Viral that hurts

Whether or not this video in fact is part of the marketing campaign for this amazingly titled movie “The Women“, it succeeds firstly in criticising the viral medium and secondly in suggesting new settings for the future of virals: The personal, intimate and familiar.

Phrasing

Found among Casper’s shared items.

Different perspective

Forget about your stressful life for a second and look closely at this:

Amazing. This recent photo was shot from a plane overflying the Amazon rain forest between Peru and Brazil in search of one of the world’s 100 remaining uncontacted tribes. Besides the fascinating aspect of having found new groups of mankind, this encounter raises ethical dilemmas:

“What is happening in this region is a monumental crime against the natural world, the tribes, the fauna and is further testimony to the complete irrationality with which we, the ‘civilised’ ones, treat the world“, says José Meirelles of FUNAI – the Brazilian government’s Indian affairs department.

For more photos and Reuter’s news article, go here.

Challenging oneself

Gary Kasparov on making mistakes in chess.

Birth of a moustache

While in the middle of writing a literature review about the clashes between acts of governing and acts of creation within entrepreneurship, I was pleased to stumble upon pure creative passion.

Paul from San Pedro, California, just decided to build a huge pink moustache (and of course I find it cool that someone physically realized my weird blog title). Watch his dedicated process:

I wonder what he will use it for.

Beating writer’s blocks

A friend om mine just messaged me saying “Fuck, this is hard! Sitting here, trying to write, but the words just won’t come out… what to do?“

Here’s my advice.

• Write something – anything! Start with “I’m really stuck in this writing process and it frustrates me, because…etc”. Reflect yourself out of your frozen condition using words that immediately come to mind.
• Pick up the newspaper, read magazines or skim your favourite blogs. Simply gather inspiration – both from content and styles of writing.
• Dig up the best texts you’ve previously written and try to discover what worked for you back then and what didn’t. Possibly re-use bits and pieces to get rolling again.
• The last recommendation is optional: Write a blog post about writing.

Writer’s blocks are about lack of creativity and ideas. Going back to the stage of research or taking on different activities, stimulates your mind and relieves you from the destructive awareness of “being passive”.

Content meaninglessness

In the mid-90s, Jens Gaardbo was the Clark Kent-ish TV-darling on Danish news. Today he’s found in the field of communications consulting with a judicious view on absurdity:

“As a child, I thouht life was meaningsless, and that was terrifying. Today I am convinced that the existence is meaningsless, but at the same time I find that I have great pleasure in it. I have been given that peace in life through realizing that life is meaningsless. It must be terrible for people that believe in someting. For them contemplations never cease.”

Quick recap of Gaardbo’s guide to an atheist life:

1. Realization of the absurdity.
2. Accepting the ensuing bond to absurdity.

Coincidence

Half a year ago my life was exhilarating. I even went out from time to time. One night I went to the final party at Turbinehallerne. Good event – and they had fireworks. A stranger next to me took a picture of the happening and I ended up in the frame.

Many months later I signed up for a Master’s programme. There I met dozens of people, exams started rolling in and my life became less exhilarating. However, I did find time to go sailing with a few of my new friends, one of which happened to be the person that took the first photograph.

Spooky.

The question of negative experiences

I was given a lecture the other day about creative business strategies. In his introduction the speaker defined ‘cultural industries’ as industries in which companies (1) employ artistically creative people and (2) produce experience products. The great talk about experience products and what it does to imaginative consumers has regretfully been worn down, but the assertions inherent in his definition of the actual experience somehow triggered my common sense.

The lecturer claimed that experiences bought in cultural industries can be both positive and negative – in other words that customers in cultural industries happily would seek “negative” experiences – even if they in advance knew the experience would be negative.

I disagree. If a person chooses the bungee jump, it’s because he likes the rush – and even if he’s afraid of heights, the overall benefit (“having done it!”) must be bigger than the cost (“dreadful seconds on the bridge”) in his initial calculations. Claiming that an experience within these cultural industries could be negative would initially require the overall expected cost to surpass the overall expected benefit, which from my point of view would entail that the given experience was left out of consideration.

It reminds me of an interesting philosophical point raised in discussions of good vs. evil. The claim is that no person could regard himself or his actions as “evil”, since actions always follow what is “right” or “good” for the individual person, cf. “evil” is a term introduced in communities (or societies) of people. Vice versa – if you choose to buy a certain experience, it’s because you have estimated that the overall outcome will be good.

Teenagers

Last Saturday I slept in a tent in the northern part of Sweden. The camp mattresses were brand new, so getting to rest after 12 hours of canoe paddling was no problem. Slept quickly overwhelmed us.

But I should have known better. While seaching for an acceptable campsite, we had asked a flock of six approxmiately 16-year old teenagers for directions and in their own childish internally amusing way they had pointed into six different directions of the horizon. Tired and hungry we ended up camping a few hundred metres from their excursion.

I suddenly woke up around 3 AM. Flash lights were pointed at our tent from a short distance and loud voices affirmed that someone had placed themselves just outside our tent. Being covered by three layers of nylon plus a sleeping bag at the same time as you’re seriously fearing for your belongings (and who knows what else) is a very claustrophobic experience. In the process of opening up the many layers, we started yelling (loudly!) from inside the tent – telling them among other less flattering words to literally “fuck off”.

But unbelievably they stayed just outside the tent entrance pointing their flash light at my extremely angry face as I managed to unzip the last layer. At this point my angry face went back into the tent to grab our newly acquired flash light in order to get a glimpse of them (my body was still covered in sleeping bag and everything up until now had relied on reflexes).

When I had managed to find the light and move it outside, the two guys were far away. They were obviously drunk and had probably entered a bet about “annoying the Danes in the tent over there”. Nothing was stolen outside, though.

It took me a while to get back to sleep. Every sound in the woods was suspected of being another teen trying to impress the opposite sex and as I was giving up the idea of hunting down the two intruding idiots, I started wondering why actions of teenagers could be so far away from any conception an adult would expectedly have of how the world works.

Plato believed children shouldn’t be considered human beings, because they don’t contain a fully developed reason. Adolescents or teenagers are slowly moving along the right path towards increasing their awareness, while they still have a long way to go. But whereas children are conscious of their lack of reason in their commitment to adults, the thing that scares me about teenagers is that they gain contempt for the basic reasoning set up by adults throughout a long intellectual tradition and in their own arrogant stupidity teenagers believe their own unreflected view on things can secure them a better way to act.

Mix this approach with alcohol and you get two obnoxious teenagers – as unpredictable as animals – trying to provoke sleeping people in tents.