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11.23.07

happy holidays, everyone.

i'm blogging from work, where i eventually ended up after attempting to participate in "black friday." i came away with 3 picture frames (dirt cheap at hobby lobby), a mild amount of stress from the traffic, and a renewed passion for purchasing christmas gifts online.

and, in honor today being the official kick-off of the holiday season, i want to share two websites with you that i have enjoyed lately. hopefully the joy will spread.

the first sits is archive.org. its basically a digital library of text, images, films, and music. but what's especially exciting is the live music page, where you can download (free) live music from a wide array of artists (ryan adams, ben gibbard, waterdeep are among my favorites on the site).

the second site is freerice.com. its an online vocabulary game where they give away 10 grains of rice to help end world hunger for every word you get correct. the man who started it launched the website just a couple of months ago, and to date they have given away 3,403,520,350 grains of rice. the site partners with the united nations to disperse the rice among nations such as myanmar, nepal, cambodia, bangladesh, and several others. the game is a lot like practice questions from the vocab section of the GRE. so, the next time you want to piddle around at work, don't waste your time on crosswords or youtube. you can donate rice instead!

merry christmas!

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11.10.07

prepare yourself, for you are about to read something completely ridiculous...

i heard a story on npr today about this organization called reversible destiny lofts. these two people- artists-architects-poets Arakawa and Madeline Gins- design these architectural spaces to stimulate the mind and "complete" the position of one's soul (as in, the soul extends out beyond the vessel of the body and into the space around it) in order that the body will never die. the idea sounds a lot like existentialism.

now if this sounds totally silly, it is. but this is the premise of their work-- to "reverse" one's destiny (which would obviously be ultimate death) and to experience immortality. They have also written a book about this called Reversible Destiny: We Have Decided not to Die. Here is some of what they have written:

" 'Beginning,' 'past,' 'future,' 'I,' 'me,' and 'you' are all words that have no place in this process. They are superfluous. As if magnetized, the body, moving in a veering, unbalanced balance, loses all sense of identity, or casts the little that remains of its identity as a person, outside itself. The person who entered the cylinder on her own volition ceases now to be the initiator of her own actions."

so to make a crazy idea a little crazier, this couple builds this outrageous living spaces to help you achieve immortality, mostly popular in japan. here are a few images of what they look like:

feeling immortal yet?