Shaun Duke
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.
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Airport Shuffle — Or, Hey, Airports in X-Files are Weird Places
Reading Time
I’ve been re-watching X-Files lately and it dawned on me how strange the world looked back then. For example, in one of the 1st season episodes (“E.B.E.”), Scully walks right into an airport terminal and purchases two tickets (one with her credit card and one with cash). The desk lady says to her “You can catch your plane right over there,” pointing to the actual gate at which Scully would board her plane.
Think about that for a moment. When was the last time you could do that in an airport? Granted, some of you are older than I am, so you have better memories of the pre-9/11 world. I, however, didn’t do a lot of flying pre-2001 because I was a) not quite an adult yet, and b) not financially well off (by that I mean my mother didn’t have a lot of money, as we spent part of my youth on welfare
and the rest as lower middle class). So while I have some memories of flying pre-2001, more of my flight memories take place after.
For me, then, seeing someone waltz into an airport, do something fishy, and then get pointed to their gate without having to go through a giant x-ray machine or without TSA agents staring them down is a little bizarre. That world doesn’t exist anymore (and in a somewhat ironic way, it’s the exact world Mulder and Scully were fighting against…only their “terrorists” were aliens and their agents, not human beings with a political/religious agenda of destruction). I’m not even sure that world can _ever_ exist again. How could it? The world Mulder and Scully fought in died on 9/11 (one of my professors actually sees the end of the collapse of the Soviet Union and 9/11 as two rupture points in U.S. history, framing, I would argue, a long-not-quite-decade of utopian thinking).
Has anyone else had this experience? You’re watching some show from the 90s or whenever and realized that things are different. Not because the cars are from a different era or they have strange hair or use different slang, and so on and so forth, but because the ideological landscape is almost alien.
I wonder what the world of film will look like in 20 years…
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Book Review: Start Finishing by Charlie Gilkey (2022)
Sometime near the end of the Spring semester, I decided it was time to take another crack and reorganizing my life. I’ve gone through years of on again / off again burnout, some of it my own fault (I’m disorganized and try to do too much) and some of it a consequence of things about which I have no control (my former university essentially bankrupted itself, forcing me to find a new job in my field, and I’ve since moved twice — the short version). All that burnout and overfilled plate-ism has made it harder to keep up with grading and find the energy to complete tasks on time. So it seemed only logical to use my university library privileges to borrow a variety of recommend productivity and project management books to see what advice, systems, etc. are out there.
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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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