Mike’s Blog Round-Up

"Today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups... So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing." -- Philip K. Dick
By driftglass — February 6, 2026

On this day in 1962, the animated show Space Angel premiered featuring the voices of Ned Le Fevre, Margaret Kerry, Hal Smith, Johnny Coons, and Pat Kearin. It was mostly cheap, storyboard animation where secondary characters somehow always had their mouths covered, and when close-up speaking was required they used a technique called Synchro-Vox, which involved superimposing live-action footage of human lips onto static, illustrated animated characters. For 52 adventures/stories (which were divided into 260 five-minute segments) Scott McCloud, the Space Angel (a secret agent for the Earth Bureau of Investigation), cruised the spaceways in his ship, the Starduster, fighting to protect the solar system. It was cheap and silly and, for some of us, a beloved and ineradicable childhood memory.

First Draft: Putting The Id In Idiocracy.

Flux Media Network: Don't Trust Trump's Fake Interest in "De-escalating" ICE Tactics.

Governing: Minneapolis Chief on Policing a City in Chaos.

Attention space nerds! Grrr. NASA had 3 years to fix fuel leaks on its Artemis moon rocket. Why are they still happening?

Round Up by driftglass of the Professional Left Podcast and Science Fiction University

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