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Joseph Khemili
https://www.goodreads.com/cyanphoenix
“Love feels like a great misfortune, a monstrous parasite, a permanent state of emergency that ruins all small pleasures.”
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“You see, cuckoos are parasites. They lay their eggs in other birds' nests. When the egg hatches, the baby cuckoo pushes the other baby birds out of the nest. The poor parent birds work themselves to death trying to find enough food to feed the enormous cuckoo child who has murdered their babies and taken their places."
"Enormous?" said Jace. "Did you just call me fat?"
"It was an analogy."
"I am not fat.”
― City of Ashes
"Enormous?" said Jace. "Did you just call me fat?"
"It was an analogy."
"I am not fat.”
― City of Ashes
“Our world is not safe. It is a toxic swamp populated by predators and parasites. The odds are stacked against us from the moment of conception. We survive only because we fight the elements, hunger, disease, each other. And, although civilization promises us safe harbor, that promise is a fairy tale. Only the storm is real. It comes for each of us. And we cannot win. We can only choose how we will suffer our defeat.
We can meekly take our beatings, and die like lemmings, finding solace in the belief that we shall one day inherit the earth.
Or, we can plunge into the chaos with eyes wide open, taking comfort instead from the bruises, scars, and broken bones which prove that we fought to live and die as gods.”
― Life for Life
We can meekly take our beatings, and die like lemmings, finding solace in the belief that we shall one day inherit the earth.
Or, we can plunge into the chaos with eyes wide open, taking comfort instead from the bruises, scars, and broken bones which prove that we fought to live and die as gods.”
― Life for Life
“Men who reject the responsibility of thought and reason can only exist as parasites on the thinking of others.”
― The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism
― The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism
“Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains — cheat. Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection. Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations. Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I.”
― Blindsight
― Blindsight
Joseph’s 2025 Year in Books
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