Diana

"What moves me so deeply, about this little prince...is his loyalty to a flower - the image of a rose that shines through his whole being like the flame of a lamp, even when he is asleep" (Antoine de Saint-Exupery, born 29 June 1900) #AntoinedeSaintExupery #TheLittlePrince #Quote

@PublicDomainRev The rubedo stage, then. The water circle is interesting 🤔

A crowned woman in red inside a circle of water and holding a rose-topped caduceus; a representation of a stage in the process of alchemy, ca. 18th century. Buy print here: publicdomainreview.org/product/alchem…

« Et si nous étions ici seulement pour découvrir que l’humanité peut être aimée en tant que telle ? » Réponse soviétique à 2001, l’Odyssée de l’espace, méditation sur l’homme, sa conscience, la vie, la mort, le ciné-club des hussards vous recommande ce soir Solaris de Tarkovski

Wheat Fields under a Cloud-Filled Sky, 1888. Vincent van Gogh

Mirra reaches the crown 👑 #RolandGarros

7 Great Books on Consciousness thoughtsonpapyrus.com/2026/06/05/7-g… #consciousness #nonfiction #humanmind #tbr #books #booklist #reading

7 Great Books on Shamanism thoughtsonpapyrus.com/2026/06/01/7-g… #books #booklist #greatbooks #nonfiction #shamanism #shaman #recommendedreading #tbr #mysticism #HealingPractices

Tiger and Dragon, by Hashimoto Gaho, 1895

@IMPERATORAUS Sincerity was also lost. Before, literature, music, art, film were not made to be "consumed" so instantly without thought. It was meant to be considered, loved, & stand the test of time. Much time, heart & soul were put into it. The feeling now, sadly - there's no need for that.

Modern art, music, literature, and film are often criticised for their decline in quality. Many argue that this is because we have run out of things to say, but the problem is more structural than imaginative. We live in an era with unprecedented access to knowledge, technique, and technology. We can study any tradition, analyse any method, and reproduce almost any artistic process at a scale that would have been unimaginable even a generation ago. Yet this abundance has not translated into a corresponding improvement in the quality of our art. The reality is that the overwhelming majority of contemporary artists lack disciplined training in the fundamentals of their craft. Rather than developing technique, structure, or form, many pursue "transgression" as an end in itself – a stance adopted before any real understanding of what is actually being transgressed. The result is rebellion without comprehension and provocation without purpose. All sensation, no substance. One cannot effectively subvert artistic forms – structure, genre, proportion, narrative, or visuals – without first mastering them. The major innovators of the twentieth century – Pablo Picasso, Miles Davis, T. S. Eliot, and Stanley Kubrick – were all classically trained, and all masters of their respective disciplines. They broke the rules carefully and effectively because they understood the rules intimately. By contrast, much of today’s avant‑garde operates without this foundation. It often mistakes intensity for insight, inversion for innovation, and novelty for genius. The result is work that appears radical but is frequently derivative of earlier movements whose original force depended on a level of mastery that is now largely ignored or forgotten. This is not a rejection of artistic experimentation, but rather, an argument that experimentation only becomes meaningful when it is careful and intentional. In the rush to distance themselves from tradition, many contemporary artists have abandoned the very skills that make true innovation possible. For this reason, a classical training is not just nostalgic but necessary. Without it, art continues to degenerate into an increasingly provocative and performative expression, increasingly self‑referential, and increasingly detached from the standards that once enabled progress. This is why so much modern art, music, literature, and film has declined in quality – not because the age lacks ideas, but because it lacks the training necessary to express them.

"McTeague" (1899) is a vivid tale of the corruptive power of greed set in San Francisco at the turn of the twentieth century, full review thoughtsonpapyrus.com/2026/05/28/rev… #FrankNorris #bookreview #americanclassics #classics #americanliterature

@johnesparza82 @httplec since when read books are badges of honour to be collected like Pokémon cards? To what point is the "counting" when reading is so multidimensional and varied, and books - so diverse in their content, size, level of difficulty, etc? It makes no sense.

@httplec Better question, and more relevant. How many books COULD you have read if all the time we spent doom scrolling was instead spent reading?

quick question how many books have you read so far this year

@httplec reading isn't a numbers' game. math is.

Thebaid (Scenes from the Lives of the Desert Fathers), 1417–1423, by Fra Angelico #Thebaid #tebaide #FraAngelico #renaissance #art #religiousart

« Les Bastides Blanches, c'était une paroisse de cent cinquante habitants, perchée sur la proue de l'un des derniers contreforts du massif de l'Étoile, à deux lieues d'Aubagne... » Jean de Florette - Marcel Pagnol

"The Hunt in the Forest" by Paolo Uccello #PaoloUccello #art #renaissance #AshmoleanMuseum #Oxford

“You know, we thank some people for merely living at the same time as we do. I thank you for the fact that I met you, that I will remember you for all my life.” — Dostoevsky. White Nights

A Norwegian neuroscientist spent 20 years proving that the act of writing by hand changes the human brain in ways typing physically cannot, and almost nobody outside her field has read the paper. Her name is Audrey van der Meer. She runs a brain research lab in Trondheim, and the paper that closed the argument was published in 2024 in a journal called Frontiers in Psychology. The finding is brutal enough that it should have changed every classroom on Earth. The experiment was simple. She recruited 36 university students and put each one in a cap with 256 sensors pressed against their scalp to record brain activity. Words flashed on a screen one at a time. Sometimes the students wrote the word by hand on a touchscreen using a digital pen, and sometimes they typed the same word on a keyboard. Every neural response was recorded for the full five seconds the word stayed on screen. Then her team looked at the part of the data most researchers had ignored for years, which is how different parts of the brain were communicating with each other during the task. When the students wrote by hand, the brain lit up everywhere at once. The regions responsible for memory, sensory integration, and the encoding of new information were all firing together in a coordinated pattern that spread across the entire cortex. The whole network was awake and connected. When the same students typed the same word, that pattern collapsed almost completely. Most of the brain went quiet, and the connections between regions that had been alive seconds earlier were nowhere to be found on the EEG. Same word, same brain, same person, and two completely different neurological events. The reason turned out to be something nobody had really paid attention to before her work. Writing by hand is not one motion but a sequence of thousands of tiny micro-movements coordinated with your eyes in real time, where each letter is a different shape that requires the brain to solve a slightly different spatial problem. Your fingers, wrist, vision, and the parts of your brain that track position in space are all working together to produce one letter, then the next, then the next. Typing throws all of that away. Every key on a keyboard requires the exact same finger motion regardless of which letter you are pressing, which means the brain has almost nothing to integrate and almost no problem to solve. Van der Meer said it plainly in her interviews. Pressing the same key with the same finger over and over does not stimulate the brain in any meaningful way, and she pointed out something that should scare every parent who handed their kid an iPad. Children who learn to read and write on tablets often cannot tell letters like b and d apart, because they have never physically felt with their bodies what it takes to actually produce those letters on a page. A decade before her, two researchers at Princeton ran the same fight using a completely different method and ended up at the same answer. Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer tested 327 students across three experiments, where half took notes on laptops with the internet disabled and half took notes by hand, before testing everyone on what they actually understood from the lectures they had watched. The handwriting group won by a wide margin on every question that required real understanding rather than surface recall. The reason was hiding in the transcripts of what the two groups had actually written down. The laptop students typed almost word for word, capturing more total content but processing almost none of it as they went, while the handwriting students physically could not write fast enough to transcribe a lecture in real time, which forced them to listen carefully, decide what actually mattered, and put it in their own words on the page. That single act of choosing what to keep was the learning itself, and the keyboard had quietly skipped the choosing and skipped the learning along with it. Two studies. Two countries. Same answer. Handwriting makes the brain work. Typing lets it coast. Every note you have ever typed instead of written went into your brain through a thinner pipe. Every meeting, every book highlight, every idea you captured on your phone instead of on paper was processed at half depth. You did not forget those things because your memory is bad. You forgot them because typing never woke the part of the brain that would have made them stick. The fix is the thing your grandmother already knew. Pick up a pen. Write the thing down. The slower road is the faster one.

@joydivision 🙏

Today we remember lan Curtis, whose voice, words, and presence continue to echo through generations since his passing on May 18, 1980 - forever missed, forever heard. 📷 (c) Anton Corbijn

"Tristana" is an elegant, character-driven romantic drama by one of the greatest Spanish authors thoughtsonpapyrus.com/2026/05/18/min… #readingaroundtheworld #bookreview #books #BenitoPérezGaldós #Tristana #libros

@Caol_MacCormaic Who is in Lynch's "posthumous cult"? If there is a director who never needed his own death to suddenly become popular, surely it is David Lynch.

Mulholland Drive is going to be at the top of the 2032 Sight and Sound list and then there will be a vicious and immediate Lynch backlash that will have been slowly building from people being turned off by his posthumous cult. just prepare yourselves for that.

@Caol_MacCormaic No one, & I mean no one will be against Mulholland Drive finding itself at top of the list. That movie achieved greatness while Lynch was still alive. At the rate we're going in cinema, we now got genuine fears that spot will be taken by something close to new Snow White.