randomWalks

The daily repetition of chores once associated with survival has now been fully recast as a series of almost spiritual rituals intended to reconnect the camper with what has been largely lost; for by now most of the old necessities — hiking to and clearing the site, hunting for game, collecting water and firewood — have given way to such less arduous activities as parking the car, pitching cable-free pop tents, buying cold cuts at the campground store, hooking up electrical and sewerage conduits, setting up patio chairs, etc.

I was wolfbackriding while shooting white doves with fire when I got the email from Visitsweden.

I have been using the internet for TWENTY years! Like some hipster who has been following a band for years I spent 10 of those years not shutting up about the internet, and then the second 10 years wishing everyone would get off my internet.

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jimn:

How is this considered OK but Milli Vanilli were fake (for doing what every pop act did & does)?  

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One of 26 photos in ISS Star Trails by NASA_JSC_Photo

I had never been able to find a clear way to say “it’s over” until now. Last week, I broke up from my long term girlfriend simply by using the “unpair” button. Alas, it saved a lot of pain and “talking,” since we conducted our entire relationship on pair since we had moved. It’s like we never even met — easy and painless.

But let’s face it — most of us know in our hearts that eschewing a breakfast of whole grains and fruit crowned with a dab of yogurt for a greasy pile of sausage, bacon, and eggs is not the road to health.

I try not to make it be about me, but as with all evangelizers, something transforms you and changes your life—you see people saying things that are dangerous, and it’s hard not to speak up.

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(via The crayola-fication of the world: How we gave colors names, and it messed with our brains (part I) | Empirical Zeal)

It took me 10 years to figure out that I have a large karmic debt to pay for the number of Cokes I sold across this country. … It’s shocking to me now. But it was not shocking to me then in any way, shape or form. … We were really uninformed relative to the health issues.

There is a large portion of the population that relies on the carbohydrates and energy in our regular beverages. When my son gets home from school, he needs a pick-up with calories and great taste.

Increasingly I find myself purchasing from the food underground, tiny businesses that could never find their way through the monolith of regulations. They are foods, god forbid, cooked in people’s kitchens. You know, kind of like the food mom made, but for some reason it’s OK if mom does it, but not OK to sell it to other people.

This is by far my favorite book of the series, which makes no sense because it is the most boring and nothing happens in it. But there’s a scene at the beginning, when the Ingalls family moves into their fiftieth new house, and comes across all of the cool odds and ends left over by the last tenants that reminds me so much of my favorite dream ever, in which I am roaming around a house filled with all of these endless rooms of marvelous and amazing stuff, that I couldn’t help loving it despite its boringness.

I’m not going to put anything in my body that was not here before the Europeans arrived, because there is something wrong here. Ever since colonization, my people went from being a fit, athletic race of people to the most sickly and lame.

The absence of human placentophagy, the maternal consumption of the afterbirth, is puzzling given its ubiquity and probable adaptive value in other mammals. We propose that human fire use may have led to placentophagy avoidance in our species. In our environment of evolutionary adaptedness, gravid women would likely have been regularly exposed to smoke and ash, which is known to contain harmful substances. Because the placenta filters some toxicants which then accumulate there across pregnancy, maternal placentophagy may have had deleterious consequences for the overall fitness of mother, offspring, or both, leading to its elimination from our species’ behavioral repertoire.

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(via Mind-Blowing Shadow Art by Kumi Yamashita)

Liberal democracy—based on commitment to individual liberty and dignity—does not exist if the government legislates against particular bodies in public spaces, as it did during Jim Crow, or when it is complicit in the violent policing of those bodies by other citizens, as in the Trayvon Martin slaying. For more than two years, vocal pockets of conservative activists and politicians demanded proof of President Obama’s citizenship—as if a black man was trespassing simply by being elected to the Oval Office. As the president was being asked to show his papers to the nation, state governments in Arizona, Alabama and South Carolina empowered police officers, school officials and merchants to demand proof of citizenship from anyone they deemed suspicious of immigration violations—suspicions that are triggered primarily by racial, ethnic and linguistic profiling. Despite the dramatic legal changes brought about by the ending of Jim Crow, it is once again socially, politically and legally acceptable to presume the guilt of nonwhite bodies.

Unfortunately, “inadequate citizen rule” or “doubts about corporate governance” are not among the choices. From the available list, I went with “I don’t feel safe on Facebook.”

They’re fucking gross, man. Look, I love beautiful girls too. I think everyone should be free to have their knee socks and their sweaty shorts, but I’m over it. I’m over this weird, exhausted girl. I’m over the girl that’s tired and freezing and hungry. I like bossy girls, I always have. I like people filled with life. I’m over this weird media thing with all this, like, hollow-eyed, empty, party crap.

vimeo.com/42420343

jsmooth995:

DON’T FREAK OUT ABOUT THE WHITE BABIES.

I would predict the first guy who uses a Second Amendment weapon to bring a drone down that’s hovering over his house is gonna be a folk hero in this country.

We have a game that you play once, on a randomly assigned difficulty setting, where you initially spawn in some random location (and may legally be prevented from leaving that location), where your long-term stats depend heavily on both the stats given to you by your parent gamers and by their treatment of you early in life. Every one of these factors is out of your control, and heavily influences how successful you’ll be in the game. What can be done, both as an individual player and as a collective of players, to give as many people as possible a satisfying gaming experience?

We need to work toward flooding the market—even if for the moment merely the intellectual market—with a mass of desires whose realization is not beyond the capacity of man’s present means of action on the material world, but only beyond the capacity of the old social organization.

My son will be three-years-old next month and is still breastfeeding. In other words, he is a typical primate.