Dear @TuckerCarlson
I'd like to repost this great letter from a teacher in Iowa to a noisy little TV dinner heiress in need of some tutoring

So here is a secret: Not everything I write goes anywhere. I have at least 4 books completely written and edited that never went on submission. I have books that stalled out at 20k. I have docs on my computer with opening paragraphs I don't remember writing. But! 1/

Every now and then an idea sticks with me like that corner of tortilla chip that just won't go down your throat. It happened with SPARROWHAWK, which began as 40k of a YA story, died, and was reborn as a comic, thanks to @christopher_j_r and @boomstudios. And now... 2/

It's happening with THE WILLOWS, a short story that you'll see in @UncannyMagazine next year. This Southern Gothic horror story began as an attempt to sell my next Romance to @AbZurdity after the Blud books in 2014 or so. And she didn't buy it. Guess why? 3/

Turns out, it wasn't a Romance! It was Southern Gothic Horror. Even the bones of it screamed strangeness, not sexiness. I loved the taste of the world, but I hadn't found the right story yet. Tried to write it 2 more times and failed. Until I finally understood what it was. 4/

So I took the 50 pages I'd written and cut half of them, twisting the story around from a gothy Romance inspired by the band the Civil Wars and turned it into a spooky descent into madness. And it looked back at me from the abyss as if to say, DUH. Sometimes... 5/

Andhakasuravadha Samharamurti -#story #Thread
Sculpture of Bhagwan Shiva as the destroyer of the Asura Andhaka - Cave 29,Ellora caves

Asura Andhaka hangs on to a trishula held by 6-armed Shiva.

Once Parvathi & Shiva were relaxing in the pleasant gardens of Mount Mandhara.

Bhagwan Shiva sat down there to enjoy the happiness.Parvati closed the eyes of Shiva playfully & darkness covered the whole universe.Parvati was perplexed & her palms were wet with perspiration.A few drops of her sweat mixed with sweat from Shiva’s body& fell to the ground.

From this sweat,a fierce creature was born,it started to roar.Child was born blind as Shiva's eyes were closed so was named as Andaka.Andha means darkness&also ignorance.Around the same time Asura Hiranyaksha was performing rigorous tapas Shiva for a boon of powerful son.

Bhagwan Shiva was pleased by tapas of Hiranyaksha & blessed him with darshan.Hiranyaksha asked for a powerful son,Shiva told him that he cannot have his own son,but can adopt a blind child who would become very powerful later.Shiva gave child Andaka to Hiranyaksha.

Hiranyaksha returned to his kingdom with Andaka.Later after the vadh of Hiranyaksha, Andaka is said to have lived with his cousins.He was ridiculed,so dejected Andaka went to forest.He did severe tapas for over many years towards Brahma Dev. Brahma dev appeared before him.

Observing the public conversation around FB, and the private ones happening among techies and ex-FBers, I think the mutual misunderstanding is worse than when I set out two years (and 500 pages) ago to (in a small way) bridge that gulf.

We're basically fucked.

The tech world has gotten so huge, self-reinforcing, and insulated from reality they can no longer even vaguely look at themselves (and their actions) as others do. They just live on a different planet than most people.

Conversely, the average tech consumer doesn't understand the technology that has slowly taken over their lives, and their designated emissaries to figure it out--politicians, pundits, regulators, journalists--understand it barely better than they do, and have their own agendas.

To say more than generalities for a moment, here's what I think is likely the core problem.

Techies take weird, improbable visions, and make them realities: some BS pitch deck to a VC, mixed with money and people, really does turn into some novel thing.

Most people work inside a legacy industry that's evolved that way over time (usually for good reasons), and they think about the future via some analogy with their present (which is a function of a long-ago past). The interruption that tech will introduce is often hard to grasp.

One fascist to watch in 2021 is Joseph Charles "Oakman" Golinske of SE MI. He's been a Proud Boy for a couple years, but took a break recently from the group and promotes himself through the "Oak Nation" channel on Telegram.

Most people may be familiar with him as the tall guy in the Proud Boys bridge shot, from their August 17, 2019 attack on Portland, which featured an American Guard bus trying (and failing) to bludgeon antifascists with hammers.

He was also with his g/f at the time (Dominique Tota, left of Tarrio), and that's definitely a twitter account folks will want to block/report because he posts on it.

He's been plenty active at the pro-Covid/anti-mask/ReOpen protests in Lansing MI, seen here with Jerry Wayne and an effigy of Gretchen Whitmer, who his militia friends tried to kidnap and publicly execute.

Outside of the Proud Boys, his solo "career" with Oak Nation features the same misogyny, classism and gateway to far-right domestic terrorism the Proud Boys themselves feature. Here's him peddling oxychlorinque and bragging about harassing service workers.