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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The Michio Kaku Meme: Thoughts on the World of Science Fiction
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Over and Big Think, Michio Kaku has posted a bunch of questions he wants fans to answer for a project he’s working on. I don’t know what the project is, but if Michio Kaku is involved, then it’s bound to be awesome. So, considering that his questions are blog worthy, I thought I’d start a little meme. If you’d like to participate, all you have to do is steal the questions for yourself and answer them. Make sure to link here, and, if you want, post the link over at Big Think so Mr. Kaku can see what you wrote. Simple enough, right?
Here we go:
Which ideas from Science Fiction would you most like to see become reality and why?
This question is kind of enormous. There are a lot of ideas that I want to see become a reality, but putting it all here would take up far too much space. So, I’m going to narrow it to three:
I want to see the stars and other planets in my lifetime. I can’t do that when it takes longer than a single human lifetime to get to the nearest star. Just imagine seeing other planets and maybe finding a habitable one. It’d be nothing short of amazing.
In science fiction, you sometimes see futures where we’ve cured most of the major human ailments, or, at the very least, have come up with extremely effective ways to fight off cancer and so on. For me, this is a must have, since I’m a cancer survivor and have an unreasonable amount of compassion for people who are suffering diseases and ailments that we should have cures or reasonably effective treatments for. Sadly, we seem more interested in spending money to build things to blow one another up than to find cures or improve food production to combat starvation, etc.
Maybe I’m stupid for wanting this. We’ve seen so many movies in which robots rise up and try to take over or exterminate us. Yet, I can’t help wanting truly self-aware, human-like robots in this world. Having robot friends and companions, playing robot games, and all of that sounds like great fun to me. Maybe if we’re smart and design them just the right way, and treat them appropriately, we won’t have to worry about all of that death and destruction stuff. Maybe…
What is your favorite scene from a Science Fiction movie?
The entire sequence in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi from the moment the rebel fleet appears above Endor to the destruction of the second Death Star. I remember watching that scene with awe when I was younger. It’s visually gorgeous and it’s just freaking cool. Say what you will about Ewoks, you all know the fight was entertaining. And how about that space battle? That’s the one big difference between the originals and the prequels for me. In the new films, the space battles just aren’t as impressive. They’re CGed and seem too fake to me; I think they’re a mark of how George Lucas has fallen into the CG trap with directors like Michael Bay. But the originals were just amazing. Yes, the visuals are flawed, and obviously so, but they are still so much more “real” than anything else. The miniatures used are beautiful.
Besides, the ending of Return of the Jedi is quite powerful, if you ask me.
Who is your favorite Science Fiction character and why?
That’s an impossible question to answer. It doesn’t matter who I pick, I’m leaving someone out that deserves to be mentioned. So, hopefully people will forgive me if I play the exclusionary type and pick Captain Malcolm Reynolds from Firefly. He’s witty, gruff, and almost everything a good spaceship captain should be.
Plus, he’s poetic. See for yourself:
What is your favorite Science Fiction device, machine or weapon?
For very personal reasons, the hypospray needle-less vaccine gizmo from Star Trek. I hate needles something awful. I can deal with being stabbed by them, but there’s no reason for us to still have needles for administering vaccines and medicines. Where are my hypospray things? Hmm? Where?
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A Reading List of Dystopian Fiction and Relevant Texts (Apropos of Nothing in Particular)
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:
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Duke’s Best EDM Tracks of 2024
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:
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2025: The Year of Something
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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