Story time: When I turned 16 my dad took me on a hunting trip. It was a kind of right-of-passage into adulthood and some father-and-son bonding. We travelled to Plumas National Forest (beautiful place) for mule deer.

We drove there. My dad seemed really into the trip. I hadn't seen him so happy but there was something off. Occasionally when discussing "my task" he would trail off and whisper. It was a little strange that he wouldn't say "the task" out loud: kill an animal.

And every time I asked if I couldn't complete "my task" he he would go quiet for a few seconds and say "it won't come to that." I wasn't really sure what that meant but I was 16 and figured I'd "man up" and make my dad proud anyway. But I was a little hurt. I don't perform

traditional masculinity very well and I was very sensitive to that as a teen. Those moments aside, the drive was a blast. Blasting The Clash in the car and talking about Civil War history (my dad is a CW buff) and enjoying the scenery.

It took half a day but we made it to a beautiful campsite in the forest. We set up our tents, made a fire, cooked dinner and settled in for the night. It was so beautiful and peaceful at night but I admit I was starting to dread the next day.

When we talk about #Tokusatsu FX directors, the first name that come to mind is, understandably Eiji Tsuburaya (FX director for the first Gojira, Ultraman’s father). However, one less-known person is Nobuo Yajima, who passed away two years ago, in November 2019. A THREAD

Born in 1928, Yajima left studies in engineering to join Shochiku in 1949, where he studied everything about movies (even collecting tickets in cinemas !). After watching John Ford’s The Hurricane, he grows an interest in FX, and joins the dedicated team at Shochiku.

His interest for editing came after he met a French editor while working as assistant director, cameraman and editor on the French-Japanese movie Typhon sur Nagasaki. An experience that shaped his vision of FX.

At the time, Tsuburaya was an advisor for Shochiku (since he was forced to leave Tôhô during the purge of occupied Japan). That's when he asked Yajima him to join the team for Gojira when he went back there.

Yajima refused, since he was working at Shochiku at the time, but you can see that he drew interest from the greatest FX director at the time. Fun fact, he created the first color logo of Shochiku !

Download before they order web archive to zoink it

https://t.co/30WMwU2r4B https://t.co/aGgROUz7n6

I'm creating a recommended book list for students of South Asian history and politics.

What do you think should be on it?

- "Annihilation of Caste" by BR Ambedkar
- "Walking With the Comrades" by Arundhati Roy
- "Hindutva" by VD Savarkar
- "Slavery" by Jyotirao Phule
- "Mogul India" by Niccolao Manucci
- "Sketch of the Sikhs" by John Malcolm
- "Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi" by Mohandas Gandhi

- "The Mughal Throne" by Abraham Eraly
- "Aurangzeb" by Audrey Truschke
- "What Gandhi and Congress Have Done to Untouchables" by BR Ambedkar
- "A History of the Sikhs" by Joseph Davey Cunningham
- "Travels in the Mogul Empire" by François Bernier

- "City of Djinns" by William Dalrymple
- "A Free Man" by Aman Sethi
- "Ants Among Elephants" by Sujatha Gidla
- "Jahangir's India" by Francisco Pelsaert
- "The Sikhs in History" by Sangat Singh
- "We or Our Nationhood Defined" by MS Golwalkar

- "War at the Top of the World" by Eric Margolis
- "The Argumentative Indian" by Amartya Sen
- "The Age of Kali" by William Dalrymple
- "The Temptations of the West" by Pankaj Mishra
- "For Reasons of State" by John Dayal
- "The Punjab" by Henry Steinbach

"Music, Sense and Nonsense: Collected Essays and Lectures", por Alfred Brendel.

Capítulo: “Thanking the Critics - London Critic’s Circle Award

Alfred Brendel ganó en 2003 el London Critic’s Circle Award, el cual que se otorga a quienes han prestado por un largo tiempo un servicio distinguido a las artes. Este premio se ha entregado a Ninette de Valois, Alicia Markova, Judi Dench, Ian McKellen, Helen Mirren, entre otros.

En su discurso, Brendel confiesa que aún en ese punto en su vida y con el gran éxito alcanzado, sigue teniendo algo de la aprehensión que tenía en un principio cuanto trataba de consolidar su prestigio con la ayuda con la prensa, y a veces sin ella.

Brendel agradece en particular a los críticos que después de su primer recital en Graz, Austria, le predijeron un futuro brillante, y a William Mann, quien lo describió en “The Times” uno de sus primeros conciertos como “un recital en mil”.

Brendel también agradece en retrospectiva al “New York Times” que por varios años lo menospreció, por demostrarle que es posible ganar admiradores y establecer una reputación a pesar de él.

🧵 12/24/2020 🧵
@DanScavino FB Posts
Dan has been busy today.

TS 5:13 pmE

360° pic reshared from WH
I did my best to capture it, but I apologize in advance. There’s a very good reason I’m not a brain surgeon😅

I had never heard of a man named Ferdinand Pecora before I had met the likes of the legendary William K Black who is the foremost expert in bank control fraud. But Bill was adamant that we learn about Ferdinand Pecora who had apparently brought the banksters to their knees 1/x

I was then introduced to @PatrickLovell1 and his brilliant partner Eric Vaughan who reemphasized the need for a modern day Pecora hearing.

I started to dig in. These guys Eric, @PatrickLovell1 and Bill had created a docuseries called "The Con" and it broke the story of the housing collapse and the fraud that fueled it from the GFC in 2007-2009 and beyond.

Our financial system is a backstop for elite control fraud. Elite bail outs while the same wretches predate on the poor and minorities, these rich cons live off of their misery foreclosing on homes people spent their lives securing.

The Con is about every person. Regular you and I. But it centered on an elderly black woman named Addie Polk who committed suicide as her home was being taken from her. Millions of Addie Polks exist today. Many of us experienced the fall out of Countrywide and subprime mortgages.

Let's review the ambitious labyrinthian design of Mothership's Gradient Descent, a 64-page mega-dungeon with a half-letter (5.5 × 8.5'') format.

This is gonna be a long one, so I'll experiment and break this review into multiple threads. This one will be about graphic design.

Mothership is a lived-in universe. No matter the particular brand of sci-fi you bring to your table, the books imply a grimy, sweat-soaked space made of pig iron and leaky hoses.

Of all the Mothership products, Gradient Descent is the truest expression of that.

Exhibit A: Textures

For example, the pages look like Sean McCoy didn't design the book so much as found it wedged behind IBM terminals tasked with MKUltra—and then faxed it to himself.

Every page has this weathered look deliberately placed where it would exist in real life.

Before I was a copywriter, I crawled inside furnaces in manufacturing, and strung from the catwalks over centrifuges and die toolings were books like this.

Cobbled together, photocopied, faxed, stomped out, squeegeed dry, and faxed-again manuals.

This design speaks to my soul.

If Gradient Descent were a handout, the graphic design would be perfect. Atmospheric. It feels more discovered than constructed.

But as a gm article, it fights itself on usability, economy, and storytelling, which I'll explain further in parts.

[thread in 12: The hill we climb — @theAmandaGorman]

When day comes, we ask ourselves
where can we find light
in this neverending shade?

The loss we carry a sea we must wade.
We've braved the belly of the beast.
We've learned that quiet isn't always peace.

1/12

In the norms and notions of what just is
isn’t always just is.
And yet, the dawn is ours before we knew it!
Somehow we do it.
Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.

2/12

We, the successors of a country and a time
where a skinny black girl descended from slaves
and raised by a single mother
can dream of becoming president
only to find herself reciting for one.

Yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine,
but that doesn’t mean..

3/12

... we are striving to form a union that is perfect.

We are striving to forge our union with purpose
to compose a country committed
to all cultures, colors, characters, and conditions of man.

So we lift our gazes not to what stands between us,
but what stands before us!

4/12

We close the divide because we know
to put our future first,
we must first put our differences aside.

We lay down our arms
so we can reach out our arms
to one another.

We seek harm to none and harmony for all.
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true.

5/12

I was reading something that suggested that trauma "tries" to spread itself. ie that the reason why intergenerational trauma is a thing is that the traumatized part in a parent will take action to recreate that trauma in the child.

This model puts the emphasis on the the parent's side: the trauma is actively "trying" to spread.

This is in contrast to my previous (hypothetical) model for IGT, which puts the emphasis on the child's side: kids are sponges that are absorbing huge amounts of info, including via very subtle channels. So they learn the unconscious reactions of the people around them.

(I say "hypothetical", because all while this sort of thing is in my hypothesis space, I haven't seen clear enough evidence that intergenerational trauma is a meaningful category that I solidly believe it is real.

More like, "here's a story for how this could work.")

On first glance, I was skeptical of this "active trauma" story.

Why on earth would trauma be agenty, in that way? It sounds like too much to swallow.

Just how dangerous and cunning is A@mir Khan
:An Observation
A@mir Khan claimed his movies Dangal,Secret Superstar made tonnes of money in China.The claim was Dangal made so much money in China that it's bigger hit than Bahubali 2 & therefore India’s biggest blockbuster movie.

Bahubali 2 hardly made any money in China. Chinese distribution is very funny.We don't know who those guys are,how they calculate the collections and how they share it with Indians.A@mir Khan said his movie made 1500 crores and more than 700 crores in China we have to take his

words.
Dangal made 538 crores (gross) in India while Bahubali 2 made 1429 crores (gross) in India.
Aamir claims even his Secret Superstar, where he played a guest role, collected 863 crores in China while it’s India collection is just 64 crore.

So with these collections he is 20 times biggest superstar in China than in India.
A@mir is a very intelligent operator. Unlike Salman Khan or Shah Rukh Khan, he played it very well from the beginning. He made super-patriotic movies like Sarfarosh, Lagaan and Mangal Pandey,

gaining the acceptance,trust of patriotic Indians.Then he surreptitiously and subtly started inserting his agenda into his movies.Take the example of Rang De Basanti. Everyone who saw it hated George Fernandes and BJP govt for making a quick buck with corruption in Defence deals.

1) I had a wonderful Christmas, and I hope everyone else did as well. There was one point in the night where a friend of the family managed to push my buttons, I admit it. Here’s how that went...

FYRE FESTIVAL FOR KIDS

Strap in folks for I have story about a festival I ALMOST worked at many years ago that essentially turned out to be a massive scam akin to Fyre Fest only it was aimed at families.

And believe me when I say this tale has a killer twist ending.

THREAD

I say 'almost' worked at because I backed out a few days before. My suspicions were already on alert due to the natural wariness a balding man like myself has towards any full grown adult who uses loads of hair gel, like the Event Organiser (EO) in question. Also he was horrible.

I looked after a STEAM workshop for Science Gallery for a few years and in 2014 we were asked to do a new family friendly festival in Malahide called Wonderfest.

I met with the EO to discuss details & from the off he seemed a bit off. Not my kind of

He promised everything under the sun but wouldn't just give me a fixed budget. The way he talked about the festival sounded great but also far too good to be true. Anyway, we agreed to do the festival, I put a programme together and he approved.

And then it started to get weird.

This was 3 months before the festival & I didn't hear from him again until 3 weeks out. I sent him numerous emails to discuss info we would need for the festival. We did soldering workshops with kids & on a weekend like this you'd get through around 200 workshops, details matter!

One of my favorite

Forbes estimates that Beanie Baby creator Ty Warner’ net worth is $2.7 Billion. This is an amazing achievement considering a bulk of it was earned during a 3-year time frame selling a $5 per unit stuffed animal.

The fact that Ty Warner’s Beanie Babies were able, without the benefit of a single ad, to outpace the combined annual profits of the largest toymakers in the world for even a few years is unprecedented.

To illustrate how quickly the bubble grew - In 1995, Ty Warner’s company Ty Inc had sales of roughly $28 million. In 1996 sales were $280 million with $90 million in pre-tax income. By 1998, Ty Inc sales reached $1.34 billion with pre-tax income of $700 million.

In Ebay’s 1998 Annual Report it disclosed Beanie Babies as material. “At times, approximately 7% of our listings involved Beanie Babies”. Furthermore, it was said that 10% of Ebay sales at the time were derived from Beanie Babies.

Y’all know how much I love “The Twilight Zone”... the more I learned about the man behind the show Rod Serling, the more I loved it. Here’s what he had to say after Dr. King was assassinated #thread #MLKDay

There is a bitter sadness and special irony that attends the passing of Martin Luther King. Quickly and with ease, we offer up a chorus of posthumous praise—the ritual dirge so time-honored and comfortable and undemanding of anything but rhetoric.

In death, we offer the acknowledgement of the man and his dream that we denied him in life. In his grave, we praise him for his decency—but when he walked amongst us, we responded with no decency of our own.

When he suggested that all men should have a place in the sun—we put a special sanctity on the right of ownership and the privilege of prejudice by maintaining that to deny homes to Negroes was a democratic right.

Now we acknowledge his compassion—but we exercised no compassion of our own.

Yesterday an old family friend came to visit for a few hours from NY. She was absolutely destroyed about the voter fraud that took place, but she exclaimed “Why isn’t anyone doing anything?!” She isn’t on social media at all. She just gets what the TV and paper tells her.

She wanted to know why so few people went to the first march in DC. She wanted to know why everyone was complacent and what she could do - she had no idea what she could do. She was depressed over it.

I took some time to explain to her and show her all of YOU. I showed her my pictures from the first event and also described just how many people were there. I tried to explain there was a lot going on and gave her a few numbers she could call.

The point of this is, again - she is not the minority but she FEELS like she is. She said “we have no country without fair elections. That means I can’t even get rid of the people I don’t feel are doing a good job! What’s the point!” What’s the point indeed. The only

way we are going to break through this is for those of us who are involved in this to keep spreading the word and keep fighting for those who know they have been wronged here but aren’t connected enough to know something is being done about it.