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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What Star Trek Desperately Needs
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I’m currently enjoying Enterprise, one of the least-liked of the various Star Trek incarnations. I won’t say that Enterprise is the worst of the lot; in many ways, it has the great adventure and anthological introspection commonly found in everything from Star Trek to The Next Generation to Voyager (and, I suppose, DS9 — my least favorite). Yet despite that, I think the problem with Enterprise is precisely that it maintains the format Star Trek fans have become familiar with in every single previous incarnation available. It’s an anthology show. Every episode offers some new idea, which has to be explored and resolved, more or less, in 45 minutes. What little overarching plot the show offered was pretty much irrelevant, except at random junctures the creators decided would serve as “connectors” to the series premiere.
Think about it. The original Star Trek set the stage. Captain Kirk and his crew set off to explore the universe, discovering new species, different cultures, and so on and so forth. The Next
Generation: same basic idea. Voyager tried to mix things up by having the ship get lost way out in the middle of nowhere, but that plot point didn’t change the basic format of the show. And neither did Enterprise. It gave us the same format, the same basic concepts, and so on and so forth. It was a repetition, like everything else before it.
What Star Trek desperately needs is to break format — or, as I like to say, it needs to have its BSG moment. If we are to enjoy another series, that show has to be more than just “humans and a couple of aliens running around in the galaxy finding shit.” It certainly needs to be more than the same cliche character types too. What we need is a story set in the Star Trek universe which explores the intense personal relationships formed on spacecraft or even the traumas of space flight. It might even be an interesting idea to jump into the future of ST’s established timeline and show the trials and tribulations of characters fighting a major war. It doesn’t much matter how a set of writers gets to the deeper relationships; what matters is that they avoid the weak gestures we so often see in anthology-based TV series and actually explore who these characters are.
That, in my mind, is what Star Trek needs. Not flashy new movies. Not new series following the same old format. But a new show which crosses the boundaries of its familiar community and gives us a show we have to watch every week just to know what happens next. Next. As in the continuation of a single, overarching plot, in which each episode contributes to the whole. In which each episode shows us a little more about the characters we love, or hate, or love to hate.
That’s what I’d like to see anyway. 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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