There’s a recurrent theme in my inbox as another semester is near the end. (And yes, I do use that wooden desk Gmail theme. Let a man keep his kitschy customizations.)

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John Perry’s How to Procrastinate and Still Get Things Done looks like a good article on the ‘active procrastination’ I wrote about yesterday. True to form, I’ll read it later.

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Agreed. I try hard to circunvent this sad fact of life by wanting to do things that can still be considered productive — something I call ‘active procrastination’. Sadly, I’m often unsuccessful.

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I guess I’m going through a deliberately defective images phase. Here, have some Notendo.

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Robert Anton Wilson. (via Boing Boing)

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Enda O’Donoghue’s Reflection (oil on canvas, 2010). Can we call this ‘compressionism’? (via new-aesthetic)

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Here’s a new sad pasttime of mine, The Gallery of Dead Projects. It will contain posters for all the films I never did, either because I couldn’t find a way to fund and/or shoot them, or because they were only temporary musings and I never even bothered to commit anything to paper. This first one definitely refers to the latter type of project — at some point, I guess I wanted to make a film like Dune, but good and set in this solar system. Don’t we all?

But then again, perhaps this movie does indeed exist, as a blockbuster in the same parallel universe where a James O. Incandenza does his arthouse movies (hence the ‘Interlace’ Infinite Jest reference). I’d like that.

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Getting paid for what you love harms your love for what you do. Well, this shouldn’t be much of a surprise: Everyone who ever followed sports a bit has seen promising players lose their motivation despite becoming millionaires, and perhaps because of it. But still, this shouldn’t be read by greedy ‘employers’ as an excuse not to pay interns, for fear of damaging their priceless intrinsic motivations (this “we won’t pay you because you will love us” seems a recurrent theme among sleazy internship ads here in Portugal). On the contrary, the article is right to point out that a removal of an extrinsic motivation can also be damaging. ···

Mark Pagel on why we are, as a species, stupid plagiarists. ···

James Meek’s In the Sorting Office. Economic liberalism as Dutch housewives earning a pittance as ‘freelance’ postwomen, allowing their ‘employers’ to provide physical spam services to mail order companies at competitive prices. Among other nasty things, all in the mail delivery microcosm. An upsetting read. ···

Pico Iyer about the point of writing in long and winding sentences. My reading tastes are pretty strange for the ‘mainstream’ portuguese reader, as I like really long and difficult books that allow me to feel like a tourist in that world during the months they might take me to read, and I like long, tree-structured sentences that force me to pay attention. The vox populi here immediately associates long sentences with the writing of José Saramago and the mainstream consensus again is that his works are boring and impenetrable (both untrue), even if said consensus can’t explain how his books sell so well, and even documentaries about him get so many viewers in a country where no portuguese films have any viewers, let alone documentaries — it’s as if portuguese are secretive hypocrites in their appreciation of the long sentence (and it might very well be the truth that reading Saramago is a bit of a guilty pleasure — after all, forcing an author upon students in high school is the best way to make him unhip for life). ···

Occasional Dispatches from the Republic of Anhedonia by Colson Whitehead is a long and entertaining account of the writer’s experience as a player in the Poker World Series in Las Vegas. ···

Eat, Pray, Love may very well be the worst movie of all time. I haven’t seen the film, read the book, or even watched the book author’s TED talk, but I find the notion of rich people going on ‘self-discovery’ vacations and attaining ‘an enlightment’ through self-indulgence without the slightest bit of self-sacrifice (i.e. do these people ever give away their fortunes, or stay in a refugee camp for life?), then lecturing everyone about it while making an arms dealer’s fuckload of money in book and film deals, to be truly an insult to the rest of humanity. So yes, I agree with the article, on the basis of the film’s repulsive premise and my realization things like Sex and the City at least are honest in their depictions of self-indulgence. Ennui is something that only afflicts the well-off, and if you can plug the big hole in your soul with — let’s face it as that’s what it is — a big pile of money made manifest in sex tourism and shopping abroad, good for you. Some of us are only lucky enough to use Tumblr. ···

The Ballad of @Horse_ebooks: endless Zen, avant-garde writing, and humour from a Twitter spambot. ···

The Physics Factbook. Might be useful. ···

Here’s a very realistic Adobe Photoshop ‘simulator’. It really captures my experience using Adobe software. Nice. ···

The Restart Page. Really, are we nostalgic about rebooting our computers now? What the hell is wrong with us? I’m almost ashamed to admit I did get nostalgic when I ‘rebooted’ the Amiga Workbench. But why? Why? ···

Again, because it deserves its own entry: Become a Programmer, Motherfucker. You really should. Here’s a list of free books to get you started. ···

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Phillip Stearns’ Year of the Glitch: glitch art from ‘prepared’ digital cameras.

While there’s a lot of interesting things to discover in pushing cameras way past their standard mode of operation — through circuit-bending or digital cross-processing (that is, ‘databending’) —, I’m still a big fan of the glitch art resulting from true malfunctions.

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Jason Sweeney. Bravo!

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