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 Election: My Late Thoughts (In Case You Care)
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My original intention was to do a long post about what exactly went wrong for Democrats, with bullet points and the like laid out and organized appropriately. But then I realized that doing that would mean this post would be extraordinarily long, and unnecessarily so. Besides, if you want to see some interesting opinions on the election, Scalzi has fairly detailed ones here.
But I do want to throw out my two cents, in contracted form, for those that actually care about my political opinions. Considering the outcome, I am not surprised. Democrats got exactly what they deserved. I hate saying it, but it’s true. That’s not to say that they haven’t done anything good since taking control of the Presidency, the House, and the Senate. They have, albeit not to the extent many of us had hoped, but they’ve also taken an extraordinary amount of power and squandered it by trying to appease an opposition who publicly declared that they were essentially going to be the party of obstruction (anything Obama was pretty much not a-ok with them). Democrats allowed Republicans and Tea Baggers to control the dialogue and turn public opinion around based on false information and half-truths, and the result was exactly what I thought would happen: Democrats would lose power.
At the same time, though, the election didn’t go as poorly as I had thought it would. Democrats
barely control the Senate, which means that even if a Republican were our President, hardly any major Republican policies woiuld make it through (assuming the remaining blue senators have the spine to stand up for Americans over corporate interests). There’s a glimmer of hope there, and maybe Democrats will have learned a lesson about what happens when you don’t control the dialogue and point out your opposition’s lies.
So, on the one hand, I’m disappointed. Despite pulling in over 800,000 jobs this year (paltry as it may be compared to the 8 million lost) and the announcement that the recession is actually over (which is different than saying that the economy has fully recovered), people decided that the party that claimed to want to change things was better than the party that said the same thing two years before with an actual plan of change, but who didn’t do that at all. The fact that Republicans are essentially running on an economic platform that prizes trickle-down economics hasn’t registered with many voters, perhaps because we constantly hear about how great the system is without also paying attention to the fact that it doesn’t work. It sucks, but I also understand it.
There’s good news, though. Several Tea Bagger crazies lost their races (like O’Donnell, who lost by 17% to Coons). Amendment 62 in Colorado was shot down something awful (71% against) and almost 75% supported providing tax benefits for military service men and women in Florida, which is pretty damn awesome in my book. The one thing the election reminded me of is that there are things that we can agree on (like benefits for soldiers, etc.). So, it’s not all bad, and you better bet that I’m going to latch onto the good as things go quickly into the toilet.
So, that’s how I view the election. What about you?
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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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