Latest on twitter:
"When our days become dreary with low hovering clouds of despair, and when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. ”Where do we go from here?” August 16, 1967.
"There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter—the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last—the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store in a slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company."
Here is New York, E.B. White (via chrysilla) Of all the poetry and literature quotations posted in subway cars, this one (in abridged one) is my favorite.
This is sounding more and more like Amy Poehler’s quote about how she treats improv as her sacred space - as her church. I believe that so much right now. I want to stop judging and just treat that stage and that rehearsal space with that level of commitment. It’s also just a really useful metaphor. Even if you don’t view the improv stage as your personal sacred space (although if you’ve been doing this for more than a couple years and you still don’t think of it that way… not quite sure why you are doing it), you would still respect it as such right? I am not a Christian, but I still respect cathedrals as spaces.
All the good Christians I have ever known have said that a church is not a space, it is the congregation. I always interpreted Amy Poehler’s comment in the same light.
There have been two different churches in my life. My Egyptian relatives would drive over an hour every Sunday, from several different directions, to attend Saint Mary Coptic Orthodox Church in Ambridge, Pennsylvania. My family would make the trip only occasionally. After services everybody would gather downstairs to eat and socialize. Everybody was friendly, but almost every interaction was embarrassing for me because they all knew my name but I didn’t remember anybody else’s. I was young, shy, and saw them less than once a month.
At some point my family started attending Grace United Methodist Church in Natrona Heights, very close to our home. Here we attended regularly, and my brother and I joined the youth group and even went to a national convention in, strangely enough, Salt Lake City, Utah. It seemed like I should have an easier time fitting in, except for the fact that the rest of the youth went to one of two schools in the area, while I went to a prep school miles away. So even though I was more involved, everybody else still saw each other more frequently than I did.
In both cases, I was insanely jealous that everybody else was a part of a community and, for whatever reason, I didn’t fit into it. And I wanted it, so badly.
When I started taking improv classes, I seriously had no idea what I was getting into. Betsy Stover literally instructed us to go out and drink together after our 101 classes, because classes that socialize do better. Perhaps if she hadn’t said that, the past three years of my life would have turned out very differently.
I know now, the feeling I get when I step into the theatre and see my friends, is the feeling that I grew up watching other people have at church. It has only a little to do with the physical space, only a little to do with improv as a spiritual cult sort of thing, but everything to do with the people. Everything to do with the community. That is what makes it sacred to me.
P.S. I only quoted a small portion above. If you haven’t read the entirety of Katey’s manifesto, do it now.
Space hotel says it’s on schedule to open in 2012. The Barcelona-based architects of The Galactic Suite Space Resort say it will cost $4.4 million for a three-night stay at the hotel, with this price including an eight-week training course on a tropical island. (via MSNBC)
Please let me magically have $4.4 million by 2012 for this express purpose.
This makes me wonder if history will repeat itself and, in the future, those of us without the means to afford private space travel will still be able to see the universe by joining some kind of galactic navy. I’m not really a military man, but a slogan like “Join Starfleet, See the Galaxy” would be enough to convince me to enlist.
Also, I’d much rather fly around in a cool-looking starship than spend three nights in a orbiting wad of cigarette butts.
"Adding the random element to collection quests, no matter how illogical it might be, turns an otherwise flat “Kill ‘x’ creatures” quest into a dopamine roller-coaster of failures and successes. You feel satisfaction when that quest item drops. You also feel frustration when it doesn’t drop, but at least you feel something more than counting kills."
I have never really been a fan of Stargate. Mostly I have found the show campy and silly. A few interesting ideas but it always felt like Sliders meets Xena with some military crap on top of it.
But I’ve been watching Stargate Universe and digging it. Clearly influenced by BSG, in a good way. Sure, the set up is pure Voyager which would turn off most TV sci-fi fans. But I love the idea of being on an alien ship, trying to figure stuff out, struggling for resources, incredibly far from home.
Worth a look.
BUT WHAT ABOUT THE AWESOME MOVIE THAT WAS AWESOOOOOME?!?
Ancient Egyptian space travel, FTW!
"What I keep hearing from Washington is one of two arguments: either (1) the stimulus has failed, unemployment is still rising, so we shouldn’t do any more, or (2) the stimulus has succeeded, G.D.P. is growing, so we don’t need to do any more. The truth, which is that the stimulus was too little of a good thing — that it helped, but it wasn’t big enough — seems to be too complicated for an era of sound-bite politics."
Paul Krugman, Too Little of a Good Thing
NaNoWriMo: A Pep Talk and a Warning | 43 Folders
Are you writing a novel this year?
"Even when they take a biohazard on board, they contain it exclusively with a forcefield, which means that the lives of the entire crew are dependent on the continued operation, millisecond by millisecond, of some forcefield generator. I know that bottles and walls may seem “primitive” to the pinheads who write the show, but they work. And in engineering, you use what works."
Engineering and Star Trek. For Brett, who was interested in hearing about how the Enterprise was less than perfect.
