We have engineered a life support system without fault tolerance, and we did it because engineers didn't design the system. Politicians did. Special interests did. And it's built on antiquated job-centric moralism instead of contemporary life-centric realism.
Being a nerd is the key to happiness:
For example, I started hiking recently, and I've also been trying to learn about the plant life around my area. Knowing what plants are as I pass them, knowing the specific mountain ranges in my area, and all of those details make the experience so much more interesting and enriching for me.
Why are the Pleiades called the seven sisters, when we can only see six? Astronomers Say Global Myths About 'Seven Sisters' Stars May Reach Back 100,000 Years.
paint.wtf is a website where people make illustrations, usually bad ones, which are then judged by an AI.
And some music, a brand new song by Origami Conspiracy, Nothing to Me. I love the backing vocals.
In essence, it is swaying people to your political side not by argument or reason but giving them the intensive, almost lustful, experience of being part of something greater, a movement that will solve whatever ails them, of history, so to speak. And this is achieved through ritual, staging, and performance... By displays of violence, Fascism seeks to transform politics from the - admittedly often skewed - exchange of ideas into an aesthetic experience itself: Aesthetic violence is the end point of fascist politics, not just its tool.
Something aesthetic but less exciting, an update on my piano playing. I've become obsessed with polyrhythms, specifically playing one time signature with my left hand and another with my right. I practice when I'm lying in bed with restless legs, by wiggling my feet in different polyrhythms, usually 3-5, my favorite. This one minute exercise goes through the following sequence: 1-1, 4-5, 2-5, 1-2, 3-5, 2-3, 3-4, 4-5, 1-1. My goals are to get cleaner, to move easily between any of those, and between right and left hand dominant, and to add melody. My November 24 piece was already using melodic polyrhythms, but only 2-3 and 3-5, and the poor recording made it hard to hear the individual notes.
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