This is astonishing. It's Google Street View, curated by an artist:
http://9-eyes.com/

And the essay that goes with it:
http://www.artfagcity.com/2009/08/12/img-mgmt-the-nine-eyes-of-google-street-view/
Really worth reading, gives so much depth and meaning to what you see in 9-eyes

He also has a video art piece of Orpheus missing his Eurydice
http://jonrafman.com/youtheworldandi.html

I don't care whatchoo say. I think Yoko is cool. She was cool before she started hanging out with the Beatles, and she's still cool.

Anyway, her thoughts on Mother's Day :)
http://imaginepeace.com/archives/11159

When I woke up on Sunday morning, I found a dead bumblebee in my bed.
Yes, I was worried and puzzled too.

Happy new week everybody. I had things to say but I forgotted them.

If I'm ever late... It's probably like this:



*is never late*

The Original Coca-Cola recipe.
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/427/original-recipe/recipe

By the way, I love Ira Glass. Just... Love him.

COULD YOBS MOLEST ENGLAND?
Haven't they already?

COULD BRUSSELS INFECT BRITISH JUSTICE WITH AIDS?
Safe sex, yo.

ARE PAEDOPHILES TURNING MIDDLE BRITAIN GAY?
:O Yes amg

HAS BINGE DRINKING STOLEN THE IDENTITY OF THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY?
Bloody drunken Tories... -_-

WILL CANCER IMPREGNATE YOU?
The explanation to the immaculate conception! :O

COULD GYPSIES KILL THE ROYAL FAMILY?
Actually, yes. It's not even funny.

IS THE METRIC SYSTEM MAKING BRITAIN'S FARMERS OBESE?
There is a strange logic to this one: "Measure in stones: I'm fine. Measure in kilograms - holy heck I'm fat!"

IS THE LABOUR PARTY STEALING FROM HARD-WORKING FAMILIES?
And leaving the lazy families be?!

COULD FOXES DESTROY PENSIONERS?
...could they?

And this is where I leave you.
Good night, from today's installments of Daily Mail-o-matic.

http://www.qwghlm.co.uk/toys/dailymail/

I'm looking into all them polytechs around Finland. There is a number of them, and some of them are doing cool stuff. :3

I really like lists. List seem to be something that define a lot of my wiki-art. There's also something cool about the process of making lists, the monotony of typing them (I never cheat - I create my own lists from scratch).

I'm thinking of making something like dis http://www.craftster.org/forum/index.php?topic=343486.0 for my mum for Mothers' Day (in Finland we don't celebrate Mothering Sunday, only Mothers' Day. Which is cool, because I can make Mothering Sunday my English Mum's day, and Mothers' Day my real mum's and my mission mum's day. :3 But when I'm a mum, we're having it the English time, no matter where I live :P)
I found the thingie by looking for "craft community" because I couldn't remember what your thingie was called Silvie (but then it dawned on me that maybe the one you talk about a lot if only for yarn things?)

News about R.E.M.
Don't worry, nothign earth-shaking. They are still cool, and Michael Stipe has a beard. o.O
But they are doing... something. With YouTube. They are... curating YouTube.
So they made a playlist of cool things, and a little introductory video to go with it.

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=8A8DD4BF397CFA4A

I do believe that this makes them more cool than they were before.

I can't get my parenthesis right with this paragraph, so I took them out. And then I took out all other punctuation too, in despair:
Then on to iippo Today I drove 35 minutes to another town with my father the town where my brother who was having a day-off and using it to fix up his car and having had asked my dad to come help him lives with his family I tagged along in order to meet up with an Italian girl who is here on a study exchange whom I met last Sunday in church and translated for her She is studying design and I asked her to show me her school and their facilities because it sounds interesting and also because I did not know there was any kind of an art school near here There is albeit it's a polytech but I have since going to Cov after the initial feeling of betrayal when I heard that my dear Alma Mater used to be a polytech up until they allowed polytechs to start calling themselves universities had I known that I probably would have been too snobbish to apply and wouldn't have met the wonderful people I did though I probably would have met other wonderful people... but it's better to not be a snob about polytechs learnt to not be snobby about polytechs I want to teach there.

Sorry about that.

I also think that the perfect date is October 10th. Autumn is the best season, and October is there in the productive middle of Cats Days. Get some nice strong wind, leaves blowing in the air, get to wrap up a little but not so much that you'd die without...

I keep having to log in. Why is this?

I am currently making more job applications.

I draw every day now and am pretty excited about it.

I need to give a talk in church tomorrow. I had forgotten.

I have managed to get in contact/keep in contact with a bunch of people I want to keep in touch with. :)

Final travelog


If you don't care to read about my travels, you could go look at other things that'll drive you insane in http://lolthulhu.com/


So I'm home in Finland. I traversed England's green and pleasant land, learnt a lot of things (mostly things I missed in my absence: Inception! :O :O and Hello to Jason Isaacs and this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/5live/films/code_of_conduct.jpg ). The trip home went almost marvelously, I had one kilo of excess luggage (after hiding all my books in my carry-on bag that didn't get weighed :P) and the plane was an hour and a half late. I've always had great luck with flights, but this one was dreadful. There was a problem with the plane so we had to change planes before take-off, and it was really windy in Finland so there was a lot of turbulence before landing. I'm pretty zapped right now, I left Coventry at 3am.

I climbed in my dad's car outside the terminal, and found out on the radio that Finland had its election while I was away (so I missed it and didn't vote :O And I also missed the census in England by a week - I really wanted to be signed up in the English census). Kokoomus (the Finnish version of Tories/Republicans) won, but only by a wee bit (Socialist Democrats and True Finns had almost as many). But still, they won. It's so interesting how that seems to be the trend all over Europe, we lean to the right. And I was reading the Spectator on how in the States the Republicans don't really have anyone they could put up against Obama for his next run at presidency in 2012. How interesting, we go right, they go left. Maybe there is some unspoken rule that there needs to be this balance. Or maybe it's just that us voters think short-term and go "they messed up our economy, get the other guys in!" and then few years later we'll go "now the other guys messed up our health services! Get the earlier ones back!" Although these True Finns (Perussuomalaiset) are the interesting thing, they asploded all over the place. And no one even knows if they are left or right, or what. It's a little nerving, they went from tiny party to (probably) government.

Enough of politics.

Well, there isn't anything else to say.
Back to art.

Everyday Superpower

Diary a la [Viking]:

Interview with the Man Who Made World's First Cell Phone Call
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/04/10/greene.cellphone.cooper/index.html?hpt=Sbin


Diary a la [iippo]:

Still tramping through England, visiting friends. Currently in Silvie visit 2.0 at her family home. This trip has gone marvellously well considering how badly planned it was. I have now a flight to go back home on Monday, so that makes the entire duration of the trip almost three weeks. I've met many of the people I really wanted to meet, some by wonderful "coincidences" (I don't believe in coincidences remember); I've stayed at the homes of the people that I really needed to stay with to properly rebond after my long absence, and had drinks or lunch with the people with whom that was enough or whom I couldn't visit properly. I've also developed further this idea of mine to drive through Europe to bring my belongings from England to Finland, and it might work and I think I can afford it, now the question really is "when". The most exciting part of this whole idea is that my bishop¹ has expressed keen interest in doing the trip with me. I'd love that so much, I never have enough time with him to just talk, so five days of road trip with him would be great. If only I can bring myself to accept his offer to take him away from his family and responsibilities and life... I probably could.

Other than that... I have new pokemans, new books, my old books, couple new friends, new clothes, inspiration and direction for arty things, and a lot of new determination and hope for the future. Y'see, I haven't been particularly happy about my decision to go live in Finland, because Coventry just is my home and I love it too much. But I stick with my decision, and this trip has helped me do that. It's almost like... England is rejecting me. o.O I'm a little afraid of the political situation here, and everything seems to have moved on without me. Friends are still friends, and the people who I'd like to be more than friends are also still "just" friends too :P The love hasn't faded, and that is a great comfort. I can rest assured that I can come back whenever I want. But now it''s onwards.



^{1 A mormon bishop: In the church no one is paid for the service or leadership they are called to provide, and it is only for a short time anyone is called as an anything. My bishop at the moment is a young father of three and a civil servant (I think? Something to do with immigration legal business) and I consider him a dear friend. He's just awfully busy all the time and I don't want to be all needy and stuff and hang onto him.}

Well, I had a very different way of enjoying that movie. See, I had set it to record from TV on Sunday. Sunday is when we changed to summer time. TV digi-box thingie wasn't aware of the change. So it had recorded an hour of a program about how Africa was a white man's playfield (interesting-ish topic, but I fast-forwarded) and then it had cut the movie short. So I watched some cowboys first separate from a pioneer trail (whoo pioneers!) and start a ranch, and then in a blink of an eye it was fourteen years later, they were all old (or grown up in the case of the kid) and there had been a war and there was no need for beef in Texas. So they decided to drive ten thousand moocows a thousand miles north to Missouri (boo Missouri!) And they started and it was hard and there was some mutiny and a stampede, and some people said they should go to Kansas, and then the movie ended.

I kind of like unfinished stories. :) <Mission story> There's this CD we found in an apartment once, that has what we call "some guy's conversion story" and it's him giving a lecture or something, telling how he went from Lutheran minister to mormon. And it end´him being stuck in California, living on the beach, then he goes to church and the missionaries invite him over for dinner, and they eat potatoes and Kool-Aid, then the CD breaks and the four or five tracks at the end don't play. :) *really likes CD as it is* </mission story> I might upload it here at some point as part of sharing mission stories...

We had another one of these with Silvie, watching a talkie called The Pulse. It was a horror film with something to do with computers etc and I thought "hey that might have a cool concept of viri perhaps, or a commentary on how social networking technology is making us all braindead, or something, y'know. Well we started it and weren't much in the mood for the thing, and the guy and the girl were just about getting on to something, and then they had a car crash. And we decided that it would be awesome if the movie ended there: they died in the car crash, and they were the only ones who could have saved everything. The end. So we stopped the film and that's how it ends for me now. :)

AhhahahahI'm screwed >_>

So remember when I maybe can't vote because I haven't officially changed my address? Well, the National Insurance people also know I don't live here, and sent me a letter saying "since you don't live here, we won't give you back your social security status. Go set your life in order at the correct office before the 6th, 'cause that's when we'll do this thing." Well, I can't go there before the 6th because I'm going to England tomorrow. My only hope is going by a Post Office right before I board my plane to get temporary login details to the Post Office web-service, where I can change my address details. The reason I can't do it any other way is because I have forgotten my internet bank password (which is the other way to login to the Post Office), and my bank told me to come in and get it reset - but it's 5km (half a swedish mile! :O) away and there's no blooming way I'm walking over there in these blizzards we've been having lately (okay fine, I could take a bus, but even that is over a km to walk to... Which I did to go to church, and instead of asking for a ticket to Rantahaka, I said Haaparanta. :P Rantahaka is about 5 minute busride away - Haaparanta is in Lappland, on the other side of the Finnish-Swedish border :P I saw signs to Haaparanta a lot in Sundsvall, so it's just a more familiar name and I wasn't paying attention at all :P). So yeah. Whatever. We'll start this process over after I come back from England *seriously consideres not coming back*

Oh, and turning clocks to summer time seriously messed up my sleeping pattern. I can not for the life of me, wake up at my usual hour anymore. Which makes me snooze past any kind of reasonable time, or worse yet, I fall asleep during studies. I migth have to adjust and accept that my wake time is not officially an hour later than it used to be. Perhaps that is best.

In other news... I have none. It's just continuing: drawing (come to the stage of colouring things now :O), watching movies (a mormon movie The Mountain of the Lord, then a re-visit of As Good As It Gets, later today an old western, and a live tv-show where important people talk about the internet. Need to listen in on that one to see where they at :P), I'm doing all sorts of mission recording (to be revealed at a later date), walking the dog, sing and play guitar a little sometimes (mostly sing, I hurt my hand with the dog one day), and of course all this internet business. All of which (except the internet business) is coming to a halt from tomorrow, because I leave for England. :3

I watched a Danish symphony orchestra play Gustav Holts Planets on TV... I did not know that you can watch classical music being performed on TV. I also hadn't remembered how awesome it is to watch music. It was much win, and I was inspired with an idea for a new project - which will just have to wait its turn in the queue just like all those other ideas that are so meticulously written down on some random scrap piece of paper and left floating in my room... Hmm, maybe I need to learn the good-better-best approach even in art projects, and do the ones that matter most first. This project would be win because it would be animation, and possibly would be easy to place in the space of any kind of a classical music building. Which I hear they are building a new one in Helsinki... Humm... That'd be cool :D

I also watched my first movie since being back. It was a delightful French thing called Odette Toulemonde - a little like Amelie but more grown up, and less... magicalness. Though it did have plenty of its own kind of magicalness, when Odette gets very excited, she starts to float. :) And she often greets Jesus on her way to or from home; and the silhouette couple in her wallpaper is alive. Other than that, her reality is pretty magical too, and she is a hero for the simple man: she has her life, her family with its problems, her home in the ghetto, her job with its drama, and her favourite author, whose books are loved and adored by people just like her. And why not? She has more life in her little toe than those Parisian snobs in their entire lifetimes. <3 This was an ode to the everyday hero. And I must admit, when the movie started... <_< I was that Parisian snob. I looked at her and thought "oh my goodness, what a little person" - I was in my head preparing for a movie like Amelie, and she is a giant soul - but so is Odette, in her own way, when you don't judge her first off the bat. I was rebuked by this movie (I love being rebuked; I love being proved wrong in my judgment).


Anyway, I'm catching the bus again today to go to Kouvola, this time I'll spend the night at my brother's. Meh, I need a car so life would be easier (or I just need my dad to come back from his hols >_> Ah well, this is the last time for a while, because London's calling on Wednesday!)

http://xkcd.com/726/

I never thought of this! :D *will totally do that on wednesday*

http://xkcd.com/722/

I've mostly thought this way about television - and via that, the simplicity yet finesse of our race: we can sit perfectly still watching a flickering colourful light. For hours. Then I imagine aliens trying to nslave us with such a flickering light weapon, and we'd be all like "err, what the heck? *smash aliens to pulp* *go sit in front of our own flickering lights again*"
              My other alien thought is how much superior we are to the vulcans. In Star Trek, their planet is blown up. And the ones that were off-planet are all "we need to find another planet. Luckily because some of us survived, our culture is preserved." I may be quoting liberally; there may have been some key word like "the main points of our culture" or something, instead of the whole thing. But it doesn't matter. Because the point of this isn't our superiority to vulcans, really, It's the fact that that sentence made me realise - and constantly realise over and over again - how rich our life here on earth is. There is no way our culture could be preserved if the planet exploded. There are just too many things. So many countries, all with their own languages, traditions, special little quirks; too many things that take a team effort - from sports and music to all medical advancements ever; too much individualism. Even if only my room was destroyed and I survived, I would not be enough to bring it all back. It would be forever lost.
             I told this one to a friend of mine from the mission. And he said I was funny, but then admitted that he had thought that he could never fall in love with an alien because she would not be able to have the same taste in music as him. That man is deep :P


http://xkcd.com/696/
I am up for a strip chess by mail any time, y0.

http://xkcd.com/695/
In the words of Charlie Brown: Aaaaauuugghhh! ;_;

Snippets.

-I realised that it's possible that I can't vote because I'm not as of yet registered to live here :O Crap. And I can't register online because I've forgotten my internet bank details and need to go to town one day to fix those.

-I'm applying for a position to be a lecturer :3

-I'm thoroughly enjoying my walks with my dog. Not only is it inspirational and important head-space-time, I'm also interested in this strange relationship I have with this strange animal. It is my way of practicing accepting the fleeting. This dog will die. The relationship will end. Yet, there is nothing I can think of doing of recording the relationship in anyway - and I feel that I shouldn't do it either. It is simply here for me right now to enjoy, and let things of the future be for the future.
(You have no idea how difficult this is for me to accept.)

-New art, room cleaning, guitar playing, scripture reading, other reading, Elftown, Facebook, email... All is well. Apart from the, y'know, personal struggles and hardships that tie me down and from which I just don't seem to be able to escape from. <_< But everyone has those. So they're in check.

-Cryptic diaries, new wikis in the making, necroposting and generally not taking things too seriously here just yet. :P Sorry, I'll become useful soon enough.

-Deadlines: job application, England trip. I need to take the bus to the airport (haven't done that before).

Updates:

-Out of 3 big suitcases and 1 carry-on, and 3 blue boxes from Posten, I have so far unpacked: 1 suitscase and 1 box.
-Bookshelf and wardrobe are now sorted. Yet the mess in the room is worse than ever. More clothes are on their way out (to be given to charity or just plain thrown away) than came in with me, unfortunately same cannot be said of books, my shelves are desperately over-crowded. There is a chance of fixing this by getting rid of all the old VHS tapes that currently take up 2 out of 3 shelves above the TV.
-Been listening to much musics. The first one to break my missionary music habit was the Beach Boys with Pet Sounds. Followed closely by Paul Simon, David Bowie and then a whole plethora of awesome stuff like Tom Waits, They Might Be Giants etc etc... <3 But the CD-shelf is in desperate need of cleanup, though I think my very next project ha to be the desk. I need to move that darn thing >.< And into the messiest part of the room too, so I have to clean a ton before I get it anywhere. 
-I wore trousers. They weren't very comfortable :P Well okay, in all fairness, they were my jeans and they were stiff from not having been used in such a long time, plus they are too big for me: I can pull them down without opening the buttons. :P But I'm back in a skirt today.
-Am making art, it's epic.
-Have been uploading photos to Facebook, and lost my patience with the place. It pretty much arbitrarily decides whether it takes my edits into account or not and whether it lets me see my friends' comments or not. FailBook has fail.
-Waking up is fine again. Maybe it was just the jetlag :P
-Stuff in Japan still makes me cry.

I'm heading off to [Dory]'s tonight to sleep there before I go to church on Sunday.

So apparently we have an election in a few months. This is exciting. I get to vote :D

But who to vote for? It would seem that the Pirate Party talks about all sorts of things that matter to me alot - copyright and all that crap - but also doesn't seem to make a stand with other things that also matter, that in turn the Christian democrats talk very openly. But I'm also not so sure where I stand in terms of aligning politics and my religious beliefs. Just because I won't marry a woman doesn't necessarily mean that no one should. Or does it? Meh, gay marriage isn't really one of my hot topics, that was a bad example... A better example: the stuff that the Christian democrats say about culture and the arts is good, I agree with it alot - but on a personal level. Is politics supposed to be personal? I think that art should be ethical - does that mean that everyone should think the same? Someone put it really well when they said that politically Jesus Christ would have been a liberal but he would have personally lived like a socialist. So then we have the liberals in the picture, that would be a pretty obvious choice - except they don't exist here. So I'd have to move to Helsinki to vote liberal. Then there's a whole ton of other parties that I don't have the energy to look into right now... ._.

So perhaps we're back with the Pirates. Maybe, if I can't be bothered to find out which party exactly is the one for me, I should go with the ones who talk about the one thing that matters to me but will leave the other stuff be? Meh, I have month to pay attention to this stuff, so maybe I'll find it out. Or maybe I'll once again find myself out of the country when it's time to vote... >_>

Here's something amusing and related:
http://www.finlandforthought.net/2010/01/18/which-finnish-political-party-should-i-join/

Again and still; not yet and never again; after all

It's funny how some things don't change. For example taking my dog for a walk for the first time after my mission was exactly the same as ever. Consequently he is my guineapig in relearning how to speak Finnish :P Other things I find myself in need of relearning are different every-day routines, such as mornings and eating. My goodness how I struggle to wake up at 6:30! :O I snooze til 7. -_- Ridiculous. How can it be this hard? X_x I then take some of those good solid morning-hours for reading and study, then go down at my leisure to eat breakfast, after which I take the dog for a walk. Rest of the day is an unstructured mess (though it is becoming a little bit more evident that early day/afternoon is a good time for the internets as my mum usually watches stuff in my room around that time, so cleaning and art-related activities aren't going to happen... Too bad, since those are the super-productive hours of the day after the morning, but I'll just be productive in ET-catchup... >_>) But I certainly have decided to not be on the computer past 8pm.

Plenty of things need to change, beginning with my room. I need to clear out my bookshelf, my wardrobe, my musicshelf, my instrument-space, my walls and overall basically everything. I have not as of yet worn trousers after my mission. I am very comfortable in skirts thankyouverymuch. I also haven't really properly listened to any music I wouldn't have listened to as a missionary - partly because the musicshelf-cleanup that is due, partly because my CD-player is acting up. This clean-up means that I may be getting rid of some stuff... CDs... mainly punk and such... maybe. If I manage >_> I made this decision on my mission, and somehow the thought of doing it was much easier then... The only thing I have actually intentionally listened to is some uber-culture radio, which doesn't really count. And I haven't as of yet watched any TV. I just don't feel the need. YouTube on the other hand made it back to my repertoir ejust fine :P Mostly my not-being-a-missionary-anymore shows mostly in the time I spend alone, and my internet usage. :P

Things have changed on the internet, too. Not so much here in ET, at least not as much as I expected... Very kind of you to wait for me, but seriously, isn't it time to fix up some things? :P But every once and a while I spot a thing that's new or a new face, and it's cool. Very good. I hope you know that I'm planning all sorts of grand projects and stuff, I'll be getting very busy, tell you that. And I'll invite all my geeky missionary-buddies over here and the place will be swarmed with mormons. :P Maybe. They might be more prunish than I am an be put off by the sex, drugs and rock n' roll that is so very rife here in town (I'm going to talk more about this kind of thing later... If I remember to). Or they'll all be too busy studying and getting married that they won't have the time. But at least ET will be a good place to share my mission-stuffs with them, so at least they'll look at that. After all, they were there. They'll care that much.

Now, on to other post-mission discoveries... My phone is ancient! :O What the heck?! I have a Nokia 3210 (the first model that didn't have an antenna poking out of it...) and on the mish we used the smalled 1661 models, and now I want one of them instead of this old monster. That's right people: [iippo] wants a new phone. We did not ever imagine this day would come. This should be international news, this is so big. But I have also not as of yet acquired aFinnish number, so I am out of reach by anything bar text messages (picking up calls would be too expensive for me because of those roaming charges - or have those gone down since I left? But still, talking on the phone zaps my battery, so I won't pick up no matter what).

Yet the strangest thing so far is the empty lack of other mormons. I was with another missionary 24/7 for 18 months. Not only is it totally alien to be with another person that much, let alone a stranger who just happens to belong to your church. Good grief it was crazy. And cool sometimes, and sometimes you were just all "phew thank God you are here with me all the time!" But now, not seeing other mormons at all for long stretches of time... is weird. I miss you mormons ;_; So while I have immensely enjoyed my new-found isolation, I do miss that contact. Which is probably why I'm on Facebook all the time, talking to a lot of my mish-buds on there. And hey speaking of Facebook - there's a thing that changed since I left! :O What happened? I used to have apps and lolcats and stuff... I think.

As of yet, I have not picked up a pencil/brush/tablet/paint or even a wikipage to make art. Why? I just don't feel ready. o.O I'm itching to go, but... I'm not ready. I haven't closed the mission-books just yet. Even these diaries are part of the post-mission wind-down. I'll ease myself into it by editing and organising my mission photos and making wikis here. But I do have a lot of thoughts and plans for new art (18 months worth of inspiration). And now really is the beginning of my career. I learnt of some New Media places in Sweden while there, I have friends in Texas in case I need to go over to the Austin Digi-Art place, and all the old galleries in England (though it sounds like the UK government is dealing some blows to the arts lately...?) I just need to start producing work to exhibit. There could also be a lot of mormon-themes in the new work ahead :P My career might be developing towards "church-related information design" :P (I had some ideas in that direction, how to explain things in an interactive/web-based way... And seeing the changes in lds.org and mormon.org makes me think that the church might just put it to use if I make it...)

Something I have observed recently in myself (and let this be a warning to Silvie :P) is that I'm like... super-sensitive. o.o Whenever I hear more news from Japan I almost start to cry. I'm still in some missionary mindset that things that I hear and see have a really big impact on me. News, music, swearing... all causes a reaction, almost a flinch. o.O

And in totally other kinds of news, I like my waist :) I can wear my dog's collar as a belt. *wants a waspie*

I caught up with [Viking]'s diary.
I was kind of speed-clicking (because there is no 'continue where you left off' with diaries), so this is the list of things I need to look at later.

Birth of steampunk
http://io9.com/#!5780422/the-birth-of-steampunk-in-the-19th-century

A real revolution
http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewrw/archives/78969.html

Democracy is not enough
http://reason.com/archives/2011/02/16/democracy-isnt-enough

http://www.librarything.com/

Obsolete Occupations
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124251060

Douglas Adams TED talk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZG8HBuDjgc

Internet Enables Intimacy TED talk
http://www.ted.com/talks/stefana_broadbent_how_the_internet_enables_intimacy.html

Strange Maps
http://www.slate.com/id/2236256/

On the Pleasures of Not Belonging, or Notes on Interstitial Art (Part One)
http://henryjenkins.org/2009/11/on_the_pleasures_of_not_belong.html

Secret Histories
http://unlikelyworlds.blogspot.com/2009/11/secret-histories.html

5 Ways to hack your brain into awesomeness
http://www.cracked.com/article/127_5-ways-to-hack-your-brain-into-awesomeness/