News is bad for you – and giving up reading it will make you happier | Media | The Guardian (via wildcat2030)

insta-gratification institutional manifestation #97646425789

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(via epistephilia)

Google Instant (& Auto-Complete) is like someone annoying standing over your shoulder and talking while you’re trying to think.

Did you mean this?
Or this? How about this?
Or this too?

No, Google. Shut up.

jocreativearts:

olena:

I used to be an artist…

and now? Paint something? Why? That’s the whole thing about art. There’s no reason. Except when you feel the reason with all your being, and have to do it.

But now, I’d rather practice Trig.

Life has funny ways of fucking with you.

I enjoy your art.

Now you might be trolling a little with your statements, but there’s no more reason to do art than there is to do trigonometry. They are different forms of expression. Perhaps you find greater value in trigonometry right now, but that doesn’t mean there’s no value in art. 

It sounds like you prefer the medium of math/scientific expression now. If true, I’m a little bummed because I am not in an environment that lets me spend the necessary time to explore and engage with your scientific variety of exploration, and because I enjoy your visual art.

I hope you don’t really feel like you “used” to be an artist, and that you’ve given up entirely on creating the visual variety of art. Surely the meditative/explorative process of art is excuse/value enough, “reason” enough, to paint? 

The life bit sounds about right to me : )

Anyways… you’re work is always interesting, enlightening, and enjoyable. Keep on keepin’ on. 

Hello!

Thank you! Your response is funny. Especially that it seems like I’m trolling. Oh, I often do… :D But not now. (And the following response got a little too long, sorry. It’s also not totally directed at you; just general, if anybody feels like reading.)

You never know how something will be taken when you write it, although you can do your best with tone and so on. It wasn’t intended to sound negative or even depressing. Especially the part about art being pointless. I mean that in the most sincere, “factual”, dry way — that’s what makes Art: its “uselessness”.

Art is not design, it’s not commercial, it’s not utilitarian. It must be free. That’s what separates “fine” art from “low brow”, easily-marketable stuff like Pop Surrealism, illustration, and vinyl toys. (Not that any of these are bad, but they are not necessarily, always Capital-A-Art.) At least, ideally. We all know the reality of the art world is different, and it’s a total commodity. A sham even, depending on the situation.

But as for art “vs” science:

I always created art because that’s kind of all I knew. I felt that I had to do it; sometimes not only for myself, but also to perpetuate an image, and/or due to others’ encouragement. I felt bad if I “wasn’t inspired” and couldn’t make. And it wasn’t always so romantic: sometimes it was all about money. I’ll be damned if I didn’t recognize early on that I was good at something and didn’t want to offer quality work for naught.

But mostly, it’s not something I can ever part with. “Ideal Art” is one of the only things in this world (that I know of) that offers a true mode of exploration, past anything we can do in other fields. And science needs that.

This is always something I struggle to explain: the merge of art and science. It’s not about expression, it’s not about “art drawing inspiration from science”. (I really hate the idea and presumptuousness of the latter.) It is like living (hard) science fiction: taking what we know about the natural world and running with it, in a way that we cannot do in science/tech fields because they’re too focused on Products and Practicality. (Have you heard/seen the comments after a new discovery is made? “Oh but what can we DO with it? Can we SELL it?”) Art is wonderfully impractical, it doesn’t need to “work”, thus it offers avenues to test the ridiculous, the far-out, the futurist, the truly sci-fi.

But about science:
It has this connotation for people that it’s like any other subject that one learns in school and “you need it for jobs”. But it stemmed from the most vital questions we’ve ever had about life itself. When I talk about science, I mean Nature. It’s inescapable. To think one could continue through life without learning about that… I don’t understand. Call me undemocratic, but I really don’t think it’s up for debate. How can someone ignore everything that surrounds them, that makes up their very being? And yet we’re encouraged to only think about the world as we’ve made it: pants, phone, bank, celebrities, whatever. It can even be seen as negative: “nerdy”.

What I mean to say is, it’s not a hobby, nor a passing phase. It can’t be, and it can’t be forgotten: it’s too important. Even Art — despite a strong relationship with and propensity towards it — is something I can put down, because it’s not, literally, essential. It’s not basic. It figures highly in human history, but outside of us? Eh.

Anyway… “I ‘used’ to be an artist”. Well, I joke. Sort of. But it honestly feels that way sometimes. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t do it anymore, despite that being my strongest skill-set, so far. So what kind of thing is it to say “I’m an artist” if all I have to show for it is sketchbooks filled with math homework and hopes and dreams? Pretentious, or just silly?

^___^

fin.

I used to be an artist…

and now? Paint something? Why? That’s the whole thing about art. There’s no reason. Except when you feel the reason with all your being, and have to do it.

But now, I’d rather practice Trig.

Life has funny ways of fucking with you.

fivekeys:

olena:

Dmitry Itskov thinks we can have inhabitable avatars for our minds by 2045.

I’m not convinced.

…

I agree.

The philosopher David Chalmers argues that there is an “explanatory gap” between the physical and the mental. It is not clear how our best theories of how the physical universe operates (the standard model of quantum particle physics and general relativity) would generate subjective experience. Chalmers calls this “the hard problem of consciousness.”

All interesting stuff. More on Wikipedia of course…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Chalmers#Work

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness

Tumblr, how should one write a post if it’s impossible to format correctly? The “i” to italicize button does nothing or emphasizes the wrong things, while opening up the HTML deletes some of the text. Same with “b” to bold, and possibly other functions.

*Or is it FireFox that’s the culprit… makes me want to convert to luddism.

*Also thanks for deleting half of my post, god knows why. Damn it.

acalc:

olena:

BioShock: Infinite

Finished this title today. It was not what I expected — from the amazing previews, I’d gathered only that it’d be a fun Steampunk adventure. And it was that, in part…

But… well, if you’ve played BioShock games before (I hadn’t), you’re probably laughing at me now. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Mostly, the level of darkness was totally unexpected, although not unwelcome. In the end, it was so much more AWESOME than anything I thought it’d be.

The criticism of video games put forth most often, by those hopeful that the genre can mature but not yet convinced it has, is that games (especially popular games) — partly because they are games, foremost — lack substance: a story with morals and difficult questions, something to think about after you’ve finished shooting everything in sight. BioShock: Infinite has exactly that.

Possibly because I don’t game that often, I’m not yet numb to the level of intensity that built up in this one. It reminds me of T.S. Elliot’s lines:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

I’m sitting here with this feeling of mental overload. Similar to the kind felt after consuming more respected, traditional content: viewing a piercing art film, a heavy documentary, reading an enlightening-if-difficult book… or, thinking about quantum mechanics.

This last is an actual, primary theme in BS:I, alongside those of jarring racism, elitism, fundamentalism, bigotry, religious zealotry, violence and resulting questions of guilt and forgiveness, and forgive me if I’ve left any off the list but holy shit. Even this is a lot to take in over just a few hours, and I’ve never seen real issues like these addressed in a game (not including the indie realm), and this much in-your-face, loudly and apologetically, at that. It’s as if, for once, an account team somewhere didn’t care if a major company released something “politically incorrect” in a non-comedic, non-ironic way…

That’s too many ellipses already. I’m just shocked and impressed, let’s leave it at that.

Well said. :) Yours is an interesting perspective, and it got me thinking.

One of the main threads of game criticism is that games have always had trouble reconciling interactivity with narrative. For Bioshock Infinite, I think they could have gone a long way towards that goal by expanding the existing framework of Elizabeth’s tears as the main gameplay hook, as opposed to the safe and relatively average first-person shooting. It actually looked like they would feature more prominently in the early demo videos, but that particular reality never materialized.

There is also that element of relative experience at play. You said you don’t game often. As for me, I’ve played so many games for so long that it’s hard to not see—sense—them as a collection of mechanical systems sometimes. So the first-person shooting of BI, for instance, is really, really familiar and not that exciting to me. (The Halo series does this better for my tastes.) So it ends up being kind of a shame that it’s such a prominent part of an otherwise brilliant experience.

Anyway, I think you would appreciate playing the original Bioshock. It does some things better than Infinite, and vice-versa. As for Bioshock 2, that’s kind of a toss up. It’s what I would consider an obligatory sequel, but it has some interesting elements.

Thanks for this response!

I’d been thinking about the FPS element of it earlier; just got so caught up in writing the above that I forgot to address it altogether.

I agree with you, it’s actually very boring. I’ve played games that are solely about being FPS, like COD, wherein that style of play held up better.

But then, I realized that the dull shooting actually worked in this case: it allowed the story (and all the side-details) to be at the forefront of the experience. I’m not saying it would’ve been less interesting if the play-style was more intricate (haven’t seen the demos, sounds cool), just that maybe it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

I hate to admit this, but this is one of the only games I’ve gone through fairly — no cheats, walk-throughs, glitch exploits, etc. I played on Medium: don’t care to challenge myself when it comes to games, and frankly hate when shit chases after “me”, thus would rather have less of it. It was easy enough that I could get through the thing and pay more attention, again, to the story, rather than to game-play details like bosses or leveling up.

Anyway, just another perspective.

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