THREAD: My top music picks for 2020. An ongoing tradition I’ve maintained for years, here are my favorite music projects of the year:

on a very basic level it is astounding to me that seemingly half the country is hooked on the adventures of The Vision & Scarlet Witch, whose last series together was a precise contemporary of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, and which was quarter box fodder for decades

in hindsight, of course, the idea of framing a superhero story as a suburban dramedy seems novel and fresh to people, but that’s only because other people spent literally three and a half decades sleeping on it

now, of course, many new fans who look into the history of the matter might wonder why such a seemingly popular and fecund direction for these two characters was permanently shelved in the late 80s, what set of factors could possibly have -

they were able to put back some of what was broken - in time - but they never were able to get back to the marriage, and by the time the characters had new status quos in the early 90s the company had moved away from those kinds of genre experiments, and the rift became permanent

the Vision was a humorless drip for years, doing much the same schtick as Data during the precise years ST:TNG was airing

and as a consequence of those stories Wanda permanently became the poster child of women who cannot handle their power because of female inconstancy ...

Thread on best books + readers to learn Sanskrit. I will list only books I have read & their pros and cons.

1. Samskrita Bharati (4 Part Series)

This is by far the best structured english course to learn to read, speak & write Sanskrit. The material is well-structured.

... and grammar is introduced at apt phases. There is enough Sanskrit text to immerse yourself & best part is they have accompanying online/in-person courses entirely in Sanskrit. This is the best method to learn spoken Sanskrit.

2. Svayam Sanskrit Shikshak (Hindi)

This is the second best immersive-learning series. There are 2 parts and progression is gradual. The advantage is it is entirely in Hindi, so the 1:1 syntax + vocab connect for native speakers is instant, Hindi being a daughter of Sanskrit.

this however is also it's only disadvantange. It's language restricted & not suitable for say a Telugu with poor Hindi or for an American or European learner. There is enough reading material here to "learn" Sanskrit.

3. The Sanskrit Language – Walter H Maurer

This is an amazing course. The best to learn Sanskrit for Americans/Europeans & an excellent one for Indians to use to learn the western grammar terminology. Best part about it? It is extremley long & has at least 100 pages of Sanskrit.

one of the things i like about Batman is that it's fundamentally about being orphaned, and being an orphan — how this guy stays tethered to the world in his own weird, abstract, extrajudicial way when he feels that his link to it has been violently severed

Batman does this by permanently recapitulating his own trauma: solving crimes for other people, protecting them. But that's actually just the beginning; he also recapitulates his own experience of orphanness by essentially raising several orphans

Dick is an orphan in the traditional sense: dead parents. Batman sees it happen. Jason, less so: missing dad, known mom who eventually dies. Tim, even less so: parents are around a while, and involved, before both dying. Carrie, even less than that: negligent parents.

Steph: evil father, who openly works against her. And then there's Damian, whose parents are both alive and yet both have identities that totally obliterate their role as his parents. He doesn't relate to them as a mother and father; he can't, and neither can they.

In all these different cases, Batman tries all these different ways of making orphanness for them not what it was for him: Either by trying to teach them the (arguably poor) coping skills early that he learned over a very long time, or by literally legally adopting them, etc.

[thread]

Folks at Marvel were trying to figure out how to launch phase 4 of the MCU, incorporate the addition of the X-Men, the relaunch of the Fantastic Four, and help the MCU on Disney+ get off the ground, and Feige was like:

The meta goes deep on WandaVision. This bit might be unintentional, but there's poetry in Marvel Studios launching its first foray into TV shows with a show about TV shows. Some history:

The previous Marvel TV properties were (mostly) run by Marvel Television and Jeph Loeb. They did some brilliant work, but the MCU films largely ignored the goings-on over there.

Now everything is in one house. It has the potential to be a huge freaking mess.

Part of the problem is how to insert the "first family" of Marvel comics into the MCU timeline. The Fantastic Four are old-school. The MCU heroes we know looked up to them and went to them for advice. Now they are going to get an MCU origin story. That's a conundrum.

Kevin Feige is a big comic nerd with a whole team of comic nerds, and one of them was probably like:

"Hey, did you know the witch who mentored Wanda was a nanny for the Fantastic Four? Maybe she could be in this."

Did you know:

—in old-timey-times women got abortions w no constraints?

—ads for abortion were so common in the 1800s they were blasé?

—native women controlled their fertility & men had no say?

Today's @OrdEquality ep will blow your freakin’ mind

There's this perception that women didn't have abortions in the past— that we were somehow better & more “moral” in the past— but, that could not be further from the truth.

Women have always controlled their fertility throughout the entire history of time. — Dr. @lmacthompson1

We interviewed @LorettaJRoss Prof, Co-founder @sistersong_woc & Godmother to the reproductive justice movement:

"Emperor Augustus was complaining about elite Roman women not having enough children... Roman women were using knowledge from Egypt to practice fertility control..."

"I discovered that the kidnapped, enslaved Black women who were brought over in the slave trade actually brought knowledge about abortifacients with them. And so, they were secretly controlling their own fertility on these plantations." — @LorettaJRoss on @OrdEquality

"Black women have been fighting for reproductive self-determination since our arrival in this country." —@LorettaJRoss on @OrdEquality