after thoughts

BUBBLING WITH IDEASSSS

Learning its good to not be comfortable sometimes.

Good friends are hard to come by. Half way there are a plenty.

latimes:

In China, millions make themselves at home in caves: Some are basic, others beautiful, with high ceilings and nice yards. “Life is easy and comfortable here,” one cave dweller says.

In recent years, architects have been reappraising the cave in environmental terms, and they like what they see.

“It is energy efficient. The farmers can save their arable land for planting if they build their houses in the slope. It doesn’t take much money or skill to build,” said Liu Jiaping, director of the Green Architecture Research Center in Xian and perhaps the leading expert on cave living. “Then again, it doesn’t suit modern complicated lifestyles very well. People want to have a fridge, washing machine, television.”

Liu helped design and develop a modernized version of traditional cave dwellings that in 2006 was a finalist for a World Habitat Award, sponsored by a British foundation dedicated to sustainable housing. The updated cave dwellings are built against the cliff in two levels, with openings over the archways for light and ventilation. Each family has four chambers, two on each level.

Photo: Ma Liangshui, 76, has lived in caves around Yanan his entire life. Credit: Barbara Demick / Los Angeles Times

(Source: Los Angeles Times)

inothernews:

holocene | bon iver

(via projectvinyl)

Y’all can probably tell I’m obsessed with this song.  Here’s Justin Vernon on the song’s — and album’s — meaning:

Holocene is a bar in Portland, Ore., but it’s also the name of a geologic era, an epoch if you will. It’s a good example of how all the songs are all meant to come together as this idea that places are times and people are places and times are… people? [Laughs.] They can all be different and the same at the same time. Most of our lives feel like these epochs. That’s kind of what that song’s about. “Once I knew I was not magnificent.” Our lives feel like these epochs, but really we are dust in the wind. But I think there’s a significance in that insignificance that I was trying to look at in that song.

because in the grand scheme of things

we’re blessed

Big hopes, baby steps

And some big naps on the way

fast or slow?

so i wrote this in my xanga right before my freshman year at midd:

“so i’m off to college in a few more days and time passes by too quickly just like how harry potter 7 already came out, and they made a simpsons movie after 18 years and people are saying how america isn’t going to be the land of dreams in a few years and laundromats are closing down because everyone and every building is getting their own washing machines and photo stores are closing down because of the new dawn of digital cameras and people are rethinking about how to make a CD smaller and less fragile and my parents are already talking about retirement and my dad is winding down: limping more, becoming too wise to be angry and my grandparents already have their coffins ready. i don’t know how hard i’ve been trying to hold onto these last moments of what was; i think i’ve just been letting them happen because i don’t know what else to do and i’ve lost enthusiasm or hope for slowing down time. how naive.”

kind of crazy how things have changed since then. for one, no one talks about CDs anymore, the financial crisis of 2008 took its toll on the superpower mindset of the u.s., digital cameras and smartphones are almost synonymous and in my own life, i have one grandparent left and my parents closed their laundromat in 2008. if you told me all this back in 2007 when i first wrote that, i’d be depressed about how the future was going to unfold. not to say those moments weren’t hard but i think i’m also super content with my life right now. kind of cool, kind of crazy how time works its magic.

hi i miss writing

but i’m so lazy

at the end of the day

my anger comes from being a hopeless romantic

curate:

sylviac: The translation is not entirely accurate (but it’s really good!) - crucially, I would have translated what she wrote at the end as “We are ALL the 99%.”

curate:

I immigrated to the US a few years ago. I have 2 kids. I don’t speak English. Because of the environment change, my entire family is unhappy. I work in a garment factory for 19 hours a week. My boss doesn’t pay me minimum wage and overtime pay, nor does he give me rest breaks or healthcare. On top of that, he constantly verbally harasses us. This affects my emotions and my family. We are the 99%.

wearethe99percent

i swear

life can be so overwhelming in this underwhelming world. 

theclotheshorse:

these I steal for you by dkim

cheesy things like this tehehehhe

inothernews:

newshour:

A map of the proposed Keystone XL, also called Tar Sands, pipeline.

It could carry crude oil some 1,700 miles from Alberta, Canada, to the Gulf Coast in Texas.

A friendly and safe new source of oil for the U.S. or an environmental disaster waiting to happen?

A pipeline that’s 36 inches in diameter, less than half-an-inch thick?

Environmental disaster waiting to fucking happen.

Pat Buchanan Admits Bush Broke the US as a Superpower