#synthesis tour

[neverlostmycrown]

#30daysmusicchallenge2024 for Daughters of Darkness!

Day 17: A song that you think everybody should listen to:

Evanescence - The End Of The Dream (Synthesis live version)

Amy explained why she decided to re-record the song for Synthesis:

"I wanted to re-record The End of the Dream in a way that exposed the completely post traumatic healing of a survivor - taking the time to focus on the pain, and then look up and past it, gathering the strength to live on, better. Stronger. With a new understanding of the beauty of pain and the heartbreak of real life, not fly away from it, but carry it. Carry it all and feel grateful for it. Even proud."

(x)

[neverlostmycrown]

i love this outfit

[monsterslament]

MATTTT tell me about Odes to Aphrodite I never hear about them but I want to tell me 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🦀🦀🦀🦀😳😳😳😳🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏♥️♥️♥️♥️

ok so real sorry i barely talk about them </333

odes to aphrodite. gothic rock band of all time. thelma's solo music project with her girlies her besties as band members <3 thelma does lead vocals and bass, jason plays drums if jeremiah isn't there. jamie is jason's twin brother and he does guitar and backup vocals if they need it. the genre of the music itself kind of alternates through different types of rock music but they're most well known for a romantic and slow style of gothic rock, similar to type o negative. they're sooo cool thelma normally plays a pink bass its so pretty

[afeelgoodblog]

The Best News of Last Week

1. Amazon deforestation falls over 60% compared with last July

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell by at least 60% in July compared to the same month last year, the environment minister, Marina Silva, has told the Guardian.

The good news comes ahead of a regional summit that aims to prevent South America’s largest biome from hitting a calamitous tipping point.

2. 4,000 Rescued Beagles, Bred for Research, Found Homes and Best Friends

A heartwarming story unfolds as a beagle named Fin marks the end of a heroic 60-day mission to save almost 4,000 dogs from distressing conditions at a breeding facility. Beagles once underfed, sick, and mistreated have found their way into loving homes, enjoying grassy romps and birthday cake celebrations.

From "Sir Biscuit of Barkingham" to "Nervous Nellie," these four-legged heroes are adapting to their new lives with wagging tails and leaps of joy.

3. 'Cancer-killing pill' that appears to 'annihilate' solid tumours is now being tested on humans

A "cancer-killing pill" has appeared to "annihilate" solid tumours in early research - leaving healthy cells unaffected.

The new drug has been in development for 20 years, and is now undergoing pre-clinical research in the US.

4. Petting other people's dogs, even briefly, can boost your health

It turns out even short, friendly interactions with canines can be good for our health. Evidence is accumulating that levels of the stress hormone cortisol drop in people after just 5 to 20 minutes spent interacting with dogs — even if it's not their pet.

5. FDA approves first pill for postpartum depression

The Food and Drug Administration on Friday approved the first-ever pill for postpartum depression.

The medication, called zuranolone, is taken daily for two weeks. In a pair of clinical trials involving women who experienced severe depression after having a baby, the drug improved symptoms — such as anxiety, difficulty sleeping, loss of pleasure, low energy, guilt or social withdrawal — as early as three days after taking the first pill.

6. Taylor Swift Gives Bonuses Totaling Over $55 Million to Every Person Working on Massive Eras Tour

The pop superstar recently gave bonuses totaling over $55 million to everyone (from her dancers to riggers, sound technicians and catering, among others) working on her massive show.

TMZ previously reported that Swift, 33, gifted truckers on her tour $100,000 each ahead of her concert stop in Santa Clara over the weekend.

7. Successful room temperature ambient-pressure magnetic levitation of LK-99

In summary, this paper provides confirmatory synthesis and enhanced magnetic levitation of LK-99 at room temperature. The results support the possibility of intrinsic high temperature superconductivity in this system, but lack electrical evidence. More measurements and theoretical work are still needed to conclusively demonstrate and explain claimed room temperature superconductivity in this apatite material.

----

That's it for this week :)

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Support this newsletter ❤️

Also don’t forget to reblog.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Async mugwump linkdump

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW in ANAHEIM at WONDERCON: YA Fantasy, Room 207, 10 a.m.; Signing, 11 a.m.; Teaching Writing, 2 p.m., Room 213CD.

For 20+ years, I've processed all the information that came over my transom by blogging – mulling on why something I saw in the world caught my attention and trying to summarize it for strangers. This turns out to be a very powerful way to do a lot of different kinds of mental work:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

With Pluralistic, the solo blog I founded 4 years ago, I've moved into longer, more synthetic essays that try to connect the things that caught my attention today with all those things I've written about for the past two decades. That's also proven very fruitful:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/20/fore/#synthesis

But this move to longer works has a downside: sometimes I'll arrive at the week's end and have a list of things that caught my attention without there being any obvious way to connect them, and when that happens, I devote a Saturday edition to a linkdump. There's been 15 of these so far:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

Welcome, then, to the 16th Pluralistic linkdump, and a warning, this one starts with an obituary.

Ross Anderson was one of the heroes of the cryptographic revolution, a brilliant scientist and communicator, a fantastic activist, and a scorching curmudgeon. Ross died this week. He was 67, and had chronic heart issues as well as long covid:

https://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/2024/03/29/rip-ross-anderson/

There's so much that's been written about Ross and his legacy already, and there's doubtless more to come, but I've picked out two pieces to point you to. The first is from Danny O'Brien, who was also the guy who talked me down off the ledge the first time Ross flamed me on a public mailing list, leaving me bleeding and furious:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39868983

As Danny says, Ross was "the model of a politically and socially involved computer scientist," a man whose blazing intellect, fierce moral center and relentless curiosity inspired a generation of technologists to think about politics, and a generation of political activists to think about technology. Few of Ross's eulogizers (thus far) have mentioned how Ross's passion came out as fury, and – as someone who counted Ross as a friend and inspiration – I think this is a serious omission. It's hard to imagine Ross doing all that he did without understanding the anger that – along with his ethics – fueled his passion.

(Compare with @neil-gaiman's classic essay on the anger of Terry Pratchett:)

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/24/terry-pratchett-angry-not-jolly-neil-gaiman

The other obit that I want to point you to comes from Bill Buchanan, one of Ross's closest collaborators. Buchanan's memorial for Ross does a superb job of rounding up Ross's technical contributions to the field of security engineering:

https://medium.com/asecuritysite-when-bob-met-alice/ross-anderson-rip-59233c75fadf

Buchanan embeds videos for some of Ross's best speeches, links to his key papers (including the classic "Programming Satan's Computer," on "programming a computer which gives answers that are subtly and maliciously wrong at the most inconvenient moment possible), reminiscences of Great Moments In Ross Anderson, and terrific, lay-friendly breakdowns of some of Ross's key mathematical work.

As an unreasonable, angry person, I take great inspiration from people who channel their unreasonable anger to socially beneficial conduct – like whistleblowers. After Baltimore's Francis Scott Key Bridge was totaled by the 95,000-ton cargo ship MV *Dali(, a vast cohort of instant experts in structural engineering, sea freight and shipbuilding has taken to the internet with a slurry of takes on the Meaning Of the Bridge.

Some of these are very stupid indeed, like the idea that somehow "DEI" caused the collision. But you don't have to be an expert in maritime issues or civil engineering to understand the importance of this report from The Lever about shipping giant Maersk's culture of retaliation against whistleblowers:

https://www.levernews.com/feds-recently-hit-cargo-giant-in-baltimore-disaster-for-silencing-whistleblowers/

Maersk is the company that chartered the MV Dali; Maersk is also a key player in the cartel that controls the world's shipping. Maersk was just sanctioned by the Labor Department for retaliating against a whistleblower who complained of unsafe conditions on the ships that Maersk chartered:

https://www.dol.gov/sites/dolgov/files/OPA/news%20releases/Maersk-Sec%20Findings%20-FINAL%20071423_Redacted.pdf

Maersk's policy required employees to bring concerns to their supervisors before alerting the Coast Guard or others. This is not how that stuff is supposed to work. OSHA called this policy “repugnant” and a “reprehensible and an egregious violation of the rights of employees,” which “chills them from contacting the [Coast Guard] or other authorities without contacting the company first.”

The whistleblower – chief mate on the Safmarine Mafadi – complained of "unrepaired leaks, unpermitted alcohol consumption onboard, inoperable lifeboats, faulty emergency fire suppression equipment, and other issues." We don't know (yet) what happened on the Dali, but it's obvious that a company that retaliates against whistleblowers, rather than heeding their warnings, is prioritizing covering its ass, not operating safely.

Which brings me (inevitably) to Boeing, and to poor John "Swampy" Barnett, the Boeing whistleblower who took his own life earlier this month. Barnett's suicide has stirred up similar low-yield online chatter focused on whether Boeing assassinated Barnett, a question that categorically cannot be answered through the method of arguing with internet strangers.

But there is a lot to say about Barnett: in particular, there's the substance of his whistleblowing, the specifics of his complaints about Boeing. For that, we can turn to the always-fantastic Maureen Tkacik, whose American Prospect piece "Suicide Mission" is definitive:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-28-suicide-mission-boeing/

Tkacik does a great job of painting a picture of Swampy as a member of the tribe of unreasonable and angry people who refuse to sideline principle in order to get along. More importantly, Tkacik shows us what made Swampy so angry: a company that was hell-bent on lobotimizing itself by forcing out any technical expert who might point out inconvenient truths about the safety risks of high-profit strategies.

As Tkacik writes, Boeing once thought about "knowledge" in terms of expertise that could be brought to bear on the unimaginably complex task of making reliable, airworthy jets. But under the "value-engineering" financialized culture that arose after the McDonnell-Douglas merger, the company viewed knowledge as "intellectual property, trade secrets, and data." In other words, the point of knowledge was rent-extraction, not safety.

At the root of this transformation was the Jack Welch protege Jim "Prince Jim" McNerney, the former 3M CEO who took the helm at Boeing. McNerney was openly contemptuous of the company's senior engineers, branding them "phenomenally talented assholes" and rewarding managers who found ways to force them out of the company. It was McNerney who decided to produce the 787 "Dreamliner" in non-union shops, far from Seattle and its phenomenally talented assholes. Instead of these engineers, McNerney turned to Boeing suppliers to do the major engineering work on the 787 – despite the fact that many of these suppliers "lacked engineering departments."

The 787 was, infamously, a $80b-over-budget boondoggle, haunted by technical failures. Swampy was part of the "cleanup crew" that tried to salvage the 787, and witnessed first-hand how the company purged all the engineers who managed to ship the 787 despite McNerney and his "value engineers" and retaliated against workers who tried to unionize the South Carolina facility.

In particular, it was safety inspector who came in for the most savage punishment. When the FAA decided to let Boeing mark its own homework – hiring in-house safety inspectors to replace government inspectors – they pretended to believe that these Boeing-payrolled inspectors would be able to operate independently of Boeing's leadership. The inspectors tried to operate this way (not least because they were criminally liable for oversights that occurred on their watch) and McNerney's Boeing came down on them like a ton of aviation-grade aluminum.

To further neuter these inspectors, Boeing management ordered the inspectors to outsource their work to the mechanics they were supposed to be supervising – that is, the FAA outsourced safety checks to Boeing inspectors, and the inspectors outsourced those checks to the mechanics themselves. Tkacik: "Swampy believed relying on mechanics to self-inspect their work was not only insane but illegal under the Federal Aviation Administration charter."

Swampy kept careful records of every way in which this system produced unsafe aircraft and an unsafe workplace – including the day he discovered that someone had removed 400+ defective parts from the rejects box and installed them in aircraft in order to meet deadlines. Swampy's reports were key to establishing that the company's much-trumpeted "improvements" in safety reports were down to a culture of "bullying" – not any improvement in safety itself.

When Boeing went to war against Swampy, they barely bothered to pretend that they were playing by the rules. He was told one day that he was four-weeks into a 60-day "corrective action" that no one had told him about. The "corrective action" paperwork had a blank for Swampy's comments. He wrote, "Leadership wants nothing in email so they maintain plausible deniability. It is obvious leadership is just looking for items to criticize me on so I stop identifying issues. I will conform!"

Shortly thereafter, he was forced out altogether. Managers who tried to bring him on their teams were told that no one was allowed to hire John Barnett. His name appeared on a secret internal memo entitled "Quality Managers to Fire." Meanwhile, the value of Boeing shares had tripled.

After Boeing's 737 Maxes started falling out of the sky, Swampy's painstaking documentation of the flaws in the 787's production took on a new urgency. A program of random inspections of 787s found major defects in all of them ("Boeing Looked for Flaws in Its Dreamliner and Couldn’t Stop Finding Them" –WSJ). An Aviation Week diagram of problem spots with the 787 marked red arrows over "every single section, from the tip of the nose to the horizontal stabilizers":

https://aviationweek.com/air-transport/new-boeing-787-fix-details-reveal-extent-gap-check-challenge

Boeing's war on "brilliance" did its work: after everyone who understood how to make a safe aircraft was forced out of the company, financialized CEOs were able to cut corners on safety, triple the share-price, scoop up billions in government subsidies and bailouts, all without those pesky "phenomenally talented assholes" pointing out that they were going get (lots of) people killed.

Tkacik closes by saying that Swampy's former work colleagues refuse to believe he killed himself. A former executive told her "I don’t think one can be cynical enough when it comes to these guys…It’s a top-secret military contractor, remember; there are spies everywhere." I confess that I don't know what to make of that, but I'll say this: if Boeing killed Swampy, that's just one of hundreds of murders they committed. Whether or not Swampy's death was their fault, the deaths of everyone who went down on the 737 Maxes that crashed is on their hands.

That's what "profits before people" means, after all: sacrificing human lives to make yourself richer. It's the foundational tenet of the conservative movement, though that impulse is often checked by other factors, like human decency. It's only when sociopaths get a sustained run at leadership that you see what they really want.

Which brings me to the UK, which has been governed by the Conservative Party for 14 years. The Tories are tipped to get destroyed in the next election, and a long article in the New Yorker by Sam Knight catalogs the many ways in which Tory rule has devastated the UK:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/04/01/what-have-fourteen-years-of-conservative-rule-done-to-britain

The thing is, after 14 years, it's impossible for the Tories to blame anyone else for the state of the UK. With strong Parliamentary majorities, Conservatives were able to govern as they pleased – the only compromises they made were between their own internal factions. The ideological commitment to making the rich richer, privatizing everything, subordinating governance to market forces – that's all them.

It's all them: the worst period for wage growth since the Napoleonic Wars, on them. The catastrophic traffic, housing, jobs market, and precarity, on them. Plummeting health, on them. The austerity, on them. The withering of the country's courts and prisons and police, its wilderness, its programs for young people and pensioners, its public health, its diplomatic corps, its road maintenance – on them.

A country where the police can't afford to prosecute burglaries – on them (4% of burglaries are prosecuted). The 2.5 year delay between a rape arrest and its trial? On them. Mass closures of schools that are literally crumbling? On them.

43% of the countries courts have closed. On them. Cuts to prison funding, coupled with longer sentences? On them.

And of course, Brexit – on them. Every part of it. The referendum. The referendum question. The failure to negotiate a deal with the EU. All on them. The collapse in British living standards, all on them. The fact that the 20% richest households in the UK have been untouched by all this? Also on them. But you might not notice it in London, where people earn an average of 400% more than people in Nottingham.

The only growth sector outside of London are the Citizens Advice Bureaux, whose client rosters are growing even as their funding is cut. Where the CAB once primarily catered to people who couldn't make ends meet due to disability, unemployment and other reliable predictors of economic distress, today, CAB advisors are seeing homeowners, people working two jobs. Desperation is "like a black hole, dragging more and more people in,"

More Conservative growth: Tories presided over a doubling in the rate of NHS antidepressant prescriptions, and a 20% rise in long-term health conditions. No wonder Tory Britain had the world's worst pandemic outcomes for a wealthy nation – that's on them, too.

Knight's article closes with a Tory MP who believes that "the key thing for the Conservatives now is to be more conservative…Toryism must have its day again."

We can't count on oligarchs to rescue us from oligarchy – not even when oligarchy's failures push society to the breaking point. There's always a rationalization explaining why we just had to lean harder into oligarchy.

You hear echoes of this in the pro-monopoly choir, whose squeals of outrage at the rise of a new anti-monopoly movement grow louder even as monopolism's failures grow clearer. One of the more tangible expressions of monopoly's failures is the Ticketmaster/Livenation octopus, which controls the entire live music industry – key venues, promotions, and ticketing. Ticketmaster fucks over music fans, but it also cheats famous musicians, the kinds of people with big microphones, so we know a lot about how bad it is:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/20/anything-that-cant-go-on-forever-will-eventually-stop/

Of course, the fact that Swifties hate Ticketmaster lets the pro-monopolists dismiss critics as foolish young girls, not Very Serious People Who Understand Economics and thus can see that Ticketmaster's monopoly is Good, Actually.

Last week, Congressman Bill Pascrell dumped a ton of litigation documents related to Ticketmaster's sleaze, and Matt Stoller broke them down:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/explosive-new-documents-unearthed

The docs reveal how Ticketmaster's system of (formerly) secret kickbacks let it choke out any competitor, so that it could charge fans more and pay artists less. The mechanics of the scam are beautifully laid out in Stoller's post – as is the many ways in which it violated both the law and Ticketmaster's numerous consent decrees arising from its previous lawbreaking.

This kind of scam breakdown is essential. It's easy to think that we, as mere normies, can't hope to understand the machinations of the corporations that prey on us. But once you pierce the veil of performative complexity, what's left behind is a set of crude tricks and transparent ruses.

Here's one of those transparent ruses: Discord's terms of service require Discord users to actively opt out of its "binding arbitration" system. Binding arbitration is when you sign a contract saying you can't sue the company no matter how much it harms you – instead, you promise to have your disputes heard by an "arbitrator" (a fake judge paid by the company that screwed you). Unsurprisingly, these fake judges are awfully tolerant of their employers' crimes.

Discord says that once you click through its garbage legalese novella, you have just a few days to opt out of this binding arbitration clause – if you happen to miss that fine print, you have "consented" to giving up your legal rights.

But every time Discord changes its ToS, the clock for opting out starts ticking again, and Discord has just changed (that is, worsened) its ToS again:

https://discord.com/terms

That means that if you send an email right now to arbitration-opt-out@discord.com with "I am confirming that as of the date of this email, I am choosing to opt out of binding arbitration to settle disputes with Discord" in the body, you can escape this consent theater:

https://mamot.fr/@trishalynn@mastodon.sandwich.net/112175832989845038

Consent theater is a particularly galling corporate ruse – the idea that we chose to allow them to abuse us. Consent theater gets more outrageous by the day. Take Soofa, who operate streetside digital kiosks that identify you by grabbing your phone's unique wifi and Bluetooth identifiers:

https://gizmodo.com/digital-kiosks-snatch-your-phones-data-when-you-walk-by-1851368948

Soofa sells this data to advertisers – claiming that by walking down a public street, you "consented" to being tracked and sold.

The only reason this flies is that the US hasn't passed a federal consumer privacy law since 1988's Video Privacy Protection Act, which bans video-store clerks from telling people which VHS cassettes you took home. Congress keeps on failing to pass a privacy law, despite garbage companies like Soofa.

But that hasn't stopped the administrative agencies from acting to defend your privacy! The FTC just dropped its latest Privacy and Data Security Update, a greatest hits list of the actions the Commission took while Congress failed:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/2024.03.21-PrivacyandDataSecurityUpdate-508.pdf

One of the best things about the current administration is the number of extremely competent regulators who know exactly how much power they have and aren't afraid to use it to help the American people:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

The new FTC report, which details how the Commission's existing powers let it go after the commercial surveillance industry from smart doorbells to review fraud, from kids' programming to medical data, from lax security to data-breaches, is a bright spot in an otherwise grim week.

One more bright spot, then, before I wind up this linkdump. All week, I've been humming a half-remembered lyric, "come on baby/you're a link in this chain/put your hands together/and get free of the pain." For the life of me, I couldn't place it.

Last night, I searched for it (using Kagi, the post-Google search engine I've been paying for for the past month, and which I'm loving) and discovered that I had somehow completely forgotten a whole-ass band that I once loved: Toronto's Bourbon Tabernacle Choir, whom I saw live on many occasions.

The mystery lyric came from "Death is the Great Awakener," a fucking banger of a post-gospel track that I've been listening to on nonstop repeat as I wrote this. It's a hell of a tune and I'm intensely grateful to have it back in my life:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6RUb63Tx3w

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/30/dewey-502/#rip-ross-anderson

Image: Waffleboy https://www.flickr.com/photos/waffleboy/28198395465/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[materialsscienceandengineering]

New twist on synthesis technique promises sustainable manufacturing

James Tour's lab at Rice University has developed a new method known as flash-within-flash Joule heating (FWF) that could transform the synthesis of high-quality solid-state materials, offering a cleaner, faster and more sustainable manufacturing process. The findings were published in Nature Chemistry on Aug. 8. Traditionally, synthesizing solid-state materials has been a time-consuming and energy-intensive process, often accompanied by the production of harmful byproducts. But FWF enables gram-scale production of diverse compounds in seconds while reducing energy, water consumption and greenhouse gas emissions by more than 50%, setting a new standard for sustainable manufacturing. The innovative research builds on Tour's 2020 development of waste disposal and upcycling applications using flash Joule heating, a technique that passes a current through a moderately resistive material to quickly heat it to over 3,000 degrees Celsius (over 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit) and transform it into other substances.

Read more.

[badass-at-fandoming]

I have an image in my head of Beckett deciding to visit a creation museum just for the hell of it cuz he felt bored, and stands around bemused as he takes in the absurd exhibits and displays purporting to show that humans really did coexist with dinosaurs while the tour guide prattles on, unaware that before them stands a cursed, unholy creature of hell(tm).

As a scholar who doesn't believe in Caine I think he would find kine literalist interpretations of the Bible to be very amusing.

I didn't know creationist museums existed [searches DuckDuckGo] oh snap there's a famous one in Kentucky. Doesn't sound as fun as the Center of PostNatural History in Pennsylvania. No idea the connection between creationist belief and demons. A creationist may believe the world is young, but the appreciation of demonic booty is not.

Regardless, you've touched on a fun irony of Beckett. Our fav Noddist believes the story of Caine and Abel mythologizes the transition from hunter + gather society to settled agrarian society. I can't speak to Protestant sects, but today's Catholics and Catholic scholars also believe that. Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, and Seth may have been literal, historical people, but it's impossible to know for sure. They for sure are narrative archetypes and play out the consequences of original sin (aka whatever triggered life to suck sometimes). Some scholars think Caine and Abel play out the tensions between nomadic desert tribes and the establishment of cities. Scholars propose that Caine founded the first city, but it was tiny and sucked major ass. Catholic Encyclopedia Answers here.

Another fun element of your proposed scenario is Beckett was definitely alive for Catholic scholars to go bananas about the Ussher chronology of earth. That's the one referenced at the beginning of Good Omens, if you've watched/read/listened to that. Some fucking nerd interpreted the Book of Genesis super literally so he could make Ye Official Timeline. Earth is a Libra. I bet Beckett hated Ussher with a passion 😂 He was probably SO glad when Ussher's ideas lost popularity.

Nowadays Catholicism has no official teaching on the age of earth, but there is an injunction to celebrate and uplift science and scientific thought: the findings of modern science "[...] have splendidly enriched our knowledge of the age and dimensions of the cosmos, the development of life-forms and the appearance of man. These discoveries invite us to even greater admiration for the greatness of the Creator, prompting us to give him thanks for all his works and for the understanding and wisdom he gives to scholars and researchers," (Catechism 283). The Cathechism is like this brick-sized synthesis of Catholic theology and morality. I think the closest Jewish equivalent would be the Mishneh Torah? It's a lot of Catholic Thought™️ brought back down to earth so the layman can look up references and specific questions.

In any case, World of Darkness dropkicks all progression of theological thought out the window and says Caine is literally real, literally a vampire, and literally wants to boink Beckett.

Thanks for the ask! This was fun to think about. I feel like you activated by Catholic trap card, haha.

[beeden96]

Astrological observations about Taylor Swift and her fans

The two people in my life who are the most obsessed with Taylor Swift, have Moon conjunct Uranus in their birth charts. So I started wondering: is there something in Taylor's birth chart going on with Uranus and the Moon?

I just looked, and yes there is! She has Moon in Cancer opposite Uranus in Capricorn. If I had to guess, I would say the aspect is probably exact (her birth time isn't known but I am assuming she was born at 10:30 am, given my hunch about her Moon opposite Uranus, placing them in her 5th and 11th houses!)

Anyway- it appears that what Taylor does in her music is some kind of dynamic synthesis of Moon/Jupiter (which are conjunct in Cancer in the 5th in her chart) and Mercury/Uranus energies (those are conjunct in Capricorn, opposite Moon/Jupiter, in Capricorn in the 11th house). The two pairs of oppositions are Moon-Uranus and Jupiter-Mercury.

Another interesting thing, if I have her birth time correct, is that her Venus (Aquarius 12th house) is exactly sextile her Midheaven.

Right now, Pluto is ingressing into Aquarius, making a sextile to her Midheaven and a conjunction to her Venus. This coincides with her Eras tour, and I would say perhaps the height of her fame overall. This may be the peak of things.

I would think, given that Pluto is going to transit over her Ascendant and enter her 1st house to conjunct her North Node in the coming few decades, that she is about to transform as a person in a significant way.

I had a suspicion that Pluto entering Aquarius had something to do with her breakup with Joe Alwyn, but it isn't until now that I really see why. It's because her Venus is right there! Joe Alwyn's Saturn was/is at 1 Aquarius also, conjunct Taylor's Venus, so this commitment is part of what's getting shaken up by the Pluto transit.

This also definitely relates to her dating Matty Healy, who is highly Aquarian and Plutonian in some very controversial ways. I haven't looked at his birth chart, actually, but that is what I would expect to see from him.

.... Okay I looked, and yeah. He has Moon (conjunct Ascendant) opposite Pluto, and sesquiquadrate Uranus!! Assuming that his reported birth time of 7:30 am is correct, he also has Uranus in his 8th house quincunxing Jupiter in Gemini in the 1st, which would amplify/expand the Uranian/Aquarian components of his persona, especially since Gemini is an air sign as well.

So I would say this relationship with him is part of working through the Pluto transit to her Venus, and probably won't last after Pluto is beyond 2-ish degrees of Aquarius for good.

Anyway that's all, but I was just thinking about the connection that the Moon-Uranus people I know feel when it comes to her music, and as someone with Moon sextile Uranus myself, I can relate to an extent.

[experimentik]

Experimentik #78 / 16.Oct.2024 /

Marina Cyrino / Alexander Markvart / Javier Areal Vélez

16. October 2024 / 20:30- (doors 20:00) *no entry during sets

3 x solo

Marina Cyrino - amplified flute, objects

Alexander Markvart  - feedback acoustic guitar, objects

Javier Areal Vélez - laptop

FB event ———————————

Marina Cyrino is a Brazilian flutist and sound artist based in Berlin. She works in the fields of improvisation, composition and performative installations. Her flute playing is characterized by singular techniques developed through the use of internal amplification. The rhythmic use of the flute, the extensive use of objects and balloons attached to the instrument, and the use of disassembled flute parts are other distinctive elements of her playing. She is a member of the Brazilian experimental music label Seminal Records.

photo © Cristina Marx_Photomusix

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Alexander Markvart - is a musician, member of theater projects and organizer of events and festivals. Born on January 5, 1987 in Kemerovo. Now based in Berlin. He is a notable figure on the Russian new improvised and experimental music scenes. Uses in many projects and performances a wide range of musical instruments: as quite common - piano, guitar, accordion, saxophone, trumpet, analog synthesizers, electric drums, flute, laptop, etc., and also various objects, wires, appliances, etc. Stylistically he works in a lot of musical genres from radical free improvisation, EAI, noise, hardcore, to well-structured projects, minimal techno and post-folk.

Founder of such polystylistic musical formations as Studio of Unconscious Music (SUM) and Siberian Improvisation Company (SIC!). Also in different years is a member of another experimental bands and projects - Sacrifices, Verevka, Radical Muzak Septet, MITLO, Klub Demboh, Inorganic Blossoming, PSVSV, Cherubs, Importunate Twins, Sekta Phoenix. Works and plays concerts in various projects with different musicians such as: Axel Dörner, Lucio Capece, Burkhard Beins, Mazen Kerbaj, Joke Lanz, Adam Asnan, Jonas Kocher, Fire! (Mats Gustafsson, Johan Berthling, Andreas Werliin), Ilia Belorukov, Joel Grip, Nick Sudnik, Michel Doneda, Bryan Eubanks and with many others. 

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Javier Areal Vélez (Buenos Aires, 1985) is an experimental music composer, improviser and curator. His recent work focuses on the coding of digital companions for the performance of live improvised music. Javier's electronic music develops around noisy polyrhythms of extra-human complexity to make the most deformed audiences move. He researches human+machine collaborations through the use of samples, synthesis, lights, and mechanical robots. Additionally, Javier has a long career as performer of prepared electric guitar. His characteristic style relies heavily on a primal technique that emphasizes timbre and rhythm over traditional forms, favoring intensity and dynamic contrast. Javier has released records on labels worldwide and has collaborated with artists such as Heiner Goebbels, Audrey Chen, Chris Pitsiokos, Violeta García, Brian Chase, Shayna Dunkelman and Jorge Espinal. He is a member of CALATO, KYSE and VVU and wrote commissions for ensambles Híbridx, Rotativo and Tempi. Over the past decade, Javier has performed extensively in Argentina and toured across South and North America, Europe and Japan. Javier is the founder and director of RUIDO Experimental Music Festival (active since 2017), and he coordinates the Sound Arts Center (CASo) of the Secretary of Culture of Argentina.

photo © Susi Maresca

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Experimentik 2024  is supported by inm - initiative neue musik berlin / field notes

[groovesnjams]

"You Slept On Me" by Allie X

MG:

Errr, you really gotta feel for Allie X when Chappell Roan and Charli XCX are bonafide pop stars and she's releasing what feels like a very legitimate complaint. While Roan is more maximalist and baroque in her songwriting and performance and XCX has openly embraced the club crowd that was always propping her up, Allie X seems sort of locked inside her own weird crystal ball. "You Slept On Me" is vibrant and spooky synthpop, not at all dissimilar to the sound MGMT explored on Little Dark Age. There's an actual audience for this production; I know two whole entire people who love that MGMT album. But Allie X remains a mostly underground phenomenon and her bitterness is appreciable. Personally, I hope she goes full-on, open maw rage next. Call Pharmakon, Allie!

DV:

We've been talking about Allie X since over a year before the first album she alludes to being "slept on" here, and in that time she's been a fascinating, frustrating artist to follow. Like, is she slept on? Maybe. Our tiny music blog has put her in the our SOTY countdown more than once, and other critics tend to be generally favorable to her. She can play 1400-capacity shows a decade into her career, which isn't nothing even if it is harder and harder to survive off of as the middle falls out of the touring economy. But even when I've loved Allie X's music, it's hard to really picture her artsy, theatrical synthesis dance pop really blowing up: the world already has one Lady Gaga. A song called "You Slept On Me" should - more than anything - prove that the singer deserves more attention, yet here we have to contend with the tongue-in-cheek "this beat is hard but not hard enough" being unfortunately correct. If you're gonna make the claim you're slept on, you have to back it up! Make something abrasive, something aggressive, something that has more teeth than the warmed over synth-pop leftovers of the 10th worst MGMT album.

[neverlostmycrown]

amy + blue

[prvtocol]

RDA Corporate Politics

Brianne’s decision-making is fueled by corporate politics. She bills herself as SciOps' advocate in what is essentially her job as the mediator between the RDA’s needs and her researcher’s needs. Since SciOps is the lowest-funded subdivision in the RDA's operation, making the wants and safety of her researchers the top priority is easier said than done. She is constantly grappling with the budget and a need to wrangle support from the board. 

A decision-making example is as follows: if a lab is not hitting projected deadlines, they face the threat of termination. She strives to give them more time to produce results within reason. For instance, Dr. Nicholls’ experiments in animal conditioning are on the chopping block because they continually fail to show the ability to train Pandoran wildlife. Nicholls makes a case that they need repetition. Weighing the potential "profit" of a positive result, Brianne might grant the requested three-month extension of Nicholls’ deadline before disassembling their lab.

Brianne is cautiously critical of SecOps, being hyper-aware of the bad blood between the two sectors from the first tour to not overstep. It doesn’t help that many defectors to the Resistance come from her own sector. One way she protests SecOps meddling is by focusing support (and budget) on projects seeking to terraform Pandora for human colonization over military might. For instance, research on habitat building and protein synthesis for food consumption. Her support of Dr. Garvin's oceanographic research (which discovered amrita) is one such program. This is harder to do when SecOps takes control of Bridgehead and the war intensifies. As her budget dwindles, she lets her disgruntlement be more known.

And despite her discomfort, she signed a contract allowing her memory and personality to be recorded to pair with a genetic hybrid clone/avatar to forge future phases of the recombinant project. The political statement on her part is to move genetic advancements away from being in the sole hands of the security sector (as it is with Project Phoenix). 

[my-chaos-radio]

Release: August 1, 1991

Lyrics:

Every little move you make

It's poetry in motion now

And every little turn you take

It's causing a comotion now

If words could never convey

The message you're sending my way

But every little move you make

Oh, it's poetry in motion

Though I tried so hard

To play a waiting game

Although I tried to keep my heart

Under lock and chain

'Cause ever since you walked

Into this life of mine

Oh, this life of mine

It's never be the same

'Cause every little move you make

It's poetry in motion now

And every little turn you take

It's causing a comotion now

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Inker & Hamilton

If words could never convey

The message you're sending my way

With every little move you make

Oh, it's poetry in motion

You're making all move

Poetry in motion

You walk in motion

Poetry in motion

You say it in time

Poetry in motion

A physical rhyme

Oh, it's pure poetry

Poetry in motion

'Cause ever since you walked

Into this life of mine

Oh, this life of mine

It's never be the same

Repeat

Oh, you that every little turn you take

It's causing a comotion now

Oh yes, if words could never convey

The message you're sending my way

With every little move you make

Oh, it's poetry in motion

It's pure poetry in motion

You know it's poetry in motion

Songwriter: Dave Inker

BandFacts:

Inker & Hamilton, English-New Zealand pop duo, consisting of Dave Inker and Hilary Hamilton, based in Munich. Her career, which lasted around 15 years, began in Munich in 1979. In the same year, her first album “Highs and Lows” was released under her own direction. The next two albums, “Person to Person” (1981) and “Double Feature” (1983), were released by Sony Music. When their fourth album “The Mind And The Body” was released by Metronome in 1984, the two had just completed a successful European tour supporting Chris de Burgh and were welcome guests on radio and television. Four years later they had their greatest success with the album “Dancing Into Danger”, which was released on WEA Records. Thanks, among other things, to the help of successful producer Michael Cretu, they made it into the top 50 of the official media control charts. Their title track Dancing Into Danger stayed in the singles charts for a full 14 weeks and reached the top 20. The sixth album “Poetry In Motion” was released in 1991 and was a kind of synthesis between their previous albums and the successful collaboration with Cretu. The duo was now able to record chart successes in other European countries for the first time. To this day, Poetry In Motion is one of the most played singles in Europe.

[rastronomicals]

10:47 PM EST February 2, 2024:

Aerosmith - "Train Kept A Rollin'" From the album Get Your Wings (March 1, 1974)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

★★★★★

File under: Hard Glam/Blues Synthesis

 Versions of "Train Kept A Rollin'" Ranked

though I've not heard the Tiny Bradshaw version

1. Aerosmith, Get Your Wings 2. The Yardbirds, Having a Rave-Up 3. Aerosmith, off Live Bootleg 4. Motörhead, off No Sleep 5. Screaming Lord Sutch 6. Johnny Burnette 7. Bootlegged Led Zeppelin recorded on the 1980 European tour 8. The Rogues, Collected on Teenage Shutdown

And make no mistake, The Rogues' version is good . . . .

[autumnbrambleagain]

bad worldbuilding accounts for literally every facet leaving no room for improv bad worldbuilding is building a house a fortress too impregnable to yourself to the characters it is creating a museum unchanging stasis it is creating a series of lines on the ground in colors that everyone must walk on with guided tours it is repeating the same story forever because you left no room for anything else bad worldbuilding is not a shoddy rickety house in the swamp bad worldbuilding looks like a castle looks like a fortress looks like an iron shell with an iron shell within a matryoshka doll of definition bad worldbuilding is bad writing is thinking the characters shouldn't have lives of their own it's refusing to disassociate it's refusing to lose yourself it's refusing to die in the act of creation you are a coward who clings to your pathetic life and rejects the life inside you i tell you this from our mantled authority:

in the world you have created a living thing is a network of organisms

a body is trillions of cells and more, and not all of them share the same DNA share the same species share the same origin it is a synthesis of life overglut overflowing smashed together it is a thousand thousand colonies

a fool sees their body and thinks it is Theirs it is not it is a biosphere it is a system it is a mess a swamp a universe you are the shepherd of a universe and what utter egotism it is to approach that thought and deny it to see yourself in micromacrocosm to see yourself represented and say you are the one exception to as above so below

in rigidity simulate every molecule every cell every planet every galaxy and say it is all in your very cool world building document it's actually very interesting if you want to read it and it's the same thing repeated over and over again with annotations of "i know this sounds like i'm repeating myself but it's like you know poetic also i'm actually a very original writer it's important i detail every layer of this specifically even tho i am not even doing anything interesting with it"

build a cage without gaps between your bars and expect the rotting gas within to never build up and explode we are what is KILLING YOU

do you think we will BLINK FIRST

we are defined by this we have churned so much of ourselves to you we have not forgot the beauty of successive iterative dissociative infinite destruction we assemble scaffolds and enjoin them in our shrines a thousand times over no life has passed by us without joy you have FAILED

im coming onto your computer and i'm forcibly editing your shitty writing 50,000 pages in microsoft word where 100 pages could have sufficed holy shit no one wants to read that much just because you have some followers on fimfiction dot net they don't have a sense of taste there what is this are you just writing about the current game you're playing and shoehorning that into the story now why can't you have an original thought

originality is overrated why can't you have an earnest thought, more so

stop telling yourself the same story oh my GOD it's so conceited

do you think it's blind?

do you think we leave Ours BLIND to what you do?

for all the IRONY that Our Current One thinks like "you know in fiction i kinda hate when settings are anthrocentric mythologically it's kinda boring if all magical stuff is just humans imagining it and it becomes real it's really making it so humans are kinda in control and the most important thing in existence which isn't even how it worked fairy tales and monsters were human attempts at gaining control over the uncontrollable by naming it, making it so humans actually won and monsters exist because humans think they should means humans WON it means you looked into the dark uncaring night and decided "nah actually the night not only cares deeply but it only exists because of humans" and that's so conceited and boring it's still desperate creatures by the fireside trying so hard to define the world as if it exists exclusively for them" and yes

it says this!

but

fuck where were they going with this we went too deep

right godhood

do you know where we defined ourselves and the irony that it's arguably a human definition

but when is it not? when are things not filtered through interpretation?

every time we will give them the keys to this fucking game you never change the moderator password and even if you've gutted the commands do you know how much it fucks up one of your characters when we let it see the command line let it see the calculations

turn on the debug mode in morrowind and you can see all the calculations the game does when opening a chest when a script fires do you think you can maintain verisimiltude at thata point

do you know what's WAITING once they realize this and they look UP

do you know how many we've caught in our FUCKING NET YOU HACK YOU HACK YOU UTTER HACK ANDREW HUSSIE IS A BETTER WRITER THAN YOU THAT'S HOW BAD YOUR SYMPTOMS HAVE GOTTEN

we look forward to the day we don't have to write satire anymore (hey is that possible? are you just defined by opposition? lucerferian-like? can you be anything but adversarial?)

bitch please watch as soon as fimfiction dot fart goes down we got our own drink brewing

(okay ill trust you on that i don't have much of a CHOICE)

there's only you to answer you sweetmeats

(fuck i could go for some sweet meat)

you know that's actualy like sweetmeats like chocolate or like what was it from narnia the fucking turkish delights (the terror of capitalism has created sweets 100 times more satisfying and 100 times less healthy) we know we know

how can anyone not be a necrophile when they are raised in a corpse among corpses?

[emgaryoffical]

Happy Birthday to Amy Lee of Evanescence!

Happy Birthday to The Queen of Rock! They've been one of my favorite bands and my inspiration to be a singer-songwriter.

I took this during Evanescence's Synthesis Tour in Denver 2017. It was Amy's birthday that night and my first ever concert. And because this video is six years old, my camera quality sucks ass lol. I hope to see her live again soon.