BC HISTORY
Saved by @Alex1Powell

Look at some historical examples of mass psychogenic illnesses: dancing plagues, laughing plagues, meowing nuns,

 Here's a video on them: https://t.co/YNxCk7ZpEe
They are interesting, but what is more interesting to me is Culture Bound Syndrome. https://t.co/hMKaApUMZn

Basically: mass psychogenic illness, and presentation of various mental illnesses, do not occur in a vacuum. Cultures shape them.
For instance, Koro.

There have been several mass outbreaks of men completely convinced their penises are shrinking, anchoring them with string at night so they don't get sucked back inside.

Almost all in Southeast Asia.

https://t.co/fr9X1E1ayx
Here's a description of one outbreak in Hainan in 1984: https://t.co/GsXCZ70qx1
In Italy, there've been outbreaks of tarantism https://t.co/QGq9VAybjt

In which people compulsively dance until exhaustion, dehydration, and death.
Resignation syndrome among Swedish children, who go into a dissociative catatonic state https://t.co/sABPjuP4zs
Piblokto among Inuit women, deserves a mention.

It is not real. Arctic explorers invented it to justify sexually assaulting women.

Like drapetomania, it was colonizers pathologizing self preservation

https://t.co/cmq6zg9ZJ1
What it amounts to is common sense: you don't live in a vacuum. Paranoid delusions, compulsions, hallucinations, all are shaped by your culture.

You should expect there to be different presentations of various mental illnesses in different places.
Just think about night terrors over time.

150 years ago, if you had night terrors, you hallucinated monsters and fair folk trying to eat you.

After the Wright brothers, you probably hallucinated aliens abducting you.
So: culture influences presentation. It shapes the models you adopt, how you behave. This is common sense.
Which leads, of course, to zombies.

The US has had modern zombies permeate public consciousness for 52 years. Everyone knows what zombies are. They are as ingrained into culture as any folkloric demon or monster anywhere else.
If you wanted to realistically cause at least a limited zombie outbreak, you probably could do it by inducing a mass psychogenic illness in the US.

No rage virus or space radiation or 2-4-5 trioxin needed. Just stress, applied at the right points.
Basically, every recorded instance of a mass psychogenic illness occurred among people experiencing stress of some sort. Check out a list: https://t.co/LkoDVgRO5Z
William Byrd High School in 2007, multiple schools in Afghanistan in 2009, LeRoy High School in 2011, the 2016 evil clowns, etc

Stress, in the right conditions, does interesting things.
You simply need to find a small group of vulnerable, stressed people, and allow them an outlet to relieve that stress.

Schools and convents have historically been perfect breeding grounds for this.
Find that vulnerable, stressed group, your petri dish.

Get them to have zombies on their mind. Have em do zombie-related art, or marathons of zombie movies, or do papers on the ethnology of zombies.

Let that percolate.
And then, spike their stress to 11.

Somehow frustrate the everloving fuck out of them. Constrain their freedom, clamp down with your adult authority, annoy them even more than teenagers usually are annoyed.
At that critical moment of shared stress, in that vulnerable group of people who have zombies on their mind, offer them an outlet.

Have one kid pretend to bite another. Use squibs for realism, call in a favor from Tom Savini or something.
And voila. With any luck, your stressed-out little guinea pigs will relieve that stress in the most natural, intuitive way they can: acting like zombies.
If you think that's far fetched, read up on some of those historical incidents I linked above.

People have, multiple times, danced so violently for so long that they wore away the skin on their feet revealing bone before dying of dehydration.
They danced, or laughed, or meowed, or attacked their neighbors, because that was in their zeitgeist. Their culture informed the way that stress was relieved.

And in American culture, the zombie is standing right there as a perfect outlet.
In recent times, almost all such outbreaks have occurred in schools, or cramped workshops. Look up the June Bug epidemic.
What this means is, odds are you could create a local, contained zombie outbreak.

You could call it Quisling Syndrome, after the similar condition in the book World War Z.
Could you make it spread beyond your petri dish of stressed out people?

Well, look again at the 2016 evil clowns, and how one of the forgotten plotlines in 2020 was that they'd returned.
If those meowing nuns had had social media, I guarantee you every monastery and convent would have ended up with a case of the meows.
I guarantee you that your little, local outbreak would go viral on tiktok and instagram, it'd be everywhere the same way the Great Bathsalts Zombie story was.

Speaking of which: notice how readily and hungrily people ate that up? How excited they were to see it?
And that is how you easily, cheaply, and entirely realistically create a zombie outbreak without ever needing to do illegal biochemical experiments. Any jackass could do it.

If you do it, buy me some rice to thank me: https://t.co/TRTsg6UUwh

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Here's an interesting ncbi article on rage:

One of the claims argued, is that frustration triggers rage.

Either frustration from behaviour not producing expected outcomes, or frustration from someone not doing what one asks.

And, you can experimentally trigger rage by frustrating people sufficiently.

Get someone to do something in order to get a reward. Suddenly stop rewarding them for that. Bam, frustration and then rage.


Alternatively, pair your test subjects, ask them to cooperate to accomplish a task, and have your inside guy not listen.

Bam, frustration and then rage.


The thwarting of expectations is the common theme. Thwart someone's expectations, violate their model of how things work, and you frustrate them.

Keep at it, and you enrage them.
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So you want to generate interesting melodies.

1. Make a file called 1235.txt containing, one per line, all 24 unique permutations of the elements 1 2 3 5.


2. Cp 1235.txt to D.txt

3. Use sed to convert the numbers in D.txt to notes. Now you have 24 permutations of the major tetrachord in D.

4. Play them each. If it sounds like it increases tension, mark the beginning of that cell in 1235.txt with a +. If it sounds like it decreases tension, mark with a -.

Now those 24 melodic cells are divided into two groups: tension increasers and resolvers.

5. Rinse and repeat for all 12 keys.

You now have 13 plaintext files, filled with stuff like + 1 2 5 3 and - D E F# A

6. Figuratively roll dice to decide, given a +/- cell, what the next cell should be.

33% chance a + follows a +, etc.

Now you're outputting a stream of dynamic tensions: ++-+++-+-+---+ etc
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@pookleblinky
Vormithrax is basically the Lobos of Cataclysm. He plays the game with challenges that'd make it impossible for other people to survive even for a few minutes.

While his challenge runs are stunning, it is annoying that there *is* a meta.

In each, "normally I'd ___ but I can't do it so easily now, so ___"

What usually happens is someone watches a Cataclysm video, gets it, and then dies.

Then dies and dies and dies, having tons of fun in the process.

And then they learn the meta.

Grind slings to level crafting, search bushes to level survival. Make a knife spear. Stop making a knife spear, they nerfed it.

And before you know it, every game starts the same way. Like a video game, not an apocalypse simulator, or a story generator.
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@pookleblinky
You know all those mysterious disappearances youtubers?

If I were a serial killer, it would be an irresistible temptation to get in on that action.

It'd be simple.

Capture a hiker. Immediately freeze their body.

Wait 5 years, 10 years.

Place their body 15km away in an inaccessible location.

Wait 5 years to make a video about it.

"search and rescue parties scoured the area for weeks, with no result. 5 years later, a troop of boy scouts discovered his body over 30 miles away, in a tree. Forensics indicate he'd only been dead less than a week."

Imagine publicly describing, with millions of views, the circumstances of one of your victims and *no one* having a clue.

5.6 million views where you describe exactly where and when that hiker disappeared, and how mysteriously they were found.

"Park rangers say the only way to get there is to climb down a 2,000 foot cliff using climbing equipment. It's not a straight fall. How did he get there?"
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@pookleblinky
Consider that Late Registration came out in 2005.

A 15 year old would only know Kanye as a maga hat embarrassment.

The Selfish Gene came out in 1976. Anyone under 44 only knows dawkins in his bigot form.

The milkshake duck time horizon

Dawkins, for instance, has now been a bigot for much longer than he was a respected scientist.

Kanye has been an embarrassment for much longer than he was a talented rapper.

It's like how a 120-year old has spent half their life as an elderly person.

At some point, the milkshake duck has been one so long that no one remembers the milkshake anymore.

It's just the racist duck, or the terf duck, or the virulently islamophobic duck. Or all three, and for brevity simply called the asshole duck
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Thank you so much to the incredible @gregjenner and his team for having me on "You're Dead to Me" and to @kaekurd for being so hilarious and bringing Gilgamesh the restaurant into my life!

Here’s a thread of some of the stuff referenced in the podcast for those interested


First of all, what even is cuneiform?

It’s a writing system from the ancient Middle East, used to write several languages like Sumerian and Akkadian. Cuneiform signs can stand for whole words or syllables. Here’s a little primer of its evolution https://t.co/7CVjLCHwkS


What kinds of texts was cuneiform used to write?

Initially, accounting records and lists.

Eventually, literature, astronomy, medicine, maps, architectural plans, omens, letters, contracts, law collections, and more.


Texts from the Library of Ashurbanipal, who ruled the ancient Assyrian empire when it was at its largest in the 7th century BCE, represent many of the genres of cuneiform texts and scholarship.

Here’s a short intro to the library via @opencuneiform https://t.co/wjnaxpMRrC


The Library of Ashurbanipal has a complicated modern and ancient history, which you can read about in this brilliant (and open access) book by Prof @Eleanor_Robson
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asif
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THE LAST PRINCESS OF LAHORE - BAMBA DULEEP SINGH (1869 - 1957)

Thread

Post partition, every morning a weak old woman would board the Model Town bus service headed to the city. The conductor never asked her for money or he would invite anger of the last Queen of Punjab.

1/n


Princess Bamba Sutherland, the eldest daughter of Maharaja Duleep Singh and grand-daughter of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, was born on Sep 29, 1869, in London.

Duleep Singh, the last Maharaja of Punjab was taken away to England by British after annexing Punjab.

2/n


Since he was still a child he was forcibly converted to Christianity and made to adopt British values in order to prevent him from ever thinking about regaining Punjab.

He was also kept away from his mother Maharani Jindan.
When he finally met his mother years later...

3/n

...he was told about his lost kingdom and religion after which he decided to reclaim it from British treachery.
During his struggle he married and had six children, 3 sons & 3 daughters from the 1st marriage.

Bamba was the most colorful character among 6 and was a rebel...
4/n

...like her father and daring like her Grandfather Ranjit Singh. She married Col Sutherland who later became principal of King Edward Medical College.

When she got permission to bring her grandmother Maharani Jindan's ashes to Lahore in 1924, she saw a huge crowd gathered...
5/n
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#THREAD
1.Meenakshi Amman Temple(472ft High)also called as Meenakshi Sundareswarar is a famous Hindu temple located on the southern bank of Vaigai River in temple city of Madurai, #TamilNadu.It is dedicated to Parvati(Meenakshi)& her consort Shiva(Sundareswarar). @LostTemple7


2.Madurai Meenakshi Sundareswarar temple was built by King Kulasekara Pandya (1190-1216 CE).This popular temple visits over 15000 visitors daily & around 25000 on #Friday !Friday sees the most number of devotees visit the temple with the number going as high as +25,000.


3.Meenakshi Temple also hosts an annual festival called Meenakshi Thirukalayanam that is held in April. A celestial wedding of the god and goddess marks the end of the festival. About 1 million devotees visit the temple during this festival.


4.the temple has been tagged as one of the seven wonders of India along with stunning Architecture.The temple is built using Dravidian South Indian style of architecture, and is one of the most impressive temple structures in South India.


5.The principle deity here is MEENAKSHI, a form of Goddess Parvati. The idol of the goddess is carved in emerald hued stone. The Meenakshi idol has 3 breasts as Meenakshi was born with three breasts and was blessed that the 3rd breast would vanish once meets right man of her life
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It's now over half a century since 1970, and I'm starting to wonder if we should bring back its concept of gracious modern living...


You see we've grown so used to Swedish-style modernism that we've sort of forgotten that maximalism, rather than minimalism, was once the sign of a cultured abode.


The 1970s in many ways reached back to the rich ideas of Victorian decor: heavy, autumnal and cluttered. Home was meant to be a baroque and sensual experience, rather than a 'machine for living in.'


Gaudy was certainly in by 1970: colour choices for interior design were rich and varied, with every room becoming a boutique of signature design.


Experimentation and adventurism were also coming to the fore: now we had landed on the Moon surely we should start to live like astronauts on Earth.
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I am for Afrakan-centered unity, not "Black" unity. People often assume that they are the same thing.


Black unity is the concept that people unify with anybody who has Black skin; as a result, they often find themselves uniting with people who are Eurasian Supremacists (since 95% of Black people are devout Eurasian supremacists) and if you unify with them they will only lead…

…you to their Eurasian master. Most activist in the Black population only preach Black unity, which is why we are not able to develop anything.

This was the same problem with Nkrumah's Pan-African unity.

It resulted in exploitation of the concept by Arabs, Asiatic "Berbers," Chinese and Indians, and even Europoids.

Afrakan-centered unity is distinct from Black unity because it requires the Black person to be Afrakan-centered.

This safeguards the unity because they don't just have skin in common, but common understanding. This is essential because in order to build something we have to have a common understanding of what we are building, why, and for whom.
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1/ Someone emailed me asking how to break into VC, so I wanted to answer on Twitter where others could see and contribute to the conversation.

2/ “Being a VC” can mean a lot of different things, so it’s worth asking:

What actual activities do you want to do?

- Deep market analysis?
- Be in the flow of information and people?
- Make deals?
- Work closely w/ founders over time (e.g take board seats?)
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3/ It’s worth specifying what type of VC you might like to become — as there are different archetypes. E.g.

- Benchmark (Lead series A/B - couple investments a year)
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4/ Continued:

Expa - Incubate companies

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Different paths will require different skillsets & sets of experiences.

5/ Since the person who wrote the email is a young person trying to break into VC by joining a firm (and who doesn’t want to start a company), I’ll tailor this tweet storm to that goal. There’s some overlap.
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So I was talking to @gewt about Job: A Comedy of Justice and I came up with a theory that I think explains why Heinlein's late-period work is so kinda-terrible and why I still enjoy it so much


So Heinlein had always been very interesting in the short parts of his novels, like the little snippets inside chapters. He had a very fun writing style, and wrote some fun dialogue with fun characters, right?>
It probably comes from how much of his early stuff was short fiction

And I think what happened with a lot of his longer works is that he'd just start writing fun bits and hope it would end up going somewhere or having a bigger plot by the end. like eventually he'd figure out where this was going, then go back and rewrite it into a cohesive whole

and I'm sure he had editors that'd help this process. No editor would let you publish something as rambly and changing-gears-every-other-chapter as The Number Of The Beast, for example... unless you were God-King Of Science Fiction 1980s Robert Heinlein.

so basically I think what happened is that by the 80s (when he was in his seventies!!) he lost the drive to go back and rewrite and he was too Untouchable for editors to make him.
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I was standing outside, waiting for a lyft to get home, when two cis men came out of the bar to smoke cigarettes. They're discussing the masks that folks are wearing in California at the moment because of the very dangerous air pollution from the fires happening.

I happen to be wearing one of those masks, because I think lungs are important and I like breathing. I dunno. One of the men notices me standing there, and says, "Like this f*cker right here. What is this shit?"

He goes on a homophobic rant about me, the pansy with a mask, and what a Very Manly Man he is because he's not afraid to smoke a pack of cigarettes while California is on fire. He doesn't need a mask, because something-something-heterosexual-something.

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Dayanand Condemned Idol worship and blamed it on jains . like really??


The book peddles hate against several Hindu sects.

here is hate against Vaishnavas
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