May 2013
7 posts
2 tags
"I try to play with at least one deck every...
My team and I spent almost four hours straight yesterday afternoon making gloriously inappropriate deck jokes amongst ourselves and then eventually the rest of our cohort and laughing so hard we couldn’t breathe or speak or see (due to the tears streaming from our eyes). Because we were building a web app for flashcard studying, so we were working with card models and user models and study...
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“Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you...”
– Margaret Atwood (via biscodeja-vu)
I adore Margaret Atwood, but Bruce Lee > Madam Mags:
“Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless— like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup; you put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle; you put it in a teapot, it becomes the...
rachelisaflameprincess:
bendydicks:
considerthishippie:
Instead of just looking up into the sky, you’re actually gazing down into the infinite cosmic abyss, with only gravity holding you onto the surface of the earth.
oh
i was not prepared for that
"Always come back to the breath" →
Something Jen occasionally does during a session is remind us to “always come back to the breath”. While I am poetically fond of the prepositional phrase “back to” in and of itself, I especially like the sound and feel of this particular saying. Breath is such a fundamental, elemental thing. Coming back to the breath is coming back to the thing that keeps us alive. Coming back to the breath is...
(not posting on the DBc stream for fairly obvious...
Recently I had a dream in which I was writing Ruby code for sex. And not like code for a game about sex, but like actual human sex. Like, if humans were actually just computers running programs— I was writing the program we would be running when we wanted to get down and dirty.
The point here, though, is that I woke up seriously disturbed. And not because I was dreaming about coding (this...
writersprocrastinate:
Hi, I’m a writer. My hobbies include not writing.
Also occasionally writing about not writing.
April 2013
18 posts
1 tag
DLG + DBc →
Notes from the Squirrel girl of the first graduating class of the Chicago Dev Bootcamp program.
My head hurts and I don’t have the patience to figure out Tumblr’s inner workings right now. If you’re looking for or are interested in following my Dev Bootcamp notes, they’re on the account linked above, not this main one.
Award-winning childrenâs author E.L. Konigsburg... →
neil-gaiman:
FALLS CHURCH, Va. â E.L. Konigsburg, an author who twice won one of the top honors for childrenâs literature, has died. She was 83.
I loved “From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler”. I loved reading it as a boy, and I loved reading it aloud to my kids.
Oh. “Mixed Up Files” was a favorite of mine for so long. When I finally went to New York for the...
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ONE: TRANSIT (LAS-BKK) + BANGKOK →
You are sitting in your room in Las Vegas. It is midnight on Friday, May 19, 2012. You have 3 hours and 45 minutes before you’re supposed to leave for the airport.
» look room
A typical bedroom. There is a bed, covered with clothes and electronics. An empty 65L backpack sits on the floor. A suitcase full of clothes and shoes is in the corner.
» pack backpack for trip
You...
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Also: yeah, that was a “Tangled” GIF. I watched it for the first time in February and am oddly hooked on it now.
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Net neutral is still way better than pissed-off.
Discovered a really great speakeasy last night. +1 With a really great jazz quintet playing. +1 And had one (1)(ONE) drink that had me intermittently sprinting to the bathroom the rest of the evening to throw up. -1 Even after I stopped having anything left TO throw up. -1 Which reminded me why it’s been 4 months since the last time I drank anything. +/-1
My bike arrived! +1 It...
Hello: We need to talk about the Friendzone →
yeti-detective:
Consider something for me. Imagine that I, an incredibly good-looking, nice, eligible man, was walking into a shop ahead of you. As I reach the door I stop to look behind me, and I see you there only a few paces away. So I wait and hold the door. Maybe you say something like, “Thanks, bro. That was really nice.”
To which I respond, “Yeah, it was. Now you know what you have to do,...
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"we who find solace in the darkness are not alone" →
If I say that walking through that drain was like a dream, understand that I don’t mean dreams of the soulful-wishing kind.
In 2002, a (now-but-not-then-)friend of mine and his editor explored miles of storm drains beneath Las Vegas to investigate the community of people living down there. Eleven years later, I asked him to take me down into the madness to see it for myself, and then I...
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Stubborn goat days
Obstinée. Têtue. Tvrdoglava.
I am six keystrokes and five trackpad clicks away from disappearing into the European countryside and becoming a cheesemaker.
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you marvel at “seeing me” for the first time but I never asked, never wanted to be seen I say: “love can’t be selfish” you insist: “my love is selfless” our common language fails and again and again we fall
2/30
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Day 2: Who was the last person you texted? Write a five-line poem to that person. [Only Day 2 and I’m remembering why I never...
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leaving behind an unmarked pittance, obfuscating whispers of divided allegiance: reality beckons and the heart twists with conflict; amidst fresh snow trees stir from sleep
1/30
——-
Day 1: Write a poem where each line starts with a letter from your first name (an Acrostic). It can be about anything, but it should not be about you or your name. [apparently they *are* making new...
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March 2013
17 posts
1 tag
Come unto these yellow sands
I’m not religious and it’s a stretch most days to say even that I am spiritual. I don’t believe in an afterlife or in reincarnation; I don’t believe in the supernatural or the paranormal— then again, my views on truth and knowledge are shaky. I’m a follower of Hume. I really should have never been allowed near the philosophy department at school.
Either way,...
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[j'avais froid tous les jours]
For the past five days, all of a sudden, Facebook has been persistently showing him in my sidebar and suggesting that we be friends. I don’t know how to explain to an algorithm that it isn’t possible to be friends, even facetious online friends, with an unsummonable ghost.
"Advice for my daughter" →
Whatever you are, and whatever you become, it’s partially us in there. You’re going to hate that sometimes, but it conquers death. You are our heaven. We go to you when we die. (Chris Magyar)
"Christopher, the wolf, is blatant wish... →
Bad prose is not so much bad as unfocused. I have just discovered this. I have also discovered that constructing a plot, any plot, is difficult, what with how you have to draw up characters and invent some scenery and move them around and do it all in a way that isn’t obvious or boring.
I have learned the meaning of self-loathing, and it is writing a sentence that you know is sloppy and...
“MASHA: Well, I wish you all the best. Don’t think badly of me. I’m...”
– “The Seagull”, Anton Chekhov
Despite owning a fair amount of Chekhov, I’ve never read or studied his work, so I don’t know if I’m supposed to find this as funny as I do or if it’s just the fact that I’m in a mood of black humor right now.
2 tags
February 2013
9 posts
Watchlaughingsquid:
Portlandia Spoofs Conceptual Art
“Run Fred, Run!”
1 tag
outofcharactersuburb:
I’ve stopped drinking Diet Coke in the sense that I no longer buy it or keep it in the house, but if YOU have Diet Coke in YOUR house be prepared for me to lock myself in your bathroom with all of it.
I suddenly have the urge to drive to Tempe and create a trail of cans of Diet Coke that lead all the way back to Vegas.
Watch, read, listen, wait
I clicked through enough times to identify the author of that typed blue poem two posts ago, the one about how “everyone you love is made of stardust” and “the night sky is no home” and you know what, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, just go read it.
“F. Butler” is one Finn Butler, and not only does she write poems that will break you with...
I'M AN AMERICAN. Also, there is nothing right...
[While trying to use a French keyboard on a Windows computer]
Me, muttering: Where the HELL... where is the...? Oh goddammit.
Him: What are you looking for?
Me: The period. The dot.
[he points to a key in the middle of the board which requires Shift to access the "."]
Me: That is a stupid place for a period.
Him: Well, where is it on your keyboard?
Me: WHERE IT'S SUPPOSED TO BE.
"Six cents. It was a cheap thrill, and an... →
The best argument for verse memorization may be that it provides us with knowledge of a qualitatively and physiologically different variety: you take the poem inside you, into your brain chemistry if not your blood, and you know it at a deeper, bodily level than if you simply read it off a screen. Robson puts the point succinctly: “If we do not learn by heart, the heart does not feel the rhythms...
