Spending too much time on Twitter is definitely bad for the brain. Undoubtedly the place is addictive, which I ascribe almost wholly to the frenetic pace of things there. One is dazzled by the ever-changing parade of events. Surely there's a similar draw towards casinos, carnivals, the furious hyperactivity of market speculation, etc. Even when I'm away from the place, the memory of Twitter spins round in our headspace, always seeming to gain speed with time, like the runaway carousel at the end of Strangers on a Train.

There's so many people who still use Twitter to try to support themselves that it feels like a shame merely to crash the place. I've entertained idle notions of Twitter recovering something of itself under new management, but probably the damage is irreversible. And maybe something like Twitter shouldn't ever come back, because it breaks people's brains. In the extreme case they practically lose their ability to use language and can only communicate in symbols and pictures.

~Chara of Pnictogen

I'll add a grace note to this piece: one of the most striking moments in Lars von Trier's Melancholia comes when the protagonist Justine (superlatively realized by Kirsten Dunst) says quietly but confidently that there's no life outside Earth. This comes in the second half of the movie as the "Melancholia" disaster slowly builds and she seems to be the only person at peace with it.

As an expression of despair it's very powerful: "We are alone. There is nothing else." I used to live with that....It's not true. We are not stranded here.

~Chara

I tried watching a Spanish dub of King Vidor's The Fountainhead earlier on this evening, and it was entertaining in a corny way but I turned it off after a while. We weren't following the Spanish well enough, all the audio was out of sync by maybe a half-second (this is entertaining in a scene where Dominique Francon drops a Greek-ish statuette from a high window), and also...ugh, do I really need to be exposing myself to Ayn Rand, even filtered through King Vidor and Patricia Neal? ~Chara