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32-year old Tar feels like a Non-Player Character in their own life. They’ve been utterly sidelined by their anxiety and …
Environmental devastation and economic chaos have turned America into a land of depravity. Taking advantage of the situation, a zealous …
"We are coming apart. We're a rope, breaking, a single strand at a time.
America is a place of chaos, …
This is a text on games and how to play them intelligently. In this volume, …
After watching an absolutely disorienting video on hackenbush, surreal numbers, and this book I just have to learn more
Russell Means, Bayard Johnson: If You've Forgotten the Names of Clouds, You've Lost Your Way
In the last months before leaving to join the Ancestors, Russell Means felt the need to record in permanent written …
The world has finally awoken to the reality of climate breakdown and ecological collapse. Now we must face up to …
As I noted earlier, there is a significant portion of people for whom the project of day-to-day survival leaves no attention for anything else; that's part of the vicious cycle too. This is why it's even more important for anyone who does have a margin—even the tiniest one—to put it to use in opening up margins further down the line. Tiny spaces can open up small spaces, small spaces can open bigger spaces.
If it's true that collective agency both mirrors and relies on the individual capacity to "pay attention," then in a the that demands action, distraction appears to be (at the level of the collective) a life-and-death matter.
I'm happy to be already hoping i have time in this library loan to read it twice. I think this book deserves me taking the time to properly collect and organize my thoughts about it.
To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system. To do this means refusing the frame of reference: in this case, a frame of reference in which value is determined by productivity, the strength of one's career, and individual entrepreneurship. It means embracing and trying to inhabit somewhat fuzzier or blobbier ideas: of maintenance as productivity, of the importance of nonverbal communication, and of the mere experience of life as the highest goal. It means recognizing and celebrating a form of the self that changes over time, exceeds algorithmic description, and whose identity doesn't always stop at the boundary of the individual.
The idea of a communal self feels weird to me, which I'm upset about because I know it's only unfamiliar because of my detachment from any community.
I want to trace a series of movements: 1) a dropping out, not dissimilar from the "dropping out" of the 1960s; 2) a lateral movement outward to things and people that are around us; and 3) a movement downward into place. Unless we are vigilant, the current design of much of our technology will block is ever step of the way, deliberately creating false targets for self-reflection, curiosity, and a desire to belong to a community.
I want this not only for artists and writers, but for any person who percieves life to be more than an instrument and therefore something that cannot be optimized. A simple refusal motivates my argument: refusal to believe that the present time and place, and the people who are here with us, are somehow not enough.
Douglas R. Hofstadter: Godel, Escher, Bach (Undetermined language, 1990, Penguin)
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this book applies Godel's seminal contribution to modern mathematics to the study of the human …
