BC SOCIETY
Saved by @SteveeRogerr

gonna get in line for the vaccine because I've heard all these urban legends about tracking microchips

and I think I might be able to root it and install Doom

 supposedly bill gates is involved, right?
so it's probably like a miniaturized 386 running ROM-DOS.
the doctor walks in, looks down at my charts, and sighs.
"well, the bad news is that you've got the virus. I'm sorry..."
"and the good news?"
"well..."
*at doom's gate starts faintly playing from my lungs*
https://t.co/6QFwNCdTpD
it took them four tries to figure out that I had the virus, because every time they did a nasal sample, the diagnosis machine kept glitching and playing a youtube video

https://t.co/R8Z6lDUKMy
I laugh in the hospital bed while they're like "ma'am sir ma'am sir, please, this is serious: we can't treat you. Our ventilator keeps trying to reboot in to Windows 3.1 and play skifree. we're quarantining you here so you don't spread this DIGITAL VIRUS to other patients"
https://t.co/fAzkHdgSk8
my last message is an annoyed rant on discord where I complain I can't access the full power of the tracking chip and get it to 3d accelerate my software enough to play crysis
all I can do is unlock the mode that turns everyone into femboy catgirl maids. USELESS, I SAY!
the police access my PC and discord has 900 friend requests, all from people named like awoo_lizard with anime-animal avatars
it's like fermat's last theorem: but for furries.

furry's last theorem ?
in case this seems exceptionally random, even for me: there was a conspiracy meme about masks which was "they want you to keep doing this [picture of mask wearer] because eventually they're going to make you do this [picture of a woman in a burka]"
which naturally got meme'd on really hard and fast with a lot of silly second images, like ravers in gas masks, furries in fursuits, and people wearing maid outfits
and it's long since past the point where you are gonna see more versions of the parody than the real one (especially if you don't hang out on weird-conspiracy-facebook) so yeah. that's what I was referencing.
I just realized it wasn't very clear what the heck I was talking about, and I can't even locate that specific joke image right now to clarify, so it may be WAY more obscure than I thought
here's the gas mask version, at least:
https://t.co/o8WEx2hPpK
also every time I try to type "gas mask" my fingers type "gask mask"
I suspect the one I'm referencing is actually this meme (the parodies of anti-mask memes) crossbreeding with an unrelated meme, which is basically just "I don't care what gender you are: put on the maid outfit".
the first line is often removed. and it's just become "PUT ON THE MAID OUTFIT" with threats of violence.
anyway it's weird that two of the conspiracy theories about the virus are "the government is making us wear masks! (for reasons other than public safety)" and "the government and/or bill gates is gonna track us with the vaccine!"
because you know how we actually DO track people, quite a lot, right now? and this is a known, proven thing, not a conspiracy?

FACIAL RECOGNITION
you know what causes a huge problem for facial recognition systems?

MASKS
but I guess conspiracies don't really have to make sense, especially when combined with other conspiracies.

Try to build a grand unified set up moon landing and/or JFK conspiracies sometime, for example.
my favorite versions of both are, by the way, the SCP "we landed on the moon, successfully, and then ended up faking it later" and the Red Dwarf "JFK was killed by the gunman on the grassy knoll... who was also JFK" answers.
although I'm looking forward to the theory that unifies the two and explains that JFK was either killed by the moon, or he's not dead: he's on the moon.
ANYWAY before you mock the "tracking microchips in the vaccines!" people too hard, that's basically how the CIA figured out where Osama Bin Laden was.
https://t.co/jruIWAQQ0P
it's sometimes disturbing how often "crazy conspiracy theories" are basically just "what if the US had slightly better technology and/or was slightly more competent"
my favorite amusing one of those is the urban legend that the spy satellites can read your license plate from space.
and the reply isn't "we're not observing the US" or "the government doesn't want to track cars" or even "that's impossible", it's always "don't be silly: you'd need telescopes with at least twice the resolving power (of declassified systems) to be able to read license plates"
it's a wild conspiracy theory and the counter argument is basically "not yet, they'd need bigger telescopes and algorithms and optics, but all are within reach within the next decade or so"
anyway, bill gates? if you have computers small enough to fit in the bloodstream, hit me up. I want some of those. you can even skip out on the vaccine part, I just want to be full of computers.

my DMs are open
BTW, one thing I've been thinking about with the masks, especially with the whole right-wing-memes about how it's all a conspiracy to later force us to wear SOMETHING ELSE:
Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters.
It's a 1951 novel about mind-controlling parasite aliens who invade and start taking over, but they don't go inside people, they're just like a small animal that has to extend a tentacle to your brain and drive your body like a marionette
and they're relatively flat creatures like a manta-ray so they can hide under clothes, so the government decides the only way to stop them is to BAN WEARING CLOTHES IN PUBLIC
so the whole nation switches over to mandatory public nudity for a while, except for some extra-conservative areas in the south, which are revealed to be mainly caused by alien infiltration anyway.
and it's just amusing at the idea that you could force that radical of a shift in what people wear in public, and only have minor outcry.

meanwhile, in the real world, it's just "wear a mask" and BOY HAS THERE BEEN SOME PUSHBACK AGAINST THAT
but I guess maybe you could justify it in the case of The Puppet Masters, since the novel is set in the far future, maybe a lot of social mores have changed by then?

the far off future of 2007
flying cars and everything. one of the protagonists is an FBI agent who grew up on the Venus colony.

we were SO SURE the future was gonna be amazing.
BTW, the novel is often compared to Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
It came out 5 years before the movie, and 3 years before the book, and takes a very different tone.
It's very much less "what if secret infiltration of modern day society with EVIL MIND CONTROLLING PARASITES?" and "what if in the future some aliens show up and start mind controlling people, and it goes public and we have to wage a complex global war against them?"
it's a decent book. I recommend it.
It got made into a movie, too, which I don't recommend.
the movie basically removed all the weirder elements and future setting and open warfare, which basically turned it into a bad adaptation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
which seems kinda pointless since we already had two adaptations of Invasion of the Body Snatchers already, the 1956 version and the 1978 version.
The movie was in 1994, which puts it between the 1978 adaptation and the 2007 adaptation, "The Invasion".
and @DoomishFox found an example of the meme I was talking about, more or less. I could swear there was a maid version too.
https://t.co/TGsdUhG0dh
ok @minirop found two examples of the maid versions, so I definitely didn't make this up:
https://t.co/tuLTPayc7u

More from foone

foone
foone
@Foone
Something that I didn't realize but hurt my brain to learn:
John Norman (aka John Frederick Lange Jr.), of the Gor series of sci-fi/BDSM novels, is still alive.
He released two books (one of them a Gor book, #35), in 2019.


I guess with the fact that the series started in 1966 and feels like it's always a historical thing... I assumed he had to have quit writing and/or died back in like 1986.

Nope. Still alive, he's 89, and was apparently still writing as of 2 years ago.

also, my brain being what it is, I totally just googled for the book's cover image by entering "trans man of gor" which is NOT the title.

in my defense, how many book serieses look like this WITH THE SAMEAUTHOR FROM BOOK #1 to BOOK #35?


Anyway if you look at any this and think it's a suggestion that you should try reading any of these novels or learning anything about them, you are quite mistaken.

Gor is bad sci-fi and bad BDSM, and you should skip it for either reason.
CULTURE
foone
foone
@Foone
you know how Atari called the Jaguar as a "64bit system", because it had two 32bit CPUs? (or because it had a 64bit bus, but let's not worry about that)
we should apply that logic to the current generation of consoles.
So the Switch is a 256bit console. It's the Nintendo 256.

The Xbox Series X? terrible name.
Better call it the "Xbox 512 Blu-ray".
like the Jaguar CD, the Sega CD... the good old days when consoles had their media type in the name.

Boringly the PS5 is also a Playstation 512 Blu-ray, because both of them are using the same AMD Zen 2 CPU.

The Switch one is weeeird. It's built on an Nvidia Tegra X1, which is an 8 core 64-bit CPU, so that should be 512, right?

Well... no. Four of them can't be used. And later documentation doesn't even mention them.

it's some weird system where the system-on-a-chip has four Cortex-A57 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores but only the A57s are usable?
TECH
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foone
foone
@Foone
An interesting set of games that I've been vaguely interested in since I was a kid, after seeing one at a friend's house and never being able to find it again, was the BATTLES IN A DISTANT DESERT/BATTLES ON DISTANT PLANETS series.


These are turn-based wargames for windows 3.x, sharing the same engine.
Battles in a Distant Desert is from 1992, and is based on the first Iraq war (Desert Storm)


and Battles on Distant Planets is from 1991, and takes place in SPACE!
I'm pretty sure this is the one I played as a kid.


They've got 3 options to play with:
* Player vs. Player
* Player vs. Computer
* Computer vs. Computer

So it's a 0-2 player game!


They also did a DOS strategy game called "STARDATE 2140.2: GALACTIC CONQUEST" in 1990, but it seems to be lost.
All the games share an experimental AI system based on neural networks.
FUN
foone
foone
@Foone
I dreamed a fleet of alien ships had shown up to destroy the human race, and the ships were all invisible but were easily detected because they were using some kind of chameleon camouflage which didn't work if the thing they were chameleonizing as was another invisible ship

after it was known that they were here to destroy the human race, system of a down set up a fundraiser for the invasion.

not to stop it, but to support it?
the pope called in a message of support.

so my dad and I were at a mall to get some food while waiting for news, but we couldn't get any because there wasn't room to have socially-distanced lines for the restaurants

after an acapella band crashed the foodcourt and bombed, some folk singer lady showed up to try to cheer up the crowd, and my dad was so obviously enthusiastic about her performance that she told him to get a guitar and join in.
which is when I left

I thought about going into a toy store or a game store to see if there was anything interesting I could buy, but I realized I forgot my mask
SCIENCE
foone
foone
@Foone
Tomorrow is gonna be fun for anyone in charge of requisitions.

There's gonna be a bunch of SRE teams asking for lockpicks, crowbars, hydraulic rescue tools, chainsaws, and some breaching shotguns

new SRE exercise:
imagine all the digital locks have broken and are keeping you out, and you can't connect in via the network.

how long until you get a console on the main servers?

now figure out how much money you'd lose being down for that long. Multiply out hours-of-downtime by money-per-hour.
There's your budget for designing Creative Solutions to bypass all your security

Although before you go trying to kick down doors:
Remember that doors are secured between the uprights and aren't as easy to smash open as movies might lead you to believe.
But the wall next to the door is probably just drywall and a little insulation.

drywall is also pretty cheap to repair.
CATEGORYPDFMAKERAPP GRAB THISTHREADREADERAPP UNROLL PLEASE

More from Society

Garfield but Anti-Fascist
Garfield but Anti-Fasc...
@AntifaGarfield
Tomorrow, January 6th, MAGA chuds, Proud Boys, and white supremacists are planned to descend on Washington D.C. to contest the election. Among them will be NSC-131, a New England based neo-Nazi organization. Let's welcome them by saying hi to one of their members, Eddie Stuart!


Edward Stuart, from Chester, New Hampshire, has been a member of Nationalist Social Club (NSC) since the very beginning and is a staple participant in their actions. He is known in NSC chats as "Carl Jung" and is well connected in the New England Nazi scene.
2/


NSC-131 is a neo-Nazi group that was started in Massachusetts in early 2020 by Chris Hood. You can learn more about NSC and it's members in these threads:


Eddie describes his ideology as "Esoteric Hitlerism" which is an occult form of Nazism that literally worships Adolf Hitler as a god, or, specifically, as an incarnation of the Hindu God Vishnu. Here is Ed holding the RigVeda with some of his occult Nazi pals. Interesting Ed!
4/


Much of this ideological insight was gained from Eddie's Twitter, where he originally used his "Carl Jung" persona and reposts explicit neo-fascist content and racist memes. In one edited picture, Eddie can be seen at an NSC event in late June 2020 holding a Nazi Sonnenrad flag
5
SOCIETY
AFP news agency
AFP news agency
@AFP
Hong Kong protester equipment list:
- respirator (dubbed "pig snouts" in Cantonese)
- helmet
- eye mask
- heat-proof gloves
- water bottle
- cling wrap
- saline
- traffic cones
- pots and pans

Demonstrators find creative methods to battle police tear gas
https://t.co/kPeUTu9iFh


AFP graphic charting Hong Kong's main socio-economic indicators and opinion polls on press freedom and government performance

@AFPgraphics


AFP graphic showing the main equipment used by hardcore pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong to battle police tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets

@AFPgraphics


Frontline first aid.

Nurses, doctors, medical students and ordinary citizens with first aid training have clamoured to join a small volunteer corps helping treat people involved in the Hong Kong protests

@AFP's Yan Zhao reports: https://t.co/uDfYkMeZJf

📸 Anthony Wallace


Pro-democracy activists kick off three days of rallies at Hong Kong airport.

Protesters hope to win international support from arriving passengers. The last demonstration at the airport on July 26 passed off peacefully without causing flight disruptions
https://t.co/jmVqtEd4M2
SOCIETY
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Dr. Simon \u30c4
Dr. Simon ツ
@goddeketal
1/ One year of destroyed economies, social isolation & deep social splits calls for an anniversary ⬇️thread ⬇️ to celebrate the RT-qPCR manuscript by Christian Drosten (@c_drosten) & Victor Corman (@vmcorman), submitted on 21st Jan 2020 to @Eurosurveillanc. #UnbiasedScience


2/ Before this very publication, virologists were neither treated like superstars, nor were they considered icons or half-gods. In 2009, Drosten almost succeeded in installing the false premise virology could supersede holistic medical sciences as discussed in this thread.

3/ Drosten is a virologist. He neither has any background in epidemiology, nor has he ever worked in the civil service. He also doesn’t have a background in public health. Yet he and his colleagues affect our daily lives to the level of whom to meet up or how to flush the toilet.


4/ Before January 2020, Drosten and Corman were common virologists at Charité Berlin, whenever they were not involved in economic implications (https://t.co/UTDwG8U7Du). Other than that, they looked at coronaviruses in dromedary calves in the Middle East or Africa. 😍 #cute


5/ Finally in Jan 2020, the published paper laid the theoretical grounds for the current pandemic, the RT-qPCR mass testing-religion, for which he was awarded his second German Federal Cross of Merit (he received the first one in 2005 for developing the SARS-CoV PCR test).
SOCIETY
Adedamola C. Adesina
Adedamola C. Adesina
@DamolaAdesina01
Faith Without Works is Dead!

Jam2:17 NLT - “So you see, faith by itself isn’t enough. Unless it produces good deeds, it is dead and useless.”

There is a growing message and doctrine in the church that seems to discountenance works and suggests that the only thing we need ...

... as Christians is just to ‘believe’ in Christ and that lack of good works does not affect one’s faith in Christ. My brother and sister, this is big lie from the pit of hell. It doesn’t matter who is saying it or how big their ministry is, it goes against the scriptures ...

... and is against the Truth.
Our opening scripture tells us that it is not enough to simply believe in Jesus; there must be accompanying works to prove it. In fact, Jam2:19 says even demons believe that there is one God and His only begotten Son is Jesus.

However, they don’t obey Him or submit to His will. In order words, submission to the Lordship of Jesus Christ and the total will of God is the proof of faith. Jesus said “not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will ...

... of My Father in heaven.”(Matt7:21) and “for whoever does the will of My Father in heaven is My brother and sister and mother.” (Matt12:50).

Rom3:28 NIV - “For we maintain that a person is justified by faith apart from the works of the law.”
SOCIETY
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
When it's railroading time, you get railroads.

When the railroads turn into the personal satrapies of rail-barons, you get trustbusters.

A couple decades ago, it was online service time. We had the users, the telcoms systems, the computers, the modems, so we got platforms.

1/

We had that, but we lacked something important: effective antimonopoly enforcement. Lax merger laws allowed companies with access to capital markets to buy out or neutralize all their competitors, so we got monopolies.

Right on schedule, we're getting digital trustbusters.

2/

Now, some people aren't technically sophisticated, but they do understand a lot about competition law. That's how you get meat-and-taters antitrust proposals like @amyklobuchar's #CALERA, which address the structural problems with antitrust

Klobuchar's bill is hugely important. The reason we have monopolies is that we stopped enforcing anti-monopoly law 40 years ago. Monopoly isn't a tech problem, it's everywhere from sneakers to glass bottles to pro wrestling to candy to

Klobuchar's CALERA doesn't just seek to apply antitrust law to tech - it also explicitly restores the pre-Reagan basis for fighting monopolies: we fight monopolies because they concentrate power and corrupt our politics. All monopolies are guilty unless proven otherwise.

5/
SOCIETY

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Noah Smith
Noah Smith
@Noahpinion
1/OK, data mystery time.

This New York Times feature shows China with a Gini Index of less than 30, which would make it more equal than Canada, France, or the Netherlands. https://t.co/g3Sv6DZTDE

That's weird. Income inequality in China is legendary.

Let's check this number.

2/The New York Times cites the World Bank's recent report, "Fair Progress? Economic Mobility across Generations Around the World".

The report is available here:

3/The World Bank report has a graph in which it appears to show the same value for China's Gini - under 0.3.

The graph cites the World Development Indicators as its source for the income inequality data.


4/The World Development Indicators are available at the World Bank's website.

Here's the Gini index: https://t.co/MvylQzpX6A

It looks as if the latest estimate for China's Gini is 42.2.

That estimate is from 2012.

5/A Gini of 42.2 would put China in the same neighborhood as the U.S., whose Gini was estimated at 41 in 2013.

I can't find the <30 number anywhere. The only other estimate in the tables for China is from 2008, when it was estimated at 42.8.
SOCIETY
V.S.S
V.S.S
@Scion_of_Shekha
8 March 1679 - The date on which 300 saffron clad warriors gave their life to protect temples from mugal army. Thread➡️
Aurangzeb's huge army, which was adorned with artillery, elephant and horses, under the leadership of Commander Darab Khan had marched to punish the ruler of/1


Khandela Raja Bahadur Singh, who became a rebel due to the anti-Hindu policies of Aurangzeb, and to destroy the temples of Shekhawati. Bahadur Singh to compete with such a large army, vacated Khandela for the purpose of conducting guerilla warfare and went Kot Sakrai /2

located in the inaccessible hills of Sakrai. People of Khandela also vacated Khandela and hid in nearby villages.

But some Shekhawat warriors did not like this as they knew that the royal army would not leave a single temple located in Shekhawati unbroken./3

so soon the teams of self-sacrificing Dharma-protectors Shekhawat heroes started reaching Khandela to protect the Dev temples.

Sujan Singh Shekhawat, the young thakur of Chhapoli, was coming back from his wedding when he heard about the imperial army from Shepherds./4

झिरमीर झिरमिर मेहा बरसे,मोरां छतरी छाई |
कुल में है तो आव सुजाण, फोज देवरे आई ||

if you are born in your glorious clan, then come, the army have come to destroy temple. /5
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Hermann Peterscheck
Hermann Peterscheck
@petershk
For fun I made a Robinhood account. It took me 5 minutes to sign up, get approved and transfer funds for trading...

Here's some details... Read on.

...it took me another 5 minutes to get qualified for options.

If I share a sign up I get "free shares" and I can share as much as I want up to 500$ worth.

The main UI has a prepopulated "list" of stocks/crypto to watch and links to news.


Clicking a stock opens a "trade" button that looks like this.

Notice options is first, buy second.

Options took me to an approval process (which took about a minute) and now away I go trading Baba options.


Buying stock looks like this. It emphasizes fractional shares.
TRADING
Ethan \U0001f468\u200d\U0001f3a4
Ethan 👨‍🎤...
@Booligoosh
First update to https://t.co/lDdqjtKTZL since the challenge ended – Medium links!! Go add your Medium profile now 👀📝 (thanks @diannamallen for the suggestion 😁)


Just added Telegram links to https://t.co/lDdqjtKTZL too! Now you can provide a nice easy way for people to message you :)


Less than 1 hour since I started adding stuff to https://t.co/lDdqjtKTZL again, and profile pages are now responsive!!! 🥳 Check it out -> https://t.co/fVkEL4fu0L


Accounts page is now also responsive!! 📱✨


💪 I managed to make the whole site responsive in about an hour. On my roadmap I had it down as 4-5 hours!!! 🤘🤠🤘
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The Astro Sapien\u2728
The Astro Sapien✨
@TheAstroSapienn
Here is my Thread on 'Ketu (South Node) Through Nakshatras' The 27 Constellations 🙏❣.

Do check your “Past life Mastery” which KETU Represents🤞🏻.


1. Ketu in Ashwini Nakshatra:

Here native is Great at Financial Planning, Face reading, understanding other’s mind and intention, Driving Fast they don’t like but they are wayyy smooth over driving Fast. This is also great position which can make native Great Surgeon,

Neurologist, Psychologist.
These natives are Selfless and Sacrifice self for others. They gets Fame and Success but they just don’t care.

2. Ketu in Bharani Nakshatra:

They are good at Flirting, Attracting opposite sex, studing ancient subjects. They are also Great at Creativity and Artistic activities. The are lazy but they are really open minded who handles situations really well.

In Past life they have handles many things which is now helping them to make things easier in this life. They are great Leaders too.

They are really good at Hard work and Smart work both. And yes just as Ashwini they don’t much care about Fame and Success!
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