It was raining all day and my backpack leaked…now my autographed, personalized advanced copy of The Dead & the Gone by Susan Beth Pfeffer is ruined and the copy of The Awakened Mage by Karen Miller, which SQT sent me is almost in little pieces from the water damage. I’m absolutely livid…literally, my entire week has just gone to crap…I’d curse right now, but this isn’t that kind of blog…
GAH!
(Don’t click the read more, there isn’t any more after this)
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:
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:
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… ↩
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4 Responses
BUT You also got into the Sci Fi class today! 🙂
Yeah, but that signed book was really important to me :(. She personalized it for me! it’s not like a “oh hey, thanks for reading, signed me”, it was a real little note in it and now the book is ruined :(. I’m so upset. It’s not just the whole book is ruined, it’s partly because they are important books…I hate ruining books to begin with…
Sweet on on Sci-fi class! Sad on the book …
Hmm … I believe I mentioned my brother is a huger reader. He recently sent my mom & I “The Secret” which is about The Law of Attraction. You’ll find lots on it when ya google it … anyhow, however crazy or cheesy it sounds I’ve seen it work in my life before I even heard about.
Be passionate that you’ll receive another signed copy in time. It’ll happen.
K- there’s my over the top faith but it doesn’t hurt anything to remain positive *Smiles*
Well, I’m always passionate about reading and writing :P. Which is exactly why I’m going to go do some writing.