Open Tab Bankruptcy, Q1 2025, Part IV

Open Tab Balance Transfer Wednesdays arrives at the grand finale!

Up first: I need you to click through and see the header image Wookiepedia has for Princess Kneesaa from the ‘80s Ewoks Cartoon: Kneesaa a Jari Kintaka | Wookieepedia. Hang on, I’m worried you misheard me. I didn’t say I want you to click, I said I need you to click this. Trust me.

That goes double for this, which is almost certainly I’ll link to the wreckage where twitter used to be: Chuck Buriedtreasure on X: "The law and order SVU clip where Kyle MacLachlan does a Big Boss judo throw on a cop, steals another cop’s gun, and blows away a kid in a courthouse was apparently scrubbed from YouTube so I spent $3 to buy the episode digitally https://t.co/BGWWple6nj"

Where is culture headed?: ruminations on what the various website apocalypses mean for culture at large.

Millar Time #22 | Joe Quesada : Mark Millar interviews Joe Quesada; really interesting to hear about Marvel comics’ turn of the century turnaround from the inside, sources notwithstanding.

@reading-comp-posting on Tumblr: This person has an incredible bit on Tumblr; after a joke or series of jokes they post “reading comprehension” questions like it was a high school english test; this should be a service you can subscribe to for your own posts.

From Infocom to 80 Days: An oral history of text games and interactive fiction: relevant to my interests, as they say.

Are there examples of actual 80s music that sound like modern retrowave? : r/outrun: like it says on the tin; I found this to be a valuable source of “oh yeah, THOSE guys!”

Can we avoid the enshittification of clean-energy tech?: great interview with Cory Doctorow about enshittification, and the ways that seeps into everything now. The focus is on clean energy tech, but since software really did eat the world, well…

Your Picks: Top 100 Science-Fiction, Fantasy Books : NPR: something I stumbled across literally as I was wrapping this post up, a 2011 NPR list of the “best” SF & Fantasy books as voted on by the internet. It’s like a transmission from another planet, it’s hard to believe now that anyone would publish a list this white and this male and claim they’d done a good job of curation. I feel like I know exactly what part of Old Twitter found this poll, even if the people working at NPR at the time didn’t. This is a rare example of something that really has gotten better over the last fifteen years, at the time the response seems to have been “welp, guess the fans only like old white guys!” whereas now someone running that poll would look at the results and realize that it got cooked. I mean, heh, as much as I like it, having HHGG land at the number 2 slot is a huge red sign that you got votes from “guys who still read slashdot” and no one else. See also their editorial decision to “exclude YA books”, which somehow only seemed to exclude books by women, but didn’t exclude Heinlein juveniles? Make sure to click through to the blog entry about the list where the guy almost figures out what happened, but can’t quite get there, because, using the original sense of the term, he wasn’t quite woke enough. Things are getting better.

The WELL: Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky: State of the World 2025

Sterling is a guy I have a lot of time for even (especially?) when I disagree with him. It’s been intereresting to watch his progression; he started as cyberpunk author, became a semi-journalist, helped cause the EFF to form, started an artistic movement to fight climate change, spent a bunch of time as a futurist warning people what was going to happen with things like “the internet” and “the climate”, then went on about a ten year I Told You So World Tour and now seems to have settled into the strange calm of a man whose seen all of his worst case predictions come to pass and knows he won’t live to see any of them fixed. The air of a man whose picked out the best deck chair on the Titanic and is describing each part of the ship as it slips below the water. The state of the world convo has a real weird vibe this year, the least optimistic I can ever remember. And it wrapped up in mid-January.

Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping?;

Fascinating, but also, click through for this chart:

Matt: "i hate to be a monocausal guy but i really think this discussion of masculinity, trade school, the gendering of education etc is beating around the bush. male democrats have seen no sizable drop in their desire to attend college. female republicans have. it’s about politics." — Bluesky

And:

Jane: "Just like the “male loneliness epidemic” the imbalance in men going to college is entirely their own doing. A whole generation has decided to make themselves uneducated and unfuckable because they’re addicted to resentment. Manosphere influencers line their pockets by ensuring they stay that way." — Bluesky

Like, this fits in with the rest of the manosphere garbage of recent decades so I get it, but also, I do not get it at all. The college I went to in the mid-to-late 90s was something like 60:40 women to men, on account of traditionally being a nursing and teaching school amongst other things, and look, 30 years ago, all the right-wing-leaning “men” I knew were all “hell yeah, college is where the easy chicks are!” And, on a personal note, and I don’t want to give the wrong impression here, a bunch of dudes with pooka-shell necklaces who purposely went to a school with a lot of girls was extremely easy to counter-program, if you take my meaning. Amongst all the other things, it’s nearly incomprehensible to me that the Young Republican subculture found itself in a place where they’re telling each other “more girls around is bad, actually.” What?

Mike Monteiro: F*ck You, Pay Me - from CreativeMornings: A classic that came up again this year.

Almost finally: oh snap new BOBBY FINGERS: Joe Rogan and The Black Keys Diorama

Finally Finally, I cannot believe I let this tab sit open for a year without sharing: jwz: Jungle. Trust me! This’ll make your day.