August 30, 2007

Official Notice of Nothing Whatsoever

World in the Satin Bag

Reading Time

Alright all, I’ve sat around arguing with myself for the past week and a half now about whether to jump to WP or not. SQT has given me some great advice on what I could do. As of this moment I am doing nothing whatsoever. I’ve searched the net for an easy template to fiddle with that has a built in top bar (which you apparently can have with Blogger and which I can actually create alternate blogger accounts to go with those links), but quite honestly, it’s all a lot of work I’m not willing to do for a blog, at least not right now with my schedule and with all that is going on.
So I have some questions.
Is anyone really all that bothered with the layout now? Are there things you would like to see improved? These are serious questions. It won’t hurt my feelings if you mention what you don’t like. In fact, I would appreciate it if someone said something
One thing I was considering is using a 3 column version of this particular template, but at the same time I think such a template would be rather cluttered. Another thing I’m considering is trying to figure how to stretch the header bar and the section where all the post text shows up across the left side so it is somewhat larger. I don’t know how to do that, but maybe someone else does. What about a different template that is a 3 column? Would 3 column with small left and right columns and a larger text section look okay? My hope is to at least make this blog look more original. I don’t want to have a template a million other people have. So, what are you thoughts?

In other news the TW Anthology is technically coming to a close. I’ve accepted 3 fiction submissions–all rather good I think–and 5 poems–which were phenomenal poems to be honest and were instant acceptances without even an iota of thought. The deadline obviously is right around the corner. Yes, there is a possibility that I will be extending the deadline to a later date. However, this is pending what happens over this weekend, obviously.

I’m also currently reading Crystal Rain by Tobia Buckell and will finish that this weekend so I can get to Ragamuffin. I’ll be doing all book reviews at SQT’s review blog. I’ve done one review there already. It’s for Spin State by Chris Moriarty. Check it out here! I will keep everyone informed of my reviews as they come available.

So, for now, that’s it. More blog posts will come this weekend. I’ve got some links buried in my bookmarks to share. Also I have two chapters due of WISB to finish it out. Hopefully I can manage it.

Anyway!

2 Responses

Alex says:

August 30, 2007 at 7:15 am

I wish i was better at HTML and stuff, rather than just having a base knowledge lol.
I feel the site is pretty nice considering how bad it could be, sometimes the buttons and widgets look a bit weird, but that tends to be because they are of vastly different sizes so you can’t really do anything…well i guess you could like organize them in size or something…
but anyway, overall i like the site. it is genuinely well set out, with nice quick links (despite them being in that wacky MS word style oragnization, so they are different sizes)
…hrm…
no i don’t think there is anything else. i guess you could try the three column template, i don’t know how it would look until you tried it…and thats all!

Good luck with all this.

Reply
gogogo27 says:

September 12, 2007 at 11:38 am

HELLO,my friend nice to meet you

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Shaun Duke

Shaun Duke is an aspiring writer, a reviewer, and an academic. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Digital Rhetoric and Writing at Bemidji State University. He received his PhD in English from the University of Florida and studies science fiction, postcolonialism, digital fan cultures, and digital rhetoric.

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A Reading List of Dystopian Fiction and Relevant Texts (Apropos of Nothing in Particular)

January 22, 2025 No Comments

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 bound to be texts I have forgotten or texts you think folks should read that are not listed. Feel free to make your own list and tell me about it OR leave a comment. I’ll add things I’ve missed! Anywhoodles. Here goes:

Duke’s Best EDM Tracks of 2024

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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 full playlist is available on Tidal proper (which has a free version just like Spotify does). For whatever reason, the embedded playlist breaks the page, and so I’ve opted to link to it here and at the bottom of this post. Embeds are weird. Or you can pull songs into your preferred listening app. It’s up to you. Some caveats before we begin:

2025: The Year of Something

January 9, 2025 No Comments

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, California ablaze with a horrendous and large wildfire, right wing thinktanks developing plans to out and attack Wikipedia editors as any fascist-friendly organization would do, Meta rolling out and rolling back GenAI profiles on its platforms, and, just yesterday, the same Meta announcing sweeping changes to its moderation policies that, in a charitable reading, encourage hate-based harassment and abuse of vulnerable populations, promotion and support for disinformation, and other problems, all of which are so profound that people are talking about a mass exodus from the platform to…somewhere. It’s that last thing that brings me back to the blog today. Since the takeover at Twitter, social networks have been in a state of chaos. Platforms have risen and fallen — or only risen so much — and nothing I would call stability has formed. Years ago, I (and many others far more popular than me) remarked that we’ve ceded the territory of self-owned or small-scale third party spaces for massive third party platforms where we have minimal to no control or say and which can be stripped away in a tech-scale heartbeat. By putting all our ducks into a bin of unstable chaos, we’re also expending our time and energy on something that won’t last, requiring us to expend more time and energy finding alternatives, rebuilding communities, and then repeating the process again. In the present environment, that’s impossible to ignore.1 This is all rather reductive, but this post is not the place to talk about all the ways that social networks have impacted control over our own spaces and narratives. Another time, perhaps. I similarly don’t have space to talk about the fact that some of the platforms we currently have, however functional they may be, have placed many of us in a moral quagmire, as in the case of Meta’s recent moderation changes. Another time… ↩

Dr. Shaun Duke, Professional Nerd

Editor. Writer. Professor. Host.

Official Notice of Nothing Whatsoever

Reading Time

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