“I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible—states of affairs removed from them in space and time—ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the
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“and that is true insofar as it is mostly true and things that are mostly true are not true at all.”
― Seven Demons
― Seven Demons
“A statue waited before them, a sapien male made entirely of glass, the height of ten market stalls. “The Glass King,” Kaluza whispered. “You read about him?” “A little.” “The Glass King built Arcadia, understand? The world was made, not formed. Thousands of years ago, by the sapien metric.” “Why?” “Why what?” “Why did he build Arcadia?” “Because sapiens broke easily, and even if they stayed careful they still wore down and died. Not so deep into their history they’d peered into physics and wrapped the universe up in equations and built huge societies, and they still hadn’t done a thing about death. The Glass King vowed to kill it.” “To kill death?” “To kill death.”
― Logic Beach: Part I
― Logic Beach: Part I
“Two of the deacons were just boys. I guess they had to join a gang one way or another, and the church won out.”
― A Red Death
― A Red Death
“The artisanal firearm right now being used as punctuation is called a Donnerbüchse, which is to say a thunder gun, and it is basically a weaponized recycler. It is a cone with bang bang at the back and an open mouth at the front and you put any old crap you happen to have in and then pull the trigger and all your chicken bones or nails fly out and rip pieces off whoever is in your way. Many people who are shot with one of these things who do not sustain fatal initial damage are killed by the very many fucked-up infections they contract in unexpected body parts because that is what happens when you get shot with a chicken carcass and a bag of nails. Another way of thinking about a Donnerbüchse is that it is a handheld unidirectional pipe bomb.”
― Seven Demons
― Seven Demons
“I’m not an optimist. That makes me sound naïve. I’m a very serious “possibilist.” That’s something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful.”
― Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
― Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
greenMOO
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Anything to ignore my IRL responsibilities.
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