theoutregirl-blog

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Black is always elegant. It is the most complete colour in the whole world, made of all the colours in the palette.

Ricardo Tisci (via enkelthed)

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Ray Villafane - sand sculpture

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We’re all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn’t. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing.

Charles Bukowski (via patrickrhone)

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Detail from Kevin Rolly’s The Awakening 

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I think I'm going to retire into one of these. So lovely.

Tom’s Treehouse is an impressive three-story treehouse that was completed in 2011 and built for free by the talented and generous friends of couple Tereasa Surratt and David Hernandez. They used their combined skills of carpentry, roofing, and design to create a beautiful and touching tribute to Surratt’s’ father, who passed away shortly after the couple bought the property.

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<3 <3 <3

Professional sculptor Stefanie Rocknak beat out 265 other artists from 42 states and 13 countries to create a sculpture honoring author and poet Edgar Allan Poe that will be displayed in Boston, Poe’s birthplace. A five-member artist selection committee decided on Rocknak’s stunning work that shows Poe with a suitcase in hand and a raven in front of him.

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This kid is going places. [x]

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Thoughts on Facebook during my vacation from Facebook.

Articulating my annoyance with Facebook - See also, this is only my opinion/perception/yes I realize sharing this changes nothing. First, the things I like. I would *never* be able to keep up with this many people otherwise. I would find out months later that old friends had moved on to the next spectrum of existence, or never know that a childhood friend is now a forensic scientist, or see all of my Dad's great vacation photos. This is the summary of why I persist here, in the face of what I perceive as a massive (and mounting) quantity of drawbacks. Facebook is a black hole for time. After years of blogging and joining most, if not all, of the latest and greatest in communication, distraction, and online community it's just par for the course to participate. I'm here because, what the hell, everyone else is here. (See previously: Friendster, Myspace, LiveJournal, etc...)

But somewhere in that collective participation is the dominant influence of distraction. I can't actually tell if I'm "interested" in the information on facebook or it's just a reflex to go and check. Like most of my peers I live in a world full of multitasking and information saturation. My problem has become that because the bulk of my newsfeed is composed of people I'm not going to interact with much, if at all, outside of the online sphere, that my experience with that "person" is comprised entirely of their online behavior. Now before I explain why I hate this and I feel like it's turning me into a judgmental asshole let me clarify two things. First, yes ofcourse I realize *you* are not your Facebook, your memes and venting and links and reblogging and love of George Takei or Duck Dynasty are just a fraction of the whole. And second - I realize that asking you to "think" or police your content with your audience in mind is straight out of some Orwellian b.s. that even I think is ridiculous. But bear with me... because here's what I think happens (atleast to me). Your Facebook is all I know of most of you. It composes the inarguable bulk of my interaction with 'you', whoever you are. An in spite of my intelligence and rationalizing and my ability to put the place of Facebook into context of the fact that "you" are a complicated, interesting, good person that I probably really like for one reason or another, that's a lot of work to have to constantly re-contextualize information when you're "friends" with over 300 people. Think about it. Facebook was designed as a "community" for interactions. If your entire contribution to this environment is what I classify as "noise" (news links, memes, quotes, vague declarative statements) or worse, a constant stream of complaining or an invitation for conflict, your online persona is at best, like an annoying advertisement or at worst, a vacuum of negativity. And as a result my perception of "you" is composed entirely of this complaining and noise. It's happened that I have deliberately *hid* a number of people from my newsfeed because  I want to continue to like people, but it's an increasing challenge when the bulk of our interaction is me scrolling through this mountain of negative, A.D.D.-riddled, unfiltered b.s. that is the *only* representation of you I have. I get it. It's *your* Facebook. You post what entertains you, or distracts you, but that's whats made me start to hate this site. There is NO THOUGHT about what you're putting out. In favor of gratification and distraction it's all noise, there is no substance, it's largely just 80 - 90% wall of negativity or crap. You are not going to convince your friends to change their mind about their love of music/religious preferences/political leanings. That's a farce, I have no idea why people do it. People rarely post anything real. Nothing about who you are or what you're doing, no consideration for your "audience".  Now multiply that by 300 people and you have a typical Facebook newsfeed. No WONDER half of us are so pissed off being on this site. Think of all the utter garbage you have to sift through to read something interesting or funny or meaningful in a way that actually speaks to what a "community" online used to be like (at least in my experience).

It's made me irritable and jaded and it sucks. The suggestion that the solution is to "hide" the information that's annoying effectively renders the Newsfeed feature and the entirety of Facebook unusable.All that being said, I had to get off of the site to remember that I do like the people behind that crappy online interaction and allow my brain time to recalibrate and remember that it's just one place, one medium. I realize it would be lunacy to think that you can ask everyone, politely, to cultivate more meaningful content, when it's all we can do to just put down our phones and hang out together in person. Myself included. But truly, I think this is why Facebook will fail. People will slowly leave, drawn by the streamlined functionality of Twitter (and it's ability to allow you to group, read actual news, and its inherent limitation of *noise* both by posters and advertisers), or whatever site creates intuitive filtering to display the kind of real information that people used to share. It is not a community, maybe when it started it was, clinging to those vestiges of "sharing" popularized in the world of LiveJournal, but it hasn't really been one for awhile. I only stay for the small connections that are real and I guess... as long as I keep finding them inside this dumpster of a site, I'll stick around as long as I don't get buried or swept up in the rest of the garbage that this rapidly devolving medium seems to subconsciously encourage. 

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[In capitalism] Freedom is one of the commodities that is for sale, and if you are affluent, you can have a lot of it.

Noam Chomsky (via noam-chomsky)

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Really like this one

john william waterhouse - the magic circle

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Faces of Olympic Figure Skating [via] Previously: Tennis Faces

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Are you kidding me? This makes my nerdy/literary/geek heart want to explode.

Hogwarts

KurtFagerland.tumblr. Com

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What the kitchen looks like when I make dinner, every single time.

ALL THE PANS MUST BE USED. GIANT DISASTER. *bork booork bork*

Lunchtime!

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Merek Davis