All art is quite useless.

When words become unclear, I shall focus with photographs. When images become inadequate, I shall be content with silence. I sing myself.

[veryfunnymemes]

[flavoracle]

Mental Crop Rotation

When farmers grow the same crop too many years in a row, it can leave their soil depleted of minerals and other nutrients that are vital to the health of their fields.

To avoid this, farmers will often alternate the crops that they grow because some plants will use up different minerals (such as nitrogen) while other plants replenish those minerals. This process is known as “crop rotation.”

So the next time you find that you need to step away from a project to work on something else for a while, don’t beat yourself up for “quitting” that project. Give yourself permission to practice “mental crop rotation” to maintain a healthy brain field.

Because I’ve found that when that unnecessary guilt and pressure are removed from the process, a good mental crop rotation can help you feel more energized and invigorated than ever once you’re ready to rotate back to that project.

[bomberqueen17]

: A crucial part of crop rotation is that the field is let fallow sometimes. You plant what’s called a “cover crop”, which is something you don’t expect to harvest– it’s there for its roots to hold the soil in place, and often it’ll be what’s called a nitrogen-fixer, i.e. a plant that can pull nitrogen out of the air and fix it into the soil with its roots (but sometimes it won’t, sometimes it’s really just there to shelter the soil surface), and then you’ll till in that cover crop, or let the frost kill it and the stalks lie as mulch, and then you’ll rotate productive crops back into that field the next season. 

It’s important, though, to understand that during the fallow period, no nutrients are removed from that ground, and nothing is expected of it. Whatever the land grows then, it keeps, and it gets tilled back in or decomposes in place, to return its energy to the earth.

We’re not allowed, in our current society, to just let our minds be fallow for a bit, to produce nothing for export, to make nothing that can be sold. But it’s part of good land stewardship, to give every field time when it doesn’t need to give you anything back. 

So yes, grow and produce different things from time to time, rotate them around your mind and exercise different mental muscles, take different things from your creative processes, yes– but also, give yourself a fallow spell now and again, and let the field of your mind grow things for itself to keep, to break down and save for later. 

[highvelocitysandwich]

Positive mental health AND agriculture??!?

*slams reblog button*

[misswallflower]

“Visible Light” series by Alexander Harding

[text-mode]

The Morris worm or Internet worm of November 2, 1988 was one of the first computer worms distributed via the Internet. It was written by a student at Cornell University, Robert Tappan Morris, and launched on November 2, 1988 from MIT.

[pyronoid-d-deactivated20181217]

It’s trapped on a floppy tho this is some dark shit it has been denied its purpose forever bound to this obsolete storage

[smolmzd-deactivated20150612]

am i glad it’s in there and we’re out here

[undergroundmonorail]

people reading fantasy novels ask “why did the ancient ones seal the evil away for ten thousand years instead of just killing it” but then we go ahead and do this shit

[thefingerfuckingfemalefury]

We have learned nothing from every fantasy novel ever O.O

[ayellowbirds]

The best part, from the wiki article: “According to its creator, the Morris worm was not written to cause damage, but to gauge the size of the Internet.”

It was intended to do good, but the programmer made a mistake and it got out of hand, becoming viral.

[dr-archeville]

R̴͓̮͈̞̿͐͛̏̒͂͊̾ͅE͉̝͍̹̣̺̿͗͟͝L̶͖̫͇͙̬ͬ͗͌͘E̻͔̳ͪͭ̑̔̉̉̑ͣ͝͝ͅẢ̲̳̝̗̮ͩS̼̮̠̦͍͈̳̝ͮ̌ͯͯ̌͆͗͠ͅEͦ̎̊͏̪͙̤̦͈̯̱͞͠ ̱̃ͥ̆̄M̛̝̘̺̥̙̱͚ͣ̋͊̚E̪̮͍̘̟̟͚͖͐

[hotcommunist-deactivated2019032]

the year is 28AW (after worm) and still we suffer

[superfluousspork]

Oh, w o r m

[itscolossal]

Alex Chinneck Unzips a Condemned Building in the Style of a Retro Shirt

[academicssay]

On poverty and pronunciation in academia

[jazzybot4]

Oh.

[confusionofconfusions-deactivat]

Why I never mock or even bring attention to mispronunciation in a conversation, and will snap down anyone who tries to

[bogfox]

Besides poverty, for many peoplevEnglish is a second (or third+) language and has weird rules too. Most of the time, even when words are mispronounced, they’re still understandable if you make an effort. Just be patient and don’t look down on people who mispronounce!

[linguini17]

I was once on a plane to start my teacher training.  A retired teacher sat next to me and we got to talking.  She asked what my training would be like and I said it was mostly pedagogy (pronouncing it with the ‘juh’ sound in the middle instead of ped-a-gah-gee).  She carried on the conversation as if I hadn’t mispronounced it but managed to work ‘pedagogy’ into what she was saying so I heard it said the right way without embarrassing myself.  It was a lesson I try to emulate with my kids.

[viralthings]

[seksilelulaatikko]

Olisiko teillä hetki aikaa puhua puurosta

[deservingporcupine]

Translation from Finnish: “Do you have a moment to talk about the porridge.”

[hishap]

I see your Russian cat memes and raise you Finnish bear memes

[itscolossal]

Artist Walead Beshty Shipped Glass Boxes Inside FedEx Boxes to Produce Shattered Sculptures

[thivus]

cant tell if pretentious or just petty about their experience with fedex

[coyotebuegwater-deactivated2016]

[the-uppity-b]

Why is this so fucking funny 

[helloitsbees]

in all my life, I have never encountered such an astounding act of trolling as the time I spent an hour and a half downloading what I thought was a Good Omens fanmix and then discovering that it was a Best of Queen album.

[the-real-seebs]

i… wow.

that’s beautiful.

[watchthelightfade]

is that trolling or is that just an accurate fanmix

[eirenical]

Third option: it WAS a Good Omens fanmix, but someone left it in the car too long.

[cinematographiliac-blog]

Endless list of beautiful cinematography Paddington (2014) Director of Photography: Erik Wilson

[bidoof]

movie idea: guy finds a stone tablet engraved with a mysterious alien language and gets caught up in a national treasure-esque adventure to decipher its meaning, only to learn that it’s just an alien “live, love, laugh” decoration

[thechubbynerd]

My favorite part about this post is that it infers that there’s an alien suburban mom demographic.

[figseachhoot]

It also suggest she lost her live, love, laugh decoration

[thewightknight]

Photographer Charles Freger has traveled through 19 European nations to gather pictures of impressive costumes from pagan rituals that have survived to this day. The series, entitled “Wilder Mann,” inspires images of an older, wilder and more tribal Europe filled with wild beasts, bonfires and pagan gods.

More photos here

[stability]

[tony-soprano]

Michelle Obama delivers her final speech as First Lady on Friday, January 6, 2017 (x). 

[allthingslinguistic]

Who would have believed that the perfect Wikipedia photo caption could have been improved on? (Alan Ferrier on twitter)

I love this as an example of Gricean humour. Grice’s Maxims say to only say things that are relevant (i.e. interpret everything someone says as if it adds relevant information to the conversation). In this case, the caption is “improved” by adding (right) after the name of the bagpiper. In many photo captions, (left) or (right) is used to tell us which of several similar-looking people the caption is about. If there were several bagpipers or even humans, (right) would be a neutral, informative information. 

But here, the only entities in the photo are Piper Kerr and the indifferent penguin. It’s very easy to tell the difference between them. So adding (right) brings with it the absurd interpretation that (right) is relevant information, i.e. that the piper and the penguin are hard to tell apart. 

[skepticalavenger]

Why Did God Create Atheists?

There is a famous story told in Chassidic literature that addresses this very question. The Master teaches the student that God created everything in the world to be appreciated, since everything is here to teach us a lesson. 

One clever student asks “What lesson can we learn from atheists? Why did God create them?”

The Master responds “God created atheists to teach us the most important lesson of them all — the lesson of true compassion. You see, when an atheist performs and act of charity, visits someone who is sick, helps someone in need, and cares for the world, he is not doing so because of some religious teaching. He does not believe that god commanded him to perform this act. In fact, he does not believe in God at all, so his acts are based on an inner sense of morality. And look at the kindness he can bestow upon others simply because he feels it to be right.”

“This means,” the Master continued “that when someone reaches out to you for help, you should never say ‘I pray that God will help you.’ Instead for the moment, you should become an atheist, imagine that there is no God who can help, and say ‘I will help you.’”

ETA source: Tales of Hasidim Vol. 2 by Mar

[scyphozoans]

I started reading this and was worried it would be something attacking atheists, or bashing religion, but this makes me really, really happy.

[naamahdarling]

imagine that there is no God who can help, and say ‘I will help you.’”

Holy shit.

Holy shit.

Yes.  YES.