These awesome photos are from the 2013 Weston Sand Sculpture Festival on the sandy shores of Weston-super-Mare in Somerset, England. Each year the festival has a different theme and this year’s theme is Hollywood.
“Since the festival started in 2006, themes have included Fairy Tales, The Continents of the World, Under the Ocean, Great Britain, and The Jungle. What began with two Dutch sand sculptors building a giant King Kong from 30 tonnes of sand has now turned into a world famous get-together of some of the niftiest hands in sand sculpting.
More than 20 of the world’s greatest sculptors from nine different countries are working away using 4,000 tonnes of sand from the beach.”
The festival opened on Good Friday and runs through the end of September.
Visit Dailymail.co.uk to view more of the awesome sand sculptures from this year’s Weston Sand Sculpture Festival.
[via Free York and Dailymail.co.uk]
Some people have asked to read the commencement address I delivered this morning to the 2013 graduates of Butler University. So here it is.
My own commencement speaker, who shall remain nameless, began with a lame joke about how these speeches only come in two varieties: Short and bad. This…
ancient history humor
and it’s even funnier for me since I’m an actor who likes her booze
yup.real.life.gpoy
GPOY
I am so tired of Vim it is really bad
Nope
Clarification: I hate it because I average 125 WPM and its time-saving shorthand hinders me more than it helps
Even if you only use the navigation/line manipulation ones?
Even then. I’m used to my hands constantly moving and I can execute Ctrl + * commands way faster with one hand than the time it takes to switch between modes to do stuff.
Emacs. Definitely emacs.
What if our religion was each other,
If our practice was our life,
if prayer our words?
What if the temple was the Earth,
if forests were our church,
if holy waters—the rivers, lakes, and oceans.
What if meditation was our relationships,
if the teacher was life,
if wisdom was self-knowledge,
if love was the center of our being.
—Ganga White (via mirroir)
It turns out procrastination is not typically a function of laziness, apathy or work ethic as it is often regarded to be. It’s a neurotic self-defense behavior that develops to protect a person’s sense of self-worth.
You see, procrastinators tend to be people who have, for whatever reason, developed to perceive an unusually strong association between their performance and their value as a person. This makes failure or criticism disproportionately painful, which leads naturally to hesitancy when it comes to the prospect of doing anything that reflects their ability — which is pretty much everything.
But in real life, you can’t avoid doing things. We have to earn a living, do our taxes, have difficult conversations sometimes. Human life requires confronting uncertainty and risk, so pressure mounts. Procrastination gives a person a temporary hit of relief from this pressure of “having to do” things, which is a self-rewarding behavior. So it continues and becomes the normal way to respond to these pressures.
Particularly prone to serious procrastination problems are children who grew up with unusually high expectations placed on them. Their older siblings may have been high achievers, leaving big shoes to fill, or their parents may have had neurotic and inhuman expectations of their own, or else they exhibited exceptional talents early on, and thereafter “average” performances were met with concern and suspicion from parents and teachers.
—
David Cain, “Procrastination Is Not Laziness” (via pawneeparksdepartment)
This totally justifies every excuse I’ve been giving myself from not doing that thing I’m supposed to do.
(via aaronmoles)
Ack
Growth is betrayal. There is no other route. There is no arriving somewhere without leaving somewhere.
—John Updike (via withinaframe)
