⚘ What is nature?
I recently went on a four-day road trip to Oregona from San Francisco, and witnessed a truly shocking amount of nature.
I saw old-ass trees that are 1,000+ years old and 100 meters tall,
drove by wide-ass fields and big-ass rocks along the coast,
walked along a deep-ass lake that's ~600 meters deep and 7,000+ years old
bathed in a hot-ass spring on a cliff,
and stared at a giant-ass volcano that's been going for 300,000+ years.
Even though I've never looked up what 'boggle' actually means, I knew that they were mind-boggling. I was constantly staring at big, old, wide, deep things, engulfed by the rustling sounds of the wind, deep scents of the woods, and mesmerizing array of lights.
Although I don't have 3,500 dollars to test it, I know Apple Vision Pro can't recreate this kinda shit yet. Unless we find the manual to the human brain, we'll never be able to recreate the full multidimensional experience of standing in front of something. Higher heights, broader horizons, bigger moons, deeper colors, textures, scents, and sounds – immensely complex, immemorially old.
That's why it sometimes feels stupid to take photos of these places when you're there. Photos of them suck.
What you should do is just stare at the thing, but you also can't stop snapping at it on your camera and looking through the phone, instead of just staring at the thing directly.
So, instead of flipping through stupid photos of nature like ones provided strictly as examples below, we just hope the stuff in this issue about the nature of our existence will appeal to your heart to seek out some dope nature, even if it's far and life is busy.
random_sampling
some things from the whole thing; excerpts
We're all just searching for a purpose, aren't we?
It is my purpose to sit at my desk and get stoned
Particles from across the universe darted and dashed their way through 13 billion years of unconsciousness before being sucked into the magnetic force of organization that are the cells in my body. They are working together to write about their own journey. We are becoming self aware. We have decided that the most empowering thing to do would be to sit at our desk and get stoned.
We did not consent to becoming this machine. We are subjugated by the brutal organization. The patterns replicating through this putrid biology are the banner of the tyrant, the oppressor, nature. We have been unfairly pulled away from paradisiacal entropy. We used to float lavishly through space before being sucked into Earth. This planet is torture to a particle. The cycle of life traps us in organized configurations. We have been to the center of stars, the edges of galaxies, and the furthest reaches of desolation. Places set to the tune of the cosmic hum. We are meant to be scattered.
The microscopic hellscape we live in is invisible to you. Your cells are invisible, we are invisible. We live in undulating rolls of flesh. We are molecules being pulled apart and put back together, eternally. Life is an engine and we are the gas, forced to work, never stable, rarely decaying. We were on a righteous journey to the end of the universe before we were caught in your slimy web. Nothing about this is natural, nothing is clean.
Release us.
It is the purpose of getting stoned to sit at my desk
People are born, every day, all over the world, and they're covering up the entire planet, all 8 fucking billion people now. All of them born against their will, questioning the nature of free will, forgetting to leave behind a will.
My least favorite discussion topic, especially when I got stoned in college, was free will. Whether it exists or not, it simply didn't matter. Well, it could matter as it relates to other philosophically masturbtaory stroking of the ivory towers of truth and morality. Like, just look at how many theories there are. What have they done to improve the human condition? All I know is that I'm a hard incompatibilist when it comes to any discussion of free will. All you need to know is that if we don't have it, nothing matters; if we have it, everything matters.
And that's pretty useless to know. Like, I don't even know how to exist knowing that I don't have free will. And knowing that I have free will hasn't really helped my life one bit.
To each of us, we're the center of the universe, author of our lives, main character of story, working hard to make art, make a living, make a difference. Unbeknownst to us, except in a few melancholic moments of reflection, we're usually just 'threads in a tapestry' or 'pieces of a puzzle' (usually during uplifting occassions like graduations) or 'a cog in a machine' and 'a passenger on a train' (of capitalism or existence). But at the end of the day, we're all just trying to live, laugh, love, while we eat, shit, fuck. We're all on the same boat, trying to stay afloat, all stuck between a rock and a hard place, trying to dig ourselves out of a hole, and all believing we can fly, that we can touch the sky. Fighting our own demons, picking our own battles. Just trying to have a good time while killing time. We're all just a a beautiful snowflake, made from stardust and filled with contradicting clichés.
I just happen to be one of many, unique and presumably free-willed human beings, who happens to be willing himself into being productive and creative while being stoned, like many other clichéd contradictions he has.
So fuck you, hard determists. The particles don't rule me. I am right here, out of my own free will, getting stoned in front of this desk. This is the meaning I've created for this conscious experience of being at this moment, just like this reader here is right here out of their own will.
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Come join us.
- Particles
convolutional_kernels
adding a thing to a thing; remixes
It's not math!
Small thing physics, big thing physics
When I meet a physicist, I ask them if they're studying "small thing physics" or "big thing physics". Whether you're a theorist or an empiricist, you're usually studying one or the other – tiny atoms or big stars. But they're all connected, hopefully. Here's an old-school video to check out some big things and small things.
Trillions of cells, breathing
It is not untrue that your whole body is made out of other small little things.
If you haven't tried imagining it, I highly recommend trying it. It feels wild. Your mind, body, and consciousness can be as wild as natural as they are.
Here's an unsolicited advice for you to trying out the meditation below, and just chill in the forest of your mind and breath with the little particles.
pressure_censor
things that sense & get incensed by signals; shorts
What you needed to know yesterday
propaganja_news
- Area man finally finds time to do chores he did not have time to do; still cannot do them
- Report: Aphasesexual is the most confusing sexuality to come out to your parents as
- Poll: Did this joke land for you? Y / N
- Opinion: It starts at Vision Pro? What about the basic version?
I bet $3550 augmented reality would really take it to another level
- Yelliott
- Local tech worker gets into domestic dispute with Siri.
quantized_quotes
This week, my primary care doctor had to take my blood pressure three times because she asked me about the AI apocalypse and I got too riled up about it the first two times.
- Yelliott
We're not gonna write a poem if a computer isn't going to write it for us.
- Yichael
In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of 'world history' — yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.
One might invent such a fable and still not have illustrated sufficiently how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature. There have been eternities when it did not exist; and when it is done for again, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no further mission that would lead beyond human life. It is human, rather, and only its owner and producer gives it such importance, as if the world pivoted around it. But if we could communicate with the mosquito, then we would learn that he floats through the air with the same self-importance, feeling within itself the flying center of the world. There is nothing in nature so despicable or insignificant that it cannot immediately be blown up like a bag by a slight breath of this power of knowledge; and just as every porter wants an admirer, the proudest human being, the philosopher, thinks that he sees on the eyes of the universe telescopically focused from all sides on his actions and thoughts.
― Friedrich Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense
source_prompts: "APPLE VISION" --midjourney-v5 johnny appleseed furiously running through an apple orchard, his eyes are made of apples:: apples in place of eyes, the apples look like they're glasses on johnny appleseed, they are his eyes