[b]Walter Isaacson
The reality distortion field was a confounding mélange of a charismatic rhetorical style, indomitable will, and eagerness to bend any fact to fit the purpose at hand.[/b]
We have ours, they have theirs.
Form follows emotion.
Yo, Ayn!
Above all, Leonardo’s relentless curiosity and experimentation should remind us of the importance of instilling, in both ourselves and our children, not just received knowledge but a willingness to question it—to be imaginative and, like talented misfits and rebels in any era, to think different.
No, seriously.
One of the strongest motives that leads men to art and science is escape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopeless dreariness. Such men make this cosmos and its construction the pivot of their emotional life, in order to find the peace and security which they cannot find in the narrow whirlpool of personal experience.
I’ve come close a few times.
Asked about the fact that Apple’s iTunes software for Windows computers was extremely popular, Jobs joked, 'It’s like giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell.”
Enough said?
Pretend to be completely in control and people will assume that you are.
Anyone pretending to be in complete control here?
[b]Existential Comics
The only real difference between Donald Trump and Elon Musk is that Trump’s tweets were actually funny.[/b]
Yeah, but only if you took them literally.
French literature: will she love me?
English literature: will she marry me?
Russian literature: will she mind if I murder her?
American literature: You tell me.
When a politician says something really stupid, 9 times out of 10 they aren’t “playing to their stupid base to advance their career”, they are just fucking stupid.
If only in the red and the blue states.
Plato: “philosophy is a discussion where we all work together to find the truth.”
The discussion: “Yes Socrates. Certainly Socrates. That’s correct Socrates, you are right about everything.”
You know, like Satyr over there.
At the current minimum wage, a worker would have to work 165 hours just to afford ONE guillotine. This has to change.
Mass produce them?
You see, Israel is one of our greatest allies. We send them billions of dollars in weapons, and in return we get to funnel billions of dollars of public money into the military industrial complex.
Shhh. Let’s not go there.
[b]Holly Black
I want to tell you so many lies.[/b]
Not many will actually start there.
I can’t trust the people I care about not to hurt me. And I’m not sure I can trust myself not to hurt them, either.
To be continued.
He’s flint, you’re tinder.
I’d change that myself.
He’s the kind of liar who totally forgets what he told you the last time, but he believes every single lie with such conviction that sometimes he can convince you of it.
Yeah? Well let him try to convince me.
What an author doesn’t know could fill a book.
Not unlike the reader.
We don’t need to be good. But let’s try to be fair.
We’ll need a context of course.
[b]Existential Comics
The US media is like: “look, the Israel-Palestinian conflict is very complicated, on the one hand Israel is an occupying, colonizing oppressor who is displacing, imprisoning, and killing Palestinians to make room for Israeli settlements. On the other hand, we kinda like that”.[/b]
So, what do you think, “the deep state”?
Israel can be literally cheering as they drop bombs on children and destroy Palestinian holy sites and every American newspaper will start the headline with “Palestinian terrorists…”
Well, he is a Commie, right?
Why are “essential employees” paid so little? Because employees are not paid based on how much value they provide to society, they are paid based on the sacred principle of “however little the bosses can get away with”.
According to economics, this is good.
Capitalist economics, I’m guessing.
The biggest threat to free speech is that billionaires literally own and control the media. Nothing else is even close.
Let’s find something.
The one lesson from philosophy that I think should be taught to every child is how the self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or the relation that the relation relates itself to its own self; not the relation but that the relation relates itself to its own self.
You know, technically.
What can humans do that animals can’t?
Aristotle: use reason
Nietzsche: make promises
Kierkegaard: be in despair
Marx: I don’t know but no dog ever became fantastically rich by making thousands of other dogs work for it.
Marx, right?
[b]Emily Dickinson
Behavior is what a man does, not what he thinks, feels, or believes.[/b]
Unless, of course, they’re connected.
How do most people live without any thought? There are many people in the world,–you must have noticed them in the street,–how do they live? How do they get strength to put on their clothes in the morning?
Yo, Kids! You’re up!!
Anger as soon as fed is dead
'Tis starving makes it fat.
What say, you, Mr. Pinhead?
That love is all there is, Is all we know of love.
Not much that can’t mean.
The possible’s slow fuse is lit by the Imagination.
No doubt about it: for better or worse.
Dying is a wild night and a new road.
Your own demise, on the other hand, might be different.
[b]Doth
In honor of Charles Darwin’s death day, lie down in the woods, turn into dirt & remove yourself from the reproductive gene pool.[/b]
Now, goddamnit!
I wish I loved something as much as humans love treating each other like pieces of shit.
No way, right?
If someone asks how you’re doing, just say “we live in an endless hell” and then they will just leave.
Okay, but what if they don’t?
If you know someone who doesn’t have anxiety issues, that’s a demon. You’re friends with a demon.
Wow, he thought, as luck would have it, I’m friends with no one.
What you do at night is between you and the fucking moon.
The fuller the better.
Normalize getting lost in the woods & never being seen again.
Let’s start by making it a national holiday.
[b]Matthew McConaughey
I don’t want to just revolve. I want to evolve. As a man, as a human, as a father, as a lover.[/b]
All the way to the grave, for example.
My experience in work, even going to work with Scorsese, is that people always think there’s some magic trick. There’s no magic trick. The people who are really good at what they do do simple things really, really well.
Here? Thinking I’m guessing.
The unsaid rule for living in a trailer park is: ‘If the door’s shut, don’t come a-knockin.’ But if it’s open and you’re walkin’ by, feel free to say, ‘Hello.’
On the other hand: youtu.be/yVSWwuD9oVQ
I have my own vocabulary. I love linguistics. That surprises people.
In Texas, for example.
We dissect failure a lot more than we dissect success.
Let me guess: that doesn’t suprise you.
If you want your hair to be thicker, cut it when the moon is about to be full - a heavy, full, waxing moon. Do not cut it when the moon’s waning.
No, he actually said that. To Holly Milea for one.
[b]Doth
Before we all die from nuclear war or a global climate crisis, can we get a little alien invasion as a treat.[/b]
Hear! Hear!
Horror movies have given me an unrealistic expectation that there is someone out there that cares enough about me to kill me.
Me? You would if you could, right?
The CDC says fully vaccinated people can now continue to let time slowly ravage your body in this vast abyss.
Well, that’s coming anyway.
I exist & that is something I’m going to have to deal with the rest of my life.
Back again to the brute facticity of it all.
My body is not a temple, it is at best a decaying old cabin with a horrifying past.
Not counting the soul of course.
As your goth therapist I need you to remember that you don’t live in the hell, hell lives in you.
My guess: Eventually, it’s a lethal combination of both.
[b]Mark Strand
She stood beside me for years, or was it a moment? I cannot remember. Maybe I loved her, maybe I didn’t. There was a house, and then no house. There were trees, but none remain. When no one remembers, what is there? You, whose moments are gone, who drift like smoke in the afterlife, tell me something, tell me anything.[/b]
Ah, the poetosopher!
No voice comes from outer space, from the folds of dust and carpets of wind to tell us that this is the way it was meant to happen, that if only we knew how long the ruins would last we would never complain.
Ah, the poetosopher!
We are reading the story of our lives
As though we were in it
As though we had written it.
Seems that way, doesn’t it?
For some of us, the less said about the way we do things the better.
Let alone why we do them.
And at least in poetry you should feel free to lie. That is, not to lie, but to imagine what you want, to follow the direction of the poem.
You know, like you do here.
The burial of feelings has begun.
Trust me: it won’t stop until it’s all gone.
Unless of course I’m wrong.
[b]Jan Mieszkowski
Goals For Your Essay:
- originality
- rhetorical elegance
- a polemical edge
What You’ll Settle For:
- finishing the essay[/b]
Next up: Goals for your post.
The Long Eighteenth Century: 1688 – 1815
The Long Nineteenth Century: 1789 – 1914
The Long Twentieth Century: 1870 – 2012
The Long Twenty-First Century: 2020 – 2021
Yo, Joe! Let’s make this official.
Deleuze: The state apparatus is a concrete assemblage
Foucault: Techniques of power abound
Sartre: I need a drink
Then the photos I couldn’t figure out how to post here.
So, use your imagination.
Psychology: The past hurts
Sociology: The present hurts
Politics: The future hurts
Philosophy: The past conditional perfect will have hurt if the future conditional perfect turns out to hurt as well
You know, epistemologically.
Nietzsche: God is dead
Freud: God is dad
Kafka: Dad is dead
Beckett: Dead can dance
Dead Can Dance: youtu.be/7iqxzURgQWg
This year has been so bad that
a) Camus seems like an optimist
b) Beckett seems like a realist
c) Nietzsche wishes God were alive
So, how about me?
[b]Ernest Cline
I was even beginning to wonder if the invention of a worldwide social network was actually the “Great Filter” that theoretically caused all technological civilizations to go extinct, instead of nuclear weapons or climate change. Maybe every time an intelligent species grew advanced enough to invent a global computer network, they would then develop some form of social media, which would immediately fill these beings with such an intense hatred for one another that they ended up wiping themselves out within four or five decades.[/b]
Take ILP for example.
It’s fucking lame, is what it is! The swords look like they were made out of tinfoil. And that soundtrack is epically lame. Full of synthesizers and shit. By the motherfucking Alan Parsons Project! Lame-o-rama! Beyond lame. Highlander II lame.
Highlander II for sure, right?
Everything about our online personas is filtered through our avatars, which allows us to control how we look and sound to others. The OASIS lets you be whoever you want to be. That’s why everyone is addicted to it.
So, is that dumb enough for you?
Human beings were never meant to participate in a worldwide social network comprised of billions of people. We were designed by evolution to be hunter-gatherers, with the mental capacity to interact and socialize with the other members of our tribe—a tribe made up of a few hundred other people at most. Interacting with thousands or even millions of other people on a daily basis was way too much for our ape-descended melons to handle.
My guess: no turning back now.
You’re going to turn it into a fascist corporate theme park where the few people who can still afford the price of admission no longer have an ounce of freedom.
About ten years from now, right?
To quote the Almanac: “People who live in glass houses should shut the fuck up".
Them and the fucking Kids.
[b]God
Some MemorialDay statistics:
• 6,713 Americans died in Iraq and Afghanistan.
• 47,434 Americans died in Vietnam.
• 291,557 Americans died in World War II.
• Up to 35% off robotic vacuums at Home Depot.[/b]
Next up: Up to 35% off robotic vacuums at Home Depot on the Fourth of July.
There are two kinds of Americans and one of them shoots the other.
Though sometimes it’s the other way around.
It’s getting so police can’t even act like criminals without being treated like criminals.
Those fucking liberals, right?
Bernie Madoff is in hell.
The Devil will be broke in 18 months.
Unless of course Bernie Madoff is the Devil.
Dafuq?!
Just in general.
Let’s make it more specific.
I blame My parents.
Wow, didn’t even know He had parents myself.
[b]Paul Gauguin
Art requires philosophy, just as philosophy requires art. Otherwise, what would become of beauty?[/b]
Let’s toss them both and find out.
Take care not to step on the foot of a learned idiot. His bite is incurable.
Yo, Satyr!
You know, for starters.
youtu.be/g-avaa9a_HU
There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite.
You’d hope that here it might at least be less so.
Civilization is what makes you sick.
And then some here.
The public wants to understand and learn in a single day, a single minute, what the artist has spent years learning.
Not unlike the masses.
Sooner or later people will learn to recognize your worth.
Not counting you alas.
[b]God
On MemorialDay the United States honors the brave men and women who died preserving the nation from external enemies so it could one day be destroyed by enemies from within.[/b]
Indeed, don’t we have a few of them here?
If at first you don’t succeed, blame minorities and immigrants.
That’ll work, right?
Everything happens for a reason you make up afterwards.
Best of all, it doesn’t even have to be a good one.
I consider Myself spiritual but not religious.
Lots of that going around these days.
If I’d made all penises identically sized the world would be a much better place.
Breasts too.
Why do bad things happen to good people?
To balance out the good things that happen to bad people.
Mathematically as it were.
[b]Robert Mapplethorpe
You’re never going to get anywhere in life if you don’t live up to your obligations.[/b]
I know: define obligation.
I always thought I was good. That’s why it was so frustrating when other people didn’t agree.
Like most of us posting here, right?
I just hope I can live long enough to see the fame.
That he did. Then what happened next.
Whenever you make love to someone, there should be three people involved - you, the other person, and the devil.
Probably not Lucifer himself though.
If I have to change my lifestyle, I don’t want to live.
And so, given his lifestyle, he died.
Just because I was out at the bars all the time didn’t mean I wasn’t looking for someone to love.
Loosely as it were?
[b]tiny nietzsche
cringe. rinse. repeat.[/b]
Don’t we all?
And, no, not just here.
yes, we have no nihilists. we have no nihilists today
Plenty of yak yak yakkers though.
well, at least it’s a dry nihilism
Mine being sopping wet of course.
get up early so you can get a good start ruining everything
Before the break of day if you can.
Mercury Is In Retrograde, Charlie Brown
Yo, Fixed! What can we expect?
our bodies, our chimeras
Next up: our minds.
Let’s explore this further: youtu.be/cFods1KSWsQ
Sort of along the lines of this: youtu.be/44PfcCmfY-0
In other words, some threads here really are more fascinating than others. Philosophically for example.
While other threads are fascinating only for those who are, well, yak yak yakkers. 
[b]Laura Dave
There are different ways to be confused about how someone’s disappointed you.[/b]
Don’t get me started, okay?
Josh had told me a long time ago that he had this theory that an entire relationship was based on what occurred over the course of the first five minutes you know each other. That everything that came after those first minutes was just details being filled in.
You know, in the movies.
Why does it take fear to move you? Why does it take chaos to make us understand exactly what we need to do?
No, seriously, let’s discuss this.
You can’t finish the things you weren’t supposed to start.
Yo, Maia! Could that explain it?
Belief isn’t supposed to make sense, at least not all the time. In that, it finds its power. It gets to creep up on you and carry you forward. Until you can carry yourself again.
On the other hand, next thing you know you’re an objectivist.
I’m not sure we get to choose when or where we find what we’re looking for.
Philosophically or otherwise, he surmised.
[b]tiny nietzsche
now that I’m older, I see things that aren’t there[/b]
On the other hand, why should they be?
I don’t know what happened to me either
On the other hand, why should I still want to?
which stage of grief is spiders?
Actually, for some, they’re not even on the list.
all I ever wanted was to be your abyss
And, once she realized that, she pulled the plug.
If you know who I mean.
two philosophies diverged in a theory, and I ignored the one less popularized, and that has made all the indifference
Right, Meno?
I remind me of myself
Wow, that makes at least two of us.