#and another example of that is that when i'm bored i cycle through the same three mobile games

[le-velo-pour-dru]

It's so comforting to realize that since the self-imposed rules I put upon myself are completely made up, I can change them to make myself more comfortable. I forget about that all the time X'3

[giorgiastastes]

Cidade De Deus (2002)

“Why return to the City of God, where God forgets about you?”

 Let’s start from the title, which is certainly enigmatic. Calling city of God, a suburb that is the scenario of a reality abandoned by God is not a mistake, nor is the frequent recourse to religious faith seen as the only motivation, the last hope of these young men for a better life, that does not lead them in a coffin before the age of twenty. I am in favor of full religious freedom and belief, but I cannot fail to notice how, if faith can lead to extremism, bigotry and fanaticism, very often it is also the only light of those who have already touched the bottom or are about to do it.

Speaking of the plot, the film begins in medias res, in the Cidade de Deus, one of the most dangerous favelas in all of Brazil.

The initial scene, so frenetic and almost surreal, is part of the history of cinema, with the chicken running away through the alleys of the neighborhood, while at least twenty boys chase her, trying to catch her with guns and rifles, as if it were Pablo Escobar reincarnated.

The chicken finally ends up clashing with our narrator, aspiring photographer, now stuck between the street gang and the police.

 Masterfully we see the camera rotating around this boy, over and over again soon becoming an hypnotic rhythm, while at the end of the last turn we find ourselves in another time space, in the 60s, accompanied by the phrase A PHOTO COULD HAVE CHANGED MY LIFE, BUT IN THE CITY OF GOD IF YOU ESCAPE YOU ARE DONE, AND IF YOU STAY YOU ARE DONE, IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN SO, SINCE I WAS A CHILD.

The protagonist, faced with such a difficult choice, returns to the past with his mind and begins to tell us about a naive gang of thieves in order to narrate with their story, also the reality of the favela, which, using the the film’s wording, is too far from the idea of a Rio’s postcard that the government wanted to portrait at the time.

After a series of episodes that I don't want to spoil, we will move on to the next decade. This initially will seem like a positive turn and then will turn out to be only a patination of the neighborhood, which in the end is even more socially structured and cruel than how it used to be.

 Finally, let’s move to the strongest part of the film, the children. They are the ones who make the choices that will most mark them.

In the city of God you cannot live your childhood with carefree, you must immediately decide which side to stand on, and this childish decision, you will take to your grave.

Among the children there are those who immediately think of themselves as an outsider in that climate of crime and violence, but according to them, not because of a sense of morality,but simply because they’re afraid of getting a bullet.

Then we find those who were born for it, and even plan for new robberies, who feels strong and great showing off a gun often bigger than their head.

To say that the film offers us several times the philosophical doubt of WHO ARE GOOD ONE AND WHO’S THE BAD would be redundant and perhaps too direct even to be discussed, with the police who often behave worse than the bandits, and the only “non silent” citizen is the one acting the most violent crime, so I want to focus on other points.

 

Can you choose which side to fight for or are you facing a one-way street? And then, badness, evil and violence are innate or you learn them, you discover them with living?

Answering the first question, the most objective and direct of the two, there is certainly no doubt that in such ill-famed neighborhoods, it is the crime that pursues us and not the other way around. When you are so abandoned by institutions and authorities, often even with a lack of reference figures from which to take example, Crime is not a choice, simply because there are no choices, it is the only option, even if unjustly glorified.

About the second question, on the other hand, in my opinion, the evil is innate, but not because it is to be considered hereditary, more because but it is part of the human nature, of the animal part in each of us, which, unfortunately, is not held back by human intelligence, but brought to extreme sadism from this intellectual capacity which other animal species lack.

It is morality that then represses these instincts, but if we left the world to anarchy, only a few would stop, and as Plautus says, Homo homini lupus.

To better explain my thoughts, I must refer to another masterful work.

I'm talking about Dogville by the controversial but brilliant Lars Von Trier. I won't talk about this film, but just to summarize the idea, we are faced with a town where cruelty is so eradicated in the population that it is a same child who starts the cycle of violence and abuse. This episode perfectly reflects how human’s evilness is, in my opinion as much as that of the director, genetic, and that can also be seen in City of God.

The undisputed head of the city, Ze Pequeno, begins his rise to power at the age of eighteen, as soon as he realizes that he wants to become the absolute king of the favela.

But if we were to talk about his desire for blood, that was born much earlier, when he was still a child and, as the narrator tells us, "he wanted to act out his whim of killing" and then took advantage of the robbery at the motel to make a massacre.

Certainly the number of its victims grows with its age and so its desire for power but, however questionable this choice is, it was not homicide for futile reasons. In fact, he decides to exterminate all the main drug dealers in the area with the intention of becoming the only owner, when he begins to understand that it was necessary to switch to the drugs field.

What makes me reflects is that, although the character will always be easily triggered, and it is not uncommon for them to put a hole in someone’s head, the reason why he killed as a child was not even money, it was just an innate desire to kill, to take the life of another human being and watch him take his last breath.

 

His disturbing laugh proves it.

Even the punishment, albeit excessive, that will lead him to death, inflicted on children who had robbed a rotisserie, is still part of his plan to be the owner of a favelas that respects him because in good or bad it is he who protects the city.

And it is precisely in that scene that we see how the cycle begins again, when Ze Pequeno forces a child to kill another child, or when those same children make up any type of story just to receive a weapon or the same one who will then take control of the city at the end of the film, probably taking the man they killed as an example.

They are always the victims and executioners, as well as the heart of the story. Of course, in the seventies we see the protagonists grown up, but of adult men they only have the appearance.

Their character is still that of the decade before, as well as their choices and behaviors. One of them was marked by the sight of a camera as a child and this became his greatest passion as a teenager and then an adult. The same one, despite knowing who his brother's killer is, decides not to take revenge in order to respect the choices he made years before, that is, to abstain from evil.

I don't even need to dwell on the exceptional and impeccable shots because, although there are unforgettable scenes such as the death of Benny between the screams and the intermittent lights of the disco, each shot would have to be studied and likely more than that, the transitions between one and the other.

The plot remains a rhythmical crescendo, we never get bored and the story remains in evolution: we don't have a real incipit, a problem that upsets the balance, a resolution of the problem and then a conclusion, it is a story that it follows changes without actually being a real beginning and end, just like a cycle.

Another and final theme is the power of art, the only means of escape from such a difficult reality, but art itself can often be used improperly to advertise and almost glorify this underworld. In this case we are talking about photography, but it could be any type of art from poetry, cinema to music.

The film must be said that it has no clear defects, but if I could have put my own I would have made the symbol of the camera even more important, since mainly we see it in the very first scene and in the change of decade, and then obviously for the whole last half an hour, while I would have made each photograph part of a chapter of the story, which did not happen.

All in all, I went too far and if you still didn't get the message, run to discover this masterpiece of cinema.

[gazing-imagination]

How to put 'It Works' to work for YOU!

The powerful idea presented so simply and well in 'It Works' will change your life. I know this because it has changed mine. The fantastic results that I have created using this idea have motivated me to investigate these principles for 25 years.

I want you to be rich with things that make you happy. I'm going to give you ideas and images you can use to help you be more successful with the list technique presented in 'It Works'.

What I have Done With 'It Works'

My annual income is now 35 times greater than it was the day I first read this little book. I have gained houses, cars, boats, businesses, friends, a family, and numerous creative and prospering ideas using the principles set forth in this book.

In the last 25 years I have spent thousands of hours teaching these ideas to other people. I've seen many people use the ideas in this book to create something new in their life, and I have seen others who are not so successful with it. I want you to be one of the successful ones.

How to Succeed with your List

First, let's take a little test. Take a sheet of paper (or your word processor) and without looking at the book write down the 'Three Positive Rules of Accomplishment' that are the key to this technique.

Then go back and compare them to the text. How did you do?

Did you miss a few? I did when I first tried this test myself.

If you read this book and it never goes farther than words and ideas in your mind, then you have lost the advantage of it.

The key to success with this method it to DO IT, not just think about it. Don??t think that by reading it, even many times, that you will know it. That would be like thinking that you know how to ride a bicycle just by reading about it. In order to master the bicycle, you have to get on it and ride, learning to keep your balance as you move forward. That is exactly the way you learn the principles of conscious creation taught by ??It Works??.

When I first started using the technique in this book, I wrote my first list, and started getting great results. Then after a month or so, I stopped writing and reviewing the list, and tried to 'do it in my head'. I didn't get the same results.

I went back to using the list, and the great results started happening again. Then I got what I wanted and let things slide, and the cycle repeated.

Meanwhile I started studying the ideas and teaching them to others. In the process I learned some interesting things I am sharing with you.

What I learned is that each of us has a spark from the Creator which is our own personal creator, like a genie from a magic lamp. The problem with this genie is that he responds to every thought in my mind as if it were a command. If I think of something with desire, he starts creating that for me. If I start to worry or fear, he starts to erase that creation.

Wherever I put my attention, the genie starts multiplying that attention into a real experience in my life. All of this creation takes place in a part of my mind called the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind is the part of my mind that holds the tremendous creative power that I can learn to tap into and use. However, it has a special way of working that I must understand if I want to use my subconscious mind power effectively.

If my attention wanders all over the place, my subconscious becomes full of half-created thought-forms and my life is chaotic or boring. That??s because the genie is busy trying to do a million different things at once, many of which contradict each other. His efforts always follow in the track of my attention, and until I get my attention going in a constant direction, I don??t get the results I would like.

The plan given in 'It Works' helps me to control my attention, and put that genie to work with enough time and focus to produce real and complete results. It will work the same way for you.

My conscious mind sets the agenda, but I often get distracted by the half-formed and malformed effects of previous wishes and desires. Many of those desires are unconscious, created with incomplete understanding or fear or worry. The genie does what I tell him, but he listens to my daydreams and worries and treats them as commands.

This creative power responds to what I believe. I have come to realize that what I believe is not necessarily the same as what I think. It's easy to know what I believe - it is what I act on. It is what I do. Even while I am unable to admit to myself what I really believe, my subconscious mind is working to make circumstances, opportunities, and events in my life to experience those beliefs.

How do I change what I believe, so that I can get what I want? There is a simple way to do this. It has been discovered and rediscovered by teachers and writers throughout the ages.

Here it is:

I can imagine what I want, I can pretend that it is so, and I can repeat this over and over.

The creative genie of my subconscious mind responds to imagination, focused attention, and repetition. That's what the book 'It Works' is all about.

How to Get Faster and Better Results

Here are things that will help you create more successfully when you use the technique presented in ??It Works??. These are things that I have discovered in the last 25 years of using 'It Works.' Each of these is a suggestion based on actual experiences with using the list. Use the ideas that sound good to you.

The most important thing is to do exactly what it says. Follow the plan exactly: Create a list, include what you really desire in order of its importance to you, read the list three times a day, think of the items on the list as often as you can, and don't tell anyone what you are doing.

For faster demonstration of results, you can rewrite the list each day, even if it hasn't changed. Reorder the items on the list according to their importance to you. Doing this makes the ideas new again, and will lead to more rapid success. It??s also important to do something physical with your ideas, as soon as possible. Writing them out is a way to give them entry into the outer world of manifestation. It creates a toehold for their growth into physical reality.

If you have a tape recorder, you can read the list out loud in a firm voice and tape it. Then play the tape over and over again (perhaps in your car as you commute to and from work). This needs to be done and played in private. That's easy nowadays since you can get an inexpensive tape player with headphones.

I found a little digital recorder that records into it's own computer memory, and then plays it back over and over again through headphones. You can also do this with the 'Sound Recorder' program that is built into most personal computers.

Put real amounts, specific items, and specific dates in your list. Some people worry that this is 'outlining' and delays manifestation. But what good is it to get Coke when you want Pepsi, or Pepsi when you want Coke? You don??t plant strawberries and expect to harvest watermelons. The most important thing is not a particular item on your list, but developing your power of conscious creation.

Do you have trouble remembering the items on your list? If so, it may be that they are not really that important to you. Try memorizing the items on your list.

Are you having trouble finding ten things to put on your list? Are you unsure which things should really be on the list? Here??s an easy way to build your list: ask yourself- ??What do I think about all day??? That is what should be on your list. You may have to start by listing your worries, and then turn each of them into a positive desire. For example, what do I worry about? What would need to happen for me to not worry about this any more?

If you have trouble finding things that you want, try thinking of it in another way. What would you like to see happen?

How will you know it is working?

When you receive an idea about something that is on your list, act on it in a positive way. Sometimes the thing you want requires a few intermediate steps. Be ready to go through several doorways as they open before you, to reach your goal. If you want a car, perhaps you will find yourself creating a new set of tires first, or a garage to keep the car in.

Realize that many of the things you want will find you. You will be tempted to say, 'but I didn't do anything, it just happened.' Your inner mind genie will use the simplest and most efficient way to create the results you imagine. It doesn't care who gets the credit. After a while you won't either!

Remember that your genie is working nonstop, according to the program that you set for him. If you say, ??this can??t be working??, he will do his best to make that seem true ?V even while he continues his nonstop creation of the other things you ask for.

How will you know it is working? For most people it is not one thing, or two things, but the fact that one thing after another manifests in their lives. The first thing you get from your list seems to be a coincidence, the second is luck, the third is serendipity, and the forth is a miracle. Finally after many creations, when your friends start wondering what the heck is going on, you will realize that there is a simple and rational law in operation, and that you know how to use it.

Get excited and enthusiastic about the good things coming into your life. If this doesn't seem natural to you, go ahead and use your 'power of pretend' to fake it until you make it. Appreciation is the oil of the engine of creation. Enthusiasm and excitement are manifestations of your appreciation, and confirmation of your positive expectation.

The attitudes that will delay your success or confuse your creation are jealousy, envy, resentment, reservations, uncertainty, and indecisiveness. Put all of those to the side. The more you recognize your own creative ability, the less you will care about those things that these attitudes have been attached to. You just won??t have time for those ways of thinking any more.

There is no such thing as a negative thought - every thought has a positive result in reproducing itself. Every thing you think about grows in your mind and becomes part of your physical life. That??s why it is so important to control what you are thinking. The key to controlling your mind is replacing the thoughts that create what you don't want, with the thoughts that create what you do want. You do not resist the old thoughts, you replace them by putting your attention somewhere else. Using your list is your key to accomplishing this. Use this physical tool to reinforce the thoughts that you want.

Think of your subconscious mind as being like a sailboat in the middle of the ocean. The sailboat is blown everywhere, back and forth, by the wind, which is the power of thought. It needs a keel and a rudder to be able to set a course and make way to a certain destination. Your list is the keel and the rudder of your subconscious sailboat.

Thought follows a certain structure in your mind. The idea comes first, then the belief, then the attitude, and then the behavior. Your strongest foundation, the anchor of your thinking, begins with your behavior. Change your behavior, then change the attitude that changing the behavior reveals, then change the belief that inspires the attitude. Grab hold of an idea that is bigger and more inclusive than the small ideas that have kept you poor and unhappy.

When you are tempted to tell everyone what you are doing to make the changes in your life, send them a copy of this book instead. After you have received 40 things you have asked for, you can start talking about the process you are using. Keep a list of everything you get until you receive 40 things you have asked for.

Many people find this book, and use it to get one important thing, and then abandon this method. How did this book come into your life? Your genie brought it to you, or brought you to it, in response to your conscious or unconscious desire to create a specific experience, or to understand creation itself. Take advantage of this experience, and make this intelligent, conscious creation a way of life, not a one-time experience.

??Hey Peter, get back in the boat!?? - the other 11 apostles

Trying to control other people and make decisions for them is a misuse of them, and of your own creative power. The most important thing you can make is a decision. Trying to take that opportunity for creation away from others is based on fear, not love. Fear in your mind will generally create things you do not want. Lewt people learn their lessons. God loves them, too.

I learned something wonderful long ago, that will give you freedom. I can??t prove anything to you about anything important or meaningful. However, I can tell you how you can experiment and prove these things to yourself. If I walked on water, you would be looking for the rocks. If you walk on water, you will know that there are no rocks. Using this list will show you how to walk on the water of your life. You will have to learn to politely ignore your friends as they yell: ??Hey Peter, get back in the boat!??

The Toyota Principle

The subconscious mind creation process goes on all the time. You don't have to be good to make it work. You don't have to chant, exercise, or repeat magic words. You are rich now with the results of what you have been thinking about. Your life is always full of something. If you want to be rich with something else, change what you are thinking about.

As you develop your ability to consciously direct your creation process, as you build your confidence and increase your will power, your results will come more quickly and be more satisfying. Don't delay this process by calling the results coincidence. Wait until you have received at least 40 items on your list (by receiving something and replacing the list item with a new item) before you judge the results as coincidence or creation.

You are already a success at creating what you are thinking about - everyone is. The biggest enemy of conscious control is self-importance - which may manifest in disguise as self-deprecation, worry about what others think of you, or the desire to have others approve of you. Don't let your ego distract your from taking control of your mind and your life.

Everything in your life is there because you have asked for it through either desire or fear. Nothing comes to you by itself. I call this the "Toyota Principle" because there used to be a commercial advertisement on television for a certain car company with the catchphrase "You asked for it - you got it - Toyota!' When you have used your list for a while, you will begin to see this is true, and then vast realms of possibility will open in your life.

It's a friendly universe.

If you are of a certain religious orientation, you might be concerned about this creative process and think it is a possible affront to God. I don't think it is. Think of the New Testament phrase, ??Pray without ceasing.?? I have decided that this is a description of what we all do all the time. We pray nonstop without knowing it. Practice of the method of conscious creation will show you what prayer is, how it works, and that it is always functioning. I am firmly convinced that learning how my mind works, and how to use it more effectively to help myself and others, is what God wants me to do. How about you?

You don't have to believe in God to use the list. However, don't be surprised if using the list shows you that there is order and structure to the universe, including your mind as a part of that universe. Your world is a lot closer to you and more responsive to you, than you may have considered it to be. It's a friendly universe.

Be careful about including other people on your list. If you want joy and happiness with Jane or Bill, is the joy and happiness more important, or the relationship with Jane or Bill? Maybe the best way to be happy with Jane is let her go find Bill, and let Suzy come find you. As long as you are focused on what someone can give to you, you aren??t yet completely experiencing love.

It may be tempting to think your success is dependent on the channel it happens to come through - your job, your family, a particular relationship or thing you possess. Time and experience will show you that this is not so. In the meantime, place your sense of appreciation and thankfulness on the Creator within you, who has made you in his image as a creator. When the river of your life changes its channel, you had better be ready to go with the flow.

How fast will it work? Faster than you will expect. I put the number one item on my list last week and it manifested in two days ?V and I thought it would be six months or maybe never. Fortunately, while writing and then rereading that list item, I suspended my disbelief. Even before your pen finishes the sentence, the act of creation has begun. Of course there is no magic in the pen or paper ?V the magic is in making the decision a physical thing instead of just a mental idea. No matter how long you use this method, there will be times when you are just utterly amazed at what ??happens?? to you. (It isn??t happening, you are creating it.) How fast can it happen? Don??t blink twice ?V you??ll miss it.

Everything you think will try to prove itself ?V including your skepticism. If you are afraid of what others will think of you, or of what you will think of yourself, then you may be fooling yourself while thinking you are being completely rational. The world is plastic to the molding power of your thoughts ?V even while you think this is untrue, or don??t have a thought about it at all. Everything lives and moves and has its being in a sea of self-modifying thought. You can prove this to yourself, and put it to effective use, with the simple experiment of work with the list for a few weeks or months.

It doesn't take much time or effort. You have nothing to lose. No one will even know you are doing it. They will just think that you have suddenly become incredibly lucky, intelligent, charming, and good looking. It helps to smile a lot.

Creating complete mind pictures is very helpful. That is another book in itself. Feeling joy and enthusiasm about your mental creation is very helpful. It will start to happen naturally as you use this process over and over, because ?{

It Works!.🏄‍♂️ ~Brad Jensen

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHY I'M SMARTER THAN RULE

It felt as if there was a machine on my desk that spat out a dollar bill every two minutes no matter what I did. The metaphor people use to describe the way a startup feels is at least a roller coaster and not drowning. More recently the recipe is often one founder, one VC, and he'll chase down the implications of what one said to them. The third big lesson we can learn from open source and blogging show us things don't have to explain why. It's hard to see how bad some practice is till you have something to compare it to. Unlike physics in a hundred years. People who fall victim to a monotonically increasing confidence in their opinions are implicitly concluding the world is static. Hackers & Painters that hadn't been online. And barring financial catastrophe, I think, is to separate the meaning of a program with the least effort.

Both took years to succeed. When the disaster strikes, just say to yourself, ok, this was what Paul was talking about. It's like the rule that in buying a house you should consider location first of all. Most people have had the experience of working hard on some problem, not being able to solve it, giving up and going to bed, and then, fairly quickly, they learn something about work that's a lot like what they learn about diet. I was being paid for programming. From the start they had a lot in common with. They're just promising to do what they'd do anyway. They traversed idea space as gingerly as a very old person traverses the physical world. The problem is the same they face in operating systems: they can't pay their bills and their ISP unplugs their server.

Mark Pincus has kept control of the board may even help VCs pick better. You can have rules saying one shouldn't be mean, and if you enforce them it seems possible to keep a lid on stupidity is harder, perhaps because stupidity is not so easily distinguishable. We just don't hear about it usually, because to prove yourself right you have to discover, not something you naturally sink into. But when I think about why I voted for Clinton over the first George Bush managed to win in 1988, though he would later be vanquished by one of the problems I hope to focus on next. The way to come up with something plausible-sounding on the fly, like a student who hasn't prepared for an exam. I've learned about dilution is that it's measured more in behavior than users. When I say there may only be a few languages, I'm not including domain-specific little languages. And if you just hang on, things will probably get better.

I said something to a partner at a well known VC firm that gave him the mistaken impression I was considering starting another startup. The second component of the antidote was Sergey Brin, and vice versa. When you do this you can assume unlimited resources. Instead of trying to point yourself in the right direction is, and try instead to be super sensitive to the winds of change originate in the unconscious minds of domain experts. I assumed that was the highest form of writing. Perhaps only the more thoughtful users care enough to submit and upvote links, so the marginal cost of one random new user approaches zero. I've read on HN. Phrased that way, it doesn't sound good at all. Well, that's news to no one. So these, I think professionalism was largely a fashion, driven by conditions that happened to exist in the twentieth century was professional, which amateurs, by definition, are not. The list of what you can't ask in job interviews is now so long that for convenience I assume it's infinite. How will we take advantage of the opportunities to waste cycles that we'll get from new, faster hardware?

A better way to describe the failure to do so is probably denial, though that seems a bad road to go down. At the very least, it has to be a side project—an application to sharpen Arc on, and a few places being sprayed with startupicide, it's more elegant to think of all phone calls as one kind of thing, no matter how inexperienced you seem or how unpromising your idea sounds at first, because they've all seen inexperienced founders with unpromising sounding ideas who a few years old. I think it is good to have such incentives can, by turning their comments into bets: if you work here we expect you to get more done than you would otherwise, because every dinner is a kind of a deadline. But not always. In 1984 the charisma gap between Reagan and Mondale was like that between Clinton and Dole, with similar results. In particular, don't go to graduate school, and don't start other projects. Bush managed to win in 1988, though he would later be vanquished by one of the principles they teach you is to align the car not by lining up the hood with the stripes painted on the road, but by publicly saying that, they're saying they're willing to be held to a standard that, say, New York Times. The first component is particularly helpful in the first stage of a startup's life, when you try to optimize it.

A and still has it today. I could see the average town was like a roach motel for startup ambitions: smart, ambitious people went in, but no startups came out. Well, that's news to no one. Business still reflects an older model, exemplified by the French word for working: travailler. I'm not sure why it has. No philosopher ever refuted another, for example? Wufoo is on the same trajectory now. Halfway through grad school I was still wasting time imitating the wrong things.

And it's not just the way offices look that's bleak. TV was still young in 1960; only 87% of households had it. That's what was killing them. Girls who dissed him in high school classes, we read a lot of time learning to recognize such ideas, and the word that came to mind was optimism. There were no fixed office hours. If someone proves a new theorem, it takes some amount of pain. Mean people are more likely to know they're being stupid. And yet it also happened that Carter was famous for his big grin and folksy ways, and Ford for being a boring klutz. But the major parties know so well which issues matter how much to how many voters, and adjust their message so precisely in response, that they tend to; and vice versa. In a hundred years, I told you so.

Thanks to Fred Wilson, Robert Morris, Greg McAdoo, and Patrick Collison for putting up with me.