Status Updates From Twenty After Midnight

"There are things we want to experience but never do.
Because we can't. Because we won't let ourselves. Those things are little monsters born in basements. They grow. They wither. They become deformed. There's no way to know how the basement will affect them. But they stay there. The only thing the little monsters won't do is disappear. While we live, they live."

„There were certain ways the body had of imposing its presence that could mean only one thing: the existence of some emotional instability. Andrei had written in one of his books that depression was the body calling attention to itself, imposing itself, mastering the mind by fire and whip until it bent to its needs. My own fusty breath was the cracking of the whip, and my mind wanted to cower.“

„…video game parameters shouldn't be bound to the narrative sophistication of literature and flm — …plot, quality of dialogue, graphic sophistication, and other such things were secondary and, sometimes, even superfluous in the gaming world; the pleasure and meaning of games lay elsewhere, in interactions, patterns, and rules, in how the processes introduced by them became metaphors for life.“

„Out goes intensity, in comes quantity. Out goes the sublime, in come patterns. … The beauty that emerges is one of patterns, filing systems, algorithms, montages, and oppositions plucked from an excess of information. In this new world, the possibility of transgressing or transcending doesn't exist. There is no truth slumbering beneath the surface. Flowers that bloom in excess wither from one day to the next."

“Digital technology conditions [us] to convert [our] desires into information that can be remixed, which leads … to the search for the exhaustion of possibility. … The profanation of all that was once indistinct, inaccessible, and elevated is a sadistic process, not in the common sense of the term, meaning cruelty, but in the sense of pining for the methodical exhaustion of desire through data processing.”