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This Must Be The Place: Poetic Short Films Explore ‘Home’

From filmmakers Ben Wu and David Usui of Lost & Found Films comes This Must Be The Place — an inspired ongoing series of short films exploring the idea of home and what our private sanctuaries mean to us. The latest film in the series, Coffer, takes us to the small kingdom of an upstate New York farmer named John Coffer.

COFFER from thismustbetheplace on Vimeo.

(via brainpickings.org)

The Atlantic: Inspiration: Something of an Ongoing Disaster »

theatlantic:

contemplatingchicken writes:

I struggle with consistency. I think that’s the best way to put it, and it makes talking about “inspiration” almost a laughable endeavor because I don’t feel, I never feel, as if I have enough data points in any given field to make generalizations about where I…

theatlantic:

The Most Desolate City on Earth: Gunkanjima, aka ‘Battleship Island’

Utterly abandoned, this former coal-mining site stands like a rotten tooth jutting from the turbulent waters off Nagasaki. A formidable seawall protects a dense warren of empty factory buildings and crumbling apartments. Roofs have blown off or caved in and walls have sloughed off their skins, leaving the skeletal underpinning of buildings visible. Dark hallways and dangerous, twisting staircases abound in M.C. Escherian complexity, leading to ruined vistas with names like “Block 65” and the “Stairway to Hell.” (Top-left and top-right, respectively.)

See more at The Atlantic Cities. [Images: Wikipedia]

theatlantic:

npr:

futurejournalismproject:

What Happens in an Internet Minute

Via Intel:

In just one minute, more than 204 million emails are sent. Amazon rings up about $83,000 in sales. Around 20 million photos are viewed and 3,000 uploaded on Flickr. At least 6 million Facebook pages are viewed around the world. And more than 61,000 hours of music are played on Pandora while more than 1.3 million video clips are watched on YouTube.

All in all, that’s 625 terabytes of information sloshing about the tubes each minute.

Whoa. That is all. Whoa. -Savy

Seconded. Whoa.

And over my body your body spreads
The sheet of its bright mirror.

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—	Paul Éluard, from “The Absence” (thanks, greenpunchbuggy)

If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another. The formula seems to lie solely in the aching urge of the writer to convey something he feels important to the reader. If the writer has that urge, he may sometimes, but by no means always, find the way to do it. You must perceive the excellence that makes a good story good or the errors that makes a bad story. For a bad story is only an ineffective story.

“

—	John Steibeck’s caveat to advice on writing.

Like carpenters’ tools, you have to learn when it’s appropriate to use each one. Everybody has these tools to some degree but none of them are taught in any curriculum. Observation is key. If you don’t interact with the digital world and you don’t observe what’s going on, then you have no data to work with. Abstracting involves sifting out what’s important and what isn’t. Imaging is remembering what you’ve abstracted out. Kinesthetic thinking involves feeling what a system is like and putting it muscularly into your body. People talk about finding problems by how you ‘feel.’ While sitting in a meeting, something might not feel right and you get a knot in your stomach – that is your body telling you that something doesn’t fit together. People who are creative tend to feel that explicitly. Learn to pay more attention to how your body feels about a problem.

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—	Dr. Robert Root-Bernstein Sparks of Genius: The 13 Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People (via)

explore-blog:

This manifesto for visual culture from Rencontres d’Arles is a fine addition to these 5 manifestos for the creative life.

(ᔥ The Histograms ↬Quipsologies)

curiositycounts:

Nelson Mandela Center of Memory: Beautifully designed, brilliant and ground-breaking on several levels — historically, technologically, socially. Another round of applause to Google for continued support in cultural exploration.

“With the help of a $1.25 million grant from Google, the center digitized thousands of documents and images that illustrate the life and times of South Africa’s first black president. But instead of scanning them and dumping them online for scholars to peruse, the center, with Google’s support, created a virtual museum experience — highlighting certain pieces from the archives, putting them in the context of Mandela’s life and then enabling a visitor to the site to go deeper if they’d like.”

(via)

curiosity counts: The Brain on Love »

curiositycounts:

A RELATIVELY new field, called interpersonal neurobiology, draws its vigor from one of the great discoveries of our era: that the brain is constantly rewiring itself based on daily life. In the end, what we pay the most attention to defines us. How you choose to spend the irreplaceable hours of…