GIRLS OWN THE VOID

all the wind that blows through your hair, it makes things new.

[heartlessqueen]

if you keep swallowing the anger back, it’s going to choke you

[luxe-pauvre]

NOVEMBER

Read:

What It Takes To Put Our Phone Away

How Augustinus Bader Made Us Believe

“am I wasting my 20s?”

Why we should rethink our moral intuitions about deepfakes

New Brain Maps Can Predict Behaviours***

The Power of Testimony

Head Games

Distraction disaster! Notifications are ruining our concentration - here’s how to escape them

Our innate ideas prevent us seeing what is innate in human nature

How to know what you really want

The virtue of honesty requires more than just telling the truth

Careerism

This is what peak culture looks like

The Zen of Joan Didion

Trolls be gone

Food for Life: The New Science of Eating Well by Tim Spector

Everything That Makes Us Human: Case Notes of a Children’s Brain Surgeon by Jay Jayamohan

Sedated: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis by James Davies^^^

Watched:

why smart people write bad

I Emailed My Doctor 133 Times: The Crisis in the British Healthcare System

Nightcrawler: Lou Bloom’s Sociopathic American Dream

Kirsten Dunst: Sofia Coppola’s Greatest Muse

Severance~~~

The Handmaid’s Tale (S5)

The Crown (S5)

All Quiet on the Western Front

Listened To:

Henry Marsh - Blood

Atul Gawande: The Path to Perpetual Progress

The “Winning Expert”: How To Become The Best You Can Be: Sir David Brailsford‘’’

How To Fix Your Focus & Stop Procrastinating: Johann Hari‘’’

This Town by The Go Go’s

Renaissance by Beyonce (again, again, again)

Went To:

Quantum Mechanics: Stranger Than Fiction? Carlo Rovelli and Jim Al-Khalili in Conversation @ the Science Museum

British Neurosurgical Research Group Meeting

[hilema]

Lokakuu 2022

[hedgehog-moss]

Hi, could you tell us more about your night time walks with your cats?

I wrote a post about it last year if you want to check it out :) Usually we go down to the torrent because you can’t get lost with this itinerary; even when you don’t see anything you can hear where the water is, and then going home is just a matter of going up and up until you emerge from the woods. I was a bit concerned about getting lost at first because as an ex-city person, the forest at night is an experience of profound, total darkness that I’d never had before. It’s unsettling and lovely.

(Although the flash and the snow make things look deceptively luminous here.)

The cats usually retreat to the barn in the evening (as they’re supposed to—it’s their prime hunting hour and I want them to keep the hay rodent-free) but when they hear me walk past the barn after dark they’re like “yay we’re going on a walk tonight” and I see three cats jump out of the window one after the other and then follow me. It’s very cute. All four of us enjoy our night walks.

I love how many wild animals you can hear at night (and without Pandolf scaring them off), the forest feels so much more populated than during the day. And I love how lively cats are after sunset.

They spend the day sleeping on the couch or in my bed (depending on whether I’ve made a fire in the living-room) but then at night they keep chasing each other around, climbing on things, exploring, playing pranks on each other... Morille likes to hide (very poorly) behind trees or rocks and then pounce on me or the other cats when we walk past. She does it 12 times per walk and we pretend to be very startled every time to make her feel formidable.

[exhaled-spirals]

« Here is something I’ve been made to understand: Using my phone and computer might feel like nothing more than the static of passing time, but all the micro-decisions I make as I search and swipe and scroll are secretly valuable commodities. Every time I touch a device, I leave a trail of digital DNA that can be used to reverse-engineer some version of me that is used to sell me things.

[… But] understanding myself as data requires a large measure of abstraction, so when I think about how my data is used and by whom, I would say it makes me feel abstractly very bothered. Theoretically totally creeped out. […] Let me tell you what feels definitely and unbearably concrete: [someone] getting his paws on my phone and riffling through my tabs. My husband hopping on my computer because it’s close by, and he wants to “just check something really quick.” […] I don’t like to think of my relationship to technology as possessive, but the internal histaminic explosion I feel when someone else uses — or, if I’m being honest, even just touches — my devices says otherwise. Despite my better knowledge, my devices still feel like private spaces.

One thing the era of big data teaches is that everyone has something to hide. […] There’s nothing on my phone or computer that could be considered even remotely indecent. [But] my phone and computer are repositories for the minutiae that swims through my stream of consciousness: what I wonder about, worry over, linger on. Curiosities I would have once called “idle,” fancies I’d dismiss as “passing” — it seems there’s no longer such a thing. As long as I have a device on hand to help me do nothing, I’m always at work in my inertia, mounting evidence of myself. […]

My blind-spots are witnessed by some algorithmic omniscience that uses them to reconstitute me as a consumer. Weirdly, allowing a human being access to that same material feels somehow more uncomfortably intimate, even if I know it’s less harmful. Because knowing you’re being monitored is different than feeling seen. Differently put: I’m more willing to be exploited than I am to be judged. »

— Suzannah Showler, “New Feelings: Screen Protectiveness”

[gnossienne]

Humphreys Johnston, The Mystery of the Night (c.1898)

[derekjarman]

Неотправленное письмо (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1960)

[dame-de-pique]

Gunnar Lundh - Skridskosegling, c.1936

[garadinervi]

Sacha Archer, Empty Building, Penteract Press, 2022

[warmfuzzyphoto]

[funeral]

The value of the vanishing word in human communication has only grown in the age of information overload. In an unexpected kind of way, the blank page, the faded word, the deleted sentence all seem to suggest that fugitive expression has become cogent and timely, taking a greater hold on our imagination…We may not be prisoners trying to get our messages out, but we are captives of the information age, which has multiplied immeasurably the volume of communication. The perpetual exchange of data…is now part of ordinary life.

Akiko Busch, How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency

(via

funeral

)

[astranemus]

Fungi make worlds; they also unmake them. There are lots of ways to catch them in the act: when you cook mushroom soup, or just eat it; when you go out gathering mushrooms or buy them; when you ferment alcohol, plant a plant, or just bury your hands in the soil. And whether you let a fungus into your mind, or marvel at the way that it might enter the mind of another; whether you're cured by a fungus, or watch it cure someone else; whether you build your home from fungi, or start growing mushrooms in your home, fungi will catch you in the act. If you're alive, they already have.

Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, And Shape Our Futures

[conceptualfinearts]

(via Kristof Kintera and the monumental smallness of the human being (a critic writing))

[tenpa]

for me, hedgehog moss is up there with stray cat j’s landlady as women who absolutely bless tumblr with their blogging and you should not bring weird or annoying shit onto their posts at all costs. this is their site. back off.

[headspace-hotel]

You know what? Destroy the "people in rural areas are all ignorant conservatives" stereotype and start mocking the "trad"/anti-feminist/neonazi people that are obsessed with rural areas despite having never been to one

[headspace-hotel]

I'm absolutely laughing my ass off at all these "Traditional Femininity" blogs that post nothing but aesthetic photos of supposed "Rural Life"

Lady this is a skinny influencer in a frilly white dress that's never had dirt on it, with her hair in professionally-done beachy waves, doing a photoshoot in a field using a basket of strawberries bought at walmart as a prop.

If you saw an actual woman farmer you would think you were seeing the Masculinization Of Women By The Degenerate Left

[funeral]

Kier-La Janisse, House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films

[unknought]

fantasy novel where everyone speaks completely normal modern English, but there are extensive footnotes and appendices explaining the etymologies of the words being used and the history of the language, and it’s all totally different from real English