PCA/ACA Conference: Day Two (It Begins)
The first day of the actual Popular Culture and American Culture Association Conference proved to be one of the best of the entire event, not least because of my presentation at 2:30 PM. But we’ll get to that in a minute. The day began innocently enough. Luckily for me, I roomed with a particularly interesting fellow named Randall, who is actually a neuroscientist. The sad thing about being an English major is that you don’t get much opportunity to chill with folks outside of your department. Some part of this is because people in other departments look down on us English folks; the other part is because English people are generally terrified of scientists due to the fact that they have giant ninja stars that shoot out of their hands and hit random passersby. Okay, so that’s a load of crap. I have no idea why English types don’t hang out with science types. You’ll have to figure that out on your own. First things first, I presented a paper on a panel about Battlestar Galactica. Specifically, the panel was concerned with posthuman identity and revolution within the BSG, which fit my paper (“Otherism: The Dissection of Humanity and the Negation of the Human in Battlestar Galactica”) quite well. The most interesting thing about this panel was how each of my fellow presenters had a paper that interacted with the others, including my own. Each of us had something interesting to say about hybridity, the Other, reactionary politics, and so on, and this made for a very connected and, I think, powerful panel. If you’ve ever attended an academic conference (three total for me now), you’ll know that panels which end up with a hodgepodge of ideas tend to end up with equally as hodgepodged questions from the audience–sometimes presenters get no questions at all. This wasn’t a problem for my panel. I presented last (and was the only one to use PowerPoint), and when all was done, the questions came flying in. Quite a few were directed at me, and some were directed to all of us, since we all were dealing with similar issues. Of all the conferences I have attended and presented at, this is by far the best response I have ever received. Some panels end up with rather lackluster discussion, but we actually had a rather robust discussion amongst ourselves and the audience. When all was said and done, the panel went astonishingly well. I even had someone comment at the end that I looked comfortable up at the podium (I was terrified, but it’s nice to know that I look pretty good up there and that self-deprecating humor still works among academics). I was extraordinarily pleased and I hope that I will end up in a similar situation in the future. Now enough about me. A brief recap of everything else I managed to see and do, followed by a quick reading list: –I attended an interesting panel that was, unfortunately, mislabeled as “Celebrating Diversity in Science Fiction.” Yes, it was clear that the papers represented the interesting diversity of ideas within science fiction, but none of them were explicitly about diversity, so much as interesting analyses of shows like the original Twilight Zone, and other work like John Ringo’s controversial military science fiction, Pratchett’s Discworld series, and a fellow named Bixby who wrote some children’s novels some time ago. The Discworld paper was the most interesting; it discussed the nature of belief within Pratchett’s world and absolutely made me want to read his work (the presenter of that paper ended up being one of my conference buddies, of which everyone needs at least one). –Zombies were a big hit this year (as compared to all the other years that I didn’t attend…). I saw a rather informative panel that gave some historical perspective on zombies. You don’t hear much about the origins of zombie myths and literature in modern culture these days; it’s a welcome reprieve from what has since become the popular conception of the zombie. Reading/Watching list:–The Night Trials by Joan Crawford–John Ringo’s Posleen War series–Startup Nation–The Vanishing Village by Hazel Townson (?)–Twilight Zone–“It’s a Good Life” by Jerome Bixby–The Plan (Battlestar Galactica)–How We Became Posthuman by Katherine Hayles–Homi Bhabha on subjectivity–Foucault on subjectivity–Judith Butler on the psyche as a remainder–Bruce Clark on cybernetic humans–Brian Willems’ discussion of Heidegger’s theories about death There you have it!
PCA/ACA Conference: Day One (Travel 101)
(A little overdue, but so be it.) Day one of my trip to the Popular Culture and American Culture Association Conference in St. Louis, Missouri proved to be rather informative. First, I learned a few things about air travel: No matter what airport you go to, you will not get on the plane if you show up anything less than 35 minutes before your flight takes off. It doesn’t matter if your airport is the smallest airport in the whole United States, or if there are only a handful of people there, or whatever. You won’t get on the plane. If you are a self-professed liberal or atheist, you will get searched on your way out of any conservative city. They’ll be nice about it and tell you that it’s random, but when it happens every single time, you start to wonder. (I don’t know if this one is actually true; it probably isn’t, but it’s entertaining nonetheless.) The people who make subway systems want you to get lost. Instead of putting a lovely map up there that flat out tells you which train to get on and where to get off, in the most simple and easiest way to understand, they have confusing maps that tourists might find rather daunting. And that’s what I learned. Now for the first day: The trip began in, you guessed it, Gainesville, FL, where I was uncharacteristically late by 10 minutes (meaning that I still had 25 minutes to board the plane). There was nobody in line, nobody in the security line, and one fellow at the counter who had nothing else to do. It was still my fault, but I found it rather irksome that I had to pay $50 to change flights (one that was 2 hours later and yet still got me to St. Louis at a decent hour). Why did I miss the flight? I wanted a hard copy of my final paper in my hands for the big day, just in case one of those journal editor types showed up and wanted me to submit it. It’s smart business is all. Anyway. After changing flights and paying the ridiculous one-way checked-baggage charge (don’t get me started again), I went and sat around for two hours, staring at my bag on the mat in front of the TSA scanner gizmo. Why was I standing there? Because, like a good citizen, I didn’t want to leave the blasted bag there and have the whole bloody airport in an uproar all because the TSA guy who was supposed to scan the bag didn’t want to be out and about doing his job. After my bag was checked and everything was in order, I got something to eat, waited for an hour and a half, had the distinct pleasure of hearing a baby scream bloody murder for fifteen minutes, and then went through airport security, where I was summarily executed…I mean searched. The cool part about being searched is that you start to learn about all the cool technology we have. Did you know they have a little machine that can check if there are traces of explosives or the contents that make them on your person in a matter of seconds? All the guy has to do is wipe your hand with a dry baby wipe and put it in the machine and that’s it! Cool? I think so! An hour later I was in Atlanta, one of the two cities you can go to if you’re in Gainesville. The other is Charlotte, but I’ve only ever been there once, I think, and I distinctly remember it being unmemorable. After another two hours, I landed in St. Louis. There I discovered that not only is it easy to get confused on the train system (the Metro Link, as they call it), but that trains at night are bloody scary. There’s a story here, I promise. So, I got a ticket and got on the train and decided to sit right under the little map for the two routes in St. Louis. It wasn’t until the train had already set off to lands unknown that I discovered that my chosen seat was three rows away from a slightly mental man. This man proceeded to have a full on conversation with himself in the manner that you might expect of someone on drugs–this was not a the normal crazy person kind. The odd thing is, I kept looking back at him and seeing one of my friends from school, who used to smoke pot and had the exact same look on his face. Some moments later, a rather rowdy bunch of youngsters (boy am I getting old) hopped on and started making weird remarks and giggling to themselves. I don’t know if they were laughing at me (probably the only person of my kind to ride the train that late at night), at their friends, or at the crazy guy, but I spent a good deal of the time avoiding eye contact. If you’ve dealt with young people before, you know that looking them in the eye is like asking for death. They have a way of eating into your soul like a parasite and sucking the life right out of you. That’s why parents age. Look it up. It’s in the Bible. At some point on this trip the conductor decided to phone it in on the announcements. Her voice went from being clear and concise to muffled and incomprehensible. And that’s where the confusion began. About eight stops in, I got confused. I’ve never been to St. Louis, and so having your one lifeline (i.e. the conductor) turn into a mumbling stranger is a great way to have your brain get lost in all the flashy lights and passenger nonsense. I ended up getting off the train, thinking I had missed my stop, and then realized I was on the right train all along, and headed the correct direction again…only
10 Things You Learn About the Internet (in a couple months)
(Note: @amisuggests on Twitter remarked that this post sounds angry. I’m not sure why. Perhaps the tone in some of the items below suggests anger? For the record, this post isn’t actually an angry post, nor a reflection of some personal experience with the below items. These are general assessments of the Internet, some of them good and some of them bad. I’m not angry at all. I haven’t the time to be angry for the things mentioned below.) The last few months have been pretty intense. I’ve attended two conferences, I’ve had all manner of problems in my personal life, and a mountain of unnecessary Internet drama that would make Jonathan Swift roll over in his grave. Through the course of all of this, I’ve come to a series of conclusions about what I’ve learned about the Internet: YouTube is probably the biggest intellectual cesspool to ever exist. Worse than the United States Government. Worse than the most radical of political activists. Trying to have a conversation there is like trying to convince a tiger not to eat you. You keep talking, but nothing changes, no matter how persuasive you are. The Internet is the premiere place to say whatever the hell you want without worrying about or even considering the consequences. People you meet on the Internet will often violate their own personal rules to get back at you. This is attached to #2, obviously. These same people will make a public spectacle of your personal life if they think it will lead back to you and, in effect, harm you. And if you’re smart, you learn to shrug it all off like the petty, vindictive, childish nonsense that it is, without letting it rule your life. Because…it’s just the Internet. E-commerce is the greatest thing to happen to the modern world. I can buy anything I want online, and that’s freaking awesome. I can literally find information on anything I want on the Internet. That may not sound impressive anymore, but imagine a world in which we had to spend weeks searching through a library of books. I’d still like to do that, but I don’t have time to do that for everything I want to know. The Internet makes knowledge available to everyone. That’s kickass, in my book. Trolls and other inflammatory Internet types are almost as bad as child molesters, and sometimes fit into that latter category. Hulu, YouTube, and other video or audio services have revolutionized the way we watch or listen to anything. Likewise, they’ve revolutionized how we produce and distribute visual and aural content (i.e. music). Podcasts, webshows, and so on. There has never been so much free entertainment in the history of humanity. Blogging, Twitter, Facebook, and all these other nifty ways of engaging with the WWW are just the tip of the iceberg. Just wait. Something is coming that will change the way we do things now so much that it will cease to resemble the current way of doing things. Just look back to the beginning of the Internet and see the difference between then and now. The Internet is evolving at a rapid pace, and we have to try to keep up with it. There you have it. So, what have you learned about the Internet in the last few months? What about in the last year?
Hitchens vs. D’Souza: An Interesting Debate
I just got back from a debate at the University of Florida between Christopher Hitchens and Dinesh D’Souza on the truth of the existence of God. Truly an interesting, if not downright amusing, experience. Some quick thoughts from me:–Hitchens absolutely won the debate. It wasn’t because he made the best arguments one could possibly make on the “no” side of the issue (I think others have made better ones), but because D’Souza really phoned it in tonight on both the logic fronts and the common courtesy fronts (ad hominem was the order of the day from the “yes” camp). –I find it rather interesting that, in this particular debate, the “yes” side (D’Souza) attempted to use material-world analogies in order to explain metaphysical-world realities, without noting the irony in their being irreconcilable. The fun thing about these analogies is that as soon as you apply the realistic framework of the world all of us agree exists (with the exception, perhaps, to those philosophers who try to argue that maybe we don’t exist, or know if we exist, and so on) to D’Souza’s arguments, they fall apart entirely. It’s like saying “I’ll talk about this apple as though it were God” without realizing that your audience can see the apple, but cannot see God. –There were a few crazies during the audience Q&A. I suppose that shouldn’t be a surprise, but I thought it was great that Hitchens (and D’Souza, sort of) took the attacks launched at him in stride. He’s been at this long enough, obviously (not just with religion, but with a host of other controversial topics), so he knew exactly how to deal with such things. –Hitchens and D’Souza are both quite good at making jokes about their respective opinions and the other side, and in good taste. I was happy about this fact because I think if they had been more mean-spirited it could have turned out nasty for either side (during the debate and from the audience). The audience responded fairly favorably on both sides of the issue, actually. –People who get into the line for book signings should have a book to sign. Hitchens got a little upset with this couple who tried to hand him a card instead of a book…I did too, because I wanted to thank Hitchens and D’Souza for the talk, but apparently Mr. “I can’t be bothered to show up on time to get a copy of the book” had to ruin that moment. Overall, I think the debate went rather well, despite the fact that D’Souza seemed very much out of his element. His arguments seemed sound if you didn’t think deeper about them, but the second you took that extra step (as anyone, religious or otherwise, should), most of the arguments fell apart or could be directly refuted by historical or scientific evidence (D’Souza did get a few facts wrong, unfortunately, which did not win him any favors from Hitchens or some members of the audience, religious and otherwise). Now all I can hope for is a debate between Dawkins and the guy who runs the Discovery Institute. That would make my year!
If I Had a Spaceship…
…with faster-than-light capability, without all the time paradoxes and other realistic nonsense that eventually ruined the fantasy of the science fiction pulps; if I had that, where would I go? I would head to every star that could sustain life, each with a reasonable habitable zone where planets might arise, or where we know planets already exist. Why? To answer, once and for all, the age old question: are we alone in the universe? Because, hey, if you’ve got an FTL ship and you don’t have to worry about time dilation, fuel (a problem for current propulsion models), and so on; if you’ve got that, then why not head out on a 30 second trip to Alpha Centauri and see a binary star close up for the first time ever, looking for that one little planet that might very well put truth to the words of countless science fiction authors who have proposed life around our binary cousin and in the universe (trinary, if you want to get darn specific)? Why not see the check every potentially habitable rock for signs of intelligent life and come back with an answer, laying to rest Fermi’s Paradox and establishing into law (or modifying) Drake’s equation? That sounds like a fantastic way to spend a few days in an FTL spaceship to me. What about you? So, if you had a spaceship with faster-than-light capability, minus all the negatives typically associated with a realistic vision of FTL, where would you go and why?
Healthcare, My Thoughts, and My Resolution
Most of you are probably well aware of the fact that the healthcare reform bill passed and has been officially signed by President Obama. I am both very happy about this, and also very nervous. There are some understandable questions about the bill, and while I would like to pretend that critics, including myself, actually understand what the bill will do on the wide-scale, such a thought is really nothing more than an illusion. Very few probably know how the bill operates on the wide-scale, and I’m hesitant to listen to people who have spent the last year plus misinforming the public about the bill in an effort to scare them into opposing it. That said, I do hope that, on a wide-scale, the bill functions well enough, with little need for significant revision. I’m nervous because it’s an enormous undertaking and something that, obviously, is remarkably contentious in this country. We’ll see what the year looks like when everything is in place. For the record, if it isn’t already clear, I have always been for healthcare reform, but on a much grander scale. I honestly think we should have kept the public option on the original bill, but at least this is a step in the right direction. Now, for my resolution, which is only indirectly related to the healthcare bill: I’ve noticed over the last few months that I have been consuming an abnormal amount of garbage in the form of soda and related things. So, as an experiment, I am going to cut out all soda consumption from my diet for 30 days, starting today. I’ll be cutting out other junk foods as well (namely candy bars, though I will splurged once in a while). Part of this is because I have been eating too much crap; part of this is because I want to see what happens to my body. If I have a heart attack, you’ll all be the second to know (since I’ll be the first). Wish me luck!