- Blog
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This Isn’t Self-protection; It’s Cosplay
Alan Jacobs asks us to consider the influence of the first-person shooter video game genre on the minds of young men, in particular the young men adorned in combat gear in Ferguson, Missouri: What is it like to have your spatial, visual orientation to the world shaped by thousands of hours in shooter mode? I want to suggest…
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What the Hell is Going On Here?
I have a new blog-home, iMortal, at the Patheos network. They’ve imported pretty much everything from this blog into that one, so I need to start picking and choosing what will live there and what will stay here. So you may notice posts beginning to disappear here, but living in their new home at iMortal. …
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Weird Al Offers Safe Passage to Pop Music
“Weird Al” Yankovic was the first “popular music” I ever liked. Well, him and the Monkees, because I was a kid. From a young age I felt alienated from what I knew of pop music: Rock was aggressive and threatening (to me), and Top 40 pop was dopey. At the age of 8 or 9…
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What the Facebook Brain Thinks of You
If you’re in public relations, journalism, entertainment, or other similar fields, you already know that Facebook wields enormous power, probably far too much, in that its algorithms are what chiefly decide to what degree any content you post will be seen by users. Only the people who work at Facebook can know precisely how every…
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Robin Williams and the False Promise of Success
I have no idea why he did it. I have no special insight into whatever darkness weighed on the heart of Robin Williams. I haven’t even seen a Robin Williams movie since Man of the Year, which was terrible. But he’s someone I absolutely idolized as a young comedic performer, someone whose career I would have…
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Of Muggles and Mutants: Sci-fi’s Concern for “Better” Humans
I’ve moments ago finished The Bone Season, a novel by Samantha Shannon that I quite enjoyed, about a near-future world in which “clairvoyants,” those born with an ability to interact with the spirit world, are considered riffraff at best and plague-carrying criminals at worst. The layers of the world are rather quickly shown to be numerous,…
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Social Media and the Imprisoned Juggler
Speaking of whether social media can subsume one’s identity, I’m reminded of a piece from last year by Sara Scribner on “breaking up” with Facebook, and for so many of us even contemplating such a thing is fraught with anxiety and percieved peril. (I also wrote about this piece around the time it came out.) Toward the end,…
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The Spectacle of Ourselves: Social Media and the Superfluous Will
Are we losing ourselves in social media? A lot of people feel that way, that we’re all just absorbing ourselves into some kind of swirl of ones and zeroes, and that our identities and individualities are being lost to “Big Data.” One way I’ve heard it put is that we’re all turning into the passengers…
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EU’s “Right to Be Forgotten” Hits Wikipedia, Blocking the Memory of the Web
In May, the European Union’s top court made the controversial ruling that search engines were responsible for upholding a so-called “right to be forgotten,” compelling Google, Bing, Yahoo, and others to cease indexing and displaying links to web pages that are “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant” to a person making a complaint. This is not…
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It’s No Longer a Crazy Idea to Move to the Cloud
Jeff Jarvis (media critic, journalism professor, co-host of This Week in Google, and warrior in the battle against Verizon’s LTE device activation policies) has abandoned local storage in the form of owning a traditional Mac/PC, and moved entirely to the cloud. Ding, dong, my personal computer is dead. I bought my first machine, an Osborne 1,…
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Montaigne: A Skeptic and Secular Humanist Before It Was Cool
Montaigne is a huge influence on my writing, as he exemplifies what I love best about the form of the “essay,” where certitude about a subject is put aside for self-reflecting deliberation. He’s also the prime influence of Andrew Sullivan, who also inspires my writing, and Sullivan is currently hosting at his site a book…
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One Way to Play “50 Ways”
What happens if you play Paul Simon’s “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” as a slow, bluesy, pained, Neil Young-inspired number? Let me back up. Yes, I’m a musician and songwriter, and I don’t think I suck or anything, but the real musical powerhouse bearing the Fidalgo name is my dad Phil Fidalgo, a true…
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Spark! A Telekinetic Girl Superhero is Pitched for a Brilliant New Comic
A few weeks ago I came upon perhaps my favorite website ever, Little Girls Are Better At Designing Superheroes Than You, where Alex Law and others are sent photos of real little girls in their own, self-designed superhero costumes, and illustrate them in full comic book glory. It’s one of those “I’m glad to be alive to see…
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Humanism in Software. Stop Laughing.
When I talk about humanism, I’m really talking about compassion. Whatever the tenets of a given strain of humanism, whether you think it should have religious elements or be utterly devoid of ritualistic trappings, whatever version of whatever manifesto one might subscribe to, for me, humanism is really all about compassion for other folks, acting…
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Abuse on Twitter: Humans Can’t Always Just “Brush it Off”
People being assholes online is hardly new, though awful people using Twitter as a kind of heat-seeking missile to hurt people has only lately begun to rise to the level of a mainstream conversation. There seem to be three legs to this stool: The responsibilities of the perpetrators of Twitter abuse, what the target of the…
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