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TED at 2X
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 2532
So a little under the weather, still, tired a bit but you have to spend some of the day awake, lunch, coffee, then back home, nap, up, bored...
No good reason to be bored if your me, it's a form of procrastination, surf the web, see what there is to see, catch up, talk to family, but I'm not so well that I'm getting anything done...
Watch recommended TED Talks on YouTube. Some are OK, most are just shit. At 15 or 20 minutes a video these create even more boredom than they dispel...
...but every talk has something, and reading the comments on one that promises to "Multiply your time" I discover that the key is to watch the videos at 2X their regular speed...find it, it's on YouTube, the settings icon in the lower right corner...
And sure enough, everything is still there, you can understand the speakers, less "meaningful" pauses, and if you watch them you'll notice that the acceleration makes people more or less plausible as they give their talks, it accelerates, accentuates their mannerisms, gives you a quicker insight into not only who they are but what they're telling you...
So, life is short, the internet, vast, Watch TED Talks at 2X the speed...
A farm west of Lethbridge...
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Dreams
- Hits: 2267
I'm driving somewhere south of Calgary, West of Lethbridge, a country road, then the best picture ever, the sun setting, sky turning every shade of over-saturated blue, moon rising, I'm taking pictures...a barn, big, red, tourist, rising up from the edges of the river...a row of trees trace silhouettes against the sky....photography gold...
Down, to the farm, I work here, haven't worked here forever, don't know if they remember me, some sort of tourist farm, with shops for all the visitors, I'm trying to find where I fit in, don't know, it's busy and understaffed...
...And I'm wondering, when did I last work here? And do they have a cheque for me? I'm not sure, not sure if anyone remembers me, soooo many tourists, don't know where to start, which shop to man...
...I find myself wondering, I've driven here from Calgary, to work, so far, 3 hours, and I'm not sure if they remember me, have my cheque, only I remember they told me I'd be back, and I'm thinking that this is bollocks and so I return to my car, leave the tourist barn filled with shops, drive back towards Calgary, I need to get a job closer to home...
(Sick the past couple of days, chest, head cold, sleeping 12, 14 hours per day, these amongst the feverish dreams...)
Trudeau being Trudeau
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Conversations
- Hits: 2236
Now I wasn't and I'm still not necessarily a fan. Yep, he's good looking, charismatic, and all the rest, still....
Nonetheless, here, he acquits himself rather well and I'm glad he's our PM. There's a lot worse options out there...
(Can't seem to embed this. Follow the link): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWI5-vWqcGc
The Role of the Artist
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 2114
I will give you this, that if you've found this, that art to you isn't some accurately rendered portrait of a duck, panda-bear or wolf. That you've set the bar a little bit higher and have some appreciation of both the history and role of art...
That said, there's no accounting for taste. Still, I'll try and sum up my own tastes and expectations below...
The role of the artist is to open us up to new experiences, thoughts, feelings, realizations and understandings. These things are not done from the center, they are done from the outskirts, from the margins...you cannot see or describe the shape of the world if you live at the center, from the center you see the world spreads out limitless and without end, rather you must live and travel upon it's edges...
...the artist, they delineate and describe the shape of our world, our expectations, of emotion, of love, of thought, they open up to us the doors to worlds we are too fearful and inadequate to explore ourselves firsthand...
...there is the myth of the self-destructive artist, Orpheus, any one of a number of popular singers, Van-Gogh, ... the myth survives, because what do we expect of them? That they travel further than us, experience more than us, that they feel, love, understand, intuit more than us, and that they somehow bring us back and translate some portion of their understanding, so that we may, vicariously, live through that minute remainder of their experience, the bored suburban housewife who never has been camping, a picture of a wolf upon her wall, the articulate university graduate, never been kissed, Klimt's "The Kiss", the pedant, never outdoors a single night his entire life, "Starry Starry Night", the voyeur, Egon Schiele...from a person's taste in art we may somewhere discern where their life is lacking, what speaks to them...
...For those who would live, they need nothing, they need only to create, for the rest there is the artist, that shared and subdivided, infinitely replicated portion of life that is dulled the moment it is shared and discovered, perhaps only music stands up to the endless replication and division of art, everything else wears thin...but if you were wondering why art doesn't grow in the suburbs, why, it's the same reason that love doesn't, life doesn't, intelligence doesn't, art demands a richer soil, and the comfortably numb will never weep for joy or sadness to fertilize it...
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