July 25, 2020

My Worldcon / ConZealand Schedule

Announcements

Reading Time

Things have been extraordinarily busy in the Duke compound. I’m buying a house. I finished an online college argument course. And now I find myself prepping for a whole semester of virtual classes. Thus, I have no posted much here in the last few weeks.

The good news? I’ve got a ConZealand schedule to share. To add things to your ConZealand schedule, you can find all my items here in Grenadine. I’ve also included the list below w/ U.S. times. There are panels, like Skiffy and Fanty Show shenanigans, and more. So please come!

Here’s the schedule:

“Magical Realism in Genre” — Tuesday (7/28) at 6 PM EST / 5 PM CST / 3 PM PST (10 AM on 7/29 in NZ)
Magic realism has highlighted inner life when confronted with harsh reality, with a turn of a kaleidoscope,. Given the how magic realism works within interstitial spaces of ordinary life, can it slip into genres that already require a suspension of disbelief? (w/ Eli K.P. William, Silvia Brown, and *hopefully* Libia Brenda)
“Recent SF and Fantasy on TV: Beyond the Usual Suspects” — Wednesday (7/29) at 5 PM EST / 4 PM CST / 2 PM PST (9 AM on 7/30 in NZ)
Talk of SF and fantasy on TV and streaming services often centers on Star Trek, Doctor Who, Game of Thrones and the Expanse. But there is so much more. Westworld. Stranger Things. Counterpart. The Good Place. The DC and Marvel Universe Shows. Star Wars (The Clone Wars, The Madalorian). The Witcher. What’s really good? (w/ Juliana Rew, Stina Leicht, Christine Taylor-Butler, and possibly another)
“The Golden Age of SF Movies: SF Films of the 1950s and Early 1960s” — Wednesday (7/29) at 12 AM EST / 11 PM CST / 9 PM PST (4 PM on 7/30 in NZ)
Soon after World War II, as the Cold War introduced chilling new threats to the world’s peace of mind — Hollywood (and Tokyo) launched an avalanche of SF and monster-related movies. Was this a golden age? Or were these flicks mostly cheap shockers that kept recycling variations on the theme of “Monster Attacks!”? (w/ Dr. Bradford Lyau, Mallory O’Meara, and Ion
“The Skiffy and Fanty Show Podcast (LIVE)” — Thursday (7/30) at 4 PM EST / 3 PM CST / 1 PM PST (8 AM on 7/31 in NZ)
Join us for a discussion of the Netflix film The Old Guard & comic book adaptations. (w/ Jen Zink and Alasdair Stuart)
“History and SF” — Thursday (7/30) at 9 PM EST / 8 PM CST / 6 PM PST (1 PM on 7/31 in NZ)
Phil Klass (William Tenn) once said that the real science of science fiction is history. Many great SF works get much of their strength because the history — implicit or explicit — behind the story feels real. How do writers manage this? How can real history be made to work in a story? What are some examples? (w/ Arkady Martine, Dr. Farah Mendlesohn, Claire Bartlett, and Ada Palmer)
“Kaffeeklatsch: Shaun Duke and Jen Zink” — Friday (7/31) at 10 PM EST / 9 PM CST / 7 PM PST (2 PM on 8/1 in NZ)
In which Jen and I will sit in a Zoom meeting to talk about podcasting, nerdery, and whatever else you want to pester us with. Come hang with us! We might have beer…for us. Sorry. We can’t share over video…

And there you have it. My schedule. I hope to see y’all there!

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.

All Posts

Follow Me

Support Me

A Reading List of Dystopian Fiction and Relevant Texts (Apropos of Nothing in Particular)

January 22, 2025 No Comments

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:

Duke’s Best EDM Tracks of 2024

January 18, 2025 No Comments

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:

2025: The Year of Something

January 9, 2025 No Comments

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… ↩

Dr. Shaun Duke, Professional Nerd

Editor. Writer. Professor. Host.

My Worldcon / ConZealand Schedule

Reading Time

Like this:

Related

Leave a ReplyCancel reply