BC CULTURE
Saved by @CodyyyGardner

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/
The city's avatars are a BIPOC, queer, all-ages group, spiky and disunified, forced to resolve their differences as they quest for one another and battle the adversary in a race to save the city - and ultimately, our universe - from its eldritch horrors.

6/
As Lovecraft pastiches go, this is pretty fucking great stuff. Jemisin invokes Lovecraft's purple prose and vivid imagery to evince the real frisson of his horror, while simultaneously puncturing Lovcraft's noxious racism, which famously manifested in his disgust for cities.

7/
As with @bymattruff's 2016 novel LOVECRAFT COUNTRY, Jemisin does fantastic work in puncturing Lovecraft's atavistic horror of The Other by holding the mirror to it - inviting the reader to empathize with the object of that reflexive fear and disgust.

https://t.co/TtMuSzCgSz

8/
But THE CITY WE BECAME represents an advance on LOVECRAFT COUNTRY in an important regard: the way that it treats with the simplicity of the conservative worldview and the complexity of the real world.

9/
Many have observed that conservativism's nostalgia for "simpler times" is really a yearning for childhood: the reason life was simpler when you were a child isn't because times were simpler - it's because you were a child, sheltered from life's complexities by your parents.

10/
Hence conservativism's daddy issues, its yearning for strongmen who'll make the nation great through discipline, ordering and control.

In this telling, xenophobia is just the adult version of a toddler's unwillingness to eat their peas if they touch the mashed potatoes.

11/
An infantile, irrational fussiness that, in turn, is antithetical to cities - the sprawling, organic, self-organizing, diverse, chaotic places where ideas and languages and peoples and smells and tastes all rub up against each other.

12/
Jemisin's mythical battle of the messy city and the Lovecraftian adversary's desire for sterile order is a kind of eldritch dramatization of the fight between Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs - a fight that goes all the way back to Plato.

13/
Plato's Republic, after all, is the ultimate conservative work - the belief that people are born to virtue, and that virtue determines who is fit to rule and who must be ruled over because they cannot govern themselves.

14/
Plato even presaged Lovecraft's disgust with complex polyrhythms ("maddening drums"), decrying "broken rhythms" for their potential to disorder the listener's self-control - a theme that repeats in Jemisin's book as the avatar of Brooklyn spits weaponized rhymes.

15/
An obsession with neatness, categories, purity and hierarchy are the hallmark of both toddlers and conservatives, and Jemisin reveals that Lovecraft's squamous, rugose revulsions are just three grossed-out toddlers in a trenchcoat throwing their carrots on the floor.

16/
There's many ways to carve our ideological divisions right now. One of the most powerful fracture lines is simplicity-vs-complexity - the need to bleach everything to sterility versus the understanding that complex, thriving, diverse systems are necessary to our survival.

17/
Like all the best "urban fantasy," THE CITY WE BECAME is a love-hymn to cities themselves as living climax systems. More than that, Jemisin wields her city against the forces of infantile reaction.

eof/

More from Cory Doctorow #BLM

Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
If you think "It's not censorship unless the government does it," I want to change your mind.

It's absolutely true that the First Amendment only prohibits government action to suppress speech based on its content, but the First Amendment is not the last word on censorship.

1/


Here are some kinds of private speech-suppression that I think most of us can agree are censorship: when the John Birch Society burned mountains of rock records and novels - or when Tipper Gore's PMRC pressured record stores to drop punk, metal and rap albums.

2/


Or the Comics Code Authority, which signed up all comics publishers and retailers to block comics if they contained anything unfit for small children, which stunted American comics for generations while their European counterparts created entire sophisticated genres.

3/


Or MPAA ratings, in which a secret group of censors (falsely described as frequently rotated, randomly selected parents - really they're long-serving studio insiders) decides whether movies get NC-17 ratings and thus be blocked from nearly every screen in the country.

4/


(You can learn more about this from Kirby Dick's unmissable doc, "This Film Is Not Yet Rated," which documents both how the MPAA misleads the public about ratings, and uses them to block LGBTQ
HISTORY
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
After the 9/11 attacks, airlines and public buildings adopted a flurry of "security" measures, like taking away pen-knives from fliers or requiring visitors to office buildings to be photographed or present a driver's license.

1/


Bruce Schneier's seminal 2003 "Beyond Fear" called these measures: #securitytheater.

Schneier pointed out that these measures would be easy to circumvent, and were thus providing only the comforting appearance of security - not security

Security theater is worse than nothing. Security theater gives people the false impression that their risks have been mitigated, when actually things are just as dangerous.

After al, if you know that danger exists, you can take some steps to mitigate or avoid it.

3/

But if you have the false impression that you've been made safer, you might unwittingly engage in risky behavior.

4/

Like, if you know your car's brakes are flaky, you might nurse the car along to the mechanic at low speed on side-streets.

But if you don't know about the brakes, you're apt to discover their flaws at 75mph on the freeway.

5/
FOR LATER READ
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
20 years on, #BushVGore is back in our discourse - an election stolen by mobs at the polling places, a media blitz, and a Supreme Court at its most antidemocratic and antimajoritarian.

1/


We remember this as an election that the plutes stole, but it's also an election that the Dems gave to them. That's why we're talk about it now. There will be an attempt to steal next month's election. Will we surrender again?

2/

The last surrender led to a war being fought today by the children of the soldiers who were sent into battle on day one. It led to climate inaction, monopolistic concentration, erosions to our right to vote and to our right to protest.

3/

Thanks to that surrender, voter suppression was expanded and reinforced, leading to the election of a fumbling liar who got to appoint more SCOTUS judges in 3.5 years than all Democratic presidents did in the previous quarter


You may be wondering how the Dems surrendered in 2020. For a detailed account of what surrender looks like, read @rsgexp's @jacobin memoir of her time as an @AFLCIO organizer sent to Florida during the
POLITICS
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
2022 is shaping up to be a bloodbath. The Trump census cooked the numbers to advantage Republicans, and GOP statehouses are poised to redistrict in ways that will hand potentially permanent minority rule to the GOP in Congress.

1/


There's a potential way out: #HR1, an omnibus bill of electoral reforms that would create durable, structural protections for voting rights and a level playing field for campaigning.

2/

To get a sense of how urgent the looming crisis is - and of how important HR1 is - listen to @ryangrim interviewing @schwarz and Rep @JohnSarbanes [D-MD] on this week's

In theory, HR1 could be blasted through - Dems control the Senate, Congress, and the White House, and the future of the party depends on it, but I'm far from confident that they'll find the discipline and political will to make it happen.

4/

The Democrats keep squandering their majorities and wasting opportunities to make real change - changes that are must-haves, not nice-to-haves; changes needed to head off existential threats to the nation itself.

5/
TRUMP
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Ring - Amazon's surveillance doorbell division - has 4,000 "partnerships" with US police ("public safety") orgs. The company has lied about how these work for years, but the basic deal is that they give cops free stuff to buzz-market their products.

https://t.co/716iaXUXWR

1/


Ring tells its customers that they get to choose whether to share the footage from their street-facing cameras with cops, but that's a lie, too. If you say no, the cops still get to look through your

That's why cops debase themselves to serve as buzz-marketers for Ring - in exchange, they get an off-the-books, free-to-use, warrantless, city-scale, video surveillance grid.

3/

It's an investment that pays off. Back in July, @EFF documented how the @SFPD was able to commandeer 200 Ring cameras to produce surveillance data on #BLM

And in a new blockbuster report, EFF's @maassive and @mguariglia document how @LAPDHQ did the same thing, fraudulently using "unusual occurance" protocols to gain access to last summer's BLM
AMAZON

More from Culture

Pulp Librarian
Pulp Librarian
@PulpLibrarian
At it's #NewYearsEve we're going to end the year by playing the Agatha Christie game!

I'll show you the book cover artwork by Tom Adams, and you guess the Fontana edition Agatha Christie novel it's from.

Here's your first one...


A little bit trickier for question 2...


A lot trickier for number 3, but the clues are there if you know your Christie...


And here's your last Agatha Christie cover for this round - quite a famous one.

I'll post the answers in a bit, so get your guesses in now please!


Here are the answers to round 1 of the Agatha Christie game. I hope you got a few right, as round 2 will exercise your little grey cells a little bit more...
CULTURE
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Inequality requires narrative stabilizers. When you have too little and someone else has more than they can possibly use, simple logic dictates that you should take what they have.

1/


The forbearance exercised by the many when it comes to the wealth of the few isn't down to guards or laws - rather, the laws and the guards are effective because of the STORY, the story of why this is fair, even inevitable.

2/

Think of the story of monarchy and its relationship to the Church: the Church affirms that the monarch (and the aristocracy) was chosen by God ("dieu et mon droit") and the monarchy reciprocates by giving the Church moral and economic power within the kingdom.

3/

Capitalism replaced the story of divine will with a story of a self-correcting complex system: humans are born and raised with a variety of aptitudes and tastes, and at any moment, historical exigencies dictate that some individuals are better suited than others to do well.

4/

When it's railroad time, there are people who were born to oversee the laying of track and the coordination of rail networks: markets find those people, allocate capital to them, and allow them to mobilize that capital to produce shared prosperity for all of us.

5/
CULTURE
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Pulp Librarian
Pulp Librarian
@PulpLibrarian
What do you think folks, shall we do some bad book covers today?

I think we should...


"I have made some bad decisions in my life..."

Dressed Up For Murder, by Gary Brander. Fastback, 1986.


"It's not you Mr Darcy, it's me..."

Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen. Bestseller Library, 1966.


Move along Twitter, nothing to see here...

The Star Fox, by Poul Anderson. Panther Books 1968. Cover by Bob Haberfield.


Fangs For The Mammaries, edited by Esther Friesner. Baen Books 2010. Art by Clyde Caldwell.

I see what you did there Clyde...
CULTURE
Pulp Librarian
Pulp Librarian
@PulpLibrarian
Now many readers have asked me over the years "how do I (with my great hair) go about fleeing a gothic house?"

That's a very good question, because it's not as easy as it seems...


There are of course many gothic domiciles that women with great hair can flee from:
- a house
- a mansion
- a castle
- a chateau


More adventurous gothic heroines can also choose to flee:
- a manor
- a keep
- a graveyard
- some dark foggy towers


As gothic houses come in all shapes and sizes you may come across the following things which require fleeing:
- Strangers (call a taxi)
- Tombs (walk to the nearest exit)
- Hell (fleeing recommended)
- Darkest Death (head start required)


There are some items that are a clear giveaway that you are in, or near, a gothic house that requires fleeing. Look around you and see if you can spot:
- sarcophagi
- crucibles (unless in a chemistry lab)
- anemones
- any form of ides
CULTURE
Kahaniyan, Bas Yun Hi
Kahaniyan, Bas Yun Hi
@geetkahani
Amongst my absolute favourite musicians of all time, one name that is certainly near the top is of Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan sahab. I don’t know if any such data exists, but I am pretty sure he would also be among the most widely sold international artists in India. (1/43)

This is a thread about Nusrat sahab’s connections with India - his first performance here, songs blatantly copied from his compositions, his non-film albums done here, and also his work in Bollywood. So buckle up, coz this is gonna be very very loooong. (2/43)

The story starts in 1979, when a certain legend by the name of Raj Kapoor was invited to a Qawwali show in Birmingham, and heard Nusrat sahab performing there. So impressed by his music was Kapoor sahab, that he made up his mind to invite Nusrat sahab to India. (3/43)

Soon after, in early 1980, Rishi Kapoor was getting married to Neetu Singh, and Raj Kapoor promptly invited Nusrat sahab to perform at one of the sangeet ceremonies. The invitation actually was sent through Pakistani actor Mohammad Ali, a mutual contact of the two. (4/43)

Nusrat sahab accepted the invite, and was apparently excited with the prospect of also visiting Ajmer Sharif. His performance at the sangeet was attended by the who’s who of Indian film and music at the time, and he is said to have performed for hours through the night. (5/43)
CULTURE

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V\u0936\u0941\u0926\u094d\u0927\u093f
Vशुद्धि...
@V_Shuddhi
क्या आप जानते हैं कि क्या है, पितृ पक्ष में कौवे को खाना देने के पीछे का वैज्ञानिक कारण!

श्राद्ध पक्ष में कौओं का बड़ा ही महत्व है। कहते है कौआ यम का प्रतीक है, यदि आपके हाथों दिया गया भोजन ग्रहण कर ले, तो ऐसा माना जाता है कि पितरों की कृपा आपके ऊपर है और वे आपसे ख़ुश है।


कुछ लोग कहते हैं की व्यक्ति मरकर सबसे पहले कौवे के रूप में जन्म लेता है और उसे खाना खिलाने से वह भोजन पितरों को मिलता है

शायद हम सबने अपने घर के किसी बड़े बुज़ुर्ग, किसी पंडित या ज्योतिषाचार्य से ये सुना होगा। वे अनगिनत किस्से सुनाएंगे, कहेंगे बड़े बुज़ुर्ग कह गए इसीलिए ऐसा करना

शायद ही हमें कोई इसके पीछे का वैज्ञानिक कारण बता सके।

हमारे ऋषि मुनि और पौराणिक काल में रहने वाले लोग मुर्ख नहीं थे! कभी सोचियेगा कौवों को पितृ पक्ष में खिलाई खीर हमारे पूर्वजों तक कैसे पहुंचेगी?

हमारे ऋषि मुनि विद्वान थे, वे जो बात करते या कहते थे उसके पीछे कोई न कोई वैज्ञानिक कारण छुपा होता था।

एक बहुत रोचक तथ्य है पितृ पक्ष, भादो( भाद्रपद) प्रकृति और काक के बीच।

एक बात जो कह सकते कि हम सब ने स्वतः उग आये पीपल या बरगद का पेड़/ पौधा किसी न किसी दीवार, पुरानी

इमारत, पर्वत या अट्टालिकाओं पर ज़रूर देखा होगा। देखा है न?

ज़रा सोचिये पीपल या बरगद की बीज कैसे पहुंचे होंगे वहाँ तक? इनके बीज इतने हल्के भी नहीं होते के हवा उन्हें उड़ाके ले जा सके।
ALL
Nick Kapur
Nick Kapur
@nick_kapur
A thread of images from a Japanese illustrated history of America from 1861.

Here is George Washington (with bow and arrow) pictured alongside the Goddess of America. 1/


Here is Christopher Columbus (seated at center) reporting his discovery of America to Queen Isabella of Spain.

So far, kinda normal, but wait for it.... 2/


Now it's the American Revolution. Here is George Washington defending his wife "Carol" from a British official named "Asura" (same characters as the Buddhist deity). 3/


And here is Washington's "second-in-command" John Adams battling an enormous snake. 4/


Here is Washington and his wife "Carol" meeting an extremely youthful Benjamin Franklin, who has an impressive squat. 5/
CULTURE
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JayneshKasliwal
JayneshKasliwal
@JayneshKasliwal
ULTIMATE GUIDE TO 21 and 200 Moving Average
SUNDAY THREAD 🔖
A trend Following System That will Help You Improve Trading immensely.

RETWEET AND SHARE 🔄
@kuttrapali26 @AmitabhJha3
#stocks #StockMarket
1/n

Moving averages
EMA and SMA
1. Exponential Moving Average (EMA) is similar to Simple Moving Average (SMA), measuring trend direction over a period of time.
2. However, whereas SMA simply calculates an average of price data, EMA applies more weight to data that is more current
2/


21 EMA : SHORT TERM TREND
1. Calculates the Average Price of past 21 days
2. A stock above 21 ema is in strong momentum , which will give pullbacks to 21 ema again and again.
3. Stock above 21 ema should never be shorted so as to stay with the trend
3/n

3. A stock which moves 10-15% above 21 ema will be too extended and hence will generally pullback
Stocks take dynamic support on 21 ema
4. You can Short only if its too extended like 15 to 20% from 21 ema ( Not advised )
#ADANIPOWER:
#pnbhousing
4/n


1. Whenever 21 ema is sloping upwards its called uptrend
2. Whenever 21 ema is sloping downwards its called dowtrend
3. Whenever 21 ema is sideways its called consolidation
⏫Buy in uptrend
⏬Sell in downtrend
Examples:
5/n
MOVINGAVERAGES , MOVING AVERAGE 20021 , ALL
Vibhu Vashisth
Vibhu Vashisth
@VIBHU_Tweet
महाभारत की कहानी कौन नहीं जानता।लेकिन क्या आपको पता है कि महाभारत के ज्यादातर पात्र किसी न किसी श्राप में फंसे थे।अगर ये श्राप न होते तो कदाचित महाभारत की कहानी कुछ और होती।हिन्दु पौराणिक ग्रंथों में विभिन्न श्रापों का वर्णन मिलता है व हर श्राप के पीछे कोई कहानी अवश्य होती है।


आइए आज जानते हैं महाभारत कथा में वर्णित कुछ श्रापों के बारे में।

1) राजा पाण्डु को ऋषि किन्दम का श्राप

एकबार महाराज पाण्डु शिकार खेलने वन गए।झाडियों के पीछे कुछ हिल रहा था। मृग है सोचकर राजा ने बाण चलाया जो जाकर ऋषि किन्दम और उनकी पत्नी को लगा।वे दोनो रति-क्रीड़ा में लिप्त थे।

जब राजा ने उन्हें देखा तो बहुत दुखी हुए कि ये मुझसे क्या पाप हो गया।बहुत क्षमा याचना के बाद भी किन्दम ऋषि ने पाण्डु को श्राप दे दिया कि जब भी वो किसी स्त्री को काम भावना से स्पर्श करेंगे उसी क्षण उनकी मृत्यु हो जाएगी।पश्चाताप करने, वे सिंहासन पे अन्धे राजा धृतराष्ट्र को बैठाकर...


..स्वयं अपनी रानियों कुंती व माद्री के साथ वन चले गए।पांडवों का जन्म भी कुंती को ऋषि दुर्वासा द्वारा दिए गए मंत्र से हुआ था जिसमे किसी भी देव का स्मरण कर उस देव से कुंती,पुत्र प्राप्त कर सकती थी।एक बार माद्री पे मोहित हो जब पांडु ने उसे स्पर्श किया,उसी क्षण पांडु की मृत्यु होगयी।


2) उर्वशी का अर्जुन को श्राप

महाभारत युद्ध से पहले जब अर्जुन दिव्यास्त्र प्राप्त करने स्वर्ग गए तो वहां उर्वशी नाम की अप्सरा उन पर मोहित हो गयी। अर्जुन ने जब उन्हें अपनी माता के समान बताया तो यह सुनकर उर्वशी क्रोधित हो गयी और अर्जुन को श्राप दे डाला कि तुम नपुंसक की भांति...
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Billy Bostickson \U0001f3f4\U0001f441&\U0001f441 \U0001f193
Billy Bostickson 🏴👁&👁 ...
@BillyBostickson
@EricTopol @NBA @StephenKissler @yhgrad B.1.1.7 reveals clearly that SARS-CoV-2 is reverting to its original pre-outbreak condition, i.e. adapted to transgenic hACE2 mice (either Baric's BALB/c ones or others used at WIV labs during chimeric bat coronavirus experiments aimed at developing a pan betacoronavirus vaccine)

@NBA @StephenKissler @yhgrad 1. From Day 1, SARS-COV-2 was very well adapted to humans .....and transgenic hACE2 Mice


@NBA @StephenKissler @yhgrad 2. High Probability of serial passaging in Transgenic Mice expressing hACE2 in genesis of SARS-COV-2


@NBA @StephenKissler @yhgrad B.1.1.7 has an unusually large number of genetic changes, ... found to date in mouse-adapted SARS-CoV2 and is also seen in ferret infections.
https://t.co/9Z4oJmkcKj


@NBA @StephenKissler @yhgrad We adapted a clinical isolate of SARS-CoV-2 by serial passaging in the ... Thus, this mouse-adapted strain and associated challenge model should be ... (B) SARS-CoV-2 genomic RNA loads in mouse lung homogenates at P0 to P6.
https://t.co/I90OOCJg7o
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