All the details are below (what I’m doing, why I need to do it, what happened, etc.). Read through or skip right to the end for info about the cool painting John Ward is putting up for auction to help me out or other ways to donate (and some perks for doing so).
What is it?
An attempt to raise $482 $306 to replace my laptop without taking out another student loan. I already have $30,000 in student loans for my B.A. and part of my M.A. The only way I can replace my laptop in a timely manner is to take out another loan, or crowd-fund.
John Ward, Mike Reeves-McMillan, and Alison Marlowe were kind enough to suggest I try crowd-funding so I can keep doing what I do. I am eternally grateful for their support.
Why do you need a laptop?
Much of what I do involves being mobile. While I can do most of that work from home on my desktop, it does severely limit me, as I cannot take notes in real time, record podcasts, etc. when I am not at home. It comes down to what enables me to do my PhD and “hobby” work at optimum efficiency. A laptop lets me do it all in one unit.
The big issue is that I have my PhD exams this coming spring, which means I have to get a replacement ASAP.
What happened?
Unfortunately, what happened is more my fault than anything else. I made the mistake of leaving a glass of water too close to my laptop and my new cat (10 minutes before I decided to keep him) knocked it over while I was in the bathroom. After several unsuccessful attempts to fix the laptop, I came to the conclusion that it had died. Luckily, I did not lose any relevant work (Dropbox), but I did learn a valuable lesson.
How do I help?
There are two ways you can help:
1) You can donate via Paypal using the my email — arconna[at]yahoo[dot]com (see below for a perk for donating)
2) You can head over to John Ward’s page and bid on his amazing zombie painting, which he has kindly offered up to help me out. Details for the auction will be located on that page.
To sweeten the auction deal (for me, really), Mike Reeves-McMillan has offered to match the auction up to $250, which is incredible.
What are those perks you keep babbling about?
Here’s Captain America trying to explain all of this in typical Captain America fashion:
Perk #1: Those who you follow my podcasts will know that my friend and I do a special segment for The Skiffy and Fanty Show called “Torture Cinema,” in which we review bad science fiction and fantasy movies (sometimes books) while drinking alcohol. Anyone who donates $50 or more (including via the auction) will get to pick a movie for us to watch starting in August. No voting. You get to be dictator for the day.
There are only two rules:
1) the film must be SF/F (broadly defined)
2) it must be something we haven’t reviewed yet. You can find the list of previous Tortures here.
Perk #2: I’m giving away a small collection of short stories for donations $10 and up (whether direct to me or through John’s zombie painting auction). The stories will include:
–“Burned by Sol’s Rain” (high-octane military SF involving time dilation and human/machine hybrids, among other things)
–“Irlgem” (sword and sorcery story about a female knight and a murder and a dangerous magic item)
–“Dear [Redacted]” (a humorous letter explaining why a planet has been marked for extermination, more or less)
–“Interstellar Realty” (a humorous far future tale about customer service, real estate, mortgage payments, and robotic dogs)
Perk #3 (alternate to #1): If you’d like to torture me in a more direct way, I will read the first chapter of any crappy SF/F book of your choice. It will be on video, and it will involve drinking. Yes, I am aware this may give me a brain disease, but sometimes pleasing others is worth it. Same donation level as #1.
Perk #4: Anyone who donates (or has donated) $20 or more will receive a copy of Crux’s upcoming novel at release. The novel is based on urban legends from the Elkhorn, Wisconsin. Sounds pretty interesting to me.
Is that all?
For now. If you’ve got other ideas, such as forcing me to read from a really awful book while doing an impression (a bad impression), I’m not against the idea. You just have to let me know. As long as it’s reasonable, I’ll do it for $50. Call it whoring myself out for your entertainment, only I’ll have my clothes on and we won’t be in a cheap pay-by-the-hour hotel.
If you have any questions, let me know. And feel free to share the word!
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.
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… ↩
The Magic Crowd-Funding-a-Laptop Project
Reading Time
From Google+:
All the details are below (what I’m doing, why I need to do it, what happened, etc.). Read through or skip right to the end for info about the cool painting John Ward is putting up for auction to help me out or other ways to donate (and some perks for doing so).
What is it?
An attempt to raise
$482$306 to replace my laptop without taking out another student loan. I already have $30,000 in student loans for my B.A. and part of my M.A. The only way I can replace my laptop in a timely manner is to take out another loan, or crowd-fund.John Ward, Mike Reeves-McMillan, and Alison Marlowe were kind enough to suggest I try crowd-funding so I can keep doing what I do. I am eternally grateful for their support.
Why do you need a laptop?
Much of what I do involves being mobile. While I can do most of that work from home on my desktop, it does severely limit me, as I cannot take notes in real time, record podcasts, etc. when I am not at home. It comes down to what enables me to do my PhD and “hobby” work at optimum efficiency. A laptop lets me do it all in one unit.
The big issue is that I have my PhD exams this coming spring, which means I have to get a replacement ASAP.
What happened?
Unfortunately, what happened is more my fault than anything else. I made the mistake of leaving a glass of water too close to my laptop and my new cat (10 minutes before I decided to keep him) knocked it over while I was in the bathroom. After several unsuccessful attempts to fix the laptop, I came to the conclusion that it had died. Luckily, I did not lose any relevant work (Dropbox), but I did learn a valuable lesson.
How do I help?
There are two ways you can help:
1) You can donate via Paypal using the my email — arconna[at]yahoo[dot]com (see below for a perk for donating)
2) You can head over to John Ward’s page and bid on his amazing zombie painting, which he has kindly offered up to help me out. Details for the auction will be located on that page.
To sweeten the auction deal (for me, really), Mike Reeves-McMillan has offered to match the auction up to $250, which is incredible.
What are those perks you keep babbling about?
Here’s Captain America trying to explain all of this in typical Captain America fashion:
Perk #1: Those who you follow my podcasts will know that my friend and I do a special segment for The Skiffy and Fanty Show called “Torture Cinema,” in which we review bad science fiction and fantasy movies (sometimes books) while drinking alcohol. Anyone who donates $50 or more (including via the auction) will get to pick a movie for us to watch starting in August. No voting. You get to be dictator for the day.
There are only two rules:
1) the film must be SF/F (broadly defined)
2) it must be something we haven’t reviewed yet. You can find the list of previous Tortures here.
Perk #2: I’m giving away a small collection of short stories for donations $10 and up (whether direct to me or through John’s zombie painting auction). The stories will include:
–“Burned by Sol’s Rain” (high-octane military SF involving time dilation and human/machine hybrids, among other things)
–“Irlgem” (sword and sorcery story about a female knight and a murder and a dangerous magic item)
–“Dear [Redacted]” (a humorous letter explaining why a planet has been marked for extermination, more or less)
–“Interstellar Realty” (a humorous far future tale about customer service, real estate, mortgage payments, and robotic dogs)
Perk #3 (alternate to #1): If you’d like to torture me in a more direct way, I will read the first chapter of any crappy SF/F book of your choice. It will be on video, and it will involve drinking. Yes, I am aware this may give me a brain disease, but sometimes pleasing others is worth it. Same donation level as #1.
Perk #4: Anyone who donates (or has donated) $20 or more will receive a copy of Crux’s upcoming novel at release. The novel is based on urban legends from the Elkhorn, Wisconsin. Sounds pretty interesting to me.
Is that all?
For now. If you’ve got other ideas, such as forcing me to read from a really awful book while doing an impression (a bad impression), I’m not against the idea. You just have to let me know. As long as it’s reasonable, I’ll do it for $50. Call it whoring myself out for your entertainment, only I’ll have my clothes on and we won’t be in a cheap pay-by-the-hour hotel.
If you have any questions, let me know. And feel free to share the word!
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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:
Share this:
Like this:
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:
Share this:
Like this:
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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