Feynman's Rainbow

Tim | writing and comics | they pronouns | Melbourne

[meremothh]

first time following dracula daily is so fucking funny because every day i wake up to a new email and i’m like “oh great, wonder how my good friend jonathan harker is doing?” and i open it and jonathan harker is sweating bullets in his room as he writes in his diary shit like “today dracula’s head spun 360 degrees so i gave him a thumbs up. i fear this is my last entry and i am inconsolable”

[wordfather]

writing tip:

if you push buttons on a keyboard, letters will appear on the screen. and with that power you can do anything

[lychgate]

 i think it was cruel to give lightning mcqueen a foot fetish, as he lives in a world where all feet are wheels. he has nothing.

[wordfather]

sorry i wasnt talking to you i think

[bloodraven55]

Anyway I love Qwydion with my whole heart 😤

[feynmansrainbow]

iykyk

[silverformymonsters]

Dragon Age: Absolution

[kierongillen]

I was touched by yr portrayal of Ash's gender troubles in Die, which felt deeper and more true to life than I often see from cis (?) writers. So I'm curious: what went into that? Were there elements of yr own experience with gender that you drew on (not necessarily trans; I recall Phonogram doing interesting stuff w/ masculinity)? Did you do any special research or consultation? Or was it just paying attention and empathy over the years to trans people in yr life? Or something else? Thanks x

Thank you.

Ash is born of my own experience and observations of the intersection of games and gender. I certainly wanted to write about aspects of my own messy gender feelings. I worked with the wonderful Natalie Reed as a consultant, primarily through the filter of me knowing what I wanted to do, and her making sure I was saying what I wanted to in a way which would hopefully land with folks. Thinking of it, it feels like a producer aspect - turn this up in the mix, more snare drum, etc. She was amazing and invaluable,

Certainly listening to all the trans people in my life impacted it.

[iguanamouth]

and all the final beasts, together

[orbitaldropkick]

KILL SIX BILLION DEMONS

[theriodont]

I think we should all take a moment to appreciate this gloriously well-preserved nodosaur that turned up in Alberta.

I mean, look at this thing!

This has got to be one of the most well-preserved dinosaurs I have ever laid eyes on.

Even the keratin sheaths around its osteoderm spikes were preserved, so it can be used to reliably reconstruct how ankylosaurids would have looked at in life!

And the best part is it was discovered completely by accident in a mining operation! Can you imagine being one of the miners who stumbled across this beautiful, beautiful thing?

National Geographic link

[viergacht]

ITS SO BEAUTIFUL

[spirits-of-kin]

@abrictosaurus

[minodah]

[rocketumbl]

Blade Runner

[idiopathicsmile]

the trouble with writing is that it’s literally always easier to just lie facedown on your floor and make inarticulate noises

[thenearsightedmonkey]

January 25, 2015 Dearest DrawBridge Class,

Here are two photos from our first day which included a visit from some of our “Co-Researchers”.  The comp-book drawing was done from memory by Woodstock. And another set of pictures of ‘Bootsy-Eyed’ DrawBridge co-researchers taken last semester.

I hope that you’ve been thinking about the nature of pretending, and your history with it since our last class.  Sometimes when we try to remember something on purpose, like what sort of things we pretended when we were children, we may find that our minds go blank.  A few images show up but not as many as we know must be there.  However, if you keep this question alive in your mind as you go about your day you may find other images that come to you, and when they do it’s a very good idea to write them down. Here is a question: What is the difference between pretending and lying?  For example, when I was in the first grade I told classmates I could control bees with my mind. I’d tried to do it quite a lot, but I didn’t feel I’d really ever succeeded.  After I made this claim I hoped it would come true and I doubled my efforts to control bees with my mind. For a little while, before one of the classmates told the teacher what I’d said, I actually believed it might be possible.  My teacher asked me to stand in front of the class and admit that I could not control bees with my mind.  I did what she asked, but didn’t believe what I said to the class.  I still believed it was possible.  What I should have said to the class was, “I cannot control bees with my mind.  Yet. “  Attached are some of the things I’ll be asking you to read this week. I send them now in case you’d like to get a head start. You don’t have to read them in any particular order.

One is an New York Times article called “What’s Lost as Handwriting Fades?”

One is an introduction to “On Not Being Able To Paint”  written by British writer and psychoanalyst, Marion Milner — about 2 pages (I’ll include it at the end of this post)  One is an introduction to “The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World”  about 14 pages (Download Introduction (PDF file, 455 KB)

 The last is the original version of Pinocchio, written in 1881 by Carlo Collodi-  about 22 pages.  Collodi first ended his story at Chapter 15. That’s the ending I’d like you to know about.  Later he added more chapters.  All of them can be read here.  When an idea ‘comes to us’ where does it come from?  I’d like you to start thinking about drawing as something other than a way to make a pleasing visual image.  Try thinking of drawing another means of thinking and communication. Think of drawing as not just as a means of communication with others, but as a means by which we enable parts of ourselves to communicate with each other and think together, resulting in what we sometimes call ‘insight’ — a sudden understanding that seems to ‘come to us’  and arrive whole. The kind of insight drawing can provide is easily lost when we approach it in a critical way, or try to fix its meaning in speech. However, when we learn to watch a drawing the way we might watch a living thing, and see that it exists in a changing way that is free from speech and the structure speech brings with it, we may find a new place and way of sorting out things we are trying to understand and problems we are trying to solve. Speech and written language used in argumentative reasoning structures the way we think about problems we are trying to understand.  I believe that a certain kind of drawing offers us an additional approach, one that sets different conditions for insight and allows us to pay a different sort of attention to the same problem.  Iain McGilchrist argues that the division of the brain into two hemispheres is essential to human existence, making possible incompatible versions of the world, with quite different priorities and values.  ”Things change according to the stance we adopt towards them, the type of attention we pay to them, the disposition we hold in relation to them. This is important because the most fundamental difference between the hemispheres lies in the type of attention they give to the world.” “It is not about what each hemisphere does, as we used to think, because it is clear that each is involved with literally everything. It is about how it is done – an approach, a stance, a disposition towards things. Above all, this is not about ‘thinking versus feeling’. It is about two kinds of thinking.”  Our class is about finding routes to another kind of thinking which may lead to a different understanding of the same problem. I look forward to seeing you tomorrow and to hearing some of the stories you’ve written since our last time together. Prof. Hebdo

Excerpt from introduction of  “On Not Being Able to Paint” (1950)

By Marion Milner (1900-1998) British psychoanalyst and writer.

After having spent five years in schools, busy with a scientific study of how children are affected by orthodox educational methods, and after the official results of that study had been published, I think found myself free to investigate certain private misgivings. They were misgivings which had begun to emerge during the course of the scientific work but which had not been clear enough or objective enough to have been put forward in a scientific report. They were concerned with the basic principles underlying the educational method, particularly in the sphere of what is usually called ‘moral’ education and also in sex education or the lack of it; they centered around a feeling that I needed a new set of ideas in thinking about these controversial questions. Although I felt there was a good likelihood that such matters were all connected to the problem of psychic creativity, whatever that might mean, I  had not known at all how to take the first steps for studying them or even how to frame the pertinent questions. It was only gradually that a persisting idea had emerged that somehow the problem might be approached through studying one specific area in which I myself had failed to learn something I wanted to learn.

            Always, ever since early childhood, I had been interested in learning how to paint. But in spite of having acquired some technical facility in representing the appearance of objects, my efforts had always tended to peter out in a maze of uncertainties about what a painter is really trying to do. Now the thought became more and more insistent that if only it were possible to find out how to set about learning to paint it should be also possible to find out the basic ideas needed for approaching  the general education problem.

            This thought did not emerge out of nothing, it was in fact the result of a most surprising discovery, one of those happenings  which seem to occur by inadvertence but which afterwards are recognized as marking a turning point in one’s life. It was the discovery that it was possible at times to produce drawings or sketches in an entirely different way from any that I had been taught, a way of letting hand and eye do exactly what pleased them without any conscious working toward a preconceived intention. This discovery had at first been so disconcerting that I had tried to forget all about it; for it seemed to threaten not only all familiar beliefs about will-power and conscious effort, but also, as I suppose all eruptions from the unconscious mind do, it threatened one’s sense of oneself as a more or less known entity.  But gradually I had had to force my self to face it, for it was clear that such a fact must undoubtedly have some bearing on those very educational assumptions which had aroused my misgivings. For instance, it might demand a revision of one’s beliefs about the exact role of moral teaching, in so far as such teaching demands willed effort to live up to preconceived standards.

            Not only did the way the drawings were produced seem to have a bearing upon the general educational problem but also their content. I did not at first see this, for although the actual technique of the drawings was often better than anything I managed by deliberate effort, their subjects were usually phantastic, they were more concerned, I had thought, with psychoanalysis than with either painting or school methods. Bit by bit, however, it became clear that they were not only clues to unconscious ‘complexes’, they were a form of visual reflection on the basic problems of living—and of education; and being so, they were intimately connected, both in their content and their method, with the problems of creativity and the creative process.

            In the school study one of the problems raised had been to do with what line the staff should take in order to help the quiet over-introverted child who seems to have insufficient contact with the external world.  It was through study of the experience of the free drawings that I came to understand more about the kind of problem that the over-introverted child is struggling with; and also, incidentally, what the over-extroverted child is running away from.  Also, in the school study, since the needs of large numbers of children had to be considered, it seemed best to concentrate on the variety of ways in which different types of children seek to solve their difficulties.  Thus certain aspects of the basic nature of everyone’s problem in coming to terms with their surroundings had had to be taken for granted; there had been no time to inquire, for instance, into the process by which any one of us comes to recognize the significant reality of our surroundings at all. But through the study of difficulties in painting I was to find that this question could no longer be ignored and that it was in fact closely bound up with a misgiving about something being left out of account in the general school system.

            Although this issue was at first only dimly guessed at, it did seem likely that my inquiry into painting would lead to certain philosophical issues upon which many books had been written. But I decided to make no systematic attempt to read about these. This did not mean making no use of any philosophical writings that I chanced upon, if they appeared relevant, it only meant not making any deliberate excursions into this field.  This was because I vaguely suspected that whatever it might be that the misgivings were beckoning me on to investigate, it was not something that could be apprehended in the first instance by an intellectual approach. For this reason also it seemed best to try to record the stages of the investigation in as simple and a direct way as possible and not venture beyond personal experience.

London, 1950

[postcardsfromspace]

Hey, Internet, I made you a gif that can also double as a short essay on one of the many reasons that Speed Racer is the best movie of all time.

[feynmansrainbow]

nice jorb, homestar

Today's accomplishments: -bought a nice shirt at 9am -made it to work -went to a job interview -didn't feel like a complete idiot afterwards -went to my first class at Deakin -didn't feel like a complete idiot afterwards -came home and watched Speed Racer The past couple of weeks have felt a little directionless, so it was nice to get a lot done. Should hear back about the jorb tomorrow, fingers crossed. Night!

[feynmansrainbow]

Monday 6 March

It's looking like I'll be spending even more time in public transport, what with travelling to and from Burwood four days a week, so I may as well use my time. Reading Warren Ellis' weekly newsletter Orbital Operations this morning. He's an old coot, as he will freely admit, but his style is a pleasure to read. Like he's everyone's cranky grandfather who is just clever enough to warrant listening to. Here's a fantastic clipping, talking about a new biography of American inventor Buckminster Fuller: "Jonothan Keats brings, finally, a skeptical human presence to consideration of Fuller.  He was frequently a crackpot, he made shit up, he stole credit, had a ego the size of the moon, and some of his ideas just made no fucking sense, then or now. People don't normally say those things. Keats does, with evidence." I've been subscribed to OO for about 3 months now, and it's a great way to shake the sand out of my eyes on a Monday morning. Subscribe here: http://orbitaloperations.com/

[feynmansrainbow]

me: hey what's on for Monday

also me: buying a shirt, work, job interview, study, first class, selling a textbook, more study

me: haaaaha cool