Needed a globally accessible place to jot down notes about books, films, music and the such.
Not even finished yet, but enjoying it.
The "clues" the main character finds, like translating the three ".. .. .." in some note she found, to use as the taxidermized foxes in a house she broke into, seem a bit farfetched at times, but so far not in a troublesome way.
I broke in. The method isn't important. I've done it since. Several times. Each time it feels less like crossing a boundary or a border. Each time, there's less resistance.
https://www.washington.edu/news/2006/10/05/emotionally-ambivalent-workers-are-more-creative-innovative/
This increased sensitivity for recognizing unusual associations, which happy or sad workers probably couldn't detect, is what leads to creativity in the workplace.
"Due to the complexity of many organisations, workplace experiences often elicit mixed emotions from employees, and it's often assumed that mixed emotions are bad for workers and companies," said Fong, whose study appears in the October issue of the Academy of Management Journal. "Rather than assuming ambivalence will lead to negative results for the organisation, managers should recognize that emotional ambivalence can have positive consequences that can be leveraged for organisational success."
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/jan/02/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-giving-up-adam-phillips
There tends to be a determined cultural consensus that life is, and has to be, worth living (if not, of course, actually sacred).
There are, to put it as simply as possible, what turn out to be good and bad sacrifices (and sacrifice creates the illusion - or reassures us - that we can choose our losses). There is the giving up that we can admire and aspire to, and the giving up that profoundly unsettles us. What, for example, does real hope or real despair require us to relinquish? What exactly do we imagine we are doing when we give something up? There is an essential and far-reaching ambiguity to this simple idea. We give things up when we believe we can change; we give up when we believe we can't.
All the new thinking, like all the old thinking, is a bout sacrifice, about what we should give up to get the lives we should want. For our health, for our planet, for our emotional and moral wellbeing - and, indeed, for the profits of the rich - we are asked to give up a great deal now. But alongside this orgy of improving self-sacrifices - or perhaps, underlying it - there is a despair and terror of just wanting to give up. A need to keep at bay the sense that life may not be worth the struggle, the struggle that religions and therapies and education, and entertainment, and commodities, and the arts in general are there to help us with. For more and more people now it seems that it is their hatred and their prejudice and their scapegoating that actually keeps them going. As though we are tempted more than ever by what Nietzsche once called "a will to nothingness, a counter-willan aversion to life, a rebellion against the most fundamental presuppositions of life".
Whether we are giving up on confidence, or on free speech, or on sociability, or on wanting, or on meaning, or on life itself, it is, as it were, the return we have in mind, however unconscious we are of the deal being brokered. What we want from any given sacrifice is always worth discussing. Sacrifice and its discontents is what there is to talk about. Givign up, or giving up on, anything or anyone always exposes what it is we take it we want.
To attend to something and yet want nothing from it, these seemed to be the essentials of the second way of perceiving ... if by chance we should have discovered the knack of holding wide our attention, then the magic thing happens.
The "magic thing" is to "make boredom and weariness blossom into immeasurable contentment"; the second kind of attention "brought a quality of delight completely unknown to the first kind". Wide attention reenchants the world, narrow attention can diminish it. Narrow attention creates a certain kind of person - is a way of overdefining oneself; wide attention provides alternatives, alternative ways of seeing ourselves and others. Clearly what Milner is describing here as wide attention is a form of attention purged of aims and wants and conventional satisfactions (it is a version of forgetting oneself); and she describes in vivid detail her struggles to attain this wide attention, freed as it seemed to be of Darwinian and Freudian and indeed acquisitive purposes. It is a version, as she acknowledges, of what Blake called "vision". It acknowledges that any idealogy of virtue can only ever be a provocation.
Our frustration is the key to our desire; to want something or someone is to feel their absence; so to register or recognise a lack would seem to be the precondition for any kind of pleasure or satisfaction. Indeed, in this account, frustration, a sense of lack, is the necessary precondition for any kind of satisfaction.
I think it got described as "Portal meeting philosophy" which is not a bad description. Good stuff.
amazing game.
the weight/encumberment system is a bit silly. The weapon combination of handle and blade is fun.
Enjoyable, now happening in Ireland, exploring his past as son of one of two families who have been feuding forever.
Didn't see the end ("love letters being hidden") coming, but was good.
