Tom Steele

“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.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“I love you like a fat kid loves cake!”
― Scott Adams

“every story written is
marks upon a page
The same marks,
repeated, only
differently arranged”
― Max Barry, Lexicon

“He gave a puzzled look. ‘Doesn’t the Lord’s Prayer mention just that? “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” The answer is staring them in the face, but we’ve ensured they ignore and deride it – and no, pay no heed to the English Standard Version, we’ve already begun to corrupt God’s word in the ESV, amongst others. We don’t just try to pervert Catholics, God, no, all Christians are fair game – the fools. All religions, for that matter. We’ve had particular fun demonising Jews and Muslims, and some entire countries have been cast into madness by pornography alone. Papua, New Guinea, is a particularly pleasing example. But I digress. Did you know there’s a whole raft of trauma release therapies that work amazingly well at curing virtually all mental disorders and addictions? They can even reverse some diseases and prevent the manifestation of others. It’s not very well known, but that’s because we can’t make money out of healthy people, we need them sick and disorientated and thinking they need drugs to cure themselves, when the cure is within them all along!”
― Robert Storey, The Lost Prophet