Linkage

Cool links ahead:

* I stumbled over Geocaching, which seems like an awesome way to get out into the wilderness and discover your surroundings. I really want to do that, too! :D

* Mark Kennedy wrote a brilliant blog entry about the original Star Wars, analysing the first hour of the film.

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This started as another sketch/idea for a bedroom painting. But it decided pretty quickly that this isn't what it wants to be.
(Pose again from ref, and general idea not really original - I forgot the artist who gave me the inspiration, though.)

Sketchy sketch:

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I'm probably referring to my Popular Culture lecture from Oxford way too often. But sometimes life gives you stuff that sticks with you mentally and every now and then your mind opens up the drawer in which it was hidden.

A film that we watched in that lecture was The Unbearable Lightness of Being. It was an interesting film, but I didn't fully understand its point and in general it wasn't the type of film that I normally like.
Still, something in the title intrigues me. Wikipedia says:

According to Kundera, "being" is full of "unbearable lightness" because each of us has only one life to live: "Einmal ist keinmal" ("once is nonce", i.e., "what happened once might as well have never happened at all"). Therefore, each life is ultimately insignificant; every decision ultimately does not matter. Since decisions do not matter, they are "light": they do not tie us down. But at the same time, the insignificance of our decisions—our lives, or being—is unbearable. Hence, "the unbearable lightness of being".

Which is something I need to internalise. I simply can't make decisions and usually let life and fate make them for me (which works surprisingly well).

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I remained pretty unaffected by today for most of the day. But ... at some point, the urge to do something grew too strong and I couldn't resist any longer.

Spread the love.



And this isn't a subtle hint that my cannibalistic tendencies and my appetite for sweets are interrelated. Tehehehe :->

Sweet Dreams

Intending to paint some oil or acrylic pictures for my flat - bedroom first. So I'm just throwing around some ideas for the time being (heavily referenced):

Something remarkable

He says my daugther, and all the love he has is wrapped up in the tone of his voice when he says those two words, he says my daugther you must always look with both of your eyes and listen with both of your ears. He says this is a very big world and there are many many things you could miss if you are not careful. He says there are remarkable things all the time, right in front of us, but our eyes have like the clouds over the sun and our lives are paler and poorer if we do not see them for what they are.
He says, if nobody speaks of remarkable things, how can they be called remarkable?

- Jon McGregor, "if nobody speaks of remarkable things"

Average student hit by origami plane from space

More stuff from New Scientist: A Japanese engineering professor wants to launch a 20cm Origami airplane from ISS.
The things you learn from unconventional ideas - I'd never have guessed that light objects don't heat up much when entering the atmosphere. I'd have thought a paper plane entering the atmosphere would make *poof*.

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The government made a social survey on students. I'm guilty of being interested in knowing the averages about my field of study (It's a general problem of humanity, I think - we need to know all kinds of averages, so we can compare ourselves and see if we're average enough. Only then can we rest easy) - that interest, however, has never been satisfied, because nobody seems to take us literature students seriously enough to justify talking to us about our averages.
Anyway, now I know - again - that I'm atypical (or maybe les beaux arts are simply atypical by themselves, and therefore nobody investigates them - why look at something that you know will disappoint your expectations, eh?).

Apparently, a majority of students gets public funding. The average student also has a monthly budget of over 1000€ (imagine how many books you can buy for so much money), and spends 970€ (a majority of that is spent on accommodation and food - knowing how much accommodation roughly costs, I can estimate what is left for food, which isn't bad; although I do wonder if "food" includes all the money spent on party drinks; hmmm). The average student has a 45-hour-week (33h for studies, 11.5h for work). Only one third of all students has no stress-induced health problems (!).

So we have a body of over-worked, under-paid future labourers who are already damaged before they take up their intended position in society. That's good. Because, you know, broken people do so much better work.

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I think I haven't shown these before ... they're quite old. I tried to make some simple icons depicting German idioms. Some more simple than others ;)