bastardtravel - Tumblr blog

[bastardtravel]

Say no more fam

https://www.feralstrengthco.com/product-page/monkey-time-tee

want a shirt that says YOU SHOULD FEEL VISCERALLY VIOLATED BY THE UNSTOPPABLE CORPORATE ENCROACHMENTS ON YOUR ATTENTION SPAN, BY THE FACT THAT YOU STARTLE LIKE A TRAINED ANIMAL AT EVERY NOTIFICATION, BOTH OVERSTIMULATED AND BORED, LETHARGIC AND JUMPY, WAITING FOR THE NEXT BIT OF VALIDATION WITH THE SAME SICKLY EXCITEMENT AND FEAR AS A GAMBLER AT THE TABLE

[bastardtravel]

... within reason

People with higher body mass are literally more attractive than people with lower body mass.

[bastardtravel]

I travel pretty light, by virtue of having been itinerant for most of my life. When you’re forced to get by on the essentials, you realize everything else is just dead weight. I think I heard a singing bear say that once.

Ivan NIkolayevich, Panopticon Blues

[bastardtravel]

These gendered delights have gendered ends.

[bastardtravel]

The arts are long and life is short.

Bernard Cornwall, Excalibur

[bastardtravel]

My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart concealing it will break.

William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew

[bastardtravel]

Especially when we can’t live perfectly on a plant-based diet. Crippling anemia and B-vitamin deficiencies, often intractable even with supplementation due to overconsumption of grains.

They don’t want you to eat 2000 calories of actual vegetables a day. The only crops that fit this misrepresented “environmental sustainability” mythology are grains, and those wreak havoc on human health, no matter how organic the sticker reads.

Inuits in the Arctic can survive perfectly on a plant based diet 😤

[bastardtravel]

cut out the middle man and just cut the cop

[bastardtravel]

The mistake people make when they talk about not being able to trust Wikipedia is in the implicit assumption that we could trust encyclopedias as infallible sources before Wikipedia. I like Wikipedia because I know it could be wrong. Regular encyclopedias can be wrong, too, but my guard was never up in the same way with them as it is with Wikipedia. I like Internet media specifically for the reason that Aaron Sorkin doesn’t like it: because it makes it that much more difficult for me to have any illusions about the fact that the burden of critical thought is on me. I don’t automatically trust bloggers because a group of people I’ve never met decided to give them a badge that says “reporter” on it. I don’t turn off my critical thinking because they’ve gotten to be some sort of “professional”. I have to judge them on the merits of their writing and history of thoughtfulness or thoughtlessness alone. That is a feature, not a bug, because we should never trust any news media outlet implicitly.

On the Internet Everyone Knows You Could Be a Dog, or Why I Think Aaron Sorkin Is Wrong About the Value of Established Media Outlets (via researchtobedone)

[bastardtravel]

The conquest of the fear of death is the recovery of life's joy. One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to life but as an aspect of life. Life in its becoming is always shedding death, and on the point of death. The conquest of fear yields the courage of life. That is the cardinal initiation of every heroic adventure -- fearlessness and achievement.

Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

[bastardtravel]

Leisure without study is death - a tomb for the living person.

Seneca, stoic nerd

[bastardtravel]

The soul silver is coated with gold, into fixed importance and highest value. Gold everywhere. Here however, the warm world (interpersonalization) turns into the great cold sea, sharing nothing. The earth and its works and its human bodies become merciless mechanical beetles, never quite warm; everything is as it is, things as they are, but as if detached from us.

James Hillman, analysis of stanza 7 of the Blue Guitar, describing depersonalization

[bastardtravel]

It is the sun that shares our works. The moon shares nothing. It is a sea. When shall I come to say of the sun, It is a sea; it shares nothing; The sun no longer shares our works And the earth is alive with creeping men, Mechanical beetles never quite warm? And shall I then stand in the sun, as now I stand in the moon, and call it good, The immaculate, the merciful good, Detached from us, from things as they are? Not to be part of the sun? To stand Remote and call it merciful? The strings are cold on the blue guitar.

Wallace Stephens, “The Man with the Blue Guitar”

[bastardtravel]

I have seen the place called Trinity in New Mexico where our wise men exploded the first atomic bomb, and the heat of the blast fused sand into a greenish glass. Already the grass has returned, and the cactus, and the mesquite.  On this bedrock of animal faith, I take my stand, close by the old road that leads eventually out of the valley of paradox. Yes; feet on earth, knock on wood, touch stone, good luck to all.

Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness

[bastardtravel]

Sit down and write the damn thing.

Lawrence Block, Telling Lies for Fun and Profit

[bastardtravel]

You know, you're just like one of my characters. You love evil. You don't run from it, you don't try to avoid it. You welcome it. You crave it. You invite the pain and you cherish the suffering. You dive right into the filth and you make no attempt to wash it off. And when you finally climb back out, it doesn't matter how bad it smells, how the stench and taint cling to you. You just can't wait to dive back in. Like a dope fiend hankering for a fix, you don't want it to ever end. You need it. Your entire identity, your raison d'être, is at stake. Think about it. Who would you be, what would you be, without this? Without your precious war on evil? Without your secret world, your sacred brotherhoods, your ranks and titles and rituals? You'd be just another rat stuck in the race with a dead-end job, living for a pay-check and the weekends. One long booze-soaked downhill slide towards the dark and cold grave.  But you probably believe in what you do, believe it's right, that it's good. You soak in it so others don't have to. You take one for the team. You bend over and spread your legs and let the darkness inside. And somehow, you justify it all with utilitarian pragmatism. You're a bona fide American hero. Get the hell outta here. Go find an abyss to jump into. Go soak yourself in filth. Maybe it'll be different this time. Maybe you'll save them all. Maybe you'll finally find some god-damn peace, some closure. You're just like every character I've ever written.  Fucked from page one.

Sam Krieg, alcoholic misanthropic lighthouse-dwelling writer archetype, The Secret World