310A mental health break to put a smile on your midweek: Lovely Japanese papercraft stop-motion music video, a charming manifestation of the magic of papercraft.
It’s not a failure until you stop trying.
[…]
I don’t think you can achieve anything remarkable without some risk. Risk is actually a rather tricky word because humans aren’t wired to tolerate it very much. The reptilian part of our brains wants to keep us safe. Anytime you try something that doesn’t have any certainty associated with it, you’re risking something, but what other way is there to live?
An interview with the brilliant Debbie Millman, whose 5-point advice to young people starting out is to be heeded.
Complement with famous creators on the fear of failure, which might be the greatest psychological impediment to happiness, and see Millman on confronting our self-imposed restrictions.
(via explore-blog)
Stunning architectural map of the solar system from Old Blueprints. Complement with the Milky Way as a subway map.
Do not be afraid to want a lot.
Things take a long time; practice patience.
Avoid compulsively making things worse.
Finish what you start.
Often people start out by thinking about all the things that they can’t do. Once you take that path, it’s very hard to get off of it. Shoot high and shoot often.
In this interview on The Great Discontent, the inimitable Debbie Millman (who is newly on SoundCloud!) offers five pieces of advice for young people starting out in any creative field – a fine addition to our running record of sage advice.
Complement with Neil Gaiman’s advice on the creative life and treat yourself to Millman’s sublime Look Both Ways: Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design.
(via explore-blog)(Source: , via explore-blog)
American cartoonist and author Lynda Barry (born January 2, 1956) is as much a storyteller as she is a visual philosopher. From her 1999 graphic-novel-turned-off-Broadway-hit The Good Times Are Killing Me, exploring the interracial relationship between two girls, to her long-running, deeply empathic weekly comic strip Ernie Pook’s Comeek, Barry’s instantly recognizable works are invariably imbued with equal parts humor, irreverence, sensitivity, and wisdom.
In 2009, her graphic novel What Is, published the previous year, received an Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work. But perhaps the most remarkable quality of Barry’s work is precisely its defiance of reality — the whimsy and wit with which she blurs the line between the real and, to borrow Sartre’s term, the irreal to peel away at some simple truth or grand complexity of what it means to be human.
Learn more: Wikipedia | Books | Literary Jukebox
When we talk about “searching” these days, we’re almost always talking about using Google to find something online. That’s quite a twist for a word that has long carried existential connotations, that has been bound up in our sense of what it means to be conscious and alive. We don’t just search for car keys or missing socks. We search for truth and meaning, for love, for transcendence, for peace, for ourselves. To be human is to be a searcher.
[…]
In its new design, Google’s search engine doesn’t push us outward; it turns us inward. It gives us information that fits the behavior and needs and biases we have displayed in the past, as meticulously interpreted by Google’s algorithms. Because it reinforces the existing state of the self rather than challenging it, it subverts the act of searching. We find out little about anything, least of all ourselves, through self-absorption.
Nicholas Carr worries about the filter bubble of modern search-culture and how it betrays the meaning of life.
Pair with neuroscientist Gary Marcus’s vision for what the future of search should be.
(via explore-blog)(Source: , via explore-blog)
When we say that love is ineffable, as Beckett knew, what we mean is that, when we love, we don’t know what the hell we are doing. We can’t stop talking through it, trying to figure it out. We think we ought to be talking about everything, doing everything, doing anything — breaking into spontaneous rage, talking about suicide, playing games, complaining about our boots — instead of just loving. We wait and wait and wait. Inevitably, boredom creeps in, terror creeps in. When you give yourself completely to another, as Vladimir and Estragon have done with each other, and you say, “Don’t leave me, you’re my only hope,” every day is a little more and a little less frightening, every day is a little more and a little less suicidal, every day is a little more and a little less. You could, like Vladimir or Estragon, easily be talked into hanging yourself from a tree by the only one who could save you from it. We must escape. We cannot. We can’t go on. We do.
Beautiful read on love in Beckett. Complement with literary history’s most timeless meditations on love.
(↬ Page Turner)
(Source: , via explore-blog)
There is a lack of rebelliousness and surprise. I also see this in students. I think we’re going through a period where the concept of a young person being rebellious is unusual. I think we’re going through a period where students in the U.K. are going to college not for an education but to get a job. And I see staff-to-student ratios of 1 to 100. One staff to 100 students—I find that shocking.
Legendary record sleeve designer Vaughan Oliver in How To Think Like a Great Graphic Designer, which also gave us timeless wisdom by design titans Massimo Vignelli and Paula Scher. (via explore-blog)
Gorgeous covers for four Hemingway classics — A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Death in the Afternoon, and The Old Man and the Sea — by artist Paul Rogers.
