Terry Tsai

“Boredom is a luxury good. This simple statement dug its claws into me and didn’t let go. Of course. I’d lost sight of the extraordinary privilege inherent within boredom.”
― Adam Fletcher, Don’t Go There!: From Chernobyl to North Korea—One Man’s Quest to Lose Himself and Find Everyone Else in the World’s Strangest Places

“This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it—talking trade balances here—once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here—once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel—once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity—y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else music movies microcode (software) high-speed pizza delivery”
― Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

“More and more university students lack social skills after growing up in small families and suffering intense competition at school. If people prefer eating alone this may be a sign of psychological problems,” said Kim Hye-sook at Ajou University.”
― Graham Holliday, Eating Korea: Reports on a Culinary Renaissance

“The extreme formality with which he addresses these officers carries an important subtext: your problem, sir, is deciding what you want me to do, and my problem, sir, is doing it. My gung-ho posture says that once you give the order I’m not going to bother you with any of the details—and your half of the bargain is you had better stay on your side of the line, sir, and not bother me with any of the chickenshit politics that you have to deal with for a living.”
― Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon