Category: media
Art by Thomas A. Gieseke
Like psychedelic weirdness? Always wanted a Tardigrade Queen hung on the wall with your family photos? Tom Gieseke can help. My favorite is The Extrovert Leaves the Introvert to His Own Devices.
How to Be a Stoic | RadioWest
“No matter where you live or what culture you live in, the question of how to lead a good life is central. And there is no shortage of answers, from fundamentalist religion to nihilism. For his part, philosopher Massimo Pigliucci has become a Stoic. Stoicism, he says, isn’t about suppressing or hiding emotions. It’s about mindfulness and virtue. It’s about focusing your efforts only on that which you can control and understanding the truth of death. Pigliucci joins us to discuss why and how to be a Stoic.”
—Massimo Pigliucci. “How to Be a Stoic.” Interview with Doug Fabrizio. Radiowest. April 13, 2018. Rebroadcast.
Glassy-Eyed Automatons
The New 8-bit Heroes
“While visiting his parents’ home in Central New York, Joe Granato discovered a box of forgotten illustrations, designed by he and other eight-year-old neighborhood friends—concepts for a video game for the original 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System. He decided it might be fun to try to realize those ambitions.
But instead of creating it for a mobile device or modern console, he set out to use the same techniques and adhere to the same limitations that would have been employed in 1988 to make a new cartridge-based game actually playable on the now-archaic hardware.
Gathering a small team of modern creatives, what began as an explorative novelty project about building a video game for a system 30 years removed from relevance escalated to a two-year, ten-thousand-mile journey into an esoteric subculture made up of devotees to creating new NES games; artists who thrive on limitation.”
h/t Tedium.
Smog (Bill Callahan) – Rock Bottom Riser
Processed World
“Are You Doing the Processing, or Being Processed?”
—Slogan of Processed World
Processed World was part zine, part street theater, part forum for college educated temp workers serving as grist for the machines of capitalism. The first issue was published in April 1981, at the dawn of the “information age” and explored its underside. The early 1980s were its hay day, but there were occasional “special issues”, like this on-point question from the 2001 issue, which is just as relevant now as it was then:
“What happens when pressure to work longer and harder constrains non-work life? When lunch breaks are shorter, less convivial, or simply an excuse to slip in more work? When fast food isn’t deemed fast enough, so we “drivethru,” take out, and dine alone, en route, as tens of millions of Americans now do everyday?
What becomes of imagination when we entertain, read, vacation, play, sleep (and, in consequence, dream)less? What happens to personal life when, as time-managment authors now advise, we schedule weekend “appointments” to garden, to have brunch or “romance,” or to meet with family to review the “domestic agenda”
What happens to work itself when, to get more done, we go at several tasks simultaneously?
