Hi! This morning I filed the first in a long series of forms which will induce the United States government and various international institutions to recognize that my last name is not Adkins anymore; it is Jercich.
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“This is not about appropriation: this is about the problems of setting in fiction that trouble us all because we live in the same empired-haunted world, ruined by colony and postcolony alike, this tainted, unstable ground. There is no true and authentic fixed thing, and no one can, or should wish to, lay claim to it. Imagine the horror, if there were such a thing that you could hold in your hands, that you could never put down or toss away, how it would burn and cut.”
Some websites that exist
types of websites that exist anymore:
– algorithmic feed of whatever makes the rat keep pushing the lever
– we hope you enjoyed your 3 free articles
– ENABLE NOTIFICATIONS? SHARE LOCATION?? GET NEWSLETTER???
– labor of love by an actual person, last updated 2009— Cliff Jerrison 🌻 (@pervocracy) March 12, 2021
I think about this tweet a lot, even though I don’t actually read twitter anymore. It has achieved what I believe user @BAKKOOONN has called “barium dye” status, inescapable in any segment of the internet’s digestive tract—in part because it so succinctly captures the ache inherent in our cultural surrender to platforms that do not care for us. This paragraph should make it clear that I myself do not find it easy to escape the reach of those platforms. But it has never been easier to carve out your own platform, either.
For that reason I would like to point out some labors of love that have been updated in 2022. I link to my favorites all the time: Leonard and Sumana and Lucy and Rachel are indefatigable. I will enthuse at anyone about longtime stalwarts Derek Guy and Tom Murphy and Audrey Watters and their respective fields of expertise if given the slightest opportunity, and I hope Molly White never runs out of dry schadenfreude, even if her current beat (I hope) fades from the headlines. Jenny is a great and terribly clever friend whose archives I still have to go back and savor. Adam Cadre seems never to have flagged on updates for the last two decades. David Bordwell has been giving away just masterful levels of accessible, expansive teaching on film for even longer than that!
Blogspot, never my favorite platform, has begun to acquire a certain old-timey charm to me, via its placid refusal to become a redesigned algorithmic nightmare (for now!). I’ve been following Peter Gainsford for years, interested in his Classical-era mythbusting even when I am far from understanding its academic context. Kerry Callen has a unique style and sense of humor that recalls the days when lots more comics artists kept delightful sketchblogs. I wish I could remember how I stumbled across Dan of the Salty Throne; not only does reading his posts feel like stepping into an idea stream just as the flash flood barrels down upon you, but his blogroll also helped me realize where all the RPG hobby writers went when Google Plus died. I put five more URLs into my RSS reader yesterday, and I look forward to following them toward more.
There are sites still marching onward that are almost suspiciously me-shaped, too, perhaps because I was shaped by them. If you ever want to learn how to undertake the arcane rituals of BlogNomic, let me know, I’m currently an active mentor. Cyberdelia seems like I made it up for my own amusement (but I didn’t!). And just today, I made a tiny update to my ancient tilde.club page, and I’m not even the only one!
I thought about including my Patreon subscriptions, and some of my favorite podcasts, and my favorite email newsletters—okay, well, I am going to link to Sophie’s newsletter because Sophie is wonderful and her latest letter arrived in my inbox as I was writing this. But I think I will save those for other entries. I just want to remind myself that Cliff Jerrison and despair can be disproven. Not all love’s labors are lost.
“For some years I’ve been arguing that the martial arts cinema of East Asia constitutes as distinctive a contribution to film artistry as did more widely recognized ‘schools and movements’ of European cinema like Soviet Montage and Italian Neorealism.”
I used to read the AV Club every day and now I don’t read it at all and it’s probably not hard to gather why
But Caroline Siede’s retrospective analysis of romantic comedy as a film genre just wrapped up, after a hundred reviews, and I think they are all worth reading if you can manage three quarters of your browser being occluded by ads. Even when I have drawn different conclusions from Siede I have found her work exemplary, and have in fact used her work as an example when thinking about how to structure longer writing about movies. I can recommend in particular her highlighting of gems like Saving Face (2004), The Big Sick (2017), Brown Sugar (2002), and of course, the movie that guaranteed I would one day fall for a Chicago brunette.
It has been ten years almost to the DAY since I linked to one of Jeremy’s projects. This is neglectful and I apologize, Jeremy
I get pretty excited when someone whose creative work I have long admired puts out a nice long essay, these days, because I am—and I cannot emphasize this enough—forty. Jeremy Penner, who has been the kind of historian who actively makes more history ever since I came to know him, dropped a bombshell of such an essay into my Old Reader just this week.
“Quite frankly, nobody who wasn’t an absolute fanatical follower of webcomics discourse 20 years ago has any idea what the fuck this means.”
But I am just such a one, and this filled some gaps in my understanding of the little sphere wherein I came of age. I value this kind of clear and well-founded writing so much. It’s the counterpoint to the Wesley Aptekar-Cassels quote I posted earlier today: archives may succumb, but archivists keep fighting.
“this website should be thought of as a jungle — attempts to link to it are at your own risk. you may attempt to archive it, but should you wish to avoid sadness down the line, you should accept now in your heart that all archives will eventually succumb to the sands of time.”
Old Fashions
I realized with mild startlement, this morning, that I’ve been using a Google Reader replacement called The Old Reader for over eight years—longer than I actually ever used Google Reader. One of the widely loved features of GR was its quiet, useful social function, allowing you to follow your friends and see what they wanted to surface and recommend. The idea of a social network that just unobtrusively shows you the things you want to see, in order, seems like a quaint and nostalgic dream these days.
I never actually made much use of the social feature—I just wanted a reader that persisted between computers—but today (after eight years!) I’ve realized that The Old Reader lets you follow people too, and I’m curious about trying it. Do you use it, dear Four People Who Read This Blog And Possibly A Lost Search Crawler Robot? I’m xorphus there and I’d be happy to connect.
“There’s really no limitation if you’re up to the challenge.”
If it’s ever unclear where my fascination with the tools of creative constraint came from, this process overview video about my uncle John Andrew Dixon’s collage work en plein air should provide a strong clue.