Wreck This Journal and you will get dirty
Wreck This Journal
by Keri Smith
Perigee Books
2012, 224 pages, 5.5 x 8.2 x 0.6 inches (paperback)
$9 Buy a copy on AmazonThere was just no way I could walk by this without picking it up, and there was no way I could pick it up without buying it. Oh my goodness. Wreck This Journal is so therapeutic and funny and awesome! It starts out with a great big warning – “During the process of this book you will get dirty” – and lives up to it. Take it in the shower. Tie it to a rope and swing it around over your head. Lick it. Tear it up and tape things in it. At first you don’t really want to mess it up, but once you start, you must wreck the journal. You must.
But the activities aren’t even the best part! There are little goodies hidden in the acknowledgements and copyright information, like the last line of acknowledgements: Dedicated to perfectionists all over the world. Sure, perfectionists, please crumple up a page and play golf with the journal and the crumbled paper. There’s a little note under the library of congress information that says, “Some of the activities in this book may not be appropriate for unsupervised children.” It lives up to it. This is the kind of book that brings people together. I want to share my journal with you. I want other people to draw in the pages and enjoy the destruction with me! Are you in? – Kitty Lusby
March 20, 2015
(via winkbooks)
“There’s a lot to be said for making people laugh. Did you know that that’s all some people have? It isn’t much, but it’s better than nothing in this cockeyed caravan.”
For a long time, Reddit ran a famously scrappy operation. The front page of the internet, with amazing visitor numbers, run by a very small team. A great counter to the notion that you had to be big to do Internet Scale. When the team finally started to swell a bit, they did so as a distributed…
(via mostlysignssomeportents)
Pobřeží slonoviny vyváží kakaové boby. Místní kteří boby pěstují a sklízí netuší k čemu je “bílí” používají. Na tomto videu je zachycena jejich první příležitost ochutnat čokoládu. Úsměvné a paradoxní zároveň. Do této chvíle si mysleli, že běloši dělají z kakaových bobů víno.
(Source: youtube.com)
The recent release of “Dawn of the Planet of the Apes“ reminded me of one of my favorite ape vs. man films – this 1932 video that shows a baby chimpanzee and a baby human undergoing the same basic psychological tests.
Its gets weirder – the human baby (Donald) and the chimpanzee baby (Gua) were both raised as humans by their biological/adopted father Winthrop Niles Kellogg. Kellogg was a comparative psychologist fascinated by the interplay between nature and nurture, and he devised a fascinating (and questionably ethical) experiment to study it:
Suppose an anthropoid were taken into a typical human family at the day of birth and reared as a child. Suppose he were fed upon a bottle, clothed, washed, bathed, fondled, and given a characteristically human environment; that he were spoken to like the human infant from the moment of parturition; that he had an adopted human mother and an adopted human father.
First, Kellogg had to convince his pregnant wife he wasn’t crazy:
…the enthusiasm of one of us met with so much resistance from the other that it appeared likely we could never come to an agreement upon whether or not we should even attempt such an undertaking.
She apparently gave in, because Donald and Gua were raised, for nine months, as brother and sister. Much like Caesar in the “Planet of the Apes” movies, Gua developed faster than her “brother,” and often outperformed him in tasks. But she soon hit a cognitive wall, and the experiment came to an end. (Probably for the best, as Donald had begun to speak chimpanzee.)
You can read more about Kellogg’s experiment, its legacy, and public reaction to it here.
(via npr)
I v New Yorku vás překvapí, pokud potkáte v recepci hotelu chlapíka v kraťasech a vertikálně (!) pruhovaných zlatofialových punčochách, s mušketýrským knírem, v tričku s nápisem: Happy hacking! Pokud zjistíte, že takových lidí jste při návratu do hotelu potkali celý houf a všichni sice vypadají…
(via databoutique)
Why don’t we do it in the road?
The practice of open defecation is increasingly dangerous to public health when people crowd close together. Worms and bacteria spread by human waste spread deadly disease and can be a big cause of malnutrition. India is, far and away, the country worst blighted by open defecation, made worse by the fact it has a large population crowded onto relatively little land. Why India suffers worse than much poorer countries, such as Congo or Afghanistan, and worse than fellow South Asian countries, such as Bangladesh, is a matter for contentious debate.
Justin Fox’s The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street is a book that chases down a provocative debate that the author discovered while working for Fortune magazine: the idea that the market is driven by fear, psychological quirks, fads, and…
Srandovní pes výzkumník. Zvířata myslí. 2 minuty. Smál jsem se nahlas.
(Source: youtube.com)
We are just like the genitals for our machines.
I think that the precious boundary between ourselves and our machines, that a certain brand of anxious humanists is worried to preserve is a just a bunch of malarkey. And that it’s perfectly clear now that human world means the soft tissue that runs around having affairs and migraine headaches and it also means the hardware that sits in the basements and the skyscrapers in super-cooled, air-conditioned rooms where the entire unconscious of the culture is in storage.
That’s what this database is, it’s the dreaming brain of the over species.
The fact that we are the waking, mobile organic attendants of this cyber electric reef of information. We are easily replaced and we all make our small contribution. It exists all over the world, dispersed. It sets the price of gold, turns on the flow of petroleum, it moves natural gas futures in Jakarta. It is largely autonomous and by algorithmic input that is on semi-automatic mode.
We imagine that it’s human civilization run by human beings. No it’s just Civilization run by the mysterious forces that get you to join book clubs and take certain drugs. Watch certain things, buy certain things. It has a will to its own, a complexificaiton of its own.
I think unless you psychedelize your self, we tend to be so embedded in its assumptions that you we don’t see it… and then when you do psychedelize yourself, and you DO see it, the problem is to not freak out about it.
The implications… are so appalling. Because what does it mean?! IT DON’T MEAN SHIT.
(via mostlysignssomeportents)
Tower of David: the World’s Tallest Slum | Via
The Tower of David is an abandoned unfinished skyscraper in the center of Caracas, the capital city of Venezuela, that is now home to more than 3,000 squatters, who have turned the 45-story skyscraper into the world’s tallest slum.
Construction of the building, originally called “Centro Financiero Confinanzas” and nicknamed the “Tower of David”, after its developer, David Brillembourg, was started in 1990 and was to become a symbol of Caracas’ bright financial future. It is the third highest skyscraper in the country. But a banking crisis brought those plans to an abrupt halt in 1994. The government took control over the building and construction was never completed. The building has no elevators, no installed electricity or running water, no balcony railing and windows and even walls in many places.
In 2007, a group of squatters took over the building, and it quickly gained notoriety as a hotbed of crime and drugs. Despite this, residents have managed to build a comfortable and self sustaining community complete with basic utility services such as electricity and water that reaches all the way up to the 22nd floor. Lifts being absent, residents can use motorcycles to travel up and down the first 10 floors, but must use the stairs for the remaining levels. Inside the building’s long hallways there are warehouses, clothing stores, beauty parlours, a dentist and day-care centers. Some residents even have cars, parked inside of the building’s parking garage. Some seven hundred families comprising over 3,000 residents live in the tower today.
(via brucesterling)
I know you need caffeine sometimes but don’t even fucking think about reaching for a RedBull or 5-Hour Energy. I will slap that shit out of your hand so quick you won’t know whatthefuck happened. Energy drinks are toxic and fucking expensive. Money doesn’t grow on trees; coffee does. Don’t waste your time in a fucking line and spend your hard earned cash on something you can make while you’re sleeping. Cold brewed coffee is also way less acidic, making this easier on your stomach. SO GRAB A CUP OF THIS SIMPLE SHIT AND SEIZE THE GODDAMN DAY.
COLD BREWED COFFEE
¾ cup ground coffee (whatever you got is fine)
3 ½ cups cold water
Put the coffee grounds in the bottom of a large container. If you like coffee with some fucking bite, add another ¼ cup of grounds. Slowly pour the water over the grounds and stir. Make sure all the grounds get wet because sometimes there are weird dry pockets and then you’re just wasting fucking coffee. Let this sit in the fridge (or on your counter if its not too fucking hot in your place) overnight or for at least 10 hours. In the morning, strain that shit using a mesh strainer. You know, the ones that look like a screen door. If you have the time, strain one more time through a paper coffee filter to get out the last of the grounds (or don’t and just deal with a couple rogue grounds in your drink). Serve over ice and with some almond milk if that’s your thing.
Makes about 3 ½ cups of coffee (triple this recipe and keep the extra in the fridge all week)
OR USE A FRENCH PRESS AND HAVE A FRESH CUP EVERY MORNING HOT DAMN COLD BREW IN A FRENCH PRESS WAS A GODDAMN REVELATION
Cold brew coffee is amazing, and once you have it, you may not go back to any other way.
I make it a lot, and I’ve found that a lighter roast, as well as beans from Kenya or Central America really bring out the most amazing flavours you’ve ever had.
Cold brew coffee can have these really complex fruit and floral, or chocolate and caramel flavours that we never even notice when we make it any other way.
Give it a try; I think you’ll like it.
(via wilwheaton)