Log24

Saturday, May 9, 2020

Quicksilver* Meditation

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:40 pm

Suggested by the previous post

Tom Lamont in The Economist , June/July 2020

Recently, I saw that a person called Celine in San Francisco had tweeted to her 2,500-odd followers about the difficulty of “trying to date SF guys in between their week-long meditation retreats, Tahoe weekends, month-long remote work sessions…” About 4,000 people tapped to endorse the sentiment, launching Celine onto an exponential number of strangers’ screens, including my own. The default sound for any new tweet is a whistle, somewhere between a neighbourly “yoo-hoo” and a dog-walker’s call to heel.

“Everybody, here comes the life of the party
Everybody, here comes the life of the party, yeah, she is.”

Songwriters: Ben Hayslip / Rhett Akins / Jason Sellers

See as well Life of the Party  in this  journal.

Synchronologists  may consult posts of March 2015.

*This was Language herself , as she first sprang at Maleldil’s bidding
out of the molten quicksilver  of the first star called Mercury on Earth,
but Viritrilbia in Deep Heaven.” ―  C.S. Lewis,  That Hideous Strength .

 

Tuesday, July 23, 2019

Word Magic

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:52 pm

"Business-wise, Magic is working—Bloomberg reported 
that the game brought in $500 million in revenue last year.
Hasbro owns Monopoly and Scrabble, but Magic  is its top
game brand. . . . 

The idea of using a card mechanic to generate story has
precedent—the Italian postmodern writer Italo Calvino
generated an entire novel based on drawing from a
tarot card deck. Games provide frameworks that miniaturize
and represent idealized realities; so do narratives."

— Adam Rogers, Sunday, July 21, 2019, at Wired

"The Esper party began . . ." —

Life of the Party

    From Stephen King's Dreamcatcher :

The 'Dreamcatcher' warning

    From Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man :

Alfred Bester— 'The Esper party began.'

    From Anne McCaffrey's To Ride Pegasus :

"… it's going to be accomplished in steps, this
establishment of the Talented in the scheme of things."

Adam Rogers at Wired  as quoted above —

"The idea of using a card mechanic to generate story
has precedent. . . ."

See The Greater Trumps .

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Wednesday April 16, 2008

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:10 am

Poetry for Physicists:
The Gates of Hell

From the obituary of physicist John Archibald Wheeler at Princeton:
 

In the fall of 1967, he was invited to give a talk…. As he spoke, he… [mentioned] something strange… what he called a gravitationally completely collapsed object. But such a phrase was a mouthful, he said, wishing aloud for a better name. "How about black hole?" someone shouted from the audience.

That was it. "I had been searching for just the right term for months, mulling it over in bed, in the bathtub, in my car, wherever I had quiet moments," he later said. "Suddenly this name seemed exactly right." He kept using the term, in lectures and on papers, and it stuck.

From Log24 last year on this date ("Happy Birthday, Benedict XVI"):
 

"Know the one about the Demiurge and the Abridgment of Hope?"

— Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise, Knopf, 1981, the final page, 439

From Dante, The Inferno, inscription on the gates of Hell:
 

"Abandon all hope, ye who enter."

From Psychoshop, an unfinished novel by Alfred Bester completed by Roger Zelazny:
 

His manner was all charm and grace; pure cafe society….

He purred a chuckle. "My place. If you want to come, I'll show you."

"Love to. The Luogo Nero? The Black Place?"

"That's what the locals call it. It's really Buoco Nero, the Black Hole."

"Like the Black Hole of Calcutta?"

"No. Black Hole as in astronomy. Corpse of a dead star, but also channel between this universe and its next-door neighbor."

"Here? In Rome?"

"Sure. They drift around in space until they run out of gas and come to a stop. This number happened to park here."

"How long ago?"

"No one knows," he said. "It was there six centuries before Christ, when the Etruscans took over a small town called Roma and began turning it into the capital of the world."

 

Related material:

Log24 on
narrative–

Life of the Party
(March 24, 2006),
and
'Nauts
(March 26, 2006)
 

Thursday, August 31, 2006

Thursday August 31, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:25 pm

Party Phone

for Van Morrison
on his birthday

A few words for M.C.C.:

Honey Blonde

She's as sweet as
  tupelo honey
She's an angel
  of the first degree.
She's as sweet as
  tupelo honey
Just like honey, baby,
  from the bee.
— Van Morrison, 1971

From March 24, 2006:

Life of the Party

From Stephen King's Dreamcatcher:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060324-Dreamcatcher.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

From Alfred Bester's
The Demolished Man:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060324-Party.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Related material:

"… it's going to be
accomplished in steps,
this establishment
of the Talented in
  the scheme of things."

— Anne McCaffrey, 
Radcliffe '47,
To Ride Pegasus

"It's not the twilight zone no,
it's not the twilight zone
Yes it's just a party phone,
pure
honeycomb,
honeycomb,
honeycomb"

— Van Morrison, "Twilight Zone,"
in The Philosopher's Stone

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/PhilosophersStoneAlbum.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
 

Sunday, March 26, 2006

Sunday March 26, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:02 pm
'Nauts

(continued from
Life of the Party, March 24)

Exhibit A —

From (presumably) a Princeton student
(see Activity, March 24):

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060324-Activity.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Exhibit B —

From today's Sunday comics:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060326-Blondie2.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Exhibit C —

From a Smith student with the
same name as the Princeton student
(i.e., Dagwood's "Twisterooni" twin):

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060326-Smith.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Related illustrations
("Visual Stimuli") from
the Smith student's game —

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060326-Psychonauts1.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Literary Exercise:

Continuing the Smith student's
Psychonauts theme,
compare and contrast
two novels dealing with
similar topics:

A Wrinkle in Time,
by the Christian author
Madeleine L'Engle,
and
Psychoshop,
by the secular authors
Alfred Bester and
Roger Zelazny.

Presumably the Princeton student
would prefer the Christian fantasy,
the Smith student the secular.

Those who prefer reality to fantasy —
not as numerous as one might think —
may examine what both 4×4 arrays
illustrated above have in common:
their structure.

Both Princeton and Smith might benefit
from an application of Plato's dictum:

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/motto2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Friday, March 24, 2006

Friday March 24, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:22 pm
Life of the Party

From Stephen King's Dreamcatcher:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060324-Dreamcatcher.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

From Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060324-Party.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Related material:

"… it's going to be
accomplished in steps,
this establishment
of the Talented in
  the scheme of things."

— Anne McCaffrey, 
Radcliffe '47,
To Ride Pegasus

 

Powered by WordPress