Everything’s amazing, and nobody’s happy
In my opinion one of the greatest minds of our time, Stephen Fry takes half an hour for a monologue on, well, a little bit of everything.
(via Nerdcore)
By exploring the words of great philosophers like Seneca and Nietzsche, Alain de Botton suggests that we should stop trying to reach happiness in the way many self-help-books try to sell us, but that we should introduce a certain amount of pessimism to our lives instead.
About two years later, following the earthquakes in Japan this spring, de Botton once again picked up some of the ideas from his talk and wrote the essay On Tsunamis and Stoicism. In this piece, he cites the eruption of the volcano which eradicated the city of Pompei in AD 62 as bearing some familarity to the events in Japan and explores Seneca’s typically dark reaction to it.
Seneca tried to calm the sense of injustice in his readers by reminding them – in the spring of AD62 – that natural and man-made disasters will always be a feature of our lives, however sophisticated and safe we think we have become. We must therefore at all times expect the unexpected. Calm is only an interval between chaos. Nothing is guaranteed, not even the ground we stand on.
Mike Monteiro at San Francisco Creative Mornings: Fuck You. Pay Me.
It should mute the ringtone to prevent any possibly embarrassing moments in class, in meetings or in other situations where people might not be thrilled to hear your cool star wars-theme ringtone.
It should not affect the behavior of any app that I deliberately tell to play music or any other kind of sound. This mostly seems to work quite well, but still, sadly, some apps like the newly released vimeo app ignore it completely and insist on staying mute (without giving me any visual clue why this might be the case).
