Lam Pham

1 followers · 867 views

on the atlas — 31

highlights — 68

His stance is not nostalgic but forward-looking, and it exposes the moral bankruptcy of the old system.
Is Tradition a “Curse”? — Reflections on Jujutsu Kaisen
“How a couple handles where to eat is a low-stakes rehearsal for bigger conversations.”
Are You in a Restaurant Gap Relationship? - The New York Times
“I have been living by the standards of the very people I disliked.”
The Nobility of the Soul: Jujutsu Kaisen and the Curse of Modernity
I no longer have access to something specific that is dear and familiar like my old habits of mind. It is ultimately a trivial complaint, a champagne problem of sorts, but a problem nonetheless. Let me whine for just a bit longer—Heaven can wait until I am unburdened by what once was
The grief of losing your sense of self is like getting to Heaven and being upset they don't have your favorite flavor of La Croix
So it’s my job to deny my love.
“The Gatekeeper” by Kim Haengsoon
He wrote on the perils of pictures under glass, the common interface for the phone. “It's a Novocaine drip to the wrist.” he said. Numbing, disconnected. By now, that novocaine has turned to nicotine.
The Object I'm Holding Is Not a Phone
we often think of narrative as a temporal art, experienced in time like music, but it’s visual, too; a story’s as much garden as song. Northrop Frye puts it this way: “We hear or listen to a narrative, but when we grasp a writer’s total pattern we ‘see’ what he means.” John Berger atomizes further: “Seeing comes before words.” We first apprehend text as texture—blurry or dense, black on white—and perceive each word as a picture
The Paris Review - Beyond the Narrative Arc - The Paris Review
we’ve never gotten along, even when we’ve gotten along. This is what happens when you have parents who fetishize family, and the viscosity of blood relative to water: you resent the force with which they push you together with this person who is, genetics aside, a stranger
Help Me Follow My Sister into the Land of the Dead - Lightspeed Magazine
if my job is to communicate, I need to be able to communicate with everyone. I need to be able to sit in front of SZA and talk to you in a way where you feel comfortable, in a way where it feels authentic from me to you, you to me, and I can’t do that with a wall up. I can’t do that with my full masculinity.
Kendrick Lamar on Vulnerability, His Childhood, and “Not Like Us”
She never even imagined what her dream house could be. So it’s like it scared her. It fucked her up. She was upset and embarrassed, but now she’s, like, freed-by-proxy type shit.
Kendrick Lamar on Vulnerability, His Childhood, and “Not Like Us”
But for what I do, there is certainly no growth without vulnerability. If I understood the power of vulnerability earlier, I could have had more depth and more reach to the guys that was around me in the neighborhood coming up.
Kendrick Lamar on Vulnerability, His Childhood, and “Not Like Us”
The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down just to feel the warmth
Former classmate of Trump rally gunman says he was ‘bullied almost every day’ from NBC News : r/interestingasfuck
The cost of participating in the new “free-to-play” platforms not only denominated in time and money as traditionally economics understood, but also in emotional satisfaction provided by challenges, social recognition, and self-actualization. The deeper a platform can penetrate the player’s identity needs, the stickier the platform becomes and the higher the switching cost.
[FKPXLS] The Illusions of Free-to-Play - by Tina He
The concept of Metaverse might be an ultimate manifestation of a “free-to-play” driven digital economy, and it’s the first time a complex, adaptive ecosystem such as a city can theoretically be rendered in the virtual world in lossless fidelity. Even companies like Google and Facebook, whose value is driven by the advanced sorting and indexing of digital information, still have to rely heavily on the demand generated from the physical world.
[FKPXLS] The Illusions of Free-to-Play - by Tina He
“The DNA of the company”, “the ecology of the marketplace”, “the pulse of a city” and so on are all attempts to understand the unpredictable fluctuations of man-made entities through the lens of nature, who’s familiar with the cycle of birth, maturity, and death.
[FKPXLS] The Illusions of Free-to-Play - by Tina He
Players no longer “pay to win”, rather the games are “free to win”. Instead, they “pay to belong” or “pay to find themselves”. To be the most skilled at the game is only one dimension of winning. A player can also win by flexing the coolest cosmetics, gaining access to once-in-a-game-time events, and participating and gaining social status in a metagame that emerges outside of Fortnite itself
[FKPXLS] The Illusions of Free-to-Play - by Tina He
The illusion of “free-to-play” is at its core the illusion of costlessness. As participants in these newfound “free-to-play” games, we are as powerful as we’re powerless. For every action we take, we are either being sold as products or we are facilitating the sale of the product, most of the time without being fairly compensated for it.
[FKPXLS] The Illusions of Free-to-Play - by Tina He
The “free-to-play” game design has been berated as sneaky and manipulative, luring the players to trade “something” for “nothing”. Such assumption implies that real-world currency definitionally warrants more economic value than the virtual one. We all know that this is no longer true.
[FKPXLS] The Illusions of Free-to-Play - by Tina He
An Atomic Value Swap is the measurement of the sustainability of repeated core transactions in an ecosystem. Payment for goods or services is an example of an atomic value swap, one where cash is exchanged for an item or service. Both parties deem the transaction to be beneficial and therefore the transaction occurs. If the price of a product or service is too high, the buyer will not engage in the transaction.
[FKPXLS] The Illusions of Free-to-Play - by Tina He
Nietzsche was right about Carpe Diem, but fundamentally, I think we must still accept that we exist in a society of shared knowledge and a united storyline that thrives on systems built off of objective values.
Nietzsche's Will to Power - by allywaytalk - Ally Zhu
The Spirit of Gravity is also a lack of ownership over our past; we can act in the present to alter our future, but there is nothing we can do to change our past. This thought can enslave us, as the past becomes a permanent, immobile reminder of our seeming powerlessness.
Nietzsche's Will to Power - by allywaytalk - Ally Zhu
Nietzsche’s belief that our objective definitions of justice and goodness is just a means to power also spurs him to claim that equality, defined through Christianity as the ultimate virtue of a successful and just society, is simply a means through which the powerless attempt to level the playing field. Everyone longs and strives for power, but the weak disguise it through a call for equality.
Nietzsche's Will to Power - by allywaytalk - Ally Zhu
Our justice systems and our holier-than-thou morality thus becomes an underhand last defense, after strength and might have failed.
Nietzsche's Will to Power - by allywaytalk - Ally Zhu
The “Will to Power” can be understood as one’s personal desire and ability to recreate the world in the image of one’s will, where value is not discovered but self-made.
Nietzsche's Will to Power - by allywaytalk - Ally Zhu
My genetic make-up does not determine my personality or my political views; it just influences them.
Personality Politics | DPIR
Doing this well takes practice connecting familiar dots in new ways, and connecting new dots in familiar ways.
What Rick Rubin’s ‘The Creative Act’ reminds us about design | by Elaine Lu | Jul, 2024 | UX Collective
I think for most people who want to do great work, the right strategy is not to plan too much. At each stage do whatever seems most interesting and gives you the best options for the future. I call this approach "staying upwind." This is how most people who've done great work seem to have done it.
How to Do Great Work
At the heart of Cioran's critique lies the concept of the "will to power," a driving force that propels saints to endure immense suffering in pursuit of their faith. "What fascinates him are their tears, their thirst for pain and their capacity to endure it; in short, the pathology… 'the voluptuousness of suffering' for 'suffering is man's only biography.'"
Tears and saint - TINA HE
Assuming their expenses remain constant and their revenue growth is what it has been over the last several months, do they make it to profitability on the money they have left? Or to put it more dramatically, by default do they live or die?
Default Alive or Default Dead?
We can choke on the things we love.
‘Scenes From a Marriage’ Season One, Episode 3 Recap
We didn't record the talks. I didn't want to distract the speakers with the presence of a video camera, reminding them of a potential audience situated somewhere else, somewhere later. I had asked the speakers to experiment with form and felt it was my responsibility to create a safe environment where sharing was limited to the eyes and ears in the room. At the same time, I wished for their stories to connect beyond the walls of the film school.
naive-yearly.are.na
“architecture should not occupy the cultivated soil layer but rather exist humbly under the flourishing of plants and microorganisms in the soil.”
A submerged Japanese library by Hiroshi Nakamura & NAP as a ‘tranquil place’ for reading and rest | News | Archinect
We forgot about time outside of thirst and hunger, sunrise and sunset
naive-yearly.are.na
The consciousness implied by the measurement problem in quantum mechanics is the “observer within,” the most primordial awareness of existence. By cultivating our sense of that observer self, we are able to transcend the simplistic automatic behavior purported by materialist philosophers as evidence of our lack of free will, and instead approach the full-bore capacity for manifestation implied by fundamental primordial consciousness, to truly actualize the world dreamed by our higher self—the ultimate expression of our free will.
Your Sense of Free Will Defies Conventional Science
The emerging neuroscience of consciousness and related philosophy of mind suggest that consciousness is fundamental in the universe. The physical brain does not produce consciousness, so much as serve as a filter that allows primordial consciousness to trickle into our awareness in a very limited fashion, which is the “here-and-now” that we experience in normal waking reality.
Your Sense of Free Will Defies Conventional Science
based on many decades of electrically stimulating the brain in awake patients and based on all of his scientific work studying consciousness and the brain, he concluded the brain does not create consciousness or free will.
Your Sense of Free Will Defies Conventional Science
there is also agreement in the scientific community that the firing of neurons determines not just some or most but all of our thoughts, hopes, memories, and dreams.
There’s No Such Thing as Free Will | Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science
If we have evolved, then mental faculties like intelligence must be hereditary. But we use those faculties—which some people have to a greater degree than others—to make decisions. So our ability to choose our fate is not free, but depends on our biological inheritance.
There’s No Such Thing as Free Will | Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science
It permeates the popular culture and underpins the American dream—the belief that anyone can make something of themselves no matter what their start in life.
There’s No Such Thing as Free Will | Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science
The line between progression and regression is thin, so is the line between passion and clarity, imagination and escapism, future and present, physical and virtual.
When gods are dead, we create new ones - TINA HE
Unable to tolerate the randomness and chaos of many worlds, some of us try to restore the order of the past by rebuilding Pantheon by migrating universities, hospitals, and offices to the cloud. If we’ve learned something from past migrations, it is through the creation of new gods, new hopes, and a new faith that anything meaningful gets built. By the end of the day, businesses are the metaphors of what we choose to believe as a collective at that moment in time
When gods are dead, we create new ones - TINA HE
The ebbs and flows of our fears are being crisply captured by Google searches, Youtube homepage, trending tweets, and Instagram ads in real time.
When gods are dead, we create new ones - TINA HE
What the aestheticist resists is the notion that moral value has ultimate priority over aesthetic value. Moral catastrophe tempts us to fall into despair, and to condemn this world, but aesthetic value redeems it. Aesthetic value finds the final value of things both in their quintessential characteristics and in their manifestation of deep natural principles. It allows us to place suffering and evil within a wider context. So it is when we turn our attention to the world as a whole that, I claim, aesthetic value has priority.
Why aesthetic value should take priority over moral value | Aeon Essays
Weber himself acknowledges that increasing rationalization and intellectualization does not mean a greater general knowledge of the conditions we live under.
Here I stand. I can do no other. - TINA HE
There is currently some debate over whether depression cuts one off from appreciating beauty, but the philosopher Tasia Scrutton has plausibly argued that depression may only undermine the enjoyment of cheerful sunny scenes, and not the appreciation of the gothic aspects of nature that resonate with one’s condition while also elevating and dignifying it.
Why aesthetic value should take priority over moral value | Aeon Essays
Note in particular how he points to flies and worms – creatures that we may find disgusting – pointing out that it is ‘our sins’ (that is, our selfish interests) that make them seem unworthy. A more cosmic perspective finds the beauty in all things.
Why aesthetic value should take priority over moral value | Aeon Essays
Tell me about a challenge you faced and how you approached it I’m sure many designers face this, but it’s always challenging to ship both the more tactical, required design work of today while simultaneously defining an ambitious and holistic vision for the future, which rang true for the FigJam AI launch. There were instances where I had to embrace the discomfort of maintaining the ground-level view and 40K-foot view for the project, without getting the bends. Despite that, building this overall muscle as a designer almost always produces better work. It’s a helpful forcing function for your …
A day in the life: a product designer at Figma | Creative Bloq
Caring too much makes you a sheep. But you need to be at least a little in tune with others to do something useful for them.
Sam Altman
the idea of simulacra, all these surfaces that imitate other materials
NT on X: "@Culture_Crit So I looked this up to understand why this is art. It was disturbing me. The art is not what I thought it was but after understanding it I think there is something positive to be said for it. So what is it? The woman must modify her natural state to fit within the short…" / X
The primary fallacy that underpins many of their mistakes is that user flexibility and control necessarily lead to a user experience complexity that hurts growth. And the second, more grave fallacy, is the thinking that exerting extreme control over users is the best way to maximize the profitability and sustainability of their networks.
The Web We Lost - Anil Dash