Centripetal Notion: category

Put a bunch of humans on a tiny ship on a 6 month trip to Mars and, you can imagine. Astronauts need to do it like anyone else, especially if the mission counts on their mental and physical well-being.

This is my response to an image recently promoted to the top of social image bookmarking site, FFFFOUND!.

FFFFOUND! is a new-ish image bookmarking site, kind of like del.icio.us for whatever badass photography/art/design/etc. you find around the internet. Not only that though, the website itself is an aggregate cornucopia of beautiful, stimulating, cortex-crunching imagery taken from everyone else’s submissions.

“If we, as a society, have religiously idolized sex while placing it on a restricted, Victorian pedestal, and if our backlash has been to make sex compulsive, wild and unrestrained, then the balance might be found in managing our big O’s and finally finding peace between our sheets.”

A National Geographic study reveals the distribution of single men and women around the country. Blue and red represent an excess of single men and women respectively. It’s middle school all over again — the boys grouping up on one side of the continent and the girls on the other.

Some thoughts from Danah Boyd on the implications persistent digital memory (IM/email archives, blogs, images, video) has on culture, relationships, etc.

John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus explores the lives of several emotionally challenged characters as they navigate the comic and tragic intersections between love and sex in and around a modern-day underground salon. A sex therapist who has never had an orgasm, a dominatrix who is unable to connect, a gay couple who are deciding whether to open up their relationship, and the people who weave in and out of their lives, all converge on a weekly gathering called Shortbus: a mad nexus of art, music, politics and polysexual carnality.

“Susan’s creative clouds begin to lift, and Arin’s dry spell has ended. Unfortunately, a new world of more complicated problems is discovered, and they are forced to deal with intimacy as they meld together and create a monster.”

For ladies and dudes alike.

Stephen O’Regan’s short film adaptation of “They’re Made Out of Meat”, a science fiction short story by Terry Bisson starring Tom Noonan and Ben Bailey. The piece took Grand Prize in this year’s Science Fiction Short Film Festival in Seattle.