normal

It's not normal for giant conglomerates of atoms to exhibit consciousness. What the hell is going on?

There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be. - Douglas Adams

mentor

You’d get a phone call at 3 a.m., and he used to call me “Colonel Depp,” because he made me a Kentucky colonel, and he’d say, “Colonel, what do you know of black-hairy-tongue disease?” And I was like, “What? I don’t know!” He’d say, “Well, I’m going to send you all the information about this, man. We must be aware of this thing.” He was deeply concerned that the disease would infiltrate our ranks.

 

 

 

Left: Johnny Depp as Paul Kemp in "The Rum Diary." Right: Hunter S. Thompson in Bug Sur circa 1960., Peter Mountain / Courtesy of Filmdistrict and GK Films (left); Courtesy of Ammo Books

The Hunter from 1959 and 1960 was this long, lean, athletic, handsome man, who used to type The Great Gatsby over and over to see what it felt like to write a masterpiece. He was a kid searching for his voice and looking for the outlet for that rage, anger, and passion.
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Great Article

wise old (dead) man

cage

I see a picture.

I see a film.

I see an insurmountable problem.

I see . . . Rhinoceroses.

strangers in the dark

education

Guy Fawkes

I just liked this picture

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Joe the Peacock

trick or treat

I walked my line with them, too. This man was hurting, yet his problem wasn’t mine to solve. In fact, I needed to get out of his way so he could solve it.

Instead, a shroud of calm enveloped me, and I repeated those words: “I don’t buy it.”

You see, I’d recently committed to a non-negotiable understanding with myself. I’d committed to “The End of Suffering.” I’d finally managed to exile the voices in my head that told me my personal happiness was only as good as my outward success, rooted in things that were often outside my control. I’d seen the insanity of that equation and decided to take responsibility for my own happiness. And I mean all of it.
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Source

Common Knowledge

1. Although I personally do not believe in God, I find atheists to be as annoying as bible-nuts. Keep your personal beliefs or lackthereof to yourself.

2. You've been friendzoned because [they] construe your excessive emotionality and wants as feminine and needy. Love is about losing oneself in another person's ability to provide.

3. Most people are emotional and neurotic enough without having to deal with your emotional bullshit.

4. Emo and self-pity is narcissim disguised through depth. Don't, or people will resent your woe-is-me bullshit.

5. Contrary to popular belief, depression is not a painful experience. Depression is a numbing strategy to hide the consequences of anger. An emotionally healthy person can allow themself to feel true anger without reacting to it. When you numb yourself off from this anger, you also numb yourself from the happiness and joy in your life and become depressed.

6. Cigarettes stunt emotional growth by creating an easy anti-anxiety mechanism without actually solving the root of your anxiety.

7. Pop culture is not amazing. Popular culture is oppressive and stifling and is about conforming to what other people expect out of you. Find what you want and pursue it to the end of the earth.

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Source, although I don't agree with all of it.

E-prime

"E-prime denotes a subgroup of the English language without the word "is". This can prevent a host of fallacies by forcing us to include the instrument of perception into our sentences."

Examples:
Edward Norton is a good actor. - Edward Norton seems to be a good actor based on his roles in Fight Club, The Illusionist, and American History: X.

The car is blue. - Based on my perceptions of color, the car appears to be blue.

B Side

"And once physicists got down to the serious business of building bombs, we were apparently returned to a universe of objects—and to a style of discourse, across all branches of science and philosophy, that made the mind seem ripe for reduction to the 'physical' world."

Absolutely nothing about a brain, when surveyed as a physical system, suggests that it is a locus of experience.

Consciousness—the sheer fact that this universe is illuminated by sentience—is precisely what unconsciousness is not. And I believe that no description of unconscious complexity will fully account for it. It seems to me that just as “something” and “nothing,” however juxtaposed, can do no explanatory work, an analysis of purely physical processes will never yield a picture of consciousness. However, this is not to say that some other thesis about consciousness must be true. Consciousness may very well be the lawful product of unconscious information processing. But I don’t know what that sentence means—and I don’t think anyone else does either.

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Sam Harris