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“We all carry a multitude of ghosts around with us: impressions of other people, strong or weak, deep from long acquaintance or shallow with brevity. Those ghosts are maps, updated with each encounter, made detailed, judged, liked or disliked. They are, if you ask a philosopher, all we can ever really know of the other people in the world.”
― The Gone-Away World
― The Gone-Away World
“Thus, while I have now visited the Hell of Friendly Shrapnel, I have not been shunted into the Hell of Heavy Metal Poisoning or the Hell of Internal Burns or the Slow Hell of Military-Grade Carcinoma That No One Will Talk About. I can expect to live and return to service in the Elective Theatre, where I will no doubt experience further time in the compounded, fractal hells which are the state of being there, namely the hells of Grit Up My Arse, Sandmite Bites, Endless Boredom and Constant Fear, We Have No Idea What We’re Doing Here and Baked Bean Muesli for Breakfast, this last being the inexplicable gift of the hell wardens known as Supply.”
― The Gone-Away World
― The Gone-Away World
“The downside is that your workers are working harder and having to concentrate more, and the accidents they have are just a little worse, just a little more frequent. The trouble is that you can’t go back, because now your competitors have done the same thing and the Thingumabob market has gotten a bit more aggressive, and the question comes down to this: how much further can you squeeze the margin without making your factory somewhere no one will work? And the truth is that it’s a tough environment for unskilled workers in your area and it can get pretty bad. Suddenly, because the company can’t survive any other way, soft-hearted Alf Fingermuffin is running the scariest, most dangerous factory in town. Or he’s out of busines...”
― The Gone-Away World
― The Gone-Away World
“A war zone is a bad place to be a sheep. It’s not a good place to be anything, but sheep generally are a bit stupid and devoid of tactical acumen and individual reasoning, and they approach problem-solving in a trial-and-error kind of a way. Sheep wander, and wandering is not a survival trait where there are landmines. After the first member of a flock is blown up, the rest of the sheep automatically scatter in order to confuse the predator, and this, naturally, takes more than one of them onto yet another mine and there’s another woolly BOOM-splatterpitterslee-eutch, which is the noise of an average-sized sheep being propelled into the air by an anti-personnel mine and partially dispersed, the largest single piece falling to Earth as a semi-liquidised blob. This sound or its concomitant reality upsets the remaining sheep even more, and not until quite a few of them have been showered over the neighbourhood do they get the notion that the only safe course is the reverse course. By this time, alas, they have forgotten where that is, and the whole thing begins again. BOOM.”
― The Gone-Away World
― The Gone-Away World
“This is why people are so disappointed with the present. We talk so much about how wonderful tomorrow's going to be that even if it's great, it can't help but be a letdown. Tomorrow is like a summer blockbuster for which the studio starts showing trailers the previous November. By the time it comes to your complex, you feel like you've already seen it. All the best lines and biggest explosions. The most provocative coming-out-of-the-water bikini shot. You will already have seen the making-of-the-feature and heard the actors on the press junket talking about what a privilege it was to work with so-and-so and how they all did their own stunts. So because you feel like you've already seen it, by the time it comes, you have no desire to fork over $15 and actually sit through it in a theater. What's happened is that you've already experienced something which hasn't happened yet. In fact, when you think of it, the only reason to go to the movies isn't to see the feature but to get a taste of the future, to see the trailer for the NEXT big blockbuster and to experience THAT before it happens. And this phenomenon isn't limited to the movies, it is the we live today. And it is why I encourage you to ignore the hype of what's to come, and to get some popcorn and gummy bears during the previews, and to thoroughly enjoy the feature.
In real time.
Not in the black hole of expectation.”
― The Futurist
In real time.
Not in the black hole of expectation.”
― The Futurist
J’s 2025 Year in Books
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