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). Or you can pull songs into your preferred listening app. It’s up to you. Some caveats before we begin: OK, let’s get to it. Enjoy!
When You Lose Your Social Media Manager (Or, Notes on SMMSs to Drown Your Tears In) — Updated (5/15/2023)
(See Update notes before the list!) Fun fact: when a major social media network is bought by a billionaire who has no idea how to manage a social media network, one of the predictable consequences is that said social media network might stop working as expected. And so here we are in May 2023 with Twitter’s new API changes rippling through the app and service industry like a tornado of stupidity. The consequences of all this? I’ve now spent hours upon hours researching social media managers. Why? The system I was using, SmarterQueue, cut off all support for Twitter two months before my annual subscription had ended. Additionally, the new API rules also scuttled moa.party, the crossposter I used to pull certain items from my Twitter feed to post to Mastodon. Like a lot of folks, I don’t really have the time to sit on social media apps posting. And like a lot of folks, I have things to “sell,” which means I don’t have much choice but to be on social media apps. In this case, I mostly “sell” a podcast, and in the corporate environment of podcasting, you can’t exist without a social media presence. And one person really can’t manage that much social media without a little help. For me, that help comes in the form of a social media manager.
A Definitive Absolutely Accurate Ranking of James Bond Theme Songs
The title says it all. Mostly. It doesn’t tell you why I have decided to put together a ranking of every James Bond theme song. I could tell you that there are great reasons for this, but I would be lying. The real reason: I’ve been watching and re-watching James Bond movies on and off for years, both as a kind of weird comfort watching and because the culture critic in me wants to understand them. The other real reason: cause I want to. In preparing for this, I had to consider two factors: first, what criteria to use to judge these songs, because no ranked list would be valid if we didn’t pretend to some kind of objective measure; and second, how to use such a list to incorporate my brother’s feedback, as he was coaxed into participating in this fiasco for our mutual amusement. The second of these, I simply decided that we’d use the ranking average of our two scores for the final score in one of the criteria categories. The more difficult task was coming up with the criteria in the first place. And so with much deliberation with myself, a little with my brother, and a little more with other folks who also have opinions about things, I came up with this list of five:
Musicals Made 2020 Bearable; Long Live the Musicals
If you’d asked me in 2019 whether musicals were “my thing,” I might have said something like “well, I do enjoy musicals from time to time, but I wouldn’t say I go out of my way to watch them.” If you’d asked me the same question by July 2020, the answer would have been something like “oh my sweet mother of god I absolutely love musicals they are keeping me from going mad.” Throughout 2020, I consumed what to me was an absurd number of musicals for someone who had only dabbled in the genre previously. And the world was happy to oblige my desperate need for the joy a good musical can bring. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Show Must Go On YouTube channel joyfully screened some of Webber’s classics, including Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Phantom of the Opera. Other music institutions also happily aired operas, symphonic performances, and even professional productions of Shakespeare and other plays. And Spotify’s music catalogue gave me even more to enjoy, from Gilbert & Sullivan to walls of EDM and symphonies I’ve never heard before. But it was the musicals that gave me an escape.
Podcasting in the Time of Corona
We’re 40+ days into social isolation here in the grand northern territory of Bemidji. Life continues unabated. There have been a mere handful of COVID-19 infections, everyone is supposed to wear masks, and online classes are expected to continue, making those 40+ days of isolation into 7 or 8 months without normal social interaction, friends coming to your office door to chat about something mundane, or the musings of students in out-of-date classrooms. All hail coronavirus for its may gifts of disruption and death (76,000 and counting in the U.S.). It is, of course, hard to look at the world around us under almost any circumstance. We’re witnessing in unexpected, undesirable, and exceptionally disturbing ways the influence the political system can have on our ability to live, whether in the literal sense of working for life or in the more fanciful manner of extracurricular whatsit that makes life enjoyable. Not in the sense of restricting movement, mind, but in its ability to deprive us of the resources for survival during a legitimate medical emergency and to use the political system to forcibly remove access of those resources, giving so many the choice between bankruptcy or the risk of death for themselves, loved ones, or strangers. As an academic, I’ve always had a keen sense of the impact of the political process on our lives, especially now. We have always faced what we will likely see in the near future: state budget cuts and other funding decreases that will see many of our friends and colleagues on the streets, salaries slashed, programs destroyed, etc. That awareness is clear in the halls of academia, in brief face-to-face meetings with your next door neighbor, in meetings, and at social gatherings. The political is inescapable there — as it is for many people outside of those privileged halls. And it is now clearer than ever as we read the news about our profession that the future we face is not the one we had hoped for.
Welcome to Endor: A Forest Getaway You Won’t Forget
Are you looking for an escape from the bustling metropolis world of Coruscant or Eufornis Major? Do you desire an adventure in a forested wonderland where you can experience nature in its purest form? Have you always wanted an unforgettable experience you can tell your friends about for years to come? If you answered yes, then a trip to the amazing forest moon of Endor is just what you need. Our attractive vacation packages will take you on adventures even dreams could not imagine. And with six new hyperspace lanes dedicated to travel into the Endor system, it’s never been easier to bring the whole family to this incredible moon.