Rachel > Recent Status Updates

"Too little information and you're blind. Too much and you're blindED."

"Since the first moment he saw her, the exotic beauty of the woman drew him like a magnet. Some men might have been put off by the obvious intelligence in Rebecca's dark eyes, and the hint of sly humor in her full lips. Mike sighed. 'Not me.'"

Um...yikes? What men worth considering would be put off by intelligence and humor? Also...if Mike is thinking that, I think he's a Nice Guy® :/
But yeah, we Jewesses are hot!

"The airfield...was an uncanny spot: really truly in the center of everything--with San Francisco's skyline visible across the water, the great bustle of the Port of Oakland across the channel, Oakland's own downtown rising in the other direction, the Marrow Fair beneath us--yet it felt utterly desolate and disconnected. It was amazing to see the goats grazing here in the calm eye of a storm of trade and transit."

"The lights above snapped off. We'd sat talking for too long.
'Does that happen often?'
'A fair amount, yes,' Horace said. 'I don't mind. It gives me a minute to think.
We stayed quiet. Thinking.
'You must seek her out,' Horace said at last.
He was right.
The lights snapped on again, revealing Horace on his feet, caught mid-gesticulation. 'It takes a bit of a leap to wake them up.' He straightened."

"I followed him as he plunged down the corridor, which was not wide to begin with and made narrower by the shelves and legal boxes... Cold white lights above...snapped to life as we approached...
I saw annotations on the fronts of the boxes. The years ticked back like a time machine: 1992, 1991, 1990...
Behind us, the motion-activated lights snapped off.
We passed through a tunnel of memory in a bubble of light."

"In this new darkness, I stood behind the ping-pong table, considered the Clement Street starter in its crock and my partner the brawny Vitruvian. The hardy Faustofen, too. I looked out across the depot, awash in pink light, the tang of tube-fish rising, and realized it was the hidden root of something interesting and maybe important, and I, improbably, was part of it."

"I rose earlier than ever before and experienced a portion of the morning that was new to me. I heard the chirping of unfamiliar bird species--negotiations that had, until now, been concluded long before I woke."

"'Actually,' I said--oh, it felt good--'the Vitruvian 3's motors are exactly the same as the V4's.' ...
The wraiths noticed me for the first time. 'Wait,' said the first. 'I know you, right? You're . . . one of our marketing people?'
My face burned hot, but through force of will, I cooled my gaze to absolute zero kelvin. 'Actually.' Yes. It felt very good. 'I work on Control.'"

"It always begins with the humming...It sneaks up on her. In another minute, she'll be singing with her full voice. She can't help herself. Right now, she's humming her favorite song, which is about leaving places behind, and how it's sad but also happy."

"'Why not just leave it liquid like Slurry?' I asked.
Jaina Mitra ticked off the reasons: 'Mouthfeel. Dental health. Market research indicates people associate liquid superfood with pessimistic science fiction.' That was a good point."

"'I think of them as microbial cathedrals,' Jaina Mitra said.
I wondered if that comparison made her the architect of the deity."

"'What's it supposed to taste like?'
Jaina Mitra's gaze sharpened. 'Nothing. It's not intended to be a simulation. I think food should taste like what it is, don't you? And what this /is/, is a super-nutritious cellulosic suspension manufactured in situ by a community of microbes.'"

"'Here we have a reproduction of a pamphlet printed by the bakers guild in London, around, let's see, 1600, very nice. And /A History of Food/, it's quite contemporary'--he said that with palpable regret--'but there's a good bit on baking.'"

"Realize what a gift they've possessed all along."

"The Ferry Building was more than amazing; it was mythic. This grand structure on the city's edge, perched on pylons, built a hundred years ago and in the middle of that century, not merely abandoned but actually walled off by a dark freeway that curled around the Embarcadero like a rampart. Then, an earthquake came and it was like something out of a fairy tale: the wall tumbles, the spell fades, and the townspeople

"It looked dead. In a panic, I threw together a batch of the flour-water starter food. It felt like I ought to drip it in slowly, just a bit at a time, as if I were bottle-feeding an ailing kitten. (I had never bottle-fed an ailing kitten.) (I did once coax Kubrick back to life with a spray bottle.) (You have to work pretty hard to push a cactus to the brink of death.)"

How is he getting these stories from my life?!

"This was us, our time and place: we could wrestle sophisticated robots into submission, but were confounded by the most basic processes of life."

"There was still another loaf to share. I went to the house next door, its resident unknown, never before seen or even considered. No one was home--or they were, but they were spooked by the appearance of a wild-eyed woman in sweatpants alive to the miracles of the universe, cradling a mysterious bundle, with traces of dough drying on the front of her tech company T-shirt."

"The house was large and deeply lived-in, all the shelves and surfaces stacked with books and boxes, framed pictures, old greeting cards set up like tent cities. If there was a spectrum of spaces defined at one end by my barren apartment, this marked the other extreme. Every single surface told a story. A long one. With digressions."

"The summer before freshman year, the One Campus, One Book selection had converted me to vegetarianism."

"I sniffed again, still detected nothing, but nodded my head agreeably. 'You're right. That is nice.' It was the same strategy I employed at wine tastings."

"There were murky glass vessels holding baby Xenomorphs (possibly they were pickles)."

"I activated the standard suite of office chaff: left a data sheet in my desk, opened to its third page, seemingly mid-consultation, and draped my jacket artfully across the back of my chair, indicating that I hadn't left the office--never that--but was only attending a meeting or crying in a bathroom. Normal stuff."

"We would solve everything else before we solved the egg problem."

"I worked on the submodule responsible for Proprioception, which is, I think, a beautiful word--/pro-pri-o-cep-tion!/--and also the process by which organisms judge the mushroom of their own body parts in space. ... When you walk, you look forward, not down at your feet, because you are confident they are where you expect them to be, obeying your commands. That's a pretty cool feature."
Speak for yourself! #autism

"On the phone with Beoreg, I ordered my food with a rattling sigh, and when his brother arrived at my door, he carried something different: a more compact tub containing a fiery red broth and not one but two slabs of bread for dipping. 'Secret spicy,' he whispered."

"·They possessed no storefront: they cooked where they lived, in an apartment whose precise location they were reluctant to disclose.
·Chaiman said, 'It is okay. Just not legal. Definitely okay, though.'"

"We were on a quest to end work.
And it would involve: a shit ton of work."

"I set out across the country with all my belongings in the back of my car and my desk cactus strapped into the passenger seat. I drove west through the narrow pass in the Rockies, crossed the dusty nothing of Nevada, and crashed into the verdant, vertical shock of California. I was agog...here was a world with az-axis."

"But the menu intrigues me...the menu was compact: available was the /Spicy Soup/ or a /Spicy Sandwich/ or a /Combo (double spicy)/, all of which, the menu explained, were vegetarian."