Skyrim buy link

What Christmas is About, Charlie Brown

"Christmas is associated with the birth of several pagan gods..."

imitating my cat's strange glare

Seneca's turn to self

Like St. Augustine, whose “turn inside” is as much debated by scholars as Seneca's “turn to the self,” Seneca seems to think that turning to one's soul is not enough—we need to further turn to God. However, for Seneca, the study of nature and God seems to be motivated by care for one's soul (rather than, say, by love for God). In the Natural Questions, Seneca suggests that the reflective engagement with our own soul is but the first step. Even if we escape the violent emotions and disruptions of a public life, we might not yet have escaped from ourselves, that is, from an excessive concern with our own particular situation and needs. We must turn into ourselves (in se recedendum), but then we must also retreat from ourselves (a se recedendum) (NQ 4.20). From a care of ourselves that revolves around ethical questions, we must turn to the study of nature and theology (NQ 1.1–8). How does such study liberate us? By removing us from our localized concerns, and offering us a distanced, disengaged perspective on them. The study of nature is an attempt at overcoming one's mortality (NQ 1.17). More than that, the ideal of virtue that is at issue in taking care of one's soul is, ultimately, the ideal of becoming like God (Russell 2004). This is a thought that perhaps is rather foreign to modern psychotherapeutic techniques, and to Foucaultian ideas about self-care.
SEP Seneca article

Alan Moore reads a poem about Robert Anton Wilson

Watch it on Youtube
thanks to Cat Vincent for linking me on twitter

Jack London Quotes and Links for Occupy Oakland

“Darn the wheel of the world! Why must it continually turn over? Where is the reverse gear?” -Jack London

“The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.” -Jack London

War of the Classes, How I became a Socialist, The Iron Heel by
Jack London, Socialist

"A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog." -Jack London

"Man always gets less than he demands from life." -Jack London, The People of the Abyss

"You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." -Jack London

"To be sure, London found in socialism an outlet from the abyss" -some literary critic

Rimbaud vs. Baudelaire -- dueling quotes on genius as childhood

"Genius is the recovery of childhood at will" -Arthur Rimbaud

“Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man's physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.”
― Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays