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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Neil Armstrong, the Great Hero (Or, What He Means to Me)
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The net is abuzz with news that Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the Moon, has passed away after what appeared to be complications from heart surgery. He was 82.
Perhaps it sounds silly to some, but I teared up after seeing this on Twitter and realizing it wasn’t a hoax. It’s hard to explain, but Neil Armstrong is one of those people you can’t help but look up to. A person who did something no other human being had ever done before. He fulfilled the dreams of writers and scientists and people sitting around in their living rooms watching black-and-white scifi TV shows. July 20th, 1969 will forever be a reminder of his achievements, and the achievements of his fellow astronauts, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins.
Like a lot of people, he was, in no small way, an inspiration for me when I was a child — if not directly, then by proxy. I remember watching a live broadcast of a shuttle liftoff as a kid and thinking to myself, “That might be me one day.” There’s something powerful about that kind of reaction, of believing you can do something — that you should do something. Health conditions made sure I would never be an astronaut, but the world Armstrong created by putting his feet into the fine dust of the Moon was one that made me long to go up there and carve out a piece of history for myself, however small. Perhaps that explains my obsession with space, and not just science fiction. It explains my desperate desire to go up there one day, even if only for a few moments. To feel space in my own way. To feel like I’m a part of some grander human experience. Armstrong made all of that possible.
And in a weird way, I thought he would always be here. I know that’s insane, since we all must die. He was 82, after all; he lived a lot of years. But he was supposed to be there like some kind of great father, to watch over us as we journeyed further and further out there, to be there for us with all his wisdom. The world does not feel right without him — cannot feel right. There’s an emptiness now. We’ve lost a human being who meant so much to so many. A man who took us where no humans had ever been before, who uttered a line that will echo throughout history forever: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
You will have a special place in our hearts, Mr. Armstrong. One day, when some human being puts his or her feet on some distant rock, like Mars or maybe a planet around another star, they will think of you, your words, and what you meant to the world and mankind. And maybe they too will bask in the glory that you began all those years ago.
Sleep well, hero.
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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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