Avner Shanan

Out of Context: Another Link Round Up

Started a new job at the beginning of June so it’s been hard for me to focus on much else. A month in and I’m starting to feel like I’ve got my shit together enough to come up for air a bit, so I’m throwing together a quick round up post.

Reading

• In case you missed it, last week the MTV News archives were deleted by parent company/ghouls Paramount. Luckily for us, Internet Archive has been hard at work for a while now, and has archived MTV News webpages dating back to 1996 (though it seems unlikely to me that they have everything). On a completely unrelated note, this thread lists some handy sounding tools for archiving various kinds of Internet content, in case you happen to run across anything in the wild that needs to be archived for posterity.
• Speaking of archives, Imperfect Archiving, Archiving As Practice: The Ethics of the Archive is a zine I read back in April but haven’t gotten around to talking about anywhere until now. It’s short and good, and I really love these two quotes so I think I’ll just let them speak for themselves:

  • Each torn page, mark, bent corner, coffee stain, missing page, faded color, invokes the lived experience of the object. These signs of wear and tear communicate the history of the object, one that reflects the ways in which a body has pressed and had an impact on it.

  • In a world of extreme hardness, hyper masculinity and ecological disaster, an embracing of softness is not only “political” but potentially world changing.

Listening/Watching

• The podcast Let’s Learn Everything has been a really important find for me. It’s got good science, good politics, good storytelling, and it isn’t about all the ways that the world is falling apart. That kind of podcast is a loadbearing part of my life and I do tend to go through them pretty quickly. Bonus points for having hosts from both the US and the UK, so you get interesting perspectives sometimes on ways that our cultures handle things differently.
• The Future Is (Literally!) Bright - How Infrastructure Works, by Deb Chachra - Climate, Energy, & the Future
  • I’m a big nerd about infrastructure and a bit of a Deb Chachra fanboy, so I’ve been looking forward to her new book, How Infastructure Works, since I heard she was writing it. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but I follow the host of this podcast, Kevin Riggle, on Mastodon, so when I saw that he interviewed her about it, I couldn’t pass up the chance to get a preview. It was a good episode and I’m now going back and listening to the rest of the podcast from the beginning, so don’t be surprised if you see more episodes showing up here.
• BiiiBLE STUDY. a thiiird person podcast
  • Do you like hip hop? Do you like fanfic? Then you might like this podcast. thiiird person dives into the Kendrick-Drake beef and weaves a fanfictive theory of love and hate, crime, spite, sneak disses, and grand plans over the course of a decade plus through a close reading of the lyrics from the beef and across Kendrick’s whole discography. Is he onto something? I don’t know, but honestly, it’s a great excuse to listen to good music and I love watching an artist have fun doing their art.