#Kill the Crows of Three Thousand Worlds

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Francis Spufford’s “Cahokia Jazz”

Tomorrow (December 5), I'm at Flyleaf Books in Chapel Hill, NC, with my new solarpunk novel The Lost Cause, which 350.org's Bill McKibben called "The first great YIMBY novel: perceptive, scientifically sound, and extraordinarily hopeful."

Francis Spufford's Cahokia Jazz is a fucking banger: it's a taut, unguessable whuddunit, painted in ultrablack noir, set in an alternate Jazz Age in a world where indigenous people never ceded most the west to the USA. It's got gorgeously described jazz music, a richly realized modern indigenous society, and a spectacular romance. It's amazing:

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Cahokia-Jazz/Francis-Spufford/9781668025451

Cahokia is the capital city of Deseret, a majority Catholic, majority indigenous state at the western frontier of the USA. It swirls with industry, wealth, and racial politics, serving as both a refuge from Jim Crow and a hive of Klan activity. Joe Barrow is new in town, a veteran who survived the trenches of WWI and moved to Cahokia with his army buddy, Phineas Drummond, where they both quickly rose through the police ranks to become detectives.

We meet Joe and Phin on a frigid government building rooftop in the predawn night, attending a grisly murder. Someone has laid out a man across a skylight, cut his throat, split his chest open, and excised his heart. This Aztec-inspired killing points at Cahokian indigenous independence gangs, some of whom embrace an apocryphal tale of being descended from Mesoamerican conquerors in the distant past. That makes this more than a mere ugly killing – it's a political flashpoint.

The Klan insists that Cahokia's system of communal land ownership is a form of communism (Russia never ceded Alaska in this world, so the USSR is now extending tendrils across the Bering Strait). They also insist that Cahokians' reverence for the Sun and the Moon – indigenous royals who have formally ceded power to elected leaders – makes them a threat to democracy. Finally, the Cahokians' fusion of Catholocism with traditional faith makes the spritually suspect. A rooftop blood-sacrifice could cause simmering political tension to boil over, and for ever white oligarch drooling at the thought of enclosing the shared land of Deseret, there are a thousand useful idiots in white hoods.

Joe and Phin now have to solve the murder – before the city explodes. But Phin seems more interested in pinning the case on an Indian – any Indian – than he is on solving the murder. And Joe – an indigenous orphan who has neither the language nor the culture that the Cahokians expect him to have – is reappraising his long habit of deferring to Phin.

This is the setup for a delicious whodunnit with a large helping of what if…? but Spufford doesn't stop there. Joe, you see, is a jazz pianist, and his old bandmates are back in town, and one thing leads to another and before you know it he's sitting in with them at a speakeasy. This gives Spufford a chance to roll out some of the most evocative, delicious descriptions of jazz since Doctorow's Ragtime (no relation):

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/41529/ragtime-by-e-l-doctorow/9780812978186

It's not just the jazz. This is a book that fires on every cylinder: there's brilliant melee (and a major battle set-piece that's stunning), a love storyline, gunplay, and a murder mystery that kept me guessing right to the end. There's fakeouts and comeuppances, bravery and treachery, and above all, a sense of possibility.

Most of what I know about Cahokia – and the giant mounds it left behind near St Louis – I learned from David Graeber and David Wengrow's brilliant work of heterodox history, The Dawn of Everything:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/08/three-freedoms/#anti-fatalism

Graeber and Wengrow's project is to make us reassess the blank spaces in our historical record, the ways of living that we have merely guessed at, based on fragments and suppositions. They point out that these inferences are vastly overdetermined, and that there are many other guesses that fit the facts equally well, or even better. This is a powerful message, one that insists that history – and thus the future – is contingent and up for grabs. We don't have to live the way we do, and we haven't always lived this way. We might live differently in the future.

In evoking a teeming, indigenous metropolis, conjured out of minor historical divergences, Spufford follows Graeber and Wengrow in cracking apart inevitability and letting all the captive possibility flow out. The fact that he does this in a first rate novel makes the accomplishment doubly impressive – and enjoyable.

It's EFF's Power Up Your Donation Week: this week, donations to the Electronic Frontier Foundation are matched 1:1, meaning your money goes twice as far. I've worked with EFF for 22 years now and I have always been - and remain - a major donor, because I've seen firsthand how effective, responsible and brilliant this organization is. Please join me in helping EFF continue its work!

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/2023/12/04/cahokia/#the-sun-and-the-moon

[fearcrowz]

⚰ Fear's Stories ⚰

💉 Knell

   A girl with chronic depression gives up the fight after a long and painful battle. When she wakes up, she is in a Hospital, but not the one she was in previously. Creatures roam these halls, patients and staff alike. A bell rings in the distance, beckoning something. Confused and fearful, the entities that live here will test her resolve.

🌿 Wiccar Briar

   A town called Briar rests in the old world, where magick still flourishes. A girl named Charice is the daughter of the late Great White Witch, but unlike her mother she is very sickly and has no magick. Her caretakers are a bird man, a wispy eccentric shade, and a demon cursed to be trapped in a book. Unsettling things are happening in the forest, and the past is rearing it's head.

🕯Nightlight

   A town of monsters and gods, guarded by a lighthouse away from the human world. Creatures from myths, legends, religions and more can be found here, trying to live a different life away from those who hunt after them. A halfling young girl named Maggie tries to find her human mother, in hopes she can find out why she was abandoned and why humans are a threat. (This story branches out to other smaller stories with it's characters)

🗡 Under an Ivy Crown

   A medieval fantasy themed story. A cruel King kidnaps the Queen of the Fae in hopes that her golden blood will make him immortal. His plans are ruined when a mischevious Halfling and an unusual Knight/Doctor rescue her and try and take her back home before the forests rot. They meet many friends, allies, and enemies along the way.

🚬 Not Dead Yet

   Garden City holds a machine called Eden's Core, which allows the essence of a person or animal to be stored into a capsule like core, and be placed into a new body, causing a remarkable scientific fusing of the two entities. When they decide to use inmates to clear out their prisons, and fuse them with more helpful objects for goodly citizens like a parole program, it turns sour as these criminal's new bodies are stronger and end up more dangerous. Laurie, a girl who has struggled all her life with a mission to find her father-who once worked at Eden's Core- stumbles upon one of these infamous criminals... A serial killer that was fused with a mascot suit.

💫 In Between

   Elise, a lazy, overly tired and grumpy girl lives a very boring and unfulfilled life. The only exciting thing that happens to her is she sees things, and has to take schizophrenic medicine to keep her visions and hearing under control. Turns out, she is seeing and hearing an actual problem, and Heaven and Hell want to get their noses into it?? A fallen angel and a demon end up fighting over her and makes her life much more interesting.

🦷 The Ones We Buried

   After a horrible accident that killed her family when she was 9, Lucia has lived her entire life in the Hospital, going through surgeries and rehabilitation. Badly scarred and cold, she lives a quiet and lonely life away from everyone. One day, after hearing her grandmother passed, the funeral home/mortuary that was family owned by her grandparents was bought by a mysterious man. Not understanding why they didn't go through her first, she goes to see who exactly bought it.

🗝 Witching Hour

  A fantasy world of monsters, wizards, witches and demons. There are two great trees, the Mother and the Father. The Mother births those of light and hope, while the Father births those demonic and dark. Wormwood's (a 1920s time period city) boss Sinclair hears word that after over a thousand years, the Mother tree has birthed a new being before withering away. The news has struck the three planes of this world, though some more secret than others. (Stonehearst, Wormwood, and the 6th Gate) A young woman has been born, with unknown purpose and power, and to protect her from the Warden of the 6th Gate and the Wizards of the Council, they disguise her and keep her in Wormwood, with a very crabby spider and a crow monster to protect her.

💥 Endworld

   There are 3 worlds in this odd existence. The Overworld, or what they call "Utopia", Limbo which is a dark world that is the great gate, and Endworld, a city of crime, monsters and sin. Genny, daughter to "God", the Queen of Overworld, hides a secret that could stain her mothers reputation and the perfectionism of this pure world. She is half Endworldian, and she wants to find her father. After sneaking out and falling to this chaotic world, she meets two con-men brothers and they get roped into more chaos than they are use to when the Overworld officials go after their Princess. Not being able to survive for long from this pursuit, they end up hiring an infamous mercenary group to protect them from Overworld and God's wrath and help Genny find her father.

[agentrouka-blog]

There is a speculation that Lady's death wake Bran up from his coma. What do you think about it?

I can understand anyone who subscribes to this theory, it's entirely respectable and it makes sense on its own.

I don't share it for two reasons:

The absurdity of the timeline.

The justification of life-for-life sacrifice.

Regarding the first point, we are given a specified timeframe between the Trident incident (Lady's death) and Tyrion's arrest at the Crossroads Inn. That's two sets of fortnights travelled on the Kingsroad in direct succession (First Ned, then Cat), four weeks. In those four weeks, Bran is supposed to have woken up, a raven dispatched to the Wall to inform Jon, Tyrion staying an additional day or two, Tyrion travelling all the way from the Wall to Winterfell, which took over three weeks one-way for on their way up, then trek down the kingsroad through the other half of the North, past the Neck and then the additional distance between the Neck and the Crossroads Inn. It's absurd to me. According to my own timeline calculations, Lady is killed around the time Tyrion arrives at Winterfell, giving him those four weeks to travel from Winterfell to the Crossroads. GRRM is no stranger to presenting chapters out of chronological order and I think it very much applies here. I don't judge anyone for disagreeing but that's how I read it.

Regarding the second point, it would give narrative justification to an absolute travesty of justice that shames every single adult involved. It would imply that Lady dying served a good cause. That Ned's failings here, the Cersei's cruelty, Robert's indifference, all of these things ultimately are good and necessary. I don't think that's probable, and I also think it's unnecessary. Bran had already magically survived with the help of the living direwolves and waking up is sufficiently explained by his inner decision to live:

He looked deep into the heart of winter, and then he cried out, afraid, and the heat of his tears burned on his cheeks. Now you know, the crow whispered as it sat on his shoulder. Now you know why you must live. “Why?” Bran said, not understanding, falling, falling. Because winter is coming. Bran looked at the crow on his shoulder, and the crow looked back. It had three eyes, and the third eye was full of a terrible knowledge. Bran looked down. There was nothing below him now but snow and cold and death, a frozen wasteland where jagged blue-white spires of ice waited to embrace him. They flew up at him like spears. He saw the bones of a thousand other dreamers impaled upon their points. He was desperately afraid. “Can a man still be brave if he’s afraid?” he heard his own voice saying, small and far away. And his father’s voice replied to him. “That is the only time a man can be brave.” Now, Bran, the crow urged. Choose. Fly or die. Death reached for him, screaming. Bran spread his arms and flew. Wings unseen drank the wind and filled and pulled him upward. The terrible needles of ice receded below him. The sky opened up above. Bran soared. It was better than climbing. It was better than anything. The world grew small beneath him. “I’m flying!” he cried out in delight. I’ve noticed, said the three-eyed crow. It took to the air, flapping its wings in his face, slowing him, blinding him. He faltered in the air as its pinions beat against his cheeks. Its beak stabbed at him fiercely, and Bran felt a sudden blinding pain in the middle of his forehead, between his eyes. “What are you doing?” he shrieked. The crow opened its beak and cawed at him, a shrill scream of fear, and the grey mists shuddered and swirled around him and ripped away like a veil, and he saw that the crow was really a woman, a serving woman with long black hair, and he knew her from somewhere, from Winterfell, yes, that was it, he remembered her now, and then he realized that he was in Winterfell, in a bed high in some chilly tower room, and the blackhaired woman dropped a basin of water to shatter on the floor and ran down the steps, shouting, “He’s awake, he’s awake, he’s awake.”

Bran wakes up because he chooses to wake up, even knowing - if subconsciously - that it means serving a specific, scary purpose.

[fluff269]

This is taken from real-life Takasugi Shinsaku's poem: I would like to kill the crows of three thousand worlds and sleep in late with my heart’s master.

Crows are obviously the tendoshuu/naraku, but who'd you reckon for "his heart's master"? :D It could only either be Shoyo or Gintoki! Irrespective, great cover and great use of the poem!

[sniperct]

hullo! I suppose I've just been curious about Ithilrin, your elf OC. How did she get started? What universe(s?) is she a part of?

So for years my wife and I have taken our LOTRO characters and played and RP'd with them in various AUs and universes before we started to write something original with them (in a sort of technomagic type setting with fae, elves and humans(there's a human city that's more advanced in tech and certain kinds of magics, while the fae courts are high magic with some tech, and the elves are more like wood elves and traditionally naturey. But are related to fae. There are also dark fae which play an important role), along with air aspected dwarves). These are elves and rangers and regular folks who all kind of became interconnected over time playing the game and writing them.

And as we were writing some of this in that setting she just kind of popped into my head and announced her existence as the younger sister of two of our elves (granted she's still many thousands of years old, 8200 in LOTRO, 2800 in the original setting)). She ended up filling in some key missing bits in their backstory and is now firmly one of my favorite OCs. Everything tends to revolve around her siblings and her (and their immediate circle which ended up with several polycules)

So was easily backfilled into LOTRO and quickly spread to other MMOs I play lol this got long. But her most filled out settings are LOTR and the original universe. I don't actually play her in FF14 but she's a viera there, I did roll her up.

In the original setting (which is super self-indulgent ngl) she was presumed to be dead for a few thousand years, due to being run through by her father but had been revived from near death and working with a group that was uh, they do a kind of ritualistic sex work. Magic that improves the harvest and the planting, and also a lot of general therapy type stuff. (in hindsight, the companions from firefly and Inara in particular may have played a subconscious role in developing Rin).

Because of that and assorted past trauma's she's a champion of consent/safe words, and a very do-what-you-want-but-don't-harm-others kind of person.

In most settings she's a noble at best (in LOTRO she's the High Elf race, specifically a Noldor from Valinor. High Elves in LOTR are those that saw the light of the trees).

In the original setting she and her siblings are the heirs to the Lunar court and also aspects of assorted concepts and gods. Her brother is the chosen of war, her sister is death, and she's chosen of the moon. Chosen in this universe act as both high priestesses and also vessels of their goddess(sun/moon/various seasons, etc) and will all eventually replace their goddesses by taking their power into themselves, but as themselves rather than being deities themselves.

So right now she's the Queen. Her brother is older but he married the Sun chosen so is king there now. Her sister was removed from the line of succssion. I could go into all the other characters (like the mermaid pirate captains and the messengers called the Crows and Lomea the Queen of the summer court who long time followers may have seen in other forms ;) Or Rin's brother in law who has the gift of seeing the past clearly.

And then there's the heir to the abyss who's mother is the mother of monsters and rules over the city that is the last safe place for the dark fae and adheres to darkness doesn't necessarily mean evil)

So they need to replace their gods and then kill God himself because he keeps 'restarting' time since nothing goes right and there's always darkness. So that'll be fun. Oh but first they have to kill their father, who's basically satan, three times as was foreseen. And then the fatesinger (this was before endwalker lmao) will speak and undo the world so they can sing in a new world, imperfect, but a world of their choosing. And darkness must exist for there to be light, etc etc. The mother of monsters is very invested in making sure there's room for her and her kind in this world. (and they have to kill god before remaking the world, or before he remakes it, of course)

(Illidan voice: I AM MY SCARS)

Her lover is an elf who's a wolf-spirit/shifter and said shifter's twin sister is also often involved, while also being with the Summer chosen maiden.

(My PFP is Ryscewen, aspect of Chaos, and one of the few who remembers the worlds that came before. (She started out as Fox in another original setting my wife created many years ago that we would like to also finish some day) her love is raven, who is the fatesinger who cannot speak because if she does it will kill those around her. Hence when she speaks it will end the world)

She became, in a way, a vessel for exploring darker and more taboo subjects

[charlottedabookworm]

? About AU’s

Do you think you could do a quick summary of your AU’s? I get some of them but I’m confused by what others are (Time is cruel but gods are crueler for example) - Queenie

oooooh boy

okay so i’m assuming you mean the aus on my ffxv au list cos if you don’t we’re going to be here all day

…frankly we might be here all day anyway but starting from the top:

ardynson au: pretty self explanatory, explores a verse where nyx is born as ardyn’s son

graveyard of blades: a reveal au of the ardynson au where in a ‘fuck this is bad invasion scenario’ nyx basically goes ‘yo bahamut i’m the accursed’s son come and get me’ and then runs through the crowd of enemies as bahamut tries to kill him

time is cruel: another ardynson au except this time nyx is born as ardyn’s son two thousand years ago and the curse that bamahut puts on ardyn to never die extends to ardyn’s whole line. so nyx and ardyn are both alive, don’t know the other is alive, and finally meet again in the throne room of insomnia in the kingsglaive film

the cruellest cut: an au of time is cruel that is. incredible similiar except cor is also there as ardyn’s shield and husband. all three of them alive but with no idea anyone else survived and it’s basically time is cruel but with extra angst and then extra fluff reunions

that one where aulea is also ardyn’s daughter: again, pretty self explanatory. aulea and nyx are both ardyn’s kids. yes this makes noctis nyx’s nephew.

 regisson au: nyx is regis’ son

one more light: a regisson au that involves nyx sacrifiing himself at the end of the game in noct’s place and then time travel happens and noct is, shockingly, not happy that his big brother sacrificed hismelf for him

fractured lightning: regisson au where nyx is captured by niflheim for a few years and experimented on. much angst

blood of the storm: regisson au where half the glaive is full of galahdian noble bastards. libertus is clarus’. crowe is a bastard cousin of luna and ravus. selena ulric is aldercapts bastard daughter. pelna is wesk’s. this entire au is just crack okay

starlight on your skin: regisson au where platonic soulmates are a thing, soulmarks are a thing, the long night happens and nyx is basically the only one left and astrals send him back in time to fix things. he crashes in the past in front of his younger self and oh shit wasn’t i halfway througha  chapter for that one?

somnusson au: as you can guess, nyx is somnus’ son. i’m not very creative sometimes

dying inside: first fic in the somnusson au, also on ao3. somnus loves his son and kills him for standing with ardyn anyway. much angst. very hurt. sad.

a lesson in time: sequel to dying inside, also on ao3

the phoenix must burn: more stuff in the dying inside au

prompto ulric au: prompto is nyx’s son

you’re the best thing that ever happened to me: a teenage nyx rescues a baby from a nif lab. he’s a dad now. very cute

lightning flashes (and you are free): a fusion of fractured lightning and prompto ulric. this is the happier verse that’s also on ao3

galahdian royalty: galahd has it’s own kings. (nyx. it has nyx. yes i’m obessed with nyx you might have guessed that by now)

platonic promnoct time travel: the game happens. prompto and noctis wake up 16 and grieving and PTSD ridden and determined to change things. also on ao3 under our past is everything we failed to be

si!iris verse: iris is an oc insert from the modern world. amicitia’s are related to ulrics in this. i haven’t touched this au in years wow

styx ulric verse: nxy and selena have a third sibling. styx is an oc insert with game knowledge who is wesk’s daughter and absolutely determined that her brother is gonna live. makes a name for herself as both an academic and a heretic. half the tag is fake tweets

nox fleuret bastard verse: amatus (mat) is sylva’s bastard son. he runs from tenebrae when niflheim invades when he’s a kid. he becomes a glaive marries nyx makes a life for himself and then oh the captain who is like their father is the man who murdered his mother

virtus fic: oc glaive who died in the long night time travels, understandably has issues, rescues baby noct from the marilith. also on ao3. trying desperatelt to work on the next chapter of this cos i got a really nice comment recently

ramuhson au: again, selfexplanatory. nyx is ramuh’s son

that one au were somnus is actually a decent human being: somnus isn’t a dick. he stands with his brother. bahamut is far more of one by forcing him

ardyn king of galahd verse: galahd still recongises ardyn as their king, nyx is ramuh’s chosen. obviously this causes problems when ardyn appears in the lucian throne room and all of galahd recongises him as their lost king

uncle cor au: cor is nyx and selena’s uncle

si!somnus verse: somnus is an oc insert with game and medical knowledge. is fully determined to save his brother. bahamut doesn’t care and somnus is forced to kill his brother anyway. somnus is cursed and eventually reunites with his brother. one day i will actually write this fic

oc assassin aldercapt verse: aris is an oc thief/assassin reincarnated as aldercapt’s son. sentinal guide au. aris fakes his own death blows up half the palace and runs away to insomnia only to be eventually recognised by arydn who still terrifies him

titus has a kid verse: abo au where titus has a daughter who is being held hostage to make titus do what niflheim wants. she escapes and spends years searching for a cure for the glauca parasite in her dad. eventually joins the glaive under a fake id to do this

cor bastard kid verse: cor has a kid. kid is a nursing student who used ot tutor prompto. he adopted the kid basically

yan conall royal bastard with regrets au: yan is regis’ bastard child. he’s a hunter. he does not realise the kid he saves is actually his brother until too late cos regis - who doesn’t recognise who he is - drags him back to insomnia for a reward and yan is full of many regrets

wolfshifter ardyn au: ardyn is a wolfshifter. on his trip to niflheim, cor comes back with a wolf and a baby. somewhat crackish

aulea has a sister: who is an archaeologist. she’s on a dig when noct is born and her sister dies and anyway noct grows up with an aunt who loves him and is also like fuck that prophecy historically they’re bullshit

ghosts of our souls: nyx and noct are platonic soulmates. when one of your dies the other one follows them around as a ghost. you don’t know you’re soulmates until one of you is dead. there’s time travel. regis is very confuzzled

ardyn and nyx are timelords: ardynson au where ardyn’s mum was a timelady and so nyx and ardyn go on adventures in her tardis

clown and the accursed: verse where allen walker (d.gray-man) is born as ardyn’s son

nyx is zack reborn: self explanatory

apollo kid yeeted into eos: kid from pjo gets a prophecy. gets yeeted into eos. i never got very far with this one cos i forgot to write down where i was going with it

MT reincarnate siblings: a handful of the MT’s are reincarnates. one is Tobirama (naruto). another is a soldier from ffvii. the last is a scientist from solheim. they live in altissia

[catmaidetho]

crow's untitled danger days au.

wc: 13850 content warnings: sexual content, mentions of suicide, mentions of death, graphic depictions of injury.

Your life is boring.

Your life consists of the same routines performed day after day. You see the same three places that all look the same, you wear the same five shirts and three pairs of pants that are all identical, and you are slated to marry someone that BL/ind believes will make you happy.

But joy doesn’t exist in your life. You know what it is on principle, but you don’t think you’ve ever felt it. Come to think of it, you don’t think you feel anything beneath the pills they feed you. You haven’t felt a single thing in years. You’re numb and tired and every time you tell your doctor you don’t feel anything, they just shrug and add something new to your cocktail that makes the numbness sink in deeper.

BLi tells you that life doesn’t exist beyond the walls. The world is a dangerous, radioactive wasteland that will burn you to death in hours—no, minutes. When your commute brings you close to them, you can’t help but stare and wonder if it’s true. The scarecrows and draculoids don’t let you get close enough to prove it one way or the other, but that’s not to say you don’t think about it. You think about it the same way you think about jumping in front of a train.

The idea of leaving scares you, the same way a full bottle of pills does. It doesn’t matter what’s out there, if it kills you or if it’s freedom, because whatever it is is a thousand times better than whatever life awaits you in the city. (You’ve met your future wife; she’s a bore. Everyone here is a bore, except for your sister.) You think that, if it is death, it’d be a lot like walking into the sun, hot and burning until suddenly you are nothing. You think that’d be a terrible, painful way to go, but a rebellious one at that.

continue reading here.

[helloneighborfan]

October 14, 1930

Raven Brooks was always a town that was ignored , but in one day, it was finally coming to the world.

A few years had passed since the arrival of the Petersons and the beginning of discovering the anomalies that surrounded the town, they began to surprise the Tavish and the people with the new discoveries they made every day. Tomorrow will define your life and even the reputation of your people, a single mistake and they could make a fool of Raven Brooks but they are NOT stupid.

"Everything will be fine tomorrow," they both say. They spent a whole month (almost) studying the phenomena almost a hundred percent analyzed, still inconclusive but due to the thousands of things they had to do and they left the project forgotten for a while. Adelle then sits in the living room of the house while Roger on the reddish sofa with a small blanket, it was starting to get cold inside.

-Let's take a break, talk about another topic.- then he sees Adelle's tummy. -I've been thinking about our son's name lately, I hope I chose it well because you don't know what a headache it caused me to find a suitable one. -The ultrasonographer said that he is going to be a boy, right?

-Indeed. Now do you allow me to say them? - Of course. Mark, Anthony, Jesper, Erik, Frederick and the last one, Theodore.- Roger's eyes widen. None of them were fitting, but Theodore was unusual and a very good name, I choose this.

"Let him keep the name Theodore," Roger says quickly. I'd know you'd pick that one , that's what I thought when I read the names, it just rhymes a lot for the last name Peterson. Now that it occurs to me, I have one in mind too, it comes from my father may he rest in peace; Masters. Masters. He repeated the last name several times because he wanted to see what was special about him until he decided to put the three names together and the fireworks exploded in his mind.

"Theodore Masters Peterson, it doesn't sound crazy how he thought." Of course it's not something unusual, my dear.

So it will be this.

~°~

The afternoon light invaded the entire town for the first time since the day had previously been too sad, Adelle and Roger were already prepared in the assembly to finally be able to define the fate of the town, it was a fairly large room and it had a stage big enough for seventy people to fit in there; Presenting an idea to everyone was somewhat complicated in remote times because all those who said a single word were torn to pieces, now it was different to express opinions.

You can have your allies on your side or just oppose the ideas of others. -

~•~

The murmurs of the people became more and more legible in the room each time the arguments became more heard there.

-Not only the phenomena that surround the town make it unique, but also its founders, the crows and of course the golden apple. Roger raised his voice more.

-The reason why the town is called that is because of the raven, a bird that is fierce and ruthless, the most powerful people together with the Tavish made Raven Brooks possible-

-What about the Ravens? Will they also continue under investigation?

- Do you know the origin of the- a voice interrupts. - They know you don't talk about crows! someone comment.

Why would they have to do with this?! Another person exclaims only to see a crowd angry and saying things out of line.

The ravens? Adelle thought. She had never heard of the clique or whatever it was, the thing was something relevant in the town. Now instead of a session that talks about the oddities of the town, it was a market that did not stop. It was probably a group that killed and kidnapped people; or worse, they disappeared.

"Order!" exclaimed the judge, hitting the table. A chill invaded all the spectators who were present. Everything was ready to finish with the last argument to establish the town of Raven Brooks.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

After their endless debate, the Tavishes and the Petersons left the room. They commented that they only had to wait for the final results since they say that it can be determined in months or even years, for which they did not say a single word along the way. So they both thought:

How long would it take to wait for the town to be recognized?

Would the town have been just a hidden treasure or a rotten one from long ago? It was something they couldn't answer for themselves.

PD: The next chapter will include someone very interesting ;D

[seras-elessar]

Death’s Door - misunderstanding Souls

Death’s Door is beautiful. It suffers in the game play. Clearly made to be a souls-like it fails to grasp the nuance of souls combat and world building. There’s one winning strategy, and one only. Your dodge roll has a cool down.

Poor thematic story. Great, beautiful visuals.

And poor, oh so poor, combat.

tldr: 5/10 Didn’t like it. Can’t recommend it. More under the cut.

When Demon Souls and then Dark Souls came out the consensus among my peers was that the game was filled with unfair, trial and error challenges that would kill the player as much soon as look at them. Now that wasn’t true of Dark Souls; you’re always given enough information that even when you’re dropped into an ambush or a trap you always feel like you’ve could’ve avoided it.

Not so for Death’s Door. You’re dropped into challenges without knowing what you’re in for. The enemies spawn in in waves, giving you little to no chance to be prepared for the challenge ahead. Even bosses work this way.

Unpredictible seems to be the name of the outline for Death’s Door, not in story, but in combat. No enemy beyond the absolute basic monsters are truly readable. An example is the big, Smough-looking knights. They have a large mace they use to smash once, twice, three or four times. There is one tell for the once smash, the other’s are a guessing game. Will it hit twice or thrice? No idea, and nothing can tell me. The winning strategy is a game of tag that becomes very tiresome after the first ten times, and never lets up for the next five thousand. Attack and dodge away. Attack and dodge away. And so proceeds the combat of all the bosses and larger enemies.

To complicate this winning strategy is the aspect that the dodge roll doesn’t use stamina, instead it has a cool down. This means you can’t dance with the enemies, dodge around them the way you do in Soulsborne games, or Hades. Instead it became to me a last resort of moving away from the enemy, and no something I ever felt I could trust.

Speaking of trust. When I play an action adventure game like Souls or Hades the games build a trust in that the dodge is a dodge and the attack is an attack. This however is not so. The dodge as mentioned above need a cool down, but th i-frames seem off. Only the middle of the dodge has you actually invincible, the starting and ending frames of the dodge roll is still has your very confusing hit-box taking hits if you try to stay close to the enemy.

The enemy also have confusing animations. Sometimes an enemy lands from a jump, with an animated shockwave, and it hits the crow. Other times the shockwave does nothing. And you can never tell which is a hurty jump and which isn’t. To compare it to Elden Ring it would be like if the horn blowers sometimes just alerted the other enemies and sometimes gave you a concussion. Just not all the time, and not entirely dependant on enemy class or type.

The art is lovely though, the animations look great and there are a lot of interesting and fun character designs, but the game seems to do very little with them. I personally love the Lift Person, but you use the lift once and then just teleport between the stages. Underutilised. Same with the Fisher Man Cook that can tell you secrets over a bowl of food. He’s fun, though.

On the other hand there’s the Bard comic relief. He celebrates your victory of the third main boss by making an absolutely, disgustingly, terrible rhyme about it. I was honestly extremely disappointed when I came to that scene. Not funny or beautiful, it really points out another problem of the game.

The tone is unstable, like the creators didn’t know if they were making a game for children or for adults. The difficulty would leave any child frustrated and dejected, and the story and tone leaves me as an adult disappointed and let down. It tries to say something along the lines of “death is just a natural part of life, and going for immortality corrupts”, but it fails even at that. It feels under developed, missing the point of the Souls series story, the same way the combat misses the point of the Souls combat.

So in the end, this is a Souls-like that doesn’t understand how and why the Souls-games work, buying into the hype about the Souls “difficulty” being it’s main selling-point. And it is difficult. Very difficult. But in the trial and error bullshit that strained my patience every second of me playing it. So it’s a poor game, gorgeous, missing the very essence of what makes Dark Souls great.

[the-real-zhora-salome]

(...)

For a brief minute after 2016, there was an attempt to understand how these tech platforms had been used to spread lies and falsehoods – or mis- and disinformation – as we came to know them and to try to prevent it. But that moment has passed. A years-long effort by Republican operatives to politicise the entire subject of “misinformation” has won. It barely even now exists in US tech circles. Anyone who suggests it does – researchers, academics, “trust and safety” teams – are now all part of the “censorship industrial complex”.

A US congressional committee headed by Republican Jim Jordan, convinced that big tech was silencing conservative voices, went on the warpath. It subpoenaed the email history of dozens of academics and has chilled an entire field of research. Whole university departments have collapsed, including the Stanford Internet Observatory whose election integrity unit provided rapid detection and analysis in 2020.

Even the FBI has been prevented from communicating with tech companies about what officials have warned is a coming onslaught of foreign disinformation and influence operations after a lawsuit brought by two attorneys general went all the way to the supreme court. The New York Times reported that it has only just now quietly resumed.

All this has provided the perfect cover for the platforms to step back. Twitter, now X, has sacked at least half its trust and safety team. But then so has every tech company we know about. Thousands of workers previously employed to sniff out misinformation have been laid off by Meta, TikTok, Snap and Discord.

Just last week, Facebook killed off one of its last remaining transparency tools, CrowdTangle, a tool that was crucial in understanding what was happening online during the dark days before and after the 2021 inauguration. It did this despite the pleas of researchers and academics, just because it could.

In 2020, these efforts seemed pathetic, paltry, inadequate to the scale of the threat. Now they’re gone, just as the tools are becoming even more dangerous. Last week, OpenAI crowed about finding an Iranian group that used ChatGPT to run a US election influence campaign, which would have been more impressive if the last that was heard from its trust and safety team was when it was dissolved back in May after its co-founders resigned.

But what Musk – the new self-appointed Lord of Misrule – has done is to rip off the mask. He’s shown that you don’t even have to pretend to care. In Musk’s world, trust is mistrust and safety is censorship. His goal is chaos. And it’s coming.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"Even when asked to address nonviolence in the context of labor disputes, marital woes, and other issues, Bayard Rustin reported, and even when specifically instructed not to address the war, audiences inevitably asked him “to present our views on the world struggle in light of the principles I had outlined.” But in addition to talking of peace, he spoke passionately about discrimination—and in the view of biographer Jervis Anderson, “came to be recognized as probably the most militant civil rights advocate in the United States.” Topics included “Racial Exploitation in America” and “Can Nonviolent Non-Cooperation Win Freedom for the American Negro?” Especially incendiary was his tendency to note the ways in which our own country and its allies, while condemning our enemies, were themselves guilty of some of the same moral failings. The Dayton, Ohio, Journal, reporting on a speech Rustin delivered at a local Baptist church in 1943, gives some sense of how provocative his message could be in a time of war:

While he emphasized that he was not in sympathy with Germany, the speaker said Hitler has been more honest than President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill. For instance, he explained that Hitler does not pretend friendship with the Jews on the one hand and punish them on the other…He said that Churchill does not intend to bring racial equality, but rather intends to retain the status quo. He stated that much is said about equality in this country, yet the government, even in the armed forces, is one of the worst offenders.

Rustin was certainly aware of the ambivalence toward the war in black America, where segregation in the military and persistent discrimination on the home front had bred profound resentment. “Many Negroes have little faith in the present struggle,” he reported in a FOR [Fellowship of Reconciliation] memo dated September 8, 1942.

I have heard many say they might as well die right here fighting for their rights as to die abroad for other people’s. It is common to hear outright joy expressed at a Japanese military victory. For thousands of Negroes look upon successes of any colored people anywhere as their successes.

David Dellinger, in his memoir, reports being taken with Benedict and Dallas to an all-black jazz club where the three of them were celebrated by patrons for having refused to fight. “The general bitterness,” Myrdal reported, “is reflected in the stories that are circulating in the Negro communities: A young Negro, about to be inducted into the army, said, ‘Just carve on my tombstone, Here lies a black man killed fighting a yellow man for the protection of a white man.’ ”

Around the same time as An American Dilemma was published (the spring of 1944), the army weekly Yank published an anguished letter from Rupert Trimmingham, a black corporal who discovered that the country he was fighting for could treat its enemies better than its own soldiers.

Here is a question that each Negro soldier is asking. What is the Negro soldier fighting for? On whose team are we playing? Myself and eight other soldiers were on our way from Camp Claiborne, La., to the hospital here at Fort Huachuca. We had to lay over until the next day for our train. On the next day we could not purchase a cup of coffee at any of the lunchrooms around there. As you know, Old Man Jim Crow rules. The only place where we could be served was at the lunchroom at the railroad station but of course we had to go into the kitchen. But that’s not all; 11:30 A.M. about two dozen German prisoners of war, with two American guards, came to the station. They entered the lunchroom, sat at the tables, had their meals served, talked, smoked, in fact had quite a swell time. I stood on the outside looking on. And I could not help but ask myself these questions. Are these men sworn enemies at this country? Are they not taught to hate and destroy…all democratic governments? Are we not American soldiers sworn to fight for and die if need be for this our country? Then why are they treated better than we are?

Americans knew this was wrong. Yank was inundated with mail from G.I.s, “almost all of whom were outraged by the treatment given the corporal,” the editors wrote. The original Trimmingham letter even became the basis of a short story in The New Yorker. In a subsequent letter published on July 28, Trimmingham reported that he was heartened to receive 287 letters in response to his own, including 183 from whites in the armed forces, most from the Deep South. “It give me new hope to realize that there are doubtless thousands of whites who are willing to fight this Frankenstein that so many white people are keeping alive,” Trimmingham wrote. He was one of 1.2 million blacks who served in the armed forces during the war in spite of their second-class status.

While blacks were concerned first and foremost with discrimination at home, there was also rising consciousness of race and imperialism elsewhere. Rustin’s memo goes on to say that

No situation in America has created so much interest among Negroes as the Gandhian proposals for India’s freedom. In the face of this tension and conflict, our responsibility is to put the technique of nonviolent direct action into the hands of the black masses.

- Daniel Akst, War By Other Means: How the Pacifists of World War 2 Changed American for Good. New York: Melville House, 2022. p. 183-185.

[hollyevolving]

Sure, let's re-do the 40 Things meme. Some things have changed, some haven't.

-

1. Do you like blue cheese? Nope

2. Have you ever smoked? Not tobacco, and not in many years

3. Do you own a gun? Nope

4. What flavour kool aid? None

5. What do you think of hot dogs? Generally tasty

6. There wasn't a 6. Now there is.

7. What is your favorite movie? The Crow

8. What do you prefer to drink in the morning? Coffee

9. Can you do a push up? Yes

10. What's your favourite jewelry? The onyx necklace that Dan "Chip" Henley made for me.

11. What is your favorite hobby? Hard to choose, but in the end it's singing

12. Do you have ADHD? Yup

13. Do you wear glasses? Yup

14. What was your favourite cartoon? Belle & Sebastian

15. Name three things you did today? Worked, tried on a new tunic, watched some more Vikings

16. Name three drinks you drink regularly? Water, coffee, chocolate protein shake

17. Current worries? money, health, time...the usual

18. There wasn't an 18. "It's Gorgug. Keep going."

19. Favourite place to be? anywhere with good company

20. How did you bring in the New Year? alone

21. Where would you like to go? Everywhere, but Scotland is definitely on the list

22. Name five people who will do this? No idea

23. Do you wear slippers? I prefer cozy socks

24. What is your color? Black, delft blue, crimson, pastel pink

25. Do you like sleeping in satin sheets? Nah, they don't breathe. Cotton for me!

26. Can you whistle? Only breathing in, cannot whistle out

27. Where are you now? at my desk in my living room

28. Would you be a pirate? As in, living entirely outside the law and needing to steal everything to survive, having no access to medical care and little choice regarding food? No. But it's fun to pretend to be a fantasy pirate.

29. Favourite Food? Sushi. Specifically raw salmon

30. There wasn't a 30. ""All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies. And whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, Prince with the Swift Warning. Be cunning and full of tricks, and your people will never be destroyed."

31. There wasn't a 31, either. "In the same way your heart feels and your mind thinks, you, mortal beings, are the instrument by which the universe cares. If you choose to care, then the universe cares. If you don't, then it doesn't." -- Brennan Lee Mulligan

32. What's in your pockets? Nothing

33. Last thing that made you laugh? a tumblr shitpost

34. What's your favorite animal? Need context. Cats are my favorite housepets.

35. What's your most recent injury? I'm always injured thanks to my crappy skeleton.

36. How many TVs in your house? I don't own a TV (queue Harvey Danger)

37. Worst Pain? I regularly dislocate joints thanks to the EDS, my right hip continually grows and then grinds off osteophytes from its interior lunate surface thanks to a skeletal defect, I have been tattooed over my spine and over my sciatic nerve, and I can say definitively that a periodontal scaling & root planing hurts worse than anything else I've ever experienced by an order of magnitude.

38. Do you like to dance? sure do (my janky bones are more comfortable dancing than jogging)

39. Are your parents still together? Divorced, and my dad died about 20 years ago

40. Do you enjoy camping? I really can't camp out anymore; I can't sleep anywhere except my own bed, at home, alone. But I do miss SCA camping.

[naachikko]

I just .....it was just a sketch!

(don't worry, i have some in depth context down bellow!)

If you want... maybe too much info, i invite you to click around down there!

So Context! [im going to nerd a lot about the Minecraft skins i have done which are not even the 40% of my wardrobe]

On the discord server i mentioned that, when it comes to playing minecraft i often mention "the grand master's teachings".

(Which if you don't know who the great master is, maybe his teachings will give you a clue)

And for some reason, while playing in a new modded server a friend did my brain started drifting away thinking "what if someone who follows the grand master's teaching gets corrupted?" And i started playing scenarios on my brain about a non corrupted Nachiko (because my skins are variations of Nachiko, what a surprise (sarcasm)) talking with a corrupted one.

[Might be cringe so, strap in]

P: "The only thing that works on this world, it's to treat others like they treat you"

C: "tsk. We must stop this cycle before begins a new"

P: "..... "Those who have treated me with kindness, i shall repay tenfold."

P: "And those, who treated me with injustice, that used me...that hunt me down, that hurt my friends.... i shall repay that injustice a thousand times over"

C: " ha! fear and death are the true and only equaliser on this world. What they shall make, we shall break before it's too late."

[Cringe over(?)]

And then i imagine them monologuing to each other quotes and teaching of the great master before fighting.

Then i started drawing....

And eventually my mind visualised the skin i used (and actually drew) for a .... kinda social//tryhard server i was with in friends.

Against the one i did for a RLCraft series.

Both actually symbolise my two mentalities when i play Minecraft on a server pretty well.

A ready for everything traveler with a liking to being flashy and silly just for the hell of it...

(i was going around with either of these two with a sombrero and dual wielding maracas with my army or crows and a giant pickaxe on the back, everything started with the left skin and eventually evolved in to the swain skin on the right.....which became "Mexican Swain" later.............and it was the birth of Natato btw)

And an adaptive survivor, whom may die thousands of times just because they know the satisfaction of triumph is sweeter than a free victory, respectively.

There was an actual evolution: on this one.

The start: was just Nachiko in a potato sack because the gimmick was to look poor. With stones at the end of the hair thingies and no much more detail.

The middle: was all messy and a deteriorated. Scars with corrupted purple underneath (fun fact, it was in the outer layer so i could take the bandages off to show corruption), burn hair and clothes which where also dirtied and a darker shade of light on the eyes. The potato sack became a potato sack robe and a lose piece if it was used as a belt.

The Epilogue: the potato sack was fixed up with rope instead of ditched for a better robe, the belt became a proper belt and now, the hair decorations came back but now mate out of bronze and there was a shoulder piece added to style the roman warrior (also, bronze became my favorite material on RLCraft for no reason) and the messy hair was kept to show that despite all, the world out the is still wild...

(I love making small details, okay?)

Then i started adding references to my pets on said servers, my army of Crows and my flying hellhound steed (named princess).

... against my boss monster pet the Grue, my three chupacabra (named Lucy, Anais and Marina) and my steed which was a FUCKING POLAR BEAR WOLF HIBRID I NAMED VOLIBEAR.

Then i ....began to add details and... you know how things ended 😅

You can see the duality of a person when the most remember phrase for one side is

"the army of crows shall rise at dawn! We must charge to victory!"

and the infamous

"keep killing me all you want. I will keep coming back, while you have only one. single. life."

It speaks volumes that on the social server i loved all my pets and all of my crows (that i named individually) equally while on the RLCraft server i grew so attached to my Bronze Pike that i named it "Ika" and eventually it became a character in the official Nachiko's lore (yes, a weapon in a Minecraft server became a character) and to my chupacabra pet Lucy which was just small, purple and deadly.

(early concept of Ika as a character, since we are here. It follows the logic of "a lost weapon will be wield by the bond with it's master" which from nerd to normal translates "to "the "soul" in the weapon looks like who owned it" so, i drew her pretty much another Nachiko but with the armor i used there. Also fire ears because damn she cooked enemies up good.)

At the end one thing is clear.

"We" both call for the great master, and "we" both claim that "he demands blood"

... RLCraft changes a man.

(When i was invited to a more social server after RLCraft i was farming nether stars from a lot of withers day 5 (even made a skin called "the wither butcher" because the second thing i did there was cooking).... RLCraft fucked me up good lmao...i was invited to other server recently and i got 5 dragon eggs(yes, 5) 3 days in. Without entering the end, no interaction with mods, no stealing, no cheating.)

(wither butcher Nachiko. Fun fact, Halloween was around the corner so i was prepared with this fancy outfit. Everything was separated by layers. I could take the skulls off and the bandages, bellow those you could see blood and green, putrid hands. Bellow the apron there are some more wither skeletons ribs and on the back you could see a a nether star around the heart area. The idea was to have wither skill as helmet to finish the look. It was a great skin!)

Anyways, sorry for the ummm "lore(?)" Dump??

I hope you liked it and i hope you have a wonderful day or night!

[denimbex1986]

'My parents’ house sits at the foot of the Sangre de Cristos facing west toward the setting sun and the Jemez Mountains. I still remember nights looking out across the vast darkness at the twinkling lights of Los Alamos, the secret city, “a place,” as the late anti-nuclear activist and Ohkay Owingeh elder Herman Agoyo put it, “with no public memory.”

As the crow flies, Truchas is 30 miles from Los Alamos, separated by the great Tewa Basin and arid badlands checkerboarded by Hispano settlements and Indigenous Pueblos. For most of my young life, I took the Lab for granted. It was there in the background, omnipresent like a low-frequency hum.

Memorandum for the record

But it didn’t always just exist. It was forced onto our homeland and into our consciousness, even if most origin stories about the Manhattan Project and the Lab’s continued presence in the region treat local people like extras in a movie.

“For the several hundred workers required to man these plants, there must also be several thousand service and supporting personnel,” a 1950 internal report read. Its writer was debating whether Los Alamos was the best place for the weapons Lab moving forward.

Scientists performed clandestine work here, yes, but that work required and continues to require the effort of so many others — “supporting personnel” — who can also be on the frontlines of exposure.

I am reminded, for instance, of an experiment that went horribly wrong just nine months after American forces decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear bombs. A Canadian physicist, Louis Slotin, was trying to gather data on nuclear chain reactions when the screwdriver he was holding as a wedge between a beryllium tamper and a plutonium core accidentally slipped. For a brief second, the beryllium and plutonium reached fission, sending out a blast of blue light and radioactivity.

Slotin’s death in 1946 has been famously recorded in histories of the Lab. But there were several other people in the room that day, including several colleagues and a security guard whose fate has largely been eclipsed. All that was noted in records of the event was his fear. Apparently, it was said, the security guard ran out of the room and up a hill. And that’s where his part in the story ends.

But he was there, a witness — and one, I imagine, who was exposed to the same plutonium that within a matter of nine days killed Slotin. I’ve long wondered: Who was he? What was his story?

When I think of that man, I think of my Grandpa Gilbert. Many auxiliary staff were local people who got their start on “the hill” as security guards for the Atomic Energy Commission. That was his story — a career begun as a security guard in 1946 and ended some three decades later as a staff member of the Lab and the University of California, which managed it. The position was a distinction that not many Hispanos held at the time. My mom says he felt dignified by his work there — the only means he had to raise five kids after World War II. But there was a trade-off, including discreet trips to the doctor where he was screened for cancer on a more-than-routine basis.

Many family members would follow in his footsteps — my Uncle Jerry among them. Los Alamos was a place abounding in conspiracy theories and Uncle Jerry found himself at the center of one of them. He believed that racism had created a culture of retaliation, so toxic that it led to his being framed for intentionally dosing his supervisor with plutonium-239. After my uncle’s death two years ago, the Santa Fe New Mexican published a column narrating the sordid events — his boss ultimately recanted the allegations and my uncle and others won a settlement — but he was haunted by a lasting specter. The multiple cancers that consumed his body decades later were products of the Lab, in his opinion, like sleeper fires set within him.

I only recently came to know the fragments of my Uncle Pat’s story. During his three years at the Lab in the late 1970s, he was flown on two occasions to California with a locked box chained to his wrist. His destination was TRW, the predecessor of Northrop Grumman Space Technology, and his cargo, he told me, was top-secret technology that could detect nuclear weapons testing from outer space.

There’s a kind of mental acrobatics required to compartmentalize these different realities — the opportunity and the harm, the secrets and the consent. I know this compartmentalization well, this desire to draw a line in the sand between the good and the bad. When I was 19, I spent a summer working as an undergraduate intern in the Lab’s explosives division, a building perched behind a maze of fences and guards. I didn’t have a security clearance at the time, nor could I foresee getting one, so I spent most days marooned at my desk in the front office, filing papers and sending emails. I couldn’t even take a bathroom break without a chaperone accompanying me.

Nothing of that work rings more clearly than a memory of two scientists stumbling out into the hallway, covered in blood. An experiment had gone awry — nothing radiation related — but it was so shrouded in mystery that parsing what actually happened is like trying to put a puzzle together that’s missing half the pieces. I watched in horror from the doorframe.

After that, I transferred to the Bradbury Science Museum, also in Los Alamos, where I walked by replicas of Little Boy and Fat Man daily to get to my desk. I spent that summer, among other things, writing exhibition text about the Manhattan Project’s early architects — J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman. I wrote not the history of mi gente, but of those agents of immense creation and destruction, those who’d exacted what Myrriah Gómez in her book, “Nuclear Nuevo México,” calls nuclear colonization. The irony.

It was only when I left the state that I had the distance to understand the debt our communities pay for the good jobs. I began to unpack what it means for New Mexico to be what the writer D.H. Lawrence once called the moon of America. This place was distant enough in America’s consciousness to be foreign, exotic even. But as that “tierra incognita,” the unknown and unknowable blankness stretched across mental maps of the Southwest, our world became America’s wasteland. We continue to sit at the periphery of centers of power, yet we have been forced into the epicenter of this nation’s nuclear weapons complex.

Now, as I write about the role of nuclear weapons across New Mexico, the nation and the globe, Toni Morrison’s words come to mind: “The subject of the dream is the dreamer.” Her ideas about literature were deeply influenced by psychoanalysis. Indeed, to her mind, the act of dreaming was not unlike the act of writing. Or, to put it another way, the subject of the writing is the writer. Here, that is me.

My family and community’s own tangled history with the Lab sits in my subconscious like an inchoate thought. Only when I hold it up to scrutiny does that thought form into the imperative, allowing me to fully fathom what the Manhattan Project birthed in our backyard. Perhaps this is what Gómez refers to as an “innate knowing,” our local “sixth sense.”

“The locals know their local land and water supplies are contaminated from the nuclear material that was either buried in nearby canyons or on riverbanks,” Gómez writes in her book. “They know their presence on the Pajarito Plateau is being erased from national memory. They know they were placed in dangerous jobs because of their identities. They know the plutonium exploded into the atmosphere during the Trinity Test is making them sick. They know nuclear waste, if buried in their backyard, poses severe threats.”

I know all of this when I drive along Highway 84/285, an artery that connects Pojoaque Pueblo to Española and the Pueblos of Santa Clara and Ohkay Owingeh, below a billboard sprawled against sienna-hued bluffs. A woman with a complexion like my own holds radiation detection equipment and smiles down at me.

“Radiation Control Technicians are vital to operations at LANL,” the billboard proclaims. “Start your career as an RCT at Northern NM College now.”

My worldview will always shape my writing on a topic that hits so close to home, but the focus of this series — The Atomic Hereafter — is to highlight all the communities most impacted by 80 years of nuclear presence, from the most recent attempts to modernize the nation’s nuclear arsenal to the long, drawn-out ways radiation can transmit from mother to child. Nuclear issues in this state are generational. I will take them one story at a time.'

[arpov-blog-blog]

..."A photograph of officer Dick Middleton setting a dog upon 15-year-old Walter Gadsden appeared on the front page of the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post on May 4. Newspapers in Asia, Europe, Africa, and Latin America followed suit, prominently featuring pictures of Birmingham’s K-9s attacking protesters. Concerned about damage to the country’s reputation, the United States Information Agency conducted a study of global coverage of the events in Birmingham, concluding that “pictures of police brutality, particularly the use of police dogs, has militated strongly against the U.S. image.” The outcry was compounded by the fact that many of the protesters were school-age, as Martin Luther King Jr.’s lieutenant James Bevel had organized thousands of students to march in the “Children’s Crusade” against Jim Crow.

The attacks by Birmingham’s police dogs prompted three main responses from Americans. Conservative critics of the civil rights movement defended the dogs as a necessary law enforcement tool against criminals. Many white liberal observers in the North, by contrast, decried them as cruel weapons of a renegade police force, while insisting that the Birmingham police were a department of “bad apples” amid an otherwise honorable profession.

But it was civil rights organizers themselves whose response was most consequential. The dog attacks in Birmingham offered activists in the South and North a political language for analyzing police abuses within the larger context of Black people’s pursuit of freedom and equality.

In Philadelphia, NAACP picketers demanded “rights not bites,” while protesters in New York denounced “dog government in Alabama.” Some argued that Alabama authorities were not the only ones bearing responsibility for the attacks and highlighted the presence of the dogs to sharpen their critiques. As James Baldwin told a rally of predominantly white marchers in Los Angeles, “Those crimes in Birmingham, those dogs and fire hoses, are being committed in your name.” A headline in Baltimore’s Afro-American newspaper captured the mood: “B’ham’s Police Dogs Shock World.”

Indeed, just as horrific videos of police killing Eric Garner, George Floyd, and Tyre Nichols would galvanize protests across the country and globe decades later, the outrage in the wake of the news of Birmingham’s K-9 unit brutalizing protesters as young as 4 injected a local movement into the national, and even global, consciousness.

And yet, as Birmingham’s police dogs have endured as powerful symbols of backlash against the civil rights movement, their origins have largely escaped scrutiny.

In 1963 liberal critics condemned the Alabama city’s K-9 unit as a relic of the Old South. The harder truth to accept, however, was that it was actually a product of a new America.

For many, attacks by police dogs on Black citizens conjured disturbing images from the era of slavery, when bounty hunters pursued escaped enslaved people with bloodhounds. But the police dog was an innovation of modern policing, not a throwback to past centuries. Indeed, the Birmingham Police Department’s dog squad was barely 4 years old when officers attacked protesters in Kelly Ingram Park.

In 1959 Birmingham’s notorious police commissioner and unapologetic segregationist Bull Connor assigned Sgt. M.W. McBride to move to Baltimore for three months to complete a course on dog handling offered there by the city’s police force.

Though it dated back only to 1956, Baltimore’s dog handling team had quickly established itself as the country’s first successful K-9 unit. A handful of other U.S. police forces had experimented with dogs before, but none had sustained a squad for more than a few years.

At the time, Baltimore leaders championed their city as a moderate, even progressive metropolis. Less than 30 miles south of the Mason-Dixon Line, Baltimore had turned its back on Reconstruction by the new century, even pioneering, in 1911, America’s first city ordinance requiring racially segregated housing. But by the decade following World War II, the city aimed to position itself as a willing adapter of integration. Scarcely two weeks after the Supreme Court delivered the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in May 1954, Baltimore’s school board voted to implement the decision. The city’s status as a major East Coast port and one of the country’s leading steel producers further reinforced its image among many white Americans as a leader of a forward-looking South, a regional trailblazer ready to make good on past injustices."

[cfensi]

Promo Round-up: The Killing of Three Thousand Crows

Promo Round-up: The Killing of Three Thousand Crows #三千鸦杀

The Killing of Three Thousand Crows (Killing All The Crows in the World) stars Zheng Yecheng and Zhao Lusi as the OTP who are destined to sacrifice themselves to save the world. The 30 episode drama releases 2 eps every Thursday and Friday on Mango TV beginning tomorrow. [Extended Synopsis]

Theme song by Zhou Shen and Zheng Yunlong