I’m not sure what is going on with Blogger right now, but there are some weird errors happening in regards to my expanded posts. Not sure what, but just a warning that if you’re reading the site from the main page, some things might look weird. I’m working on it.
(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… ↩
Dr. Shaun Duke © 2010 - 2025. All Rights Reserved.
6 Responses
Did it delete my very important comment before you were able to read it? Oh well. I’ll just say it again:
GRRM should be on the list.
Before Croggon, I might add.
Before the world.
But since you’re so mindblowingly convinced that GRRM is not awesome enough, I’ll go research those books you pulled up and reluctantly help you avoid reading my favorite author ever.
Because I’m nice.
I got everyone’s messages, but I lost them when I had to fix some things. I apologize for that. But I did get the messages.
And it’s not that I don’t want to read GRRM, it’s that right now, I don’t have the time to. There’s some news coming about that to explain why my time has become even more strained.
No time, no want — it’s the same thing.
You’re mixing up your priorities. 😛
How long does it take you to read a book, anyway? (Because if it takes you two weeks to read 800 pages, I guess I would be a bit more understanding.)
Not the same thing. I have 43 books or so left on my “to review” list, and now that I have a new obligation, which I will be putting up here at some point, that’s adding about 20 more books that I have a limited time to read. I have obligations that come first. GRRM is on my “to read” list. I just haven’t gotten there yet.
And right now I’m fixing how I use my time so I read faster and write more.
-sigh-
This indefinite postponement does not make me happy. I ought to postpone learning Summon the Worms indefinitely. Especially since I can’t wrap my head around the second set of eight measures.
Angry, angry song.
I’m just posting again to tell you that I didn’t mean that last comment as a threat. It does have a sort of threatful feeling to it, but I don’t want you to feel threatened.
I just went and recorded what I have so far, and it sounded so pretty that I think I’ll skip the problematic sections for now.