Inspir.es

May 24th, 2011

Zoom

My late-20’s will be remembered as the phase of my life where I did boring things in fun places.

May 20th, 2011

Sometimes when I ask people about the majors they picked in college, I get an answer—regardless of the major—akin to “because it’s like, just so fundamental, you know?” The neuroscientist thinks, the brain, the brain! Everything starts with the brain. The writer thinks, where would we be without language, without the ability to communicate our ideas? The investment banker thinks, money runs the world, and he who commands it shapes the entire planet. The environmentalist thinks, none of this would matter if we didn’t have an earth to live on. The designer thinks, everything is designed and design can solve all the world’s problems.

April 27th, 2011

Darwin’s notebooks lie at the tail end of a long and fruitful tradition that peaked in Enlightenment-era Europe, particularly in England: the practice of maintaining a “commonplace” book. Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters — just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. The great minds of the period — Milton, Bacon, Locke — were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book. In its most customary form, “commonplacing,” as it was called, involved transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one’s reading, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations. There is a distinct self-help quality to the early descriptions of commonplacing’s virtues: maintaining the books enabled one to “lay up a fund of knowledge, from which we may at all times select what is useful in the several pursuits of life.

Where Good Ideas Come From

April 24th, 2011

If you need me, I’ll be in the backyard.

March 11th, 2011

What Should I Do With My Life?

I wanted to be an engineer. My uncle Jack was an engineer, and I love my uncle Jack.

When Uncle Jack’s family visited from Minnesota, he and I would play catch. Sometimes we’d even play a modified, capitalist version of the game 500. Jack would throw a tennis ball (or baseball, as I got older)…

I wrote this for the Real HQ blog.

Reblogged from Real HQ Blog

February 1st, 2011

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Let's Fall Back In Love

Slow Club

Yeah, So

Slow Club - Let’s Fall Back In Love

And although you are so near
In everything you do
All your doubts and fears I hope some day stop haunting you

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January 19th, 2011

Zoom

Close encounters on my walk to the grocery store…

December 24th, 2010

[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

Everything Is One Big Christmas Tree

The Magnectic Fields

Realism

Everything is One Big Christmas Tree - The Magnetic Fields

Nein, vielleicht ist Alles nicht ein Traum
Ist Alles ein Albtraum? Nicht, nicht!
Alles ist ein großer Tannenbaum
Rotierend im Weltraumgeschichte

In English?

No, maybe not all a dream
Is all a nightmare? No, no!
Everything is a big tree
Rotating in space history

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December 21st, 2010

The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows.

David Foster Wallace - A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

December 15th, 2010

Matt’s Dream

Matt just sent me an email about a dream he had last night. A dream that painted a “perfect picture of our friendship and respective personalities” he said - and I agree.

Here’s Matt describing his dream:

We were both going to Alamo Drafthouse to see Black Swan (a movie I really want to see). We were walking up just as the movie is starting and we see a disheveled man sitting there - waiting for tickets to a shitty movie that won’t be premiering for 2 days. It’s like Twilight or something but he’s been camping out for a week already so he’s obviously crazy in love with the movie.

Anyway, I’m heading inside so I won’t miss any of Black Swan but you start talking to the guy about some bullshit like why he’s so interested in the movie and how this obsession affects his life blah blah blah. I peek inside the theatre and the movie is starting so I begin to act like my usual “have to be on time for everything” self and go back to find you and hopefully drag you inside.

By this point, you’d decided to perform a “social experiment” with the gentleman outside and have lost any and all interest in the movie we were going to see. You’ve discovered he’s not very well off and this movie is one of the few things he enjoys in life. So you, realizing as much as me how stupid the movie is, proceed to offer him money to not watch the film ever.

In the end you pay him several THOUSAND dollars to leave and go home and never see this movie. The whole time I’m dumbfounded that you would waste so much money on something so crazy.

I’m pretty sure I called you a dumbass and then I woke up.

Inspir.es

Matt’s Dream

I Worked Here

@timhackbarth

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