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Ryan Frishkorn

@ryanfrishkorn.com
874 followers 849 following 1.6K posts

KC8RNV - Tech engineer and aesthetic nomad. Intolerant of fascism and nihilism. Listener of crows. Driven by literature, tangled in philosophy, and fractured by everything beautiful.

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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 30/09/2026
Marigold at sunset. #flowers #macro #photography
Bright-yellow marigold at sunset.
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 25/09/2026
Sometimes when the world is asleep, I feel like I’m sleeping too. The insects are very quiet tonight.
A hand rests on the muted strings of a guitar.
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 23/09/2026
“M” as in Masterpiece. letterboxd.com/film/m/
Title screen for “M” (1931) directed by Fritz Lang
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 08/09/2026
Purple and white cornflower on a background of green grass.
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 06/09/2026
"In Athens such division led to major strife, in our own state to subversion and even deadly civil war - an outcome any responsible and courageous citizen fit for leadership will shun and resist as he dedicates himself entirely to the Republic. He will not pursue riches or power, but will look after the entire state by considering the needs of everyone in it. He will not invite hatred and ill-will against others by spreading false accusations. In short, he will hold fast to justice and integrity, suffering great loss in order to protect them, even - as I have said - preferring to die rather than abandon these principles."

On Duties, Book I (44 BCE)
Marcus Tullius Cicero
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 06/09/2026
"As with legal guardianship, so with governance of a republic: actions should benefit those being cared for, not those doing the caring. Moreover, to consider the needs of only some of the citizens is to neglect the rest and thereby invite the most harmful situation possible for the state, namely discord and sedition. This is how it has happened that so many adherents of the 'popular and 'conservative' causes look after their own side, while few look after everyone."

On Duties, Book I (44 BCE)
Marcus Tullius Cicero
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 06/09/2026
Tyranny and malice was well-recognizable even thousands of years ago. #reading #books #literature #philosophy
"In general, whoever is going to lead the state must adhere to two principles put forth by Plato: first, whatever the issue, protect the well-being of the citizenry by considering it to the exclusion of your own advantage; and second, look after the state as a whole rather than protecting one part at the expense of the rest."

On Duties, Book I (44 BCE)
Marcus Tullius Cicero
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 01/09/2026
You’re sure to find something beautiful.
Earth of departed sunset - earth of the mountains
misty-topt!
Earth of the vitreous pour of the full moon just tinged
with blue!
Earth of shine and dark mottling the tide of the river!
Earth of the limpid gray of clouds brighter and clearer
for my sake!
Far-swooping elbow'd earth - rich apple-blossom'd earth!
Smile, for your lover comes.

Walt Whitman
Song of Myself
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 25/08/2026
I love this album for summer rides at sunset! Is Billie named after Billie Holiday? 😂 🐾
Evening sunset.
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 13/08/2026
#reading #books #literature #theater
"If a man walks with haughtiness of hand or word and gives no heed to Justice and the shrines of gods despises, may an evil doom smite him for his ill starred pride of heart!"

Sophocles
Oedipus the King
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 08/08/2026
The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness."

Hannah Arendt
The Origins of Totalitarianism
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 07/08/2026
#reading #books #literature
"Genius is always ascetic, and piety, and love. Appetite shows to the finer souls as a disease, and they find beauty in rites and bounds that resist it."

Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Prudence" - Essays: First Series (1841)
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 04/08/2026
I fell in love with a whale…
"O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind." - Ahab

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
Herman Melville
020
Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 01/08/2026
#reading #books #literature
"Too much, even in later life, I have perceived in men that pass for good men, a disposition to degrade and if possible to degrade through self-degradation) those in whom unwillingly they feel any weight of oppression to themselves, by commanding qualities of intellect or character. They respect you: they are compelled to do so: and they hate to do so."

Thomas De Quincey
Suspiria De Profundis
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 30/07/2026
Prose has no poetic boundary when written with this temper of beauty and insight. #reading #books #literature
"Mockery! it was lost upon me. Laugh at me, as one or two people did! I valued not their laughter. And when I was told insultingly to cease 'my girlish tears, that word 'girlish' had no sting for me, except as a verbal echo to the one eternal thought of my heart — that a girl was the sweetest thing I, in my short life, had known — that a girl it was who had crowned the earth with beauty, and had opened to my thirst fountains of pure celestial love, from which, in this world, I was to drink no more."

Thomas De Quincey
Suspiria De Profundis
040
Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 15/07/2026
White Balloon flowers
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 13/07/2026
"For the movement, organized violence is the most efficient of the many protective walls which surround its fictitious world, whose reality is proved when a member fears leaving the movement more than he fears the consequences of his complicity in illegal actions, and feels more secure as a member than as an opponent. This feeling of security, resulting from the organized violence with which the elite formations protect the party members from the outside world, is as important to the integrity of the fictitious world of the organization as the fear of its terror."

Hannah Arendt
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 12/07/2026
Yellow sunset, frosted with purple.
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 11/07/2026
#reading #books #history #literature
"The fall of protecting class walls transformed the slumbering majorities behind all parties into one great unorganized, structureless mass of furious individuals who had nothing in common except their vague apprehension that the hopes of party members were doomed, that, consequently, the most respected, articulate and representative members of the community were fools and that all the powers that be were not so much evil as they were equally stupid and fraudulent."

Hannah Arendt
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 11/07/2026
#reading #books #history #literature
"The truth is that the masses grew out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class. The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness, but his isolation and lack of normal social relationships."

Hannah Arendt
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 07/07/2026
#reading #books #literature #history
"Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limitations to its economic expansion. The bourgeoisie turned to politics out of economic necessity; for if it did not want to give up the capitalist system whose inherent law is constant economic growth, it had to impose this law upon its home governments and to proclaim expansion to be an ultimate political goal of foreign policy."

Hannah Arendt
The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 27/06/2026
#reading #books #literature #history
"The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality."

Hannah Arendt
The Origins of Totalitarianism
040
Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 16/06/2026
Sorrow is a timeless shadow. #reading #books #latin #poetry #literature
Her words were finished, and she left me there, weeping and wishing I could say much more.
She disappeared into the empty air.
Three times I tried to hold her in my arms; three times the shade I hopelessly embraced escaped just like a weightless breath of wind, or much more like a dream that flits away.

The Aeneid — Virgil
Book 2, v. 790
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 12/06/2026
Luto friend.
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 12/06/2026
Sometimes, Nature speaks in strange reflections. #reading #books #fiction #BookSky
"O Nature, and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind." - Ahab

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale
Herman Melville
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 09/06/2026
Gizmo driving a race car. It takes a certain kind of guy.
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 21/05/2026
"The longer we live the more we must endure the elementary existence of men and women; and every brave heart must treat society as a child, and never allow it to dictate."

Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Culture" from Conduct of Life (1860)
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 09/05/2026
"John Brown believes in two articles —two instruments, shall I say? — the Golden Rule and the Declaration of Independence; and he used this expression in conversation here concerning them, ‘Better that a whole generation of men, women and children should pass away by a violent death than that one word of either should be violated in this country.’ There is a Unionist — there is a strict constructionist for you. He believes in the Union of the States, and he conceives that the only obstruction to the Union is Slavery, and for that reason, as a patriot, he works for its abolition."

Ralph Waldo Emerson
Boston, November 18, 1858
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 06/05/2026
#reading #books #fiction #BookSky
"Do you understand how there could be any writing in a spider's web?"

"Oh, no," said Dr. Dorian. "I don't understand it. But for that matter I don't understand how a spider learned to spin a web in the first place. When the words appeared, everyone said they were a miracle. But nobody pointed out that the web itself is a miracle."

Charlotte's Web
E.B. White
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 06/05/2026
April 3, 1933
Monday evening

Everything I considered un-German, brutality, injustice, hypocrisy, mass suggestion to the point of intoxication, all of it flourishes here.

Victor Klemperer
A Diary of the Nazi Years
001
Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 03/05/2026
"Is it possible, after all, that spite of bricks and shaven faces, this world we live in is brimmed with wonders, and I and all mankind, beneath our garbs of common-placeness, conceal enigmas that the stars themselves, and perhaps the highest seraphim can not resolve?"

Pierre, or The Ambiguities
Herman Melville
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 02/05/2026
#reading #books #literature #fiction
The sounds seemed waltzing in the room; the sounds hung pendulous like glittering icicles from the corners of the room; and fell upon him with a ringing silveryness; and were drawn up again to the ceiling, and hung pendulous again, and dropt down upon him again with the ringing silveryness. Fire-flies seemed buzzing in the sounds; summer-lightnings seemed vividly yet softly audible in the sounds.

Pierre, or The Ambiguities
Herman Melville
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 27/04/2026
Old woods and deep. At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned and these were like them. He passed a windfelled tulip poplar on the mountainside that held aloft in the grip of its roots two stones the size of fieldwagons, great tablets on which was writ only a tale of vanished seas with ancient shells in cameo and fishes etched in lime.

Child of God
Cormac McCarthy
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 27/04/2026
Going up a track of a road through the quarry woods where all about lay enormous blocks and tablets of stone weathered gray and grown with deep green moss, toppled monoliths among the trees and vines like traces of an older race of man. This rainy summer day. He passed a dark lake of silent jade where the moss walls rose sheer and plumb and a small blue bird sat slant upon a guywire in the void.

Child of God
Cormac McCarthy
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 27/04/2026
"He could hear it far over the cold and smoking fields of autumn, his pans knelling in the night like buoys on some dim and barren coast, and he could hear it fading and hear it die lost as the cry of seabirds in the vast and salt black solitudes they keep."

Outer Dark
Cormac McCarthy
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 23/04/2026
Soft pink and purple hues at sunset, shaking off the last of cold winter.
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 20/04/2026
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 14/04/2026
“fragile thread which the little surface corners and edges of men’s secret and solitary lives may be joined for an instant now and then before sinking back into the darkness where the spirit cried for the first time and was not heard and will cry for the last time and will not be heard then either”
Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner in paperback format.
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 07/04/2026
"Therefore, a psychiatric symptom is distinguishable by adamant denial, 'doubling down' when confronted, and — when truly severe — turning violent in order to defend one's fixed false beliefs. This is why mental pathology should be kept away from power, even if it avidly seeks it, for no amount of power in reality will satisfy the inner feelings of deficit, and will eventually lead to large-scale violence and devastation."

The Psychology of Trump Contagion
Bandy X. Lee
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 07/04/2026
"Donald Trump, therefore, is a product of our collective suicidality as well as our chief destroyer. His dysfunctional defenses are magnetically attractive to those who share his symptoms, and Trump Contagion now looks more like a shared psychosis."

The Psychology of Trump Contagion
Bandy X. Lee
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 29/03/2026
"It is natural and beautiful that childhood should inquire and maturity should teach; but it is time enough to answer questions when they are asked. Do not shut up the young people against their will in a pew and force the children to ask them questions for an hour against their will."

Essay: Spiritual Laws
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 29/03/2026
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 17/03/2026
#reading #books #literature #fiction
"I'll give you my father's answer to those who act without thinking: "A stone is heavy and the sand is weighty; but a fool's wrath is heavier than them both."
-Staban Tuek

Dune
Frank Herbert
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 15/03/2026
#reading #books #fiction #literature #scifi
My father once told me that respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. "Something cannot emerge from nothing," he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable "the truth" can be.

"Conversations with Muad'Dib" by The Princess Irulan

Dune
Frank Herbert
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 13/03/2026
Egon agrees.
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 11/03/2026
Strongbad: "It's over!"
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 07/03/2026
#reading #books #literature #fiction
"But every report on Salusa Secundus says S.S. is a hell world!"
"Undoubtedly. But if you were going to raise tough, strong, ferocious men, what environmental conditions would you impose on them?"
"How could you win the loyalty of such men?"
"There are proven ways: play on the certain knowledge of their superiority, the mystique of secret covenant, the esprit of shared suffering. It can be done. It has been done on many worlds in many times."

Dune
Frank Herbert
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 02/03/2026
Look at the way these two in the foreground almost melt into each other, and note the abnormal hand.
Two foreground figures pressing into each other.Disfigured arm and hand holding a phone.
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 23/02/2026
#reading #books #literature #shakespeare
"Ha, majesty! How high thy glory towers When the rich blood of kings is set on fire.
O, now doth death line his dread chaps with steel:
The swords of soldiers are his teeth, his fangs, And now he feasts, mousing the flesh of men In undetermined differences of kings."

King John
William Shakespeare
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Ryan Frishkorn @ryanfrishkorn.com · 11/02/2026
I’m no grandma, but here’s a classic tomato bisque. For your health!
Tomato bisque and baked bread.
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