When I watched Black Panther, I remember thinking, “This is not just any superhero film. It has heart.” Actually, here is my orginal review of the film, that I wrote when I was 17. I remember crying in the theatre, feeling hopeful and moved. As a visual communication design student, the visuals had blown me away. Despite being fully aware of what Marvel does, I went into Wakanda Forever with a sliver of hope, but I was thoroughly disappointed....
Does art not also contain the opposite of this ‘Dionysian’ losing of oneself? Does it not also contain the ‘Apollonian element of entertainment and satisfaction which consists precisely in the fact that the onlooker does not identify [themselves] with what is represented but gains distance from it, overcomes the direct power of reality through its deliberate representation, and finds, in art, that happy freedom of which the burdens of everyday life deprive [them]?...
This article will be a work-in-progress node of my digital garden to hold my observations about social media in one place. If you know me, chances are you have heard me scream about quitting Twitter and joining Mastodon. I joined a little before the first wave of Twitter migration. While I had been wanting to get my friends to join Mastodon for a long time, I didn’t actually think they would....
Note: This arises from lived/autofictional experiences. I have quoted credible sources wherever necessary, but it shouldn’t be taken as scientific advice. The article is structured to reflect the circular and often convoluted train of thought caused by BPD. Feel free to read it out of order, in order, or link hop. This is an ongoing, growing digital forest. The what Opening up Everyone hates me Splitting How are you?...
TLDR: The base website is hand-written and uses Bootstrap. The blog is built with Hugo and uses the excellent PaperMod theme (with a single, minor addition). Hosting is via Cloudflare Pages. The website One of the primary design goals was that Madhu should be able to edit the blog and make textual edits to the website directly from GitHub. This ruled out fancy React-based SSGs such as Next or Gatsby. I eventually settled on Bootstrap and Hugo, picking Hugo over Jekyll simply because I liked how PaperMod looked....
Who are you? When I was a child, my answer to this question would be aspirational, traits I wanted to be associated with by other people. I am smart. What is smartness but a metric contingent upon a person’s social and cultural capital? I am hardworking. I am not always hardworking. I procrastinate endlessly when I am anxious. I don’t work hard when I don’t see the point in a particular activity, such as assignments....
An ongoing collection of gnomic neologisms, lilting phrases and word combinations from my readings that, when spoken, just roll off the tongue and fall together — like elusive puzzle pieces, to illustrate complexities that I previously believed I had no language for. Use Control+F or Command+F to find a particular phrase or word. Words moribund: In a dying state; dying; at the point of death. 1 motley: Consisting of many different types, parts, or colors that do not seem to belong together....
My morning classes begin at 8:30 AM. To reach on time by bus, where I actually have a chance to get a seat, I have to wake up at 6:00 AM because the frequency on my route is low and erratic—a bus every 30 minutes on a good day. However, I often miss the one scheduled to reach my stop at around 7:20 AM, leaving me no choice but to catch the overcrowded buses....
Welcome to my blog! I hope to talk about culture, poetry, art, cinema, social science, mental health, observations and transformative justice. This blog is a writing exercise for me to have a dialogue with myself, slowly.