October 1, 2008

Update On Me

World in the Satin Bag

Reading Time

…because I’m really so obsessed with my self-importance that I must update you all on what’s going on with my life.

Actually, this is more so all you readers out there don’t think I’ve died or been kidnapped by aliens or Sasquatch or even, heaven forbid, the chupacabra. So what’s going on:

I’ve moved, successfully. I no longer live in the hell hole I was in before, my new landlord is actually pretty cool and really nice, and it’s freaking quiet as hell up here. I now live in the woods, as strange as that might sound, and, well, I like it. I come from a wooded area anyway (Placerville), but what makes Felton (where I live now) better is that it isn’t as hot. True, it gets warm up here (I think the hottest thus far has been in the 80s), but because we’re relatively close to the ocean it won’t maintain high temperatures for long and won’t have the peaks like Placerville or Sacramento. So, lots of good things here. Plus, it’s really easy to get to Santa Cruz from up here.
I’ve started school (well, I started on Friday, but so be it). It’s actually a lot more insane than I expected. My grad course is…terrifying, but at the same time challenging. I’m confused right now, but one of my professors is really happy for me and thinks I’ll do well in it. This is something I’m not very used to, perhaps because I grew up with some sort of issue with detaching myself from my family. I don’t know why I was like that, or why I still am, but I’ve never felt comfortable with my family giving me compliments and this has moved in the opposite direction to people who are friends or acquaintances. So, to be told by my professor that I’m a good writer, that I’m intelligent and destined for graduate school and great things is really surprising and wonderful and a lot of things all at once.
Moving on, I have a lot of work to do for school…
The Gaylactic Spectrum Awards are coming to a close soon, so I will be reading like mad over the next few days to catch up.
I am hoping to join the staff of a magazine run by UCSC, probably fiction editor or something else. It’s pending at this point.
I’m applying for an undergraduate research grant and have to have the proposal written in about two weeks so I can go over it with my professor.

I think that’s about all. What all that means above is that there might be a severe reduction in posting on WISB for at least two or three weeks, maybe longer. With that in mind, I would love to bring in more guest bloggers. If you’re interested, let me know. Seriously. I’d like to keep this thing running, but something has to be put to the side so I don’t explode, and it will be the blog for a short time due to school being far too important (sorry if this upsets you, but this blog is not what is going to allow me to get a good job in the future, as much as I love this thing).
I will continue to post, but it might be less than three or four times a week, depending on my time.

So, anyone want to be a guest blogger?

(Don’t click the read more, there isn’t any more after this!)

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

January 18, 2025 No Comments

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.

Update On Me

Reading Time

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