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“His body detaches from his brain. In order to transform into Halo, he must leave himself first.”

occasional flashes of shimmering cleverness through the muck of annoying guy narration

how did the new yorker think this book was that good lol … we’ll see if it gets better

"Now why am I rehashing years-old Twitter wank? Because, first and most importantly, lol."

i need to study tony tulathimutte’s mind

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“If we are so contemptibly selfish that we can’t radiate a little happiness and pass on a bit of honest appreciation without trying to get something out of the other person in return — if our souls are no bigger than sour crab apples, we shall meet with the failure we so richly deserve.”

i was told to read this basically as soon as possible

“That my mother would have found me devil-like did not surprise me, for I often thought of her as god-like, and are not the children of gods devils?”

“I said that she had acted like a saint, but that since I was living in this real world I had really wanted just a mother.”

"How do you get to be the sort of victor who can claim to be the vanquished also?" !!!

“If the demons lie within they travel with you. / Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic I am no exception.”

“It is not possible to change anything until you understand the substance you wish to change. Of course people mutilate and modify, but these are fallen powers, and to change something you do not understand is the true nature of evil.”

“my mother had painted the white roses red and now she claimed they grew that way.”

“It all seemed to hinge around the fact that I loved the wrong sort of people.”

"I didn't feel much remorse for what I'd done...I would have liked to have tried explaining to him cordially, almost affectionately, that I had never been able to truly feel remorse for anything."

"Then he asked me if I wasn't interested in a change of life. I said that people never change their lives, that in any case one life was good as another and that I wasn't dissatisfied with mine here at all."

"In this sense the algorithm does start learning about you. You give it pieces of yourself, and in doing so enter a relationship, continuously renegotiating between the algorithm and your revealed preferences to help construct your identity. Rather than knowing you, then, the algorithm moreso guides you into who you will become."

“The algorithm simultaneously unites us and divides us by creating a common online culture and then dividing us into smaller and smaller groups for us to create our own subcultures.”

“The gift is not in the blood but in the stories, the axioms, the experiences garnered from centuries of living on the outskirts of a dubious democracy.”

“This was not just another evil done by another state, but an evil done in my name…I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel.”

"visibility is one of those really pernicious notions because not only do most people misunderstand what visibility is about (or ought to be about) but because they most often see _hyper visilibility_ and, in their bitter envy, decide that _this_ is what their goal should be and something worth working towards."

"transmisogyny was a necessary part of colonialism exerting its hegemonic power over colonies. and this, of course, is also connected to the forced spread of christianity across the globe."

im like 10 pages into this and it’s so bad i like billy-ray belcourt but god

“Whiteness, the idea, the identity tethered to no nation of origin, no place, no gods, exists only if it can expand enough to defend its position over every group that challenges the throne…For that situational dominance to reproduce itself, there must be a steady pole.”

“The networks of capital, be they polities of organizations, work most efficiently when your lowest status characteristic is assumed. And once these gears are in motion, you can never competent enough to save your own life.”

“Changes in language tend to come from below.”

i will finish this book ... eventually