“The library’s one of the few civic spaces we have left. People are feeling like there’s no other ways for these online platforms and services to be run, it’s our destiny to have them be privately run, and yet we invoke the analogy of the library or archive all the time. To me it says that we find it realistic that Google will be our archive when it’s an advertising company. We’ve seen them get rid of services that are not profitable (Google Reader), and we’ve seen them demote things like Google Scholar. That’s realism, where it’s unrealistic to think we’d build on the success of the library with a national repository for knowledge, arts, and culture? Libraries exist and they’re open. Libraries exist with all these values we invoke in the digital sphere, but there are very few people thinking about how we might build upon them.”
Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus, 1665.
“Athanasius Kircher’s diagrams of the interconnectedness of fire (above) and water (below) in Earth. The diagrams are just a piece of his large, multi-volume work Mundus Subterraneus, published in 1665.”
“On a visit to southern Italy in 1638, the ever-curious Kircher was lowered into the crater of Vesuvius, then on the brink of eruption, to examine its interior. He was also intrigued by the subterranean rumbling which he heard at the Strait of Messina. His geological and geographical investigations culminated in his Mundus Subterraneus of 1664, in which he suggested that the tides were caused by water moving to and from a subterranean ocean.
“Kircher was also puzzled by fossils. He understood that fossils were the remains of animals. He ascribed large bones to giant races of humans.[24] Not all the objects which he was attempting to explain were in fact fossils, hence the diversity of explanations. He interpreted mountain ranges as the Earth’s skeletal structures exposed by weathering.
“Kircher’s map of Atlantis, oriented with south at the top, from Mundus Subterraneus.
Mundus Subterraneus includes several pages about the legendary island of Atlantis including a map with the Latin caption “Situs Insulae Atlantidis, a Mari olim absorpte ex mente Egyptiorum et Platonis descriptio.” translating as “Site of the island of Atlantis, in the sea, from Egyptian sources and Plato’s description.”
What @katiewest actually saw.
[YOUR ART IS BETTER THAN YOU THINK IT IS] – Problem Glyphs by Eliza Gauger
![[YOUR ART IS BETTER THAN YOU THINK IT IS]](https://78.media.tumblr.com/349f333e74a951ff16e12d648fa3b3dc/tumblr_n4az0b2Ief1tnsksko1_r1_1280.png)
[YOUR ART IS BETTER THAN YOU THINK IT IS]
Anonymous asked:
“November 4th 2013, 12:09:00 am · 5 months ago
“I’m terrified that if i can’t create something of meaning, then i don’t even exist . I am constantly failing to measure up, humiliated to be ‘not quite good enough’. Sometimes despair causes me to be tempted to become destructive and hateful just so i leave a mark. I feel disposable. I need the courage to grow, the faith to try. Is there a sigil for that?”
“Problem Glyphs is a project by Eliza Gauger in which sigils are drawn in response to problems you send in. There are over 200 glyphs so far. You can support this project on Patreon or with a one time contribution.”
“Lucretia My Reflection” by The Sisters of Mercy (1987)
“GDSP 10 – Directed by electronicalrattlebag “
reblogging of-saudade:
“GDSP 10 – Directed by electronicalrattlebag
Take a picture of yourself with an important thing.
You could tell us what the thing is, and why it is important to you.
You could tell us how it smells, feels, tastes, sounds, if these are applicable.”
“I found this quite hard because I couldn’t decide what ‘important’ meant to me. I attach strange sentimentality to all things; objects, songs, films, places. This is the Tea House.
“The Tea House has been with me for over 20 years. It’s a tin that came filled with cheap English toffees that I got for Christmas when I was six years old. I don’t remember who gave it to me, probably one of my distant aunts. After the toffees were eaten, my mother used it to hold herbal tea bags; peppermint to sooth my frequent stomachaches, chamomile to help me sleep, some awful lemon concoction that she made me drink when I had glandular fever for most of the year I was thirteen.
“I didn’t think to take it with me when I ran away from home, but a few weeks later it arrived in the garbage bag of remaining belongings that my mother unceremoniously dumped at the front door whilst I was still at school, a few stray bags of tea fluttering inside. For a while I kept money in it, then cigarettes, drugs, things to spite my mother, but it just felt wrong, and it became the Tea House again.
“The Tea House is ‘important’ because it is a tiny pocket of warmth, care and affection from my childhood. It smells like Earl Grey, is cold to the touch, clangs like a broken bell when you drop it, and its contents taste delicious.”
You all know about GDSP, right?
I set number 10, you can see the other submissions (also amazing, insightful, beautiful) for that prompt here.
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- (reblogged from of-saudade)
Trying out the Blend app for a friend.
Paul Greer 