Existential Romance

decemberpaladin:

wilwheaton:

WRITE MORE, DO OTHER STUFF LESS.

That’s it. Everything else is meaningless. You can take all the classes in the world and read every book on the craft out there, but at the end of the day, writing is sorta like dieting. There are plenty of stupid fads out there and charlatans promising quick fixes, but if you want to lose weight, you have to exercise more and eat less. Period. Every writer has 10,000 pages of shit in them, and the only way your writing is going to be any good at all is to work hard and hit 10,001.

Wonderful advice, isn’t it? If you’re a Redditor, go give the OP some karma love, won’t you?

A reminder.

projectchancecomic:

Sixteen-year-old Alexi Rivera is just your average 10th grader. She’s got friends, math homework, an annoying older sister, and - oh yeah - she was assigned “male” at birth. As if that wasn’t enough for her to handle alongside advanced geometry, Alexi now has to deal with Or’n and Stout, ghostly…

austinkleon:

From a 1987 article in Discover magazine, Jared Diamond takes issue with the idea that agriculture led to more free time and less work for humans:

Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves [by hunting and gathering]. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn’t emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, “Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?”

He continues to question whether agriculture encouraged art by providing us with more leisure time:

[M]odern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do farmers. The whole emphasis on leisure time as a critical factor seems to me misguided. Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to. While post-agricultural technological advances did make new art forms possible and preservation of art easier, great paintings and sculptures were already being produced by hunter-gatherers 15,000 years ago, and were still being produced as recently as the last century by such hunter-gatherers as some Eskimos and the Indians of the Pacific Northwest.

(Thanks, @gerrycanavan)