prokopetz:

asymbina:

ultralaser:

batmanisagatewaydrug:

aevios:

worldsworstfather:

pacific rim really went OFF with drift compatibility. like, there was absolutely no reason the jaegers couldn’t be piloted by a single person; a bunch of teenagers managed it just fine solo in evangelion, but guillermo del toro was like “nah, we’re gonna reinvent the concept of soulmates with mecha and kaiju” and then went and did just that, the absolute madman,

And they also did that without making it inherently romantic

that’s like my favorite thing about the drift comparability concept tbh

siblings? drift compatible. married couples?drift compatible. parents and their kids? drift compatible. two folks who just met but trust and respect each other a lot? drift compatible, babey.

it ties in perfectly with the idea that jaegers are an effort made by the entire world coming together to fight a bigger threat. all kinds of relationships are valued in Pacific Rim, because what matters is people supporting people.

these robots are powered by LOVE

The Drift being powered by love is stated explicitly in the Tales From Year Zero graphic novel, which was written by Travis Beacham. And Pacific Rim is as much his baby as it is Guillermo del Toro’s — he wrote the script and the setting Bible, too.

Which neatly ties into the just-barely-subtextual reading of Stacker Pentecost as a Messianic figure: universal drift compatibility necessarily implies the capacity for universal love.

(Not that it really needs the extra support, what with the solar iconography, the Wounded King allegory, and the fact that his name is “Pentecost”, but hey!)

(via rowantheexplorer)

notpulpcovers:

Not sure how much longer we will be able to broadcast before all illustration is banned…

Willpower Is A Myth, So Take The Damn Nap

stoweboyd:

The $25 Nap Is Worth It | Stephen Marche tells us it’s worth the twenty-five bucks to take a nap at Caspers, the mattress company.

I’ve been a freelancer for more than 10 years now, working from home; the quality and quantity of work I can do emerges directly from my ability to concentrate. I do not understand how people have creative careers without napping. Every day at about 1 p.m., everyone faces the same choice: sleep until 2 p.m. and then work until 5, or daydream and drift around social media and take pointless meetings until 7 p.m.

The friends I have who still work in offices inform me that their bosses insist they take the second option, that napping is equated with laziness. I genuinely find it bizarre. One piece of nap research demonstrated that if you nap properly, it’s like waking up from a full night’s sleep. You can double your day’s worth of concentration.

[…]

Under hypercapitalism, the most beautiful things are the surest signs of impending crisis. The nap seems like a luxury, or even a sign of weakness, a regression into infantlike torpor. Nothing could be further from the truth. In a gig economy, the ability to take a nap is a huge advantage. The availability of a proper nap for a reasonable fee is yet another example of how inequality works. People with enough money will be able to afford the naps that allow them to have enough intellectual energy to make the money to afford the naps.

I nap nearly everyday. Roughly from 12:30pm to 1:30pm. Then I work until 6pm (with a walk in there somewhere). Note that I typically start work before 6am (often before 5am), so a nap is essential to my workflow and sanity.

The idea that napping is a sign of laziness is stupid, another example of anti-scientific thinking in management. Read the science instead of just spouting platitudes, management drones! The same small-minded fanaticism associated with the crappy logic surrounding will power, which is increasingly viewed by those researching it as an obsolete Victorian concept, like Freudian psychology and mesmerism.

In Is Willpower a Finite Resource, or a Myth?, Carl Erik Fisher cites modern research, and suggests

More fundamentally, the common, monolithic definition of willpower distracts us from finer-grained dimensions of self-control and runs the danger of magnifying harmful myths—like the idea that willpower is finite and exhaustible. To borrow a phrase from the philosopher Ned Block, willpower is a mongrel concept, one that connotes a wide and often inconsistent range of cognitive functions. The closer we look, the more it appears to unravel. It’s time to get rid of it altogether.

Forget the ‘marshmallow experiment’ by Baumeister – it’s been shown to be baloney. Forget ‘ego depletion’, which is a great example of 'publication bias’ – everyone knows its’s true because it’s been cited so many times.

Fisher goes on:

Willpower may simply be a pre-scientific idea—one that was born from social attitudes and philosophical speculation rather than research, and enshrined before rigorous experimental evaluation of it became possible. The term has persisted into modern psychology because it has a strong intuitive hold on our imagination: Seeing willpower as a muscle-like force does seem to match up with some limited examples, such as resisting cravings, and the analogy is reinforced by social expectations stretching back to Victorian moralizing. But these ideas also have a pernicious effect, distracting us from more accurate ways of understanding human psychology and even detracting from our efforts toward meaningful self-control. The best way forward may be to let go of “willpower” altogether.

So take the nap, and tell your boss to pound sand.