Lana V Lynx
Bio
Avid reader and occasional writer of satire and short fiction. For my own sanity and security, I write under a pen name. My books: Moscow Calling - 2017 and President & Psychiatrist
@lanalynx.bsky.social
Stories (554)
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Twitter, Musk, and Trump. Top Story - November 2022.
I was inspired by the High-Ku challenge to write about one of the most important developments in the social media world, i.e. Musk's takeover of Twitter and his desperate attempts to attract more eyeballs to the platform and stop exodus of advertisers and reputable news organizations. So here are my haiku verses on Twitter's demise and impending death:
By Lana V Lynx3 years ago in Poets
Khan Tengri
This high-ku is devoted to Mount Khan Tengri, whose ancient Turkic name denotes nature's sacredness and literally means "King Heaven" in Kazakh and Kyrgyz and "King Sky" in Mongolian. A jewel of the Tien Shen mountain range, second only to the Victory Peak, it stands at five meters short of 7,000 (almost 23,000 feet) on the tripoint of three countries: Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and China. Notoriously hard to scale, Khan Tengri is one of the deadliest mountains in the world. It also has a sacred meaning for local cultures that believe the mountain only allows those people close to it or onto it who have righteous strength, pure soul, and good heart.
By Lana V Lynx3 years ago in Poets
Door-In-the-Face
We all have been targets of marketers and salespeople who use well-established and proven techniques of "foot-in-the-door" and "low-balling," when the persuader starts out with a small request and then ramps it up to a bigger second request if you comply with the first one. In case of low-balling, the second request will be followed by the third, fourth, fifth, etc. into perpetuity until the target gets tired, exhausts resources to give, or figures out the manipulation. This excellent illustration from Curb Your Enthusiasm shows how foot-in-the-door and low-balling can be rolled together into a never-ending string of requests, making a good comedy.
By Lana V Lynx3 years ago in Humans
Kyrgyz Farmer's Luck
I come from one of the most beautiful places on earth: a mountainous country of Kyrgyzstan, which used to be a part of the Soviet Union. It is located in Central Asia. Its mountain range north of Himalayas makes up about 93% of the country's land and is a part of the Tien-Shen system with the highest peak amply called Victory Peak measured at 7349 meters (24.4K feet) sitting close to the border with China.
By Lana V Lynx3 years ago in FYI
Moonlighting in Academia
Let me tell you the quirkiest story about an “entrepreneurial” academic who managed to get himself hired into two tenure-track positions at the same time, at two different higher education institutions. The schools were only about one-hour drive from each other. So, our scholar found a house in the middle and commuted to both!
By Lana V Lynx3 years ago in Education
Ugly Blinis
I was making the blinis (Russian version of crepes) the other day and remembered how my great aunt used to make them. Baba Lyuba, as we called her lovingly, was my maternal mother's older sister and they lived across the road from each other in our "ancestrial village" in the north of Kyrgyzstan. They were "Irish twins," only 18 months apart, and when I became aware of myself, baba Lyuba was already a "pensioner." Women retired at 55 at that time in the Soviet Union, and my grandma, who was born in 1924, retired at 50 as a mother of 5 children (mother-heroines they were called). So, for as long as I remember myself, they both were retired, and just living their lives off the land and their small pensions (social security payments). Simple, heavenly life.
By Lana V Lynx4 years ago in Feast
Elevator Encounter
It’s day 439 of World War III that started on February 24, 2022 with Russia invading Ukraine. The entire world is burning since November 2022, after the exhausted and desperate Putin’s army launched a missile aimed at Lviv, miscalculated, and overshot it into Poland. NATO countries immediately activated Article 5 for joint defense and sent a missile directly into the Kremlin. It was an imploding bomb, taking everything with it underground in a clean sweep. After the dust settled, the entire Kremlin was gone as if someone carefully cut out a cancerous mole off the face of Moscow. Even though Putin had not stayed in the Kremlin since the beginning of the war and the hit was largely symbolic, triggered Russia went all in and launched a tactical nuclear bomb into the formerly British and currently Canadian Arctic. NATO retaliated by sending a similar bomb into Siberian taiga. All hell broke loose. Russia twisted the arms of the other BRICS countries, and Brazil, India, China, and South Africa reluctantly got involved by either kicking out or directly attacking NATO bases located in their jurisdiction or proximity. India’s Modi sent his troops into Kashmir, setting off a war with Pakistan. China invaded Taiwan, killing off most population as dissidents and resettling the island with mainland Chinese.
By Lana V Lynx4 years ago in Fiction
Twitter Takeover
I have already mentioned that I teach Ethics of Communication (see my previous essay on the Oscar Slap here). Last week, just as we were wrapping up the semester by discussing Ethics of Communication Technology, life brought me another gift of an urgent topic for the debate: Should Elon Musk be allowed to buy Twitter? The topic was deliberately formulated in the passive voice because I wanted the students to consider who or what agency has the authority to facilitate or prevent the deal from happening.
By Lana V Lynx4 years ago in 01
"Fake It Till You Make It"
"Inventing Anna" on Netflix (see my detailed review here), all the documentaries and movies on "Theranos" on various platforms (see a guide here) and now "WeCrashed" on Apple TV. What do they all have in common? - They are about people with breathtaking chutzpah.
By Lana V Lynx4 years ago in Geeks
