I’ve been sleeping erratically and eating terribly lately, and I have a headache that was started to turn into tears and muscles spasms and then all of a sudden I got a text from one of my best friends in the world and sometimes, these things just fix themselves.
Orchid Mantis (Hymenopus coronatus) - Malaysia
From Wikipedia:
This species is characterized by brilliant and beautiful coloring and unusual structure; their four walking legs resemble flower petals, and the coloration of the bodies tends to match the environment in which they were raised. H. coronatus shows some of the most pronounced sexual dimorphism of any species of mantis; the males are generally less than half the size of the females. Young nymphs resemble ants with orange and black bodies. As the mantis grows in its environment, its color comes to more closely match the coloration of its surroundings with each passing molt. It has been theorized that humidity and intensity of light play a large role in the final coloration of the adult.
(Various photos from Google Images)
(via abhorticulture)
She patted him on the arm. “You’re fucked up, Mister. But you’re cool.”
“I believe that’s what they call the human condition,” said Shadow.
-American Gods, Neil Gaiman
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
The little girl up the street that I used to babysit who is now about five or six years old started playing cello and this makes me inordinately excited.
marcus du sautoy says that the goldberg variations spiral up in pitch like the frieze pattern on the edge of a vase, but the core is the same— listen and you can hear the same theme repeated over and over again, climbing the musical scale as reliably as counted numbers. a trained ear can practically hear the next variation before it is played; each variation is like a tile fitting carefully into a wall of tessellation
i feel like this is the sort of music j. d. salinger would have found life-affirming— this is your variation, here is what follows, here is where you start and where you end and everything in between is music, even if it is music no different from your neighbors. this is supposed to be comforting but sometimes it just seems like trying to turn mathematical algorithms into art, ignoring the absence of identity, ignoring the fact that human ego stems from the very human need to seek out singular monuments in an otherwise even field.
academic bookshop, helsinki, 2010
The last (academic) year was one long nose-dive in slow motion— I guess I really collapsed somewhere in the middle of last semester— and basically I spent so much time wondering if I’m really cut out to be an architect, because I can be so lazy and unmotivated and unfocused if I’m not ~inspired~, and I have no effective job-hunting skills, and the one thing I hear over and over is that if you want to be an architect, you have to want to so bad that nothing can stop you, and I was beginning to wonder if wandering away from a field as high-paying as neuroscience/biotechnology was an awful, awful idea, maybe I should have just gone pre-med, but
then I do something like flip open an architecture book (Architecture, Francis Ching— eeeeevery architecture student has this, I think) and my heartrate goes up and ugh. Sometimes I forget that architecture is about space and how to define it, and not just construction and finances and management and while I know that the only successful architects are good at handling those things, too, the heart of it is just… space. Organizing space, defining experiences.
Sometimes doubt is a good thing just because it reminds you why you believe something so strongly in the first place.
Adamo-Faiden - Venturini house renovation and extension, Buenos Aires 2012.
I keep thinking about getting tattoos— sometimes little ones, like a Nordic row boat on one wrist and a penny on the other, sometimes big, like a half-sleeve of Corinthian pillars and poppies (FOR CALIFORNIA, NOT HEROIN), but honestly the trouble is I feel like I’d always want to go straight for the half-sleeve. I don’t see the point in getting tiny little tattoos, because unless they’re so tiny that they could pass for moles at first glance, they’d look like such an oddity. (So I guess I’m waiting until I’m like forty or fifty to get one because 1) It’s hard enough to get a job as an architect without anything that makes people judge you and 2) a really good half-sleeve on a architectural intern’s starting salary? HAHAHA)
So kudos to people who get tattooed like this and allow their body to be completely transformed. How beautiful.
(via thedandyunderworld)
