September 2009
60 posts
brian dettmer: cassette tape skeletons →
Carl Jung and the Holy Grail of the Unconscious →
“In the Red Book, after Jung’s soul urges him to embrace the madness, Jung is still doubtful. Then suddenly, as happens in dreams, his soul turns into ‘a fat, little professor,’ who expresses a kind of paternal concern for Jung.
Jung says: ‘I too believe that I’ve completely lost myself. Am I really crazy? It’s all terribly confusing.’
The professor responds:...
“There is no more selfless and heroic breed of civilian than smokers, who...”
– Matthew Norman (via jhnbrssndn)
Book Titles, If They Were Written Today
yourmonkeycalled:
Then: The Wealth of Nations Now: Invisible Hands: The Mysterious Market Forces That Control Our Lives and How to Profit from Them
Then: Walden Now: Camping with Myself: Two Years in American Tuscany
Then: The Theory of the Leisure Class Now: Buying Out Loud: The Unbelievable Truth About What We Consume and What It Says About Us
Then: The Gospel of Matthew Now: 40 Days...
“As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our...”
– Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (via methodoftheskeleton)
Time Donkey :: Blurst →
Time Donkey Trailer from Flashbang Studios on Vimeo.
secondopiano:
«Death is a dialogue between
The spirit and the dust.
“Dissolve,” says Death. The Spirit, “Sir,
I have another trust.”
Death doubts it, argues from the ground.
The Spirit turns away,
Just laying off, for evidence,
An overcoat of clay.»
Emily Dickinson
Endless →
(via today and tomorrow)
The 100 Most Beautiful Words in English →
(via id0be1ieve)
Amusing Ourselves to Death →
[I wanted to post the whole comic here, but it was too wide for my column.
If you click the link, there’s a fantastic comic detailing the differences between Orwell’s dystopia in 1984 and Huxley’s in Brave New World.
It’s better this way.]
(via Stuart McMillen at Recombinant Records)
Book of Space →
“The inspiration came directly from the single shot film sequence in Sokurov’s Russian Ark, where the camera is taken through the timeless spaces of the Winter Palace, jumping decades from one room to another. The distortion of time is, of course, interesting in terms of the timelessness of the spaces – but I was interested in the way that the camera never looks back. Even though the...
Your Body Wasn’t Built to Last: a Lesson from... →
“The sharp fall in survival rates can be expressed mathematically as an exponential within an exponential:
Exponential decay is sharp, but an exponential within an exponential is so sharp that I can say with 99.999999% certainty that no human will ever live to the age of 130. (Ignoring, of course, the upward shift in the lifetime distribution that will result from future medical...
Watch“I made this film in 1979-80 to accompany a SIGGRAPH paper on how to synthesize fractal geometry with a computer. It is the world’s first fractal movie. It utilizes 8-10 different fractal generating algorithms. I used an antialiased version of this software to create the fractal planet in the Genesis Sequence of Star Trek 2, the Wrath of Khan. These frames were computed on a VAX-11/780...
Toy fanatic builds a house from LEGO →
“You’re all geeks, so I can confidently wager that you’ve spent a fair amount of time building miniature cities with Legos at some point in your lives. I know I did. Not only cities, but spaceships and boats, and forts, and … well, you get the picture. But James May, a toy fanatic from the UK (who has his own TV show), built a real house from Legos.
This two-story Lego...
The Mushroom Tunnel of Mittagong →
“Dr. Arrold has been growing mushrooms in the Mittagong tunnel for more than twenty years, starting with ordinary soil-based white button mushrooms andCremini, before switching to focus on higher maintenance (and more profitable) exotics such as Shimeji, Wood-ear, Shiitake, and Oyster mushrooms.
A microbiologist by training, Dr. Arrold originally imported his exotic mushroom cultures into...
Tumblarity, revisited
kitschfrays:
A few months back, I wrote a long(for me) post about Tumblarity, and Marco was even cool enough to give me some feedback about it(though I promised not to divulge anything he said, and I won’t). A couple weeks later, dwineman discovered the same week-long shelf life of Tumblarity points. However, if you search posts by tags, you’ll note that 95% of the posts concerning Tumblarity...
Thoughts from a Magazine
I was reading an article yesterday in the latest issue of Paste Magazine about Patton Oswalt, a comedian of whom I know nothing about. According to the article, he voiced Remy in Ratatouille, wrote a little bit of Borat, and served a nine-year stint as Spence Olchin on King of Queens. I like Paste because it brings me things like this.
Something Oswalt said has changed my perspective on the...
"What do you say you and I,"
abahd:
he insinuated, creeping up silently beside her like a snake in leather boots, “team up and kill all these people,” gesturing to the crowd, “take their money?”
“You’ve got the wrong girl,” she replied. “I despise omitted conjunctions, and abhor the thought of murder for as petty a cause as wealth.”
“For love then,” he said, casting a tired eye on her naked shoulders. “We’ll kill them for...
Sanderson Kofax was a terrible Jew.
abahd:
He ate bacon-wrapped hot dogs: he spilled his seed with total impunity, on astonishingly frequent occasions. He worked only on Sundays. He was circumcized, that much you could say for him, but the few people ever willing to observe Kofax in the nude would attest unanimously that it seemed insincere.
All this Oscar learned from the statement on the back of a paperback novel. Kofax was the...
We will begin with a scene: A skinny glass-
abahd:
topped table perches with three aluminum legs on a floor of cold tile. All is white and dented, flecked with rust-the glass is chipped. A dark man sits there, bearded and restless. His coat is thick and green, like an infantryman’s, buttoned straight to the neck.
On the table sit two glasses, one full of ice and the other of water. The water is cold—the glass is sweating—the ice has just...
