(via Jon Crispin: Suitcases from the Willard Asylum for the Insane (PHOTOS).)

overidealism:

Ghost in the Machine by *linnsetane

explore-blog:

Beautiful patent drawing for R. J. Spalding’s Flying Machine, 1889. Complement with the illustrated history of human flight and 100 diagrams that changed the world.

Social behavior boils down to the “Morris Theorem”: “Change is caused by lazy, greedy, frightened people looking for easier, more profitable, and safer ways to do things.” These people are much the same everywhere. Their societies develop along similar paths. Geography explains different outcomes. “Maps, not chaps,” as Morris likes to say.

“The agency of individuals actually matters much less than historians tend to assume,” Morris tells me. “It’s hard to find any examples of decisions made by single individuals that ­really changed the big story very much—until you get into the 20th century, when you’ve got nuclear weapons.”

I recently said to a director, ‘Audiences are like furtive strangers standing outside school gates with bags of sweets. You follow them at your peril.’ They lead you down the wrong path, and then they say, 'We don’t believe you’ at the end of it when they’ve laughed and laughed and encouraged you to be funnier and funnier. They drop you, and you’re dumped as a character and as an actor, so always stay true. That’s the point.

I see time as sailors see wind, or photographers see light, as something to use, manage, and shape, not as something to be a victim of, or to see go by.

Martin Vasky

(via Great Expectations - Blog - Get Everything Done)

(via Yin and Yang: Man Feeding Swans and Ducks in Krakow | Bored Panda)

Annie Dillard observed that “Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.”

Few writers have managed more fully than Stacton to bear out Gore Vidal’s maxim that writers shouldn’t “write what they know” but, rather, what they imagine or suspect. The Stacton oeuvre also flies in the face of Michael Frayn’s droll advice that authors do well to write the same book “over and over again, just very slightly different, so that people get used to it”.

(via Los Angeles Review of Books - The Voice Of The Sea: Hurricanes In Life & Literature)

IN THE SUMMER OF 1999, the Holy Spirit directed Rick Karr, a 51-year-old Texan, to answer the calls made to a phone booth located in the middle of the Mojave Desert, 15 miles from a highway. He spent 32 days camping beside the phone booth on the desert playa in scorching heat. During that time he answered over 500 calls, many of which came from someone named Sergeant Zeno, who said he was phoning from the Pentagon.

(via Study Hacks » Blog Archive » “Write Every Day” is Bad Advice: Hacking the Psychology of Big Projects)

(via Jazz Age Club |  The cult of sunbathing)

(via PostSecret)

No one can accuse me of pandering or writing purely in the hopes of having a commercial hit. I doubt I could do that if I tried anyway. My friend pointed out that I also have a track record that establishes that I’m not fixated on having commercial hits. I forgot that part.

patakk:

for ivaplays

But the hallmark of a good writer is not avoiding script calamities. They are unavoidable. It’s responding to them - working hard to get the story right, being prepared to sacrifice every part or piece of the story and ultimately the episode itself to get the story right so the jokes will fly. It is hard work, but it’s mostly indoors, done with a MacBook Pro, nearby copious amounts of coffee, so it’s not all bad.

[In other words, the only way out is through.]

Story-surgery is required at a number of stages - and is more easily done early on in the process. That’s why is worth being brutal with your story or outline before you start writing a script. It’s like baking a cake. Mary Berry says to make sure you measure the ingredients carefully. If you don’t, it’s very hard to remove flour from a cake and add an egg when the cake is in the oven. The script equivalent of removing flour from a cake is through-the-night rewrites, caffeine overdoses, panic, sweat and weight gain. This, in my experience, can be exhilarating, once or twice but is mostly no fun

How would you like to be remembered?

I would like to be forgotten. What’s so good about being remembered?