Kat's Tumblr

it's me, kat. now one of the Old People on tumblr past lives: subjunctivelymoody.tumblr.com, radiantxrad.tumblr.com

[katmh]

I found it both freeing and disturbing to spend time on a platform that didn’t ask me to pretend that I was on the Internet for a good reason. I was not giving TikTok my attention because I wanted to keep up with the news, or because I was trying to soothe and irritate myself by looking at photos of my friends on vacation. I was giving TikTok my attention because it was serving me what would retain my attention, and it could do that because it had been designed to perform algorithmic pyrotechnics that were capable of making a half hour pass before I remembered to look away.

Jia Tolentino, “How TikTok Holds Our Attention”, The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/30/how-tiktok-holds-our-attention

[mr-downer]

with adobe flash going the way of the dinosaur it really solidifies that the old net is dead, and our children will grow up in a world in which the web is a highly commercialized hell hole instead of a lawless zone free of civilization.

So this is how the cowboys felt huh

[nerdgul]

A moment of silence for all the poorly animated flash videos and games on newgrounds that shaped our childhoods

[katmh]

There is of course the case of jazz and the entire African-American musical tradition: since the 1920s African-American music, originally used by lower-status classes for entertainment and dance, has been the focus of estheticized listening in intellectual circles (Leonard, 1962). Clearly there is no surer way for upper-status class members to affirm their symbolic domination than borrowing forms of expression from outside the perimeter of highbrow art, thereby manifesting a capacity to culturally empower or rehabilite that radically distinguishes them from lower-status class members.

https://www.cairn.info/revue-francaise-de-sociologie-1-2005-5-page-123.htm

[katmh]

I won't get into whether this is a good or bad thing, but we should recognize the entire world of professional investing went from a highly-regulated information environment to the messy, infinite, and algorithmically curated one the rest of us without a Bloomberg Terminal have long navigated.

Ranjan Roy, Is WFH affecting the S&P?, Margins

[katmh]

For you and I who have been oppressed, you must let go of the myth that writing is what you know. We know to distrust ourselves and to defer to someone who will always “know” better. We know to dress up our stories for entertainment and decoration; to always be ready and waiting to appease the next task that will be thrown over to us. We cannot write what we know. We must write what we want.

Yanyi, 'How Do I Write About My Identity Authentically?' (2020)

[katmh]

[E]xit the trajectory of productive time, so that a single moment might open almost to infinity.

Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing

[sydthefuturenurse]

I guess I did not buy this new desk for myself 😂

[katmh]

In the context of health and ecology, things that grow unchecked are often considered parasitic or cancerous. Yet we inhabit a culture that privileges novelty and growth over the cyclical and regenerative.

Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

[katmh]

Each person deserves a day in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for... When I return home, I am always surprised to find some questions I sought to evade had been answered and some entanglements I had hoped to flee had become unraveled in my absence.

Maya Angelou, “A Day Away” in Wouldn’t Take Nothing for my Journey Now (1993)

[katmh]

I realize that living well is an art which can be developed. Of course, you will need the basic talents to build upon: They are a love of life and ability to take great pleasure from small offerings, an assurance that the world owes you nothing and that every gift is exactly that, a gift.

Maya Angelou, “Living Well. Living Good.” in Wouldn’t Take Nothing for my Journey Now (1993)

[katmh]

I want to speak in favour of recognising our place within ‘the many’. Not only as a slogan, much less as a personal sacrifice, but rather as a potential source of joy in your life.

Zadie Smith’s graduation speech at the New School (2014)

[katmh]

A potential danger of getting exposure to the scale beyond our reach as young, driven people is that anything less than that feels like suboptimal rational thinking. When "impact" has been abstracted away from our day-to-day operations, when"meaning" has been outsourced to the institutions, how much of the world is left to be truly experienced when the hardest answers have been figured out? As savvy decision-makers, the opportunity cost of teaching at a local school would be too high when we can make a mark on two billion users. But what if the opportunity cost is an illusion? What if hedging our potential to comfort isn't a hedge against early death, but is indeed an early death?

Tina He, Fakepixels Vol. 53

[katmh]

earth is a good color picker

max

[katmh]

That's why I tell my older son who's in university now that it's more like a mirror. If you're on fire it'll reflect that back to you. And if you're just passing through uni will be a ok Las Vegas weekend at best: in-out-done as there was no long term vision anyway. I'm less and less convinced that human organizations can light kids up. We gotta come lit up and some hard knocks often helps get that fire started.

doonesbury on Hacker News, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24005305

[katmh]

One typology subdivides practically oriented ethical discourse into protreptic, therapy, and advice. The aim of protreptic is to induce the listen to engage with philosophy at all, or to do so more deeply; that of therapy is to use philosophy to help him get rid of false beliefs, affecting his motives, emotions, and actions; advice aims to replace the rejected beliefs with better-grounded guides to action.

Epictetus: Discourses, Fragments, Handbook

[katmh]

[katmh]

Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.

Milton Friedman