The Blob: No-Face as a Mirror to Billionaire’s Greed

A blob has no sense of self. All it knows is that it must become bigger. Our world is full of self-centered blobs.

The blob is in pain. The movie Spirited Away features a character similar to a blob: No-Face. No-Face wants attention, so he swallows the bathhouse employees. In the process, he adopts all the negative traits of those he consumes. No-Face becomes an arrogant, disgruntled, and selfish monster.

The amorphous blobs of this world — large organizations and individuals — want our attention. And there is never enough of it. Driven by attention mania and the temporary satisfaction that these blob gets from power and prestige, the blob keeps eating. It clings to everything around it in a meaningless and frenetic way.

The blob doesn’t like being told not to eat just anything. This gets the blob angry and mean because the blob needs to grow. Then, the blob deploys his soldiers. An army of dependents, frightened to the bone followers, is deployed to ensure that the blob can continue to grow. All work for the benefit of the blob.

In Spirited Away, No-Face offers gold to make the creatures around him like him. The creatures accept the gold and obey the blob. But when Chihiro refuses the gold yet is kind to him anyway, No-Face becomes so upset and confused, and sick of himself, that he vomits up everything he has swallowed. Only then does he find a balance in his existence—an existence in which he does not always want to devour others. No-Face turns into a humble being.

Let’s feel sorry for the No-Faces of this world. The pitiable CEOs are morbidly seeking attention. These No-Faces use their money, business, wives, and children—everything to get attention.

But no one likes them. No-Face is a nasty, selfish creature that lives a terrible life of eternal dissatisfaction. They can’t be helped. They can only help themselves and puke out everything they have swallowed.

On Luscinia svecica and two Homo copiarius subspecies

This week, we walked across the Engbertsdijkvenen. We spotted an uncommon bird, the Bluethroat (Luscinia svecica). Helped by the app Merlin Bird ID, an app that lets you listen to birds like you’ve never heard them.

We also spotted Homo copiarius avium, a species of Homo sapiens equipped with a still camera with an 800mm lens. I can estimate this species quite well since I am of the affiliated subspecies Homo copiarius platea, also outfitted with a camera, but with a 28 or 35mm lens. Whereas the Homo copiarius platea like me is more often found in inhabited areas, where it generally operates in isolation, the Homo copiarius avium is found in nature reserves, where they operate in groups of 3 to 7 of their conspecifics, and often congregate in observation huts to share their collections of copied birds.

Ben van den Broek made this picture of the Bluethroat.

Beyond Time Management: Oliver Burkeman’s ‘Four Thousand Weeks’

Four Thousand Week – Time Management for Mortals, by Oliver Burkeman, is a book about what Burkeman calls “the paradox of limitation.”

All of this illustrates what might be termed the paradox of limitation, which runs through everything that follows: the more you try to manage your time with the goal of achieving a feeling of total control, and freedom from the inevitable constraints of being human, the more stressful, empty, and frustrating life gets. But the more you confront the facts of finitude instead—and work with them, rather than against them—the more productive, meaningful, and joyful life becomes.

Burkeman shares a wealth of wisdom on how we can achieve more focus in our lives without getting overwhelmed by our social media addiction and how the media manipulates us for the sake of gaining more eyeballs on the media itself (the media is the message, as Marshall McLuhan concluded years ago).

The unsettling possibility is that if you’re convinced that none of this is a problem for you—that social media hasn’t turned you into an angrier, less empathetic, more anxious, or more numbed-out version of yourself—that might be because it has. Your finite time has been appropriated, without your realizing anything’s amiss.
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It’s been obvious for some time now, of course, that all this constitutes a political emergency. By portraying our opponents as beyond persuasion, social media sorts us into ever more hostile tribes, then rewards us, with likes and shares, for the most hyperbolic denunciations of the other side, fueling a vicious cycle that makes sane debate impossible.

The book is a gem. I conclude with his advice for a more creative life.

In practical terms, three rules of thumb are especially useful for harnessing the power of patience as a creative force in daily life. The first is to develop a taste for having problems.
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Once you give up on the unattainable goal of eradicating all your problems, it becomes possible to develop an appreciation for the fact that life just is a process of engaging with problem after problem…
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The second principle is to embrace radical incrementalism.

When you accept that you probably won’t produce very much on any individual day, you will find that you produce much more over the long term.

One critical aspect of the radical incrementalist approach, which runs counter to much mainstream advice on productivity, is thus to be willing to stop when your daily time is up, even when you’re bursting with energy and feel as though you could get much more done.
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Stopping helps strengthen the muscle of patience that will permit you to return to the project again and again…

The final principle is that, more often than not, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality.

This is the principle known as “Stay On The Bus”. You don’t find originality around the corner. It is in the depth of the work.

… it begins at all only for those who who can muster the patience to immerse themselves in the earlier stage – the trial-and-error phase of copying others, learning new skills, and accumulating experience.

Burkeman uses the metaphor of the long-married couple.

To experience the profound mutual understanding of the long-married couple, you have to stay married to one person; to know what it’s like to be deeply rooted in a particular community and place, you have to stop moving around. Those are the kinds of meaningful and singular accomplishments that just take the time they take.

Printing photos and photographing prints

I am in the process of printing this series of black-and-white photos, and it is coming along quite well now. The prints on Canson Infinity Baryta Photographique II (try to think up a name like that for a paper type) look very nice.

Now, I want to share the results of this work, so I need to make a good picture of the print. That is not as easy as it seems. Despite the luster of the paper, the print reflects light, creating bleak spots on the photo. Not so nice.

Or I am too finicky.

Oostknollendam