Professor, Writing, Editor, Podcaster, Streamer
Yesterday, SF/F fan/YouTuber Erin Underwood posted a “GenAI open letter” on File770. By this point in the “discourse,” you’d have to be living on the Moon without an Internet connection to not understand just how much the SF/F/H community despises GenAI as an avenue for creative function. However, you’d have to be a moral coward to understand this fact and not meaningfully engage with any of the…
I love Mac & Me. No, really. I love it. Yeah, I know. It has been pilloried and ripped to shreds countless times. We covered it on Torture Cinema. Paul Rudd has made a joke about it for years (the Rudd Roll, if you will). And I will even admit that it is a ridiculous film that by most standards would be considered legitimate “trash.” But I love it nonetheless, so much so that I appeared on Fine…
Sometime near the end of the Spring semester, I decided it was time to take another crack and reorganizing my life. I’ve gone through years of on again / off again burnout, some of it my own fault (I’m disorganized and try to do too much) and some of it a consequence of things about which I have no control (my former university essentially bankrupted itself, forcing me to find a new job in my…
Why would someone make a list of important and interesting works of dystopian fiction? Or a suggested reading list of works that are relevant to those dystopian works? There is absolutely no reason other than raw interest. There’s nothing going on to compel this. There is nothing in particular one making such a list would hope you’d learn. The lists below are not an exhaustive list. There are…
And so it came to pass that I finished up my annual Best of EDM [Insert Year Here] lists. I used to do these on Spotify before switching to Tidal, and I continued doing them on Tidal because I listen to an absurd amount of EDM and like keeping track of the tunes I love the most. Below, you will find a Tidal playlist that should be public. You can listen to the first 50 tracks right here, but the…
We’re nine days into 2025, and it’s already full of exhausting levels of controversy before we’ve even had a turnover in power in my home country of the United States. We’ve seen resignations of world leaders, wars continuing and getting worse and worse (you know where), the owner of Twitter continuing his tirade of lunacy and demonstrating why the billionaire class is not to be revered,…
It has been an inordinate amount of time since I last posted. It’s been a busy year. New job incoming. New move incoming. Family is growing. Life is wild! Speaking of all those changes, I’m presently offering up for sale over 1500 books from my extensive collection. We’re downsizing because I can’t possibly read all of these AND we need to save up some money for the cost of moving and other family…
Turns out I’m going to be at a convention this weekend! Specifically, CONvergence 2023 (July 6-9). Naturally, I’m going to be on a bunch of things for this event. Lots and lots of things. I’ve taken a screenshot of my list of panels for this convention. You can also find full details about these and other panels on the convention schedule. If you will be in the area, feel free to say hello!…
Some of you may know that I have been working on this silly project called The Histories on and off for a while now. For those not familiar with it, I’ll just point you to the very accurate description on the wiki. This project is now closing in on 30,000 words, and it features content spanning centuries, numerous real and tru-real subjects and peoples, and events both grand and minor (many of…
(See Update notes before the list!) Fun fact: when a major social media network is bought by a billionaire who has no idea how to manage a social media network, one of the predictable consequences is that said social media network might stop working as expected. And so here we are in May 2023 with Twitter’s new API changes rippling through the app and service industry like a tornado of stupidity.…
Starting now, I’m campaigning to get at least 100 people to buy an entry in The Histories so I can buy a new computer. That’s 100 people sending $10 or more to my Ko-Fi or PayPal OR joining my Patreon at the same level. The Histories is my quirky encyclopedia project (now a wiki) wherein I write absolutely true short histories about real people. Lots of folks have already been included in the…
The title says it all. Mostly. It doesn’t tell you why I have decided to put together a ranking of every James Bond theme song. I could tell you that there are great reasons for this, but I would be lying. The real reason: I’ve been watching and re-watching James Bond movies on and off for years, both as a kind of weird comfort watching and because the culture critic in me wants to understand…
Every once in a while, fandom is beset upon by a series of somewhat aggressive arguments about the function of accuracy in film/tv adaptations. The best of these follow my own path, which involves assessing the work on its own terms before going back to look at how it functions as an adaptation. The worst of these, however, fall into a familiar trap of damnation by comparison — typically by…
Over the past week, I’ve been thinking a lot about why Twitter Blue has not been the success its new owner had hoped for. While subscription numbers are hard to assess, Endgadget reported that as late as mid-January, Blue had only 290,000 subscribers worldwide, which doesn’t come close to Musk’s demand that the company get half of its revenue from subscriptions. Using absurdly basic math, you’d…
For folks who follow me here on this blog object, below is my current schedule of events at this year’s Worldcon! You can find the program guide online here. There is a lot of great stuff on the program, including stuff I worked on as academic head! 😀 Do with this knowledge what you will :): Thursday, September 1 11:30 AM: SF Scholarship for Fans 5:30 PM: Integrity vs. Money: The Platforming of…