• When Fortuna spins you downward, go out to a movie and get more out of life.
  • Each day was only as good as its distractions.
  • Once built, the digital environment becomes a monument, an artifact, a site, a landscape, made from human time, labor, and money, made by machines, made of natural resources. Its contents can be otherworldly, yet the digital's creation remains very much of the world, material culture of the immaterial.
  • What seems like nostalgia is more about remembering concepts that we forgot in our ambition to turn software entirely into productivity, pure functionality, and maximizing output
  • The sun never sets for those that ride into it.
  • That deadpan Mad magazine irreverence that crops up any time talented folks are given free reign to do whatever they want as long as comes in under budget and on time and is over 60 minutes long
  • If it is easier to kick someone out than to go through a difficult series of conversations with them, it is not a community.
  • However, the simple fact that they have been resounding failures in our century does give them a certain spiritual quality.
  • From this hiding place life was way too much, it was loud and rough round the edges
  • To me UI isn't just UI. You’re designing an actual space that people will be living in.
  • Thus he truly served as a guide, philosopher, and friend to many Christians; precisely because, while his own times were corrupt, his own culture was complete.
  • I do not understand this compulsion of mine for seeing movies; it almost seems as if movies are "in my blood."
  • While our senses of cultural and historical value may vary over time, we have only one chance to document an event and infinite opportunities to reconstruct it as it never occurred.
  • I don't think that decisions to migrate and destroy material should be made in private. While a single decision may seem trivial or obvious, the sum of many decisions will change history.
  • We must define our interest and pursue it.
  • The true modernism is not austerity but garbage strewn plenitude.
  • In a world that is well on its way to becoming one vast quarry, the collector becomes someone engaged in a pious work of salvage.
  • Life is not about significant details, illuminated a flash, fixed forever. Photographs are.
  • All my preoccupations are about the end of the world.
  • No archive will restore you.
  • Sixteen, clumsy and shy, that's the story of my life.
  • Destroy the warming sun.
  • You've got to really try, try so hard to get by, and where are you going to? Flip on your TV and try to make sense of that. If we were all in the movies maybe we wouldn't be so bored. We're giving it up so plain, we're living our lives in vain, and where are we going to?
  • Clearly, that is at bottom the same ancient lament that the masses seek distraction whereas art demands concentration from the spectator. That is a commonplace.
  • The distracted person, too, can form habits.
  • Reception in a state of distraction, which is increasing noticeably in all fields of art and is symptomatic of profound changes in apperception, finds in the film its true means of exercise.
  • Get through this.
  • Peaceful morning = Happiness.
  • I want to live like you, simple but fun.
  • Studying is not the same as being a student, being a student implies behaving like a student, not cutting class, answering the register, taking exams.
  • Little things are what screw you up the worst, just like little things will be the downfall of the American Empire.
  • Voices echo this is what salvation must be like after a while.
  • There's literally no living person I would pay money to meet. That's just fucking stupid.
  • City pop is also known as YouTuberecommendationcore.
  • No matter where we are - far away in the mountains or downstairs in the cafeteria, swimming in the ocean or hiding in an automobile - I enjoy being together with you, and I miss you when we are not.
  • Ring, hair, letters, photographs - all traces of our love will be scattered then, like an anagram from one of our code lessons.
  • Then there was the discovery of Factsheet Five in the early 90s and things began to get real fuzzy and out of hand.
  • Far beyond the limitations of nostalgia, there are stories to be told and history to be discovered
  • But I had this feeling inside of me that something real was there. Just hardened shit, maybe, but that was more than they had.
  • The Lord God himself put a fever in my brain, and sometimes it makes it hard to get my message straight, but it puts me in discernment.
  • You're wrong, I do want to live. Just not like this.
  • Frank and I never got into fights. We were curious about things.
  • It was an amazing time in Chicago back in 1990.
  • I wondered if she wished I were an object, a crystal, a talisman, something that couldn't cause her harm, something that would bring her luck.
  • I felt like maybe I wasn't just a girl to him, maybe I was a freak, and I smiled, and blushed, not at him, but at myself. Maybe I could become somebody else.
  • It was dumb and it was hard. We needed mercy. Our lives were dumb enough. Something had to save us.
  • The girls seemed to be more serious about it. That's why I didn't really trust them. They seemed to be part of the wrong things. They and the school seemed to have the same song.
  • First night of damp skin on sheets. I couldn't tell you why I am taking photographs again or why I am spending my lunch breaks searching for words. The answer isn't what I am here for.
  • An intense love for what most people would consider garbage.
  • Get a man who works for nothing and you get a man who just likes to hang around.
  • But sometimes I believed that everyone and everything we called when we were out there - that I called silently under my breath at home, too, and at school, that Grey must have called when she was alone, too - would somehow keep us safe.
  • I don't need to figure anything out. I'm fine. It's not a big deal. What I really need is to not be here anymore.
  • If there was no reason to get out of bed, there was no reason to sleep either.
  • If you get nothing else out of a.c.8-t-t but the realization that there is more than one way of looking at the world, then you have gotten the point.
  • How we are used to operating in a computer is very vignette and collage-like in itself.
  • The reach of human nature can create the wonderful (Silly Putty) and the dreadful (Napalm) with everything else falling in between in its valley like a bottomless pit. Pop culture serves as a wallpaper to take the edge off the reality and, if done well, help you understand it, too.
  • The point of his walks, he said, is not to get somewhere: "I like the spaces in between."
  • I wanted to create a large body of work and I realized that if I stuck with it that I could not be ignored.
  • As for me, I seemed born not to raise hell but to doubt everything.
  • And Dear Reader please don't start me up with "the internet now gives everyone a voice" bullshit. Give me the Flyer On The Telephone Pole Guy over anyone posting anything on the internet. Maybe it’s Marshall McLuhan's "The Medium Is The Message" thing that I’ve never quite been able to dissect.
  • When you defend rapists, and bemoan the cultural loss of their work when they get called out, think about the bigger loss that could have been the contributions of their victims. I have things to contribute too. I have art to put out there too. I matter too. Other victims do too.
  • Mail Art was never about quality, but participation and communication. That's why as the medium has matured, it has been able to escape its initial postal format and continue on to Fax and Internet exchanges. In truth it is no longer Mail Art at all, but International Networker Culture.
  • Watched Korean movie, "The Sassy Girl," (with the moral: "Love is a bridge to chance events from which we prosper").
  • There are different ways of looking at change in the world. We're biologically the same as we were 10,000 years ago. Maybe the only change we can make is through technology. Culture is changing, and that change might be caused by technology.
  • Maybe I don't know myself any better than someone would looking back on disjointed evidence of my life. Maybe that's a good thing.
  • Going to therapy and doing yoga so you can heal while your victims hide in shame, wondering if they'll ever recover, wondering if you'll ever allow it, is fucked up. That's not accountability, that's not rehabilitation; it's fucking privilege.
  • Creativity is the ability to present information in a perspective that is new, but also adequate to a coherent model in the audience's minds.
  • What emerged was a deep well of grief that is the unspoken fundament that underlies so much of our time - certainly when we gather together and purport to be any sort of "community." What is so often banished had returned: tears, anger, sorrow, transparency, trust.
  • As distinct from the choreographed "emergence" of days 4 and 5
  • People who aren't freaks will never be able to cast spells.
  • It's practically a myth now. I barely remember a world before Columbine. It was like it was in my memory before it even happened.
  • I basically love eyeball anything.
  • I'd read a book about saints once. They weren’t perfect. They were total weirdos, my kind of weirdos, and I wondered when the word saint had become synonymous with good. Saints had visions and desires and they were smart, they read books, they wrote books. They went crazy. They locked themselves away from the world, became hermits. They talked to ghosts.
  • CBS also ran It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown earlier that evening. Halloween was on from 9 through 11 EST, so if you planned your night accordingly, you could've dived straight from Linus van Pelt into Laurie Strode.
  • Self-marriage also propels its adepts to elevate regular, garden-variety consumerism into a kind of courtship. In doing so, it soothes the alienated modern human's need for ritual, for a communion with something greater than oneself.
  • Describing things in a controlled manner is not easy and despite the many rules we've come up with to describe and organize things, there's still lots of room for discussion.
  • Gold is the only memory of money.
  • Success is impossible but our cities are possible and real.
  • Every time I hear the phrase 'commitment to excellence,' I feel like someone has injected arsenic into my veins and shoved a sharp stick up my ass.
  • Games aren't a service. It’s like asking for a director to keep updating a movie, or for a musician to keep changing their song so it can keep running. Decisions like this erase our history.
  • It's someone else's turn to go through hell.
  • People add vintage effects to their home movies because they are nostalgic for traditional family rituals rather than for their aesthetics.
  • These weren't comped to me by Kellogg's or anything. I just kept reloading like my life depended on it, because in the moment, it felt like it did. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
  • The hopeful quality of these books encourages us in developing a movement of our own, in the form of how-to manuals with the explicit intent of building a new society of optimistic resistance.
  • We use it as a way to pay attention to the places we live and find ourselves working.
  • The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.
  • There's this type of play experience that’s unique to freeware. It's been part of the internet ever since Dial Up. That past time of finding weird things to download, from sites that you might more or less trust, and running them.
  • It's a special experience to "find" something like a game, somewhere in the back corner of some virtual space, and collect it. It's how we participate in making it our own. Games that you lose, and then find, is part of the sentimental charm of them as objects. These things involving you as part of the mystery of their existence adds to the joy of finding them.
  • The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is a phenomenon of the library.
  • How is one to give a name to what he is still searching for?
  • Library books affirm the irrevocable beingness of books in a world which is not our personal world.
  • An environment of strangerhood is the necessary premise of some of our most prized ways of being
  • I have learned from libraries that where you put a book matters. Shelve Thurber beside Machiavelli and watch how both become their opposites. Edgar Allan Poe next to Emily Dickinson remains decoration, but next to Betty Crocker it transmutes into something ghoulish.
  • Traveling on the bus at night is beautiful for all the lights, sounds, the tiny phone screens of other passengers lighting up the buss, looking into the car windows of other drivers passing the bus, staring into lit office windows wondering how it's like in that room... I'm probably not the only one that enjoys just looking while traveling. People are observant, and curiosity about what we are looking at is what makes traveling fun.
  • The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather - in many cases - offers an alternative to it.
  • A left that does not have class at its core can only be a liberal pressure group.
  • The interests of the working class are the interests of all; the interests of the bourgeoisie are the interests of capital, which are the interests of no-one. Our struggle must be towards the construction of a new and surprising world, not the preservation of identities shaped and distorted by capital.
  • The goal is not to 'be' an activist, but to aid the working class to activate - and transform - itself.
  • I was eleven years old, and junk food was the only thing that loved me back.
  • Climate change is not apolitical. Even mental health is not apolitical. These issues, which the couple have voiced their opinion on, come with real, important, and political questions attached. On climate, it’s one thing to say it's important, another to say what should be done about it. Who should bear the costs of tackling it, for instance? Mental health also comes with big, unanswered, and deeply political questions: Who should pay for treatment? Should it receive parity of funding with physical health? None of these questions have universally agreed-on answers - they are political.
  • Their lives seemed purposeful and integrated - full of pleasure, and none too strenuous.
  • All too often, "racism" is the subject of sentences that imply intentional activity or is characterized as an autonomous "force." In this kind of formulation, "racism," a conceptual abstraction, is imagined as a material entity. Abstractions can be useful, but they shouldn't be given independent life.
  • When we blame the absence of printed books for the distraction and the impatience and superficiality of the digital world, it's unfair. We’re comparing an ideal scenario of print reading with a more realistic assessment of digital reading.
  • Much of society still can't account for women like me.
may 4 2019 ∞
apr 17 2020 +