Médiathéque: Summer Reading List
As a side effect of not getting much time to write, I have a pile of unreviewed books I've been reading this summer. A few of them are relatively slight, fitting a digest of quicker reviews than entire standalone reviews. (I'm also rolling up all of the reviews under the Médiathéque banner from here out.)
To Rouse Leviathan . . .
Self Care In The Age Of Doom-scrolling
Looking at the last published date is a bit weird for me. Granted, I don't keep a strict weekly schedule here, almost a month without writing is pretty bad. On the other hand, I have been trying to juggle doing training classes for work at night and keeping some kind of downtime, so I don't pull the remaining few . . .
Book Review: Agency By William Gibson
The marketing around William Gibson’s Agency didn’t do it any favors. Thinking that The Godfather of Cyberpunk was writing liberal wish-fulfillment about Hillary winning the election and the UK staying in the EU sounded terrible. Having read a few different books in that genre, they are usually somewhere between SNL on a bad week and a . . .
Scaffolding Ignorance
Railing on technology for giving every idiot a microphone abdicates the role society has played in creating all these idiots. To be sure, Facebook creating tidal pools full of Karens filling each other's heads with confirmation bias channeling their parental anxiety toward vaccines, secret celebrity sex cabals, and GMO deserves . . .
Book Review: Once and Future by Kieron Gillen and Dan Mora
I’ve been on a bit of a tear through Kieron Gillen’s work after the first volume of DIE came out last year. I tend to follow writers more than artists in my fandom, so it isn’t that surprising. Other creators have worked with mythology in comics, but Gillen quickly subverts expectations. When some England for the English types . . .
Putting Down The Foil
I despise conspiracy thinking, and not because there aren’t any real conspiracies out there. Following the thread of the CIA in the 50’s and 60’s and you find plenty of backroom deals darker than any la Carrè novel. Yet you don’t see people who subscribe to conspiracy theories that don’t believe the entire slate. Every anti-semantic . . .
Post Mythical Culture
Culture is the scaffolding that holds a society together. It isn’t a coincidence in the wake of the internet and social media’s ability to create micro-cultures withdrawn from the larger whole that society seems frayed at the edges. Some of the frayed edges are helpful; cultural fictions are disintegrating right before our eyes. I . . .