#justify your existence

[samiholloway]

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[samiholloway]

“Research has also shown that tactile sensory perceptions tend to stimulate parts of brain that are associated with creativity. So, touch, feel and the sensation you get when you build something physical has also got a lot to do with creativity,” he says.

BBC - Capital - Why paper is the real 'killer app'

[astropress]

the second letterpress print i ever made, circa 2010, documented by eva nagao

[samiholloway]

Well, one survives that, no matter how… You survive this and in some terrible way, which I suppose no one can ever describe, you are compelled, you are corralled, you are bullwhipped into dealing with whatever it is that hurt you. And what is crucial here is that if it hurt you, that is not what’s important. Everybody’s hurt. What is important, what corrals you, what bullwhips you, what drives you, torments you, is that you must find some way of using this to connect you with everyone else alive. This is all you have to do it with. You must understand that your pain is trivial except insofar as you can use it to connect with other people’s pain; and insofar as you can do that with your pain, you can be released from it, and then hopefully it works the other way around too; insofar as I can tell you what it is to suffer, perhaps I can help you to suffer less. Then, you make — oh, fifteen years later, several thousand drinks later, two or three divorces, God knows how many broken friendships and an exile of one kind or another — some kind of breakthrough, which is your first articulation of who you are: that is to say, your first articulation of who you suspect we all are.

James Baldwin on the Artist’s Struggle for Integrity and How It Illuminates the Universal Experience of What It Means to Be Human – Brain Pickings

[samiholloway]

commercial creators are starting to accept that women watch nerdy stuff, too. More than that, they are the ones who are talking about it the most within fandom circles.

http://www.denofgeek.us/tv/sleepy-hollow/254450/what-tv-networks-still-dont-understand-about-fandom

[samiholloway]

As people dredge the unknown, they are engaging in a highly creative act.

How to Cultivate the Art of Serendipity - The New York Times

[samiholloway]

"Tiny markings on a clay tablet let us transcend mortality."

[theamericanbear]

... The reason the NSA’s success rate at defeating terror plots leapt overnight from an initial unimpressive two to an impressive 50 is that it turns out that the American people were really not very happy or grateful about learning that they had surrendered all privacy to Big Brother in return for the alleged disrupting of one wacko who had a dream, though poorly conceived, of bombing the New York subway, and the belated capture of another guy who had already allegedly done all the target-scouting work for the successful massacre in the hotel and train station of Mumbai, in India. That’s clearly not a great record to stand on, so now we’re being told by the NSA that actually it wasn’t just two plots that were foiled by their Orwellian spying, it was two score and 10. Much better, right?

Except… we don’t get to learn what those alleged busted plots were. If they were as hairbrained as the underwear bomber’s plan, which succeeded only in scorching his own privates, or as poorly conceived as the Times Square bomber’s plot, which succeeded only in burning some of the upholstery in his SUV, we don’t really have much to show for the freedom we’ve had stolen from us.

And we’re not going to learn what most of these alleged foiled plots were because…they’re secret.