Posts tagged perspective
The Overview Effect
watch and learn. this will be my 3,000th post, and i’m glad i saved it in my drafts rather than posting it as soon as i watched the video. it deserves the milestone placeholder.
I feel inordinately fond of this sketched girl; my nervous habit is similar to the one she’s shown doing with her fingers. In case anyone needed further proof of the sentiment above.
“Perspective, as has often been remarked, leads inevitably to history. But, once again, being eludes it.”
-Yves Bonnefoy (again), The Lure and the Truth of Painting
(quote: adapted from invisiblestories; image: Shai Kremer, Abandoned Syrian base, View of a minefield, Golan Heights, 2007 via mpdrolet)
witnessing a story told shakes the ground beneath us.
because we leave our ground, and it’s left without an anchor. it shakes until we land.
Yummy Gasoline
- Leo (age 6): Zanna, what's that black stuff you have in your mug? Is it chocolate?
- SR: no, Leo, it's coffee. It helps me wake up in the morning.
- Leo: does it taste good? would I like it?
- SR: you can smell it, but you like sweet things, so I don't think this is for you. and you have tooo much energy already! this would make you bounce off the walls. and Grandma has lots of paintings up that she doesn't want shredded.
- Leo: like Taz in Loony Tunes? (almost destroys kitchen in impromptu imitation) what happens if you don't have it?
- SR: i would slow down and slow down and eventually probably fall asleep standing up, like a car breaking down.
- Leo: so it's yummy gasoline for grown-ups!
2nd
Casual reminder that Obama’s drones kill children almost everyday around the world.
You know, while y’all are watching him cry on television over the children who tragically lost their lives in Connecticut earlier today.
I actually really did need to see this.
Miley Cyrus is called a ‘Slut’ and a ‘Whore’ on a daily basis although she has been with the same guy for 4 years and they’re now engaged.
Taylor Swift is called “Lovely” , “Kind” , “Elegant” etc, and she has seen 14 guys in the past 4 years.
PRAISE THE LORD GOD AMEN CAN I MARRY THIS POST
You may, if being married to an insipid string of letters is a prospect that appeals to you. I would rather talk about why we still allow these judgments to carry any measure of weight in reference to total strangers, much less to ourselves.
Both science fiction and futurism seem to miss an important piece of how the future actually turns into the present. They fail to capture the way we don’t seem to notice when the future actually arrives. Sure, we can all see the small clues all around us: cellphones, laptops, Facebook, Prius cars on the street. Yet, somehow, the future always seems like something that is going to happen rather than something that is happening; future perfect rather than present-continuous. Even the nearest of near-term science fiction seems to evolve at some fixed receding-horizon distance from the present. There is an unexplained cognitive dissonance between changing-reality-as-experienced and change as imagined, and I don’t mean specifics of failed and successful predictions. My new explanation is this: we live in a continuous state of manufactured normalcy. There are mechanisms that operate — a mix of natural, emergent and designed — that work to prevent us from realizing that the future is actually happening as we speak. To really understand the world and how it is evolving, you need to break through this manufactured normalcy field. Unfortunately, that leads, as we will see, to a kind of existential nausea.
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