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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Dear DC: Little Girls Play Board Games, Too
Reading Time
The folks on Sword and Laser recently had a brief discussion about the Justice League: Axis of Villains board game, which apparently includes no women. Peter V. Brett has a post about it here. In short, his daughter didn’t want to play the game because it didn’t even have Wonder Woman.
WONDER WOMAN. The single most important female superhero in the entire DC canon is not in a fucking board game meant to be played by children.
I cannot express how angry and disappointed I am in DC over this. Every single time I hear something about DC, it’s shit like this. DC saying something dumb about women. DC releasing creepy suicide PSAs w/ Harley Quinn practically nude in a bathtub. DC not including women. DC bad. DC bad.
The more DC fails at what are the most basic levels of equality, the more I’m reminded how much better its major competitor is by comparison. Marvel has failures, too. It fails a lot. Look at the Spider-woman cover. WTF was that, Marvel? But you know what Marvel didn’t do? Create board games for kids that don’t include women.
That link will take you to Marvel Heroes, which is certainly not female heavy, but at least includes enough female characters that a group of young girls could play the game without having to create their own pieces (as Brett suggested he and his daughter do to make up for the stupidity of DC’s failure)(granted, they would have to fiddle with game parameters; thanks, Marvel). The only “team” (X-Men, Avengers, etc.) that doesn’t include a female character in that game is the Avengers, which I also think is stupid (where the fuck is Scarlet Witch, Black Widow, Spider-woman, etc.?). But it at least has SOME female characters. Not a lot. It’s still a failure. But fuck. It’s not a total fuckup.
Marvel has other board games which at least have women in them. Marvel Legendary: bunch of women. I’m sure Marvel has failed on the board game thing in the past, but nobody should be failing in 2014 (or 2013, the release year for the game). Nobody.
Marvel is not perfect. It is a monstrous beast of a company which is still trying to figure out how to be progressive in an era where you can be ripped to shreds for failing to represent humanity. But it’s a company that gives the impression that it’s trying. Ms. Marvel. Captain Marvel. Black Widow. Storm. They’ve all got their own comics right now. They put Black Widow in Captain America 2 and gave her a prominent role (I think they meant her to be a sidekick, but I actually think she’s more equal to Captain America in many respects — and, hey, Cap actually respects *her* as a human being in that friggin movie…she’s not on a t-shirt congratulating Cap for gettin’ sum — fucking DC).
This kind of stuff has put a sour taste in my mouth about DC. When they release a new comic, I find myself turning the other way. There are only two comics I currently read from DC: Batman and Justice League. But the more DC fails at being…modern, the more I’m inclined to drop those, too. Because I’m getting more of what I want from Marvel. I get female characters. I get *good* female characters. I get diversity and new perspectives. Marvel gives me more of what I want, and it fails far less than DC. And when it does fail, there seems to be a greater effort to make a correction. There won’t be any more of those butt-in-the-air Spider-woman covers. We will have better visual representations in the future. That I’m sure of.
So I end this rant with this: When will DC realize it is 2014 and grow up?
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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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