Category: general

It’s much easier to believe in our importance when we view ourselves within small contexts. Through its networks and groups, Facebook simplifies the globalized world into manageable cyber-villages, with many of the costs and benefits of real villages, from the lack of privacy to the comfort of being recognized. The difference is that on Facebook, each of us gets to rule our own village, inviting and expelling members as we see fit.

Johnny Thakkar in “The Withering of Narcissus: Playing Tyrant on the Internet” for The Point (via britticisms) (via somethingchanged)

People ignore design that ignores people.

Frank Chimero (via charzmendoza)

The wounding and healing of nations are not different from the wounding and healing of individuals.

Aurora Levins Morales, Remedios:  Stories of Earth and Iron from the History of Puertorriqueñas (via lalilster) (via deltafoxtrot)

Christians should not talk so much about “morality,” a word derived from mores, the beliefs of a particular tribe. Ethics, however, are based on ideas that are true at all times and in all cultures.

marvin olasky

The problem here is that no one outside the IP lobby, not even those who strongly support copyright and patents, believes that these things are property that can be stolen. There is, I think, quite a bit of public sympathy for the view that the creative workers deserve a fair return for their efforts, and that social institutions should help to ensure that they receive it. There is essentially none for the inane suggestion that copying a video is similar to stealing a car.

John Quiggin on intellectual property. (via monkeytypist)

People only see what they are prepared to see.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (via reluctantbuddha) (via quote-book) (via ireadintothings)

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

Rudyard Kipling (via kari-shma) (via quote-book) (via ireadintothings)

what if our homes were places not where you retreat from the big bad world but what if they were places of hospitality where we welcome people in and we share life with them and we ask them about their hopes and dreams and… their failures?

kurt hannah

Even when we try to avoid looking at screens, our eyes are naturally drawn to their flickering lights. The dazzling special effects of our iPhones and our video games stimulate our brains more powerfully than reality. Given the option of looking at the slow pace of nature unfold or the frenetic speed of a big budget movie playing on a tiny screen, we often choose the screen. […] Our visual addiction is masking our fear of feeling existence to its fullest.

Screen Addiction, Adbusters (via somethingchanged) (via jomc)

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and the sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer.

Ernest Hemingway in Esquire, December 1934 (via 52books)