my theory on magic:
humanity sucked so bad that magic went away and to mock us, magic now manifests itself in fleeting phenomena like this
(via inothernews)
i have forever anxiety now..and therefore what feels like a forever unsatisfied BM.
the countdown begins.
oh god this is it.
May 26, 2013 - here we come
For the first time scientists have printed human embryonic stem cells using a 3D printer.
The Heriot-Watt University team’s research could eventually lead to human organs being printed on demand and an end to animal drug testing. Jim Drury of Reuters reports.
i love science i love science i love science
NYT opinionator: “How to Live Without Irony”
At the recommendation of two friends of mine, I sought out and then read this article titled “How to Live Without Irony” by professor of French at Princeton University, Christy Wampole.
It has nothing to do with the moral degradation of a generation (i.e. MY generation) and everything to do with the adjective-form-of-sincerity degradation (shall we say the sincere degradation of sincerity? or not..) inherently associated with the rampant irony Wampole addresses in her article.
Obviously, when we talk about us “millennials”, a term by the way with which I have a love-hate relationship I can’t get into now but one day might (no promises), and irony we end up talking about the (in)famous abstraction known as “the hipster”. By Mark Greif’s definition in this NYmag article, “the hipster is that person, overlapping with the intentional dropout or the unintentionally declassed individual—the neo-bohemian, the vegan or bicyclist or skatepunk, the would-be blue-collar or postracial twentysomething, the starving artist or graduate student—who in fact aligns himself both with rebel subculture and with the dominant class, and thus opens up a poisonous conduit between the two.”
A small liberal arts college like Wesleyan has a higher percentage of hipster represented in the campus population than elsewhere. As a student of said institution for four years now and not being part of that demographic, I’ve been fascinated by the hipster, more so because it was the conceptual image of the hipster that would define my generation (i.e. my kids will ask me if I was a hipster the way I ask my 70-year-old stepfather if he was a hippie).
Now Wampole has me self-correcting and realizing that my “fascination” was/is, let’s face it, an irritation. And maybe hipsters really do provoke me because they are an “amplified version of me”.
Woah, what? Is the nurture half that contributes to my identity sprouting from the very irony and insincerity I scorn? Am I snarky and sarcastic not because I got it from my mother but because I’m a watered-down version of a hipster? I don’t buy into it 100% but I can’t help but think that I’m unknowingly slipping into the black hole of the hipster generation, taking no note of how I am mocking that which has already staken claim to my cultural DNA.
Let me do some self-reflecting without the Tumblr public looking on now.
With that, I’ll close with two classics of the hipster (self-)hating genre, one old and one newish.
Oh and Merry Christmas.
