Gerhard > Recent Status Updates

“Hello!” Ilyukhina lunged forward and hugged Stratt. “I’m here to die for Earth! Pretty awesome, yes?!”
I leaned to Dimitri. “Are all Russians crazy?”
“Yes,” he said with a smile. “It is the only way to be Russian and happy at the same time.”
“That’s…dark.”
“That’s Russian!”

“It’d be the biggest thing ever made by humanity,” he said. “It’d be starkly visible from space.”
I glared at him. “And it would destroy the ecology of Africa and probably Europe.”
“Not as much as the coming ice age will.”

“Humans,” Stratt said. “I want to know how this affects humans, and when. I don’t care about the mating grounds of the three-anused mud sloth or any other random biome.”

Project Hail Mary has overstepped its authority in the matter of digital data acquisition and licensing. They have, in their possession, a gigantic solid-state-drive array upon which they have copied literally every single piece of software that has ever been copyrighted, as well as every single book and literary work that has ever been available in any digital format.

I’m a scientist, not Buck Rogers.

Maybe Earth sent multiple ships with different designs? Like, for redundancy or to increase the odds that at least one of them works. Maybe that ship is the Praise Allah or the Blessings of Vishnu or something.

Evolution can be insanely effective when you leave it alone for a few billion years.

Londoners during the Blitz in World War II went about their day as normal, with the understanding that occasionally buildings get blown up. However desperate things were, someone still had to deliver milk. And if Mrs. McCreedy’s house got bombed in the night, well, you crossed it off the delivery list.

“For a long time,” B said at last, “I’ve kept a diary.”
“ ‘Are You There God?’ ” Keever said. “ ‘It’s Me, Berserker.’ ”

The heterotopia and the dead zone, but this can be said of any space, are real spaces but also unreal as much as they are constructed and viewed via representational space. Therefore, taking into account the subject’s position, it is tempting to think about the heterotopia as a place that is seen/created from the Other, unreal side of the mirror – looking at the real, while the dead zone is constructed from the real.

Things change, though, and time may have come to extend Foucault’s periodization. Arguably, in relation to the production of ‘heterotopias of deviance’, a key change is that the social norms from which deviance emerges (that deviance mirrors) have become more flexible, and deviance a more transient concept.

All this does not mean that the unknowability and mysteriousness of heterotopias have disappeared. Indeed, the realization that more ‘fragments’ of spatial orders coexist in the same physical space can make their ‘glitter’ more blinding.

This process of normalization does not translate into the elimination of difference, but in its exaltation as deviance: ‘when one wishes to individualize the healthy, normal and law-abiding adult, it is always by asking him how much of a child he has in him, what secret madness lies within him, what fundamental crime he has dreamt of committing’...

Foucault’s heterotopias have an essentially disturbing function: they are meant to overturn established orders, to subvert language and signification, to contrast sameness, and to reflect the inverse or reverse side of society. They are the spaces reserved for the abnormal, the other, the deviant.

...the heterotopia that was the Castro Street ghetto – or rather, nested heterotopia of heterotopias, for its bars and baths were themselves sub-emplacements of the counter-sublime – provided a space in which some men at least were able to ‘get outside of themselves’, but it did not realize or even offer the utopian promise of their getting outside of the broader society that had brought or driven them there.

‘The spaces and places that Foucault identifies as heterotopic are not spaces of the erasure of the normative. They are instead places and spaces in which the ordinary normative order is modified, or rather more precisely, where certain of the norms of ordinary life are under suspension.’

A seemingly small technical innovation had an outsize impact on this radical project of enclosure: barbed wire. In 1857, John Grinning, an iron foundry worker from Austin, Texas, was the first person to incorporate barbed wire into fencing by attaching sharp metal pieces to wire.

Beyond political, legal, and military mechanisms of integration and domination, the United States created an expansive free-trade zone rivaled only by that of the British Empire. The US went far beyond Britain’s vaunted navy, however, in its integration of that free-trade zone by ensuring its continuity and connectivity via an extensive continental-scale infrastructure...

A new kind of capitalism had emerged by the early twentieth century, arising from the ashes of the old regime. These global reconstructions responded not only to the rebellions of industrial workers, rural cultivators, and capital owners but also to economic crisis and the technical and administrative possibilities of the age.

As work was reconstructed, a new intensity of manufacturing labor became ever more common: Workers spent most of their waking hours in the factory. Until 1918, the standard workday in Germany (and elsewhere) was twelve hours. And even that was not a given.

“I’ve told you that the usual story is bullshit. That it goes: Paleolithic ignorance, then”—he clapped his hands—“Neolithic Revolution! Then you give it a few more thousands of years and—poof!—you’ve got writing. And now finally the party begins.”

The impossible new science they were all there to advance, that field that shaded from morphology to speculative biology to quantum physics to fulminology, thence to mythography and ontology, sometimes even fucking theology.

Diana Ahuja had dutifully read Sontag; she had a Tom of Finland coffee-table book; she’d shaken her stuff to the Village People now and then: it was hardly a revelation to her that the machismo of the military was camp.

“I return, and I kill and kill and kill again, and eventually I die again, and the whole merry-go-round continues. So please tell me, Herr Doktor,” he said to me, “what sort of man am I?”

“I heard about your daughter being a terrorist and all,” said Jim. “Tough break.”
Bud got into the front seat of the minivan.
“I heard you have a basement full of ceramic vaginas,” said Bud out the window.

“The value of ephemerality,” Paul Alabaster went on. “I can purchase the land beneath the sunset, the airspace it occupies, but I cannot own the moment, the rays of fleeting light. This frustrates me, Miss Flynn.”
“Totally,” said Abigail.

She told Abigail that she could get her a vial of holy water from the Vatican. Just the Taser would do, Abigail had said.

As chains and lashes faded as symbols of capital owners’ power, debt came to the fore, a contractual relationship that ordered new forms of dependence and new kinds of coercion. Fettering workers to their employers to extract their labor inexpensively and durably, the reconstruction of agricultural labor created a countryside filled with toilers working primarily to pay off their debts.

It is language (and/as social habit) that cuts the world up into the elements, objects, and categories we so glibly call reality—a reality that includes the varieties of desire; a reality where what is real is what must be dealt with, which is one with the political: the world is what it is cut up into—all else is metaphysics.

What homosexuality and prostitution represented for my uncle was the untrammeled pursuit of pleasure; and the untrammeled pursuit of pleasure was the opposite of social responsibility.