You really have to work hard to get hooked on smoking opium. The Victorian-era form of the drug, known as chandu, is rare, and the people who know how to use it aren’t exactly forthcoming. But leave it to an obsessive antiques collector to figure out how to get to addicted to a 19th-century drug.

It might have been something as simple as a portion of white asparagus. Peeled, steamed and served with a delicious sauce, as Germans traditionally eat it. And with real butter, a scarcity in wartime. While the rest of the country struggled to get even coffee, or had to spread margarine diluted with flour on their bread, Margot Wölk could have savored the expensive vegetable dish — if not for the fear of dying, that is. Wölk was one of 15 young women who were forced to taste Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s food for some two and a half years during World War II.

Fascinating.

Fascinating Reddit thread!

RosaFoetida:

You would be stuck in a constant state of sleep paralysis.

SweetieKat:

If I had to design Hell, I wouldn’t want people to know it’s Hell. Knowing the place is designed to torture you would make it too easy to fight against. No, I would make it seem like the person didn’t die at all. I would make them live out their lives with the worst luck imaginable. Everything that can go wrong does go wrong. Well, nearly everything. The only way to make someone truly suffer is to put them in an unwinnable situation but keep their hope alive.

beerMonger11:

A small, black box that is not tall enough to sit up in, and not long enough to lay down in.

Dollarama:

Make it a really warm, over crowded Walmart.

SoulWager:

A place where everybody is exactly like you, the society you deserve.

dollord:

Just white nothingness. Each person is unable to see any other person. Completely alone in a white world with no explanation or way out.

orald:

Sitting alone in a vast, empty, black nothingness watching a TV play 24 hour live-streaming of heaven.

SergeantTibbs:

You can go anywhere by elevator. The world is merely single rooms connected by elevators.

However, the elevator will always take a random amount of time to arrive, anywhere from a few seconds to months or even years.

The doors will only stay open for three seconds, and the time it takes to open them is counted. So, you must be ready to leap through as soon as they begin opening.

There’s no indicators to tell you you’ve pressed the button and an elevator is coming. There’s no indicators to tell you the elevator is arriving. The door makes no sound when it opens or closes.

The elevator can’t be blocked open. The doors close without resistance on anything you could use to bar them open. If they close on you, you are ejected back into the room.

There is a way out, but with infinitely many floors, your chances of finding it are equally infinitesimal.

punkpixzsticks:

Never ever going above -30 degrees.

yaysuekristy:

Never ending call with Indian tech support.

NozzALa:

A fun place where you could roast marshmallows at leisure. Almost everyone is going there, according to the bible, so it might as well be fun.

John and Zoltan are both blind, but they deal with the world in completely different ways — one paints vivid pictures in his mind, while the other refuses to picture anything at all. In this short, they argue about the truth of a world they can’t see.

When John Hull, a theology professor in England, lost his sight he became convinced that the images in his mind — like his memories of his wife’s face when she was younger — no longer matched the reality in which he lived. He didn’t want to live in a world of fantasy, so decided to stop picturing the world altogether. Zoltan Torey, on the other hand, simply couldn’t stand living in a world without images, so he resolved to visualize everything. He constantly creates a world of pictures inside his head that (he says) matches up with the world as it really is.

Because they settled on diametrically opposed ways of living without sight, we wondered what would happen if we got them on the phone together to duke it out. So we patched them through our studio, and recorded their conversation for our live show In the Dark.

While John finds truth in darkness, Zoltan sees an emotional void. And as they argue, they reveal some very powerful truths about how we connect to one another. 

In an excerpt from his new book, David Byrne explains why sometimes, he prefers hearing nothing.

The UCLA study proposed that our appreciation and feeling for music are deeply dependent on mirror neurons. When you watch, or even just hear, someone play an instrument, the neurons associated with the muscles required to play that instrument fire. Listening to a piano, we “feel” those hand and arm movements, and as any air guitarist will tell you, when you hear or see a scorching solo, you are “playing” it, too. Do you have to know how to play the piano to be able to mirror a piano player? Edward W. Large at Florida Atlantic University scanned the brains of people with and without music experience as they listened to Chopin. As you might guess, the mirror neuron system lit up in the musicians who were tested, but somewhat surprisingly, it flashed in non-musicians as well. So, playing air guitar isn’t as weird as it sometimes seems. The UCLA group contends that all of our means of communication—auditory, musical, linguistic, visual—have motor and muscular activities at their root. By reading and intuiting the intentions behind those motor activities, we connect with the underlying emotions. Our physical state and our emotional state are inseparable—by perceiving one, an observer can deduce the other.

People dance to music as well, and neurological mirroring might explain why hearing rhythmic music inspires us to move, and to move in very specific ways. Music, more than many of the arts, triggers a whole host of neurons. Multiple regions of the brain fire upon hearing music: muscular, auditory, visual, linguistic.

galluptious: wonderful, fascinating, delightful

Some interesting bits:

• Shakespeare was only 18 when he got married. His new wife was 26. All of the manipulative older women in his plays don’t reflect very well on Anne.
• The term ‘ham’–for an actor who overplays to the audience–originated during Shakespeare’s lifetime. The acting style of the period was highly formalized and gestural. ‘Ham’ refers to the old-fashioned style of strutting across the stage, exposing the ham-string of the leg.
• The ‘Nothing’ in Much Ado About Nothing of course refers to the sundry misunderstandings on which the plot is based. It also had a more indelicate connotation for 16th century playgoers. ‘Nothing’ was a slang term for female genitalia.
• In his will, he gave his wife the furniture and “my second best bed”. This sounds more provocative than it actually was, as guests usually got the best bed in a 17th century house.