beauty of bewilderment

the face of a man struggling to accept the reality of what he believes to be impossible.

ichthyology [imposter edition]

don't just exist

live!

painfully honest

winter rhapsody

good daughter

listen to me because i am wise

reality zizek tv

"In a comment on the genre of reality TV, the theorist notes that "the charm of it is a certain hidden reflexivity. It is not that we are voyeurs looking at what people are already doing. The point is that we know that they know that they are being filmed." In other words, says Mr. Zizek, "we are seeing people acting themselves. In everyday life, we act already, in the sense that we have a certain ideal image of ourselves, and we act that persona."

zizek

even cowgirls

"So Sissy lived in Richmond, Virginia, in the Eisenhower Years, so called as if the passing seasons, with their eggs hatching and rivers rising, their cakes baking and stars turning, their legs dancing and hearts melting, their lamas levitating and poets doing likewise, their cheerleaders getting laid at drive-in picture shows and old mean dying in rooms over furniture stores, as if they, the passing seasons, could be branded by a mere President; as if time itself could toddle out of Kansas and West Point, popularize a military jacket and seek election to Eternity on the Republican ticket."

I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers.

- Jean-Baptiste Clamence in The Fall

scratch

my head

milton

ikkyu

Ikkyu, a highly revered Zen monk born in the fourteenth century, expressed a similar view on sexual activity in this short poem:

From the world of passions returning to the world of passions:
There is a moments pause.
If it rains, let it rain; if the wind blows, let it blow.

1.3.10

dia beacon

1.1.10

brooklyn

the bouba and the kiki

"An example of this is the bouba/kiki effect. In an experiment first designed by Wolfgang Köhler, people are asked to choose which of two shapes is named bouba and which kiki. 95% to 98% of people choose kiki for the angular shape and bouba for the rounded one. Individuals on the island of Tenerife showed a similar preference between shapes called takete and maluma. Even 2.5 year-old children (too young to read) show this effect.[61]

Ramachandran and Hubbard suggest the kiki/bouba effect has implications for the evolution of language, because the naming of objects is not completely arbitrary.[28] The rounded shape may intuitively be named bouba because the mouth makes a more rounded shape to produce that sound, while a more taut, angular mouth shape is needed to articulate kiki. The sound of K is also harder and more forceful than that of B. Such "synesthesia-like mappings" suggest that this effect might be the neurological basis for sound symbolism, in which sounds are non-arbitrarily mapped to objects and actions in the world."