Culture | Buzz Chronicles

Well this is pretty terrific: @PavelAnni was so taken with my 2020 novel ATTACK SURFACE (the third Little Brother novel) that he's created "Mashapedia," a chapter-by-chapter breakdown of the real world technologies in the tale.

https://t.co/Z2aLwF1Ez3

1/

Pavel is both comprehensive and comprehensible, with short definitions and links for the mundane (MIT Media Lab, EL wire, PGP) to the exotic (binary transparency, reverse shells, adversarial preturbation).

2/

When I was an adolescent, my friend group traded secret knowledge as a kind of social currency - tricks for getting free payphone calls, or doubling the capacity of a floppy disc, or calling the White House switchboard.

3/

I doted on books that promised more of the same: Paladin Press and Amok Catalog titles, Steal This Book, the Anarchist Cookbook, the Whole Earth Review and the Whole Earth Catalog.

4/

But when I sat down in 2006 to write the first Little Brother book, I realized that facts were now cheap - anything could be discovered with a single search. The thing in short supply now was search terms - knowing what to search FOR.

5/

LGB Alliance
@ALLIANCELGB

"This fearless book [by @abigailshrier] shows how girls’ bodies have become collateral damage in adult culture wars," says @VictoriaPeckham. In 2021 we must explore what drives gender identity theorists to put their ideology above the health & welfare

of children & young people. Gender identity ideologues promote a “progressive” new world where "trans children" skip an essential stage of every human being's physical, psychological & sexual development - puberty. /2

Then these “trans children” move on from puberty blockers to cross sex hormones whose effects are immediate and visible. 98% do @TaviAndPort. More experimentation and no measurable improvement to mental health. /3

And then we see some surgeons who have forgotten their oath to “First, do no harm” or who simply cannot resist the temptation of £/$. They remove healthy organs whose functionality can never be restored. /4

Most children play, dress up, put on make-up & cowboy hats. They use their imagination to try out all sorts of things. We think they're just growing up normally. We believe they deserve protection from a global movement that seeks to force outdated gender stereotypes on all /5

Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow

Macarthur fellow and Hugo-award-winner @nkjemisin's 2019 book "The City We Became" is both a fantastic contemporary fantasy novel and a scorching commentary on the infantile nature of the racist dogma of HP Lovecraft and his

It's a quest novel about a group of New Yorkers who awaken one day to discover that they are mystical avatars of the city, which has awakened and been reborn as a kind of powerful colony organism.

2/

There's an avatar for each of the five boroughs, plus a "primary" who represents the city as a whole. As with all births, this one is somewhat traumatic - but NYC's birth is uniquely fraught.

First, the five boroughs must find one another and connect with the primary.

3/

But they must do all this while under sustained assault from a mystical, transdimensional, Lovecraftian horror, a great adversary to all of our Earth's living cities - but an adversary that had been believed to be powerless against cities after their births.

4/

The enemy manifests as a Karen, a white woman clad all in white, dogwhistling racist tropes, summoning police, weaponizing vast fortunes to evict its enemies or distort their culture. It is attended by harbingers - human beings infected with fluttering white tentacles.

5/

Michael Nielsen
@michael_nielsen

I've been reading the wonderful book "Cell Biology by the Numbers" (https://t.co/rLzAiv32Dq ). Here's a thread of striking things I learned from the book (or related reading)

1. In terms of raw genomic information, human beings are
unimpressive. Many plants & amphibians, for instance, have larger genomes. We're not so much the genomic crown of creation as a cul-de-sac of creation.

I haven't checked, but this graph suggests it may be possible to have a pet snail more genetically complex than you. Or keep (be kept by?) a houseplant that's more genetically complex

2. In fact, the herb Paris japonica has the largest known genome, ~150 billion base pairs, about 50x the human genome. The lungfish has more than 100 billion.

3. What are Paris japonica and the lungfish doing with all that genomic information? No idea! But what a great question!

$\U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8\U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8\U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8LindaAFBB\u2b50\ufe0f\u2b50\ufe0f\u2b50\ufe0f$

🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸LindaAFBB⭐️⭐️⭐️...
@LindaWarriorGal

.1

BLOODLINES OF THE NEPHILIM – A BIBLICAL STUDY

Fred Connelly
@brendonconnelly

I'm now going to ad-lib my long-threatened thread about Mission: Impossible and my single favourite sequence in motion pictures (take that, Red Shoes ballet sequence). Here's the film on the iPlayer right now. The sequence in question is the one in the thumbnail. Of course!

The sequence really begins with a choreographed bit of sitting-on-a-train, wherein Ethan Hunt gives a broad sketch of his plan. Essentially he says "We all have jobs to do" but what those jobs are is basically secret. Heist movies can go both ways. This one hangs on surprise.

The heist target is an IMF mainframe - they're going rogue and infiltrating their own agency. It's crucial to what the scene, and film, means at the most basic level. The institution is corrupt, our 'heroes' are pitted against it. Lots of the film is foggy but *this* is clear.

The remainder of the early train scene has one major purpose: to tell us the mission is impossible. This sequence delivers on the basic promise of the film (the whole series, arguably). The impossibility of the mission is exciting for the crew, compounding audience excitement.

Though this scene doesn't tell us what Hunt's solution is, it's crucial that it lays out the problem in a very clearly readable way. The vault's high security is hammered home. We're shown *and* told at the same time.

BISAY
@Ka__Bisay

REPOST | A woman in the people’s war

English: https://t.co/WN4mjjVuzy
Pilipino: https://t.co/EDMyltmAlq

A woman in the people’s war (Thread)

There are many women who embrace the sacrifices and challenges of life in the New People’s Army (NPA). With firmness, they perform their tasks as equal counterparts of male fighters. 1/19

These women include Paolin, Mimi and Jellyn, young women fighters from various walks of life who found acceptance and equality in the people’s army. 2/19

Ka Paolin, revolutionary mother

Ka Paolin is a member of a propaganda and education committee in a province. She serves as teacher to her comrades who are unable to read and write. She also teaches cultural performances, and mass and Party courses. 3/19

Her parents are both leading cadres of the Party and NPA. She decided to follow their footsteps and joined the people’s army when she turned 18. This was where she met her husband. 4/19

Lenny Rachitsky
@lennysan

Earlier today, I gave a talk at the @SubstackInc's writer conference about building a writing habit. Below are the ten concrete strategies I shared that have helped me publish a post every week for 1.5 years 👇

0/ First of all, just sharing advice about this topic gives me serious impostor syndrome because writing is still pretty new to me, and I have much to learn. But these are things that have helped me, and I hope they'll help you.

1/ Strategy 1: Commit publicly

This was maybe 50% of my initial motivation. Having told people I was going to write weekly made me feel bad when even thinking about skipping a week. It gave me just enough nudge to keep

I'm kicking off an experiment. Inspired by the great @joulee, and building off of the great inbound questions I continue to get from ya'll -- I\u2019m going to start using my newsletter to answer your questions. \U0001f44b

Sign up belowhttps://t.co/z1F1efMcue
— Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) September 12, 2019

1b/ You don't need to make this super public. Just sending an email to a few friends regularly with your concrete goals about writing (and anything else) works wonders.

1c/ If you *really* want to be motivated, ask people for money. Nothing motivates you more than people paying you for regular

Life alert: I\u2019m adding a paid plan to my newsletter \U0001f91e

After much prodding from readers and friends, I\u2019m going to take the leap and give this life-path a shot.

Consider subscribing and joining me on this journey \U0001f64fhttps://t.co/gtFm4POGSQ
— Lenny Rachitsky (@lennysan) April 7, 2020

PRINCE LEGION
@PRNLegion

THREAD: Prince's socially conscious songs

Lyrics taken from Genius

"Uptown" from Dirty Mind

"Partyup" from Dirty Mind

"Sexuality" from Controversy

"1999" from 1999

David Hundeyin
@DavidHundeyin

🚫Things to leave behind in 2020:

1. Leaving the diaspora and moving to "Gohna🇬🇭" without a plan for earning income, then trying to survive in Gohna by monetizing your new YouTube channel about life in Gohna.

This thing is becoming a ponzi scheme and it must stop⛔

There\u2019s a YouTuber who interviews people who\u2019ve moved back to Africa from the diaspora and somehow all the videos sound like this to me pic.twitter.com/jwjMZMkueZ
— Nelumbo N. (@vuyanzi93) December 31, 2020

2. Uploading photos of your snowed-in car or 2-bedroom house in Mississauga with the caption, "Still want to come to Canada?"

Just drop your photo, write "I escaped" and go.😐

3. Writing "Sapiosexual" on your Tinder bio.

Facebook. You need Facebook.

4. Headhunting someone and taking them through an entire interview and testing process after reaching out to them yourself, only to hit them with the "We like you but" email.

This one baffled me because I was literally by myself and you came to meet me. What was the reason?🤷🏿‍♂️

5. Using the phrase "Good PM" for any reason whatsoever.

Return to Ìbàràpá from whence you came, foul creature

$Remi_1111FR \U0001f438 \U0001f64c \U0001f54a$

Remi_1111FR 🐸 🙌 🕊...
@film_instant

Color of the year https://t.co/6jnnf2jJLA

I want to wish you a Happy New Year!!!
I hope everybody will be healthy in 2021 \U0001f64f\U0001f3fc\U0001f64f\U0001f3fc\U0001f64f\U0001f3fc\U0001f64f\U0001f3fc
SEE YOU SOON ON THE DANCEFLOORS!!!!!!@MuseeLouvre @restosducoeur @UNICEF @PlayStationFR @XiaomiFrance pic.twitter.com/AeLf6wHMaT
— David Guetta (@davidguetta) January 1, 2021