mid inner life i think you are alright

[elbiotipo]

"warm, shallow seas" is one of the most beautiful phrases in paleontology and it's everywhere... these mollusks lived in warm, shallow seas... scientists think that photosynthetic life evolved in warm, shallow seas... in that era the Earth was covered by warm, shallow seas...

I wish I was resting by an antediluvian warm, shallow sea

[candiedspit]

[milksockets]

So it is not that real kindness requires people to be selfless, it is rather that real kindness changes people in the doing of it, often in unpredictable ways. Real kindness is an exchange with essentially unpredictable consequences. It is a risk precisely because it mingles our needs and desires with the needs and desires of others, in a way that so-called self-interest never can. (The notion of self-interest implies that we always know what we want, by knowing what the self is and what its interests are. It forecloses discovery.) Kindness is a way of knowing people beyond our understanding of them. By involving us with strangers (even with “foreigners” thousands of miles away), as well as with intimates, it is potentially far more promiscuous than sexuality.

On Kindness - Adam Phillips + Barbara Taylor

[lena-oleanderson]

also a poem from the new, unreleased collection. very possibly my own all-time favourite.

[hungwy]

Was just listening to a podcast while driving in the snow. They decided to take an intermission and play some spring bird sounds for a bit. Very surreal and beautiful to hear birds chirping in like 5 foot visibility snowfall. Kind of felt like I lived through a haiku

[lettercube]

birds fall under snow

and wheels turn at pausing thoughts

chirp broke gloom through glass

[salemwitchtrials-deactivated202]

i was re-watching ‘maya angelou: still i rise’ & lost my mind & heart during this reading of ‘the mask’ so i decided to record + upload for anyone who would also like to be brought to tears. 

[say-ouch]

Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

[someforbiddenparadise]

The Writer's Technique in Thirteen Theses by Walter Benjamin (as appears in his 1928 treatise One-Way Street, in a section titled "Post No Bills")

[drunkwhenimadethis]

"Angels can fly because they can take themselves lightly. ...Seriousness is not a virtue. It would be a heresy, but a much more sensible heresy, to say that seriousness is a vice. It is really a natural trend or lapse into taking one's self gravely, because it is the easiest thing to do. ...For solemnity flows out of men naturally; but laughter is a leap. It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. Satan fell by the force of gravity."

G.K. Chesterton

[drunkwhenimadethis]

Heard this in a lecture by David R. Hawkins: "How you contextualize your life then is how you present yourself to the world and that's what you are to the world. The universe responds in like. When you are thus to the world, the world is thus to thee, and you walk safely through the hail of bullets and if one's meant for you, so? If you come out the other side then there wasn't one meant for you. That is the way it goes. That's complete surrender, is it not? The past is eliminated by the realization that a decent regret is all that's necessary. You can stop ruminating and trying to rewrite the past. Have a decent regret about it and let it go. I don't want to hear other people's chain's dragging. They wallow in the past because their ego is sucking the juice out of it."

[havingapoemwithyou]

Sanity by Caroline Bird

[dtwoff-deactivated20260402]

Okay guys it's November we need to become serious people again and start listening to Leonard Cohen every day

[exitwound]

its been really liberating and empowering to learn that the huel black meal replacement powder, which ive been consuming in place of breakfast every day for a year, contains 6 mcg of lead per serving, the same as the average 8-oz glass of water in flint michigan, during their lead crisis. 6 mcg of lead is also in the ballpark of what the average american is exposed to each day, in total. you get the idea. that's why im replacing my daily huel shake with a cigarette, which come in at only ~0.15 mcg of lead intake (Ashraf 2006). personally, i smoke the japanese brand Peace light cigarettes, rated on r/cigarette as the best cigarette in the world. i can confirm. i would highly reccomend this cigarette, and i would suggest it if you're lookign for a habit-replacement while quitting your meal replacement powder addiction, as im sure many of us are working the courage to do in light of the news. with some simple back of the napkin math, its clear that you can come out in the green big time by making the switch

[alienaficionados]

““When I was about 20 years old, I met an old pastor’s wife who told me that when she was young and had her first child, she didn’t believe in striking children, although spanking kids with a switch pulled from a tree was standard punishment at the time. But one day, when her son was four or five, he did something that she felt warranted a spanking–the first in his life. She told him that he would have to go outside himself and find a switch for her to hit him with. The boy was gone a long time. And when he came back in, he was crying. He said to her, “Mama, I couldn’t find a switch, but here’s a rock that you can throw at me.” All of a sudden the mother understood how the situation felt from the child’s point of view: that if my mother wants to hurt me, then it makes no difference what she does it with; she might as well do it with a stone. And the mother took the boy into her lap and they both cried. Then she laid the rock on a shelf in the kitchen to remind herself forever: never violence. And that is something I think everyone should keep in mind. Because if violence begins in the nursery one can raise children into violence.””

— Astrid Lindgren, author of Pippi Longstocking, 1978 Peace Prize Acceptance Speech (via jillymomcraftypants)

[elwenyere]

— Ursula K. Le Guin, from “A Rant About ‘Technology’”

[exhaled-spirals]

« [I]n the early decades of the 1800s, no one had any inkling that there had ever been such creatures as dinosaurs. The word dinosaur would not be coined until 1842. That seems awfully late in the day, especially considering how much we now take dinosaurs for granted. Today every natural history museum in the world boasts an enormous dinosaur skeleton that scrapes the ceiling [...]; every toddler has pajamas with cartoon dinosaurs or a bin stufed with toy dinosaurs.

But a time traveler from 1800 would look at those toys and relics in bewilderment. Shakespeare, who imagined everything, never imagined a world ruled by house-sized beasts and where human beings had never set foot. The world’s most farseeing thinkers had never seen that far. No such possibility had ever crossed the mind of Leonardo da Vinci or Galileo or Isaac Newton or Benjamin Franklin. [...]

Outside of myths and fairy tales, no one had ever dreamed that creatures like three-toed giants had once rambled across the land. No one ever imagined that, for eons and eons, legions of flying, slithering, lumbering creatures had ruled the world, and that human beings had played no role whatsoever in the tale. [...]

And dinosaurs had an unfathomably long run; they reigned for over one hundred million years. (Some scientists believe the true figure is closer to one hundred eighty-six million years.) Modern humans have been around for perhaps a hundred thousand years. If humans manage to survive ten times as long as we have so far, we will have made it 1 percent as long as the dinosaurs did.

[...19th-century scientists] had only a few bones or teeth, and their task was to imagine a body from those scanty hints. It was a bit like trying to solve a maddeningly dificult jigsaw puzzle where a great many pieces had been lost, and pieces from diferent puzzles had been flung together, and no one had ever seen the picture they were trying to assemble. [...]

Today we encounter these puzzles from the past in their complete, solved form, with all the signs of hard work hidden from view. The resolution of the tale is so familiar—dragonlike creatures roamed an ancient world—that it is easy to forget how hard-won those successes were. [...]

The tale begins around 1800 and reaches its climax on New Year’s Eve 1853. Those bookend dates are key. These were early days for science—the word scientist did not exist until 1834—and natural history in particular was an unsettled muddle where nearly every question was up for debate.

The dinosaur discoveries were news flashes in a world unprepared to make sense of them. Suddenly it seemed that the familiar world had been built atop a vanished world, or perhaps a series of vanished worlds, that had been filled with gigantic marauding creatures.

The cozy cottage had become a haunted house. »

— Edward Dolnick, Dinosaurs at the Dinner Party: How an Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended the World

[warlockofagnesi]

There’s a dream I have in which I love the world.

[we-are-rogue]

If the door’s locked, try the wall

[by Geoff Manaugh]

a drywall knife

In one of the most interesting moments in his memoir, [jewelry thief Bill Mason] sees that architecture can be made to do what he wants it to do; it’s like watching a character in Star Wars learn to use the Force.

In a lengthy scene at a hotel in Cleveland that Mason would ultimately hit more than once in his career, he explains that his intended prize was locked inside a room whose door was too closely guarded for him to slip through. Then he realizes the obvious: he has been thinking the way the hotel wanted him to think—the way the architects had hoped he would behave—looking for doors and hallways when he could  simply carve a new route where he wanted it. The ensuing realization delights him. “Elated at the idea that I could cut my own door right where I needed one,” he writes, Mason simply breaks into the hotel suite adjacent to the main office. There, he flings open the closet, pushes aside the hangers, and cuts his way from one room into the other using a drywall knife. In no time at all, he has cut his “own door” through to the manager’s office, where he takes whatever he wants—departing right back through the very “door” he himself made. It is architectural surgery, pure and simple.

Later, Mason actually mocks the idea that a person would remain reliant on doors, making fun of anyone who thinks burglars, in particular, would respect the limitations of architecture. “Surely if someone were to rob the place,” he writes in all italics, barbed with sarcasm, “they’d come in as respectable people would, through the door provided for the purpose. Maybe that explains why people will have four heavy-duty locks on a solid oak door that’s right next to a glass window.” People seem to think they should lock-pick or kick their way through solid doors rather than just take a ten-dollar drywall knife and carve whole new hallways into the world. Those people are mere slaves to  architecture, spatial captives in a world someone else has designed for them.

Something about this is almost unsettlingly brilliant, as if it is nonburglars who have been misusing the built environment this whole time; as if it is nonburglars who have been unwilling to question the world’s most basic spatial assumptions, too scared to think past the tyranny of architecture’s long-held behavioral expectations.

To use architect Rem Koolhaas’s phrase, we have been voluntary prisoners of architecture all along, willingly coerced and browbeaten by its code of spatial conduct, accepting walls as walls and going only where the corridors lead us. Because doors are often the sturdiest and most fortified parts of the wall in front of you, they are a distraction and a trap. By comparison, the wall itself is often more like tissue paper, just drywall and some two-by-fours, without a lock or a chain in sight. Like clouds, apartment walls are mostly air; seen through a burglar’s eyes, they aren’t even there. Cut a hole through one and you’re in the next room in seconds.

~ Geoff Manaugh, A Burglar’s Guide to the City