#2017bestof

[awkrecommends]

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives

David Eagleman

SUM is a dazzling exploration of funny and unexpected afterlives that have never been considered–each presented as a vignette that offers us a stunning lens through which to see ourselves here and now.

In one afterlife you may find that God is the size of a microbe and is unaware of your existence. In another, your creators are a species of dim-witted creatures who built us to figure out what they could not. In a different version of the afterlife you work as a background character in other people’s dreams. Or you may find that God is a married couple struggling with discontent, or that the afterlife contains only those people whom you remember, or that the hereafter includes the thousands of previous gods who no longer attract followers. In some afterlives you are split into your different ages; in some you are forced to live with annoying versions of yourself that represent what you could have been; in others you are re-created from your credit card records and Internet history. David Eagleman proposes many versions of our purpose here; we are mobile robots for cosmic mapmakers, we are reunions for a scattered confederacy of atoms, we are experimental subjects for gods trying to understand what makes couples stick together.

These wonderfully imagined tale–at once funny, wistful, and unsettling–are rooted in science and romance and awe at our mysterious existence: a mixture of death, hope, computers, immortality, love, biology, and desire that exposes radiant new facets of our humanity.

[awkrecommends]

Lao Tzu : Tao Te Ching : A Book About the Way and the Power of the Way

Ursula K. Le Guin

No other English translation of this greatest of the Chinese classics can match Ursula Le Guin's striking new version. Le Guin, best known for thought-provoking science fiction novels that have helped to transform the genre, has studied the *Tao Te Ching * for more than forty years. She has consulted the literal translations and worked with Chinese scholars to develop a version that lets the ancient text speak in a fresh way to modern people, while remaining faithful to the poetic beauty of the work. Avoiding scholarly interpretations and esoteric Taoist insights, she has revealed the *Tao Te Ching *'s immediate relevance and power, its depth and refreshing humor, in a way that shows better than ever before why it has been so much loved for more than 2,500 years. Included are Le Guin's own personal commentary and notes on the text. This new version is sure to be welcomed by the many readers of the *Tao Te Ching * as well as those coming to the text for the first time.

[aliceofelia]

100 things that made a difference (2017)

1.     Singing out loud with Pandora during my commutes

2.     Face Painting children

3.     DundraCon in San Ramone – gets a girl out of the house.

4.     Steampunk Bazaar for fun and frivolity

5.     Being asked back from local businesses, for annual events for Henna

6.     10x10 film challenge - makeup

7.     ConQuest Sac

8.     Putting on the Ears! Embodying the Bunny! Building & donating Easter Baskets to the Casa Kids, at Casa de Esperanza

9.     Reading life stories of people that start from nothing and rise to their own greatness.

10. KublaCon fun-ness, Burlingame, CA

11. Making disabled kids smile for the Arts Council event: A Very Special Arts, with color and GLITTER!

12. Golden Coast Adventure Fair; followed by a glorious Berry Festival!

13. Loving astrology and astronomy; looking at the moon.

14. Treasuring the seasons, and turning of the wheel of the year.

15. Meeting new friends, at first time events

16. Premier of long awaited film project: Capps Crossing.

17. Peach Festival

18. Conceptualizing and doing Special FX Makeup for From the Mad Genius Mind of Devin

19. Being lazy. Taking moments doing nothing but chilling marathoning through Movies.

20. Being asked to do makeup on Good Day Sacramento

21. Zombie Walk – Special FX makeup

22. Fight For Your Life – film; Special FX makeup

23. Birthday visits from a Cherished Friend; getting a handmade gift.

24. Kirshners Animal Sanctuary

25. PacificCon, Santa Clara

26. CrawFestival

27. Pagan Pride; visiting with Rescued Animals.  (Crow, specifically was so cool)

28. Harvest the Arts, Arts Council event.

29. Not having negative encounters with people over politics.

30. The Heart Walk, Sacramento

31. Premier of film and Place Called Sacramento, film Festival.  Being apart of a film that won 4 awards.

32. Making the Film poster.

33. Helping a friend with promotion, marketing and profitability, and subsequently seeing his success.

34. Vampire Ball and Sinister Creature con.

35. Having dinner next to Tom Atkins, Actor; Halloween III with my friend Abby.

36. Still studying Elvish, Sindarin. Hannon le!

37. Discovered ‘Si’ the perfume. MMMM

38. Conquest Avalon

39. Alan

40. Sculpting

41. Creature brainstorming

42. Playing with a Mogwi Furby

43. Reading “Steal Like an Artist” again.

44. CSM certification

45. Repairing my Windshield

46. Investing in new tools for the shop

47. Purging un-needed, un-used items from the collection.

48. Letting go

49. Sushi, mmmm Sumo roll is to Die for.

50. Making a blanket after creating a new design/pattern, then giving it away.

51. Making people smile.

52. Helping friends

53. Making Ties

54. Yoga

55. Stranger Things – WTH, but I love it.

56. Starting a new journal

57. Getting a new Surface

58. Studying Makeup

59. Making Art; any kind

60. Writing short stories

61. Watching Making of’s and Behind the Scenes

62. Listening to the music of Pan’s Labyrinth

63. Playing the Piano

64. Realizing why I love the creative mind of Guillermo Del Toro

65. Discovering the genius of paper.

66. Seeing son ‘beam’ when he got a new job

67. Laughter

68. Being there for a friend when in need

69. The Thrill of getting a new job, but knowing you have a family with the old one.

70. Going to the Movies to see a film on the big screen.

71. Star Wars

72. Taking time to breathe, and slow down.

73. Listening to Celtic music

74. Dealing with negative people by imagining something in their teeth or hanging out of their nose.

75. Finding people you can share PB&J

76. Reading Stephen King; The Colorado Kid

77. Discovering Lisa Nichols

78. Watching movies in bed.

79. Re-watching old favorites – The X-Files

80. Putting up the Christmas Decorations for the first time in years.

81. Watching looney tunes on YouTube

82. Digging out the Disney; Mulan, Hunchback of Notre Dame

83. Contemplating the Why of things; such as Extremism??

84. Drawing

85. Moments of silence; doing stuff or just sitting, with nothing on.

86. Pyrography

87. Discovering CashFlow, and finding my son likes learning about it too.

88. Cherry Tomatoes

89. Letting myself be vulnerable to someone

90. Deadpool; I could watch this over and over.

91. Getting a pen with my studio name printed on it.

92. Nautilus Tea Company – Mmm.. Pomegranate Black Tea is the best.

93. The realization that live is more than, “Rinse, Wash and Repeat!”

94. Finding one thing every day that makes me smile.

95. Being positive.

96. Designing a logo for a project at work.

97. Being a Hero to myself, if no one else.

98. Reaching out to old friends. Reconnecting.

99. Taking some good advice.

100. Helping a long distance friend.

[realjlive]

#Repost @atlcollective ・・・ @realjlive was outstanding doing his thing to retell #tribecalledquest @terminalwest 📸: @mrfingazproductions #2017bestof

[enoteasegretacapri]

#selectaspa #valrhonaitalia #valrhonausa #repost##6 of @ValrhonaUSA #2017BestOf: «All I want for Christmas is..” @swmsweets ‘s New Limited Edition Advent Calendar: the “Nutcraker Box”! #ValrhonaCercleV #BestOf #adventcalendar ™@valrhonausa (presso Selecta spa Occhiobello)

[awkrecommends]

Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A. (New York Review Books Classics)

Eve Babitz

No one burned hotter than Eve Babitz. Possessing skin that radiated “its own kind of moral laws,” spectacular teeth, and a figure that was the stuff of legend, she seduced seemingly everyone who was anyone in Los Angeles for a long stretch of the 1960s and ’70s. One man proved elusive, however, and so Babitz did what she did best, she wrote him a book. Slow Days, Fast Company is a full-fledged and full-bodied evocation of a bygone Southern California that far exceeds its mash-note premise. In ten sun-baked, Santa Ana wind–swept sketches, Babitz re-creates a Los Angeles of movie stars distraught over their success, socialites on three-day drug binges holed up in the Chateau Marmont, soap-opera actors worried that tomorrow’s script will kill them off, Italian femmes fatales even more fatal than Babitz. And she even leaves LA now and then, spending an afternoon at the house of flawless Orange County suburbanites, a day among the grape pickers of the Central Valley, a weekend in Palm Springs where her dreams of romance fizzle and her only solace is Virginia Woolf. In the end it doesn’t matter if Babitz ever gets the guy—she seduces us.

[awkrecommends]

Henry David Thoreau: A Life

Laura Dassow Walls

“Walden. Yesterday I came here to live.” That entry from the journal of Henry David Thoreau, and the intellectual journey it began, would by themselves be enough to place Thoreau in the American pantheon. His attempt to “live deliberately” in a small woods at the edge of his hometown of Concord has been a touchstone for individualists and seekers since the publication of Walden in 1854.   But there was much more to Thoreau than his brief experiment in living at Walden Pond. A member of the vibrant intellectual circle centered on his neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson, he was also an ardent naturalist, a manual laborer and inventor, a radical political activist, and more. Many books have taken up various aspects of Thoreau’s character and achievements, but, as Laura Dassow Walls writes, “Thoreau has never been captured between covers; he was too quixotic, mischievous, many-sided.” Two hundred years after his birth, and two generations after the last full-scale biography, Walls restores Henry David Thoreau to us in all his profound, inspiring complexity.   Walls traces the full arc of Thoreau’s life, from his early days in the intellectual hothouse of Concord, when the American experiment still felt fresh and precarious, and “America was a family affair, earned by one generation and about to pass to the next.” By the time he died in 1862, at only forty-four years of age, Thoreau had witnessed the transformation of his world from a community of farmers and artisans into a bustling, interconnected commercial nation. What did that portend for the contemplative individual and abundant, wild nature that Thoreau celebrated?   Drawing on Thoreau’s copious writings, published and unpublished, Walls presents a Thoreau vigorously alive in all his quirks and contradictions: the young man shattered by the sudden death of his brother; the ambitious Harvard College student; the ecstatic visionary who closed Walden with an account of the regenerative power of the Cosmos. We meet the man whose belief in human freedom and the value of labor made him an uncompromising abolitionist; the solitary walker who found society in nature, but also found his own nature in the society of which he was a deeply interwoven part. And, running through it all, Thoreau the passionate naturalist, who, long before the age of environmentalism, saw tragedy for future generations in the human heedlessness around him.   “The Thoreau I sought was not in any book, so I wrote this one,” says Walls. The result is a Thoreau unlike any seen since he walked the streets of Concord, a Thoreau for our time and all time.  

[awkrecommends]

The Importance Of Living

Lin Yutang

The Importance of Living is a wry, witty antidote to the dizzying pace of the modern world. Lin Yutang's prescription is the classic Chinese philosophy of life: Revere inaction as much as action, invoke humor to maintain a healthy attitude, and never forget that there will always be plenty of fools around who are willing-indeed, eager-to be busy, to make themselves useful, and to exercise power while you bask in the simple joy of existence.At a time when we're overwhelmed with wake-up calls, here is a refreshing, playful reminder to savor life's simple pleasures.