I’ve been gone. Not just from Pasadena, but from the world at large, for at least six months. I can probably count the number of times I left Mike and Susan’s house in 3.5 months on two hands, or maybe three, but some of those were just hiking. I didn’t see much news. Thankfully I missed the entire healthcare debate. I didn’t spend time with other people. I was checked out. Now I’m starting to check back in, and of course things seem kind of surreal.
I went to a mall last Friday. The one by the Santa Anita racetrack. I went with Ian to see Avatar in IMAX-3D, and to get a little exercise. I’ve mostly been laying around trying to stop being sick for the past week. When we got there, the show had sold out, so we decided to walk around the mall — to literally circumambulate it, not walk around inside like shoppers — and decide whether we wanted to go to the next showing, and kill some time. It was bizarre. The whole place. I felt like an alien, first for having biked there (they have a giant valet-only parking lot), second for clearly not wearing culturally acceptable Friday-night-at-the-mall attire, and third for having a giant crazy-homeless-guy beard. The homogeneity of the people just seemed bizarre somehow. Lots of black and white clothing. Lots of text messaging. Lots of makeup and trying to look tough. The scene was so strange we decided to pee in the bushes in the parking lot rather than try and find a bathroom inside. Continue reading ‘Checking back in with the world’
Published by
Zane Selvans on
December 27th, 2009 in
linkstream.
Tags: data, drugs, ecstasy, education, health, language, law, online, research, safety, school, technology, tools.
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Continue reading ‘Links for the week of December 24th, 2009′
Published by
Zane Selvans on
November 22nd, 2009 in
linkstream.
Tags: anasazi, art, backpacking, biology, blm, canyon, career, cedarmesa, change, children, climate, coffee, cop15, copenhagen, design, drugs, education, fractal, gradschool, grandgulch, law, mandelbrot, marijuana, math, philosophy, portland, school, science, technology, tools, twitter, ucsc, utah, visualization, web2.0, wilderness.
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Continue reading ‘Links for the week of November 20th, 2009′
Published by
Zane Selvans on
November 8th, 2009 in
linkstream.
Tags: afghanistan, art, bicycle, boulder, canyon, cars, christianity, drugs, economics, education, government, halloween, hirise, internet, islam, law, losangeles, mandeville, mars, mro, nasa, naturalism, nudity, pakistan, photos, policy, politics, religion, sanfrancisco, science, sex, space, technology, telcos, terrorism, torture, transportation, uk, usa, veritas, war, women.
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Continue reading ‘Links for the week of November 6th, 2009′
Published by
Zane Selvans on
October 25th, 2009 in
linkstream.
Tags: autism, children, climate, drugs, medicine, policy, propaganda, pseudoscience, science, sustainability.
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Continue reading ‘Links for the week of October 22nd, 2009′
Published by
Zane Selvans on
February 27th, 2009 in
journal, photos and public.
Tags: acid, animation, brain, DARE, drugs, LSD, propaganda, psychedelic, tripping.
This animation was inspired by an anti-drug poster, which showed two brain scans and the text “Have you changed your mind?”. Since the target audience was obviously not neuroscientists or brain surgeons, the only way to interpret it was based on the context, in which the connotation was presumably that one of the scans is a “damaged” drug-user’s brain, and the other is a healthy D.A.R.E. graduate.
Ironically, in a different context, the image becomes pro-drug. The word “psychedelic” is from the Greek roots psyche (mind) and delos (to manifest or become). Psychedelic means “mind-making”, or even, quite literally, “mind changing”. To those who have had positive, responsible, drug experiences, the poster might as well be channeling Jimi Hendrix: Are you experienced?
Made with the GIMP, and licensed to the public like all my content here, under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.
Continue reading ‘Have you changed your mind?’
