A Brave Sparrow

White supremacist trying to form a straight-pride parade accidentally lets truth slip at city council meeting

me: dONn’t touch those

new guy:

me: they need the toys to function. if they don’t all have toys they get jealous.

new guy:

new guy:

It has become the lucky charm in the IT industry because engineers believe it will make machine acting good (like the name of the snack) and stay in green light (like the color of the snack’s package) when a 乖乖 is put on top of a server.

It is the only food allowed in a server room and the biggest semicondoctor company in Taiwan (which is also the biggest worldwide) even commissioned the snack factory to make a customized version with blessing on the package.

This is how a server room is blessed by 乖乖. You put at least one on top of each server. It’s important that the engineers change them before the expire date because legend says the snack looses it’s power after expire date.

You’ll hear engineers swearing up and down that their server room crushed down the one time they forgot to change the snack.  Or some newbie ate the forbidden snack put on top of their server and caused a disastrous crush down.

The 乖乖 religion later spread to all people who want their machine to act nice. In the lab we put 乖乖 on ultra-low freezer (you really don’t want it to drop dead along with your 2 years’ worth of sample/data), mass spectrometer etc.

When Taiwan’s about to launch the first self made satellite in 2017, the develop team even put 乖乖 around the satellite model to prey for a successful launch (it did). This shit is real.

Broke: Humans are inherently evil

Jenna Moran announces Glitch, a sequel to Nobilis: the Game of Sovereign Powers

PORTLAND, OR (May 31, 2019) – The author of the diceless RPG Nobilis has announced a sequel game, “Glitch: A Story of the Not.” Glitch is intended as a stylistic successor to Hogshead Publishing, Ltd.’s highly-regarded, award-winning 2002 edition of Nobilis, and is targeting a 2019 or 2020 release.

“Glitch: A Story of the Not” is a tabletop RPG about living in a broken world. Its protagonists came into that world to destroy it, to unmake it; to cleanse it all with an eldritch fire—only, in the end, they had to stop. Some of them do good work, now, instead. Others just do their best.

Glitch will use the basic Nobilis setting and a substantially updated version of the Nobilis rules engine (integrating improvements from the 2011 edition, curated elements from the author’s later projects, and a selection of new mechanical ideas). Play will focus on exploration and investigation. The book is estimated at 360 letter-sized pages.

Please look at this bowl, made in Egypt almost 6000 years ago. Look at it.

“Ritual purposes, but in the sense that we know it’s definitely some sort of ritual but not what the fuck the ritual was but likely the act of ‘bringing’ since feet indicate movement in later hieroglyphs for the word ‘to bring’ which also incidentally is a pot on two legs, but this cannot be considered a direct correlation. *20 second instrumental* So yeah, ritual purposes because none of us know what the fuck Pre Dynastic Egypt was doing but it was definitely ritualistic in the same sense that some people having a preferred coffee mug is ritualistic. It’s not spooky we just don’t quite know why they did it.” 

I personally love the idea that the hieroglyphic sign for ini (pot with legs) might have been connected to this type of vessel, and that the verb in which the ini sign appears most commonly, “to bring”, is also thus connected. 

You know what the protesters who marched with Dr. King wore? Their best. Their clergy stoles, their suits. If you’re a doctor or a nurse? Wear your scrubs. If you’re a parent? Wear your PTA shirt if it’s too hot for a suit. If you’re a student? Dress like you’re going to go volunteer somewhere nice, or wear a t-shirt that proclaims you a member of your high school band, your drama group, your church youth group. Whatever it is, make sure it’s right there with your white face.

This is literally the tactic of the people who marched with King in the 60s, and we need to bring it back, and bring it back HARD.

I do this all the time when I go to marches. I wear my cutest, least-offensive geeky t-shirt, crocs and black pants, or I wear my t-shirt that mentions my kid’s school district, or now I’ll wear the pink t-shirt that says I’m part of the Sisterhood at my shul. If it’s cold enough, I wear a cardigan and jeans and sit my ass in my wheelchair. (I need to anyway.) I put signs on my wheelchair that say things like ‘I love my trans daughter’ and ‘love for all trans children’ or something else that applies to the event. Dress like you are going to an interview if you can, or make yourself look like a parent going to pick up a gallon of milk at the corner store. Make yourself “respectable.” Use respectability politics and whiteness AS A WEAPON.

The “Sunday Best” thing from the Civil Rights Movement of the 50s & 60s, or wearing markers of an assigned profession (e.g. scrubs) is an established tactic of social movements.  They’re part of what Charles Tilly (one of the academic god father’s of social movement theory) called “WUNC” displays.  WUNC can be broken down to:

worthiness: sober demeanor (!!!); neat clothing (!!!); presence of clergy, dignitaries, and mothers with children;

unity: matching badges, headbands, banners, or costumes (!!!); arching in ranks; singing and chanting;

numbers: headcounts, signatures on petitions, messages from constituents, filling streets;

commitment: braving bad weather; visible participation by the old and handicapped (!!!); resistance to repression; ostentatious sacrifice (!!!), subscription, and/or benefaction. (Tilly, 2004, pg. 4 - tumblr-style emphasis my own)

While I’m very much in support of anti-fascist protesting in whatever form it takes, especially when engaged in a counter-protest, one of the great tragedies of the American political climate right now is that we’ve really forgotten some of the biggest lessons of the Civil Rights Era.  King didn’t trot out fresh-faced students, church women in big fancy hats, or the elderly and disabled without knowing what he was doing.  He (and the other members of his affiliated organizations) knew that if the police were photographed using violent repression against a mother holding her child, or a student in slacks, a cardigan, and Buddy Holly glasses, it would go over very differently than if they were photographed beating up “unruly thugs”.  Their presence alone would be notable to people locally, especially in the heat of the south.  But so would photographs of repressive violence against “nice people” that would then get picked up by the national media, and maybe in markets that were more sensitive to racial oppression.  

[And like, there are other factors as well.  People also sometimes think the Civil Rights Era erupted spontaneously from Jim Crowe and segregation in the South, and those are giant factors (”depravation” and “grievance”, in jargon), but there were also legislative things and court rulings brewing since the 1920s (the NAACP had been trying Civil Rights cases, and looking for test cases over the years), and the Cold War meant that America needed to appear to be the perfect image of opportunity and equality (together these things manifest as an “opportunity structure”.  again, jargon).  Not to get to down on protest as its own thing, but the structuralists do have a bit of a point.]

…  There are other types of anti-fascist counter-protesting that have developed in various ways through the years. And like, a big thing in social movement theory overall is that while there are common tactics (”protest repertoires” in jargon), historical contexts matter a lot and some groups will have to do more dramatic performances of the WUNC to get attention.  There’s also the move revolutionary antifa-type riot mentality.  I’m not gonna call that one wrong either, mind, but since the Civil Rights Movement was brought up, it should be noted that those two forms of protest differed intentionally.

Anyway, as someone turning in a dissertation on this in a couple of days, here’s some drive-by political-sociology.  If you want to learn more about the research behind processes of social movements, where they succeeded, and where they failed, I totally recommend checking out:

Charles Tilly (2004) Social Movements 1768-2008, 

Sidney Tarrow (2011) Strangers at the Gates: Movements and States in Contentious Politics, 

Sidney Tarrow (1998) Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, 

Frances Fox Piven & Richard A. Cloward (1988) Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed and How They Fail, (this is on the Civil Rights Era protests and the somewhat fraught legislative follow-up exactly)

McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly (2001) The Dynamics of Contention

(McAdam has a quite well-regarded book on the Civil Rights Era specifically. I haven’t read it personally as it relates less to my regional context. However like, that’s worth noting and looking into.  Also all of these are stodgey academic texts, but they’re not uncommon in university libraries, or even in some bookstores. They’re also all a bit old now and shouldn’t cost you a ton online.)

As a note – My point here isn’t to descend from the Ivory Tower of Academia and say “you people on the streets are doing this wrong!!1!”.  Theory doesn’t always match up with Practice, and as noted by pretty much every notable theorist anyway… Context matters a TON.  Not all movements will be able to use the same practices or performances.  Sometimes their inaccessible, sometimes they just don’t have the cross-context appeal.  It’s about experimentation and finding opportunity.  To be clear, this isn’t about me telling folks how it should be done.  Still, I think it’s worth sharing information when it’s available, especially if people who might not know are trying to draw specific links to historical cases.  Social movement theorists have pretty much all agreed that WUNC displays (along with other factors like media diffusion) are super duper important and can be recognized in movements across historical contexts.  I think it’s worth it for younger activists who might be looking for protest repertoires that work for their movement as it’s developing to take heed of the successes and failures of the past.  Especially since a lot of it is either a) so much a part of history and culture that it doesn’t really get examined for its constituent bits, or b) has been mythologized to the point that it’s hard to look for really good popular historical information on its technical processes.

Then neo-fascism reared its head in America, but Roma and Jews were left out of the conversation in terms of people being impacted, because our oppression was “over.”