№ 386. Gaming GOT

"Next week promises to bring the Battle of Winterfell and plenty of bloodshed; the function of battle episodes is to test, strengthen, and shake up character dynamics. If Thrones’ main couple were more convincingly committed to each other, “A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms” could have given elegant voice to a central question in advance of that fight: When humanity looks death in the face, will they think about love in opposition to destiny, or love as destiny? For Episode 3, fans will have to look to characters beyond Jon and Daenerys to see that tension meaningfully played out."

How the empire of the dead will be routed would be the mother of all battles. Or maybe not. There's still the Iron Throne to be won after the face off with the Night King.

№ 385. How to Not Let ISIS Win

Weaponize humor and sacrilege.



Ridicule and laugh at them.

№ 384. Pop

№ 383. I E> 2018, Here Lies 2019

№ 382. Waking Up to Binary Dreams 2018

The digital world’s emphasis on speed inhibits reflection; its incentive empowers the radical over the thoughtful; its values are shaped by subgroup consensus, not by introspection. For all its achievements, it runs the risk of turning on itself as its impositions overwhelm its conveniences.


 

№ 381. Forecast for Our Dust Mote

This excerpt from Sagan's book Pale Blue Dot was inspired by an image taken, at Sagan's suggestion, by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990. As the spacecraft left our planetary neighborhood for the fringes of the solar system, engineers turned it around for one last look at its home planet. Voyager 1 was about 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) away, and approximately 32 degrees above the ecliptic plane, when it captured this portrait of our world. Caught in the center of scattered light rays (a result of taking the picture so close to the Sun), Earth appears as a tiny point of light, a crescent only 0.12 pixel in size.

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."
--- Carl Sagan

№ 380. Pluck the Day While It is Ripe

A Bigger Splash by David Hockney  

Ask not ('tis forbidden knowledge),
what our destined term of years,
Mine and yours; nor scan the tables of your Babylonish seers.
Better far to bear the future, my Leuconoe, like the past,
Whether Jove has many winters yet to give, or this our last;
This, that makes the Tyrrhene billows spend their strength against the shore. 
Strain your wine and prove your wisdom;
life is short; should hope be more?
In the moment of our talking, envious time has ebb'd away.
Seize the present; trust tomorrow e'en as little as you may.

№ 379. Deep Swedish Strokes: ABBA