Everyone who terrifies you is sixty-five percent water. And everyone you love is made of stardust.
— Finn Butler
…the loss of the starry skies, accelerated by worldwide population growth in cities, has created an urbanite who “forgets and no longer understands nature.” He adds, “To show him stars is to help him dream again.
— Thierry Cohen (via nikkiatschool)
The Amsterdam-based designer says he likes to “visualize [his] fantasies” with his projects, many of which, he thinks, are shared by others.
— http://www.fastcodesign.com/1671645/three-absurd-tools-for-coping-with-waiting-room-misery#7 (via nikkiatschool)
Charles Duke
This was the first photograph I ever bought, a print from the original NASA negative. I looked at it every day for years.
The astronauts on the moon had to contend with quarantine, not just for them, but for their stuff. Nothing could touch the surface, or be exposed to raw atmosphere without extensive decontamination.
Charles Duke brought a photo of his family with him and like everything else they carried, it needed to be isolated from the environment with plastic. It’s hard to say exactly what motivated him to photograph it lying on the surface of the moon, but it’s not that hard to say. If you looked up and saw the earth 250,000 miles away, when you looked back down, you’d want to see something close.
Among the other remarkable aspects of this photo, it made me realize that all the other NASA photos of the moon’s surface were actually color photographs. It was the moon that was monochrome, not their film.
I always try to picture Duke looking down and seeing his family there, covered in plastic, and wondering whether it made them feel closer, or further away. Of all the photos in the world that address the fragility and vulnerability of human life, this is my favorite. It’s in contrast to the hubris, genius, and accomplishment of considering that vulnerability while dressed in a spacesuit and stomping around on the motherfucking moon.
Looking back, I’ve had a remarkable ride. I’m not sure I can call it a career, because a career implies that I had some kind of career plan, and I never did. The nearest thing I had was a list I made when I was 15 of everything I wanted to do: to write an adult novel, a children’s book, a comic, a movie, record an audiobook, write an episode of Doctor Who… and so on. I didn’t have a career. I just did the next thing on the list.
— Neil Gaiman (via nikkiatschool)
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead He was my North, my South, my East and West, The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
— W.H. Auden (as seen in Quinn’s post about Aaron)
Explaining technical camera things to my 11 yo cousin is like explaining the internet and computers to my seniors.
Me: yeah. the cheapest SLR you'll find is probably around 500.
S: i really want a SLR camera
Me: that's how much i got my most basic one before.
S: what is the diff betweem SLR and DSLR
Me: oh, just use them interchangeably.
S: so no diff?
Me: there is a diff technically. one is digital and the other one is analog.
S: whats analog
Me: like, old. you know, haha
Me: like a film camera.
S: so i think i want the new one.
My whole career has been me trying to find new ways to communicate with people because I desperately want to communicate with people but I don’t want the messy interaction of having to make friends and talk to people, because I probably don’t like ‘em.
— Edmund McMillen in Indie Game: The Movie
When there’s nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire.
— Stars
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.
—
Jack Kerouac
The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.
— Neil Gaiman
The urge, starting out, is to copy. And that’s not a bad thing. Most of us only find our own voices after we’ve sounded like a lot of other people. But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.
— Neil Gaiman
Something that worked for me was imagining that where I wanted to be – an author, primarily of fiction, making good books, making good comics and supporting myself through my words – was a mountain. A distant mountain. My goal. And I knew that as long as I kept walking towards the mountain I would be all right. And when I truly was not sure what to do, I could stop, and think about whether it was taking me towards or away from the mountain. I said no to editorial jobs on magazines, proper jobs that would have paid proper money because I knew that, attractive though they were, for me they would have been walking away from the mountain. And if those job offers had come along earlier I might have taken them, because they still would have been closer to the mountain than I was at the time.
— Neil Gaiman
…it will make you yearn for materiality and ask yourself how you can bring a stillness of the senses back into an area that feels perpetually hyperactive.
— Andy Polaine’s review of Kenya Hara’s Designing Design
