Linny & Life

Photo taken by Kelly! At SF Conservatory of Flowers

Fri, 24 May 2013 05:11:00 -0400

Photo taken by Kelly! At SF Conservatory of Flowers

SF Conservatory of Flowers

Fri, 24 May 2013 05:10:59 -0400

SF Conservatory of Flowers

Sutro Baths! <3

Fri, 24 May 2013 05:10:55 -0400

Sutro Baths! <3

I’ve seen a few of Koreeda’s films: Nobody Knows,...

Fri, 24 May 2013 03:43:00 -0400

I’ve seen a few of Koreeda’s films: Nobody Knows, Still Walking, and part of Air Doll. I should probably finish Air Doll some day when I feel less creeped out. I Wish is the fourth one I’ve seen, and it’s by far my most favorite of Koreeda’s (and maybe makes it to my top ten favorite films). Maybe because it’s got a ”more commercial” feel to it because I think it’s sponsored by the JR Shinkansen bullet train, but my god it’s so different from his other ones. It ends happily! Still a bit open-ended but that’s fine. It’s amazing to see how well he works with children.

I really hate writing film reviews. I can’t possibly do the films justice by describing them because 1) I suck at summarizing a film and 2) I don’t like setting expectations.

But seriously, the fact that I’m taking the effort to write this draggy post really reflects my enthusiasm for this film. It’s mostly about two brothers working together to reunite their divorced parents. I say “mostly” because the film doesn’t just focus on the two brothers but rather reveals the intricacies of the theme “families in progress”: of husband and wife taking a break from each other, single moms taking care of children, a surrogate parent providing care her child, and grandparents holding on to dreams of connecting with the newer generation by not compromising any values.

Many of the children go through their own personal difficulties as well. One aspires to be an actress. Another one wants to revive his dead dong. All six (or was it seven)? children decide to embark on an epic journey to have their wishes come true. I won’t reveal any more but if you ever need to watch an uplifting movie because you had a sucky day, this would be one.

As usual, Koreeda’s films are gorgeous to watch. Lush landscapes. I am always taken back by his ability to capture the beauty of dusk and twilight. The soundtrack is worth listening to as well.

Two brothers talk about their dad’s “indie...

Fri, 24 May 2013 03:13:00 -0400

Two brothers talk about their dad’s “indie label” music.

Just finished watching I Wish (2011) dir. by Hirokazu Koreeda. Hands down, one of my favorite films so far.

Getting ready for a dance performance.

Thu, 23 May 2013 17:15:48 -0400

Getting ready for a dance performance.

I’ll miss these late night shenanigans.

Thu, 23 May 2013 05:06:06 -0400

I’ll miss these late night shenanigans.

beauxsons: Stars (Hold On) / Youngblood Hawke New running...

Thu, 23 May 2013 00:30:16 -0400

beauxsons:

Stars (Hold On) / Youngblood Hawke

New running song!

monicatramos: Trouble Sleeping. I made this a while back and...

Wed, 22 May 2013 03:53:46 -0400

monicatramos:

Trouble Sleeping.

I made this a while back and didn’t mean for the guy to look like he’s just rolling in place… but he is.

Nice!

devotchkas: Doin’ it Right (ft. Panda Bear) - Daft Punk Fave...

Tue, 21 May 2013 05:41:19 -0400

devotchkas:

Doin’ it Right (ft. Panda Bear) - Daft Punk

Fave song in this album. I love the progression of the controlled beats. So good.

aqqindex: Jean Nouvel, CIrca, 1980

Tue, 21 May 2013 05:34:58 -0400

aqqindex:

Jean Nouvel, CIrca, 1980

tlbsandwich: A Library at Chatsworth House. Photo: Derry Moore...

Mon, 20 May 2013 22:55:20 -0400

tlbsandwich:

A Library at Chatsworth House. Photo: Derry Moore for Architectural Digest, 1979.

Just finished reading Derry Moore’s “House”. He takes breathtaking photos of rooms. Rooms!

"“I didn’t watch the whole documentary. After a few episodes it was too painful. I kept wanting to..."

Mon, 20 May 2013 02:59:16 -0400

“

“I didn’t watch the whole documentary. After a few episodes it was too painful. I kept wanting to scream at Pam. It took me so long to do so many important things. It’s just hard to accept that I spent so many years being less happy than I could have been. Jim was five feet from my desk and it took me four years to get to him. It would be great if people saw this documentary and learned from my mistakes. Not that I’m a tragic person, I’m really happy now; but it would just make my heart soar if someone out there saw this and she said to herself ‘Be strong, trust yourself, love yourself, conquer your fears, just go after what you want and act fast because life just isn’t that long.’”

-Pam Beesly Halpert from The Office Finale

”

- (via thepoetryfarm)

file under: relevant to my life.

(via fabthings)

I’m not sure if another show can ever fill in the hole The...

Mon, 20 May 2013 02:53:00 -0400

I’m not sure if another show can ever fill in the hole The Office has left in my heart. I’m not being melodramatic. It was the only show that captured the essence of - as Pam would put it - ”beauty in ordinary things.”

Granted, I haven’t watch too many American shows to compare. But seriously, it’s been a great series. I’ll miss everyone. Thank you, Office, for all the tears, laughter and inspiration!

I thought it was weird, when you picked us, to make a...

Mon, 20 May 2013 02:36:37 -0400

I thought it was weird, when you picked us, to make a documentary. But, all in all, I think an ordinary paper company, like Dunder Mifflin, was a great subject for a documentary.

My favorite quote.

jamdance: John Krasinski and Jenna Fisher auditioning for Jim...

Mon, 20 May 2013 02:16:48 -0400

jamdance:

John Krasinski and Jenna Fisher auditioning for Jim & Pam, The Office

youmightfindyourself: Vision Is All About Change By SUSANA MARTINEZ-CONDE NY Times: May 17,...

Mon, 20 May 2013 01:12:31 -0400

youmightfindyourself:

Vision Is All About Change

By SUSANA MARTINEZ-CONDE
NY Times: May 17, 2013

YOUR eyes are the sharks of the human body: they never stop moving.

In the past minute alone, your eyes made as many as 240 quick movements called “saccades” (French for “jolts”). In your waking hours today, you will very likely make some 200,000 of them, give or take a few thousand. When you sleep, your eyes keep moving — though in different ways and at varying speeds, depending on the stage of sleep.

A portion of our eye movements we do consciously and are at least aware of on some level: when we follow a moving bird or plane across the sky with our gaze, for instance. But most of these tiny back-and-forths and ups-and-downs — split-second moves that would make the Flying Karamazov Brothers weep with jealousy — are unconscious and nearly imperceptible to us. Our brain suppresses the feeling of our eye jumps, to avoid the sensation that the world is constantly quaking.

Even when we think our gazes are petrified, in fact, we are still making eye motions, including tiny saccades called “microsaccades” — between 60 and 120 of them per minute. Just as we don’t notice most of our breathing, we are almost wholly unaware of this frenetic, nonstop ocular activity.

Without it, though, we couldn’t see a thing.

Humans are hardly unique in this way. Every known visual system depends on movement: we see things either because they move or because our eyes do.

Some of the earliest clues to this came more than two centuries ago. Erasmus Darwin, a grandfather of Charles Darwin, observed in 1794 that staring at a small piece of scarlet silk on white paper for a long time — thereby minimizing (though not stopping) his eye movements — made it grow fainter in color, until it seemed to vanish.

In the early 1950s researchers used technology to counteract eye movements by mounting a tiny slide projector onto a contact lens affixed to the observer’s eye with a suction device. This retinal stabilization technique forces the image to remain still with respect to the eye, even when the eye continues to move. The images, in these experiments, fade away perceptually, because of the lack of neural stimulation.

Some two decades later, the neuroscientist John K. Stevens, at the University of Pennsylvania, underwent the injection of a paralytic drug that obliterated nearly all of his bodily motion, including that of his eyes (he was artificially ventilated during the experiment). An arterial tourniquet prevented blood flow to, and therefore paralysis of, one of his arms, allowing him to communicate with his colleagues by flexing his hand. He found that without eye movements, “image fading became a real problem.”

We see the same result with certain rare diseases that lead to complete ocular paralysis. One woman afflicted with extraocular muscular fibrosis has never made eye movements. She can read and even perform some complex daily activities (like making herself a cup of tea) — but only because she has learned to make saccade-like motions with her head. The head movements provide her brain with the jerky motion it needs to gather information from the environment.

What may be most surprising is that large eye motions and miniature eye jolts help us see the world in similar ways — largely at the same time.

Scientists had long believed that we used two types of oculomotor behavior to sample the visual world, alternating between big saccades to scan our surroundings and tiny ones to fix our gaze on a location of interest. Explore, fixate, repeat, all day, every day.

It seemed to make intuitive sense that we would have one brain system for exploring the environment and another for focusing on specific objects. But it turns out that exploration and gaze-fixation are not all that different processes in the brain.

Three colleagues and I recently published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in which volunteers were asked to view images of all sizes, from the massive to the minute, while we measured their eye movements. We found that people’s eyes scanned the scenes with the same general strategy in all cases, whether the images were huge or tiny, or even when they were fixing their gaze.

The findings suggest that exploration and fixation are not fundamentally different behaviors after all, but rather two ends of the same visual scanning continuum. They also imply that the same brain systems control our eye movements when we explore and when we fixate — an insight that may ultimately offer clues to understanding oculomotor dysfunction in neurological diseases, like Parkinson’s, that affect eye movements.

On a more personal level, I’ve often found a bit of inspiration from the biological fact that vision is all about change. If the world stands still, we must manufacture our own motion to perceive it — which would mean that the well-cited spiritual advice, “be the change you wish to see in the world,” often misattributed to Mohandas K. Gandhi, has a sound scientific basis as well.

This looks like a stock photo but I still love it. I can’t...

Thu, 16 May 2013 18:17:32 -0400

This looks like a stock photo but I still love it. I can’t wait to be done with finals so I can watch The Office finale!

I really like this album design. The song is pretty good too!

Thu, 16 May 2013 02:03:00 -0400

I really like this album design. The song is pretty good too!

afadzari: Shooting Stars - Bag Raiders When the beat drops....

Thu, 16 May 2013 00:56:23 -0400

afadzari:

Shooting Stars - Bag Raiders

When the beat drops. Bliss!