I Think, Today's Irony Ends Up Saying: 'How Totally Banal Of You To Ask What I Really Mean.' Anyone With

Peter Bialobrzeski

life

Sometimes I think about what would have happened if Game of Life had been invented in antiquity. The concept is sufficiently simple for even a child to grasp and simplicity should have appealed to Pythagorean sensibilities…

Would they have developed standardized tokens for exploring the game, and would they have recognized it as a game?

Would there be biblical parables about the glider?

Would alternate rules have been considered heretical in the Middle Ages?

Would the R-pentomino have been thought an infinite growth pattern until some diligent mathematician, maybe an Arabic one in the 1000s, were to show the opposite by working out all 1103 generations?

Would the LWSS, the Gosper glider gun and related technology have been hailed as great inventions of the Renaissance?

Would the Gausses and the Eulers of this world have dedicated time to searching for new oscillator periods or spaceship velocities?

Would still lifes be tabulated by hand to stupendous numbers in the 1800s, and would these in modern days be memorized in a similar way digits of pi are now?

Would the entire concept have encouraged a considerably more rapid development of fields such as computability or signal processing?

Backwards/forwards time travel is overrated; I’d definitely rather explore alternate timelines…

I frequently hear the same yearning expressed in my consulting room – the wish for the world to disappear, for a cessation of any feelings, whether positive or negative, that intrude on the patient’s peace, alongside the painful awareness that the world’s demands are waiting on the way out. You feel burnout when you’ve exhausted all your internal resources, yet cannot free yourself of the nervous compulsion to go on regardless. Life becomes something that won’t stop bothering you. Among its most frequent and oppressive symptoms is chronic indecision, as though all the possibilities and choices life confronts you with cancel each other out, leaving only an irritable stasis.

Josh Cohen

Wooded valley, probably Bolton Woods Lovers in a woodland clearing a pair, John Atkinson Grimshaw

Any social entrepreneurs worth their (fair-trade, alder-smoked) sea salt will have an "our story" section on their website, explaining how a college trip to Guatemala or a grandmother's devotion to fresh produce inspired the company's current mission. "It's not just 'my candles are great', it's 'and then I went to Java and discovered this wax and this is a part of my journey, here's a picture,'" says Deresiewicz. "Goods now all have to be experiences.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown aka. "smoothie catharsis will solve your existential crisis"

Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.

Frank O’Hara, Mayakovsky (via naranzarian)

jensenacklesmishacollins:

Ei talupoegadele - No to peasants.

...

The majority speaks Sense.

http://jensenacklesmishacollins.tumblr.com/post/99414721364/as-i-said-there-was-a-protest-against-union

Julius Sergius von Klever - Erlkönig (1887)