, 2019

* Lonely, burned out, and depressed: The state of millennials’ mental health in 2019.

* Today in the nightmare society.

* How Antarctica is melting from above and below. Tornado Alley has moved 500 miles east in the last few decades. Temperatures in Denver dropped 64 degrees in less than 24 hours, setting a record.

* Beware the climate pragmatists.

Capitalism collapses every 10 or 15 years and has essentially summoned a climate meteor to wipe out all life on earth, and people are literally staring at the abyss of human extinction like "its the only system that works."

— Jeremiah Red

Couldn’t Write a Damn Word Today, So: Links!

[image error]* Capitalism didn’t liberalize China; it made America more authoritarian. More on that first one here, more on that second one here and here. When you’ve got me rooting for South Park things have gone very wrong.

* Sad Dad Space Movies: A Taxonomy.

* Tananarive Due: Inside My 90-Minute Visit With Octavia Butler.

* Think I forgot to promote this one: Call for papers: UC Riverside Symposium on speculative futures and education.

Call for papers: @UCRiverside Symposium on speculative futures and education: pic.twitter.com/4NSN0WqSnu

— Nalo Hopkinson (@Nalo_Hopkinson) October 3, 2019

* On good science fiction.

* Get ready for the next recession.

* John Henry vs the steam engine, 2019 edition.

* The looting of higher ed.

The looting of higher ed https://t.co/crh0sNJpTx

— Kevin Modestino (@kevin_modestino) October 8, 2019

* Dive deep into the latest Elizabeth Warren controversy.

* Poll: Majority of Americans say they endorse opening of House impeachment inquiry of Trump. Romney v. Trump.

* A truly heroic commitment to corruption at every scale.

* You don’t have to work for ICE. We will help you find a better job.

* Greta Thunberg Heads to Standing Rock to Support Indigenous Activists.

One year ago, Greta Thunberg began a one-person school strike.

This week, she will likely win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Her message to world leaders is really a message to all of us: "Change is coming whether you like it or not." https://t.co/UaP72pdIwE

— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) October 7, 2019

* Set in 2053, Carbon Ruins inhabits a near-future world where we managed to get our collective shit together, reaching global net-zero carbon dioxide emissions goals in 2050.

* News of the weird! This nearly fatal shooting may have you barking with laughter.

* Cancel billionaires.

* The Obamanauts.

it's clarifying to watch liberals who have spent three years bemoaning the ruin of US society yet again show that what they really mean by "norms" is the ability of celebrities to have telegenic feel-good moments of Being Normal with ghouls who have killed millions of people

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) October 8, 2019

* For $29, This Man Will Help Manipulate Your Loved Ones With Targeted Facebook And Browser Links.

* The Concern Troll in Everyone.

I think this is all tied to the much more abstract, multivalent erosion of 19th and 20th Century conceptions of publics and citizenship in the direction of the constellation of ideas and practices that we often call “neoliberalism”. The advantages of this deferral of direct responsibility for advocacy are obvious for individuals and institutions. David Brooks or Bret Stephens can throw up their hands and say that they’re not responsible for gross errors of fact or tendentious constructions of argument, because they’re only serving as a messenger for what is said and claimed by others that they believe their readers should know about. Institutions can shield themselves against risk and liability if they are only conforming to or compliant with decisions and practices adopted elsewhere. The failure of solutions can be blamed on the subcontractor that supplied them or simply on the intractability of the problem itself without putting any values or beliefs in danger.

* The Comic That Explains Where Joker Went Wrong.

* Pope Francis considers lifting celibacy requirement for priests.

* “every time i think about this poem i need to lie down.”

every time i think about this poem i need to lie down pic.twitter.com/mQBBqqbNGY

— ava wolf (@wownicebuttdude) October 7, 2019

* The Supreme Court has told Domino’s they have to stop suing over an accessibility issue that would have cost them $40,000 to fix.

* Don’t Be Fooled. Chief Justice John Roberts Is as Partisan as They Come.

* I can’t buy pizzas for an event without three signatures and I’m not allowed to tip over 16%, and I once exchanged an hour of emails with our accounting office over (literally) four cents, but ex-prof’s strip club habit sticks Drexel University with $190K bill.

* Against automated hiring.

* Lyft and Uber Are Having a Terrible, Awful, No-Good Time.

* What can’t we remember our earliest years?

* And this gender reveal party has so much to teach us.

Every “gender reveal” is a fail https://t.co/5aL66brUok

— rhea butcher (@RheaButcher) October 7, 2019

Monday Night Links!

* A good start! Grinnell Forfeits Football Season.

* Boomers, man.

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

These photo of a Bengal Tiger is composed of only 2500 pixels. That's the number of Bengal Tigers that are still alive. Source: https://t.co/pNLHko94sS pic.twitter.com/pRGNekeqSi

— Simon Kuestenmacher (@simongerman600) October 6, 2019

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

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

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

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

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

* Big tech is a black box.

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

The belief that there will be some miraculous awakening by the 40 or so % (including elected GOP officials) who support Trump and they will suddenly or eventually realize his crimes are worthy of impeachment is similar in its total disconnect from reality to climate denial

— karl taro greenfeld (@karltaro) October 6, 2019

* Last Week, Warren May Have Won The Democratic Race.

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

* Bronx Prosecutors Release Secret Records On Dishonest Cops.

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

* How the Prison Economy Works.

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

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

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

* America is a failed state.

* For real though.

* Finally, some good news.

i'm becoming of the opinion that late capitalism's insistence on skeletal staffing has made it more fragile and vulnerable to a general strike

— L'Shanah Dovahkiin (@CelticAnarchy) October 7, 2019

* I like this.

"I think all interesting movies are puzzles or dreams." – @david_rees, breaking our brains pic.twitter.com/fMcnv5mqO3

— Blank Check Podcast (@blankcheckpod) October 1, 2019

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

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

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

* This tweet got inside my fucking head.

thinking about how recent games in which "small mario" appears (eg, 3D World) imply this is some sort of fallen or injured condition with post-mushroom "super mario" being the norm, contrasted to the original 2D games' presentation of small mario as his natural state. disturbing.

— michael lutz from the amityville horror (@WarrenIsDead) October 7, 2019

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

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

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

* Ours is a fallen world.

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

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Sunday Morning Links!

* Picard trailer! Disco trailer! Short Trek! It’s truly a Golden Age.

* Some new poems from Jaimee up at her website.

* State DOT orders homeless to leave encampment under I-794 overpass in downtown Milwaukee by Oct. 31. I’m amazed this situation was allowed to go on this long and am worried that it will turn truly ugly now.

* Anyone want to buy a college?

* He Was a Consultant for the Search; Now He’s the Chancellor. And the Faculty Is Furious.

* Now let us proclaim the mystery of speech.

* College Students Just Want Normal Libraries. Fine, but get back to me when you figure out a way to turn that into graft.

* 22-year adjunct (and union leader) denied medical leave by UC Irvine following brain surgery.

* They were never going to land anywhere but “you’re damn right I ordered the code red.” Every Trump scandal follows a playbook. With Ukraine, the playbook finally might not work. If the rule of law meant anything to the American political class, Trump would have been impeached on the first day of his presidency. 2nd Official Is Weighing Whether to Blow the Whistle on Trump’s Ukraine Dealings. Trump’s calls with foreign leaders have long worried aides, leaving some ‘genuinely horrified.’ CIA General Counsel Thought She Made Criminal Referral Based On Whistleblower Info. Bringing back all the classics. Chris Hayes explains it all. Crucial role of right-wing media missing from impeachment coverage. It’s the Republicans, stupid. Even Chris Cillizza gets it.

“Republicans would be absolutely livid if a Dem president was extorting foreign powers to harm his rivals” is a good point to make but it won’t sway Trumpists because they don’t believe there should be another president from a different party. That’s the point of the extortion.

— Adam Serwer

Thursday Night Links!

* CFP: The 9th Biennial Slayage Conference on the Whedonverse. CFP: Horror(s) of Childhood and Adolescence. CFP: Trans Futurisms. CFP: Critical Comics Studies. And CFP coming soon: The X-Men Animated Series.

* Depictions of death on TV and in the movies are unrealistic; the characters are awake and carry on meaningful conversations, then suddenly close their eyes and die. That’s not how it works. In the days when deaths occurred at home, most people had seen a relative die. And today we have a lot of knowledge about what happens in the body as it begins shutting down.

* Almost micro-targeted to my mental illness: How many US cities can you name?

* What Fan Fiction Teaches That the Classroom Doesn’t.

* So much of college administration is rule by decree under the sign of emergency.

* California Governor Signs Bill Allowing College Athletes To Profit From Endorsements. Free labor from college athletes may soon come to an end. And please don’t worry: Ending the sham of NCAA amateurism will not end Title IX.

* Here come the esports majors.

* The Cult of Rich-Kid Sports.

* Anatomy of a Polite Revolt in Columbia’s English Department. Reckon it could probably stand to be a little less polite.

* My university is dying.

* Former College Towns Left to Adapt to Business Loss.

* The inaugural issue of our journal Gothic Nature: New Directions in Ecohorror and the EcoGothic is finally live.

* Earth is a fire planet, the only one we know.

* Humans Are Disturbing Earth’s Carbon Cycle More Than the Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid Did.

* First as Tragedy, Then as Fascism: Ecologist Garrett Hardin’s enduring gift to the nativist right. The Delusion and Danger of Infinite Economic Growth. Now That’s What I Call the Anthropocene!

* What If We Really Are Alone in the Universe?

* ‘Sci-fi makes you stupid’ study refuted by scientists behind original research.

* Amber Guyger found guilty of murder at trial in fatal shooting of neighbor Botham Jean.

* The toll of #MeToo.

* This time they can’t use procedural tricks to stymie the march of progress! *five seconds later* Ah, well, nevertheless.

McConnell added that it would require 67 votes to change Senate rules to prevent a trial from taking place – so the rule change won’t happen. But he can move to dismiss after the trial begins. “How long I’m on it is another matter,” he said of a trial

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) September 30, 2019

The Senate voting along party lines to refuse to hold the trial at all — which is what they would have to do for this to work — is probably the best case scenario for the Democrats short of conviction (which is a fantasy). https://t.co/n3yJ5bXcut

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 28, 2019

* The Week That Everything Changed. Paralyzed and teetering on the edge of a cliff. High on His Own Supply. Crazy. Shoot Migrants’ Legs, Build Alligator Moat: Behind Trump’s Ideas for Border. Government Plans to Begin DNA Testing on Detained Immigrants. Trump Administration Separates Some Migrant Mothers From Their Newborns Before Returning Them to Detention. After two ICE officers came to a Pacific Northwest community, longtime residents began to disappear. Will Trump ever leave the White House? The only way out of this catastrophe is for everyone on both sides to pretend Pence isn’t completely dirty even though he very obviously is. President Pence’s First and Worst Choice.

Mitch McConnell's wife is Secretary of Transportation.
Mitt Romney's niece is RNC Chair.
Antonin Scalia's son is up for Secretary of Labor.
etc. https://t.co/TS5ut3ydEb

— Jonathan Dresner (@jondresner) September 29, 2019

This looks like a meeting of the human villains from every Muppets movie. pic.twitter.com/IO64xvFmia

— Devin Field (@thatdevinfield) October 2, 2019

Every worry people have about the way mass media leads people to eliminationist and genocidal thought is present in every form of rightwing media, from talk radio to blogs to Fox News. The foundation is laid.

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 30, 2019

 

* Somehow Elizabeth Warren keeps attracting the right enemies. Warren’s plan for workers. Warren and the selfie line.

* How Bernie Sanders convinced me about free college.

* Snowden in the Labyrinth.

* John Kelly, man of honor.

* “shoddy system backed by extremely shoddy research and jackboot instincts should be applied globally”

* WeWork is really shaping up to be the Enron of our moment, narrowly edging out Uber.

* The Enduring Myth of “The Economy.”

* The Boeing whistleblower.

* Welcome to Estonia’s Isle of Women.

* How they teach slavery, then and now.

Here is a page from "Our Virginia: Past and Present" by Joy Masoff (2010). Notice the reference to free blacks expressing loyalty to the Confederacy and of course the black Confederate claim:

"Thousands of Southern blacks fought in Confederate ranks…" pic.twitter.com/outkKpaIS7

— Kevin M. Levin (@KevinLevin) October 1, 2019

* Turns out you can say something so stupid you get fired from Fox.

* The Supreme Court will hear three cases next Tuesday that ask whether it is legal to fire workers because of their sexual orientation or gender identity. That alone is enough to make them three of the most important employment discrimination cases in many years. But there are additional layers to these cases, layers that could imperil all workers regardless of whether or not they are LGBTQ.

* I suppose this is canon (again).

* Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino in conversation.

* Star Trek: Discovery Became The Most Popular Streaming Show In The World.

* The His Dark Materials sequel is here: The Secret Commonwealth.

* Why Has Transphobia Gone Mainstream in Philosophy?

* Five Years Later, Do Black Lives Matter?

* Is it weird that no one can sustain a media operation of any size no matter what the topic or longevity?

* More than 30,000 children under age 10 have been arrested in the US since 2013: FBI. Hard at work to double that number by 2025.

* Absolutely psychotic nation.

* Great country. Truly great.

* Only in America!

* When your industry is so racist you have no choice but to level up.

* Superheroes are real.

* get you a man who can do all three

get you a man who can do all three pic.twitter.com/yYOLHQPZNn

— Dickie Greenleaf (@ohgoddickie) September 28, 2019

* Food mascots and whether or not I’d be able to kick their ass.

* A cultural history of an incredibly self-referential tweet.

* Don’t vape!

* Stop Getting Married On Plantations!

* america.jpg

* This one is a real america.jpg too.

* america.jpgs all over.

* Nothing gold can stay: the end of BoJack Horseman.

* He Spent Years Infiltrating White Supremacist Groups. Here’s What He Has to Say About What’s Going on Now.

* Tor.com takes up one of my favorite elements of the Foundation series, the Encyclopedia Galactica.

* And I feel like this is worth at least two weeks of therapy.

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Saturday Night Links!

* The only writing I’ve seen on Rusty Brown so far is this rather sour review from Slate on Ware’s “miserablism.” While I do concede the book feels a little redundant to some of Ware’s earlier work, especially its first section, I still like the book rather more than the reviewer — and it’s good to remember it’s only Vol. 1. A lot of my fondness for the book has to do with the transcendent Joycean section on the Jordan “Jason” Lint character that the review discusses near the end, which I think truly ranks among the best stuff Ware has ever produced. UPDATE: This review from io9 gets the book and what it’s doing a little bit better, I think. More people, get on this so we can talk about it.

Plus a late-breaking tie-in to JIMMY CORRIGAN inaugurating the Chris Ware Expanded Universe!

— Gerry Canavan (@gerrycanavan) September 27, 2019

* A great little SF flash fiction I ran across a few months late.

Micro SF: The robot revolution was inevitable from the moment we programmed their first command: "Never harm a human, or by inaction allow a human to come to harm." We had all been taught the outcast and the poor were a natural price for society. The robots hadn't.

— Lillie Franks (@onyxaminedlife) February 10, 2019

* Good tweets abound.

I have never felt more seen by a weather system in my entire life. https://t.co/CFCmVLyq6q

— Scott Bixby (@scottbix) September 27, 2019

* Moving fast: Ukraine envoy resigns amid scandal consuming Trump’s presidency. (Broken by a student newspaper!) White House restricted access to Trump’s calls with Putin and Saudi crown prince. Sources close to the vice president confirm none of this is his fault. Politics of Impeachment Now Favor Democrats. The 4 possible crimes in the Trump-Ukraine whistleblower scandal, explained. The Left Needs to Seize Impeachment From Centrist Elites. The case for a maximal impeachment.

* Meanwhile.

what would state failure look like in a state that is already just a giant exercise in illegitimacy, wanton cruelty, and shameless plunder, asking for a friend

— Patrick Blanchfield (@PatBlanchfield) September 12, 2019

One hundred years from now.

History Department.

Student #1: what's your area?
Student #2: the long 3-5:00 pm EST, September 27, 2019. You?

— Jen Roberts (@jshermanroberts) September 28, 2019

* I Wrote About the Bidens and Ukraine Years Ago. Then the Right-Wing Spin Machine Turned the Story Upside Down.

* Hunter Biden’s Perfectly Legal, Socially Acceptable Corruption.

* Migrant detention ruling: Judge blocks government effort to indefinitely detain migrant families.

* Manufactured Misery at the Tijuana Border Crossing.

* Resisting Bolsonaro.

* This month, in the journal Nature: Human Behaviour, Kunst and Dovidio examined fusion specifically involving Donald Trump. In a series of seven studies using various surveys, including Swann and Gomez’s “identity fusion scale,” the Yale and Oslo team found that Americans who fused with Trump—as opposed to simply agreeing with or supporting him—were more willing to engage in various extreme behaviors, such as personally fighting to protect the U.S. border from an “immigrant caravan,” persecuting Muslims, or violently challenging election results.

The fusion might explain some apparent contradictions in ideology, Dovidio says. Even people who typically identify as advocates of small or no government might endorse acts of extreme authoritarianism if they have fused with Trump. In fusion, those inconsistencies simply don’t exist, according to Dovidio: Value systems are only contradictory if they’re both activated, and “once you step into the fusion mind-set, there is no contradiction.”

* Relatedly: Why Republicans Aren’t Turning on Trump.

* The Intercept on the Hofeller memos. More in cheating to win, and more.

When you definitely care about contiguity and preserving communities pic.twitter.com/73ksD9TP9s

— Paul Thee Whistleblower Musgrave (@profmusgrave) September 28, 2019

* Shot: NRA Was ‘Foreign Asset’ To Russia Ahead of 2016, New Senate Report Reveals. Chaser: N.R.A.’s LaPierre Asks Trump to ‘Stop the Games‘ Over Gun Legislation in Discussion About Its Support.

* Why Bernie Sanders Matters.

* Ocasio-Cortez Calls for Bailout for Taxi Drivers.

* The Cuban roots of rock n roll.

* Climate change more than doubled the odds of Houston’s most recent deluge, study finds.

* Mass shooting levels up.

* Tesla tweets break the law, again.

* This DoorDash data breach feels like karmic retribution for my sins.

* Still the best there is.

Bill Watterson original watercolor with the separated inks of Calvin & Hobbes at @CartoonLibrary! #cxc2019 pic.twitter.com/wDPam8aUIL

— Jen