That’s right, our glorious, slowly dying space program is officially 50 years old today. I think it’s cause for some celebration. As such, I’m officially holding a “Yay, our SP is 50” party over Superbowl. Who’s with me?
On a side note, here is a New Scientist article on this very subject, though they’re not offering to host a Superbowl party in Van Allen’s favor…
(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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6 Responses
What’s the superbowl?
Can’t you hold a chocolate party instead? They didn’t even have chocolate fountains when I held mine …
The Superbowl is an American football game that is generally won by the New England Patriots — and will be again in three more days.
Well, for a more unbiased approach:
Superbowl is the name given to the championship game between the two ‘conferences’ of American Football. Conferences could translate to ‘league’ too, I suppose. Basically all the teams in American Football are in one conference or the other and they all play to win their conference championship, and then the winners of said conferences go to the Superbowl to get what would be, basically, the biggest trophy.
The Patriots have won it a good portion of times, particularly in the last 10 years, but they certainly don’t have the most Superbowl wins. The 49ers I believe hold that trophy. The 49ers are also the team with the most wins and no losses. While they haven’t been to the Superbowl as many times as other teams, they do have a perfect Superbowl record.
Gah, on a side note, I agree, I have a feeling that the Patriots will win again this year. While I do think the Giants are a decent team, the Patriots are running on a 16 and 0 season (or 18 and 0 if you count playoffs) and the team is so well rounded and offensively powerful I don’t think the imperfect Giants have much of a shot.
I got bored after the word ‘football’ so I still don’t know what it is. However, I can safely say I don’t care.
Oh, and your football is just rugby for wimps. 😉
Way kewl on the Space Program! Yes to the chocolate party & I actaully experienced one once when we were on a cruise. There was a midnight Chocoholic Buffet 😛 And luckily they even had sugar-free since I am a diabetic.
Good memories! Which why do the Patriots need to win again?! I seem to cheer for the underdogs – Go Vikings! Opps, they didn’t make it at all, but hey I am hopeful for some year. So – Go Giants *LOL*
Football is an American love & we were proud to make 3rd in our Fantasy Football.