“ Your head’s like mine, like all our heads; big enough to contain every god and devil there ever was. Big enough to hold the weight of oceans and the turning stars. Whole universes fit in there! But what do we choose to keep in this miraculous cabinet? Little broken things, sad trinkets that we play with over and over. The world turns our key and we play the same little tune again and again and we think that tune’s all we are.
The Invisibles, Grant Morrison.
tlvxtlvx
“ Often people cannot move on because they cannot yet grieve… In neuroplastic terms, if the romantic or the widow is to begin a new relationship without baggage, each must first rewire billions of connections in their brains. The world of mourning is piecemeal, Freud noted… We grieve by calling up one memory at a time, reliving it, and then letting it go.
Relevant for any kind of letting go, as well as finding and eradicating the unconscious “bugs” that litter our minds until we learn (+ apply, repeatedly) the process of identification + re-integration.
(From Norman Doidge’s The Brain That Changes Itself.)
via Diana Wolf.
Nature is a slut for life (flowers time lapse).
(Also, the drun ‘n’ bass version.)
both via my mother.
“
Being threatened is addictive.
When those in power are infatuated with you, you feel valued.
Ai Wei Wei. via instant-gratification.
“ We care about the small people.
BP Board Chairman Carl-Henric Svanberg, one of the people we’ve made rich buying oil-based products.
This happened yesterday.
Also, finally the first piece I’ve read to attribute blame to the consumers of oil, which is us all:
“Because if you’re honest, no matter where you stand, no matter your politics, religion, income or mode of transport, you see this beast of creeping death and you understand: That is us. The spill may be many things, but more than anything else it is a giant, horrifying mirror.”
“As if oil wasn’t woven like oxygen into every single aspect of American life, as if fully 30 percent of domestic transportation fuel didn’t come from the gulf, as if shutting down a fraction of those wells wouldn’t re-devastate the economy, as if petroleum and coal weren’t powering the very energy plants that deliver the electricity that charges the iPhones that allows everyone to Tweet their angry complaints through all the various energy-sucking server farms the size of a small country.”
Behold our dark, magnificent horror, Mark Morford, SF Gate.
“ There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
Isaac Asimov, Newsweek interview. 1980.
“Throughout Sandy Kim, there is a lot of blood, but that blood is never the same—blood on her sheets after sex, blood from a dead body covered in a sterile white sheet, blood on the hand of a friend after an unknown accident. He’s smiling, looking straight at the camera, at Sandy. They both know it will heal.”
“ We were blessed in our lives to come close to some special human beings. Special, yes, because they had more being than the rest of us. But that doesn’t mean that they were any the less human. Quite the contrary.
Dushka Howarth.
“
How much money would you pay for a yearly subscription to Tumblr?
How much money would you pay to get back the time you’ve spent refreshing when you knew something else was more worth your time?
How much money have you gotten paid to use the internet clandestinely at work? In what country is that the yearly income?
How long did it take the atoms in your body to coalesce into you for about 30,000 sunrises & sunsets?
Advice for greater productivity and meaning?
“ Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
Clay Shirky, The Technium: The Shirky Principle.
See also Systemantics + Systems Theory.
via Jay Parkinson.
