Hi! Here is a linkdump. I told myself I would post these with really minimal context because I am too busy to summarize these things and have a really giant backlog of links I’ve been wanting to post, but uh, the writer in me won out and I failed. Some of these have way more description than others. But I do also have quotes I’ve pulled for some of them, so maybe that will help make this post more interesting.

This is (almost) verbatim text from a journal entry I wrote for a seminar I took on immersive documentary. I thought it was interesting enough to put here, even though parts of it might not make sense if you haven’t read the works I’m talking about. For context, my class had previously read an essay called “Disaster City” by Barrett Swanson, in which Swanson participates in a disaster recovery simulation, explores his personal fascination with disaster scenarios, and explores the blurring between reality and fiction that occurs in those simulations. A lot of our conversation had to do with rituals and performative preparedness and how they can be used to enable cognitive avoidance of the root causes of certain issues, creating a false sense of safety for the person practising (or even observing) the rituals.

You know the drill. In the last episode I did of this series, I said the next one would be coming shortly, huh?

Yeah, right. I lied. These come out when they come out.

Here’s another linkdump—a list of links to stuff I thought was interesting but likely won’t get to properly reviewing any time soon.¹

I reserve the right to more fully review any of these article at a later date, of course. (Though at this point, it’s extremely unlikely to ever happen.)

I think there might be people out there who think I’m a poet, and I think it’s terrifying. I haven’t been a poet since my middle school days of writing rhyming couplets about hating school and my early high school days of writing terrible prose with line breaks. In hindsight, I’m pretty sure the main reason I wrote so many poems in grade nine was because my teacher seemed to have no idea how to grade poems but very strong opinions about fiction, and I felt like I was terrible at writing fiction and wanted a shot at a decent grade. Man, high school was such a great time.