- All Hail the Defiant Fictional Weirdness of Queen by Robert Repino at Tor.com – An exploration of the use of Queen’s music in science fiction films, and science fiction themes in Queen’s music. He left out Freddie Mercury’s contributions to the soundtrack album for the 1986 West End science fiction musical Time, which was a sort of Dr. Who-ish thing involving Dave Clark, Cliff Richard, David Cassidy, and the videotaped head of Laurence Olivier.
- “LiveJournal represents social media without borders” – Discussion on Metafilter of the implications of LiveJournal’s servers physically moving to Russia. Tl;dr: This probably affects Russian users more than North American users, but it has caused a steady stream of people to port their accounts over to Dreamwidth.
- “Fish and Brewis is the dish that Newfoundlanders yearn…” – Great piece on a national dish and its World War I history by Larry Dohey at Archival Moments.
- I participated in the local March Against Hate on MLK Day that the Village Voice profiles in “A March Against Hate Shows Bay Ridge Grappling with Trump’s America”. It was pretty positive.
- Philip Kennicott at the Washington Post reported on the apparently deliberately offensive choice of 19th-century American painting by George Caleb Bingham to serve as an inaugural backdrop.
Blogging
Happy New Year!
I resolve to blog more in 2017.
Happy New Year
My semester break has been pleasant but is drawing to an end and it’s time to return to blogging.
Why this blog
I have been blogging since Blogger was its own separate company, before Google bought it. I had a LiveJournal and a Journalfen, multiple Blogger blogs and WordPress blogs, and some blogs in systems whose names I’ve forgotten. Fifteen years of blogging.
I did a lot of fandom blogging under fandom names. (I am a science fiction fan.) Lately I’ve been blogging on Tumblr because it is easy and there’s an app for my tablet and phone. I feel philosophically more aligned with Dreamwidth, but fandom has moved to Tumblr and you have to blog where the people are.
I have also blogged as an academic. (I am a community college English professor.) I’ve had course blogs and academic ranting blogs and even a blog on MLA Commons. None have felt particularly comfortable or easy to maintain. I was always worried that my writing wasn’t translating well to non-academics, or that I had crossed the line from critiquing to complaining.
My most successful blogging was as a family history/genealogy hobbyist. That blog got the most hits and comments, and I met some cousins through it. I also got lots of comments telling me my well-documented claims were wrong, or asking for help with research unrelated to my family, or complaining that I wasn’t covering their ancestors. It started to feel like work instead of a fun hobby. (My surname list and Ahnentafel is linked in the column on the right if you wish to check our relatedness.)
Last week in a work meeting, people discussed qualifications for teaching online writing, and one qualification that people agreed on was evidence that the instructor has been writing online for at least six months. Now, I’ve been writing online for fifteen years, but I didn’t have a single place I could point people to see all that work, not professional colleagues anyway. So I’ve decided to revamp this site as that permanent blog space.
This blog is my main online home, where I post my work and thoughts to my own domain. It’s a link I can share publicly. It is a kind of a diary, though I’ll post academics and genealogy as they come up. I maintain a couple of tumblr blogs where I can quickly post links for academic and genealogical purposes. I also have Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter accounts. All those links are in the column on the right. Follow or ignore as you please.
Emily Hegarty 