The Will To Hack
Aaron's tiny playground
quoteblog
Perhaps Pinker can "almost" hear me saying this, but I cannot. The quoted passage is not in a dialect I speak, nor one I find congenial.†
It is the sort of collection that publishers describe as "delightful."†
TV and film development is just like the game Battleship. Executives flail around blindly, making wild guesses about what combination of coordinates will hit, and when they do stumble across something that connects, they just keep firing away at the same general area and hope to connect three or four more times with the exact same formula. Witness three CSI shows and soon a fourth Law and Order.
(n+1 2, 178)
My only wonder is how a member of the Bad Subjects collective would deem a trip to Congress worth the trouble. One supposes that despite all the transgressive gestures of our postmodernist friends that bourgeois respectability remains their underlying desire.†
In general, for every belief that I don't want to take hold in society at large, I am in favour of it being taught in state schools.†
"We know they cheated. You know how we know? Because in one area we had 5,000 forged ballots, and when they were counted, we didn't even get that many."†
My Web 2.0 palindrome: We won: no morons nor Om on now. (Ew.)
I suppose there's someone in the world who would want to be Pierre Curie, so that he know what it was like to fuck Marie Curie. That person isn't me.†
There is, frankly no way of writing this post which isn't as sick and tasteless as hell, so I'm just basically going to go for it.†
"They want to lower our U.S. standard of freedom to some U.N. standard of freedom that's a lot lesser, in terms of freedoms, than we enjoy here in the United States."
(Harper's November 2006, 52)
When talking to prospective students, I am selling a product. Of course I'm going to accentuate the positive. †
President George W. Bush complained that Part I, Article 3 of the Geneva Convention was too vague. “What does that mean, ‘outrages upon human dignity’?” he asked at a news conference. “That's a statement that is wide open to interpretation.”†
Computer games don’t affect kids; I mean if Pac-Man affected us as kids, we’d all be running around in darkened rooms, munching magic pills and listening to repetitive music.††
Stored food can also feed priests, who provide religious justification for wars of conquest
(Jared Diamond, explaining why agricultural societies dominated others in Guns, Germs, and Steel, 90)
Dear Capable, it said, we are in receipt of your letter of the other day, that other day, whenever that day was, when you sent that letter that you sent us. We regret to inform you that, although we are very sympathetic to your significant hardships, don't you think it would be better if you took responsibility for your own life? We feel strongly that, once you rid your goats of gappers, as we have, you will feel better about yourself, and also, we will feel better about you. Not that we're saying we're better than you, necessarily, it's just that, since gappers are bad, and since you and you alone now have them, it only stands to reason that you are not, perhaps, quite as good as us. Not that we hate you! We don't. We sort of even like you. Just please get rid of those gappers! Prove that you can do it, just as we proved we could do it, and at that time, and that time only, please come over, and won't that be fun, all of us standing around the fire, sharing a laugh about those bad old days when we all had gappers.
Love, Your Neighbors.
(George Saunders, The Very Persistent Gappers of Frip, 36)
Real life deductions are always probabilities, and when lined up in a series of 3 or more, the product is virtual chaos. It's your basic Lorenz Attractor.†
Individuals make certain choices or perform certain actions not because they fear punishment or attempting to conform, and not because an action is appropriate or the individual feels some sort of social obligation. Instead, the cognitive element of new institutionalism suggests that individuals make certain choices because they can conceive of no alternative.†
"You people really do have no respect," she went on. "Joe is such a wonderful man . . . " "Listen," I exploded, interrupting her. "Do you know what this song is about?" She froze. "It's about a guy who gets an erection that doesn't go away," I said. "Can you explain to me why this song is playing now? What the hell is wrong with you people?"†
Firefighters who want to live in high-priced cities can work two jobs, said W. Michael Cox, chief economist for the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “I think it’s great,” he said. “It gives you portfolio diversification in your income.”† (via)
People who tell you that it is possible to think too hard about things are always the ones who aren’t good at thinking about things in the first place, just as people who tell you that you can make yourself sick from too much exercise are always the ones who don’t exercise at all.†
Citing public opinion research, Fournier said, "At least one out of 10 Americans tell the other nine what to buy, how to vote, where to eat, and that literally is the group of people we're going after."†
Richard Stallman:
