Mind Palace of Ivalo (original) (raw)
What occupied my time was my new endeavors as an architecture student, I've been trying to grasp through the many layers of this complicated bureaucratic ridden regime where creativity is always second to what consumer needs.
Reflecting on my reading of the past years, I've gone halfway through Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and I also started Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. I plan to finish GR and Infinite Jest by the end of this year. So I'm majorly tackling three large works while also juggling a part time job as a street painter.
I can't wait to read through everybody's journals again.
An analysis of the Three Body Problem series
May 21st, 2024
By being someone who's read the first book thrice and the rest twice, loving the trilogy as much as I do, I've waited for the film adaptation for a whole year. I don't like how it 'became' British, because the book is wholly Chinese, god bless Cixin Liu. And now I finally get to understand the direction, screenplay, and accurateness, although I won't brag about its accuracy, but a series has every right to reinterpret(slightly), the book it adapts.
I doubted that the Netflix version would be particularly faithful to the book. They need to appeal to Western viewers who are going to want fast-paced action and an over-the-top depiction of the story.
The deviations from the book are not my ground of expertise as Liu Cixin said he gave his blessing for them to change things. Maybe he likes the changes, but those two are completely different.It is a beautiful series with excellent graphics. I wrongfully accused it in the beginning, although it had its slight faults, but I think their worthy of the hype and I cannot wait for S2.
May 20th, 2024
I never thought I'd like any Wes Anderson more than I liked The Grand Budapest or Darjeeling Ltd, but Rushmore was WHAM
It hit me like this, because I'm so very personally affectionate, to the character, the storyline, the lunacy, the idiosyncrasy, the beauty of the raw emotions that I can still, only discover in a Wes Anderson movie. Watch Wes Anderson when high, I always tell.
The main character Max Fisher writing plays in a Pynchonesque style, perfection at its best, I believe I've found my new comfort film. With the fact that I'm so much like Fisher, and the lovely vibe, the je ne sais quoi ideal of this whole thing, ravishing and simply rural.
May 13th, 2024
I think, as a kid, I liked a Brontosaurus this much because of the Bronte sisters. I love them, especially Charlotte Bronte, and her awesome, wonderful, heart breaking, breath taking Jane Eyre, which has made me cry again.
> “If all the world hated you and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.” — Charlotte Brontë (1847), Jane Eyre, chapter 8.
What this meant is that so long as Jane does what is right (that is, what her conscience approves) she will not lack for people who sympathize and support her, even if it appears that “all the world” hates her. 'Friends' here therefore, means something more than just mutual companions, but eternal informality and intimacy.
In The Last Temptation of Christ, by Nikos Kazantzakis
May 10th, 2024
I wish God would love me like he loved Jesus. I need it now, the most. I lack it and I feel hopeless about living. When there is no hope there is no life. Dredging through the heat of cities and the sounds of laughter that are impenetrable to me, covered in a shell that suffocates and annihilates my ideals, I'm diminishing and becoming nothing because I lack love.
Sontag- An Argument about Beauty
May 5th, 2024
The less ‘uplifting’ beauty of face and body remains the most commonly visited site of the beautiful Beauty (should you choose to use the word that way) is deep, not superficial; hidden, sometimes, rather than obvious; consoling, not troubling; indestructible, as in art, rather than ephemeral, as in nature. Beauty, the stipulatively uplifting kind, perdures.
When that notorious beauty-lover Oscar Wilde announced in The Decay of Lying, “Nobody of any real culture ever talks about the beauty of a sunset. Sunsets are quite old-fashioned,” sunsets reeled under the blow, then recovered.
The sick are interesting, as Nietzsche points out. The wicked, too. To name something as interesting implies challenging old orders of praise.
The beauty of art is better, ‘higher,’ according to Hegel, than the beauty of nature because it is made by human beings and is the work of the spirit.
Imagine saying, “That sunset is interesting.”
https://www.amacad.org/publication/argument-about-beauty
Virginia Woolf — 'How should one read a book?'
April 25th, 2024
In the first place, I want to emphasize the note of interrogation at the end of my title. Even if I could answer the question for myself, the answer would apply only to me and not to you. The only advice, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I feel at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fetter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can possess. After all, what laws can be laid down about books? The battle of Waterloo was certainly fought on a certain day; but is Hamlet a better play than Lear? Nobody can say. Each must decide that question for himself. To admit authorities, however heavily furred and gowned, into our libraries and let them tell us how to read, what to read, what value to place upon what we read, is to destroy the spirit of freedom which is the breath of those sanctuaries. Everywhere else we may be bound by laws and conventions—there we have none.
Yet who reads to bring about an end, however desirable? Are there not some pursuits that we practise because they are good in themselves, and some pleasures that are final? And is not this among them? I have sometimes dreamt, at least, that when the Day of Judgment dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards—their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble—the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, "Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading."
THE END
April 25th, 2024
If you haven't watched it yet, you must. It's Wes Anderson's greatest.
Scenes from the Darjeeling Limited — Wes Anderson
April 23rd, 2024
Why do I like it so much? Excellent background music, artistic shooting, a movie that starts from nowhere and ends nowhere, it just is, being itself, characters that develop remarkably, the compassion that I never see anywhere else, deprived of nothing but love, searching for love, finding everything but it, characters I can relate to, scenes I adore.
April 23rd, 2024
I'm swamped with books to read, & recently I stopped marginalia after reading a book that had marginalia: it constricted my reading comprehension because someone else's thoughts coexisted with mine and contaminated my understanding of the same text. My withdrawal was quite abrupt, so I needed a separate book to write about the text, a reading notebook; if you wish. It's a more laborious process than marginalia, writing with pen and paper & noting page numbers, but all for the sake of a future reader who may not wish to muddle their reading with my scribbles.
Thus I have to revise my older reading list, making it concise(One Greek play/poetry, 2 easier books, one harder book, one non-fiction) each week.
This Week:
1. The Aeneid — Virgil
2. History of the Decline and Fall of Roman Empire — Gibbon
3. Virginia Woolf's Diaries
4. Swann's Way — Proust(re-reading)
5. The Common Reader — Virginia Woolf
I have noticed that in stream of consciousness writings like Proust's In Search of Lost Time, it is much easier to forget what one wants to remember, similar to Ullysus. I have to reread them all.
The Royal Tenenbaums — Wes Anderson, a movie that critically disassembles a family.
April 22nd, 2024
reading Anton Chekhov! MY! She's me fr
Opening song was the instrumental version of the Beatles' 'Hey Jude'. Very faintly, beautiful songs(excellent choices, even Nico's These Days) hums over the entire movie, in trumpet, in crescendo, violin, cello, different parts saturating into the beautifully colored movie another one of my favorite Wes Andersons.
Margot even has a model of sets, a darkroom, and does ballet.
April 20th, 2024
1. Feeding the Mind — Lewis Carrol
2. The Common Reader — Virginia Woolf
3. The Game of Logic — Lewis Carrol
4. Leviathan — Thomas Hobbes
5. The Poetry of Architecture — John Ruskin
6. The Seven Lamps of Architecture — John Ruskin
7. The Vindication of the Rights of Women — Mary Shelley
Trying LJ25 challenge for a change
April 19th, 2024
- _LJ appeared in April 1999, the year when I_…was not born yet, but totally thought I was going to end up somewhere in Andromeda.
2. _As a child, I wanted to become a_…dinosaur, specifically the Yi Qi, whose fossil was discovered around my childhood, I was obsessed with paleontology.
3. _My favorite school subject was_…Mathematics, until I discovered the joys of looking out the window.
4. The tune of my carefree youth is...The Carpenters, On Top of the World.
5. Books (or an authors) that influenced me... Noam Chomsky, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Arundhati Roy.
6. A city (or cities) I truly love...Kashmir and Paris(the land of Proust)
7. I started an LJ blog in 2020, because I wanted...to type my feelings out. Instead I channeled new emotions in.
- The catch phrase that nearest and dearest recognize me by…"what a joke."
9. _A movie I’m never tired to watch again..._any Wes Anderson. Personally I loved the Grand Budapest Hotel and Darjeeling ltd. I love Wes Anderson, Wong Kar Wai, Martin Scorsese.
10. _When I am 25, I will like_…to drink coffee without sugar, and weekends.
11. I can’t live a day without....sending a meme to someone.
- _An LJ post I’d like to recommend to everyone_…all of mine. thanks.
13. _I’m proud of…_my cat. She's done a very good job annoying everybody, she's got my genes.
15. _My favorite LJ blog(s)_- unsane1, btripp, annvole,fryusha, evseygribovsky
- My favorite LJ community (-ies) your_food_today, math_in_school, math_lovers, mathart, nihilists
Happy Birthday Sylvia darling dearest
April 12th, 2024
If you were coming in the Fall,
I’d brush the Summer by
With half a smile, and half a spurn,
As Housewives do, a Fly …
— Emily Dickinson
April 2nd, 2024
I'm currently semi-free(in twelve days I shall be as free as a baby), and I was thinking that I should learn a new language. There's a joke on russian livejournal - 'optimists study english, pessimists study chinese, and realists learn the working of a kalashnikov rifle.'
But I really (now), doubt the world domination of China when Russia has so much more potential.
Dear David Foster Wallace, you stole my soul...or did I steal yours?
March 29th, 2024
If you like reading Virgina Woolf, then it is very very easy to fall in pace with the rhythm of DFW. The same, 'stream of consciousness' style of writing. He puts the post, in post modernism, so wildly unique and yet very approachable. I do realise that some people hate him for the length(Infinite Jest, The Pale King), but start with the small stuff, like 'consider the lobster' or 'this is water', and my personal favorite 'big red son'.
links for free pdfs from some shady chinese downloading website(that still has a good interface, imo)
1/ cambridge dfw reader(if you need help understanding some works) https://www.doc88.com/p-73647515821741.html
2/ how to write like dfw https://www.slideshare.net/nstearns/david-foster-wallace-writing
3/another collection of free dfw writings https://tetw.org/David_Foster_Wallace
4/the essay(Hail the returning dragon, clothed in new fire)https://www.doc88.com/p-956219109794.html
5/the broom of the system(novel) https://www.doc88.com/p-85329339464883.html
6/wiggle room(essay)https://www.doc88.com/p-6438636582772.html
7/ this is water(essay) https://www.doc88.com/p-67747315159047.html
8/ THE DFW READER(HAS ALOT OF HIS ESSAYS) https://www.doc88.com/p-00729128441987.html
9/ sort of a biography https://www.doc88.com/p-97839165350509.html
10/consider the lobster(essay) https://www.doc88.com/p-9919926895149.html
11/oblivion(essay collection) https://www.doc88.com/p-40529398849440.html
12/girl with curious hair(essay collection) https://www.doc88.com/p-3929649425778.html
March 27th, 2024
A training ground in China's Inner Mongolia is a replica of the road network near Taiwan's Presidential Palace.
https://thediplomat.com/2015/08/satellite-imagery-from-china-suggests-mock-invasion-of-taiwan/
possessive passion and obsession- my new idol
March 16th, 2024
I started getting obsessed with Woolf a year after I read To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway, The Waves, A Room of One's Own, and Orlando. It took a whole year to process that I was in fact getting into my Woolf era, pretty late.
Now I've read up two biographies(one by Quentin Bell and the other by Alexa Harris), and I've searched up everything, tried to read everything, to grasp a fleeting genius, to understand, in a very masked calmness, my own anxiety of originality.
Some gem websites in my sleuth
https://fleursdumal.nl/mag/category/fictionandnonfiction/fiction-short-stories/virginia-woolf
https://archive.org/details/virginiawoolf0000harr
https://archive.org/details/lettersofvirgini0001wool/page/n14/mode/1up
https://archive.org/details/lettersofvirgini0001wool/page/18/mode/1up?view=theater
https://archive.org/details/isbn_2800156935809
Almost all her books:
https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupnamekey=Woolf%2C%20Virginia%2C%201882%2D1941
Uber Esser- Superfluous Eaters
March 14th, 2024
They ask, how does a Gandhian India have so much violence in it? Gandhian philosophy is an act, a stage play that requires an audience. In the depths of a forest where there is no one to watch, how can the starved displaced tribes stage a hunger strike?
I heard about superfluous eaters from an unoriginal point of view at first. The Operation Green Hunt in India to track down Maoists in India that joined radical forces to oppose the mining that was conducted by the signing of MOU. Bauxite in Assam itself cost over a billion.
Scholars say the way to create superfluous eaters is to dehumanize them- either by demonizing or making them faceless citizens, so that they 'disappear' into the forest, living in constant fear of ambush. By dehumanizing them, the rest of consumer India's conscience remains unaffected(to get something unlike the response to CAA right now).
When the whole world turns a blind eye, the villagers have nothing but to turn to Maoism. Operation Green Hunt was a failure, it only created more naxalites. The only success is that it created superfluous eaters(a Nazi term).
Hitler planned the annihilation of superfluous eaters through famine. All of Poland, USSR, Czechoslovakia were to be converted into large German settlement areas, which would entail 'resetting'(or killing), 30-50 million present inhabitants of those areas. This was a draft of the GPO(General Plan for the East). Hitler wanted people to have one justification for existence- "to be of use for them economically." A horrible stretch of this idiocy was the hunger strategy(depriving USSR of food to feed the German military), which had a devastating impact on soviet population. These were superfluous eaters, too starved to wander around to barter food. The famine was later culminated into Hitlers plan for the final solution, and it was the prime method of 'getting rid' of Nazi's racial and ideological enemies.
This is genocide. After the outcome of CAA, India is no better, spiraling unto itself, creating a deathtrap under divisions. It is only a matter of time before more of us become superfluous eaters.
July 26th, 2023
Here's what happened after Covid vaccines were made available in the US: "The excess death rate among Republican voters was 43% higher than the excess death rate among Democratic voters." 43% is a *massive* difference in outcome. Literally a death cult.
May 7th, 2023
As an intenet pundit known to be on the cutting edge of the cutting edge(ouch, it hurts!), I suppose I can't completely ignore the phenomenon known as New Media.
Not that I object to technological inventions, I like that my words can be read by anyone, anywhere, day or night.
Yet I dread the day when printed word is regarded completely obsolete by interactive broadand digital communication. It's so much easier to throw a book at your sibling.
Will Meta become the giant breathtaking Uber edia, or just a shovelfull of crap?
And how will this affect developments in copyright law, privacy and lame homepages featuring way too many pictures of someone's cat?
Sure, the idea of new media is flashy and more lively than the stone tablet, but as long as Musk continues to fail, and countries still have civil wars like its 1984, nothing will change.
That's what's old about the new media.
May 1st, 2023
Trust me, I'm all for plastic surgeries. What's cooler than cutting up people with their permission, all thanks to deluded image of 'prettiness'?
Perhaps they undergo suffering to change themselves because they're afraid of looking inside themselves and finding emptiness. Does tweaking the way your body looks create an illusion of depth among shallow minds?
Amundo, I'm truly annoyed.
Maybe the cosmetic surgeons should be more creative. How about an extra hand or a monkey tail to hang about trees, or skin pockets? Inbuilt weaponry sounds awesome.
Personal inflictions caused because of a close proximity nose job. I heard it caved in after two weeks.
Yours plastically,
AE Sam
January 28th, 2023
In our household, items such as clothes and toys would have multiple lives before being thrown out, and leftover food would be transformed into tomorrow’s lunch. In other words, my mother was an early advocate of the circular economy, in which materials and products have multiple iterations, and the waste of one process loops back and becomes the input for another.
For people of her generation, these are commonly held values. But younger generations have largely strayed from these ideas, opting instead to produce and consume more and more. Some of the waste is recycled, but that only goes so far towards addressing the problem that the planet has limited resources to offer.
The finiteness of this supply distinguishes materials from energy. There’s little doubt that in the future we will be able to capture more solar power and even build nuclear fusion reactors to abolish energy scarcity forever. But for material resources, no such technology is in view.
How to make plastic less of an environmental burden
January 19th, 2023
"At a lonely border post high on the Himalayan frontier, Ramaswamy Balasubramanian peered through his binoculars at the People’s Liberation Army soldiers stationed in Tibet—who were peering through their scopes back at him. Tensions between India and China had been high for several years since 1962, when the two countries traded shots across their disputed border. The PLA soldiers, knowing they were being watched, taunted Balasubramanian and his fellow Indian soldiers by shaking, defiantly, high in the air, their pocket-sized, bright-red copies of Quotations from Chairman Mao—better known in the West as “Mao’s Little Red Book.”
Balasubramanian, then a conscript studying physics in his spare time, soon grew tired of these taunts. So one day, he came to his observation post prepared with a suitable rejoinder. As soon as the PLA soldiers started waving Mao’s Little Red Book in the air again, he and two fellow Indian soldiers picked up and held aloft the three big, bright-red volumes of The Feynman Lectures on Physics."
----- Ralph Leighton, May 11, 2005
Recent Ponderings:
The current system of producing knowledge in science is a classical example of a failed capitalist system. Researchers are being exploited, and do not receive money for their work: the knowledge they produce in the form of research papers, does not belong to them. And it does not belong to people either. Instead, the knowledge in science today is a private property of a few mighty businesses, who make huge amounts of money from it. Not only that system is an obstacle to the progess, but it also creates huge distances between rich and poor, where poor people are blocked from access to knowledge. And that includes such important areas as medicine and healthcare.
All this was made possible by the fundamentally wrong concept of intellectual property.
Not only intellectual property creates injustice, but is also self-contradictory.
What can one do to avert this? Cognition? Technological advancement? Brain Mapping?
A new political ideology? Perhaps something that takes heed of evolution? Another Hitler?
Since the past few inactive months, I've actively read up everything I got, from pure mathematics, physics to theology, philosophy, communist and liberal ideologies, cognitive and neuroscience papers, random long essays that highlight the lives of women under Taliban, all in an attempt to become a omnipotent polymath.
Under this false canopy that I used to live, understanding the world, and knowing that it was all just a fallacy is quite the wrenching idea. My cover was torn and I witnessed the world as it is, and now I'm a muddled mess of everything humans have discovered the past few centuries.
Rings of Power(Running commentary)
September 11th, 2022
I found the first episode very boring, I'm afraid to say. I hope the next one will be drenched in LOTR theory and be a bit more interesting.
Also, the acting choices are very bad. I don't like the way hobbits look in this series. LOTR fan is mad.
August 27th, 2022
Lasting for four years (between 1975 and 1979), the Cambodian Genocide was an explosion of mass violence that saw between 1.5 and 3 million people killed at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, a communist political group. The Khmer Rouge had taken power in the country following the Cambodian Civil War. During their brutal four-year rule, the Khmer Rouge was responsible for the deaths of nearly a quarter of Cambodians.
The Cambodian Genocide was the result of a social engineering project by the Khmer Rouge, attempting to create a classless agrarian society. The regime would ultimately collapse when the neighboring Vietnam invaded, establishing an occupation that would last more than a decade.
Khmer Rouge's History.(If you don't know)
( Read more...Collapse )
There is difficulty establishing a definitive number of victims of the Cambodian Genocide. The Cambodians kept methodical records of prisoners and executions. However, because Cambodia’s enemy, Vietnam, invaded and released the records, there is speculation they could have been exaggerated. In addition, estimating the total number of people who starved is difficult. Estimates range from 1.5 to 3 million people having died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, with the consensus being approximately 2 million.
I was rather dismayed by the publication of doctored photographs from the Tuol Sleng prison archive by Matthew Loughrey. These photos are of incarcerated, often tortured individuals, who were subsequently murdered by the Khmer Rouge regime during the Cambodian Genocide of 1975-79. The preserved original photographs serve as a solemn reminder of lives lost, and more broadly of the horrors of that episode in humanity’s shared history. They are not material for an intellectual exercise or art project, and should never be used in that way.