BC FOR LATER READ
Saved by @CodyyyGardner

Hungover & bored, might do a thread of my favourite little known stories about The KLF/The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu

 When they won at the Brits, their award later turned up buried near Stonehenge. They have a long standing interest in the place & K2 Plant Hire at one stage expressed interest in 'fixing it up', which would entail grinding all the stones down & making them into nice oblong blocks
which would then be replaced just as they were. K2 Plant Hire's feeling was that the place had been allowed to fall into disrepair & it was a great shame. Sadly the plan never materialised.
When they released their first record, 1987: WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?, its bizarre use of sampling technology was met with surprise & disbelief, not least by a London DJ named Tony Thorpe.
He said "I had to meet these guys because I couldn't believe how shit they were."
"I was sampling James Brown, they were sampling the fucking Beatles & Dave Brubeck."
Tony Thorpe became a key part of their arsenal, crafting the machine-tooled Stadium House that made them the best-selling singles band of 1992.
The director of their excellent videos, Bill Butt, was once Daniel Day-Lewis's landlord.
When they were recording Justified & Ancient Jimmy said to Bill "We should get that country music singer woman for this." Bill immediately got in touch with Tammy Wynette & ended up in Nashville recording the vocal in her house. He flew back with the finished track & played it -
- but Jimmy then figured out the one he'd been thinking of was Dolly Parton.
The record was a massive hit anyway.
They had an idea to do a rave version of the Dr Who theme but none of the house rhythms they tried worked. Then they realised that the Glitter Beat fit perfectly. Lsitening back they fell around the floor in helpless laughter. The record was a #1 hit & the beginning of it all.
There was the time they decided to build an enormous cube out of cans of Tennents Super & drive around London on Christmas Eve giving it away to the vagrants & alcoholics of the city. The plan was not a success. The cube had little structural integrity & subsided into a chaotic -
- booze-smelling, high-alcohol content mess on the back of their lorry. Then a man from a homeless charity gave them an angry talking to, saying there was one day a year in which it was possible to get these people sober enough to help them, what did they think they were doing?
Their intentions were good but unfortunately as with many of their actions, ended in a kind of benighted chaos. I think they left the rest of the cans in the corner of a lorry park or something.
6.237 cans were needed to make the perfect cube.
Photographic evidence:
As a teenager Jimmy Cauty drew a series of Lord Of The Rings posters which ended up being franchised by Athena posters & became the world's best selling poster for a time.

https://t.co/0upvLpKyUN
The idea for having an entirely studio-based came about when they went to see a rare live show by The Residents, who had carefully maintained a sense of mystery around themselves for decades.
One of The Residents had his long hair visibly poking out from under his eyeball mask.
This convinced Drummond & Cauty there was no way you could preserve any real mystery around yourself if you performed live. So they never did.
They had started out as a sort of shouty guerilla hip-hop act in 1987 but as rave music broke through they could see the possibilities in this new music.
They went to Heaven nightclub together to check it out.
They decided they should try out this ecstasy the kids were doing too.
Going to the bathroom, they carefully split a pill & went back out to the dancefloor.
As Bill tells it, he sat there waiting to be overwhelmed by the feeling of community & happiness promised by this new designer drug.
He was nervously rubbing his hands & gurning a little by now.
But he wasn't sure how long this feeling would take to come on, so he turned to Jimmy to ask him what he thought, and the words, "Jimmy? What time is love?" came out of his mouth.
Jimmy reckoned that this was a phrase they could work with, and they did.
In later years after The KLF had successfully left the music business & deleted their back catalogue, Bill Drummond was in Dublin in a nightclub & a waiter approached him with a bottle of champagne 'courtesy of the man in the corner.' Turning round, Bill realised the man was Van.
Morrison, that is.
Bill was staggered that Van would have any idea who he was but went over to say thank you.
"You're the fella that got out of the music business' said Van.
Bill agreed that, yes, he was that fella.
"HOW DID YOU DO IT" asked Van.
We just... DID it, said Bill.
"I KEEP TRYING!" replied Van. "THEY WON'T LET ME!"
One music paper had a feature where they allowed bands to run around HMV & take whatever albums they could grab in a five minute period then discuss why they chose particular each particular record.
The KLF were asked to do it & they grabbed as many blank cassettes as they could.
(I fucking love this photo of Bill, the madness is palpable)
Speaking of madness, their TOTP appearance for It's Grim Up North is one of the maddest things ever broadcast on prime time TV.

https://t.co/50EaaUcXMX
The band lasted exactly five years - 1987-1992 - because Bill & Jimmy reckon no band has ever been good for longer than a five-year stretch.
I don't know what that says about Bill's favourite group The Beatles, though.
Their famous exit from the music business, firing blanks at the audience at the Brit awards & dumping a dead sheep at the entrance to the afterparty, could have been a lot more dramatic. Bill had to be convinced not to sever his right hand & throw it into the audience mid-show.
He intended it as a reference to the Red Hand of Ulster, where a race to decide ownership of Ulster ended when the guy who was behind in the race chopped his hand off & threw it ahead, saying that he had touched ground first & could claim it.
Bill wanted to claim the music biz.
The band's performance was met with a great deal of controversy but DJ Jonathan King said he thought it was very good.
This was the final epitaph for The KLF.

They could not beat the music business.
It will co-opt whatever you throw at it.
Disappearing was the only option left.
Finally. Some think the whole story of The KLF was carefully stage-managed & planned from the beginning. Nothing could be less true.
The money they made from their freak novelty #1 hit Doctorin The Tardis got spent on making a quixotic road movie in Spain, THE WHITE ROOM.
They hired the crew who had just finished shooting an Indiana Jones movie & made the film, which ended up being an unreleasable mess that they pretty much hated.
But they had already recorded the soundtrack for it.
This music ended up being the basis for their run of huge hits.
It was all a huge, beautiful accident. There's been nothing like it in the history of pop music and there never will be again.
END OF THREAD
END OF POP
END OF THE ROAD
addendum: Bill Drummond in the NME in '91 talking about the thing with the dead sheep they dumped at the entrance to the Brit awards party.

More from For later read

David Boxenhorn
David Boxenhorn
@davidboxenhorn
1. The death of Silicon Valley, a thread

How did Silicon Valley die? It was killed by the internet. I will explain.

Yesterday, my friend IRL asked me "Where are good old days when techies were


2. In the "good old days" Silicon Valley was about understanding technology. Silicon, to be precise. These were people who had to understand quantum mechanics, who had to build the near-miraculous devices that we now take for granted, and they had to work

3. Now, I love libertarians, and I share much of their political philosophy. But you have to be socially naive to believe that it has a chance in a real society. In those days, Silicon Valley was not a real society. It was populated by people who understood quantum mechanics

4. Then came the microcomputer revolution. It was created by people who understood how to build computers. One borderline case was Steve Jobs. People claimed that Jobs was surrounded by a "reality distortion field" - that's how good he was at understanding people, not things

5. Still, the heroes of Silicon Valley were the engineers. The people who knew how to build things. Steve Jobs, for all his understanding of people, also had quite a good understanding of technology. He had a libertarian vibe, and so did Silicon Valley
FOR LATER READ
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr
stacks are eating the world

business used to be easiest to comprehend via a) market-based logic of horizontal vs. vertical STRUCTURE, b) professionalization/specialization based FUNCTION c) core competencies based BEHAVIORS

this has pretty much collapsed in the last decade

Structure = sclerosis
Functional specialization = bureaucracy
competencies = inertial habits

"Stack" thinking instead lets technology structure (rather than market structure) drive business org logic

Companies seem to do well when they identify an entire stack of technologies they are good at (not just point bits) and organize to conform to its logic. There is a "full-stack" dimension of technical specialization that is the spine of the org

It feels buzzwordy, but it really is getting to be that way. AI stack, decarbonization stack, mobility stack, electrification stack... some end-to-end pathway of turning physics into economics via layers of tech artistically baked together like a cake
CRYPTO , FOR LATER READ
Advertisement
Rising serpent \U0001f1fa\U0001f1f8
Rising serpent 🇺🇸...
@rising_serpent
It's been a long time since I said it, and who knows if there'll be a chance to do so in the future. So here goes:
I've learned more by being on Twitter than I could have imagined, and it was possible only because so many excellent people say so many amazing things. So thank you
FOR LATER READ
Heather Griffin
Heather Griffin
@MargeNAlia
Part of what is going on here is that large sectors of evangelicalism are poorly equipped to help people deal with basic struggles, let alone the ubiquitous pornography addictions that most of their men have been enslaved to for years.


On the one hand, there's a high standard of holiness. On the other hand, there's a model of growth that is basically "Try Harder to Mean it More." Identify the relevant scriptural truth & believe it with all of your sincerity so that you may access the Holy Spirit's help to obey.

Helping sincere believers believe and obey the Bible facts is pretty much all the Holy Spirit does these days, other than convict us of our sins in light of the Bible facts.

If you know you are sincere and hate your sin and believe the right Bible facts as hard as you can but continue to be enslaved to your pornography addiction, what else left for you to do? Just Really, Just Really, Just Really Trust God and Give it to Him?

To suggest that there are other strategies available sounds to those formed in this model of growth like one is also suggesting that the Bible is insufficient, but it also suggests something just as threatening- that there are aspects of reality that are not immediately apparent.
FOR LATER READ
JesseJenkins
JesseJenkins
@JesseJenkins
Morning. The #TexasFreeze continues & grid operator ERCOT is still reporting >31,000 MW of thermal generation capacity out as of 9AM CT. Down slightly from a peak of 34,000 MW reported yesterday afternoon (https://t.co/jNMR4ibyY0) but still >40% of thermal capacity in state!


Wind power is currently producing about 4,000 MW, or 2/3 of the ~6,000 MW that ERCOT was counting on wind to contribute during winter peaking events. Solar is coming online now and helping during daytime, exceeding the <300 MW it is counted on for in system planning.


Main story continues to be the failure of thermal power plants -- natural gas, coal, and nuclear plants -- which ERCOT counts on to be there when needed. They've failed. Of about 70,000 MW of thermal plants in ERCOT, ~25-30,000 MW have been out since Sunday night. Huge problem.

ERCOT started directing electric utilities (like Oncor or Austin Electic) to start rolling blackouts or involuntary emergency load shedding at 1:25am on Monday morning, with 10,500 MW shed during that late morning. That's ~2 million homes worth of load

Throughout Monday, many thermal power plants remained offline, as freeze-offs + fuel shortages in gas pipelines forced large numbers of natural gas plants offline. Many coal plants likely struggled as well w/frozen coal piles, but breakdown of thermal outages by fuel type unclear
FOR LATER READ

You May Also Like

Cookie Cyboid
Cookie Cyboid
@CookieCyboid
“Why are Tumblr and Facebook cracking down on sex so much? And why is Facebook in so over zealous about it? It’s all Apples fault!” Etc etc

I can explain all. It is largely the fault of a set of US laws called SESTA and FOSTA.
TECH
Anshul Pandey
Anshul Pandey
@Anshulspiritual
TYPES OF SINS(PAAP) AS PER SKAND PURAN.

There are three types of Adharma- Sthool, Sukshma and Ati Sukshma. The group of Sins in the Sthul section carries you to Narak. These sins are committed through your thoughts, words and deeds.


It is of four types.

1)First is the sin committed by your mental state-
Thinking about woman other then your spouse.

A)Resolution to amass wealth from others.

B)Thinking ill about others.

C)Thinking of doing a forbidden or unworthy deed.

2)Second is the sin that you commit through your words :-

A)Talking irrelevant things.

B)Telling a lie.

C)Speaking harshly.

D)Talking ill about others.

3)Third type of sin is committed through your body actions-

A)Eating food not prescribed to you or forbidden.

B)Violence.

C)Eating fancier food.

D)Acquiring other's wealth.

So these twelve types of sins.

There are six types of sinners or Mahapatak

1)One not bowing his head in front of a temple.

2)Never praise Shiva.

3)People who behave untowardly way in front of Ishwar.

4)People who do not show respect to Ishwar, guru or one who are undignified.

5)One who do not behave properly.

6)One who is jealous of other bhakts.

Below is the list of sins which people may commit.

1)One who does not help a needy person or a person in pain,
RELIGION
Advertisement
Gal Gur \U0001f1ee\U0001f1f1
Gal Gur 🇮🇱...
@GalGur_
1/
Hello, my name is Gal,
I am an Israeli citizen, and I want to convey this urgent message to the world: Contrary to what you are told, Israel has not "returned to normal" in any way >>

2/ Moreover, despite the desire to create a setting as if there was a full and normal routine here - the Israeli Ministry of Health JUST RECOMMENDED TODAY TO EXTENT THE DECLARATION OF A “STATE OF EMERGENCY” in Israel >>

3/ to which is the foundation for coercion, violation of basic rights, severe discrimination under a "green mark (pass)", prolonged closure (Of about 5 months overall) and a lot of undemocratic and not “routine" restrictions. >

4/ If the situation in Israel had "returned to routine thanks to the astounding success of vaccines" then the "state of emergency" would not have continued.

5/ In fact, since the beginning of the "vaccination project" there has been only more intimidation and in many ways - even though the closure has been lifted, much more coercion.
TYRANNY
dan spaceman
dan spaceman
@ohlaika
I'm gonna do my other star wars thread tomorrow, which will primarily be me yelling at a @RowanKaiser-shaped strawman for calling the First Order and The Resistance "cosplayers who the rest of the galaxy has to deal with"

the deal w/the New Republic, the First Order, and the Resistance is very weird and complex and I actually take issue with how Story Group frames the actual conflict.

pre-TFA stuff is presented as a "cold war" between the New Republic and the remnants of the Empire that form the First Order, which 100% makes sense.

But they frame the First Order's attack on the Hosnian system and the subsequent battle that takes place across TFA and TLJ as a full on war when it's very clearly a coup. A war implies at least equal standing, but the First Order completely wrecks shop and takes over the galaxy.

ok never mind I'm fucking doing this now.

The First Order fleet we see in TLJ is *not* the entire fleet of the First Order (I don't even think Starkiller Base was their main base of operations honestly, it couldn't have been considering they were operating out of Wild Space)
CULTURE
foone
foone
@Foone
So there's a class of puzzles called "river crossing puzzles" which involve having to cross a river on a boat/bridge containing some set of individuals/items with restrictions on which ones can be on the boat/left on each shore, right?

and the most common subclass of these problems is the one where you have 3 items/animals to cross with.
This is alternatively called the "fox, goose, and bag of beans" or "wolf, goat, and cabbage" puzzle.

the idea is that your boat can only carry one item at a time, but if you leave the wolf/fox unattended with the goat/goose, the wolf/fox will eat the goat/goose.
and similarly, the goose/goat will eat the beans/cabbage if left alone

so you have to set up a set of actions that never leaves either side of the river in one of the lose-states.

the solution to this variant being:
1. take the goat/goose over
2. return empty
3. take the wolf/fox over
4. return with the goat/goose
5. take the cabbage/beans over
6. return empty
7. take the goat/goose over
GAMES