Purge And Burn

I’m about to do a purge and burn on my RSS reader’s feeds, because it’s boring the shit out of me.

Nick Harkaway on the Russia/Wagner thing this weekend:

For me, among other weird things, it had the feel of a sandpit row played out huge, with money and tanks and death. The ordinary business of disagreement and bad blood, but rendered enormous (and – probably not a word – enormitous). Basically, in my context, a Titan argument.

I’m trying to put something non-fictional together on the madness of kings – or Titans – right now, and the world is just absolutely firehosing options onto the ground in front of me.

Jess Valice, artist and neuroscientist: “When is a good time to freak out?”

There is this overwhelming sense of fatigue that I think is typifying our generation, the weight of a spectrum of emotional responses that digital space provokes in us every day. We have never been more exposed to devastating news stories, politics, war, fighting, and hunger. It’s all so complex—this is where the science and melancholia come in—the recognition of this blankness as a widespread response. It’s too much to feel. I would have a hard time painting someone crying. I don’t want to show you the release… I want to show something else.   This idea of ‘crisis’ I think is so different now, and our methods of consuming information and coping with it are arguably far greater. Imagine 100 years ago hearing about a little button that someone could push that would wipe you out, there would be people screaming in the streets! I’m not sure we know when to freak out now, as we just perpetually cope in heightened states which again is where psychology comes into play. Why isn’t anyone freaking out? As we filter such enormous amounts of terrifying information via our screens, when is a good time to freak out? The figures are more gentle reflections of this intensity, so I want them to stop you and then bother you later. Take a photo and you revisit it to torture yourself, haha, searching for where that familiarity is.

The supermassive black hole lurking at the center of our Milky Way galaxy is not as dormant as had been thought, a new study shows.

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The slumbering giant woke up around 200 years ago to gobble up some nearby cosmic objects before going back to sleep, according to the study published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

FANTASTIC PLANET, via.