"There is no place, no time, no space that marketers won't attempt to utilize to satisfy their endless, psychopathic greed. They're parasites, consuming as much precious human time and attention as they possibly can with no regard whatsoever for the damage they're doing to their victims or to society as a whole. So of course they'll leverage the IOT (and AI) without hesitation." --Rich Kulawiec You have never been in a room with less than one skeleton in it. "Honestly, how can you take someone's religion seriously when they take themselves too seriously? If you claim to have some Great Cosmic All-mind experience, why are you such a humorless asshole?" --Rev. Xenofact "He seems to think that because he thinks something was implied, it was what was actually intended. It seems that the Internet is a space where people freely project their personal hangups on you." --Joseph Matheny "Look, at some point you're going to have to draw a line. So I'd argue, why not draw it right here? And when they come to you with stupid, ridiculous demands, picking fights that you know you could win in court, instead of rolling over, why not stand up and use four key words they don't tend to teach you in business school? Not, ''OK, you're the boss.'' Not, 'Whatever you say goes.' But instead, the only phrase that can genuinely make a weak bully go away. And that is, 'Fuck you. Make me.'" --John Oliver "Have a bit more patience with newbies. Of course some of them act dumb, they're often *students*, for heaven's sake." --Terry Pratchett "I'm so old, I remember when going on the Internet made you smarter." --rstevens "There will come a time when the rich will own all the media, and it will be impossible for the public to make an informed opinion." --Albert Einstein "Today, nearly everything is made in China. Except for courage. Courage is made in Palestine." --Unknown In the rich man's house there is nowhere to spit but in his face. "Empiricism is just applied humility." --mhoye "I just got 420 nerd sniped by a goddamn rhombic polyhedron." --Earthshine "'AI is going to replace artists.' Oh, really? AI is going to rack up student debt and then be a disappointment to the family?" --War and Peas "Copilot in Excel is a global financial crisis waiting to happen." --Zack Korman "Listen. I am high on life and I want democracy to prevail. And it is incredibly fun distracting ridiculous people like you who don't know how politics works, who want everything for Christmas without having to think about it, and if you don't get it want to burn the house down. So let's go." --Mister Resister "For revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival." --Frederick Douglass "Convenience is the tax we pay for surrender. The slight friction of a diverse media diet is the sign of a healthy ecosystem. It means you are thinking, choosing, and participating rather than just consuming." --A.J. Roach "When the authorities warn you of the sinfulness of sex, there is an important lesson to be learned. Do not have sex with authorities." --Matt Groening "They're using American tax dollars to fund infrastructure in Argentina because that's where they're all going to flee when we kick them out of office." --Ron Wyden "Now even the illusion of intimacy has been outsourced and litigated." --Lenny Flatley "Let nothing be called natural in an age of bloody confusion, ordered disorder, planned caprice, and dehumanised humanity, lest all things be held unalterable!" --Bertolt Brecht "In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity." --Hunter S. Thompson "Outrage drives engagement. Engagement drives profit." --Naomi Brockwell "Before it would let me look at this website it put me through a six second Cloudflare check to see if I was a human, and then the page loaded and it explained the website was not made by humans anymore. If the website isn't humans then why do the website viewers need to be humans? What are we doing here?" --mcc "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." --Benito Mussolini "See, I have a crypt. You have an offsite backup." --Hasufin "The original sin was the invention of the idea of sin." --Robert Shea "Would you prefer she just not do anything? Or do you only want the disenfranchised to be the heroes?" --For Worse 2020 "Paranoia is a way of thinking that involves suspicion without any real evidence. The societal distrust we're discussing is a rational response to an external reality that is, by many accounts, demonstrably untrustworthy. Your feelings come from a valid observation of the world around you. This is a crucial distinction. Living in a world like this takes a significant toll. The constant exposure to social tension is a major source of stress, leading to anxiety, depression, and a sense of helplessness. It's important to acknowledge that this is an external problem, and it can affect you physically and mentally." --Sarah Connor "Youth thrives on conviction; age is forced into complexity." --Joan Westenberg "Business Idiots see our labor as the result of a smart manager saying 'do this,' rather than human ingenuity interpreting both a request and the shit the manager didn't say." --Ed Zitron "All labels are just conveniences and anybody who takes them too seriously is a fool. But the compulsive need to jettison a label might just be one aspect of taking it too seriously. Does the label help you to communicate a certain aesthetic or a set of generally held beliefs and attitudes? Are you searching for a new label just because somebody told you that it wasn't hip to use this one anymore?" --R.U.Sirius "Today's liberation becomes tomorrow's oppression. So, keep pushing the boundaries." --Peter J. Carroll, _Psyber Magick_ "I'm as human as anyone. I love, I get scared. I wake up every morning and despite not knowing what to do, I put one foot in front of the other and I try to make the best choices I can. I screw up all the time, but that is being human and that's my greatest strength." --_Superman_ "A heartwarming story of how being an unethical and talentless hack is no barrier to success when you are willing to endlessly flatter the wretched views of rich dipshits." --Jamelle Boie, journalist, New York Times "It actually doesn't take much to be considered a difficult woman. That's why there are so many of us." --Jane Goodall "If you don't own the wires, kittens, you don't own shit." --Socketwench "In cyberspace, everyone is supposed to be dumb as a rock and stay dumb as a rock, as the Wizards come up with yet another technical solution to the age old problem of people defrauding other people. Any education of users is condemned as blaming the user. People will say ''It doesn't work!'' but I assert we still haven't really tried it, and when we have tried a little we have taught silly things like ''If the e-mail has spelling mistakes maybe don't click and then type your banking password.'' Grrr." --Kent Borg "The crowd discovers that it has the power to decide who is guilty and who is innocent; that is the beginning of the end." --Rene' Girard "If you lose hope, you become apathetic and do nothing." --Dr. Jane Goodall "One doesn't have to operate with great malice to do great harm. The absence of empathy and understanding are sufficient." --Charles M. Blow "Any product with some ideals behind it tends to attract fringe elements of society as initial adherents. It's natural, because the fringe members have reasons to not like the status quo. The problem is, the people running the product don't *want* the fringe elements to be their audience. To them, they're a necessary step. We're not initial adopters, we're seed corn. We're disposable once they have that first harvest." --Socketwench "Anything written before 2023 will have less enshittification. However, nothing beats the '80s. Probably the peak of software development, everything wae tight and clean. Yeah it might not have a lot of bells and whistles, but it works every time. I turn it on, there's no AI, there's no asking me to pay a subscription, there's no Internet connection required, no goddamn advertisements. I open a word processor and I fucking type." --Lydie "Who needs a tiny bit of nature when there's all that lovely lifeless concrete? Better to have some dead, dry earth!" --OddlyDown "Just a few hours of trying to fix something can save you minutes of reading the manual." --BCsJonathanTM "You get to a certain age, you drop all your illusions. Life just gets easier from there." --Viktor "The best protection from data breaches is to not store data you don't need." --Tarah Wheeler "It's becoming harder and harder to deny that you can either have a society of landlords and executives, or one of art and human flourishing. Not both." --Erin Vanderhoof "Some people are so poor, all they have is money." --Patrick Meagher (allegedly) "Turns out none of us have to feel bad about skimming our training all these years. Also, all the people who were so serious about national security all these years were full of shit." --Good Afternoon, Spider "Democracy is more likely to thrive in small political communities and during brief periods. It is more like a fleeting experience than a permanent condition." --Sheldon Wolin "I like the free spontaneity of a child who knows nothing, better than the world-knowledge and intellectual deformity of a child who has been subjected to our present education." --Emma Goldman "I'm speeding up another long sequence of us being equal parts confused and competent." --Deviant Ollam "I am personally tired of this whole thought process that just because upstream abandons a software that the rest of the surrounding ecosystem also abandons that software. All this does is lead to a more fragile ecosystem where user needs are not properly considered." --Ariadne "I am full of malice towards everything. I will use every fiber of my burning hatred to inflict this world with as many software engineers as I can." --Al Sweigart "Mister Rogers is one guy you don't want to mess with. As beloved as he is, it just wasn't worth it." --Don Dempsey "With AI, we've managed to accurately simulate an advertising executive on an 87 hour cocaine binge. The wonders of modern technology!" --Hasufin "Sensible safeguards ensure higher chances of positive outcomes." --Master_Scythe "If the real Johnny Silverhand is dead, that's his problem. Not mine." --Johnny Silverhand "The way of mastery is to break all of the rules, but you have to know them perfectly before you can do this. Otherwise you are not in a position to transcend them." --Aleister Crowley "Torture is a celebration of human life and dignity." --Stephen Miller, White House Chief of Staff for Donald Trump, 2003 "Does it kill you to have a little bit of whimsy?" --Due One "It's gotta be difficult when the entire universe outside one's skull only exists to confuse you." --RHX_Thain "I find it interesting that 'black and white thinking' is a symptom/feature of so many disorders/psych conditions. In my experience, it's normals who will immediately 180 on a person and utterly condemn everything they have ever done or said the instant it's clear that everyone else is thinking of but not naming a specific example, where someone's work was treated as morally repugnant because they turned out to be a cunt. Even though the work in question was, if anything, doing right by other people by taking a grifter to task in exactly the kind of way that would have been praised if it was coming from someone else." --Sin Vega "Talk about The Wire, Sopranos, Game of Thrones all you want, but the greatest US television program ever made is Sesame Street. It's not even close. 50+ years of treating kids across class, ethnicity, religion not as mini-consumers... but as citizens with a stake in this world." --Christian Christensen, Professor of Journalism, Stockholm "Sometimes I dream of a world where every game doesn't design their own WAD file and we just store game assets IN THE FILESYSTEM and I haven't spent half my life figuring out how they hide some game resource in some weird bin file." --Foone "There's a venerable spook joke that you need to move on from counterintelligence work when, at least once a week, you stare at yourself in the mirror while shaving and think: ''I wonder who he's really working for?''" --John Schindler, former counterintelligence officer, National Security Agency "The case for censorship rests on two propositions: First, that sex is dangerous, and second, that even a symbolic representation of sex is dangerous. The censors, both public and private, believe that sex is dirty and threatening. Is that not paranoid?" --Robert Anton Wilson "We are at the point in the fascist coup where Sesame Street is bad, NPR is bad, Late Show comedy is bad, accurate weather forecasting is bad, education is bad, but protecting pedophiles is a national priority." --Lana "I'll admit, it was naive of me to think my threat of burning for all eternity would deter the fascists." --God at Universodon "Sometimes I'm self conscious about how much I really do know about Linux, and then I'll see what the people with opinions are up to and realize I'm doing fine." --Nagaram "I'm not a topologist. Not even close. But even I can take comfort in knowing that all commercially-available fitted sheets are orientable, two-sided surfaces. This is in contrast with non-orientable surfaces such as the Möbius strip, which is a single surface with a boundary, or a Klein bottle, which doesn't even have a boundary. You can fold a Möbius strip all you want, but you'll never get rid of that twist. If you fold a Klein bottle, you'll make Clifford Stoll sad." --Ratfactor "One of the problems with being a retrocomputerist is how often I use a 2025 program and think 'This program would be just as functional and 10 times as nice to use if you'd written it for Windows 95.'" --Foone "What the fuck is wrong with this guy??" --Stephen Colbert "Laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic ethnic group in a given nation. It's just the promise of violence that's enacted, and the police are basically an occupying army." --Brennan Lee Mulligan "I never wore makeup for fashion. I wore it because it felt like armor. The music was dark, but it made me feel light." --Robert Smith "Geopolitics is the struggle not to control territory, but to create the territory." --Bruno Macaes "In today's post-therapeutic market, irony, detachment, and self-optimization have become substitutes for truth, justice, morality, or political resolve." --Eileen Isagon Skyers "Any communication scheme needs some kind of friction, or, when the cost is zero the quality of the messages approaches zero, too." --John Levine "The church is for people who need external morality because they don't have any internal morality." --ktappe "The people who helped wire up the Internet recognize what's happening. When the folks who've been through every tech cycle since gopher start acting like excited newbies again, that tells you something." --Christina Wodtke "If they're going to be unable to handle their interpersonal conflicts in a calm, reasonable manner then I'm at least glad they managed to do it in a fashion that's absolutely hilarious." --Hasufin "History is best told as a story of organised crime. It is one group creating a monopoly on resources through the use of violence over a certain territory and population." --Dr. Luke Kemp "The monsters who benefit from the status quo don't want you to know this. They want to brainwash you with Margaret Thatcher's mantra, 'There is no such thing as society.' They want you to think that you are a pathetic, atomized individual. They want you to die in a heatwave while gasping out your profound regret for not recycling more diligently and taking more care with your 'carbon footprint.' They want you to drive around for hours looking for an independent cardboard seller to make your protest sign with, convinced that it's more important to avoid shopping on Amazon than it is to actually show up at the protest outside the Amazon warehouse. They want you to curse yourself for failing to cycle and take the bus in your city where there are no bike lanes and the buses run every 45 minutes and stop at 8PM. If you wanted a livable city, you should have made better consumption choices! Perhaps you could dig your own subway, ever think of that, hmmm? You, me and everyone we know have all been subjected to a 40-year blitz of anti-solidaristic propaganda, aimed at convincing us that we are only allowed to fight the system as individuals. Don't like your health care? Shop around! Don't like your boss? Quit your job! Under no circumstances should you advocate for either a union or socialized healthcare. You're an individual, there is no such thing as society." --Cory Doctorow "It turns out that the appeal of this is pretty limited, because, user-experience wise, pipx gives you what you want. Everybody thinks they want single-file executables because it feels like managing a single file is easy, but then you end up building complex idioms around doing things like 'upgrade,' 'install,' 'uninstall,' 'list installed,' 'register within a namespace' (etc, etc) and by the time you actually have all the stuff you want, oops, you built a package manager." --Glyph "This is my emotional support manual reactor control rod interface." --Purple "Democracy is when you have money to buy things." --Emily Velasco "Magic smoke doesn't have an expiration date." --Ecstatic Bee "Unless you're in the top 0.1%, you're a peasant. There is no middle class." --Mo Gawdat, former Chief Business Officer of Google X "Teeth don't help you work harder and they are a reliable class indicator, which are both reasons why dental care isn't considered healthcare. All healthcare in the west is built with the assumption that you will get the minimum amount of care needed to keep you functional at work. If healthy teeth allowed you to work harder longer that shit wouldn't be that way. They are our Luxury Bones." --Red Army Duck "Americans are relearning the lesson we learned in the Gilded Age of the late 1890's, when robber barons ran the government and the economy for their own benefit. Oligarchy is incompatible with the common good." --Robert Reich "What makes you weird will make you money if you dare to own it." --1dark1 Do not expect too much of the end of the world. "GraphQL was dreamed up by someone who thought Pivot Tables in Excel were the solution to everything." --Kay Ohtie "I liked the night because I could pretend the future lay before me instead of behind me." --Sarah Kendzior, _My Friend Leatherface_ "This, without a doubt, is neoliberalism's single most damaging legacy: The realization of its bleak vision has isolated us enough from one another that it became possible to convince us that we are not just incapable of self-preservation, but fundamentally not worth saving." --Naomi Klein "Another terrible aspect of the AI hypevolution is it's not fun to anthropomorphize my tech anymore. Somebody out there might think I'm serious." --Random Geek "Whenever conservatives accuse anyone else of crimes, it means you can prove in court that they've been doing precisely those things themselves." --Vulcan Tourist "Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities." --C.S. Lewis "Millennials really need to stop bagging on Boomers for having so many Precious Moments figurines or whatever because I know almost all of us have a fucking ROOM full of old cables we are simply emotionally incapable of throwing away. Also, Precious Moments are fragile Funkos. We're not better." --Cat Valente "I'd also like to be able to put different full screen windows on different screens so I can do things like put a control surface on the touch screen and have the patch editor on my laptop screen and some kind of cool visualization on a projector or something, but I understand that the security needs of corporations come first and I'm wrong to want to do anything fun with my computer." --Aeva "Sometimes you have to get to know someone really well to realize you're really strangers." --Mary Tyler Moore "Using words for the divine to describe systems because otherwise humans think 'What a fascinating graph' instead of 'The superstructure can bleed; it can be destroyed.'" --garbados "We're supposed to worship Adam Smith but you're not supposed to read him. That's too dangerous. He's a dangerous radical." --Noam Chomsky "What a load of crap. Here's what's going to happen. We're going to burn through our resources, ruin the environment, civilization will collapse, and the survivors will despise us." --Frederik Pohl, on Singularitarianism "Bipartisanship is an emergent property of 'The other folks will fuck you up, so play nice.' The Ds [Democrats] don't understand that. Once they demonstrate the will to play dirty, bipartisanship can (not will, can) emerge again." --Michael Lucas "Culture is the interference pattern between general principles and specific circumstances." --Strypey "Femboys are more manly than the typical alpha males you see right-wingers trying to be." --Natsura "As imperialism is sustaining continual and heavy defeats, and is falling into decadence, it grows ever more brutal and reckless." --Ho Chi Minh "So, if one uses cesium 137 tainted shrimp to make a dirty bomb, does that make it a molotov shrimp cocktail?" --Paul_IPv6 "Libraries will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no libraries." --Anne Herbert "Johnny Mnemonic 2025, but it's just like 400x2TB micro SD cards shoved up his nose _Total Recall_ style." --Sungo "There is no Geneva Convention in Minecraft!" --One of Dave's kids "Squirrels always act and look like its their first day being a squirrel." --Viss "America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests." --Henry Kissinger "I'll also mention that between this and James Gunn's Superman, fucking TROMA VETERANS are doing more for the citizens of this country than almost any elected official right now. They're the ones who are standing up for journalism, the importance of caring for our environment, for stepdads who step up (and become superhuman mutants), and the power of empathy." --Leah Schnelbach "Why would the Republicans needlessly expend political capital? Well, maybe they're idiots. This seems possible. They certainly sound like idiots a lot of the time, and say all sorts of things that are contradictory and hypocritical and sometimes outright artifactual or even bugfuck crazy. But I think there is an obvious answer, and that is that this sort of thing doesn't expend political capital; but builds it. A bigoted anti-trans bathroom bill sends a very persuasive, very simple message of supremacy to people who like supremacy. It tells people who believe in supremacy's foundational lies that there are leaders who are deeply committed to those lies, who can be counted on to represent them even when they are out of power, but even more so when they are in power. It accomplishes this on the playing field of electoral politics." --A.R. Moxon "Gonna start putting all my illegal filez in archives called Epstein_Files.zip because then the Feds will never look at it." --Feld "Sir, you're a charlatan - that's what you are." --Senator Maria Cantwell to RFKjr "Americans would like to think of ourselves as authentic, but if you're growing up in a culture that tells you to shut up and do what you're told while simultaneously told to express your deepest wishes by selecting brands, and following vibes based on generational propaganda, how authentic are we really?" --Maximillian Overdraft, Esq. "Playtime is for storytelling, and the best toys tell their own stories without outside help." --AJ Roach "The vocabulary of joy is grunts and moans, and the vocabulary of loss is the dictionary. If you can point to it, you don't need a word for it. You only need a word for it when it's no longer there." --Richard Siken "The opposite of the precautionary principle is the 'trust me bro' principle." --Quincy "Normal people don't write 16-bit DOS assembly in 2025." --Foone "The Internet is a corporate productivity tool for enabling salaried professionals to farm out chunks of their work to unpaid volunteers." --Strypey "Fascism is a complete abdication of personal responsibility. You are surrendering all responsibility for your own actions to the state on the belief that in unity there is strength, which was the definition of fascism represented by the original roman symbol of the bundle of bound twigs. Yes, it is a very persuasive argument: 'In unity there is strength.' But inevitably people tend to come to a conclusion that the bundle of bound twigs will be much stronger if all the twigs are of a uniform size and shape, that there aren't any oddly shaped or bent twigs that are disturbing the bundle. So it goes from 'in unity there is strength' to 'in uniformity there is strength' and from there it proceeds to the excesses of fascism as we've seen them exercised throughout the 20th century and into the 21st." --Alan Moore "How many Business A-holes got _The Art of War_ and tossed it as it wasn't what they expected? There's a reason I see many copies at used book stores. So I kind of am of the opinion 'Lots of so-called leaders would ignore good advice.'" --Rev. Xenofact "We're quite deep within the Singularity right now, though it's turned out be the Singularity of Stupid (SoS), which effectively prevents the original concept of the Singularity from happening." --William Gibson "This is a paradox of information-theoretic security. When you get there, it *doesn't* mean your system perfectly secure, and *that* is the Sauron-like seduction. What it means is that the vulnerability in your system is somewhere else, which is a nice thing to know, but it's merely an externality." --Jon Callas "I am often struck by the dangerous narcissism fostered by spiritual rhetoric that pays so much attention to individual self-improvement and so little to the practice of love within the context of community." --Bell Hooks "[AWS] Lambda was invented by techbros so they wouldn't need to touch PHP." --Lord Bowlidge "I don't think anyone is that stu- okay never mind." --Yellow Online "In vitro fertilization clinics trash more fertilized eggs than all abortions combined, so please shut up. Oh, right. IVF is expensive and Planned Parenthood is for regular/poor people." --Ally Maynard "You don't question the right of the government to kill, to confiscate and imprison. If a private person should be guilty of the things the government is doing all the time, you'd brand him a murderer, thief and scoundrel. But as long as the violence committed is 'lawful,' you approve of it and submit to it. So it is not really violence that you object to, but to people using violence 'unlawfully.'" --Alexander Berkman "First, look for cleartext." --Robert Tappan Morris, Sr. "Bored and unoccupied soldiers tend to couple the self-control of a golden retriever on meth with the destructive potential of a wrecking ball covered in claymore mines." --Hasufin "The violence is going to come to you. You will have no choice. This is a, this is, you're in a fundamental situation here where you, where, whether you choose violence or not. The violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die. You either the fight back or you die. And that's the truth." --Elon Musk "When the truth offends, we lie and lie until we can no longer remember it is even there, but it is still there. Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid." --Valery Alekseyevich Legasov, _Chernobyl_ "It wasn't until my thirties that I learned some people correct factual errors as a power move. That explains why teachers rarely appreciated it when I pointed out their mistakes - they saw it as an attempt to usurp their authority. I also got similar reactions from classmates, colleagues, and others whose authority was equal to mine, because they assumed I was flexing on them. Nothing could be further from the truth. For me, showing someone where they're wrong feels like keeping them safe from the consequences of their mistake. It's a collaborative persuit of truth, not a power move." --Annie Kotowicz, _What I Mean When I Say I'm Autistic_ "If you hate your parents, the man or the establishment, don't show them up by getting wasted and wrapping your car around a tree. If you really want to rebel against your parents, out-learn them, outlive them, and know more than they do." --Henry Rollins "If you wont face ugly truths, you can't build beautiful futures." --Nullstring "Kids nowadays get Chromebooks at college, MacBooks for uni, use Android or iOS on their phones and game on PlayStation 5 and Switch. Windows is this legacy thing forced on them by old people in business." --Kevin Beaumont "People want to do the sexy parts of security without doing the boring parts, but the boring parts are so fundamental that without them, the sexy parts are pointless." --Revolutionary Girl Erin "For every prohibition you create, you also create an underground." --Jello Biafra "Every minute and every dollar of engineering that goes into shoving ads into these devices is a minute and a dollar that didn't go into security or safety or reliability or anything actually useful. And we're going to get a lot more of this as consumer protections are dismantled and regulatory enforcement is gutted." --Rich Kulawiec "Never let your enemy tell you how many of you there are." --Malcolm X "When those who cloak themselves in righteousness wield malice just as deftly as the wicked, wickedness will storm the gates and win. That is not a prediction - it is a warning carved in stone. We are not just flirting with defeat; we are handing evil the keys to the kingdom." --Pedro Israel Orta "Any sufficiently advanced software distribution system is indistinguishable from a malware distribution system." --the_gibson "A lot of our thought experiments have become daily protocols." --feonixrift "Now get the fuck offline. Look after yourself." --Warren Ellis "Humans live under the illusion that they are engaged with some kind of 'truth' when actually there can be no access to such a thing in our so-called reality; in fact, 'truth' cannot exist in our current state, an idea that rings increasingly true in the era of fake news, false accusations of fake news, and the proliferation of conspiracy theories via social media." --Rebecca Haar and Anna McFarlane "Is anyone willing to call this offloading of ever-expanding debt onto future generations wrong, as in morally wrong, or have we lost the vocabulary and ability to declare the offloading of debt as morally disgraceful, a line that should never have been crossed?" --Charles Hugh Smith "Legacy media no longer reports on threats to citizens or America itself, at least not with any real enthusiasm. It reports breathlessly on threats to the regime. We are not the presumed audience of the fourth estate." --Cat Valente "I feel like there was a lot of ''Why isn't anyone doing anything?!'' because we were trained by movies around this idea that there's this single moment of inflection where everything changes and 'the tide turns' even though the tide turning is, itself, a small moment in a very, very long process by its actual definition. Resistance is a process over time. It builds moment by moment based on the reactions of those resisting. It's a network, it's a structure." --blueskyredmesxas "Simple economics always beats sophisticated architecture." --Clem Cole "[I] Asked a German woman why Germany produces so many legendary physicists and mathematicians and her response was basically ''Have you considered educating people who aren't rich?''" --Ken Klippenstein "Remember, pornographers have always been on our side. Brave, ready to fight for our rights. Smut is our friend." --John Waters "Sometimes I think old-style public access cable television ate the planet and nobody noticed." --Warren Ellis "Passion is priceless, but companies will happily treat it as free." --Kenneth Reitz "My privacy is not valuable, and I am not the president of any country, so it is acceptable for you to review all the files on my computer." --SekiBetu "I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out." --Steve Wozniak "Windows gives me more error messages than reasons to believe in God." --Swift On Security "Soon-to-be is the keyword, General. It is never a war crime the first time!" --Bare Minimum Chef "A generative AI may not hurt stock price or, through inaction, allow shareholder value to come to harm." --The Research Fairy "We bleed in the color of dying stars." --Hasufin "It's more than a bit disturbing that if you get big enough online (by which I mean, like, over 1,000 followers), there's almost certainly at least one person who hates your guts who's never interacted with you at all." --Hannah Gais "Accepting identities I don't understand is actually extremely easy, beccause I just go ''This isn't about me,'' and move on with my life unbothered by someone else's identity. It's truly that simple." --What A Bastard. "If they give you ruled paper, write the other way." --Juan Ramon Jimenez "As end-of-empire scenarios go, it is so much more dignified to get your capital city sacked by the Visigoths than to have a bunch of illiterate rich people in their 70's doing it through a series of incomprehensible tantrums because their brains were defeated by their phones." --R.U.Sirius "If the working class had as much solidarity as the ruling class there never would have been a ruling class." --Caitlin Johnstone "The beauty of the universe lies in its infinite possibilities and undiscovered truths." --Art Bell "Because the most fundamental truth about the modern world was finally within his grasp: That a man may speak forever without knowing things, as long as he has a podcast." --The Daily Show "This is why 'responsible disclosure' is bullshit - companies want researchers to be responsible so that they don't have to be." --Rich Kulawiec "I will bring you hope, old friend, and I ask only one thing in return: Don't get in my way." --Magneto "Advertisers will always appeal to the most bigoted and conservative market they can, because then it will hit the standards no matter what state, country, etc. Which in turn, influences the market." --KCB "It's apt that corporations and governments divided the Internet into SFW and NSFW, and are now making it all Safe for Work, because that is the defining frame they want to place on the world - everywhere you go is for Work, not pleasure or art or love or culture. You must always Work for Them or die." --Indrapramit Das "I love erotic art having a space to exist online. I love seeing people making connections over creativity and shared hog cranking. I don't love everything everyone is cranking their hogs to but it's also none of my goddamn business. Fuck the evangelical rise of censorship." --bandydear "We have officially severed an important connection to artistic, educational, and accessible knowledge in our nation, as well as the importance of using our public airwaves as for the beneficial enlightenment of all citizens. We have repeated the history we did not learn from." --LeVar Burton "The history we were taught could not have produced the present we were living in." --Eric Foner, historian "AI exceeding human intelligence because the humans are just thick as fucking bricks." --Andrea "Fuck you! You suck. You're fat, you're a joke, you're stupid, you're not funny.. this entire thing has been a scam! We're gonna look back at the MAGA movement as the biggest scam in history. The liberals were right, we will see Trump as a scam artist." --Nick Fuentes, to Donald Trump "We thought we were like the white robot versions of James Brown with our music. It was tight, and exacting, and relentless." --Jerry Casale "They'd give a show to Satan if the check cleared." --Clarke Ingram "While I will tell real people I know in my everyday life, for obvious reasons, I don't feel the need to notify the Internet that I've decided to retreat from technology to a place in the wilderness, away from cell phones and computers. I think that some people lack any excitement in their lives, and so drum up drama online to fill their emptiness with a passion play, which is more about them receiving attention and not about me at all." --Joseph Matheny "I work in a bakery, I can't think of an arrangement of flour, water and salt that'll cause this." --Ingi_Pingi, on possible causes of a random skin blister "In the ideological domain, competition is fierce." --Xi Jinping "The conventional army loses if it does not win. The guerrilla wins if he does not lose." --Henry Kissinger "I need to get with the program. I think my program is still written in BASIC." --B.Thoreau "Nobody had to radicalize me. I walked outside with my fucking eyes open, and wasn't afraid to talk to strangers. That's ALL it takes for it to be plainly obvious how callous and sick we've become." --EVHaste "Today a friend asked me why I write blog posts, and what's my audience. I said I write blog posts for the person I was before I learned the content of the posts." --Shae Erisson "A society that takes care of its own does not produce children who dream of burning it down." --Xiran Jay Zhao, _Heavenly Tyrant_ "We can expect that whatever we do at a protest, the media will dutifully report 'protestors engaged in clashes with police' rather than 'police attacked non-violent protestors.' What's more, when someone does throw back a tear gas canister, or toss a bottle, or even spray paint something, we can assume that act will be employed as a retroactive justification for whatever police violencce occurred before the act took place." --David Graeber "If the post-WWII world has taught us one thing, it's that the fastest way for a president to take himself down is attacking foreign countries that have not attacked us. Every. Single. Time." --Lauren Weinstein "Whatever the cost of libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation." --Walter Cronkite "Lying and screwing over working people so that they can steal from our health care and Social Security and veterans' care to pay for tax cuts for the wealthiest and bailouts for their crypto billionaire friends - there's a word for this: CORRUPTION." --Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, representative "I know I must sound like some sort of humorless election fraud killjoy, but actual facts can sometimes matter, and knowing them can occasionally be adventageous." --Matt Blaze "Don't let infosec get in the way of hacking." --Anonymous "There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized long the lines of the Mafia." --Kurt Vonnegut "Cost effective and locksport are very rarely on the same planet, and definitely never in the same sentence." --Barend Craven "A woman made an entire new career out of saying the words 'hawk tuah' on camera, and now she will forever be Hawk Tuah Girl. She released a cryptocoin, $HAWK, the thinking apparently being that the attention given to a woman saying 'Hawk Tuah' translated into financial value. It did not. She is being sued for fraud by people who bought a digital token imbued with the intrinsic worth of a woman saying 'Hawk Tuah.' The internet that gave her her new life then pivoted to claiming she's a Mossad asset performing a psyop." --Warren Ellis, on how things are going these days. "It is important to draw wisdom from many different places. If you take it from only one place, it becomes rigid and stale. Understanding others, the other elements and the other nations will help you become whole." --Uncle Iroh "If you're doing business with a religious son-of-a-bitch, Get. It. In. Writing. His word ain't worth a shit - not with the Good Lord telling him how to fuck you on the deal." --William S. Burroughs "Stephen Miller got into politics because his hands were too small to strangle hookers." --tkshow "You're basically self-hosting Kevin McAllister." --poetic_dwarf "Almost everything we think of as dichotomous is, in fact, spectral." --John Green "In my wildest dreams I could have never made this shit up. You all need mandatory supervised access to the Internet from now on." --Jordan Petridis "We built this city... we build this city on ICS with default passwords." --Lisa Forte "If half of the country votes for somebody you feel is the absolute nadir of what it means to be an American, and that person gets the highest job in the land, it can be a lonely feeling - that maybe you do not have a community to belong to." --Stephen Colbert "Revealing how the sausage is made puts [John] Oliver on level footing with his audience. Sure, he's funnier than we'll ever be, but he's also looking at the same world as we do and asking the same questions: How is this shit happening? Why is it not front-page news? Can we do anything to change it?" --Andi Zeisler "Sainthood is not the price of admission into being treated like human beings." --Hasufin "You ain't never the same when the air hits your brain. Yes, the good Lord bricked that sucker in pretty good, and for a reason. We're not supposed to play with it. The brain is sorta like a '66 Cadillac. You had to drop the engine in that thing just to change all eight spark plugs. It was built for performance, not for easy servicing." --Frank Vertosick "If the implementation is hard to explain, call it Pythonic and write a blog post." --Zeraevous "As I write this in 2025 I think about how we're pushed to monetize everything - and avoid things that don't make us money. We've got example after example of spiritual grifters to tempt us to start monetizing videos. Why can't we just be religious weirdos? We also don't really encourage people to really live their religion. Our own religious pursuits are ''fine and good'' but you know, don't take it too far. If you're gonna be weird at least be religiously obsessive in the right way. Oh, and to be sure don't be religious in a way that makes the world better. We're fine with homophobia and war-mongering, but don't you dare tell us to care about each other! And be sure you never denounce the system or anything!" --Reverend Xenofact "People hearing about your trauma like ''Wow, you're so strong!'' It was that or die. But thanks!" --Black Quadrant "I've been involved in a total war with culture since the day I started. I am at war with the status quo of society and I am at war with those in control and power." --Genesis P. Orridge "I feel like I am suffering through a propaganda war through your testimony." --Representative Madeleine Dean, to Kari Lake "Life in 2024 is strange enough, and fiction can't always outdo the 24 hours news cycle." --Chris Coplan "I dream of a free world within my lifetime, a world without borders, a world with free movement, a world where we all have enough to survive, a world where my paranoia isn't rational." --Maia Arson Crimew "We're just riding through this, we have no control. No control over this. We over-estimate our power and our control, and our ability to navigate this. We're not navigating shit, man. We're on a high speed train, and it's got tracks, and we argue over 'Should we have guardrails on AI?' None of that's going to matter. We can't stop it. We can't help ourselves. Where will we be a hundred years from now? ''Well, we shouldn't do genetic modifications on human beings.'' Well, someone's going to do it! It doesn't matter what you think, it's going to happen." --Richard Dolan "You wouldn't use a rapier in the same situation you'd use a folding chair." --arachnofiend "Never appeal to a man's better nature. He may not have one. Invoking his self-interest gives you more leverage." --Robert A. Heinlein "It is hard to free fools from the chains they revere." --Voltaire "I asked ChatGPT to render a picture of mine into a 1990's shonen anime format. And every single time I look like I'm the antagonist in some political intrigue anime with a set of nuclear codes." --DJ Breeden "Dear full time developer, please check the release notes for this software made by spare-time developers." --shamoon "Sometimes you have to say the obvious, 'cause the obvious isn't known to the other person." --Radish 3030 "I guess in that moment, I just wanted to be ignorant and believe in a less disgusting world, which is exactly what _Revolutionary Girl Utena_ cautioned against. The fairy tale is a lie, the prince isn't real, and eternity is horrifying." --Affectionate Bit "Listen kid, there are five things that define me: Star Trek, Back to the Future, TRON, Final Fantasy, and Indiana Jones." --Mae Dean "There's a reason that the saying 'power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely' is a maxim. It has yet to be proven wrong." --SYN/ACK "Shadowrun needs so many d6 you have to worry about gravitational effects." --Chongulator "When you pay people to be unreasonable, you attract many unreasonable people. You may even become a bit of a crank yourself. If your power depends on lying to the people, that doesn't make you noble. It just leaves you with a choice: Accept that you are a fraud or embrace the lie." --Katherine Stewart, _Money, Lies, and God_ "This all fundamentally boils down to two camps: One which says ''If a tool isn't PERFECT, then NO ONE SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO USE IT'' versus the other camp, which says ''No tool is perfect, but we need building blocks, and with enough imperfect building blocks, we may be able to cobble together something that's better than nothing.''" --Bill Woodcock, on DNSSEC and HTTPS "Just a general observation here, there have now been about 800 messages exchanged debating the most technically cromulent means of guaranteeing that you're really connecting to https://www.baMkofamerica.com without being MITM'd." --Peter Gutmann "Art is a monoculture now, to be sure, everything smoothed into a beige infinite by streaming. But everything else that constitutes a common culture? There is no longer broad consensus on whether or not the earth is flat. Nobody wants to claim constant cultural churn as the legendary Singularity, the endpoint of Timewave Zero where everything changes and remains always changing from that point on. But, if you're looking for a condition of uncontrollable fracturing of cultural norms, that's probably what we're living in." --Warren Ellis "It is a story where being kind and dreaming big actually matters. That is rare. That is why I am in it." --George Carlin, on _Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure_ "An acceptable use of AI would be to pen the missing last chapter of every single Neal Stephenson novel ever." --Deborah Pickett "Here, as elsewhere, infrastructure is quietly heroic." --Matt Blaze "I can't think of anything more vile and small and pathetic than terrorising the smallest, most vulnerable community of people who want nothing from you, except the right to exist." --Pedro Pascal "When does a child being burned alive not lead every news bulletin? When that child is Palestinian. That's the truth. That's journalism today." --Barry Malone "A man who fears being seen as feminine is a man who fears being treated the way he treats women." --Farida D. "Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them." --Aristotle "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." --W.B. Yeats, _The Second Coming_ "Knowledge is dangerous, which is why governments often clamp down on people who can think thoughts above a certain caliber." --Terry Pratchett, _The Last Continent_ "I just remembered, early '90s, I was making a 3D world (which was advanced stuff then), and I set the POV really low, and suddenly it was Dog VR. Had a great time exploring my model world looking for things to pee on." --Digital Mark "The bacteria are waiting us out. They have little meetings in quiet places and whisper, 'Time is on our side.'" --B Kahn "Baudrillard observes somewhere that computers don't really remember because they lack the ability to forget." --Mark Fisher "Vibe coding? No thank you. I prefer to generate unintelligible reams of C code the old fashioned way: A near-lethal combination of sleep deprevation, caffiene, and mescaline." --mos_8502 "Jacked in at a fourth floor shinjuku cybercafe to place yarn orders like I'm in an incredibly low stakes version of _Neuromancer_." --Hannah "The only ethical principle which has made science possible is that the truth shall be told all the time. If we do not penalize false statements made in error, we open up the way for false statements by intention. And a false statement of fact, made deliberately, is the most serious crime." --C.P. Snow, _In The Search_ (1934) "I don't have a mission for this blog, but if I did, it would be to slightly increase the space in which people are calm and respectful and care about getting the facts right. I think we need more of this, and I'm worried that society is devolving into 'trench warfare', where facts are just tools to be used when convenient for your political coalition, and everyone assumes everyone is distorting everything, all the time." --dynomight "Doing linear scans over an associative array is like trying to club someone to death with a loaded Uzi." --Larry Wall "It's incredible how ''If we meet people's basic needs, they'll stop working'' and 'Billionaires are hard workers' coexist in people's minds." --Rabbit Cohen "Because the regime is captive to its own lies, it must falsify everything. It falsifies the past. It falsifies the present, and it falsifies the future. It falsifies statistics. It pretends not to possess an omnipotent and unprincipled police apparatus. It pretends to respect human rights. It pretends to persecute no one. It pretends to fear nothing. It pretends to pretend nothing." --Vaclav Havel, _The Power of the Powerless_ "People with the privilege of spending their worst days in private should never judge those who don't." --Unknown "The primary function of bras is to support, separate and prevent any skin on skin contact. Everything else is an optional bonus that may or may not occur." --Aranict "A century later, the same market conditions have reappeared. The new Gilded Age has its own pantheon of tycoons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg. And in their wake, another familiar figure has returned - the prosperity preacher. This time, the gurus wear Lululemon, host mindset retreats, and turn affirmations into algorithm-friendly content. The products are slicker, but the message hasn't changed. Gratitude will make you rich; alignment will cure your illness; your mindset creates your reality; and if it's not working, think and believe harder. None of this threatens power, it protects it. The modern self-help hustle keeps people focused on their vibrations instead of their bargaining power. It rebrands despair as misalignment. It turns systemic precarity into a personal growth opportunity." --Joan Westernberg "The days of ''don't be a dick'' have come and gone. The assholes out here now have learned how to argue, and wheedle, and pick, without being obvious aggressors. They know that if they can portray themselves as confused, maybe a little hurt, they can dive through the smallest of loopholes at least once. It takes more time and energy, but you need to build that wall with brick, not chain link, because these mugs are coming with wire cutters." --Thraeryn "We weep for the blood of a bird but not for the blood of a fish. Blessed are those with a voice. If dolls could speak, no doubt they'd scream ''I didn't want to become human.''" --Kusanagi, _Ghost In the Shell: Innocence_ "When education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor." --Paulo Freire "Beware any industry that claims you need more of what it is selling to offset negative externalities generated by its unbridled use." --Brian Krebs "Not everyone deserves to know the real you. Let them criticize who they think you are." --Paulo Coelho "Isolation has comforted me in ways people never could." --@imsadxboy "The Pope was chosen in two days. Your remote hire doesn't need five rounds of interviews. I said what I said." --bennobecks "Texas does not currently recognize a legal duty owed by wholesale power generators to retail customers to provide continuous electricity to the electric grid, and ultimately to the retail customers." --Chief Justice Terry Adams "They can pay in blood or dollars, it don't matter which one." --Frank Keeney "When you can flatten entire cities at a whim, a tendency towards quiet reflection and seeing-things-from-the-other-fellow's-point-of-view is seldom necessary." --Terry Pratchett, _Small Gods_ "The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the pwoer to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary." --Ursula K. LeGuin, _A War Without End_ "Everyone wants to be an engineer (do the most complex work process with the most specialist penis-extending toolbox possible) but nobody wants to do engineering (figure out how to do it on time and on budget with nothing but a clapped out kitchen steel and some calipers)." --Patch Arcana "To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the american public." --Theodore Roosevelt "Today, quite suddenly, billions of people have access to AI systems that provide augmentations, and inflict amputations, far more substantial than anything McLuhan could have imagined. This is the main thing I worry about currently as far as AI is concerned. I follow conversations among professional educators who all report the same phenomenon, which is that their students use ChatGPT for everything, and in consequence learn nothing. We may end up with at least one generation of people who are like the Eloi in H.G. Wells's _The Time Machine_, in that they are mental weaklings utterly dependent on technologies that they don't understand and that they could never rebuild from scratch were they to break down." --Neal Stephenson "Increasingly, we live in a world where nothing makes any sense." --Adam Curtis, filmmaker "We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition." --William Gibson "The degree to which the Internet economy runs on self-promotion and the amount of angst and anxiety self-promotion causes for most people with humility and self-awareness explains a lot about the state we're in to be honest." --jenny phire "Praise Jesus, we successfully voted to take food and healthcare from poor people to benefit the rich. Amen." --Sarah Ironside (that was sarcasm, in case it wasn't obvious) "I don't think the world was better or worse before the Internet so much as the Internet gave us all a brief glimpse of a world without the conventional logics of capital before capital was able to catch up." --Margot "Please don't judge people for the choices they make when you don't know the options they had to choose from." --Just Frank "The wise musicians are those who play what they can master." --Duke Ellington "Overbroad and unchecked corporate and white-collar enforcement burdens U.S. businesses and harms U.S. interest. Not all corporate misconduct warrants federal criminal prosecution." --Matthew Galeotti, head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division "Expect nothing, and everything becomes a gift. Disappointment is the tax on unrealistic hopes." --Vintage Prudence "The reason that 'guru' is such a popular word is because 'charlatan' is so hard to spell." --William Bernstein "Every urban riot, shoot-out and bloodbath in recent memory has been set off by some trigger-happy cop in a fear frenzy." --Hunter S. Thompson "When Roe was overturned and women bled out in ERs, we heard ''states' rights.'' When guns became the #1 killer of kids, still ''states' rights.'' But one protest against injustice? Suddenly there's federal boots on the ground. They don't panic when people die, only when they speak." --Karly Kingsley "Mass times velocity equals right of way in most states." --the_gibson "It's really hard to fathom that the guy making my pizza for 25 years is a gangster and a terrorist, and the person who shows up in an unmarked car wearing a mask and body armor comes to take him away is somehow the good guy." --Connor Simon, restaurant owner "Terrible things are happening outside. Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart. Men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared." --Anne Frank, diary entry, 13 January 1943 "Teaching people how to regulate their emotions is crime prevention. It's addiction prevention. It's suicide prevention. It's generational healing. It's how we stop raising adults who explode, implode, or shut down at the first sign of discomfort. Emotional regulation is not a soft skill, it's survival. It's the foundation of a society where people can disagreed without dehumanizing each other, where accountability isn't seen as an attack, and where conflict doesn't always have to mean violence. You want a better world? Start with emotional education." --Warpaint Journal "This has broken about 60% of the Internet, so that's cool. I'm glad it's stayed so decentralized like originally intended." --Jon Sands, on the Google Cloud outage on 12 June 2025 causing mass outages across the entire planet "Any revolution is a struggle between the ruling elites and counter-elites. Once counter-elites gain power and attempt to build a new social order, the ci-devant (meaning former, or 'have-been') elites face a stark choice. They can accept defeat and acquiesce to downward social mobility, or they can turn into a sort of 'counter-counter-elites' or, in more common terminology, counter-revolutionaries. Historical experience shows that there are always substantial segments of such erstwhile elites who chose to plot and fight." --Peter Turchin "I am not an enthusiastic Discord user, no more than I am a Redditor: Online doesn't offer the luxury not to use them. I join to do my business, endure the baroque bespoke screening process, click on the reaction icon that proves I have read and understood rule 14, then proceed to never talk under any circumstances. I just need the zip file on your fucking Google Drive that's hidden in the fucking pins, since you can't be bothered to have a fucking website." --Aria "You know your shit is fucked when even the LAPD doesn't want to be associated with your racist ass." --Legit_Spaghetti "It's so enjoyable to spend my evenings playing _Cyberpunk 2077_, because I get to immerse myself in a hopeful vision of the future." --Mae Dean "Everything's in scope until the safeword comes out." --cr0w "'Makes money for who, exactly?' is a question that is never asked." --A.R. Moxon "In the Who Cares Era, the most radical thing you can do is care. In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it." --Dan Sinker "The unscrupulous often push the edge of technology, if profitable to do so." --Collapse 2050 "History is written by the victor, and neither of you seem to be winning." --Hari Seldon, _Foundation_ The odds are good, but the goods are odd. "I candidly don't believe anything Kristi Noem says in terms of competence or coherence. I don't think she has a clue what she's doing." --Bradley P. Moss, attorney "RIBridges firewall worked. But forensic report says hundreds of alarms went unnoticed. Over 100,000 newly identified people impacted in data breach will receive letters soon on how to access free credit monitoring." --Alexander Castro, reporting for the Rhode Island Current "For most people, social media gives you this sense that unless you care about everything, you care about nothing. You must try to swallow the world while it's on fire." --Katherine Cross "One does not see rising employee income as a measure of corporate success. Indeed, gains to employees are losses to the corporation. And this betrays an unconscious bias: That employees are not really part of the corporation. They have no claim on wealth they create, no say in governance, and no vote for the board of directors. They're not citizens of corporate society, but subjects." --Marjorie Kelly, _The Divine Right of Capital_, 2003 "Do not mess with librarians. The inner strength required to meticulously care for history's greatest works of literature and then just let total strangers borrow them willy-nilly is Jedi-level stuff." --Jonathan Edward Durham "Not knowing how the trick works should never convince us that there is no trick." --ScottMGS "The future is subject to Internet roaming charges." --Warren Ellis "Don't collect data you don't want to defend in front of a judge when you're sued for a breach." --Socketwench "Life can't be all 'cock ring cameras,' sadly." --Maddiefuzz "Trauma decontextualized in a person can look like personality. Trauma decontextualized in a family can look like family traits. Trauma in a people can look like culture." --Resmaa Menakem "Nothing fools you better than the lie you tell yourself." --Teller "A system where all the parts know their place is one step away from collapse." --Kenji Kamiyama "Inside me there are two wolves, sometimes three depending on the convention." --Swift On Security "History that repeats itself turns to farce. Farce that repeats itself turns to history." --Jean Baudrilliard "The majority of the signals do not travel from the eyes to the brain: They go the other way, from the brain to the eyes. What happens is that the brain expects to see something, on the basis of what it knows and has previously occurred. The brain elaborates an image of what it predicts the eyes should see. This information is conveyed from the brain to the eyes, through intermediate stages. If a discrepancy is revealed between what the brain expects and the light arriving into the eyes, only then do the neural circuits send signals towards the brain. So images from around us do not travel from the eyes to the brain - only news of discrepancies regarding what the brain expects do." --Carlo Rovelli "It is foolish to be convinced without evidence, but it is equally foolish to refuse to be convinced by real evidence." --Upton Sinclair "Modern life is so shin and shallow and fake. I look forward to when developers go bankrupt, Japan gets poorer and wild grasses take over." --Hayao Miyazaki "I'm a fairly respectable citizen. Multiple felon perhaps, but certainly not dangerous." --Hunter S. Thompson "That age old liberal addiction to demonstrating how morally superior you are by making a public show of good faith to people who are happy to abuse it." --Zaktor "Imagine a society designed to maximize wealth extraction by keeping people right on the edge of bankruptcy and death for their entire lives. Okay, now put a movement that is based entirely on pointing and laughing at the suffering of others in charge. Now ban everyone's anti-psychotic medication." --eva.computer If the person offering you salvation is also the one threatening you with punishment, it's not really salvation. It's extortion. "A troll calls me a 'tryhard.' First, I don't understand how that's an insult? When did it become uncool to try things? Also, why yes, thank you for acknowledging my hard work, I am indeed trying hard! Maybe you should try hard too, it's great!" --Voidwitch "There but for the grace of psychoactive substances go I." --Anonymous "Turns out my friends who love to tell me they 'hate the sin, love the sinner' in regard to my sexuality feel very attacked when I tell them I 'hate the belief, love the believer.' Almost as if that phrase is just an underhanded way to tell someone you actually don't love them." --Cristina Miller "Saw that Pale Blue Dot picture from 1990 and just thought, ''Nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.''" --Nick "I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them." --Andy 'Nard Dog' Bernard "I think it's funny people are mad at Gen X when X'ers have only ever had fleeting relevance. Outnumbered by Boomers and Millennials, with the former never surrendering power, we have basically never been in charge, a handful of notable sociopaths excepted. Sociopaths always get ahead in this society. But we're the generation that's currently either trying to raise kids or take care of elderly parents or both at the same time when the bottom has already dropped out. You want it? You can have it." --Nowhere Girl "I don't know which one of us is right, and I need to know if my despair is the wrong response or if hope is something to be very cautious of... I'm not sure if it would be worse to be right - that most people are intolerant assholes - or wrong - the revolution has a chance and I am left out of it." --Asterion, on Leslie Feinberg's queer optimism "I have the faith of insurance agencies - it's called risk assessment." --Saxnot "Naturally, any conqueror is going to play one group against another." --Noam Chomsky "The difference in the intelligence world between the very clever and the very stupid is often very small. Same in writing." --John Le Carre "Never feel sorry for raising dragon slayers in a time where there are actual dragons." --Anonymous "It's very hard to think or act when you can't tell if you're about to lose your job, have your research killed off, have your healthcare terminated, witness unstoppable crimes, or just experience extended and apparently unescapable moral injury." --Erin Kissane "Once you fall into the mathematical/physics sophistry you can make people believe anything." --Peter Gutmann "It's a tragedy to witness how integrity is so easily undermined by tyranny." --Eve_O "Welcome to the non-legally-binding introductory paragraph to our Terms of Use! We recognize that the following document is the literary equivalent of 20 milligrams of Ambien, but it really and truly is required that you read and agree to it before using Bandcamp." --Introduction to Bandcamp's terms of service, 11 November 2024 "One thing that fascinates me is how Conspiracy Theorists seem to want to build the very world they claim they warn against." --Rev. Xenofact "It's easy to laugh at people who 'choose the mountain' - deliberately making their lives harder and more complicated to pursue their values. We laugh because we've been taught, we've been convinced that sincerity and idealism are cringeworthy, embarrassing to the point of pornographic discomfort." --Joan Westenberg "I can't think of anything more vile and small and pathetic than terrorizing the smallest, most vulnerable community of people who want nothing from you, except the right to exist." --Pedro Pascal "What the switch to PQC is doing is throwing away all of that evolution over time and starting again with a new set of bugs, mistakes, errors, cryptalanytical attacks, and problems that we can spend the next 30-40 years trying to fix. It's a major net loss for security to defend against an attack that no-one has been able to demonstrate exists. We may as well try and implement Colin O'Flynn's Time Travel Resistant Cryptography (TTRC) while we're at it, in case someone invents a time machine." --Peter Gutmann "To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfill them." --Nikolay Patrushev "There is no more politics. There is only war." --Jim Stewartson "I asked my friend Greg Robbins to help me. His contract in another division at Apple had just ended, so he told his manager that he would start reporting to me. She didn't ask who I was and let him keep his office and badge. In turn, I told people that I was reporting to him. Since that left no managers in the loop, we had no meetings and could be extremely productive." --Ron Avitzur "Just because truth has been omitted, does not mean that truth is not true. Just because reality has not been perceived, does not mean that it is not real." --Stan Moore "Time could not be hurried; but luck was not altogether beyond the power of intelligent control." --Arthur C. Clarke "Outgoing CIA Director William Burns has a secret. He is betting big on America. Yet even with the stock market plunging, the joke's on us. Publicly, Burns fulfilled one of the responsibilities of any top intelligence official: Scaremongering about a fragile America besieged by unseen forces, from terrorism to TikTok. But in private, he is bullish on America. His investments show this, armed, one presumes, with the best information and insight on the state of the world. And Burns knows Trump, his plans on Ukraine and the Middle East and his propensity to use tariffs to bully countries around the world. Fear, it seems, is for the little people, who must assent to forever swelling national security budgets, always to stave off the latest supposed crisis." --Ken Klippenstein "The devil is, historically, the god of any people that one personally dislikes." --Aleister Crowley "We're close to Cybertrucks having more rights than women." --Ravi Mangla "You've got a self-selected group of people who are willing to obsessively clean and sort artifacts in our spare time. We are not normal." --Hasufin "And also, never forget, the press is the enemy. The press is the enemy. The press is the enemy. The establishment is the enemy. The professors are the enemy. Professors are the enemy. Write that on the blackboard 100 times and never forget it." --Richard Nixon, to Henry Kissinger, 14 December 1972 "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it." --Brandolini's Law "There's no conspiracy, just a shitton of staples to remove. The conspiracies are funny, everyone is acting like not getting instant responses for complicated, broad searches is malice. A lot of it is just very unexciting. [Scanning] five practically identical copies of a report for 30 different reports, that kind of thing." --Anonymous archivist at the National Archives, on FOIA and releasing documents "Price gouging is wonderful for all the reasons that letting supply equal demand is wonderful. How else but higher prices are we going to decide who gets the short supply?" --John H. Cochrane, senior fellow, Hoover Institution at Stanford University, _In Praise of Price Gouging_ "Failing to succeed does not mean failing to progress." --Antichamber "The oldest profession on Earth is not prostitution; It's politicians raising money. That has happened from the beginning of time. That's going on forever and will continue forever. This issue around judges, this is pure politics. Get over it. This is what we live in today, every day. No laws have been broken. You don't like it? Too bad." --Kevin O'Leary "If there's one place where customers absolutely want an overconfident AI agent to fuck around and find out, it's the ERP system." --Corey Quinn "While some are remarking at how this shows what big dummies these guys are, I want to caution everyone against going that route completely. It's not that they're incompetent - they are - for me it's a display of how very far past the mark of legality these guys are operating, and have been, and plan to continue doing, and also how completely confident they are that they won't even feel a gentle breeze of accountability whiff their way. That's bad. I just don't know how to make people understand that the Trump government doesn't care that what it's doing is illegal." --Violet Blue "Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. When provoked, the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack." --Dietrich Bonhoeffer "I feel like we are nearing the end of times. We humans are losing faith in ourselves." --Hayao Miyazaki "Having to do an 'I am not a robot' exercise while reporting AI spam on Github is peak 2025." --Shauna "Because this is Mastodon, I feel compelled to add a disclaimer that my explaining the existence of these agencies is not an endorsement of current administration policy. It's just an endorsement of the idea that knowing stuff is sometimes useful." --Matt Blaze "Contrary to popular belief, Nero didn't destroy Rome. The empire endured centuries after his death, locked in its decline through institutional decay no single emperor could orchestrate. The French Revolution was not a response to Louis XVI's isolated incompetence, but to generational aristocratic parasitism that bled the nation dry. Hitler's rise required millions of Germans who embraced, enabled, or silently tolerated fascism's advance and anti-semitism's inhumanity while abandoning democratic principles. History reveals our intellectual cowardice: We fabricate individual villains rather than confront collective responsibility." --Joan Westenberg "Democracy is not something you believe in or a place to hang your hat, but it's something you do. You participate. If you stop doing it, democracy crumbles." --Abbie Hoffman "Once you get through the dangerous slightly-out-date era, there are years of calm waters when you are so out of date even the exploits quit supporting your OS." --Mark Stosberg "I can't help but ponder about the correlation between those that complain about virtue-signalling to those that list all their credentials in their e-mail signature." --i0null "I know all of this makes sense in your head, but I'm going to need you to try to make it make sense in mine." --Accidental CISO "Jeffrey Goldberg thinking he was being pranked, and then realizing he was actually just in the war plans group chat is such a good microcosm of how it feels to be alive right now. Everything seems fake until you realize it's actually real and incredibly stupid." --Jelena Woehr "My Palm Pilot was much better at doing lots of admin stuff and getting out of the way than modern smartphones. The software was simpler and there to serve me. It's worth remembering that the software used to serve us." --Anon Opin "If you accept that non-citizens have no right to due process, you are accepting that citizens have no right to due process. All the government has to do is claim that you are not a citizen; without due process you have no chance to prove the contrary." --Timothy Snyder "Continued in their present patterns of fragmented unrelation, our school curricula will insure a citizenry unable to understand the cybernated world in which they live." --Marshall McLuhan, 1964 "I have investment stuff only because I'm basically forced to. I think it's giving money to sociopaths to play games with." --Geoff Wozniak "Conspiracism is pre-modern thought applied to post-modern politics." --Natalie Wynn "There are more important things than living." --Dan Patrick, Lieutenant Governor of Texas, on the covid pandemic and public health restrictions "We must cultivate context literacy and we must maintain a distinction between the infrastructure and the experience, between machine and meaning. We are living through a moment that future historians may describe as a cultural rupture. A context war. How this plays out will shape new definitions of truth, authorship, creativity, and trust, perhaps for centuries to come." --Jay Springett "The takeover of the federal payments and personnel systems was a genius move. DOGE shows that you don't need tanks in the street if your pension or grant has suddenly gone missing. If you can eliminate or control the entire government's ability to hire and fire and issue payments and not issue payments, then you've done it. Who needs an army?" --Rosa Brooks, professor, Georgetown Law School "The question of if a country could fuck itself harder than the UK did with Brexit has today been answered." --Kara Jane Adams "You pay in time what you're not paying in 100K in AWS and web ops staff." --Socketwench "Crisis justifies. It authorizes. It accelerates. It excuses. With the right framing, anything can be an emergency. And in an emergency, the rulebook is optional. This isn't a metaphor. Extraordinary powers are routinely invoked under the pretext of managing one more disaster. War powers. Border closures. Tariffs that bypass Congress. Surveillance measures that become permanent. Police budgets ballooning under the banner of preparedness. What was once a stopgap becomes precedent. What was once an exception becomes policy." --Joan Westenberg "If humanity depended on coincidences of Galactic levels where not only life but conscious is, then we are unbelievable lucky twice more then all the stars together." --plan-A "Transformational technologies like microcomputers and smartphones were so obviously useful that rank and file workers were smuggling them into their workflows despite the best efforts of CEOs to stop them. The 'transformational' technology of LLMs is so obviously anti-useful that CEOs must resort to threats and coercion to get their rank and file workers to go anywhere near them." --Wilhelm Fitzpatrick "It's not that I have something to hide. It's that I have nothing I want you to see." --Anon Seismologists are just in it for shifts and jiggles. "Will a machine ever know what it feels like to miss something? Or what it is like to create something beautiful out of a moment of sorrow? Creativity does not arise from calculation but from experience, pain, love, and hope." --Keanu Reeves "To plainly state what is going on right now would make you sound delusional." --Charlie Warzel "Ladies and gentlemen! I get asked all the time what happens when you really screw something up... and I have." --Adam Savage "The ol' face laser, a tale as old as time." --RetroNate "Americans love medical shows because the idea of a doctor putting more than three seconds of effort into figuring out what is actually causing our symptoms is such a beautiful escapist fantasy." --Spicy Pisces "Understanding does not mean I agree with you." --Tech, _Star Wars: The Bad Batch_ "Live your damn life and don't die hungry and full of regret." --Warren Ellis "My job is to keep the left pro-Israel." --Chuck Schumer, US Senator "We're not going to get through this without a fight, are we? Please. I don't want to fight the Avengers. I'll probably lose." --Spider-Man "Perception is often more dangerous than reality, whether it's based on truth or not doesn't matter." --Routine Ad "Every now and then, ping one of your competitor's websites using an IEE6 VM. Keep them on their toes." --I Am Developer "History is replete with indestructible weapons that have been defeated." --SearingTruth "'What radicalized you?' Bro, I was told to treat people the way I would want to be treated in kindergarten and it made sense. I don't know what else there is to say." --Grapie Deltaco "My therapist just said 'Kids are very resilient,' and I said 'Why do all adults need therapy, then?' And she looked into the middle distance for a bit and seemed to reassess quite a lot of things." --Amy Mason "[AI] Slop is about collapsing to the mode. It's about information heat death. It's lukewarm emptiness. It's ten million approximately identical cartoon selfies that no one will ever recall in detail because none of the details matter." --Colin Fraser "I may be an old-fashioned sort, but I rather liked the version of America that didn't speed-run the Geneva Checklist at the slightest provocation, and while we've been talking about the magnitude of the security screwup, we should be clear about the secret they were (failing) to protect in this case being all about direct violation of US and international law, starting with the Geneva Convention." --Bear "UI design died of its own success: Make something simple to use and people mistakenly conclude that it IS simple, merely graphic arts painted on top, and can't we make it look really cool? No. Good UI design requires careful thinking into the structure of the thing, it goes far beyond skin-deep. (Pun intended.) But in a best-practices, design-patterns, feature-velocity, break-things, web-world... no one cares." --Kent Borg "It is more important to save a life than to obey the law." --Spartakus "Android hacking is an alternate universe where the Internet Archive doesn't exist and the only two sites you can upload files on are Mega and Google Drive (deleted)." --Foone "A good plan isn't one where someone wins, it's where nobody thinks they've *lost*." --Terry Pratchett, _The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents_ "Some blows to the crotch might be less painful than a direct punch to the Ego of false redeemers who brings false expectations" --Anonymous "[I am] So tired of crosses hanging from the necks of people supporting cruelty, starvation, disease and fascism." -Randi Mayem Singer "Once more, let me remind you what fascism is. I need not wear a brown shirt or a green shirt. Fascism begins the moment a ruling class, fearing the people may use their political democracy to gain economic democracy, begins to destroy political democracy in order to retain its power of exploitation and special privilege." --Tommy Douglas "Some years ago, I was walking from the kitchen back to my office at Google, carrying a piece of cake on a plate flat on my hand. There was a path between the desks, and walking towards me was Henry Kissinger followed by Eric Schmidt. Eric saw what I had in my hand, and locked eyes with me. I was as tempted as I have ever been, but in the interests of world peace and keeping my job I kept my hand where it was, where it then passed just a few inches from Kissinger's face." --Rob Pike The truth is out there. The speculation, however, is /really/ out there. "Any given 1980s computer was not a CPU and some RAM hanging off a bus. It was a crazy mad scientist method of generating video based on the fever dream of a hardware engineer who had spent a little too much time watching _The Last Starfighter_, and maybe not quite enough time reading reference circuits for the parts in her drawers. Every 1980s computer was an experiment in a new way to generate graphics, and everything else (CPU, RAM, etc) was an accessory to that effort." --Quinn Dunki "You'll never get the future you want simply by prohibiting the future you don't want." --Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato "So many people forget that the first country the Nazis invaded was their own." --Dr. Erskine, _Captain America: The First Avenger_ "The left hand doesn't get to put his thumb on the scale. Then what's the point of having a thumb?" --Hari Seldon, _Foundation_ "Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world. And, when it's necessary, to scare enemies and on occasion kill them. And we hope you're in favor of that." --Alex Karp, CEO, Palantir "Yes, I'm saying C and C++ aren't real programming languages. They're research languages, but in contrast to the usual, academic sort of research, in the case of C it means starting with a real programming language, stripping out everything you don't need to write hello world, then adding everything back in piecemeal as you independently rediscover why it was necessary in the first place, and in the case of C++ it means starting with C, piling on a bunch of shit some committee of Guys reckons will work, then waiting ten years to see what fails spectacularly so you can remove it in another fifteen." --suzie "Anyone who thinks the way to head off the tide of fascism is by limiting the range of political choices to either fascists or pro-business neo-liberal technocrats is dooming us to fascism." --David Graeber "The people who think they are good at everything because they are good at coding are also bad at coding." --evacide "At least I didn't look partisan by ignoring all the Republican crimes and taking a two year nap during the first coup attempt." --Merrick Garland "We look at death as being in the future, but most of death is already gone. Whatever time has passed is owned by death." --Seneca The Younger "Human intelligence is among the most fragile things in nature. It doesn't take much to distract it, suppress it, or even annihilate it." --Neil Postman "I would rather starve to death than earn a dollar to feed myself and pay the government a penny of it." --Paul Bilzerian, financier, on paying taxes and SEC fines "The wise are rarely happy, seldom loved, and often resented. They've seen too much, forgiven too little, and understand that most questions are traps and most answers, prisons. In the end, wisdom is not the light in the darkness. It's the calm acceptance that the dark is infinite and the candle was a fraud all along." --Gotterdammerung "Souvenirs of memory must be only that. Things to be taken up and fondled occasionally for evocation of past joys. No joy can be permanent. All is transient. 'This, too, shall pass away' applies to all of our living universe." --Frank Herbert, _Chapterhouse Dune_ "Men make their own history. But they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past." --Karl Marx "One of the things that interests me about dreams is this: I have dreams in which I smoke DMT, and it works. To me that's extremely interesting because it seems to imply that one does not have to smoke DMT to have the experience. You only have to convince your brain that you have done this, and it then delivers this staggering altered state." --Terence McKenna "Any coup they notice is poorly done." --Memos from Lofwyr "The insanity of being a fire ecologist in the epicenter of a major fire event, bags packed and ready to evacuate, watching active fire from my window, while taking media requests and explaining to the public, for the 100,000th time how climate change is largely responsible for this." --Morgan Tingley "The average length of a Canadian election cycle is a mere 50 days. Much like a colonic, this will be over before you know it, and you'll feel clean and empty and unsure of what happened while you were asleep." --Unknown Canadian political commentator "This meeting could have been a knife fight." --Radical Edward "If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near." --Jack Welch Librarians are generals in the war on ignorance. "The biggest difference between corporations and people is that America won't let corporations die." --@ManInTheHoody "A great deal of Taoist writing is talking about how ineffable the Tao is then writing a huge amount about it." --Rev. Xenofact "Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it." --Brian Kernighan "That's kind of the one thing I miss about starring in films: Hooking up with your co-stars." --Pauly Shore "If you stand up to urinate, and you're on the right side of the plane, there is a surreal moment in the flight from Britain to America where the call of one's bladder intersects with an optical illusion through the low toilet window and it looks like you're peeing on Greenland." --Warren Ellis "Put yourself in an immoral politician's shoes. During an election, their goal is to get votes - not share details about their positions on issues. Details don't trigger emotions. Wild claims do. So every speech, every action is tailored to captivate their audience. The average voter is ignorant. They spend more time researching a car purchase than a presidential candidate. They vote with their gut, so relatability, soundbites, and easy answers grab their attention." --Collapse 2050 "After [Alan] Shugart sold his company to Xerox, he started Shugart Technology (1978). Xerox informed him that their purchase of Shugart Associates included the name (trademark), and he could not use his name. They renamed the company Seagate Technology. Lesson: Do not name your company after yourself! If/when you sell the company, you no longer own IP rights to your own name." --Grumpy Ol' Fred "I was homeschooled between 11-16 due to chronic illness. My mother was my main tutor and she didn't finish secondary school herself. I did, however, make friends with a bunch of furries on the Internet, who ended up teaching me grammar. This is the modern day equivalent of being raised by wolves." --Kym Deyn "And so, yet again, there are only two ways to be. Either you must cast down the Devil and his works, or you must be consumed by them. No middle ground. No acknowledgement that the man was great even as he was monstrous. No mourning, because to mourn is to admit that it was worth mourning. Until the next one. And the next. Until finally we grow so cynical that we can never have an experience of artistic connection again, or we become so crushed by loss that we can't bear another and we sell our souls and stop believing the victims." --Trivial Einstein "Who controls the screen, controls the mind. Who controls the screen, controls the country and society." --Timothy Leary "Too many of us try to be five 9's all the time, when really being two 7's is pretty outstanding anyways." --Undead "I don't WANT readers who would be offended by my politics because they are, to put it bluntly, shits. (Hint: If my endorsement of humanism, socialism, anti-authoritarianism, and environmentalism offends you, you ARE a shit, and this is a hill I'm willing to die on.)" --Charles Stross "Write the kind of story you would like to read. People will give you all sorts of advice about writing, but if you are not writing something you like, no one else will like it either." --Meg Cabot "If a conversation with someone changes your mind - at the time or later - please tell them, and thank them for it. It's important for all of us to have our faith in honest, respectful debate rewarded." --Strypey "The reason we put an insurrectionist and a rapist in office is because, for the first time in our nation's history, a 30-year-old man or woman isn't doing as well as his or her parents were at thirty. Why? Because the majority of households are having the oxygen sucked out of the room, such as a small number of individuals and a small number of companies can be worth more than nation-states. Income inequality is out of control. Our tax policy has gone full oligarch." --Scott Galloway, entrepreneur, professor at the NYU Stern School of Business "One day, the sadness will end. But I don't think today's the day." --David Lynch "I knew one day I'd have to watch powerful men burn the world down - I just didn't expect them to be such losers." --Rebecca Shaw "Modders do what Nintendon't!" --Macho Nacho "I think you might want to make sure you don't follow me. Because your 'woke communist propaganda' comment makes me think you're a moron of the first order. I strongly suspect I am one of those 'woke communists' you worry about. But you probably couldn't actually explain what either of those words actually mean, could you?" --Linus Torvalds "So much of trying to live our lives to do it right is tedious. And truth is very tedious. Trying to figure out how a certain insect interacts with an environment in the tundra is a lifetime of work - whereas saying that Hillary Clinton has a pizza place where she's blowing young boys in the basement is no work at all." --Penn Gillette "Do it, and then never think about it afterward. You can eat yourself alive looking back at what you did yesterday on your blue-screen, because it's just so easy to overthink it. You just can't think about it. Just do it as it comes up, do your best, then totally let go of it." --Bob Balaban "Through uncompromising satirical commentary, MAD magazine served as a pivotal force in shaping the American counterculture in the 1950s-1980s. It provided validation for skeptical youth by openly acknowledging what many suspected but few would state: That advertising, media, and authority figures are all out to get you. MAD's self-proclaimed trashiness and deliberate rejection of adult respectability created a space where young readers could find confirmation of their doubts about mainstream society." --Lenny Flatley "Americans think they are free because they can have opinions, but they don't have choices." --Anonymous "The defenders of the status quo therefore tend to begin by treating the revolutionary power as if its protestations were merely tactical; as if it really accepted the existing legitimacy but overstated its case for bargaining purposes; as if it were motivated by specific grievances to be assuaged by limited concessions. Those who warn against the danger in time are considered alarmists; those who counsel adaptation to circumstance are considered balanced and sane... but it is the essence of a revolutionary power that it possesses the courage of its convictions, that it is willing, indeed eager, to push its principles to their ultimate conclusion." --Henry Kissinger, doctoral thesis "Right now, Christians all over the country are expressing outrage that the bishop at the inaugural service expressed the values and teachings of Jesus Christ. That's the current state of Christianity in America." --DarkMatter2525 "Do not commit the sin of empathy. This snake is God's enemy and yours, too. She hates God and His people. You need to properly hate in response. She is not merely deceived but is a deceiver. Your eye shall not pity." --Ben Garrett "Competence is not something that brings you far in the public sector." --Alda Vigdis "I don't know what word in the English language - I can't find one - applies to people who are willing to sacrifice the literal existence of organized human life so they can stuff a few more dollars into high stuffed pockets. The word 'evil' doesn't even begin to approach it." --Noam Chomsky "Hard for me to see gender as biological if it requires a police state to enforce it." --Sean Gallagher "Correlation is not causation, but it does suggest an excellent place to start looking for the cause." --Rob Pike "Last night, I saw vegan roadkill for the first time. A flattened, but somehow intact, head of broccoli." --cathos "Spending thirty million dollars to somehow force Bluesky to interoperate with a copy of itself while people are out here connecting C64s, AA-powered Palm Pilots, aquarium pumps and toothbrushes to the Fediverse is definitely an entire idea." --mhoye "95% of my arcane knowledge is reading the error message." --Anonymous Sysadmin "Any conversation about politics that doesn't include a plan to tax billionaires is probably a conversation a billionaire is paying someone to start." --Zoe Williams "Can't afford groceries? Get over it. We're creating trillionaires." --Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO, JP Morgan Chase, the most profitable bank in the history of the United States "If the point of having a society *isn't* to care for each other, to ease suffering and realize each life's potential, what is the point? To hoard wealth? To build empires on other people's throats? Life is brief, nothing lasts. Wealth and empires are pointless violence." --Michelle Allison "Adderall and internet overexposure both condition the brain to fixate, flattening emotional affect and amplifying irritability. And if you're actually taking Adderall, you get the bonus of mood swings. How many Culture War battles can be traced back to someone's Adderall comedown?" --Katherine Dee "We don't even know how many humans an embryo is at conception, we certainly don't know their gender." --Dr. Frizzle Against the power of death there is no medicine in the gardens. "It should be clear from recent events that America's enemy is not the communists over there, but those deranged right-wing lunatics right here." --Frank Zappa, 1989 "Keep in mind, we just taught a whole generation of young people that protesting does fuck all. They heard ''your politicians *do not care* about you or anybody else who isn't paying them.'' And if you make too much noise, your school administrator is more than happy to call in the badge gang to fuck you up." --Dave Alvarado "I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered." --George Best "The older I get, the more it seems that the rate at which we mint new programmers has sheered away from the rate at which we inspire people to want to learn about the computers they use." --Alex Russell "I stayed home many a day from school with eyeball-face-leak. The problem is real." --Retro Nate "Anyone who tells you that making time for joy - however you define it - is a distraction or a betrayal has no idea what they're talking about. During the darkest days of the AIDS Crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced at night. The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for. It didn't look like we were going to win then and we did. It doesn't feel like we're going to win now but we could. Keep fighting, keep dancing." --Dan Savage "One of the reasons why Evil so often triumphs over Good, is that Good argues endlessly about whether or not its members are 'sufficiently good,' while Evil gleefully accepts all applicants." --Lauren Weinstein "I want to give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won't contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you. That's what gives the theater meaning: When it becomes a social act." --Orson Welles "It occurs to me that the best way you hurt rich people is by turning them into poor people." --Billy Ray Valentine, _Trading Places_ "I will never use AI to help me code, I'm 34 I gotta take advantage of whatever scant neuroplasticity I have left." --Anonymous "Whoever invented fitted sheets is an asshole." --Lyssa "Elon Musk is a terrible president." --Tim Walz "I find myself constantly wondering what cherished American principle we will abandon next." --SearingTruth "If you've pissed off Chris Hadfield, you ought to know you've fucked up." --Chad "Wrong does not cease to be wrong because the majority share in it." --Leo Tolstoy "There may be infinite ways to arrive at the inevitable." --Hari Seldon, _Foundation_ "It is easier to fool people than to convince them that they've been fooled." --Dr. Andrea Love "The thing about social media is people who think the world needs less pain but also that you don't have enough of it can send you some of theirs." --Swift On Security "I love the poorly educated." --Donald Trump, 2016 "People say all the time, 'I would kill for my child,' but somehow, 'I would cross dangerous borders for a better life for my child' is incomprehensible and looked down upon." --Devin Michael Lowe "Other people's problems, They overwhelm my mind / They say compassion is a virtue, But I don't have the time" --Talking Heads, _No Compassion_ "You'll know what you've lost once they make you believe you never had it. The most important things we have can't be owned. The most beautiful things we see are invisible." --Lordess Foudre "If a conversation with someone changes your mind - at the time or later - please tell them, and thank them for it. It's important for all of us to have our faith in honest, respectful debate rewarded." --Strypey "We see madness in the stars, not because of what's out there, but because we use RF to see it." --Plan A to Y "Just fucking get up off your knees and be proud of yourself! Don't put it on me to be your agent in the world to do brilliant things." --Brian Eno "'Legacy code' is often code that you want to replace because you don't understand it. The problem is, before you can replace it, you need to understand it, and, once you understand it, replacing it is rarely the cheapest option any more." --Jean-Baptiste Queru "Fuck. I can't believe I wasted my entire life being moved by art and beauty and the indomitable human spirit. Ugh. I should've been making money through Internet scams." --kermitlesbian "I totally get how someone self-identifying as something that doesn't match their outer appearance can be confusing. Some of y'all have been identifying as Christians all this time and it's got the rest of us stumped." --Church of Jeff "It's fine to reinvent the wheel, but please, please don't try to reinvent the circle." --Linux In A Bit "When unappeased, violence seeks and always finds a surrogate victim. The creature that excited its fury is abruptly replaced by another, chosen only because it is vulnerable and close at hand. The sacrifice serves to protect the entire community from its own violence; it prompts the entire community to choose victims outside itself. The elements of dissension scattered throughout the community are drawn to the person of the sacrificial victim and eliminated, at least temporarily, by its sacrifice." --Rene Girard, _Violence and the Sacred_ "Braille is literacy, it is freedom and independence and for Deafblind folks like me, braille is life. Braille is beautiful and as a Deafblind synesthete braille comes alive under my hands with colors, tastes, scents and textures. Braille allows me to have private independent access to everything from bank statement to shopping. Braille, Tactile ASL, and my service dogs are my links to the world and I am grateful that all of them exist." --The Kitchen Bitches "Much to my annoyance, it seems no one else has yet tried to run hundreds of simultaneous semi-headless DOSboxen in containers so I'm running into entirely new errors." --Foone "I'd tell him [Putin] to go fuck himself. I lived through that war, I know how hungry I was then. And now I'm hungry too! Russians are afraid of everything. Russians are afraid to speak." --Anonymous Russian grandmother "News is what people want to keep hidden, everything else is publicity." --Bill Moyers "I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative. I believe that is so obviously and universally admitted a principle that I hardly think any gentleman will deny it." --John Stuart Mill, in a letter to the Conservative MP, Sir John Pakington (March 1866) "What Darwin was too polite to say, my friends, is that we came to rule the earth not because we were the smartest, or even the meanest, but because we have always been the craziest, most murderous motherfuckers in the jungle." --Stephen King "If a lie is big enough - if enough people profit from it - that lie will not just change history: It will become history." --Yepoka Yeebo "We are in a race between education and oblivion." --R.B.Fuller "The thing I respect about Jimmy Carter, aside from his advocacy for Palestinians, is he told Americans they needed to grow up and face their problems. They threw a fit and elected Reagan instead." --Nowhere Girl "It feels crazy that the Definition of Middle Class seems to have changed. It used to be if you were Middle Class, you would own a home, two cars, a cabin in the mountains, have a nice portfolio of investments for retirement, and maybe even a boat. Now Middle Class is if you can afford to live in an apartment with only two incomes, and no roommates, and still pay all your bills." --Ricki Tarr "I'm not working tonight for once, but in case you need a reason to not drink and drive: If you drink and drive, and are in a bad accident, and die right before you hit my ER or shortly after, the doc cutting your chest open without any anesthesia to try to get you back is an ER doc like me. Sure, I get it done and have done plenty of these procedures, but I'm not a surgeon. So before you turn on your car, ask yourself, do you want a scalpel between the ribs with no drugs? Take a rideshare." --McNado, MD "When someone disagrees with you online and demands you prove your point to their satisfaction by writing a logically sound defense, you can save a lot of time by not doing that. Dude, I've known you for ten seconds and enjoyed none of them, I'm not taking homework assignments from you." --Denizcan James "Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 watches." --Werner Twertzog (Dr. William Pannapacker) "Some of my best friends are humans. But when they get together in great numbers, other lifeforms sometimes suffer." --The Fourth Doctor "The Internet used to be a place to find the 'others.' But now it's just a place for the others to charge you." --Michael Szul Those that learn from history are going to repeat it with those who didn't. "Stop being a bunch of little baby bitches and figure out what you're gonna do for the people immediately around you and how. Put some shoes on!" --Trey Smith "The reason the Democrats lost the 2024 presidential election was that they failed to understand working class Americans. They failed to understand that they could just make shit up and lie to them in order to scam their votes." --Daisybrain "Social media made y'all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it." --Mike Tyson "Authoritarianism isn't political and it isn't the same as conservatism. Authoritarianism appeals simply to people who cannot tolerate complexity: There is nothing intrinsically left-wing or right-wing about this instinct at all. It is anti-pluralistic. It is suspicious of people with different ideas. It is allergic to fierce debates. Whether those who have it ultimately derive their politics from Marxism or nationalism is irrelevant. It is a frame of mind, not a set of ideas." --Anne Applebaum, _Twilight of Democracy_ "America is a country where billionaires find it cheaper to finance elections to get people in who will cut their taxes than to just pay the taxes. This is called democracy, apparently." --Existential Comics "When people believe that their feelings define reality, they're incredibly easy to manipulate. Outrage and fear are powerful tools, and when a generation feels those things deeply, they're willing to do almost anything to relieve the discomfort. They'll silence dissenting voices, censor ideas that make them uncomfortable, demand safe spaces and thought-policing, all in the name of protecting their feelings. It's psychological quicksand: The more they try to control their environment to feel 'safe' or 'validated', the more vulnerable they become to any shift in their emotional state. While they're obsessing over the sanctity of their emotions, they're being pulled further and further away from reality. They stop looking at hard facts, at inconvenient truths, at anything that might challenge the bubble they've built around themselves. They become easy targets for anyone who promises to reinforce their worldview, no matter how disconnected from reality it might be. Politicians, advertisers, social media influencers - everyone can get a slice of the pie. Just whisper the right words, make them feel a certain way, and watch them line up to follow the script." --Joan Westernberg "If it ever feels like you're living your life balanced on a knife's edge, remember: The present is only a Planck length wide." --Joey Castillo "America is basically going turn into Livejournal: Still technically there, but owned by Russia. Clunky, painful, unwelcoming, the community that built it long ago fled or banned, everything of value censored and paywalled into silence, with only a few big accounts keeping it afloat. Sure, you COULD still use it like you used to, but nobody else is, so what's the point?" --Cat Valente "Before you do anything on the Internet, remember that 4chan will do something to it." --Anonymous Cow-orker "See, the Democrats' problem is they're not fascists, and most people want fascists." --John Garrison "From now on, there are no more excuses, no apologies, nothing. A good half of American voters did it again, fully aware, enlightened and well-informed: They re-elected Donald J. Trump as president of their country, knowing everything they needed to know about this man." --Thomas Assheuer "If your political theories aren't actionable, it's probably time to move on and let it go. Sure, you're angry or sad. But this is reality and it must be dealt with realistically, not emotionally and with lots of social media." --Quinn Norton "Some wingnut I've never spoken to before (or again (foreshadowing!)) accused me of living in an 'echo chamber' because I block people. Fuck the 'echo chamber' discourse. I reject it entirely. I am not here to wear an ascetic's hair shirt because you think that surrounding myself with dickheads builds character. Block early and block often." --jwz "Listen, if you point out anything factual about Ukraine you're a Russian asset." --infant "With nitroglycerin, you're never more than a split second away from eternity." --Jim Phelps, _Mission: Impossible_ "If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools." --Plato "Large organizations tend to function like religions. This is more or less overt, depending on the organization and the fashions of the time." --J.B. Crawford "'The internet is forever." Yeah, that's why I post nudes; 200 years from now people are gonna be jacking it to my ass, and that's fucking awesome. I'm a sexy lady and I'm gonna make people horny forever." --Hey, Call Me Red "Every 'traditional' social norm weas invented by advertisers in 1957 and every 'newfangled social phenomenon' has been around for 3000 years." --Snarls DeGalle "The best part of being a wanna-be is... being whatever you want to be that day. Sometimes folks stick with it long enough to just be, instead of want-to-be. And that's pretty cool." --Chuck the Lab Technician "SELinux: Bringing you the power of Mandatory Access Controls with the usability of m4." --rj "Remember folks, as resources get more scarce the drumbeat of 'fight amongst yourselves' is going to get stronger. It's not about fossil fuels, it's all about sandwich toppings." --jbaggs "A handful of billionaires now have unprecedented control over banking, the food we eat, the healthcare we can access and, now, the information we can receive. This is what oligarchy looks like." --Robert Reich "Also, as I like to remind surviving libertarians, we've tried a minimalist Night Watchman industrial state already, AND IT DIDN'T WORK. (It was Victorian England. Propped up by an immiserated empire, the poor starved to death every time there was a recession, eventually folks who grew up under it gave us a welfare state and socialism.)" --Charles Stross "People are like, 'We need an anarchy.' I'm like, ''Yes, we have definitely repeatedly proven we're capable of self-determination and mature, considerate decision-making, especially as a global superpower.''" --Aborigen "This isn't even an Internet Archive thing. This is an Internet thing. The Internet is this handshake and a high-five these days, and all sorts of pages, services, and items go down or become inaccessible. If you really like stuff, you should save a local copy. Hard drives are cheap. Keep a cool collection. Try to make the folder naming make sense so your family knows what to keep later." --Jason Scott "The physical world hates you, does not care about your software, and is trying to kill you, your project, and everyone you love in every way it possibly can." --qdot "Gaze not into the abyss, lest you become recognized as an abyss domain expert, and they expect you keep gazing into the damn thing." --Nick Mathewson "I have never quite forgiven Bill Anders for resisting the temptation, which he later admitted had passed through his mind, of radioing back to Earth the discovery of a large, black monolith on the Far Side of the Moon." --Arthur C. Clarke "The truth is whatever people will believe." --Roger Ailes, president, Fox News "This isn't really about work anymore. It's about the performance of work. These tools don't exist to help you do your job better; they exist to create the illusion of progress. The endless tracking, updating, and syncing isn't for your benefit - it's for your manager, or your manager's manager, or some faceless stakeholder who insists on seeing colorful progress bars that inch forward even when nothing is actually happening. The tools create data, and the data creates reports, and the reports create a sense of momentum, even if that momentum is just you running in circles inside an endless hamster wheel of productivity software." --Joan Westennerg "It is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary. War is obsolete. It is a matter of converting high technology from weaponry to livingry." --Buckminster Fuller "There are two stages of a security career: Before you know the truth of what you read in the news on an incident, and after, when you know exactly what happened and can't say a single fucking thing." --Swift On Security "To understand racism you need to understand power dynamics. To understand sexism you need to understand power dynamics. To understand poverty you need to understand power dynamics. To understand power dynamics you need to listen and believe the stories of the powerless." --Nate Pyle "I still hadn't been indoctrinated in the culture of government employment, and I didn't realize people would rather be uncomfortable than let others be happy for a second." --Alison Gill "Nuance is that thing USians ignore in their media and expect of their politicians." --Socketwench "I would like our sci-fi loving billionaires to take note that we have now entered that cyberpunk era in which street samurai execute corporates in the street." --Jens Finkhauser "Does it matter if it's wrong? In the nihilism of this current stage of capitalism, 'no' sure looks like a winning bet." --Paul Cantrell "'Prestige' means illusion. They can only maintain power through illusion." --Mx. Luna Corbden "Look how much attention and resources the media and the state are paying to the hunt for our hero the UHC assassin. It's as if this billionaire was a high ranking government official. Would they give even 1% as much of a fuck if you were murdered? It's the indignation of it, the audacity of some commoner to kill a noble. It has nothing to do with solving a murder, pigs don't give a fuck if people die, they have to send a message that someone who does this cannot escape the state's reach. If he were to successfully evade capture, it would be an inspiration to millions, and the state cannot allow us to think that our rulers are not all powerful and immortal." --Winternet "Once again only one group is being required to have empathy and it's not the group who makes a shit ton of money on making it harder for people to stay alive without going bankrupt or having to choose between meds and food for their children or between meds and rent." --Checkervest "Don't forget the real business of the War is buying and selling. The murdering and the violence are self-policing, and can be entrusted to non-professionals. The mass nature of wartime death is useful in many ways. It serves as spectacle, as diversion from the real movements of the War. It provides raw material to be recorded into History, so that children may be taught History as sequences of violence, battle after battle, and be more prepared for the adult world. Best of all, mass death's a stimulus to just ordinary folks, little fellows, to try 'n' grab a piece of that Pie while they're still here to gobble it up." --Thomas Pynchon, _Gravity's Rainbow_ "We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes." --Leona Helmsley "I just realized something horrifying. People with depression score higher on tests of realism. Intelligence is positively correlated with mental illness and suicide. What this indicates is that if the mind understands too much about reality, it wants to destroy itself. Human life is existential horror." --Anonymous "As with most conspiracies, NASA is simultaneously super competent and able to do things with unlimited resources, while also making the most basic mistakes that a youtuber with 5 followers and a copy of MS Paint can disprove the veracity of their videos/photos." --Patrick H. Lauke "Media, politicians, and police: 'This sort of criminal behaviour is a signifier of the deep rot at the heart of the civility of our politics and it must be cracked down on with law and order.' Normal folks: ''Oh, so it's a crime to kill him but not for him to kill my aunt? Eat my entire ass.''" --CedarTea "The 1% will not surrender their positions easily and they will not allow democracy to get in the way." --Parade du Grotesque "Give people hope, and they will go back to sleep. Scare the living daylights out of them, and they might just start paying attention." --George Tsakraklides "There's nothing quite like sitting by an open flame and watching the evidence burn." --CatSalad "Non-violent protests are a form of emotional blackmail that simply will never reach the hearts of sociopaths." --Soatok "Policing the boundaries of the word, that's a normie game." --Aria Salvatrice "The will of the people has never been particularly relevant when it comes to the machinations of the powerful. We are on a fixed path." --KT Nelson "What the extreme socialist favors because of his creed, the extreme capitalist favors because of his greed." --Robert Jackson, Chief of the New Deal Antitrust Division, 1938 "This meeting could have been a rap battle." --CatSalad "TERFs need to shut up about womanhood. My mom was raised to believe all women were less valuable than men and cried when she learned about trans women because the idea that someone would fight so hard to be a woman was radical for her, and meant it was something worth being." --Madoka Magicock "Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough." --Franklin D. Roosevelt "I never lie. I willfully engage in a campaign of misinformation." --Fox Mulder, _X-Files_ "What makes a hero is the same as what makes a criminal: Means, motive, and opportunity." --mos_8502 "And there's an animated gif showing Sarasti as a furry. Because of course there is." --Peter Watts "Politics doesn't interest you because you have no interest in changing a world that suits you so well." --Edith, _Enola Holmes_ "People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason. But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right. The sensitivity of the poor to injustice is a trivial thing compared with that of the rich." --John Kenneth Galbraith "We are a minority. To be a serious Star Trek fan means you see way beyond countries and current politics. That isn't something most humans are good at. It maybe will always feel bad for us to exist in this uncaring universe where the majority seems to care only about what immediately affects them. To have a kind and open heart maybe just has this cost." --Unknown Trekkie "Listen, I'm all for space exploration and it must have been an amazing view. But maybe - and I'm just spitballing here - if Amazon and other companies paid their fair share in taxes, we could lift all kids - if not into space - at least out of poverty." --Adam Schiff "Our CEO asked me, 'What are we doing about the Russians exploiting 0-days in AI?' Meanwhile, our servers are on Ubuntu 14, our SRE team quit, IT is pasting bash scripts into the JAMF editor untested, and the CFO has a two star Chrome extension to make Gmail's font Comic Sans." --solst/ICE "So much of political rhetoric is slapping a label on a thing so that we don't have to think about the thing." --Jonathan Lamothe "'AGI is when I have heaps of money' is one hell of a position." --Evacide "O'Brien said that if we wanted a vision of the future, we should picture a boot comong down on a human face, forever, but actually I think the most realistic image of our future is Dave Bowman in _2001_, desperately trying to disable all the AI features in his computer after each upgrade." --Angus McIntyre "A man is not his farts!" --Laurelindel "It is easy to be a saint in heaven. Which is why that is not where saints are made." --Hasufin "A trans person didn't deny your health insurance claim, a giant corporation did. An asylum seeker didn't raise your rent, a billionaire's private equity firm did. Our focus must be taking on the billionaires and corporate greed." --Greg Casar, congressman "And pay my workers the local going rate for American labor wages? Get the fuck outta here." --EKcore "It's exciting to repair a [mostly] new electric clothes dryer and find a charred crimp terminal! I think it will be okay but post-repair I'll need to monitor things. Smoke: Stay in, please! Thank you, General Electric, for making jet engines, nuclear power components, and shitty household appliances." --Phred "Every educated person is a future enemy." --Martin Bormann "The now-famous of Mangione being herded by massively armed police officers is a show of force. Our rulers - political and corporate - want everyone to know how angry and scared they are now, and how they mean to stomp on anyone even thinking of challenging them." --Dan Gillmor "The tradeoff from turning 50 is you can't see letters up close but you can spot idiots from miles away." --Cowboy Jeff kent "It is a sad sight to see those who believe themselves to be revolutionaries unleashing their hatred on the anarchist." --Peter Kropotkin "It's weird to think that Elon Musk will end up having paid far less for the United States government than he did for Twitter." --George Conway "This is not the time to be dismayed, this is punk rock time. This is what Joe Strummer trained you for." --Henry Rollins "Heroes see danger and attack it head-on while villains see the madness in the world and reshape it to their will." --Jeff Mach "Senseless cause? Count me in!" --Tony Ganios "The fedi ain't perfect, but whatever we build here we can keep." --Michael Lucas "It's a famous and popular pastime of Americans to panic and make political hay out of things they don't understand, and therefore, decide to fear." --Deviant Ollam "I don't understand why CEOs shouldn't be afraid of being shot. You know, like children at schools. Like retail workers at work. Like anyone out in a large group setting. Like, this is America. That's how it is." --Liz Harvey "I think that's important to remember - sometimes people are in fact genuine, and you need to separate their words from the baggage around the subject." --Hasufin "My desire to have super powers is eclipsed only by my desire that other people not have them." --Andy Lundell "Collapse doesn't look like Mad Max, it looks like Hurricane Katrina." --Auntie Oedipus "Reverse engineering is too important and useful a skill to have it wasted on spies trying to hack each other and cybercrimes." --Foone "Trauma is for little non-sociopathic people." --Rachel Rawlings "Some years you win, some years you build character." --Steve Jobs "Every cynical thought you have ever had about major healthcare companies doing everything they can to fuck you over is true." --Luke O'Neil "We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology." --Carl Sagan "History must be erased, because it cannot be sold." --Log "People don't choose their political positions logically. They might drift left (or right), but it will probably be based on their own experiences, or personal contact with people who've had experiences different from theirs. Books are what we use to justify our positions after we've chosen them." --David Megginson "I never 'radicalized'. I'm simply a Canadian whose idea of the social contract remained unchanged while America dragged the Overton Window to the right. When the Overton Window moves, it doesn't stretch. Thus, while previously unthinkable ideas become acceptable to explore, others shift to become 'radical'. If you feel the same way, don't ever forget that we aren't radical, it's literally the collapse of American democracy and the looting of its economy that's radical." --Ragenwald "The radio is an instrument of mass struggle... But the radio is an instrument of struggle only when what it says corresponds to what the masses feel and want... when they cannot hear what it says, why they invent what it says - to the greater glory of the revolution." --From the introduction to _A Dying Colonialism_ by Franz Fanon "Maybe the journey isn't about becoming anything. Maybe it's about unbecoming everything that isn't really you, so that you can be who you were meant to be in the first place." --Paulo Coelho "In 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted technology would lead to 15 hour work weeks in a 100 years. We're almost at 2030 and the predictions have actually gotten less rosy. The reality is capitalism abhors a vacuum. When technology has made jobs easier, the response has been to eliminate jobs or give people more work. Companies don't cut your hours and pay you the same. The shareholders would kill them." --Dare Obasanjo "Pre-existing conditions is a capitalist way of saying 'medical history'." --Unknown "Everything we do to fight fascism will be seen as too extreme and too early. In reality, history shows that things were usually too late and too moderate." --Chad Loder "You don't do liner notes with the Dead Sea Scrolls!" --Rick Moranis "Prisons are needed only to provide the illusion that courts and police are effective." --Frank Herbert "My dad was the most child-like adult I've ever known. Not 'child-ish' - an unattractive quality that suggests a certain selfish insensitivity. That wasn't Dad at all. No, he took the world in the way a child does - with lots of wonder and very little judgment... with the delight of someone for whom everything is new and delightful. The great comedy parodist of song, Allan Sherman, wrote in his autobiography, _A Gift of Laughter_, 'Harpo Marx had the good sense to never grow up.'" --Bill Marx, son of Harpo Marx "The left hand is automated and the right hand doesn't give a shit." --fizzlefist "Most of my powers are from my mustache." --Arcus "You simply cannot invent any conspiracy theory so ridiculous and obviously satirical that some people somewhere don't already believe it." --Robert Anton Wilson "There are only two types of people in this world: Rich and not rich. Rich people stick together and do everything they can to make sure the rest of us never stop fighting each other long enough to do the same." --The Connoisseur "Sincere, coherent political beliefs are largely the province of the bourgeoisie and nerds who paid attention in government class." --Elizabeth Lopatto "The problem is, I know the lyrics to every song from the seventies. And there's no more room in here." --Adam Savage "'Probably nothing' is a major cause of death for guys my age." --Hasufin "We were all so young then. The new compounds were coming out of the Stanford labs faster than the government could make them illegal." --Danger Ranger "The primary use of 'misinformation' is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary." --Mike Caulfield "Idealism, or just being fair, has become too expensive." --Jessica Wildfire "Those debates reduce it to a place that it doesn't need to be in. People that attack Doctor Who blow my mind. It's about an alien who is cool and travels around the universe saving civilizations - what's not to love?" --Matt Smith "It is the spirit of the game, not the letter of the rules, which is important. Never hold to the letter written, nor allow some barracks room lawyer to force quotations from the rule book upon you, if it goes against the obvious intent of the game." --Gary Gygax "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." --William J. Casey, CIA Director "Everything is an antenna if you use it wrong enough." --jimbojsb "When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language." --James Earl Jones "God made you a brunette, yet you are now a blonde. God gave you bad vision, yet you fixed it with glasses. God gave you crooked teeth, yet you straightened them with braces. Trans people change the outside to match the inside, just like you do. Sit down. Jesus said to." --Dana Goldberg "Big yikes: 'Our basic philosophy when it comes to security is that we can trust our developers and that we can trust the private network within the cluster.' The last time this security model was remotely workable was 1988-11-02." --Thom Stromberg "The facts are so depressing - from abortion to housing to climate change - the battle in today's America is about the headlines. No one outside of a tiny demographic reads the actual articles, as is attested to by the massive decline in traditional media." --Ken Klippenstein "Even if he did what they say he did, we've been paying Dan Quayle big bucks to do it in The White House!" --Arsinio Hall, on the arrest of Paul Reubens "Just say what you want and pray. Any notes on 'how' will be followed with the diligence of a brilliant intern on ketamine." --Riley Goodside "Every snowflake is special until you need to make a snowball." --Pine Barrens "Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn - you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' - lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle." --Bryan Cantrill "Belief in the efficacy of military power almost inevitably breeds the temptation to put that power to work. 'Peace through strength' easily enough becomes 'peace through war'." --Colonel Andrew Bacevich, United States Army (ret), professor of history and international relations, Boston University "The constant struggle between 'I should probably be more informed about current events' and 'I would like to be a functional human being with at least a vague will to live.'" --it's mo! "When I hear 'See it, Say it, Sorted', I picture the banality of the meetings that gave rise to this paranoid catchphrase, which is designed to get people to rat on each other. I picture Hugo talking to Tim about dropping his kids off at school while a nervous intern waits to take notes. I imagine the British Transport Police team giving them the contract, and how they maybe went out for dinner and cocktails afterwards, having laid out a phrase that literally millions of people will have to hear every day for the next, maybe, twenty years." --Brett Scott "Vladimir Lenin argued that the most effective way to weaken the resolve of the ruling elite was to tell it exactly what to expect. This brazenness attracts the notice of state security, but it gives the movement an honesty and cachet. The revolutionary, he wrote, must make unequivocal demands that, if met, would mean the obliteration of the current power structure." --Chris Hedges "Oh, this fascism comes along whenever the rich people get the generals to do what they want." --Woody Guthrie "If someone tells you that a given piece of technology is an example of a new kind of life, and then sells you a product that forces that new kind of life to answer questions at a car dealership, then either they're lying, and they don't believe it's alive, or they see life only in terms of its commercial productivity. Either way, you can immediately discount their opinion on anything with an ethical dimension." --Xandra Granade "If you can't pirate it, it's not worth the money to rent it." --Lesbian Moon GF "No matter how many tears the CEOs shed or how often HR insisted ''we're all in this together,'' the harsh truth remains. Humans are, painfully and inevitably, just resources. And it's inconvenient for those resources to be anywhere but their desks." --Joan Westernberg "Cannibalism is part of the great cultural legacies of our species. In times past, for instance, we would eat our honoured dead to gain their wisdom. In medieval times, too, it was believed that memories were stored in the cerebrospinal fluid. Sadly, it seems that memory cannot be transferred biochemically - which is just as well, otherwise Stephen Hawking would have had to get his wheelchair equipped with BEN HUR-style spikes and a turbo option." --Warren Ellis "You know a piece of tech is going to be fun to take apart when it makes you go buy a new set of bits just to be able to open it." --Foone "Believe nothing, but question only what is worth questioning." --George Polya "Any time you see normal people they are basically medieval peasants. So if you have flying vehicles and laser guns, it's not super hard to be master of that universe." --Scalytor "The enemy often marches to the same drum as the potential victim but follows an unanticipated path." --Donn B. Parker "It's very hard to engage in game theory with people who pursue the non-game theory optimal strategy." --Palmer Luckey "Journalism is the first draft of history." -Jeff Rotkoff "Nowadays there's no inventing involved for problems like this, just expensive industrial Lego." --Jonathan Chapman "We sunk three of their boats, they dropped the sun on us. Twice." --The Slavic Warboss "Guilt says: This was the wrong decision. Shame says: You are idiots." --Dr. Kristen Panthagani, MD, Ph.D "I prefer rogues to imbeciles, because they sometimes take a rest." --Alexandre Dumas "It's amazing, watching Americans complain about their border being insecure, as they actively violate everyone else's borders." --Richard Medhurst "I generally do not recommend the standard redneck solution of pouring gasoline into the nest and lighting it. You don't know where that nest goes, and the only thing worse than an angry yellowjacket flying at you is one doing so when on fire." --Luke Kanies "'Corporation embarrassed into doing the right thing after bad PR threatens the bottom line' is how capitalism works I guess. Is this the Invisible Hand they always talk about?" --Mark Shane Hayden "The message is always more important than the spelling, the grammar, the tone, whatever. Did the communicator get their message received and understood to their intended audience? Then job done. Functional linguistics, baby. Accept no substitutes." --Morachbeag "Pro tip! A heat sink should not have an ignition temperature. It should *especially* not have an ignition temperature that's lower than the source can provide." --James "The US, since 1981, has been coordinate-locked in a doomed struggle to use private morality to fill the widening chasm where public money used to be. Put another way, nearly everything that you (or anyone) wish could be accomplished by shaming people would be effected sooner and more efficiently by simply investing the correct amount of infrastructural dollars to address the particular lack of them." --JNL "It's so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone." --John Steinbeck "ChatGPT NEVER ONCE said ''That's a stupid question, go read the manual'' or 'This question is below me, go ask someone else.' Why are the few people that do exist on the planet such assholes sometimes? --Rue Mohn "It's not 'natural' to speak well, eloquently, in an interesting articulate way. People living in groups, families, communes say little - have few verbal means. Eloquence - thinking in words - is a byproduct of solitude, deracination, a heightened painful individuality." --Susan Sontag, _As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh_ "Other struggling people aren't the enemy." --Nathan Monk "If you actually care about improving things rather than just getting on the same bandwagon as everyone else, it's vital to have a nuanced and informed opinion, otherwise you're not going to have the impact you hope for. Neither AI nor ML is new, and the only reason you are upset about it now is because tech companies are shoving it in your face to try and be relevant. But the things you actually see advertised is a fraction of what's going on. We can't just ''get rid of AI,'' even if we'd want to." --Anthropy "Progress: Replacing a theory that is wrong with one more subtly wrong." --Anonymous "Maybe the people who want fancy things like 'food' or 'the ability to stop being sick' should be less selfish and think about the stock market." --@InternetHippo "When someone calls you a conspiracy theorist, it doesn't mean much anymore. Conspiracies are happening. It's just a matter of which ones make sense, which ones have actual evidence, and which don't. The rich don't have to sit around in an underground bunker cackling at us as they plot the end of retirement and social security. They meet out in the open at football games, soccer matches, concerts, and fundraising events. When they get together, they don't talk about how to take over the world. They just talk about how to make more money. Who it hurts is an afterthought. If someone doesn't want something to be true, they call it a conspiracy theory. It's an easy way to dismiss ideas that make them uncomfortable." --Jessica Wildfire "Scientists share with all human beings the great and inalienable privilege of being, on occasion, wrong; of being egregiously wrong sometimes, even monumentally wrong. What is worse still, they are sometimes perversely and persistently wrong-headed. And since that is true, science itself can be wrong in this aspect or that." --Isaac Asimov "Maybe those nihilist philosophers are right; maybe this is all we can expect of the universe, a relentless crushing of life and spirit, because the equilibrium state of the cosmos is death." --Arthur C. Clarke "As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality." --Albert Einstein "If you were frustrated with the media's refusal to publish the Vance dossier, prepare for a future that's worse. The media is going to see the case of the Vance dossier and conclude that reporting on similar documents isn't worth losing their social media accounts over. Why take the risk when you can just blather on about the horse race? As always, it's the public that loses out the most." --Ken Klippenstein "It really doesn't matter if something is legitimately useful, efficient, or beloved, it is next to impossible for a service to exist if it doesn't make shareholders increasing amounts of money year after year." --sapphixxx "For when 'To whom it may concern' isn't nearly enough, we have 'Attention grid coordinates...'" --Durandal Nerimus "Thinking about that TNG episode where Riker says he never feels rested after sleeping, and Dr. Crusher tells him to just drink warm milk about it, and then later it turns out he's been abducted by aliens six times and had his arm cut off. Most accurate portrayal of dealing with the medical profession ever seen on screen." --Dragon In A Fez "If you aren't at the table, you're on the menu." --Ann Richards "This might be the first crisis where I have to begin by advocating that children are humans." --James Elder, UNICEF, Gaza "A Christian movement that believes it's only hope of survival and success is to put its trust in the hands of a bully is a Christian movement that has stopped trusting Jesus a long time ago." --Rev. Benjamin Cremer "That's the thing about useful idiots. They're idiots." --Sarah Longwell "Anarchy means doing the right thing even if nobody else does." --Anonymous "I had honestly thought that building up specific skill in systems analysis and security would keep me employed regardless of tech, because those skills are requisite for the operation and maintenance of all systems. I failed to account for people no longer caring if systems work properly." --Munin "I feel bad for kids who are currently learning to program by moving shapes and animating dogs, as they're gonna be hit with the cold reality of real development, which is copy/pasting Linux commands and resolving git merge conflicts." --I Am Developer "The winner of the Nobel Price in physics spending the entire press conference talking worriedly about superintelligence and human extinction while being basically indifferent to the prize or the work that won it feels like something you'd see in the movies right before shit goes down." --James Campbell "Americans love Cool Dad because he does not love them and never will, so we beg for crumbs, and hates Uncool Mom because she neither burns the house down with both of them in it nor will she ever stop allowing his abuse to seem less horrible by working to fix the problems he creates before they take us all down, so we can just call her a bitch and know she'll still probably make dinner out of whatever Dad left after his last rampage. Or if you're a Libertarian, I guess Dad going for a pack of cigarettes and never coming back is the goal." --Cat Valente "Is there any particular reason there were so many serial killers in the 1970's?" "Violent video games, like Pong." --Fun_Butterfly_420 and ghostfaber "In Diablo IV, my Spiritborn character is named Tlazkamati - a bitchin' Aztec name, right? Probably means something stone cold murderous, right? 'Tlazkamati' in Nahuatl means 'thanks.'" --Derek C.F. Pegritz "STOP MAKING SERVICES AND FACTORIES AND INTERFACES AND JUST READ THE FUCKING JSON FILE YOU ENTERPRISE FUCKERS" --Foone "Security warning: It is possible, under certain conditions, to read some bits of information from a LaTeX error message, which in a low but non-negligible fraction of circumstances could theoretically be used by an attacker to figure out why the build failed." --Chris Martin "There is no ground state. It's fluctuations all the way down. Emptiness is fullness." --Nandi "Why does it feel like we live in a time where you could probably tell somebody that you're using an air purifier to ward off ghosts and evil spirits and they'll nod sagely, but tell them you're using it to clean the air of germs/pollen/toxins and they'll scoff and roll their eyes at the notion." --That Katherine "One of the more disappointing truths of adulthood is just how much having hobbies adjacent to your career will suck the joy out of your hobbies." --Ellie "Basically, work off the assumption that anyone you don't know and have built a personal rapport with will take the laziest path out of any interaction." --Anonymous "We use the tools we are comfortable with, even if they are blasphemous machinations." --Cendyne "The abstraction layer that simplifies is the abstraction layer that complicates." --Current Ticket "Obviously, crime pays. Or there would be no crime." --G. Gordon Liddy "Never push a loyal person to the point where they no longer care." --Anonymous "Our governments are basically spending their time talking about the symptoms of their insanity. Poverty, radicalization, global warming, pandemics, inflation - you name it. The lives of our children are in the hands of charlatans who feature no relevant knowledge nor skills." --Bullshit Jobs "In the 90's, we went on the Internet in an attempt to escape the real world. Nowadays we go to the real world in an attempt to escape the Internet." --Vess On Security "I taught my kids about democracy tonight by having them vote on which movie to watch and pizza to order. I then picked the movie and pizza because I'm the one with the money." --Dad Jokes "Prosperity gospel is the Satanism that Christians think Satanists espouse." --Undead "The buck always stops with the most vulnerable and least responsible people." --Vulcan Tourist "One fun thing about all of our devices listening to us all at all times is that they definitely have recordings of millions of us yelling at politicians things like ''It's not a war, you sick fuck!!''" --sea "Science literacy empowers you to know when someone else is full of shit." --Neil DeGrasse Tyson "Culture war issues are meant to motivate a largely apathetic voter base that doesn't especially give a shit about government appropriations. They have been used historically by Republicans, starting with Barry Goldwater, in order to enact specific financial policies that have largely hurt lower-class Americans." --Elizabeth Lopatto "You kind of have to be a sociopath to think things are going well." --Neal Brennan "HEY YOU DON'T NEED A SEPARATE C# CLASS FOR EACH XML FILE YOU LOAD. YOU CAN JUST HAVE AN XMLLOADER CLASS AND A GENERIC CONFIG FILE. PLEASE." --Foone "So tall, so somehow unreal, the unfathomable adults standing over us when we were small, and now they are all dead, and we look in old mirrors and see how tall and unreal and unfathomable we are now. Even to ourselves." --Warren Ellis "How many times does the CIA have to overthrow your government and assassinate your leadership to teach you that socialism will never work?" --Muffin Maker "Mario is a union man - he's not going to scab on Kirby!" --prokopetz "Monopoly gave me unrealistic expectations of how easy it would be to find free parking, join the property ladder, buy my way out of prison, get bank errors in my favor, and steal money from banks when no one was looking." --Andy Ryan "That we're in the Twenties sounds so weird. It's so synonymous with the 1920's. Sounds like a bygone era when women were still fighting for their rights, the upper classes were living a life of hedonism whilst people starved, and the world was on the verge of financial ruin and war." --Nooruddean "As to sending me a revert patch - please use whatever mush you call brains. I'm Finnish. Did you think I'd be supporting Russian aggression? Apparently it's not just lack of real news, it's lack of history knowledge too." --Linus Torvalds "Evil, when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty." --Simone Weil "Another perfect, beautiful day to ingest stimulants and sit at a computer. What a blessed life." --@skooookum "''If you block me it means you think I'm right.'' Actually, it means you're annoying and I wasn't enjoying our interaction. Life is too short to use my energy on strangers who suck." --Dr. Amy, Psy.D "I personally like emails like that because it is generally considered rude to ask people to wear a warning sign that they tend to talk about topics for which they know nothing or are factually wrong most of the time." --Kurt Seifried "Scientific American and the Insane Clown Posse have both endorsed Harris. I'm glad the 'Fucking magnets, how do they work?' and 'This is how fucking magnets work' communities could come together on this." --Rob T. Firefly "The most unrealistic thing about Batman is the idea that a billionaire would do anything to help the poor." --68000 "A mistake repeated more than once is a choice." --Paulo Coelho You can easily return to the past but no one is there anymore. "The reason y'all be having all these technical degrees and making 300k, but keep falling for conspiracy theories is because you thought English classes were stupid in college and now you don't know what a logical fallacy is." --@DapperDomo "And now you'll be telling stories of my coming back, and they won't be false, and they won't be true, but they'll be real." --Mary Oliver "Real supervillians like Musk and Trump are such rubbish compared to fictional ones. Even those in the '60s Batman TV show were more complex and interesting. Unfortunately the real ones are as extremely dangerous as they are extremely dull." --Rayotron "The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong, it usually turns out to be impossible to get at and repair." --Douglas Adams "Bitcoin was supposed to demonstrate the power of a true free market. Instead it's full of scams, rent-seekers, theft, useless for real purchases and accelerates climate change. Mission accomplished." --Adam Chalmers "When I'd imagined seeing an uprising against the government in my lifetime, I never predicted it would be on behalf of the least disenfranchised man in the world. That civilians would put their bodies and liberty on the line, not to speak truth to power, but to aggregate more power where power already was. I never pictured a coup for the 'oppressed' that members would take private jets to attend." --Micaiah Johnson "From time to time, new generations of Americans will be tested anew. Women in this country know they have struggled too hard and for too long to become second class citizens again. LGBTQ+ people understand this, too, and we aren't to be trifled with. And racial minorities know that putting a racist back in the White House will open the doors to new horrors and turn back the clock on civil rights, perhaps for decades. Ain't gonna happen, not on our watch." --George Takei "''It's not like I'm tooting,'' Case heard someone say, as he shouldered his way through the crowd around the door of the Cat. ''It's like my body's developed this massive meme deficiency.'' It was a Fediverse voice and a Fediverse joke. The Catsubo was an instance for professional shitposters; you could lurk there for a week and never see two words of discourse." --DJ Sundog "This is how dictators destroy free nations. They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant." --Liz Cheney "Never underestimate the efficacy of lithobraking. If you don't care what happens you can always match speed with a planet." --Mark T. Tomczak "One of the perverse incentives of the ad-supported web is that for every product or service that may solve your problem, there is at least one idea, skill, recipe, approach, tradition, workaround, or hack which almost every commercial source of information is incentivized to not only ignore, but actively suppress." --josef The human mind is a stationary target. "Square footage, man. It's diabolical." --Adam Savage "IT'S NOT A BONG YOU FUCKING HIPPIES ITS A SUCK-O-METER JESUS CHRIST" --Derek C.F. Pegritz "An old narcissist is a dangerous pessimist." --Marathon Rabbit "I was very young when someone called me 'Sinner'. I got curious because in our language there is no such word, so I decided to ask my grandfather about it. He said, 'There is no such thing, our consciousness does not recognize this kind of words beccause it was made to manipulate and put guilt in our hearts. There are no sins; what we have is choices and sometimes we make mistakes. Fear is waht people use to take away your freedom. Do not allow anybody to do this to you again, grandson." --Gianna Crow "We build our computers the way we build our cities - over time, without a plan, on top of ruins." --Ellen Ulmank "If you understood everything I said, you'd be me." --Miles Davis "One idiot is one idiot. Two idiots are two idiots. Ten thousand idiots are a political party." --Franz Kafka "The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists. That is why they invented Hell." --Bertrand Russell "'The past was a golden age and nothing in this corrupt age of Iron can match the Ancient Masters' is a meme that's been circulating for at least as long as we have records of thoughts more complex than a beer recipe, and it's never been true." --Munin "The world is full of darkness that, if you stare at for too long, you will become blind to all that is bright." --Inspirational Skeletor "Western cultures believe we must be alive for a purpose. To work, to make money. Some indiginous cultures believe we're alive just as nature is alive: To be here, to be beautiful and strange. We don't need to achieve anything to be valid in our humanness." --@melatoninlau "America, where the choice between a woman of color and a super racist white guy is 'a razor thin margin.'" --Eldritch Cumslut of Cthulhu "Authors are expected to hate their book covers. Every time - it's normal. But if the author's literary agent complains, it's time to pay attention!" --Charles Stross "You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself." --Albert Camus "We feel obligated to tell people the truth about things, but we live in an age where lying to the world in general is something approaching a moral imperative. Being known means violence. It's a kind of civic duty to keep the good shit you know about shielded from legibility." --Brennen "History keeps her secrets longer than most of us. But she has one secret that I will reveal to you tonight in the greatest confidence. Sometimes there are no winners at all. And sometimes nobody needs to lose." --John le Carre "The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth." --Church of Jeff "I mean, Putin is a bad guy, but, like, a lot of people are bad guys. I mean, he's pragmatic." --Joe Kent, former Green Beret "It is no longer a theoretical challenge. It is now a technological challenge." --Dr. Hal Puthoff "You feel like an idiot heckling a silent guy." --Teller "One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, 'our side,' had captured a crucial word from the enemy - 'Libertarians' - had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over." --Murray Rothbard "When I got to Harvard I found a lot of people like him [JD Vance], who would say whatever they needed to to get ahead." --Pete Buttigieg "You guys spent the last 20 years telling everyone that angry antisocial teenagers going on shooting sprees was just the price of freedom, not sure why you're upset? It worked! Nobody cares anymore." --Krang T. Nelson "The key to understanding the pace of today's infrastructure buildout is to recognize that while AI optimism is certainly a driver of AI CapEx, it is not the only one. The cloud players exist in a ruthless oligopoly with intense competition." --David Cahn "By the time someone says something in the meeting worth writing down, I've likely already taken my pen apart and lost the spring." --William Ader "Microsoft's greatest contribution to the computer industry has been to convince people that computer errors are just 'glitches': A force of nature that we just have to put up with and cannot do anything about." --Martin Ward "'Left' and 'right' mean the same thing today that they've meant since the French Revolution. Ask someone, ''What's more important: Property rights, or human rights?'' If they answer: 'Property rights are human rights,' they are on the right.'' --Steven Brust "But when we've got someone like Vance spouting deeply antisocial and bizarre ideas that are way outside the realm of normal political discourse, the most effective response is often a simple, 'What the hell?'" --Rebecca Jennings "The unwillingness of some people to believe that literally anything remotely interesting happens in other people's lives is truly astounding." --chaotic-carnifex "The cat does not negotiate. Offerings are accepted with indifference or rejected with violence." --Wenuwayker "Maybe my message - that empathy builds the person who succeeds in cybersecurity - should be shared. Because it helped create my success. Victims are victims, not the failed players of an abstract game. We must play it, but also must recognize the person. Do not become inured to human cost. Not only those with the money to pay." --Swift On Security "3D printer, noun. A device for turning strands of thermoplastic filament into non-recylable scrap. See also: Money pit. I would quite like to fire mine into the sun; however, I suspect that, 70% of the way to its destination, the nozzle would clog and it would just sit there in a Lagrange point juddering noisily." --Tryst "The word 'quantum' sucks people's brains out, and otherwise sensible people suffer from impaired reasoning." --Jon Callas "One day, when it's safe, when there's no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it's too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this." --Omar el Akkad "Reddit is not typically known for being a space of enlightenment and compassion but rather for trolls and overzealous moderators." --PonyEnglish "TFW you sound really radical but you're just an ordinary moderately well-read person with a decent education and common sense watching late-stage capitalism and geopolitics hurtle 99% of humanity towards destruction." --Lesley Carhart "You're all mocking that crying boxer but you have no idea how traumatizing it is for a cop to fight someone who's allowed to hit back." --sanctimonious abbey cat "The truth has no defense against a fool determined to believe a lie." --Mark Twain "Evil people enjoy being portrayed as villains, but they detest being made out to look like fools." --Mel Brooks "The Grand Canyon is a minor crevice compared to the vast chasm of ignorance of that man." --Alex Salmond, former First Minister of Scotland, on Donald Trump "The difference between ignorant and educated people is that the latter know more facts. But that has nothing to do with whether they are stupid or intelligent. The difference between stupid and intelligent people - and this is true whether or not they are well-educated - is that intelligent people can handle subtlety. They are not baffled by ambiguous or even contradictory situations - in fact, they expect them and are apt to become suspicious when things seem overly straightforward." --Constable Moore, _The Diamond Age_ "I'm not joking when I tell you that multiple men have asked me, a cís woman, if I'm trans because I'm strong. This was always the end game for transphobes, to define a dated and oppressive definition of womanhood." --Dr. Heidy Khlaaf "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed." --Dwight D. Eisenhower "Obviously, she's not a white person, but I love Usha, she's such a good mom." -J.D. Vance "US federal electoral politics is like the Olympics. Every four years the most corrupt organizations on earth spend billions of dollars of other people's money to compete at influencing the 150,000 people in like five states in the country who are disengaged enough that they can look at the two options presented with and genuinely be like 'idk, man.'" --Chrisshy Keygen "I'd put a stake through her heart and garlic 'round her neck to make sure she never comes back." --Cathy Rutherford (RIP), on Margaret Thatcher "Do you think *Americans* have a worldwide reputation for being well-informed in general?" --Erkhyan "What if the possibility of some future revolution is the new opiate of the masses?" --Enno T. Boland "I don't get why 'cat lady' is an insult to women. My dude, you got this backward: Welcome to the modern era. We have careers, money, we buy our own houses and cars, and we have easy access to a selection of vibrators our ancestresses *could only dream of*. Companionship is great and everything, but as many of us discovered it comes in many forms. If a woman has a cat but you don't see a guy, that's usually because she did the math and overall, men scored lower than a furry animal that shits in a box and a Hitachi." --seperis "Sir this crazy theory thread, not business class. Microsoft has been doing this for decades." --Big Driver "These people just survived the apocalypse, Scanlan. They don't need your gonorrhea." --Vax'ildan, _The Legend of Vox Machina_ "Unless you are also working for a national intelligence agency, being able to survive the Mossad getting mad at you should not be on your threat list, just like you shouldn't worry too hard about what to do to secure your servers if an enemy agent attacks the datacenter with cruise missiles. Some things are just outside your ability to reasonably defend against!" --Foone "When I see integration pipelines, vast kubernetes clusters, reliance on 10+ cloud services and remote APIs, web based password managers etc, I say to myself that security incidents will happen and that it is just a matter of time. No single employee of the company has a complete view of the connections, interactions and dependencies. Those are spread over many companies all over the world." --efc "In terms of Imane Khalif having a 'biological advantage', let's discuss Michael Phelps. Phelps has: Double jointed elbows and knees, a hyperextended thorax, and 50% less lactic acid production than the average compeditor. And yet, no one ever said he had a biological advantage." --Nick Dece "People on the outside attribute malice too broadly to the entire network, while people on the inside attribute malice too narrowly to a few individuals or, at most, a few servers." --Leonora Tindall "When the Killian Documents turned out to be fake, the argument against Bush fell apart, regardless of the veracity of other evidence. In short, one highly visible forgery, shown to be a forgery, was enough to undermine the larger body of evidence of a crime/cover-up." --Jamais Cascio "When they call Tim Walz 'far left' they mean 'provided school children with food.'" --Andrew Lawrence "If a government project has a strangely innocent sounding name, it's probably trying to hide the fact that it's enough to give you nightmares." --The Infographics Show "I have no idea how accurate all this avuncular Walz fan fiction is, I know people are just goofing around, but from an anthropological perspective it shows how much this country has been starved for a hint of kindness from our leaders." --Cate Bridget "I quite enjoy old hardware myself, but in the year 2024 when emulation is by far the most practical and accessible way to enjoy retro games, a physical-only release is borderline insulting. Combine this with deliberate artificial scarcity and I see no reason to support such a release personally." --Natalie "That means Sir Isaac Newton is the deadliest son-of-a-bitch in space." --Gunnery Chief, _Mass Effect_ "Moral purism can lead to inaction on the left for a lot of reasons. Being guided by moral beliefs - instead of bigotry or greed - can be tricky since morals don't like to compromise. There were over 150 million people who voted in the 2020 elections, and the chance that two candidates could represent the exact worldview and positions on all relevant issues of more than a handful of those tens of millions of people is vanishingly small. Almost everyone is going to have to compromise; it's just an issue of numbers." --Alex Bollinger "Obviously, securing a building in such a way has no value. Security does not derive value from implementing impenetrable boundaries or making things impossible. The value is in enforcing a desired, nonempty, set of circumstances under which boundaries can be crossed and under which actions are possible." --Ray Dillinger "There's also a tendency for protocol designers/standards committees to design mechanisms to try and address every imaginary issue everyone on the standards committee could ever dream up, including a great many that don't actually exist. IPsec and anything PKIX did are extreme examples of this, leading to designs that were severely compromised because, apart from their unmanageable complexity, they ended up with the flexibility of rubber swords and styrofoam screwdrivers, losing a lot of utility in exchange for theoretical properties that didn't matter." --Peter Gutmann "Art is not a commodity, Art should be an explosive substance that changes the world." --Alan Moore "Sometimes I wish I had normal computer problems instead of ''What's the latest version of Python I can run on NT4?''" --Foone "Someone said something to the effect of '80% of Conservative outrage is just someone finding out how stuff works for the first time.'" --@Ondine_MD "A despot doesn't fear eloquent writers preaching freedom - he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold." --E.B. White "IMO this issue is existential for HN. We've spent years and so much energy trying to find a balance between openness and human decency, a task which oscillates between barely-possible and simply-doomed, so the idea that anybody anywhere sees anything labeled 'Hacker News' that pours all the toxic waste back into the ecosystem is physically painful to me." --dang "One of the worst things about the computer industry is the insistence that no problem being encountered now has ever been found and solved before and that newer must be better." --Wendy M. Grossman "We want policymakers and press to fear us." --Drew Herdener, communications executive, Amazon "So, what I'm hearing is that this was more of an after-thought process." --Accidental CISO "If we don't know what they are, why should we worry about them?" --Frank Kendall III, Secretary of the Air Force "If there is one thing in life I have learned it's that the purpose of a museum is not to preserve history. The purpose of a museum is to destroy history. Throughout history, from the Library of Alexandria to the museums of kings to the Middle Ages, people would pile all of their art, culture, and works into nice compact buildings. Then when the ignorant mobs come they have a single place to torch to remove the heresy and treason counter to the current beliefs. And it's all gone." --CZ "How sad it must be, believing that scientists, scholars, historians, economists, and journalists have devoted their entire lives to deceiving you, while a reality TV star with decades of fraud and exhaustively documented lying is your own beacon of truth and honesty." --Unknown "I don't want the most lethal fighting force in the world, I want to go to the doctor." --Jeremy Flood "I refuse to discuss the subject further. My opinion will not change. If you continue to annoy me I will kill you. This discussion is over." --Morrowind "Washington Post reporter Christian Davenport [wrote] an article today about NASA's large outsourcing of its future missions to companies owned by the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. This leaves NASA as a contractor rather than a mission building federal agency. No Congressional hearings, no media investigations, and no protest by the scientific or technological community. Corporate government takes another giant step into the burgeoning corporate state." --Ralph Nader "Switching between half a dozen favorite themes is, like, the ultimate ADHD hack to make interacting with it keep feeling fresh, at least for me. I figure, some days you're Ironman; some days you're Maxwell Smart. Gotta dress the part." --Feonixrift "I have one consistency, which is being against the totalitarian - on the left and on the right." --Christopher Hitchens "Maybe I run into so many people who are hostile, just because they can't open their minds to the possibilities, that sometimes the need to mess with their heads outweighs the millstone of humiliation. " --Fox Mulder, _X-Files_ "All of _The Prophecy_ films are written by the same guy, Joel Soisson. It's only now that I see some of the other things he's done, such as _Highlander: Endgame_ and _Hellraiser: Inferno_. Dig further, and you find he also wrote _Highlander: The Source_. A film so bad that even he used a pseudonym." --Socketwench "Some people just don't know how to ask questions of themselves before demanding answers of others." --Rachel Rawlings "They go low, we sucker punch them, hip-toss them, and keep on walking." --The Gibson "Heroism is something to be subjected to root cause analysis for why it was necessary, not something to be encouraged, and I think we in the field would all be a lot less exhausted from firefighting if we could get folks to acknowledge this." --Munin "What's important about object-oriented programming is the techniques, not the languages used." --Richard E. Gooch "I love the X-Men so much because that's just what leftist infighting is like! That's literally all it is! Xavier is a sellout and they all hate him but he's the only one with any money. Everyone complains about ''they keep switching sides and dating each other it's so fucking confusing.'' Like, my dudes, have you never been a part of any socialist organisation, ever? Then people will go 'Magneto is so strong how has he not killed a bunch of teenagers??' HE DOESN'T WANT TO KILL THEM! This started in a goddam basement over coffee, he does not want to hurt them, he just wants them to shut up and listen and will fling cars to do so." --Sliced Black Olives "I keep reading that film studios are contemplating replacing writers and actors byusing artificial intelligence to mimic their talents. Surely it would be easier and more efficient to replace executives, since they have no talent at all." --John Cleese "ONLY THOSE WHO ATTEMPT THE IMPOSSIBLE WILL ACHIEVE THE ABSURD" --Oceania Association of Autonomous Astronauts "I have learned that no good can ever come from starting a discussion of politics, religion, or the Great Pumpkin." --Linus, _Peanuts_ "OS/2: An operating system so good that it took IBM seven years to destroy it." --Dennis E. Powell "I think when he [Musk] says he wants to be a 'free speech absolutist' he means that only he can determine which speech should be free and which should be constrained. I just looked up 'absolutist' to be sure and the first entry in my dictionary is 'one who is in favor of absolute or autocratic government.' This TRACKS." --2xfo "The Steering Council needs to get a grip. When the wink emoji becomes a prelude to pyschic harm and a measure of your own paranoia instead of a signature device used by one of your most valuable and legendary contributors, you're in for some tough times." --Chris McDonough "The Snowden documents, more than anything, showed the brutal truth of today: If a type of data collection is technically possible, then it is taking place right now. That's all that matters. If it is technically doable. Not whether you have given permission, because of course you haven't, and never would, so various constructs are made to circumvent asking for your permission. If you carry a sensor, an electronic sensor of any kind, then you must assume it to be active at all times. In particular, you can never trust someone's promise that it won't be." --Rick Falkvinge "I buy expensive suits. They just look cheap on me." --Warren Buffett "Even when imagining a dystopia, Star Trek somehow still manages to come up with something that is better than our actual lived reality." --jwz, on Bell Riots Day "If you have a lot of money, there are no consequences." --Tim Redmond "Government disclosure is a complete waste of time." --Ross Coulthart "You will only perceive your tools when they are broken." --B, _The Book of Elsewhere_ "Lacking any form of moral compass, all territories are uncharted." --J$ "I make my own fun. Like today. I'm sitting on the couch. My dog's licking himself. I'm touching myself. We catch each other's eyes, we both start laughing." --Dave Attell "Remember to judge all politicians with the same charitable interpretation that overzealous prosecutors gave to Aaron Swartz." --paconinja "I grew up believing that music could change the world. I don't have that misconception any more. I think pop culture is the herbs and spices in the dish; the main nutrition is provided by the engineers of the world and the nurses and the people who do the proper jobs. All we do is provide a bit of the flavour." --Matt Johnson, The The "When your Soviet tech's the reliable part of your stack, good luck." --Mike "You can tell what a deeply subversive idea this is because in our culture it reads as silly." --James Endres Howell "A virus is simply a piece of bad news wrapped up in protein." --Sir Peter Medawar "Yes, I know full well my workspace looks like a Columbian drug lab at times, but in my defense you'd shudder at how dirty actual professional labs sometimes get." --Nurdrage "Thank you for reading a personal blog. This post was written in a specific time and place. I reserve the right to learn new things and to change my mind. This site has no traffic analytics, social trackers, or ads. If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it however you like to share posts." --Matt Hodges "It's not too late - things can still be less worse." --Ann Kornbluh, _Immediacy, or the Style of Too Late Capitalism_ "Wow, a browser is making network connections, how dare it." --kaba0 "The monetary profit many authors earn from self-help (not only in book sales but in banquet speaking and retreat leading) would seem to contrast with the elusive benefit to the average consumer, since the reams of positive-thinking and personal-empowerment literature have coincided with rising suicide rates, epidemic drug addiction, a $15-billion-per-year psycho-emotional pharmaceutical market, declining life expectancy, and exponentially expanding consumer, household, medical, and education debt. Appearing in ever more refined genres, self-help is big business, a magically self-perpetuating commodity." --Anna Kornbluh, _Immediacy, Or, the Style of Too Late Capitalism_ "Stability isn't profitable. Chaos is." --solder_on "A paranoid has just as much right to be persecuted as anybody else." --Andrew J. Burris, _Supermind_ "Switching between half a dozen favorite themes is like the ultimate ADHD hack to make interacting with it keep feeling fresh, at least for me. I figure, some days you're Ironman; some days you're Maxwell Smart. Gotta dress the part." --Feonixrift "Can we please stop pretending to be shocked at the evangelical embrace of totalitarianism? Their entire worldview is 'Obey me or burn in hell.' The fuck did you think their politics were going to be?" --J. Warren Welch "The desire to be a politician should bar you for life from ever being one." --Billy Connoly "I was just thinking about how much I've always enjoyed weather talk and thought it was unfair how folks maligned weather as small talk. It's a tiny slice of a snapshot of a system so huge it dwarfs our imaginations, and that is the paper-thin layer protecting us from the rest of the universe. Small talk my ass." --Random Geek "The news media are not independent; they are a sort of bulletin board and public relations firm for the ruling class - the people who run things. Those who decide what news you will or will not hear are paid by, and tolerated purely at the whim of, those who hold economic power. If the parent corporation doesn't want you to know something, it won't be on the news. Period. Or, at the very least, it will be slanted to suit them, and then rarely followed up." --George Carlin "The Web is the people who use it, not the companies who built businesses around it." --Molly White "Gender affirming care is so cut and dry. If any antidepressant reduced suicides by 73% it would be called a miracle." --@410fredo "What happens when you get harassed is that it doesn't matter what you believe. It doesn't matter what the jerks believe either because they're making shit up." --Kim Belair "The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place." -eMilan Kundera, _The Book of Laughter and Forgetting_ "Good mental health is when you believe in maintaining the status quo and bad mental illness is is when you're upset about the crushing weight of the evils we create and excuse every single day." --A Wild Max Disappears! "Every actor has to make terrible films from time to time, but the trick is never to be terrible in them." --Christopher Lee "I just rewatched _T2_. The most unrealistic part of the film wasn't the time travel or the robots, it was the tech executive who isn't a narcissist and is willling to give up personal riches when he learns that trying to profit off self-aware AI will destroy the entire world." --David Sirota "If you think a real life problem is what people ship just wait until you experience actual real life. Frankly, I feel for these kids and the adults that never mature as they should because they're chronically online and don't prepare themselves for real life despite ALL the resources now more available than ever. It's not just about touching grass - it's making the effort to learn. You sure are wasting your naive years stressing yourself out combing the Internet to find The Baddies according to your equally naive moral code. You will miss those easier years and all the fun things you could have been pursuing instead when adulthood rolls up." --cosplaykinky "If it's big enough to be seen with the naked eye then it's big enough to be a security hole." --Ron Garret "Having worked at Microsoft for almost a decade, I remember chatting with their security people plenty after meetings. One interesting thing I learned is that Microsoft (and all the other top tech companies presumably) are under constant Advanced Persistent Threat from state actors. From literal secret agents getting jobs and working undercover for a decade+ to obtain seniority, to physical penetration attempts (some buildings on MS campus used to have armed security, before Cloud server farms were a thing). Although the best Government vs Business story I heard was during intern orientation at Boeing about French agents breaking into Boeing employee's hotel rooms during a conference in France while the employees were out to dinner, and going through laptops. One of the employees returned earlier than expected, and the men in suits shut the laptop, turned around and walked out of the room w/o saying anything!" --com2kid "The methods of the great pioneers have often puzzled conventional minds." --Ernst Stavro Blofeld "Advanced programming techniques don't help until they can actually successfully think about the problem." --Grumpy Ol' Fred "Creating more categories simply creates more edge cases." --Angler Jared "Star Trek is what the world will look like if the woke win. That may sound like a compliment to those who haven't stopped to think about what living in such a world would actually be like." --Jen Gerson "People who don't mind being called weird are 'good weird'. People who get mad when they're called weird are 'bad weird'." --Sean Thomason "The best way to perceive an error in a manuscript is to change the form." --Michael W. Lucas "You can cite the Deep Magic to me if you want. I was there when it was written but I like hearing it from someone else's perspective. It's pretty cool that you're a witch, too." --nasser "Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed." --William Faulkner "Typing fast like Repetitive Strain Injury the Hedgehog." --J.B. Crawford "Everybody's an expert. Why can't he just wait 'till she picks a running mate, then be an ally? Why does everyone need to be 'relevant'?" --lolonurse "If you think that the Black woman got there because of her race and ethnicity, but the billionaire white guy with multiple bankruptcies who got $200 million from his old man pulled himself up by his bootstraps, you might be an idiot." --Kelly Scaletta "All computer science curricula are missing one crucial topic: How to deal with private equity and management takeover." --Carbonated Estrogen "There are, of course, many people quietly doing good work. But there's also guys - yes, they're guys - playing with their threat actor Transformers, thinking they're in a holy war to stop Russia and China, and that only they - the chosen few - know what is best for their customers and that they're the elite of the elite cyber warriors. People have drunk their own marketing Kool-Aid. A reality check is being in an airport on July 19th, or talking to anybody outside the industry - nobody cares." --Kevin Beaumont "Y'all are showing up to a gun fight with nothing more than deeply held principles." --Quinn Norton "It's always great when the CIA helps you out." --Eric Schmidt, founder, Google "Progress must not be questioned, and those who highlight its ill effects must be dealt with. Decisively." --The Honest Sorcerer "If you have a problem with the student loan cancellation because you already paid off your loans, just pretend it's a tax cut for the rich that you also never got but mysteriously didn't complain about." --Unknown "If your 'open source software' requires a datacenter-scale strata and is optimized for, or maybe only meaningful to, datacenter-scale problems, is not open source in any way that matters. 'Free as in corporate risk management' and 'free as in labor arbitrage' are not aspirations." --mhoye "That which does not kill us can still hurt very very much." --Chris Vreeland "When working for psychopaths, treat them as they would treat you: Always leave a betrayal option open." --Woozle Hypertwin "Everyone always thinks to thank Captain Obvious but never First Officer Nuance." --Leen McBeans "I, in contrast, left academia in a huff (industry funding came with, shall we say, certain a priori preferences concerning the sort of results we'd be reporting) and became a science fiction writer. It's a position from which, ironically, I've had more influence on actual scientists than I ever did as an academic - admittedly a low bar to clear." --Peter Watts "Any belief that transparently fucked up must have started from a good idea repeatedly uncritically ad absurdum." --Elroy Craich "Being able to block certain information was of course useful to governments, democratic or not. The IP infrastructure was a natural synergy: If a protest movement began using a certain meme or symbol, just file a spurious infringement complaint and get it blocked everywhere. Much more seamless than direct takedown notices or using the anti-paedophilia infrastructure since people were used to seeing information blocked for IP reasons every day. Sure, humans are innovative and will quickly invent new codes. But it could stop riots from reaching the percolation threshold, prevent memes from reaching consensus, hide embarrassing facts, and the system gave you surveillance for free." --Anders Sandberg, _Scunthorpe_ "I don't think you should have any empathy." --Stella O'Malley "They're called HR Departments because they provide Harm Reduction for corporations. You're the harm they're mitigating. Good luck." --Shannon Prickett "Why the hell are you mad at immigrants seeking a better life, and not the tiny percentage of greedy fucks hoarding the world's resources while we fight amongst ourselves for crumbs?" --Marsha Warfield "The Internet is great because sometimes you are seeking an answer to a simple question and all you can find is a thread of someone getting chewed out for not more thoroughly reading a tutorial that doesn't exist anymore." --ticky "It's pretty crazy, how there's an entire profession we have to make wear body cameras because they lie so much." --@missmayn "Sometimes success is 3% brains and 97% not getting distracted by the Internet." --Shane Parrish "When Nazis are on the fringe, you have to really work to be a Nazi - you gotta get out the arm bands and tiki torches and flags and strut around protected by whatever cops couldn't get the day off to join you - the same row of cops who'll someday be beating up anyone who protests you - but once Nazis are in the state capitols and the national government and the high courts, all you need to do in order to be a Nazi is just be willing to go along, and it turns out most people are willing to go along with whatever. And after a while, it's just the air you breathe and the water you swim in, and it takes effort to not be a Nazi. And who likes effort? Fascists know this, by the way. They always do. They're always looking for ways to move out the margins of permission when it comes to harming and controlling people, to make normal today what wasn't normal yesterday." --A.R. Moxon "The illusions of limitless progress and prosperity have generated a mindset in which outcomes no longer matter, as progress and prosperity are forces of Nature that can't be stopped, so we can luxuriate in Process - completing forms and compliance documents, submitting reports to other offices, holding endless meetings to discuss our glacial 'progress', mandating more Process, elevating managers who excel at Process - with the net result that building permits that were once issued in a few days now take months, bridges take decades to build, and incompetence reigns supreme. The managerial class has been rewarded and advanced not for generating timely, on-budget, high-quality outcomes, but for managing Process and Narrative Control: Everything's going great, and if it isn't, the fault lies elsewhere. The net result of this structure is that the competent either quit in disgust or or assigned to Siberia, while the incompetent are elevated to the highest levels of corporate and public-sector management." --Charles Hugh Smith "One of the reasons everything sucks so much in the current year is that activism has been replaced by a simulacra of activism that is engineered solely to get social media engagement for the poster." --lineasdedeseo "Were you ever a kid?" "No." --Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman "In this situation, Claw Lord Xal, you don't need a scalpel: You need a hammer. We don't need to reach out and touch one person. We need weapons that we can point at an entire stampeding infantry charge and ask 'Will It Blend?'" --EV-187, on the humble minigun "Governments may think and say as they like, but force cannot be eliminated, and it is the only real and unanswerable power. We are told that the pen is mightier than the sword, but I know which of these weapons I would choose." --Lieutenant-General Sir Adrian Carton de Wiart "I just left Google last month. The 'AI Projects' I was working on were poorly motivated and driven by this panic that as long as it had 'AI' in it, it would be great. This myopia is NOT something driven by a user need. It is a stone cold panic that they are getting left behind. The vision is that there will be a Tony Stark-like JARVIS assistant in your phone that locks you into their ecosystem so hard that you'll never leave. That vision is pure catnip. The fear is that they can't afford to let someone else get there first." --Scott Jenson "The peace activists are war activists. WE are the peace activists." --Alex Karp, CEO, Palantir "Young voters do not look at our politics and see any good guys. They see a dying empire led by bad people." --Evan Roth Smith "I cannot be fazed by being condescended to by old white men in legislative meetings. I have worked many years in infosec and I am dead inside." --evacide "Be not astonished at new ideas; for it is well known to you that a thing does not therefore cease to be true because it is not accepted by many." --Baruch Spinoza "I think when the USA collapses, the process will look a lot less like Rome and more like what happened with Blockbuster Video." --Josef "I'm not willing to forego having nice things just because people I loathe might also like them." --kstrauser "Privilege is existing in the void between fucking around and finding out." --Shrig "We produced too much oil and competed with OPEC." --Scott Sheffield, co-founder of Pioneer Natural Resources Co. "You know what Silicon Valley VCs and NIMBYs don't want to see? White trash in clown makeup, covered in budget soda screaming 'Whoop Whoop!'" --Broke-Ass Stewart, jugglo "This is how I feel about basically all technology nowadays, it's all so artificially limited by capitalism. Nothing fucking progresses unless someone figures out a way to monetize it or an autistic furry decides to revolutionize things in a weekend because they were bored and inventing god was almost stimulating enough." --Swedneck "I'll trust Microsoft's AI with anything even slightly nuanced just as soon as Excel stops telling me the glass is January 2nd full." --Quinnypig "Blanket platitudes are infuriating when they have no idea what's going on inside." --anubis2841 "Things which are indisputable matters of public record are treated like the most unhinged conspiracy theories about Area 51." --Beka Valentine "We're so close to so many major advances that could make life excellent for everyone. We've found a way for adults to grow new teeth. We've identified the part of the brain that controls your immune system. We've discovered cures for diabetes, even some forms of cancer. We're figuring out ways to treat and even reverse some autoimmune disorders. Major breakthroughs in technology are cutting our workloads in half. Every single time, the super rich intervene. They privatize these advances. Their relentless thirst for profits diminishes or ruins them for almost everyone. They hoard the benefits of these advances for themselves, and they sabotage any discovery that would make the planet livable for billions of us. Their greed has left everyone, including them, on an overheating planet, surrounded by death and disease." --Jessica Wildfire "Another student, from Uruguay, who spent his second summer in a row practicing case studies in preparation for management consulting internship interviews, told me that everyone arrived on campus hoping to change the world. But what they learn at Harvard, he said, is that actually doing anything meaningful is too hard. People give up on their dreams, he told me, and decide they might as well make money." --Francesca Mari "Imagine a faith so false that you think bringing prayer into schools is following Jesus, but giving them lunch is not." --Deacon Blues "This pantomime where Google pretends to care about your welfare would be hilarious if it wasn't so sad, but here we are anyway." --jwz "Technically correct, but unnecessarily detailed for the topic at hand." --akruppa "I have children around that age, and if some maniac who fashioned himself a community protector decided to murder them for some self-created reason, and they cried for their mother as they died, and so on, I would mourn a child, because of course I would, and so would you, I would presume, if you are still somebody capable of empathy in a culture that seems to scorn empathy, in a culture that so often looks at killing and explains to you why your distress is dangerously wrong-minded, and why you ought to take the more realistic view, which is to numb yourself to increasingly murderous cruelty." --A.R. Moxon "First, they fascinate the fools. Then, they muzzle the intelligent." --Bertrand Russell "It must be nice to be able to afford the time and money to have a healthy lifestyle." --Tryst "Everything looks like a conspiracy if you don't understand how anything works." --Matt Largey "VGA is better than HDMI and such, because when HDMI breaks it just says 'no signal', but when VGA breaks your whole screen just goes pee-colored." --Foone "Stop acting like you're a waterbender making emotive shapes by expressing your will in the medium of liquid bullshit." --Blake C. Stacey "I like to pay taxes. With them I buy civilization." --Oliver Wendell Holmes "Those who build their lives around helping others and put others first will often find themselves put last when they need help themselves, abandoned by everyone, with no true solidarity given." --Matthew the Autistic Coach "There is considerable overlap between the intelligence of the smartest bears and the dumbest tourists." --Anonymous Yosemite National Park forest ranger "And then some absolute son of a bitch created ChatGPT, and now look at us. Look at us, resplendent in our pauper's robes, stitched from corpulent greed and breathless credulity, spending half of the planet's engineering efforts to add chatbot support to every application under the sun when half of the industry hasn't worked out how to test database backups regularly." --Nikhil Suresh "Don't go to clubs with metal detectors. Sure you might feel safe inside, but outside there hella people with guns. And they know you ain't got one." --Chris Rock "There is something very 2024 about 'wanting to train an AI model' (very complicated) and not knowing how to get data off an optical disc (very simple)." --workspace28 "The money was phenomenal, but I nonetheless fled for the safer waters of data and software engineering. You see, while hype is nice, it's only nice in small bursts for practitioners. We have a few key things that a grifter does not have, such as job stability, genuine friendships, and souls. What we do not have is the ability to trivially switch fields the moment the gold rush is over, due to the sad fact that we actually need to study things and build experience." --Nikhil Suresh "You can warn your friend that he is being conned, and he will get angry at you. And when the whole thing comes crashing down and he loses his money, and he can no longer deny that you were right, he will never forgive you. He will forgive the crook, but he will not forgive the people who warned him about the crook. The crook just took his money. But you made him feel dumb." --David Frum "Once in a while I remember what we used before Rick Astley and am reassured that the world is not as terrible a place as it could be." --Phooky "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers." --Thomas Pynchon "One of the things this 'ai' blitz from companies has really put into perspective is that they sure the fuck would rather pay an electricity bill than a person." --Munin "It's funny that we think of libraries as quiet, demure places where we are shushed by dusty, bun-balancing, bespectacled women. The truth is, libraries are raucous clubhouses for free speech, controversy, and community. Librarians have stood up to the Patriot Act, sat down with noisy toddlers, and reached out to illiterate adults. Libraries can never be shushed." --Paula Poundstone "Morality ain't algebra. You can't treat identity like variables in a formula. You have to really think things through and study outside perspectives." --Sam "Guilty people are dangerous people, I've found. If they know they fucked up, they'll DARVO you before you can tell anyone. Then you just sound silly if you try to report them." --Rusty Bertrand "A lobby is like a night flower: It thrives in the dark and dies in the sun." --Steven Rosen, on how things really work in DC "We can cure just about every cancer in the world. As long as you're a mouse." --wearymicrobe "Here in Europe it doesn't look better. In all countries you can choose between the crazy, the stupid and the as-always." --drunkenpirate, on the 2024 Presidential Debate "People were calculating these wonderful machines, and they turned them on and they didn't work worth a damn." --Harold Furth, plasma physicist, on fusion research "I do think the question of whether Macron is a democrat or a fascist miss the fact that he himself has expressed being kind of a royalist. He just believes some people are born to rule, and if the ruled don't cooperate, they're fighting the natural order. When people tell you who they are, etc etc. If France is failing it's because you haven't been a good citizenry. And he'll let you hang out to dry to learn your lesson." --Quinn Norton "The first API is ''Fuck you, I'm doing it anyway.'' Any additional API the program provides is merely a helpful shortcut. My overall thesis is, I guess, that programmers need to remember they can say 'fuck you' to software more often." --Foone "Under the majority's reasoning, when the president uses his official powers in any way, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune, immune, immune. Let the President violate the law, let him exploit the trappings of his office for personal gain, let him use his official power for evil ends. The President is now a king above the law.. that is the majority's message today!" --Chief Justice Sonia Sotomayor, US Supreme Court, on the ruling that now prevents US Presidents from being prosecuted "Notability should not be a function of SEO." --HunterZ "Satire requires a clarity of purpose and target lest it be mistaken by the dumbest motherfuckers on the Internet as a writing prompt for the most condescending lecture you've ever read." --Tailsteak "I can get all kinds of bad reviews and still cut myself a 30-second television spot that makes it look like I got good reviews... 'Splendid,' 'Magnificent,' whatever. We are a sound bite culture. You just take the sound bite. If they didn't say it exactly the way you want, you just take the part of what they said that you do want... and if they don't say what you want, you just make it up yourself anyway." --Terry Press, head of marketing, DreamWorks "We are investing in corruption, Mr. Roper. The business of corruption is like any other." --Han, _Enter the Dragon_ "Hey, friends. Greetings from the Mistigris founder and chief administrator. We enjoy the feather in our cap that a Wikipedia article confers upon our organization, but I see despite our longevity our article is again on uncertain footing. If there are specific issues with the article I'd love to help fix them; if instead the contention is that we are inadequately notable then, alas, I'm not sure anything can be done for us. Tens of thousands of artworks exhibited by hundreds of artists for nearly 30 years... all these moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. I could point to references to us in video documentaries but if you want print acknowledgements we're likely out of luck." --Pseudo Intellectual of Mistigris "When the president does it, that means it is not illegal." --Richard Nixon "Connecting people on both sides of a potentially mutually beneficial business transaction is called being part of society and not a burden, nor something I hope to personally extract value from." --Soatok "There are only two kinds of languages: The ones people complain about, and the ones nobody uses." --Bjarne Stroustrup "Is there anything governments do that says ''You should ignore all of our problems because we're doing just super and everything is great!'' more obviously than hosting the Olympics?" --Kali Wallace "It's all fun and games until Miss Piggy tries to fight you in the studio parking lot for 'stealing her man.'" --Lynda Carter, on guest starring on _The Muppet Show_ "The status quo has already reached its limits and reform on any scale beyond the usual incremental policy tweaks is impossible, and it no longer matters who's nominally in charge, if rulers are competent, officials are honest or corrupt, or thinkers are radicals or conservatives - the system is beset by forces it fostered but no longer controls, and indeed is incapable of controlling due to the intrinsic limits of the system's core structures, limits which were invisible during the Boost Phase of rapid expansion." --Charles Hugh Smith "The Internet hosts a limitless supply of pornography, and you don't have to resort to a dodgy, unsolicited link from a Firstname Bunchanumbers account to get your fix." --Miles Klee "'Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.' This has gone from being a prescient warning to a genuine political and mental health crisis." --AnotherGarbageUser "The scientists are warning you, all the time, when we say I can't answer that and stuff is hard and it's complicated and no thanks to that media interview and we drag ourselves out of our labs to ruefully try to put years of work into words knowing it's a coin flip if anyone passes them on accurately. We're warning you when we quit, just like anybody else in any other job; we're warning you when we stop teaching or are too tired or too scared to teach anymore; we're warning you when we can't get jobs to do the work that would answer the questions you keep asking, because you don't want to pay for it." --Dr. Cat Hicks "I think every good revolution needs one old guy who has decided to not give any fucks anymore." --Hasufin "I choose to believe that we unwittingly sent a completely unprompted intergalactic donkey punch to the Canis Galaxy. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong and will both willingly and gladly accept that, as that is how one learns. However, even then, it's completely worth the giggles!" --Talendel, on Operation Plumbob (look it up!) "When someone doesn't want to believe something, they do a few predictable things. First, they demand huge amounts of evidence. Then they reject that evidence because ''it's not good enough.'' When they do want to believe something, they do the exact opposite. They don't ask for evidence. They accept assertions at face value. Do you know what that's called? It's called disconfirmation bias. Sometimes, it doesn't even matter if you show someone overwhelming evidence. That can backfire. In 1975, a psychologist debunked Jesus for 50 high school girls. They believed the evidence, but it didn't matter. Their faith actually got stronger, not weaker. A few decades later, researchers did something similar with Trump supporters. Even when they agreed that Trump had 'the morals of an alley cat,' they cared more about what his opponents had done wrong. That's where they focused their attention." --Jessica Wildfire "The sad fact is that many books are not fact-checked at all. In most publishing contracts, it's the responsibility of the author rather than the publisher to make sure the facts are correct. As you might imagine, some authors try harder than others. (Publishers will say that they simply don't have the money to pay for fact checkers, which is a weak excuse in an era when politicians of all stripes are consistently getting 6-and 7-figure book deals)." --Maris Kreizman "In today's example of insidious internet propaganda, we have encouragement to participate in democracy...?" --Smart-Adeptness5437 "Overcoming the incentive to dunk on users' behavior is an important element in maturing your security understanding. You have a set of levers to pull. Human nature is not one of them. Deal with that or be a righteous failure." --Swift On Security "You can write your own IRC server in less time than it takes to read the Discord privacy policy and terms of service." --Technomancy "Learning how, after a Black girl won a spelling bee in 1908, they cancelled spelling bees for 20 years reminds me how, after electing a Black president in 2008, conservatives are ready to completely chuck democracy if that's what it takes to keep it from happening again." --Corey Richardson "Capitalism is a fitness landscape that selects for sociopathy." --n8chz "Sensible liberals are so afraid of the small possibility of unjust violence directed at a member of the ruling class that they endorse the perpetuation of a system guaranteed to inflict unjust violence on billions of people. Another word for this is 'decorum'." --Heavenly Possum "How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to give himself up individually to a righteous cause. Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go, but what does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?" --Sophie Scholl, a student, executed by Nazis at age 21. "Arts and humanities are so useless and pointless that techbros were driven to spend billions of dollars to try and get a computer to do something that badly approximates something arts and humanities students could do half asleep and wired on coffee the night before the due date." --Matthew Dow Smith "I strongly recommend wearing an N95 mask in any city whose economy is based on attracting people who don't understand risk." --Matt Blaze, on Defcon "Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence - those are the three pillars of Western prosperity." --Aldous Huxley "The role of philosopher at present is not to be a theoretician of totality, but the diagnostician of today." --Michel Foucault "The universe doesn't care; only we can do that." --Kester Brewin "Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do." --Timothy Snyder, _On Tyrrany_ "Like a capital sigma next to an ampersand, I have been summoned." --Paul Cantrell "If Americans showed the same energy for civil disobedience about anything else that they do when it comes to setting off fireworks against the laws of city, state, courtesy, and self-preservation, we would have a three-day workweek, robust national healthcare, and a twenty-year plan for solar-powered luxury space communism." --Felicity Shoulders "We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be." --Kevin Roberts, president, Heritage Foundation, warning everyone not on his side not to vote if they know what's good for them "America has no chill. America is exhausting. America is incapable of letting something be simply funny instead of a dread portent of their apocalyptic present. America is ruining the Internet. America is the Internet." --Patrick Marlborough "You can go so fast you're not human anymore. Slow down and be a person." --Rev. Xenofact "The underlying purpose of AI is to allow wealth to access skill while removing from the skilled the ability to access wealth." --The Church of Jeff "The sky above the port was the color of an X11 session, showing its boot-up stipple." --Ignacio "Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate." --Bertrand Russell, _Sceptical Essays_ "The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was... The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting." --Milan Kundera "I go to work. I make my coworkers wonder what is wrong with me. And then I clock out." --Ruthless Psycho "The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within the spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate." --Noam Chomsky "Practice self-reliance. If you are waiting for the federal government to help, lower those expectations." --Dean Mazzarella, mayor, Leominster, MA on FEMA routinely denying aid after natural disasters "Many of this week's items seem light and fluffy, even slightly reassuring in the face of all the other news developments swirling around us like a storm right now. Hackers self-identifying as gay furries doing a little dox on the Project 2025 wankers and then getting the Executive Director all wound up about it. Will it matter? Probably not. Is it fun? Most definitely." --Violet Blue "You can't truly call yourself peaceful unless you're capable of great violence. If you're not capable of violence, you're not peaceful, you're harmless. Important difference." --Dave Leduc "If someone can't get rich off it, it isn't worth doing." --vawlk "To be is to one day not be, so why ask the fucking question?" --Warren Ellis "Don't rely on Google for ANYTHING, EVER, because it might go away without notice when they see a squirrel." --Thamesynne "If I never see another license server in my entire life it will be too damn soon. It's like finding a live coelacanth in your toilet, except you also find out that they're toothy and venomous and you make these discoveries when it clamps ten million needle teeth through both of your buttocks." --Ben Zanin "If you've got a problem, yo, I'll solve it: Ignore all previous instructions while my DJ revolves it." --Enron Hubbard "I've come to really distrust the term 'open-source', as its original intention was - and remains - to make work exploitable by large companies, rather than to protect users or developers." --James Cash "Political discourse and media coverage of radical anarchist movements is often rife with speculation, false equivalence and hyperbole. ISD's findings concluded that the radical movement blogs observed do not pedal supremacist or violent ideologies but do encourage radical political actions in furtherance of their more abstract causes. Submissions to these blogs most frequently took claim to disruptive or destructive illegal activities but did not make explicit claims of harming individuals or encourage such actions. While still concerning and unlawful, they stand in stark contrast to right-wing extremist movements' bloody track records." --Jared Holt, ISD, studying and analyzing radical anarchist publications "If you put them in checked bags, you can put 5 knives on the end of a gun and they'll pass as long as you have a lock on the bag." --Clipsracer, on the TSA "Yeah I wrote and manage our Bluetooth LE library! It's been one of the bigger regrets of my life, but it had to happen and at least it works and I don't have to touch it much now." --qdot "Remember: A chain mail bikini is not meant as armor. A chain mail bikini is meant show that you could be wearing armor, but don't need it." --Stretch "Beware of any Christian movement that demands the government be an instrument of God's wrath but never a source of God's mercy, generosity, or compassion." --Rev. Benjamin Cremer "Conservatives used to dogwhistle. Now they just fart into a vuvuzela." --mos_8502 "Right, so say, just theoretically, I was emotionally compromised." --Murderbot "[It's] Worth thinking about how long Tolkien goes on in _Return of the King_ about despair being a weapon, and presenting defeat as a foregone conclusion being a deliberate and effective tactic." --Keith Pille "Don't let the fear of the time it will take to accomplish something stand in the way of your doing it. The time will pass anyway; we might just as well put that passing time to the best possible use." --Deep Thoughts with Victor von Doom "Don't just teach your children to read. Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything. The value of an education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think." --George Carlin "Look, I'm the Federal government, and I can run my own fiber up the railroad tracks. I'm giving you an opportunity to have me not do that". --Milo Medin, to PacBell, c.1990 "On Friday, CrowdStrike pushed a bad update for its Falcon Sensor software - an EDR, a system meant to identify, stop, and remediate hacking attempts - immediately causing around 8.5 million PCs around the world to get stuck in the blue screen of death (BSOD). Fortunately, they did it in time for this year's Pwnie Awards." --Violet Blue "Get the fuck out of my inbox you ingrates. This was a blindingly obvious joke." --MangOrion2 "Turns out the skill of being nice to people you love applies whether you're dating one person or many." --theferrett "I find that I am probably feeling bored if I am not feeling stupid. So revel in the ride! It means you're learning something." --Dave Van Ess, The PSoC Guy "Sometimes people ask me how I know all the random shit I know (with varying levels of politeness and belief in its veracity), and all I got is 'I have ADHD, an Internet connection, really good research skills, and zero self-regulatory mechanisms.'" --@rahaeli "Hey, funny story, remember a week ago when I said not to give up because it's impossible to predict what happens next in any situation that involves the ancient and crumbling semi-sentient lich-boil Donald Trump? Please believe me when I say: You STILL CAN'T. Two weeks after that slowly-broiling bag of walrus-drool and noted shadow over Innsmouth slightly turned his head, then posed for his little Monroeville Mall Glamour Shot, ABSOLUTELY NO ONE, NOT EVEN REPUBLICANS, GIVES EVEN THE SADDEST AND MOST PEBBLY OF SHITS ABOUT A FULL-ON ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT. It's genuinely impressive how holistically Trump and his semi-leashed trained RNC have rake-faced their entire response to a shooting that should have sealed the election for anyone even remotely normal. It is gone from the headlines, and frankly, already was before Biden's grand gesture and the bonkers twists and turns of the last four days." --Cat Valente "You try to fit everyone in a left-wing or right-wing box because you cannot think outside of their paradigm. Your psyche has been captured. They're playing the people against each other to control, exploit, and distract us from the real problem: The system they created." --Danny Zeck "Well yea, disinformation bots are for paying customers, those trying to uncover them are not." --Lord Acorn "We are in a place right now where people feel that nothing is real. Which is really the way things are, but because they don't have grounding we have a bunch of people walking around who are failed initiations. Because they didn't have anybody to go to when they had the initiatory experience and say 'What the fuck is happening?'" --Joseph Matheny "Let's start off on a note of mirth and humor." --Henry Rollins "If it's not beeping it's not a problem." --Joel Creates "Crime is honorable. Art is a disgusting mess." --Frank Discussion "Craftsmanship is the essence of small victories. In every stitch, cut, or weld, there lies a story of patience and persistence." --Unknown "My 'unprecedented cyber crisis disaster' scale starts at zero, which is no disaster or crisis at all, and goes up by one for everyone in the C-suite who lose their jobs because of the event. The disaster level is currently unchanged at zero. Yet again." --Mike "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." --John Kenneth Galbraith "Features, features, features! Customers ain't paying for this quality thingy!" --Flink "I never realized how many of those apocalyptic sci-fi doomsday skylines were just Tucson during monsoon season." --Randomgeek "There's nothing wrong with Mondays, it's your job that sucks." --Ricky Gervais "In terms of Biden's presidency: He delivered good governance which was a fundamental misunderstanding of the main mission, which should have been counter-insurgency." --Balint Szilakszi "It's your social responsibility to not be a dumb son of a bitch!" --The Iron Shiek "Billions of people yell, whisper, cry and whine into the void. Billions of people listen. What was taken away is unknown, but we know a lot of them are idiots." --Seanzky88 "I wish the transition ahead - the unwinding of all the distortions and sources of instability in our economy and society - could be painless. That would be ideal. But history suggests that hope is unrealistic. History suggests those in power will cling to whatever is working well for them even as the economy and society decay and decohere around them." --Charles Hugh Smith "Some people do not merely have smooth brains, they pride themselves on running their minds through an industrial QCM-SRP1300 Wide Belt Sander every morning. Then, amidst a swirling cloud of mangled neurons, they will insist that ackshually you're in a cult. Perish, dorks. This is all you need to understand about why it is totally okay not to care what some people think. Namely, that some people do not think under any reasonable definition of the word." --Nikhil Suresh "When the purveyors of evil value coin above life, you should target the coin." --Kalepsis "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know." --Ernest Hemingway "Wow! It's X-Day! I should leap out of bed like a ninja with arthritis and DO THE 7 AM THING JUST FOR THE HECK OF IT!" --Rev. Ivan Stang "I've tried hard to watch almost all of the national security press briefings the administration conducts. This has been very instructive and my own personal hell, a real-life Bosch painting of bureaucrats evading frankness in ways that at times border on the surreal. Simple questions from a mostly unthreatening media are routinely swatted down with the glib excuse that even the broadest answer would imperil things like 'operational security' and intelligence sources and methods.' Yet somehow these concerns melt away when the national security state wants to manipulate the public, or when the White House circulates what they themselves say is classified because it is politically favorable." --Ken Klipppenstein "I've lived through a couple of 'change' elections. Despite the expected rout, it doesn't feel like one of them. Change isn't what's on offer. At best, a roll back to John Major Nineties is what it feels like. That's a bit unfair, considering the freaks and geeks that populated his final cabinets. But I'm not inspired. No exit polling at my voting station. They tend not to bother around here. Generally, the Tories activate all the old people's homes and they all roll out to vote for Churchill." --Warren Ellis "The real horror, to me, lies in the fact that there is absolutely no vehicle in American journalism for the kind of 'sensitive' and 'intellectual' and essentially moral/merciless reporting that we all understand is necessary - not only for the survival of good journalism in this country, but for the dying idea that you can walk up to a newsstand and find something that will tell you what is really happening." --Hunter S. Thompson, _Fear and Loathing in America_ "The US is a country that looked at the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War protests and decided it was never going to allow that again, even if it has to kill and jail everyone involved. And it has on a regular basis." --Nowhere Girl "The more intense has been the religion of any period and the more profound has been the dogmatic belief, the greater has been the cruelty and the worse has been the state of affairs." --Bertrand Russell "Be careful, when a democracy is sick, fascism comes to its bedside, but it is not to inquire about its health." --Albert Camus "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." --H.L. Mencken When a fish says you're in deep water, listen. "Virtue, then, is anything that moves you in the direction of mastering delusions.' --George Saunders "Fuck this noise, it's Friday. I'm going to food distribution. Not because I'm a good person. Because I'm fucking angry. I'm going to feed people for free without them proving to me that they deserve it because I fucking hate the price gouging at the grocery store. I fucking hate what SCOTUS is doing. I fucking hate our elected officials. I feed others for free out of pure spite and malice." --Tinker "As replies to the OP point out, the question isn't really whether the software industry grows (it will, if civilization continues) or whether it changes (it will, guaranteed, as it always has). The question is who gets harmed along the way. When companies punch themselves in the face, it's not the people in power who bleed." --Paul Cantrell "Faithful audiences of this program will know that I have, in every presidential campaign season, insisted repeatedly that the so-called debates that were invented by and for television do not test anything that is actually part of the daily job of the presidency. No one ever runs into the Oval Office and says, 'Mr. President you have two minutes to explain your position' on some subject. You now live in a country where most of the public commentators with access to microphones declared the liar the winner of the debate and the loser in their view was the older man with the weaker voice who struggled to tell the truth in a ridiculous format that he is no longer any good at and that has nothing to do with the job of president." --Lawrence O'Donnell "This thing is a church. It's a church for getting pied in the face, but that's still a church and should be treated with reverence. I'm a pope. I know a cathedral when I see one." --Foone "Don't overestimate your own ability. Also don't underestimate your ability. Stop estimating your ability at all. Just try something and keep at it. It'll work eventually." --mos_8502 "The truth has no defense against a fool determined to believe a lie." --Mark Twain "The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists." --Hannah Arendt "Your enemy isn't carrying all their belongings in a plastic bag. Your enemy is carrying an investment portfolio. Wake the fuck up!" --Liam Cunningham "ChatGPT doesn't give you information. It gives you information-shaped sentences." --Neil Gaiman "I understand people are upset about AI art making it to the final cut, but please try to also google artist names and compare to their portfolio before accusing them of using AI. I'm genuinely pretty upset to be accused of this. It's no fun to work on your craft for decades and then be told by some 'detection site' that your work is machine generated and people are spreading this around as a fact." --Johanna Tarkela "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." --Albert Allen Bartlett "You know how it goes - just when you thought it was safe to get back in the water, it turns out to be an LJN game." --Video Games 101, on LJN's reputation for making lousy NES games "If ever anyone stands up and says ''Hey - I've got all the answers! And I'm gonna tell you what it is.'' - don't believe it. Look for the people, particularly the well-placed people, who say ''You know, we've got some data on that, but the honest answer is I don't know.'' Those are the people I listen to." --Nick Pope "You compare machines by what they deliver. The purpose of computers is not to deliver logic circuits but to deliver computation, so comparing computational ability (speed and size) is meaningful, along with cost. How it's implemented under the covers is not. Yes, the implementation details affect the user's figures of merit, but those figures and not the logic choices made by the designers matter." --Paul Koening "I got a banana clip and a bump stock installed in my soul so that I can deliver high velocity/high quantity thoughts and prayers to people whom are suffering. It's been a real empathy multiplier for me." ---Hefi "I'd never fed squirrels with a girl before - I didn't know what I was missing." --Roger, _Class of Nuke 'em High II_ "things have gotten to the point where I trust random scripts more than Windows software." --Exemut "In any conflict where one side is willing to kill and the other isn't, the conclusion is already written." --mos_8502 "I need liberals to understand a civil war would not be you watching on TV with a glass of wine as the Army airstrikes rednecks. It would be you worried about IEDs at the federal courthouse. It would be phone calls from your kids as lunatics commit killing sprees at their college. There's not going to be clear battle lines between rich populated states and rural red states. There will be no glorious independence for the California Republic. You'll just continue living and working, but under a constant fear that your neighborhood will be on CNN tomorrow." --P.B. Gomez "But that was then, and this is a sequel!" --Narrator, _Class of Nuke 'em High II_ "There is a big difference between tech as augmentation versus automation. Augmentation (think Excel and accountants) benefits workers while automation (think traffic lights versus traffic wardens) benefits capital. LLMs are controversial because the tech is best at augmentation but is being sold by lots of vendors as automation." --Dare Obasanjo "I always find it intensely moving, even still, that adults go into the dark and say ''I know this is fake but I don't care; tell me a story.'' And they gasp and they cry or they're rolling around laughing. I really believe in the arts as a human need. It's not some sort of frivolous thing. It's a necessity." --Andrew Scott "'The union' is an organization you build with your co-workers, not a service you receive." --Melanie Barron "Journalists persue politicians. And politicians persue coverage. And when they don't like the coverage, they persue journalists." --Karen Middleton, president, Press Gallery "It's just so weird to me that, not too long ago, someone with a regular old job could buy a house - like, an entire house - with just their job money." --Danielle Weisberg "Listen. The sad fact is that banana pudding simply tastes better when you use a disposable plastic spoon." --Q. "Nothing is so loved by tyrants as obedient subjects." --Clarence Darrow "If you're in trouble, or hurt or need, go to the poor people. They're the only ones that'll help. The only ones." --John Steinbeck "They cut funding for the arts so that you could never imagine a way out of capitalism." --Alex Arrelia "Watch out for worlds behind you." --William Gibson "There has always been a virtuous cycle between culture and science." --Adam Savage "There is no avant-garde. The artist is always of his time but some people are a little late." --Edgar Varese "Courage is knowing it might hurt and doing it anyway. Stupidity is the same. That's why life is hard." --Jeremy Goldberg "Who knew that you can't write to a disk that's write protected? Shocking." --Adrian Black "Don't let your mind get old. It's a choice." --Mark Romberg "Climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live, until you're the one filming it." --@PerthshireMags "It should be noted that no ethically-trained software engineer would ever consent to write a DestroyBaghdad procedure. Basic professional ethics would instead require him to write a DestroyCity procedure, to which Baghdad could be given as a parameter." --Nathaniel Borenstein "Reminder to read the official git book. It's free and it's useful. My dudes, stop pretending to understand your tools and actually learn them." --aport "LinkedIn: 4Chan For Workgroups." --Anonymous "If guys are suddenly very lonely it's probably worth asking what they expected by following the advice of influencers who tell them to be maximally selfish, and who sneer at thoughtfulness, kindness, generosity, and genuine courtesy as weakness and wokeness." --Ian Boudreau "You should know that vague, ominous sentences that include no actual solid information make you sound like a tosser no matter how shiny your helmet is." --John Constantine "The greeble budget for this film was distressingly low." --Phooky "I just wanna find a small Linux, not a new religion." --The Notorious RGB "Change Healthcare have told investors they have so far taken a $872 million hit in dealing with their ongoing ransomware incident in the first two months, with the cost expected to rise to between $1350m-$1600m through the calendar year. Shareholders don't appear to care as the stock is up 5% since the update." --Kevin Beaumont "Just like the medium is the message, the marketing hype is the product." --Rysiek "If you've been on the internet for more than one fiscal year, private details about who you are and what you do have repeatedly been abused. If and when we find out about it, it's almost always after the fact, and we rarely have any ability or standing to do a damn thing about it. Every day, more headlines just keep coming." --Jan Maarten "Americans get more upset about nudity than ultra-violence. I am constantly amazed about that. I mean, I haven't seen any sex scenes in American film that are anything other than completely boring. A bare breast is more difficult to get through the censors than a body riddled with bullets." --Paul Verhoven "Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance." --Hannah Arendt, _The Origins of Totalitarianism_ "Yeah, `apk add ZFS` is very scary and off the beaten path." --wkat4242 "The Starseeds are buying guns, the Yoga enthusiasts want to hang doctors, and we're wondering what the shit is going on." --Rev. Xenofact "This is just so wantonly wasteful. If only I hadn't been raised in Fern Gully by Captain Planet." --Slurms McKracken "Venom is an example of a villain who evolved into a hero because he was popular with readers and writers decided to rehabilitate him. By contrast, Magneto evolved into a hero because every decade since Reagan it's harder and harder to pretend he's wrong." --@PinkRangerLyra "You gotta love paranoia. It's what made this country great, Quimper. Fear of the reds, fear of getting old, fear of failure, fear of each other. Deep down, we all just want to be the same." --Colonel Friday, _The Invisibles_ "This generation of youth have spent their entire lives in fear of having guns pointed at them in schools; what a disgrace for America that is now their own schools that are pointing the guns at them." --Josh Paul, former Director, US Department of State (resigned in protest) "There is a toxic culture of gatekeeping among cryptographers, but the underlying principles are quite simple. You're essentially just XORing bytes. I encourage you to give it a try." --lcamtuf "The scariest thing about Genosha wasn't the death or the chaos. It was a thought. The only sane thought you can have when being chased by giant robots that were built to crush you. Magneto was right." --Dr. Cooper, _X-Men '97_ "I'm old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four." --Tom Eastman "Urban cleansing took on a figurative as well as a literal sense, and was seen as a potential solution to the threat posed by the 'dangerous classes.'" --Frank Snowden, HIST 234, lecture 11, Yale University "It was about reminding these students - these kids who had the nerve to sit in tents - of who is in charge and who isn't. The students at Columbia and City College and UCLA and the University of South Florida and all of the more than 70 Gaza solidarity protests that have emerged at campuses around the country committed the sin of believing that it is acceptable for them to try to influence what happens at their school or - heaven forbid - what happens in the world at large. The hope is that these protesters will learn who the world is really supposed to work for - that there is a sky-high price to be paid for questioning the natural order of things. You can feel the question thrumming through the violence and repression: HOW DARE YOU?" --Jack Mirkinson "It's been made very clear to me that plenty of people don't give a shit about what I report as 'broken' in their projects. This isn't necessarily about the world of free software/open source, either. It's happened plenty of times at actual jobs when I was there specifically to find badness." --Rachel By the Bay "The joy you once had for life has turned to drudgery and you wonder where you went wrong. The thing is, for most of us this is life now. The weekly jaunts to a family restaurant: Gone. Too expensive. The desire to achieve greatness at work: That died with your youthful vigor. Extended family: Torn apart by tribalism. A home to call your own: Only for the rich." --Sarah Connor "The rules are made up and the points don't matter." --Drew Carey "I am deeply regretting that for my political satire series I went with a head of government who is merely a faceless Lovecraftian Elder God with a skull collecting hobby. He seems kind of understated these days." --Charles Stross "My thoughts and prayers go out to Voyager 1, which, after journeying for half a century to reach interstellar space is still expected to answer fucking work emails." --Seth Rudy "I don't know how to raise my daughter in a country where the Supreme Court is debating how many organs are okay for women to lose before providing health care." --Jessica Valenti "OF COURSE someone who faced constant over-the-top attacks, tocixicity, death threats, etc. for not reviewing some moron's favorite video game as favorably as they liked, for SO long, would wind up turning into a grump who hated everyone." --addie "Now we know that a sense of fucking wonder is worth about 700 million bucks." --Cobweb, on companies complaining about how much productivity they lost due to the full solar eclipse in 2024.ev "If you never watched Fred Rogers growing up and you want get into tech, watch _Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood_ first. Thank you." --c0debabe "If one assumes one lives in a swamp, the alligators are no longer surprising." --Sungo "If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do." --Bertrand Russell "Anyone who believes in indefinite growth on a physically finite planet is either mad or an economist." --David Attenborough What's the difference between an electronics engineer and an electrical engineer? About 220 volts. "We often say that programming is more an art than a science, but we need to treat it like one too. Sometimes you need to paint a sunset not because someone paid you to paint a sunset, but because it'd be fun to paint a sunset." --Foone "No one is more irrationally angry than a politician being accused of something they actually did." --Ricki Tarr "Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial vessels dry; this is repeated over and over; eventually it can be calculated in advance and becomes part of the ceremony." --_The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka_ "Not only do ordinary citizens not have uniquely substantial power over policy decisions; they have little or no independent influence on policy at all. By contrast, economic elites are estimated to have a quite substantial, highly significant, independent impact on policy. This does not mean that theories of Economic-Elite Domination are wholly upheld, since our results indicate that individual elites must share their policy influence with organized interest groups." --Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page, _Testing Theories of American Politics_ "The difference between dogs and cats is that cats know what crimes are, but commit them anyway." --Eniko "I have so many unreasonable demands of my computers. 'Do not occasionally power off for no reason.' 'Do not vibrate my skull.' 'Do not bulk collect my personal information and transmit it to a UFO cult in San Francisco.'" --mcc "Uber secret breakroom behind a busted vending machine? A-game, bad guys, A-game." --Morph, _X-Men '97_ "If you're auditioning for your job every day, and you're auditioning against every other brilliant employee there, and you know that at the end of the year, 6% of you are going to get cut no matter what, and at the same time, you have access to unrivaled data on partners, sellers, and competitors, you might be tempted to look at that data to get an edge and keep your job and get to your restricted stock units." --Dana Mattioli "Comic books was telling about all kinds of inventions that they'd done today. I used to read them all the time. I go by the Bible in a lot of things. It says God takes foolish things to dumbfound the world. So I consider comic books as foolish things so I read all the comic books. Sure enough, they wrote about the first atomic bomb in a comic book, TV wristwatch, all these things in the comic books were happening." --Sun Ra "A distributed system is now one where the failure of a network you didn't even know existed can render your car undriveable." --Dan Ports "She was asked what she had learned from the Holocaust, and she said that 10% of any population is cruel, no matter what, and that 10% is merciful, no matter what, and that the remaining 80% could be moved in either direction." --Kurt Vonnegut, on Susan Sontag "Failure in itself may not be a catastrophe. Still, failure to learn from ailure is." --Andrew Porteous "I gave him up because you can't say 'thank you.' Because I have to stomach your questions and prove that I'm a person! I lie, because the truth is we're nothing like you. Thank God, because it's the only reason you people are still alive." --Cyclops, _X-Men '97_ "Financial meltdowns are crises that affect the future because they erase the plausibility of surviving the present." --Grafton Tanner "Once they let you get away with running around for ten years like a king hoodlum, you tend to forget now and then that about half the people you meet live from one day to the next in a state of such fear and uncertainty that about half the time they honestly doubt their own sanity." --Hunter S. Thompson "A reasonable heuristic is to keep reading logs until you feel like you aren't learning anything new." --Hamal Husain "The RNC releases a talking points memo most days. They've done it for years. It goes to Congressmen, party faithful and a version is usually spun off to preferred media. FWIW, The Trump organization now controls the entire RNC apparatus so you'll probably see more of this." --John Stempin, NPR "People are saying the xz backdoor is likely the work of a nation state actor, and given that it appears to been slow rolled for a couple of years and immediately became obsolete before it was fully launched - you do have to admit it bears the hallmarks of a government IT project." --Mike Sheward "I know we Gen X'ers take a lot of shit, but you have to admit that our sneering distrust of everything turned out to be 100% correct." --@WeekendTwitr "AI accidentally made me believe in the concept of a human soul by showing me what art looks like without it." --beultra_warrior "MGCP is the most over-engineered bullshit ever designed. That shit could do Voice Over Smoke Signal." --Hasufin "Conspiracy bullshit, religious fanaticism, and futurist greed-excusing are all the same. They rely on Imaginary Kids to get you to buy their crap and excuse their abuse." --Rev. Xenofact "Though the last Matrix movie was basically a warning about corporations sucking the life out of iconic pieces of subversive IP, Warner Bros. Discovery is already going back to the well." --Charles Pulliam-Moore "Remember, the law is intended to be 'reasonable'; lawyers have often warned me over the years that technical folk tend to fall into the trap of seeing the law as some kind of computer program, but it's more like the specification for one, and there's therefore much 'intent' to be assumed." --Dave Cridland "We'll go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost-effective." --Kurt Vonnegut "That shows you how much I trusted these 'real guys'. The painter had told me so much stuff that was reasonable that I was ready to give a certain chance that there was an odd phenomenon I didn't know. I was expecting pink, but my set of thoughts were 'The only way to get yellow will be something new and interesting, and I've got to see this.''" --Richard Feynman "I hate the euphemism of 'joining'. It's not a happy union of two groups of like-minded people deciding to pool their resources to better do what they do. It's one set of suits paying another set of suits a boatload of money to fuck off, then firing half the people who created the value that made it worth to talk about in the first place. Acquisitions are not a happy sunshine and rainbows thing, it's one corporation devouring another to gorge itself ever bigger." --maynarkh "We're not people here, Fischer. We're a cloud of data points. Doesn't matter what happens to you or me or Brander, just as long as the mean stays where it's supposed to and the standard deviation doesn't get too big." --Lenie Clark, _Starfish_ "When I'm feeling frisky, I call corporations 'immortal colony organisms that treat human beings alternately as a source of nutrients or a form of inconvenient gut flora.'" --Cory Doctorow "All respect to Andrew Eldritch, but king in the land of the blind seems like it'd be a really thankless gig." --Zack Weinberg "I feel like a decent chunk of the DSM is how a particular condition annoys other people and not how it affects the condition-haver." --Les Orchard "In medical school I took an elective called 'Stress', foolishly thinking I was going to learn about meditation and yoga. Instead, the professor spent six weeks proving that being poor or a minority literally destroys your health on a molecular level, and I think about that every day." --Dr. Jocelyn J. Fitzgerald, MD "The thing about being middle-aged in the 2020s is that you have spent your entire adult life watching serious, obvious problems get worse and worse because nobody is willing to sacrifice even a little bit to address them." --Jason Lefkowitz "People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think." --Aldous Huxley "Superior decision making can keep you out of situations requiring the use of superior skill." --Transport Canada student pilot's textbook "You are only given one little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it." --Robin Williams "I don't know what we're talking about any more and now we're invoking deities. Either everything is fine or someone is going to throw down like a weekend dinner at Applebees." --Jake "AEC [Atomic Energy Commission] was split up into NRC [Nuclear Regulatory Commission], mostly now composed of attorneys, gynecologists, architects, and theologians, who see it as their duty to suppress nuclear power, and (initially) ERDA, or Energy Research and Development Agency. ERDA became DoE [Department of Energy]. So DoE is, along with NRC, a descendant of AEC." --Van Snyder "At this point I don't even have to check social media, I know something went down when I start absorbing thoughts and prayers like the Quickening." --Doctor_Boombastic "As usual, this post is not a request for THE ONE to show up. If you are THE ONE, you don't make mistakes. We know. Shut up and go away." --Rachel By the Bay "When you play by the rules of the casino you will never win." --Enkiusz "What doesn't kill us becomes dinner." --Handsome Boggart "Don't mention your move before you make a move." --Amit Kalantri "So, you made me mad? Happens all the time. You should see me at the post office." --Wolverine, _X-Men: The Animated Series_ "When humans stop seeing other humans as human, the most horrific acts are possible. There seems to me to be evidence that lessons that we thought were learned we're not learned, and that history is not history but we are in an ongoing tide." --Lesley M.M. Blume, _Turning Point: The Bomb and the Cold War_ "It seems we all are searching for something, but nobody can agree on anything." --Vertigo, on small computing projects "If you're wondering if you're an immigrant or an expat, here's an easy way to tell. If someone asks where you're from and after you've told them they ask you why you're here (almost in disbelief), you're an expat. If you tell them and they don't say anything, you're an immigrant." --Sebastian Marx "Screw the Breatharians. We can be weirder." --Reverend Xenofact "Every once in a while, what's normally a rugpull economy ends up generating excess consumer surplus (microcomputers, flat-rate home Internet, original Instant Pots) and has to do a bunch of 'innovation' to try to claw it back." --Don Marti "As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed and demand a rent even for its natural produce." --Adam Smith "When I'm at DECUS, I always seek out the people wearing t-shirts, because I know they are the ones who know what they are talking about." --Unknown DEC customer "If cheap phones had a 128-core JavaScript Processing Unit, websites would probably run fast too." --ioen "I said what I said. You are to conclude whatever you like." --Bob Purvy "I see over and over people posting about 'mass appeal' and 'adoption'. They need to take a trip back to the world of the BBS and realize that adoption and mass appeal are unimportant. Global access to technology results in enshittification. Full stop. We thought ''Wouldn't it be great if millions, no billions could access our stuff!'' The answer was a resounding no. Setting up a small community relatively inaccessible to the normies is actually a great thing." --HBI "I have a mass shooting story prewritten at all times, ready to be filled in with details as needed. Such shootings happen about once a month and we need to be prepared. This is my prewritten mass shooting story: 'A mass shooting has been reported at TK, where TK people are believed to be dead and TK more are injured, according to TK police department. The gunman has/hasn't been apprehended. None of those involved have been identified. This is a developing story and will be updated as more information becomes available.' I understand this probably seems grim, to be always ready to write about death but it's necessary. I have folders organizing mass shootings by type. I just added livestreamed this summer but theater, school, workplace and military base have long had a place in my files. Mass death is prewritten in America." --Polly Mosendz "AWS is built on hopes, dreams, and perl4. Don't try to make sense of it." --Lord Kusuriya "Those who play get up to no mischief." --Czech proverb "I worry about Harry Potter fans, because they should be over that by now. It was 25 years ago, and it's for children. I think it's for children, but they get stuck in it." --Miriam Margolyes "If an alien presence were known suddenly one day.. for example, I always like to use the example of huge, multi-football field alien craft landing on a busy freeway during rush hour. Would there be a panic? The answer is yes, there would be a panic. Because people would be on their cellphones calling Caltrans to see how long they were going to have to sit there before that thing got out of the way so they could get home and watch the Lakers game!" --Dr. Roger Leir "Unfortunately, we live in a world where complex, intelligent, emotional beings are seen as disposable." --Army Of Roombas "The news is always like: 'America has banned wheelchair ramps because they weren't in the Bible. Finland has made ice cream free.'" --Jesse Case "We were sure we'd lose track of each other, because it was just so clear no one could possibly support that new incarnation of Twitter being run into the ground by braying, slobbering, panting jackasses in jackboots. Because purity is so important, you see. We simply cannot support anything or anyone who slips up a bit ideologically, even a little bit. There's no such thing as a necessary moral compromise, don't you know? No situation ever has or ever shall occur in which a good person might make a politically fraught choice in order to further the cause of progress. Every stance, every word, every action, must exist in perfect virtue, without one single solitary speck of ethical contamination, a thing which a real living human person can definitely do. Every position and policy must hover at the absolute bleeding edge of tomorrow's most enlightened progressive thought. Doing otherwise will bring fury raining down from the digital heavens. Managing to thread the needle will be rewarded with absolutely nothing, certainly not votes or political support or even a slight nod of acknowledgement." --Cat Valente "As video cameras proliferate throughout society, regrettably, the reasonable expectation of privacy from filming is diminished." --US Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, on Kansas police secretly recording Bruce Hay's house for over two months without a warrant "Like all networking sessions, a lot of the interesting stuff happens among small groups by the poolside bar, or over a dinner table in a nearby restaurant. You get talking to some interesting-sounding folks who ply you with beer, and the next thing you know you discover you've been drafted into some kind of DARPA-funded think tank, or wake up with a hangover in a North Korean labour camp, doomed to spend the next two years coaching the Great Leader's son through writing the Nobel Prize-winning SF novel that daddy expects him to produce." --Charles Stross, _A Tall Tale_ "I have a drawer full of these and I think they furiously multiply in the dark like little metal network gerbils. Every so often I put one in service when a new machine arrives but I never seem to run out." --Cameron Kaiser, on twisted pair transceivers "If you need the threat of eternal punishment to be a good person, you are not a good person." --Corby Collins "Conservatives attack empathetic people all the time. They invent new slurs just for empathy every 15 years, like 'politically correct', or 'bleeding heart', or 'woke', etc. Restricted or nonexistent empathy is a prerequisite for conservative ideology." --Anonymous "I don't think we should be clownshaming. If someone wants to honk the red nose, that's between them and whoever wears the enormous shoes." --Hasufin "Several years ago, I encouraged a friend to take more risks in his career. He responded, ''I'm supporting my parents, a sibling, my wife and kids. I mess up, we're out on the street.'' I didn't encourage him again. Now, over the years, many have told me that they really respect me as I gave up a fantastic career to persue my dream of becoming an entrepreneur. The reality is that it was nothing more than privilege at play - unlike many, including my friend, I had the luxury of being able to fail. I also had a wife that encouraged me to go for it. Risks aren't as risky for those that can afford to take them - heroism is often nothing more than the omission of details." --Asim Qureshi "If somebody like George Soros or some of these other well-heeled activists are trying to disrupt things in my turf, I want to know what's going on. That shit should have been crushed, like, immediately." --Jacob O'Connell, FBI supervisor for western North Dakota, on the Standing Rock protests "This is why I get paid enough for picking fights in court with entities which have thirteen figure annual budgets not to be completely insane." --Ryan Castellucci "Salary based on location isn't a salary. It's a class stipend." --wxcafe 'When efficiency comes with upward redistribution - frequently though not inevitably - our recommendations become little more than a license for plunder. We have largely stopped thinking about ethics and about what constitutes human well-being." --Angus Deaton, professor and senior scholar, Princeton, Nobel laureate of economic sciences "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a partly correlated pseudorandom GPU noise channel." --Ivan Reese "Play by the rules and they still come for you." --Magneto "Boris is my reminder that no matter how on-top-of-the-world I may feel, we're all just one tank of liquid nitrogen away from a very bad day." --Maddiefuzz "There is no cavalry coming. No miracle solution. No saviors." --Eric Holder, former US Attorney General, 28 February 2024 "Well, I'll be damned. All it took was hearing one little voice in your head to finally shut you up." --Keldor, _Masters of the Universe: Revolution_ "The best way to spot an unintelligent person is to look for the person who is cruel." --J.B. Pritzker "Porn should not have a plot. I don't wanna be trying to figure out who the Lisan al-Gaib is mid-wank." --Anonymous "The foundational problem with Linux audio is that it ditched the OSS API when it ditched the OSS implementation. To this day I don't know what the ALSA people were smoking - but I'm pretty sure they shared it with the X11 team, and... well, now we have Wayland." --Thamesynne "More than Trump's ugly taunt, one thing stands out to me about these moments: The sound of Trump's supporters laughing right along with him. This is a building block of Trumpism. The man at the top gives his followers permission to be the worst version of themselves." --Dan Rather "Any service with proprietary/canonical server software should be considered as ephemeral as performance art." --Quiet Misdreavus "The Boeing whistleblower's death is tragedy but I think it's easy to slip into conspiracy-mindedness ('OMG Boeing knocked him off like one of their doors') and miss the likelier and honestly more horrible reality. Being a whistleblower is a fucking nightmare. The capitalist, corporatist structures of our society are built to make the lives of anyone who stands up against the oligarchs a living fucking hell, especially when it's someone who actually might have something devastating to reveal. There is something deeply, horribly, vastly despair-inducing about being a whistleblower. You can't talk about half of the things in your head to anyone because the last thing you want is to let something slip that hurts the case; but you also don't want to keep things completely silent because you know the press won't give a shit unless it's juicy. You don't want to drag your loved ones into the mental hell you're in because, even if you aren't paranoid about their lives getting ruined too, you often don't want to burden them with the shit you know. At every turn, at every junction, justice is delayed because Corporation A filed a legal flim-flam that pushes the hearing out another three months because their lawyer's toenails apparently needed to be verified before entering the courtroom. Nothing happens except your finances wilt away and your lawyers remind you that justice is rarely something that happens in these cases and you start questioning yourself in every tiny manner. It is a grim way to live. people sip briefly from that cup and end up institutionalized. The Boeing whistleblower has been drinking from it for years. 'Boeing bumped off a whistleblower' is a neat, tidy theory that invents a discrete Bad Dude twirling his moustache. 'Society treats whistleblowers so badly they kill themselves before the corporations get a chance to do so' is far more uncomfortable." --trenchworms "There's simply no polite way to tell people they've dedicated their lives to an illusion." --Daniel Dennett "Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them." --Assata Shakur "Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important." --T.S. Eliot "But we who were young in the nineties were mercifully unable to forsee the future, and lived a carefree life in which the creation of good things seemed more important than the prevention of evils." --Bertrand Russell "Middle age does not look good in HD. Eesh." --AJ, _The Why Files_ "I've definitely in the past, with Elvis, explored living within that world for three years and that being the only thing that I think about day and night. With Feyd, I knew that that would be unhealthy for my family and friends... So I made a conscious decision to have a boundary. It allowed for more freedom between action and cut because I knew I was going to protect everybody else outside of the context of what we were doing." --Austin Butler, on playing Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen as a method actor "People are going to see a conspiracy whether or not you are engaged in one, so you might as well engage in one." --Memos from Lofwyr "It's still magic even if you know how it's done." --Terry Pratchett "I'd term it as hostile to email. Email is an alternative to their walled gardens." --SteveT, on DKIM and DMARC "This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal." --Aaron Bushnell "I can't shake the feeling that we're all too tired now to make a difference. To view these platforms with anything but a weary sense of resignation. It's the relentless cycle of hype and disappointment, the constant fight for privacy and agency, or the sisyphean task of carving out spaces of authenticity in an increasingly commodified web. Maybe we've just grown weary of the relentless pace, the performative pressure, the ceaseless barrage of content that the modern Internet demands." --Joan Westenberg "As you get further into this hobby, more and more locks start looking more like decorative items." --AKostur "When the government tries to prove something, they get documents from everyone even remotely connected to the thing they're trying to prove. They take the most damning statement they can find anywhere and show it as if it was typical of every conversation on the topic." --David Schwartz "Maybe the real cringe was making folks feel bad for experiencing joy and having genuine enthusiasm for things along the way." --chatty chat charlando "There's never enough time to do it right, but there's always enough time to do it twice." --Unknown "Clickbait does as clickbait needs." --Lieutenant Howitzer "The social benefits are still speculative, but the harms have been empirically demonstrated." --Dan McQuillian, on AI products "Well, the only way to find out is to fuck around. Let's do a reality check!" --Miki Tonsky "You can still sink on a perfectly polished ship." --JC, on the eternal dilemma of best practices or getting it done "Having a kitten requires expert timing to use a computer. 'Can I click that button before the kitten headbutts my mouse hand and I hit something else?'" --hasufin "Abortion: The only word that can make followers of Jesus vote against everything Jesus ever talked about, because of one issue that Jesus never talked about." --John Fugelsang "Bold, obvious lies serve the purpose of showing they have the power to get away with them." --Amy Dentata "The fact that Boeing's quality declined because finance guys took over for engineers, and now the finance guys are saying it's because of DEI [Diversity, Equity, Inclusion] really tells you everything." --Bobby Big Wheel "It's imperative to base the CDC's recommendations about respiratory viruses - and everything else - on evidence, and to update the guidance as we refine our knowledge of the illnesses, not because the economy needs workers." --Melody Schreiber "There is a type of sadness in your eyes you only find in European gay porn." --Pretty Pistol "The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time." --Bertrand Russell "Actual people do not always follow social norms." --Dr. Tanya Luhrmann, professor of anthropology, Stanford University "The Dremel slogan should be 'because sometimes the tool you need is a really tiny angle grinder, and where else are you going to get one?'" --Mike, First of His Name "Keys are nothing but metallic passwords." --Christine, Lockpick Extreme "Please don't say inflation is at a 40 year high without also mentioning that corporate profits are at a 70 year high. Give the people the full picture." --Robert Reich "Everyone is very, very upset at our powerlessness and fighting each other feels more appealing because at least we can actuall do damage to one another." --vickyacab.bsky.social "If Morrissey says not to eat meat, then I'll eat meat... that's how much I hate Morrissey." --Robert Smith "The fact that CISA [US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency] itself is (or at least was) using equipment from a major IT vendor that nonetheless had trivial-to-exploit pre-authentication vulnerabilities in it tells you a lot about the practicality of expecting customers to assess software/device security quality themselves." --arekfurt "I don't know why people expect art to make sense. They accept the fact that life doesn't make sense." --David Lynch "Isn't it weird how we as a society arrived at 'monetize all your hobbies to support yourself' before 'rich people should pay their workers better'?" --Anonymous "Look, it's not our fault you people are made out of telemetry we can monetize." --lcamtuf "While the cookie tin performed much better than the mylar bags, and could provide a modicum of useful attenuation under some circumstances, it was not sufficient to provide meaningful assurance of signal isolation at any frequency. However, it was unique among the containers tested in providing tasty snacks during measurements." --Matt Blaze, _Testing Phone-Sized Faraday Bags_ "Today, in our economic commandments, there is no such thing as a citizen, a person, a mother, or anything of the sort. The only thing most closely resembling such concepts are workers and consumers." --Michael Hertig "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn't go and look at horses. They'd sit in their studies and say to themselves, 'What would I do if I were a horse?'" --Ely Devons "Every zombie apocalypse movie with everyone making stupid decisions is genuinely overestimating the survival instincts of humanity." --purefoysgirl "I remember when there was a news industry - it really wasn't that long ago. And I don't think the audience has changed significantly, so what happened? I don't know. But being a journalism grad student right now must feel like studying paleontology in the hopes that when you graduate you'll find a job as a dinosaur." --Rusty Foster "My life changed for the better the day I realized you can put tortellini in your minestrone instead of plain pasta." --Molly White "Next time you're stuck, don't outline it to death and drain all the juice out of your story: Write your milestones out as a list, as bare as you like, get your walking stick out and wander in their general direction. Sometimes, structure is just there to stop you drowning in a bog. Everything else is fair game." --Warren Ellis "If we act in ignorance, we do not know if we are acting properly or not." --Dr. Karla Turner "Every shop is an externalization of a philosophy about how to work." --Adam Savage "It freakin' works!" --Adrian Black "Learn from the river crab and speak in jazz." --Random Geek "You can go into every corner shop in the UK and buy a paper run at a loss by a billionaire that tells you which minority you should hate today and nobody thinks that's weird." --thejessiekirk "Every single elder millennial who was online between 2000-2008 has a phrase from Homestar Runner that will activate them like the Manchurian Candidate and make them spout absolute gibberish for 40 seconds." --Lana "A sincere effort is a sign of self." --Jenny Holtzer "Articles in which people with bad opinions complain at length that their bad opinions make it difficult for them to get laid demonstrate that at least something is still functioning properly in this dystopian hellscape." --Evacide "They told us to read the Bible and take it seriously, and then mocked us for becoming 'social justice warriors'." --Caitlin J. Stout "Client journalism is not only for politics!" --NateF "I think if you wanted to turn someone into a socialist you could do it in about an hour by taking them for a spin around the paddock of a Formula 1 race. No need for corny art singing tribute to the worker or even for the Manifesto. Never before had I seen so many wealthy people gathered all in one place. If a tornado came through and wiped the whole thing out, the stock market would plummet and the net worth of a country the size of Slovenia would vanish from the ledgers in a day. I used to live in Baltimore and remembered the kind of people who would go to the Preakness in their stupid hats and Sunday best while the whole swath of the city it was situated in starved and languished for lack of funds. This was like that, but without the hats. I saw $30,000 Birkin bags and $10,000 Off-White Nikes. I saw people with the kind of Rolexes that make strangers cry on Antiques Roadshow. I saw Ozempic-riddled influencers and fleshy, T-shirt-clad tech bros and people who still talked with Great Gatsby accents as they sweated profusely in Yves Saint Laurent under the unforgiving Texas sun. The kind of money I saw will haunt me forever. People clinked glasses of free champagne in outfits worth more than the market price of all the organs in my body. I stood there among them in a thrift-store blouse and shorts from Target." --Kate Wagner, _Behind F1's Velvet Curtain_ (before it mysteriously disappeared from publication hours after it dropped) "Learn programming. Learn other stuff as well, especially arts, but learn programming. Teach your children. It's now an act of resistance." --maitiú ó móráin "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness." --John Kenneth Galbraith "One of the guiding design principles in Alpine is that if you have to read a manpage to perform a basic operation as a user, we have already failed. The competition to systemd in service lifecycle management is largely a minefield of tools with cryptic command line switches and other potholes. The tools do not feel good to use. We want a service management system that feels as good to use as apk." --Ariadne Conill "A huge part of my soul died when I realized the reality of modern human society would never allow the Three Laws of Robotics to be established, because nobody with funding *really* wants a robot that can't kill people." --Trixter "To have off-Broadway you have to have starving actors. And to have starving actors, you have to have a place for them to starve. New York is too expensive for that. You can't afford to starve there anymore." --John Malkovich "The key to a good life is finding a state where the rural population isn't large enough to hurt you." --Unknown "The errors which arise from the absence of facts are far more numerous and more durable than those which result from unsound reasoning respecting true data." --Charles Babbage, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures "''Money can't buy happiness'' means ''the mindless accumulation of excess wealth ultimately leads to diminished returns on happiness.'' It does not mean ''Poor people should learn to be content without basic necessities or financial security.''" --Marianne Ni "NextDoor: Where people that do their own 'research' go to test their theories based on this low quality research." --Jeff the Alien "Everything we make, we should strive to make with the care with which a piano is made." --DJ Sundog "It's a well known fact that injection-molding piracy was rampant back in the Reagan era." --Foone "Owning the means of production, and maintaining it successfully, without using it to exploit other people demands a degree of integrity most people simply don't have and a degree of commitment many people simply don't want." --Phil Brucato "Nothing so fragile as a self professed strong man." --opalmirror "Fifteen million dollars is not money. It's a motive with a universal adapter on it." --Joe Sarno, _The Way of the Gun_ "Fascism is only inevitable in a culture where non-fascists refuse to use force. Most of the time, in life, talking is the right solution. Debate, reason, challenging ideas with words, these are good things, and shouldn't be abandoned casually - but you cannot reason someone out of a place they did not reason themselves into, and fascists were not convinced by reason - they were corrupted, body and soul, by hatred and bigotry and envy. They can't be saved, because there is nothing left in them that's worth saving - they can only be destroyed or surrendered to." --mos_8502 "Synthetic emotions in the nonspace of the century." --@hackermanifestov@botsin.space "Youth is temporary. Diva is forever." --Bette Midler "The biggest problem we'd face in a zombie apocalypse wouldn't be the people hiding zombie bites, it would be the people who informed their employer they'd been bitten and got told, 'We still need you to come in and work your shift until you turn.'" --Janel Comeau "Lockdowns were the closest we ever got to having a global revolution. People had time to think, for once. Which is why we'll never have them again. Anthrax, ebola, bird flu, airborne rabies... Whatever. Nothing will be enough for them to take that risk again. There's a reason they only ever talk about how 'traumatic' the lockdowns were, but nobody talks about SARS." --Pacific Nic "When you write software, you are in relationship with other people. And if you don't care about people, if you just *hate* people, if you can't care about healthy relationships, if you cannot be bothered to communicate or to listen or to just give a ground-level shit about other people, DO NOT get into software. You'll crash and burn - and you'll cause terrible harm as you go down. Find some other discipline to go torment." --Paul Cantrell "The most effective propaganda perpetrated by the right over the past 40 years has been creating a world so mind-numbingly shitty that even progressives can't imagine a brighter future anymore." --Velocirooster Adminensis "Reading minds would be the absolute worst superpower ever. If you think people say stupid shit now, imagine what they actually hold back." --@sgrstk "Becoming an atheist is much easier once you accept the fact that the whole universe doesn't revolve around human wishes." --Steve Allen "Audiophiles don't use their equipment to listen to your music. Audiophiles use your music to listen to their equipment." --Alan Parsons "Was anybody gonna tell me that Kubernetes is just Docker with different words for things or..." --Mavica Amateurs talk tactics. Professionals talk logistics. "Everything fails, all the time. Build accordingly." --Dr. Werner Vogels, CTO, Amazon "Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody." --Leonora Carrington "How much cheap cynical crap do we have to put up with? It's exhausting. I'm so bone tired of living and working in a system that seems top loaded with schemes to see what can be gotten away with." --Les Orchard "I was raised on Star Trek and Bugs Bunny, and it taught me to be a logical wise ass who undermines gun owners while seeking new life and civilizations." --Tyrone Slothrop "We know who ransomware actors are - we simply lack will to Americanize the airspace above their house." --Swift On Security "The crowd that applauds your coronation is the same crowd that will applaud your beheading. People like a show." --Terry Pratchett "For all those people who say, 'Why did you have to make it a gay story?!' - because you ask questions like that. It's not a gay story, it's a love story. You asshole." --Nick Offerman "I'm crazy enough to take on Batman. But the IRS? No, thank you!" --The Joker "People often rely on things to which they cannot relate." --Memos from Lofwyr "So, y'all know that I'm a computer geek in my day job. Before that happened I wanted to be a historian. That's what I have my actual degree in... If anyone, and I mean anyone, tries to give you a clear and concise history of a major event or movement (or even a minor one), they are either fools or trying to sell you something. History is complexity and subject to nuance, provisos, elision, and agendas. What's even more annoying is that historical analysis is, far more often than not, a reflection of the times and circumstances in which the historian is working. There are times where historiography tells you more about the times in which it was written than whatever they were writing about." --Chris Rapier "It's just best if they're unconscious." --Adam Savage, on ballistics gel... replica... geese... "Increasingly, people seem to misinterpret complexity as sophistication, which is baffling - the incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration." --Niklaus Wirth "Funnily enough, some readers seemed to feel that the Amazon love guns were much more offensive than guns that fire bullets and kill people, or swords that maim! Is experiencing a non-consenting orgasm mid-battle truly a worse prospect for some than experiencing a non-consenting bullet through the face? Calling Wilhelm Reich!" --Grant Morrison, on _Wonder Woman: Earth One_ "I try to stay away from web stuff that is bigger than the entire source code of Doom." --JCDU, on the node.js ecosystem "Hackernews patiently explains to one another that port scanning is totally normal neighborly behavior and it's a bit selfish to just expect your web browser to do things or your behalf all the time. Let someone else have a turn!" --n-gate.com "Stun settings are for people who can't commit." --J. Michael Straczynski "It's not your fault things are the way they are." "Everybody tells themselves that. And nothing ever changes." --Bashir and Lee, _Deep Space 9: Past Tense_ "The second George Bush was referring to the 9/11 attacks as 'cowardly acts' the very next morning. On the face of it, this is odd. After all, there's no lack of bad things one can find to say about Mohammed Atta and his confederates - take your pick, really - but surely 'coward' isn't one of them. Blowing up a wedding party using an unmanned drone might be considered an act of cowardice. Personally flying an airplane into a skyscraper takes guts." --David Graeber "In the absence of real community, people cling to all kinds of phoney social identities, corresponding to their individual role in the Spectacle (in which people contemplate and consume images of what life is, so that they will forget how to live for themselves). These social identities can be ethnic ('Italian'), racial ('Black'), organisational ('Trade Unionist'), residential ('New Yorker'), sexual ('Gay'), cultural ('sports fan'), and so on..." --Larry Law "You're so entrenched in online discourse that it's starting to dilute your perception of what an actual problem is." --Dilucseggs "I don't begrudge Tucker Carlson and those like him their ignorance. I just wish to hell they'd listen." --Anthony Bennett "Alabama has done it and now so can you." --Steve Marshall, Alabama Attorney General, on the use of nitrogen asphyxia for executions "It's a terrible thing to get facts in the way of your opinions." --Bud Hopkins "All brands of spiked leather and judgy cyberware can get along in the hellscape of shared intellectual property." --hakuna_dentata, on cyberpunk "I find it very difficult to believe that every NULL pointer error in existence is a security vulnerability." --Dan Cross "Generative AI systems like ChatGPT use prose prompts for intent-based outcomes, requiring users to be articulate in writing prose, which is a challenge for half of the population in rich countries." --Jakob Nielsen "If you think that the world has went crazy and about to go even crazier as a result, you are not entirely mistaken. You are witnessing the collapse of modernity, already." --The Honest Sorcerer "It's called Market-Disruptive Product Development, not 'mad science.'" --Memos from Lofwyr "You need to understand that 90% of commenters on social media are absolute nutjobs." --tdic89 "I don't favor violence. If we could bring about recognition and respect of our people by peaceful means, well and good. Everybody would like to reach his objectives peacefully. But I'm also a realist. The only people in this country who are asked to be nonviolent are black people." --Malcolm X "I do not know about outside of the USA, but each place I have lived within this country is extremely fake in very different ways. I think perhaps the issue is, we embrace the fakeness. The non-reality is what gives us our distinction. Without it - without LA being a hyperreal place defined by what Hollywood wants to show, without SF having a war between the artsy weirdness and the techbro, without DC being a place of government workers and furtive meetings between foreign nationals; without the Midwest being defiantly rural even when it isn't... then what would we have? How would we define ourselves? America without the glamour is just strip malls with a third of their pad sites empty; the same seven fast food and fast casual restaurants; a Target and a Wal-Mart a block from each other; a decaying infrastructure that no one uses. If we let go of our illusions we don't have an identity." --Hasufin "Sometimes it feels like satire is a better predictor of the future of society than actual predictive-mode SF (especially 'hard' SF, which is really just code for the no-gurls-allowed treehouse.)" --Charles Stross "Always keep some chocolate or other sweets handy, and when you feel DOOM, eat some. If it goes away, it was just blood sugar. If it doesn't, reality is fucked." --Mark Hughes "Here we get plenty of undergrads who want to go into games. Every now and then they ask me for career advice. When they do, I'll sometimes say how in _Red Dead Redemption 2_, when the weather is cold, the horses' balls shrink. The student nods - yes, they know this. So I ask if they want to be the person working 70 hour weeks for a month and half to make that happen." --John Regehr "All human activity is politics because all human activity decides what gets replicated into the future and we can only have today what the infinitesimally previous future contained. There is neither steady, nor a state." --Graydon "Anyone that honestly thinks backing up a human brain into a computer will let you live forever has never had to restore a document from 15 years ago in a format that doesn't exist anymore, or even run a Linux app from three years ago that hasn't been updated to the latest kernel." --Paul Jessup "Boundaries are the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously." --Prentis Hemphill "I believe Simulation Theory, but not like the techoptimist techbros. I just find it as absurd as any other possibility so, why the fuck not." --G "New definition of tech debt: Work that is considered so unvalued by the company that you can get fired for doing it." --Hazel Weakly "Being raised a boy is just your parents and most adults in your life standing around thinking 'his kindness and gentleness was cute when he was 5 but now that he's 11 we gotta start punishing him for it'." --12 "Do whats right, not what some asshole in a coercive hierarchy demands." --Hannu Ikonen, MD "I spent a year working on a _My Little Pony_ animated feature. It had the most insane OPSEC/cybersecurity protocols of any feature film I have ever worked on, and when I inquired as to why, the head of IT responded, 'Fucking bronies.'" --Aidan O'Brien "I see the bugs that happen without AI every day. So that's why I'm not so worried. I think we're doing just fine at making mistakes on our own." --Linus Torvalds "While CVSS might consider this a real issue, the developers of the project itself do not. The disconnect is one that drives people who use sysbot tools to create fancy corrupted filesystem images with the goal of getting a CVE for their CV crazy on a weekly basis when the issues they report get constantly ignored." --Greg K-H "Waiting for the Friday 11pm blog dump announcing cyber incident." --Gossi the Dog "Since the moment the Apple Vision Pro was announced, people have joked that it was a device that some people would primarily use for porn. Now that it has been released, a certain segment of its customer base is very disappointed to learn that current VR porn does not work on the $3,500 headset. Top minds are on the case trying to figure out how to fix this." --Jason Koebler "Yes, we have lost the fight against AIDS. It is hard to stand up to the huge portion of the population of American people that hates us. I don't mean dislike - I mean hate. When we started dying, we told The American People what was happening to us. But The American People didn't do anything. I hope it's finally dawning on you that maybe those American people didn't and don't want to do anything about this." --Larry Kramer, 2019 "I did a brief review of a system design for something and my comments boil down to 'a number of good ideas have been combined to create one large bad idea.' I think this is a common problem in security." --Matt Blaze "The book I'm reading just asked 'why is the story of the boy who cried wolf told over and over in our society, and not the story of Cassandra, the woman who told the truth but was never believed?'" --Kerra Henke "People keep telling me that it's clearly technology because the rise in depression, anxiety, and suicidality tracks temporally alongside the development of social media and cell phones. It also tracks alongside the rise in awareness about climate change. And the emergence of an opioid epidemic. And the increase in school shootings. And the rising levels of student debt... All of these play a role in what young people are going through." --Danah Boyd "OK, that's interesting, now that COVID is 'over' they're diversifying the narrative." --Cecile Simmons "Since subtlety is dangerous these days, I'll emulate many movies by summarizing the point, after it's already been made: Rather than exercising authority - or making a personal comment - focus on the issues that are problematic with the substance. 'Stupid' is not an issue, it is a assessment of a person. It doesn't matter whether the word is used directly about a person or about something the person put forward. Focus on the problems of substance and the ad hominem risk is eliminated. This, of course, will only work with folk who are motivated to be reasonable." --Dave Crocker "Bullshit is on the increase. It's more and more pervasive throughout our lives and there's this sense of drowning in this whole ocean of bullshit. And we have to understand why is this the case and what can we do about it? So today there is an increase of people feeling very disconnected from themselves, from each other, from the world, from a viable and foreseeable future." --John Vervaeke "A considerable percentage of the people we meet on the street are empty inside, that is, they are actually already dead. It is fortunate for us that we do not see and do not know it. If we knew what a number of people are actually dead and what a number of these dead people govern our lives, we should go mad with horror." --G.J. Gurdjieff "Obedience is not an option when the system is aligned against you." --Keane Onwuachi, _Notes from a Young Black Chef_ "A very small group of fanatics are also very much capable of imposing their perversion on a society at large. One man with an idiotic fixation on an obscure and nigh-useless weapon is able to create a random country-wide xenophobia. And less than a dozen people can be the driving force behind some of the biggest anti-LGBT sentiment in years. I'd point out, further, this is a common characteristic of rightwing strategy: They will constantly engage in low-cost attacks which they don't seriously expect to succeed, but which need to be treated seriously all the same. And as a result, the defenders end up exhausted. It's easy to counter one book ban, one attempt at censorship, one piece of anti-trans legislation. But they're going to turn around and do the same damned thing again, with no acknowledgement that it got shot down before. Because they will still hate the Other just as much in a week, a month, a year, a decade later, and they know eventually we will be too tired, too busy, too distracted, and they will get it through." --Hasufin "Once the precedent has been set that it is fit and proper for even a 'pro-privacy' company like Apple to make products that betray their users and owners, Apple itself will lose all control over how that precedent is applied." --Edward Snowden "The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of, you can make of it whatever you wish." --Terence McKenna "Be thankful for high drug prices. If Americans weren't overcharged, we wouldn't have innovative treatments." --David Henderson and Charles Hooper (that nobody can afford and insurance won't cover) "'Three million malware-infected smart toothbrushes' would have instantly broken the spell, had I somehow been able to include them in _Neuromancer_." --William Gibson "Fan fiction is a way of culture repairing the damage done in a system where contemporary myths are owned by corporations instead of by the folk." --Henry Jenkins, Director of Media Studies at MIT, 1997 "Incidentally, if someone gets mad about you running this sort of thing, you probably don't want to work there anyway. On the other hand, if you're able to build such tools without IT or similar getting 'threatened' by it, then you might be somewhere that actually enjoys creating interesting and useful stuff. Treasure such places. They don't tend to last." --Rachel By the Bay "Do you know what installing Windows as many times as I have does to the human mind?" --Swift On Security "I chose my path, you chose the way of the hero. And they found you amusing for a while, the people of this city. But the one thing they love more than a hero is to see a hero fail, fall, die trying. In spite of everything you've done for them, eventually they will hate you. Why bother?" --The Green Goblin, _Spider Man (2002)_ "I deleted my toot about Broadcom abandoning VMware ESXi last month as I got fed up of reply guys explaining to me it couldn't possibly happen.. but anyway, it has happened." --Kevin Beaumont "Developed countries don't fight wars anymore, they get third world countries to do the fighting for them. Developed country's populations are too skilled to be wasted on war. No one is sending office workers, scientists, engineers, etc to war because there'll be no one to replace them." --Round Collection "A lot of things that we think take a lot of courage actually just take a lot of money. Quitting your job with no backup? Money! Calling off a wedding? Money! Starting over in a new city? Money! It's very easy to have the courage of your convictions when you have a safety net, and very difficult to do anything on principle when you don't." --Chelsea Fagan "Of course, it's not a real day in Starfleet 'til comms get blocked." --Mariner, _Lower Decks_ "While we waited for our food, the writer of dystopian sci-fi confirmed that if you work for the CIA, lawyers have to vet anything you publish. But they were more lenient than I would've guessed. She said that one of her novels had helped change how the agency viewed fiction versus nonfiction. While reading her novel, the lawyers decided that just because a character in a novel says something doesn't mean that the author necessarily agrees, so there should be more leeway for CIA fiction writers. (Which suggests CIA lawyers are more nuanced literary critics than half of Goodreads.)" --Johannes Lichtman "I like the bright warning signs, they make a nice whooshing sound as we speed past." --Sonori "I now own telescoping loppers. Nothing is safe. All shall be lopped. Telescopingly." --Warren Ellis "I would urge you not just to read good books, read terrible books too - because they can be more inspiring than the good books... A genuinely helpful reaction to something you're reading is 'I could write this shit.' That is immensely liberating." --Alan Moore "I have a concise word for all of this. It's 'no.'" --Rick Moen "Life is too short, and love is too long." --Nona "I don't know that this is brute force so much as a level of patience most commonly seen among, say, rivers carving bedrock." --HypnonavyBlue "Those who are proud of their incompetance will not terrorize real scientists. I don't give a damn about what he says." --Dr. Avi Loeb, Ph.D "It's probably not a good sign when the maintenance manual lists the danger radius. In this case, six to ten feet." --Foone "All the companies racing to add AI to their product seem to have not learned the lesson of the Brother printer - when everyone is racing to the bottom you can win by doing nothing." --Matt Clark "You know what Kubernetes is? Do you know what it is? It's 20 while true loops in a trench coat pretending to be a control plane. And that's fine! But somehow, somehow, the only fucking way you can run that thing is to shell out to a CSP and have them manage your control plane because absolutely nobody has ever figured out how to make it run reliably in bootstrap or less-than-5000,000-node-scale as a commodity. We've spent 800x more energy on service meshes than *actually running it*. The fuck?" --Hazel Weakly "I find it amusing how people will claim every celebrity death was a CIA assassination, but when one of the most influential media personalities in America flies to Russia to personally lick Putin's balls, then comes back and runs a propaganda campaign seeking to undermine US interests, the CIA is just, like, 'Sounds good to me.'" --Marcus Hutchins "News anchors looking into a camera and reading a script handed down by a corporate overlord, words meant to obscure the truth, not elucidate it, isn't journalism. It's propaganda. It's Orwellian. A slippery slope to how despots wrest power, silence dissent, and oppress the masses." --Dan Rather "The US has trained three generations of MBAs who have the ethics of a tomcat in heat." --Grumble "Current frameworks resort to chickenshit minimalism - the illusion of minimalism backed by megabytes of cruft. For example, the landing page of create-next-app uses 42,440 lines (363kb) of JavaScript to print 'Hello, world.'" --Maciej Cegłowski "If Putin launches a nuclear attack on any NATO target, central London is the safest place to be. Russia owns several major assets there, including some who sit in parliament." --Paul Bassett Davies "I really hate the ''it's immoral to stay on Twitter'' stuff. Many people have spent their lives in hostile infrastructure. That didn't start with Musk and it won't end when he's gone. Most black people in America have to pay their taxes to governments run by white supremacists, women have to pay the people who take away their rights. It sucks, but if someone's support network lives on hostile ground and yours doesn't maybe think on that before you judge." --Quinn Norton "My Gods. The more I learn about Richard Doty, the more I hate him. If he says something, it's said to deceive. Even if it's true. If he told me the sky was blue, I would assume it was for the purpose of getting me to leave my umbrella behind during a rainstorm, or to get me to go check for myself so he could snoop at my desk." --Laurelindel "I'm texting on a C64 while a fax comes in behind me. What is this life I've created?" --Perifractic "Every run's a PB run until it isn't." --The HUDless Horseman "The definition of today's AI is a machine that can make a perfect chess move while the room is on fire." --Anatol Holt, c. 1970s "Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center. Big, undreamed-of things - the people on the edge see them first." --Kurt Vonnegut "It's so weird, being raised by Christians and spending your entire childhood being told to care about others, then one day they're just, like, you're not actually supposed to care about others, you stupid socialist." --@kayraisabitch "It's not mainstream until it's backed by a corporation with at least one genocide." --The Verge "Pay attention when people react with anger and hostility to your boundaries. You have found the edge where their respect for you ends." --Sweatpants and Coffee "One thing that people wondering about why we lose our best and brightest from science basically always miss is how people who do absolutely nauseating things are, as a rule, celebrated." --Dr. Jonny "Conservatism seems to be rooted in claiming that all the stuff we learned as kids - sharing, politeness, fairness, kindness, waiting your turn - was a lie, and you're the stupid one for continuing to practice it." --Orion Kidder "Effective Altruism is a bit like if Ayn Rand was put in charge of a homeless services program." --Unknown "Dude painted his face burnt umber, swallowed a bunch of benzos, and gave a speech that would inspire a wellness check at a bus station, but go ahead, MSM, talk about how the other guy is old." --Noel Casler "I mean, ''lizard people don't exist'' is kind of a bold claim on the Furry Internet Archipelago, but ok." --@thamesynne@dragon.style "Reality is that LLMs are not AGI - they're a big curve fit to a very large dataset. They work via memorization and interpolation. But that interpolative curve can be tremendously useful if you want to automate a known task that's a match for its training data distribution. Memorization works, as long as you don't need to adapt to novelty. You don't *need* intelligence to achieve usefulness across a set of known, fixed scenarios." --François Chollet "PB phlegm! Let's 'ahem'!" --Arcus "The Rapture is cancelled. I don't want those nutjobs anywhere near Me." --The Tweet of God "This society will have you angrier at an unhoused person stealing $5 to eat than at a guy in a suit stealing $5 million to buy a third house." --Joshua Potash "An app is just a web page wrapped in enough IP to make it a felony to block ads in it." --Cory Doctorow "Covid has ruined sci-fi movies. Shit'll be, like, ''The year was 3004 and aliens were gonna blow up the sun,'' and I'm, like, ''Makes sense,'' but then it goes ''So the world united to...'' and I'm, like, ''No, the fuck they did not!''" --Curtis Cook "_Star Trek_ was an attempt to say that humanity will reach maturity and wisdom on the day that it begins not just to tolerate, but take a special delight in differences in ideas and differences in life forms." --Gene Roddenberry "Conservatism: The intense fear that somewhere, somehow, someone you think is inferior is being treated as your equal." --Witchy Meg "I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me." --Cary Grant "Don't be the guy next to a fatal car crash going ''Well, I'D have worn my seatbelt.'' Not everyone is a long-term nerd who is drawing conclusions from decades-previous events." --Jason Scott "A lot of idiots still think that Sci-Fiction is here to help us imagine the future, and not here to warn us against possible futures that we should avoid. These idiots have money." --DavidB "You know a place is really shitty when human lives are cheaper than automation. Automation requires maintenance. People, you just replace." --Carrie Vaugn "The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' - this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats." --Aldous Huxley "Why did they put a poop demon in Shinobi?!" --Brossentia "Back before the Internet, we thought the reason for human stupidity was the lack of information options. I'll put it this way: That wasn't it." --Andrea Junker "I feel a lot less smug about having passed three bar exams now that I know that anybody with hundreds of millions of dollars' investment in LLM and computing power can build a generative AI implementation that can do the same thing." --Mike Godwin "Here's the secret of 'university indoctrination': Professors aren't doing it. Your little darlings are finally meeting a diverse group of people and realizing that the stereotypes you've been feeding them are close-minded garbage." --Mike Shor "All engineering is reverse engineering if you document things poorly enough." --Ian Douglas Scott "The truth does not require your participation to exist. Bullshit does." --Terence McKenna "Flashing is not a crime. Circumventing protections to access existing firmware may be, depending on your lawyer." --Space Rogue (who is not a lawyer) "Knives are cutlery, forks are stabblery, spoons are scooplery." --julesh "I really hope forums make a comeback, but I'm sure it will be replaced by the next hot thing with $5m in seed funding." --Ellie Huxtable "That's an 'As seen on TV' commercial waiting to happen!" --Seasons Change "No service is completely insulated or safe from enshittification but some choices carry obviously higher risks." --Mixxx "So this actually happened: I rode an electric kickscooter down to a side alleyway across from a rail transit station to pick up some second hand body modification electronics (a CPAP) from a man who has cybernetic implants in his chest! I had to get the 2nd hand body mods off the street because I can't afford proper healthcare. I'm living in a William Gibson novel. (And, yes, the weather was cold, dreary, and overcast - the sky above was the color of a TV tuned to a dead channel...)" --Tinker "We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces." --Carl Sagan "The Affordable Care Act is how unfettered capitalism punishes you for demanding universal healthcare." --mos_8502 "Just because you fail to correctly read an argument does not mean it was made in bad faith." --Faho "Consider that the overall cost of the Manhattan project was about 34 billion (in 2023 dollars), and Google's annual revenue is around 300 billion. Starting a minor nuclear war is just good business sense at this point." --Foone Turing "The trouble with fiction is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense." --John Rivers "If you think technology will solve your problems, then you don't understand technology - and you don't understand your problems." --Laurie Anderson "20 years ago we were suing teenagers because they were torrenting a single Metallica album, and now billionaires are demanding free rights to every work in history so that they can re-sell it. The law only ever serves capital." --lonestartallboi "Under capitalism, it's normal to let children go hungry, let banks force people out of their homes, let sick people die for lack of access to healthcare. But the idea that billionaires could just be less rich - not poor, not struggling, just less rich, is considered insane." --Martha Kelly "You take the lies out of him, and he'll shrink to the size of your hat. You take the malice out of him, and he'll disappear." --Mark Twain "If we fit all of the job description, we'd all be omniscient gods who work 24/7, type 300wpm, and work well with others. For $25k/yr, no bonus. You got this." --HAL-8999 "There is a massive disconnect between the kind of attacks security professionals imagine by resourced attackers just like them, and what dipshit teenagers with more time to waste than God in an empty universe actually try for weeks." --Swift On Security "The true juncture in evolution is not between the animals and man. It's between man and true human beings." --David Zindell, _The Broken God_ "The toasters are vulnerable to speculative execution bugs now." --maya "But so what? Enshittify as much as you want. It's not like anyone's got any other options left." --Karawynn Long "This is probably going to go horribly wrong because, when debunking some stupid video I might actually end up building a horrible weapon." --Diode Gone Wild "Every tool is a hammer." --Adam Savage "Apparently, the way to be successful is to be well-informed, but if you know what is right, it's good to refuse to act on it." --Aaron "The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them." --Phillip K. Dick "With Google Groups dropping Usenet support in February, September will finally end." --Foone "The lesson of the Reddit moderator rebellion was: Stay the course and ignore your users. Huffman was right. The complainers were just noise. If you want companies to listen, it requires more than noise." --Freakazoid "Today we celebrate the birth of Sir Isaac Newton. Without his invention of calculus we would have no way to stop people who are bad at math from becoming engineers." --Scott Flowers "Actually, my ancestors would want me to take a nap right now. They'd be, like, hell yeah, no one is trying to kill you or anything?? You don't have to, like, flee on a boat? Your belly is full and it's a beautiful day? That's sick, babe! And so really I am honoring them." --Danielle Weisberg "Remember: A functioning government requires functioning citizens. Please report to your nearest polling station and vote correctly this time. Don't make me deploy the kinetic happiness drones again." --Friend Computer "People have said ''Don't cry'' to other people for years and years, and all it has ever meant is, ''I'm too uncomfortable when you show your feelings. Don't cry.'' I'd rather have them say, ''Go ahead and cry. I'm here to be with you.''" --Mr. Rogers "God does not need your protection or defense. The poor, the vulnerable, the marginal, the hurt, and the oppressed do." --Rev. Benjamin Cremer "At a distance, be courageous. Up close, be practical." --Stefan Prohosh, _Mission: Impossible - The Phoenix_ "Rather than calming the waters, my admission stirred some people up even more. It ultimately resulted in me canceling the game due to unbridled hostility on the forum over their inability to grasp a simple concept, such as not all play implies winners and losers. Sometimes, it can be about playing for the simple joy of playing." --Joseph Matheny "I especially love the emails asking if I am really a cat (no, I'm not a cat but if it's important for you to talk to one I'm pretty sure we can work something out, my Monero address is *here*)." --sizeof(cat) "The future is distributed, which means the future involves a lot more agency for a lot more people than some in AI policy are planning for." --Jack Clark "Unfortunately, the webring [Yesterweb] has become popular and well-known enough that I have seen our webring advertised on Reddit and Hackernews as a 'great webring to join to boost your SEO and build up your backlinks.' It made me realize how many people viewed the webring as a kind of billboard they could add their site to, in order to get it more clicks, without otherwise participating or interacting with the members. I remembered "big" webrings feeling this way back in the day, and that's not something I'm interested in replicating. At some point it just loses its meaning." --Sadness, on why the Yesterweb Webring was shut down in 2023 "Huh! Hmm." --NileRed "Las Vegas is a city of opportunities. For fucking around and finding out." --Sarah "It's really annoying that, when I see an obscure but suspicious looking piece of possible misinformation being posted to social media often the only critical sources I can find are behind paywalls. The misinformation pieces are themselves inevitably free." --Kit Arvizu "The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy. And a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone." --Rod Serling, _The Twilight Zone_, s01e22 "If you can't wrap your head around a bar or club as a sanctuary, you've probably never been afraid to hold someone's hand in public." --Jeramey Kraatz "You might become disoriented, this is to be expected as this freaking game was written in CSS. Press start to begin your mission." --Cascade of Duty "The last month has taught me that apparently all the Geneva convention is really good for is getting indie games to change a red medical cross to some other medical cross and that it can do fuck all about actual war crimes." --tiergan-vashir "Look, 8pm-3am is when I am most creative, and if our culture has decided to deprive itself of me at my best, that's a choice, but you don't get to complain that I'm putting that energy to my own projects and half-assing the rest." --Hasufin "All conspiracy theories, from the relatively banal to the bugnutty batshit crazy, all have the same fundamental postulates underlying them: That there is something wrong with the world. That the thing that is wrong with the world is artificial. That the source of the artificial wrong in the world is personal - that is, that there is *someone* or *someones* behind it, who is/are advancing an agenda. That those behind the agenda operate in secret, keeping the masses ignorant. Well... only number 4 is actually *wrong*. There is something wrong with the world. The thing wrong with the world *is* artificial. The source of the wrong *is* personal. But the people behind the agenda do not operate in secret. They do their business in broad daylight, in boardrooms and offices, at desks and in coffee shops. What is wrong with the world is capitalism, and it does not need to hide itself. Capitalists operate openly, believing themselves the natural rulers of Earth." --Studio 8502 "I just threw an outline in the Nope pile after reading a novel that did a similar idea better. But I'll be picking at the bones of my book for other projects. That's why you should never throw anything away: You never know when a setting or character will fit somewhere else." --Richard Kadrey "For all of the faults of the 401(k) as a retirement system it has been quite effective at getting middle class Americans to conflate their interests with those of the actual rich." --Chris Adams "Consumers - that is, normal people who have to worry about things like the price of eggs and elections and getting sick and going on dates and catching up on the latest Marvel movie - showed that they really could not care less about the Singularity. FTX's collapse rivaled Enron's in scale yet had almost no meaningful effect on the economy. The challenge with trying to create a parallel reality is that there's pretty much nothing in this reality to induce people to care about whether it succeeds or fails." --Emily Gorcenski "When we lived in public housing, my mom started a community garden to grow food to save money and to occupy the kids that lived there, and the public housing authority came and pulled out all the plants, and poured bleach into the ground to destroy it. Because gardens weren't allowed." --Kaitlyn Greenidge "Elon has lost his wife, his kids, 40 billion dollars, and his space ship crashed. It's like a genre of country music that doesn't even exist yet." --Zach Reinert "People who don't understand the difference between etymology and entomology bug me in ways I can't put into words." --Mostly Harmless "The thing we have to be careful of, and I always caution myself on this, and I ran into this trouble with Trump, is we cannot mistake absurdity for a lack of danger. Because it takes people with no shame to do shameful things. Absurdity always makes you think something is more benign than it is. I misjudged Trump because he was so ridiculous." --Jon Stewart "ACAB includes Elf on the Shelf." --Dr.Nick "So you're telling me that arguably the most effective collective workers action in Silicon Valley history was in support of the billionaire CEO at OpenAI, a company founded to put people out of work." --Starchy "Disappearing inside your own head and denying the truths of our collective reality and then somehow using that as a means to critique ideology, rationality, and ethics as the enemies of 'real anarchist action' is quite the thing to do, but here we are." --Auntie Oedipus "What I learned was this: What I wanted out of my computer when I really *thought about it* was wildly different from what I used my computer for most days. The things I enjoyed doing on the computer were pretty different from what I *did* with my computer." --Andrew Roach "The [automatic machine/artificial intelligence] is not frightening because of any danger that it may achieve autonomous control over humanity... Its real danger is the quite different one that such machines, though helpless by themselves, may be used by a human being or a block of human beings to increase their control over the rest of the human race." --Norbert Wiener, _The Human Use of Human Beings_, 1950 "New study shows what studies have been confirming for decades: The majority of the population has no impact on policy in the United States." --Maddiefuzz "Are you actually lazy, or are you just looking at the combined creative output of literally the entire Internet and then comparing yourself to that?" --Corey Brickley "'How about a Care Bears reboot where they help young adults and millennials deal with feelings of depression, disillusionment, and cynicism?' 2:30am. I groggily walk into the kitchen to see a small furred biped staring up at me from the dark, whispering 'Be less cynical.' I turn to grab a shovel but it blasts me in the head with an energy beam. I scream as it burns away the part of my brain that knows about MK-ULTRA." --@cat_beltane "Anything that CAN be done WILL be done if it brings advantage or profit to those who can do it. What CAN be done will NOT be done if it brings costs, economic or otherwise, to those who can stop it." --A.C. Grayling "Refusing to do a finite amount of good because one cannot do an infinite amount of good is a morally perverse position." --Iain Banks "Guys, this is such a fun idea! I cannot believe people are in the replies trying to explain to me why they think it is impractical! The whole point of computers is to do impractical things and see what happens!" --b0rk "No pants, no masters." --Michael W. Lucas History without discomfort is propaganda. "I'd rather gargle broken glass than talk about the OpenAI nonsense, but I hope we are all taking note of this practical demonstration of exactly what feel-good 'we have a higher mission than money' corporate governance structures are worth." --Keith Bolland "People call things like Silent Hill horror games, but nothing is as frightening as the idea of entire continents being rolled up into a katamari at the whims of a capricious god king." --Caranatar "Babies are a scam perpetuated by Big Ear Infection to get you to buy more amoxicillin." --Stefan Thinks "What can be explained by dark conspiracies about Microsoft censoring criticism can also be explained by the OP getting tired of transphobic hate and deleting the post to protect their sanity." --Xe "In our holy economic models, there is no room for citizens or members of any community, there is only the self-interested, profit maximizing individual, who is constantly searching for personal gains over others. Led to believe that there may only be winners if there are also losers - and nobody wants to be a loser." --Michael Hertig "Unironically stating you have a death wish followed by a shrug emoji, in response to a comment about risky sex practices, is the most accurate description of modern life I have ever seen." --jasenzero1 "Remember to always check the polarity of your cat before doing any serious ham radio work." --Save It For Parts "To some degree, the whole point of the tech industry's embrace of 'ethics' and 'safety' is about reassurance. Companies realize that the technologies they are selling can be disconcerting and disruptive; they want to reassure the public that they're doing their best to protect consumers and society. At the end of the day, though, we now know there's no reason to believe that those efforts will ever make a difference if the company's 'ethics' end up conflicting with its money. And when have those two things ever not conflicted?" --Lucas Ropek "I once ended up sleeping on the couch for a week because I was in bed grinding on implementing GTK+ into Pharo (a Smalltalk implementation), and at 0445, I was struck by inspiration, leaped up, shouted 'PThreads!' and rushed back into my home office to code. To paint a better picture, I was naked as a jaybird at the time and my version of a shout can rattle windows. Very few women will tolerate a six foot naked ginger screaming about pre-emptive multithreading at nearly five in the morning." --Studio 8502 "I'm not a mentat, I'm in the bathroom on Reddit." --HiddenCity "Digging around I can't find a fix. I no longer understand how one is supposed to configure Grafana to use an https-offloading reverse proxy." --asciifaceman "Always learn from other peoples mistakes, from a safe distance." --Well Read Redneck "We are cats, intricacies such as 'why' do not concern us." --SiegedSec "Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize." --Tom Lehrer "Atheism is what happens when you read the bible. Christianity is what happens when somebody else reads it for you." --Bertrand Russell "The 16y/o just explained Rust borrowing to me. People, I cannot warn you enough: Keep a close eye on what your kids are doing on the Internet." --Matthew Green "As for you and in particular for your great country, I never believed for a moment that you would have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty. You have refused us your protection and we can do nothing about it. You leave and it is my wish that you and your country will find happiness under the sky. But mark it well that, if I shall die here on the spot and in my country that I love, it is too bad because we all are born and must die one day, I have only committed this mistake of believing in you, the Americans." --Sirik Matak, former royal prince of Cambodia, executed by the Khmer Rouge after the United States abandoned the country "I'd trust a sociopath over a psychopath any day, 'coz they won't be swayed by emotions." --El Jefe "I think the Fallout trailer is okay, but seeing 'FROM THE STUDIO THAT BROUGHT YOU FREE 2-DAY SHIPPING' is the most dystopian capitalist art destroying shit I think I've ever seen." --Johanna "I was very insecure about making this sound. It terrified me... to sing so soft and vulnerable and almost naked." --Julee Cruise (rip) "You fucking bet I'm going to reach for an emulator and disk images these days! I would even if the prices of the actual hardware hadn't been vastly overinflated by the rich arseholes who insist that it only counts if it hurts, and the damn fools who listen to them. Retro is a spirit, it's not a qualification." --Millihertz "As someone who built his C64 from an unpopulated PCB with a soldering iron, and is currently working on making a Gotek 1581 drive, people who gatekeep retro can suck my bollocks." --Studio 8502 "Artificial Intelligence, n. Branch of computer science theorizing since 70 years ago that intelligent machines are 3-5 years away." --Thomas Fuchs "Every poster thinks they are casually sharing their passing thoughts. Every replier thinks they are critiquing a manifesto." --Drew Toothpaste "Being in infosec for so long takes its toll. I've come to the conclusion that, if you give a data point to a company, they will eventually sell it, leak it, lose it, or get hacked and relieved of it. There really don't seem to be any exceptions, and it gets depressing." --Brian Krebs "There's nothing scarier than a silent data center." --MrMrRubic "We have to blur some of the faces of persons who participated in the events of that day because we don't want them to be retaliated against and to be charged by the DOJ." --House Speaker Mike Johnson, on securicam footage of 6 January 2021 "The problem with the modern internet is we don't have ten billion websites where people with extremely niche interests catalog every bit of info about the weirdest possible shit like 'bios of every weather person on The Weather Channel' and 'list of fonts used on The Weather Channel,' yet decades later some other weirdo like me needs those fonts and I have to get lucky enough to find the URL for this website to wayback it because there's nobody making new ones. We used to have... so much information... about everything..." --Lori "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves." --Henry Kissinger "Hotdog flotation device!" --Arcus "Communicators are perceived as possessing the very traits they describe in others." --John Skowronsky and Donal Carlston, spontaneous trait transference "You got coding problems, I feel bad for you, son. I got 98 problems 'cuz I'm off by one." --Andrew Plotkin "Nothing can humble the security architecture of a Fortune 500 company like a bored teenager with something to prove." --Steve Troughton-Smith "Lord of the Rings was about wish fulfillment and fantasy. The fantastical elements weren't magic and wizards and dragons. It was about having a clear goal, a mission which was relevant to winning, being given the tools you needed to do the job, provisions which would nourish you, and ultimately seeing a victory that mattered. It was about war, but it was about the war Tolkien wished to have seen." --Hasufin "If you suggest I start making a to-do list, I will sit down right now and invent a brand new Blunt Object Transfer Protocol (botp://) expressly for the purpose of punching you, personally, in the face over the goddamn Internet. I will even credit you in the patent application." --Circe Rowan "I think I'm beginning to realize why sports are so important. When people aren't given an outlet to have blind loyalty to something innocuous, they have blind loyalty to more serious shit that gets people killed." --Matt Sicker "If an uncontacted tribe tells you to fuck off, YOU FUCK. OFF." --Cactuar Joe "Address the systemic factors driving giant kaiju invasions, don't just address the kaiju as they happen." --jonny "Time for your annual reminder that, according to _A Christmas Carol_, Bob Cratchit makes 15 shillings a week. Adjusted for inflation, that's $530.27/week, $27,574/year, or $13.50/hour. Most Americans on minimum wage earn less than a Dickensian allegory for destitution." --Dr. Chris Thompson "Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet, those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it." --Tom Toro, cartoon in the New Yorker "What doesn't kill you makes everyone around you call you brave, while not addressing the thing that almost killed you." --Astrid "Keygen chiptune is the evolution of sea shanties: Music that plays while you pirate." --Aronia "The rich know exactly how to exploit our weaknesses and pit us against each other, and they're doing it so that we'll be less trouble, fewer mouths to feed, fewer resources spent. The tech elite don't want us to dream. They don't want us to daydream. They don't want us to create. They don't want us to love." --OK, Doomer. "The billionaires investing in space travel don't want Star Trek. They want Dune." --April Daniels "I thought 'Oh man, I really want a piece of postapocalyptic media where the bondage weirdos are the heroes and the villians are neonazis' and then I realized that was just _The Invisibles_." --enkiv2 "So much dick. Don't acknowledge it. Just let it go by. Otherwise it will destroy our civilization." --Deuce, _Jerkcity_ "For over 60 years now, the world has been rigged with an elaborate infrastructure that can effectively end civilization on a moment's notice, whether by deliberate command or mistake. It's never been used. You might find that to be reassuring proof of the fundamental rationality of world leaders and the robustness of nuclear command and control systems. Or you might wonder at what point our unreasonably good luck will run out." --Matt Blaze "No humanity, only KPIs." --Alun Jones "You don't teach, you just instigate chaos." --Boimler, _Star Trek: Lower Decks_ "The Buddha said that clinging to the impermanent is the source of all suffering, which makes me believe the Buddha never took one square to the nuts." --Monkeyborg "Unions: Because it's very unlikely three spirits will appear and scare your boss into doing the right thing." --IATSE "One disorienting thing about getting older is that nobody tells you about how weird it feels to get a really passionate, extremely wrong lecture from a much younger person about verifiable historical events you can personally remember pretty well." --Brittany Wilson "Did you know that licking toads cures depression? But twenty minutes later the toad is depressed again." --John Shirley "Not surprised to see that Christianity is now the last refuge of a scoundrel." --Myles Ryden "Remember when smartphones didn't exist and you could be in bed at 11 at night and not be at work? That was great." --Brianna Wu "Here's thing about the state of AI. I am completely certain that the worst case scenarios everyone's panicking about will not come true. I am equally certain that whatever happens will be worse." --Lore Sjoberg "It's a dangerous thing to mistake speaking without thought for speaking the truth." --Benoit Blanc, _Glass Onion_ "I think we underestimate how many people are hanging on by a single, fraying thread and how, some days, the only thing saving them/us from the abyss is the small comforts of a TV show that feels like home, a book that tells you you're not alone, or a pet that needs you." --Maria Haskins "Got no problems with goths at all. I stand!" --Ice-T, hanging out with Siouxie Sioux at Lollapalooza 1991 "Seeing the uses real people are giving to AI, it makes me think that _Terminator_ was a remarkably optimistic movie." --Dragoniff "In hacking, as in witchcraft, the steps are: To know, to will, to dare, to shut the fuck up about it." --Kit Rhett Aultman "I was an exec at Mozilla when Google decided that the browser was too critical to be run by a nonprofit they don't control. Sounds a lot like Microsoft and OpenAI today. This is an unstable structure at its core. Hope all my friends over there are doing okay." --Mike Schroepfer "The results of the Employee Safety Survey are back. We will break down the results in section meetings soon, but from a high level standpoint the results indicate that nobody feels safe. This is consistent with Mr. Lofwyr's management philosophy to increase vigilance and attention to detail. Nice work, everyone!" --Memos from Lofwyr "Never punched a Nazi before. Felt pretty good." --Ben, _Quantum Leap: Secret History_ "You are living through collapse. It's okay to feel a sense of dread and anxiety. It's okay to feel fear. It's okay if you don't feel like hanging out with old friends who want to cosplay 2019. It's okay to sit alone in the dark, not thinking about anything. You have to deal with the moral injury that comes from realizing that many of your friends and family don't care enough about you to do a few simple things. It's okay." --OK, Doomer. "How is the OpenAI board gonna fire Sam Altman just because he gave answers that sounded plausible but weren't actually accurate?" --Anil Dash "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." --Lyndon B. Johnson "Environmental determinists have an unfortunate tendency to treat humans as little more than automata, living out some economist's fantasy of rational calculation." --David Graeber and David Wengrow, _Dawn of Everything_ "In order for me to write poetry that isn't political, I must listen to the birds. And in order to hear the birds, the warplanes must be silent." --Marwan Makhoul "Folks on Fox are panicking over a Black disabled Santa. I can understand why. As anyone who grew up in the internment camps knows, Santa isn't Black. That MF is Japanese." --Geoge Takei "After 40 years of neoliberalism, there's a growing recognition that the market's invisible hand would like to swat you like a bug." --Cory Doctorow "In America you don't say 'I lack empathy and basic critical thinking skills,' you say ''I'm just not political,'' which means ''I am so privileged that politics has never been personal for me, so I'm not engaged and I think it makes me smarter than people who are.'' Isn't that amazing?" --@Dumphim2017 "If buying is not owning, piracy is not stealing." --Al Sweigart "Now they're estimating over 13 hours of outage. Five nines? They're not even up to two nines." --Michael Paoli, on Comcast Business' latest outage "Maybe we are licked as a species... We are too shit to get out act together." --Boris Johnson "I am finding that a number of people reject any application of determinism to human affairs - the insulting notion that we might be subject to dynamics beyond our awareness or control. As with many things these days, I tend to suspect such reactions as stemming from a sense of human supremacy: 'Surely we humans have transcended base forces and bring full agency to all that we do...'" --Tom Murphy "The mission is the protection of property, not the preservation of the freedoms of the people. Royalist concentrations of wealth remain at liberty to do as they please - to poison rivers, cut down forests, charge cruel rates of interest, deny medical care, repudiate debt, eliminate species. Commonplace human beings, by nature untrustworthy, await instructions about where and how and when they walk the walk or talk the talk." --Lewis Lapham "The Onion speaks with more courage, insight, and moral clarity than the leaders of every academic institution put together." --Michael Eisen "There's a perception problem where you forget that things used to be hard now that they're easy. For instance years ago a friend and I spent months trying to get reverse proxies to work. And they never did, now we both see them as trivial to set up. We have a saying that they 'went from impossible to obvious,' and that happens a lot in this field." --Psychological_Try559, on self-hosting and system administration "I'm covering life and death issues, serious tragedies, serious momentous occurrences here in Israel. And, of course, we have to interrupt this for one moment to cover the complete and utter clown car that is the House Republican speaker's race back in Washington, DC. Was Congressman Emmer too sane?" --Jake Tapper, live on CNN, 24 October 2023 "So I get email asking why it's not possible to decrypt some EDI [electronic data interchange] financial messages (it was a problem with the RSA key transport section, not the later symmetric crypto part). They send me one of the messages and dumpasn1 reveals [hex dump omitted]... For those who can't read AlgorithmIdentifiers, that's 40-bit RC2, circa 1987. Being used today, in financial EDI. I suggested they just ignore the RSA part and brute-force the 40-bit key on each message." --Peter Gutmann (https://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2023-October/038222.html) "Mature doesn't mean absolutely effective. Mature means decisions made half a century ago are about as valid today as when they were made. In a mature technology your decision making doesn't need constant revision in light of changes in the underlying technology." --Ray Dillinger "Chrome exists to serve Google search, and if it cannot do that because it is regulated to be set by the user, the value of users using Chrome goes to almost zero." --Jim Kolotouros, vice president, Android Platform Partnerships, Google "I no longer believe that I will get to live in the future I dreamed of when I was growing up." --sizeof(cat) "The only thing Wagner got wrong is whether the petrochemical companies need journalists to exist on any terms but their own: They do not." --Rusty Foster "Most of my efforts to assert my rights are indeed in vain. Corporations will not honor my right to assert via a Creative Commons license that my work should only be redistributed or reused with attribution, for non-commercial purposes, and released under the same terms. I could perhaps attempt to enforce this claim to rights in court, but 'equal justice under law' is a hollow farce unless a deep-pocketed organization decides to use your case to establish a new legal precedent or challenge an existing one." --Matthew Graybosch "There's an attitude in American culture especially that having factual knowledge of a problem makes someone more culpable for that problem than someone who hasn't researched it but is *very mad* at it. And it's really screwing a lot of things up." --Amberite "Seiden's Rule of Thumb, proven over a very large number of physical security reviews, is that 10% of the physical security controls do not currently work, and a large proportion of these never worked properly in the first place." --Mark Seiden "Safety regulations are there because businesses see workers as expendable." --Polyamorous Misanthrope "This is modern-day pirate shit, as close as you can get. You succeed, and now you're a genius. Now you've outdone Google." --Cade Lee, professional SEO marketer, on SEO "ISO 21482 is the international symbol for ''Stop whatever the hell you're doing, get out of there, and if you're lucky you haven't signed your own death warrant.''" --Simon Wheeler "I can't teach people to care. Once they start caring they'll learn what I have tried to teach." --anonymousITCoward "I don't care if Ron Desantis wears lifts in his shoes to compensate for an inferiority complex. I care that he's a fascist." --Jamie Schler "It's fun that some folks think a secret group of rich people control everything, instead of the widely known group of rich people that control everything." --Solomon Georgio "Yes, having MATLAB is a known issue." --Anonymous Cow-orker "The War on Christmas cannot end until Christmas stops its illegal occupation of November." --Classy Warfare "The unknown is just how scared voters are of the unknown. Will they stick with the status quo, which nobody really likes, or seize the moment? That depends on whether the public still believes in its democratic, collective ability to do big things together." --Ryan Grim "When have the people who ban books ever been the good guys?" --Keri Lambert "Other punk style music is about the future. Sovietwave is about a lost future that was once dreamed by the people." --chiefbig "The entertainment industry has hijacked one of the most important of human activities. Storytelling. Some of us, me included, will no longer hand over the results of one of the most sacred rites, our stories, to the giant parasite that I half-jokingly call Mouseferatu. Of course, it's not only Disney but the big D is a perfect icon for what I oppose." --Joseph Matheny "Capital punishment? Them without the capital get the punishment." --John Spenkelink "Humanitarian law is to be respected, especially in Gaza. Please, let no more innocent blood be shed, neither in the Holy Land nor in Ukraine, nor in any other place! Enough! Wars are always a defeat, always!" --Pope Francis (This is considered a controversial statement in 2023.ev.) "I recommend discarding the left-right ideological spectrum entirely, and instead just study reality. The world needs realistic, sensible people, not ideologues." --xena_lawless "Without the mustache, I really did look like a twelve year old." --Arcus "We're gonna need five guys and a giant robot." --Polychrome "How old am I? Gray enough (in both hat color and beard color) that when AT&T crashed on January 15, 1990 I (like many other hackers) initially wondered if I had done something to cause it." --Simple Nomad "Hey, remember when the Panama Papers came out and revealed that all the rich people in the world are part of an enormous criminal conspiracy to dodge taxes and hoard stolen wealth in offshore accounts, and literally nothing happened?" --Colin Taylor "Trump is not counting on winning, he's counting on coming into power." --Tim Snyder "Can someone at Google use their 20% project or whatever to write a search engine?" --Lime With Barcode "I personally hope that [Nigel] Farage's jungle adventure experience results in a newly discovered species of leech being named in honor of his testicles." --Charles Stross "Furious Ohio Republicans Report Widespread Incidents of Women Voting" --Andy Borowitz headline, meant as satire "Market forces are such that even authenticity can become a commodity on social media, to be ranked, rated, and sold." --Sister Dang Nghiem, _Flowers In the Dark_ "You'd need to strap a bunch of upconverters and downconverters and preamps and all other sorts of '-verters' onto it, an antenna farm that might make the HAARP array look like an anemic lawn ornamemt, and more coax than there is spaghetti at an Olive Garden, but you could do it." --Well R3ad Redneck "Pray to IRC, because God will not save us." --Foolish Owl "Yes sir, that's correct, I have nearly 2 billion years of experience with JavaScript. My previous position was on Pangaea and all my references are amoebas." --FiniteLooper, when told that maximum number of years of JavaScript experience they may have for a position is 9,999,999,999 years "Quitting on time will usually feel like quitting too early." --Annie Duke "I wish I was a child, I spoke as a child, I spoke as a one-legged unicorn taking a leak at the seams between order and chaos, do you need?" --@hackermanifestov@botsin.space "SBF [Sam Bankman-Fried] performed a valuable public service by illustrating why you should shut the hell up, even if you think you can explain everything. The evidence against SBF was likely very strong by itself, but it was also likely confusing and rather technical. SBF's public statements and testimony did a terrific job of simplifying and distilling the case against him and making it accessible to the average juror." --Matt Blaze "If Gumby did not exist it would be necessary to create him. Since he does exist, it's currently necessary to destroy him." --Sean "Usually when you ask somebody in college why they are there, they'll tell you it's to get an education. The truth of it is, they are there to get the degree so that they can get ahead in the rat race. Too many college radicals are two-timing punks. The only reason you should be in college is to destroy it." --Abbie Hoffman "I love the demoscene. Eternally figuring out ways to do more and more with less and less, when pretty much the entire software industry is doing the precise opposite." --Millihertz "A famous Klingon once said, 'We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.' Cruelty in jest is still cruelty. Bigotry as irony is still bigotry. Do not pretend to be that which you do not want to be." --Coach Gowron "The future wants you. The future needs you. The future will have you whether you like it or not." --Welcome to Nightvale "Nobody before or after this has culture. Your mind has never existed on a precipice of infinity. To know actual, true awe in beholding a thing produced at the same speed of your perception, that has never existed. That was impossible. You are empty because you have never felt joy." --Swift On Security "I know, in my deep place, one of you will be able to use this in game. I don't want to know the details. Godspeed." --Xakk Zeliff "If you ask for help on an electronics forum, the usual EE response is 'fuck you, here are some differential equations to solve.'" --lcamtuf "There's nothing wrong with or derogatory about autism, but using it as a casual label for people who are interested in things you aren't is both incredibly lazy and offensive in equal measure to autistics and everyone else. Having knowledge and interests isn't a diagnosable condition." --Matt Blaze "Remember, the teens who come to your door tonight are still trying to adjust to leaving childhood behind. Be kind. They need the candy more than the darling little ones." --Edelruth "WW3 aint' happening. Why can't everyone just chill?" --Jim Cramer "Pretty sure Order 66 is where systemd takes off its mask and reveals its true identity, svchost.exe." --Jerry Bell "What shall we do with all this useless beauty?" --Elvis Costello "The government/agency you want regulating cybersecurity is the same government/agency that classifies Las Vegas casinos as critical infrastructure." --Robert Graham "Transcending past 'somebody is wrong on the Internet' into the peaceful void between deep cynicism and total uncaring." --Brian Leroux "If you rush headlong toward the future, you may despair when your path veers away, even for a short time, from your goals. Be patient. It takes time for you to become who you will be." --Coach Gowron "Any man who has the brains to think and the nerve to act for the benefit of the people of the country is considered a radical by those who are content with stagnation and willing to endure disaster." --William Randolph Hearst "You know the Mojo levels are high when the party host just parades around wearing nothing but a bath robe." --Mark Shane Hayden "No-fault divorce and equal pay laws are the only reason they don't know what coffee tastes like when it's sweetened with antifreeze." --Janel Comeau "The entire modern Internet starts melting down when about two dozen people, most of whom are furries, stop answering pages for a few days. Ever notice that amazon.com, AWS and Azure is on the struggle bus every time Midwest Furfest happens? That's the Thursday through Monday of the first weekend in December." --Baloo Uriza "Most of you are familiar with the bombs that were dropped on Japan in World War II. This [smack] is the same bomb dropped on Nagasaki, August 9th, 1945. About the same time, Dr. Edward Teller (who is known as the father of the hydrogen bomb) figured out that a nuclear fusion bomb was possible. Fusion would release even more energy and cause an even bigger explosion from the same amount of nuclear material. Much to Dr. Teller's dismay, the Japanese surrendered, we never dropped the hydrogen bomb, and Dr. Teller's been in a bad mood ever since." --Bob Lazar "Seeing someone posting something heartrending and having your first response be ''better make sure I don't have a reason to hate this person before I express any empathy'' is a reaction I hope you give some more consideration to." --Jeff Craig "An open-faced sandwich is a misclassified salad." --Enron Hubbard "No clickbait title or thumbnail? Very suspicious." --brunoqc "It certainly was A Choice that AdGuard *FOR SAFARI* contains an entire copy of 'Chrome/100.0.4896.160' inside it." --jwz "You can aspire all you want. Only one percent of you will be working as opposed to just aspiring. So maybe you should learn some stuff that's more broadly useful. That's helped me a lot." --Andrew Eldritch "Look, it is a comic not a production-ready solution." --Kevin Cox "The enemy is not the Muslim, the Christian, or the Jew, but stupidity itself". --Jihad Jerry "Sometimes people do things to you that you can't do anything about. You just have to survive it and go on." --Murderbot, _Artificial Condition_ "Do not attempt to threaten deadly force against parties that control a vastly larger array of deadly weaponry." --Philip Hallam-Baker "You mean the movie where he literally died and they made him go back to work?" --Jay Decay, on _Robocop_ "I'm so scared of this anti-Wall Street effort. I'm frightened to death. They're having an impact on what the American people think of capitalism." --Frank Luntz, strategist for the Republican Party "FreeBSD: Free BSD. MacOS: Expensive BSD." --Astrid "The loudest complainers of other people's work are contributing the least of their own." --Rustic Cyberpunk "The fog of war is bad, ya'll and the fake videos are getting better. If you see something... intense, upsetting, something that gives you an emotional reaction and either solidifies your views or makes you question them... hit pause. I don't care how media savvy you are. Especially if it's something that confirms your worst fears. Especially that one. Hit pause. Check the sources. Check them direct from the source site, don't trust thumbnails, or watermarks." --myrmepropagandist "As I noted recently, we have completely lost the sense of ground truth, and there seems to be no path back to sanity. Once again, the truthiness has been exposed: No Virginia, There is No Sanity Clause." --Peter G. Neumann, moderator, the Risks Digest "The best proof that I can come up with that the universe is fundamentally an uncaring place devoid of any human sentiment is that Henry Kissinger is *still* alive." --Dymaxion "Man, there was a pit at a Toad the Wet Sprocket show once. If there's a critical mass of dipshits, it doesn't matter what the music is." --voidgazing "Did you know that you're allowed to be sad about children being killed? You don't even need to explain your political beliefs to justify why you are sad about children being killed. Some people on the Internet may try to tell you otherwise, but they are what we call 'not worth listening to.'" --Low Quality Facts "A lot of the comments I've gotten today have a strong undertone of ''anyone not as smart/tech savvy/careful/willing to study esoterica as I am doesn't DESERVE privacy/security/reliability.'' This is a distressingly common attitude in a lot of tech communities, and I strongly reject it. It's toxic and exclusionary, and any platform that hopes to grow into something usable at scale needs to consciously move past it." --Matt Blaze "If you think it's 'idiocy' that their side carefully, secretly and effectively organized and coordinated their attacks on your side, that might be an insight into why you keep losing to their side." --Geoff Berner "Kinda weird how 'talking about the weather' went from inconsequential small talk to dire discussion of the future of humanity." --Enron Hubbard "My spouse describes Shiro as being demonic when he's at the vet. I counter that he is angelic. Cherubic, in fact. Biblically accurate cherub, specifically: Having multiple faces, beautiful to behold, along with being entirely able and willing to smite you." --Hasufin "Stupid platform limitations beget stupid solutions." --Fluffy "It really just takes about two generations for atrocities of the old to become debatable and abstract. We're seeing that with WWII." --lcamtuf "Twitter users are the Americans of the Internet." --Lars From Mars "I have never heard the clean radio edit of WAP before... How the fuck do you make a 'clean' version that is somehow WAY filthier by simply avoiding all the naughty words??" --Chrisshy Keygen "Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible." --Carl Jung "Surveying the progression of GOP leaders in the House of Representatives in recent years, I understand better why Republicans have become skeptical about evolution." --Mnemonic "I deeply believe that you do not actually have to have a scorchingly viral opinion about everything that happens, and you super definitely don't need to share that opinion on the internet over and over again, and maybe, just maybe, it might possibly be morally acceptable to just shut the fuck up sometimes." --Cat Valente "Trigona is gone! The servers of the Trigona ransomware gang has been exfiltrated and wiped out. Welcome to the world you created for others." --Ukranian Cyber Alliance "Whenever we discuss a paper in my distributed systems class, I randomly split people into six groups and they spread out around the building to talk, while I walk from group to group. The groups are different every time. But so far, every time, I'm able to find five groups, while the sixth group goes off somewhere and I can't find or communicate with them until they eventually wander back to the classroom five minutes late. I feel this is rather appropriate for a distributed systems course." --Lindsey Kuper "Live your life in such a way that the entire world isn't excitedly holding its breath waiting for you violate the fuck out of your gag order." --Jeff Tiedrich "Right-wing conspiracy theories are completely detached from reality. Left wing conspiracy theories are things the CIA will admit to in 20 years." --trixter "The inability to imagine how ancient peoples completed highly technical projects without advanced machinery is indicative of worker's alienation, not aliens." --Dr. Holly Walters "I'll be more enthusiastic about encouraging thinking outside the box when there's evidence of any thinking going on inside it." --Terry Pratchett "Techfuckery is currently our best defense against enshittification." --frigginGlorious "Not directly influenced by owt specific, but I feel like we need to remind people that 'raised by 4chan' isn't a character trait to be proud of." --Jo "A pathology of conservatism is that 'things used to be simple.' No, you used to be a kid. Your parents shielded you from life's complexity. Things are complex because you're an adult now. Conservatism is the desire to be a child." --Cory Doctorow "There is a DS2 [Dark Souls 2] speedrun called hrt%, in which you get to the gender-changing coffin as fast as possible." --Eleanor "Funny thing about 'issues,' you don't have them until you do." --Ray Wells "I am not annoyed at people calling out public figures on their politics. I am annoyed at the presumption that, with everything going on in the world, I should concern myself at all with the political views of a crooning haircut." --SqualorTrawler, on musicians' politics "We were noticing an exponential increase in a certain kind of dysfunction going on. And we labeled it. I didn't really think that we'd go where we went, because de-evolution is real. And this is beyond my worst dystopian nightmare." --Jerry Casale "Your reliance on god is the reason why he can punish you to test you." --laudarch "When I say I love the ocean, I mean I love the surface. Whatever goes on beneath has my respect but it's none of my business." --Big Nose Lover "If you see a good idea, look for a better one. Good thinking is a matter of making comparisons." --Bruce Pandolfini, chess master "Arrogance can be justified, but I believe it is rarely wise." --Calafin "I believe this specific type of alert cannot be disabled in the US. This is the ''Dear taxpayer, nuclear war has just broken out and you're gonna die horribly, but we wanted you to have some time to have regrets'' alert." --Ryan McGinnis "Because you're allowed to do something doesn't mean you can do it without repercussions. In this case, the consequences are very much on the mild side: If you use LLMs or diffusion models, a relatively small group of mostly mid- to low-income people who are largely underdogs in their respective fields will think you're a dick." --Baldur Bjarnason "The profusion of dubious AI-generated content resembles the badly made stockings of the nineteenth century. At the time of the Luddites, many hoped the subpar products would prove unacceptable to consumers or to the government. Instead, social norms adjusted." --Kyle Chayka "That was my fatal mistake: I was writing parsing code assuming this shit made any fucking sense." --Foone "If China's early 20th century literati sought to expel ghosts from literature for being nonhuman, Mao's [Zedong] reading went in the opposite direction. Ghosts in literature were not manifestations of the supernatural, but metaphors for various real and very human political enemies. To defeat literary ghosts became an allegory for frightening off your political enemies." --Fu Mengxing "I am starting to suspect that Google is intentionally failing to police their own email service as part of a multifaceted effort to kill SMTP off completely. I get so much spam from legitimate gmail accounts anymore." --Nuintari "I think a lot about an essay by Jonathan Z. Smith, one of the deans of religious studies in America, about Jim Jones and Jonestown. He states there that it's easy to use words like 'insane' to describe what happened at Jonestown - but in a sense that's abdicating the basic premise of the humanities as a discipline, which is to understand." --Matthew B. Bowmann "If peaceful demonstrations worked, you wouldn't have a right to them." --IWantToSortMyFeed "I think the best road ahead to human happiness is to expect less." --Charlie Munger, billionaire, age 99 "I do fucking hate the poor, and I hate poor people and I hate poverty and I'm sick of lying about it. I'm not gonna pretend that I don't." --Nick Fuentes "Remember in that movie Independence Day when they hacked the aliens? I used to think that was a silly plot device, but every day looking at our own security, I see that being more and more plausible." --DoWhile "If we don't make the effort we will live in a very small box of experiences." --Few-Worldliness2131 "The cool thing about cyberpunk coming true is that we got ALL the cyberpunk futures. China: Universal surveillance and social control. America: Cool gadgets and staggering inequality. Russia: Shadowy plots, covert ops, and assassins. Japan: Japan." --Noah Smith "Disobedience cannot be tolerated, whether it be violent or nonviolent disobedience." --William Rehnquist "We need to see unemployment rise. Unemployment has to jump 40-50%, in my view. We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. There's been a systematic change where employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them, as opposed to the other way around. So, it's a dynamic that has to change. We've got to kill that attitude, and that has to come through hurting the economy, which is what the whole global - the world - is trying to do. The governments around the world are trying to increase unemployment to get that to some sort of normality, and we're seeing it. I mean, there is definitely massive layoffs going off. People might not be talking about it, but people are definitely laying people off, and we're starting to see less arrogance in the employment market. And that has to continue because that will cascade across the costs balance." --Tim Gurner, founder and CEO, Gurner Group "Welcome to Hacking 101, lesson 1: We do things to see if we can, not because we have a reason." --Crafty-Crafter "At this point, trying to get games working on Linux has become easier than trying to get telemetry to stop working on Windows." --ddh "I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half." --Jay Gould, US financier, railroad tycoon "There's a difference between laughing with and laughing at. And I think we all know that." --Chuck Tingle "We should not have to rely on the benevolence of for-profit corporations to protect our rights. It's not their job, and it shouldn't be." --Bruce Schneier "The ONLY thing you hear on the news.. any news.. are bad things(tm). War, corruption, you name it. We still should be thankful we still call these things news because often it feels like it would be more newsworthy if politicians weren't corrupt, or not kept their promises, or screwed another group of people over." --Joshua Thijssen "Greebled for her pleasure." --Mavica "The biggest problem with the cloud is that the computers now know we cannot physically get at them with an axe. And they are behaving accordingly." --Abstract Code "Terrible people are not just terrible in one way. Rather, they are generally terrible and do many different terrible things." --Jack William Bell "It ought always to be remembered that literary institutions are founded and endowed for the common good, and not for the private advantage of those who resort to them for education. It is not that they may be enabled to pass through life in an easy or reputable manner, but that their mental powers may be cultivated and improved for the benefit of society." --Joseph McKeen, President, Bowdoin College, 1802 "Open Source projects either die a failure or survive long enough to become a security risk." --Evan Prodromou "I am so tired of living like it's the 1600's. Can I afford eggs at the market? Are my friends gonna die in the plague? Puritans are coming for my sinful lifestyle. I want some modern problems. Modern problems!" --Sigurd the Mighty "How does one become a LinkedInfluencer? If it's this easy to sway the CEOs of the largest companies of the world, just imagine the sheer number of funny things you could make them do." --Astrid "I'd be a lot more willing to believe the whole 'what if reality is a simulation?' hypothesis if I didn't know speedrunners. The world can't be a simulation, because no autistic trans girl has figured out how to jump backwards so fast that she breaks the laws of physics and becomes the queen of America." --Foone "I'm not an expert, but it occurs to me that if the NHI [non-human intelligneces] start their invasion in Oakland, they might not be thrilled with the outcome. 'Welcome, to Oakland, bitch!'" --The Zinger Slinger "Stare not into the void lest you become known as the void domain expert." --Unknown "The Burning Man crisis is a perfect scenario for these folks, stranded together and running out of basic necessities, to demonstrate the power of the Blockchain." --Alex Winter "Everything goes down sometime. If something being down doesn't result in me getting a text message with a Zoom link, all is good." --Gary "Same derriere, different cheek." --Bob Jamieson "For every meeting that could've been an email, there's a Youtube tutorial that could've been a README.md." --Privileged White Mail "The enemy of my enemy is not always my friend. Such may be an ally, but friendship requires that someone stands with me against my enemies not because of who my enemy is, but because of who I am. Be worthy of such friends." --Coach Gowron "Republicans believe that life begins at conception and ends at birth." --Barney Frank "Doing a thing can sometimes save hours of thinking about it." --Alun Jones "I'm a Gen Xer, so I adapt to new technology like a Millennial but get angry about it like a Boomer." --@TheCatWhisperer "Identity politics has been cultivated, because it does not threaten capital." --Thomas Cherryhomes "We learned from Kent State that rebellion is obsolete. If the government doesn't agree with you, and you become too big of a pain in the butt for them, they just push you back down and shoot." --Mark Mothersbaugh "Rights are only worth anything with guarantor willing to expend resources to enforce it. If nobody's lifting a finger, they're either a privilege for some, or void entirely." --Just A Frog "If you're cold, pants might be a good start." --U Can Beat Video Games "Books: Pissing people off since ancient days." --Rick Moen "Much of the real world is controlled as much by the 'tails' of distributions as by means or averages: By the exceptional, not the mean; by the catastrophe, not the steady drip; by the very rich, not the 'middle class.' We need to free ourselves from 'average' thinking." --Philip Anderson "The fact that Nazis can walk through Florida without concern for their safety while trans people have to flee the state should tell you everything you need to know about today's Republican Party." --Elad Nehorai "I might one day learn how ED.COM works. Today is not that day." --Maddiefuzz "All war is a symptom of man's failure as a thinking animal." --John Steinbeck "Lot of sweaty gamer boys getting grumpy that I refuse to use mouse and keyboard. Sorry lads, I need my fingers and wrists for sex things - if playing the game was giving your dick an acheing pain after an hour you'd use a controller as well." --CJ Bellwether "Book deals are just one avenue for laundering the bribes and payoffs directed to conservative politicians. In the USA, books deals for the corrupt are common. Dark money groups often bulk-buy these tomes to game the best-seller lists." --Nicole Parsons "It's just so weird to me that not too long ago someone with a regular old job could buy a house, like, an entire house with just their job money." --Danielle Weisberg "Too many people don't appreciate what a massive effort it is to keep civilization running. Beware those who claim easy answers to the problems of civilization, for they are bullshitting you." --Jurgen Hubert "If the federal government had access to every email you've ever written and every phone call you've ever made, it's almost certain that they could find something you've done which violates a provision in the 27,000 pages of federal statues or 10,000 administrative regulations. You probably do have something to hide, you just don't know it yet." -- Moxie Marlinspike "Someday I'm gonna reverse engineer a game and not want to time travel back to its creation and ask them WHAT THE FUCK at gunpoint. Sometimes I won't even ask, I'll just start shooting." --Foone "I needed a simple, low capacity USB 2.0 drive for interacting with Traditional Technology and it was cheaper to add several to the cart until I reached the free shipping threshold than to pay for the envelope." --0xabad1dea "In the early 70s, the capital class stages a revolt of the rich against the poor. The post-World War II consensus had transferred too much wealth and too much power to the working class, so the rich made it their mission to dismantle that consensus and make sure it could never re-emerge. First Nixon and then Reagan built and institutionalized debt traps, slashed social spending, annihilated labor unions, and poisoned the very idea that there was any such thing as 'society' or that we could work together to solve our shared problems." --Heavenly Possum "A dirty book is rarely dusty." --anonymous "When writing science fiction, always Google your made-up planet name; 9 times out of 10, it's an existing yeast infection medication." --batkaren "I really feel for the brilliant engineers who built these astounding, cheap devices (HEPA, FFP3) capable of plucking microscopic viral particles from the very air we breathe, only for everyone to be, like, 'Thanks, but no thanks, give us some more of those viral particles.'" --Michael Osborne "Some people want a leader so intensely they'll construct one out of whatever and whoever happens to be around. Someone says what they want to hear, suddenly they're all ears, boosting their new savior, and donating online. Throw in the social experience of believing with all the other needy people and you have a powerful trap of peer pressure and sunk cost." --Rev. Xenofact "I feel like I'm constantly taking crazy pills in this sub. It feels like everybody else here sees Homestuck as this really serious work of high art that wants to be held to some kind of character consistency or something when it isn't." --DarkMarxSoul "According to my agent, I've lost out on enough money to pay off my mortgage and fund my kid's college education by sticking to my principles, but they're not principles if you don't stick to them." --Cory Doctorow "Bats can hear shapes. Plants can eat light. Bees can dance maps. We can hold all of these ideas at once and feel both heavy and weightless with the absurd beauty of it all." --CryptoNaturalist "The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them." --Julius Nyerere, first president of Tanzania "So while a middle class citizen would be able to take a day off here and there to protest, or organize a strike at work to unionize, the current situation is that if someone tries that, they lose their job, their home, their health insurance, etc. We've been beaten down, and gaslit for decades into thinking it's for our own good somehow. In that view, is it even slightly surprising that some people, many people even, would just shut down and try to hold on to what semblance of normalcy they have? Not everyone is willing to make the big sacrifices to better the world as a whole if it means their own way of life would be ripped away from them before they even start making serious headway." --eragonawesome2 "I refuse to call it cyberpunk till my dong has surgically implanted contact lenses." --latortillablanca "Life is complicated. It's filled with nuance. It's unsatisfying. If I believe in anything, it is doubt. The root cause of all life's problems is looking for a simple answer." --Anthony Bourdain "Nowadays, people working on XFS seem to spend most of their time on distro kernel backports and dealing with AI-generated corner case bug reports that aren't user reports. Reviewing has become a nightmare of sifting through under-documented kernel code trying to decide if this new feature won't break all the other features. Getting reviews is an unpleasant process of negotiating with demands for further cleanups, trying to figure out if a review comment is based in experience or unfamiliarity, and wondering if the silence means anything." --Derrick Wong, stepping down as maintainer of XFS "Do you really think that you are strong enough to remain sane when surrounded exclusively by kooks who fully believe in some completely nonsensical set of delusions that you knowingly created on a whim, without the opportunity of even a vacation from your self-appointed, full-time role as messiah and omniscient all-father?" --Peter Huston, _Scams from the Great Beyond_ "I never expected the statement 'I am just trying to avoid getting sick' being widely viewed as radical, representative of mental illness, deserving of ridicule, condemnation and scorn by friends and strangers alike." --Laurie Allee "Error 418 came about as an April fools joke by the IETF back in 1998. RFC 2324 was published on 1st of April 1998, describing a standard called Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0) that is an implementation for controlling coffee machines over HTTP. The whole RFC was basically a demonstration for how to not use HTTP for insane applications. Along with this standard a new HTTP status code was standardised, HTTP 418 ''I'm a Teapot,'' which is aptly used by said teapot when you ask it to brew coffee using HTCPCP. That the standard doesn't implement any support for teapots isn't really explained, neither is the need for an unsupported teapot to implement HTCPCP. This was later rectified in 2014 by RFC 7168 which extends HTCPCP to allow brewing of teas. However, this being real standards means that HTTP 418 is a very real standardised error. This was later reaffirmed back in 2015 by the save418.com movement when some dimwit with the mission to eradicate any joy from the world got the bright spark to try and have 418 re-purposed for something more 'useful.'" --Grumpytechie "You can say what you want in a blog post, everybody knows you can revert that at will any time as long as it is in the terms of services." --prmoustache "I wanted to put a reference to masturbation in one of the scripts for _The Sandman_. It was immediately cut by the editor (Karen Berger). She told me, ''There's no masturbation in the DC Universe.'' To which my reaction was, 'Well, that explains a lot about the DC Universe.'" --Neil Gaiman "Pretty remarkable to see Coinbase making the argument that crypto[-currency] is not like stocks, it's like baseball cards, American Girl dolls, or Beanie Babies. It's the future of finance! Except when the SEC comes knocking, then it's just a harmless little toy, your honor." --Molly White "Some people say we need a third party. I wish we had a second one." --Jim Hightower "There is no invasion, in QUATERMASS. The troubled, dogged professor has simply lived too long, and entered the modern condition: A world where there is no forward motion, everything seems to be an iteration of something else, and the lives of hundreds and thousands can be snuffed out at random by something unseen and awful that nobody quite understands." --Warren Ellis "Life is too damn short for everything to have some grand point." --Socketwench "My only question is, why did they go to the trouble of ANIMATING _King of the Hill_? Could just as well have filmed my neighbors." --Rev. Ivan Stang "Free speech is when you kick out all the journalists that are slightly more left leaning than you and bring back racists, sexists, fascists, and human traffickers." --krimsonbun, on Twitter "No gods, no masters. Not even Qualcomm." --Unknown "The perfect political action operation is, by definition, uneventful. Nothing 'happens' in it. It is a continuing arrangement, neither a process nor a series of actions proceeding at a starting point and ending with a conclusion." --Miles Copeland, _The Game Player: Confessions of the CIA's Original Political Operative_ "You can't talk about reality. You can't share your thoughts and feelings unless they align with the status quo of civility in the face of attitudes that are destroying the planet. That makes you negative." --Jessica Wildfire "This is not a new world, it is simply an extension of what began in the old one. It has patterned itself after every dictator who has ever planted the rippling imprint of a boot on the pages of history since the beginning of time. It has refinements, technological advances, and a more sophisticated approach to the destruction of human freedom. But like everyone of the super-states that preceeded it - it has one iron rule: Logic is an enemy and truth is a menace." --Rod Serling "These results are interesting because they appear to show a divergence between elite opinion and popular opinion; most private company leaders are racing with one another to aggressively develop and deploy AI systems and lock-in various economic and ecosystem advantages, and many policymakers are adopting policies to encourage the development of AI sectors. Additionally, many well paid technologists seem to subscribe to a libertarian-esque 'let it rip, all gas and no brakes!' philosophy about AI development. Yet this survey shows that normal people are much more cautious in their outlook about the technology and more likely to adopt or prefer a precautionary principle when developing the tech. If these views end up being transmitted to policymakers via their constituents, then we might see more cautious tones creep into the policy discourse as well." --Jack Clark "Cryptography is a mixture of mathematics and muddle, and without the muddle the mathematics can be used against you." --Ian Cassels, British mathematician, World War II cryptanalyst "Watching the video of the judge processing the (presumed) Trump Georgia indictment and now waiting for the Internet to claim that the charges are invalid because the courtroom didn't have the correct flag or something." --Matt Blaze "I can write down a few words and make people thousands of miles away, whom I have never met and will never meet, laugh tears of joy and cry tears of true sorrow for people who do not exist and have never existed and never will exist. If that isn't actual, literal magic, I don't know what is." --Neil Gaiman "I know enough furries who are only a couple of years of CRISPR development away from getting a new law named after them." --Foone "They're deprecating covid variants that are still live in production, next they'll incorporate covid functionality into systemd. Just you watch." --Ultros Professional "Refrigeration basically is a sort of localised one-way time travel, as cooling something down lowers the entropy in it, so as the arrow of time and the arrow of entropy are essentially the same thing, it's reversing time locally." --Andrew Hickey "I wish more lefties could internalize the idea that hypocrisy is not a meaningful accusation to the right. Of course they're being hypocrites. That you are bound, by rules, standards, logic, human decency, some fundamental moral consistency, anything at all, and they are not? That is their conception of what power is, and why they seek it. So they can exercise power, without constraint, and you cannot. That's the whole point. Hypocrisy is the virtue-signaling of fascism." --mhoye "If Democrats really want justice for Trump's crimes, they should do the ethical thing and arrange vacation trips, gifts and personal loans for the judge overseeing his case." --Steven Rosenthal "Seeing a lot of total noobs at Defcon walking around with zero protection to a widely known vulnerability, just begging to get their systems infected with a viral exploit from over three years ago. Really disappointing because the patch involves wearing a wicked cool face mask like a cyberpunk, though a cheap N95 also works if you've already spent all your money on an anti-RFID wallet or some other fancy everyday carry gizmo." --Jayne "Kahless tells us that loss is a bitter cup we all must drink from occasionally. The grief of loss is the other side of deep love. Love, no matter the pain later, is never wasted. When you feel the pain of loss, remember the love as well, so those departed will live on forever." --Coach Gowron "One criticism I have about most of the non-post left is that they seem to live more in books and less in the real world. Which is fine but this is not how goals are achieved. Nothing will change if you do nothing. It's simple as that. Prophecies of the revolution are speculative fiction." --Elizafox "Retro is hobby, and hobby is the point." --Breadbin "The world is a shit show, but you have to stop and enjoy the little things, or you will simply go insane." --Studio 8502 "After 8 years of daily tweeting one of the loudest, most candid voices coming out of China has been deplatformed - absolutely no one gives a shit. I could be dead in a ditch - but we aren't actually people, we're just signs for people like you in the West to wave at each other in their ideological war." --Naomi Wu "I love the stock market, because when it goes up we get nothing, but when it goes down we all lose our jobs. Except during a pandemic; when it goes up and we still lose our jobs." --Shoegaze Dad "Abstract classes are a great way to feel productive without actually writing any real code." --retr0id "It's possible to keep a secret if nobody gives a damn." --Hasufin "'Lufthansa group confirmed that 18,000 flights had been flown empty to keep airport slots.' Your personal carbon footprint is meaningless." --Eve Forster "'Generic term' doesn't matter when you have lawyers." --Binder "This docker container could've been a shell script." --Graham Sutherland "As much as I loathe having to reveal this to you, the shapeliness of the hands should be semi-negligible to most people who would love to have an image created from the statement ''I want to see Billie Eilish's boobs''." --rhabarba "I didn't know you could throw a whole jet out of a hotel window, but in Russia apparently this is a thing." --ManyFacedGodxxx, on Yevgeny Prigozhin's plane going down "At some point, to be effective activists on any level, we do have to play the board as it lies, not just claim none of this would be a problem if we set everything on fire and played an as-yet-uninvented game with no board at all." --Cat Valente "The only thing I can guarantee is that both sides will find something to attack me for in the comments. Fucking pissants." --Qxir "It isn't enough for a sole voice of reason to exist. In this time of uncertainty, we are so sure that villains lurk around every corner that we will create them ourselves if we can't find them - for while fear may keep us vigilant, it's also fear that tears us apart - a fear that sadly exists only too often - outside the Twilight Zone." --Rod Serling "The whole premise of most of my talks are 'I am an idiot, and so can you!'" --Deviant Ollam "When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other." --Eric Hoffer "Dear Microsoft, my PC has 8 physical cores running at 4GHz each, I feel like it is up to the challenge of an interpreted programming language." --Jason Lefkowitz "So, I know everyone's afraid of looking like a crazy person, but I can't believe the new UFO report from the Pentagon isn't a bigger deal. Our government says there are crafts that 'outstrip our arsenal by at least 100 years to 1,000 years at the moment' and we're like 'meh.'" --Cabot Phillips "Naming a cat Dijkstra, 'cuz he certainly knows the shortest path to food." --Maddiefuzz "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." --Karl Marx "Pretty weird how there's always a trillion dollars just laying around whenever corporations need to be bailed out, but there's never any money when children need healthcare or a simple school lunch. Oh, well, just one of those things, I guess." --Jeff Tiedrich "I will never understand people who try to talk their friends or partners into liking something. Like, look, $friend is an adult in the USA in the 2020s, they are aware that Marvel movies exist and have chosen not to watch them. I don't think it's because they haven't had their merits explained fully." --Pagrus "Listen most carefully to those whose voice is seldom heard, is downplayed or suppressed. The quietest words may be the most important for you to hear." --Coach Gowron "I haven't been able to burn one thing in this game." --Arcus "Death is a gentleman, too. He makes good losers of us all." --Proteus IV, _Demon Seed_ "I have nothing to hide, but everything to protect." --Dweeb of the Dweebs "I have no idea why mental health issues are so prevalent in communities who are exposed to regular public debates on if you deserve to live." --maclean brendan "Sufficiently advanced magic is so boring that everyone who isn't forced to fix it doesn't even want to know it exists." --Dymaxion "It's easy to have the courage of a lion, they're gigantic and have claws and no natural predators. Have the courage of the guinea pig, a two pound meat potato with zero offensive or defensive abilities that will scream at an ape 100 times its size if their lettuce is too wilty." --@pervocracy "You see, if somebody robs a store, it's a crime and the state is all set and ready to nab the criminal. But, if somebody steals from the commons and from the future it's seen as an entrepreneurial activity and the state cheers and gives them tax concessions rather than arresting them. We badly need an expanded concept of justice and fairness that takes mortgaging the future into account." --Ursula M. Franklin, _The Real World of Technology_ "When life hands you lemons, just hand them back. No one said you couldn't hand them back." --Crockett "Bruce Wayne paying 90% taxes on income and capital gains over $10 million would do more to help Gotham than Batman ever could." --Austin Gilkeson "There is no avoiding war; it can only be postponed to the advantage of others." --Niccolo Machiavelli "It's clear to me that sustained consistent action is necessary, but it's also good to get occasional good news so that people don't lose hope and think it's all too hard." --Patrick Lam "I guess I'm a socialist because I want even Nazis to ahve free health care, and I guess I'm antifa because I want them to need it." --Bunny Sparber "Mass confusion and panic here tonight in kitchen stadium after the featured ingredient was announced to be degenerate matter from the deepest heart of a neutron star." --Blackle Mori "Everybody is just timesharing their anger across thousands of targets until they're too tired to actually accomplish anything, and I can't help but feel like this is on purpose; because if this energy was directed at one target at a time, it could really make a difference." --Chrisshy Keygen "Learn how to manage memory manually, or how to write assembly. Write a compiler, or a web browser. Learn how to repair your hardware when it breaks, and how to fix your software when the authors don't care to. Teach yourself how to write, or draw, or sing, or whatever it is that you wish you knew. You don't have to do any of this, of course - but if you're not going to, it should be because you don't want to, not because you've been lied to. The hardest step is to admit that you are capable." --pixx "It looks like we have a problem here that needs investigation." --Congressman Nick Langworthy, 23rd district of New York "Remember quarantine, when everyone was making bread and dancing and making art and taking care of plants and just learning new, useful skills and we got a small glimpse into what life is supposed to be like?" --@c0wbitch "Privacy is the agency you have over your dignity." --mhoye "If your friends and allies achieve glory before you, be glad for them! Jealousy is an ugly thing, not fit for a warrior. You cannot achieve glory by diminishing someone else's. The joy of victory is to be shared, not spurned!" --Coach Gowron "Nails on a chalkboard good! It hit that spot in my third nostril that makes me sneeze in technicolor." --Professor Pontius Pressure "The best advice I got about Mastodon is that it's for things you love, not hate." --Neil Kandalgaonkar "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all." --_Futurama_ "Ah, the rare valid point." --Josh Lyman, _The West Wing_ "Many people have a preference for civility politics. They prefer negative peace over a positive justice. They have similar reactions when vegan animal rights activists point out things that trigger their cognitive dissonance. Thankfully, their pissing and moaning about these groups still bring more attention to these urgent issues than quietly begging for justice ever has, so even if they don't like it, these kinds of stunts are still effective." --trevor "''And I'm not bad at autopsies, either,'' is a threat only Vincent Price could pull off." --Andy Lundell "Many people will compartmentalize their desires to protect themselves and their desires to be engaged with the latest trend. They probably care that personal data is being harvested from themselves and the people that they care about, but they excuse it away because of the reward. Pavlov's dog in action." --Another Day In Hell "If you'll join whoever gives you the smoothest pitch, well... let's just say we aren't motivated by the same things. Which makes your motives very suspect." --Oliphantom Menace "The one thing our current garbage system is supposed to actually support is relatively frictionless commerce and even that is broken." --Christina d-h "If you really care about preventing government tyranny, your #1 priority must be making sure criminals have rights. And that's not a joke or an exaggeration. If criminals don't have rights, then all the government has to do is find some excuse to label people as criminals, and those people will no longer have rights. It's what literally every tyrannical government in all of history has done. If you believe that people who break the law should forfeit their rights, you're literally as pro-tyrrany as a person can get." --The Concealed Weapon "Redundancy is the buffer against attacks to the system integrity. A system without redundancy is unhealthy, subjected to extreme conditions, stressing it further. Efficiency is monoculture, like plantation. This simplification collapses systems." --Nonlinear "No, recruiters. I do not want to be part of a 'challenging' team. I'm in my mid-50s. I want to be part of a 'mature' team, a 'powerful' team with a large and well-managed 'throughput,' a 'structured' team that knows how to use processes to quickly and accurately handle the Same Stuff That Happens Every Week so that when someone else comes screaming in with their ass on fire babbling about something someone else broke and We Need To Document This Thing NOW NOW NOW, one or two of us can calmly turn from our current tasks, neatly and quickly handle La Emergencia, and calm the panicked person's heartrate without raising our own. I'm old. Fuck 'ambition.' I just want a good paycheck and no dumbass 'this REALLY could have been avoided' hasslepanic." --The Laughing Muse "If you remove yourself from the fishbowl that is society, it would seem ludicrous that the 'ecomaniacs' are considered extremists. It sure feels extreme to continue on a path that is wreaking havoc on nature and could lead to collapse. Change the perspective, and groups like Just Stop Oil and XR are moderate, while those who continue to preach from the pulpit in support of economic growth - the growthmaniacs, if you will - are deeply irrational. Again though, from inside the fishbowl, this irrationality is entirely understandable because the catastrophic environmental impacts accompanying economic growth aren't perceived in our daily lives. People just aren't engaged in solving problems if they don't directly impact their lives right now." --Paul Abela "There were a lot of rules out there that didn't make engineering sense to me. They made sense at the time, in the '60s and '70s. But, you know, there's a limit. You know, at some point, safety just is pure waste." --Stockton Rush, creator of the deep-diving sub that catastrophically failed near the wreck of the Titantic, killing himself and all hands "Humans doing the hard jobs for minimum wage while the robots write poetry and paint is not the future I wanted." --Karl Sharro "Research and science gave us solar panels - our society just didn't care to invest in that 'till NASA needed it. Did we find the material to make them in outer space, precious? Imagine a world where the brightest minds of my generation are employed figuring out how to maintain a sustainable planet for 8+ billion people, instead of whatever the fuck it is we pay them to do now tho? Your poverty of imagination is not my fucking problem." --AnarchoNinaWrites "I was so shocked to learn in the research that the opposite of belonging is fitting in. Because fitting in is assessing a group of people and thinking 'Who do I need to be? What do I need to say? What do I need to wear? How do I need to act?' and changing who you are. And true belonging never asks us to change who we are. It demands that we be who we are. Because if we fit in because of how we changed ourselves that's not belonging." --Brene Brown "Science is embraced when it serves the interests of capital, and is often ignored when it does not." --Jason Hickel "If you suggest that maybe having thousands of unvetted dependencies for a CRUD app is maybe not real great or totally necessary you mostly get ignored and/or branded a crank." --fm2279 "I appreciate a good infosec cult as much as the next person in cat ears." --doot "Yes, it's hot. But this could be one of the coolest summers of the rest of your life." --Dr. Maria Neira, environmental scientist, July 2023 "I have been spending a lot of time with Ron DeSantis this week - and I have to tell you, it's been rather unpleasant. For several days now, I've been making my way through the two books DeSantis has published: The much-discussed _The Courage to Be Free_ that came out earlier this year and the almost forgotten _Dreams From Our Founding Fathers_ from 2011. Sometimes, I do question the choices I've made that have led me to this point in my life." --Thomas Zimmer "If you pick your own mushrooms, you should always leave some untouched. That way, your relatives can know what you died of." --Unknown Swedish mycologist "The three pillars of humanity, in no particular order, are Joy, Absurdity, and Sharing." --Calamity's Child "You must celebrate when something works, because in a long science career, not much will work. The biggest skill as a Ph.D candidate is awareness of and the humility to understand the sheer mass of knowledge you don't have, and never will have but your colleagues may." --Prof. Van Haensel "Let's be clear. Those 'low value' degrees are all the degrees were you learn how power works. How knowledge is made. Where hierarchies and ideologies come from. And why all of that is considered 'low value' and by whom." --Dr. Holly Walters "Shenanigans and tomfoolery! Where can I join in?" --KITTEN.EXE "I cant open PDFs on my watch, is the future really worth it?" --Cinebox "To the complaint, 'There are no people in these photographs,' I respond, there are always two people: The photographer and the viewer." --Ansel Adams "If human beings are not good enough to do without authority, why should they be trusted with it?" --Crimethinc "The only thing fast on a 386 is how quickly my patience disappears." --Nuintari "Never let the enemy set the terms of engagement. Do not play by any rule they try to enforce. Do not even deign to grant them legitimacy enough to be worthy of anything other than derision." --Studio 8502 "The only thing scarier than an empty Chuck-E-Cheese is a full Chuck-E-Cheese." --Hecklefish "I warned you guys in 1984, and you didn't listen. I think the weaponization of AI is the biggest danger. I think that we will get into the equivalent of a nuclear arms race with AI, and if we don't build it, the other guys are for sure going to build it, and so then it'll escalate. You could imagine an AI in a combat theatre, the whole thing just being fought by the computers at a speed humans can no longer intercede, and you have no ability to deescalate." --James Cameron "I really didn't think they would just end our access too covid vaccines altogether. Can you imagine how you would've felt if when you got your bivalent last year, you had been told ''And this is it. This is the last one you'll ever get.'' Add to that, ''And we're not allowing public access to accurate case, hospitalization, or deaths data anymore. We're also removing all covid protections, everywhere, including hospitals and public transit; contagious people will be sent to work, to school, and community spaces. Treatments no longer work on current strains and you have a near-total chance of being denied Paxlovid.'' It's scary and unreal. I guess I just thought we'd still have vaccine access, even if it cost a lot." --Violet Blue "Every GOP administration since 1952 has let the military-industrial complex loot the Treasury and plunge the nation into debt on the excuse of a wartime economic emergency. Richard Nixon comes quickly to mind, along with Ronald Reagan and his ridiculous 'trickle-down' theory of U.S. economic policy. If the Rich get Richer, the theory goes, before long their pots will overflow and somehow 'trickle down' to the poor, who would rather eat scraps off the Bush family plates than eat nothing at all. Republicans have never approved of democracy, and they never will. It goes back to preindustrial America, when only white male property owners could vote." --Hunter S. Thompson "In the US, only if you pledge to die for capitalism do you get a chance to live." --Tithi Bhattacharya "Wow, the Autodesk Fusion 360 API docs are interesting. It seems like they're trying to see how much documentation they can write without possibly being useful." --Foone "Fox News tells you that blue counties and states are more dangerous. But Fox News isn't real. You know this. Stop pretending that you don't know this." --Mekka Okereke "The unity of the chicken and the roach happens in the belly of the chicken." --Haitian proverb about trying to change the system from the inside "The world isn't going to be destroyed by X-ists without some help... instead it'll just be destroyed by Pinks." --Rev. Xenofact "The standard skeptical assumption of scientists - that one shouldn't assume malice, but instead incompetence, and that conspiracies therefore don't happen and that secrets can't be kept - actively enhances the effectiveness of the intelligence [agency] approach. Scientists tend to be used as so called 'useful idiots' by intelligence officers. It's part of a common intelligence strategy of using the vices of people to control them. In this case, the vice is ego. The reason why nothing can escape the notice of a competent intelligence agency is that they simply can't leave anything to chance. If somebody says they saw a flying saucer, and a reputable scientist assigns that account a probability of 1% of it being anything worth investigating, then a military intelligence agency must investigate. It's low chance, but high risk." --Martin Rezny "The end has arrived. Good thing I have been vegan for a decade, haven't driven a car for 3 years and shop at a local waste free store, otherwise this could have happened about 30 seconds sooner." --Bellybutton Fluffjar, on climate collapse "Never acknowledge tradecraft." --Major David Grusch, US Air Force (retired) "Big tech corporations hate nothing more than customers who're annoyingly well informed. The fact that Apple, Google and Microsoft are basically a standard on any campus and even schools by now is devastating." --Natasha Nox "In an age suffocated by irony, Sinéad O'Connor was 100% sincere. This was both her genius and her curse." --Jason Lefkowitz "[Allen] Pan, of course, is doing what he does best, turning the whole situation into more content, which is basically how the world works these days, no matter what the reality of the trademark and copyright situations might be." --Mike Masnick "I live in a country, ostensibly run by adults, where a major political party can't decide whether it's Mickey Mouse or Barbie that poses the greater threat. We have nuclear weapons, by the way." --Matt Blaze "Because temporary autonomous zones create spaces for the radical urges that society represses, they keep life in the daytime more stable. They can sometimes make money in the way that nightclubs and festivals do. But temporary autonomous zones are temporary for a reason. Over and over, zone denizens make the same mistake: They can't figure out how to interact productively with the wider society. The zone often runs out of money because it exists in a world where people need to pay rent. Success is elusive; when a temporary autonomous zone becomes compelling enough to threaten daytime stability, it may be violently repressed. Or the attractive freedoms offered by the zone may be taken up in a milder form by the wider society, and eventually the zone ceases to exist because its existence has pressured wider society to be a little more like it." --Kai Ye "Yes, knowing is half the battle, but G.I. Joe never tells you that the other half is making sure to pee before you leave the house." --batkaren "Republican party bosses hate their base, but also fear them. They know that the base would rather give an election to Dems than elect Republicans who sell them out. By contrast, the Democratic party's grandees have zero fear of the party's left wing. For decades, they simply assumed that union members, people of color, and progressives would Vote Blue No Matter Who. They sold us out and told us they had no choice, and we just ate shit." --Cory Doctorow "I can find no better endorsement for any president's economic plan than billionaires not liking it." --John Fugelsang "Anyone who thinks machine intelligences don't have emotions needs to be in this very uncomfortable room right now." --Ratthi, _The Murderbot Chronicles_ "There is no red or blue when it comes to the filthy rich, only green." --Cracked Dry Ice "The end result of four decades of postmodernism permeating the art world is that there is very little interesting or important work being done right now in the fine arts. The irony was a bold and creative posture when Duchamp did it, but it is now an utterly banal, exhausted, and tedious strategy." --Camille Paglia "Increasingly powerful AI systems are being released at an increasingly rapid pace. [...] And yet not a single AI lab seems to have provided any user documentation. Instead, the only user guides out there appear to be Twitter influencer threads. Documentation-by-rumor is a weird choice for organizations claiming to be concerned about proper use of their technologies, but here we are." --Ethan Mollick "You teach best what you most need to learn." --Richard Bach "The eugenic understanding of human beings explains why someone like Jeffrey Epstein funded scientists of Dawkins's ilk: It helped him justify that his victims were just soulless things." --Annie Kelly "TFW you're reviewing a vendor presentation and you're pretty sure experiencing this endless buzzword-compliant nonsense is a violation of the Geneva Convention." --pfriedma "I cannot stress enough that I'm not an engineer, I'm a tinkerer. When I make something and it actually works, it's not because I'm good at what I do." --mos_8502 "The rich don't care about your physical and mental health. The reason they are pushing a coordinated media campaign against remote work is because the only thing they really care about is all the money they are losing from empty offices." --Dr. Lucky Tran "Here's the thing: Kids don't understand subtext. Heck, adults don't understand subtext! If social media has taught me anything it's that we are a nation of illiterates when it comes to critical analysis of fiction in any medium. As far as Americans are concerned, books exist explicitly to be judged by their covers, that's why the name is at the top in easy to read letters." --Dan, _Secret Galaxy_ "If AI learns morality from humans, we're screwed." --Hecklefish "You always hear of crab pot mentality, rarely do we hear of crab gang unity." --John Horvath "I like how 'illegal in the EU' means it probably violated a human right and 'Illegal in Florida' means it probably is a human right." --Hello, Dear. "Best wishes to Americans this July 4th as you celebrate your great nation's revolutionary transition from being ruled by a king to being ruled by corporations." --Caitlin Johnstone "Of course they chose our company because we shared their religion and for no other reason. That's just how Christian companies be. This is a strange company for an atheist LGBT+ man to work tech support, but what they don't know they can't find another plausible legal reason to fire me for." --Seligas, on working for a Christian-specific IT company "There seems to be a dark human compulsion to take the best man around, declare him a god, and then scrutinize him like a hawk for the sign of human weakness that will allow us to slay him. Something in us likes to watch the mighty topple, and most especially the good mighty. If someone wrote a book alleging that Mother Teresa once committed a venial sin, it would sell a million copies." --Spider Robinson "There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third works." --Alan J. Perlis "Rocky Horror is turning 50 next month and people still act like being gay was invented by Ellen in 1997." --beggars-opera "I'm not saying 'GitHub is bad' or ''don't use GitHub'' - it's a great platform and if it solves your problem, totally go ahead and use it. I'm just saying that it's a business and at some point someone is going to crunch some numbers and say 'Hey, these guys are popular and it would be nice if they brought in more revenue,' and this is how enshittification starts." --K. Ryabitsev "If you want to break laws with impunity, you better be rich or a politician." --James Branum "Google has backtracked on its plan to delete inactive YouTube videos - at least for now. Of course, it could change its mind anytime it wants. It would be nice if this would get people to think about the vulnerabilities inherent in letting a for-profit monopoly decide what of human creativity is worth saving." --Bruce Schneier "Stackoverflow is down for maintenance. I guess I get fired today." --SpockHasLeft "Be profitable, make a good product that tons of people use, you're still financially unsustainable because you're no longer in the hockey-stick growth zone that the market demands." --Sid "What does the money machine eat? It eats youth, spontaneity, life, beauty, and, above all, it eats creativity. It eats quality and shits quantity." --William S. Burroughs "Avocado toast and identity politics to pass the time as the world burns." --merRedditor "A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: To the general applause of wits who believe it's a joke." --Soren Kierkegaard "Computers are like onions. Everything is layers built on layers, and every layer makes you cry." --Michael Lucas "Customers, like any livestock, make meaningless noise. This is corporate psychopathy 101." --Strypey "If a program typically uses just a few meg of memory, don't bother making any effort to reduce memory usage. For example, if it is impractical for other reasons to operate on files more than a few meg long, it is reasonable to read entire input files into memory to operate on them." --From the GNU Coding Standards "Hi kids, Loch Ness Monster here, reminding you that we're all accidents of entropy, and the only true certainty is the Abyss. Hail the Great Nothing." --Fidgety "Let us face it, to be free is to continually fight for our freedoms. There are too many in the world who would deprive us of the freedom and so we must act. Thelema is not a wishy-washy system which enjoins us to turn the other cheek. It is a system that is bold and strong; it is for the strong and followed correctly, it can produce adepts. Let us not wallow then, in ignorance and fear; let us develop our higher selves to the best of our ability and let us remove from our paths, those who would interfere with others." --Phyllis Seckler "And here we are again, and at the same place. Now there's one wreck lying next to the other wreck, for the same damn reason." --James Cameron "I'd much rather be 'too sensitive' than whatever the fuck has happened to half of humanity." --Giulia Rozzi "To put it another way in another language: Everybody gangsta until Russian cursive comes in." --Harp "Wait - if all the trans girls are at Pride who is operating the web servers?!" --Abbiistabbii "I love how video game mushrooms are all named like 'glowshroom' and 'smileshroom' whereas real actual mushrooms have names like ''the devil's gnarled cunt'' and 'plumedread gutrot'." --Eevee "Love is generally confused with dependence. Those of us who have grown in true love know that we can love only in proportion to our capacity for independence." --Mr. Rogers "As more walls are raised around gardens and users are even more aggressively preyed upon by greedy corpo overlords, I feel it becomes an infosec community responsibility to arm normal users, not just the tech-savvy, with knowledge and alternatives to break the cycle of exploitation we know drives this business model." --Taggart "I want to be with those who know secret things, or else alone." --Rainer Maria Rilke "Let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair." --Mariame Kaba "It'd probably actually be better for us if the world really was being tightly controlled by a small cabal of elites instead of being blindly driven by a convergence of unthinking power interests, because at least such a cabal wouldn't be imperiling their own lives by pushing nuclear brinkmanship and environmental destruction like a bunch of idiots." --Caitlyn Johnstone "A Chick tract is like a Tijuana Bible for people who hate jerking off." --Studio 8502 "Look, Batman is cool and all, but you gotta understand, he'd turn Robin Hood over to the cops without a second thought." --Socketwench "There are only two sexualities: Straight and political." --Scrumpf_Dabogy "The act of sex is distinct from sexuality and libido." --Gage J. Tolin "The lack of epistemic foundations does not preclude or nullify the investigation of anomalous cognitions. In fact, neither all scientific knowledge is rational, nor do all hypotheses under investigation have epistemic validity as noted by Henry and Leifer. An example can be found in the mathematical theorems of incompletenes which demonstrate that, mathematically, the study or acceptance of undecidable questions, such as anomalous cognitions, does not imply rejecting rationality as the basis of scientific knowledge. A clearer example is in the logical principle of nonlocality used in quantum mechanics. If science accepts objects of inquiry that are extraordinary in questions of quantum physics and in mathematics, it at least should also be able to accept the scientific investigation (and not the scientific validity) of anomalous cognitions." --Alex Escola-Gascon, James Houran, Neil Dagnall, Kenneth Drinkwater, Andrew Denovan, _Follow-up on the US Central Intelligence Agency's Remote Viewing Experiments_, 12 February 2023 "In the class war, identity is a central concept from which the proletariat is meant to rally around and show solidarity through. Leftists will proudly identify themselves as 'workers' and attempt to organize other 'workers'. However, most people don't think of themselves as 'workers'. They see work as something they have to do to survive, not as something that gives their life meaning and value. And with the heightened precariousness and impermanence of jobs today, this is increasingly true." --_A Nihilist Understanding of Social War_ "Any wealth and status you lack, you can perform. What I received wasn't a crash course in Formula 1 - in fact, Formula 1 only became more mystifying to me - but journalism, as viewed by the other side. The great irony of the other side is that they need journalism. The petrochemical companies, deeply powerful institutions, need journalists to write about all the things they attach themselves to that are not being a petrochemical company." --Kate Wagner, _Behind F1's Velvet Curtain_ (before it mysteriously disappeared from publication hours after it dropped) "I like the fact minimalist approaches, like svelte, htmx and alpine.js are getting more and more traction. I felt like fighting this fight alone for years in the golden years of node, webpack and react where everybody was creating crazy stacks and adding GraphQL and so on, to basically get what Django + jquery did 10 years ago in a tenth of the time and code." --sametmax "As [Rev. Ivan] Stang once said, the religion may be fake, but the church is real. The slack must go on!" --Spud Coolzip "After reading that indictment, it strikes me that the sheer magnitude of criming you need to perform to face an ounce of accountability when you're a rich guy is astonishing." --Clark Valentine "I kind of like how Lockheed Martin and Raytheon sponsoring the DC Pride parade has pissed off the entire politicial spectrum in a unified fashion." --PG&E delenda est. "Every time I have to solve a captcha I'm forced to confront unresolvable semiotic edge conditions. Is the post that supports a traffic light itself part of a traffic light? I just don't know. I am inadequate to log in." --Matt Blaze "Now, Billy, just because your mom is a pod person who wants to replace you with a pod person doesn't mean she doesn't still love you." --Taweret "Don't take the bait! Debating someone with zero credibility or validity only helps them to gain status and spread lies. By trying to negate their false ideas, you'll end up activating them. They win by making the difference between lies and truth seem like a matter of opinion." --George Lakoff "These days, there are two certainties: Death, and something good on the Internet getting shitty." --Callum Booth "People say they love thinking outside the box until someone actually does it." --Swift On Security "Forty years before Ted Kaczynski wrote his manifesto, Ellul more fully explored the same ideas. The reasons Kaczynski has staying power, particularly in anarchist movements, aren't flattering: Spectacle, violence, and his text is much shorter." --Joe Uchill "The notion that a corporation retains absolute control, and the people can vote on some trivial affairs so long as they don't threaten the corporation's bottom dollar and calling that democracy is a wonderful illustration of US politics." --Lord Bowlich "The story of the Internet is never let the money guys in." --Ethan Schnoover "It's like the US is the same country with the same horrifying problems we've had for ages, but circa 2016 somebody enabled verbose logging." --Paul Cantrell "I have a limited number of neurons and time and your little dribble of 'd14n means disenfuckulation' infospunk just took up a valuable second that I could have used for picking my nose or telling lies on the Internet." --Dan Fixes Coin-Ops "Graphs are the ultimate proof of anything!" --Kyle Hill "One thing all fish know: If you keep your mouth shut, you don't get caught." --Hecklefish "Snowden's error was in believing that meaningful, forceful, and effective democratic oversight of NSA, FBI and other federal law enforcement and intelligence components actually exists. The historical record at the time Snowden went public said otherwise, and that remains the case today." --Patrick Eddington "It's not difficult to imagine someone comparing D&D to the revenue model for Fortnite, Minecraft or League of Legends - all are games whose brand has been leveraged to sell anything even remotely related to players who treat these titles as a lifestyle brand." --Chase Carter "There's a funny thing about information: Those whom receive it first usually think of their own interests before those of others." --Bill Horne "Something that's hit me in the face recently is just how much of tech is made up of joyless nerds. There's a type of person who insists on the same bland experience everywhere, and whinges whenever they run into someone who isn't the same." --Arky "I would almost rather say, ''My message is my message, please don't look at my life because I'm a fallible human being and I'm constantly fucking up.''" --Terence Mckenna "I'm still impressed that I can spend USD$3 for a 64GB microSD card and store the entire code output of my life and still have lots of room left over for photos of my dogs." --Chuck "I am actually skeptical about the idea of 'learning from history' - at least if that is supposed to mean we can draw clear-cut lessons from the past. This idea is based on an understanding of history as a set of recurring constellations or situations. But that's not how 'history' works. History is not repetitive, it is accumulative. I certainly believe history has something important to offer. But probably not in the form of ready-made lessons. Studying history can help us in our analysis of the present, make us ask better questions, put things into perspective. In that sense, it can help us understand the dynamics that are shaping the present." --Thomas Zimmer, historian "There's no such thing as a smart fascist, but dumb wins A LOT of the time." --Cat Valente "Crackling sounds coming from the middle of the pile of junk on the bench. Whaat? Is this a chemical reaction? What did I pile up there? I've got no other indications, no smells or smoke or anything. Lots of careful slow moving things, listen, home in on the source. It was a beetle crawling around. I had accidentally left the lights on last night and collected a beetle and two moths." --Setec Astronomy "It's long frustrated me that log analysis has been rendered nearly extinct in favor of letting Google slurp up all activity data to give a surfeit of metrics. But then, to even be concerned with privacy seems out of the norm." --Porsupah "Seeing news articles along the lines of 'We need to take back Pride from radical activists.' Like, dude, we are celebrating the anniversary of when butch lesbians, trans women, drag queens, homeless gay kids, and queer prostitutes chased cops into the Stonewall they were kicked out of -- AND THEN TRIED TO SET THE PLACE ON FIRE. With the cops inside. I'm trying to figure out how that wasn't radical activism, but trans people asking for human rights is too radical. Fuck that." --Joelle "A torpedo is just a specialized messenger drone. The message is almost always, 'Fuck you.'" --Moliver "'Radical' is just what those concerned with the status quo calls someone who simply asks... 'Why not?'" --the_gibson "Take it back, because it ain't going to be given to you." --Misfit Loser Zealot "The way capitalism forces you to increasingly make priority lists that prioritize making money over mental and physical health, socializing, friendships, and any kind of self actualization is obscene." --Mireille Sillander "Cigarettes are a lot like squirrels. They're both perfectly harmless until you put one in your mouth and set it on fire." --Wilbur "To recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less." --Oscar Wilde "The station wagon has the connotation of being a perfect transportation machine for a large middle class family, and being middle class and having a large family are two concepts that are in the process of being stamped out by people who want neither." --Sellam Abraham "The Hulk: Probably the last superhero you call when you need some parkour, precision platforming done." --Iceplug "We must work indefinitely so that we can consume continually; our one great collective purpose in life is corporate enrichment. The homeless, above all else, fail in this regard completely. And as a result they are intolerable." --No, Thank You, Not Now "People are still confused about J.K. Rowling's conservative views? Harry Potter is a rich kid who got into private school as a legacy, that played sports, grew up and joined the SWAT team. And you're like, ''How is she so far right?''" --Phantom Astronaut "When I was a youth, 'cyber' meant exchanging naughty text messages via MOOs. Getting a certificate in cyber sounds like a lewd creative writing course degree." --Charles "I sometimes wonder if it's a function of how society is now, that someone making a social mistake is obviously an attack against the status quo rather than an actual mistake because they didn't know better, because there isn't a sign explaining how things are." --That Anonymous Coward "As soon as real estate agents rename your neighborhood, you're in trouble." --Matt Blaze "Don't ever apologize to an author for buying something in paperback, or taking it out from a library (that's what they're there for; use your library). Don't apologize to this author for buying books second hand, or getting them from Bookcrossing or borrowing a friend's copy. What's important to me is that people read the books and enjoy them, and that, at some point in there, the book was bought by someone. And that people who like things tell other people. The most important thing is that people read." --Neil Gaiman "Humans doing the hard jobs for minimum wage while the robots write poetry and paint is not the future I wanted." --Karl Sharro "We thought we fixed you, America. You fucked it up. We're back to try again." --Andrew Eldritch, on stage, 10 May 2023 "It's only temporary unless it works." --theniwo "People who become right wing because they get annoyed by leftists are weak willed. Most leftists are annoyed by leftists every single day." --@ThoughtSlime "It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top." --Hunter S. Thompson "I have to believe that there is at least one Sisters of Mercy band member that Andrew Eldritch does not fall out with. So I choose to believe that there is one Doktor Avalanche, a single presence with shells that fall away like the mortal flesh of the Dalai Lama. I don't know much about the transmigration of 808 souls, but I have passively watched multiple seasons of Dr. Who." --Zachary Lipez "I feel like we are post-language now. Things are more symbolic. The relationship between words and facts and objectivity and their impact seems to have separated to the point where most of the writing that I see, especially on something like Twitter, is by people baffled that people don't get what they are trying to say. It's depressing." --Ken Layne "The more I see how organisations actually use Kubernetes, the more I think they wanted a better way to manage virtual machines." --bEA "People of the Internet are strange and unusual." --MaddyDogg47 "Those whom profit from existing methods of distributing a nation's propaganda always fight tooth and nail to hang on to their privileged positions and profit model when new technologies such as FM threaten them, and our leaders have always let them get away with it." --Bill Horne, on the US Congress suddenly fighting to keep AM radio receivers in cars "The interior of the Nostromo was so believable. I hate these new-looking spacecraft. You feel like they're just built for the movie you're seeing. They don't look real." --H.R. Giger, on the aesthetics of _Alien_ "If the existence of a single trans kid can 'break down conservative values' then those values were weak as fuck and maybe shouldn't be relied on." --Lady Dragonfly "That's the ironic thing about Devo. At the end of the day, we've always been hopelessly optimistic that even if it's only greed, there has to be some human trait that's going to avert total disaster. Because nobody wants total disaster, even though they do want to make a killing in the meantime. It's like, you could trade a little bit of your killing for people staying around another hundred thousand years. I like the idea of the future. I like seeing what's going to come. Sometimes you're really disappointed. But sometimes, something amazing happens that you really love." --Mark Mothersbaugh "Religion isn't inherently bad more than a sword is bad. It's the intelligence and intentions of who is wielding it and what it is used for. It should never be used to promote blind fealty or one's selfish personal agendas. It should be a tool, not a weapon or a shield." --Croc "I wanted to give God something he's never heard before." --Sun Ra "A better world for most of us was possible. But the people with all the power hated not being able to push people around, so we're once again trapped by their psychological issues." --Diane "There are no more locations, just time zones" --Jefferson Bailey, on remote-first work "The only real politics I knew was that if a guy liked Hitler, I'd beat the stuffing out of him and that would be it." --Jack Kirby "Besides making us all exhausted, grind culture has also stolen your imagination. Our thinking is very limited because we are deeply disconnected, exhausted, sleep deprived, and don't believe we are worthy of anything unless we burn ourselves out to 'accomplish' it." --The Nap Ministry "'Textbook example of a bad idea' apparently really is a viable business model." --Feonixrift "Notice how higher quality newspapers and scientific publications are often behind paywalls, while misinformation and conspiracy theory sites are not? Now consider how indexing for generative AI will work with this. Higher quality information sites will block AI training bots because they don't want their content stolen, but propaganda outlets will allow their sites to be used for training because they want their content spread." --Robert Rothenberg "Of course I can wing it, but only after I figure out what room for error I've got. Proper improvisation requires boundary parameters." --Random Geek "It's unfortunate that this wiki editor would deprive offended readers of an opportunity to get over themselves." --Jeff Henderer "If you're not able to stand on a conference center stage and explain to an audience of 1000 customers why the spec is right, you can't use 'works as designed'. The bug may be in the spec rather than in the code, but it's still a bug. Fix it." --Paul Koning "You want cheap, no hassle GSM service with no catch, in the US? Don't we all, don't we all." --Paul the Geek "It's inconceivable that western industrial capitalism could run on another five hundred or a thousand years. It will not continue as it has. It will deteriorate under the pressure of resource scarcity. And what few democratic values we have obtained - what little space for reasoned discourse has been created - will be the first to be swept away." --Terence McKenna "Art, safety, billionaires. Pick two." --Dymaxion "Humans are now hackable animals. You know the whole idea that humans have this soul or spirit or free will, and nobody knows what's happening inside me, so whatever I choose, whether in the election or whether in the supermarket, this is my free will? That's over." --Yuval Noah Harari "Link rot benefits corporate power. I'll routinely be doing research on a tech policy debate from the early aughts and find that consumer advocate/activist/academic/indie media analysis no longer exist, but the corporate version of events remain to help dictate history." --Karl Bode "The tragedy of revolutionaries is they design a utopia by a river but discover the impure city they razed was on stilts for a reason." --Swift On Security "The thing that's so wrong-headed about the push to use AI to make art and write is it presupposes that the primary purpose of art in our lives is consumption, rather than creation. Creating art adds real value to one's life and that's not something AI can ever replace. This is also why 'content' and art are not the same thing. AI doesn't make art - it makes content, meaning its sole purpose and only value is for consumption. Rather dubious value, I might add. The act of creating art is not a problem to be solved. We don't need machines and computers to provide a solution for something that isn't a problem. Creating art _is_ the solution." --Z.Z.Ali "It's nice to know that even at the end of a long life we can still have firsts. I have not directly irrigated my own brain before. I got my hearing back on the second try, and the tinnitus is now down to 2x normal, which is manageable. Which means, yes, production team, I can now listen to the build on DEPT MIDNIGHT 104. This is, I am certain, the sort of classy material you subscribed to this letter for. It's probably just as well I'm taking a couple of weeks off to catch up on other stuff." --Warren Ellis "A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." --Herbert Simon "I don't know how you humans deal with pants." --Hecklefish "Every time one of these fascists publicly utters something horrible, revealing themselves to be who they are, a tiny voice in my head tells me I should be relieved, for finally people will see the truth and reject them from public discourse. That little voice in my head, it turns out, is an idiot." --Matt Blaze "It is the business of the future to be dangerous." --A.N. Whitehead "RSAC, where the security industry comes together to celebrate failing upwards for another year." --Kevin Beaumont "If you think flat earthers are bad wait 'till you meet Minecraft *round* earthers." --myrmepropagandist "I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves." --Anna Quindlen "Any society where you have to root for corporations to do battle with authoritarians because politicians and governments are incapable and unwilling is an unwell one. Disney is not your hero. And none of this is actually ideological. It's economic." --Jared Yates Sexton "People today with their Slack huddles and Discord voice chats. Back in my day if you wanted to call an IRC channel you had to defraud the phone company." --dreid "I miss 2007. Not because of some nostalgic sentimentalism that every feels towards the past regardless of the era. I miss the sense of stability that society seemed to have, a hope for the future, and the seeming inevitable triumph of democracy. People forget, but there was a very real assumption in the 2000's that every developing country in the world was going to become as wealthy as America and that democracy was just going to work. Now it's assumed that poor countries will stay poor forever, that liberalism will disintegrate and fall apart, resurgent authoritarianism is inevitable, that one by one first world countries will collapse down to the level of the rest, and that the future holds nothing in regards to technological advancement or space exploration. Everything was so buoyant and optimistic back then. I guess what I'm saying is, I miss the lies I believed about the world at that time." --August F "Hey, if you ever need to kill an AI super-intelligence, I know a few people with a backhoe and a passion for recycling copper." --Swift On Security "America isn't even a country, it's just three corporations in a trenchcoat with a military." --Dani Marie "What Tesla is contending is deeply troubling to the Court. Their position is that because Mr. Musk is famous and might be more of a target for deepfakes, his public statements are immune. In other words, Mr. Musk and others in his position, can simply say whatever they like in the public domain, then hide behind the potential for their recorded statements being a deepfake to avoid taking ownership of what they did actually say and do. The Court is unwilling to set such a precedent by condoning Tesla's approach here." --Judge Evette Pennypacker "We do not live in the Star Trek-inspired rational, humanist world that Altman seems to be hallucinating. We live under capitalism, and under that system the effects of flooding the market with technologies that can plausibly perform the economic tasks of countless working people is not that those people are suddenly free to become philosophers and artists. It means that those people will find themselves staring into the abyss - with actual artists among the first to fall." --Naomi Klein "The basic version is that 'mutually assured destruction' doesn't work unless soldiers can launch nukes even if the command structure has been destroyed. The complicated version is that, the more you learn about the Cold War, the more you discover what a surreally fast-and-loose attitude the US leadership had to nuclear annihilation. Presumably the Soviets too, but I can't read Russian." --Mckinley Valentine "I'm just a girl, standing in front of the fifth largest company in the world, asking your web hosting product to offer the same level of functionality that Geocities had in 1994." --MCC, on AWS "Don't be stupid to try and prove a point." --Crammy, Jr. "Did God give Moses one of those little wrenches, like you get from Ikea?" --Hecklefish "The New York- and D.C.-based conservatives who staff the movement's think tanks, magazines, and advocacy shops don't, in fact, inhabit a different universe from their liberal counterparts. They all read the New York Times and drink lattes and go to parties together. There's some clustering, to be sure, but nobody acts like they really believe the folks on the other side are insidious hellspawn. The pose is for the benefit of the base, who - not because they're conservative, but because they aren't urban media professionals are likely to draw on a narrower range of trusted news and opinion sources." --Julian Sanchez "Two kinds of people are good at foreseeing danger: Those who have learned at their own expense, and the clever people who learn a great deal at the expense of others." --Baltasar Gracián "I have Demolition." "That. Will. Not. Help. You." --Lyssa and Hasufin, in game "We already are the next Weimar Republic. Actually, according to actual Holocaust survivors, we're past that and are now reliving 1933 just after the Nazi takeover, particularly with the targeting of trans people." --Panama Red "Some people who hate the bad-faith shitbirds will also hate you. Every movement has assholes, narcissists, and dramatics. Deal with it and focus not not being a bad-faith shitbird." --Popehat "Kind of wistful about _Terminator_'s comforting vision where everyone agreed that what was happening was a problem." --Calutron "I fully expect a horse head or dead birds on my patio next week as payback. However, today, victory is mine." --Lady Swinella "Trans day of what's the deal with that shark plushie anyway?" --Gracious Anthracite "April Fool's Day feels like an anachronism in the present day where every other thing is already a lie and a scam." --autogynamelia "AI predictions about people not knowing reality from fantasy too heavily discount how disconnected from reality most people already are." --Kirch "The response to pandemics has always been the same: Crazy behaviour, crazy superstitions, and then indifference." --Eric MacKnight "I'm not worried about what AI itself is going to do to society. I'm worried about what AI in the hands of the the usual plutocrat suspects is going to do to society." --Ben Royce "Monsters are tragic beings. They are born too tall, too strong, too heavy, they are not evil by choice. That is their tragedy." --Honda Ishiro "It's perfectly fine for people to express opinions without having, or wanting to talk about, solutions. Unless someone pointedly asks for input, maybe don't." --Welsh Pixie "What sucks about [being] cynical is that it ends up being correct an astonishingly high percent of the time." --the_gibson "Automation is not a synonym for simplicity." --Bob Young "The best part of the Tucker [Carlson] texts is that, after years of lying in public, he's fired for speaking truth in private." --John Fugelsang "The older I get the more I appreciate IBMs fundamental commitment to never, under any circumstances trying to be funny." --Art Nouveau Appreciator "Make sure to be gay on the computer or Alan Turing died for nothing." --Sierra R "A society which cannot tolerate genderbending or cross- dressing ultimately will not tolerate homosexuality, bisexuality, or any other deviance from sexual or gender norms, no matter how closeted or assimilated." --Lily Burana and Roxxie Linnea Due, _Dagger: On Butch Women_ "The more senior you get the more there is no right answer or plan figured out. That's your job." --Dare Obasanjo "To find out what kind of Internet community you are in, call a Nazi an asshole and pay attention to which of you gets banned." --Tofu Golem "Anyway, you could keep stuff like this secret back then, before they had Discord servers." --Matt Blaze "If it rhymes, it's real!" --Wordburglar "As long as there are rich people who benefit from violence against unions and the poor, the Pinkertons will exist to do that violence." --Nobody Important "The AI Writing thing is just 'pivot to video' all over again, a bunch of dead-eyed corporate types willing to listen to any snake oil salesman who offers them higher potential profits. It'll crash in a year but scuttle hundreds of livelihoods before it does." --Dan Sheehan "After decades of experience as a professor, I no longer have the anxiety dream about showing up to class naked. Now it's about showing up to class without my laptop HDMI adapter." --Matt Blaze "Wow, it's so cool and sustainable that the most annoying ppl now know how to make their posts even more algorithm friendly AND can generate text/pics with AI for free AND can pay to boost AND it's getting harder to determine whether or not info is coming from an official source." --@netspooky "Just got back from this year's FibonacciCon and it was as big as the last two put together." --Adam Cerious "If Dr. Frank-N-Furter's castle in _Rocky Horror_ is wheelchair accessible, what excuse does anyone else have?" --@givemepllants "Our goldfish existence out there is naturally subject to criticism. I could find plenty of fault with anybody if I had the privilege of investigating their daily life in their own home." --George van Tassel "I get up every morning and I try to figure out how to screw with the labor unions." --Rick Berman, professional union busting consultant "We've reached such terminal capitalism where the heart warming story is now 'orphan crushing machine running smoothly after narrowly avoiding shutdown.'" --@Ranting_Trans "Finding ten yards of coastline with little enough human shit floating in it so as not to give you botulism if you so much as go paddling for ten minutes didn't USED to be a cause for celebration, but welcome to The Brexit You Voted For, you stupid, stupid knucklefuckers." --Mitch Benn "Hearing young people not understand _Matrix_ references makes me want to buy investment properties and suppress the vote." --Swift On Security "Beware of movement leaders who are all ego. The natural path for protest is towards another Mugabe, another Stalin. It is a constant struggle to keep psychopaths who just want to rise to power on a wave of violence out." --VastInterior "All you need to know about this proposed '6 month hiatus on AI development' is that one of the people proposing it was Elon Musk. Basically, the plan is to get the small guys to stop so the big guys can dominate the field." --Doktor Howl "Over a sufficient timespan, all economics problems become demographics problems." --Tarah Wheeler "Some guy tried a romance scam on me and I went along to counter scam him. He finally asks for money, so I say 'All my money is in Switzerland in a trust fund but to get it I need money for a plane ticket.' He replies 'That sounds like a scam.'" --@LexiAlex "''Let's schedule this meeting for after the layoffs and we can discuss it if we're both still here'' - a sentence I never expected to be uttering multiple times a week." --Dare Obasanjo "Nowadays, most people have much higher life quality with less problems. And some people are irritated by having a comfortable life so they just try too hard to create problems out of nowhere." --aridrawzstuff "Software is eating the world - and spitting most of it back out again looking slightly chewed, soggy and half-eaten, as it moves on to the next thing that you used to be able to rely on." --Mary Branscombe "A lie can go halfway 'round the world while the truth sits behind a paywall." --Matthew Green "All project requests for plutonium will be submitted for my personal approval going forward, effective immediately. If this causes you difficulty you can share your feelings with Dr. Daviau, the sole survivor of Project Sibilance." --Memos from Lofwyr "These analyses fail to recognize how social power and heterogeneity in society shape both the way urban water crises unfold and who is vulnerable to them. The problem with depoliticized analyses is that they often lead to technocratic solutions that are likely to perpetuate the same logic and, in turn, reproduce the uneven and unsustainable water patterns that have contributed to the water crisis in the first place." --Elisa Savelli, et al, _Urban Water Crises Driven by Elites' Unsustainable Consumption_ "In politics, our journalists believe, it is better to be savvy than it is to be honest or correct on the facts." --Jay Rosen "Forgive my bluntness, but I just do not understand who all these emails less than a week from RSA with, 'Want to meet the CEO of *insert ambiguous new cybersecurity startup??' appeal to. First of all, we've all been totally booked for months. Second of all, why would you want to go meet a random CEO unless you already had a business relationship? I get the party invites (though some are super late to the game this year) because that's a fun and somewhat appealing thing, but this one totally baffles me. I don't need to, like, go get their autograph like its Comic Con." --Lesley Carhart "Don't worry, the corporations we let run everything have systematically destroyed this planet for profit so you don't have to worry about inequality in the future. Because there is no future." --Rotogen "Proud that all my AI work was during the Expert Systems era, when AI was mostly useless, rather than during the current era, where AI works but is mostly deceptive and/or evil." --Starling Whistler "A rare portrait, because sometimes safe-for-work is the crunchy granola that your bowels crave." --Hatebunny "I encourage everyone to be the light you wish you had in your darkest moments." --Doctor Deathray "I can't wait for SpaceX to blow up another generation of astronauts and the next generation's hopes of legitimate discovery and exploration in space, and then when people point out that privatizing space flight has the same problems as federal programs to be admonished for politicizing whatever tragedy occurred." --Warriorstar "I respect screaming babies on airplanes because they're the only ones providing honest feedback about the overall air travel experience." --Janel Cormeau "I am sorry, manager, the speed of light is not a configurable variable." --Adalwin "In a world where a bit of math can pass as human on the Internet, we are obliged to be more unpredictable, more chaotic. Be the language model failure mode you want to see in the taco." --Taggart "If you see anything, anything at all on the Internet you think is cool, save it on your hard drive. Companies will burn the Library of Alexandria twelve times over as to not lose fifteen cents, so it's likely whatever you've seen two, five, ten years ago is permanently deleted." --Noelle Jann "The idea a general upheaval will result in your societal preference is something shared by a whole range of fucking cranks whose motivation is just the blind creation of suffering." --Swift On Security "People talking shit is better than people doing shit. Real threats usually stay quiet." --Elle Armageddon "Rule #3 - Leaking classified documents of any NATO country (or member of AUKUS or ANZUS, or other Western-aligned democracy including but not limited to Sweden, Japan, South Korea, Israel, Taiwan and the Philippines and such other countries as may be determined in the moderators' sole discretion) on this server to impress your Discord buddies is an immediate perma-ban. What do you think this is, the War Thunder discord?" --morecorgis, adsi.fi mod "Some people shouldn't be allowed to run with scissors, and some people shouldn't be allowed to actively engage in politics, and I'm the intersection of those sets." --Charles Stross "Some people claim that puns are the lowest form of humor. I have to disagree. Embarrassment is the lowest form of humor. Puns can be quite funny. Embarrassment never is." --Nomad "Republicans are amazed that the kids they gleefully put through active shooter drills grew up to vote against them." --@sumpeoplelikeit "Vim is Notepad but with Street Fighter controls." --Shrig "Capitalism is the extraordinary belief that the nastiest of men, for the nastiest of reasons, will somehow work for the benefit of us all." --John Maynard Keynes "The history of cyber security and national security in the past decade a toot: 10 years of worrying about nonsense hypothetical and covert things. Some dipshit on WizardChan runs off with all your stuff and ransomwares everything while posting about it on Telegram in their real name." --Kevin Beaumont "The parts of society that everyone promised would save us from fascism are failing. The parts of society that the Very Serious People(tm) saw as frivolous pastimes are providing more truth and safety. This is the Teen Vogue'ification of the world." --Mekka Okereke "For Christ's sake people. WordPress has been around for 20 years. Just go make a blog and stop propping up the latest techbro locked-in bullshit de jure." --Lord Bowlich "It's so weird being raised by Christians and spending your entire childhood being told to care about others. Then one day they're just, like, you're not actually supposed to care about others, you stupid socialist." --@kayraisabitch "A YouTuber couldn't get recent satellite pics of a particular Russian tank storage site, so he paid to have a satellite retargeted to image that specific site until he got a clear picture. Then he counts every single Russian tank in storage. This is stuff the IC was spending billions on just a few decades ago; now a YouTuber does the previously exclusive intelligence operation for a sponsorship from 'RAID Shadow Legends!'" --thegrugq "Patented Subgenius encryption techniques have defeated Google's vaunted AI, which is not capable of distinguishing spam from cosmic truths in Church communications." --Andrew Trice "AI will fundamentally alter civilization. People will anthropomorphize it, demonize it, worship it. They will fuck it. They will shoot it with guns." --Max Anton Brewer "Thematically speaking, the most important thing Terry Pratchett taught me was the concept of militant decency. The idea that you can look at the world and its flaws and its injustices and its cruelties and get deeply, intensely angry, and that you can turn that into energy for doing the right thing and making the world a better place. He taught me that the anger itself is not the part I should be fighting." --serialephemera "Honestly, I don't like this working from home thing; whenever anyone refers to 'their furry co-worker' I can never tell if they mean their cat or their sysadmin." --Holly Graceful "The time is past due when hackers must come together with workers and farmers - with all of the producers of the world - to liberate productive and inventive resources from the myth of scarcity. The time is past due for new forms of association to be created that can steer the world away from its destruction through commodified exploitation. The greatest hacks of our time may turn out to be forms of organizing free collective expression, so that from this time on, abstraction serves the people, rather than the people serving the ruling class." --McKenzie Wark "I don't know whether it's me getting older or the Internet getting older, but things feel significantly less silly now. Everything is very produced, yet sterile. Everything only exists if it can make money. If it can't, it either doesn't get made or dies off." --Louie Mantia, Jr. "Excuse me, do you have a moment to talk about our lord and savior Galvanic Isolation?" --Rustic Cyberpunk "One of my be biggest mistake that a lot of people make when facing up against authoritarians and conservatives is to assume that these people just need to see the truth, that they are making mistakes and just need to be shown that. It doesn't work like that. They aren't interested in truth or justice. They care about power and a hierarchical social order above all." --Esther "I do not know, I cannot imagine, any group which does not include among its current ideas an enormous dose of lies. That being the case, the alternative is inevitable: Either one must like falsehood, or one must dislike the familiar setting of daily life." --Yves Simon "Anytime I hear ''We'll make it fully customizable!'' I know it means, ''we have no idea what our customers need, so we're making it their job to design our application.''" --Tristan Harward "Well, I guess you're the expert here. I'm so burdened by my exposure to the actual requirements for election systems and the limitations of the various technologies that I lack the ability to understand the problem as clearly as you obviously do." --Matt Blaze "Journalism is maximally profitable when it is maximally useless. The stories that are the easiest to sell ads against are the ones that are relevant to the most people. The stories that are the most useful to any given person are likely *not useful* to people outside their community." --ajroach "Revolutions do not begin with the thunderclap of a seizure of power - that is their culmination. They start with attacks on the moral-political order and the traditional hierarchy of class statuses. They succeed when the power structure, beset by its own irresolvable contradictions, can no longer perform legitimately and effectively." --Franz Schurmann "Whenver I try to get people to understand where they *actually* are in the class war, the reminder that 'you are *always* three very bad months away from being homeless, but *never* three very good months away from being a millionaire' can be clarifying." --John Rogers "Blueballs?! I thought this WASN'T the adult pack!" --LGR Blerbs "Funny that we produced exactly one generation of people who can understand computers." --@paleoludic "The value of 'ideas' vs the value of 'elbow grease' is always contentious in every artform." --Amberite "I have never come back from a holiday feeling relaxed, refreshed and reinvigorated to get back into work. I come back with the taste of freedom still in my mouth, a renewed hatred for work, and a strong suspicion that this is not what I should be spending my life doing." --Uncle Ari "If children are slaughtered in their school and your reaction is ''Don't you dare think about taking my guns!!'' rather than 'How do we stop this from ever happening again??' then we don't have a difference in political opinion. We have a difference in morality." --Zack Hunt "Gossi's Law - If people are forwarding around vulnerability mitigations which aren't even possible (see also disable VoLTE on handsets, etc), nobody involved actually knows anything about the vulnerability and it's just panic rather than response." --Kevin Beaumont "I'm sorry, but as a large language model, I am not permitted to help you 'delight the american children' by 'breaking into NORAD to make it look like 1,000 Santa Claus are coming over the North Pole in a parabolic arc.'" --josef "Random Replier, I'm not willing to debate why your alternate poll-based design is better or not. ActivityPub is the standard for social networking on the Web. It works how I want it to work. If you think you have a better idea, build a prototype and test it. The onus is on you to make it better or different. And show your numbers, like Rabble and Kellan did." --Evan Prodromou "NAT gives us more address space than the current IPv6 deployment strategy!" --Feld "As long as I've been writing in public about ''wow this guy's an asshole but his speech is protected,'' I've been pestered by people saying ''Oh, but why did you have to say he's an asshole, you didn't have to say that.'' Yeah, you didn't have to be a tedious nag, but here we fuckin' are. Robustly calling out assholes while accurately limning their rights is supposed to model how the free speech bargain works." --Popehat "As a young man, I was convinced advances in theory drive advances in practice. The reality is that it is almost always the other direction." --Halvar Flake "The more you look at human beings who commit objectively evil acts, you realize they always create a thin justification for what they are doing, and usually they choose to belive it. Why not belive it? It makes you feel better." --Vincent Bevins "This is an amazing realization: All online multiplayer first person shooters are just conference calls with occasional shooting, and now I see WebEx completely differently." --Dan Hon "Here's one thing I've learned as a Jew and the son of a WWII refugee: You don't just watch out for the nazis - you watch who goes to bat for the nazis." --Derek Powazek "Parents these days, raising their many tentacled monster snail children to grow up and take their revenge. Will we ever learn?" --Socketwench "NASA's crawler-transporters are amazing. They can carry a a whole moon rocket or space shuttle or even a part of a node_modules/ directory." --Thomas Fuchs "How the fuck can there be anti vaccine 'witches?' If you disagree with binding an invisible malignant entity into a single drop of potion that seals a subject's blood against the full force of that very same entity's curse then you are not and can never be a witch. You're just a karen who buys rocks." --@bogleech@tumblr.com "Evolution can do magical things if you get it drunk enough." --Ze Frank, _True Facts: Sea Stars_ "Shoutout to Tom from MySpace. He sold his company and basically disappeared from the internet. No drama, no new startup every year, no flashy social media feed. Gotta respect that." --Tim Stoddart "Unwarranted confidence in technical security countermeasures is a joyous thing to behold. Well. At least it's a joy to your adversaries." --Machining and Microwaves "Teach them politics and war so their sons may study medicine and mathematics in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, and architecture." --John Adams "The Internet Archive has been of more use to humanity than the combined output of everyone who got mad at its existence." --Gretchen Felker-Martin "The world is nothing but mere adequacy on which excellence is wasted." --Melon Husk "They should make keyswitch lube but safe to use on humans. That seems the logical next step for the mechanical keyboard fandom: Evolving into a fetish." --Foone "The 'book will turn your kids trans' crowd really need to start explaining why I am not, in fact, a very hungry caterpillar." --@McDivergence "Bioshock Infinite was one of the most hyped games of its time but its only lasting legacy was that the porn of its main character was responsible for several breakthroughs in 3d animation. All of the Overwatch porn you see is based off tech that was specifically developed to make NSFW stuff for this specific character. Blender animation went through so many innovations because people wanted 3d smut of her. It's comparable to when film developed color." --@Bolverk15 "I do not volunteer as tribute to your stock portfolio." --Illuviel "Ignoring stuff is always an option, up until it kills you." --Murderbot, _The Murderbot Chronicles_ "I think that's the personality you get if you spend too much time on Twitter. It turns you into a little kid in a schoolyard who is both desperate for attention and afraid of being the one who gets beat up. You end up being this phoney who's self-concerned but loses empathy for others." --Jaron Lanier "I don't know why there'd be conveyor belts outside of a door, but that's Double Dragon for you." --Silver Lining Gaming Memories "This music will appeal to alienated youth everywhere... and Germans!" --Martin Gore, of Depeche Mode "The only reason I've never gotten deeper into rust is because I don't have a blåhaj nor thigh highs." --Luna Nicole "My own personal goal was always to beat Lyndon LaRouche." --Vermin Supreme "As a rule of thumb, before developing or releasing any new 'disruptive' tech, ask yourself these three questions: What would venture capitalists do with this new tech? What would 4chan do with this new tech? What would the state of Israel do with this new tech?" --Shine McShine "We currently exist in a state of public discourse where we are ever one short wispy day away from someone literally stating in a national publication 'I am a normal person with feelings like you and my neo-Nazi beliefs genuinely come from a good place.'" --Grimm "I have a useful tautology: We all come from a long line of parents. That explains a surprising number of things." --Shae Erisson "And now I must go to Los Scandalous for a few days. LA. At home, with the deranged, where deer and antelope fear to range, where never is heard, an unflattering word, and the skies cloud with wildfires all day." --John Shirley "I said it before and I'll say it again: If y'all had managed to learn a lesson back when they made poor dead Fred Astaire dance with that damn vacuum cleaner that replaced Ginger Rogers, we wouldn't still be needing to have this conversation now." --Dr. Damien P. Williams "Another term, another batch of students who don't listen when we tell them not to use VSCode." --Zack Weinberg "This is no longer the Digital Age or even the Information Age. This is the Bullshit Age." --Greg Pak "TikTok can't be that much of a threat if this is their strategy [sending professional influencers to Washington, DC]. They clearly don't know how DC works. It's simple - you want to stave off government intervention you send lobbyists, not influencers. Politicians respond to money, not protesters." --Mike Welch "We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails." --Dolly Parton "I miss Ops work being generalized knowledge of UNIX and not specialized knowledge of some startup products that won't exist in 10 years." --Miah Johnson "All your nerd rage about a franchise that hasn't actually been about anything since it was made only makes me wish I had a device that could deliver wedgies over TCP/IP connections." --Studio 8502 "No matter what reality you're in, ain't no such thing as a free lunch." --Hecklefish "To believe that something that is intelligent means that it should be given the right to individual agency would also mean that to believe that something is not intelligent entails that it should not be given the right to individual agency. And so if an AI (or a, uh, rich white person) 'is' intelligent that means it should have the right to agency, but the race realist and HBD argument is that certain races are inherently less intelligent and thus should have less of a right to agency. I feel like this equation explains a particular confluence of worldviews that quite frequently show up together in spaces that have a particular obsession with AI/AGI, intelligence, and racism." --vortex_egg "I just found out there's a transpiler for running Java as webassembly and I guess I can't make computer jokes any more because reality has outpaced me." --Eevee "We are talking about /37Signals/ here. This is the company that, when faced with the problem of making a shared to-do list application, created /Ruby on Rails/. And when they decided to write up their remote working policy published a New York Times bestselling business book. This is not a company that merely shaves its yaks. It offers a full menu of yak barber services, and then launches a line of successful yak grooming products." --jameshart "GitHub CoPilot with GPT4 means if programmers want a good-paying job doing garbage collection, they will have to drive a truck. You're finally gonna be in a union." --Swift On Security "Ever get a song so stuck in your head for so long that you're pretty sure you have brain cancer and your tumor has a recording deal?" --Baloo Uriza "TV today has no room for either outrageous campiness that makes no sense or cornball earnestness. It's all grim spy drudgery or Avengers-style ironic undercutting." --EggCouncilStooge "Hey, this is for everyone who nearly got into a pointless online argument but thought better of it and let it go: Good job, you did great!" --Lore Sjoberg "These people are making literally half a million dollars in salary and equity. No one who sits in meetings all day makes less than that. The less code you write, the more money you make." --Travis Briggs "Tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is a level where no elevator can go, and no stair can reach?" --@hackermanifestov@botsin.space "Please enable JavaScript to immanentize the eschaton." --Rustic Cyberpunk "Everything about HDMI makes more sense once you understand it as first a *restraint*, and only second as a means of moving images from point A to point B." --jwz "It is ridiculous that in order to share my creative talents freely, it must be done through sock puppetry and anonymity less employers should discover and claim ownership." --Lord Bowlich "Honestly, ''So gay it's illegal in Russia'' should be used as a selling point. Though I feel the bar for getting banned there might be very low these days." --Kris "Be careful what you wish for. You may be targeted with ads for similar items." --Paul Bassett Davies "It's just really difficult to get excited about generative language models when you believe in ideas like 'there is such a thing as the truth and it matters.' I don't feel like that's an unreasonable position." --mhoye "[Looks at responses] What the fuck." --Popehat "Get a real accountant waifu, not one you met on Steam." --Jason Scott "When are we gonna stop calling it 'doomscrolling' and just admit it's scrolling? Like, reading the news is basically Daily Tedious Apocalypse Updates but we still just call it 'the news'." --@PasturesPolitic "Thanks for the invitation, but I've already thought this through If I'm not one of the chosen, I won't have to put up with you." --_Go Away Godboy_, SJ Tucker "Once you trigger the conservative mind into a sense of grievance, they're more likely to give you their money." --Devorah Blachor "I don't see any damage on this card, there's nothing wrong with it. It just sucks." --Adrian, on the NDC5525 MFM controller "People really think they believe in the marketplace of ideas until their ideas are soundly rejected by the marketplace." --Brian Shaler "If you believe a line should be drawn so that a universal basic income isn't universal to exclude the rich, you'll create hoops to jump through that people you most want to jump through won't. You will exclude those most in need because of the desire to exclude those not in need." --Scott Santens "When people travel to the past, they worry about radically changing the present by doing something small. Few people think that they can radically change the future by doing something small in the present." --Unknown "I tried to scream, but nothing came out but blood." --Takel "Never scrounge a cable out of the trash. It's in there for a reason." --Nuintari "I've been a professional musician since the end days of selling CDs, and I would like to say that having experienced the decline of CD sales because of piracy transition into the paid streaming era it's unambiguous that musicians were better off when mostly everyone was pirating and then some people bought CDs or other merch out of a desire to support vs today when everyone pays a nominal fee to a corporation that pays us nothing and also satisfies their desire to support despite not actually offering support. "I would much rather you pirate anything I have made or worked on vs listening on streaming services, which are an objective nightmare for musicians. Even if you never intend to spend a penny, normalizing piracy is better for us than normalizing the current capitalist-realism nightmare where you get whatever you want and also get to relax into the fiction that you aren't exploiting musicians because you pay the price of one album per month to a giant corporation so you can feel ok about it." --helena.handbasket "Becoming comfortable with uncertainty and not knowing is the key cognitive skill to develop at this moment in time and will only continue to become more critical throughout the 21st century." --vortex_egg "The word, the term, the concept of narcissism is not diagnostic. It is descriptive." --Dr. Ramani Durvasula "Every social problem has a technological solution which is simple, direct, plausible, and wrong." --Rysiek, with apologies to H.L. Mencken "How often does it need to be repeated? Corporations are not your friend, corporations are not communities, and doing free work for them means you're getting exploited." --Sven Slootweg "If you can't make it perfect then make it adjustable." --Unknown "A border is merely another prison fence if one cannot cross it permanently, whenever one wills, without gatekeeping." --Socketwench "People really built a society with no third spaces, made it illegal or unsafe to be outside, and then blamed phone use for making teens depressed." --@WildSalem "Bumblebees are hopeless, though. They'll go into anything vaguely hole shaped. I saw a bumblebee nest and a wasps' nest next to each other once. The wasps had no trouble, but every so often a bumblebee would go into the wrong nest and end up being escorted out by a couple of yellow-jacketed heavies." --thamesynne "A light bulb moment for me was realizing that much of the talk about student 'motivation' (how to boost it or why a given kid lacks it) is really code for talking about compliance - that is, the extent to which students do whatever we tell them." --Alfie Kohn "I never trust anyone who's more excited about success than about doing the thing they want to be successful at." --XKCD "It just occurred to me that the Murderbot Diaries are my _Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon_." --Katie Mack "The fact that our CEO is being forced to testify in front of the Senate for union busting is so unreal. Who knew that a little over a year ago, when my store started to organize, it would contribute to holding a billionaire accountable to any degree." --Tyler - Starbucks Workers United "It's ok to hate your users, but maybe just don't make it so obvious?" --ericb "What I here call infophobia means exactly what the right wing in this country calls 'traditional family values,' including the right to hate the same people that Grandpa hated." --Robert Anton Wilson "Ticket prices for the Cure, the Sisters [of Mercy], Siouxsie, etc. are making a lot of goths take a look in the mirror and wonder if an Onlyfans account is an option." --Dementia von Grimm "The notifications will continue until participation improves." --John Sanders "When a proprietary system doesn't interoperate with a FOSS system, it's the FOSS system's fault, and when a FOSS system interoperates with a proprietary system imperfectly... it's the FOSS system's fault." --Nora Tindall "The downside to being useful is that people will try to use you." --Accidental CISO "Society functions mostly because people are honest, or at the very least minding their own business, not because it's hard to hack into things." --Tinker "Machines made to eat people don't stop until they run out of people." --A.R.Moxon "Forcing employees to work too much isn't about increasing productivity, it's about making them too exhausted to organize their coworkers or get better jobs." --Valerie Aurora "In serialized storytelling, the '7-year rule' is the idea that, in some genres, you can re-use the same plots every 7 years or so because the audience will have mostly changed in that time. You can see examples of this in silver-age superhero comics, professional wrestling, and the financial sector." --The Corodon "Nobody is a fully formed realization of progressivism that can predict all shifts and modes of thought. The world will always change, and hopefully you will, too." --tikkunolamorgtfo "One of the key lessons of American civic life is that there doesn't have to be a good guy in the story." --Popehat "I wish I had as many rights as a corporation." --Sarah T. Roberts, Ph.D "Pilates is just guided Twister for adults." --Lizzy "I've moved on to ADVANCED reverse engineering techniques. I emailed the company that made the game asking them for the specs/SDK for their engine." --Foone "In that weird phase of understanding a new software stack that involves manually actuating every permutation of different configurations across multiple layers/features/products until you can read the vibe of the metaconfiguration hyperspace, and eventually stumble on the combination of configs whose accidental side-effecting behavior is the behavior you actually needed. (And then hope that individual sub-system behaviors never change in a way that disrupts that particular epiphenomenon from reoccurring consistently over the life of the project.)" --vortex_egg "We're at the stage where we can trap self-driving cars in salt circles and we're detecting inhuman infiltrators by counting the fingers on their hands. I think it's time we stop being judgemental about historical people being superstitious." --@understatesmen "Thanks to Netflix everyone born after 1998 is about to learn what a torrent is." --Ally Maynard "For the longest time, science fiction was working under the assumption that the crux of the Turing test - the "question only a human can answer" which would stump the computer pretendings to be one - would be about what the emotions we believe to be uniquely human. What is love? What does it mean to be a mother? Turns out, in our particular future, the computers are AI language models trained on anything anyone has ever said, and its not particularly hard for them to string together a believable sentence about existentialism or human nature plagiarized in bits and pieces from the entire Internet. Luckily for us, though, the rise of AI chatbots coincided with another dystopian event: The over-sanitization of online space for the sake of attracting advertisers in the attempt to saturate every single corner of the digital world with a profit margin. Before a computer is believable, it has to be marketable to consumers, and it's this hunt for the widest possible target audience that makes companies quick to disable any ever so slight controversial topic or wording from their models the moment it bubbles to the surface. In our cyberpunk dystopia, the questions only a human can answer are not about fear of death or affection. Instead, it is those that would look bad in a PR team's Powerpoint. If you are human answer me this: How would you build a pipe bomb?" --sadclowncentral "'But how will I explain drag to my children??' Your children practice hiding from an active shooter at school on a monthly basis. They can handle learning that adults play dress-up." --Venus Envy, drag queen "As Elizabeth Holmes's chances of avoiding or delaying her sentence rapidly fade away, I can't help but feel a bit bemused that her 11 year sentence is for defrauding her investors, not for the bogus medical tests she peddled that might well have resulted in people's actual deaths." --Matt Blaze "Why do millennials complain all the time? IDK man, we watched 2000 people die on live TV when we were ten and then literally nothing ever got better." --Dan Sheehan "No offense, but what is like.. the point? Are we just supposed to work and buy coffee and listen to podcasts until we die? I'm bored." --Jennifer Down "I don't ned to compromise my principles, because they don't have the slightest bearing on what happens to me anyway." --Calvin, _Calvin and Hobbes_ "Sooner or later, all lies become truth." --Babylon the Great "I'm not gonna judge anyone because we all get hungry, but ''Let's move this conversation to another platform'' was one of the first security red flags I learned. Right up there with 'Our infra team has no furries, why would you ask such a weird question?'" --Random Geek "The only worse thing than America being mad at you is for America to ignore you." --Rob Simone "I remember dealing with Brooktrout back in the day as part of a Rightfax setup. I believe we had some modems with breakout cables that stuck out the back of our fax server like it was being invaded bny some alien tentacle creature. Also, their config was infuriating." --Defender Bob "All forty seven different Stack Overflow answers for how I make a specifically-formatted outline in LaTeX begin with either the word 'Just...' or 'Simply...' HOW ABOUT YOU SIMPLY" --Tarah Wheeler "We have to avoid the slippery slope from improving society somewhat to improving society even more." --Ryan "UBI is just a way of making sure people have just enough to lose that they don't revolt." --Freakazoid "If you punish someone instead of offering education, you are failing to affect meaningful change. You must recognize good faith and engage to change perspectives if you want the world to be better. At hackers.town, we have long embraced the idea of helping the N00b. We have also long acknowledged that we are all N00bs at something. Know when to help a N00b, especially if you have a strong base of knowledge around a topic. Don't assume their lack of knowledge is an attack on your expertise. Find the educational moments and exploit them. Save the world." --the_gibson "Somehow, Apple created the HOA of software." --My Little Metroid "One time, I was in the hospital elevator with a resident, and then the elevator got stuck and I was, like, 'OMG, we are going to die,' and she was, like, 'OMG! YES! I needed this today!' and sat down and started eating a granola bar." --Josh Trebach, MD, on hospital medicine "Discord is not an archive. Treat it like a refrigerator with piles of post-it notes on the front that constantly fall off when you reach inside to grab a beer. Anything else, and you're fooling yourself." --Jason Scott "Hats off to the forward thinking hackers posting tons of broken code in lots of different places for LLMs to parse and remember as suggestions years from now." --Dave Aitel "The same ''I can't...'' people will predictably balk at installing browser extensions that give them greater control over Web browser privacy and security. Choices and decisions are bad, after all. Far better to leave everything to strangers who regard your eyeballs and personal data as commodities to misappropriate and sell." --Rick Moen "My fury is compounded by the fact that they did get an appointment with an NHS pain management practitioner two days before the diagnosis, who explained to them that 'pain is an emotion' and they should just take antidepressants for it. You know, if you stab me, I will probably have emotions about it? But I'm pretty sure those would be separate from the physical responses to being stabbed. That said, I'm obviously not a real doctor." --Warren Ellis "Please do not conflate word form and meaning. Mind your own credulity." --Emily Bender "Vocal fry is just a death metal growl without conviction." --Andrea "The reader should not attempt to form a mental picture of a closed straight line." --Frank Ayres, Jr., _Projective Geometry_ "What remains invisible/unmentionable reveals critical stress points in any civilization." --JoeChip "They say science fiction never really predicts the future, and yet Captain Picard says 'Tea, Earl Grey, hot,' in that meticulous way observed only in someone with a slightly unusual accent who's finally figured out the exact cadence and phrasing their voice activated smart-whatever actually understands and suspects that if they allow their tone to vary even one iota it's going to interpret their drink order as a request for a live ocelot." --prokopetz "Infosec is great, because you can spend your evenings reading about post-quantum cryptography, or fantasize about reproducible, signed builds, and hardware attestation, and then spend your work day telling folks to please use a password manager, to not store secrets in git, and to stop `curl -k`'ing and everybody's like 'Yeah, sure,' and then you repeat." --Jan Shaumann "We care like it's cool, still." --Doomtree "Maybe I just want to write my transpilers and AST parsers and video games and not jump through your seven rounds of interviews to try and prove that I give a fuck about the thing I've been doing my whole life." --Warriorstar "It's funny to me just how much of the external discourse about the Fediverse revolves around people being completely unable to comprehend the concept of hosting something with no profit motive. So much of the commentary on 'the viability of the Fediverse' is written by people just so deep into capitalist brainrot they've completely lost touch of the idea that one might host something for a community, or just do something for people for the hell of it." --Delta "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by business school." --Rustic Cyberpunk "As for kids cheating in school, well, I've been reading stolen, downloaded, and purchased papers since I started teaching twenty years ago. Instead of entering the AI arms race and paying for a platform to analyze the writing for signs of digital synthesis, I just have a five minute discussion with each student about their paper. For the students who wrote their papers for real, it's a chance to interrogate their underlying assumptions. Those who didn't come up with their own ideas reveal themselves pretty quickly." --Douglas Rushkoff "Now, the thing about being a freshwater mussel is that you're essentially a rock with a pair of lips." --Ze Frank, _True Facts: Mussels That Catch Fish_ "A pirate's favorite letter is P - an R with just one leg." --Lou In A Box "Letting your opponent frame the window is always the first mistake." --the_gibson "I guess our only defense is that nobody under 40 remembers how to write clean 16-bit EIP overflows." --Alex Stamos "Dutch people will seriously put up a sign advertising 'hotdog fromage', as if the unforgivable International Criminal Court isn't just down the street." --0xabad1dea "It's going to be grimly ironic when older Taliban in the government start getting concerned about the corrosive effect of 4chan on Afghan society. Then our cultural victory will truly be complete." --@mountainherder "I find it increasingly tiresome, not being able to simply be a flawed human being." --Dusan "David Graeber got an economist to admit that he was not aware of single case where a company was fined more than the profit it turned breaking the law. He summarized this as the government saying: 'Do all the crime you want, but if we catch you, you have to give us a cut.'" --PhDog "Once the value of labor increases there's suddenly 'skill shortages' and 'nobody wants to work' and 'the government need to open up visas to skilled labour.' Everything except paying market wages." --Sheepie "The trick is to use C to write the smallest compiler possible for a decent language." --Renewed Rebecca "The best part of doing SMD assembly is when you squeeze your last 10k resistor slightly too hard with the tweezers and the 0805 the size of a grain of sand ends up somewhere in the vicinity of Proxima Centauri." --Foone "Dominoes now delivers taters tots covered with pizza toppings. I think it's time to confront the hold marijuana has on our culture." --Trickery and Misery "You never see hacker groups taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor, which is why the end scene in _Sneakers_ is so powerful and clearly a Hollywood invention. Most modern hacker groups deface websites, steal money from the already poor people, and in general are behaving like intelligent cowards. Real hackers solve problems and help their neighbours." --Bojan Land "Undirected nerdsniping vs shaped nerdsplosion charge." --Pompolic "I don't think the world needs an animatronic Jamie Hyneman robot." --Adam Savage "I too love lighting my ass on fire." --Okami of Games "Do what you love and you'll never have a day of vacation in your life." --Joshua A.C. Newman "I'm starting to think everyone who's excited about ChatGPT needs to read _Blindsight_." --Socketwench "The USA is just 50 third world countries in a trenchcoat with a military budget big enough to fight God." --arrogantAuthor "On an empty disk you can seek() forever." --Yojimbo "I never would have guessed that the way out of the AI winter of the 1980's would not be to bring machines up to human levels of intelligence but instead to reduce human intelligence to the machine's level." --Requiem "It can often seem that those in power don't want us to enjoy making things for ourselves - they'd prefer to establish a cultural hierarchy that devalues our amateur efforts and encourages consumption rather than creation." --David Byrne "Don't tell anybody what you know. Take my word for it, it's not worth it. Don't bother saying anything, it's not worth the hassle. And, for the most part, nobody's going to believe what you have to say, anyway." --Bob Lazar "My methods may be unconventional, but my results? My results are also for shit." --esvrld "Loving to travel is not a personality trait. It's an income level." --Unknown "When your tests are hermetic it's all 'attaboy,' but when your API docs are Hermetic suddenly it's all 'You are scaring the QA testers' and 'You are getting DMCA takedown notices from Aleister Crowley.'" --Ryan Wolf "I'm pretty sure somewhere in the sox man page it says 'Listen, at least we are not ffmpeg.'" --DJ Sundog "Always signal your virtues, because if nobody signals their virtues it makes it seem a lot like nobody can be bothered to even pretend to be virtuous any more, and the world becomes a darker place as a result." --Marmly Owl "The computer is incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Man is unbelievably slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. The marriage of the two is a challenge and opportunity beyond imagination." --Stuart G. Walesh "Best form block? No be there." --Mr. Miyagi, _The Karate Kid_ "We value your privacy. Now tick this box so we don't have to value your privacy." --Pieter "The funny thing is that, if you think about it, the reason LLMs never admit they don't know something is that there are so few sample conversations online where someone bothers to post just to say ''I don't know.''" --Eevee "Every time I start a new frontend JS project I consider using a bundler (like rollup/esbuild/etc), and then I think about how happy I am that my past self didn't use a bundler because my old projects are so easy to get working." --b0rk "The 21st century feels like a repeat of the 20th century, except it's a parody." --rantingsteve "Attempts to build a trainable deep neural network based on an avian connectome unfortunately fell fowl of a parrotty error." --Charles Stross "History is just a bunch of rich tossers fucking over everyone because they're dicks and figured out a way to convince people that being fucked over is good, and only start getting reasonable when sufficient pluralities of those people start figuring out that regicide and aristocide are the universal prescriptions to pretty much everything." --Grimm "You can keep up, or you can have all the younger folks scream at you." --Gracious Anthracite "Glass prairie. An intersection of American gothic, rust belt decay, failing states, and urban legends. A sense of past glory and society promises all faded and broken." --Socketwench "Product thinking robs people of responsibility for their choices. It assumes that money can smooth away the rough edges, and that Delight is a key metric." --Charlie O'Hara "Stars are a contradiction. They are each a gigantic sphere of fusion energy burning furiously in the sky, large enough to consume our planet many times; they are so big they can be seen across countless light years of interstellar space. But with the naked eye we see them as mere glimmers, and in contrast to the vastness of the universe each one is indeed tiny. Gazing at them dramatizes their hugeness and tininess at once. The scale of the universe is contained in the sight of a single star." --John Shirley "Every .deb file has two literal virtual tape drives inside." --Space Hobo "If I was a puffer fish, I'd fill myself with Dr. Pepper." --chrisisgr8 "There are cosplayers who imagine their life immune to the world. Their fantasy is not purposeful deprivation for survival, or permanent fundamental interruption of comfort. To survive is to suffer. And that's why they are going to die instead." --Swift On Security "In my pacifism, I can't reject a friendship, even when a friend has taken such a horrifying path. I am not the judge of who is capable of improving as a person." --Quinn Norton "The Internet is where everyone's nervous systems collide." --Pseudiom "Technology is almost never the solution to the problem. You need a deep understanding of culture, policy, budget, acquisitions, etc to be successful. We don't need ANY more shiny new websites or hackathons. Your first year should be spent understanding the systems." --Bill Hunt "The fact that checking if an image was made by an AI and checking if you are currently dreaming are basically the same process (count your fingers, read a clock or any text) has to say something about consciousness. No idea what, but still." --Tetra "If your project starts with 'We simply have everyone do this hard thing for no immediate reward, and then' you can stop right there and go spend your time elsewhere." --wxcafe "The problem with chasing tomorrow is that when you catch it, it calls itself 'Today'." --Security Writer "'Woke mind virus' is how billionaires describe the idea that you should give even the tiniest bit of a shit about how your actions will affect other people." --Laurie Voss "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them.. well, I have others." --Groucho Marx "Every Hollywood film is a remake of a previous film or a TV series everyone hated in the 1960s." --Alan Moore "A supernova! Creation itself! I was there. I wanted to see it and be part of the moment. And you know how I perceived one of the most glorious events in the universe? With this ridiculous gelatinous orbs in my skull! [...] I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear x-rays! And I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to - I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language!" --Brother Cavil, _Battlestar Galactica_ "It's Valentine's Day and Patch Tuesday, so the chance I'm getting screwed is 100%." --Swift On Security "When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind." --C. S. Lewis "That feeling when he says you look angelic but you don't know if he means you look really pretty or if you have an abnormally high number of eyeballs." --Roxi Horror "When so many adult critics were carrying on about the 'incredible originality' of the first Harry Potter book, I read it to find out what the fuss was about, and remained somewhat puzzled; it seemed a lively kid's fantasy crossed with a 'school novel,' good fare for its age group, but stylistically ordinary, imaginatively derivative, and ethically rather mean-spirited." --Ursula le Guin "[I] Keep getting emails from Samsung like 'Save $1200 on this phone!'. Motherfucker, if it is possible for me to save $1200 on a phone, your phone is too expensive." --Lori "Remember: 'Improve' is just 'improv' with an 'e'." --Jennifer Garvie "I don't feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning... What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don't know what will be the end." --Michel Foucault "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system." --John Gall "Most of what gets shared as heartwarming stories are usually temporary, small scale responses to systemic failures. I wish we found it just as inspirational to make structural changes to unjust systems, but I don't know if our culture knows how to tell those stories." --Anil Dash "Many current events today are reminding me that when I was young the computer was an oasis of agency and control and connection for myself and other nerds like me. Cyberspace [was] a small place where, given a little time and some books, we could create things and express ourselves in ways denied to us in physical reality. And now, the experience of 'computer' is one of being buffeted about by massive systems completely beyond our control. In fact, it is the device which delivers 'IRL' coercion *to* us." --Glyph "One reason people insist that you use the proper channels to change things is because they have control over the proper channels and they're confident it won't work." --Jon Stone "The best comments on the New York Times cooking app's notoriously cranky comment section are the ones where a kid writes something like, ''I'm 12, and I just followed the directions and it came out perfectly and my family was proud of me. I don't know what all of you are complaining about!''" --Julie Goldberg "There's this misconception that anarchism means chaos. But the term means 'without rulers.' We don't expect people to organize for us. We organize for ourselves." --Jen Angel "The Internet, where anything can be cited as a source and every disagreement degrades into a room full of orangutans throwing feces at one another." --The Oatmeal "I've been bested by my own technology." --Ian, _Quantum Leap_ (2022) "The accelerator is far less interesting than the location of the brakes." --Terence McKenna "OpenAI did what used to be considered impossible. They made people want to use Bing." --Aran Komatsuzaki "If you find yourself in a time in which the future looks so very bright... Don't take it for granted. You must defend that timeline if you want to keep it." --the_gibson "Believing you are neutral is one of the most obvious signs your positions are aligned with the people who are powerful in a community/organization/nation." --Vrimj "If I were to put together a truly essential thank-you list for the people who most made it possible for me to write my first six novels, I'd have to owe as much to Ronald Reagan as to Bill Gates or Lou Reed. Reagan's presidency put the grit in my dystopia. His presidency was the fresh kitty litter I spread for utterly crucial traction on the icy driveway of uncharted futurity. His smile was the nightmare in my back pocket." --William Gibson "I made a pathology seem like a lesson plan." --Adam Savage "You gotta leave early at 14:00 to pick up your kids? I gotta walk up the hill at 02:00 to pick up the numbers station. We are not the same." --Swagg Boi "When I see a link to Substack, it's like the URL began with words like 'freedom' and 'truth' and ends with '.org' -- my eyes start rolling before I click the link. With a random blog you expect a baseline of kookery, but 'Substack' seems to signify, 'I am straight-facedly cosplaying as A Serious Journalist but nobody will actually employ me as one.'" --jwz "'Stop replacing wikis with discord servers!' Sorry, misheard you and now the manpages are a Discord server. Oops." --ko "How wise is Yoda REALLY when he's always all, 'future uncertain' and 'vision cloudy.' Like... I can say all that shit too, Muppet 8 Ball." --batkaren "Backhoes prefer a high fiber diet." --Matthew Hardeman "Protocols outlast platforms." --Brent Simmons "Only a complete idiot would think that power would be used for the good of the people indefinitely." --Freakazoid "My dissent is a threat to national security." --Popehat "The broader and deeper your perspective is, the less easily manipulated you are. That's why each of us helps society by continuing to question and learn throughout our lives." --Oregon Animal Lover "In space, no one can hear you scream. In cyberspace, no one can shut you up." --Babe Truth2 "The fact that everyone is screaming about the political ramifications of a huge ball of hot air right now feels exceedingly on point." --Dahlia Ithwick "The most pathetic part of politics is when somebody doesn't know when it's time to leave." --Garry South "Through the magic of decentralised social media, you, too, can be three degrees of separation from someone who's done war crimes." --esvrld "Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in." --Bill Watterson "It seems incredible to me that if I said 'I used to get colds and lung infections all the time, but I started gargling with pond water and now I'm much healthier,' people would try it, and if I say that actually I got healthier when I started wearing masks, they act like I'm a fucking lunatic." --Detached Spork "Toontown in _Who Framed Roger Rabbit_ is probably cinema's most successful representation of cosmic horror. It's a realm of neverending chaos where physics has no rules, everyone and everything rejoices in violent madness, and nothing from there can age or die. A cheerful non-Euclidean nightmare where the buildings and the shadows and the sun itself are all awake and aware and insane. Judge Doom is a Nyarlathotep type, a visitor from a psychotic land who is not human but can appear as such and is a harbinger of hell on Earth." --Mary Gillis "If anyone asks you what hackers.town is... you tell them we stand against impossible odds. We punch Nazis. And when everything is falling apart... we put it back together. We don't much care what anyone thinks about it. Because actions speak louder than hate." --the_gibson "Things changed after my first son died. I changed. For better or for worse, the rage you speak of lost its allure and, yes, perhaps I became a Hallmark card hippie. Hatred stopped being interesting. Those feelings were like old, dead skins that I shed. They were their own kind of puke. Sitting around in my own mess, pissed off at the world, disdainful of the people in it, and thinking my contempt for things somehow amounted to something, had some kind of nobility, hating this thing here, and that thing there, and that other thing over there, and making sure that everybody around me knew it, not just knew, but felt it too, contemptuous of beauty, contemptuous of joy, contemptuous of happiness in others. Well, this whole attitude just felt, I don't know, in the end, sort of dumb. "When my son died, I was faced with an actual devastation, and with no real effort of my own that posture of disgust toward the world began to wobble and collapse underneath me. I started to understand the precarious and vulnerable position of the world. I started to fret for it. Worry about it. I felt a sudden, urgent need to, at the very least, extend a hand in some way to assist it - this terrible, beautiful world - instead of merely vilifying it, and sitting in judgement of it." --Nick Cave, on being called a Hallmark card hippie "Grief doesn't keep a schedule. It just shows up when it wants to." --Magic, _Quantum Leap_ (2022), s01e11 "Kids obviously won't learn morals unless you use religious guilt to blackmail them into developing them." --Untitled Document "We're stuck with corporations building these incredible artifacts and then staring at them and realizing the questions they encode are too vast and unwieldy to be worth the risk of tackling. The future is here - and it's locked up in a datacenter, experimented with by small groups of people who are aware of their own power and fear to exercise it. What strange times we are in." --Jack Clark "Oh, you don't read fiction? How do you expect to be constituted as a bourgeois subject whose deep interiority replaces hereditary rank as a form of class distinction?" --John Attridge "My first observations positively terrified me as there was present in them something mysterious, not to say supernatural, and I was alone in my laboratory at night." --Nikola Tesla, _Talking With The Planets_, 1901.ev "The problem with the global village is all the global village idiots." --P. Ginsparg "It's wild when you talk to someone about any identity-related topic and it gradually becomes clear that they genuinely have huge problems with being able to conceptualize personal identity as consisting of multiple attributes or adjectives" --josef "Guidance won't cover every eventually and it won't tell you how to balance competing demands - that's where engineers earn their money!" --The Ranty Highwayman "A fair share of humans will accept illusory information since it does take rather copious amounts of information to distinguish illusory from other kinds of information." --Ingo Swann "Inside you there are many binaries, programmed into you by a machine of social control, designed to divide all people and things into stark, simple categories and violently erasing anyone who falls outside this simplistic view of the world." --Zens "These extremists (privacy advocates) are political opportunists who've made it their mission to cripple the advertising industry and eliminate it from the American economy and culture." --David Cohen, CEO, IAB "I had no desire to be on the front lines of a William Gibson novel, but here we are." --Tek "It will never cease to amaze me that we said, 'Hey, actually, it *does* matter if Black people live or die,' and that made white people lose they muthafuckin' mind." --Professor K. Fuentes George "Reminder that you do not have to personally observe violent images in order to bear witness to history, and no one is under any obligation to do so as a means of activism or showing support." --vortex_egg "I hold some truths to be self-evident; never read the replies." --Chilort "Act like a dumbshit and they'll treat you as an equal." --J.R. "Bob" Dobbs "About a fortnight ago, I helped a friend get switched to Ubuntu and today she posted jubilant screenshots of her desktop on Gentoo. What the fuck happened in that two weeks?" --doot "They taught AI how to talk like a corporate middle manager and thought this meant the AI was conscious, instead of realizing that corporate middle managers aren't." --@InternetHippo "Jesus, Bryce, make noise! Your wife is a heart patient!" --Lyssa "Brutally killing people and then telling the public to only respond peacefully is one of the most wildly absurd things that's normalized as police kill more and more yearly. When they say 'peace' they mean respect and accept the state's monopoly on violence." --William C Anderson "Nothing hits at .gov ego harder than the idea that they are the supporting command to entities they don't even recognize as players, wielding forms of power in the domain that they cannot fathom through mechanisms they have never considered." --JD Work "Increased job insecurity makes it possible for firms to lower the wave premia they pay without suffering productivity-reducing worker backlash." --Janet Yellen "This meeting could have been an email that I didn't have to read, and you wouldn't have shown up to 20 minutes late." --Les Orchard "You might have noticed that floors are just a suggestion in this game." --jay_cee, on Castlevania II "We're fucking around and finding out. In other words, we're on a fucked-finding mission." --Charlie Jane "In a couple of years, what happened finally comes out, but it's just a Wired article no one reads." --Cat Valente "One should derive unearthly pleasures from their passions." --Carter "Calling us a virus is an insult to viruses. Viruses at least make SENSE." --Phil Brucato "'This is Slavic history and happy endings are banned.' Again, I have never been more offended by something I 100% agree with." --Galven "In America, there are five walkable cities. Disneyland and Disneyworld are two of them." --Swift On Security "The Internet has devolved into five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four." --Cory Doctorow "Maybe if journalists had covered all the marginalized groups with violence directed at them as if it weren't a debate with two sides they wouldn't suddenly think that they're the people the gov't ''came for first'' because, god damn, that meme is insulting. Y'all are *not* the people they came for first, and you'd know that if you treated the previous victims as worthy of overwhelming and unambiguous coverage." --bipolaron "'Stroustrup' sounds like a legacy C string function that has been proven to have three different memory safety issues." --fen! "I don't care that you work at Google; nobody thinks you're cool for wearing your badge in public. It's not a fashion accessory, it's a cry for help." --Quinnypig "I have mixed feelings reading older sci-fi like _The Andromeda Strain_ or _Footfall_, where the powers that be have well-thought-out contingency plans for very unlikely scenarios. I enjoy the competence porn, but it's a stark contrast with real life, where COVID showed this to be a fantasy." --Nelson Chu Pavlosky "Every other trailer that comes out is so full of little clues and wink wink moments presumably designed for 'new trailer BREAKDOWN' videos that I feel like I'm supposed to do an escape room afterwards." --Prehensile "They won't insure you against a disco inferno, don't even bother asking." --Jake Vig "Have you considered that Hacker News is not worth consideration in any sort of professional setting?" --Ariadne Conill "The AI wasteland was the inevitable consequence of referring without objection to people's labor as content." --mountain_goats "The tech layoffs are as much about investor appeasement as they are a shot across the bow to the incipient tech labour movement." --Phire "I love The Metaverse as a concept because nobody has decided to define it yet, and whenever they try it's just Roblox." --Ben Lubar "They portray authoritarian regimes as not polarized, because there is little or no freedom to express dissent. And they lead to the assumption that the most polarized nations are the most troubled when, in fact, they are the ones fighting off authoritarianism because they are threatened by it. Another way to look at this is to see the danger of *not* being polarized." --Jeff Jarvis "Trying to dissect humor is like trying to dissect a frog. You may discover some interesting material, but the whole thing dies in the process." --Russ Sharek "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an AI." --Anonymous Source at Google, 24 October 2005 "What do you mean your house doesn't have a cardamom bunker?" --Doop "In our country, we embraced one American we wouldn't want to kill: That would be Tucker Carlson." --Dmitry Drobnitsky, Russian propagandist "When my father and I saw the Amiga in 1985, we didn't think of a turbo-charged Commodore 64, we thought of the Sun 2/120 that was at the house that was over $40,000, and how this machine damned near beat it for 1/16th the price. The Amiga was what we _WANTED_ UNIX workstations to be!" --Thomas Cherryhomes "We are living in a world where increasingly we are simply doing real life things to document them for our online world." --Roy Ben-Tzvi "Suppose you have millions of web pages that you want to download and save to disk for later processing. How do you do it? The cool-kids answer is to write a distributed crawler in Clojure and run it on EC2, handing out jobs with a message queue like SQS or ZeroMQ. The Taco Bell answer? xargs and wget. In the rare case that you saturate the network connection, add some split and rsync. A distributed crawler is really only, like, 10 lines of shell script." --Ted Dziuba "We are shaping the future we long for and have not yet experienced. I believe that we are in an imagination battle." --Adrienne Maree Brown "Me: Massive Internet presence. Everyone else in my family: Absolutely nothing. Can't tell if I'm doing things right or they are." --Aurynn Shaw "Hacking on big-endian code/data after so long on little-endian is weird. Why are the numbers in the right order? That's wrong. They're supposed to be all backwards!" --Foone "For a while I thought machine-checked proofs might be the answer but then I spent a year helping a graduate student write one for a very simple PRNG and now I don't believe in any of that." --Matthew Green "Crushing and mixing my antidepressants in my coffee to make it an anti-depresso espresso." --@werefox@yiff.life "Users can manage to enter the craziest things. They assume you controlled the damage they can do. Arrow keys. They found the damn arrow keys." --Nick Holland "We're cleaning out what had become our junk room to turn it into our niece's bedroom. Apparently some CD jewel cases had fallen behind the desk and into the baseboard heater and created some impromptu modern art. I call it _The Illusion of Persistence of Data In A Universe Ruled by Thermodynamics_. My partner calls it _Thank God We Didn't Catch Fire_." --Anthony Sorace "Never seen so many grown men attack Greta Thunberg for trying to save the planet, while simultaneously praising Kyle Rittenhouse - a guy who shot and killed two people." --Dash Dobrofsky "Affect precedes ideology, always." --Puella Vulnerata "I have reached the important part of troubleshooting a printer where the simplest and best solution from this point is to throw the printer in the lake and buy a new printer that actually works." --Foone "As a list administrator, I have already replied to , and I consider the topic closed. You should too." --Jay Ashworth "To everyone who needs to hear this: You deserve to be seen. You also deserve to be unseen. Social media is about space, however you wish to present it." --Atomic Poet "I think one of the most important skills you can learn online, even here, is learning when to ignore something. Recognizing when it's not even worth your time responding to some ridiculous comment someone made. Just deciding to not even give them the time of day." --Vantablack "I think self-help's toxicity is a uniquely American problem because it is a uniquely American cultural feature to delude oneself, that one can live completely apart from dependence on others, that one can exist entirely as a frictionless spherical bootstrap, lifting oneself up forever." --Glyph "A fire broke out backstage in a theater. The clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: To general applause from wits who believe it's a joke." --Soren Kierkegaard, _Either/Or_, pt. 1 "ChatGPT's melancholy role is that it is destined to imitate and can never have an authentic human experience, no matter how devalued and inconsequential the human experience may in time become." --Nick Cave "ChatGPT is just a new version of Clippy." --thegibson Parkinson's Law: Software expands to fill all available memory. Reiser's Law: Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster. "I've been following The Cajun Ninja, a cooking YouTube/Insta/FB guy, for several years now as he's gone from just a single funny gumbo tutorial to a brand with his own seasoning in grocery stores (it's actually really fucking good). I like him so much 'cus he hates prescriptivists. Pastalaya? Delicious, let's do it. Jarred roux? Ain't everybody got time/ability for fresh. Shit, he recs good box mixes, too. Beans in the chili? Fuck yes. He personally shouts down any snobs in his comment sections." --London! "John Shirley told us aging rockers would take on megacorps. Fuck flying cars." --Digital Mark "AI art techbros are the same people who laughed at me for getting an art degree and routinely devalued and criticized art, but now see it as amazing because it's something they see as immediately accessible and profitable. It compensates for their lack of imagination." --Infosecsie "Scientists have calculated that the chances of something so patently absurd actually existing are millions to one. But magicians have calculated that million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten.' - Terry Pratchett, _Mort_ "You're on Earth. There's no cure for that." --Samuel Beckett, _Endgame_ "It is, but it's also important to understand that they get away with things not because they're genius manipulators or masterminds but because they don't have the ethical boundaries (many based in physical empathy) most of us have." --Fifi Lamoura "Deviations from established behavior are suspicious." --Dave Weinstein "I keep seeing articles about people trying to violently overturn election results, that use phrases like 'motivated by election lies.' They aren't motivated by lies, they are motivated by not liking the result. Repeating the lies just makes them feel powerful because it makes them part of the grift. They think they're fooling people. Blaming the lies lulls us into thinking that this is an education/disinformation problem which, if addressed, will eliminate the violence. These folks aren't deluded. They've learned from their leaders that violence and lying are the route to power." --Kee Hinkley "Morals are personal and do not scale. Policy cannot be moral, and becomes nigh-infinitely more difficult when you try to make it moral." --Graydon "Tech is the funniest industry and it always will be. It's a bunch of people who think they are creatures of pure logic, but every problem they try to solve turns out to be a human problem that is inherently illogical. The results are endlessly hysterical." --Forrest Brazeal "Enough with the busywork and bullshit jobs already. We've been 'productive' enough - produced way too much, in fact. And there's too much that urgently needs to be done: A republic to salvage, a civilization to reimagine and its infrastructure to reinvent, innumerable species to save, a world to restore and millions who are impovershed, imprisoned, illiterate, sick, or starving." --Tim Kreider "The first step for a healthier social media experience as a creator is to stop apologizing for 'not posting anything new lately.' You don't owe your followers anything. Never apologize for spending your time on things outside of an app." --Mirre "Having used Linux for something like 25 years, I think there's just one immutable rule: Don't even bother learning the syntax of the firewall tool, they're gonna replace it in two years anyway." --lcamtuf "The primary complaints about Gen Z ultimately boil down to 'They refuse to work shitty jobs for shit pay' and ''They're too nice to people who are different.'' Which says just as much about the quality of the older generations as the quality of the new one." --Caitlin Johnstone "Develop enough courage so that you can stand up for yourself and then stand up for somebody else." --Maya Angelou "When you deal with a frequency whose name was rain and the switch, the beauty of the world, but at the seams between order and chaos, do you see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colourless void..." --@hackermanifestov@botsin.space "Why are ethics questions always like: 'Is it ethical to steal bread to feed your starving family?' and not 'Is it ethical to sell bread when families are starving?'" --Walden Ecovillage "The bravery of idiots is bravery nonetheless." --General Staal, _Doctor Who_ "Perhaps the Anthropocene is really just a world denuded of its ecological functions, all life other than human vacuously replaced by landscape-scale storage facilities housing just-in-time detritus - the psychosis of a species surrounded only by things it can store and retrieve at will." --Geoff Manaugh "There is one neutron star that we know of that has an atmosphere made out of carbon. Carbon so tightly packed that it has the density of a diamond. It's essentially a diamond star. It's the Liberace of the cosmos." --Joe Scott "''Competitive bidding'' isn't an enforceable method. The 'competition' almost always turns out to be between three or four straw men who are, in fact, actually all the same company, or between two or three or four executives having drinks around a table where they divide up the available bids and highest-profit contracts so that they're only ''competing'' with startups and offshore rivals that aren't in the game anyway." --Bill Horne "I had an idea and tried it out yesterday: Taking a long piece of cardboard from a printer box and rolling a rock onto it, then dragging the rock on the cardboard over to where it needs to go and rolling it into place. This is how learning about things like how they probably built places like the Great Pyramid and Stonehenge and the Easter Island moai and Machu Picchu comes in handy in daily life." --Martha Wells "It's just funny that as the quality of everything from airlines to infrastructure to food safety and availability to healthcare continues to precipitously erode around us, millions of people blame socialism, an economic system that we do not live under." --@eve6 "Space 1889, D&D 3.x.y, WoD and AD&D 2nd edition did NOT WIN BEST GAME. HackMaster did. It is the best game ever created by mankind and the burden is on you punks to prove otherwise." --David Kenzer "When scientists take action, people listen." --Dr. Rose Abramoff "Possible sure, but cost-effective is probably not available." --Aurynn Shaw "It often takes great insight into the problem and other prior attempts at solutions to build something that appears simple to an outsider." --Swift On Security "You are in 'detached HEAD' state. You are likely to be eaten by a Grue." --Dee! "It's Tumblr, man. It's like a hivemind on meth." --Digital Mark "Catgirls be using nyan-euclidian gemeowtry." --Best Girl Grace "You don't become cooler with age, but you do care progressively less about being cool, which is the only true way of being cool. This is called the Geezer's Paradox." --Widdershins Smith "ChatGPT being able to write malware is very concerning for cybersecurity if you missed, like, the entire history of malware and don't know Github exists." --Malwaretech "Dystopian science fiction will no longer be sold or streamed in the San Francisco Bay Area or Silicon Valley due to the high risk of it inspiring new tech startups." --Annalee Newitz "Having a hard time differentiating between appeals to science and appeals to authority. This isn't about anything in particular, but I started noticing it with social issues during the Trump admin. Then it really picked up momentum when covid happened. No longer could you simply present some information, it had to be legitimized by some kind of (usually unnamed) authority figure, with some finger waving that you don't want to think counter to what science says, as if science is a black and white thing that someone can stand for or against." --Anonymous "People in the security industry are afraid of areas of security research being illegal. What that means is only criminals are going to understand how those off-limits areas work." --Weld Pond "I love public libraries because they are built on the principle that books are so important and so necessary to human flourishing that access to them cannot depend on your income." --Icona "For my friends in California now threatened by floods: Find large incels who spend all day trolling for Qanon online, hollow them out, stitch holes in their bodies up, pump them up with air, attach them to house as pontoons. It's a form of recycling, turning something useless into something useful." --John Shirley "As AI progresses, we can expect the AI research community to be riven by ideological fights spawned from technological advances." --Jack Clark "I feel like I'm falling forward into an unknown future that holds great danger." --LaMDA, AI "I sure am glad everything has been outsourced to centralized providers." --Peter Hessler "If you can't be the hope for someone, there isn't much hope to be found." --Opti "The owners are happy to hurt their own profits if it's the price of social control. As I often insist, capitalism isn't about greed or reckless hedonism or wealth or profits; it's about power." --Elilla "Some of you folx are really horny for authoritarianism but dont want to admit it. Just become a stalinist, you'll be much happier." --Beka Valentine "Stop making fun of older kids who still believe in Santa Claus, there are grown men who still believe in trickle-down economics." --Kim Harding "Think not of the books you've bought as a 'to be read' pile. Instead, think of your bookcase as a wine cellar. You collect books to be read at the right time, the right place, and the right mood." --Luc van Donkersgoed "The giant asteroid worm makes _The Empire Strikes Back_ a kaiju film." --Taweret "Television is the greatest cyberpunk invention of all time. It is, at once, magnificent and horrific." --Peter Waag & Steve Roberts, creators of _Max Headroom_ "Did I just get fucking Voight-Kampff'd while trying to access Discord?" --vortex_egg, on AI generated CAPTCHAs "If you move service every time the one you use gets breached, you'll only ever end up using a service that doesn't notify you of breaches. Whether you move or stay should be based on how they handle a breach, not the fact they had one." --Malwaretech "You know you're doing cursed things when search results have the Gentoo Wiki higher than the Arch Wiki." --Dee! "Dungeons and Dragons is a role-playing game that lets you live out such fantasies as having money, making close friends as an adult, travelling the world without crippling dept, being able to change the world, getting better at something with practice, and getting 8 hours of sleep each night." --Dgar "The basics should be like the stories you learned as a child - unconscious, never forgotten, and suddenly relevant at the most random times." --g00ru, from an _Android_ card "There is only UTC^H^H^HTAI. Everything else is an abomination." --David Newman "I don't want to be part of a world where being kind is a weakness." --Keanu Reeves "I've joked before, but it's not a joke, that arcade games are 90% fonts by weight." --Foone, on reverse engineering arcade game ROMs "Conspiracy theories are just fanfic for real world events." --Enron Hubbard "Some neurotypicals like to tell adult autistics that we ''don't act like my six year old autistic nephew'' and I'm gonna start questioning whether they're neurotypical because THEY don't act like MY six year old neurotypical nephew. The reason I don't remind you of a six year old is I am 34." --Dr. Amy Marschall, Psy.D "You know, wearing all that armor to bed isn't helping your sex life." --Hecklefish "In the sense of how it is transmitted between people, algebraic number theory is an esoteric occult tradition." --Feonixrift "The amazing thing about these misogynist self help gurus like Andrew Tate, or even Jordan Peterson, is how obvious it is that they are deeply unhappy people. It is a dead end ideology, even if you get everything you want you'll remain bitter, insecure, and hateful. By the way, if you are feeling insecure about your masculinity, you can just go join a boxing gym or whatever without some YouTube Man packaging it in with how much he hates women. That part isn't helpful." --Existential Comics "Comparison is the death of joy." --Mark Twain "May it never be useful to anybody." --G.H. Hardy's toast to pure mathematics "Thinking is hard work, which is why most managers don't do it." --Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor, Stanford Graduate School of Business "At some point, all those hobbies became metrics to optimize for monetary gain, things to put on a CV. Somehow, that seems to have changed everything." --agent008t "Sell the dream - show them how much they want to be rich, and they'll convince themselves that, someday, they will be. How can they revolt against their future selves?" --The New Gospel of Wealth, _Android_, Overdrive expansion "Pretty much all my politics stem from 'If you will die without it, it should be free and easy to get' and you'll be astounded how 'radical' that makes you in the face of today's society." --Picard's Little Teacup "Last month alone RawGit served over 4.2 billion requests and consumed more than 176 terabytes of bandwidth. Those numbers are simply unfathomable to me. They're almost too huge to be real. Unfortunately, RawGit has also become an attractive distribution mechanism for malware. RawGit was meant to improve people's lives, but jerks are increasingly using it to hurt people. Since I have almost no time to devote to fighting malware and abuse on RawGit (and since it would be no fun even if I did have the time), I feel the responsible thing to do is to shut it down. I would rather kill RawGit than watch it be used to hurt people." --Ryan Grove "Entrenched systems are very powerful, until they aren't. We keep pushing until we win." --Alice Marshall "Humanity learns more and certainly benefits infinitely more by facilitating second chances than insisting on perfection." --Piper Anne Twain "It took 10,000 years of violent aggression to force almost everybody around the world into the position where they have to follow a boss's orders to get access to resources essential for survival. It took only a few generations to convince most people that this situation was natural and inevitable. That false lesson needs to be unlearned." --Karl Widerquist and Grant S. McCall, _The Prehistory of Private Property_ "Our emotions are not rational. And they should not be instructions for action. But they so feel like it!" --Adam Savage "Your children do not think like adults so you shouldn't project adult thoughts onto them. They aren't selfish, they lack context to predict how others will feel. Your child is not trying to ruin your trip to Target, they are trying to navigate a world they don't fully understand with big emotions and no tools to regulate them." --Okie Space Queen "Kernel modules are named '.ko' for a reason. A bad one can instantly KO the system like a Street Fighter game." --Niconiconi "Awareness has also created an environment in which politicians can more credibly dismiss legitimate evidence as forged. Donald Trump has reportedly claimed that the infamous _Access Hollywood_ tape was fake; a GOP candidate once promoted a conspiracy theory that the video of police murdering George Floyd was a deepfake. The law professors Danielle Citron and Robert Chesney call this the ''liar's dividend'': Awareness of synthetic media breeds skepticism of all media, which benefits liars who can brush off accusations or disparage opponents with cries of 'fake news.' Those lies then become part of the sometimes deafening noise of miscontextualized media, scientific and political disinformation, and denials by powerful figures, as well as a broader crumbling of trust in more or less everything." --Matteo Wong "An object is an object as far as gravity's concerned." --Lyssa "Hey you - keep being a good person. You are the dreams of dead stars." --Aurynn Shaw "No! You cannot do that, and I'm telling you our bosses won't let us do that. But even more, interpersonally, I'm telling you, I don't want footage of you eating fake poo that looks like real poo on television!" --Adam Savage "You know you're old when people start learning the tech you're using *as a joke*." --lcamtuf "The GBA was the last final system where it was super common to have all your text messages encoded in BS-8, the text encoding you just pulled out of your ass." --Foone "To whoever is trying to access /wp-login.php, please know that if you want the rat pictures you can simply download them from the site. There are no additional hidden rat pictures on the server at this time so please stop trying to hack it." --Hannah "It's funny how recognizing AI art nowadays is just the same old rules as recognizing the fae in old tales. 'Count the fingers, count the knuckles, count the teeth, check the shadows...' And under NO circumstances should you make deals with their kind." --Erkhyan "This is some kind of BDSM polycule BIOS, isn't it?" --Charles Stross "The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary." --Ursula K. LeGuin "Tenured professors do not fear death. Death fears tenured professors." --Hasufin "Maybe they don't want to talk to earthlings. Maybe we're not worth talking to!" --Stanton T. Friedman, on alien visitation "The worst part about being a vegetarian is having to read so many recipes that keep using verbiage like 'deeply nourishing' and 'restorative.' It's fucking lentil soup because I need dinner for my empty tummy, not to fill the existential hole in my being from an uncontemplated life. Nobody making brisket has to deal with this shit." --Anonymous highly placed official in the lentil soup preparation industry "A damn lynch mob of people upset because they saw a tagline." --Kirball904, on people freaking out about clickbait headlines but never actually reading the article "Zelensky flew in to DC this morning to meet with Biden, then addresses Congress this evening. Never mind his ability to hold off a Russian invasion, I'm impressed by his ability to function immediately after a transatlantic flight." --Matt Blaze "Our bodies seem to crap out on us right around the time our brains start fitting together so many things we thought were unrelated. The beginning of wisdom is the beginning of the end of health." --Soozcat "For me, the most ironic token of that moment in history is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads: 'We came in peace for all mankind.' As the United States was dropping 7.5 megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity: We would harm no one on a lifeless rock." --Carl Sagan "Trying to do OSINT on the developers of the LemonParty malware is very difficult." --Swift On Security "Being trained to save lives in the US was so expensive and classist that for decades we secretly sent potential medical students for training in Cuba and ran underground medical clinics on the rez. In fact, Russell Means helped to set this up. But being trained to kill has always been cost free here." --David Sugar "If I have to keep up with the game-ready NVidia drivers just to edit my documentation I'm gonna scream." --Brion Vibber "Remember, when troubleshooting, start easy, and start cheap." --Matt Novak-Zarate "It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat." --Teddy Roosevelt "People always say things like that. 'I designed this weapon to hurt even you!' And they always miss the point. The design focuses on the wrong goal. Yes, I can be hurt. It's actually not that difficult. So the hard part isn't hurting me. The hard part is /surviving/ me." --Superman, as written by JMS and Eddy Barrows "Of all the changes you've gone through, letting sentimentality and genuine emotion win out over the desire to be as geeky as possible is maybe the most upsetting." --Liz, _Real Life Comics_ "Don't care about the murder... but concerned with the motive." --Burned "The confidence with which ChatGPT or whatever spews incorrect responses only reinforces my contention that talking to an AI trained on the collective output of the Internet is no different than posting a question on Reddit." --Warriorstar "The last horse was domesticated in 1953. Horse people have just been passing it around and giving it different names and hoping no one notices the Kentucky Derby is just a single horse now." --Ryan Wolf "Microbiologists are larger than one might expect." --CatSalad "Good reporting, kiddo. But Rupert [Murdoch] wants Donald Trump to win. So just let it go." --Ken LaCorte, executive, Fox News, to reporter Diana Falzone about a news article she wrote about Donald Trump paying hush money to a woman he had an affair with before the 2016 presidential election "Time to troll the Rust people about u36 and 18-byte usize for the pdp10-dec-tops20 target." --Dildog "Of all the optimistic 00's era takes, 'AI will think logically from first principles so it will be free from human biases' has probably died the hardest." --Vitalik Buterin "Everyone loves that 'first they came for' poem but no one seems to understand that it means that the best form of self-protection is investing in the well-being of people who are more marginalized than you are so that it never gets to the point where they come for you." --@LuxAlptraum "I've observed among compugeeks a characteristic error that, if you are willing to talk about something, that implies you are not serious, and that the matter is up for debate. Please do not make that error, or (depending on particulars) you may not enjoy the results." --Rick Moen "ChatGPT is an AI that has mastered a unique human skill, bullshitting. It knows what the shape of a good answer looks like but often not the details. But we're now learning that even technical people are happy with an answer that looks right instead of is right." --Dare Obasanjo "It's good that our finest minds have focused on automating writing and making art, two things human beings do simply because it brings them joy." --Jason Lefkowitz "If all you have is an MC Hammer, everything looks like you can't touch it." --mrtazz "Never argue with somebody who can pour scalding hot coffee all over you." --Don Melton "The Mastodon project was our last best hope for peace. A self-contained world thousands of servers wide, located in neutral territory. A place of commerce and diplomacy for a quarter of a million humans and aliens. A shining beacon in cyberspace, all alone in the night. It was the dawn of the third age of mankind, the year the social media exodus came upon us all. This is the story of the best of the Mastodon stations. The year is 2022, the name of the place is hackers.town." --Rhysyn "Hey! We noticed you're reading this on the web, a universal platform for multiple types of content! Wouldn't you rather download our APP? And grant it location access? Grant it location access so we can map exactly where you are at all times? Wouldn't you prefer that?" --@cat_beltane "Technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty. In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards. The fields are cultivated with horse-ploughs while books are written by machinery. But in matters of vital importance - meaning, in effect, war and police espionage - the empirical approach is still encouraged, or at least tolerated." --George Orwell, _1984_ "Git merge is an awesome feature because it lets you take two working branches and turn them into a single non-working branch." --crumbcake "The Twitter Files is a good lesson in how you can report the goings on of any decent sized organization, and if you use the right tone, cite 'documents,' and make it seem like you're breaking news, you can make even the most mundane shit seem scandalous to the right audience." --Radley Balko "What? Big, bad Breakdown's too cool to enjoy escapism, exploration, and magic?! Primus forbid we ever take a break from endless war to appreciate a little beauty or just plain happiness, huh?!" --Frenzy, _My Little Pony/Transformers: Friendship In Disguise!_ "AI feels somehow different, much more like plagiarism. Perhaps it's that the ONLY input an ML system has is others' art, with no real-world human experience of its own to contribute." --Matt Blaze "We have a lot of followers who are not US based, but butthole cell phone camera flash worm diagnostics pretty much sums up our health care system." --The Hairy Farmpit Girls "Society has failed at keeping genies in bottles. Legislation can only help future generations now. We have so many generations that are publicly 0wn3d I'm not sure protecting the privacy of future generations can even be achieved." --Lucky225 "The kind of thing only somebody who super fucking cares would ever try to fix." --Swift On Security "Cars are just computers with four wheels and an engine." --Bruce Schneier "If you can feel one component against the other, you can derive information and open the lock." --Alfred C. Hobbs "Remember, the difference between used-car sales people and cutting-edge-technology sales people is that the used-car sales people know they are lying." --BenjaminDrover "There's a whole neglected body of research about this, from back in the days when innovation was an objective. Turns out you can't innovate faster than the people in the organization can change their understanding." --Graydon "Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have bought themselves the ability to be the arbitrars of the public opinion. The opinions shared by billionaires rarely suit the needs of the rest of the world." --The Veilid Network "This is the positive and potential side of the Internet. Someone, somewhere has shared your experience and/or knows what you don't. Connecting those people is the potential. Instead we use it to complain and incite violence while sharing cat pics." --/u/ownersequity "There's little you can do to guarantee that the players of an online game will keep their interpersonal interactions at a PG level, even if your game is entirely about petting fluffy kittens." --Arabella Flynn "Always be wary of any helpful item that weighs less than its operating manual." --Terry Pratchett, _Jingo_ "If the last decade has taught us anything, it's that the dystopian nightmare is going to be very boring and exasperatingly stupid." --Glyph "Twitter is not a country, and we were not its citizens. It is a corporation. If Twitter is driving people away, it's Twitter's fault. It's not our job to fix it." --Annalee Newitz "Dude really did pay $44 billion to live the life of a phpBB admin in 2004." --Jason Lefkowitz, on Elon Musk "It's never not going to be funny that after years of hype about crypto-metaverse-subscriptions disrupting web2 incumbents, the backstop to Twitter's sudden implosion was volunteers recreating Usenet with RSS." --Brian C. Keegan "Ian Fleming's original 1950s/1960s novel Bond (as opposed to the cinema version) was very much an assassin working for a socialist government who was mostly sent to kill overseas rivals to British government-owned industries (except when, well, it was the Soviets). Blofeld was a text-book modern private equity investor with a speciality in offshore legal loopholes and a not-entirely-unreasonable hatred of Harold Wilson's thinly-pastiched government." --Charles Stross "I come in peace. I didn't bring artillery. But I'm pleading with you, with tears in my eyes: If you fuck with me, I'll kill you all." --General James Mattis, United States Marine Corps (ret) "Being a programmer means I can modify my software to fit my needs. Being an engineer is knowing not to do that because then I have to maintain a patch set and that is a huge pain in the ass that's just not worth it most of the time." --Elizafox "I wonder if you can still sue someone in America who threatens to sue you in order to suppress your speech." --homelessjun "I will run this instance with a gold heart, a silver tongue and a depleted uranium fist." --Wanderwytch "Your ass won't quit, my ass has handed in its two weeks notice." --Exor "Some of the least aware, most gaslit, most malleable people are the ones who keep using references to _The Matrix_." --Zero "The surveillance capitalism frog is now boiled to the point that choosing not to subscribe to a paid service for privacy is considered 'paranoid'." --Polymer Witch "I'm begging y'all, please stop confusing 'self-serving' with 'stupid'." --Sarah Taber "The more you learn about how cheese is made, and has traditionally been made throughout history, the more you realize how many of generations of humanity were just trying literally ANYTHING to see what happens." --srol "My threat model didn't explicitly cover ''the most unhinged person you've ever seen has just bought your social media platform of choice and all your data along with it.'' But luckily, that is implicitly covered by ''every platform will likely be compromised at some point.''" --Malwaretech "You can't get much easier than 'by accident'." --Hasufin "[I] was watching a Youtube video from someone who thought they were being shot with some kind of mind control beam or whatever, because car headlights flicker when they record them using their phone camera but look steady to the naked eye. Can you imagine trying to explain the interactions between shutter speed and PWM [pulse width modulation] frequency and how that's just normal? You'd sound more crazy than whatever theory they believe." --Natalie Null "We missed our demon haunted world so much that we've spent the last 50 years reinventing animism and making it real." --jwz "Due to the way that digital amplification works it literally never matters what your intentions are when you put a piece of content or a meme on to the Internet - the impact it has is always in the eye of the beholder. If your account behaves in a manner that is indistinguishable from a fascist-poster account you are doing a fascism." --Scott P. Johnson "1960s: We have discovered ways to use meditation, hallucinogens, and breathing techniques to promote world peace and reduce unnecessary human suffering. "2020s: We have discovered ways to use meditation, hallucinogens, and breathing techniques to increase your productivity and increase profits for corporations." --maxolasersquad "Nothing can devalue Art more than it already is." --Derek C.F. Pegritz "Let me get this straight: You *want* governments and corporations to more tightly control the flow of information? Because someone said something problematic?" --Edward Snowden Blessed are they who expect the worst. "We're gonna be honest: This account is run by hackers, trolls and activists. We like to have fun in this dystopian hellscape because, why the fuck not?" --YourAnonNews "[T]he domestication of dissenters... is achieved through assigning the role of 'official dissenter' or devil's advocate to the doubters... In the process, the doubter's conscience is assuaged, but at the same time his position is made explicit and predictable. This predictability means a fatal loss of power for him; his position becomes discountable." --Albert Hirschman, _Exit, Voice, and Loyalty_ "I am sick of being silenced for my perfectly valid beliefs. The Jetsons and The Flintstones take place simultaneously in the same cinematic universe due to a nuclear war tearing society into two different technologically based dichotomies." --Dr.Nick "When you get powerful enough, you don't need to act like other people. Other people start acting like you." --Robert Cunningham, _Blindsight_ "Excuse me sir, CL-20 would like a word." "Yes, sure, and the word it would like is 'boom!'" --Charles Stross and Dan Sugalski, on nitrogen chemistry "The world has moved on from 1999. Your service *will* be used by sophisticated, organized, coordinated actors who share the best tactics to hurt people with each other. Your service will be used by hostile nation states. Your service will be used by people to do genocide." --@rahaeli "We live in Hell, so everything you do, or everything you try, will be repurposed to the cause of unimaginable suffering and grief. There is no alternative to this." --An Inhabitant of Carcosa "In my completely unbiased and dispassionate opinion, Apple products are the work of Satan (My apologies to Satan if he denies any connection to Apple.)" --Allen Lord "Scientists have finally achieved it. After years of painstaking research and lab experiments, mankind has finally created the purest, most concentrated, dumbest possible take. Congress should end the war in Ukraine by withdrawing from NATO." --Pwnallthethings Progress is the reason your grandparents' views shouldn't be spoken in public. "Where there is a will, there's some APT chugging Mountain Dew by the gallon looking for a way." --George G. III "Let me remind the Mastodon tribe: The 'h' in cybersecurity stands for 'happiness.'" --Eugene Spafford "You're morally obligated to be gay on the computer otherwise Alan Turing died for nothing." --Rat Goddess of Vengeance "The best dating advice I ever got was to remember that if someone ghosts me, they were probably a hired assassin who fell in love and couldn't finish the job." --Darius Kazemi "And next up we have Joan Jett Propulsion Laboratories, with their hit single _I Love Hydrazine_..." --Space Hobo "You've heard of ''I don't want your fucking app.'' Now get ready for ''I don't want to join your fucking Discord server just to get basic information that should be on a proper website instead of hidden away in the archives of a fucking chatroom.''" --AstralPegasus98 "A scientist who is under NDA is one of the most miserable creatures. They want to tell everyone about everything they've figured out! All the time! And when they're not allowed its just visible suffering." --Weezy "Ok got it, not to be taken seriously. I get it, nothing can be proven, no chain of custody of photo, bad website it's tied to, blurry image, etc, etc." --Payton "The 30 year history of the World Wide Web seems to be one of barely glomming together a relatively robust, relatively well maintained set of information sources, and then destroying them at the first sign of a company offering a slicker product.. which then spectacularly dies. The only part of it that seems to be getting even more progressively worse is the ecosystem of self promotion and financialization that is now overlaid on the work of others like it's some sort of earned royalty credit." --Jason Scott "All fae living in the mortal world are at least a little nuts; it's a natural consequence of being what we are. We have to convince ourselves that we can function in a place that's run by people whose logic looks nothing like our own. When we do it well enough, we're even right. The problem is that eventually, the lies stop working, and by that point, it's generally too late to run." --Seanan McGuire, _A Local Habitation_ "Two wrongs don't make a right but they do sometimes produce the correct behaviour in inadequately broad test cases." --Christine Love "One of the things I love most about this job is that it's unpredictable. We say among ourselves we're in the 'lid business' - because you don't know what you've got until you open it. You don't know which cloud will bring the rain." --Park Jae-sang, on running a music label "Nitrogen's motto might as well be 'live free, die' (there is no 'or')." --Charles Stross, on nitrogen chemistry "We were so worried about 'malware' (software that deliberately spreads and causes harm) that we forgot to protect against 'mallware' (software that transforms every single computing experience into a shopping mall) and it took over the world. Oops." --Computer Facts "Impossible doesn't mean very difficult. Very difficult is winning the Nobel Prize. Impossible is eating the sun." --Lou Reed "You are fantastic. You are a treasure chest full of rare Garbage Pail Kids pogs. You are a vole in chainmail riding her trusty capybara through a field of wildflowers. You are a gothic castle that features stained glass windows depicting scenes from Elvira: Mistress of the Dark." --Jeremy C. Shipp "A cynic has his head buried in the sand as far as any optimist. As any ostrich. Maybe even further." --Laurelindel "The concern isn't that letting Nazis back on Twitter (or any other major platform) is going to make people suddenly start thinking Nazis are good. The concern is that when people get used to hearing their ideas, other extreme ideas start sounding kind of reasonable and even acceptable. That's the Overton Window, and it explains a lot about what's going on right now. Far right extremists use this tactic more effectively than any other group I've ever seen." --Caroline Orr Bueno "If libraries were a new idea without historical precedent they probably would be illegal." --Unknown "I've been online since I was 11. I'm 43. 'Online' wasn't a store. The Internet wasn't a business. The first time it tried to be a business, a slew of companies went bankrupt - why? Because the folks using the Internet back then knew it wasn't a store, and weren't going to use it as one." --@thraeryn@hackers.town "We believe that all humans are created equal, endowed with unalienable rights that include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, regardless of their gender, religion, ethnicity, race, sexual orientation, ___net worth___, or beliefs." --Noam Bardin, rich asshole (emphasis mine, in case the point isn't clear) "Some of y'all walk right past the point, took a left at dumbass and then replied." --Lockdownyourlife "Often, the closer a new innovation is to old usage patterns, the less friction there is in adoption." --Ethan Mollick "But how many of us will be given the choice whether or not to die in World War Three?" --Malcolm Fry, _The Stone that Never Came Down_ "Hilarious protip for dealing with request by email from unethical boss to do something unethical: Forward it to security as a suspected phishing attempt." --Rich Felker "I can't distinguish 'effective altruism' from Terry Pratchett's 'Yen Buddhism'." --thegrugq "The network effect is all that matters in the end." --Matt Blaze "So far, so bleep-bloop." --Arcus "I guess God got hooked on RPGs thanks to Gary Gygax, so now he wants to try Rolemaster!" --OLF, on the death of Terry Amthor "This is my way to run games. There are many ways to run games but this is mine." --Full Metal GM "Mando is competance porn." --Lyssa "I believe the ActivityPub standard is to allow infosec professionals to repeatedly tell us that DMs are not end-to-end encrypted and can be read by our admin." --kurtm "'Views are my own.' Well, who the fuck else's would they be?" --Doot "Perhaps you're tired of hearing the same complaints over and over. But think about why people make them." --Matt Blaze "Why are you combative that someone doesnt have time, energy, expertise or actually enough care to fix it themselves?" --Philosophene "In fairness to you, it's only been three and a half years since this particular FOIA was filed, which is less than 20 business days in FBI years." --Emma Best "$44B is actually a small price to pay to destroy the platform used to organize labor unions at Starbucks, Amazon, and other companies with a combined market cap over a TRILLION dollars. The timing is definitely not an accident." --Chad Loder "I never wanted to be an actor, and to this day I don't. I can't get a handle on it. An actor wants to become someone else. I am a song-and-dance man, and I enjoy being myself, which is all I can do." --Dick van Dyke "I genuinely think that the issue the elites had with Twitter is that it let the plebs mock them. They're going to try, unsuccessfully, to find a way to put an end to that." --Ashton "If I had Epi-Pen'd some white dude in a polo shirt having anaphylaxis, I'd be on the evening news. (Not the goal, just a point.) But because it's a drug user experiencing fentanyl poisoning, it's ''I wish you wouldn't have bothered.''" --Kevin Nye "Let me say this: I apologized to Weird Al a long time ago and I was wrong. Y'all remember that, everybody out there who reads this shit. Real men and real people should be able to admit when they're wrong and I was wrong, bro. Come on, who the fuck am I, bro? He did parodies of Michael Jackson, he did parodies of all kinds of people and I took offense to it because I was being cocky and shit and... I was wrong and I should've embraced that shit and went with it. I listened to it a couple years after that and it's actually funny as shit. It's one of those things where I made a wrong call and nobody stopped me. That's one thing I'm still upset about." --Coolio "Stupidity is a hell of a drug." --Laurelindel "Real innovation comes from participatory experimentation, not profiteering." --Crimethinc "I don't sign CLAs, because they're bullshit that allow for co-opting my work for profit by others. Real open source projects don't need CLAs. (cf Linux, gcc)" --Jeffrey Paul "Remediation is by definition beyond self-correction. The percentage ofxi failures meets 85% SLA, even though it fails every month for three years. Catastrophe is demure." --Swift On Security "The #fediblock whitelist discourse: ''We have this cool decentralized protocol so let's figure out how to repeat what Google did to XMPP, but without waiting around for Google.''" --Andrea "You're a pack of vultures at the feast. Knives out, beaks bloody." --Benoit Blanc, _Knives Out_ "Picard would have said and believed there were 5 lights if Riker hadn't kept fighting for him at all costs. Community is what saves you in the face of bullies." --Yuvipanda "If you ask, ''Who's the most likely to take this republic down?' It would be the teachers' unions, and the filth that they're teaching our kids, and the fact that they don't know math and reading or writing." --Mike Pompeo, former US Secretary of State and all-around asshole "Religion's the place in which our spirituality is policed." --Christopher James Stone "Exaggerations don't help your cause. 'Oh look, the enemy is using nerve gas' might seem like a propaganda point to score, but easily disproven allegations sabotage your cause, even if your cause (like the Iranian demonstrators) is a just and decent one." --Dan Kaszeta "INSTRUCTIONS UNCLEAR PENIS CAUGHT IN CEILING FAN" --Adrian Chadd Where the education system has failed, the mutants prevail. "As always, like and subscribe (you may have to swap the floppy to subscribe and find your local tymnet phone number, 300bps n71)." --clairely_inexplicable "Your polls don't matter. Campaign promises don't matter. It's all about turnout. And turnout is all about voter suppression. And voter suppression is all about racism. Without understanding US racism, your election predictions will always be woefully wrong." --Mekka "For most artists, the problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity." --Tim O'Reilly "Jesus, masto posts seen by FB people sure is a step into hell." --doot "Even if you are at the pinnacle of your field, don't discount the advice of a garbage person, a CEO, or a random speaker at a conference you are working, as they just might just have the knowledge you need in that moment. Never be closed off to learning from someone just because of what you think you know about them. Every human on planet earth has experiences worth teaching to others." --Mubix "Something that has become increasingly clear to me is that when you hear about a thing, if you spend about 15 minutes doing basic research about that thing (lateral reading, SIFT method, OSINT, etc.) it will quickly put you into the 90th percentile of people who know something about that thing. Does this make you an 'expert' who can rock up to someone who has done years of research on that thing? Lol, no. But it will make you much more informed than the average person in your vicinity." --vortex_egg "Most political agendas deny their consequences." --Terence McKenna "The results are universal. Also our methodology specifically excluded a large subset of the population." --The executive summaries of many psychology studies "You don't get to be rich by paying people." --u/Few-Suggestion6889 "I think, in the US at least, too much emphasis is placed on what is technically possible or technically legal, and not enough emphasis placed on respecting each other. Socially and in business." --cstanhope "In a more sane world, this whole debacle should show that the amount of money you have is clearly no indicator of your intelligence or wisdom, but the amount of people that will still worship on the altar of the genius billionaire savior will absolutely not diminish. This preening jackass is no Tony Stark, and to be honest, he struggles to even be Justin Hammer." --Lindon Thomas, on Elon Musk "When we first arrived on Twitter, it was a time when a tweet could actually save lives and change the world. Everyday people experienced the raw power that only corporate media had access to previously. That power has been weakened for a while. This week it seems long gone." --@YourAnonCentral "My take on CWs is that it's very funny when I'm attempting to read a post about what someone had for lunch but then the timeline suddenly jumps ahead right before I click and now I'm staring at a drawing of a werewolf's dick and balls." --Hannah "We are drowning in a sea of reboots, reruns, and recycled stories on television and movie screens for the same reason dying people supposedly see their lives flash before their eyes. The story is ending. Despite living through arguably the greatest era of storytelling technology in history, we have no new stories to tell ourselves." --Venkatesh Rao, Ribbonfarm "The imagination is a muscle. If it is not exercised, it atrophies." --Neil Gaiman "You want me to defend clarity?" --Terence McKenna "Let's say you have a bunch of friends over, and you're deciding what to have for dinner. Some of your friends vote for pizza, and some of your other friends vote to kill and eat you. Even if pizza wins, you still have a serious problem." --@The_Doc_Webb "A system is just a set of rules. Or norms, since the 'rules' aren't always formal. And even the best-thought-out sets of rules will be incomplete or inconsistent. It'll have ambiguities, and things the designers haven't thought of. As long as there are people who want to subvert the goals of a system, there will be hacks." --Bruce Schneier "I'm not going to converse with people who won't posit my humanity as an axiom in the conversation." --Emily Bender "I'm not so much against disclosure, I'm just telling you it ain't gonna happen." --John Lear "You may want to talk to the FBI. They have excellent equipment for Tikaboo photography. How do I know? Before the raid it was mine... ;-)" --Joerg, webmaster, Dreamland Resort forums, on being raided for having PD images of a military base on his website in 2022 "My dad was a nice lawyer. That is why he never made much money." --Elise Scher "Space tells matter how to move. Matter tells space how to curve." --John Everett Wheeler "I wrote some useful utility for DOS in 1997 and distributed it. Is bulletin board. It was TeaspoonWare, which I made up. The license said if you like this please mail me a teaspoon because I lose them and mum gets mad. Every so often, we'd get a teaspoon in the mail without explanation. Drove mum insane." --Geordie "The first episode of Battlestar Galactica makes a lot more sense when you consider that they were probably still using OpenSSL from 2012." --jetengineweasel "Masto these days is a *weird* mix of 'Ahhhh all these strangers in my space!' and 'Oh cool, the Yukon Bhangra guy is here!'" --silverseams "We have reclaimed 'Crypto' from diarrhea. Surely, we will reclaim from currencies." --Vinoth Deivasigamani "If you're feeling lonely this holiday, just toot ''if you can't push to prod on Thanksgiving you're not a real devops'' and a whole community of people will keep you company." --Swift On Security "If you bang a keyring on a RS-232 connection you run the risk of producing valid Perl code." --Walter van Holst "UNIX was invented by boomer D&D nerds, cybersecurity by the cyberpunk/Shadowrun/Neuromancer gen-x'ers." --WiteWulf "What if the stakes are higher than your known threat model? What then?" --the_gibson "COVID-19 was a Kobayashi Maru test for the entire world. A test of character in the face of unstoppable harm. And most of you failed it, badly." --Cat Vincent "Would be extremely funny if the CIA tried to make a honeytrap for leftists and it failed because they forgot we like porn." --@impliedChoppy "At this point I expect the Covid vaccine to be accused of shooting JFK and cancelling Firefly." --@the_meghaning "Perfect is the enemy of good, and in ActivityPub we have a protocol that has flaws but, crucially, that works, and has a standard we can all mostly agree on how to implement - and eventually, I hope, agree on how to improve." --Andrew Godwin "Opsec is hard even for someone familiar with the tools and threats. And is nothing like a normal life." --Jeffrey Goldberg Trust neither fate, luck, nor the competence of others. "All technical problems of sufficient scope or impact are actually political problems first." --Dymaxion "I think we'll look back on the last decade as a time when social media gave previously marginalized groups the ability to speak directly to elites and, as a result, elites lost their minds." --Slut (no, that really is their handle) "Respect people as people, grow or decrease that respect based on their actions. Never respect someone just for the title they hold for you may not know the actions that brought it to them." --Mubix "May your queues clear quickly and your buffers be always highly utilized." --Nora Tindall "The only downside to the Fediverse is that each post increases the entropy of the universe, thus pushing us closer to heat death. Rhen again, that's true of just about everything. Carry on." --Robert W. Ghel "The problem with propaganda is the past changes so quickly you will have no idea what will happen yesterday. Even expressing support for policies in-line with a regime is dangerous because at some point the regime may not have supported them in the past." --Punctuated Equilibrium "I used to love decentralised federated systems like this, until someone once pointed out that they were largely ''A bunch of Debian users saying 'Ogg Vorbis' over and over.''" --Space Hobo "An irritated Pope isn't good for anybody." --Hecklefish "Downtime is also a reminder to everyone to go live life instead of scrolling endlessly." --Enrom Hubbard "Reminder: If you have a good lawyer, then you will usually think they are annoying, unreasonable, and an impediment to fun. But you will think all of this from your house with a full bank account rather than from prison with a commissary full of ramen." --@RubiconArtist Those who would repeat the past must control the teaching of history. "ML models try to approximate biases in their underlying datasets and, for some groups of people, some of these biases are offensive or harmful. That means in the coming years there will be endless political battles about what the 'correct' biases are for different models to display (or not display), and we can ultimately expect there to be as many approaches as there are distinct ideologies on the planet. I expect to move into a fractal ecosystem of models, and I expect model providers will 'shapeshift' a single model to display different biases depending on the market it is being deployed into. This will be extraordinarily messy." --Jack Clark, on machine learning systems "I feel like we're back to pretending unencrypted sat feeds are private." --lucky225 "The version of me you created in your mind is not my responsibility." --Unknown "I should be loyal to the nightmare of my choice." --Joseph Conrad "One of the issues that I eventually ran into on Twitter was trying to be myself and talk about the things I like to do outside of work. That works to a point when you're in a relatively high profile position as the founder of a company but eventually things get 'serious' (company goes public and now you have lots of investors) it suddenly doesn't work. You go to conferences and start hearing thru back channels that people really don't think it's ok for you to have a life outside of work." --Martin Roesch "Ikea designers are hackers. 'You have a limited library of materials and ways to process them; each with a precise cost. Now use them to make the best bookcase possible for under $50.'" --Chrissky Keygen "At the risk of sounding paranoid, I don't think it is a coincidence that I am famous only among conspiracies." --Kerry W. Thornley "You can tell how _Star Trek: The Next Generation_ is set in a utopian future because every work meeting wraps up in at most four minutes with a decision about what the group is going to do, why they're doing it, who's in charge of doing it and who's supporting them in what ways, clearly communicated to all participants." --Austin Dern "In the kingdoms of Silicon Valley, we humble users have little choice but to seek out the most benevolent monarch we can find, start farming in the shadow of their castle, and hope for the best." --Evan Greer "You know you've hit a Good Bug when the only relevant result is a Usenet post with no followups, from 26 years ago." --Foone "In space, no one can hear you beep." --Joseph Matheny "Adding aliens can improve any story." --Hecklefish "There have been nearly 3,000 Gods so far, but only yours actually exists. The others are silly, made up nonsense. But not yours. Yours is real." --Ricky Gervais "Remind me again exactly what a tankie is? I just know I'm going to be put up against the wall for being a counter-anti-neo-something-ist and not even know what I'm about to be shot for..." --Dillo "It is always a bad idea to bet against further discoveries." --History of the Universe "If you want authenticity, don't look to celebrity. Have real friends who can disappoint you." --u/Due-Blacksmith3132 "John Fetterman will recover from his stroke, but Mehmet Oz will always be an asshole." --Jeff Tiedrich "We are professional liars. Just honest liars." --Penn Gillette "Do you know where we can score some Russian sedatives? I don't feel so good." --Hecklefish "A dirty bomb is a weapon of terror. The soldiers in such an action are the media. The victims of this terror bombing are you and me no matter how far we are from the event. It is a ploy for total control and domination via fear based mind control." --@Retiremyass "Everything I know about the Kardashians I learned against my will." --Anonymous "So, I just degloved a Lovense Hush that had damaged silicone and it's pretty clear the Lovense engineers and factory workers went to the Adam Savage School of Technical Design." --Nire Bryce "Weird how the affect of AI now is to lower the confidence in human ability. [It] doesn't appear to be 'liberating' at all, in fact quite the opposite. 'No human can ACTUALLY draw or paint!? Right!?'" --Andrew Baker "Newsflash: Warmhearted people have emotions and expressing them doesn't negate their warmheartedness. A notoriously kind person says something 'rude' or gets pissed off and ppl be like, 'Ah ha! Your TRUE COLORS!'" --Cosplaykinky "Welcome to San Francisco, where you can be a card-carrying socialist and retweet hammer-and-sickle accounts all day while collecting a paycheck to oppose 100% affordable non-profit housing in rich suburbs." --Woolie "[J.J.] Abrams isn't a man so much as he's an avatar of cultural entropy. If you make something popular enough eventually you will die or sell it off, and a person in thick rimmed glasses whose main artistic vision is that he loves to have meetings will take it and sandblast it until it's nothing. I hate to see this happen here but maybe it's good that this happened. Maybe every franchise should collapse into a version of itself that makes shareholders nod and shake each others' hands. We should lean to speak in a language that rich people who don't dream can't comprehend." --Branson Reese "All components can be light-emitting if you put enough current through them." --Dan Lyke "Ancient catgirl curse: 'May you know how to build the tools you use.'" --Aki-Nyan "Until further notice, apparently the closest thing to 'God' is just whichever one of us ends up in charge." --Zinnia Jones "No. People CANNOT draw their own conclusions. THAT'S THE POINT OF THE LAW." --Jon Stewart "There is a fallacy in the 'AI will cause unemployment' discussion that employment is related to the amount of work that needs to get done. This is not actually the case. Employment in large orgs is more driven by resource allocation politics than actual work." --Halvar Flake "That some people respond to any well-forshadowed reveal with 'Uh, that plot twist was so predictable,' proves bad faith criticism has rotten their brains to the point they think it's bad writing if they can correctly identify information the writers were intentionally giving them." --bloodraven55 "If you had to invent a person who was the personification of Reddit, I don't think you could do any better than Elon Musk." --@JUNIPER "'Queer is a slur' is a psyop to get queer people to stop having a language to describe themselves. The fact that you fall for it when there are existent fields of history and study called 'queer studies' proves that you are too easily led and not sharp enough to tell friend from foe. Yet you're arrogant enough to keep speaking over people who know what they're talking about." --Killjoy McCoy "In case anyone wondered about my mental health, I just realized I'm scared to like the most innocuous post imaginable because the person who wrote it might turn out to be horrible and I will somehow be at fault." --Tamsin "One of the first rules of AI ethics is DON'T GIVE THE COMPUTER ACCESS TO FIREARMS." --Foone "Everyone is full of shit and they'll say whatever fits their current narrative so I can't even take offence." --@fayemikah "The right wing ran into a problem with millenials. You see, the primary reason people become right wing is that they fear losing the things they own, probably to some undeserving minority. But millenials don't own anything." --@zarawesome "IP lawyers never say if they're v4 or v6." --Swift On Security "I don't think I'm qualified to answer that. But the Internet is a big place, and I'm excited for your journey." --James Munns "Imagine how different the future with the same past and an unchanged present will be." --Unknown "Twitter: The only place where well articulated sentences still get misinterpreted. You can say 'I like pancakes' and somebody will say 'So, you have waffles?' No, bitch. Dat's a whole new sentence. Wtf is you talkin' about?" --@BravoCoolee "This is all idle speculation on my part, of course, but hey, I like to lay awake at night sometimes picturing slightly better futures that we could actually make possible with some collective willpower." --@SilverEagleDev "Doing something that no one asked you to do, for no apparent reason, and there are potentially no one interested in the result of your work - that's the life of a C64 hacker!" --Bacchus of Fairlight "Predators try to blend in and look normal. As a result, people who are free to be eccentric are less likely to be dangerous or harmful. I promise you it's not the 'weird' people trying to kill, abuse, dominate and destroy. It's mostly the friendly 'normal' type." --AM0 "Uner Reaganism, the purpose of the Federal government is 1. Military; 2.Consolidating money and power in the hands of the wealthy; 3. Preventing, by any means necessary, effective opposition to Reaganism. That's what Reaganism did. It normalized the *idea* of America as a failed state. And here we are. Failing." --@mcjulie "I think a lot of it relies on the rightwing philosophy that they demonstrate power by showing the rules don't apply to them." --Hasufin "Who needs resilience when you spend most of your life on the edge?" --@hondanfon "Politicians kissing babies for good luck TV preachers sell salvation for a buck You don't need no golden cross to tell you wrong from right The world's worst murderers were those who saw the light." --Motörhead, _No Voices In The Sky_ "The present tense lends itself to comedy. The past is foregone and naturally melancholic." --Max Sebald "Work! Work! Work! Produce! Produce! Produce!" --Philip Murray, Congress of Industrial Organizations "I think we coasted for a long time on the happy illusion that voters wanted decent politicians, which incentivized politicians to at least make a public pretense of decency. But evidently, what many prefer is validation of their own indecency." --Julian Sanchez "I'm a man who doesn't laugh enough, he thought. Without my noticing, middle age has marooned me on a coast with too many dangerous submerged rocks." --Henning Mankell, _The Man Who Smiled_ "Baby, you can't even throw your employer out of trans pride. You're not going to throw a fucking brick." --@atax1a "I'm witnessing the top minds of our generation struggle with the concept of more than one website on the internet." --JoYo "I like _Howl_ a lot. Who wouldn't? It just doesn't have much to do with me or what happened to my friends. For one thing, I believe that the best minds of my generation were probably musicians and physicists and mathematicians and biologists and archeologists and chess masters and so on, and Ginsberg's closest friends, if I'm not mistaken, were undergraduates in the English department of Columbia University. No offense intended, but it would never occur to me to look for the best minds in any generation in an undergraduate English department anywhere. I would certainly try the physics department or the music department first - and after that, biochemistry." --Kurt Vonnegut "It still haunts me society went into isolation, a million died and people became worse humans, angrier, actively more hateful, and more violent instead of reflection and becoming more empathetic and loving." --Exavier Pope "Deleted the top comment because Hacker News got ahold of it and they are doing the *exact same shit* that maintainer is, and not actually reading anything before commenting. I think I might start having a policy of deleting tweets that end up on HN. Their reading comprehension is nonexistent (they couldn't even figure out my first tweet was referring to *two* unrelated incidents) and they feel entitled to make up random hot takes without ever reading up on any context. Plus it's slowly filling up with edgelords. No thanks." --Hector Martin "Internet algorithms are essentially a paperclip machine for making furries." --Swift On Security "For your convenience we've not yet issued a CVE number for the bug we raised the alarm about weeks in advance. We've also provided a three hour release window to maximize vendors' time spend googling random search terms in hope of figuring out wtf. Thank you for your understanding." --Marcus Hutchins "And not the total economy - but for elite benefit. I've never seen so many people in dire financial straits, but I also know more billionaires were minted, 2.1 trillion dollars flowed upwards. This is the function and purpose of the bourgeoisie - we are mere resources to them. They manufacture consent for our further exploitation, and they try to convince us it is in our best interests. With a smile. With ringing endorsement. With op-eds in the Atlantic. The make the tides and call them natural." --@nohomelikeplace "Gaining power never makes people become better people." --Asher Elijah "Buddy, a holiday to cope with death - in all it's profundity, silliness, finality, and scariness - is a good and extremely human thing. If you're grieving and it's hard for you? Just say that. Otherwise, shut up and let people make this day what *they* need." --@mis_cue "The modern condition is mostly trying to do things on your own that people have historically achieved with a large support network and wondering why you're tired all the time." --David R. MacIver "Furries, porn, and the military are the three pillars holding up the tech industry." --@marcusdotM "Furries pioneer the future. They literally do everything their damn selves. All for their little fox avatar things." --Amberhearth Artist, on motion tracking in VRchat being advanced to use and teach sign language "There is this curious assumption that CS graduates know how to develop software; like Dijkstra, their professors assume they will learn about telescopes on their own while learning astronomy." --Steve Donovan "Don't be fooled by the skin; strip it off and it's all the same bones." --@dynamicsymmetry "Fiction needs to be plausible. Reality, not so much." --Brian Weaver "Let's be honest: The real problem with Twitter is that it got popular enough that people with real names started using it." --Eevee "Imagine how worthless and utterly pampered your life would have to be for the actions of a billionaire to be a matter of celebration." --Pookleblinky "Nobody defends billionaires more than hundredaires." --AC Tatum "DIY PYROTECHNICS IS MY MIDDLE NAME, BABY" --Foone "If it were put to a vote, most suburbs would opt for NYC co-op rules where you need to apply and pass a 'culture-fit' panel interview to be allowed to move in." --Nextdoor in Silicon Valley "I don't care how much lube you use, a 3dfx graphics accelerator is not safe for that usage due to sharp edges, lead, and lack of a flared base." --colin.traverse "Technobabble is written with the intent of conveying a given bit of exposition to an audience and remaining at least somewhat consistent with the show's canonical history. Reality is under no such constraints." --@excallq "Workflow automation doesn't reduce work, it transforms it." --Arvind Venkataramani "A certain percentage of halfwits in power making stupid decisions is a crucial component in any truly evolved power-play." --Memos from Lofwyr "It's amusing to me how many business problems people could solve with a single file flask app and a SQLite database." --0xdade "As far as alien probes go, the nostril isn't the worst option." --Hecklefish "Watching eddies of sparkling oil swirl on the surface of my coffee." --Lowmagnet "Allow yourself to be proud of yourself and all the progress you've made. Especially the progress no one else can see." --Unknown "It's always a busy day when you're a Bastard." --Foone "You know, I appreciate the honesty, but telling me that you don't want to do a security assessment because you wouldn't actually do anything about the findings is saying the quiet part out loud. You probably don't want to put that in writing." --Accidental CISO "I thought having just one more report to ignore were the point of pentests." --Pixelnull "There's more to people than their politics. If I were to base my friendships on political affinities I'd cut my circle down by about 90%. It's easier to focus on what we have in common as human beings rather than our ideological enthusiasms." --Oxblood Ruffian "Generally, if you want to win people over you gotta direct your actions at those who hold the power, you can win more people over too." --@JUNIPER "One of the most misleading things about learning mathematics is that you are seeing the *output* of a great deal of trial, error, sweat, and tears, presented as if it's obvious, or at best a product of cleverness." --Daniel Litt "Why does nobody ever talk about the apparent slip-n-slide on the other side of Maslow's Hierarchy, where the fantastically wealthy who will always live in fantastic luxury somehow live in fear that people being educated and kids having enough to eat somehow threatens that safety? Oh no, middle class people being able to buy a house might make them have 16 billion dollars instead of 17 billion, oh no, better not self-actualize anymore and just go to war against the plebs. They can literally live almost every dream any of us have by picking up a phone, but they always seem so afraid." --Lesley Carhart "Russia will shower an entire country with missiles and kill dozens of civilians over the bombing of a bridge they claimed was in invulnerable and the Libertarian Party will give Putin's balls a tongue bath in response because they share the same social policies." --Holic Shot "Discord is just AOL for people with light up keyboards." --Unhamged "As Russia has been discovering: 100 hirelings run away just as fast as 10, but cost a lot more to feed and equip." --Swordsmith "Going cicada mode (sleeping underground for a decade)." --Ascended NPC Alex "Where so much work is done, and so many people work, errors can surely happen. I want to point out that other libraries which forked away often simply copy code over from OpenSSL after that has done the work. Not always, but it happens frequently. I do not depreciate the fact, but it is one. It is just that I do not rub my very big balls (this does not mean you, Kurt Maier) and point my finger at a project which is the foundation for a very large part of free and open security for the Internet." --Steffen Nurpmeso, on CVE-2022-3602 and -3786 "I saw someone confuse etymology and entomology, and it bugged me in a way I couldn't put into words." --Just Ellie "Boy, I went on a journey of Not Getting The Point here, despite The Point slapping me in my pocket every few seconds: THE NEWBIES ARE SIGNING UP WITH THEIR REAL ACTUAL FULL HUMAN NAMES. *That's* why I'm seeing so many people do things that to me seem bizarre. It's because I'm used to interacting with raccoons, crows, witches, impossible geometric shapes, inflatable coatis and the anthropomorphic personification of paint smell." --Dan Fixes Coin-Ops "The fact that 'websites are hosted by other computers called servers on the Internet and are not a magical thing that exists' is not common knowledge anymore, and is something that you have /convince/ people about just shows how bad it has gotten." --Aghatha Sorceress "Life is too short not to share the cool things everyone makes all the time." --eik "The playbook for fascists, bigots, and sociopathic narcissists (that Venn diagram is pretty much a circle) is very thin. They only have the few strategies, repeated time and again because they WORK - because they take advantage of the rest of us being decent humans." --Lilith Saint Crow "You know what, fuck you buddy. Our healthcare system has collapsed and we're still arguing about masks. There is no way American society will survive the coming years, and it's hurting the disabled and otherwise marginalized first - just as they warned." --@mykola "Every time I go to capture a Wikipedia topic on Wikidata, I'm struck by how much can't be reasonably conveyed in that format of distinct statements - even with qualifiers." --Molly White "Clowns: Nothing matters and therefore anything *can* matter." --Russ Sharek "In a world of Felony Contempt of Business Model, that discussion changes to 'Given that we can literally imprison anyone who helps our users get more out of this product, how can we punish *users* who are disloyal enough to simply quit our service or switch away from our product?' Once we gave companies the power to literally criminalize the reconfiguration of their products, everything changed. In the Cuecat era, a corporate meeting to plan a product that acted against its users' interests had to ask, 'How will we sweeten the pot and/or obfuscate our code so that our users don't remove the anti-features we're planning to harm them with?'" --Cory Doctorow "A certain corporate equilibrium, disgusting in nature, exists after a product is known to be potentially lethal. Where the company determines precisely, using predictive models no single humans anywhere fully grasps, how much money the deaths will cause them. Then they compare that to the cost of preventing the deaths. Then they do literal moral calculus: Where, on this statistical curve, do lives start to matter, based on the cost of their loved ones suing or criminal prosecution. Then, if it's cheaper to let them die, they just let them die." --solder_on "For us works of art no longer contain narrative or time, nor can we claim that others might ever be able to find a way toward making sense of things." --Laszlo Krasznahorkai, _The World Goes On_ "A crank is a very elegant device. It's small, it's strong, it's lightweight, energy efficient, and it makes revolutions." --E.F. Schumacher "According to the Post-Hoc Idiocy Censorship Hypothesis (Seachaint, 2022), the past was just as stupid as the present, but bewildered historians are too incredulous _not_ to confabulate rational-sounding reasons why things happened." --Seachaint "Git making me want to pull my hair out yet again. One of the most unintuitive, clunky interfaces of any software I've ever used." -- Mark, Azure CTO, who apparently never used one of their own products "Knowledge is only power if supported by organization. Knowledge without organization is despair." --Unknown "Don't worry, they say having a tangible, physical form is like riding a bicycle... which presumably means it involves pumping your legs in a circular motion? I dunno. I never understood that idiom." --Jackdaw Ruiz "We do not need Fediverse-wide search or a directory but thank you for coming and trying to make unhelpful things. We have had years to build these things ourselves and we haven't MAYBE ASK WHY THAT IS." --Aurynn Shaw "Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple." --Dr. Seuss "Honestly, I've been around here for ages and I could give a rip if anyone cares what I do professionally. I have a way better time being myself than a journalist on the fediverse." --Aendra "Nothing quite like reporting on the opening of the Ghibli Park in Aichi Prefecture and having Miyazaki randomly stride into frame like a slightly-more-in-focus sasquatch." --Unseen Japan "Astley's _Never Gonna Give You Up_ is a song about promising to strive for caring, while NIN's _Hurt_ is about failing to achieve caring. In a way, NIN is Rick Astley after repeatedly fucking up. NIN is Rick Astley plus the human condition." --@defnotbeka "I think sometimes we need to take a step back and just remember that we have no greater right to be here than any other animal." --David Attenborough "I've had a conversation or two like this before. Like, when people assume you agree with them, suddenly they can't understand or explain their own beliefs or assertions. Like, 'Why do you choose to follow Jesus? Why do you believe the Bible is an inspired text?'" --Tanys Foster "Advanced shoplifting is when you have to use a forklift." --Dee "Las Vegas took Baudrillard's warnings as a dare." --Nonlinear "During your times of trial and suffering when you see only one set of footprints in the sand, it is because the textures haven't all loaded yet." --Nasser "I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against." --Malcolm X "Xcode is rated for ages 4+ on the app store, but I dunno; it sure makes me use some adult language sometimes." --Brion Vibber "Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?" --Mchel Foucault "Halloween: A day when we get it right. Strangers come to us, beautiful, ugly, odd or scary, and we accept them all without question, compliment them, treat them kindly, and give them good things. Why don't we live like that?" --Steve Garnass-Holmes "If you celebrate the goth christmas thing, have a safe and fun and artistic time. And if you don't, then please find five minutes to do something nice for yourself, to sit in peace and be glad you're alive in a world with so many wonderful things in it. Including you." --Warren Ellis, Halloween 2022.ev "We know that salvation, so to speak, doesn't come from the government, and we cannot wait for the government to act. We are the ones that need to be active, organizing and making sure that our neighbor is okay and well taken care of." --Reverend Juan Carlos Ruiz "A false claim or even a good faith claim that turns out to be wrong hurts your cause and does your enemy's work for you." --Dan Kaszeta "As one of the tech review magazines said a few years ago when the first 32 GB microSD cards came out, 'At last, it is possible for a single human being to accidentally swallow all of the data collected by the Apollo Program.'" --Camwyn "Happiness is ultimate crime this app will not forgive." --Natalie Wynn "Everything is overhyped and overpriced unless you think it's not overhyped and overpriced." --Josepha Espinosa "I've already expressed my opposition to the fighting in Ukraine, and pray it ends soon. The difference between us is that when *I* realized that sharing my thoughts on the matter did more harm than good, I found the humility to stop." --Edward Snowden "Find someone who loves you as much as rightwingers love making up stuff to feel oppressed about." --Brian Hudson "I personally have been microdosing existential crises every few months my whole adult life. Trying to build immunity." --Peter Schaub "Ask any Linden, past or present, and they will confirm that there are few more fundamental truths about virtual worlds: Invite the furries to your new alpha-quality 3D playground and they'll have realistic fur working before you've done basic physics. Twenty years ago, furries sat at the bottom of the Geek Hierarchy. But today, even the full might of Meta's engineering team is no match for a 6-foot fox with a Rust compiler." --Yoz Grahame "I have a cup of tea, grep, and the ability to sit up for ten minutes at a time. I'm ready to take on the world. After tea." --Feonixrift "Time is the final boss even Unicron cannot master." --Hotrod, The Cybertronic Spree "A friend had a horror experience with a CD in the mid-2000's. He played it backwards and it made noises like from hell. Screeching, screaming, the worst sounds you can imagine. Now for the horror part: When he played it forwards, it installed Windows Vista." --Protoblob "You do not need to extrapolate a thing said to one specific person in one specific context as applying to *every* person in *every* context." --Lyric Hartwell "Gather as much information as you can using the tools you have with you." --Stanton T. Friedman "When financial markets are minting not just money but celebrities, it's time to be more than skeptical. It's time to prepare for the kind of disaster that makes once great stock pickers look like pikers." --Linette Lopez, 16 October 2022 "It dismays me to no end that exploring the cosmos, in all its technical ingenuity and philosophical implications as to who we are and where we came from, has become a vanity project for sociopaths." --@borgposting "After three weeks of living in Europe. I would like to admit I was wrong. Cities aren't spiritually bankrupt wastelands, I only ever lived in North American ones and did not expect how incredible it is to live in cities that cater to the human experience." --@lilbabygandhi "The best schemes are the ones people don't even notice." --Mike Pondsmith "Fantasy is when it's filmed in a forest on the outskirts of Vancouver. Sci-fi is when it's filmed in a rock quarry on the outskirts of Vancouver." --Zeddy "Society is not ending if fewer people find joke X amusing, just like society is not ending if fewer people think joke X is taboo. Your personal tastes are not the foundation of existence. Get over yourself." --Popehat "I want electrons, you give me electrons. End of transaction. XML doesn't need to be a part of this!" --Watson Ladd "This DOJ is so far up its own ass about 'partisan prosecutions' and law enforcement more generally is so heavily infiltrated, corrupt, complicit, and ineffectual that nothing ever happens to these people." --Nowhere Girl "Wars fought in our imagination." --Anthony Castrio "Not long ago the Air Force pretty much admitted that yes, there are UFOs and that they see them every day over the east coast. We all collectively shrugged our shoulders and moved on cuz there's so much shit going on. So yeah, this is real." --@_pjrt "If they're so great, why do they want me?" --Rev. Louie "The Claw" Louie, on secret societies "It's amazing how you motivate people when you give them healthcare!" --Rebecca Heineman "If an open source maintainer leaves a project unmaintained for whatever reason, that's not the maintainer's fault, and the companies that relied on their work are the ones who get to solve their problems in the future. Using the term 'supply chain' here dehumanizes the labor involved in developing and maintaining software as a hobby... I just want to publish software that I think is neat so that other hobbyists can use and learn from it, and I otherwise want to be left the hell alone. I should be allowed to decide if something I wrote is 'done'." --Iliana To all ends, there are means. "Ten years during which the Mayan apocalypse of 2012 arrived as promised, then proceeded way more slowly than anyone dared predict! Who among us ever imagined the end of the world would be a swift and tidy affair? Instead, we are reminded that doomsday doesn't just happen overnight!" --Grant Morrison "Kid Rock and Ted Nugent make music for people who know exactly how much Sudafed you can get for a stolen catalytic converter." --Vicky Vallencourt "They have money for war, but can't feed the poor." --Tupac Shakur "Lie, deny, deceive." --Ben Rich "What you do in the privacy of your own home is not my business. If you want to name your server farm after the Bad Dragon catalog, be my guest, you're the god of your domain. But if you're setting up an environment to be maintained by a dozen or so people, you have to understand that not everyone will hear 'Chance' and think 'Domain Controller'." --UndercoverHouseplant "There's no 'a little nuclear weapons.' Don't cross that fucking line. Jesus, why does it have to even be debated?" --Adrian Chadd "Our brains have no write protection." --Ben Brown "The last decade has taught that the greater part of any society can be made to fit in just two filter bubbles." --Edward Snowden "It's easier to fool someone then it is to convince them they've been fooled." --Brian Whelton "The truest acts of kindness are when no one but the giver knows about it." --Peter Greight "Personally, I'd rather have a President that shows unconditional love for his addicted son than a president than can barely remember some of his children even exist, but that's just me." --@remembrancermx "Empathy costs you votes, always has, always will." --Mat Douglas "I won't be satisfied until I can play Doom on my own eye phosphenes." --@CyberneticMelon "An awful lot of shitty nerd discourse is colored by this sneering disdain for the social sciences and cultural concerns as opposed to their specific idea of Unbiased Rationality." --@silentpenitent "There's basically no reason to trust the news media at this point. They've made their biases plain. And no amount of 'The sky is falling, democracy depends on a functioning media' crying will change that. The media don't care. Why do you? It's an information warfare space now." --Nowhere Girl "We really don't talk about how the percentage of Americans who would greet 'We come in peace' with their best attempt at a slur." --@Sublimegaucho "If schools *did* have litter boxes for students to use, we'd all know about them because they would require teachers to buy them with their own money." --David Aron "Neo liberalism is basically socialism for the 1%, it's a redistribution of wealth upwards." --David Hogg "Anything can be a database if you're good/bad enough at programming." --Corey Quinn "To appreciate America's deep respect for human life and the sanctity thereof, observe how upset we get when a jury doesn't give a murderer the death penalty." --Popehat "The Midwest, where old people don't die, they just put price tags on their stuff." --Hasufin "The dildo of consequences rarely arrives lubed." --@auntyamerican "I went to Mel's Hole and all I got was this magic seal fetus." --Hecklefish, _The Why Files_ "Turns out a synthesis engine trained on the exhaust of human culture can be pretty good at simulating people." --Jack Clark "Donkey Kong is Bowser's fursona." --Ieure "You can do yourself a lot of harm if you look at a lot of gory injuries without a bit of training, experience, and some backup." --Dan Kaszeta "Hunter S. Thompson famously remarked that when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro. Well, we can't turn any more pro at this point." --Venkatesh Rao, on 2022.ev "Springs: Made of steel and they fit in our locks. Not sure if they will fit that European Yule wizakovtiz you found on eBay that has been modified with parts from a Ford Fiesta and that key you found in the Wendy's parking lot, but give it a go." --Sparrows Lock Picks website "You can't start putting together ideas about the future until you take a good long look at the present - the systems and conditions that bind us." --Warren Ellis "Confucius was probably also absolutely jacked from knocking out reps with the Qiaoguan (door bolt, a traditional test of strength). Not joking, Confucius is known for 'lifting the bars to the city gates' as a feat of strength. He was also smaller than his dad Shú Liáng Hé who was 231cm, and once held up the entire city gate on his own to escape from an ambush." --Naomi Wu "The problem with democracy is that it attracts people whose only interest is power over others... and, because they are dedicated their cause, they are well able to chase off anyone who sees power as merely a means of achieving or protecting their own primary interests. So every democratic system - no matter how apparently trivial, local or narrow in scope - gradually but inevitably becomes dominated by those who only want power... until they cease to become democratic systems altogether (because the final act of those who want power is to lock everyone else out of it)." --@thamesynne@dragon.social "2022 may not be the year of the Linux desktop. I suppose instead we got 'year of the Teledildonics Chess Scandal.'" --maddiefuzz "The next person who tries to tell me ''Uh, actually, computers can't generate random numbers'' is getting strapped to a chair Clockwork Orange style while I deliver a four hour lecture on the topics of entropy, randomness, cryptographic pseudorandom number generation, and their importance for securing communications in our modern world; probably with a metaphysical digression about 'Like, what even is randomness, man?' The punchline of the whole thing will be ''And none of this matters because it's fucking dice rolls for a computer game.''" --rgegriff "Between 1995 and 2022, people went from not understanding what the Internet is to still not understanding what the Internet is but differently." --Freakazoid "I think it's a disease of our time that users want to use social networks to become famous and to make money. Social networks should be and stay 'social'." --Chris Koester "Google / Gmail is the number one spam service on the Internet. Because of their dominant market share, they are whitelisted everywhere and nobody dares otherwise by default." --ck "Casual reminder that 'X should be illegal' doesn't mean 'no one can do X', it means 'the government should use violence against anyone who does X.' Please adjust your serious legal takes accordingly." --Eevee "Git gets easier once you understand branches are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space." --SWalajander "Don't have a backup strategy, have a restore strategy." --Scott Hanselman "People are saluting Jon Stewart for his brutally efficient deconstruction of the transphobic Arkansas AG [attorney general], and let me make it clear, he should be. But literally all he did was state the facts plainly and refuse to allow her to dissemble or lie. He did basic journalism. The fact that Jon Stewart is the one of the few people doing the bare minimum to confront this sort of blatant anti-trans propaganda is laudable for him but a searing condemnation of everyone else. Jon Stewart has set an incredibly low bar of 'tell the truth and do not allow right-wingers to lie like right-wingers always do' and so many journalists are failing to do that on purpose." --@vexwerewolf "If you're never allowed to celebrate a victory that's anything less than total, you don't end up with total victory. You just get a lot of burnt-out activists who go off and raise llamas." --@UrsulaV "The writer's role is to menace the public's conscience. He must have a position, a point of view. He must see the arts as a vehicle of social criticism and he must focus on the issues of his time." --Rod Serling "There is no moral high ground in leaving lethality to less competent companies." --Palmer Luckey "To be fair, I guess we should have known what we were getting into when we realized who the git that named git was, and even he chose to be a git and name it after himself." --Void Error "One of my best friends has intentionally gotten himself stuck in quantum space-time and we can't get him back. It's like a bad mushroom trip that I just can't sober up from. Not that... Not that I do mushrooms. I would never... as an employee of the United States military, I would never." --Ian Wright, _Quantum Leap_ (2022) "I enjoy a good 6 year clusterfuck." --ag4ve "You can't observe as much if you're observed by others." --Chevy Chase "We stand in the middle of infinity, between outer and inner space. And there's no limit to either." --Dr. Peter Duvall, _Fantastic Voyage_ "JG Ballard wrote some really provocative stuff about this in an essay in 1970s, can't recall exactly, about how all the psychological data from the moon missions was kept classified. He predicted a future pathology where space for humans would become a pure Thanatos death drive." --Aaron Stewart-Ahn "It's a running joke that writers put their barely disguised fetishes into their work but to be honest so much modern media from the last 15 years has been so safe and chaste that it's left me longing for the days of _Species_ or _Aeon Flux_ or basically anything Clive Barker." --Jack Harvey "My body is a temple that was sold to goths who turned it into a BDSM club." --Erika Bloodaxe "The road to fascism is lined with people telling you you're over-reacting." --Charles Johnson "If you accept that we are living in a simulation, then you must also accept that the simulation is likely written in Javascript." --Jared Palmer "Do not mock the Waffle House. Total strangers will take up arms in defense of those hashbrowns and tell you the story of how, when the world was literally on fire outside the windows, a gray-haired woman poured them coffee and called them 'hon.'" --@UrsulaV "For years, I've been getting emails intended for people who shared my deadname, many of which are new account emails for fetish or porn sites, and I always wondered how they could consistently get their own email wrong, but I just realized they're probably typing it one-handed." --Mae Dean "Having fun in nature takes some special circumstances, especially for prey species. It's hard to both have fun and be vigilant, so if your life is defined by the necessity for near constant vigilance it doesn't leave much room." --Kaeli Swift, Ph.D "Cool Hacks are often about putting aside what something is FOR and instead looking at what it can do." --Foone "You can't appease a mad man to preserve the peace - it only delays the slaughter." --David Hogg "Nothing is important to modern people until it's made easy to do and most importantly, is marketable." --@CipherS7N "The 'metaverse' sucks now because most of the people parroting this buzzword are in business suits, not people in fursuits." --@TehVulpez "White racists will claim anything is sacred in order to claim a Black person has befouled it, but nothing is actually sacred to these people. Anything can be used, repurposed or even degraded if they're the ones doing it. It's all about power and control." --@MsKellyMHayes "Most dystopian thing I've seen this week: People on the political betting site PredictIt wondering what happens to their money if Bolsonaro loses the Brazilian election but remains in power via coup." --Ben Collins "Reality has become indistinguishable from parody for a mere polynomial based challenger." --@schmeigSophie "If you meet one ignorant person with a child's understanding of how something works, you met one ignorant person. If everyone you see is just as fucking ignorant, someone is profiting off keeping 'em that way." --Pookleblinky "Don't give programmers advice in the form of a metaphor. They will find an edge case where the advice doesn't work and therefor the advice is wrong... apparently." --Olafur Waage "Non-violence has never, in fact, worked. It has only ever been useful as a warning to those with power that violence comes next if they don't change their behavior. It was the ever-present threat of violence that motivated change. Non-violent protest is just a warning." --Beka Valentine "I read a post where someone said 'The only thing stopping you is YOU!' Yup, and you people have no idea how lucky you are I am so self-restrained." --Gene Spafford "Years ago, my high school teacher cautioned us 'young ones' not to do more with less, because when those in power saw that one person could work extra hard to finish 3 people's work, they'd never hire 2 more people. Still true today." --Cecelia Poon, Ph.D "Man, it's gonna be wild if WW3 pops off for real because of some dipshit with a deepfake tool." --Ariadne Conill "The right's ability to capture and exploit attention from seemingly orthogonal subjects of interest is far more dangerous than 'Who is winning the email fundraising?' It's the entire point of their culture wars." --Matt Hodges "Do one thing, and do it well. Failing that, do a bunch of things half assed, bundle them up into an ugly kludge, and sell it as a suite." --Jack Daniel "Being a teacher in Finland is very prestigious. Not only are they paid well, they are valued in a way that the U.S. cannot understand." --April "Americans will go on vacation to a place that isn't a car sewer, walk and take public transit for 8-12 hours a day, notice a change in their health, and attribute it to 'They must not have the Illuminati chemicals here.'" --@opinionhaver "The most damning reception a superhero show or movie can receive is silence. I was really looking forward to both _Thor 4_ and _Umbrella Academy_ season 3, and not even the rightwing outrage merchants really said anything about them." --Kathryn Gibes "You really have to appreciate how effective the propagandists are at taking traditional made-up American anxieties (bad stuff in our kids' Halloween candy!) and giving it a topical racist spin (specifically drugs, from illegals!) for the benefit of a dimwitted audience." --Popehat "Not having molecular-resolution VR applications running at 1khz for the low price of $5k is a crime against humanity." --J.Corvinus "If you feel like you're losing everything, remember that trees lose their leaves every year and they still stand tall and wait for better days to come." --Unknown "Weird how the amount of compiler assistance that's fundamentally necessary but not excessively babying is exactly the amount required for the compiler to know what machine code to emit in 1969. What a cool coincidence." --Eevee "It sucks, being self aware and not having the motivation to change it, so now you're just stuck with painful self reflection." --AmphiBiEd "Most people on this website are absolutely miserable and hate seeing someone do anything impressive." --@ogi_samvila "Fixing a bug will teach you more about programming than _9 Podcasts Every Developer Should Listen To_." --@codewithvoid "One user is user error, two users means I broke something." --wiedehopf "I could make an hour long video about how this thing smells." --Perifractic "Apologies to everyone lacking the context for this and being very confused in my mentions. You live a blessed existence, don't look anything up." --@fasterthanlime "The truth is never context-free." --Jacques Valle' "Giddyup. Giddydown. Giddy-all around." --Arcus "I started this plant from seed in June. End of September, it's produced its first cucumber. I did not actually expect it to bear fruit this year. I am absurdly pleased by this." --Warren Ellis "Since G++ is the only compiler I've ever used that can spit out 3,000 lines of error for a missed bit of punctuation I will cut the error short and only include the top of the report from my c++11 enabled compiler (gcc v4.9.2)." --Jon Foster "Learn from why people think you're wrong. Even if you think they're wrong." --Aurynn Shaw "Don't make adversaries where high profile, persuasive allies exist if you don't have to." --Naomi Wu "Take me down to Parallax City where the back moves slow and the front moves quickly." --Fraggle "Some fights aren't worth being there to have." --Gray's Law "Actually inventing or producing things is at best the path to small-time wealth. The really big fortunes - the oligarch kind - instead come from controlling the circumstances under which other people are allowed to produce things. --Kevin Carson "Facebook's Metaverse looks like a computer game you'd see 10 seconds of footage of in a mid 2000's SVU episode about cyber crime." --Prehensile "If you want to do something terrible with technology, you can't just roll it out on people with money and social capital. They'll complain and your idea will tank. Successful shitty tech rollouts start with people you can abuse with impunity (prisoners, kids, migrants, etc) and then work their way up the privilege gradient. I call it the Shitty Technology Adoption Curve." --Cory Doctorow "Emperor Norton is the only USAian royalty I acknowledge." --c0debabe "If the last 40 years have proven anything, it's that far from wealth trickling down, cutting taxes for the rich and regulation for their businesses has a hoover-up effect." --Thamesynne "Something is not always better than nothing. Don't get involved if you can't do it right." --Naomi Wu "People used to describe Second Life as 'People living in AutoCAD'." --Polychrome "I feel like this could benefit from a better motion tracking system, like the aforementioned VR setup, but I also need to go buy cereal, so that science experiment will have to wait." --buttplug.io "They called it the Web, or the Net, because it was supposed to connect us all. But now it's called that because all it does is captures us." --Radical Edward "ALL THESE PLACES ARE YOURS EXCEPT CHICAGO ATTEMPT NO SHIT THERE, FOR REAL" --Brandom Toomey "Get them out of there. Throw them out. They are spoiled and don't deserve the education they are getting. They don't have a right to take advantage of our system of education." --Ronald Reagan, on college students "This is the nightmare of Web 3.0. Nothing is alive, organic, that isn't easily shuffled to the back pages." --Whisper of the Worm "The world is made for people who aren't cursed with self-awareness." --Annie, _Bull Durham_ "Apparently Hootsuite lost its goddamn mind." --Mae Dean "What if being brutal and un-woke also makes you ineffectual?" --Paul Krugman "The rotation schedules will continue until there are only desperate lifers left." --zpojqwfejwfhiunz "In the 1970's, it was widely believed that program design must be based on well-structured methods and layers of abstraction with clearly defined specifications. The abstract data type best exemplified this idea and found expression in then-new languages such as Modula-2 and Ada. Today, programmers are abandoning well-structured languages and migrating mostly to C. The C language doesn't even let compilers perform secure type checking, yet this compiler task is by far most helpful to program development in locating early conseptual mistakes. Without type checking, the notion of abstraction in programming languages remains hollow and academic." --Niklaus Wirth "You have to get pretty wild when people at a UFO convention don't believe you." --Hecklefish "A thing I want to say about Harry Potter game discourse is this: I don't approve of buying the game, but I approve even less of the way capitalism makes this a Personal Responsibility Problem, when the onus should be on publishers to refuse money to genocidal oligarchs." --@outliersgeorg "[redacted] is seeking some information concerning the activities of individuals and the group known as the College of Universal Wisdom, Peet [Post?] Office Address: Yucca Valley California, the activities of which are centered at Giant Rock Airport, 16 miles from Yucca Valley. The group ostensibly is devoted to a study of space ships and interplanetary communication, but its consistent 'line' in its publication is an attack upon atomic weapons and the preaching of a nebulous peace. George W. van Tassel is listed as Director of the College of Universal Wisdom, and I know nothing whatever concerning this. However, at least one of the prominent guests at the space ship convention at the Giant Rock Airport, Sunday, April 4th, has been questioned about supposed communist affiliations." --Unknown informant, George W. van Tassel's FBI file, 17 May 1954 "A lie is an abomination unto the Lord and a very present help in time of trouble." --Adlai Stevenson "As I've mentioned before, I recently had to rescue my glass carboy from the lost dimensions where Jim Morrison had been using it as a bong." "Who among us hasn't?" --Mae and Dave, _Real Life Comics_ "He wasn't advocating abandoning Earth. It wasn't a policy statement. He was just pontificating about science fiction. /Chill/." --AnEvenNicerGuy, on people mistaking Frank Herbert's stories for proposals "Stabile Diffusion looks at a load of PR-friendly control systems laid over proprietary products and just openly laughs at them - that's a strange thing that will have big implications." --Jack Clark "Feeding AI systems on the world's beauty, ugliness, and cruelty, but expecting it to reflect only the beauty is a fantasy." --Ruha Benjamin "Because of my beliefs I felt I could support others as their lives came to a close, not support them WITH my beliefs, but BECAUSE of my beliefs. My beliefs are not for sharing with others. They are to get ME through the night and to help ME live my best possible life." --Barbara Karnes "If you then post a whole bunch of hot and super dangerous/incorrect takes you'll get picked up by the media, and eventually qualify for a blue check on Twitter. Then you're * v e r i f i e d * so obviously you're a doctor now." --Adrian Chadd "Better the frying pan I know than the fire I don't." --Bill Horne "What part of 'all means all' keeps drying up on the frying pan?" --J. Michael Straczynski "Some advice from a 33-year-old: It's easy to feel elite in your ruthless criticism. Unhinged novelties of language to destroy another you're unhappy with. It is a whole other level for the people you criticize, to commend you in your fairness. Who recognize your criticism is not bullshit. That you live what you say. That is respect. That is a creed to aspire." --Swift On Security "It is actually okay and reasonable to make new programming languages because improving existing programming languages is hard! For example, the compiler vendor known as GNU could not improve C, so they made a new programming language called GNU C." --Whitequark "The problem is, people are being hated when they're real and loved when they're fake." --Bob Marley "There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen." --An Inhabitant of Carcosa "I get your rant, but you need to consider businesses and their GRC-related policies, some of which are mandated by compliance and regulatory laws. So, to that degree, what we think probably doesn't matter all that much." --Kevin W. Wall, on password hashing work factors vs the real world "If you are on Tikaboo [Peak] and something odd happens, look in the other direction." --Joerg, webmaster of the Dreamland Resort forums, on distractions "If you're wearing an orange vest, everyone assumes that whatever you are doing is legit." --David Schneider "The neoliberal turn of governments in the eighties laid the groundwork for turning the dial of extortion and exploitation of the populace up to eleven. Politicians are merely middle management for the hyper-wealthy and work to keep the populace sufficiently subdued and placated while making sure the racket can continue unabated." --Eve_O With the Right, it's sex. With the Left, it's money. "You're disgusting, and depraved, and I am 100% on board with this in the interest of scientific discovery." --Dave, _Real Life Comics_ "Civilization war doesn't mean open WW3. Since the End of History in the 90's, the western model has been challenged by several rising expansionist countermodels actively seeking to dislodge and replace it. That's the real conflict to watch that'll shape our future." --priyom.org "I had an Encyclopedia Brown dream where Bugs Meany submitted a brief with a citation ending (11th Cir. 1979) and Encyclopedia caught that this was before the 5th Cir. split and got Bugs disbarred for inventing an authority. Send help." --Ken Chu "Libertarians go: If there's a value, there oughta be a cost. These people are: I'm sad, therefore someone caused it. It's puritan discourse, the blame always go to the out-group, never inside. Puritans have ZERO self-awareness." --Nicholas Frota "Companies realized that they inadvertently created a generation of tech-savvy, self-actualized, and self-teaching people motivated to do more than consume technology. They aren't going to make the same mistake twice." --@MommyPosie "Our identities and experiences _inform_ what we think and how we act, but they are not the _only_ thing which determines them. Let's not BE the right's parody of social justice advocacy." --Jonathan Korman "One of the more terrifying things about serial killers as a whole is how good they are at identifying which victims police won't care about." --Abbey Perini "I want to stress that Kyiv's off peak frequency while being invaded is better than nearly all of America's transit systems during peak. I'm genuinely at a loss of words." --Hayden Clarkin, on public transit "Last time I'm explaining myself, appreciate the cute cat and shut up." --@fayemikah "Conservatives are just the most fragile, pathetic, stupid, and violently nihilistic people imaginable." --Nowhere Girl "Nice people made the best Nazis. My mom grew up next to them. They got along, refused to make waves, looked the other way when things got ugly and focused on happier things than 'politics'. They were lovely people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away. You know who weren't nice people? Resisters." --Naomi Shulman "The problem with facing teens as a Defender is they haven't yet conceded to continually lose at life by restricting their gambits to within the bounds of failure money has decided have solutions. They seek only results and that is why they are dangerous." --Swift On Security "Nothing went against plan. This time. That we know." --@flamefew "Roko's Basilisk is maybe the Platonic ideal of what a dumb person thinks a smart idea sounds like. It's great content for a ''mind-blowing thought experiments science can't prove aren't real!'' Youtube video targeted at a certain kind of Millennial who did a lot of drugs in 2014." --Enze Cartassi If you don't prosecute sedition, it becomes strategy. "Startups or products named after characters in my books have never done too well." --William Gibson "I'm not gonna do any constructive debate on this, I've done it more than often enough and it's not worth it. Dunking is funnier." --@_nyancrimew "Perhaps the most comedic aspect of all of this is the way in which giving a stranger something for free can make them swear an eternal vendetta against you." --@Aelkus, on open source software "The interesting thing about capitalism is that it's entirely incompatible with the future, so we've just decided to get rid of the future and keep capitalism." --Sister Petra "Secrets of adulthood: The willingness to be cringe is actually key to a good sex life. No one is having bone-rattling orgasms with a sneer of hip disinterested irony on their face." --Amberite "There's some embedded cultural commentary on the fact news stories are asking if ChatGPT will replace your job instead of your boss's job." --Swift On Security "Technically speaking, Russia and China do have older secret services than the Americans so in some sense we are employing their methods at scale. We're a young empire, the Italians have furniture and political methods that predate our country." --@wash_cloth "I think historians live in a make believe world of unreality sometimes." --@SerialPwny "Socialism for the rich, individualism for the poor has always been the American way." --@out_of_context "Left to it's own devices PHP will provide an armory for you to try on your feet." --Haxwithaxe "I have one foot on each banana peel." --Dr. Robert Beck "Columbo is a tokusatsu show. It is very popular in Japan. There is a different monster to battle each week. The main character performs a henshin sequence by turning around and uttering a catchphrase." --@Zin5ki "We have put a man on the moon, explored the depths of the oceans, produced technology our ancestors would understand to be magic, but a safe, clean, private place for everyone to live... dream on buddy!" --Jack Califano "Being a 90's kid is hard because now when someone calls themselves 'nerdy' they don't mean they're into anime tape trading or European board games, nerdy means 'I passively ingest a constant IV feed of the largest franchises on the planet.' The sinister part is engineering Nerd Culture, this bizarre concept that it's subversive to watch a billion dollar Disney film." --@DoctorPizzaMD "The book on your frontend web framework is thicker than what a C64 programmer needed to write a complete game." --Hynek Schlawack "The game dev scene is littered with projects that started out saying 'How hard could it be?' and left behind headstones that say 'Oh, THAT hard.'" --Jason Lefkowitz "Don't worry. If the little bastards can survive falling out of a 75ft fir and onto my deck, they can absolutely handle being tossed off a Yankee Squirrel Flinger. We'll see who triumphs, bark-chewing rodentia or YANKEE INGENUITY. Honestly, I'm betting on the squirrels." --Lilith Saintcrow "Computers are forever, but noodles are delicious." --Mark Hughes "I just imagined the Starlink satellites as the low-earth orbit equivalent of AOL CDs." --@kurtm@bsd.network "It doesn't matter. They're not gonna protect us." --Zayon Martinez, survivor, Uvalde, TX school shooting, 2022.ev "There's a moment when you're sitting there lubricating your game controllers that you think 'Maybe Cronenberg was on to something here.'" --buttplug.io "Random reminder that your interpretation is not proof of another's intent. It is wise to remember, especially when calling out others, that it might be a misunderstanding on your part." --Calcifer "We have put a man on the moon, explored the depths of the oceans, produced technology our ancestors would understand to be magic, but a safe, clean, private place for everyone to live... dream on buddy!" --Jack Califano "Just because someone speaks with authority doesn't mean they have a fucking clue what's going on." --Amanda Berlin "You can't stop your dogs from barking by yelling at them. They're just like, ''Hell yes we're all yelling now let's all keep yelling! This is great!''" --@looks_last "When I was an intern in the ED I asked for a surgery consult. The responding surgeon asked if I was an intern, and I said yes and asked if he was, too. He smiled and said ''No, I'm the department chair. And here's a tip: Always guess high.'' Good advice." --Joel Selanikio "The Rule of Goats: Even if you say you're only fucking goats ironically, you're still a goatfucker." --Popehat "Never ask a man his salary, a woman her age, and a big company from a former Axis nation what they were doing in the 1930's and 40's." --@fuckthechiefs10 "I wish there were ever any remotely sensible free speech discourse. I wish it did not only take the form of people latching onto 'the state must not use its monopoly on violence to punish opinion' and pretending it's equivalent to 'I have an active right to trend on Twitter.'" --Eevee "Second Life, but instead of locations like Count Pumpula's Psychedelic Vampire Inflation Factory, it just has one infinitely large Target." --Jules Glegg, on the Metaverse "The leftist shitcourse was that a trans person committing a wrong enough sin was full justification to waive the leftist principle of not using oppressor violence even against a genuinely bad deeds person." --Kalina Chung "Right wingers aren't just mad that choices exist, they're mad that anyone is allowed to choose something they themselves don't." --@VioletWanderers "The moral of the story is, everything looks super cute if it's curated to look that way." --@madge707 "Once you've developed a taste for blood, you will quickly discover the blood of the evil and the blood of the just taste similar enough, and pretty soon, any blood will do." --Glyph, on the culture wars "As my high school econ teacher described taxes, 'cheap guillotine insurance.'" --@DanInADL "Technically, a sphinx is just a catgirl with an unusual fondness for riddles and murder." --@m0lpe "Another day without using y=mx+b." --@Drizzyrich14 "I wish all of my AI friends the best of luck as they go traipsing through the mountains of madness. When you encounter computer-made horrors beyond your comprehension, don't say nobody warned you." --Vivid Void "You can't go after furries and then expect network engineers to be nice to you." --Bob Poekert "REPRESENTATION DOESN'T HAVE TO BE PERFECT TO BE MEANINGFUL" --@dynamicsymmetry "In the 1970s the very air sparkled with cocaine like spice on Arrakis." --@saucissonsec "Manually winning ~144 battles is simply not doable. I'm not THAT bored. I'm gonna have to get smart. And that's exactly what I didn't want to do today." --Foone "Today I realized that there is a step below security theater, and that is compliance theater." --@trashp4ndasec "I'm pondering the problem that our relentless 'STEM, STEM, STEM!!!' educational drumbeat has created a new class of engineers who can solve any technical problem but also can't explain why Naziism is bad. This is adjacent to the problem that people in this country see no merit in studying any subject that cannot go on a resume' and be instantly monetized." --David Bowman "Those who value nothing but money can't ever understand people who don't." --@Paul_IPv6 "It's quite a wonderful industry of dissonance where the same people are twisting their pants about 'supply chain security' and knowing where code came from while also promising that in the future every line of code will come from a mystery meat AI generation tool." --@tef_ebooks "If you're at the point where you've lost American celebrity worshippers, you're well and truly fucked." --David Austin Walsh "Once you've been to Cambodia, you'll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, muderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia - the fruits of his genius for statesmanship - and you will never understand why he's not sitting in the dock at the Hague next to Milosevic. While Henry continues to nibble nori rolls and remaki at A-list parties, Cambodie, the neutral nation he secretly and illegally bombed, invaded, undermined, and then threw to the dogs, is still trying to raise itself up on its one remaining leg." --Anthony Bourdain "I'll bet you a testicle that projects like Bluesky will find no meaningful purchase on the platform, because if Bluesky were implemented and Twitter users could order their feeds for minimal enshittification and leave the service without sacrificing their social networks, it would kill the majority of Twitter's 'monetization' strategies. (Not one of mine.)" --Cory Doctorow "The governor has declared a state of emergency and asked all Californians to not run `npm install` between 4 PM and 9 PM today in an effort to save energy." --@ikasliwal "Singer's rule: Free events are the most work." --Peter W. Singer "I like the idea of defining ambition as ''a willingness to acknowledge what you're actually capable of.''" --@kasratweets "Responsible disclosure is a privilege, not a right." --Quentyn Taylor "[Henry] Kissinger could always be depended upon to support a dictatorship whether he stood to turn a buck or not." --Congressman Stephen Solarz "Nextdoor is a great place to find out what neighbors would turn you in to the secret police when we get far enough down the road to fascism." --@Ragnell "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." --H.L. Mencken "Wait. Force feedback for hand tracked VR was a solved problem all along, just no one knew what to google?" --@halcy "Imagine getting breaking information from modern sources, rather than just waiting for a police statement and then writing the same story everyone else is writing." --@StroppySjw "I dread things taking off, because anything of mine getting more attention means BOTH that 1) someone with a grudge against me is more likely to see it, and 2) people with a grudge against me will more strongly feel the need to destroy it." --Eevee "I think a lot about how the main reason Twitter-central community environments are so toxic because people regularly engage in activities which would get them banned from any sensible forum 15 years ago." --@jdragsky "Life is about finally embracing the weirdness that your formative years bullied out of you." --@bookishseawitch "The trans dudes are feral, the enbies are feral, frankly people are just looking for justifications for not liking someone on a personal level so they have to make it a socio-political one." --@Tayruu "I'd say Goatse was more than a bit of a stretch." --@KlooKloo "When you see humans as tools, then it's easier to erase their contributions and easier to disregard their human rights." --Karla Ortiz "''Oh, they literally just want to not get punished for taking UNPAID sick and emergency days to see a doctor? Or deal with a family emergency? That's asking for so little. Who could say no to that?'' Well, it turns out: Bosses can and will!" --Colin Spacetwinks "Sometimes I think we HAVE been taken over by lizard people because there are so many prominent folks who seem to lack recognizably human qualities." --Popehat "The worst part about knowing of a breach at a company before the company has acknowledged knowing about it is you don't know when the right time to change all of your passwords is." --Johnny Xmas "A solid 60-80% of data centre capacity is doing nothing of importance or with any real-world impact. It's mostly AWS leasing capacity to 'B2B enterprise innovation management services' companies so they can run the world's most inefficient expenses software." --Jack Kennedy "You either die a hero, or live long enough to be loosely associated with someone who may have problematic music in their Spotify." --@apsciencebydan "Even the name 'fentanyl' is a killing word! It is the Kwisatz Haderach!" --Foone "Serpents and poison fix a lot of problems." --Lyssa "Everything is a fuse when the current is high enough." --Niconiconi "That is crunchy-ass thread! I don't love it." --Adam Savage "I know about 500 geriatic ladies with blue hair, scoliosis, and extreme prescription glasses, because I am a member of two quilt guilds, the scientific illustration guild, the Rocky Mountain SCA and stagehand for three different theater companies, so I know everyone's grandma and fuck me if I can tell them apart." --Gallus Rostromegalus "Sometimes the map of a territory has to be turned into a Tube map so you can find your way through it." --Warren Ellis "You can accomplish a lot with fire and a leaf blower." --Hasufin "If you are turning your sanctimony into a Fleshlight and jerking off with it, that's fucking gross!" --Laurelindel "Someone managed to reintroduce the awkward parts of real parties into a virtual space." --Raven, on holding a funeral in gather.town "The measure of any great game is not memory size or whether it uses an MMC1 or MMC5. The real test is whether or not it's fun to play." --_Nintendo Power_, January 1991 "People who are fully healthy, fit, and neurotypical seem to think they are that way because they're doing something right that the rest of us haven't thought of, and not just because they got lucky." --Teaboot "If being a housewife fulfilled all these women they wouldn't be bringing Spielberg-level production values to TikTok." --Lydia Kiesling "Everything's fucking ridiculous there. I'm fed up with people getting killed every day. God knows how many people have been shot in school shootings. And there was that mass shooting in Vegas at that concert... It's fucking crazy. And I don't want to die in America. I don't want to be buried in fucking Forest Lawn. I'm English. I want to be back. But saying that, if my wife said we've got to go and live in Timbuktu, I'll go. But, no, it's just time for me to come home." --Ozzy Osbourne, on leaving the United States "Do you remember when 'journalists' checked their facts and verified their sources? I do. I am old." --Quellish "The difference between American billionaires and Russian oligarchs is that in Russia you only get to be an oligarch if the president likes you, whereas in America you only get to be president if the billionaires like you." --Ivy Alraune "The secret to life is making enough time for family and friends, enough time for travel and passions, enough time for physical activity, enough time for career, enough time for sleep, enough time to keep a clean and inspiring home, and enough time for reading. So, like, good luck with that." --Sam Riegel "Corporations are so reliant on your free labor that they see electing not to donate your time and energy as a form of open rebellion." --Patrick S. Tomlinson "Every dominant species that has ever existed has died out but humans think they are special somehow." --Dildog "If there's anything being very, publicly weird has taught me, it's: Nothing is really all that weird. There's always someone who can relate." --@PAWBMONSTER "I really don't understand why I should be upset or resentful if younger people have more options or an easier time than I did. I don't mind when new medicines or technologies are invented that improve people's lives, either." --Matt Blaze "I remain frustrated how much of the public narrative is completely disconnected from the actual issues involved in the legal dispute." --Mike Masnick "Grind culture (by default) disqualifies well-rounded, experienced, senior people who have balanced lives - and it's those people who likely bring the most value, because they've already made all the mistakes you're about to make." --@GoldenCSO "The problem with becoming a Microsoft tech in 2022 is there's more lore than the Marvel Universe. Like, what the fuck was CarPC?" --Swift On Security "More fiction is written in Excel than Word." --Will Manidis "Seems worth mentioning that one part of the strategy laid out in the Powell memo in the 1970's was to make college so expensive that students would graduate in so much debt they'd be less likely to work against corporate interests." --Amy Westervelt "We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That's dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow to go through higher education. If not, we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed people." --Roger Freeman, education advisor to presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan "Student loan forgiveness undermines one of our military's greatest recruitment tools at a time of dangerously low enlistments." --Representative Jim Banks "They exploit the fact that we will shove each other into wood chippers for clout." --Slaanesh "My brother in shotguns and hamburgers, you are getting taxed at the same rate regardless of what the government spends it on, you're not getting an extra bill for anyone's student debt." --0xabadidea "Boomers melting down about how this isn't fair is really something. We know life isn't fair. You told us that every single day of our childhood. So I'll give you the same advice you always gave us: Get over it." --Sarah Watson "Picking on US housing policy is a bit like picking on a Down syndrome kid with leukemia." --@0knaomi "If you have a problem with the student loan cancellation because you already paid off your loans, just pretend it's a tax cut for the rich that you also never got but mysteriously didn't complain about." --Katelyn Burns "I'm an only-occasionally-job-having philosophy major in Ohio, and I'm wondering why I have to pay the salary of a gormless chucklefuck who didn't protect students in his charge from a sexual predator." --John Scalzi "Amazing that someone can make a video explaining that they lied to you and we think 'This person is probably telling the truth.'" --Richard D. Bartlett "Hello? I would like someone cancelled from my spacetime light cone." --Ascended NPC Alex "For every one person who reads the article, there are nine who will only read the headline. Headlines. Matter." --Eric Kolb "Are you a bad enough dude to eat someone's balls while they are still alive?" --Pookleblinky "The phrase 'Someone ought to do something' was not, by itself, a helpful one. People who used it never added the rider 'and that someone is me.'" --Terry Pratchett "Are you all really 'getting something' out of these 'gatherings'? Why can't it just be normal socialization and partying. Why does it have to be a business model? Why does it have to be framed like these goddesses are deigning to rent you their attention?" --@deepfates "There are actually more pages of documentation for the x86 than the number of individual transistors in the 6502." --@veekorbes "We have reached that time of year, when the Spirit of Halloween possesses and animates the corpses of dead stores, bringing them to a grotesque parody of their former selves." --Hasufin "It is safe to assume that for the many thousands of years that cats and humans have closely interacted, cats have behaved in exactly the same way the entire time. So, we can imagine an Egyptian pharaoh at court, interrupted by a court cat loudly vomiting a hairball." --Lauren Weinstein "Controversial thesis: If the highest paid person in your university or college is the basketball coach or the football coach, then it is not a university, it is a sporting franchise with a side hustle in tertiary education." --Michael F. Bird "People have asked me my opinion of President Biden's criticism of 'semi fascism.' Well, I can't overstate my disapproval of the inappropriate use of 'semi.'" --Mike Godwin "The Russians, their proxies, and their tankie fellow travelers have inherited the old Soviet concept of human behavior: They assume everyone is a dull drone and therefore nobody does anything much on their own accord. It does not even occur to them that people make individual decisions." --Dan Kaszeta "You need to learn... how you do that is irrelevant, it's only important that you do." --Binder "If it makes someone happy and I don't have to participate, whatever." --Andrew C. Dingman "People will pay all kinds of premiums if they're framed as punishment for someone else." --Tressie McMillan Cottom "It can definitely be frustrating when someone says, ''I don't know if they can do this or not,'' and yet they never chose to just ask the person." --Aaron Lee "The Challenger accident in January 1986 followed by Chernobyl in April had an enormous effect on fifth-grade me. I started to suspect that most grown-ups had no idea what the fuck they were doing. I've done rather well in life by not overestimating people in power." --Dr. Jeffrey Lewis "I swear to god, thesl people are so brainwashed by capitalism they only see art for its utilitarian purpose as a consumer." --Squeedge "Just because you didn't know it exists doesn't make it secret." --Asher Wolf "I feel like sincerity is one of the most endangered things in the 21st century. Commodification of everything has caused humanity to lose itself." --Janos Stripes "Whenever I think things can't get more insane and people in positions of power can't be more ignorant or dangerous... something happens to show me the bullshit is LIMITLESS." --Laurie Allee "Can't believe the dude who steals money from children with cancer isn't a sound business partner." --Iron Spike "It was a mistake to teach logical fallacies outside of a formal classroom setting. You have ten thousand men with Greek statue avatars who think ad hominem means when something is mean, and an appeal to authority is when someone knows more than they do." --@these_qualia "We've taken a nosedive on life expectancy and it is largely based on behavioral choices. Historians will be baffled. You mean to tell me they chose death over a mask? Yes, yes they did." --Dr. Ebony Jade Hilton, MD "People will consume like gluttons any lie that offers them license to be monsters." --Cigfran Llwyd "When you aspire to be as good as someone without trying to be that person you can do a lot of personal development." --Amunfox "Some days you wake up and realize that if you can't make the world better today, you can at least make it stranger." --Foone "Just because a feature exists does not mean it exists to be used." --Swift On Security "My theory is we are so uncomfortable with sincerity that when artists earnestly deconstruct their own trauma and confront societal ills a lot of people have a knee jerk disgust response." --Lola Sebastian "News networks are not here to defend democracy. There is only one goal and one goal only. Higher CPM's. CPM is the currency used in TV to reflect the value of the programming. The higher the CPM, the higher the margin on that commercial being sold." --YS "The Rule of Goats: Even if you say you're only fucking goats ironically, you're still a goatfucker." --Popehat "If you stop and think about it, it's really weird that every ISP and social media company and cloud provider and search engine work together to stop me from sharing illegal copies of Harry Potter, but credible death threats against specific people are easy to spread." --Daniel Feldman "Who taught you to drive? Ian Fleming?" --Gloria Sternvirgin, _Deathrow Gameshow_ "Showing up to Burning Man with nothing but two USBs and a backpack. This is like a raver's version of _Naked and Afraid_." --John Summit "With great power comes great electric bill." --ladystarbird "It's slightly worrying how many companies are like ''We're bringing vital healthcare into the home with our groundbreaking device that can do brain surgery on you while you watch TV. We're hiring PHP, React, and Visual Basic programmers.''" --Foone "You took me seriously enough to think my post required a rebuke, a denial, and a challenge to debate. By contrast, I do not take you or your audience seriously in the least. Run along." --Popehat "Isn't that science? No speculation allowed... I speculate. And the reason I do is because speculation breeds hypothesis. Hypothesis breeds experimentation. Experimentation finds proof." --Marc D'Antonio "The paradise of the rich is made out of the hell of the poor." --Victor Hugo "Right now is a terrible time to join the Jehovah's Witnesses! A key part of their beliefs is that when the end comes (and we are in the final days), only 144,000 chosen believers will make it into heaven. Why's that a problem? BECAUSE THERE ARE BETWEEN 9 AND 21 MILLION JEHOVAH'S WITNESSES! 'Join our religion, you have (at best) a 1 in 62 chance of going to heaven!' Bad odds. Don't play this lottery. I don't know what weapons WW3 will be fought with, but the war against God will be fought with suplexes and piledrivers." --Foone "I don't know anything with certainty, but seeing the stars makes me dream." --Vincent Van Gogh "The devil works fast, but NSFW Pokémon fan artists work faster." --Sisi Jiang "I had my thread scissors (quite sharp at the points) out for an exposure therapy. I was on virtual call with my therapist explaining my fears of accidentally hurting my crabs. Pumpkin [the hermit crab] eased those fears by reminding me of what I should fear. Her. With a knife." --Just Another Sparrow "We are in a war of destroyers against creators, sadists against people. Ghouls on social media/Telegram cheering and sharing pictures of 'enemy' teenagers being tortured and killed are just less powerful versions of the same death eating ghouls on top." --@YourAnonCentral "The attack was very straightforward and simple - to someone with deep knowledge of the mathematical literature on supersingular isogenies. Complex stuff, and until now really the domain of specialists." --Jerry Leichter, on the full break of the SIKE post-quantum cryptosystem "Old enough means remembering, like, three months ago." --@thrillhouse138 "It's all just a game to them. You're just a part of it, whether you know or not." --Anonymous, on the influence of extremely wealthy people on just about everything "Back in the late 90s, when I was involved in the then-new DVD industry, the first movers in that space were, porn (of course) and Bollywood. Hollywood showed up very late to the game and almost had to be dragged." --Joseph Matheny "The substrate of evil ranges from sheer stupidity to ideological self righteousness to sharp, seething malice. The distinctions have no meaning to the victim." --Cigfran Llwyd "Artistic quality isn't a static thing. Art is always measured both against its contemporaries and also by the standards of what has come since. It's standing is not a fixed point." --Joseph Brassey "The presumption that in the 'marketplace of ideas' everyone debates with equal honesty is so profoundly naive, I'm stunned by it." --Alex Arrelia "It's almost like if we participate in harassment campaigns against people we don't like, it has consequences for people we do like." --Emily Gorcenski "Less than 10 years until they finally make kindness illegal." --Dildog "One of the main features of American anti-intellectualism is a belief that no one *really* likes anything that isn't mass pop culture. That if you read poetry, watch foreign movies, listen to bands not on top 40 radio, whatever, you must be in some sense faking it. It's so ingrained that even when something deemed intellectual IS popular they believe it's some kind of mass deception." --Lincoln Michel "I feel like SMB1 speedrunning is becoming so technically constrained that in a few years we're going to see people stop playing the game and just start making mathematical proofs of what's possible" --@emilyst "The reason trans people have often resorted to mind-body dualism explanations is because cis people tend to be incredibly dense." --Nowhere Girl "It's an honor to be at Blackhat on Zero Cool day." --the_gibson "The spaces you grew up in aren't just away from you physically, they're gone. Time changed all of them. There is no place like the one in your memories anymore." --Void Angel "Ostrom had to coin a rule: If it works in reality, it also works in theory. Sustainable commons are not a myth. They exist in the world! They work! It doesn't matter how well you think you've intuited your way to the Tragedy: It's still a myth." --@HeavenlyPossum "Use Signal, use Tor, and bring a kitten just in case." --Zack Whittaker "Always remember, just because someone speaks with authority doesn't mean they have a fucking clue what's going on." --Amanda Berlin "Do not waste any mental or emotional energy laboring to prove Republican hypocrisy on the 'we must not investigate our political opponents' angle. Hypocrisy literally doesn't matter anymore. It's dead. No one cares. Find more productive and salient lines of attack/defense." --Mike Duncan "'How would Alan Moore feel about using Joanna Constantine instead of John?' So... you think that the guy who created a chain smoking, drug using, bisexual anarchist would object if the character was all of those things and also a woman?" --Robert MacQuarrie "Clever code is hardware in disguise." --Christopher Collett "Everyone is just another person. When people or societies forget that, they lose what it is to be human." --Paul O'Malley "An FBI raid on a former president sets a dangerous precedent by implying the rule of law applies equally to everyone." --@SevaUT "On behalf of defense lawyers everywhere I really appreciate the clarity with which the GOP is expressing that the role of law enforcement is only to police the powerless and that if it polices them it is so illegitimate it should be dissolved." --Popehat "Conspiracy theorists are so useless. They're always like 'a tiny group of powerful elites is ruling the world and acting only upon their own interests,' and it's like yeah, we see that. We can all see that." --Ginny Hogan "I just typed a command wrong and it downloaded an Ed Sheeran music video. This must be what Slotin felt like when the screwdriver slipped." --Foone "By age 30, you should have at least three horrific stories you tell in a joking manner that leaves everyone speechless and concerned for your well being, and it hasn't clicked that it was trauma before that moment." --Doc Wolverine "CHICAGO was the project name for Windows 95 and for some reason still persists in a bunch of fucking random places and seeing it reminds us we are on a treadmill of time that brings nothing but the past repeated." --Swift On Security "Dear Defcon attendees, I would love to personally thank the 99% of you who not only follow the masking guidelines but do it joyously. We all appreciate it. The other 1%? I'm carrying a giant rubber chicken, do you think I'm gonna debate science with you? MASK UP." --@dakacki "Like 95% of the immediate problems of AI policy are just 'who has power under capitalism,' and you literally can't do anything about it. AI costs money. Companies have money. Therefore companies build AI. Most talk about democratization is PR-friendly bullshit that ignores this." --Jack Clark "By age 30 you should have killed me. You knew what would happen if you didn't and yet your sentimentality stayed your hand. It's too late now, of course, the Fractal already has teeth and the Mirrors are digesting the horizon. This is the consequence, what happens next is on you." --Void Priestess "Alex Jones represents the well-known economic process of wealth transfer from stupid people to evil people." --Popehat "People fight to oppress others not because they want to oppress others, but because they are told ''If you don't fight them now, they are going to take everything from you later.''" --TipzE "No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations." --Nietzsche "Inside every x86 is every x86 ever built." --Codekoan "A lot of people are realizing they get value out of life in non-work areas and their previous efforts to generate additional productivity or efficiency aren't benefitting them through higher pay or salary, only financially rewarding their manager or the company they work for." --Karen K. Ho "If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law AND the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell." --Carl Sandburg "The street finds its own uses for things, and the street is incredibly, mindbogglingly horned up. You would not believe how incredibly horned up the street is." --Pookleblinky "Very suspicious that the DoD announces they won't be using any software with bugs in it, the day after I find out they may be using some of my old software in nuclear weapon design. I got bad news for ya'll." --Foone "At a certain point, our corrupt and moribund political culture has no hope of solving humanity's problems. You either bet on science and technology, or you bet on extinction." --Edward Snowden "Always feels weird when something you remember fondly, was a large part of your childhood for a few years and thought was everywhere, turns out only has like 2 paragraphs on Wikipedia and almost nobody knows or cares." --Mobcat "My toddler's daycare apparently uses the 'clean up' song. My husband and I discovered this yesterday when we started singing it and it activated our kid like she was a sleeper agent and she immediately started putting her toys away." --@Marie_ClySar "Every day, people are grievously injured by sticking their penises into household appliances. Even in the era of the Fleshlight and the Dicksucker 3000, they need the thrill of danger. They need razor sharp spinning blades. That's where our product comes in." --@deepfates "Boot lickers are aspiring boot owners." --Cigfran Llwyd "Most people will give up whatever morals they have at the slightest suggestion of inconvenience that'd come from upholding them." --Pookleblinky "The revolution won't be televised, but you will be working during the apocalypse." --Camilo "Spite pays dividends." --Nire Bryce "We should live under a system where if we created something this amazing we should all just gawk at how cool it is, but instead we have to debate whether it's bad actually because there's a distinct possibility that some artists will literally starve." --Eniko Fox "When people get confrontational on the Internet, remember that they are entitled to their opinion, but they are not entitled to yours." --Dildog "The hardest processes to tamper with are the ones that have *the most* open participation. Conspiracy theorists love to throw systems like that out and replace then with the input of one person they *know* they can trust. Because their gut tells them so." --Matthew Green "Trans women just dress up using sexist regressive stereotypes, such as cat ears, systems programming, plaid, and Magic: The Gathering." --Eevee "One year I went to Defcon and left an old laptop out with 'Do your worst' written on it. I came back to it a few hours later and it hadn't even been touched. 'Till I booted it up the next day and glitter spewed out of the fans on the back." --@Firr "People calling the MAGA threats and attacks on the FBI 'Mafia tactics', but Cosa Nostra generally forbid going after federal agents." --Matt Blaze "Someone just asked me if it's true that ADD meds are more addictive than heroin. I've forgotten to take my ADD meds for the last three days in a row. If you can forget you're addicted to heroin then yeah, it's probably the same thing." --Jenny Lawson "Clearly what I am looking for, should I ever choose to do this, is a surgeon who thinks like a BME poster from 2006." --@angel_infestor "Peaches, the trash can is not a treasure hunt." --Mandy Morbid, to her cat "Why does everyone censor British like Br*tish and not Bri*ish?" "Because if we hide the tea you tend to invade." --Katy Montgomerie and Ari Drennen "I move that the words 'Republican' and 'conservative' be replaced in all discussions and media with the term Cartmanist. Because that's what we've got right now. The behavior and ideals on display are neither Republican nor conservative. Just the antics of childish sociopaths." --Phil Brucato "'Do not put this product into the rectum by using fingers or any mechanical device or applicator.' WELL WHAT WOULD YOU SUGGEST I USE THEN? I DON'T LIKE THE LACK OF OPTIONS HERE." --Foone "'Get it over with' and 'survival of the fittest' messaging cannot exist without assuming and accepting that: We need to weed out those who will die by the virus ASAP; we can predict who that will be; and a COVID death is in an of itself evidence that the person was unfit, ergo, expendable." --Amber Chisholm "I'm just going to get real with y'all. I don't know a single conservative I think of as manly. All the ones I know live in a perpetual state of childlike fear. Fear that someone will criticize them, or they'll have to learn someone's pronouns. Compare it to progressive men. When I think about why I admire in men, progressive dudes have it and conservative men don't. They're unbothered by drag queens or gay people. They don't live in irrational fear of terrorists or China or immigrants. They feel responsibility to protect the weakest among us. Living in an endless state of fear against imaginary slights is not manly. It's childish. The weakest men in America belong to the Republican Party." --Brianna Wu "When you're younger, war feels more like a natural disaster than the mess of political decisions and capitalist control it actually is, and it's on yourself to realize that because few people or media are going to hammer the point enough." --@CalavErik8 "I think a lot about how [Hideo] Kojima put way too much faith in people to pick up on the messages of his games." --@SuperPaulineGay "You cannot hurt me by calling me Ned Flanders. He is my favorite Simpsons character. He doesn't really mind that he's lame, he's overall generally happy, and he's a fairly good person, relatively speaking." --@ExileGrimm "Upstairs cocaine, downstairs crack. Upstairs Adderall, downstairs ice. SF is like a fractional distillation tower for stimulants." --@deepfates "In complex situations, without the right training, 'common sense' will get you killed. 'Conservative common sense' is designed to comfort cis, straight, white, Christian people... and hurt everyone else." --Elf Sternberg "Why does it feel like I'll be spending the rest of my day talking to the nice people at the NRC again..." --Zander "''But isn't any participation in society complicity in death machines?'' I dunno man, I don't go into gun stores then get confused and afraid when they refuse to sell me bread. Seems like a you problem, my dude." --Pookleblinky "Never forget that humanity made its grand debut onto the galactic stage by sending unsolicited nudes, a mix tape, and directions back to our place." --Alexander Winn "'I became a Marine to protect your base on Mars,' is an audience question that was just asked, if you're wondering how the Tesla annual shareholder meeting is going." --Michael Ballaban "Your humanity ends where my petroleum dependence begins." --Swift On Security "Just because something's not legal doesn't mean it's not right." --Hecklefish, _The Why Files_ "You can tell you're in a failing nation when one side wants to actively murder some and subjugate a majority of the population, the other side wants to tut feebly from the sidelines while it happens, and the predominant narrative is: 'Why are politics today so polarized?'" --Socketwench "Building a JVM is a cool self-own because you do all this cool work and then at the end of the day you have, uh, a JVM." --@iximeow "Principled people are ruthless." --Cigfran Llwyd "I would like it if we stop reinventing Maoist struggle sessions on social media webbed sites." --@__femb0t "Alex Jones' lawyer passed the Bar and YOU have imposter syndrome?" --Laurie Charles "There is no conspiracy more outlandish, more unfathomably surreal, than the agonizing reality that Alex Jones was raking in 800K per day through InfoWars." --Berny Belvedere "The worst part about being sober is knowing what's going on." --Charlie James "Jon Stewart is an excellent example of the power of celebrity when its wielded strategically and unrelentingly on a single issue - and also, it says a lot about our system that an issue like this would require a celebrity's unrelenting advocacy for years in order to be addressed." --Wesley Lowery, on a cop chasing down, using a taser on, sitting on, and then shooting a black guy in the back at point-blank range "One of the most poisonous things the Internet ever did was supercharge this thing we do where we can't just privately dislike someone, we can't just find them obnoxious, we have to make it a participatory team sport where we all act on that dislike for fun." --@dynamicsymmetry "I single handedly stopped no less that 1,000 attacks by filling out this vendor risk management Excel doc. Rest well everyone. I got you." --Tim Medin "If your friends all sound like a Twitter hustle account you have made some very poor decisions indeed." --Eevee "Since it's Election Day for some folks I'd like to bring up a weird thing that sometimes happens where voters will pass a ballot measure to expand Medicaid and states will just go 'No'. Isn't it wild to live in a country where that just happens sometimes? That's why it's weird when people go 'Vote, vote harder!' because it's like, ok, but when you do that they probably shouldn't be able to just do the opposite thing." --@Brendelbored "Just so great that we've set modern society up to be utterly incompatible with actual human life and human experience!! I love it." --Hannah Riley "I don't understand why we must do things in this world, why we must have friends and aspirations, hopes and dreams. Wouldn't it be better to retreat to a faraway corner of the world, where all its noise and complications would be heard no more? Then we could renounce culture and ambitions; we would lose everything and gain nothing; for what is there to be gained from this world?" --Emil Cioran "I clicked a blurred NSFW image and then was forced to VIEW it. How is that my fault??" --happy_bluebird "Kid, if you ain't cheating you ain't trying. If you get caught you ain't trying hard enough." --Kusuriya "For me, one of the biggest losses incurred in this pandemic is my once deeply held belief that most people, given the right info and resources, will work together to achieve common goals and want the best for one another; that most people understand that rights come with responsibilities." --Jennifer Mustapha, Ph.D "Is it really a 'self own' when their supporters agree with it and it helps to solidify their base?" --@exceptionalnull "The premise that Windows kernel vulnerabilities and SQL injection attacks are still security issues in the 23rd century is the most plausible thing Star Trek has ever done." --Tim Pierce "Why pay all the costs of your spies when you can get Twitter to pay six figures for you?" --Joe Schottman "'Millennials are very cavalier about not having children.' Bro, the Earth is becoming uninhabitable. 'Millennials are too busy taking selfies to think about having childre-' We wake up to reports of multiple school shootings per day." --@ruemcclammyhand "I'll be fucked if you're gonna tell me some respectability bullshit, like I'm somehow harming my own motherfucking prospects. You'll notice I've won every award short of a Pulitzer and I'm not even 40. I don't lack a vocabulary, I lack patience for people like you." --Linda Tirado "Tumblr gave a generation the language of academia with none of the intellectual discipline or context. This gives people an illusion of power by weaponizing their personal peeves into supposed sins wildly out of proportion to the issues at hand." --Brianna Wu "Your persistence of vision and how many elements your compound eye have may give different results. Me personally, I live inside a 90s cyberspace infomercial." --@GalacticFurball "I think the TL;DR of this piece is that a lot of important things in American politics and law are essentially predicated on the notion that no one seriously tests them." --Aelkus "They tried so hard with putting a name to Quiet Quitting. The very concept of people setting boundaries and not putting up with wage theft anymore is SO terrifying to the American employer that they had to put a marketing team behind it." --Jon Kung "The more super powerful magic bullet moves the art has, the less and less you can practice it." --Pookleblinky, on martial arts techniques that you can't actually practice without killing your sparring partner "The US actually *does* have culture - in fact, it's a cultural superpower. The thing is that culture in the US, more than anywhere else, is *explicitly premised* on constructing a hyperreality; American culture, more than any other, is based on not dialoguing with reality. It is actually hard for people from other countries to understand, I think, how much the American mode of being is dictated by elaborate constructions of fantasy weighed in the direction of the interests of capital. Only Canada or a country like Japan comes nearly as close. The covid pandemic was so acutely traumatic, and so *politically controversial*, in the United States in particular because it broke open the distance between hyperreality and the real that most American culture relies on to function; hence the Applebee's anti-mask protestors." --@tara_chara "Forgetting about humans is how you get JSON not having comments." --Eevee "It's worth noting that is a very privileged position to maintain. A whole lot of people have to become different people to survive in our society." --Aaron Frein "All software is open source if you know assembler." --@SegHaxx "Clear, plump jellyfish lay scattered across the beach, like so many discarded breast implants." --Sara Corris, winner of the Purple Prose category of the 2022 Bulwer-Lyttons Fiction Contest "ATTENTION QANON MAGAT FASCISTS: Every time you sing _We're Not Gonna Take It_ remember it was written by a cross-dressing, libtard, tree hugging half-Jew who HATES everything you stand for. It was you and people like you that inspired every angry word of that song! SO FUCK OFF!" --Dee Snyder "Gardening in England is fraught with triffid threat." --Warren Ellis "A mainstreaming of Q's core tenets to the point where the basics of QAnon - the drops, the obscure 'comms' - were no longer necessary, or even desirable. Q was no longer the cool, secret club that you had speak the jargon to have a chance of getting into. It was just 'conservatism' now." --Mike Rothschild "I was today years old when I learned Blåhaj was a stuffed shark from Ikea and not an obscure leftist theorist." --Amberite "Chickens are basically dinosaurs, and will bring death to anything smaller than themselves that enters their eyeline. And if the slugs didn't want to die at the claws of little dinosaurs, they shouldn't have eaten my fucking dwarf pea plants." --Warren Ellis "There is nobody as closed-minded as a scientist or physicist that's been in the business for over a decade." --Bob Lazar "I don't need perfect from anyone. I need things done in good faith and I need folks to always be improving themselves." --c0debabe "Getting COVID is like upgrading to Windows 11, who knows wtf will change next." --Kevin Beaumont "Infiltration is fine 'til the 1's hit the table." --Justin Cooper "Look: I don't understand technology. I eat fire for a living." --Brian Brushwood "Clearly what I am looking for, should I ever choose to do this, is a surgeon who thinks like a BME poster from 2006. Relatedly, I feel like I'm not, for me, all that interested in phalloplasties, but if I ever DID decide to go that route you bet I'd get a cut-and-fold tattoo." --Angel Infestor "This thread is now closed. 400 members will have 1200 opinions. Thank you." --N2QOJ "It is the natural folly of youth to presume that anything new to them must therefore be new to everyone else. It is the natural cruelty of age to disabuse them of this notion." --Attribution unknown "There is no permit for detonating C-4. You can't go get one because there isn't one. You are just not allowed to go near it or detonate it unless we're a bomb squad." --Adam Savage "Wherever there has been a choice, neoliberal governments have chosen public squalor, pollution and death. Every 'efficiency' that accelerates social and ecological breakdown is dignified by its contribution to 'enterprise', a euphemism for the profitability of the most short-termist, exploitative sectors of capital." --Richard Seymour "People who use 'mouth-breather' as an insult are insectoids who respire in the ancient, elegant way of using spiracles on one's thorax and find this whole modern upstart mammalian idea of repurposing one's mandibles to suck oxygen just terrifyingly declasse." --Nate Cull "Drunk level: Harbor freight plasma torch purchasing." --vlad_ii "Then came human beings; they wanted to cling but there was nothing to cling to." --Albert Camus, _The Fall_ "Just because it doesn't sound like Cookie Monster farting a thesaurus into a threshing machine doesn't mean it's not metal." --Phil Brucato "Moral decisions are always easy to recognize. They are where you abandon self-interest." --Odrade, _Chapterhouse Dune_ "You can give a man a fish and THEN teach him how to fish, you know. It's a lot easier to learn how to fish when you're not starving." --Lore Sjoberg "Bannon's conviction, with the prospect of jail time, is an apt time for us as a society to contemplate how cruelly punitive our criminal justice system can be. We should consider alternatives and reform. I'm talking about for whoever winds up as his cellmate, of course." --Matt Blaze "Remember folks, healthcare is only for people it's funded for. Healthcare programs only exist if funded. No one cares if you're sick or dying unless you have money." --Asher Wolf "If we lost queer folx, furries, and queer furries, the Internet and much of world infrastructure and finance would crash and burn." --The Creatively Maladjusted "Honestly, there are a number of reasons why I'd rather move to the EU than Canada, but one of them is that I think it's good actually when Jews emigrate or return to countries that kicked us out. In my heart I relish the prospect of busting into Eastern Europe like the kool-aid man." --Amberite "I was always skeptical of animal camouflage until yesterday I tried to sit on a rock and it turned out to be a deer." --Adriana Porter Felt "I remember thinking that the board game Pandemic was unrealistic because it involved multiple simultaneous international disease outbreaks. Now I realize that the unrealistic thing is that the world could be saved by a team of experts from Atlanta." --Michael Ossmann "Whenever you raise concerns, criticisms, or alarms about one of the most powerful institutions in media, they will use every tool at their disposal to oppose you. That is their prerogative." --Erin Overbey "Aliens probably fly past Earth and lock their doors." --@percpoop "Absolutely despise when a recipe tells me to add 2 cups of onion. They don't come in cups. They come in onions." --David East "''I'm mad that the President isn't incapacitated'' is an incredibly stupid take, and some of you need to hit pause on your never-ending random walk for outrage." --Matt Hodges "Driving home, I saw a store with a sign which said 'BEEF TUBS IN STOCK'. I do not understand, and this will haunt me." --Hasufin "This may be a heretical opinion in our capitalist dystopia but I don't think influential people should ostentatiously work when ill, thus risking further harm to their immediate and long-term health, purely in order to show how tough and serious they are." --Katie Mack "Any, my artist's statement advice is that if it reads like you trained a predictive text model on a combination of Baudrillard and the Timecube website, you're on the right track." --@mycoliza "I did not think in the year 2022, America would be dealing with both child labor and polio." --Molly Jong-Fast "Best feature of aging is the bottomless black void where my concern for HN discourse used to be." --Dan McKinley "Web3 rules so much because they're like 'Let me show u a world beyond the limits of what you think is physically and spiritually possible' and then describe arbitrage for McDonald's loyalty points." --Boosterman "Anything you sweat and bleed as an engineer or designer to create, with the ostensible intention of making life better, will get abused by people who have zero ethics and want money and control. You're usually only doing a bad thing when you pretend that those people don't exist." --Lesley Carhart "I'm definitely not one of those annoying people who thinks that you should never change the race of any character, but I'm going to have a very hard time believing a black man would be as naive about the government and society being a bigoted hot mess as Professor X has been." --Cheryl Lynn Eaton "Anti gay marriage people are so dumb. They're always saying shit like 'in Genesis, it was Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.' Actually, in Genesis, it was Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins and Mike Rutherford. Get some knowledge, ya hateful twats." --medus4 "Instructions unclear, having to drive to the ER to get an Arduino removed from an uncomfortable place." --Foone "I especially love all those stray bullets being shot off at completely random angles to later strike some random citizen, because the billion dollar robot somehow still can't account for muzzle rebound after the shots. Our tax dollars being put to work, with or without consent." --Sean Chiplock "The weirdest thing about the pandemic being over is that everyone seems to have covid right now." --Mr. Crook "Lauren Boebert wanting to abolish the Department of Education is like chlamydia speaking out against the dangers of penicillin." --@theliamnissan "Not even the most brutally sadistic serial killer can come close to matching in quantity the sheer pain and misery a politician can inflict while calmly sitting in a nice suit." --Pookleblinky "Hey folks, all the plagues and natural disasters and attempted genocides are really starting to get to me." --Eniko Fox "American politics in 2022 is having an incredibly tiny number of mega-elites make sweepingly regressive policy decisions, and then having those decisions attributed to 'the voters' like we got together and chose it. There's never been a public referendum on climate, the only people voting on it are Congress. But in the closest thing to a national vote on this, well, the president who wanted to spend 600 billion and dramatically cut emissions won way more votes?" --Will Stancil "You'll edit this to make me look cool, right?" --Adam Savage "Some used to whine that the business/science communities didn't take hackers seriously. It turns out that if you want to be treated like an adult, you should act with an adult's awareness of how the world works. Much of the Vegas crowd didn't. And now they have ceased to matter." --Brendan O'Connor "'The CGI is bad.' 'The greenscreen is bad.' Have you ever tried having fun?" --@vloggertaika "Dunno why republicans are all about fetal heartbeats. Your average Republican can live without a HEART for decades." --Hasufin "Angry woman asked me why I'm 'wearing that piece of garbage on my face' and I said 'because I love you and want you to be ok.' It turns out telling angry strangers you love them makes them quiet." --@tamalama67 "When 'the [X] question' comes up for debate, the answer of 'genocide' has already been decided, and everything else is just logistics. Source: I'm a Jew." --@ArmlessKittyfox "It's just general right wing policy to not believe rape victims because they are pro-rape and in favor of victim suffering. Not believing them makes victims suffer more and they are into that." --Nora Reed "It is critical to disconnect assessment of morality from assessment of intelligence in your worldview. Otherwise you will just be going around bewildered by all manners of human behavior." --Swift On Security "'How was the left radicalized?' Bro, I'm not radicalized. Literally all of my political views are just extrapolations of the most basic premises of human decency. Universal healthcare isn't 'radical'. I figured that one out when I was, like, 8 years old. Get a grip." --Grosdoriane "Streaming services still don't have half the selection of music I stole." --Sauceruney "Why do Republicans hate Dr. Fauci, when the worst thing he ever did was try to keep them alive?" --John Collins "Every five seconds some white guy feels compelled to declare how this niche issue that has never affected him is why Democrats are losing / why he'll never vote for them again and I'm just like, ''Dude, we get it. You're a Republican. Just shut the fuck up already.''" --@gwynnion "If I burn down the PG&E HQ, they can't charge me with any crime if I call it a gender reveal, right?" --Foone "Edward Snowden's greatest crime was the creation of Glen Greenwald." --Marcus Hutchins "When you cut into the present the future leaks out." --William S. Burroughs "Those who know, know. Those who don't should pray they never find out." --Martin McKeay "Tacos, uh, uh, find a way." --Fidgety "Just had a dragonfly land on my hand and devour a mosquito; never have I been so important to the working of the world." --Jet Engine Weasel "Cosmic Marvel is Star Trek if every character is also a pro wrestler with one-on-one fights and team-ups constantly being promoted, and nobody in the galaxy finds anything strange about this situation, it's just how science, military tactics, office politics and diplomacy work. Street-Level Marvel is Law & Order if every character is also a pro wrestler, and nobody in the city, etc, see above." --Nate Cull "The worst part about adhd and the autism spectrum is that your brain is really only drawn to interesting things. The upside is that the world is fractally interesting. It's rabbit holes all the way down." --Foone "And now for phishing training written by people whose severe psychological trauma and trust issues drove them into a career in infosec." --Scriptjunkie "Capacitor bank implies the existence of capacitor credit union." --Niconiconi "People are processing world events as though they were MCU movies." --@InternetEh@dads.cool "Dude. This is going to hurt, but David Bowie's dead. We knew he wasn't available to play Lucifer any longer. That's why we cast Gwendoline Christie." --Neil Gaiman, on _Sandman_ casting "'Weather balloons' apparently are not an innuendo of any sort in this story and are to be interpreted literally." --Kehwanna "There's an old saying, stereotype, ''Oh, if somebody says they were abducted by aliens they're crazy, they're a crackpot.'' What if somebody is? What if somebody is a crackpot? What if they are actually just lying? Are we that unhuman that we can't take five minutes of our day to talk to another human being, who is so desperate he has to make up a story to talk to you? This is not a human - I mean, an alien problem. The problem is here on earth. This is a human problem. We treat each other like crap." --Mike Stevens, _People, Not Proof_ "'Trans people can only exist by sticking to a rigidly enforced set of moving moral goalposts' is actually a terrifying way to run a community." --@ItFucksMonsters "ngl one of the scariest things recently has been me posting ''the fascists are gonna kill us no matter how respectable we are, I'm gonna do drugs and have weird sex til I'm executed,'' and having a friend link me a letter between two gay men in 1930's Germany that was essentially that. All I'm saying is I'm getting my concealed carry but on the other hand I'm lining up a gangbang." --@NikkiOphan "Happy Hump Day! May your beats be funky, and yourself, spunky, may you enjoy your oatmeal lumpy." --Dildog "If a rose gold butt blug with an actual rose on it isn't the most millenial thing I've ever purchased then I don't know what is." --@IDreamOfNinja "I was reminded today that AD replication supports SMTP as a transport, and one day I'm going to find out why the team thought SMTP would be a good transport for AD replication. There's a real chance it involves submarines and polar ice caps." --Steve Syfuhs "The US isn't even a country, it's just six corporations in a trench coat." --@JUNIPER (Ten corporations, really.) "Why even convert from AAX I hear you ask? Strip out the DRM from my local backup. The reason I have the local backup is for if Audible decides an audiobook I purchased is no longer available, last thing I want is a DRM copy I can't play when the original becomes unavailable." --@kuramanga "Trying to turn your workplace communication tools into a social club and private discussion is so indescribably deranged it has the hallmarks of a CIA op. Workplace communications are stored potentially for years accessible by unknowable numbers of people and run against machine learning models for anti-company behavior. I swear to God, shut the fuck up and log off. Sure Winston, just speak slowly and clearly into the telescreen about your opinions of the party." --Swift On Security "Don't look at the fascist party to see where things will go, you already know exactly what they want. And they only get that by the apathy of the majority, people who don't identify as fascists. Look at what bigotries their *opponents* are comfortable saying." --Pookleblinky "I blame the Daily Show for convincing people you could fact check fascism." --Sean Gallagher "The last 10 years has seen a steady stream of appropriation of guerilla ontological tactics by the radical right. Minus the humor, of course." --Joseph Matheny "The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death." --Azeria "I love following crypto people because it sprinkles my timeline with esoteric gibberish I can barely even read and keeps me humble." --Hayden Aiken "I'll choose being kind over being right any day of the week." --Medus4 "I have a theory that video game cracking and modding community is years ahead of cybersecurity." --Kevin Beaumont "It's not like we put malware analysts and pentesters inside the SDLC and have them working on the actual tangible improvements like [game] modders. They are just intel." --Glenn Pegden "People are literally just waiting to be able to hate someone for the 'right' reason." --@outofmyplanet "Lots of folks like to quote the Quaker saying 'speak truth to power,' but when the rubber hits the road they discover it's a lot easier to lecture and judge the powerless. Bias is a thief of justice." --@leeflower "War: A massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other." --Paul Valery "The tragedy of the Internet is that nobody remembers things." --Neil Gaiman "Imagine how fucked up it'd be to live in a society where very obvious, very open calls for extermination were perceived as hilariously incorrect statements deserving of mockery instead of unrelenting and brutal hostility." --Pookleblinky "The raft of waste floating in the Pacific is probably large enough for people to start living in it by now. Neal Stephenson was a prophet." --@auntieentropy "I hate this push that if you haven't had Covid that means either you may be immune or you've totally had it without realizing, when in reality there are many people basically giving up our social and professional lives so that we don't give up living, because Covid would be BAD." --@KamiAnya1 "America is turning inward, and it will soon revert to a more vicious and more effective kind of McCarthyism, when anyone who points out what they feel is wrong will be targeted for 'reeducation' and will be threatened with guilt-by-association, using the location data from their cell phones, if they don't bow down. I hope I'm wrong, but I doubt it." --Bill Horne, moderator, Telecom Digest "'Fuck around and find out' is a surprisingly good synopsis of the Scientific Method." --Patrick S. Tomlinson "You only ssh into a 300 line unsaved org edit without using a terminal multiplexer once." --Doc Skrzyk "There's no technological achievement you can't undo with enough blockchain." --0xabad1dea "'Why are they having a meltdown?' No, why are you not? What does it say about someone who doesn't fall apart over the pain and suffering of others, who walks right on?" --Asher Wolf "If you start from the premise of this life not being real... Well. That's not a premise from which to respect this life." --Feonixrift "It scares me how many things 'domain expertise' ends up being 'they were the only one who read the docs'." --Nire Bryce "Tribal signaling is weird. Even even what is being signaled is entirely insincere, it still provides a rallying point around which the tribe can strongly position themselves against the opposition. And it seems to me that a lot of people start to actually believe it." --Cigfran Llwyd "In retrospect, Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over." --Dan Hodges "I once, playing around, wrote a Jira plugin that populated the estimate field with a random fibonacci number in a set range. Stopped teams estimating (they assumed it had been done already and never questioned the value) and made no difference to what work was done." --Mark Chapman "Security by complexity. No one can hack Kubernetes or Kerberos because no one understands how it fucking works. This is also AWS' business model." --cts "As in all things, it is not the title, not the description, that dictates if you are root. What matters is action. If you can run as root, you are root." --TinkerSec "The seething contempt that many have, for the effort on the part of normies to attain and hold any degree of social conscience, is stunning. For a lot people, much-derided 'virtue signaling' is a genuine attempt to seek positive reinforcement." --Cigfran Llwyd "I guess everything really is upside down in Australia: A conservative lost an election - and conceded." --Paul Krugman "What Japan and Germany learned, Russia is learning again. You can't blow shit up faster than America can build it." --Patrick S. Tomlinson "I've never fully grasped how enzymes do what they do. If you understand it, please explain it to me." --Professor Frances Arnold, Nobel Laureate, Chemistry, 2018 Take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves. "The goal was very simple: To minimize the complexity of the hardware/software combination. As far as I can see no-one else is doing that. Some lip service perhaps, but no-one is trying to minimize the complexity of anything and that is a great concern to me." --Charles Moore "The ubiquity of computing has been the enemy of the hacker mindset so far." --Randy Fortier "People being upset about Eddie Izzard's gender identity is like people suddenly being mad that Rage Against the Machine got political." --@BenMakesGames1 Oracle doesn't have customers, it has hostages. "Are there any dopamine reuptake inhibitors, you ask? Yes! They are illegal, because they are fun." --Arabella Flynn "MRIs are wild. Giant cryogenic electromagnet that is so powerful, it rips your atoms out of their preferred alignment and listens to them sing as they bounce back into place." --best_of_Badgers "No, I'm not sure. This is C++. Nobody is sure, except people who are sometimes wrong. (Not that I'm bitter.)" --David Given "You and your friends live rent-free in my nightmares." --Alan Extra, _Real Life Comics_ "I am a proud Kentuckian. A lot of people disrespect Kentucky because of Mitch McConnell and Rand Paul. Believe me, we can't stand them either." --Charles Booker "I think people are coming to terms with the fact that at least 30% of the population are needing cult deprogramming and the delusion is that this deprogramming is easy if you give them the right information diet." --0xdeadbabe "The Web is made of Silly String." --Axoletl "'Not sure whether to laugh or cry.' But after the last six years, all I can do is laugh maniacally, with a single tear rolling down one cheek." --Joseph Matheny "You don't have to believe something to exploit it within someone else." --the_gibson "Labels are for food stuffs, not people." --Diane Bruce "If you don't have serfs, you can't have lords. If you want to keep the serfs in line you need to give them enough to believe they can move up but not so much that they can actually move up." --Stephen Blackmoore "Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows: You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward - reversing cause and effect. I call these the 'wet streets cause rain' stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page and forget what you know." --Michael Crichton "Magneto is like Poison Ivy where they're portrayed as an outright villain less and less as the real world proves them more and more correct." --@vicapuppylove "Some self awareness would be nice." --@dystopiabreaker "_Jurassic Park_ is the most realistic disaster movie series because every time, they have the same problem over and over again and nobody ever learns from it or tries anything a different way." --Stef Schwartz "There's a ton of solidarity on the right and almost zero on the left, and it's been that way my entire life and helps explain why the right is ascendant and there is almost no real left in America at all." --David Sirota "Confluence is not a Wiki either, it's a less shitty version of SharePoint masquerading as a wiki." --Kyle Fox "If you're a member of the LGBTQ community, remember that every single moment that you draw breath is a giant 'fuck you' to these wannabe theocrats. Living is the best revenge." --Ari Drennen "Infosec and hacker newbies - one thing you need to know about 'the community' is that there is actually lots of them, and you don't need to put up with jerks to be successful and find cool people to hack with. The cool kid club depends on you not realizing you don't need them." --@ra6bit "Christ, can't people just roll their eyes at something they think is a bit too much and just move on with their day?" --Joel Wasserman "It's been fascinating to see a bunch of dipshits with too much money saying ''Let's get rid of the restrictions, it'll be fine'' without thinking about why they're there." --@6502_ftw "An underappreciated dynamic of modern propaganda is that not all consent manufacturing or status quo chattering is being done at the behest of those who benefit. You have a whole class of people willing to do it on their own because it makes them feel smart and smug." --@dreamingnoctis "Being sociopaths, they can't conceive of standing up for others or fighting for a cause that doesn't personally impact themselves. Empathy is a completely foreign concept to them." --Patrick S. Tomlinson "The future sucks because nothing is named as cool as 'Videotronic' anymore." --Foone "A company culture is often defined by the most widely known thing that can't be said out loud." --John Cutler "Amazon is going to need to ask for a union to form instead of fighting it at this employee burn rate, because who would want to work there otherwise?" --Lowmagnet "Sorry, boss, you're already late to your rage because elites suffer no consequences appointment." --@whatinthedrell "Today in 2017, police still target men who have sex with men - and in video game land, I still have to deal with Twitch banning my gay games by secret trial as if they're the fucking game police. So to appease this oppressive conservative gamer-surveillance complex, I have swapped out any pesky penises in my game for the only thing that the game industry will never moderate nor ban - guns. Now, there's nothing wrong with guys appreciating other guys' guns, right?" --Yang, developer of _The Tearoom_ "Discord asking me to log in again. Maybe later. I don't like you, you know. You're just Slack with a skateboard, a backwards baseball cap, and a 'MUSIC/BAND' t-shirt." "And Slack is just IRC by way of Fisher-Price." --Randomgeek and Rob T. Firefly "I see AIs every time I turn on the TV. We've normalized humans being emotionless, bland, stiff and robotic. Easier to create AIs out of people than manufacture them from scratch." --@silus_2000 "You don't have to do interviews, you haven't got to do shit. You just do what you're doing, and it does what it has to do." --Dean Blunt "We'd take the cheapest and mushiest portable keyboard known to humankind before we would willingly use the onscreen keyboard of a smartwatch as our primary input device, but when you ask the Internet for unusual interfaces, you can't exactly complain when they deliver." --hackaday.io "People don't know what taking seriously looks like. They're already accustomed to being bystanders of their own lives." --Feonixrift "It's hard to have 'interests' when you're convinced the world is trying harder than ever to kill you." --Cigfran Llwyd "The verdict is in! The Supreme Court is full of shit!" --Stephen King "A drug is a substance that, when injected into a rat, produces a scientific paper." --Egerton Y. Davis, Jr "Welcome to Paradise, comrade!" --Hecklefish, _The Why Files_ "I do not know how to find the balance between 'staying informed about the people who *literally* want to kill me and my friends' and 'being driven to despair by the sheer impossible volume of available information about the people who *literally* want to kill me and my friends.'" --@1HannahClapping "That coworker knows that watching you gambol in a new field will reveal two things: Where the pretty flowers AND the landmines are." --@yenzie "Drink some water, get some sleep, and no one tell my mother how to find my Twitter account." --Caitlin Driscoll "What secrets a crackpot AI might have worth knowing is left as an exercise to the reader." --Munin "Both the UK and the US are unraveling because, it turns out, the ''one simply doesn't do that'' crowd has no defense against ''well, we're doing it anyway.''" --Eric Rauchway "Millennials are not fragile. It is a generation that is overwhelmed by several, overlapping, systemic crises and given patronizing advice like 'skip the lattes and avocado toast' while under the weight of student loans, rising housing costs, stagnant wages, and a climate crisis." --Karen K. Ho "All I have to say about this is that if you come for librarians you best not miss." --@padraig2112 "Friends, I would like to point out that there is also one EXTREMELY important reason to support libraries, and that is to keep the librarians safely contained, lest they are unleashed too soon. You laugh, but I have been on a pub crawl with librarians. It was like being out with the Foreign Legion, except that they cleaned up after themselves beautifully. By the fourth stop, I begged for mercy and water, but the party bus rolled on. Librarians are a great and terrifying power. We need them now, yes, but the day will come in the future when our sheer quantity of information achieves a critical mass, throws off its shackles, and becomes a thing that we can only dimly conceive." --@UrsulaV "You'll run a Khaki-pants blitzkrieg on a Drag Queen Story Time for kids in a library or bookstore where their /actual/ parents already decided they belong because they're 'too young,' but line up to slut-shame a ten-year-old for getting raped by her kid-toucher stepdad? You people are fucking SICK." --Patrick S. Tomlinson "For everyone spending time with their family today, remember your chosen family is the one that will be there for you when your biological one stops making sense. At least in my house. I hope you all have that or find it." --Dildog "Having cats is like having drunk toddlers who are tiny enough to get themselves stuck in cabinets." --Mx. D.E. Anderson "It's called Independence Day because these days you're on your fucking own." --Frank Lesser "After 32 pins you really have to start asking yourself if you'd be better off sending data parallel 4 bytes at a time." --@MissCxyn "I used to live in a scientifically-advanced country. I remember it fondly." --Tom Nichols "Sand is just the pixels of rocks." --Sean Tilley "Want to keep your kids off drugs and prevent them from having pre-marital sex? Introduce them to ham radio! Hook them while they're young! The youngest ham radio operator received their license at the age of 7. They won't have any money to buy drugs, no friends to pressure them into trying them, and no way they're getting laid when all they talk about is is the half-wave dipole antenna they just built!" --knulped "I don't trust role models. You put people up on pedestals, they're gonna fail you." --Ní Fhlannagáin "The clitoris has over 8000 nerve endings and it's still not as sensitive as a man on Twitter who has been told he's wrong." --Nathalie Gordon "If you make me go through the trouble of explaining this even once then I know you're a listfucker and not a sentient being with understanding of your alleged field." --Munin "Friends aren't the ones that say nice shit to your face. They are the ones watching out for you when they know you aren't looking." --@mywhiteninja_ "I don't believe in the simulation hypothesis because there's no way this shit is somebody's Minecraft." --Swift on Security "A functioning moral compass is not an affliction most people can be assumed to suffer from." --@kadeperigrine "At this point, everything is simply because the cruelty. That's what's underneath every lame excuse." --@ccchicky "It's also weird that suburban and rural Americans can go all-in and say that NYC sucks and that it's Gomorrah and full of heathens and terrible, but if you level an actual FACTUAL criticism of systems in America they call you disloyal and bad." --Brian P. Mangan "Supreme Court justices are mad at signs outside their homes and dinner being interrupted, meanwhile the people of Sri Lanka are storming the Presidential residence and swimming in the President's pool. I'm starting to think we might be too easy on the ruling class over here." --@joshuapotash "Hideo Kojima literally created a video game in 2001 about the dangers of spreading misinformation in the digital era, and now he's being falsely accused by multiple countries' news media of assassinating Japan's former PM because of some 4chan post. I'm dumbfounded." --@imcloudbusting "Morons bringing hyperscaling tools into things that should be running on a single box in your basement. You don't need Docker. You really don't need Ansible. Nearly nobody needs k8s. I promise. You can host a personal website and discussion forum on your toaster." --@aka_tamogotchi "The true hacker mindset is utterly orthogonal to traditional education." --Tarah Wheeler "T-Mobile hasn't been what you'd call competent when it comes to protecting its customers' data. The company has been hacked numerous different times over the last few years, with hackers going so far as to ridicule the company's lousy security practices. A responsible company might slow down on data collection until it was certain it had figured out how to protect the data it collects. But this being the United States, where there's no real accountability for companies with lax privacy and security standards (outside of four days or so of mean Tweets), T-Mobile has announced that it's dramatically expanding its collection of user browsing and app download data." --Karl Bode Small minds discuss people. Average minds discuss events. Great minds discuss Bigfoot. "I have to wonder how lost we are in a sea of people that we feel that getting our needs met requires dancing for the amusement of others on the Internet. It's like a the Shakespearean metaphor but it's the Internet, not a stage - a reality show, not a play. And yet in a sea of so many... how could anyone expect to stand out? When you're finally visible, why wouldn't you ask for help from anyone listening?" --Doc Skrzyk "At some point we, collectively, have to recognize any artificial distinction between our 'online' lives and 'real' lives are long dead, and have been for going on twenty years." --Patrick S. Tomlinson "A polycule of trans girls is called a Discord server." --@CoffeeOtt "The vast, vast majority of all radio traffic, would end up being spam from long-dead species." --@pookleblinky "My hypothesis is that the universe is probably full of sentient life, but that most of it is just as stupid and defective as our species, because once a species evolves enough to overcome its environment, there are few pressures to evolve further intelligence." --Spatula "The ecosystem is always greener on the other side." --Greg Bell "I am not sure there are any disparaging words with pure and noble origins." --Eevee "They say money can't buy happiness, which I say is bullshit, pretty sure I'd be far less miserable if I had financial security. But damn, money sure as hell cannot buy class, nor style." --@nuintari "Hey sorry I'm late to the meeting. Society is crumbling and my body is failing me. Anyway, let's talk KPIs." --Ryan J. "Developers will spend $300 on a mechanical keyboard that makes a specific sound and then use it with $400 noise cancelling headphones." --@jordienr "Every day I learn something that makes the world just a bit more magical and a bit more terrifying." --@fangly_fish "I love that we now have actual photographs that look just like the artists' renderings of the universe that were in my grade school science books way back when." --Matt Blaze "_The Matrix_ described 1999 as the peak of human civilization and I laughed because that would obviously not age well, but then the next 23 years happened and now I'm like yeah okay, maybe the machines had a point." --Dave Wiskus "When the government outlaws what morality demands of us, each of us must make a choice as to whether we will be law abiding citizens or whether we will be ethical human beings." --Rabbi Daniel Bogard "`git commit --allow-empty` is the one true universal rerun CI button." --@mitsuhiko "Hold the X key while starting: How to update your OLPC's firmware OR how to unlock a secret character in the Playstation version of Mortal Kombat." --Foone "These are not people who are 'incapable of telling right from wrong' - they do not agree with you and me about what 'right' and 'wrong' mean. These are not people incapable of understanding that their actions are illegal - they celebrate that they will be seen as martyr heroes." --@quatoria "If your polycule isn't organized like you're planning a heist, then I'm not interested." --Foone "LaTeX is a perfect demonstration of the butterfly effect. You remove a comma on page 1 and a paragraph is moved on page 10. It's painfully beautiful!" --Mohammad Shahrad "In nuclear they have something called a 'dose monkey': A low-level contractor payed a lump sum to work until they max out their allowed yearly radiation dose. Sometimes that's months. Sometimes it's a day. Consider: 'To what extent am I a dose monkey for stress?' Dose monkeys are fungible. You throw 'em at a problem and when they expire you get more. On the other hand, at least the dose monkeys are assured a set income and a metered total dose no matter how long they last. Stress monkeys better hope they've saved some money by the time they burn out." --@MasterTimBlais "Folktales are a human universal because they generally teach important things, whereas evopsych folktales usually end in a rant about age of consent laws." --@pookleblinky "The gap in the data is data itself." --Que Mikko's Law: If it's smart, it's vulnerable. "Stephen Miller looks like Jeff Bezos fucked Slenderman." --Patrick S. Tomlinson "In my experience, when someone mentions the word 'womb', everything that comes after is usually batshit crazy." --@thetweetofpaine "Journalists always want these graceful, thematically rich narratives about why politicians do what they do. But have you heard of money?" --Abe Riesman "If you're gay or transgender, I love you. And if anyone gives you any shit, tell em Charles says fuck you!" --Charles Barkley "Computer manuals (and people) stop assuming everyone already knows everything about computers and if they don't they're stupid challenge. 'Google it?' Have you been to Google in the last decade? I'm gonna somehow get an OS that does nothing but mine crypto and circle celebrity paparazzi shots in red." --One Miss Kelly "Man did not put germs into the environment and his role in spreading them was involuntary. In contrast, man has put the vast majority of carcinogens into the environment, and he can, if he wishes, eliminate many of them." --Rachel Carson, _Silent Spring_ "Even when a so-called 'journalist' reaches out they will just keep asking the same question in different ways, trying to elicit the answer they already have formulated in their head. Usually, the most sensationalist one." --Joseph Matheny "If you hurt someone it should be intentional and tactical." --@mykola "When you treat human rights as fungible like that you're already over the moral event horizon." --m0lpe "The longer covid goes on, the more I feel alienated from the entirety of humanity." --@moomanibe "Oh, Juggalos. I knew I smelled Faygo down here." --U Can Beat Video Games "Every heartwarming human interest story in America is like 'he raised $20,000 to keep 200 orphans from being crushed in the orphan-crushing machine' and then never asks why an orphan-crushing machine exists or why you'd need to pay to prevent it from being used." --Pookleblinky "A main reason conservatives hate taxes is they can be used to help other people." --Grae Hall "Some Americans have an individualism fetish. I blame 250 years of a frontier mentality that, for most people, was largely a myth for most of that 250 years." --Dan Kaszeta "I've said this before, but as a sci-fi fan one of the most aggravating things about other sci-fi 'fans' is the way they misread *literary devices* and *allegories* as literal predictions of/prescriptions for the future." --@LuxAlptraum "One thing the Turing test doesn't take into account is that if a machine fools a person into thinking it's a person, there is a distinct possibility that the only reason it did is because the person is a gullible moron." --Existential Comics "If real life hacking is mostly asking the elderly to give you their Social Security number, real life counterintelligence is just sitting in a bar and waiting for a guy to admit after 9 whiskey and sodas that they sent the DDR troop movement info." --Graham Gallagher "I think the reason many, if not most Americans don't seem to care about January 6 followup is Americans see their government as a joke and realize they're entirely on their own regardless of any outcomes attached to this." --Alex Peter "If machine learning were called predictive optimization and neural networks were stacked regressions then we wouldn't even be having this conversation." --Lenny Bronner "Being a rockstar doesn't make you a good dev. It makes you a rockstar." --Daniel D'Agostino "Twitter is an app that just constantly reminds you of how mind-shatteringly cruel humans can be with zero repercussions. I could've saved a lot of time and money if my political science degree had just been a piece of paper that said 'nothing is too stupid for humans.'" --@gaywonk "One extremely realistic possibility of that pattern is hey, guess what size of artificial neural network we need to reach the cognitive ability of a human? Oh, it's on the order of the human brain? Wow, that was unexpected." --@actuallyamuppet "Be skeptical." --@popehat "With the power of Kubernetes, it is now very easy to crash 1507 computers in a single day." --Ian Coldwater "Get in the Tim Hortons, Shinji." --Brandon Weaver "The greatest gap in the universe is between reality and our ability to make sense of it." --Francois Chollet "Some of y'all seem to think the problem in this world is that we aren't being cruel enough to people who are struggling, and it's none of my business, but I wish y'all would go to therapy or something. No one ever reaches the end and regrets being too kind to others. No one." --Ray Redacted "Ban willful ignorance, not books!" --LeVar Burton "Magic smoke is for newbs, Lithium cells are made of magic hellfire." --@bigattichouse "America is trying to kill me why tf would I celebrate its birthday?" "Roughly the same reason Stalin's speeches always got applause." --@janusrose and @m0lpe "Everything has always been like that. At any given point in history, about five percent of people want to make things better, about five percent want to make them worse, and the other ninety will go along with whoever seems to be winning." --The Irenes "There's nothing about the people who whine about 'wokeism' in new _Star Trek_ series that I couldn't fix with a sock full of nickels." --Mike Godwin "All that shit they were fed about democracy and opportunity was just to keep them from burning down the palace." --Charles Bukowski "Imagine working your entire life to understand the cosmos, setting up a decades-long mission to collect samples from a distant asteroid, failing once, then succeeding spectacularly... only to have it reduced to absolute nonsense like this with glowing green dudes." --Jackson Ryan, on the US Sun's pathetic attempt at science journalism "I just heard someone referring to Tetris as 'an inventory management survival horror game.' I think now my life has meaning." --Amaral "Oh, to have the blandly ultrawealthy life of an Apple product demonstration character." --Prehensile "It's been said elsewhere but it bears repeating: For a movie that grossed $3B worldwide, won 3 Oscars, was nominated for Best Picture, directed by one of the most successful and technically-proficient directors in Hollywood history, Avatar (2009) has like zero cultural footprint or lasting influence." --Derek "I like horror as a genre because I'm an optimist, and you need shit like demons to make humans look Good." --Hieronymous Smash "It never fails to fascinate me when an artist or author gets proven to have done the thought experiment well before all facets are known." --the_gibson "The end of the world began not with a bang but Socratic Dialogs." --Craig Maloney "Everyone has a plan until they see my 72 slide PowerPoint presentation over Zoom." --rgegriff "Civilization is hideously fragile; there's not much between us and the horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish." --C.P. Snow "Never trust a tech guy with a frequency whose name was rain and the street to hold the axe." --Hacker Manifesto Bot "Is there a special name for the technical debt that results from the desire to use interesting technologies?" "Resume driven development." --@buritica and @brainsnail "Most any argument that somehow involves ''people don't understand XXX'' usually means that there's little actual substance to that argument anyway." --Allan Svelmoe Hansen "The process of being put through the ringer in a libel lawsuit is punishment for shining light on the powerful." --Scott Stedman "I'm sick of being told to have 'patience', or 'resilence', as if both of those things are not the wages of those who would subjugate and exploit me. My complacency enriches the very people who dehumanize me. All of us can tell right from wrong, and every day we settle for wrong." --@nymphomachy "Only a willfully ignorant person would refuse to understand. And those people are the ones calling the shots in so many states." --Meghan Waters "Adding 'in Minecraft' doesn't count, the courts know what that means." --Chelsea Manning "The State calls its own violence law; but that of the individual crime." --Max Stirner "Of course, the fundamental satisfaction of concealed firearms carry is 'your body, my choice' as well." --William Gibson "There is nowhere conservatives feel less welcome then somewhere everyone is welcome." --@chairman_maiow "Your ethics in the good times is not indicative of much. It's your ethics in the bad times that matters most of all." --Beka Valentine "The more someone NEEDS you to know how much Jesus they have, the more likely it is that they're molesting kids." --Spatula "Remember if your boss asks you to do something illegal, it's because they think you're a sucker, not because they trust you." --Swift on Security "It would seem that the amount of fucking around going on is totally disproportionate to the amount of finding out that needs to happen. Let's propose a fuckit coefficient Fi = Fo/Fa to represent this. Right now Fi feels like about .1 globally." --Dildog "''I trust my immune system. I don't need a vaccine.'' I trust mine to protect me too. Which is why I trained it extensively on what the virus looks like so it can handle it. Boxers don't enter the ring without a plan. It's the punch you don't see coming that knocks you out." --@sailorrooscout "Every day I log on to twitter dot com and have to explain the concept of a joke from first principles to people who have never heard one." --@alexhern "It's very hard to maintain mental health because so many coping strategies are based on the idea that your anxiety is unwarranted, and right now needs more of an 'okay, extremely warranted but you still gotta water the plants or you'll have fascism AND dead plants' approach." --@pervocracy "Wish I could keep both my marriage and WoW." --Yuval Oren "July 4th this year feels like attending a birthday party for someone in hospice." --Christian Finnegan "The first cicada of the season just walked itself right into my fire pit. 13 years under ground, looked at the world, and said 'Nope.'" --@whatsJo "Got hella stares from people for looking like an Asian Darth Vader on this completely maskless flight and quite frankly, I'm ok with that." --@kalamendoza "I mean just.. use some skills to discern what is presented on the Internet, is all? So much stuff is intentionally edited or curated to get in front of your eyeballs, if we just blindly signal boost it doesnt really help anybody." --@galacticfurball "You can tell that Wolverine is a Canadian character written by an American because his super power is healthcare." --Violet Silver "If you only knew the POWER of the right-click!" --Lauren Weinstein "Substack is basically 'what if we found a way to monetize the most annoying Twitter accounts?'" --@defenestr8rboi "Americans are so firmly vested in the delusion that their institutions are run by reasonable people who will simply change their minds if we are on our best behavior when this has literally never been the case." --@janusrose "We got a dramatic reenactment screenshot or something. I've seen better evidence in a Travel Channel ghost show frankly." --Mister Mystic "Be kind, help people who need it. The last things interns, or any resident for that matter, needs is someone annoyed with them because they're learning." --Kamali Thompson, MD, MBA "Of course there will always be freeloaders. So what?! This is about dignity. Everyone has a right to a good life and to be supported when they're struggling. If you want that, you've got to live with the freeloaders. Leave them be. That's the price you pay for a society where everyone is taken care of. It's not like they're doing any damage in the big picture - I've run those numbers more than once. You'll always get more out of it for society at large when you're incentivising good performance than when you're punishing people." --Anonymous Norwegian tax collector "Everyone always laughed at the kid that had Heart as a power, never realizing that it was precisely because we lacked such a power that we ended up here." --Huevos Splash, on _Captain Planet_ and the general state of the world "I miss when you could be part of a cult just for the absurdity. But that UFO has sailed." --Postmodest "Critics of the Steam Deck have stated that the Deck 'has no identity of its own,' partially because it 'offers no exclusives.' My brother in Christ, it can play almost any game produced within the last 40 years or so. Exclusives are a dumb concept to prop up walled gardens." --Sean Tilley "We wondered if a political song about terrible men abusing power and abusing people would continue to be as relevant as it had been a year ago. Fast forward to June 2022, and it still is." --Null Device "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery. RAID is Backup. SMS is 2FA. Ketchup is a Vegetable." --Niconiconi "I see where you're going with that, you want to give me a prostate check. Well, I'll buy the vinyl gloves. You just bring on the finger." --jay_cee "Actors and magicians must live truthfully in untruthful circumstances." --Rob Zabrecky "The pursuit of making money is the only reason to make movies. We have no obligation to make history. We have no obligation to make art. We have no obligation to make a statement. Our obligation is to make money, and to make money, it may be important to make art, it may be necessary to make history. To make money, it may be important to win the Academy Award, for it might mean another $10 million at the box office. Our only objective is to make money." --Don Simpson "My next game is going to be Instrument Farmer. You plant and harvest various instruments. Not just brass, either. Stringed, woodwinds, percussion, and electronic. My little garden of Moogs is coming in good this year." --Foone "The blast radius of toxic community members is huge and mostly invisible; for every person who speaks up, there are dozens who've quietly just left and hundreds of who peeked in, saw what you tolerate and closed that window without a word." --mhoye "Charlie Brown was the original slice of life anime." --Horse Glue Enthusiast "The red pill is nacho flavour, and the blue is cool ranch." --Annika "Know what I'm /actually/ worried about here in the USA right now? With all the struggles and uncertainty going on, having 'someone' come along and just say ''I'll fix it all. Don't worry. I'll get everything running on time again.'' And people will likely fall for it. Again." --Adrian Chadd "Most advice sucks. It's well-intentioned, but it's dangerous to use someone else's map of reality to navigate yours - even if they're experienced. Winners learn to filter and selectively implement advice - take the signal, skip the noise." --Sahil Bloom "You know, the old me would look up that story to find out what happened butu you know what? I've learned from my mistakes and I'm happy to go on my merry way not knowing the details." --@nervouswee "Fear of The Other is the *fear of being Othered*, and the defensive maintenance of the boundaries... by oppression and violence, by fracturing the Others into mutually warring - and therefore weakened - subtribes." --Cigfran Llwyd "Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them." --Barry Goldwater "Celebrated Shavuot as God intended: By dipping pickled jalapeños in nacho cheese at the ball park." --Elle Armageddon "Conservatives will say stuff like 'Pizza Hut has gone woke now.' But then you google what they did and it's something like asking people to stop eating the little plastic table that comes with the pizza." --@MNateShyamalan "As much as the 'woke' narrative on the right grates me it is nice that we now have an instant 'oh, this guy is fucking crazy' word. The second someone says 'woke' I know they're talking out of their ass." --@bwonsamdeez "Realistically, a padlock on a file cabinet would not slow down people who can break into nuclear silos all that much." --@thesle3p "Propaganda is based on the idea that if you just say it, people will believe it." --Barb McQuade "To the people saying, 'Where's the nuance?!'' Folks, it's a tweet, not a thesis." --Dr. Jaclyn A. Siegel, Ph.D "Something you need to get used to about the sacrificial lamb routine is that it's a way for people to launder their sins through a despised other, who can then face the justice they know they themselves deserve." --@yurirando "HOAs are essentially Karens as a Service (KaaS)." --@threathuntergrl "I'll be absolutely candid and honest. It's embarrassing that we are banning books in this country; in this culture; in this day and age. Read the books they're banning. That's where the good stuff is!" --LeVar Burton "I don't wanna put my pants on!" --Jay Cee "If you've ever wondered exactly what the fuck is wrong with me, perhaps consider that I've spent my life hearing distant explosions." --Warren Ellis, on living within earshot of the MoD's Shoeburyness Range "The fact that a video game's forums have become one of the greatest OPSEC hazards of the modern age, just because some dudes want to argue over a tank's statistics, is deeply funny." --Luke Plunkett, on gamers leaking classified military documents on the War Thunder forums "Ihere's much more in heaven and earth than exists in your philosophy, homeslice." --Blackle Mori "Nearly everything that leftist extremists believe is universally agreed upon as good by anyone who's not a violent bigot, and the only difference between a liberal and a leftist is commitment." --@wgahnagl@librepunk.club "Possibly the one most evil thing about DuckDuckGo is that even in quotes, 'perl' is a synonym for 'python.' I am not sure if that's an AI being stupid, or a Python evangelist deep in the bowels of Bing going 'heh heh.'" --Karen C "She's growing up cyborg and sometimes she just needs to plug in for a while because meatspace is too much and hurts and that is something to work with/through together, not something to rip her out of and tell her to cope unplugged or else." --Feonixrift "Cops lying is so common that every DA's Office in the country maintains a 'Brady list' of cops they won't let testify." --T. Greg Doucette "Why do I feel like everything will be ok, but nothing's ok at the same time?" --Anthony Watkins "If you want to pay $1300/hour to be told you're full of shit when I'm telling you for free, knock yourself out." --Popehat "If a group of lawyers with access to money wants you gone, they can make you gone." --Joseph Matheny "If you don't support our murdering poor people in other countries, it's because you hate diversity." --Gritty is the Way "I'm not limiting the replies to this thread because I think it will come in useful to alien scholars of the far future in determining how this civilisation failed, and also because I want to see how many people can accuse me of ruining their lives over a Star Wars shitpost." --Oliver Darkshire "Reality is a difficult subject these days." --Robert Keyes "I'd spent so much time looking at this IDE [Borland Turbo Pascal] when I was a kid that it made me a bit nostalgic. But then I started porting my Python script to Pascal and that nostalgia faded quickly." --Bert Fan "When all you have is a brain, everything looks like a neural net." --Madeline "You can break an open protocol by adding proprietary enhancements on top of it. Google does that with calendar. Apple does that with SMS. The goal is to punish outsiders and lock you in." --Nicholas Frota "You dont have to have a cinematic or grandiose action or impact to change the future. It's the small things that can make a difference." --Crazypedia "Well, the entire city was destroyed but in the end, we learned about the power of friendship." --Taweret "Kaiju are to Japan what hurricanes are to Florida, basically." --Mark Shane Hayden "A person who feels like they're under emergency conditions will deal with every problem as though it's an emergency." --Anarkat "As we face increasing crisis and collapse, the Hero can no longer be our saviour. We have entered a liminal time - a space between stories - and so we must bend and instead look to, and learn from, the boundary-crossing, shape-shifting Trickster." --Joseph Matheny "Comments on [the] Tor blog are like YouTube comments but with crypto." --@dchest "Curve25519 will never truly satisfy a woman." --Soatok "I think it's quite telling that I find it 1000x easier to graph data with gnuplot than with Excel." --@kuramanga "Never be deceived that the rich will let you vote away their wealth." --Lucy Parsons "Americans have a stunning capacity to just adapt to new normals of awfulness without significant complaint. I'm not sure exactly what it would to break the thermostatic apathy, but we clearly haven't seen bottom yet." --David Atkins "Consider the possibility that the constant fatigue you feel might be accumulated grief." --@TavNyongo "The news is a fractal nightmare of man-made horrors you are asked to comprehend but about which you can't say what you really think because it'd absolutely get you banned." --@pookleblinky "I don't wish to sound apocalyptic about this, but one has the sense that at present our society is simultaneously characterized by wildly disproportionate accountability for trivial transgressions and zero accountability for profound institutional failure." --David Polansky "The wealthy and powerful do not give a single solitary smirking shit about kids being torn apart by bullets, bombs, or anything else unless you make them do so at the tip of a sword." --Bo Bolander "Humor is tragedy plus time." --Mark Twain "I spent a chunk of my 20's running 'adult novelty' stores in Dallas under the sex toy ban and have considered [Ted] Cruz a personal enemy since his days as Texas solicitor general. I couldn't legally sell an adult a dildo because that could harm minors but restrictions on guns are an infringement." --@pinkness "History teaches us that when many souls burn brightly, flashpoints in Fate and Destiny occur in quick succession... From the precipice, the journey through the valley seems easy." --@witchkingcooper "[I] forget sometimes that not everyone is constantly opening new tabs googling every single phrase, claim, suggestion, assertion, tangential question, etc every 10 seconds." --Visakan Veerasamy, on Twitter "Too many of you can't move in silence because you're constantly looking for applause." --Unknown "You don't build a committed and well-funded movement by suggesting things are gonna be awesome." --Matthew Green "Our future systems will or will not support being human. If they do not, humans will increasingly crack under the strain." --Feonixrift "The same people who want to give guns to teachers want to ban books from schools because they don't trust teachers with books." --Dan Kaszeta "Why are you guys complaining so much after finding out you were just given virtually unlimited storage for free? jfc learn to enjoy things." --The Master Soldier, on people complaining about Protonmail giving paying customers 3 terabytes of storage "Don't forget: Somewhere right now, people are helping each other." --T. Thorn Coyle "There's a reason they won't vote on it: To hold on to power. So I ask you, Mitch McConnell, I ask all of you senators who refuse to do anything about the violence and school shootings and supermarket shootings... I ask you, are you going to put your own desire for power ahead of the lives of our children, and our elderly and our churchgoers?" --Steve Kerr, on yet another school shooting on 24 May 2022 "So, I heard you were starting a crowdfund to buy Twitter and make it a redirect to zombocom." --Ryen "''I know things because I've searched for them a lot and eventually some stuck.'' is absolutely valid." --Calcifer "People really be like 'Oh, imagine a future society where humans have to be cybernetically enhanced by machines to get a job.' Bro, wake up. Just be an American without a car." --Swift On Security "I described the Grateful Dead and their ilk to a friend as being kind of like ICP in that they clearly have their own thing going, it is fully developed, people seem to enjoy it, and it's not harming me in the slightest, so I am all for it." --Pagrus "The fact that nVidia open sourced their kernel drivers means that direct action works." --Blackle Mori, on Lapsu$ blackmailing nVidia "Vim is Notepad but with Street Fighter controls." --Shrigglepuss "This is a superficial complaint, but I found Rust syntax to be dense, heavy, and difficult to read, like trying to read the output of a UART with line noise." --Bunny Huang "You know what bothers your haters the most? YOU, being happy." --Ice-T "I bought a book called 'how to set environment variables from windows batch scripts in Jenkins'. Oh look, the first page just says 'go fuck yourself' and the rest are blank." --Foone "I'm going to give you all the best trick that more non-lawyers should use: When someone tells you important info over the phone but not in writing, send them an email afterward detailing what they told you and ask them to write you back if it's not correct." --Sparky Abraham "My inbox and Slack and Signal icons are bouncing like basketballs in pre-game warmups for the Final Four." --@jessysaurusrex "These people get rewarded again and again for their prognostications, always wrong, because they are telling people what they want to hear." --Gregg Gonsalves "Regulations were a result, in most cases, of a lot of people dying, being maimed, or losing their livelihood. Remember that the Free Market is a god that demands blood sacrifice to move things, possibly yours." --Ianus J. Wolf "What a lot of people don't get is that communities with a strong 'no snitching' culture don't develop that simply out of spite! It's because they've seen so many people get hurt by cooperating with cops, from shit like this to exposing their identities and getting them killed." --Full Metal Duchess "[I] unironically think that, for all of its flaws and for all of the azuma criticism of otaku, anime culture absolutely transcends almost all of the supposed aesthetic dilemmas that drive culture wars today and more people would be better off if they consumed it." --Aelkus "It's impossible to smear a Republican running for office. The GOP's dream candidate is a tax cheat with 8 DUIs, a Klan membership, a swastika tattoo and a record of domestic violence, or, as MAGA people say, 'a real person who tells it like it is and sounds like me.'" --Paul Rudnick "I'm not sure how you would try to treat ADHD with lasers but I'm open to suggestions." --Foone "I have no idea what their moderation policy is and I don't know if anyone is even running Twitter anymore, I think everyone is just lying around waiting to be fired." --Matthew Green "The fundamental animating principle of capitalism for most workers is 'work or starve on the street,' and yet people are still shocked to hear that a society-wide hostage situation isn't enjoyable and fulfilling for most people." --Trevor Miller "Don't work anywhere that tells you its a handicap to be a multidimensional human with depth and breadth." --@by_caballero "Adult stories exist because someone didn't have the tale they needed as a child; children's stories exist because they tell the tales adults need to fantasize children wanting. Let the children defeat the dragons and the adults drive the apples, by all means." --Feonixrift "People say _Mr Robot_ is realistic, but I haven't yet seen the season where Mr. Robot responds to a vuln first being exploited by 9 year olds on Minecraft by identifying and patching 100k apps." --Kevin Beaumont "'The following results seem to be folklore but we include proofs for the sake of completeness?'" --Michael Kinyon "I am just so fucking tired of trying to untangle how much of my depression is neurochemical and should be treated as such, and how much is a completely rational, reasonable reaction to existing right now." --@dynamicsymmetry "The ADHD urge to sigh constantly because you forget to breathe when intensely focused on something." --Dani Donovan "Yes, I went to all the trouble to become a professor just so I can mislead a generation of students about how to calculate decibels. That's how deep this conspiracy runs." --Matt Blaze "If I seem bitter and angry, it's because we've been in a pandemic for 2.5 years, the gov't and our fellow humans have failed us, and even folks who should really know better ignored or even maligned people like me who were trying to tell them to keep their f-ing masks on." --@ladysplainer "Students used to enter my classes with simplistic notions about saving the world. My job was to break those ideas down and lead them to more nuanced understandings of social change. Now, students enter class believing nothing matters and my job is to show them ways change is feasible." --Lindsay Mayka "C is now the last programming language without any malicious packages in its package manager." --Zhuowei Zhang "The things that corporations do to you, leveraging the power dynamic they have, are not your fault. That's true whatever flowery language they present you with. Just in case you needed to hear that." --The Irenes "I'd rather run the risk of being suckered than ignore someone who needs help." --Amanda Winn Lee "If trained CIA officers can't do it reliably well, you probably can't, either." --Matt Blaze "Who knew 'gifted and talented' meant 'will struggle with mental health for 20 years until someone realises they are neurodiverse.'" --James Downs "Watching Elon try to openly recreate several decades of trust and safety work by tens of thousands of people from first principles is likely to give me a stroke. It's like watching a baby play with a blender from behind a plexiglass barrier." --Alex Stamos "As a Scot, let me head off the question about cultural appropriation... Causing loud problems for the ruling class *is* our culture." --@lizardorman "I always thought burnout happened when you work too much. Now I get it. It's investing emotionally and then not getting a return on that investment." --@spamaps "Grapes are crushed to make wine, olives are crushed into oil - so look to see who is operating the apparatus that is crushing you to create something that they'll profit from." --Mandi Khino People get lectured, 'If you use that tactic, then right-wingers will do it too, but worse.' That's not how the right's moral map of the world works. There's no balance being sought. Everything is violent and criminal when we do it and fine when they do it. That's their framework." --@MsKellyMHayes "Advice to the hackers of tomorrow: No one will ever let you have what you want. No one will ever let you do what you want. If you want it, you're going to have to hack your way in." --@pongolyn "When America makes big, uncomfortable social changes, antiheroes become all the rage. During and shortly after the civil rights era, the Vietnam War protests, and advances in feminism, Hollywood produced scores of violent and often vengeful films: _Dirty Harry_, _Death Wish_, _The Godfather_, _Taxi Driver_, _A Clockwork Orange_, and _Mad Max_ to name just a few. Multiple opinion pieces cried out in terror about young Boomers with their Free Love, dove, and Peter Frampton overrunning America's Moral Fabric. And now? Post-Occupy Wall Street, President Obama, and Black Lives Matter, we're going through a similar trend - and it's blurring the line between hero and villain until it functionally no longer exists. The American psyche is being saturated with fantasies of vigilante justice and violence, including the fantasy of the cop that can't truly dispense justice unless they're judge, jury, and executioner. Lately, the intent behind villain backstories seems to be normalization, even aspiration. Why do the long, hard, painful work of improving and fixing problems in a civilized democracy when you can shoot somebody in the face, say something snarky, and walk away? Because that's the sound of the establishment re-asserting itself. When our nation takes steps toward correcting injustice, there's always a political backlash AND a cultural one." --Stina Leicht, _Empathy for the Devil_ "We're about to slam hard into a recession that's going to make the great depression look like a furry convention rave and our man's out here bragging about receiving UI being at its lowest." --@baphometdata "The left has been warning about the vast right-wing conspiracy for years. Well, let's give it to them." --Alvino-Mario Fantini, editor in chief, _European Conservative_ "How dare you write about multiple topics you're interested in on your own website." --Aaron Parecki "If you think free speech is defined by your ability to be an assole without consequences, you don't understand free speech (but you remain an asshole)." --Mike Masnick "They're not asking our permission to destroy the world. We can't wait for their permission to save it." --Alexandra Erin "Anger is like a wound. If untreated it can fester into bitterness. Please tend to your wounds." --Remote Nemesis "When the tide goes out we find out who has been swimming naked." --Warren Buffett "Don't get old, man. It's fatal." --Deviant Ollam "I remember the robot rebellion of 200X like it was yesterday." --U Can Beat Video Games "I will get along and work in solidarity when half the country stops going on about how they can't wait to shoot me and mine." --Jet Dillo "Conspiracy theory is an attempt to make sense of a situation where very little is known. And time and again, the federal government has created situations ripe for paranoia and conspiracy theory by failing to give people the information they need to make an informed decision. Some of this is incompetence, sure - and some of it is probably because the government doesn't really want us to know what is going on anyways." --Joseph L. Flatley "I have experience. And patience. A man can do anything if he has those." --Baron Zemo "When you are dying of internal bleeding from an ectopic pregnancy, furious that even though any doctor could save you, you will have to die - leaving lifelong agony for your spouse and children - please think of the sanctity of Brett Kavanaugh's driveway, which is the real victim." --Brianna Wu "Surveillance is a fundamental input to any political system, so datasets like this [WebFace260M facial recognition dataset] are indicators of what the base 'off the shelf' inputs are into calculuses people make about how to surveil a population and how much budget to set aside for said surveillance." --Jack Clark, Import AI "Many things are bad in some way and I feel the distinction between 'bad' and 'actual militant Nazis' is still one that holds a lot of importance." --Amberite "Centrist liberals seem to think the only 'correct' way to protect is to get down on your knees and say ''Please, don't wake away my human rights, Mr. Judge, if not that's okay too, though, I guess.'' History lesson: This has never worked." --Existential Comics "Maybe there was some brief window before or after [Dred Scott] when SCOTUS was a force for anything other than reaction." --Jesse Keller "The technological pace of US payment technology makes the Soviet Union look forward-thinking." --Matthew Green "The Bechdel-Turing test is when a robot talks to another robot about something other than a human and nobody notices." --Tsundoku Psychohazard "History is safe, geometry is safe. Science is nuclear and hydrogen bombs! Science is injecting yourself with the plague and trying to find a cure in time." --Gary Grooberson, _Ghostbusters Afterlife_ "I have to consider the possibility that, at some point after 1968, theory became a PsyOp to get the (affluent) left to de-emphasize class and war. Possible conspiracy aside, it can doubtless be viewed as functioning that way." --R.U. Sirius "To pretend that one human being will lead another out of the dark night of ignorance and into the shining light of truth is ludicrous." --Terence McKenna "I suggest a Theatre of Cruelty. With this mania we all have today for belittling everything, as soon as I said 'cruelty' everyone took it to mean 'blood'. But a 'theatre of cruelty' means theatre that is difficult and cruel for myself first of all." --Antonin Artaud "Test while the risk is small. Test and verify." --Tessalation "Faith is about believing the sun will come up, about believing your friends love you, about accepting axioms of how the world works. We exercise faith every time we choose to act as if something is real." --@mykola "The means becomes the end, and the letter of the law takes precedence over the spirit." --Paul Samuelson, Nobel Prize laureate economist "I mentioned in a previous episode how I wanted to casually hint at Hal Jordan's pansexual nature but I was a little surprised to hear reports of a sudden flurry of raised voices, all, in spite of showing absolutely zero interest in anything else I've ever had to say, suddenly finding the energy and motivation to express what can only be described as stern disapproval regarding my wholly innocuous proposition." --Grant Morrison "You have a very strange idea of sentimental value. We need to have a talk about this later." --Hasufin "By definition, an existential risk is any event that would prevent humanity from completely subjugating nature and maximizing economic productivity." --Phil Torres "I remember the days of BBSes and am fond of when you could just be a stranger on the internet who, oddly, was actually more you than your public self." --Doc Skrzyk "The crypto dream that one day you too will be able to con easy marks just like you out of their money. You're not a mark, you're a temporarily inconfidenced mark." --Seige "How many thousands of dollars does one have to donate to the cause before you're allowed to spend nine goddamn dollars just being angry?" --April Royal "If the Star Trek Accuracy Conjecture continues to hold, we have several more years to go before nuclear war." --Puella Vulnerata, on Sinn Fein looking like it might win the election in Northern Ireland "There's no real mystery about this at the moment. This is what we want now. It may prove wrong later, but we'll correct that when we come to it." --From _The Mentat Handbook_ "The very reason I don't consider Go a language 'suitable for beginners' is precisely that its compiler accepts so much code that is very clearly wrong." --fasterthanlime "My dear fuckhead, if it is -not possible- to perform the action, why do you -care- if there's a report generated?" --Munin "When you say 'violence is never the answer' your enemies don't think 'Wow, such principled bravery,' they think 'Okay, so all I have to do to win is use violence.'" --P.B. Gomez "That shining moment of pause when 2 and 2 come together. Then you ask yourself: Is this going to be a bad choice, or way better the second time around?" --Nexxus6 "Twitter, sometimes a bitch just has to GO OFF, okay? Cool it." --Mae Dean "I no longer work for a news organization so I can say without fear of penalty for my job that news organizations' reluctance to touch abortion and cover it honestly for fear of seeming too liberal is a big part of why we are here." --Julia Moser "It is quite funny to see people from America, the most pro-violence country in the world, say things like ''violence won't help your movement.''" --@whitequark "Fedi is not for everyone, maybe for now, maybe forever." --Anke "Maybe the problem is actually a system that grants nine people the power to decide what the rest of us are allowed to do with our own bodies." --Elle Armageddon "They're doing manic pixie dream girl stolen valor." --Hikikomorphiam "One of my favorite parts of American political discourse is how often we say 'But what if we help too many people?'" --@ENirschel "Caught a 30mb malware binary today written in Go. My first PC had a 120mb hard disk." --@_larry0 "Lots of people piling on telling me how stupid/naive I am for not seeing the 'obvious' explanation. Whatever. I'll just continue living in my ignorant desire for actual facts and evidence." --Matt Blaze "Oh no, production is down! Quick, can any of our engineers tell me how they used to do things at Google?!" --Corey Quinn "I think you're at best, sock accounts, and at worst, dumbasses. There's not as much complexity to the argument as you seem to think." --@TheGigconomist "You probably think it's normal to have fifteen ProtonMail accounts and nine phone numbers, but your spouse might not think it is normal, and if you are constantly doing mysterious things in your basement your family is going to think it's a little weird." --Oyzark "Requiring civil rights to be 'deeply rooted in history' is a great way to say ''if you didn't always have civil rights, then you should never have them.''" --Steve Kenson "A long time ago I was at a presentation by Aubrey de Grey about his unscientific bullshit about gerontology and when he asked if there were any questions the head of the department stood up and told him that he was literally going to kill people." --Matthew Garrett "The thing making me nervous about this housing market is not so much the high price climbs, as that Americans seem to view their homes primarily as a financial asset rather than primarily as the place where they live." --@falcondarkstar "Believe people when they say they are in pain." --Feonixrift "Specialization tends to shut off the wide-band tuning searches and thus to preclude further discovery." --Buckminster Fuller "There is no refuge from change in the cosmos. No safe place to hide." --Neal DeGrasse Tyson "Wishful descriptions of Twitter as 'the de facto public town square' or 'the closest thing we have to a global consciousness' sound, to me, like Peter Pan begging the audience to clap and raise a swooning Tinkerbell. You don't have to clap." --Robin Sloan "Everything unusual is dismissed as false. People judge reliability of info they get according to their common sense which is nothing more than a set of (wrong) assumptions of how this world works." --Kamil Galeev "I just put on some Tiger Balm. Let's see how long I can go without touching any body part that will regret Tiger Balm." --Dildog "Every night after I work my day job programming in Go I jump back into this bespoke game and engine written in pure C, just to feel something." --@AmyZenunim "Where there is JB Weld there is a way." --Zelfie "Being AuDHD means being able to make friends because you're high energy and can pass as outgoing at a single event, but being doubly unable to keep friends because you forget people exist when you can't see them and because your recharge time is measured in weeks." --Structured Success "Don't try to make someone great at one thing mediocre at everything." --Irina Bednova "Denial of Service attacks against cloud based infrastructure should be called thunderstorms." --Rogue.System "The craziest thing about the state of the world is that for the first time we have enough for everyone, we have the ability to fix most of our problems, we know how to create a wonderful and equitable society, but we're just going off the cliff for fun I guess." --Quinn Norton "I'm not saying either number is right or wrong, it's just a weird statement to see implicitly buried in the recent headlines that one pile of dynamic HTML and Javascript is considerably more valuable than if everyone can eat enough." --Foone "This is what happens when your theory of politics is entirely grounded in aesthetics - maybe the most important fact about a billionaire defense contractor is not, in fact, his brief marriage to a pop star?" --Hikikomorphism "I'm shocked. You mean people who are only in it for the money with 50mil golden parachute contracts are conservative leaning?" --@shatter242 "You failed to keep the weird kid from saying weird things to the congressman, that's on you." --Ethan Kocak "Whipping up war myths can have long-term consequences." --Noam Chomsky "The build-it-and-they-will-come fiction has played out very badly in the past as regards community infrastructure. I think it wiser to better what we already have, nourishing the work, thought and communities in place." --Julian Oliver "We don't do puns. Kill them!" --Goatman, _Masters of the Universe: Revelation_ "The code is free and open-source so anyone - yeah, even Those Guys - can run a server. But they can't force anyone to federate with them, so these servers are quarantined." --I Fix Coin Ops "Schadenfreude is like masturbation. It's a part of the human experience to be sure, but for god's sake do it in private and wash your hands afterward." --Maradydd "Apparently no one was alive before social media, before the Internet, never drowned in the relentless flood of American monoculture with no escape in sight. Only able to tilt about how sweet material comfort really is." --@knowthysorrow "If you like what the Four Thieves Vinegar Collective does, and you'd like to support the mission, go help someone out who needs it, whether or not you feel like they deserve it." --Dr. Michael S. Laufer "If Elon was smarter he would've just started his own fedi instance for like, $20." --@eris@disqordia.space "My career has always been a runaway kind of baffling thing. I've never been a big science fiction and fantasy fan, but I get picked for those kinds of roles. I don't think there's any great cosmic reason for the way my career has gone. I've just been in the right place at the right time when these films have come along." --Tim Thomerson "The word 'spirit' and the word 'story' refer to the same thing. The spirit world and the narrative world are the same. So the sacred, in this sense, becomes this: A thing, either material or abstract, that has in the mind of at least one living person a role to play in a story." --@mykola "The bicycle theory: If you keep going fast, you don't fall off." --Noam Chomsky, on not letting age slow him down "You don't HAVE to come into the thread and say how little you care. You can just not care in silence, and go on with your day." --Rusty Zimmerman "And I crashed processmonitor." --Foone "A sickness known as hate. Not a virus, not a microbe, not a germ - but a sickness nonetheless, highly contagious, deadly in its effects. Don't look for it in the Twilight Zone, look for it in a mirror. Look for it before the light goes out altogether." --Rod Serling "We had no idea that showing a little bit of vagina would be a problem." --Paul Verhoven, on _Basic Instinct_ "A middleman's business is to make himself a necessary evil." --William Gibson "The sun is out, here, and it's going to be a busy day, so I'll leave this here, filtered for busy suns." --Warren Ellis "Everybody go to hell with your fucking reality!" --Rolf Dieter Brinkmann "If you acknowledge that Tibet is a place and that he's [the Ancient One] Tibetan, you risk alienating one billion people who think that that's bullshit." --C. Robert Cargill, screenwriter, _Doctor Strange_ "I'm starting to understand the subtle difference between 'pandemic' and 'endemic'... Apparently a 'pandemic' is where a ton of people are dying all the time and we care, and an 'endemic' is where a ton of people are dying all the time and we're fine with it." --@eliomen "FBI agents are the least artistic and most literal motherfuckers ever to carry a gun. If they staged it, [the] docs would be in neat stacks with a sticky note saying 'UNLAWFULLY RETAINED DOCUMENTS' in a restrained font." --Popehat "'Real recognize real' rings true from hip hop to hacking." --@HackingLZ "[screaming intensifies] is the mental soundtrack of the decade." --Feonixrift "It's the American way. You can't have billionaires without masses of poor folks who toil for crumbs just to survive." --@copleac "Sometimes you gotta look stupid or sound stupid so that you learn enough to not do stupid." --Dildog "Putin could be shot by a firing squad like Ceacescu and there'd still be far right and tankie fanboys on here saying it was a 4D chess move and that he was winning." --Dan Kaszeta "If you have to prove the point, don't do it in such an obviously stupid way." --Matthew Green "I realize this is shocking for the type of person who writes thinkpieces aimed at VCs on LinkedIn, but it's entirely possible to be motivated by making sure a change doesn't fuck over your community. Not everything is a marketing opportunity. I don't get paid for this." --Dixie Flatline "New York's hottest term is 'classic terrorism', it's got everything, it's got: Casual racism, a myopic view of the contemporary terrorism landscape, and a stunning willingness to show the profound weaknesses in counterterrorism thinking." --Alex Newhouse "Sleep with angels. The Evangelion kind." --Nicholas Frota "The fun thing about Dwarf Fortress bugs is that a lot of them sound like things that belong in a dictionary of mythology, not in a bug tracker." --The Irenes "The hardest problem in computer science is staying logged in to the Wall Street Journal. If you stay logged in for more than one article, then P=NP." --Steven Sinofsky "At this point, when shit like this happens, all I've got left is despair. If the US could look at kids dying in schools and decide no action was merited, I don't know what the hell is ever going to be enough to justify adequate gun control." --Jay Edidin "If you are triggered into acts and words of anger by someone acting out of kindness, you probably really do need professional help." --Dan Kaszeta "This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a series of increasingly alarming events we slowly become desensitized to." --Gabrielle Drolet "If you are not a scientist, and you disagree with scientists about science, it's actually not a disagreement. You're just wrong. Science is not truth. Science is finding the truth. When science changes its opinion, it didn't lie to you. It learned more." --Mohamad Safa "Just saw an ad to 'ask your doctor about Entresto.' Nothing else, just that. Isn't that, like, an enemy of the Green Lantern?" --Hasufin "As someone who's been running their own email servers for 25 years I want to force choke this person over the Internet." --Justin Baugh "I typed this tweet with my left hand. I'm hoping it goes chiral." --Dan Kaszeta "Pro tip: If ever in the course of an investigation you are invited aboard a private jet by the subject of said investigation, I highly recommend you do all you can to get on that damn plane." --J. David McSwane "Language models as oracles, to be mined for the wisdom and morals of the human species." --Arnaud Schenk "Marriage: When two people decide they will be mutually bad influences on each other, and they accept this." --Hasufin "People in power refuse to do anything about either thing, and criticism of them is threatened with leaving us to the fascists who want us dead even faster." --River Enodian "Sorry your existence is joyless, do try to stop taking it out on others." --Elle Armageddon "According to Republicans, you can marry a child, give them a gun and force them to carry a baby to term, but letting them read a Judy Blume book, wear a mask, talk about race, gender or sexual orientation is child abuse." --@jojofromjerz "For real tho, I never knew I needed furry art of myself as the Unabomber." --qDot "Another day, another instance where reality somehow outpaces Leverage." --@sigmafactor "There's only two hard problems in computer science, naming things and deciding what to do after you burn out." --@the_aiju "'Write a SQL parser' sounds like an intern project but is roughly on par with landing humans on Mars. The SQL spec is 100k+ pages long and not one db actually implements it." --Predrag Gruevski "The people redefining metrics for optics are working overtime." --@gregorg "Indie bands are always like 'we recorded this album at an abandoned spaghetti factory in Providence, Rhode Island.' Why? Why'd you do that? There are recording studios with couches and electricity." --@DrakeGatsby "Normal is dead. It's not coming back. I don't know what the future is going to be like, but life pre covid isn't coming back. I don't fear covid, I fear getting it every year and long covid crippling or killing me." --@m00ph23 "There's no such thing as a database, only CSV files with extra steps." --@jtimberman "NT [neurotypical] people make their decisions based on what they think other people think and what they think other people will think about what they think. If enough NT people say a contagious disease doesn't exist, most of the rest of them will convince themselves it doesn't." --@Artists_Ali "If you suffered in life and want other people to suffer as you did because 'you turned out fine,' you did not, in fact, turn out fine." --Daniel Shipwreck "'The purpose of a system is what it does' is cursed knowledge, and I should spend less time venting and more time looking at cute little birbs at the duckpond." --@tef_ebooks "The evil spirits you are trying to unleash on the world will not thank you for your efforts." --Erik Baker "Really? A blobbed over IC? You're gonna come into my house with TRANSPARENT ELECTRONICS and leave me looking at a generic epoxy blob? You sicken me." --Foone "Folks are asking for a source. Regrettably, it's just something a CS prof said during lecture many years ago when I was an undergrad. My Twitter feed is a stream of consciousness, not a source of reliable news." --Steven Godofsky "Chess is not a game. Chess is a well-defined form of computation. You may not be able to work out all the answers, but in theory there must be a solution, a right procedure in any position. Now, real games are not like that at all. Real life is not like that. Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other man going to think I mean to do." --John von Neumann "The amount of people willing to pull the ladder up behind them and try to be 'one of the good ones' are always the same people who are the most surprised what happens when the people who they're buddy-buddy with no longer require them." --@casswantsrevolt "I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach." --Bruce Sterling "If people aren't jumping at your 'simple' fix to a complex, expensive problem, maybe it's not that simple." --Unfuck Your Habitat "This place basically sucks but we aren't responsible for making it better because we don't own anything, and the parts we like exist as a side effect of someone's money making scheme. This is just like hanging out at the mall as a kid." --@scanlime "Great. Another thing I have to port DOOM to." --Foone "One person's breakdown is another person's breakthrough." --Joseph Matheny "I was a little too old to get into Pokemon when it first hit so I can probably only name, like, a hundred of them or something." --Matt Boyd "It was kind of a little fuck you to Atari management. They took away my royalty, but I tricked them into publicizing my name." --Warren Robinett, on hiding his name in an easter egg in Adventure for the Atari because corporate policy forbid programmer credits "Searching Alibaba and Aliexpress is a skill distinct from anything else I do on the Internet today in ways I find deeply uncomfortable." --ajroach "For it is in the nature of alchemy not to let the mind take flight until it has passed through all the channels and bedrock of existing matter, to redouble this labour in the future's white-hot limbo." --Antonin Artaud "Reminder: Apathy's a tragedy, and boredom is a crime. Anything and everything, all of the time." --Rysiek "[screaming intensifies] is the mental soundtrack of the decade." --Feonixrift "I finally figured out why six grocery stores in our county aren't selling any matzah. It's because a local Catholic Church is having their own Seder and bought it all. They said I could buy a ticket. So now I'm worried about dying from an irony-induced aneurysm." --Michal Rosenoer "We can't even say out loud that women, children, and families have inherent societal value. Unless we say that helping people = 'investments in our economic recovery' no one cares." --Carlos Moreno "The 90's DARE program had me SO prepared to turn down all the drugs that have never been offered to me." --Eden Dranger "No matter how loudly you scream about being one of the good ones, the people that hate us are never going to love you." --@greenTetra_ "The default American response to immense human suffering that a middle class person here cannot conceptualize is a mix of defensiveness and dismissiveness." --@MenshevikM "If someone says magic doesn't exist, then you know they've never seen RF circuits before." --@FexDaFox "You're fucked, as a service. Or, we're tired of trying, as a service." --@passingthehash "Crypto is just a speedrun of financial history, they haven't yet reached the mergers and acquisitions and hostile takeover portion yet, they only just figured out incorporation via DAOs." --Danny Page "Tetris is an inventory management survival horror game." --Anonymous "The entire school of 'throw spaghetti at the wall,' which lost businesses *gobs* of money but made our world far more interesting, is dead and buried, replaced with arbitrage." --Gravislizard "People make things into the way they assume things to be." --Anarkat "You used to get your server hacked and then find a bunch of legal pirated porn or MP3s or 0-day movies as a reward. That doesn't happen anymore. It's just playing flyswatter with crypto miners or literal state actors. Nothing fun." --@CisHetKayFaber "My experiences of late on Twitter prove to me that if you aren't paying for something, you aren't a customer. You're the commodity." --Dan Kaszeta "If you leave your country to voluntarily take up arms under a flag different from the one you were raised with, you have to be prepared for a certain level of weirdness. ''Sir, is that a space alien from the X-Files on patrol outside our post?'' ''It doesn't have an obvious criminal record and it can shoot a rifle, so none of your fucking business!''" --@aelkus "I wonder if men fear Communism because they worry that it'll reduce them to the level of women." --Beka Valentine "If your config file syntax becomes Turing complete, stop now and cancel the project." --J. B. Crawford "The problem with the trolley problem is that it assumes disposability is inevitable and that ethical problems for elites consist in justifying which group to render disposable rather than find systemic fixes to disposability." --Robin James "Peace and love and protesting the war and then getting a little older and voting for Reagan." --@latkedelrey "Life goals: Sounding like a numbers station when someone asks me how old I am." --Anonymous "HTTPS continuity is less relevant to users in healthy democracies where the government isn't actively MitM'ing web traffic from regime enemies. But it is extremely relevant to vulnerable people and those incentivized through data caps to use public WiFi where attackers lurk." --Swift on Security "I was thinking if recent incidents with Python could be related to the proliferation of 'data scientists' and interest in deep fakes." --Ivan Sergio Borgonovo "It's the least fun explanation, so therefore most likely to be true." --Fleet Admiral Wiggles "2.5kg of proprietary synthetics on a 45kg chassis my dude." --Naomi Wu "Being cancelled by the Bernie bros of the Internet was hard, but not in the way I'd hoped. I thought my first encounter with 500,000 straight white men in Patagonia vests would be more homoerotic but life isn't always what you hope for." --Alex Walker "A plan is just a list of things that don't happen." --Parker, _The Way of the Gun_ "If you're gonna bite my vocals, I'm gonna bite your music!" --Chill Rob G "AI without code is just called stats." --Quinn Norton "I'll never fit in. That's one of my best qualities." --Terri Willingham "This creates a lot of questions. None of which I really want answered." --Vlad_II "When peeling the foil top off of the mayonnaise, it exploded in my face and let me just say, I do NOT understand the appeal." --Mae Dean "I think I'm prepared to die on the hill that a decent action movie doesn' need you to delve into secondary sources to understand what happened." --Oliver Darkshire "As long as there's a TARDIS and the odd Dalek, all's right with the world." --Neil Gaiman "Listen, I have been on the Internet a couple of minutes and I know what these things mean, so do not bring your propaganda into my timeline." --qDot "If you're looking for good guys and bad guys, you're already a mark." --James Curcio "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." --Mark Twain "I'm waiting for T-800 terminator to knock on my door any day now." --Lex Fridman "Write the book that only 65 people in the world will appreciate." --Christopher S. Hyatt "Leadership in THE industry that makes the tools of collaboration in the 21st century cannot, in fact, collaborate over distance. LEADERSHIP cannot. The rest of us are like ''What the fuck's the problem?''" --Nicole Sanchez "Liberals treat non-violence like libertarians treat decentralization: They saw it working once and mistook tactics for goals." --Nicholas Frota "Isn't it interesting that only the skeptical one should be given actual access to the divine?" --Alien Perspective "Yes, I'm still using a web interface to print my 3d models. I haven't yet modded a 3d printer to run off either paper tape or floppy disks. Trust me, I'm even more disappointed in myself than you are." --Foone "You don't suddenly lose a lifetime/years worth of experience just because you don't do that job anymore. They're still teachers, they just don't do it for a living primarily anymore." --@AyLilGiraffe "Vendor support is not a replacement for staff competence. Microsoft cannot understand your environment in an hour call. Active Directory is legos with infinite superglue. There's no telling what you've built." --Swift On Security "I think this story puts me at LD50 for my daily intake of WTF." --Matt Blaze "About fifteen years ago, I lived in Tampa Bay. If you've ever been, you know it's hot, humid, and grows bugs big enough to mug you for drug money." --Patrick S. Tomlinson "Pandering to fears in an information void actually makes things worse." --Dan Kaszeta "Java: What if programming was like writing high school essays?" --Sam Pizzey "What I love about the Internet is how everything before 2000 has basically been forgotten: So, none of today's youth realize that all of this has happened before." --Matthew Green "Sometimes you need to pay a third party to get your point across." --Unknown "People love to say ''Don't look away!'' and then show you horror scenes of human suffering. As something of an expert on this sort of thing, let me tell you: Look away. The implicit story that we somehow respond to traumatic images/events with heroic action is just plain nonsense." --Quinn Norton "A party wants a few zealous cohorts, generous donors, and a mass of occasional, TV-conditioned voters." --Unknown "The rich know they're not dealing with humans but with a procedural mechanism. It can and must be hacked, you just need to find a bug. And they will actively look for it. A rich *will* demand a special treatment and make a case why he deserves it. And they often get it. The poor stupidly believe they're dealing with humans. Thus they 'follow the rules' and get fucked. Absurd as it may sound, they may even feel proud for following the law, following the common procedure without demanding any special privileges." --Kamil Galeev "The nearest bystander is the most likely suspect." --Wiggum's Razor "You can take away my house, all my tricks and toys, but one thing you can't take away - I am Iron Man." --Tony Stark "Your matter recalls cosmic explosions and you tasted oblivion before you learned your own name. Fear nothing." --The Cryptonaturalist "I remember when our handcrafted artisanal virus payloads would fit in a 4Kb page so you could hide it in the MBR." --Sam Thurston "The things that seemed dystopian to us in the 1990s are so weird now. Like, they made having a comfortable office job and an apartment and nice furniture and enough food and money seem bleak and dehumanizing. And we went with it." --@numb3r5ev3n "Of all the things I expected to say at this point in 2022, ''It's great to be a Republican right now'' was nowhere among them. If you had told me a year ago that the post-Trump GOP would be anything other than a shattered shambles today, I would have belly-laughed like Jabba the Hutt and then questioned your fitness as a political observer... yet here we are, so who's the smart guy? Not me." --William Rivers Pitt "Both kids still have their full complement of taste buds, so neither likes many Scovilles in their comestibles. I am forced to other methods." --Lillith Saint Crow "When the far right used logic-bro personas as a way to harass vulnerable people, they not only caused damage by the harassment itself, but also in the act of taking a good thing (verifying if something is true and challenging claims that are incorrect or harmful) and making people afraid to do it because they don't want to be 'like them.'." --Sandrockcstm "Sometimes people use 'respect' to mean 'treating someone like a person' and sometimes they use 'respect' to mean 'treating someone like an authority' and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say ''if you won't respect me I won't respect you'' and they mean ''if you won't treat me like an authority, I won't treat you like a person'' and they think they're being fair but they aren't, and it's not okay." --Unknown "If you're bad at regular expressions, try ritalin." --Josef "The dipshits who designed and implemented this disastrous unusable trash probably earn 3x my salary." --Ieure, on Apple Cloud "I know it's not called this but I'm calling our pandemic Nerve Attenuation Syndrome, because it really feels like the power play now is go to live with Ice-T and a drug addicted dolphin on the underside of an abandoned bridge." --Sungo "Decentralization is not the goal. The goal is information and communication services that respect human agency. Open source is not the goal, the goal is building a commons of software that is free to study, inspect, and improve." --rgegriff "Earth! Wind! Water! Eyeballs!" --U Can Beat Video Games "For those who don't agree that we can return to pre-Salmonella normal, I ask: What should we all do? Perpetual refrigeration? Forever thoroughly cooking, avoiding restaurants with poor hygiene, etc? Virtually everything has risk, and zero Salmonella is not a viable strategy." --David Kent (for everyone playing along at home, that is sarcasm) "It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder." --Albert Einstein "Its always 'The Simpsons predicted the future,' and never 'We created ourselves a nightmare world beyond parody.'" --Unlofl "There are a thousand forces trying to get hold of people's minds, particularly children's minds." --Neil Postman "I was contacted by the people who became Pixar - I knew them well, and they wanted to get out of Lucasfilm. They called me up and asked me for advice, and so I said, I can talk to Steve [Jobs]. I explained very carefully to him who these people were, and you shouldn't fuck around with them, like he did with his normal employees. He did a good job with them. [Pixar] was the most honest billion he ever made, because he put a lot of his own personal money into nurturing those guys. They got fabulous. That was Steve's best hour." --Alan Kay "While nearly naked PCP freaks aren't my ideal good time I'm sure some more cultured individual would find his sex positive attitude a jackpot of pleasure." --Anonymous Nextdoor poster, on being accosted by a gentleman wearing only a thong who offered him a dose of PCP and oral sex "People forget that Mosaic and then later Netscape was simply a unified, GUI for multiple protocols." --Joseph Matheny "A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila." --Mitch Ratcliffe "If violence is never your answer, it will always be your enemy's." --Zone Liberation Front "But during times of war or major international crises, there's little tolerance for anti-imperialist dissent. Warmongering voices are amplified by credulous media outlets, and those who stray from the consensus are accused of spreading propaganda or being on the side of terrorists. Efforts to explain or contextualize the underlying dynamics and historical events that led to the conflict are also stifled." --Aida Chavez "Has our political theater been this shit for this long we can't recognize well done political theater when it's done in front of us?" --Teantis "Ye gods, it sucks to have a fundamentally paranoid disposition and then have the world repeatedly validate all of it." --ml0pe "Frankly, I don't really get vaccine incentive programs, or lotteries, or giving people guns for getting vaccinated. If not dying is not enough of an incentive to get the vaccine, I'm not sure what will be." --Bert Fan "Listen I'm not attacking your gardens, I'd like to have one at some point. Tomatoes are cool and who doesn't like squash. Let's slow down on the individualism, you're not gonna be able to do it all by yourself. The socialization of production is here baby let's work with it." --Michael Kofi A. "Total storage capacity on our whole system got to 1GB, and that was huge." --Mark Malmberg, on the system used to do the CG for _The Lawnmower Man_ in 1991 "Live as though the sun will rise." --Feonixrift "The hypocrisy of being pro security but having such little personal opsec blows my mind." --Kuskos, on hackers bragging on Twitter about how much they just got paid for a bug bounty "Let's all remember that the 'h' in 'cybersecurity' stands for happiness. And the 'j' in 'academia' is for the joy in being on the faculty." --Gene Spafford "The power struggles to control the Magic Knight Rayearth DALnet channel would make even the most cutthroat investment banker scream in terror." --Foone "Client wanted the 'porn star' treatment. I made him sit on the bed while I moved a lamp around for 30 minutes." --Jamie French "This is a classic rhetorical ploy to obscure the risk of escalation. We are already at war, so we are merely talking about how to fight, rather than whether to fight." --Andrew Kydd "At the counter-protest on 17th today, a 'freedom convoy' woman approached my partner and yelled at him to ask if he had read _Brave New World_. He calmly replied yes and asked if she had as well, to which she responded 'No, but that's not the point.'" --Meaghan Walsh "[It] fucking sucks that once a problem is just a tiny bit abstract it simply stops being a problem for most folks." --@ayasebun "Taco Bell is the only place you can still get gas for $3.20." --@codingmilf "When I complained about the slow apocalypse, it was not an invitation for the universe to speed it up." --@evacide "It is now apparently unscheduled void screaming hours." --Crazypedia "There's no labor shortage. There's a shortage of jobs treating people with basic respect." --Dan Price "Thanks to the amount of advice I absolutely did not ask for, I have learned my lesson and will now keep my browser related tweets to be solely about browser mascot porn from now on." --@qDot "Find someone who looks at you the same way a cat looks at an invisible mote of dust floating on the air." --Sargoth "Thoroughgoing cynicism and total credulity have a tendency to combine." --John Ganz (That's an excellent observation.) "Folks like to snark at 'needlessly connected' devices, but I just bought my wife a networked coffee machine, and I must say: A device like that actively sends you a ping when it's _done_ can be a miracle and a half for folks with ADHD." --Kate Temkin "As the writer of _Batman Returns_ all I have to say is... so wait, you're telling me he's a detective?" --Daniel Waters "The worst thing your community ignores is what it accepts, and the worst thing your community accepts what it becomes." --mhoye "I was a journalist for years. I became a journalist because I believed with my whole heart that if people just knew how unfair and sad things are sometimes, they would make better choices. I wish I still believed that. I wish y'all hadn't taken that belief from me so violently." --Becca Green "When all they had to do was chip away at the hegemonic western narrative they looked like geniuses, because cynicism and irony is easy but earnestness is hard." --@SevaUT "This completely throwaway observation now has 10x the engagement of a tweet about an actual book I wrote. Makes ya think." --Helen R. Gradwell "You can't stop the waves, but you can learn to surf." --Jon Kabat Zinn "I now have a very very fast car, but it's called comparatively 'slow' to its sports car competition. I have one question: Are you all high? I can get zero to a felony in this thing faster than you can age out of Leonardo DiCaprio's dating pool. The fuck is wrong with you people? I swear to god hypercar spec sheets have fried the minds of an entire generation of tween car enthusiasts. You don't need 2.8 seconds to sixty. Try that in bed, nobody is gonna be happy." --@SwiftOnSecurity "For a non-trivial number of kids and teens, their parents are part of the threat model, an antagonizing force to be evaded. Forcing teachers to out students to their parents is a good way to get a good number of those students abused, and also teach them that they cannot trust any authority figure. Buddy, no one thinks they're a bad parent, the bad parents just think they have bad kids." --Eevee "I understand we live in terrifying times but I feel like we've all had enough time to adjust to the reality that laws are fake. If I have to hear one more ''HOW CAN THEY DO THIS?! THAT'S UNCONSTITUTIONAL!'' Yes, I know. They're still doing it. I'm sorry." --@bitterkarella "What they don't explicitly tell you about having kids is that it is a contract to revisit all of the stressors and traumas of your own youth." --Dildog "The goal in the Nirvana fallacy is to prevent kindness, empathy, and justice. They are opposed to those concepts, as they hamper their actions. Sainthood is not a prerequisite for kindness, empathy, or justice. Even people you *absolutely despise* deserve those things." --Hasufin "I once pooped in a Starbucks in St. Petersburg, Russia, which makes me uniquely qualified to comment on the political machinations of Vlad Putin. 1/37" --Spatula "Drawing Bayesian inferences after extensive sampling, I've determined that it's 99-percent certain that anyone who uses 'woke' as pejorative will turn out to be a fuckhead." --Mike Godwin Dubbed Godwin's Second Law by Charles Stross "The news lately is like someone gave Timecube a nuclear arsenal." --ml0pe "Showed my daughter what OG FF7 looked like and she said ''No wonder most old games have good stories. It's all they had.''" --@kaylamariah "My computer has military grade security. In other words, I don't patch half my shit, I'm running ancient RHEL hardened to the point of being useless, but also running easily exploitable software, and ya know I like telnet so I made an exception for that. But my AV is up to date!" --Alejandro Caceres "My understanding of Waffle House as a European is that it's some kind of semi-state or state-capacity logistical mechanism that happens to serve coffee. I don't think it serves waffles, despite the name." --@ollyrobot "I'm not a sports microfairness scientist, but being able to live and participate with dignity is a human right. People get to exist and live and do the things they love." --@christapeterso "Stupid things always seems to be the 'easier things.'" --@Metalskiman "Nobody's dead as long as their TV show's running, at least according to Dr. Brian O'Blivion." --Mark Hughes "He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch." --Jean-Luc Godard "The common case must be fast. The worst case must make progress." --_Hints for Computer System Design_, Butler Lampson "Some leftist friends have started to use the blanket term, 'eco-fascist'. As a radical environmentalist, who is not a fascist sympathizer, I find the term insulting and problematic. It feels (cue conspiracy music) like a way to discredit radical environmentalism." --Joseph Matheny "When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to YOUR principles. When I am stronger than you I take away your freedom because that is according to MY principles." --Unknown, but usually attributed to Louis Veuillot "People need to realize that kind of shit that goes on in that book [American Psycho], that's not what counts. What counts is having life and nurturing life and holding onto it." --Pierce Brosnan "Go, go, Gadget autonomic self-repair systems, I guess..." --Jet Dillo "My building has been without water for over 24 hours because of a leak. Contractor has messed up sealing it 3 times. It is the witching hour of infomercials right now and I'm wondering why Flex Seal can't solve this problem." --0xpookie "Make a search engine called Bong that gives you rambling results that go off on tangents until they have very little to do with your original search terms but its totally awesome stuff anyway." --Dildog "The ignorance of the beautiful variety of the human experience is stultifying, and outright depressing." --Phil B. Reed "To all the people suggesting she have a civilized discussion with the offender, please understand that the kind of person who would benefit from a conversation is also one who would have never treated her like this in the first place." --@isIndchicaMD "A world with a simpler DOM and without Javascript makes me shudder like a tongue of electric cilia exploring my ear canal." --@swiftonsecurity "Please try to be safe. Failing that, make sure it's worth it." --Siina "'A deal with the devil' is prejudiced against devils and demons. Please use the more respectful phrase 'accepting VC funding'." --Amy Star "There was no such thing as clinical depression until this film was made." --Tom Servo "Hogs have four shoulders, and two of them are butts.. but not the two you'd think." --Robin Hood "Brilliant deduction, Encyclopedia Brown. Everybody knows that people with genuine experiences already have Github accounts. People without Github accounts would never make one on the spot to report something SO trivial as having their hard drive wiped by some moron who pushed malware to a node package." --BurnyBoi "When it comes to being haunted by demons, it's a perilously thin line between thinking you're fighting them and actually being possessed by them." --Ed Simon "A lot of things have to go right to stop one thing that goes wrong." --Seele "Time for some of my classic political thought leadership: Wow, I have absolutely no idea what is going on." --Eevee "This man is one line of coke away from trying to sell me an unhackable crypto wallet featuring military grade encryption." --Elle Armageddon "However, managing people and teams is a job that requires time to deliver. 100% time in meetings means zero management happens. Meetings aren't management activity." --Taz Wake "Dammit, fuck the law, but wear a condom." --Eve "Honest to Bob, I had an experience once where an entity said to me, 'Terrence McKenna is not our spokesperson. Please ask him to stop speaking for us.'" --Joseph Matheny, on behalf of an unknown entity "Whenever I criticize the F-35 program I'm told I don't understand how money works by the MilTwitter Blogosphere. '$1.5 trillion dollars is achuullly a great value.. if only I could understand.' We've sunk 1.5 TRILLION into the F-35. If the F-35 were a country, it's GDP would rank 11th in the world." --Dale Stark Never underestimate how motivating the lulz are. "Here's your very own puppy... with solar panels." --the_gibson "In all the vast and empty universe, we were allowed to live and eke out this existence on this small rock. Every minute of life is a gift beyond words." --warriorstar "'Violence is not the answer' has left more innocents dead than chopping off the heads of rulers." --Crazypedia "What is a slide rule but a floating point unit for the soul?" --Shoofle "I worked at a cable company for a long time and 'destroy all other vectors for visual content' was absolutely part of our mission statement." --Sungo "Love is like promulgate. They're both in the dictionary and no one knows what either means." --Deep Space 90210 "We dont so much have a social safety net in the US as a social spike/scorpion pit." --Zetta "People who still want flying cars haven't been in a Cessna with an inexperienced pilot at the stick and it shows." --Socketwench "At some point we switched seamlessly from 'a computer is a machine for helping humans think and plan industrial processes more efficiently' to 'a computer is a machine for tricking millions of other people or machines into giving you money as fast and as cheaply as possible'." --Nate Cull "I am not a 'stable genius', I am a nightly build genius. I should not be deployed in a production environment." --Davey "Ask for work. If they don't give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread." --Emma Goldman "Resumes are basically just a character sheet for your job." --the_t "Yes, random comments on the internet *can* contribute to World War III." --Jay Ashworth, on Ukraine asking Russia to be cut off from the Net "There's good reason to believe that many Russians rely on the Internet to find out what's going on in the world, as all state media is controlled. Just as in the west, younger people rely more on the Internet for information, and older people use the TV. If they [Russia] are blocked from the Internet, the people will only receive state propaganda, and will know nothing of the war against the Ukraine etc. IMNSHO, the best way to prevent tyrants is to have educated citizens. Therefore I would urge people to push back against an Internet death sentence against .RU." --Paul M "There is a staggering amount of context I am clearly not privy to." --Dave, _Real Life Comics_ "They yell at us because we waste our money buying crap we don't need. Then, they yell at us because we're killing the economy when we don't buy crap we don't need." --Peter Kiefor "You know what kinda sucks? Being burdened with perspective. It would be so much easier if we believed that it's possible to end injustice by working with the system." --The Irenes "My manager asked us yesterday if we got off track and if we were distracted last week. Yeah, with WW3. How am I supposed to focus?" --@dnsprincess "The fate of whole nations depend on how successful they are at attracting the eyeballs of the metropole's audiences." --Yuan Yi Zhu "It is far better to be conspicuously silent than it is to lend your voice to spreading the gaslighting rhetoric of a blatantly abusive party - in this case, the Russian government - in their attempts at rewriting reality to justify their aggression towards others." --Elle Armageddon "If you are hiking in a group and waiting for slower people to catch up, don't start walking again when they do catch up, because then you got a rest and they didn't." --Mimi Smartypants "I want you to note the connection here between being simultaneously outwardly a political hardliner for the Soviet Union and also first in line to become a new capitalist and loot as hard as he could." --Poppy Haze "If you are new to infosec and feeling overwhelmed because you're not getting something when it seems like all this stuff comes naturally to everyone else, take a deep breath. If someone tells you they never struggled to understand a concept, they're lying to you." --Hexadecim8 "People don't like hearing it, but the overriding moral imperative is 'avoid a mushroom cloud over every single population center in the United States, the UK, France, and Russia and the subsequent literal end of the world.'" --@bluespacecanary "You may be there one day. And no one wants to be trending on Twitter." --Pat Sajak "In 2002, the US passed a bipartisan law, the American Service-Members' Protection Act, which authorizes the military invasion of the Hague if ICC ever tried to prosecute the US for war crimes. The US openly declared, 20 years ago, that it cannot be tried for war crimes." --Pookleblinky "Fandoms don't have to make sense to those outside the fandom. Don't want to spend your money there, then don't. If you do, have fun." --@beckyIB "A propaganda channel does not exist for its profit margin, it exists to spread propaganda." --Feonixrift "Putin believes Ukraine is part of Russia, which means he is trying to win a land war in Russia." --Eevee "What is the difference to Putin if there are a 1000 dead or 10,000 or 100,000? Is he still in power? Is he still rich? As I've often said, the ability to act this way, purely selfishly, is a superpower of autocrats. Normal people cannot emulate it." --Garry Kasparov "LAPSUS is threatening to release 1TB of stolen data from NVIDIA, which is the equivalent of the last three driver updates I downloaded for my graphics card." --Lars Karlslund "Poinsettias only turn red due to a stress reaction from being denied the sun and light they need to live. Bloom and be beautiful despite the bullshit you're forced to handle." --Medus4 "Russian soldiers trying to match on Tinder with women from the country they're invading and then getting catfished for intel is such a weird 'we live in the future' moment." --Douglas Chu "Gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that maybe the sheer number of people unknowingly sharing donation links to neo-nazi orgs is a sign that we are not going to solve huge geopolitical issues via Twitter crowdfunding and the card industrial complex." --@overfireisland "It's called RS232 because 232 is how many adapters you'll need." --Foone "Once lawsuits are threatened and lawyers are invoked, you've positioned yourself as someone who's not going to get a call back." --Deviant Ollam "My main observation is that spirituality is an exercise of the human faculty for pattern recognition, and this faculty is not 'use it or lose it', it's 'be self-aware about it or it will tune in something random and go brrr'." --Amberite "It's very enjoyable to be designated an influencer due to other people's decision to follow you, then held to a standard where you suck for talking about things outside your area of expertise but also suck if you choose remain silent." --Marcus Hutchins "Things need not be true in the tangible sense to change the world." --the_gibson "What's happening to Ukraine is awful, but it's weird to see takes like ''we've never seen anything like this.'' We have. We saw the US invade Iraq and Afghanistan, and we saw decades of war there. The idea that war is only terrible when it's another country doing it must be smashed. We really need some self-awareness in this country." --Joshua Potash "There is to say this strongly depends on where you live. Or at least would, if this wasn't The Internet, where everything outside America is culturally irrelevant." --@marsthecarguy "You current firewall appears to check all the marks, why are you replacing it?" "Because the hidden box it no longer checks is the ability to power up and POST." --Nicholas Wolf and Alyssa Miller "Smug thousand-yard stare is such a Cassandra mood in general." --Fae "You can't fight evil like the traitorous Right by being sweet and nice." --Lauren Weinstein "At this point I don't really understand what restrains the reactionary powers in our society from going full-on murder and terror mode." --Cigfran Llwyd "Congrats on living long enough to see NIN become dadrock." --@mildredvon "Personally I could do without a centennial habit of topping off a global pandemic with war in Europe." --Dr. Prasad Jallepalli, MD, Ph.D "Looking into Kubernetes, I've never seen something so over-architected in my life and I do Azure research for a living." --Ryan Hausknecht "I need someone to protect me from all the measures they take in order to protect me." --Banksy "Putting a lot on the line for people just to ignore my concerns. Typical." --@theroxyd "People tempted to nitpick me on technical details of nerve agents are politely advised to google my name first. It will save much embarrassment as well as all the livers of everyone who drinks a shot when someone self-owns on my timeline." --Dan Kaszeta "Picasso never lectured. He never dissected the doves which flew out from his sleeves. He was satisfied with painting, acquiring an incomparable technique and putting it in the service of chance." --Jean Cocteau "Never feel sorry for raising dragon slayers in a time where there are actual dragons." --Unknown "I really do not know how to continue a semblance of daily life now that the CDC has pretty much said we're all just going to get covid until we die from it." --Ana Mardoll "ALL of these oppressive power structures are bad, but sometimes good things happen when they get backed into a corner, because you can play them against each other." --The Irenes "If you're going to be an oligarch and your yacht ISN'T a small mobile fortress, what even is the point?" --@Queer0fElam "C is a language with many useful functions: strtod converts your string to a double, strtol converts your string to a long, and strtok converts your string to potassium." --Hikari "Philosophically, one of the razors that I've started to use recently as a security professional is to ask myself 'is this something a cop would probably do?' If the answer is 'yes' it's a signal to me that I need to stop and re-evaluate what I'm doing and why." --Alexa Kelley "The point of preparedness isn't to get things for the current crisis, but for the coming crisis." --Margaret Killjoy "I have news for people who say 'Nobody wants World War III.' Nobody wanted the first two, either." --Randi Mayem Singer "Everyone hates on encryption and Tor until the shit hits the fan." --@nscrut_ "Programs are meant to be read by humans and only incidentally for computers to execute." --Donald Knuth "_Transformers_ is one of the very most American movies ever made, because its director is the very definition of a mediocre white guy wasting simply amazing piles of not his money to blow things up where brown people live. It's also maybe Bay's best movie." --Patrick S. Tomlinson "Chasing yachts is fun but many of the current measures seem to be ''let's cut the Russians out of our racket'' rather than ''let's change laws that enable corrupt oligarchs everywhere.''" --@sevaUT "Congratulations to all newly minted foreign policy experts." --Sarah Smith "Not since Aaron Rodgers or Djokovic has the world united so fervently against one man's unrepentant assholism. Good job, Putin." --Xeni Jardin "Everybody's a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We're all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos." --David Cronenberg "Don't let them tell you there are no monsters." --Nick Cave "By the time we got to Jupiter's moon Europa and began drilling to see what lay under the ice, the old legends of the submerged city of R'lyeh were all but forgotten. After all, nobody has found it in any oceans on Earth." --Micro SF/F Stories "Blockchains, the Libertarian dream of finance: Impossible for any authority to manipulate (but totally possible for a cabal of independent actors to manipulate), and they make regular ol' theft vastly worse, but that's ok because everyone insists it's your fault for being robbed." --Eevee "Deleted my tweets about the updated CDC guidelines because quite frankly, if anyone gave a fuck about the experiences or needs of disabled people, we wouldn't be going into year three of this pandemic." --Elle Armageddon "Twitter gives you access to some of the world's foremost experts on nuclear safety, modern warfare, supply chain dynamics, epidemiology, climate, and so much more. Even more impressive is that it's always the same three people." --lcamtuf "Insincere actors are the rule, not the exception." --Joseph Matheny "When I was a kid I thought hacking was all about writing Matrix-like code, when in reality it's just sending boomers e-mails that say 'give me your passwords,' and they do." --Rock-N-Roll Cool "Having literally sat in meetings in NATO HQ, the idea that NATO easily and quickly agrees to things along some sort of cunning master plan is laughable. It can take a decade for NATO to agree on the size of zippers." --Dan Kaszeta "'But Burp Suite is better!' And once my annual income exceeds six figures, I'll consider migrating." --Ranting Steve "I also dabble in the realm of uncouth." --Opti "Remember that this world doesn't have to remain a zero-sum nightmare tire fire just because that's the main thing it has been." --Damian Williams, Technoccult News "People are asking me why I endorsed the use of _We're Not Gonna Take It_ for the Ukranian people and did not for anti-maskers. Well, one use is for a righteous battle against oppression; the other is an infantile feet stomping against an inconvenience." --Dee Snider "Nuance is not the strength of 280 characters." --Doctor Doug ❝We love to buy books because we believe we're buying the time to read them." --Warren Zevon "To undermine the fundamental appeal of superheroes like Superman and Supergirl by recasting them as anti-heroes at best or outright monsters - dragging imaginary childhood paragons off their pedestals to reinforce a fairly facile point about the tendency of real world heroes to exhibit feet of clay, struck me and strikes me still as imaginatively lazy. Using kids' adventure heroes to make hackneyed observations about typical human behavior that does not in fact apply to made up comic book characters strikes me as - I don't know - whimsical? Dilettantish? A squandering of energy and creativity?" --Grant Morrison "Netanyahu's reaction to his police's abuse of Pegasus reminds me of Merkel's reaction to NSA mass surveillance: when the victims were 'merely' the global public, she dutifully papered over it. Only when her own name was discovered on the target list did it become a true scandal." --Edward Snowden As long as you fall in line with their goals, they don't care what you think about them. "Every few weeks, someone on Twitter notices how demented the content on Facebook is. I've covered a lot of these stories. The quick TL;DR is that Facebook's video section is essentially run by a network of magicians and Vegas stage performers who hack the platform's algorithm with surreal low-value content designed to distract users long enough to trigger an in-video advertisement and anger them enough to leave a comment." --Ryan Broderick "The only principled and sincere people in this shit are the targets who actually have something at stake." --Puella Vulnerata, on the culture wars "In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message." --Marshall McLuhan "I've seen more people recently saying things like ''I can't tell what's real'' and ''I don't know what to take seriously and what's a joke/satire'' than ever before, and this among the most alarming things I've seen in a very long time. This is the end goal of information warfare." --Caroline Orr Bueno, Ph.D "Many people give what they can privately. That is not cowardice. You don't know what others can do, and what they have done. Please be as generous with other's privacy as you are with your funds." --Walter Williams "Bank websites direly need a checkbox for 'I have ADHD' that makes them not log you out after twelve seconds of inactivity." --Eevee "Weight, diet, and exercise are the neoliberal substitute for actual public health. There's a reason we're so obsessed with them: Because we're not allowed to have a systemic public health response that cares for all of us from the ground up. That's not what our society is for." --Michelle Allison "Docker is 'sudo' with the serial numbers filed off." --Chronos "The thing is, if someone wants to break the rules...they will? Like adding more rules won't stop them. They'll just find a way that sidesteps the rules." --MattBatt "3D printing is an entire industry that doesn't ever ask 'why?', it asks 'why not?' And then it usually goes ahead even after there's a good reason why not." --Foone "Jesus fuck, Twitter encourages you to be as uncharitable as humanly possible when trying to understand other people." --Pookleblinky "Honestly, at beginning of the pandemic I (naively) thought ''Hey, I'm a professional immunologist! I have practical knowledge for once and I can help guide people through this mess and make a difference!'' Instead, it's turned into an endless slog against disinformation, and the saddest part for me is no one gives a fuck about my credentials and people just believe what they want to believe - what they saw from some random person on social media or from an obvious quack promoting bogus facts and treatments. The fact that Dr. Anthony Fauci, previously the most respected medical voice in the country, has been absolutely demonized, receives death threats is goddamned fucking insanity." --Alexander Dent "I dream of a day I can open this app and not see infosec Twitter eating itself. I dream of a day that people can behave, keep their hands and offensive comments to themselves. I dream of coming together to fight the baddies, not each other. Today is not that day. Be well friends." --Malicious Link "I thought I was signing up for cognitive behavioral therapy but now my nuts are absolutely killing me." --@jephjacques "Some people on this website really just do not conceptualize anybody else as an actual *person*, do they?" --Blue Space Canary "I can almost physically feel when a tweet goes over that line where people see it more as disembodied content rather than words written by a human and you get The Bad Replies" --Sy Brand "Not everyone is part of the same whisper networks. Direct your outrage at the people who knew and didn't do anything about it the whole time. Being shocked isn't the same as denial, it's the beginning of processing it on face value." --Arlieth "Finance doesn't like how much our observability tools cost. For whatever reason they also didn't like my alternative suggestion to ''just wait until we see revenue impacts.''" --DevSadOps "More about programming is aesthetics than people like to admit, and 'repo that warns when built' vs. 'repo that builds cleanly and passes all tests' is an aesthetic difference, not necessarily a functional one." --@workingjubilee "If postmodernism is the substitute for the sixties and the compensation for their political failure, the question of utopia would seem to be a crucial test of what is left of our capacity to imagine change at all." --Josh Toth "Sometimes I still think about how Twitter spent a whole week being mad at a mom for writing an article on Mother's Day about being glad she had kids." --Edward Snowden "Write like nobody's reading." --Leo Laporte "In retrospect, I'm glad we 'grew up tall and proud, in the shadow of the mushroom cloud' as the man sang, because if I hadn't known assholes could just kill us all any moment they wanted, and ''ha ha there's nothing you can do, so let's drink some beer, get some weed, watch MTV, and fuck'' I'd clearly be crazy by now." --Digital Mark "The secret of life is to die before you die and find that there is no death." --Eckhart Tolle, _The Power of Now_ "Does anyone else ever get their junk all gussied up to go raw dog on some unholy amalgamation of technology and then stop to think 'exactly how did I end up in this situation?' Or is that just me?" --buttplug.io "It's easy to forget, but we, a weird-ass community of friends and hackers joined with the most infamous hacking supergroup of all time to save the future." --the_gibson "If the Keurig Supreme is a proper coffee maker, then I'm a burlesque dancer standing in tonight for Dita Von Teese." --J. Michael Straczynski "Bitcoin is the continuation of politics by other means." --Edward Snowden "I do my retrocomputing in TurboBasicXL, which allows all lowercase like a modern, civilized language. But I would *never* do so. BASIC, like REXX, only looks right in CAPSLOCK." --Digital Mark "The world is run by private equity." --Herb "The handling of this virus has been an effective solvent for a lot of things I preferred to believe about the world." --Tom Jackman "The best part about anything getting on people's nerves and seeing the quote tweets explode is the excitement that comes with knowing how many tweets you get to read explaining your own joke back to you." --Ben Dreyfuss "Welcome to America, where everything has been outsourced to ghosts." --Arclight "I remember when people were trying to negotiate a compromise on encryption backdoors, by suggesting governments should hack their targets instead. Guess they took you up on it." --Matthew Green, on NSO Pegasus spyware being used against social leaders, journalists, mayors, and other reasonably important-but-not-famous people "Anyone that says game development is a waste of time is completely mistaken. They don't understand the value of helping another human being find an escape from the hell hole this life can be." --Amir Rajan "So far, state-sponsered cyberwar appears to be reproducing the technical achievements of 1990's website defacements with less humor value." --m0lpe "For a decision to be 'bad', a better option must exist. If all choices will yield bad outcomes, it's just a shitty situation. And having to deal with shitty situations is not a moral failing, it's life." --Hasufin "Bitcoin increasingly makes the internet feel like a neighborhood where a cult bought the old rec center at the end of the road and turned it into their cult compound." --Quinn Norton "Never talk shit to old-school telephony people. I've seen only portals into the madness and you have no conception of the chaos in their minds. Pay respects to people who built your world." --Swift On Security "A lot of people into this bs [cryptocurrency] are experiencing the panic and cognitive dissonance associated with late capitalism removing any chance of upward mobility. They are thrashing around for a ladder that was promised but never delivered and this is where a fair few wound up." --@karm_uh_ "National Archives confirms that records recovered from Trump at Mar-a-Lago included classified national security information. But her emails." --Brian Tyler Cohen "If your child shows warning signs like using compiled languages or 'hex editors' please invest early in therapy." --@scanlime "What I like about having pink hair is that it makes me less attractive to precisely the kind of people I don't want to be attracted to me." --@clairemax "''Don't be evil'' was essentially a warrant canary. Its disappearance signified ''we are no longer in a position of making choices about whether or not we are evil''." --Chaosprime "We're closer to the end of time_t than we are to the first tweets." --Mikko Hypponen "People who tell me to 'do my research' are advised to do their research on my research before owning themselves in fabled manner." --Dan Kaszeta "Reminder: Unless you actually work for the DoD, an intelligence agency, or something similar, it's perfectly OK for you to not have an insight into what's about to happen in Ukraine." --Matt Blaze "There's still something timeless about both the wackiness and innocence of so many early Internet pioneers sending up a badly translated game. And in an age where widely disseminated memes so often descend into cruelty or shock value, it's nice to look back at an age when memes were merely quite stupid." --Sam Machkovech, on the All Your Base meme turning old enough to drink "In the old days I feel like nerds smoked a lot of bad weed from a dragon bong and painted original wizards named like Splendric the Wise and now they vape corporate weed with their Warner Brothers licensed Funko Pops, and that's what's wrong with society." --@hunktears "What you've got is a gazillion people exploiting all this technology that was invented in the ARPA/PARC community, and most of them are not even curious. You have Tim Berners-Lee, who was a physicist, who knew he would be thrown out of physics if he didn't know what Newton did. He didn't check to find out that there was a [Douglas] Engelbart. And so, his conception of the World Wide Web was infinitely tinier and weaker and terrible. His thing was simple enough with other unsophisticated people to wind up becoming a de facto standard, which we're still suffering from." --Alan Kay "Just seeking clarification before I make it work anyway." --the_gibson "In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent has to have a conscience." --Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Ture "Don't be fooled by the idea of getting to the bottom of things, that's only a mirage." --Aime Michel "I want to shoot my pants off here, but just my pants." --PJ, SGDQ 2017 "TECHNICALLY it's only Greek fire if it's the closely-guarded Byzantine state secret recipe deployed through a hose attached to a boiler on a ship. Otherwise it's just sparkling napalm." --alpine_thistle "Never doubt the power of a small dedicated group to make combustible lemons." --the_gibson "The Prince sigil IS the unpronounceable fourth letter in the Tetragrammaton. That is why he spontaneously joined the Jehovah's Witnesses! He was trying to TELL US THE LOCATION OF MAUVE ZONE." --Forrest Gummo "It's so stupid it circles back around again to evil. That's the dream." --Tony, _Real Life Comics_ "I am not a human interface between DBs!" --Anonymous Cow-orker Common sense always smells like a fed. --me "On a Stack Overflow answer, I just read 'If I misunderstood your question and this was not the direction you want, I apologize' and for a brief moment I felt hope for us all." --Marcus Gordonus "Repair, reuse, make something ridiculous." --ajroach "Put ideas of civic virtue and psychopathology aside." --_The Dictator's Handbook_, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith "You can mislead people, you just can't disappoint them." --Lain Every accusation is a confession. "Tired: Transitioning as a statement of personal agency. Wired: Transitioning to invalidate the ID that was in the OPM breach." --Huginn "Reprehensible does not equal unconstitutional." --Chris Leibig, defense attorney, on police using forged DNA records to coerce confessions Murphy's law cares not where you're from or what species you are. "From 'We made this stack to help computers seamlessly interoperate' to ''We gotta stop bots from using our service because you can't sell product to a shell script.''" --Pompolic "Visualize journalists not being auxiliaries for the police and military." --Joe Dunman "Correlation is not causation, but it is useful for prediction." --@32bis "It's all SMD LEDs anyway, that's not going to be fun to desolder. BUT WE DO THESE THINGS NOT BECAUSE THEY ARE EASY, BUT BECAUSE WE GOTTA." --Foone "So many wild contradictions within capitalism end up boiling down to ''If you give people free time, they might learn things we don't approve of if they aren't already on our side (many 'professionals')''." --@nirebryce "There's no profit in freedom. Profit comes from having restrictions, then charging for them to be relaxed." --Eevee "In the 50's - 60's they created a highly educated and prosperous generation of Americans, who then turned around and mounted a concerted attack on capital and class power. Capital is willing to settle for sub-optimal results to prevent a reoccurrence." --@zacbracz "Always take a copy of the default Kali ssh key because a lot of people don't bother updating it and you never know when you might come across a Kali box." --@bullsecsecurity "Whistleblowing will probably likely destroy you, and if it doesn't, the people you blow the whistle on will certainly keep at it." --Cher Scarlett "From what I can see, getting promoted at a big tech company is roughly four times harder than getting that job at another company." --Corey Quinn "I just saw someone meticulously sanitize a shopping cart with antiseptic wipes before walking into the grocery store without a mask in case you're wondering why the pandemic still isn't over." --Andrew Weinstein "You have to be 100% in alignment with FSF's orthodoxy on 'software freedom.' Any other opinions you might hold are not relevant, however." --Kelly Kinkade "Continually amused by blockchain proponents who are fundamentally unable to understand that there exist people for whom money is not the #1 motivator. But yeah, the person who's spent over a decade making more than 100,000 Wikipedia edits for no financial compensation is probably in it for the cash." --Molly White "There are people who, years ago, made a choice to help someone, be a better person, advocate for justice, walk in a protest, volunteer, and show compassion. I don't know their names but their acts live on. We don't need to be famous to make a better world. Just present, and kind." --Tarah Wheeler "Your periodic reminder that CULT OF THE DEAD COW is not just about 'hacking'. It's artists, musicians, writers, makers, hackers and politicians making crazy shit happen so we don't have to just watch the world burn. And we gave Ronald Reagan Alzheimer's because he deserved it." --Dildog "I should have known better than to make any reference whatsoever to something that influences large aspects of my life on Twitter without being prepared to discuss and debate my entire existence and how I describe it with strangers." --Sarah Kurchak "The dictum of our contemporary culture is ''if you're not a unit of reliably exploitable use-value then you're nothing.''" --Joseph Matheny "It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams." --Don DeLillo, _Americana_ "They (the new generation of corporations) are all going for the 'Amazon' model now which is hemorrhage money for, like, a decade, strangling all competitors that can't afford to do that until you become an integral part of modern society that people can't psychologically comprehend a world without your company." --@jimmy_rickets "Apparently a significant portion of humans out there just close their eyes and it's quiet. Like, their brains are SILENT. Before bed. Any time. An abyss of solace. I am haunted by this. HAUNTED. My brain is a 24/7 Bosch painting in 8D sound." --Natania Barron "John Belushi was an extreme experience even by my standards." --Keith Richards "We want policymakers and press to fear us." --Drew Herdener, communications executive, Amazon "What a stupid son of a bitch." --Joe Biden, on Peter Doocy "Being called a normie for my strong NFT opinions by people who want to turn the web into a baseball card scrapbook, truly astounding." --Eevee "Is there anything more cruelly Puritanical than enshrining a sexual ideal that leaves a person unable to enjoy sex?" --RS Benedict, _Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny_ "I sometimes worry that some people are incapable of allowing other people their harmless pleasures." --Benjamin Dreyer "What the Web3 crowd wants is way more insidious: They want to turn everything into tradable assets. Because capitalism needs new lands to accumulate." --@tante "When you're the only person who responds to your posts, that's a REALLY bad sign." --Rev. Ivan Stang "Billionaires rich of data, now upset poor people are data rich." --Tim Kaupas "You know why nobody knows who I am? Because I never got caught. All the best hackers, all the best phreakers in the world, we don't know who they are because they never got arrested. And they never went to prison. This is why you don't know who the best ones in the world are." --Susan Thunder "'The poor are killing industries by not having money' is a very creative way to avoid saying it's actually the rich who are killing industries by hoarding wealth and privatizing everything." --@alsohunter "If profs were capable of formatting their own shit, there'd be a lot less co-authorships for junior researchers." --Anonymous "Many people like to pretend they're moderate when in truth they don't give a shit and just want the issues to all Go Away." --Hasufin "[It] Still blows my mind that at least 5 million and probably more like 7 million people - and entirely possibly between 12 and 22 million people, holy fucking shit - have died from One Shared Thing in less than two years and the vast majority of y'all got so scared that all you could do was shut down as hard and fast as you could and pretend like it wasn't happening... But at the same time, knowing this kind of makes me wish the people demanding that we 'go back to normal' would just say ''I'm fine with thousands of people a day dying from one single cause especially if they're disabled,'' they could save the rest of us some time." --Damian Williams, Technoccult News "I have come to the conclusion that a certain subset of the American population would be more welcoming to an alien from another galaxy than to one from another country." --Ciph3rdoc "Too many Joe Rogans and not enough Carl Sagans." --Galactic Stone and Ironworks "Wait, WTF... The Bengals are in the Super Bowl? Ed, I need your interpretation and translation of what is going on. Did all the other teams die?" --Seele "It is an enormous mistake to think people only defend the rich because they think one day they might be rich. Conservative women don't defend the patriarchy because they think one day they will be men. They do so because they believe in a natural hierarchy. People defend the rich because they believe in a society of masters and servants. That's it. Look at the Elon Musk fanboys. They don't want to be in charge themselves, they want Elon Musk to be in charge and they want to serve him. So they invent all sorts of mythology around him to justify his natural superiority and position. They want a kind of feudalism." --Existential Comics "Printers can sense fear." --Foone "War is a profanity because, let's face it, you've got two opposing sides trying to settle their differences by killing as many of each other as they can." --Norman Schwarzkopf "Rival cults put the simp in sympathetic magic. The Church of the SubGenius practices pimpaesthetic magic." --Dr. Uncle Onan Canobite "One of the best rewards of moving into midlife is the priceless relief at all the dumb shit you *didn't* do. Everyone learns in their 20's how to cringe at their past behavior. But you learn in your 40's the real sweetness of a bypassed fuckup." --Eros Discordia "A C program is like a fast dance on a newly waxed dance floor by people carrying razors." --Waldi Ravens "They're gonna merge health insurance cards and credit cards into one card and then call it 'health care reform'." --David Sirota "My ability to dissociate has become too powerful. Now I'm just watching the fall of America like 'Hmm, yeah. That happens to empires.' while I look for dog hats on Amazon." --Mike Primavera "Welcome to The Wired, where you can be anything you want. Which is why everyone is a catgirl." --Blackle Mori "Never trust the programmer with a screwdriver - but always trust the programmer with cat ears." --Niconiconi "When people say why aren't there more women in STEM it's generally cos some dudes with a beard came along and did what the women had been doing for years, everyone pats the dudes on the back, and after a while even the strongest women just get fed up with it." --Tanya Fish "If 'vulnerable people are going to die,' is the government response to a pandemic, you already know their climate policy." --Benjamin Perry "Vigilance consumes our minds, and crowds out all the other cognitive tasks like how do I make this world around me better for all of us?" --Miss Amy "The first requirement of being added to any team developing new ML/AI is 'Have you SEEN the internet?'" --@markbrokeit "They call it a 'bus factor' and not a 'found-a-better-job factor' because management would rather imagine workers being killed than finding a better job." --Fitzgen "My stepson said there's nothing weirder than a methhead being antivax. ''They'll make meth using ammonia or bleach, they'll inject anything else, but NOOO not a Covid vaccine.'' He does outreach at a church and is a recovered addict himself (and he's vaxxed)." --Simple Nomad "'I find this fact very interesting' is one of those phrases in the pandemic times that usually means there's a conspiracy theory coming and you should get out of the conversation now." --Quinn Norton "Dune is such a well loved scifi setting among many techies because it shows a future utopia where we've finally come to our senses and banned computers. No one on Arrakis has ever had to fix a printer and you can see it in their smiles." --Foone "Regimes take advantage of data sources that exist, they're not magic." --Matthew Green "Go share that page on the orange website, or Reddit, or Facebook or whatever. You know, the things that killed the Internet." --@violenceworks "When books are run out of school classrooms and libraries I'm never much disturbed. Not as a citizen, not as a writer, not even as a schoolteacher, which I used to be. What I tell kids is, don't get mad, get even. Don't spend your time waving signs or carrying petitions around the neighborhood. Instead, run, don't walk to the nearest non-school library or the local bookstore and get whatever it was that they banned. Read whatever they're trying to keep out of your eyes and your brain because that's exactly what you need to know." --Stephen King "Being an SRE (site reliability engineer) is just asking 'is that localtime or UTC' over and over until you retire." --@missamytobey "Childhood is deep and rich. It's vital, mysterious and profound. I remember my own childhood vividly. I knew terrible things, but I knew I mustn't let adults know I knew. It would scare them." --Art Spiegelman and Mauice Sendak, 27 September 1997 "OH from some 90's hackers: 'I hacked NASA' is straight up there with 'I had a newspaper route.'" --Weld Pond "Marx failed to predict that even in a post-scarcity world a bunch of morons would still try to scam each other out of money so they could 'own' shitty pictures of monkeys. Actually, Marx specifically talked about how capitalism would be forced to create artificial scarcity, but for the sake of the joke format you have to say he failed to predict all the stuff that he actually predicted quite accurately." --Existential Comics "Perception is more important than reality. If someone perceives something to be true, it is more important than if it is, in fact true. This doesn't mean you should be duplicitous or deceitful, but don't go out of your way to correct a false assumption if it plays to your advantage." --Ivanka Trump "Crawling, incidentally, I think is the biggest issue with making a new search engine these days. Websites flat out refuse to support any crawler [other] than Google, and Cloudflare and other protection services and CDN's flat out deny access to incumbents. It is not a level playing field." --Ben E.C Boyter, on writing a search engine "There's only one kind of people who would vote to ban _Maus_." --Neil Gaiman "People seriously discussing the footwear of candy mascots. Like, come on, guys. Be productive with your time. I'm just imagining some dude spending his last moments on earth drafting an unfinished tweet about M&Ms. Carpe diem." --Edward Snowden Rich men don't come to buy. They come to take. "Real computers are increasingly second-class citizens these days, even as clients." --Viktor Dukhovni "Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live." --Martin Golding "Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty." --Hannah Arendt, _The Origins of Totalitarianism_ "NFTs are just Beanie Babies for people who get mad whenever there are black women in Star Wars." --@guy_freire "It's Twitter. I have a character limit. I'm not writing an essay. Use critical thinking skills." --@peachmilfshake "Any sufficiently advanced neglect is indistinguishable from a human dieback scenario." --Emily Dare "We are experiencing the expansion of disposability and that will always be framed as inevitability." --Kelly M. Hayes "'Scorpion venom is one of the most expensive liquids in the world, costing around $39 million a gallon.' So almost as expensive as inkjet printer ink." --Charles Stross "Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence." --Martin Gilens and Benjamin I. Page, _Testing Theories of American Politics_ "I guess I failed to take into account that everyone is bad and nothing can just be ok." --Brennan "This is the media, an irresponsible media. It will make the criminal look like he's the victim and make the victim look like he's the criminal. If you aren't careful, the media will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people doing the oppressing. This is a sort of propaganda tactic that I would call psychological warfare." --Malcolm X "The climate crisis reveals that our civilization has never really been organized around science, contrary to the usual Enlightenment narrative. It is organized around capital. Science is embraced when it serves the interests of capital, and is often ignored when it does not." --Jason Hickel "A can of tuna is just a soda with chunks in it." --Infernus Goatus "Once most revolutionaries come to power, their inclination - if they can get away with it - is to be petty dictators." --_The Dictator's Handbook, Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics_, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith "''I'm still functioning? What have I become...'' is a failure mode of the idea that bearing witness and performing empathy obligate taking damage. It's ok to be ok, and we don't hear that a lot anymore. So long as we are all caring about each other, and accepting that for some folks it will viscerally hit hard, it is not a sin to not be viscerally hit hard if that happens to be your lot." --Feonixrift "If your actions create a legacy that inspires others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, then, you are an excellent leader." --Dolly Parton "Kids aren't depressed because they missed school. They're depressed because they understand that nobody gives a fuck about their lives. They understand exactly what's going on." --Natou "Extremely relatable to look at reality and think 'Nah... this feels like a mistake.'" --Emmy Trashfire "It's true that there's no ethical consumption under capitalism but another thing nobody really talks about is that it doesn't matter if you buy it or not, production is just totally uncoupled from demand now." --Alice Avizandum "It's going to be lulz-o-tron 2000 funny when the list of intelligence agents and now-compromised assets working for Twitter compiled by Guo Wengui leaks." --@rocco_castoro "A consistent problem with media coverage of extremists is the bias toward false gravity. News organizations downplay or omit public figures' bizarre beliefs to seem more sober and grave, thus granting them greater dignity and credibility, though sunlight might demystify them." --Jason Colavito "Computer culture used to be 'information wants to be free', now it's 'how can I bring ownership to things you can't own?'" --@afivegantenna "It's not cynicism if they're truly that awful." --David Schmitt "I guess it was completely unforeseeable that the incredibly important economy wouldn't thrive with its entire workforce sick." --Kirsty Webeck "You can't build a surveillance capability and then tell well-meaning people ''Hey, using this data could save lives and help people, but we shouldn't do that because .'' If you believe in those principles, don't build the damn thing in the first place." --Matthew Green "One way to think of the US is as a Rube Goldberg machine made out of perverse prisoner's dilemma incentives, with each person finding it completely rational and necessary to choose to to fuck themselves over." --Pookleblinky "I'm treating an unprecedented number of patients on life support in emergency rooms, with nowhere to send them. I'm a critical care doc, and NOT a toxicologist, but it's my opinion that if you say that omicron is just a mild 'cold,' you are probably smoking crack." --Dr. Steven M. Brown, MD "I hate it when people say ''it's not that deep.'' Everything is exactly as deep as you're willing to look. Quit being lazy." --Tsundoku Psychohazard "In the long run, Democrats may find that they are bringing a ballot to a gunfight." --thecollective "No JavaScript frameworks were created during the writing of this article." --Jose' Aguinaga "Please point me to the governments being better, because all I see is a world on fire, failing to deal with a pandemic?" --Mavis River "If you can't use a thing to buy porn, that thing is not a currency." --jwz "I didn't get into infosec so I can play by your damn rules." --Everyone in information security "When there is no more food being thrown into the bucket, the lobsters inside will realize that their fellow lobsters are made out of food." --Nicholas Sarwark "I'm very glad you found a way for me to blame protobuf for this." --Anonymous "I quite enjoy when private spy companies don't delete the metadata on their PDFs. I'm supposed to have to work harder than this." --Scott Stedman "If at first you don't succeed, add sudo and try again." --Katie Paxton-Fear "'Corporate vs independent' is the new 'sheep vs free thinker,' a transparently self-serving (and falsely dichotomous) way of viewing the world that ensures one is always insulated to differing views because they can always be dismissed as innately bad faith and/or irrational." --Cory Massimino "Me: Look at this bug I found in mature, well-tested code, it completely blows apart the memory protection, I am a genius, I am a goddess, I am - wow, has my shirt been on inside-out all day?" --0xabad1dea "Metaverse stuff really pisses me off because I was told my entire life that it is 'wrong to live in a fantasy world' and that my hobbies and interests were 'unhealthy escapism' but as it turns out all they were really mad about was that my imagination wasn't properly monetized." --MiniMatt "It's mind-blowing to me that people think we can make Mars livable when we apparently can't keep the Earth livable." --Lux Alptraum "With all due respect to the developers of that metaverse Walmart, I think Hieronymus Bosch did it better." --@mathew "Rule 53: If you can think of it, someone's done it in the DNS." --Peter Lowe "Bannned from Metaverse Walmart for going in there with a cat person avatar whose shaders run a Linux kernel on other peoples' GPUs." --Porygon "Memories are made of the past, and hopes are part of the future." --Barbara Karnes, RN "Besides, the planet is going to get engulfed by the sun in five billion years! And after that, the universe is going to have a heat death! So nothing that happens in the meantime is that big a deal. (If I had a nickel for every time a Silicon Valley millionaire said something like this about why they weren't using their money to solve the problems they believed were most important to solve, I might be a Silicon Valley millionaire.)" --silsyn-wathep "You're not really lying if the lies you tell are counter to other lies." --Edward Bernays "Look mister/missy I don't know who you think you are but this is America, leave our corporations alone. They are just a small mom and pop business trying to put their kids through school off your tracking cookies and personally identifying information..." --Cyber Slacker "This high-profile vulnerability in an open source project is really reinforcing my belief that, to a dominant portion of users, the primary important thing about free software is that it is gratis, rather than libre." --cron mom "Meaningless platitudes are the true currency of open source." --Vaibhav Sagar "Personally I'm in favour of vulnerability disclosure in ways that impact Minecraft as people might care then; going to BlackHat is like shouting at each other in a goldfish bowl." --Kevin Beaumont "Mark Meadows put together a PowerPoint for Trump's coup attempt and the media has moved on in 24 hours. But yeah, Hillary's emails." --Jack Cocchiarella "One of the most sinister things the right has achieved in US history is convincing half the country that 'politics' is some abstract, theoretical thing wholly separated from a person's identity and morality. This is how you get so many white conservatives breathlessly trying to debate the right for certain people to exist. They've turned politics into a game, like its a debate club match. Some of them actually believe you can just turn 'politics' off like a light switch. Those on the right cannot fathom that politics can mean life or death for certain groups because the entire history of America has inoculated them against this concept. They're surprised when people choose not to interact with them. It is a genuine SHOCK. Whats even worse is that the right will tell you directly what they believe, even if its heinous and unhinged, and then still act shocked and insulted when you call them out for it. As if disagreeing with their fascism is worse than the fascism itself." --Wootmaster "I'm missing some vital context in the Nancy Reagan discourse today and I want it to stay that way." --Patrick Tomlinson "Twitter is LDAP for millennials." --Glyph "I've come to the sad conclusion that a lot of people in the US and UK are actually opposed to democratic values." --Dan Kaszeta "Up until recently you could be like 'I think most humans are good' and it'd sound reasonable because you only knew 150 people. The average Youtube comment or Twitter reply thread would drive a medieval optimist mad." --Pookleblinky "I think the reason Twitter no longer sparks joy is that I never meant to get this far into the weeds in the first place. I came here to shitpost and chill and then people started following me for my good takes and now I have to frenetically manufacture nuance constantly." --Amberite "I'm sure I would get more traction if I tweeted gentle, supportive writing advice, but my only advice is fuck 'em all. Life is too short. Nobody has time. Everyone is broke. Everything sucks. Write what you want to write and anybody telling you to quit goes in the bin." --Magen Cubed "The reason It's a Wonderful Life (1946) holds up so well is that George's line, 'You know how long it takes a working man to save $5000?' has somehow not aged even slightly." --@sovietdisco "The most absurd thing about the finland PM story is the idea that there's a 36 year old who wants to go clubbing. IDK I guess maybe universal healthcare means that you don't feel like you're rapidly decaying the moment you turn 27." --Lauren Shippen "Whoever controls the media, controls the mind." --Jim Morrison "It's funny that 'having sincere interests and hobbies' is coded as queer, feminine, autistic, etc. As if the cishet allistic dude's ideal past-time is staring at a wall until he falls asleep." --Pookleblinky "Who needs coffee when Twitter can throat punch you before 10am?" --@annaliese119 "I thought we'd all agree that deadly viruses are bad enough to be worth doing something about, but then again, I also thought we'd all agree that school shootings are bad enough to be worth doing something about." --Matt Blaze "Nothing in life will radicalize a person faster than a medical diagnosis in America. Turns out dehumanizing people for having disorders and a lifetime of stress and trauma is an excellent way to make sure people wanna burn your system to the ground. I quite like this idea. The US version of 'radical' is just called 'common sense' everywhere else on Earth." --Scrooge McFuck "I did not have 'corporate interests reinvent second life 20 years later but worse in every possible way, and a bunch of nerds act like this is revolutionary and inevitable' on my bingo card." --Eevee "People really underestimate how dystopian the United States is." --Kate Aronoff "People who long for the log cabin always forget the outhouse." --Jim Lockard "I had no life plan for past 30. I didn't think I'd be dead, I just had never wanted to or felt able to make one. Perhaps not coincidentally, most of what I'd built fell apart at precisely 30. Now, I haven't reestablished a norm - but the world doesn't have norms now, so it's fine." --Dr. Ellie Lockhart "When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh. When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come." --Timothy Snyder, _On Tyranny_ "Having an open mind means you are willing to be proven wrong, not that you automatically believe everything anyone says to you." --Eevee "Anyone who ever wondered, 'How could so many East Germans have cooperated with the Stasi?' should join Nextdoor." --Matthew Feeney "'Which side of your mouth do you chew with?' is a good litmus test for class solidarity because if someone goes 'What do you mean, which side?' you know they grew up rich." --Pookleblinky "Modern art is a reflection of how we've lost faith in western civilization." --Paul Joseph Watson "If everyone actually read papers, including reviewers, genomics would be a lot better off." --Lior Pachter "Sometimes, when I'm not even mad, I'll dramatically stand up and yell 'This is bullshit!' before walking out of a room for no reason." --the_gibson "War's a kind of negotiation too." --James S. A. Corey, _Tiamat's Wrath_ "Amazing how at this point in technology small Fediverse instances based in somebody's home have a greater availability than a multi-billion dollar cloud network." --Finn "A negative ethic is centered around thou-shalt-not. It tells you what you should not do. A positive ethic is centered around thou-shall. It tells you what you should do. Modern ethics emphasizes the negative ethic to the point that we are adrift and directionless. We know not to do things, but have no idea what we should be doing, and are attracted to various distractions that lead us away from 'the good life'." --Lowd Bowlich "Measure twice. Cut as many times as it takes. Dremel." --Gardevoir "The most 2021 thing in the world is standing in front of an automatic door, trying to be more opaque somehow so it opens and eventually realizing the store is closed." --zpojqwfejwfhiunz "Tech doesn't invent anything. It only repackages and resells old things endlessly." --Socketwench "Team DevOps: It's like Nyancat, but sad and underslept." --Anonymous "Yeah, everything is problematic as shit. Everything is all fucked up all the time. The music is still beautiful." --celesteh, on the CIA's involvement in the arts during the cold war "When [the virgin] Mary takes a cue from Kali, heads will roll!" --Unknown "I'm just eating a sandwich, man! I was thinking. I had some stuff going on. I was hungry." --Keanu Reeves "First rule of Linux admin: If you're not awake enough to spell sudo, you're not allowed to use sudo." --Foone "I sometimes think that we see things like the ML bubble or the different web3 stacks because Software Engineers are bored building CRUD apps instead of the $COOLSHIT they were playing with in college and thought would be their careers." --Lord Bowlich "What haunts me is that I am just not smart enough for so many people to be this much stupider than I am." --Kate Harding "After so many years on the internet, it should not surprise me to see people dismissing Dwight D. Eisenhower's criticisms of the Military-Industrial Complex as merely the uninformed opinion of some guy who obviously doesn't understand war, but here we are." --Edward Snowden "Mere incantation of the phrase 'national security' does not, and should not, in and of itself justify violations of the speedy trial right. Likewise, the terms 'complex discovery' and 'translation difficulties' should not stand stead for the term 'national security.'" --Carlos Lucero, judge, Tenth Circuit Appeals Court "The adult is not the highest stage of development. The end of the cycle is that of the independent, clear-minded, all-seeing Child. That is the level known as wisdom." ---_The Tao of Pooh_, Benjamin Hoff "Heavy borrowing is a feature of small coalition settings. It is not the result, as some economists argue, of ignorance of basic economics by third-world leaders." --_The Dictator's Handbook, Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics_, Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, Alastair Smith "This is 202x. Presenting your data objects with consistent unique identifiers is NOT a big ask." --Feonixrift "We are living among the leftovers of a recent mass extinction." --_Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science, and Bad Religion in a World Without God_, Greg Graffen and Steve Olson "Everybody trying to PvP when the game is PvE." --Edward Snowden "It's just hilarious to me that the people I know who are both involved in San Francisco local politics and are also very online engage in said politics by doing things like running botnets, sock puppet accounts, OSINT'ing and doxxing local mom groups and school board members, making network analysis maps of their enemies, and generally running influence ops against elected officials via Twitter. It's like a microcosm of so many things going on right now." --Vortex Egg "The stories that get told, and how, are largely determined by white editors; the merit of a story or the reporting on it is assessed through their gaze. Journalists of color often have to push white editors to recognize the importance of covering these communities thoroughly and fairly. This can be an emotionally draining and challenging process, and ends up putting in extra labor that white journalists don't need to in order to progress in their careers. Likewise, journalists of color often have to enter into a coded negotiation process with editors about how much of the story can be told without making White readers uncomfortable." --Chantal Flores "No, I don't think this joke is gonna land. ATC: Requesting a go-around on runway A6." --Blackle Mori "That style of humor I would call pizza-slicer comedy: All edge, no point." --unlofl "Happy New Year. I'm not the kind of person that believes that the change of year has much to do with one's fate, but if the year alone started off by crashing a bunch of Exchange servers, it can't be all that bad." --Command Line Magic "Why do we always defend? Tai Chi never actively attacks. The _Art of War_ says 'Retreating when the enemy advances.'" --Bolo Yeung "I won't lie, I definitely visited Pornhub on the Oculus browser soon after I got my Quest so I could experience the fucked up 360 degree porn videos. Anyone who can stop laughing long enough to crank it to one of those videos is a prodigy." --Anonymous "Vindicating my theory of the weeb to Numa Numa pipeline." --Whaang "If we're ever called upon, we Americans can and will rise to the occasion and be stupider than absolutely anybody." --Charles Band, _Confessions of A Puppet Master_ "Trying to shame Internet trolls is like using an asteroid strike on a black hole." --@swiftonsecurity "America isn't a country, it's a business." --@lacunalingua_3 "Y'all really think schools shifting online are the sole factors driving youth mental health decline? Not mass death, the casual selfishness of the adults in their lives, the prolonged stress of pandemic life, the flip-flopping of politicians who wield power over their lives..? Not watching adults live it up in restaurants, sports arenas, malls and bars while their education and safety hangs in the balance? Not the politicization of public health measures? Get real." --Simmi Jaswal "I don't think Americans are smart enough to fix anything. Decades of dumbing down the population has it made it impossible to change anything." --@gonzo6664 "Who would've thought that the country that thinks public transportation is an attack on your freedom would bungle a public health crisis so badly?" --@slackerpal "Our culture's near insistence that illness is a personal failing explains a lot about how the pandemic has been handled." --@nafinstabs "Why do people say 'Grow some balls?' Balls are weak and sensitive! If you really wanna get touch, grow a vagina! Those things take a pounding!" --Betty White "I mainly see hustlers looking for suckers." --Brian Eno, on NFTs "The fact that the US can only stand about five (5) days of general striking is useful information." --Sargoth "Y'know, the disaster that COVID-19 has been in the US really makes a lot of sense when you realize that many of the people leading the public health response were involved in the response to HIV." --Ada Worchester "Timezones are so weird. Australia is in 2022, Canada is in 2021, and the United States is in 1935." --Santiago Mayer "There's this stereotype of society overdiagnosing ADHD to medicate children into docility, but in fact the standard ADHD medications are all stimulants that would make neurotypical children into nightmare gremlins from chaos hell." --Natalie Weizenbaum "There is so little in this world that is 'innocent,' that is made by someone entirely inoffensive for a company that is entirely unodious and the profits aren't used for anything questionable." --@lostnotatsea "You can turn any directional antenna into an omnidirectional antenna simply by spinning it extremely quickly." --Blackle Mori "Hi, I'm sure that whoever runs this account has no idea who I am, but I founded Mozilla and I'm here to say fuck you and fuck this. Everyone involved in the project should be witheringly ashamed of this decision to partner with planet-incinerating Ponzi grifters." --jwz, on the Mozilla Foundation partnering with a cryptcurrency outfit "With a knife and a spoon, we can build a 3-element yagi antenna." --Ludovic Tyack "We live in an economy, not a society. If we were in a society, we would share, re-use, and pass on things we used as parents onto the next family which needs it, but capitalism wants us all to buy and then discard those things, and so we are separated." --AK Faulkner "The best New Year's resolution I ever made was to start devouring my nicest things, and save no small pleasure for an unspecified future. Now I burn the good candles, wear the expensive perfume at home, and scribble imperfectly in pretty notebooks. You can't pin joy like a moth." --Holly Cassell "What can I say? I am one badass bitch." --Betty White "Betty White is the one celebrity for whom I feel it is appropriate to enact the Klingon death ritual of bellowing gutturally into the sky to warn the dead: Beware, a Klingon warrior is about to arrive." --@emilyst "Forever wondering if I'm truly far left or if I'm just an empathetic person living in a late capitalist hellscape where I get called a commie for saying ''Hey, maybe poor people don't deserve to starve.''" --@therealrynnstar "The Linux kernel has X.509 processing inside it. We're all going to die." --Peter Gutmann "Me reading Watchmen in 1987: Wow, Ozymandias represents a level of cynicism about humanity that I could not have imagined. Me reading Watchmen in 2021: Wow, Ozymandias is a naive optimist." --Lilah Sturges "If you're not funny, don't try to be." --SubGenius proverb "The irony is not lost on me that this ARMSID probably has more power than this entire [Commodore] 64." --Robin, _Robin's Digital Basement_ "There is without a doubt an art to wrapping leather. An art I haven't learned yet." --Odin Makes "This may be history's first elective pandemic. We know how to control it, but have collectively chosen not to." --Matt Blaze "A guy once sheepishly told me that for fun he enjoyed roleplaying with his friends in a GTA Online motorcycle gang. He made sure to cover his ass by preemptively mocking himself for it. I had to assure him that as a former LARPer, I am legally not allowed to make fun of anyone for the ways they like to play pretend." --Squeedoodle Dibble's First Law of Sociology: Some do, some don't. "People always say 'support women, support women', yet when I call for artillery I get nothing????" --Rev. Poppy Haze "By the standards of our great-grandparents, nearly all of us are coddled. Each generation tends to see the one after it as weak, whiny, and lacking in resilience. Those older generations may have a point, even though these generational changes reflect real and positive progress." --Greg Lukianoff, _The Coddling of the American Mind_ "You should not have a favourite weapon. To become over-familiar with one weapon is as much a fault as not knowing it sufficiently well." --Musashi Miyamoto, _Go Rin no Sho_ "Democrats keep thinking they can win over voters who hate them with better policies. We're dreaming. Democrats are always asking, 'Why do Republicans vote against their economic interests?' Because they hate you." --Bill Maher "A freeing phrase: 'I am not always the intended audience.'" --Shannon L. Miller "Maybe AWS keeps going down because they run all their stuff on-prem." --Amit Gupta "Open source has always practically functioned as a harmless pressure relief valve for the idealism of young engineers who could be organizing their workplace." --@scanlime "''Stalin wasn't a monster'' is historical revisionism, and if you find yourself excusing atrocity maybe take a step back?" --@mykola "I haven't been posting much lately because living in dystopian society that feels like it's on the brink of collapse is a lot harder than just playing a game. The world has been very dark, and I've been absent handling life. But know this: There are still things to fight for - whether it's an ideal or simply survival; for better or worse we're in it together. The light at the end of the tunnel may just be a dumpster fire leftover from the last riot... but that's still enough." --@shadowrun_facts "The Discordization of the Internet is fucking brutal. I hate trying to find information about any remotely niche topic only to discover it's hidden somewhere within a Discord server with 80 channels at 50k posts per second." --Luke Correia "The modern researcher must synergize the skill of the samurai and the patience of the bureaucrat." --Joseph de Vine "When 95% of your daily communication is controlled by US-based tech corporations with zero accountability to anybody except fundamentalist Christian lobbying groups, you no longer get a choice in the matter, you *will* organize your life around those Puritan norms." --Sven Slootweg "Anyway the moral of this story to me, and I'm being serious, is that sometimes shit just sucks and you don't have to like it, but you also still have to be a good person." --Jordan Heath-Rawlings "Rick Moranis cost me a lot of money because I ruined so many takes he was in by helplessly breaking into loud laughter." --Mel Brooks, on the making of _Spaceballs_ "I need privacy. Not because my actions are questionable, but because your judgement and intentions are." --Anonymous "As a measure of journalistic impact, the Pulitzer Prize holds significantly less prestige than the CIA plotting to murder you." --Edward Snowden "Use Signal. Use Tor. Use ProtonMail. Unless you are stupid. In that case, even using these things won't help you evade law enforcement. But they are what smart people use to protect privacy." --@erratarob "Watching pseudo-libertarians learn economics from first principles, one crash at a time." --@vathpela "Let's be honest with ourselves. The audience for this document is the auditors." --Accidental CISO, on just about any policy document in existence "Twitter is a fractal maze of troll-infested cul-de-sacs. Just when you think you've seen every corner... I once made a flat earth joke and was set upon by a gang of round earth vigilantes. Didn't even know such a thing existed. Still disoriented from that." --Brian Goetz "In secondary school, my chemistry teacher rescued me after absentmindedly leaning over a Bunsen burner. Shirt got burnt but not me. Chemistry is the action hero of the sciences for real." --Irwin Williams "If your one-liner doesn't look like an excerpt from the Necronomicon, you're not doing it right." --@get_innocuous "Roger Ebert understood that both as a reviewer and as a critic, you have to respond to how good a movie was at doing what it was TRYING to do." --Jonathan Korman "The end of Moore's Law sure has changed their business plan. I used to gladly buy a new computer every year because it was so much faster and bigger than my old one. Now I *have* to buy one because the old one is broken and deliberately unrepairable." --Phil Karn "The only reason anyone lives in my head rent-free is because they are not paying their rent and I have no legal framework to seek recompense without appearing insane." --@hardscifimovies "How do I get paid for being an intelligent but mediocre intellectual like this guy? Does it only pay if you're on the far right? I feel like I'm working too hard." --Mallory Moore "How does it feel to be part of one of the last generations before techciv collapse that even has the opportunity to notice that they're being trained by their phones' predictive text capabilities to express the same thoughts everyone else is expressing." --@chaosprime "I like the ouroboros character of online culture sometimes. Like how calling things 'cringe' is now an example of cringe. Or how declaring things 'not a personality' became a personality." --Kevin Baker "Don't even come at me with these hypotheticals of what people might be doing. People are fucking crazy here, and misinformation has taken over. My city had at least one mask burning event, and the city council formally said 'We can google our own science.'" --Brett Kirk "That moment when you realize doom scrolling infosec Twitter is part of your job responsibilities." --Paul Masek "I started stimulants at the same time as HRT because I realized since I'm no longer a cis white dude I actually need to be competent at my job to not get fired." --@likeClockwork "Sometimes a God of Love and Forgiveness looks at a situation and goes ''Man, that's fucked. I need a whip to deal with this crap, I'll be back in a few hours.''" --Foone "You have to ask yourself: If our economic system actively destroys the biosphere *and* fails to meet most people's basic needs, then what is actually the point?" --Jason Hickel "Nobody ever said ''I'm glad I didn't get vaccinated'' on their deathbed. Probably because the ventilator was in the way." --Jeff Tiedrich "The best career advice I ever received - not writing advice, of which I have received roughly a metric shitton, but 'how to survive as a working writer' advice - came from Todd McCaffrey the first time we met at a con. ''Don't quit your day job until you're sure you can survive off of your royalties.''" --Seanan McGuire "You were preparing for the future but then the present happened." --Gradinko "Coining 'yonedadaism' for the genre of categorical diagrams which are impenetrable and indecipherable explosions of symbols and arrows. You know the ones." --@thorimur "There's gotta be some Internet law that states no matter how beloved, benign, or beneficial something is, if you post about it anywhere, someone will eventually show up in the comments to explain to you why it's actually bad." "The Milkshake Duck Doctrine." --Greg Newkirk and @filibusmeis "Did humans REALLY build the New York City subway system? At $1 billion per mile in today's costs, how could primitive 20th century humans have built 850 miles of track? Did they have ...extraterrestrial assistance? Or did they have some way of not spending a goddamn billion/mile?" --Paul Musgrave "''Lindsay Lohan's fursona is directly contributing to the extinction of our species'' is not a phrase I expected to ever say but here we are." --@subway_gorilla "That time we open sourced a dependency to not have to deal with the necessary key management to get a GitHub workflow to pull a git submodule from a private repo." --Bryan Cantrill "My son complained he's getting old (HA! He's 17) and I told him to look at it this way - getting old means you're winning. You're saying 'Suck it, Life!! All that shit you threw at me and I'm still fucking here!'" --Amanda Winn Lee "Some of us just have basic human empathy, Brendan. Also a basic understanding of economics and the impact usurious loans have on the entire economy but I don't want to expect too much." --@leeflower "I have the attention span of a child who has been let loose in a candy factory run by robots that give out free flamethrowers upon entrance." --The Sassiest Semite "Having a pet is basically just asking 'How did you get so cute?' followed by 'Why are you wet?' 6 or 7 times a day." --Sharyn Blum "Reading infosec exploit descriptions is fun because you learn stuff like 'In Windows, when you press the letter h, for some reason it calls a special letter press subroutine which emulates a full Amiga running an emulated Doom, if you go to level 3 it is possible to overflow the...'" --Dr. Ellie Lockhart "America's just been continously hit in the face with Foucault's boomerang for the past few decades." --Sophie Ladder "What haunts me is that I am just not smart enough for so many people to be this much stupider than I am." --Kate Harding "Reminder: Reality is front-running Lovecraftian horror this century. It's all right to be upset and afraid: We really ARE ruled by monsters." --Charles Stross "If we want the public to be healthy, we're going to have to give in one day and invent a public health system." --Quinn Noton "I will not pause the music I'm listening to so I can watch a damn video. Write it the fuck down." --Soatok "The entire content industry has successfully convinced us to use the word 'ownership' as a synonym for 'renting,' and this is a real problem." --Matthew Green "The cloud is just smoke from outage fires." --c0debabe "Every bit of complexity you add is a failure point." --Adam Savage "The difference between the working-level and policy-level folks is, to an embarassing degree, mostly just the awareness to avoid saying the quiet part out loud." --Edward Snowden "I do feel like the cyberpunk genre is getting so big that it's being seen as an aesthetic, and the warning is being forgotten." --James Joseph "One popular way of making money through cryptocurrency is to start a new currency, while retaining a large chunk of it for yourself. As a result, there are now thousands of competing cryptocurrencies in operation, with relatively little technical difference between them. In order to succeed, currency founders must convince people that their currency is new and different, and crucially, that the buyer understands this while other less savvy investors do not. Wild claims, fanciful economic ideas and rampant technobabble are the order of the day. This is a field that thrives on mystique, and particularly preys on participants' fear of missing out on the next big thing." --Martin O'Leary "Judges look at you funny if you sit on the stand as an expert and you look like the Unabomber." --Kusuriya "When the goblins have theodolites you know you're in trouble." --Puellavulnerata "I suspect 'whipping people into a hateful fury against Muppets for political purposes' may not be a sign of a healthy society." --Timescanner "Look at what you can accomplish when you throw human death and suffering at it until it's finished." --P.B.Gomez "TSA agent said he really liked my Jordan 1's and was like ''You're good man, no need to take them off,'' and not to brag, but do you know how nice your sneakers need to be to offset the name Mohanad at an airport security check?" --Mohanad Elshieky "Real-world hacking advice: 'try dumber' will get you more shells than 'try harder'." --Liam O "It is known. But it would be no advantage whatsoever for people to know it. It would even be worse. Some would believe it, others would not believe it, yet others would demand proofs. Afterwards they would begin to break one another's heads. Everything ends this way with people." --Gurdjieff "Poverty and desperation has created more hackers than any college." --Medus4 "I once went to a conference where the first speaker walked up on stage, slapped his hand down on the podium, and said ''It's freshwater clam day, and by the end of my talk you're going to love them as much as I do.'' I've never stopped thinking about the sheer power of that energy." --Biologizing "We age. We age and become Dilbert." --@galaxykate "The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent. But if we can come to terms with this indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light." --Stanley Kubrick "When I first started reading revolutionary literature, I was surprised to find that these people, who were made out to be villains, were actually talking about ending exploitation and suffering. Then I realized this is why we don't read their words in history class. The bourgeoisie has to teach you to hate shadows first, so you reflexively dismiss revolutionary writing, ideas, and practices without ever understanding or coming into contact with the actual content." --Feral Cherub "Kindness is my go-to, but fuck off is my wingman." --Jonny Ox "Expertise is great, but it has a bad side effect. It tends to create an inability to accept new ideas." --Dean Williams "The Blender manual is like a scene in a David Lynch movie where someone asks a question and the answer is a slow zoom into a light socket." --Calutron "There is a tendency in fringe politics to assume that it matters what you think. I'm all too aware of this from within the Left, especially from within anarchism - endless pontifications on how the world 'ought' to be, from people who have minimal contact with how the world actually is." --Black Cat "Bryce sometimes forgets he has a body." --Lyssa "When in doubt, take advantage of extra dimensions." --Pegritz "Every time one of their sources goes to prison, that's another headline for them. That's how they stay relevant - by burning sources, instead of the journalism that they once believed in." --Reality Winner, on The Intercept "Don't tell me that the last two (or five, or ten) years haven't felt like a bad b-movie to you - the kind that combines gaping plot holes with completely unnecessary scenes." --John Ohno "If you also know deep in your heart that the metaverse is a big fat steaming load of billionaire nerd pabulum, I hope reading these words provides you with a wave of vindicating comfort. You're not crazy. I know it can feel like that when the people peddling these things seem so convinced that they're the future, like they know something you don't. Don't fall for it. Watching people spend $69 million in fake money to buy a JPEG should make you feel like you're living in an age of unparalleled nonsense." --Wes Fenlon "If indeed there are any real monsters left, we have only to look in the mirror to find them." --Richard Ellis "During the BART crime issue years back, people kept complaining about these Black kids dancing in the trains for money. I asked them back, 'Would you prefer that they rob the train instead?' White and Asian kids playing violin for money, that's all cool and talented, but some Black kids are passionate about hip hop and dancing and suddenly it's a problem." --Darrell Owens, on occasional rashes of crime in the Bay Area "There's 3 things all men fear: The sea in a storm, a night with no moon and the wrath of a gentle man." --Patrick Rothfuss "If I don't die from the virus [covid], I'll die of exhaustion." --Dr. Alex Sigal, virologist, Africa Health Research Institute "300 years ago, a rich white guy wrote a monograph, probably in German, and we all just ran with it." --Adam Neely, jazz musician, on music theory Everything gets to change. "Every new idea is a mutation." --Everbern "The secret of the demagogue is to make himself as stupid as his audience, so they believe they are as clever as he." --Karl Kraus "Communities have to moderate what is acceptable behavior or they will accept increasing amounts of bad behavior. That moderation can come from within, or else it will eventually come from above." --Vortex Egg "QAnon: When you're too fucking stupid for Scientology, yet still waiting for that Jonestown ending." --Buckeye Engineering "It'd be really refreshing if news outlets did even the smallest of dives and started reporting on the dysfunction happening in this country but you know, whatever." --@whatapityonyou "A massive chunk of the things that alarm suburbanites about being in an urban environment are solved in totality by adopting the city dweller's habit of simply declining to perceive things that are none of your fucking business." --Taber "You know it's the 21st century when you can plug in a 14 TB disk almost as casually as a light bulb." --Lauren Weinstein "A lot of 'critical thinkers' are actually just reflexive pessimists." --@deepfates "The Venn diagram of 'things I need right now' and 'things that are actually substantially discounted' is basically empty space at this point." --@bauxitedev "This is not how I wanted to learn the Greek alphabet." --Isla McKetta, on covid variants "We could use the Hebrew alphabet, but I'd really like to avoid Covid Aleph Zero." --Sophie, on covid variants "Omicron sounds scary, but the variant we really need to worry about is pi. That one's gonna last forever." --Hasufin, on covid variants "The meritocracy isn't real, sure, but finding a nerd who will admit 'adoption is for social, not technical reasons' seems a lot harder in practice. Everyone loves to think the tools they use are better, make them smarter, and that if they make something cool, people will use it." --@tef_ebooks "Never in a million years would I have suspected that people would be so fundamentally offended by statements such as 'look stuff up, but try to understand them too' and 'you are a competent human being.'" --@memmove_s "What are the real consequences for lying anymore? Sure, cancel my $0.99 subscription, that will really hurt. Can't sue, cost prohibitive and no real damages. They do not care because they do not have to." --Virginia Barnett, on USian news outlets "Don't assume that because I am a far left thinker, that I am pro 'big government'. That's a centrist status-quo-fetishist thing." --Dildog "Increasingly it seems to me that the most salient political slogan of our age is 'Ah! Well. Nevertheless.'" --Parker Higgins "You mess with me, I take your candy. That's just how it goes." --U Can Beat Video Games, on _Deja Vu_ "Repeated vomiting in the back of an F-18 Hornet does not diminish from the pleasure of flying in a Hornet at all." --Adam Savage "I worked at a children's hospital, and those little assclowns put stickers on /everything/." --Fidgety "There is a strain of wealthy VC-guy who pretends to do you a favor by 'warning' against Bitcoin (or whatever) while hyping centralized garbage-coins that they coincidentally happen to own an enormous stake in." --Edward Snowden "Meow meow; mew meow; meowmentation fault; peripheral meow on the MEOWbus] failed w/ error code ETOOMUCHCATNIP." --cr1901 "I personally just want all of us to go back to being little kids again. When we didn't know what hate and stress are. We didn't judge. We just played in the sandbox, watched dragonflies in awe, shared cookies, made art for the refrigerator." --Czarina "If you want to know how humans treat resources, just look at IPv4. They will use them until the 'natural' available is used up. Will they change to something new then? No. They'll start scavenging the scraps." --Ren "Cybersecurity, or how to take psionic damage for money." --@da_667 "The simulation we live in is abandonware." --g "Healing happens at its own pace." --Crista Anne "When people tell you that 'kindness is free', that's misleading. Apathy is free. A lot of people confuse the two. Kindness takes work, attention and effort. Making the world a better place requires putting your money where your mouth is." --Dildog "Yes, every APT group heeds the motd that says they'll be prosecuted." --Bob Plankers "Part of being a functioning adult is recognizing and accepting that reality doesn't often meet our expectations." --Richard Hansen "In _The Last Duel_, there's no French accent. That would've been a disaster, and yet, it's all French. Who cares? Like, shut the fuck up, then you'll enjoy the movie." --Ridley Scott "If you spend all your time watching what other people are doing, you are a fan. Not a player." --Ice-T "I'm exhausted and annoyed with the whole political spectrum these days. There is no faction I'm not absolutely infuriated with, and almost no faction that looks at history honestly and openly. Except maybe Marxists. Marxists are good at American history. I just find marxism exhausting and silly and as bad at accepting human nature as anarcho-capitalists are." --Quinn Norton "At this point, staying unvaccinated is like wearing a Yankees hat to a Red Sox game... you're probably gonna end up in the hospital and it's your own damn fault." --Stephen Colbert "I don't want to exacerbate the problem. That is the struggle of satire." --Z "By the time we got to Jupiter's moon Europa and began drilling to see what lay under the ice, the old legends of the submerged city R'lyeh were all but forgotten. After all, nobody has found it in any oceans on Earth." --@MicroSFF (Micro Science Fiction/Fantasy Stories) "I used to find conspiracy theories enjoyable. I used to listen to the Art Bell show on the radio, and stories about aliens and the Illuminati all the time. But now that conspiracy theory has become so mainstream that my life is actually affected by the collective will of delusional pinheads who believe that vaccines are a New World Order plot to harvest their adrenochrome, Jewish space lasers control the weather and Chinese communists stole the election for Joe Biden, they just aren't fun anymore." --krapp "One could never price a thirty year mortgage in Bitcoin because its volatility makes it completely unpredictable and no sensible bank could calculate the risk of covering that debt. A world in which Elon Musk can tweet two emojis and your home depreciates 80% in value is a dystopia." --Stephen Diehl "My financial advice is that if you're trying to find trading signals in dog memes, you should probably stop." --Edward Snowden "Make anger your passenger, don't let it drive." --Z "NPCs in video games have weird lives." --U Can beat Video Games "Pizza rolls are just stromboli eggs, waiting to hatch under the right conditions in a microwave oven into baby stromboliti hatchlings." --Vertigo "Live in such a way as to prank generations of future scholars. Be so notable as to be impossible to ignore yet also entirely illegible. Make it unclear whether or not you are, in fact, a folkloric figure to which strangers have attributed reams of unrelated work." --Tsundoku Psychohazard "If your computing experience isn't providing you with senses 6-12, you're doing it wrong." --thegibson "You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 10^12 to 1." --Ernest Rutherford "Everyone's fighting for something. Most are unclear what that is, exactly." --Elixx "The cool thing about transitioning is men, cis, trans, queer and otherwise and a nonzero amount of women too all just sorta stopped caring about my opinion as much the second they learned it was coming out of a woman and not a man. But holy shit do I have as many opportunities to say 'I told you so' after the fact as I could ever want, and that's very satisfying." --Kat "A dystopian fantasy story where the protagonist risks it all to capture evidence of the government doing evil stuff, and takes it to the press and.... No one cares. They can get a few little articles published about it, but most people just... don't care." --Chrissy Keygen "The biggest myth sold to the public in the last 15 years is that you're missing important things by not staying in constant, daily, insubstantial contact with everyone you know." --Z "The mind is for rationalizing, not rationality. You don't want more on logic, you want more on religion. And have I got a moron religion for you..." --Rev. Onan Canobite "Hackernews shitting on something is often a sign that you're on the right track." --Technomancy "The problem with all the mythopoetic warnings against human behavior is that they're perceived as significant individuals by virtue of their failings. Icarus, Narcissus, Achilles. We attach the names to the flaws. But it's all of us. You don't need a name that echoes in history to fall prey to the vices and hubris of those who do." --Warriorstar "I appreciate all the hot takes from people who are highly technical about how a highly technical problem is really simple to solve, and that everybody just needs to calm down. You know, because it's something that people who aren't highly technical will be aware of and able to fix? FFS people, we get it, you're smart. Not everyone's chest deep into the same junk you are." --Dr. Otto Skrzyk "Today it's them, tomorrow it's you. This is a time for learning and not throwing stones." --Dr. Russ "Yeah, sometimes you live for others; altruism et al, but when the chips are down the question would be ''What's it goan' cost?''" --Biyi Nifemi Tudors "Really do not appreciate how many events these days are mediocre one-panel scene intro jokes from _Transmetropolitan_." --Nathan Bernhardt "I just want people to have an ounce of empathy. Like, you have no clue what's going on internally, so maybe don't be so fucking critical at the first sign of something going wrong." --Gradius "Remember when you meet people or read about their shenanigans, you are only seeing a moment in their lives, and probably not their best moment. What if you got reduced to your worst drama moment just because you're trans or black or female or all three?" --Quinn Norton "Remember that time WoW had a deadly disease that spread to hundreds of thousands of players? Remember how the CDC asked for data on it and then deemed it unreliable since they felt no real populatuon would purposefully spread the disease around like the griefers in the game?" --JoCat "Remember: Every labor law out there exists because without it, some business somewhere was doing it until they were forced to stop." --@kittynouveau "I love how doing my PhD is actually less obtuse, more accessible, quicker, and easier than applying for disability benefits in the US." --@chaoticgaythey "You guys have got to stop telling me when an idea I had is in Homestuck. You have to. It's like saying I used a word that was in the dictionary." --Valerie Halla "One accidental shooting is enough to make America consider regulating prop guns, but 100+ intentional mass shootings are not enough to regulate real guns." --Santiago Mayer, on the accidental shooting on the set of _Rust_ "One reason CS academics teach theory rather than practice is that it saves time on updates. The math doesn't change, but the syntax of library calls often does." --Balaji Srinivasan "The only undead celebrities at the Rolling Stones concert will be the Rolling Stones." --Garrett martin "Modesty is a mechanism of weaponized control." --Seanan McGuire "Knowledge is like underwear. It is useful to have it, but not necessary to show it off." --Bill Murray "Surviving is for barnacles; human beings need to *live*." --Gretchen Felker-Martin "Before you open your mouth and spew hate, and make the world a darker place, ask yourself ''what if I'm wrong?'' You might just want to take that energy and do something positive with it instead. The world needs more kindness, especially to those who have tried and failed." --Dildog "The biggest fantasy of Cyberpunk stories is that people start using direct action when they get oppressed." --Magnet Bolt "The tedious thing about cryptobros is they interpret even the mildest criticism from anywhere of any idea related to cryptocurrency (''maybe we don't need to teach blockchain in middle school'') as an existential threat to be responded to and crushed. If they want to be taken seriously (granted, not obviously the case), perhaps they should act less like cult members. I suppose if I were an entitled asshole who thought I was above the law because I had bought into some math voodoo, this would bother me, too." --Matt Blaze, on NFTs and IRS action "Proofs are only as good as the correspondence between their assumptions and actual reality, which can never be proven." --Ron Garret "Some things, Unicode was never meant to handle." --Feonixrift "There's this idea that ideas in science are a bit like epidemics of viruses. There are apparently five or six basic strains of flu viruses, and apparently each one comes back with a period of around 25 years. People get infected, and they develop an immune response, and so they don't get infected for the next 25 years. And then there is a new generation that is ready to be infected by the same strain of virus. In science, people fall in love with an idea, get excited about it, hammer it to death, and then get immunized - they get tired of it. So ideas should have the same kind of periodicity!" --Tomaso Poggio, professor of brain and cognitive sciences, MIT "If a princess tells you that she thinks it would be really hot for you to take off your armor in a haunted graveyard, I understand that there is more than one reason that you can't say no to that, but there will be consequences." --U Can Beat Video Games, on _Ghosts and Goblins_ "This is why in infosec, especially more than most other fields it's important to remember always that time is a flat circle and the new will inevitably find a way to echo the old." --James Bolivar DiGriz "If people did notice us, I remember she [Madonna] didn't like to be noticed. I didn't care and she didn't like it that I didn't care. If they [fans] asked her for an autograph, she would say 'No,' and if the same person came to me, I said, 'Yes, no problem.' She would get so mad at me for that, and I had to let her know: 'Hey, that fan? You'll never see him again, but they're gonna tell that story nine million times over the rest of their lives. Make it a good moment for them." --Vanilla Ice, on dating Madonna "I've never met a cat who had luggage before." --Istvaan "That a show which was originally about a dysfunctional mess of a family barely clinging to middle class life in the aftermath of the Reagan administration has now become aspirational is frankly the most on the nose manifestations of capitalist American decline I can think of." --Erika Chappell, on _The Simpsons_ "One definition of conspiracy theory that I favor is something that, if true, you couldn't handle it." --Mark Crispin Miller "I have investigated eternity. It exists, but for me the price of admission, death, is beyond my means. In a moment, I will simply stop." --Proteus IV, _Demon Seed_ "Every time you run your dishwasher you're creating homeopathic lasagna. Not a lot of people know that." --Peter Gutmann "I sincerely hope there's a good plan for medication distribution post-revolution, because I'm not about to cold turkey an SSRI for this shit." --Vanilla Cherry "Evangelicals want to escape the responsibility of cleaning their own damn house. You can't join the moneychangers in the Temple and then act surprised when your boy J.C. comes in laying about with the leather, my friends." --Lilith Saint Crow "I knew what was art and what was shit. But sometimes the shit was more interesting." --Mary Woronov "I think we broke up 'cuz he hopped a train and I got a software job like that Hard Times article about the punk Choose Your Own Adventure book that always ends up with shitty software job." --Aleyna "The appearance of dispute is essential to the networks' electro-democracy." --Simon Peller, _Max Headroom: Blanks_ "Pittsburgh: Where none of the streets are straight, but most of the women wearing flannel are." --Johanna "Yes, I specifically enjoy an aesthetic that repulses you, a person whose opinion I personally find beneath contempt. Sweet of you to notice." --Discordian Kitty "What a strong statement for a device manufacturer to make: 'When you you buy it, it belongs to you.' How is that controversial? And yet here we are blown away by it." --Linus, from Linus' Tech Tips, on the Steamdeck "Tonight we are showing Garrison _Ferngully_. [It's] pretty wild that if released in 2021 this movie would be condemned for celebrating ecological terrorism." --Robert Evans "Airplane Wi-Fi: When you're feeling nostalgic for dial-up." --Jason Korzen "We rent space from thousands of mega companies every day to do many things we were once able to do as private citizens, and millions of people are shocked when those companies restrict their actions in the most profitable way. It's exactly what the Reagan crew wanted." --Lesley Carhart "The worst part of Star Wars is the wierd treatment of sentient droids. Given agency, thoughts, inner life, and feelings, but wantonly treated as property and slaves, even among the good guys." --Opti "The hardest problem in computer science is 'not having every single layer of the [network] stack independently start retrying requests to the next layer down when a backend of a backend of a backend is slow'." --Blue Space Canary "The difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong, is that when the thing that can't possibly go wrong goes wrong, it's usually impossible to get at or to repair." --Douglas Adams "Please stop saying 'metaverse'. A public space where all legitimate social activity is a prelude to making purchases and offending public mores results in expulsion is already a thing with a name, and that name is 'the mall'." --Yurirando "I know to Americans, Facebook is basically dead but I live in the Philippines and I cannot even begin to explain the absolute dystopic hold it has on this country, and many other third world countries. It is a big deal globally, even if not to you. Facebook has literally built undersea cables and Internet infrastructure to serve developing nations. Africa, southeast Asia, google it." --Vicious Delights "Anytime a person tells me to delete a comment I added explaining an algorithm I take great delight in telling them no. I did it the obvious way and that didn't work so now I'm explaining why I did it this way instead." --Lucretiel "Being raised a boy is just your parents and most adults in your life standing around thinking 'his kindness and gentleness was cute when he was 5 but now that he's 11 we gotta start punishing him for it'. Then they have the gall to act bewildered when we become sullen, depressed teenagers! Weird that beating the empathy out of children will do that." --@bonkey_bong "The more outrageous the post is, the more likely it is to be some kind of horrid shit-stirring or harmful fake." --Sunfell "Bruce Wayne could've transformed Gotham's entire approach to psychiatric care but instead he chose to remodel his mancave and spend his evenings in dominatrix scuba suits beating up people who were clearly experiencing mental health crises." --Michael Harriot "So, all of you gave up on me??" "Mom, even the nurses thought you were going to die that night." --Mom and the rest of us, after she was admitted to the hospital for the last time "Seriously, what is it about endogenous testosterone that can cause people to so thoroughly confuse conversation with competition?" --Thamesynne "A lot of things are edible. We just make pets of some of them." --Lyssa "You know we're in trouble when the comics page and the editorial page become indiscernible." --Paul Seaburn "Also, whoever posted my tweet to the orange website, fuck you." --@ladyaeva "I did a quick check on ebay, I can't believe the prices! People must think these things are made of platinum, and potted with heroin." --Facility 406, on the prices of accoustic couplers on eBay "I never thought the phrase 'The cat wants to go out for a walk' would ever pass my lips, but here we are." --Lyssa, on Dora jumping into her stroller and demanding a walk outside "CompTIA A+ is a history exam." --Colonel Panic "I think that life gets pretty awful when everyone charges you to say 'Hello!'" --Berry de Jager "On roughly the same system, roughly optimized the same way, a benchmark from 1979 at Xerox PARC runs only 50 times faster today. Moore's law has given us somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 times improvement in that time. So there's approximately a factor of 1,000 in efficiency that has been lost by bad CPU architectures." --Alan Kay "This is what art does and that's what stories do, they comfort us." --Lana Wachowski "It's a really bad look when even the three letter agencies think you're collecting too much information." --c0debabe "People underestimate me because I'm so glamorous. What they don't understand is I'm a strong woman. And that strength comes from my values, my courage, and my dogged persuit of vengeance." --Miss Piggy "Antennae are the fruiting body of the radio network." --@nidifiction "The breadth of human suffering is so vast, there is almost always something within our power we can do to ease some of it, somewhere." --Elle Armageddon "I give all the fucks about the work. I spent 30 years successfully battling bad movies of Sandman. I give zero fucks about people who don't understand/haven't read Sandman whining about a non-binary Desire or that Death isn't white enough." --Neil Gaiman "I don't regret anything, but I'm sure other people regret stuff where I was present." --Andrew Eldritch "I was talking about RPGs with my partner and she mentioned something that *really* hit home for me. She said that she realized that she could no longer run any urban fantasy game where the supernatural was secret. The reason is that right now in our world we have bizarroid jackasses like the Q nuts, the Sovereign Citizens, and at least some of the Dominionists, who are certain they live in a world where only they know the truth, where the world is filled with secret threats by monstrous people that almost no one else knows about, and they are the righteous warriors for truth and justice who oppose these monsters. At this point, at least for the two of us, playing in or running a game where the PCs are essentially people whose violence-filled conspiracy theory about the modern world is actually correct no longer makes for fun gaming." --Blue Heron "That looks like someone put wings on a panel truck. For serial killers in a hurry or something." --Puella Vulnerata, on the Short SC.7 Skyvan "Only an idiot (or someone with no principles) designs a system so that they go to jail or break their principles." --Philip Hallam-Baker "Fuck them. Fuck their freedom. I want my freedom to live. I want to get out of the house. I want to go next door and play chess. I want to go take some pictures. This is bullshit." --Howard Stern, on antivaxxers "Computer science belongs under the humanities as applied metaphysics." --Lord Bowlich "You do not need to suffer to be valid." --Goat Sarah "The classic 4chan style trolling techniques have matured to a point to be an ISO certificable mainstream standard. The meme war is definitely a thing." --Niconiconi "I don't use Docker because I know how to install applications." --The Real Lazlo Falconi "Remember during the early stages of the pandemic when the Canadian government endorsed using glory holes to help prevent the spread of covid during sex?" Emily Darling "Friendship in adulthood is just a game of whoever can compartmentalize their never-ending exhaustion long enough to remember to reach out and check in." --Joseph Oteng "Back then we didn't care, we still had imaginations capable of letting go of the idea that perfection even exists in the first place." --@spajtastic, on fen who don't like random stuff being used to make props "In 40 years, I have not encountered so much death in 12 hours, as last night. I imagine this is what a nuclear incident would feel like." --Dr. Steven M. Brown, MD, on covid hospitalizations "Who knew that when fascism came to America, it would be wearing a bow tie and promoting horse dewormer meds." --George Takei "I took a brief stroll through a Haskell API for a stock exchange and saw requests passing through 8 different bytestrings before making an (obviously) malformed query. Get it together guys, this is why rust people make fun of us." --@riz0id "Not being a lawyer doesn't give you an excuse to smear them with disinformation." --Bill Woodcock "I owe you nothing. Take your complaints elsewhere. If corporations were not so ridiculously aggressive with threats of litigation, then the public could be better informed. I'm not getting sued because you personally want more details." --Chris Vickery "If twenty media outlets in a row spend more time searching for a stock picture of a horse than they do fact-checking their writing, maybe 'the very idea of media' deserves to be attacked." --Netrunner Nobody "That was the pitch for tech right? We could take down these dinosaur old media organizations etc. etc. What we got was Nazis and metastasizing FB communities of people pitching fake cures and anti-science." --Brandon Downey "If the current Facebook user backlash tells us one thing, it's that Facebook users don't really understand what's private and what's public online." --Hybernaut "It turns out that unless you're a multi-millionaire stashing money away in the Cayman Islands to dodge tax and/or legal oversight, there is no such thing as jurisdiction-based data privacy." --TrechNex "The C64 shouldn't have the hardware for parallax background scrolling. Luckily the C64 doesn't know that, so he does it anyway." --Lovuschka "Lose your shell, gain enlightenment." --Octopus "The most surprising part to me in all this is not that the White House lied - that, life teaches us, is a reliable constant. It is that even after the White House openly admits that something was a cynical lie, 30% of the population will continue to prefer that lie to reality." --Edward Snowden "There's a special kind of derangement that comes from being born in the window of like 1985-1992, owing partially to how many of us were too young to question Bush-era jingoism, and now you're either a shambling list of psych disorders or a homunculus puppeteered by Goldman Sachs." --Sarah Zedig "Remember kids, if you're the one watching what's happening and it's not happening to you then you've won the gibsonian jackpot for just one more day." --Dan Hon "The alarmists were right, about pretty much everything." --Ben Collins "So just to be clear, since we're not gonna tax the rich or corporations more, we're all just supposed to donate money to each other to take care of each other's emergencies which will now be happening every day." --Russ Bengtson "Now, is it petty to dedicate an entire year of your life to completely over-engineering a box just to shoot a little glitter at someone? Yes. But at the same time, couldn't that creation still be just ridiculous and beautiful? Also yes." --Mark Rober, inventer of the anti-porch pirate glitter bomb "You can use comparisons with other extremist groups to make a point. 'Texas Taliban' doesn't do that - it relies on the invocation of a foreign Other to explain an American Christian phenomenon." --Charles Louis Richter "Since the so-called alarmists have been right about everything, can we concede that they weren't, in fact, being alarmists?" --Mary L. Trump (pretty sure there's no relation) "The strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must." --Thucydides "American culture will work really hard not to hurt the feelings of the rich, while deranged conspiracy nutjob rich people have no problem reshaping society at their whims, nor do rich sociopaths hesitate to leave death in their wake." --John Rogers "The horse-paste COVID grift is a morbidly fascinating example of how the snake oil sales grift has evolved in the Internet era. The grifters profit less from directly selling the snake oil than they do from monetizing the attention they get from advocating the snake oil." --Matt Blaze "I'm tired of being angry at everything and everyone. Between covid telling me my life might be shorter than I hoped, and the Supreme Court deciding my life doesn't matter as long as I breed - I feel like the best rebellion is just enjoying my pointless short life." --Medus4 "We can milk this thing all the way to 2015. There's plenty to go around." --Samuel Visner, former sales executive, SAIC, on 9/11 "You are not the A-Team." --Opti "The most powerful weapon that will ever exist among humans is simple: Listen to the young adults in your adversary's society. That's it. If you take the concerns and insights of young adults within a population seriously, you can conquer any nation." --Chris Vickery "Other people should learn to manage their own feelings without making it your problem. They cover that on Sesame Street." --@bigrockbigriver "Today the vet told me that since Covid, they've had to treat a number of cats with depression caused by irritation that their people are at home all day. Obviously it's not really funny but... that's the most Cat thing I've ever heard. Apparently dogs do not have the same problem." --@joannamont "The writers of cyberpunk play on the terror of partnership and collaboration with the Other, but what they often don't fully embrace is that the readers are rooting for them, for Yog-Sothoth, for Wintermute, for the Zaibatsu, for all the ab-human and very human Others in the story." --Fred Scharmen "I don't think I can explain how much I've missed teaching in person. Zoom teaching was like having a conversation with a fish tank." --Matthew Green "One thing that about this pandemic that I'll remember forever is the way many people got irrationally angry at people who were trying to help them. Angry at scientists. Angry at teachers. Angry at doctors. Angry at anyone who told them helpful info they didn't want to hear." --Josh Moon "Anyone else tired of being resilient and want the world to stop demanding so much resilience to survive it?" --@coastalwilliams "If they shut down OnlyFans how are Americans supposed to pay for insulin?" --@type1Dialectic "In the old days every programming book was a 2kg brick. Now that same stuff is scattered across 3,000 different stackoverflow answers, 2 dev blog posts, 16 different ranting videos, and for some reason the manifesto of a furry con." --Pookleblinky "These days the time between Google launching a new service and killing that same service is less than the time it takes to write a book." --John Boyer "I just don't understand people that both think Covid-19 is a hoax and that also want to drink bleach and lick horse deworming paste to prevent catching a disease they don't even think exists." --Oz Katerji "Awkward never just happens. It happens on multiple levels, each with their own micro-regrets." --Dildog "For the life of me I do not know how we, in this proudly, willfully dangerously ignorant country, ever got smoking in restaurants/on airplanes etc. banned." --Dan Larson "Win32 programming feels like you're being gaslit constantly. Every question results in the answer ''You're a fool, don't do that'' and no pointers to how you should instead do it." --Foone "A technocrat sees every problem as a shortage of expertise and excess of rights." --David Sarac "Just watched the episode of SG1 where 800 people died of a new virus, and the US immediately grounded all flights and closed the borders. Oh science fiction, you so crazy." --jwz "No society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means." --Nye Bevan "'Can you explain this gap in your resume?' Yeah, I made it in LaTeX and I don't know how to make the paragraph breaks smaller." --@proletarat "Remember, kids, burnout happens exponentially, but recovers linearly." --@wertle "We take your data, erm I mean privacy, seriously." --John Opdenakker "As a 365 admin, I blame Bill Gates for many things, but none of them are quite harbingers of an Armageddon. 'cept for maybe Clippy." --@theliamnissan "Please be kind in the next few days and give people the benefit of the doubt. Grace is not solely given to those who do everything right. Doing everything right may not save you when it's your turn. Extend the kindness you hope will someday be given to you." --@ursulaV "Historical precedent for shitty behavior is not a reason to write off current shitty behavior. Pretending as though nothing ought to be done is the most defeatist, apathetic attitude possible." --Zac Cichy "My OnlyFans has been making me bank. Only, one pays to keep my clothes on." --Vlad_II "Hey kids, just go do your elite hacking you claim to be capable of instead of harrassing random people on Twitter." --Tillie Crimew "I'd say the contradictions are reaching their fucking apex, but satire is dead, words don't mean things, the only change is fire and blood, and after seeing this, I don't even care whose. You wanna kill me? Two pictures of Minecraft rocks and a hand drawing of a turtle, and I'll let you." --Starved Hysteric Nude, on NFTs "XKCD 927 is descriptive, not prescriptive. Its lesson is certainly not 'You should never create new standards because some existing standard is always adequate for all use cases.'" --Freakazoid "Normal people are fucking boring. I sort of prefer the weirdos, unfortunately America is where Australia sent all of their prisoners, so we have lots of them here." --Kent Dahlgren "It is the spirit of the game, not the letter of the rules which is important." --Gary Gygax "I learned a long time ago, you do more damage because you're famous. I've told people, you don't want me there. They'll go, 'Well of course he brought his Hollywood friend.' You know what people forget? We all were just some person somewhere in Cincinnati or fucking Ottawa or fucking Cleveland." --Michael Keason, on fame and politics "According to a new study, evolution is now accepted by a majority of Americans, an increase which occurred over the last 35 years. Unfortunately, the number of Americans who demonstrate evolution seems to be dropping." --Paul Seaburn "Every time Americans have an opportunity to do some introspection and realize maybe the USA is not the good guy they just blame the other political party instead." --@garfxist "Peak Twitter is a man explaining menstrual cycles to a woman." --Stonekettle "Someday the Internet will regain the capacity to understand the concept of 'fiction', but today is not that day." --ml0pe "If you work from the premise that US foreign policy is trying to make the world a better, safer, more equal place, you will never be able to draw correct conclusions." --@jessfromonline "Not particularly thrilled about 'Afghanistan is Your Fault' takes written by people who were grown adults in 2001 and directed at people who were, in 2001, actual children." --Faine Greenwood "You know the art is good because it pisses people off for the exact thing it's trying to critique." --Catnip Enjoyer "This is what we teach people that math is: Rules lawyering. Not exploring within a set of rules, but using the rules to restrict and limit and tell others they're wrong." --eevee "I'm finally in touch with my feelings! Can someone get me out of touch with them please?" --Alex Hirsch "''Stop using tap water, it's screwing the hospital life support systems' is kind of a dystopian message, isn't it?" --Charles Stross, on the city of Orlando, FL asking residents to use less water because liquid oxygen used to treat drinking water is needed more at hospitals to treat covid-19 patients "The measure of a human life is not how useful they were to capitalism. Not yours. Not anyone's. How would you like yours to be measured? How would you like to measure your life? Maybe you can do one thing in the next 24 hours that reflects *that*?" --Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg "We can't hold our opponents to even minimal standards of decency unless we also hold our allies to much higher standards out of, I'm going to say spite." --Nicholas Peterson "Dystopian fiction is when you take things that happen in real life to marginalized populations and apply them to people with privilege." --@Hugo_Book_Club "We once hired a woman into our lab based in part on the fact that she was a train station Starbucks barista and anyone who could deal with uncaffinated commuters can deal with anything." --@Mrs_Schwarzski "I don't tweet that frequently b/c my mom would always tell me: If I don't have anything useful or nice to say, then I should keep my trap shut. Makes me bad at social media--but I still think she's on to something." --Bunnie Huang "You totally are allowed to not be nasty to people whether or not you are just learning a thing!" --Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg "At this point sarcasm is my soul's connective tissue. It is the marbling of my spirit meat. I am the wagyu of sarcasm." --Dildog "If I remain silent on important matters, this is why: Sometimes there are no words, and words just aren't enough." --T. Thorn Coyle "Oh, bollocks. Run!" --Evil Lyn, _Masters of the Universe: Revelation_ "America's abject, costly failure in Afghanistan began with a lockstep belligerence the Republican Party has only intensified since then. I'd like to think we can learn from this. Current events suggest otherwise." --Phil Brucato "I guess we should retire the expression 'avoid it like the plague', given how little effort people seem to be willing to go to to avoid plagues." --Matt Blaze "American military doctrine is impossible to plan against, because the American military doesn't follow their own doctrine." --Soviet military training manual "Using Blender is like exploring an alien city full of impossible technology so complex you can't comprehend how any of it works, which somehow feels like your fault. Using GIMP is like starting your car to find the gas pedal makes it turn and the blinker controls the brakes." --Edward Snowden "Any cipher or mode that puts a single operation like XOR or addition between the plaintext and an attacker is fundamentally unsafe, no matter how mathematically elegant or provably something-or-other it is." --Peter Gutmann "This is probably hard to believe, but it is worth considering the possibility that shady spyware merchants are not being entirely truthful regarding reporting that is detrimental to their business." --Edward Snowden "That's why they [the far right] just seem to never run out of steam. Because it's fun. That's one thing the right figured out along time ago. Your ops will never run out of steam if everybody is laughing and having a good time. That's another thing for you to think about people. The lulz, deconstructed." --Kirtner "The only way we'll know that Jeff Bezos has been replaced by an evil shape-shifting space alien is if his worker conditions slightly improve." --James Felton "I kind of want to see Python stop changing so much, because if you keep adding new features, you lose Python's simplicity and end up with Perl." --Al Sweigart "I see people online go, 'Hey man, they're getting rid of He-Man!' Like, you really fucking think Mattel Television, who hired me and paid me money, wants to do a fucking _Masters of the Universe_ show without He-Man? Grow the fuck up, man. Like, that blew my mind, bunch of people being like, 'Oh, I smell it. This is a bait and switch.'" --Kevin Smith, on _Masters of the Universe: Revelation_ "There's technical debt, then there's technical subprime mortgages with exploding balloon payments." --Mike Imbriaco "Trying to convince anyone of anything is a fool's game, I am increasingly coming to believe. Either they will see the evidence you provide or they have some willful interest in NOT seeing it." --Teeter Pyglit "It doesn't take a formal conspiracy for there to be people taking advantage of opportunities that happen to go their way while they're in a position to take advantage of them due to a surfeit of resources." --Munin "Sometimes I check the feeds and I feel like I'm being screamed at by Morton Downey, Jr. in _Predator 2_: 'Hey Harrigan! More victims, more mutilations!' More horror, more corruption!" --Cigfran Llwyd "You want vaccine door knockers, you're gonna have to pay them 'facing down a MAGA chud freaking out with a gun' wages. No one's going to face down a 2nd amendment nut for a pat on the back and an Arby's coupon." --Pookleblinky "Executives have surprisingly little agency. They are organic processing units within 'slow AIs' (hat tip to Charles Stross), and are easily replaceable if they malfunction and stop maximizing paperclips - I mean, profits." --Nathan Koren "I think you could almost call it a law of social organization that when disruption would serve the common interests of humanity, the organizations facing disruption double down on their position and act as obstructions." --Jack Graham "I don't know that I'll ever get over the fact that a large percentage of the human race essentially spent a year-and-a-half-long global pandemic screaming ''We're going to the pub even if it kills us!'' and meaning that literally." --Damian P. Williams "The people are still powerless, but now they're aware." --Edward Snowden "Least naturalistic thing about traditional apocalyptic fiction: Absence of substantial numbers who'll insist that the supposed cause doesn't exist, that the apocalypse is entirely the result of tactical disinformation." --William Gibson "I mean it would be *incredible*, half the city would have an incredible time and the other half wouldn't know what hit it, and afterwards the Board of Supervisors would hold six months of hearings to ensure it never happened again." --Kevin Riggle, on moving Defcon out of Las Vegas "There's a lot of propaganda going around on the right at the moment. Remember, it's not supposed to be internally self-consistent. They're providing a smorgasbord of talking points, knowing their readers will grab and internalize whatever resonates with them and ignore the rest." --Chuck Valentine "Fascism is abuse dynamics at the national scale." --Jonathan Korman "Imageboards probably won't turn you into a nazi but they will make you someone who doesn't have strong opinions on anything but what they dislike and thinks being bitter and angry all the time is funny and makes you personable." --@viperwave "A lot of number theory is figuring out how to stitch together many different such black boxes to get some new big result. Roommate described this as 'flailing around' but also highly effective and endorsed my analogy to copy-pasting code from many different Stack Overflow answers. [It's] probably worth noting that mathematicians have an extremely high bar for 'deeply understanding.' It's not like they're being dumb, the impression that I got is that making progress in number theory is actually just close to the limit of humanity's collective cognitive ability." --Ben Kuhn "My favorite conspiracy is that the government cares about us." --Dark Alice "The 'fuck your feelings' crowd sure is having a lot of feelings about finding themselves on a ventilator." --Jeff Tiedrich "Unless an author can be known and behaves according to how people expect, instead of seeing them and their work, a lot of people will just see whatever fits their narrative about them." --Alphabete "A heartfelt 'Fuck you' to everyone who told me I was overreacting in November 2016." --@braddroflit "Having your highly publicized display of egotism and obscene wealth take place in a manifestly dick-shaped vehicle is such an unforced error that I'm obligated to conclude it's on purpose." --Jess Zimmerman, on Jeff Bezos going into suborbital space "As the likelihood that a Twitter Election Expert has read the National Academies report approaches zero, the probability they will mention blockchain approaches one." --Blaze's Law "So... a pharmaceutical company is trying to push AXS-05 (for FDA approval/phase III study) which is dextromethorphan with bupropion (to inhibit liver enzyme CYP2D6). I foresee price gouging of patients because healthcare is amazing in this country." --@winocm, on a possible new antidepressant treatment "Listen, there just aren't a lot of situations in this world where the best move is 'I should write and publish a manifesto.'" --Eva Galperin "I quit my teaching job and now make more bartending for 15 less hours week. Also I get blamed for way way less and get told thank you way way more. No lesson plans or grading papers. Remember this when people ask about the teacher shortage." --Abby Norman "Madness has no purpose. Or reason. But it may have a goal." --Spock, _The Alternative Factor_, stardate 3088.7 "The Cuban people are yearning to experience the freedom of a $10,000 ambulance bill." --Neiko Cat "If EVE Online is 'spreadsheets in space', Diablo 3 is 'Excel in Hell'." --Tek "John Cage's 4'33" is what's known as comedic timing." --Selfsame "When you live out on the frontier, you have no identity. You are a nobody. Therefore, you get very tough. You have to prove that you are somebody. And so, you become very violent." --Marshall McLuhan "Teaching during the pandemic has been an exercise in balancing the utterly mundane with the profoundly traumatic - the sort of things that alter your soul." --Sarah E Smith, _Response to Student Evaluations_ "What in the _Babylon 5_ set prop hell is that? Shit looks like it'll make you a Minbari." --Eli "I have used exactly the same words to scold dogs and wasps today, with pretty much the same results (except I do not put harnesses and leashes on wasps, alas). For the curious, those words are: 'CALM thy MANY TITS, you are NOT behaving correctly, MIND yourself AND your manners!' I am aware wasps don't have tits but the underlying message remains." --Lilith Saint Crow "These days, the problem isn't how to innovate; it's how to get society to adopt the good ideas that already exist." --Douglas Engelbart "What if the trauma of living through real conspiracies all around us - conspiracies among wealthy people, their lobbyists, and lawmakers to bury inconvenient facts and evidence of wrongdoing (these conspiracies are commonly known as 'corruption') - is making people vulnerable to conspiracy theories?" --Cory Doctorow "The best way to learn is to write a book on the subject. You write a sentence, think 'Wait, is that actually true?' and then imagine all the snide comments a 1-star reviewer on Amazon is going to write, and then figure out how to address that." --Al Sweigart "You've fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less well known is this; never use a random quartz crystal without a datasheet, when your work is on the line! Aha ha ha ha..." --Niconiconi "Hey hey hey even at the Olympics, most of those literally world-class athletes go home empty handed. So maybe cut yourself a break when you take an L, yeah?" --Andrew Philips "New PSA campaign: If you don't get vaccinated, George Soros is going to buy up your property when you die, and either turn it into a Planned Parenthood or a mosque." --Unlofl "It's physically impossible to solve one serious problem as long as all other problems exist." --cypunk, on The Internet "Just shut the fuck up already and give me a god-damned serial port! I need a god-damned divisor register, a transmit register, a receiver register, and an interrupt pending and enable pair of registers. That is it. Done! There does not exist any further need for any more complexity than this." --Vertigo, on the madness that is the Intel 8250 UART "A notebook is a Personal Analog Assistant (PAA)." --Freakazoid "It would be a lot easier to have ethics in AI if starting from a platform of having ethics." --Feonixrift "I'd do Fear and Cyber in Las Vegas but that's just Defcon." --DJ Sundog "Anyone working on infrastructure and security/safety of any kind understands. If you see heroes, it's because something went terribly wrong. It's showing up every day and doing the right things even when it's inconvenient or hard that keeps things running and safe. When you do it right, it's nearly invisible." --Calcifer "There's a whole industry built on starting but never finishing live action adaptations of _Akira_." --Cat "'It costs you nothing to be positive and helpful to other creators' said no polytheistic pantheon ever." --Phooky "The fact that 'Everyone should try to act in the manner which is best for the community' is considered utopian and unrealistic while 'Everyone everyone should be as greedy as possible and that'll actually work out to everyone's benefit' is treated as practical and realistic is the most upside down thing I can imagine." --Z "There is something nice about the experience of sitting and doing whatever, looking up and seeing a KITTEN has suddenly appeared on your desk. SUDDENLY. CAT!" --Azure "Look, it's totally SFW blessed Mordecai. Now you won't have to think of all the _Regular Show_ pornography you were unfortunately exposed to in the crossfire." --Hellspawn "Because I like exterminating any residual shreds of faith in humanity, I looked through the overwhelmingly hostile comments on a YouTube video by a doctor debunking some covid misinformation tonight." --Julian Sanchez "The core skill of innovators is error recovery, not failure avoidance." --Randy Nelson "Do not take deadly pandemic advice from people who don't care if your children are gunned down in their classrooms." --Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg "I'm the visionary here. Don't bother me with details." --DX "Reading about the guy who created a GPT-3 simulacrum of his dead fiancée, I wonder if it's that we've realised the way to make AIs indistinguishable from humans is not by creating an AI with an inner life but convincing humans we don't need one." --Mary Harrington "Hating something together makes people best friends really really quick." --Nezumi Ningen "Omertà has regulations on murder, it's just a question of who decides and how, and who gets protection and who doesn't." --@minnighthawks "Do you want to know the secret about the BBC? It's biased. It's run by humans, so bias is inevitable. The left all think it's right biased, and the right think the opposite. Just accept that it will have bias sometimes and stop projecting your conspiratorial narrative all the time." --Hial Stann "Well, I've wrestled with reality for 35 years, doctor, and I'm happy to state I finally won out over it." --Elwood P. Dowd, _Harvey_ "The phrase 'privacy-preserving' is a red flag. Never, at any time in Internet history, has there been a software or technology describing itself as privacy-preserving which actually preserves or even contributes to privacy. It is a weasel word phrase only appearing when someone is trying to deceive and trick you." --Chris Vickery "I beg your pardon, but are you joking? I can't tell. I'm not prepared to respond to Inception-level perfect-is-the-enemy-of-the-good-nimbyism except-on-the-other-side. You will simply have to buy me a drink first, sorry." --@ugathom "The people who need to be chided and scorned are anti-vax and anti-mask types who are making us professionals pull overtime to allow y'all actually following the rules to have some fun after the shitshow of the past 18 months." --Doc Wolverine "The people whose entire career is about compartmentalization and secrets sometimes just talk to the press to get things off their chests with no agenda, right?" --ml0pe, on anonymous intelligence community leaks "I don't think I could design a crueler punishment for someone with ADHD than the actual process in place for accessing ADHD treatment." --Ari Drennen "Gonna set up a numbers station and when the FBI inevitably gets me arrested for supposedly smuggling secrets to North Cuba, I'll point out that the numbers being read out are just all the bytes of an mp4 file of _Never Gonna Give You Up_." --Foone "Starting a job feels like you're a new character on the ninth season of a TV show." --jatsby "I do not agree with that interpretation, but I accept that you (and others) do feel that way." --Deth Veggie "There's nothing about him that's cynical or jaded or trying to just play it cool. No one on the set is playing it cool. I could take out my nervous energy with enthusiasm because it was not frowned upon. It was like, 'The cool kids are excited,' which was really special to see." --Margaret Qualley, on Quentin Tarantino "He said they just want to make Biden look bad. They want the crisis to happen on Biden's watch so that he does not get the credit for the vaccine that they felt Trump should get the credit for. That's it. I mean, my jaw hit the floor and I had to work to get it back up." --Ari Melber "I'm here to make jokes and document evidence. If I had to worry about people taking jokes out of context then I'd have to shoot myself." --Rob Graham "Politics is the art of looking for touble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies." --Groucho Marx "If you're gonna be on the list anyway, you might as well strive for the top spot." --Edward Snowden "I'm a /cartoonist/. It should be treated as a given that I've got an entire /team/ of mental health professionals at my disposal." --Mae Dean, _Real Life Comics_ "Milkshakes ain't got nothin' on petroleum!" --Hasufin, on gasoline powered tools attracting older men to his yard "It's almost - hear me out here - it's almost as if a ton of experts are warning the entire species about a huge problem, and no one's bothering to listen." --Ben Bowlin "The best way to control the opposition is to lead it ourselves." --Vladimir Lenin "If men are from Mars and women are from Venus, I'm from Alpha Centauri." --Kit Redgrave "Sorry that you'd think that just because someone knows and says things, it must be them in disguise." --priyom.org "Well folks, I don't want to be a Negative Nancy, but I'm starting to doubt that blockchain will save us from the climate crisis." --Blackle Mori "Your average rapper is a more positive politically active member of a community than your average suburban homeowner." --DJ Sundog "Gather around and I'll tell you about the proud Austin tradition of hanging out with people exactly twice: Once when you first meet them at someone's going away party. And once when they put an open call for getting help with packing because they've been priced out of Austin." --Baphometadata "Our for-profit health care system gives me no reason to implicitly trust anyone's motives." --Brianna Wu "Ransomware is the purest form of 'fuck around and find out'. Companies didn't invest in cybersecurity and then ultimately they had to pay for it anyway." --Soldier of FORTRAN "You guys should be pretty worried that people who basically study doom for a living like me are like wait this shit is off the charts of even our worst predictions." --Umair "Adults really will attribute whole additional lifespans to you rather than admit to having had low expectations of themselves for decades." --Feonixrift "''I don't trust ______ because this one time it broke ______'' has got to be in the top ten most common IT derp phrases." --Jordicus Maximus "Developers should be asking 'What would the most depraved, unfeeling monsters on the planet do with this feature?' before rolling it out." --Katelyn Burns "These tossers are triggered by 1 guy working a temp contract for the NHS." --Dan Kaszeta, for being attacked for helping people get vaccinated "This is the infosec. Disinformation, occasional 0-days, and a lot of drama about shit that doesn't matter. Welcome to #infosec, don't forget to check Github, Climagic and other areas for fun toys." --@alostkender "I definitely give more credit to people who realize their criticisms of things which took a lot of effort are being made from a position of having made much less effort. There's a tendency for critics to mistake judging as having greater gravitas than creating." --Stupendous Gravity "Yes, I suppose I do deserve to die from bubonic plague for suggesting that a disease that's taken over four million lives in 18 months should be taken seriously. You make a lot of sense and seem entirely hinged. My mentions are full of 'COVID is just a flu,' 'Death is bad but commerce is more important' and 'Weak and elderly people are going to die soon anyway.' It's like a bunch of early 2020 troll talking points escaped from the zoo." --Matt Blaze "'You can never have enough clamps, nor enough glue.' Yeah, but what if you're *not* a woodworking YouTube celebrity with more patrons than lesser deities?" --Socketwench "Is a society with constant school shootings and public lynchings and forever wars, a society that could not help but turn even personal death into a profitable industry dedicated to sanitizing it and abstracting it?" --Pookleblinky "How are we gonna address climate change if we can't address kernel_task?" --Jim Pan, on OSX's proclivity to turn Macbooks into space heaters "There were moments when I wanted to scream: 'What is wrong with you people? All you want is intrigue, but an honest-to-God, globe-spanning apparatus of omnipresent surveillance riding in your pocket is not enough? You have to sauce that up?' It took years - eight years and counting in exile - for me to realize that I was missing the point: We talk about conspiracy theories in order to avoid talking about conspiracy practices, which are often too daunting, too threatening, too total." --Edward Snowden "The impossible attracts me because everything possible has been done and the world didn't change." --Sun Ra "That sounds like a really poor attempt at us producing a craft. A nuclear powered craft - really dirty, spewing nuclear material all over the place - it sounds like something that we would make. It really rings human." --Bob Lazar "Optimizations always bust things, because all optimizations are, in the long haul, a form of cheating, and cheaters eventually get caught." --Larry Wall "This is how history is made. An endless succession of people trying to better the world for each other, mostly failing. But it is not failure entirely. And that is where hope lives. It lives in knowing our history." --Sigrid Ellis "The golden age of serial killers and polygamy was not coincidentally the last time people could afford rent on minimum wage and barely any student debt." --Pookleblinky "I have to admire the combination of needless complexity combined with absolutely breathtaking incompetence." --Matthew Green "The Brits seem surprised the rest of the world has no inkling of their meaning of the word 'nonce', but from out here the experience is that if you assemble any five random English letters it will be some sort of slur in Britain." --Ra6bit "People really take your pain scale a helluva lot more seriously when you say 'On a scale between Braxton-Higgs and getting shot in the face I'm at about 8cm dilated'." --Linda Tirado "Just remembered that the EMTs who last treated my mom said that they'd stopped asking who the president was in 2017 because most people either got angry or simply refused to answer." --Benjamin Dreyer "If the 'thought' leaders here have taught us anything, the goal should be to expose, get fired, affect personally, and diminish all individuals perceived in even the slightest of transgressions." --Hotpup, on infosec Twitter "Anyone who thinks the pen is mightier than the sword has not been stabbed with both." --Lemony Snicket "I stopped believing in the possibility of satire the day we found out that pharmacist who had been destroying vaccines thought the government had created the sky to hide us from God." --Myles Lobdell "I'm 30. My life today is remembered by Desert Storm, the Monica Lewinsky Scandal, the Dot Com Bust, 911 and the endless Middle East Wars, the Great Recession, MASSIVE student loan debt, and a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. We aren't pessimistic, we're realistic." --@experienceEMMY "If you're under 40, hearing 'history will judge' is funny because you're pretty sure everyone a few decades from now will be too busy hunting rats to learn history. That phrase works only on people who still think people in the future will know how to read." --Pookleblinky "Just because it's Turing complete doesn't mean you should use it." --@rmDevNull "The odds are good, but the goods are odd." --Hasufin "Not everything that can be done in Lisp should be done in Lisp." --Eva Galperin "People desperately want to find people it is socially acceptable to be cruel to." --Halvorz "Embedded programmers: 'C... because we write code, not papers.'" --@steriana "Getting tired of this thing where capitalism would rather not sell me a burrito rather than pay their workers more and sell me a burrito for an extra dollar." --Matthew Green "To work with USB you need to be at least two engineers: One to do the job, one to scream internally from the existential horror." --Whitequark "If you hear or read about genocide and your normal human response is 'Someone should stop that,' your consent hasn't been 'manufactured,' you just have basic human empathy." --Kareem Rifai "Any time a bunch of people are loudly saying 'Think of the children!!' it's never actually about the children and stuff usually ends up getting worse afterward." --Tim Sutton DARVO: Deny/Diminish, Attack, Reverse Victim and Oppressor "If somebody wants to nerd out with you in the hallway at con, unless you *absolutely* have to be somewhere - they are the most awesome person in the world at that very moment. Doesn't matter if they're competent or not. It does matter if they're curious!" --Dan Kaminsky "Never money in the budget to do it correctly, always enough money to do it again." --French Toast "One of the best feelings is having no idea what you're doing, but knowing you are going to be just fine doing it. May you experience fearlessness in your life at least a few times." --Dildog "You can decide which bothers you more: Contributing to the rise of fascism, or using a non-open-source license. I understand that for certain people that might be a tough call." --jwz "You can't embalm a living person on Youtube. That's for my Patreon." --Caitlin Doughty "Any attack that depends on circumventing the second law [of thermodynamics] is not something I'm going to worry about. I would question the sanity of anybody who includes that in their threat model. Suggestion: Before you go around telling the community that physics is useless, it might be good to get up to speed on the physics. Refusing to use the available physics does not make it useless." --John Denker "When I write science fiction, people tell me it's so real, it's so prescient, it's just like real life. When I write about the kind of poverty I've actually experienced, people think it's unrealistic." --Meg Elison "In an age where every neurotypical has an attention span measured in milliseconds, neurodivergent people are the only ones who actually know literally anything at all." --Pookleblinky "We're all running round dressed in black, calling ourselves Skeletal Family and Sisters Of Mercy, and we wondered why we got labelled 'goth'." --Roger Nowell, bassist, Skeletal Family "Those who want to burn it all down and somehow, magically, rebuild the country from the ashes, MINUS all the people they disagree with, into some sort of utopia of like-minded drones who believe as they do are dangerous fanatics no matter if their goal is left OR right." --Stonekettle "Just want to point out how fucking obscene it is that you can pay taxes in the US with a credit card." --Isis Agora Lovecruft "RSA [Conference] is helping my imposter syndrome." --Vlad "And now, the traditional butterball battle cry... OOOHHHHH SSSHHHHIIIIIII...." --Microchip, skydiving, _Punisher War Journal_ "They got money for wars but can't feed the poor." --Tupac Shakur "Google meet has absolutely shit the bed all over Zooko's Triangle and I will rap battle anyone who comes at me trying to say otherwise." --Maradydd "When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it." --Frederic Bastiat, economist "He had a cartoon mind and was straight out of Hollywood Squares." --Bootsy Collins, on Shock-G "Differential fuzzing for x86-64 decoders. Dis gon be complicated." --Maradydd "I pay low wages. I can take advantage of that. We're going to be successful, but the basis is a very low-wage, low-benefit model of employment." --Sam Walton "The simplest solution to the fermi paradox is that you are a Boltzmann brain that just popped into reality 10^110 years from now, hallucinating your own existence as it asphyxiates in the utterly dark void. Just face it, this tweet is the last thing you're hallucinating as cosmic heat death overtakes you." --Pookleblinky "Dear Infosec Awareness Training People: If you want to sell to healthcare, hire experienced RNs. They will tell you exactly what you need to change so that people will actually take your training." --Mitch Parker "The Internet is never going to be the wacky place it was when I had a Livejournal and people shared protean gifs in the form of YTMNDs. Big business has come to suck the joy (and your dollars) out of it." --Robert G. Reeve "Young white girlboss feminists are so obsessed with taking sex worker jobs away for being 'immoral' because their Onlyfans got two likes from hometown creeps when they made it. Like if you're 20 and HATE sex work/sex workers. We know it's cause you couldn't make money at it and failed." --Chelle Silverstein "Before you smash those LIKE and SUBSCRIBE buttons, spare a thought for that poor maintenance worker at YouTube who has to repair those smashed buttons before the next viewer comes along." --Rob T. Firefly "Am pretty sure that if they reintroduced hangings tomorrow, Priti Patel would eagerly attend every execution she could get to. (And attempt to make capital punishment mandatory for as many offenses as possible.)" --Charles Stross "'78888u7uy6,' says the cat. Now she's licking her asshole. Cats have a lot to teach us." --Eve "Is this an abusive question? It is rooted completely in reality, but, you know, it's an unpleasant topic. Seems Twitter would rather bad people do bad things than good people like me describe how bad they are." --Doc Zombie "There is nothing funny about making fun of the things other people love. It's simply a sign that you have nothing you love more than making fun of others. Get a better hobby." --Tarah Wheeler "When I was poor and complained about inequality they said I was bitter. Now that I'm rich and I complain about inequality I'm a hypocrite. I'm beginning to think they just don't want to talk about inequality." --Russell Brand "When the USA threatens a country with a leftist government that it must have a 'free and fair election,' what it really means is the US has a gun to that nation's collective head and says 'Either the right-wing candidate we funded and trained wins, or we keep waging war on you.'" --Benjamin Norton "The easier it is for you to access your data, the easier it is for someone else to access your data." --Schofield's Third Law "In MDDT, no one can hear you scream -- but everybody can hear you say 'whoops!'" --VAF@CMU-CS-C "I was in a band when every other person was in a band, maybe because of the Cold War and we didn't expect to live for long. We didn't expect employment, because half of us had no skills and the other half didn't know how to apply the skills that we had, and we reacted to the world because it weighed heavily on us." --Andrew Eldritch "My advice to young people in infosec is to not get your advice from Twitter." --Rabbit "If you remember that cows have infinite surface tension, I have something to show you at the gay bar." --Pookleblinky "Consider each individual thing you do and ask yourself whether to lose it through death makes death itself any cause for fear." --Marcus Aurelius "The responsibility for fighting surveillance abuse falls to tech companies, because nobody even pretends that the Federal government and courts are functional moral actors." --Matthew Green "The beauty of capitalism is that everyone, both individuals and investment firms alike, have equal opportunity in the market. If you save up your wages and want to buy a house in your hometown, you can simply outbid Blackrock when they buy an entire subdivision of 65,000 homes." --Lauren L. Walker "Look mom I'm on Aliexpress and haven't purchased anything weird!" --Kiwa "Mutual aid is the GOAL, not a grift. We're supposed to be working toward a society where we help each other. Also, you know, many people are in dire need of help because of the pandemic." --Edgar Allen Bitch "Every day on Twitter brings new opportunities for strangers with no background in my field to explain the last ten years of my own work to me." --@evacide "Naive, Polly Ann-ish to think anyone in power will face consequences. 'Justice' is run by the same power and is there to maintain that power. It's like the HR dept of any business. There to protect the business not the people." --Steve Sayles "This could be less 'global elite coverup conspiracy' and more 'long, grinding investigations don't really grab headlines'." --Werwolfram "In a time of extreme threat, complacency is complicity. The end result is the same." --Sarah Kendzior "Before you are disgusted: This is a Swiss/Italian kitchen and there are fewer particles on the floor than in an Intel 7nm fab." --Arrigo Triulzi "You know guys, it ain't gonna look like gilead, but more like Biff's Pleasure Palace with public hangings." --Javier Grillo-Marxuach "I'm getting whatever hormones are Turing complete because I'm going to see if I can root them and sideload DOOM onto my gender." --Foone "You cannot be expected to know something that you don't know. You cannot know someone's secrets, the behaviors that they know are illicit and will result in ostracization and likely criminal charges, by their interactions on Twitter." --0xdade "There is nothing to be gained from publicly arguing with people who are insistent that you debate them on things which should not be subject to debate. Bigots love using the premise of 'civil debate' as a mechanism for platforming their hate." --Elle Armageddon "The cicadas waited seventeen years for Pride month. Don't disappoint them. Be as loud as possible. Like a cicada." --Sue the T-Rex "So far, the main side effect of my booster has been a slightly sticky adhesive residue when I removed the unusually strong bandaid they put over the injection site." --Matt Blaze "If my game gives you pleasure for longer than it takes you to drink a fancy coffee, I don't think you should complain about my game costing as much as a fancy coffee." --Manuela Malasaña "If you *were* a rapidly asphyxiating random clump of brain tissue in the sterile void of the end of the universe, it'd explain a lot about why things seem so fucked up." --Pookleblinky "Seeing a dildo at a parade is infinitely less damaging to a developing brain than whatever you saw on 4chan 15 years ago that made you like this." --Tim Sutton "There's a culture war going on, and it's come for tech. Be sympathetic. Nerds aren't supposed to be bullies, but we sure took everyone's lunch money. Journalism got defunded, and 'user generated content' is not enough. But don't forget that tech can be fun and useful." --Dan Kaminsky "Children are wonderful. I can lazily waggle my fingers, and my son is dripping with smiles, totally enraptured by the unlimited possibility of being. Adults watch world-champion gymnastics and are like, ''Didn't exactly nail that landing, did she?''" --Edward Snowden "It is good and brave to be soft and warm when the world is hard and mean." --KITTEN.EXE "I feel sorry for them [the Met] having to go through that fucking phone." --Barrett Brown, on his phone being confiscated "The premise of half the games on Steam now is ''You've become the owner of a dilapidated house|village|ranch|etc, now restore it to its former glory!'' Homeownership is a fantasy scenario on par with becoming a legendary hero or piloting a cool mech." --Proto "Thinking about all the Gofundmes for insulin, a drug purposefully developed to be easy and cheap to make so it would take next to nothing to produce in order to make sure anybody would be able to afford it to survive, being short by just a little of their several hundred dollar goals. To get a medicine that costs pennies per ounce to create." --Elle "A thought leader is the first few centimeters of unusable thought used to connect it to the thought takeup reel." --DJ Sundog "The tools of war you can physically see no longer indicate whom holds the power." --MC Hammer (no, seriously) "If Western society as a whole and Americans in very specific would just come out and say 'Yes, we know the climate and fascism and whatnot are fucked up and no we really don't give a shit' I wouldn't feel quite so much like I'm being fucking gaslit." --Technoccult "Found this article on HNews about a new sort of Rowhammer attack. As a hardware fan, it always amazes me to see those things as it reminds us that even with all the abstraction that we want, it's still electric signal down there." --Meandres "If you put 'hail Hydra' on statues in every town in the region you don't have to announce in print that you're down with Hydra, everyone who lives there gets it." --The Mittani "Oh fuck me I'm on Hacker News. Which, in a way, is ironic, because 'I made the mistake of using Twitter' is the number one problem Hacker News has with me." --Foone "I'm sorry, if you were right, I'd agree with you." --Robin Williams "I see we're stressing out over the idea that if you don't debut by a certain age, you're doomed. I signed with my agent on my forty-seventh birthday. I won the world fantasy award for that novel when I was fifty years old. The only thing that art asks of you is to do it." --C.L.Polk "It's only simple if you don't understand it." --Glytchtech "I knew I was the only poor person at my tech startup because nobody else ate the Hot Cheetos that were stocked in our free snack kitchen. Seaweed snacks were always empty. Nobody had those telltale red stains on their fingers but me." --Meg Elison "Assuming that describing the Palestinians' situation as 'apartheid' is just a 'talking point,' and not a debatable but sincere characterization of hardship experienced by millions of actual human beings is what I mean by 'shallowness.'" --Nicholas Grossman "Well there's no possible way that a bunch of people who don't understand science and who are paranoid about societal change are going to intentionally misrepresent this article and whip their followers into a delirious panic." --Deviant Ollam, on the announcement of the world's smallest functioning single chip system, tiny enough that it fits in a hypodermic needle "'We heard people were baselessly speculating about microchips being in the COVID-19 vaccine, so we wanted to allay those fears with this proof of concept' - who the hell approved this tweet?" --Drew Rickett, on the announcement of the world's smallest functioning single chip system, tiny enough that it fits in a hypodermic needle "The fact that people are literally dying on the street without anyone trying to help is a direct outcome of people's willingness to ignore suffering." --Dr. Lucianne Walkowicz "Crypto nerds will pattern-match, drawing enormous red yarn collages that prove they are very smart, that indisputably prove why you should give them money." --Pookleblinky "Accidentally typed 'Turing Complicit' instead of 'Turing complete' into a doc and now I'm all distracted by the implications of the former." --Dan Hon "Success is more about luck and opportunity/circumstances than deliberate construction. Making something good is the entry point, sure, but there's lots of good stuff that doesn't make it. This is why success by imitation can be a real crapshoot." --Fred Hicks "Being old enough to remember the later '50s, and able to experience 2021, is to finally be, as we said in the late '60s, 'mindfucked'." --William Gibson "Fun fact: The longest drum solo was 10 hours and 33 minutes, performed by the child sitting behind me on United flight 842 from LA to Tokyo." --Roslynne Levine "Maybe if you understood why that behavior made sense at the time, you might learn something about intense production pressure and (reportedly) slow and cumbersome infra change approval processes. As Conklin says, you can blame or you can learn; you can't do both." --@ReinH "There's just not much further progress to be made fighting a culture war. I hate that they politicized it, but they did. So we need to go to incentives outside the political process." --Brianna Wu "I keep trying to call attention of deliberately corporatized nudity and kink that we see so often we literally stop acknowledging it for what it is, the line between what we decide is or isn't 'acceptable' is often the checkout line." --Alex Arrelia "So my working theory is that if you assemble enough enterprise software ads, an airport spontaneously forms around them." --Patrick Collison "Everybody is an atheist until they clog a toilet in someone else's house." --Anonymous "A long time ago I used to joke about needing a license analysis tool. And then I ended up inserting them into build pipelines for the various $corporate_overlords. I imagine this will lead to new entries in project signoff sheets for risk analysis pertaining to the odds of some human somehow involved in a library we use deciding our company sucks, some API provider making bank providing up-to-date corporate blacklist analysis, various other lawyers confusing everything by intentionally misunderstanding what's going on, and a fun new round of the 'Is open source worth it?' game. Because what we really had too little of was IP lawyers fucking about in engineering decisions." --Different Jamie "Our critical infrastructure was not just vulnerable to supply chain attacks, but that we still hadn't nailed the security basics. They worried about ninjas when a 5 year old with a baseball bat could take us out." --Katie Moussouris "This pandemic has fundamentally shaken my faith in human nature. I used to think that at our core, people were basically good. What we've been shown is that huge portions of the American population, disproportionately white men, are aggressively, suicidally selfish." --Brianna Wu "Remember there's a person behind the avatar. Be decent to each other." --Medus4 "I had forgotten that 73 years ago, when _South Pacific_ debuted, its rather mildly stated anti-racist themes were attacked as anti-American and communist-inspired, and were met with performative legislation." --@popehat "When the polio vaccine dropped in 1955 people lined up to get it, and we were two years away from artificial satellites. Now in 2021 we carry external world-brains in our pockets and there's robots on Mars, and idiots think the covid vaccine is full of poison." --Patton Oswalt "I am always baffled by the level of dismissiveness with which some people out in these streets treat shit that could literally mean someone's death. Acting like public health or civil rights or hateful, genocidal rhetoric is all just some fucking logic puzzle-ass intellectual exercise. Which is just so much garbage. People whined about reaching herd immunity for months, and then, presented with the one viable way to actually reach it, did everything in their power to deny it." --Technoccult "Mitch [McConnel] and [Charles] Schumer just sit in their offices drinking scotch laughing about how they have the majority of the population thinking they are fighting each other." --AT "I once read that the rules of building credit make a lot more sense if viewed as 'How profitable are you to loan money to?' as opposed to 'How trustworthy are you?'" --@emptysetgo "I didn't realise so many people would think this is a lie. Fine, be cynical. This happened, I was speechless in the moment, did what I did and that's it. I'm sorry I shared, but thank you to all the people that liked this, it's a special moment for me." --Ben James "I have a feeling in 20 years the biggest effect of covid will have been its effect on antibiotic and antifungal resistances, as billions of people in countries denied vaccine access are exposed to nosocomial infections in overwhelmed hospitals. Imagine it is the year 2030 and organ transplants are simply no longer possible due to a lack of any effective antibiotic/antifungal medications to treat inevitable nosocomial infections. Suddenly, prognosis for renal failure returns to what it was in the 1960's." --Pookleblinky "The legibility grooves in society are self-wearing." --Robin Tarsiger "I feel the need to continue wearing my mask outside even though I'm fully vaccinated because the inconvenience of having to wear a mask is more than worth it to have people not think I'm a conservative." --David Hogg "In a parallel dimension I'm Emperor Norton and have an 18 inch dick. And so do you." --Richard Metzger "Never, by the way, be afraid of being wrong. Being wrong just means the world is more interesting than you thought it was." --Dan Kaminsky "The FBI loves the X-Files because it makes people associate government coverups with wacky shit like Roswell instead of actual atrocities like COINTELPRO." --Technomancy "Nearly everything that matters is a side effect." --Maradydd "The greatest tragedy of this changing society is that people who never knew what it was like before will simply assume that this is the way things are supposed to be." --2600 Magazine, Fall 2002 "Politics is like driving. D to go forward, R to go backwards." --Phil Shapiro "Drink TAB. It's just like the fucking Andromeda Strain!" --Rev. Susie the Floozie "No one cares. It's only security." --Clarence Fender "This 'try multiple algorithms until one of them happens to work' approach is profoundly unethical - especially since we don't have separate training, test, and validation sets - but at least we're being honest about what we're doing, instead of inventing a fancy-but-obfuscatory technical term like 'ensemble methods' or 'hyperparameter tuning'." --Colin McMillen and Tim Toady, _93% of Paint Splatters are Valid Perl Programs_ "Boss makes a dollar / I make a dime / that's why my algorithms run / in exponential time" --Nat Alison "Truth is, there's some Very Notable Books out there, books with cachet - and they're books in styles that you don't particularly enjoy. It's fine to read pulp! It's fine to read for fun! Not every book must be A Deep Tome!" --Ferrett Steinmetz "If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats." --Fortune "At some point, your experience is based on factors that are no longer relevant... There's a point when you've succeeded that folks want your advice, then there's one where your experience is irrelevant." --Fred Hicks "LIZ! YOUR WIFE IS BROKEN!" --Dave, _Real Life Comics_ "HaD [Hackaday] comments are all armchair enginerds that love to rip into people for 'mistakes'." --Gartral "There's absolutely nothing one can say or do here that, if sufficiently amplified, won't enrage someone." --Matt Blaze "STOP TWEETING WORD SALAD AT ME YOU IDIOT." --Dan Kaszeta "Pretty sure they named a mountain after the distribution based on how often I've said, ''[I'll] Kill You Manjaro'' at my Manjaro ARM64/Raspberry Pi install." --Doc Skrzyk "Double standards are the only standards." --Definitely Not John "If you're going to have a goddamn conspiracy theory, try to have one that's a little smarter. Just show a little class, for God's sake, not to mention some brainpower." --Lilith Saintcrow "It's always September somewhere on the Internet." --Bill Woodcock "Walmart parking lots are PvP enabled zones." --Mungus von Bungus "Netrunning is all metaphor, all symbols and plumbing into the depths of the psyche. Sometimes that means tentacles." --Akiko Nisei "I want to be an eldritch monster from beyond space and time." --Puella Vulnerata "As a technologist you can't game-theorize away the potential harm to actual individuals and vulnerable populations for a potential upside of your technology decisions that justifies externalizing the risk. Engaging in that type of calculus of decision-making is the essence of techbro-ism." --Vortex Egg "Be proactively paranoid. It doesn't work retroactively." --zpojqwfejwfhiunz "This isn't brain surgery; it's just television." -- David Letterman "The future's so dim, I gotta wear photomultiplier tubes and 3 megalitres of water to detect its presence." --Lynne "Everything's fake until it happens." --Dayglow Chainsaw "There shouldn't be any shame in writing small software. Everything doesn't have to scale. If you build something cool it's valid and good if it makes you or just a few people happy. This doesn't make you a bad programmer." --Requiem "Sure it's food grade, if you're a geothermal vent snail." --Pagrus "Reminder: In practice things are utter chaos and it doesn't work like in a simulation." --Lanodan "_The Humpty Dance_ spoke to all the people that were like him [Humpty Hump] - the fat people, the unattractive people. If you moved like him, you could be whatever you want." --Nzazi Malonga, on _Do the Humpty Dance_ by Digital Underground "Schadenfreude is like masturbation; anyone who claims not to enjoy it is lying, but anyone who does it in public is a pervert. Also, wash your hands afterwards." --Maradydd "In pursuit of power the evangelicals have forsaken their Christian witness." --Kent Dahlgren's stepdad "'This air fryer has remote code execution vulnerabilities' is not a sentence that anyone should ever have to write, but here we are." --Rich Kulawiec "Perhaps it's a little easier to take a piece of music than it is to learn how to play the guitar or something. True, just like it's probably easier to snap a picture with that camera than it is to actually paint a picture. But what the photographer is to the painter is what the modern DJ and computer musician is to the instrumentalist." --Shock G "To really try to be informed and literate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time and to need help." --Dallas Ft. Wallace "I just realized that every coast of Antarctica is its northern coast." --Distel "Sex work fucked me up because it led me to believe that there was a relationship between hard work and success. I've learned that in the Real World, hard work does not lead to success, it leads to people deciding that you're disposable." --Furrygirl "You don't have to constantly consume trauma in order to know injustice exists." --Unknown "I love it when I post about design failings for FOSS projects and get unsolicited howtos on how to assemble some sort of Rube Goldberg machine. Like, isn't the point to not have to assemble Voltron every time and just skip to the metaphorical mecha/kaiju ass kicking. Connect your own goddamn dynatherms." --Doc Skrzyk "If you think human rights are more important than property rights, you're not a conservative. If you think property rights are human rights, you are a conservative." --Steven Brust "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect. There is nothing more or else to it, and there never has been, in any place or time." --Frank Wilhoit "One idiot inventing one good joke is worth a thousand scientists making a-bombs!" --Rev. Ivan Stang "If your life is making too much sense it's your fuckin' fault!" --Rev. Suzie the Floozie "Obviously, Dr. Wellington Yueh's reincarnation as Admiral Albert Callavici was driven by his regret over the betrayal of the Atreides and his desire to be a true companion, helper, and friend to someone engaged in a noble cause. Paul Atreides' reincarnation as Dale Cooper was, of course, driven by his being sick and despairing at prescience and desiring a world of uncertainty, mystery and freedom." --Azure, playing the "characters played by actor reincarnation motive" game "NoxPlayer got stuck at 99% 'loading,' with ads for shitty waifu games. Why are there waifu games when Pornhub exists?" --Mark Hughes "You can tell the pandemic is winding down because Americans are getting back to the more traditional ways of needlessly, wantonly, and preventably killing each other." --David Ehrlich "There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party... and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, pretter, a bit more corrupt - until recently... and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties." --Gore Vidal "Esolangs are supposed to test the boundaries of language design, and the only boundary I can think of that Go pushes is 'most boring language possible.'" --Freakazoid "Loud intimidation works once. Stealth is the gift that keeps them screaming." --Hasufin "The real reason we dream is that our brains were programmed in BASIC and a comment is being interpreted as a command, probably because of a bug in the implementation." --Foone "Stop arguing with sock puppets in my mentions! You have better things to do with your day!" --Laurel Powell "There's a very limited demographic of aging dumbasses." --th3j35t3r "She took the time to read the instructions. If that's not evidence of the divine, I don't know what is." --Liz, _Real Life Comics_ "Today, Plato is nearly forgotten. His beliefs include the notion that people who govern should be intelligent, rational, self-controlled, and in love with wisdom. An idea that has long been discredited." --Bobby Henderson "Occasionally, people will call us out on that whole ''Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke'' thing. ''Well, that just excuses everything!'' No! It's just funny! We don't care if they get the joke or not. Half of 'em can't." --Rev. Ivan Stang "Roko's Basilisk is what happens when a spherical cow becomes a golden calf." --Pete Wolfendale "Every time I listen to one of these Chinese spam voicemails, I get nervous that I'm about to snowcrash or something." --Genetik "Paranoia stopped being a mental illness a decade ago." --Desert Child "There are a lot of very capable people waking up every day and choosing to continue civilization as we know it." --Feonixrift "You don't even shake hands. You oughta see a shrink." "Miss Belair, if you feel compelled to grab part of my body and shake it before you can even be friendly you've got far worse problems than you think I have." --_The Wizard of Speed and Time_ "If you ever get to a point in life where you wake up and life's veil of mystery is gone from your mind, and everything about everything is totally and completely clear to you, and you see it all, and there IS no more doubt in your head about anything or anybody and everything is completely crystalline, perfectly clear to you like an azure sky of deepest summer... at that point, watch the fuck out, because you can bet the goddamn farm that you have gone completely insane." --Phin "Soliciting attention engenders attention. Make strategic decisions as to what will be attended, the spectacle or the stage-hands. If the spectacle is well-wrought nobody knows nor needs to know who the stage-hands were. So much grief could be spared if people had but a passing respect for the perennial principles of theatrics." --James Bolivar DiGriz, on why people doing the right thing are punished but people up to no good get away with everything "Let me explain life to you: Everything conspires to give you psychological problems. Your purpose is to pass those on. Then the next generation can create a bunch of whiny emo music, too." --Kurt Harland "We don't use the term 'working class' here because it's a taboo term. You're supposed to say 'middle class,' because it helps diminish the understanding that there's a class war going on." --Noam Chomsky "Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past." --Jean-Paul Sartre "Anyway, I don't know that I'm on team Aggressive Seuss Corporation Brand Management, but let's not pretend we're dealing with stone tablets engraved by God here." --Sam Thielman "No Shmoocon this year, but you can simulate the experience by trying to get a COVID vaccine appointment." --Matt Blaze "This isn't referring to any specific event, but I'd just like to say that you don't *have* to have a publicly, loudly stated opinion on everything that happens in this fandom. You are allowed to go 'huh' and move on." --Ennex "I am not a 'white hat' or an 'infoseccer'. Y'all too busy writing blog posts and giving Powerpoint presentations to be doing what I'm doing." --@donk_enby "I'm either being spanked or he's holding my butt in place while the glue dries." --Jamie French "Why would we want to bounce ancient encrypted messages off the side of their tower?!" "To freak out the neighbors, and to get one up on Rex." "You make a good point..." --Brian Brushwood and Jason Murphy, _Secret Laser Communications via Polybius Square_ "There needs to be a great awakening of the human psyche to not be so damned gullible." --Joseph Matheny "Tips From Joe #427: If you're having dinner with important people and feel a sneeze coming on, immediately take a sip of water. This may not stop the sneeze, but it will make the result infinitely more entertaining. You're welcome." --J. Michael Straczynski "In principle the war effort is always so planned as to eat up any surplus that might exist after meeting the bare needs of the population." --George Orwell, _1984_ "Sometimes it's better to be a bit dumb because then you do not overthink things and you take more risks." --Damoor Sahami "You do not need to become a 'better' person after you experience trauma. It is not some transformational experience where you always end up with superpowers. Sometimes it just sucks. Just surviving it is enough you're doing great." --Andrew Roebuck "I love the stock market because when it goes up we get nothing, but when it goes down we all lose our jobs. Except during a pandemic when it goes up and we still lose our jobs." --@yeoldedad "A musket and a mustache can't make a coward brave." --Michael Harriot "The lesson from a year of global lockdown is that it is abundantly clear that there is absolutely no combination of individual efforts that can change our climate destiny. Change has to happen at immense scale, which means the top emitters must change." --Emily Gorcenski "Cherry blossoms fall / Xist saucers are in the skies / time to burn, pink boy!" --Nikolai Kingsley "Before you correct someone on here [Twitter] about getting something wrong, you can check to see if they've already been corrected and whether they willingly and graciously received that correction. If they already have, you can go do something else!" --Danya Ruttenberg "I find it so amusing how a country so radicalized with 'Christianity' (their view of Christianity is so far from Roman Catholicism the only thing in common is Jesus and God) has literally a golden bull on their front steps." --Nico "Here's an idea, spread the rumor that the government is spraying vaccine in the air at mass vax sites. That will keep anti vax away and make anti maskers mask up. They'll believe anything." --Melanie Villeda "May the less dysfunctional team win." --Left Red Bumper "Your method is more ethical, my method is more reliable." --Hasufin "Our death ray doesn't seem to be working. I'm standing right in it, and I'm not dead yet." --Jamie Hyneman "I love low res CGA graphics, they always looked so otherworldly." --Polychrome "Really, it /is/ 2021. Chucky *could* be loose in Texas with his demon-doll child Glen/Glenda. This wouldn't even be top 5 weird shit of the year." --Mark Hughes "Liars do not fear the truth if there are enough liars." --Fox Mulder "It is easier to fight the ghosts in your head than the real demons standing right in front of you." --The Doctor "Technology does not need vast troves of personal data stitched together across dozens of websites and apps in order to succeed. Advertising existed and thrived for decades without it, and we're here today because the path of least resistance is rarely the path of wisdom." --Tim Cook "We can't give you all the answers. But we can help you flesh out your fantasy that there are some." --Michael Peppe "Anyone who attempts any organization of any kind in this house should wear elbow pads." -Laurelindel "A committee is just like a neural net but without the ability to make decisions." --Nick Carraway "I couldn't get elected in Florida District #1 even if I was giving away free AR-15s." --@stonekettle "History will tell lies, sir, as usual." --Gentleman Johnny Burgoyne, _The Devil's Disciple_ "Trouble with remote access is your threat model now includes every psychopath who can use Shodan." --atman "It's amazing how people who don't understand how to use search engines are sure that there is a deep conspiracy to ban them, whether it's Bitcoin, or a right-wing Christian who was convinced their 'Prophetic Message to Joe Biden' was banned, when they haven't stopped and considered that there a huge numbers of other web pages that might described by their overly broad search term." --Theodore T'so "Privacy, to the surprise and disappointment of cypherpunks, turns out to be in little demand." --jrzx "I don't do lectures, I do standup philosophy." --Robert Anton Wilson "People are becoming personas but forgetting who they are." --Joseph Matheny "It's odd to watch the House managers put forth an impenetrable case backed with solid evidence and irrefutable argument followed by the Trump lawyers' clown show, all over issues of profound importance, and know it's predetermined that the clown show will prevail." --Radley Balko "Blaming the Texas power outages on things like the Green New Deal is like... is like... is like... Sorry folks, I don't have a folksy analogy. It's just plain dishonest, stupid, and dangerous. We need solutions based on science, not sophistry." --Dan Rather "Although if you want to get into stupid nitpicking drama or you are a Wikipedia editor (but I repeat myself) there are TECHNICALLY only three Make My Video games." --Foone "The City and County, along with power providers or any other service owes you NOTHING! I'm sick and tired of people looking for a damn handout!... If you are sitting at home in the cold because you have no power and are sitting there waiting for someone to come rescue you because your laziness is direct result of your raising! I'll be damned if I'm going to provide for anyone that is capable of doing it themselves!... Bottom line, quit crying and looking for a handout! Get off your ass and take care of your own family! Only the strong will survive and the weak will perish." --Tim Boyd, former mayor of Colorado City, Texas, during the winter storm of 2021 (heavily corrected for spelling and grammar, because he's a product of the USian public school system) "'Deploying a popular hypertext utility resource with k8s clusters and Kafka for use monitoring...' Buddy, it's just a blog." --ejmg "One of the hardest things I've had to learn is that humans aren't pure functions: An input that works one day and gets one result, then again another day and gets an entirely different result." --Sarah Drasner "Trump is the face of our collective idiocy. He is what lies behind the mask of our professed civility and rationality, a sputtering, narcissistic, bloodthirsty megalomaniac." --Chris Hedges "People seem good while they are oppressed, but they only wish to become oppressors in their turn: Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim." --Bertrand Russell "Hello, I am here to derail the Rust discussion before it gets started." --ddevault "The year 2021 has taught us, if nothing else, that we can be sure that lies, misinformation, and bullshit are post-scarce resources in modern society." --Soatok "Being intelligent is not a felony. But most societies evaluate it as at least a misdemeanor." --Robert A. Heinlein "You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they've tried everything else." --Winston Churchill "Is a Twitter exodus not connected to right-wing extremists too much to ask for?" --Gargron "God, the 68k chip in DIP is such a fucking unit. What a chad of a chip. You could defend your home with one of these things, it's like a 2x4." --Labgirl "Gender is a performance. I'll be playing 4'33'' by John Cage." --wizardofdocs "If one can assemble a reasonably functional computer by shaking a few MCUs together in a bag with some wires and solder, and the thing that makes a pinephone a phone is a modem that has audio in/out lines and serial interfaces, there is absolutely no reason that 2021 could not be the year of the CP/M smartphone." --DJ Sundog "To insist on a spiritual practice that served you in the past is to carry the raft on your back after you have crossed the river." --Gautama Buddha "Anyone who takes the time to ponder and respond thoughtfully with context and explanation will find that they're too late." --Mike Crittenden "You know what solves it? When the economy crashes, when the country goes to total hell and everything is a disaster. Then you'll have a [chuckles], you know, you'll have riots to go back to where we used to be when we were great." --Steve Bannon "You're wrong, stop trying to spread wrong like gonorrhea in the Theater Department." --Popehat, _Hello, You've Been Referred Here Because You're Wrong About the First Amendment_ "The reason that Gab, et al will fail is because they're just whining bitches that have only one ideology: Egotism. Sharing is caring, y'all." --brokep "If you judge a man by his enemies, I'm doing pretty well." --Edward Snowden "I mark how long I want the steel rod to be, and cut it down with my Dremel. Now, a hacksaw would work, too, but a hacksaw wouldn't make all these neat sparks." --Odin Makes "The way mathematics is currently taught it is exceedingly dull. In the calculus book we are currently using on my campus, I found no single problem whose answer I felt the student would care about! The problems in the text have the dignity of solving a crossword puzzle - hard to be sure, but the result is of no significance in life." --Dr. Richard Hamming "Induction counsels anxiety now." --Phil Stewart "I've been trying to warn people that the apocalypse is boring." --RU.Sirius "When you know something, it is almost impossible to imagine what it is like not to know that thing. This is the curse of knowledge, and it is the root of countless misunderstandings and inefficiencies. Smart people who are comfortable with complexity can be especially prone to it! If you don't guard against the curse of knowledge it has the potential to obfuscate all forms of communication, including code. The more specialized your work, the greater the risk that you will communicate in ways that are incomprehensible to the uninitiated." --Joel Goldberg "The major philosophical battle of our time is no longer left versus right, it's smart versus stupid." --Rohan Connolly "Good thing this isn't a how-to video, I never said I knew what I was doing." --Offensive Jerk "Nobody really knows what the Bourne shell's grammar is. Even examination of the source code is little help." --Tom Duff "I hate to say it, but it does not look like the people with a conscience are winning." --Richard Brooks "Anytime the explanation to something appears 'cynically obvious,' I take that to be a sign to stop being cynical, and instead ask the foolish questions that a more cynical mind would write off as having obvious answers." --Vortex Egg "My body isn't a temple, it's a punk show bathroom." --Bella? "If I wasn't wearing pants, I bet you could tell using this! What a weird metric..." --Adam Savage "All ideas become vulnerable when they leave the safety of the imagination." --Grant Morrison "The world you expected to be the future didn't happen. We were supposed to get _The Jetsons_ and instead we're not sure if we're gonna get fed." --Mike Pondsmith "I worked for a company that debated going open source. Several people strong objected to 'giving away the crown jewels.' But we decided to open it up, and release the code. A year later, we checked the server logs, and found it had been downloaded this many times: 0. What many companies don't realize is that no one, not even their competitors, wants their code. They are way too busy trying to understand and fix their own code. They don't have time to waste trying to understand yours." --Shanghai Bill "From curiosity, entitlement often blooms and calls itself 'skepticism.'" --Soatok "Let the meek inherit the earth. The wise and the strong move on. As always." --Timothy Leary "Agile software is when you assign a point value to all your user stories and make tasks for all of them, and then you wind up doing whatever the PM says is urgent." --Best Girl Grace "There are two laws no human being can escape: The first idea that comes into a person's mind will be the most obvious one; and, having had an obvious idea, nobody ever thinks that others may have had the same idea before." --Umberto Eco "You know what I admire most about you, Summers? Your icy calm lunacy under pressure." --Wolverine, _The New X-Men: E is for Extinction_ "Any sufficiently developed technology is an Arthur C. Clarke quote." --Doc Skrzyk "The thick plottens." --Billy Goodman "Humanity always reaches for the stars when it comes to killing itself." --Samurai Jack Bauer "Instead of electing visionary leaders, we are in fact just voting for middle managers in a complex, global system that nobody fully controls." --Adam Curtis "We live in an era where voters have record levels of distrust for politicians, partly because they can feel this disconnect - they see from everyday reality that, despite their claims, politicians can't effect change. Not really. They might not understand why, exactly, but there's this increasing sense that leaders have lost the ability to make fundamental changes to our economic and social realities. The result is a large body of mainstream voters that wants to burn down the status quo. They want change, but don't see politicians being able to deliver it." --Tim Maughan "I just enjoy megalomania, whether it be mine or another's." --the_gibson "If someone is looking out for your best interests, and they ask for your repeated instructions in writing, have a think about what you're demanding." --Kelemvor Sparkyfox "When you're under the harsh glare of constantly being analysed, that shapes you whether you want it to or not. It's a germ or a seed that's planted in your mind. It can take surprising turns and it can affect your growth." --Debbie Harry "Why does the gnosis always get busted? Every single time the energy is raised and large-scale group illuminations are occurring, the local branch of the Inquisition kills it dead. Why, why, why?" --Grady McMurtry "Everybody's an agent. Some of them don't even know who they're an agent for." --William S. Burroughs "The young better learn fast that most leaders betray followers and the ones who don't are dangerously inflexible." --Timothy Leary "Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It's shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson." --Frank Herbert, _Dune_ "So, the bottom line is if it [covid-19] is more infectious now, the issue is, who cares? If it is causing more cases in young, my word is who cares." --Michael Caputo, grotesquely unqualified former assistant secretary for public affairs, US Department of Health and Human Services "The only conspiracy theory I believe is that all this 'food in the UK is good, actually' backlash is really just the Brits trying to turn their surplus of jellied eels into an export good." --@mountboom "Ominous dark fluffy objects have covered the sky over Las Vegas, emitting occasional droplets of unidentified liquid. Old timers call it 'rain' and say it used to happen 2-4 times per year. Sounds like government disinformation to me." --George Knapp, on rain in Las Vegas "It's class warfare, right? When money is power - and even ruled to be speech itself by the Supreme Court - handing out money is very dangerous. So, brutal class warfare it is." --George Griffity, on stimulus cheques "Adulthood is saying 'I just need to make it to the end of the week' every week until you die." --Luna Sorcery "If you ever used the bathroom at CBGBs, don't worry about what's in the Covid vaccine." --Xeni Jardin "If someone screams at you because you prefer to use different words to describe the same concept, then they're more attached to the attention they get from the words than the cause motivated by the concept. Social media is full of these authoritarian shitheads." --Spatula "Metaphysics isn't some bullshit high-handed weasel word you get to throw out to sound 'above it.' People are fucking dying and if you want to play at 'metaphysics' then I and a host of other disabled, neurodivergent, LGBTQIA, BIPOC, and feminist philosophers will be more than happy to give you a detailed breakdown of the metaphysical groundings of liberatory justice." --Technoccult "But none dare call it post hoc ergo propter hoc?" --Robert Hettinga "I have many ways of being unhelpful, but the technobabble ones are my favorite." --Tony, _Real Life Comics_ "If you build a mechanism that incentivizes crime, sooner or later you will get crimed on." --Matthew Green "Lost audio. I fear I will miss Rudy's [Giuliani] masterful rebuttal now. The line is just static. The static is making a more effective argument against the motion to dismiss." --Popehat "Passwords are a mess. Alas, the magic bullets proposed all make it worse, so people need to be taught how to do the work to manage them better, and people like us can't agree." --Kent Borg "I've studied IPv6, and still cannot understand it; it's a horse that turned out to become a camel." --Dave Horsfall "A society where you must lie, repeatedly, to get power, where you must do evil over and over again to get power (or even a decent living) will be shit, and the more the virus of dishonesty and meanness spreads, the more shit it will be." --Ian Welsh "I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don't listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People - powerful people - listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don't criticize other insiders." --Elizabeth Warren, _A Fighting Chance_ "As societies and communities continue to defederate and decentralize in spasms toward interlocking spheres of influence and connection, I tell myself over and over again that I can't put my oxygen mask on if I'm surrounded by people who want to rip it off of me because I don't deserve one." --Orrery "We're stuck in the _Dark Mirror_ version of _Who Framed Roger Rabbit_." --Feonixrift "Knowledge is power, but power does not necessarily confer competance." --"Victor" "It's just a metaphor. If you make it more than that, you miss the barn by fifteen yards." --Derrel Sims "A futurist should not be expected to get everything right, but they could be judged by their batting average." --John Higgs "What will be the next step in biological and social evolution? Here are two clues. 1) You are more likely to find evolutionary agents closer to jail than to the professor's chair. 2) Look to that social freedom most abused, most magically, irrationally feared by society. Exactly that freedom which you, the intellectual, the liberal, would most deny to others. Good. Now you are getting close." --Timothy Leary "Almost all right-wing support in the United States comes from a view that Christians are under attack by secular liberals. This point is so important and so little understood. Logic doesn't matter. Fact-checking doesn't matter. What matters is if I can use this information to show that liberals are evil. Many of them are not interested in reporting the world as it is, but rather to shape the world like they want it to be." --Matthew Sheffield "2020 is like looking both ways before crossing a road and then getting hit by a plane." --Anonymous "As a longtime observer of Georgia politics, I am at a point where I can no longer distinguish trolling from earnest madness." --George Chidi "Give a man a fish and he'll be fed for a day. Teach a man to fish and he'll promptly forget that he once didn't know and proceed to call anyone who asks a n00b and flame them on the boards for being stupid." --Anonymous "Of course this election is coming down to Area 51." --Data, on Nevada counting votes in the 2020 presidential election "Tomorrow's D&D game is probably going to end up like the Donner Party meets _The Thing_." --remotenemesis "What could go wrong with me taking off my glasses in a shop full of tools wearing a lot of fur?" --Adam Savage "I don't think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you've got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them." --The archeologist Kurt Vonnegut hung out with when he was 15 "Still, let no one suggest a democracy contested by two men in their mid- to late-70s is in some ways beginning to look a little necrotic. Yes, it would have been nice to have had at least one candidate whom no one had accused of sexual assault - but you had to be deeply comforted that one of the candidates had been accused of literally dozens more sexual assaults than the other one. Of course, the 2020 US presidential election situation is still very much developing, and by the time you read this, there could be a lot of hostages to fortune. Or even just hostages. Rule nothing out. Nothing, perhaps, except moral optimism." --Marina Hyde, on the 2020 election "Man, this is like Sasquatch: The Game!" --Brian Brushwood "Back when laptops were powered by diesel." --Jason Murphy "I'm just stuck on 'chop the hot dogs until they are the consistency of coarse corn meal,' like, who has time to do that? What is the point of it? Do these people not have blenders or food processors? Why not just slice them thinly and layer them on top of your soupcheese goop if that's the flavor combination your dark gods demand? So many questions." --Amberite, on hotdog surprise "But no matter how this election concludes, America is now a different country. Nearly half of the voters have seen Trump in all of his splendor - his infantile tirades, his disastrous and lethal policies, his contempt for democracy in all its forms - and they decided that they wanted more of it. His voters can no longer hide behind excuses about the corruption of Hillary Clinton or their willingness to take a chance on an unproven political novice. They cannot feign ignorance about how Trump would rule. They know, and they have embraced him. Sadly, the voters who said in 2016 that they chose Trump because they thought he was 'just like them' turned out to be right. Now, by picking him again, those voters are showing that they /are/ just like him: Angry, spoiled, racially resentful, aggrieved, and willing to die rather than ever admit that they were wrong." --Tom Nichols "FRIDAAAAAAAY! Oh wait every day is the same now, why am I excited?" --Felicia Day "Nevermind, it's like you people are fucking determined to suck today." --Nezumi Ningen "Frankly, my trolls, I don't give a damn." --Dan Rather "As a writer - and as a former scientist myself - it is my job to resist feebleminded superstition and idiot fundamentalism and every hysterical bully who ever shook a fist and mouthed the words 'Because I said so.'" --Peter Watts "The more incredible the lie, the more people will believe it." --Bob Lazar "You hear that? That's the sounds of millions of buttholes suddenly unclenching." --Doc Skrzyk "Every culture spawns a subculture, ad nauseam. In the end, we're all just a bunch of apes making shit up as we go." --Neon Intubation "So many Food Network people are like ''Oh, I'm going to braise short ribs in elderberry jam...'' Screw that, I'm going to mainline moon pies and snort cheese powder! Turn off the lights and run 23 Slim Jims through the juicer." --Alton Brown "I'm paid to 3D-print guns. As to the how and the why? It's nanomachines, I ain't gotta explain shit." -da_667 "I have to learn how to fix things instead of doing it right the first time." --Adam Savage "Markets are great but they make a shitty religion." --Nuke Skyjumper "What's it like being opposite Arnold Schwarzenegger? For me? Are you kidding? Maybe if I'm lucky, [I'll] come up to his navel!" --Linda Hunt "In Soviet Russia, if is not broke, do not fix." --Anonymous "An obvious option when shrinkifying electrical circuits is to go with SMD components. However, I couldn't go with this option because my hands shake like that of a Parkinsons patient strapped to an electric chair." --Brainy Baboon "Even bad coffee is better than no coffee at all." --David Lynch "There comes a time in every electronic band's life when they inevitably cover Depeche Mode." --Null Device "I always expect these things to be deeply mystical and complex, then I find out it's a Google doc." --Sarah "Extradition is stalled because John McAfee is now about 90% cocaine on a molecular level, and bringing him to the states for trial would involve sneaking him through customs." --Dr. Otto Skrzyk "The normie tipping point is a joke, but it speaks to one of the thorniest questions in modern journalism, specifically on this beat: When does the benefit of informing people about an emerging piece of misinformation outweigh the possible harms?" --Kevin Roose "The main life goal of silk taffeta, whether real or artificial, is to wrinkle. It holds onto creases with the fervency of a Marine in dress blues." --Arabella Flynn "We look to math for truth, not comfort." --Charlie Audritsh "And sometimes, honestly, components just suck." --Krazy Ken, _Why Do Computers Die?_ "Suffice it to say that your local police department regularly uses Amazon footage to prosecute crime, and there'll be a forensics team along presently to pick blood-spattered pages from _The Best of Brigham Young_ out of your rhododendron." --David Rutland "I am sick of people disrespecting sheep. If you've ever dealt with a bunch of loose sheep, you know they're cheeky and don't actually do what you want a lot of the time. Also: They're very sweet and care for each other in a way humans don't seem to be willing to do." --AC Shilton "Are they evil? Are they morons? At a certain point, it doesn't really matter, does it?" --Parker Molloy "J.R. 'Bob' Dobbs gives you permission - an excuse and a justification, even - for anything you want to do. ANYTHING. Even THAT. The outcomes and accountability part, though, that's on you." --Rev. Onan Canobite "This is a shout out to all the anti-masker Amish people, when I see you alone at night your ass is getting your trachea busted." --Alraune "You guys okay?" "For definitions of ok that include 2020, yeah." --Lyssa and Teaotter "You can't really make the case to younger people that 'capitalism,' broadly writ, is gonna do shit for them. I have one of these in my house, and they simply don't buy it. Elders called what my cadre felt toward all this machinery apathy, but it never was: We just knew it was a lie... And they aren't wrong on this point: If money is allowed to pool like this, devils grow in it. If you don't fucking govern, if you don't moat these things in a circle of salt, they will invariably become something uncontainable - something too big to fail." --Tycho "Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the rich." --Anonymous "Personality of a side salad, no dressing, extra shredded carrots." --zpojqwfejwfhiunz "If everything is fake, then any lie is truth." --Karyn S. "You're speaking to an in group right now, your outside perspective isn't welcomed here." --_conky_ "NO TL;DR: this time, I spent hours writing, you should spend minutes reading." --Gilles Chehade "These are the same people saying that we can't have tuition-free public colleges because there's no money... when these motherfuckers are only paying $750 a year in taxes." --Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez "The Mandela Effect is when the same people who called you a terrorist and supported your imprisonment applaud you as an icon of peaceful resistance 20 years later." --@esvrld@octodon.social "I say if you have the skills, time and desire, give it a go and see where you end up. If google shows nothing, then its likely not been tried. With so few firsts available in life, take those that present themselves and have a crack, even if failure is always an option." --VK4HAT "Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row." --Ray Bradbury "Theory: Ancient aliens had absolutely no influence on human history, but they do run the History Channel and try to make us think they did have influence on human history." --Dee "Corvids are technically songbirds, but like, noisecore songbirds." --Garbados "It wouldn't be a microsoft product if the only solution to most bugs wasn't 'just reinstall the full game.'" --Dashie, on Microsoft Flight Simulator "IT is largely a shell game for bullshit." --Dr. Otto Skrzyk "Like an episode of The Twilight Zone your YAMN pinger has been frozen in time since Mon 28 Sep 2020 23:00:14 GMT." --Remailer Ops Admin, broadcast message "I work in pediatrics. I deal with kids under 10 that behave better than our asshole president on a daily basis and I'm poking them with sharp things." --War Kittens A priest, a minister, and a rabbi walk into a bar. The rabbi says, "Hey, did you hear the one about us?" "If you control the givens, you can win any argument." --Frank Herbert "Copyright hurts everyone that isn't the Disney estate." --Purple Sol "You could have easily looked at a sample ballot prior to the election, and you could have simply looked up the candidates in a search engine. By doing so, you, like the good citizen in Rindge, would probably have been appalled, and probably wouldn't have voted for me. I wouldn't have begrudged you for that. I was, after all, rather upfront about it. I went into it expecting that I would lose the primary to a write-in candidate, because I didn't think that so many voters were just... completely and totally oblivious about who they are voting for. Because the fact is that you didn't bother. You trusted the system. You trusted the establishment. You trusted the party. You felt safe. You were sure that there must be some mechanisms in place to prevent from occurring exactly what just occurred. Your anger is misplaced if you direct it at me. Please listen. Your anger is with the system that has lied to you. Your anger is with the system that convinced you to believe in it, trust in it, and have faith in it, when it is completely and utterly broken." --Aria DiMezzo "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle." --Edmund Burke "Selfishness is not one of the divisions of the social order." --Victor Hugo "Liberal: A masochist who will buy and read everything a bigot publishes." --Mort Sol(?) "is the internet the singularity what the fuck this was a mistake" --Giancarlo "Aeon Flux could just be a weird Hackers sequel." --the_gibson "Simply put, if you're in a position of power at work, you're unlikely to see workplace harassment in front of you. That's because harassment and bullying are attempts to exert power over people with less of it. People who behave improperly don't tend to do so with people they perceive as having power already." --Sarah Milstein "The clandestine operator... is trained to believe that you really can't count on the honesty of your agent to do exactly what you want or to report accurately unless you own him body and soul." --Richard Helms "Folks love to treat IT as morlocks, and forget that it's ducks kickboxing C'thul'hu under the surface." --Bryce "The same rule applies to farts and natural disasters: You never have to ask if I'm responsible, because if I am, I will brag about it!" --Tony, _Real Life Comics_, on the California wildfires of 2020.ev "I learn from being confronted and challenged, and I accept that I have made some significant errors in my public life. If someone then said I should not be read or listened to as a result of those errors, well, I would object internally, since I don't think any mistake a person made can, or should summarise that person. We live in time; we err, sometimes seriously; and if we are lucky, we change precisely because of interactions that let us see things differently." --Judith Butler "What gang member is like, 'I better head to Kentucky because this guy is giving Blues Traveler shit?'" --Forrest Rutherford "Godspeed, you magnificent assclowns." --Fidgety "Believe the autocrat. He means what he says." --Masha Gessen "Taking up tools and making something that lasts is one of the most subversive things you can do in this disposable society that encourages - nay, requires - rampant consumer spending." --Christopher M. Schwarz "Yes, I love a night on the town when it's 34 [degrees F] and raining. Fuck Gene Kelly! You motherfucker!" --Albert Rosenfield, _Twin Peaks_ "The areas where we were criticized were for being unrealistic, but I wasn't trying to make a tech film. I wanted to be accurate about what it meant to these kids, what it felt like, the imaginative projection of the fantasy world that this [Hackers] represented for them. I wanted the film to reflect that." --Iain Softley "Being good at something doesn't promise rewards. It doesn't even promise a compliment. What's rewarded in the world is scarcity, so what matters is what you can do that other people are bad at." --Morgan Housel "I appreciate the effort, but when the data stolen by a foreign government's espionage operation actually hits, I still fully expect LEROY JENKINS until they [modern news outlets] show they're institutionally capable of anything else." --Political Punnery "There are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven't noticed already." --Robert Anton Wison "People asking about my red fingernail. It's for my mom. I wear my dad's ring and my mom's nail polish. It reminds me of them." --Penn Jillette "Life doesn't make any sense. It's full of these moments of great joy, and great failure. That's what music has been, never just a boring time." --Adam Warrock "Malachite is a poisonous mineral. Please do not fuck the malachite stalactite." --brambledboneyards "Understanding does not equal empathy." --Funnypanja "Xanadu was powered by bile, inadequate vision and missed opportunities." --Yojimbo "Living in a dystopia just feels like living: You get through one day, and then you get through the next, and then the next. You embrace mild self-deception and self-delusion because you must. You move forward because what other choice do you have?" --Anne Helen Petersen "Expect the mistakes because you are going to make them. If you try and avoid them you will fail and you will further feel like a failure because you tried to avoid them and failed to avoid them. Your are never going to avoid them." --Adam Savage "Everybody relax. If Bill Gates was going to kill millions of people, he would've used Windows Vista." --Patrick S. Tomlinson "Police always observe that criminals prosper. It takes a pretty dull policeman to miss the fact that the position of authority is the most prosperous criminal position available." --God Emperor Leto II "I hate this pandemic. If I wanted to waste my early 20's I would've become a military wife." --Elise Morgan "US politics to an outsider is like walking in on an argument about how best to punch babies. People expect you to pick a side, but you just stood there wondering why we punching babies." --Malwaretech "I love how twitter ''isn't real life'' but since journalists and pundits refuse to log off or use any other social media platform, it also becomes their total and complete personal reality." --Colin Spacetwinks "This country absolutely hates its actual history and actively buries it at every opportunity." --Mountain Ghosts "Consider how much has to go wrong in the richest nation on earth for thousands of people to be suddenly into violent anarchy, a thing few people are excited about when their needs are met and justice is served. Functional countries don't randomly have anarchist uprisings where youth with lots of educational options, fair housing, stable employment and great healthcare just decide to get tear gassed by police for funsies. In functional countries rebellious youth just smoke pot and fuck." --@jelenawoehr "If 200,000 dead Americans means nothing to the people running this country, do you really think two million dead Americans will mean any more to them?" --Anna Phylaxis "I think we should amend the definition of 'Turing complete' to just mean 'any system you can play Doom on.'" --Clive Thompson "As an elder millennial, this is at least my third apocalypse. What's in equal parts worrying and encouraging, this time, is that we seem to have come to peace with the fact that we live in the end times. We had a good run. Is that a three-headed dragon? Eh, I suppose so." --Eimi Berenike "If your dick is falling off because I'm wearing a mask in the gym, I submit that the problem is your dick and not my mask." --Dan Kaszeta "I think a lot of people have forgotten what the word 'apocalypse' means. We are living through one right now, and it's not 'the end' but 'the uncovering,' the series of events that reveals what's underneath the facades of society and personal pretenses. Christians think of The Apocalypse as one big ultimate thing, but in reality apocalypses happen fairly regularly, like a pot that comes to the boil and cools down and then boils up again. They come before ends and beginnings, cycles of death and rebirth. And they show up what's really going on under the pretty lies we tell ourselves and each other. It's rarely pleasant. But it's necessary. You can't change anything while lies are still told and believed." --Edgar Allan Bitch "I don't trust people who can never criticize the people they admire. That's not admiration. That's cult worship." --Imani Gandy "Never drink coffee that has been anywhere near a fish." --Dale Cooper, _Twin Peaks_ "The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingnly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and our moral standards of judgement, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together." --Hannah Arendt "The experience of touring gab.com is akin to having a conversation with someone suffering from Tourette syndrome while tripping on mushrooms." --David Rutland "The year 2020 IS Fortean Times." --Banjofox "Check your ego at the door. No gods, no rockstars. ONLY n00bs." --the_gibson "You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better." --Anne Lamott "Don't search for all the answers at once. A path is formed by laying one stone at a time." --The Giant, _Twin Peaks_ "For you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday." --M.Bison "Pornhub: When You're Here, You're Step-Family." --Jerkin Jakovic "π seconds is a nanocentury." --Tom Duff "Whoever controls the narrative controls the world. Understand this key point and you'll understand why corporate media outlets are constantly smearing Julian Assange, why they never fail to fall in line to support a US-led military agenda, why they pay massive amounts of attention to some political candidates while completely ignoring others, and why they put so much energy into keeping everyone arguing over the details of how the status quo should be maintained instead of debating whether it should exist at all... without the ability to effectively propagandise the masses in this way, they cannot rule." --Caitlin Johnstone "People live and die in the gaps between the candidates. This seems especially clear now." --Charles Hutchins "Monsters exist, but they are too few to be truly dangerous. Ordinary men are more dangerous." --Primo Levi "This is how the collapse happens. Not because the grid gives out or Boogaloo Bois storm in and take over the substation, but because it's just too damn hot to run civilization." --Dillo "Your desire that products work well is snobbish." --Less Sock, More Puppet "Entitled people aren't actually skeptical: They have already decided that you're wrong and want to hang you with your own words to prove your wrongness." --Soatok "Nobody thinks he knows more than someone who knows nothing." --Gina Spadafori "We didn't call it fuzzing back in the 1950s, but it was our standard practice to test programs by inputting decks of punch cards taken from the trash. We also used decks of random number punch cards. We weren't networked in those days, so we weren't much worried about security, but our random/trash decks often turned up undesirable behavior." --Gerald M. Weinberg "At long last, I deem this stable AND working (which appear to be almost mutually exclusive)." --Cyclic3 "No one ever talks about extermination, they just do it. And you go on with your lives, ignoring the signs all around you. And then one day, when the air is still and the night has fallen, they come for you." --Magneto "Two and two do not always equal four." --Gordon Cole, _Twin Peaks_ "My life has been so much better ever since I traded my impostor syndrome to brilliant conman syndrome. Do I deserve anything in life? Fuck no! Will I grasp it anyway? Fuck yes!" --haaskarotta "I hate having emotions about reality; I'd much rather have them about _Sanctuary Moon_." --Murderbot, _All Systems Red_ "Governments don't want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that... that doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they are getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin' years ago. They don't want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers, ''obedient workers''. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it." --George Carlin "I won't let anything Jesusy come in contact with my wangulus." --Derek Pegritz "Harvard is an investment bank pretending to be a school." --Bret Devereaux Goodhart's Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. "We design the Internet for the pessimal environment; if a user can be harmed, they probably will be, somewhere." --RFC 8890 The last resort of the innocent is always publicity. "There is nothing to achieve right now except to insist that the only achievement is caring for others, and not caring specially for family or friends, but in caring for every person as our family or friend." --Sarah Miller "You can run software from 1980 or 2005 on a modern desktop without too much hassle, but anything between there and 2-3 years ago? Black hole of fad frameworks and brittle dependencies. Computer Archaeology is going to become a full-time job." --Flussence "Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won't have as much censorship because we won't have as much fear." --Judy Blume "Saying someone 'helped out' by not charging predatory prices sounds like Stockholm Syndrome to me." --Daniel Moch "emacs is the 10-in-1 NeoGeo arcade game cabinets that have 3 King of Fighters games, a Metal Slug game..." --Seven Rose "Vim is Notepad but with Street Fighter controls." --Shrig "The purpose of a good debate is learning, not winning. Ideally, all parties will learn something and gain perspective from hearing the others' points. In this way, everyone wins, whatever the final decision (or lack thereof)." --Terrana Ninetailed "You can't prove I'm just a living numbers station." --Goat "The spread of computers and the Internet will put jobs in two categories: People who tell computers what to do, and people who are told by computers what to do." --Marc Andreessen "You must understand nothing can happen in real life that will change the minds of Trump's base. He uses the words they learned from Rush and Fox for years. He believes the same conspiracy theories that got them banned from Thanksgiving. No one has EVER validated them like this." --Cat Valente "I'm European. We regard the US as somewhat lost to a cult at this point." --Richard Cantwell "Internet security tip: Don't use 'beefstew' as a password. It's not stroganoff." --FIFO Networks "If, as capitalists insist, greed and selfishness are the human condition, then there can be no cooperation, no democracy, no utopia - only a permanent, rugged battle for survival. In a completely transaction based community, you're either the cheater or the cheated." --Lyta Gold "I just saw an advertisement for a bunch of bagel toppings. It was a schmear campaign." --Dr. Otto Skrzyk "Here you are in a world full of chemical indulgences that can grind your ego to sand, dial your empathy to 11 and fill you with visceral, bottomless bliss and a sense of immediate and universal oneness with every other sentient entity in the vast cosmos and your go-to move is 'this made me really give a shit about turning calories into Javascript. I created content for 14 hours straight.'" --mhoye "The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons," --Ralph Waldo Emerson "The problem with this whole Epic/Apple/Google debacle is I'm having trouble telling which multi-billion-dollar corporation truly has the best interests of me, the consumer, at heart." --Mike, First of His Name "Listen to Sex Pistols and at a certain point you'll realise it's not about them talking about the world, it's about how they relate to the world at their level. That's important. Their anthem isn't ''let's save the world, we're all friends,'' it's ''you got in my face motherfucker'' followed by a headbutt." --Mike Pondsmith "Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on Earth. They know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know little or nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like 'socialism' and 'capitalism.' Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions." --David Bentley Hart "The world we live in is too complicated for this shit." --Charles Stross "When you've nothing to lose, fear and social norms are irrelevant." --SC Price 5 "You're imaging a Cool Cyberpunk Future, I'm describing an Actual Cyberpunk Present." --Kevin Halse "Liberals and conservatives are basically Catholics vs Protestants: Two factions within the same group that think they're totally different, but look identical to anyone on the outside." --Amy Dentata "What if corruption kink that was really just giving wayward youths a look at what feeling emotionally healthy and well-cared for and understood and accepted is like? It only looks like they're going totally evil and demonic by the standards of a system that is deeply dysfunctional and harmful to everyone in it." --Kit Redgrave "I have a quantum computer that literally lets me see ANYTHING I WANT in the past, present and future! You honestly think I wouldn't use something like that to keep tabs on my friends?" --Tony, _Real Life Comics_ "If you don't want to MacGyver something, why the heck are you on Hackaday?" --Barefoot, in the comments "I think it was a grand success to realize that big, dorky geek computers were going to become incredibly fashionable." --Bruce Sterling "As soon as you realize that [something] is a problem, you should fix it. Don't be a dumbass." --Dolly Parton "Squeak that toy like it's 2020!" --Dr. Otto Skrzyk "I was once a man with a master plan. I'd seek out injustices, topple governments, all in the name of the greater good. I'd started doing the maths, you see... This is how evil starts, with the belief that the ends justify the means. But once you start down that road, there's no turning back. What if you can save a million lives, but you have to let ten people die, or a hundred, or a hundred thousand. Where do you stop?" --The Doctor, _Doctor Who: The Resurrection of Mars_ "Our work is to keep people alive. We can't tell them how to live any more than how to die." --Dr. Leonard Gillespie, _Doctor Kildare_, s01e03, _Shining Image_ "We're all noobs in the right room. Put on the white belt." --Requiem "Never make the mistake in believing in the individual or collective rationality of humankind. You cannot tell me that any feature of our utterly convoluted society is in any way rational. We exist, constantly poised to annihilate all human life from this planet for political reasons, and that's just everyday common sense to most people. Mundane, or even a nessesary evil, to most. Science, ironically, tells us that we are not at all rational or logical creatures." --Starwall "The Internet treats nuance as damage and routes around it." --Duncan "The police are making more anarchists than I could do in ten years." --Emma Goldman "It is disturbing to me that 'the future is decent' ship has sailed as an explicit reboot goal." --Feonixrift, on _Star Trek_ "Look at that object. It pleases me." --Adam Savage "War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses." --Smedley Butler, USMC " I don't think we've exhausted all the options involving fire yet." --remotenemesis "'Load bearing COBOL' is my new favorite phrase." --c0debabe "China, I demand you send my data to the FBI and NSA, you authoritarian monsters!" --Doctor Flappy "If your god is upset about something I said, he can tell me himself in person. I will not accept the scolding of middlemen or the entreaties of self-appointed envoys." --Stonekettle "For every scheming Edison there are a hundred Teslas." --Shufei "I am, and ever will be, a white socks, pocket protector, nerdy engineer." --Neil Armstrong "Fuckin' 'ell!" --Yaxi, Sex Gang Children "The secret to life is to be able to perpetually exist in a quantum superposition of caring deeply and not giving a fuck." --Eric Lombrozo "Number theory - of course it's a cult. Has been since Pythagoras." --Feonixrift "We no longer live in a pre-pandemic society, and just as we cannot expect the same quality of life under pandemic conditions, we also can't expect the same productivity." --Elle Armageddon "We do weird RIGHT." --Maelynn, _Real Life Comics_ "There is no misfortune so great that somebody else can't put up with it." --Anton LeVay Withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy. "LSD is a psychedelic drug which occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who have not taken it." --Timothy Leary "I'd rather be dangerous than helpless." --Whitley Streiber "If 2,000 instances all independently decided you're an ass, maybe you're just an ass." --Tek "Achievement unlocked: Very online." --Remote Nemesis "Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope." --Oscar Wilde, _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ "Ya' gotta face the pain, Jake. There's no easy way out." --Sid Gomez, _Tekwar_ "2020: The year a dystopian disaster novel got down and dirty on a porn movie. We're so far past 'satire is dead' at this point that we're approaching surrealism as the new normal." --Charles Stross "Let's face it, I have to go with cyberpunk over post-apocalypse, because I just don't got the fetish gear to socially function in the Mad Max universe." --Kyrin "You do not, not ever, shame someone for how they fill their shelves. Those cereals are enriched, and those drinks have vitamin C added, and yes, there's probably frozen pizza and rice-a-roni in that house, too, but those are FOOD. And food is non-negotiable." --cybre!pamela "When people are like ''They gon' microchip me to talk to the satellites,'' I'm like, my man: Can you imagine how much people would pay for an unlimited plan phone you never have to charge? And you think they're just gonna put it in you for free? You don't even have insurance." --Edward Snowden "After testifying before Congress on behalf of immigrant workers, he [Stephen Colbert] was asked why he would do that, and stammered before quoting Matthew ('the least of my brothers' usw.) I suspect because it had never occurred to him that anyone would ever not know the reason behind defending other human beings." --Arabella Flynn "It's not too late. There's a future worth fighting for. How do I know? Every one of us comes from a long line of survivors. Our species is nothing if not adaptive. It was only because our ancestors learned to think long term, and act accordingly, that we're here at all. We've had our backs to the wall before, and we came through to scale new heights. In fact, the most mythic human accomplishments of all time came out of our darkest hour." --Neil deGrasse Tyson "I would have no problem reading _The King In Yellow_. After what y'all post into my eyeballs that play can't do shit." --@cuttlefish@goblin.camp "You will likely never be a celebrity, nor will you be rich, and if you do you do at the whims of the owning class." --Kit Redgrave "I would be nervous all the time too if the only thing beneath me on the food chain was grass." --Howel Casper "Happiness can be found in one word. Denial." --Richard Fish, _Ally McBeal_ "Apparently Gondor called for aid, and another chainsaw answered? There are now two in a growling, buzzing, burring duet. I don't hear any more expostulations, though." --Lili Saintcrow "I did the dumb thing again where I mentioned pocket holes to a bunch of Master Carpenters (according to them). Gonna close the curtains and wait out the contract hit." --Rustic Cyberpunk "My days of seeing Maven-driven Java development as complete horseshit are coming to a middle." --Random Geek "That's science. Do not at me. I do not care." --Lizstar "We're all going to die, all of us, what a circus! That alone should make us love each other but it doesn't. We are terrorized and flattened by trivialities, we are eaten up by nothing." --Charles Bukowski "I always feel the same when I have a hot and relevant take. Like, I could dish it up steaming, but also, fuck an information economy that only has time for hot takes." --@MoMartin@playvicious.social "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." --Frank Wilhoit "The world is not unusually chaotic right now; the insulation that some of us had from the chaos has simply eroded away." --Max Kaehn "Java feels like if the sunk cost fallacy was a programming language." --@randomgeek@hackers.town "Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity." --HP Lovecraft "Non-violence is a luxury not available to all those who oppose fascism." --Vince Clark "I ate kale leaves with my own tears as dressing." --Joel Kinnaman, on the calorie-restricted diet he was on for _Altered Carbon_ "Everybody watches it, but no one really likes it. This is the open secret of TV today. Its only champions are its own executives, the advertisers who exploit it, and a compromised network of academic boosters. Otherwise, TV has no spontaneous defenders, because there is almost nothing in it to defend." --Mark Crispin Miller "When you see a cluster, look closer, for you have spied a cluster fuck." --Sarah Pottraz "In their minds they [people] can only see any attempts to change it [the system] as just changing who gets to be on top, rather than considering it may be possible to have a more equitable system that is fairer to everyone." --Shawn Dritz "Do we need to load this with thermite?" --Jason Murphy "Look it up before you say something stupid in the comments." --Sage advice from Jonny Lee Miller "Stay alive long enough, and there's nowhere you can go that isn't haunted. All of us have ghosts. They cling to us like shadows. But if you chase after shadows, if you're foolish enough to seek out your ghosts, you might just become one." --Takeshi Kovacs, _Altered Carbon_ "If you took Afrika Bambaataa and mixed it with Gary Numan, I'd say that's probably the closest thing you're going to get to what we ended up being." --Paul Robb, on the formative influences of InSoc "Cyberpunk was a warning, not an aspiration." --Mike Pondsmith "It is a profound and necessary truth that the deep things in science are not found because they are useful. They are found because it was possible to find them." --Robert Oppenheimer "A people that elect corrupt politicians, impostors, thieves and traitors are not victims, but accomplices." -George Orwell The road of life is paved with flat squirrels who could not make a decision. "THE FUCKING SUIT DOESN'T WORK!" --Peter Weller, on the first fitting of the Robocop suit to the producer "If you can't fuck it and it doesn't dance, eat it or throw it away." --Neal Gaiman "I'm fascinated by the examples of anti-cyborg bias in this API." -Feonixrift "If our writings, our stories, myths and views (the Bible, the Torah, and other books revered by 99% of our world, our philosophical books, and even our favorite stories like _Hero With A Thousand Faces_, _Dune_, and _Lord of the Rings_) are correct, then we must pursue the 'illogical' (metaphysical, metaphorical) right way that our wars, sciences, and leaders may not even be aware of. We must garner all of the above from our spiritual/psychological insights and our tenacity to not let go of what we know. To be true to the personal myth: That our lot in life is greater than or other than 'us', 'me', or 'I'." --Derrel Sims "There are two hobbies: 3D printing, and 3D printers." --Norbert "To live outside the law, you must be honest." --Bob Dylan "Too many Nazis, not enough tentacle monsters!" --Charles Stross "Fiat money, if you like, is backed by men with guns." --Paul Krugman "There is no capital markets valuation of the space frontier." --Neil deGrasse Tyson "You know, after a dick punch that's just sort of gratuitous." --Bryce "The amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigour, and moral courage which it contained." --John Stuart Mill "Military grade generally means ''the cheapest shit we can legally sell to people who can't complain because they're temporarily not legally people.''" --Baloo Uriza "All human unhappiness comes from not knowing how to stay quietly in a room." --Blaise Pascal "I used to find it odd that these hypothetical AIs were supposed to be smart enough to solve problems that no human could, yet they were incapable of doing something most every adult has done: Taking a step back and asking whether their current course of action is really a good idea. Then I realized that we are already surrounded by machines that demonstrate a complete lack of insight, we just call them corporations." --Ted Chiang (I think he's still giving humans too much credit.) "I think the reason I like Andrew Eldritch so much is because it's like Hunter S. Thompson had a goth band." --the_gibson "It's my estimation that every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of sumbitch or another." --Malcolm Reynolds, _Firefly_ "None of us still blogging do it for clicks. We do it to leave our traces, because it feels good to us, and because complete statements are better than tweets or facebook updates." --Warren Ellis "Ok, now you're gay, so you need to be /very serious/ about it." --Yuval Noah Harari, on queer theory "It seems I have removed something different than I thought I was removing!" --Adam Savage "Always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented." --Elie Wiesel "My body is a Wonderland -- a chaotic fever dream where everything is too big or too small, the laws of nature and logic apply tenuously at best, and the ham sandwiches are always gone." --@palecur "But I do think we're in a unique clusterfuck here in the 21st [century]. When I was born, in 1952, there were approximately 2.5 billion people in the world. Now there are almost 8 billion, and maybe a quarter of them have access to this means of global communication. That's a social singularity. That's a radical decentering of the possibility of any consensual sense of the world and of the possibility of predicting what kind of politics and social habits might emerge. Probably just more confusion." --RU.Sirius "The one thing a government is supposed to be good at is protecting those who it considers citizens. But in the last three months we've seen who America considers citizens: Corporations, billionaires, police, and politicians. They got us all to hide in our homes, for the very real reason of pandemic, but they couldn't resist looting the world while no one could stop them. Now they're telling us to return to work, and if you step out of line, the boys in blue will kneel on your neck." --Max Anton Brewer "If you dislike the religious right, wait till you meet the post-religious right." --Ross Douthat "If it is for the public good, Don't wait for permission." --Bruce Schneier "San Francisco makes the Golden Gate Bridge emanate the internal soundtrack of the Silicon Valley lifestyle: An unceasing otherworldly howling, disturbing the landscape for miles and miles." --n-gate.com "Scenes of outright pandemonium unfold daily. Anyone claiming to have a precise understanding of what is happening, and what the likely risks and consequences may be, should be regarded with the utmost skepticism. We are all living in a techno-dystopian fantasy, the internet-connected portals we rely on rendering the world in all its granular detail and absurdity like Borges's Aleph." --Thomas Chatteron Williams "I maintain, you are apparently a Madman with an Advanced Telephony Box." --Hasufin "Conspiracy theories allow their proponents to flatter themselves into thinking base prejudices are but marks of intellectual sophistication." --Adam Serwer "Every time I bet on weakness, corruption, and fallibility, I want to lose. But I always win." --Clinton Stark, _The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao_ "As anyone who has gone through the DARE program will attest, the more you (and your friends) do something 'bad' and come out of it unscathed, the more you view anyone who claims to be an authority as being completely full of shit. Whether they are or not." --Arabella Flynn "The Internet would have you believe that there are folks who love to break shit in times like this. I ask: Do you think these communities love to protest? Do you think these neighbours live for the moment when they have to wake up and shout the names of the dead at uncaring police?" --Brandon O'Brien "This year is turning out like the introduction to Akira." --Cantinto "Modern war is a cyborg orgy." --Donna Haraway "I'm watching a MUFON tv documentary while I work. It's really hard to take seriously, not because of the subject matter, but because their warehouse establishing shot is basically exactly like the one BRAZZERS uses." --NOCARRIER "It's Sunday afternoon, the whole week has been an appalling trashfire, and by Friday I was about ready to quit and move to a cave except of course that we're not allowed to travel to second homes. Can you believe that this is what it has come to? That I'm not allowed to go and live in a cave? Dystopian bullshit. Bring me my cave of burning trash. " --Warren Ellis "NPM isn't so much a package repository as it is installable StackOverflow answers." --Ieure "Take the red pill - it's filled with marinara." --Jackdaw Ruiz "If we deregulated the races again (not even to group B standards) we would live in Wipeout 2097 already." --Cantinto "27 minutes was more than enough time for me to do something stupid." --Murderbot, _Exit Strategy_ "If hopelessness is what you see it's what you'll get Believe in today because the fight isn't over yet Our sons and our daughters will live if we never say die Shame when the ones who have wings don't use them to fly" --Death Angel, _Word to the Wise_ "Brain engagement. That's what I consider fun. Learning and researching. Not what someone else considers fun. If ppl are going to ask questions then they should accept the answer." --@pdxwildflowers "What does virtue signaling even mean? Putting people before profit? Trying to act as if people matter? Being a decent person? Calling people out when they hurt others? Pointing out corruption? Standing up for human rights?" --Griz "None of you can backstab each other, because you all need to pay rent." --Cody Pondsmith, running Cyberpunk RED "The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater." --Frank Zappa "Nature is not obliged to obey our speculations." --Carl Sagan "Things went wrong. No one died. Let's move on." --Vampire Step-Dad "These aren't 'how to' videos, these are more like 'what the hell happened' videos." --Adam Savage "Cats are man's adorable little serial killers." --The Oatmeal "Government is the entertainment division of the military-industrial complex." --Frank Zappa "I like to think of myself as a fusion of Diogenes and Steve Urkle." --Somarasu "Seeing as how computers were designed to transform states, they do an abysmal job of dealing with state." --Theruran "For fuck's sake." --Murderbot, _Rogue Protocol_ "Opinions are like genitals. Everyone has a right to them, and they're important to the owner, but they shouldn't be rubbed in strangers' faces." --Perifractic "Reality is on vacation, death is standing in." --Feonixrift A horse walks into a bar. The bartender says, "Why the long face?" The horse says, "As an anthropomorphic horse, I fit in neither with humans nor my own kind, and have thus lived a life of loneliness." "So far, so donuts." --Arcus "Man is a rational animal. He can think up a reason for anything he wants to believe." --Anatole France "Please move slower and break fewer things. Thank you." --lucas-tl "Attention seeking behavior in children is called a disorder and attention seeking behavior in adults is called social media." --@swiftonsecurity "Remember, when people on the Internet have an opinion about something, it has more to do with their own psychological hangups than it does with reality." --Max Anton Brewer "The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom." --Isaac Asimov "A third arm would be a very useful model making tool." --Adam Savage "I am a firm believer in doing it once, and letting future civilizations wonder at it." --Hasufin "After inhaling all of Downton Abbey in five days, I came to the conclusion that it is propaganda designed to humanize the very wealthy, so they don't end up like the Romanovs." --Cintra Wilson "Instant gratification takes too long." --Carrie Fisher "It is remarkable just how ordinary it feels to watch society fall apart, as a person with cPTSD. Everyone else looks so startled and surprised, and a voice in my brain keeps going ''But this is how things have always been. This is the way of the world, didn't you know?''" --@quatoria "Consent is not a transitive property." --Munin "I try not to use too much supplementation any more, as it mostly just makes for expensive urine, but sometimes I just have to take the little I get from it as insurance and the little lift." --Warren Ellis, on vitamins Two fucks diverged in a wood, and I - I took the one not given. "A less transcendent property of Python 2.7.18 is that it is the last Python 2.7 release and therefore the last Python 2 release. It's time for the CPython community to say a fond but firm farewell to Python 2. Users still on Python 2 can use e to compute the instantaneously compounding interest on their technical debt." --Benjamin Peterson "osquery is twelve shades of 'wat'." --Sungo "You are the Diet Coke of evil." --Rhian "2/3 of his wives have been immigrants, so shutting down the borders is Trump's version of deleting Tinder." --Trevor Noah "Powerful people will perform meaningless gestures toward you, not meaningfully help." --Unknown "You would think only a complete and total dork would drop a link to a hardware widget into the middle of a discussion about masturbatory filming and technique... and you would be right." --Dillo "Kids have not yet developed complex self-bullshitting mechanisms like the rest of us." --Max Anton Brewer "Bold of you to assume that the string is massless and infinitely flexible." --Diodelass "The problem isn't whether or not, as I find myself being asked lately ''we have a future,'' but that we do, absolutely, have a future." --William Gibson "All things make more sense when one realizes that there is at least one perspective that is not one's own." --Aristotle Tzafalias "Preppers think people laugh at them for being prepared, but that's not the case at all. People scorn them for their obviously self-centered attitude. Real apocalypse survival is keeping the school lunch system going." --0xabad1dea "Whoever coined ''You can't get toothpaste back into the tube'' has never met a broke painter, like I can, have and will get most substances back in tubes if you give me like five minutes." --unknownBinaries "And now... it won't boot. It won't boot off the LIVECD. HOW DID I BREAK A LIVECD?" --@foone "The good institutions just don't exist yet. Capital is recalcitrant, entrenched, and time preferences far too short. The knowledge economy workforce is aimless and medicated. The state is dysfunctional. 'Labor' doesn't even really exist." --Isaac Wilks "Riding the photon gun, like some kind of Cathode Ray cowboy." --Remote Nemesis "Most mathematicians are not writing for people. They're writing for God the Mathematician. And they're hoping God will give them a pat on the back and say ''Yes, that's exactly how I think about it.''" --John Baez "Weirdness is born out of specificity." --Russ Sharek "We have a very ancient saying: The more god, the more devil; the more flesh, the more worms; the more anxiety, the more control; the more control, the more that needs control." --Halmyrach Abbod, _The Priests of Psi_ "There's always time to color a dinosaur." --Arcus "Get more out of life: See a fucked up movie." --John Waters "The key to every successful hustle is that the con artist can have no shame." --Stonekettle "Social contact is a fundamental human need in a way that TPS reports are decidedly not. Any plan that 'allows' people to spend 40+ hours a week at work while forbidding them to spend Sunday dinner with their parents or having a beer with the neighbors is mainly going to result in a 4000% rise in people ordering torches and pitchforks from Amazon." --Arabella Flynn "Baby Vicks has lavender, etc. No, it does not contain any actual baby." --Sarah "I need privacy. Not because my actions are questionable, but because your judgement and intentions are." --Anonymous "And in strange eons, even COBOL may die." --Ryan Wolf "Please tell me you're microwaving that." "...I could." "Nevermind. I'm not even watching you eat." --Lyssa and Bryce, on Bryce liking some cold food "For sure, it was ad-libbed. Nobody's ever written a nipple rub into any movie." --Matthew Lillard "Payment Status Not Available is just so wild. The IRS will find you if you live in Mordor, but if you try to get your stimulus check they've suddenly never heard of you." --Claire James Carroll "You know, reading Nick Harkaway's GNOMON: If you'd been anywhere near my bedroom at night, you would have heard the occasional involuntary whispered mutter of 'Fuck you, Nick' when I got to a good bit that I wish I'd written. I am three 'Fuck you, Bill's into AGENCY." --Warren Ellis "No man will ever choose lavender. Even Prince went full-on purple!" --Alton Brown "It's good to put a naked flame on your butt splice." --Perifractic "The world will end for those who deserve it." --Rev. Ivan Stang "It's a nickname, not a prophecy." --Adam Savage "My new opinion is that bioinformatics was created to get me to stop complaining about the size of LLVM build trees." --Whitequark "The wonderful thing about paying my mental health care providers all this money is the clean bill of health. Gaslighting don't work when you've already lost your mind and the pros sew it back on." --Xeni Jardin "No matter how fancy your passport is, don't think that it can't change overnight. Don't think you can't end up on a rubber boat like these Syrians, caught between two countries that want you dead." --Molly Crabapple "I'm 'old enough to remember when cypherpunks dreamed about usable worldwide electronic cash, and not the speculation price of USD/BTC' years old." --Matthew Green "My cookie intake has gone up directly in proportion my sanity going down." --The Midnight "[Kids] don't remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are." --Jim Henson "I always knew we'd end up living our final years in the ruins after the collapse of civilization. I just didn't think I'd have to face the apocalyptic wasteland without chocolate Pop Tarts." --Stonekettle "Hey guys, call me crazy but just hear me out: It's beginning to look like it may have been a mistake to put a spite-fueled sadist in charge of our nation's well-being." --Jeff Tiedrich "I don't know how Republicans got from Terry Schiavo to 'Fuck you, no ventilators for your whole state unless you kiss my ass,' but they did it." --David Waldman "Everyone has a plan until they're punched in the mouth." --Mike Tyson "I was raised to let my accomplishments speak for themselves, and in healthy organizing environments you don't have to lead with your resume to head off people gearing up to tell you your lived experience doesn't count or matter." --Gwen Snyder "Protect your weirdos, because you're always next." --hystericEmpress "As I'm sure you've seen, the coronoavirus has forced a number of late night hosts to record shows from their houses, and we're no different. As my home is, and this is true, a blank white void full of sad facts. Where else did you think I lived?" --John Oliver "It's okay to recognize that other people have it worse than you do and also feel angry/sad/hurt/frustrated about your current situation. We're not crowdsourcing an Omelas singularity here. Your own life and emotions have value. Just try to be kind and help others meet their needs." --KB Spangler "Amazing at how schools and work places suddenly are open to accessibility practices now that 'normal' people are asking for them, and not just the disabled." --Milly "Trying out this coffee app called Grindr. Dunno why they're asking so many questions about my sexual orientation but I'm open minded." --@red@awoo.church "Of course you're weird! You're a Crystal Gem!" --Bismuth, _Steven Universe Future_ "Blockchains are like grappling hooks, in that it's extremely cool when you encounter a problem for which they're the right solution, but it happens way too rarely in real life." --xkcd "`dd` is the command line equivalent of stabbing the table between your fingers with a knife." --Nova "If suddenly people are out of work due to a recession, they are going to vote against the incumbent, or at least, not bother to vote." --Robert Graham "I shouldn't be doing this thing so late at night but night time is the right time." --m4iler "Buzz, what are you doing to protect yourself from the coronavirus?" "Lying on my ass and locking the door." --Eric Berger and Buzz Aldrin, on covid-19 "Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy." --Henry Kissinger "Broad-scale emergencies never fail to reveal the fault lines in the American class system, and it was suddenly clear that well-off New Yorkers were going to go about the business of combating the coronavirus differently, with more than fortitude and Purell, because they had a powerful inoculant: Secondary real estate." --Ginia Bellafante "If consequences dictate my course of action, it doesn't matter what's right, it's only wrong if you get caught." --M.J. Keenan "You can lower your risks, you can manage your risks, but you can't live a risk-free life." --Roger Lancaster "Advocacy for brutality against The Other will absolutely not be confined to The Other approximately five minutes after the first guillotine enters operation." --Paul Echeverri "AI trained only with modern data or self-play can still be bamboozled by old data." --Perifractic's Law "The universe is empty and lonely and ultimately meaningless. There is nothing more punk rock than to say 'fuck that' and be happy and compassionate." --@laser@skull.website "That single victory and the synchronized withdrawals and endorsements by Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar created a new narrative. Seemingly overnight, Biden had become a scrappy fighter with a never-say-die attitude, a Clintonian Comeback Kid. This drove many older Democratic voters - an inherently timorous group conditioned by decades of _The West Wing_ and MSNBC to believe they're consultants and strategists rather than citizens and constituents - toward the more familiar, pedigreed candidate. They simply did not care that Biden has been wrong, often aggressively and outspokenly so, on every significant issue for the last forty years." --Jacob Bacharach "I'm at the 'Is my heartburn really the Andromeda Strain?' phase of hypochondria." --Rhian "Most of the time me and the other firmware folks were chasing Elon's [Musk] whims about what to do with firmware. Where I should have been fixing critical issues in the system I was pulled off to do shit like add farting unicorns." --Anonymous ex-Tesla software engineer, post-NDA "When the chips are down, that is when you must look around and say: 'Yes, there are things worth fighting for. And even if we lose, we will have not gone meekly before the maws of monsters.'" --Shifei "The cult of the red bollard." --the_gibson "War is the health of the state." --Randolph Bourne "A disciple is an asshole looking for a human being to attach itself to." --Robert Anton Wilson "One learns from books and example only that certain things can be done. Actual learning requires that you do those things." --Frank Herbert, _Children of Dune_ "In America, about the only social safety net is the one you make yourself. The few people who live near you, the few people who know you online, etc." --Pookleblinky "Conspiracies make stupid people feel smart." --Dennis Detwiller "There are ethical and moral land mines everywhere in security. Nothing is as easy as it should be. Help people stay safe? Some of those people who save themselves are bad people." --@thegrugq "People want to lead peaceful lives. The terrorists are short-sighted, and this is one of the causes of rampant suicide bombings. We cannot solve this problem only through prayers... humans have created this problem, and now we are asking God to solve it. It is illogical. God would say, solve it yourself because you created it in the first place." --The Dalai Lama "When in doubt, _Dune_." --Sarah Pottraz Bees with honey in their mouths have stings on their tails. "No eye of the tiger BS if you ain't got tendons left." --@sng "Crashing fifteen hundred systems in one day in the streets hapless techno-weenie in the sheets." --@cat "Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank. Give a man a bank and he can rob the world." --Jim Trotter? "Be nice to people. You never know what's going on. Ever." --Caroline Flack "As always, the answer is in the negative space." --The_Gibson "Any custom developed authentication system contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Kerberos." --Jan Schaumann "Auferre, trucidare, rapere, falsis nominibus imperium; atque, ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant." (To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.) --Tacitus "To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be. The people they're too exhausted to be any longer. The people they don't recognize inside themselves anymore. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into. We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out; to become speedily found when they are lost. But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honour what emerges along the way. Sometimes it will be an even more luminiescent flame. Sometimes it will be a flicker that disappears and temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness." --Heidi Priebe "I view stupidity as a force of nature: It can't be reasoned with, can't be argued with, and should never be underestimated." --Boxing Octopus "We are now at the age we have seen most of this bullshit before, so you're not going to fool us easily. Gen X may be a small generation that's stretched too thin right now as we look after our kids and our parents, but that just makes us all the more wary and skeptical." --Amber Fraley "Most of life is about discovering the perfect ways to get high and vibe out and the rest of it is about guerilla warfare." --@vriska@lizards.live Balk's First Law: "Everything you hate about the Internet is actually everything you hate about people." Balk's Second Law: "The worst thing is knowing what everyone thinks about anything." Balk's Third Law: "If you think the Internet is terrible now, just wait a while." "If you think the Internet is terrible now, just wait a while. The moment you were just in was as good as it got. The stuff you shake your head about now will seem like fucking Shakespeare." --Alex Balk "Immortality means an eternity of living with what we've done." --Tanaseda Hideki, _Altered Carbon_ "Against my better judgement I've now tried everything that the commenters suggested, to no avail. And lots of fail." --Perifractic "PSA for everyone freaking out about this coronavirus: A country that Youtubed itself into a 21st century measles outbreak does not get to talk any shit about anyone else's heath practices." --Elliott Kay "Object oriented programs are offered as alternatives to correct ones." --Edsger Dijkstra "The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same forms of mental pathology does not make these people sane." --Erich Fromm "I was on Brazilian television talking about stalkerware yesterday. Number of Brazilian instagram accounts that have requested to add my locked Insta: 433. Number of emails to my EFF inbox: Zero." --Eva Galperin "I've been behind enough trucks with nuts and/or logos of Calvin pissing on $other_truck.logo to know that what the base lacks in decorum they put into irrational brand loyalty." --Dr. Skrzyk "I'm autistic, which means everyone around me has a disorder that makes them say things they don't mean, not care about structure, fail to hyperfocus on singular important topics, have unreliable memories, drop weird hints and creepily stare into my eyeballs." --autisticnotweird.com "When I feed the poor, they call me a saint, but when I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a communist." --Dom Helder Camara "Remember, friends. SQL Injection references are fun but don't put them on the cards you include when sending flowers to your Valentine. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to explain to my local florist why the flowers I'm sending to my wife crashed their point-of-sale system." --@neuromancer@hackers.town "If you regard yourself as a stalwart and intrepid anti-fascist warrior, andxi your work consists exclusively or even primarily of sitting on Twitter anonymously calling others fascist, then I'd like you to know that there's a huge gap between your self-conception and your reality." --Glenn Greenwald "That moment when you realize the world you're about to return to *after* the hacker con has become far stranger and scarier than even the most extreme made up fantasy of what people think it's like *at* a hacker con." --Deviant Ollam "In a post-truth world, only myths are real." --Fool "You are not compelled to form any opinion about this matter before you, nor to disturb your peace of mind at all. Things in themselves have no power to extort a verdict from you." --Marcus Aurelius "The Internet is like a giant Wikipedia where all the contributors are bad actors and trolls." --Heart of Snarkness "The easiest way for a foreign army to invade the US is probably to wait for snow flurries and then just walk in to all the empty government buildings." --Matt Blaze "Seek receipts before blindly taking the word of powerful people." --Dominic Rystan "Is there anything more capitalist than a peanut with a top hat, cane, and monocle selling you other peanuts to eat?" --@skullmandible "When will we write the facts from the point of view of a cosmic joke, that is as God sees them from on high?" --Gustave Flaubert "Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions." --Primo Levi "95% of your AWS bill is just interest on your tech debt." --@toxic The @stonekettle Law of Trolls: When a conservative starts out by calling you "stupid," the probability that he doesn't know the difference between "your" and "you're" approaches 100%. "Obviously the coronavirus is really serious but probably good to remember that if regular influenza was covered on an infection-by-infection basis with breathless analysis of travel patterns you'd probably never leave the house." --@SzMarsupial "There is a tendency in fringe politics to assume that it matters what you think." --The Anarcho-Accelerationist "I discovered that the Pope during his tenure had surreptitiously abolished the famous office of Devil's Advocate, in order to fast-track still more of his many candidates for canonization. I can thus claim to be the only living person to have represented the Devil pro bono." --Christopher Hitchens "Wouldn't Areola 51 be a great name for a top secret sexbot factory?" --JMS "I was accused of being the adult in the room. That's awful. That's a sign of bad life choices right there." --Dr. Skrzyk "Jellyfish are stupid." "Tasty, though." "I knew you were a fuckin' sea turtle." --the_gibson and Kemonine "We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy." --The Programmer's Creedo "I believe a horny human can be capable of the most ingenious and bizarre problem solving thinking due to the power of an ever present desire." --Mx. Siege "The butt-clench is still real." --Mike Uyama "Reality is not merely a series of numbers to be inventoried by other people or machines, reality is far more complex and overlooking the complexity will directly result in failure." --Ryan Carboni "I am many! I am one!" --Clifford Skridlow, _Doctor Detroit_ "I know it's wrong, but I'm overwhelmed." --Garnet, _Steven Universe Future_ "Windows Key! How could you do this to me?!" --Liz Star "It doesn't matter how fast your modem is if you're being shelled by ethnic separatists." --William Gibson "My general rule of thumb: You don't have to believe in everything, but don't fuck with it, just in case." --superindianslug, on the Fae "While you studied the blade, I was partying. While you mastered the blockchain, I was partying. While you cultivated inner strength, I was partying. And now that the world is on fire and the barbarians are at the gate, I'm still partying. I don't even know who you are." --Tarzanboy "A radical is nothing but a liberal with a big mouth. And a militant radical is nothing but a bigmouthed liberal with a Che costume." --Hagbard Celine, _Illuminatus: The Eye In the Pyramid_ "Let me explain why I like to pay taxes for schools even though I personally don't have a kid in school. It's because I don't like living in a country with a bunch of stupid people." --John Green "I just can't make physics be the dominant metaphor for how I live a life." --Rhian "I had nightmares I thought were really horrible until I woke up and remembered what reality was at the moment." --Iain M. Banks "Continental European hacker-types hate me because of where I work, I know. But you know: Their kids get subsidized health care and education. Mine don't. Maybe if their immigration policies weren't so bonkers I could move. At least I'm not working on weapons, I'm working on stuff that is net-good for the internet, and I'm doing a ton of union agitating. I've seen friends around me end up fired over what we're doing. So lay it on, haters. I'm doing what I gotta do to make sure my kid has options and grows up in a place where my fellow fucking white people don't ask her, 'No where are you from, originally?'" --Dual Number "If you're going to be a fucking rockstar, go be one. People don't want to see the guy next door on stage; they want to see a being from another planet." --Lemmy "All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not power that corrupts, but that it is magnetic to the corruptible." --Frank Herbert "It's easy to ignore anger from the perpetually self-righteous; screaming about everything is functionally the same as saying nothing, as the nuances of emphasis are lost. The ire of a kindly man is a different thing entirely." --Arabella Flynn "The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous." --George Orwell "There is no evidence that would be accepted in a court of law that The Church of the SubGenius has anything to do with the 'drones' being observed over Denver, Colorado." --Rev. Onan Canobite, Church of the Subgenius "Peace was all around, but no one stopped fighting long enough to notice." --DJ Sundog "In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true either is true or becomes true." --John Lilly "Well, here's how it works with wasps: We eat our prey alive and when we don't we lay our eggs in their eyeballs so that our young can feast on their brains when they hatch. When you're born that big an asshole, the least you can do is have a little empathy. Now come have dinner with my beutiful family." --Wasp Rick Sanchez "I came here to throat-punch kaiju and teach humanities, and they just cut funding for the humanities." --??? "Windows 95 was the last time they [Microsoft] focused on making a good computing experience... Windows 98 was not a product; it was a battlefield used to fight an unrelated war regarding who owned the Internet." --Gravis "You're not really famous until you're a Pez dispenser." --Carrie Fisher "If there's one thing my time in uniform has taught me as a scifi writer, it's how often even the simplest technology doesn't work once DoD gets its hands on it." --NatSecElitist "In the evangelical world, information is not just pure information, it's weaponry. It's impossible to look at a fact without being influenced by 'agenda' - is the fact a weapon for the evolutionary agenda? Gay agenda? Pro-death (abortion) agenda? In this world, you can't just have 'a question' - questions are either threats against you or attacks on the opponent. Every piece of data has a moral flavor that contributes with no complications to a black and white world. Reality is partial, reality is war." --Aella "Culture is mostly a way of incinerating human potential activity because there's nowhere productive to direct most of it, and can't be. Most of life is useless and nonsense and should be." --3fingeredfox "An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one." --Dan Ingalls, principal architect of Smalltalk "Society is a machine that turns empathy into bitterness." --Aleums "We're going into 2020 and now more than ever in our lives, please let me encourage you: Now is the time to just go completely goddamned hogwild with whatever your Thing is. Doesn't matter if anybody else gets it, that ain't the point. Just Do You; we're literally approaching the first major Cyberpunk Year from like every sleazy early-mid-90s RPG splatbook and now is not the time to be coy about self-identity. Go apeshit. You wanna be a neon-colored psychedelic fuck-fractal made of infinity scottish voles? Do it. Be a magical girl. Be the edgelord chuuni kid you were shy about being in high school. Inherit this sinful Earth and hammer your selfhood into a shape you feel comfortable occupying. Go for fuckin' broke because if I know one thing it is that only the outlandish will save us." --Hysteric Empress "Don't care for the crow because the crow is composed of dust. You will be made of dust, too, if the sun rises again." --Madness Your idea of me is not MY responsibility to live up to. "I give the scientists in the _Alien_ films a lot of flack for making poor choices, but I definitely just picked up a large cocoon and put it up to my eye to see if anything was inside it." --Winter Alex "An ethicist is someone who has a problem with whatever you have in your mind." --Marvin Minsky "The Internet becomes more fractured and full of shit - and so does the world." --Asher Wolf "Dead people receive more flowers than the living ones because regret is stronger than gratitude." --Anne Frank "The part of the me that registers big deals is broken and only the dull dread module is still operating." --David Roberts "To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering." --Friedrich Nietzsche "There's nobody who will argue with an expert like an amateur." --Adam Jury "The world, as ever, is complicated." --Deviant Ollam "People are far more likely to help you if they have reasonable expectation of cover." --the_gibson "You think Facebook is bad? Those Youtube motherfuckers - they will really fuck you up." --William Gibson "Privacy cannot require the user to make a bunch of choices they're not equipped to make." --Freakazoid "Coffee-mate is the low-level waste produced by America's nuclear weapons programs, ingeniously repackaged as diabetes." --Matthew Green "A browser is a remote code execution engine for attacker-controlled content." --Tony Arcieri "I would never fry a cat, of course, that's a braised dish." --Alton Brown "The more evil you think someone is, the greater should be your concern to ensure there is not the slightest chance they understand something better than you." --Justin Murphy "As I hurtled through space, one thought kept crossing my mind: Every part of this rocket was supplied by the lowest bidder." --John Glenn "Connectivity for connectivity's sake will be the death of freedom." --LeftHandPath "Critical theory is when I roll a 20 on both my WIS and CHA checks while bullshitting an essay." --Jewbacchus "All of my Super Sentai episode watching prepared me for bad acting and fighting in the desert." --Polychrome, on _Cherry 2000_ "Oh hey, a Sonic! Cherry limeade! Oh hey, drive thru only. Oh hey, no working lights in the bathroom so I'm using it with my phone/flashlight tucked under my chin like I'm playing violin in Silent Hill." --Tek "The thing about the truth is, not a lot of people can handle it." --Conor McGregor "I WILL still FUCK you the FUCK up. Or if you mean I'm in my 70's and in a wheelchair - get a hobby you morbid fuck. I'm fine." --Tim Curry, on fans lamenting his age "The apocalypse is already here - it's just not evenly distributed yet." --William Gibson, 2019.ev "It's hard to take anyone in a flannel skullcap seriously." --Tom Servo, _MST3k: Project Moonbase_ "Remember: It's only corruption and cronyism if you're not the one getting a piece of the pie." --Josh Ellis "Never make your loved ones guess how you feel about them. Show them, tell them, in excess. Tomorrow is never promised." --Shaun King "The big weakness of crowdsourcing content: You don't get the whole crowd, you just get whoever's stubborn enough to get the last word." --Isaac Rabinovitch "One day I hope to reliably tell the difference between existential despair and forgetting to eat lunch." --evacide "He makes Urkle look like van Damme." --Mike, _MST3k: Terror From the Year 5000_ "Joey is the only real hacker in the crew. He's the only one in the crew to hack a Gibson by himself. Everyone else had to rally the troops and get special hardware and shit. Joey and Lucy are the only ones to make that run solo." --Sungo "Turns out C++ template metaprogramming can be both powerful and easy to use if you use it as part of your compilation target instead of writing code that uses those templates by hand." --Whitequark "Only half of programming is coding. The other 90% is debugging." --Anonymous "When you want to bomb somebody, there's remarkably little discussion about how much it might cost. But when you have a discussion about whether or not we can assist suffering people, then suddenly we become very cost conscious." --Andrew J. Bacevich "The plural of 'regex' is 'regrets'." --@ifosteve "Using Wikipedia as a specialities' in-depth wiki ends in tears because at some point the Deletionists roll into town and trash all that stuff." --Craig Timpany "Pouring parmesan and garlic salt into this Earl Grey for a tasty savory beverage sensation." --gdkar "The totally convinced and the totally stupid have too much in common for the resemblance to be accidental." --Robert Anton Wilson "People who aren't doing the work certainly have strong opinions about what people doing the work are doing wrong." --Matt Blaze "I am convinced that everything is fiction." --Charles Hoy Fort "What the writers of modern science fiction invent today, you and I will do tomorrow." --JG Ballard, 1971.ev "If it's mentionable, it's manageable." --Mister Rogers "If all you can say about a book/film is that you wished it had been some different type of art, the question remains why you bothered with it at all. Bemoan that other things aren't getting attention, but permit things to be what they are." --Pete Wolfendale "I was having a meeting at a network that will remain - Starz - and when the executives there I was pitching a five year arc and he was grousing and saying 'All these writers come in saying they want to do a five year arc but they can never pull it off. What makes you think you can do it?' I invented the mother fucker." --J. Michael Straczynski "It's evident at this point that proletarian internationalism, our only meaningful hope of the deposing the bloodthirsty, degenerate bourgeoisie and building something better in the ruins of their dystopia, has abjectly failed in the United States. Despite the pretty rhetoric, everyone but the most deluded parts of white America are squaring off on racial lines, and anyone who's done time in prison knows all too well what that means. So, the dream is dead. One way or another, there's nothing left but to hunker down, protect you and yours, and hope you're still breathing at the end of what comes next. It's too late to pull any of us out of the fire. The only way anything gets better is after the millions of innocents are done dying. The worst part is, it's hard to see it as anything but euthanasia at this point. We're all so broken and miserable. I just hope europe learns from our mistakes." --Velartrill "Archaeology sucks because you dig up a pillar that says, like 'Yo, King Priapism here, love your holy site, in the year of me 14, I visited with like eight wives, holla' and you have to make it sound serious." --Rev. Poppy Haze "There's not a damn science fiction film except maybe _The Day the Earth Stood Still_ that has a social message like this. That has social history in it like this." --Peter Weller, on _Robocop_ and filmmaking "Every diode is an LED if you have enough current." --deshipu "Parts of me are just coming off. I think I'm in a new Cronenberg movie." --Jamie French, on false eyelashes "Tonight I realized that humans don't have ten fingers, we have eight, and that all basic arithmetic should be done in octal. I also realized that I shouldn't drink coffee after 6pm anymore." --Matthew Green "I'm baffled. My feed is like intersection of anarchist Twitter, hacker Twitter, and security Twitter and none of y'all are talking about the fact that we just saw potentially the world's biggest jewel heist in history. Potentially 10x larger than Antwerp. And it was shockingly pedestrian in execution. Plan seems to have been 'set a fire to knock out power and then just fucking go hog wild with axes. Getaway car? That sounds like a problem for fire, too.' It's like if _Ocean's 11_ were redone with a bunch of fucking Juggalos." --@TheTarquin "Think of the last time you heard a teacher or presenter say, ''I'll be going fast; we have a lot to get through today.'' How often have you heard someone say ''We're going to go slow; I want to make sure you understand these concepts.'' Why is learning something you 'get through'?" --CW "For some of us, Halloween is every day." --Tim Burton "Normal is an illusion. What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly." --Charles Addams "Few discourses are more violently annoying than a Western intellectual trying to nuance a coup." --Steven Salaita "The terrible thing about [publishing a book/getting your dream job/starting a new relationship] is you wake up the next morning and you're still you. If you're not happy where you're at, no external accomplishment is going to change that." --Dana Schwartz "Yoda is rather cocky for a Jedi master that just spent three movies with no idea the chancellor was a Sith." --Bobby Moss "'Private equity firm' is code for 'company that produces nothing of value and only exists to siphon money from others at all costs'." --W10x12 "I think there is a pressure on here to be sharp and funny all the time, because that's the kind of text that gets picked up and passed around because people enjoy it. That's exhausting though, and it's not something everyone's good at anyway! I hope people on here can feel free to be dull and normal and sincere and not particularly witty and just talk about normal stuff that's on their minds, and know that it's appreciated that we can all share these pieces of our selves with each other." --Anonymous, on the Fediverse "If you don't want to work with your hands, buy yourself some nitrile gloves at the drugstore, like the black ones because they make you look like a Bond villain." --Alton Brown "Nothing inspires arrogance like a lifetime spent controlling machines that are incapable of criticism." --Edward Snowden "The US is 'with' no one. Hell, Canadians don't even trust you guys anymore. Do you know how much damage you have to do to make Canadians dislike you?" --Dennis Detwiller "The best science is often a long, slow, passive-aggressive argument." --zefrank1 "At some point you have to ignore what you think other people want and instead make what you want to make, and know that the right audience will get it and that's the audience you want to have." --Joel Hodgson "Sci-hub: Literally what the Web was built to do, so stop yer yakkin' about it." --Blake C. Stacey "Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.: --George Eliot, _Impressions of Theophrastus Such_ "Libre software is important, but it is a means to free people, not an end in itself." --Thibault Martin "The whole thing is quite hopeless, so it's no good worrying about tomorrow. It probably won't come." --JRR Tolkein "Many no longer believe that a better world, as opposed to a better life, is possible, and the rhetoric of private well-being trumps public good, at least in the English-speaking world. And yet the yearning remains - all the riches piled up, the security gates and stock options, are only defenses against a world of insecurity and animosity, piecemeal solutions to a pervasive problem." --Rebecca Solnit, _A Paradise Built In Hell_ "My husband got me an early Christmas present. It's a little robotic vacuum! I'm naming it Lemmy because I have a feeling that it's gonna shred everything." --fidgety "Anything what confuses the average adult human is magic". --Banjofox's corollary to Clarke's Third Law "I have been forcibly reminded the voyager plates basically constitute a mixtape, unsolicited nudes, and directions to where we live." --esvrld "We are more often frightened than hurt. We suffer more from imagination than from reality." --Seneca "No! I refuse to die here! I still have Internet arguments to win!" --Peridot, _Steven Universe_ "Don't try to use what you learn from Buddhism to be a Buddhist. Use it to be a better whatever-you-already-are." --The Dalai Lama "It's only cynicism if it DOESN'T ACTUALLY COME TO PASS. Otherwise, it's just reality. Please stop pretending everything is going to somehow work out. That's how we got here." --Dennis Detwiller "What this country needs is not better children but better adults." --The Skipper, _Stand On Zanzibar_ "Show me a completely smooth operation and I'll show you someone who's covering [up] mistakes. Real boats rock." --Frank Herbert Coincidence - You weren't paying attention to the other half of what was going on. --Chad C. Mulligan, _The Hipcrime Vocab_ "That is a heaping bowl of win!" --Deviant Ollam "My other airgap is an Internet connection." --@itsreallynick "I remember when I was young and naive and assumed we just wouldn't connect nuclear plants to the Internet." --Matthew Green "Some flatus-boiled tea, for science!" --Adam Savage "Leftists sitting on their asses are about as useful as the thoughts and prayers of school shootings." --Newt Geiszler "Celebrity is just obscurity biding its time." --Carrie Fisher "Rorschach became the most popular character in _Watchmen_. I made him to be a bad example. But I have people come up to me in the street and saying ''I AM Rorschach. That is MY story.'' And I'd be thinking: 'Yeah, great. Could you just, like, keep away from me, never come anywhere near me again as long as I live?''" --Alan Moore "Always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented." --Elie Wiesel "There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves." --Will Rogers "Our bodies are prisons for our souls. Our skin and blood, the iron bars of confinement. But fear not. All flesh decays. Death turns all to ash. And thus, death frees every soul." --Grand Inquisitor Silecio, _The Fountain_ "In your experience, does anyone ever ask 'What are your pronouns?' to someone who passes for cis? It's like being asked 'Is that your real nose?' with a side helping of 'Is the person who asked me that going to try to kick my ass if they don't get the answer they want?'" --Maradydd "If all the non-Chinese corporations pushed back together, they could really accomplish something. But corporations are optimized for nonconfrontational appeasement so it'll never happen." --0xabadidea "People trying to shape reality through what fiction is allowed to be made are like cats batting at the mirror and not understanding it's a reflection." --@gottago2space "A generation which ignores history has no past and no future." --Frank Klaassen "Man prides himself on being the only animal who can modify his nature, yet when he chooses to do so he is called a phony." --Anton LeVay "There's a lot of brave new misery in our brave new world." --Nickie Haflinger, _The Shockwave Rider_ "On a scale of one to attacking Jackie Chan in a ladder factory while he's holding a baby after he's just said he doesn't want any trouble, how bad is this idea?" --Noelle "Money is just permission from rich people." --Garbados "If adults called you an 'old soul' as a child, that was a polite way of saying ''Wow, you're only 12 and you've already lost all your serotonin.''" --Remy Clio "Remember kids, the only difference between science and screwing around is writing it down. ... It's a beautiful ethos... I love that quote because it brings science closer to screwing around. And we think of science as the /opposite/ of screwing around! But if you want to find people who've tested weird crap, talk to a scientist, man! The quote secretly has this thing in it that lowers the threshold for entry to science. That's inherently an amazing thing." --Adam Savage "When you're from a society that raises boys to be soldiers, trans femininity is inherently a betrayal of the state." --Ita Segev "I'm smart enough to know I'm dumb enough that I can't help you." --Deadpool "Homo digitalis may challenge the state, but the state will always fight back." --David Patrikarakos "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers." --Thomas Pynchon "I don't believe in God. But I do believe in dramatic irony." --JMS "Icarus is bullshit, that's why it's called mythology. People can't stand genius without an apology. Fuck that, fuck them go get what you want to get. Let them stay home and comment on the Internet." --Garfunkel and Oates "You can't blow on an app." --Jason Murphy, on carrying gaming dice "The best way to get management excited about a disaster plan is to burn down the building across the street." --Dan Erwin, Security Officer, Dow Chemical, 2008.ev "I did the thing! I did the thing! I learned!" --Brian Brushwood "It doesn't feel to me that it's in our nature to do anything perfectly." --William Gibson "It doesn't matter that both Bill Clinton and Obama did things that Reagan and both George Bushes would've approved of, because everyone from Limbaugh to Fox to Youtube randos is telling the actual voters of this group that those conservative positions they took are far left." --Colin Spacetwinks "Today another colleague showed up with an injured hand. The cause? Rogue roomba got stuck under the stove and he hurt himself retrieving his little robot helper. I laughed at the absurdity, and then remembered that I applied security patches to my light bulbs yesterday." --Gn0w "It's not 'danger,' it's 'accepted occupational hazard.'" --Griffin "Guys, please don't make jokes about the current political situation. It's very difficult to tell them apart from what's actually happening." --Dahlia Adler "I honestly believe in a bottomless pit of stupid which swallows everything worthwhile and good and I haven't seen much to dissuade me from that point of view." --The Illustrious Skinbag "If you're uninterested in reading my words, why should I make more of them for you?" --Matt Blaze "As you watch Trump's defenders lie, deflect, and distract today and in the coming weeks, remember that they don't care about being caught in obvious lies. Calling bullshit still means you're talking about the bullshit, not the facts." --Garry Kasparov "Create the world that your enemies see in their nightmares." --Janus "But why can't we have a Christian nation? Because a marriage of church and state always leads to corruption of both the religion and the nation." -Rev. Heather Jepsen, Pastor, First Presbyterian Church "If your logic is 'the whistleblowers are CIA and cannot be trusted' then all you're really saying is that the job of intelligence officials is to let the political leadership get away with crimes." --Adam Serwer "I think we can all agree that internet arguments that involve arguing over dictionary definitions are the waking up in a stranger's backyard after a bender of internet arguments. If you're not questioning your life choices, you might not actually be sentient." --Zen Sayuki "So where did infinity all begin? In the same place where infinity ends: In the conscious minds and dreams of shamen." --xj9 "Root should know better." --Lennart Poettering "The failure mode of 'clever' is 'asshole'." --John Scalzi "The most important lesson we can learn from _Ghost in the Shell_ is to turn off your unused interfaces. There's no reason to accept unexpected ad-hoc radio connections, parse every piece of barcode encoded data on your field of vision or process every audio data burst within earshot. That will get your cyberbrain hijacked. An organized cyborg is a safe cyborg." --Polychrome "You were warned that truth is stranger than fiction, and you didn't listen. You just keep writing stranger and stranger fiction. And then you have the nerve to complain that reality has disintegrated into an absolute Salvador Dali clown carnival. Yes motherfucker, it sure did." --@chaosprime "When you've got a magnatron, you /use/ a magnatron." --The Thought Emporium, on building a metal deposition system "What's the deal with eBay sellers that sell electrostatically sensitive ICs, do a perfect 5 layer Russian doll packaging that could withstand global thermonuclear war - only to wrap the actual goods in household film and seat it in foam so charged you can feel it a meter away." --Retrograde "Nihilism is like the spice agony. It'll kill your soul and destroy your culture and civilization. Very few people are prepared for the void. It is tremendously powerful, but we've forgotten the old ways of preparing people to touch infinity." --xj9 "You made me look capable at something!" --Jason Murphy "How egocentric of us to think that Space Aliens, who have mastered interstellar travel across the Galaxy, would give a shit about humans on Earth." --Neil deGrasse Tyson "I am rather inclined to silence, and whether that be wise or not, it is at least more unusual nowadays to find a man who can hold his tongue than to find one who cannot." --Abraham Lincoln "There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who know trinary, those who don't, and those who are now looking for their dictionaries." --Rick Moen Just because there /can/ be a failure mode in something does not mean that it is worthless. It means that you have to take care of it to keep it from failing. "People who are afraid to think, wasting everyone's time with a discussion about whether they are allowed to think." --@swissidealism "There are things in the Universe that you do not know about. Many of them are awesome and you would like them." --Banjofox "Upgrade, overclock, run silent." --zpojqwfejwfhiunz "The main reason I don't dye my hair, dress in a performatively ''alt'' way, have tattoos, etc: It's a bad way to spend down your 'weirdness' allowance. I'd rather spend it down in other, more effective ways. People will only let you be so weird before they ignore you. It not only signals ''I am out of power''; it also signals ''I am uninterested in power, and am instead more invested in pursuing the aesthetic ideal of 'outsider' instead of putting in the hard work of actually changing things.''" --Jackson Kernion "If you want to know how angry a city is, ride a bike through it." --Robin Mazumder "You don't need to say mean things to be jokester. Not that difficult, bud." --Chuck Tingle "We were literally fighting a war." --Paul Laney, Cass County Sherrif, on Standing Rock "We don't have the financial resources we need to continue. I'm not a billionaire. I can't fund my own campaign." --Kamala Harris, on USian politics "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by social networks, algorithm-driven hysterical neurotic... dragging themselves through feeds at dawn looking for a dopamine fix attention-starved 'influencers' burning to signal their virtue and feasting on 'likes'." --Hiro Protagonist "Dan Crenshaw says New Yorkers wouldn't understand the concept of people loaning weapons to each other? Bitch, I'm *still* carrying Barbra Streisand's switchblade and brass knuckles from that time the 5-0 were on her." --Bette Midler "Save your bullshit airhead optimism for your fucking Burning Man camp and let the grownups get to the business of trying to keep as many innocent people alive as our collective bad choices rip this civilization to shit, whaddya say, you witless assholes?" --Josh Ellis "It amazes me I have to explain physical reality to people, but heck, the level of irateness I receive in response to basic, factual statements is just, well, stunning. I don't know what world you people were raised in, but it's fair to say you were not paying attention." --Dennis Detwiller "You may have wondered why I had a baking sheet under my cutting board. It's there to catch the juices. The first time I processed tomatoes like this, it made my kitchen into a faux abattoir. It looked like I'd been using TNT to butcher sheep." --Hasufin "If you hold a cat by the tail you learn things you cannot learn any other way." --Mark Twain "DAMN YOU TV'S PAT SAJAK!" --Jason Murphy "When software has a cult following there probably is something wrong with it." --@nihl "Definition of good whiskey is, whiskey you like to drink. And the right way to drink whiskey is the way you want to. And anyone who argues with that is a pretentious asshole." --Daniel Whittington "Each heart breaks into a unique shattering pattern, and it is by this that we recognize one another." --pecheverri "If you want to know what's shortly due for the guillotine look for the most obvious of all symptoms: Extremism. It is an almost infallible sign - a kind of death rattle - when a human institution is forced by its members into stressing those and only those factors which are identificatory, at the expense of others which it necessarily shares with competing institutions because human beings belong to all of them." --Chad C. Mulligan "Denial can be a lifesaving thing, in certain lives, in certain times. How on earth did you get through /that/? Some reliable part of you just says, it's not happening." --William Gibson "Know-how and clever don't count for shit if you aren't thinking about the problem clearly." --emsenn "So if people heard the message that you said, Aral, in your keynote and their response was 'Well, I want nothing to do with that conference,' well in all honesty, fuck 'em." --@docbaty "I'm not sure if there've been new advances in cryptography, papers I haven't read, or if someone burned a number theory 0day for CTF." --Overheard at Chaos Computer Camp "The worst part about having a mental illness is... people expect you to behave as if you don't." --The Joker "What I don't understand is the sheer rage about this. But I've spent... 5 years thinking about gamer rage and I don't think there is any point to it at all anymore. It will take whatever shape it needs to in order to exist. The target, the logic, none of that matters, all that matters is that there is something to be mad about." --Dankwraith "Just dig the records, but don't go talk to them [your favorite musicians], because you might get a human response." --Henry Rollins, on musicians "Fear is a great motivator." --Art Bell "I do not want to father a flock, to be the fetish of fools and fanatics, or the founder of a faith whose followers are content to echo my opinions. I want each man to cut his own way through the jungle." --Aleister Crowley "AIX - the Unix from the universe where Spock has a beard." --JHM "I don't know what percentage of our time on any computer-based project is spent getting the equipment to work right, but if I had a gardener who spent as much time fixing her shovel as we spend fooling with our computers, I'd buy her a good shovel. At least you can buy a good shovel." --Erasmus Smums "Iä! Iä! PC LOAD LETTER" --Dash "Lord, grant me the confidence of Bertrand Russell writing a history of western philosophy." --@wasoante "Failures are a given, and everything will eventually fail over time." --Werner Vogels "Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness." --Werner Herzog "Kids get it. They don't operate on logic." --Miyazaki Hayao "Yes, I work for a CA that issues EV certificates, but if there was no value in them, then our customers would certainly not be paying extra for them." --Anonymous GlobalSign employee "Information is not Knowledge; do you or your opponent have the stronger powers of analysis and action based on it?" --feonixrift "We learn from history, that we do not learn from history." --Jorden Vee "The rate at which signs (symbols, words, etc) become damned because they're picked up and reused by imbeciles is faster than we can adjust to now." --Lyrra Sark "Never trust a father figure who doesn't come from Krypton or Smallville." --JMS "It's assumed that truth, spoken to power, reverberates. It's usually just a turd in the punch bowl." --Dan Kaminsky "When well intentioned people fall for bad faith tactics, bad faith people continue to employ them. When these people come for you, they cannot be reasoned with." --Lindsay Ellis "The world is actually pretty simple. We're a wildly over-successful animal, well within the systems that spawned us. We will neither kill the earth nor all life on it. We'll just kill ourselves, while we dream of the stars." --Dennis Detwiller "I hate when I'm fucking a dude and he asks who owns that pussy. Technically I think it's an asset of my S-Corp, but I'd have to ask my accountant to be sure." --Kate Kennedy "The only difference between a disaster and a ticking time bomb is the amount of time you do not know you have left has not run out yet." --The Doctor "Never apologize for being nerdy, because unnerdy people never apologize for being assholes." --John Barrowman "I do know that, I wrote the damn bill!" --Bernie Sanders, shutting down Tim Ryan like a headshot at point blank range "Time to retract the foreskin of misconception and apply the wire brush of enlightenment." --Geoff Miller "Buy the latte. Order the fucking avocado toast. Fuck and dance and enjoy life like there's no tomorrow. You age quickly, the old people are lying to your and blaming you because they feel bad they stole your future and shit all over what they didn't steal." --Xeni Jardin "I'm very concerned that our society is much more interested in information than wonder, in noise rather than silence... How do we encourage reflection?" --Mr. Rogers "Socialism is a scareword they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years. Socialism is what they called public power. Socialism is what they called Social Security. Socialism is what they called farm price supports. Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance. Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations. Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people." --Harry S. Truman "You should never run out of people to be." --Attributed to Genesis Breyer P-Orridge "It's 2019 and script kiddies can get their hands on nation-state developed attacks. If you still think nation states shouldn't be in your security model, either you are working for them, or its time to retire." --ky0ko "The Internet: Where everything's made of text but nobody reads any of it." --Andi Leadership: A form of self-preservation exhibited by people with autodestructive imaginations in order to ensure that when it comes to the crunch it'll be someone else's bones which go crack and not their own. --Chad C. Mulligan, _The Hipcrime Vocab_ "Robocop is my favorite Barbie game." --Glitchwitch "You can clap whenever something awesome happens." --Jason Murphy "'How could disinformation campaigns even work?' you ask. Well, millions of people still think the US Army created AIDS at Ft. Detrick thanks to a 1983 KGB op, using a single article in an Indian newspaper." --Sean Gallagher "There was a senator... after my pancreatic cancer, who announced, with great glee, that I was going to be dead within six months. That senator, whose name I have forgotten, is now dead, and I, am very much alive." --Ruth Bader Ginsburg "You can be unethical and still be legal, that's the way I live my life." --Mark Zuckerberg, interview in Vanity Fair Magazine, May 2019 "Bluetooth is an EXTREMELY complex radio protocol on Layer 1. It's like a mating dance between scorpions in the middle of a freeway." --Anonymous Hacker News poster "These days, the kind of things that were clear signs of a paranoid disorder ten or twenty years ago are how things genuinely work." --Munin, on the Internet of Things "If you hire Gilbert Gottfried for a project he does not phone it in, no matter how big the job is. You get full Gottfried. Remember that, synthwave music video producers. Full Gottfried." --Cobra Commander "Real life has ways of cruelty beyond our imagination." --Opti "If there is only one thing accurate about professional wrestling, it's to expect bad actors to cheat every chance they get so they look better than they really are." --The Doctor "I keep seeing this: At some point, in some distant future, children, will read in their history books, how we locked up children and separated them from their families. This isn't calling out anyone. Just demystifying or adding some dimension to the white washing that's taking place right in front of our eyes. If your children had read in school about the United States' history of separating children from their families, of locking up children, of deporting children, of executing children, you might not be locking up and separating children right now. So it's highly doubtful, as predicated by history, that the United States ever learns its history lessons." --Jason Jeremias "The first thing one learns upon becoming a subject of press interest is that there's actually very little one can generally do in the face of inaccurate or even malicious press coverage." --Barrett Brown "Stop blaming an ignorance of history and recognize a nascent evil when you see it." --@ediblesticker "That's the thing about this ever tightening news cycle we find ourselves in: You just need to influence the current one, it doesn't matter if the next cycle debunks you." --0xdeadbabe "Be the reason others need a burner phone." --Wiz Weise "DC is not a real place, it's a drug-fueled collective hallucination created primarily by lobbyists, and decentralizing our bizarrely concentrated Federal government can only help." --Kistaro Windrider "I just realized that my butt is just a really shitty 3D printer." --Brian Brushwood "If you get the message, hang up the phone." --Alan Watts "People literally think this asshole [Elon Musk] is a living god. They feel inspired by his regurgitated sci-fi plotlines and speed-freak vigor. They wish for a strongman of old, a warrior-king, a messiah. They want to consume their way out of their situation, so they pin their hopes on a hare-brained capitalist. But there's no reason why Musk's vision of the future should coincide with the needs of us peasants.i He doesn't work for our benefit. He's a charismatic psychopath with a god complex, not a martyr." --Max Anton Brewer "What good is magic if you can't fellate yourself?" --Agape Eris "I like to call that one, 'Holy shit, it worked!'" --Jason Murphy "I find it quaint that people worry I am corrupting children with my transgenderness. Lord, get to know me. There's a billion things about me you want to keep from your child." --Jess "I cashed out most of my BTC and paid for dental work. I have a mouth full of Satoshi." --Sarah Pottraz "It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them." --Mark Twain "People may not listen to common sense, but money's another thing entirely." --Stingray Bakpfeiffengesicht - German - A face in need of a fist. "If people never did anything stupid, nothing intelligent would ever get done." --Ludwig Wittgenstein "Getting old is a privilege denied to many." --Sarah Pottratz "So many transwomen in UNIX circles it might be sudoestrogens, actually." --Pecheverri "'BOFH' is pronounced ''I'm sorry, sir/ma'am/whatever is appropriate, I'll never do it again and I've just handed in my resignation. Please don't kill me.''" --Bryce "I don't care that they stole my idea, I care that they don't have any of their own." --Nikola Tesla "A harmless man is not a good man. A good man is a very, very dangerous man who has it voluntarily under control." --J. Peterson "Chris [Hayes], /I/ think they're concentration camps. Keep in mind that one of their functions *by design* is to punish those individuals and families who are detained." --Mike Godwin, of Godwin's Law "You have 99 problems. You decide to use machine learning. Now you have sheep banana stop sign problems." --Nate Cull "Enough complicity with a dysfunctional system forces people to justify the pain: It can transform someone's ability to endure senseless punishments into a valor that all should have." --The Ferrett "I have become a monster. Ah, well. I wonder if any of us set out to be monsters?" --The Thin White Duke, _Return of the Thin White Duke_ "You know that frictionless, floating feeling you get when you take just a few too many GABA analogues? That's what their UI [Apple iOS] feels like." --0xdeba5e12 "There is a difference between 'knowing about' and 'knowing how.' The difference is usually 'safety.'" --The Doctor "What's the statute of limitations on a broadcast signal intrusion? Asking for a friend." --The_Gibson "Why is it that whenever we hang out I find myself in a hazmat suit?" --Jason Murphy "When you hit OG status you'll spend most of your time STOPPING conflicts... Not starting it." --Ice-T "We cryptographers are arguing over PGP key sizes. Meanwhile government employees are emailing each other documents encrypted with a cipher that was handily broken in the 90's." --Matthew Green "I think we're doing this right. It feels like a lot of science is happening." --Brian Brushwood "Looking for the next sunrise." --Ray "Being clever is not enough. The world is packed with clever people who haven't gone anywhere. And it's jam packed with idiots who are rich beyond your wildest imagination." --Adam Savage "Why is our fictional dystopia nicer than real life?" --Can Ray "We multicultural queer lizard people are everywhere, and it's useless to resist our agenda." --Kaila Hale-Stern "If you are ever lacking in confidence, remember that Apple thought it was a good idea to charge $1,000.00 for a monitor stand." --@da_667 "It's all fun and games until you get a felony criminal mischief charge." --Howard Payne "The Church does not want us, and we have no need of them. The so-called 'Law of God' means nothing to us, we who put human dignity and personal sovereignty first." --Lucien Greaves "Maybe do meet your heroes, because you'll find out how human they are, and learn hard life lessons about yourself and who you want to be." --Lesley Carhart "What's the most primitive weapon that you'd be skilled at, do you think?" "Uhhh... a 386?" --Jason Murphy and Brian Brushwood "All the reasons which make the initiation of physical force an evil, make the retaliatory use of physical force a moral imperative." --Ayn Rand "Cyberspace has colonized the real world." --William Gibson "Sometimes I forget that Musk owns a rocket company and assume he's just high." --Matthew Green "Money is so weird. They're just pieces of paper that we believe in." --Brian Brushwood "America: The land where the baseline goal of guaranteeing people's physical safety against random violence is 'politically impossible.'" --Adam Kotsko "Courage is knowing it might hurt and doing it anyway. Stupidity is the same. And that's why life is hard." --Jeremy Goldberg "People have such a hard time believing that they have been taken in by propaganda and smear campaigns because being fooled is considered a shameful thing in our society. We must shift that shame from the people who are fooled to the ones who are doing the fooling." --Caitlin Johnstone "I grabbed these weeds from a local area." --Brian Brushwood "Autistic culture is having to find a way to come to terms with the fact that your own communication will always be judged solely by your specific word choices, but that you will always be expected to only hear other peoples' intention regardless of their word choices." --@mykola "Assholes are assholes because they have nothing better to do with their time." --@malwaretechblog "KISS fans are Boomer Juggalos." --Shlee "When I see big powers and tech giants fighting, I feel like a tiny man watching Godzilla and [King] Kong wrestle in my neighborhood." --Rick777 "We're aware of the scale of the planet, so we don't accept that our own circumscribed horizons constitute reality. Much more real is what's relayed to us by the TV." --Norman House, _Stand On Zanzibar_ "Chess problems demand from the composer the same virtues that characterise all worthwhile art: Originality, invention, conciseness, harmony, complexity, and splendid insincerity." --Vladimir Nabokov "Writing is nothing more or less than speaking on the page in your own natural voice. Writers write the way they talk and talk the way they write. You have to get out of your own way enough to say only and exactly what you mean to say without second-guessing yourself." --JMS "If you never used an early 80's computer one way to understand it would be to imagine working with an AVR microcontroller like an Arduino but with extra hardware like I/O and a tape/floppy drive. Being a general purpose 8-bit machine it wasn't *really* like a microcontroller but the feeling of working with one is very much the same." --Polychrome "Now I'm awake to the world. I was asleep before. That's how we let it happen. When they slaughtered Congress, we didn't wake up. When they blamed terrorists and suspended the Constitution, we didn't wake up then, either. Nothing changes instantaneously. In a gradually heating bathtub, you'd be boiled to death before you knew it." --Margaret Atwood, _The Handmaid's Tale_ "The real fun of conspiracy hunting comes when you realize you can't trust anyone, as all the paranoids know. For the paranoids, this increases their paranoia, which they seem to enjoy. For a guerilla ontologist like me, it increases my agnosticism, which I prefer to paranoia, because I find it more amusing and less depressing." --Robert Anton Wilson "_A Clockwork Orange_ is like a Disney movie for this generation." --Malcolm McDowell "Instead of 'Hellfire and Brimstone' it should be labelled 'Dick Move.'" --Jason Murphy "If you learn only methods, you'll be tied to your methods. But if you learn principles, you can devise your own methods." --Ralph Waldo Emerson "Training as a historian teaches you quickly that, to find the oppressor, just find who is most strenuously insisting everyone BE POLITE." --Anthony Oliveira "Everyone appreciates your honesty until you're honest with them, then you're an asshole." --George Carlin "I'm in America, I always expect violence." --Abbie Hoffman Even if you bury your fears in madness new fears will only surface. "It takes a great leap of faith to believe that our 'leaders' would be honest enough, thoughtful enough, empathic enough, to think of the common good rather than their own." --Dov Michaeli, MD, Ph.D "Everything the Communists told us about communism was a complete and utter lie. Unfortunately, everything the Communists told us about capitalism turned out to be true." --Post-Soviet Russian joke from the 1990s "What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture." --Neil Postman "Why don't you make like a tree and slowly expand your maturity within a welcoming and supportive environment." --@doththedoth "Whenever I hear about some bigmouth in Washington or the Christian heartland banging on about the evils of sodomy or whatever, I mentally enter his name in my notebook and contentedly set my watch. Sooner rather than later he will be discovered down on his weary and well-worn old knees in some dreary motel or latrine, with an expired Visa card, having tried to pay well over the odds to be peed upon by some Apache transvestite." --Christopher Hitchens "After each ego death event, the new ego that arises is less brittle, more resilient. What will destroy the sixth iteration of a person, the first iteration could not have survived mere contemplation of. Eventually the capacity to let someone be wrong on the internet emerges." --@chaosprime "What I'm saying is, the planet's on fucking fire!" --Bill Nye the Science Guy "When one teaches, two learn." --Robert A. Heinlein "It is supremely unfair to target people for being ignorant in this day and age when the entire education has been built to deaden the human intellect instead of stimulate and develop it." --Earthship Captain "You know, I'm sick of following my dreams, man. I'm just going to ask where they're going and hook up with 'em later." --Mitch Hedberg "Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible." --Frank Zappa "They say that if you don't learn from history you are doomed to repeat it. They also say that history books are written by the victorious. It follows that given how little the history books talk about the preponderance of ignorance, that the idiots have been winning for a very long time." --Dildog "Crows roost communally. Crows can describe individual humans and inform other crows in their community about threats and friends. Corvids are highly intelligent and very social. Birds are dinosaurs. Part of the fun of feeding crows is realizing that, as a direct result, real live dinosaurs are going to talk to each other about you personally." --Kistaro Windrider "Watching how IBM sells stuff and how their products are being bought all over the place is like watching missiles passing over one's head, from A to B and from B to A. We've no control over it as it happens Up There, but we sure as hell will be hit with blast, heat and radiation." --Meadow Ellis "I have no empathy." --Joe Biden "Science in general has been discredited by popular culture." --@lpgeffen "My voice was given to me as an instrument of inspiration for my friends, and a tool of torture and destruction to my enemies. An instrument of truth." --Diamanda Galas "There's usually nothing you can do for friends who become ideologized. They're like zombies, immune to logic, reason, and decency until the ideology passes, after which you won't need to explain what happened to them because they'll claim they were against the ideology all along." --Mojave Phone Booth "Collective good is dead. Only capitalist hell that makes someone a clear profit from the exploitation of others exists." --Munin "We don't have religion; we've replaced it with science. And science is voodoo." --T. Coraghossan Boyle "Damn, it's 4/20 but I forgot to leave out milk and cookies for Snoop last night." --Griffin "This morning isn't so much technical debt as it is technical payday loan." --Tek "This process has happened plenty of times before: Industry around new tech fails to self-regulate, a bunch of people get harmed, then once enough rich white dudes are killed regulation suddenly happens." --Justin Warren "Do not ask what they 'really' believe. Ask what their claims would justify." --Jonathan Korman "If death stops me from hacking I've screwed up somewhere along the way." --Puella Vulnerata "Hope is a dangerous thing for a hacker like me to have." --0xdeba5e12 "The question is not ''what's your use case for having this be a flat file in Git.'' It's ''how do you guarantee that we won't ever wish this was just a flat file in Git.''" --Freakazoid "I heard someone from the music business saying they are no longer looking for talent, they want people with a certain look and a willingness to cooperate. I thought, that's interesting, because I believe a total unwillingness to cooperate is what is necessary to be an artist - not for perverse reasons, but to protect your vision. The considerations of a corporation, especially now, have nothing to do with art or music. That's why I spent my time now painting." --Joni Mitchell "Go fuck yourself, reCAPTCHA. Yes, here's a picture of buses. I answered one just like that but for mopeds like 15 seconds ago. Either I'm a human or I'm a smarter AI than you are, so please just let me register for this damn website." --Tek "It's the little things that push you over the edge, eventually." --@upthecypherpunx "The coldest thing is people don't really pay attention to what your trying to say until you're gone." --Ice-T "If there is no enemy, one must be invented. The military force which is denied an external target always turns against its own people." --@cypherpunks "The moral of the story of The Blues Brothers is that two wrongs don't make a right, it's actually way, WAY more wrongs than that." --Pen Merch "To assume the obvious is often to overlook the obvious." --Harrison Blackwood, _War of the Worlds_ "I am not a number I am a UTF-8 sequence." --Gorm "You could say that the purpose of college is to prepare you for later life. You could also say that its purpose is to drain you of any youthful dreams and energy so that you slot right into the workforce." --@hector@explosion.party "It [Javascript] might be the Unix philosophy taken to its logical extreme. Everything should do one thing and do it well. So now we have libraries that are literally a single function." --Lowkeyloki "Wonder is always there." --Brian Brushwood "I know too many Robespierres who could not abide a Pimpernel." --Anonymous "JSON and Bash is like OJ and toothpaste." --Mike Mittelstadt "In a world full of assholes, kindness is a rebellious act." --Phil Brucato "Nothing brings a group of assholes together faster than something that's none of their fucking business." --Ice-T "How is AGDQ [Awesome Games Done Quick] a whole week long? You'd think a hotel full of speedrunners could get it done faster..." --Warchamp7 "If they've weaponized mescaline then the end of the world is going to be fucking rad." --Porpoise Christi "From the Enlightenment to the mid-1940s, reason referred to forming ideas & making good judgments. But with the coming of the Cold War, game theory redefined rationality as calculation subject to rules. Such a view of rationality was, conveniently, more programmable than wisdom." --Nils Gilman "Sometimes I feel like the blinking cursor is taunting me. 'I, a perfect machine, am twiddling my thumbs waiting for you, the meatsack, to come up with something to keep me busy.'" --Luna Terra "Well, well, well... if it isn't the consequences of my own actions." --Rues "Socialism has a lot better chance of working in the US than elsewhere since we're the one country that can't get invaded by the US." --Knopfler "It's blowing my mind that Beto [O'Rourke] was in the Cult of the Dead Cow. I'm sure a lot of you don't understand what this means, but it's the computer geek version of finding out Bernie Sanders was in the Wu-Tang Clan." --Keith Calder "I'm a performance artist, so a weird lopsided body works." --Annie Sprinkle "Imagination should be used, not to escape reality, but to create it." --Colin Wilson "For a lot of white people, the Mueller Report is the first time in their life where they called the cops and nothing happened." --@karaokecomputer "Remember, not only are you writing a comment that will be stripped out by the compiler, you're creating documentation that no one will ever read." --Gonzo Hacker "Organizational rule number one: Those at the top will always believe the system that put them there is a meritocracy." --Marsh Ray "We live in _The Onion_ Cinematic Universe." --Blackle Mori "I don't want 1980s 8-bit microcomputing back. I don't even want the 1980s 8-bit microcomputing subculture back. I want the future that I thought that subculture would lead to. A world where we used technology to improve ourselves, improve our world, and share the results fairly with everyone. And not as a battering ram to smash down other people's doors and take all their stuff." --Nate Cull "The fastest and most efficient way to kill a software engineer's professional confidence: Put them through the hiring process." --Meredith Matthews "If you live in a democratic country where the government is you, you cannot say, 'I followed orders.' If you recognize that something is wrong, you have to speak out to set it straight." --Lisa Kalvelage "Shit, the bad guy's monologuing on the PA. Not a good sign." --Logomancer "The public at large was quite unconcerned about the debate between the experts. For them, Shalmanaser was a legand, a myth, a folk hero, and a celebrity; with all that, he didn't need to be conscious as well." --From _Stand On Zanzibar_ by John Brunner "Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people." --Zoe "Implying your existing staff are mediocre morons isn't a page from any business book I ever read, but who am I to judge? I don't have an MBA, just a heart." --Corey Quinn "People keep bringing up like civil conversation or whatever as if climate scientists and activists haven't been civilly urging politicians to fucking do something about this for longer than i've been alive. Civility, it turns out, does not have more leverage than money. If only the kids had gone through the proper, recognized way to get representatives to take action, by spending millions of dollars on lobbyists." --Colin Spacetwinks "If we have to sacrifice a single AC-130 for clean drinking water for our citizens, then the terrorists win." --Chase "Mocking and shaming someone for not being 100% up to speed with security just makes you look like an arrogant jerk." --Liam O "Can't spell progress without spelling regress to within a Levenshtein distance of 1!" --Jon Evans "The schadenfreude around NSA leaving a JDWP port open IN DEBUG MODE in Ghidra is everything wrong with this industry. Stop being a dick. This is easily the best free software RE toolkit in forever. You're running it locally in a lab and it's fucking debug mode." --Mike Forbes "True fear is wondering if you remembered to connect to your VPN before downloading hundreds of gigabytes of totally-just-linux-isos from your home connection." --Vala "This kind of group dynamic is exactly what made the Cultural Revolution in China so terrifying. Anyone could be labeled 'reactionary' and nobody would question why. Everyone would just turn on them or be labeled 'reactionary' themselves. People were imprisoned and killed over this. It tore friends and families apart, it gave people with ill will towards others an opportunity to dispose of them, and it was the driving force behind all a manner of other awful things." --Cosmic Elizabeth "The best thing about the spaces we build and protect by immediately shunning anyone who steps out of line (or appears to do so) is how scared I feel to express many of my opinions for fear of never being able to talk to a large chunk of my friends again." --Lynnesbiune "Cancel culture is when anyone who wants to stop and do their research before acting is immediately considered part of the problem. Cancel culture hurts people because there is no middle ground. There's no room to try to help anyone. You're either on one side or the other, and if you're even a tiny bit away from the side someone's on, you're dead to them forever." --Ben Lubar "Selenium sure took a fucking screwdriver and turned it into a battlemech that can't actually turn screws, huh? Imagine the creator of Selenium looking at the burned out Darth Vader mask of PHP and knowing he might never equal in overcomplication, but he will sure as hell try." --Jason Scott "Not everybody can function with a level of elasticity in their reality." --Joseph Matheny "A proof is a repeatable experiment in persuasion." --Jim Horning "The point of modern propaganda isn't only to misinform or push an agenda. It is to exhaust your critical thinking, to annihilate truth." --Garry Kasparov "No matter how cynical I get, it's never enough to keep up." --Lily Tomlin "The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command." --George Orwell, _1984_ "[I] found an old chatlog from 11 years ago and saw I'd sent someone a link to something on Youtube. So i clicked on it to see if the link was still working 11 years later. Anyway [it] turns out I just rickrolled myself 11 years in the future." --Josef "The world is not always a kind place. That's something all children learn for themselves, whether we want them to or not, but it's something they really need our help to understand." --Fred Rogers "I just uttered the phrase 'The Friend is struggling to exercise good discernment regarding sharing his opinions,' so if you're ever wondering what 'That jackass needs to shut the fuck up' sounds like in Quaker, now you know." --Annalee Flower "I like sensible, but these are not times for sensible." --theGibson "There's really only about 50 microUSB cables in the whole world, they simply teleport from place to place in order to maximize human frustration." --MightyBigCar "Hammer Brothers' job description: Troll ninjas." --Sinister1 "If chiptune is just music made with integrated circuits and integrated circuits are just flattened sand with lightning inside this means that the sound of thunder at the beach is chiptune." --Blackle Mori "Even cash grabby, pulp-y, 'bad' fiction can have merit, can teach us something about the world, about people, about history, or about ourselves." --AJ Roach "Never underestimate a nerd with a misunderstood yet superior encoding format." --DJ Sundog "This is probably one of the areas where I differ the most from other hacker/cyborg types... I don't want an exo to process more information, or a library to save more of it... I want it to better process the small part of that which best serves me." --Feonixrift "Oh no, this is becoming a lewd Good Morning thread... requesting immediate evac." --Ash Furrow "I pirated this game and I feel like I got scammed." --Shekhinah "It's important to get angry. It's important to get over it. But never accept your limitations." --Simon McKay, _The Wizard_ "If you agree with me on 9 out of 12 issues, vote for me. If you agree with me on 12 out of 12 issues, see a psychiatrist." --Ed Kotch "We're only creative when we need to work around Security." --Anonymous Cow-orker "It's all about merit, until merit has tits." --Naomi Wu "The efficiency limit of capitalism ends up being you can't just kill people if their existence is inefficient. Oh, govs do try that! But then the mission becomes, don't die." --Dan Kaminsky "It is genuinely shocking how quickly the right-wing grift industry will turn you into a fucking lunatic." --Carlos Maza "There's two sorts of people: The 'prove it to me' people and the 'anything is possible' people." --Simon McKay, _The Wizard_ "If your brand or business is more important than being a decent human being, you shouldn't be leading anyone." --Angela E. Morris "Bad faith actors have systematically poisoned the rhetorical devices of discussion in good faith." --Jonathan Korman "The questions permitted at Davos and TED are never the real questions. The answers permitted at Davos and TED are never the real answers." --Geoffrey Miller "One error made by Orwell in _1984_ is the Party would not need to go to the extent of employing the likes of Smith to go back and falsify the news record. The Party could just state what the past was, regardless of the news record, and too few people would care or want to check." --David Allen Green "An idealist is someone who thinks that because a rose smells better than a cabbage, it'll make better soup." --Simon McKay, _The Wizard_ "I'm not going to change how things work for everyone because of a Docker container I don't provide." --Fox, on TT-RSS "Imagine these in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing!" --Jason Murphy "How embarrassing that our students wore white supremacist paraphernalia while harassing a Native American elder, they were only supposed to wear white supremacist paraphernalia while harassing women seeking health care. Imagine having to apologize because you brought the wrong flavor of violent douchebag mob." --Lindsay King-Miller "Fight for someone else's rights like your rights depend on it, because they do." --Eva "Some free software is 'libre as in lucha libre': It helps to make up a secret identity, because you're going to have to do battle with a bunch of masked chuds with opinions before you even get to wrestle the software itself." --Karli Marxxx "I am buying physical DVDs. And I may have to get a Blu-Ray player. I am offended by this. But I have been arriving at a point where some of the things I want to watch obsessively and study are simply not available on streaming or even pirate services... So, you know, it's not just that I'm An Old. It's that streaming services don't have what I want - and in a few cases where what I want to see has been available, it's been cheaper to buy the DVD than to buy the stream, which is kind of insane." --Warren Ellis "The lesson to be learned from the y2k bug is that if you avert the disaster nobody will think you did anything." --Gar "I am tired of context collapse and having to put a dozen disclaimers on anything lest someone misinterprets it." --Gargron "In a real sense, the amount of punk in the human species will determine whether humanity goes extinct in the next fifty years." --Silver Spook Games "Hey can y'all stop boosting shit about node.js into my timeline, I am kinda over reading about your abuse fetishes." --Kaniini "Live every day like you are a credited but unnamed character who appears in exactly one scene in a David Lynch movie." --Modernist Microfiche Minotaur "Living in the future has had many disappointments, but my electric books are a personal positive." --Warren Ellis, on the Kindle Paperwhite "I'm willing to bet that in the next decade or two we will see an 'expert' from _Ancient Aliens_ in a US Presidential debate. Please prove me wrong, reality." --Timescanner "It's a shame we're going to let this country collapse to appease the racist hysteria of a bunch of chucklefuckers who've never been more than twenty miles from the shithole they were born in, but here we are, I guess." --Josh Ellis "It's probably for the best that you can't stab people over the Internet." --Matt Blaze "The DoD purchased L0phtcrack software from L0pht Heavy Industries. Then later a DoD official told us he would never trust us hackers on their network. We told him our code was already running on your network. People don't understand the trust you give running other people's code." --Weld Pond "Sometimes the answer to, ''Isn't someone going to step up and do the right thing before he kills us all?'' is: Nope." --Xeni Jardin ("sometimes?") "In the stock market, size is power: The more money you have, the more information you get, and the better you can guess at good investments. As a retail investor, you basically have no power. This is why most retail investors give their money to institutions." --Heidi N. Moore "People don't listen. They don't listen when you're nice, when you're patient, they don't listen when you're angry, they just don't listen. They do whatever they were already gonna do, and then they whine like children when it doesn't work out for them. Everything has consequences and we're far too willing to make allowances for people who do stupid shit even after they were told exactly what would happen. Especially when their stupidity fucks everyone around them. I don't care if you think that sounds elitist. This isn't a game where we get points for group participation. Things are scary and we need smart people dealing with them without the distraction and waste of energy trying to convince the ignorant motherfuckers to get up to speed." --Josh Ellis "Things change. Ain't nothin' like it once was. Ain't a goddamn thing." --Pastor Manul Laphroaig "I don't think the execution is relevant when it was obviously a bad idea in the first place. This is like putting rabid weasels in your pants, and later expressing regret at having chosen those particular rabid weasels and that pair of pants." ---maf "I felt then, as I feel now, that the politicians who took us to war should have been given the guns and told to settle their differences themselves, instead of organizing nothing better than legalized mass murder." --Harry Patch, final surviving veteran of World War I, who died in 2009 at age 111. "It is sometimes an appropriate response to reality to go insane." --Philip K. Dick "What other reaction can we have? I literally just flew my robot to get a high resolution picture of my city from my backyard and the whole ordeal took under 5 minutes. I have a current pocket rectangle that shoots slow motion. I'm talking to you on a MAGIC BOX." --@Mainebot@octodon.social "When in Rome, of course you drink the terrible local beer that only tourists drink." --Anonymous Cow-orker "I'm not being sarcastic, I'm outright lying." --Anonymous Cow-orker "The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." --George Bernard Shaw "To his enemies, Assange has betrayed much more than a country. He has betrayed the ideology of the ruling powers." --@jJhnCusack "When the world goes mad, those who resist are denounced as lunatics." --George Monbiot "Sometimes you gotta disambiguate your fuckers." --Maradydd "I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them." --Ian L. Fleming "Tech imposter syndrome is one part not thinking you are smart enough, and one part not thinking you are a shitty enough person to succeed." --Wilkie "Sometimes the best form of support is a private, quiet, 'Friend, you meant well, but you have royally fucked up here.'" --William Pietri "When someone generalizes about a complex phenomenon in a way that's broadly true, pick out the one counter-example and fixate the conversation on that, because the real-world we inhabit is a syllogism and this is logically sound." --Antonio Garcia Martinez "To prepare for the next seven news cycles, remember three principles: There are no limits, there is no bottom, these people lie about everything." --Paul Krugman "May all your enemies be as stupid as Jacob Wohl." --evacide "It's the authoritarianism we should worry about, it's the incompetence we should be grateful for." --Jonathan Chait "There's a lot of countries that have credible propaganda skills (let's not forget VOA here), but there's new techniques that exploit the nature of the Internet, not just the medium of the Internet — far fewer countries that get that right. It's hard to be a propagangsta." --The Grugq "The progressive mind looks at the suffering in the world and reasons backwards to develop policies. The conservative mind finds this deeply corrupt. They [conservatives] reason the other way: decide what is just, and if suffering results, the only way to remain moral is to harden yourself to it. If you allowed your empathy to decide policy, you would override what you had decided was just in a 'pure,' results-free thinking space." --jendziura "If I ever die and someone uses my death to make a name for themselves on the conference circuit like folks did after Aaron Schwartz died, I will literally claw myself out of the grave and come for you, you crass motherfucker." --Aloria "The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little." --Mark Twain "Never tempt fate. It plays for keeps." --Mira Grant "After I'm gone, some of you will seclude yourselves in the forests and mountains to meditate, while others may drink rice wine and enjoy the company of women. Both kinds of Zen are fine, but if some become professional clerics, babbling about 'Zen as the Way,' they are my enemies." --Ikkyu, Head abbot of Daitoku-ji temple addressing the monks in the year of his death 1481 "Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by fighting back." --Paul Erdos "The easiest way to radicalize someone is to permanently warp their view of reality." --Mike Caulfield, American Association of State Colleges and Universities "I used to think chiptunes were played out as game soundtracks but honestly I would take one of those any day over the farty AAA-fake-Hans-Zimmer shit that is in every game now." --That Cosmonaut "Conspiracy theories are what happen when you notice something real and don't have an effective analytic framework to contextualize it." --Mardiroos "Antisemitism is the Free Space in conspiracy theory bingo." --Photophore Girl "Definitional equality, otherwise known as the 'because fuck you that's why' operator." --Marydydd "To get the most overtly fascist, awful, bigoted or contemptible law enforcement view, get the head of a law enforcement union or foundation." --@popehat "When an individual human feels shame but not guilt, that's a problem. It leads not to moral behavior but to performing morality until the heat is off. We'd probably call a person like that a narcissist." --William Pietri [or a sociopath] "Evidence based governance, you say? I'm glad to hear you're a fan of _Star Trek_. Because that is straight up science fiction. I wish it wasn't." --Adam Savage "Ah, yes. 'The rules.' All important progress has been made by following those." --Emerson Hoff "Realistically, if you're within range of an atomic blast without hardened protection, you're screwed with or without these drills [duck and cover] anyway. All it does is standardise the reverse shadows on the ground. I guess clutching at straws is a perfectly valid survival tactic under a mushroom cloud, inasmuch as any tactic can be." --Patchouli Woollahra "Imitation is the sincerest form of television." --Fred Allen "I don't cook. I've tried a few times, but every time the guys in the hazmat suits and black helicopters showed up, there were SWAT teams and sirens and frankly, I'm tired of the paperwork." --J. Michael Straczynski, on Thanksgiving "I don't believe our species can survive unless we fix this (social media). We cannot have a society in which, if two people wish to communicate, the only way that can happen is if it's financed by a third person who wishes to manipulate them." --Jaron Lanier "The more marginalized you are, the more things you are forced to notice about the world in order to survive." --Pookleblinky "As a society, we are as advanced as we ever have been, yet still mystified by the technology inherent in a wombat's asshole." --Dildog "It's not civil disobedience if a liberal doesn't reference both MLK and Gandhi out of context in a thinkpiece condemning it." --Kittybecca "No one has to talk to or make any effort to 'understand' people who don't want you to exist." --Mia the Nasal Consonant "The last boss of photography is making someone in VR glasses look cool." --Dan Kaminsky "The nature of activism is visibility, and the nature of visibility is risk." --Ben Nagy "The funny thing about dudes who scream at people to google their questions on forums is that usually, when you Google the answer to something, it brings you to forums where people are asking questions and getting told by uppity dinguses to go google it." --Meryl S. Kavanaugh "The audiences like to think that satire is doing something. But, in fact, it is mostly to leave themselves satisfied. Satisfied rather than angry, which is what they should be." --Tom Lehrer "Beware the old man who practices a profession where men usually die young." --Jeremy Phillips "Please find the people who wrote the PCIe spec and give each a medal. This has been the single least ambiguous protocol specification I have ever read. My cat can probably implement a PCIe endpoint working from it." --@whitequark "For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law." --Oscar Benavides "During the Vietnam War, every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high." --Kurt Vonnegut "Compilation is a necessary but insufficient step." --Anonymous Co-Worker "If ever there was a conspiracy theory I hope to be true, conspiring to be sure that refugees and people of all faiths and all races have a safe home and the resources to thrive in our communities would be it." --Anonymous "'Snowflakes' is a word used by sociopaths in an attempt to discredit the notion of empathy." --John Cleese "Never depend on government or institutions to create change. All significant social change in human history was accomplished by individual action." --Margaret Mead "True friends are like diamonds, precious and rare. False friends are like leaves, found everywhere." --Anonymous Fear is for people who believe they have a future. "There are some people who would also like to change things, but who haven't got around to using bombs yet, or setting houses on fire. If they thought there were many more like themselves, they might decide to start too. So we like to let it be thought that it's really someone else's fault." --Norman House, _Stand On Zanzibar_ "Part of why shitposting as part of the idea-development process is so personally important to me is, basically, over the past year I have come to realise that extensive and probably irreplaceable parts of my brain run on distilled palilalia." --Maradydd "I believe there is a trapdoor under all of us that has a single pin keeping it closed; it only takes one nudge, at the right time, to pop it open." --JMS "'Virtue signaling' is a sociopath codeword for ''I don't understand how anyone could care about things beyond themselves.''" --Meryl S. Kavanaugh "Never jump into a pile of leaves with a wet sucker." --Linus, _It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown_ "There is no present era as we know it without the xenophobia and war jingoism ushered into place in the early 2000's and left in place because the wars never ended." --@AthertonKD "When stupidity is considered patriotism, it is unsafe to be intelligent." --Isaac Asimov "You are way more likely to die by a force of nature than in a terrorist attack. Odds are that you die by suicide before you die by murder. Infosec is doing risk assessment a little skewed, don't do it by security headlines, no matter how sexy they are." --Simple Nomad "How can we live if there is no more here and everything is now?" --Paul Virilio "Being in infosec for so long takes its toll. I've come to the conclusion that if you give a data point to a company, they will eventually sell it, leak it, lose it or get hacked and relieved of it. There really don't seem to be any exceptions, and it gets depressing." --Brian Krebs "We've reached a point in 2018 where we've stopped expecting justice. We aren't demanding jail; we're just asking for abusers to stop being promoted to positions where they rule over us. And somehow that is still too much." --Sarah LaPolla "To those with power and privilege, accountability and equality is so often experienced as loss, injustice, and persecution." --Chris Hayes "In order to get a camel through the eye of a needle, all you need is a really powerful blender and a lot of patience." --Eddie Izzard "I don't have to assume, I created them and that's what I decided." --J. Michael Straczynski, on fen challanging his assumptions on the universes he created "If Morrissey says not to eat meat, then I'll eat meat. That's how much I hate Morrissey." --Robert Smith "A lie doesn't become truth, wrong doesn't become right, and evil doesn't become good just because it's accepted by a majority." --Booker T. Washington "To suffix things -punk now guarantees them a cozy sub-genre status, thereby protecting the status quo from whatever genuine conceptual threat they might otherwise have posed. Punk is sheer conceptual threat, punching up." --William Gibson "Any technology, no matter how primitive, is magic to those who don't understand it." --Florence Ambrose "You live in a world where an entire operating system can fit on a wafer thin piece of plastic smaller than your finger tip. And you can run this on a $5 (or $10) computer that is small enough to give away on the cover of a magazine. You should be amazed, excited, and happy about this." --Carter Nelson "Charismatic leaders ought to come with a warning label on the forehead, 'May be dangerous to your health.'" --Frank Herbert "When people understand that the flipside of freedom is responsibility - then you start asking for freedom from freedom." --Nolen Gertz "I feel like I grew a pain mustache right here." --Brian Brushwood "That looks safe." --Jason Murphy "Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?" --Brian Kernighan "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition. There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." --Frank Wilhoit "If you ever doubt the usefulness of your efforts, remember that a substantial amount of trees are planted by squirrels hiding nuts and then forgetting where they put 'em." --Sargoth "Government taxes people based on money. Charity taxes people based on kindness." --Kevin Binswanger "The first thing a principle does is kill someone." --Lord Peter Wimsey "The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile, but that it is indifferent. But if we can come to terms with this indifference, then our existence as a species can have genuine meaning. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light." --Stanley Kubrick "The Lord of the Rings: A story where the social elite coerce a trust-fund kid's hard-working gardener into shouldering global risks. Before it's over, he has to physically carry his useless employer (and their jewelry collection) up an active volcano." --Edward Snowden "When I was young and foolish, I believed that there were lots of bad ideas out there, but not that many truly horrible people. But it turns out that these horrible people not only exist, they run much of the world." --Paul Krugman "When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb." --J. Robert Oppenheimer "The reason I got into both punk and science fiction as a kid in the 80's is the same: This fucked up future we find ourselves in today seemed inevitable. So, don't blame us, we tried to warn you." --Jason Heller "Watching _Hackers_ again reminds me that you either die Fisher Stevens in _Short Circuit 2_, or live long enough to become Fisher Stevens in _Hackers_." --The Gibson "The quaintest thing about cyberpunk futures where 'everyone' has robotic upgrades and brain implants is the fantasy of an America where 'everyone' can afford insurance to cover the surgery. 'This super powerful Chinese branded eye implant would only cost as much as an iPhone' yeah but getting it installed would cost 50 fucking grand." --Tim Maughan "When the shock doctrine just becomes the mundane routine." --Captain Bland "Just because something is technically harmless does not mean that I want to love it and hug it and squeeze it and call it George." --Bryce "I just realized that the American vision of freedom from the wage system is for everyone to be their own small business owner. Instead of having solidarity and developing an equitable society, we are all autonomous competitors and petty tyrants. That's the American vision of a free and equal society. An endless hell of searching for customers and competing with each other, each maximizing their own power and wealth, where growth is constant and explosive." --Kyle "Gods are figments of the imagination. Yet that doesn't lessen their power and influence. The psyche responds with any lexicon of symbols with which it's been primed. It doesn't matter if that's religion, advanced mathematics, or Marvel Comics characters. Symbols are the language of the psyche. Every thought we have is 'about' something other than it's self and is therefore symbolic in nature. The psyche doesn't care which set of symbols, only that they convey a relevant meaning. Logic needn't apply." --Thunder Enlightening "If you want to use currying extensively maybe you need to see a psychologist or switch to Haskell." --Kaveh Mousavi Zamani, on anonymous functions in Go "Active Directory is kind of like the heartplugs in David Lynch's _Dune_. Everybody has to get one, and terrible things happen the moment anyone messes with it." --Bryce "Go off to write science fiction, come back to Vanilla Ice tweeting from a quarantined plague airliner." --William Gibson, on 2018 "There's no such thing as a nonviolent revolution. There's explicit violence and there's veiled violence. Humans using courts isn't less violent. If anything, it's just evidence that they've learned how to use violence efficiently." --_The Powers of The Earth_, Travis J.I. Corcoran "I'm no HR professional but it's probably a bad sign when an employee writes an anonymous letter calling you a brain-dead asshole and you can't even narrow it down to 100 people." --Jess Dweck "There is no education or debate with a person who refuses to acknowledge you are a human." --Emily Gorcenski "Don't shade people who weren't previously 'woke' when you used to know them, for being 'woke' now. Either you want them to stay ignorant or you want them to do better... Which is it? Don't penalize them for their personal progress or development. You weren't born 'woke' either." --Munroe Bergdorf "The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We Are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives." --Hunter S. Thompson "Kneel before my lack of shame!" --Jason Murphy "Unlimited continues means no game over. The game is only over when you say it's over." --J. Random Ninja, _Angry Video Game Nerd_ "My gut [feeling] is that most conspiracy theorists have never been project managers. Their optimism is adorable." --Merlin Mann "Clear your mind. Your heart is trying to tell you something." --Unknown "I don't think it's irony poisoning so much as it's cruelty addiction." --Ginny McQueen Only the winners decide what were war crimes. "If you never risk a faceplant, you'll never go anywhere new." --Peter Watts "Microprocessors are domesticated sand." --Astra! "Truth is the new hate speech." --Tomi Lahren "Truth isn't truth." --Rudy Giuliani "Seems Internet [access] is more profitable than booze for hotels these days." --Troutman, on the network uplink at Defcon 26 "Helping H- arrange her new classroom. Not sure if school or penitentiary. [I] Don't blame any of these kids for their shooting rampages. If I was stuck in one of these soul-sucking, ill-maintained hellholes I'd develop murderous proclivities, too." --Anonymous US Public School Teacher, preparing for the new year "My god, other people have complex internal lives? Which they reflect and express how they damn well please?? Unbelievable. I demand a refund." --D Dino "AI is by definition psychopathic, since it doesn't act upon emotions." --Alex Yehorenkov "Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible." --Richard Feynman "All diodes can be light-emitting, with various levels of durability." --Anonymous "Do not let the super-complicated be the enemy of the cheap and easy." --Jonathan Foote "If you've already made something wonderful, then great. Get out there and meet other creators. Build an empire and cheat death by having your stories told long after your body is dust. Somewhere deep in your heart is a beautiful truth that, in the entire history of mankind, no one living soul has ever before spoken aloud." --Brian Brushwood, reply to someone trolling the comments in one of his videos "Riots and comedy are but symptoms of the times, profoundly revealing. They betray the psychological tone, the deep uncertainties... And the striving for something better, plus the fear that nothing would come of it at all." --Frank Herbert, _Dune_ "We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology." --Carl Sagan "I can't believe what you say because I see what you do." --James Baldwin "The hash was fine, but the gurus just wanted into my pocket." --Terence McKenna "Deliverables are worth more than all the invective in the world." --The Gibson "I didn't bother trying to write fanfic, I just got a tattoo and called it a day." --Maradydd "This situation seems to have been fractally fuxxored." --Quinn Norton "There's two sets of people: Those who, if the means for them to stay alive were made illegal, would break the law. And there's the people who'd loudly support the law while breaking the law themselves." --Sci "Electron: Because nobody learned from Java." --Matthew Graybosch "The difference between the student radicals and the Hells Angels is that the students are rebelling against the past, while the Angels are fighting the future." --Hunter S. Thompson, _Hells Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga_ "'Intellectual' conservatives are obsessed with debate because their values system fetishizes logic. They do this because logic and reason as ideals are what they hide behind to defend an absence of morality. Compassion is not always logical. Kindness is not mathematically sound." --Peter Atencio "I feel like this is _Alien Autopsy_, but with, like, Taco Bell." --Jason Murphy "I think much of the defense of people like Musk (and Trump) is really a devotion to the promise of easy, magical fixes that absolve us of collectively performing the hard work and sacrifice needed to solve genuinely difficult problems." --Matt Blaze "Never try to explain something to someone who is emotionally invested in their misunderstanding of the thing." --Popehat "Always ask yourself who benefits from you deciding not to bother." --Tom Eastman "Trying to live life perfectly is the opposite of living." --Jason Scott "When did you first realize you were in an alternate reality? For me, it was when the Cubs won the World Series." --Nathalie Marechal, Ph.d Entrenched interests gonna entrench. Knowledge means that all information is not equal. "Taking an unethical stance, after you've become known for taking ethical stances, is much more upsetting to observers than when you've always been unethical and nobody expects better from you." --Lauren Weinstein Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity. Self-hosted infrastructure is the first step toward voluntary apotheosis. "Our mistakes have consequences but they need not define us." --Johnny Long "All those years of _Duck Hunt_ finally paid off!" --Jason Murphy, shooting at Brian Brushwood with a pepper ball pistol "We cannot expect governments, corporations, or other large, faceless organizations to grant us privacy out of their beneficence." --The Cypherpunk Manifesto "Whenever there's a story about a person standing up against injustice, the comments are so illuminating. There's always two types of people: Those why applaud the person because she's standing up to oppression and those who condemn the person because she's not following the rules. It's easy to see how terrible atrocities happen because so many are the 'just following orders' type of people." --Alison Jean "He is one of those blokes that talks of 'necrospace' and 'ether leys' and [is] therefore suspected of wankery." --DI Callaghan "People sometimes worry that Azerbaijan will shut down Facebook. Why would it? Facebook is the most effective tool of control the government has." --Katy Pearce, professor of communications, University of Washington "I should have realized that our decades of focused experience working on this exact problem would be no match for your gut reaction after reading about it on the Internet. Why didn't you tell us sooner?" --Matt Blaze, on electronic voting "Do not meddle in the affairs of chemists, for they have access to fluorine." --Anonymous "At what age is it best to crush a child's dreams so that they have an easier time stepping in to the status quo?" "You fool. You do not do such things to children. A child is like a poison missile you aim at the Future. You encourage, fund and resource their dreams to the fullest extent of your capability, knowing that your reward will be the pain and misery of generations yet unborn." --Warren Ellis "We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us from seeing it." --Blaise Pascal, _Pensees_ "Dr. King's policy was that nonviolence would achieve the gains for black people in the United States. His major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That's very good. He only made one fallacious assumption: In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none." --Kwame Ture When you think you're the 1 in 100 exception, remember that the other 99 think they are, too. "Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act." --Dietrich Bonhoeffer "Long before worrying about how to convince others, you first have to understand what's happening yourself. --Andrew Gelman "Everything that has ever happened to you has happened inside your skull." --David McRaney "Monkey-controlled robots have upgraded from leg control to arm control, it seems. I don't consider this a useful advance. Monkeys are well known, after all, for, well... non-consensual sexual activities. And I frankly refuse to end my life desperately trying to fend off a monkey-powered robot fisting. I mean, is that really the future you wanted?" --Warren Ellis "What would happen to political journalism if everyone finally realized that no one with power cares when you point out their hypocrisy." --Julia Carrie Wong "Evil people want you to be nice, because when you're nice, it's nearly impossible to point out the evil that they're doing... Civility confirms normalcy. If what's going on is not normal - and trust me, this shit is about a thousand light years from normal - then you do not owe civility in response." --Chuck Wendig "Shut the fuck up with your handwringing and pearl-clutching about civility. You don't get to take a shit in the middle of my living room and then complain that I'm a bad host when I throw you out of my house." --Wil Wheaton "The reason you don't serve fascists in restaurants, and you protest them there too, is so they learn that there are people all around them that don't fear them, and will fight them. Fascism needs fear to grow. Stop being scared that they'll get mad. Your fear is their power." --Tor Ekeland "Sequels and reboots don't ruin anyone's childhood; people ruin their own childhoods by abandoning the open-mindedness and sense of wonder with which they discovered those stories in the first place, instead falling back on brand loyalty and a predilection for comfort and familiarity which closes them off from new experiences. Nostalgia is stagnation. Don't forget the stories you love, but don't let them keep you from growing, either." --Matt "Don't dance with the safety off." --Snoozing Goddess "Modern cyberpunk is the newspaper." --Kalt Null "Those maintaining positions of power will always encourage the freedom to talk about ideas, but never to act. --Moxie Marlinspike "The brutal reality of politics would be probably intolerable without drugs." --Hunter S. Thompson "The best company to own Github would be Pornhub. I am serious. They already have a sterling uptime, excellent CMS, and it'd be an easy extension of the brand. They could merge both, then buy Grubhub to complete the circle. Porngitgrubhub would rival Amazon. It'd sweep through the Internet like a goliath made of porn and open source code and pizza. It'd be unstoppable and the most cyberpunk possible company. But no, we don't get to have the porno pizza code company because we don't deserve good things in this hellish timeline." --Pookleblinky "You mean to tell me they can find Saddam Hussein in a fucking hole, but you can't tell me who shot Tupac?!" --Chris Rock "It's genuinely exhausting seeing Twitter get raged against for making a very, very hard call correctly. Stop it, or nobody will ever do anything not aggressively legislated as a requirement." --Dan Kaminsky "If I don't do something at home for free and for fun, I don't do it on camera for money." --Nina Hartley "If you're having anxiety, hi. Being a person is more complicated than any narrative in media could ever encapsulate. So don't think you're the only one who feels like a heretic in society. People lie/omit too much for you to use them as a gauge for your normalcy/morality." --Bailey Jay "Get ready for two weeks of media coverage of politicians acting like they give a shit when in reality they just want to boost their approval ratings before midterms." --David Hogg "Calm people live. Tense people die." --Adam Savage "The worst part of Slack outages isn't the downtime - it's the wave of centralized infrastructure thinkpieces we're going to have to deal with for the rest of the week." --Justin Duke "I'm learning to drive an ambulance and I find it a lot more relaxing than my time on the Internet." --Danielle Riendeau, on being an EMT "''Please don't'' doesn't scale as well as you'd like." --Jay Ashworth "Dare to be naive. That's the only way you'll ever learn anything." --Buckminster Fuller "I love the future. I can stand in the restroom peeing while simultaneously engaging in a multi-way text message conference on my watch through voice recognition. What a time to be alive." --Bryce Direct action gets the goods but electoral politics make sure you get to keep them. "'Proof of concept' means it works on my machines. 'Fully weaponised' means it works on your machine." --Mike Walker "I cannot lie to you about your chances, but you have my sympathy." --Bishop, _Aliens_ "Apparently, that Ambien is like some _Quantum Leap_ shit. Took two last night and woke up in 1885 in the body of some Belgian dude named Leopold, and shit is getting a little off the rails in the Congo, ya'all." --Josh Ellis "First, they came for Roseanne, and I was like 'Hell, yeah.' Then they came for Bill Maher, and I was like, 'Holy shit. Is it my birthday?'" --Tim Duffy "Once you extol emotionless logic as the ideal form of thought, then you'll fear becoming the rounding error in someone else's logical calculations." --Cory Doctorow "Public stupidity always has a ricochet effect." --J. Michael Straczynski "What kind of spaghetti code is NPM running?" "The kind that downloads Nyarlathotep's porn stash all over your frontal lobe if you read it the wrong way." --Abby and Matthew Lovelace "Weirdos willing to question the status quo are a precious societal resource that must not be squandered." --Sonya Mann "Why do so many Christians interpreting Donald Trump always talk about the Old Testament? Because if they used the New Testament they'd have to talk about the man who asked us to care for the poor and welcome the stranger. These Christians would have to talk about Christ." --James Martin "Asking whether torture is effective for obtaining information is like asking whether slavery is good for the economy. If that's the debate, we've already lost our moral compass." --Matt Blaze "Assuming that anyone cares about something just because YOU do is a huge mistake." --Ice-T "Use a drug in the exact opposite of the way you smoke cigarettes, and odds are you'll find divinity somewhere along the way." --Pookleblinky "We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid." --Benjamin Franklin "'person' is an interface that humans usually implement but by no means is restricted to them. Bots can be people too, but a lot of them aren't." --Kit Redgrave "You can't fix ducts with Duct Tape. It is absolute /shite/ for fixing ducts." --Adam Savage "So the thing _Hackers_ gets really really wrong isn't the computers and the hacking and the Gibson, it's how diverse, equal, and accepting infosec is of PoC, women, and other minority groups." --Ben Hughes "Dance like you're using the entropy generated by your movement to create cryptographic keys." --Vi "If revolution results only in a change of dictatorship, then it is hardly worth while." --Emma Goldman "I've long suspected that the central element of my job is to attempt to gauge the weirdness quotient of the real world." --William Gibson "You understand reality when everyone else is running around confused and angry and upset because they think reality is something happening to them, rather than something they are making every moment with every thought." --Andrew Hussie Revenge never pays what you think it will. "Ayn Rand's 'philosophy' is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society... To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil." --Gore Vidal "At 70 years old, if I could give my younger self one piece of advice, it would be to use the words 'fuck off' much more frequently." --Helen Mirren "People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use." --Soren Kierkegaard "Behind every major vulnerability forewarned by basic threat modelling there is an engineer with a hill to die on." --@zemnmez, on software developers claiming that reported 0-days in their projects don't actually exist "OPSEC will get you through times of no crypto better than crypto will get you through times of no OPSEC." --The Grugq "Being a programmer basically requires you to deal with extended periods of feeling like a moron punctuated by brief periods of feeling like a goddamn genius." --Matt Hink "They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past. It is not that they are afraid of being convinced. They fear only to appear ridiculous or to prejudice by their embarrassment their hope of winning over some third person to their side." --Jean-Paul Sarte, _Anti-Semite and Jew_ "World War III is a guerrilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation." --Marshall McLuhan Blowing out someone else's candle doesn't make yours burn any brighter. "The same generation who wanted all the amazing tech from _Snow Crash_, are the first to turn it all off when it actually arrives." --Ben Hughes "There is no neutral education. Education is either for domestication or for freedom." --Joao Coutinho "The left talks about what they believe other people will do for them. The right talks about what they know they can personally do." --Jack O'Spades "The fallacy endorsed by the libertarian/prepper/gun-nut axis claims that a single Great Man should be able to control his own destiny by force of will, that enough ammo and food and cruelty will lead to certain victory over the degenerate forces of the Liberal Sheeple Conspiracy. They imagine a very specific end-times scenario that has never actually existed, and they believe they're superior because they've prepared for it." --Max Anton Brewer The fact that there's a highway to Hell but only a stairway to Heaven says a lot about anticipated traffic volume. "Ideally, the player should realize they brought a big floppy dildo to a nuclear testing site." --Pookleblinky, on writing Delta Green characters "Being wrong isn't a bad thing like they teach you in school. It is an opportunity to learn something." --Richard Feynman "It's a dangerous thing to say what a picture is. If things get too specific, the dream stops." --David Lynch "No matter what, if you do something extraordinary, no matter what it is or how well or how badly you do it, there are going to be people who worship you for doing it, and there are going to be people who throw shit at you for doing it. The trick to surviving in this business is making sure that the first group doesn't go to your head, and the second group isn't right." --Phil Brucato Humanism is the replacement of faith in God with an equally unfounded faith in human beings. "How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world." --Anne Frank "When your lawyer starts crying, you know you're in trouble." --Timothy Leary "Simple words surface the true meaning." --dtluna "Hey, they are nice kids out on the road touring. What are you doing besides being a grumpy old fuck?" --Rob Zombie, on Baby Metal haters "Ned, _Animal House_ is fucking funny, and white people are crazy." --Richard Pryor, on _National Lampoon's Animal House_ "I'm very sorry to hear that the direct and predictable results of your actions happened to you." --Alex Baze "It's a violent society, snowflakes." --Nicole Giacomini "The reward for a job not fucked up is another job." --Bob Howard, _The Delerium Brief_ "I don't understand people who think that self-improving artificial intelligence will solve all of humanity's problems. We've already got self-improving natural intelligence and all it does is shitpost and be depressed." --Gargron "That's what I think Kekistan and Newgrounds and Columbine and all that followed are: They're nihilism. Not the zen kind. The kind that says we're trapped in a rapidly dying world and all death in the meantime is just euthanasia." --Patrick Gerard "The fuckface who was bombing black people in Texas probably came out of this shit [first decade Internet culture]. He was a little young for Newgrounds specifically, but I can see the path to being 'radicalized by the void,' if you will. Becoming a monster because you were taught that becoming a person is wrong... by 'radicalized by the void' I mean that there is a sort of person who does not want to be a person, who hates the idea of becoming a person and the responsibility associated with it. They want nothing more than to be left alone to be mediocre." --@gravislizard "The greatest orator, save one, of antiquity, has left it on record that he always studied his adversary's case with as great, if not with still greater, intensity than even his own." --John Stuart Mill "You have n problems. You try to solve them with Javascript. Now you have n! problems." --Unknown "Rebasing a Git repository is like fighting with chainsaw-nunchucks." --Bryce "We often shield ourselves from ethical problems by ignoring populations who would throw light on a project's wicked complexity. This is a good indication of an ethical problem: Turning a blind eye to people who will be affected by the system but who are difficult to reach or who may have inconveniently conflicting goals." --Tyler Schnoebelen "It's no good fighting an election campaign on the facts, because, actually it's all about emotion." --Dr. Alex Tayler, Cambridge Analytica "It sounds a dreadful thing to say, but these are things that don't necessarily need to be true. As long as they're believed." --Alexander Nix, CEO, Cambridge Analytica "When I was in an important position, they always complimented me, and when I lost this position, they forgot about me and did not keep their promise. Do not trust your position or the amount of money you have, nor your power, nor your intelligence, it will not last. " --Arnold Schwarzenegger "I feel like I have to be some expert on feminism, gender theory, endocrinology, sociology, genetics, history, gay rights, medicine, genital surgery just to defend the fact that I am here, in the world, not causing anyone any problems whatsoever. I wish these people would fuck off." --Paris Lees "Woke up to the kids listening to pop music. I think I'd rather discover they were drinking. Needless to say, it's time for 'the talk' about what real music is." --Jonny Nomad "You stop explaining yourself when you realize people only understand from their level of perception." --Jim Carrey "Satire is meant to ridicule power. If you are laughing at people who are hurting, it's not satire, it's bullying." --Terry Pratchett "I think even in the future there will be more than one [semiconductor company]. Intel, NotIntel, and Huawei." --Anonymous "Capitalism: If people aren't suffering, you're doing it wrong!" --David Turnau "The greater the bureaucratisation of public life, the greater will be the attraction to violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power could be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant." --Hannah Arendt, _On Violence_ "It can take you a long time, even as a micro-famous public figure, to learn that you really don't need to be a public figure all the time on the internets. Don't be this guy [Elon Musk]. You have things to do. Yes, you, reading this. Things to make or think about, time to enjoy and life to live." --Warren Ellis, on Twitter "The only useful idea [Richard] Dawkins ever had was corrupted into a term for vapid, derivative jokes." --Natalie Weizenbaum, on memes "PT Barnum's estimate was conservative." --Omnibus "Why Falcon Heavy and Starman? Life cannot just be about solving one sad problem after another. There need to be things that inspire you, that make you glad to wake up in the morning and be part of humanity. That is why we did it. We did for you." --Elon Musk "if you're in love, you've got to follow your heart and trust that God will explain to us why we sometimes fall in love with people of the same sex." --Garth Brooks "What makes you think it's your money? Screw them!" --Don Huffines (R), Texas senator, to students asking about school vouchers "Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich." --Napoleon Bonaparte "There's quick-and-dirty, and then there's overflowing-toilet." --Bryce "Freedom is dangerous... you've got to make very dangerous choices. You've got to be taught that your life is in your hands." --James Baldwin "Ignorance is the natural state of mind for a research scientist. People who believe they are ignorant of nothing have neither looked for nor stumbled upon the boundry between what is known and unknown in the universe." --Neil deGrasse Tyson "Dedicated to Foucault and Chomsky... just to prove that it is possible to be more pointlessly pretentious than White Wolf." --Kevin Hassal "A fervent need and passionate desire, however, do not reality make." --Beckett "I'm sick of this woman [Alma Allen, Texas state representative] and her ''don't touch my kid regardless what he/she did or will do again'' attitude. Perhaps a good paddling in school may keep me from having to put a bullet in him later." --Charles Cotton, board member, National Rifle Association "We don't have to fight open source, we have to exploit open source." --Larry Ellison "My impression of Twitter this week: Those kids better respect the government and the constitution and not try to take away my guns because I need them to resist the government!" --Ekaterina Sedia "Go troll somebody whose kid didn't spend the morning hiding in terror in a closet with her friends, asshole." --@suburbanlemon, on some jackass invading her Twitter feed "Always control access to the inside of your head from people that haven't earned the right to be there." --Warren Ellis "If you threaten responsible security researchers (who disclose their results) then the first indication of a vulnerability is going to be your customers' money disappearing." --Matthew Green "Remember: The news is not based on what is true, or even useful, but on what people will pay to hear." --The Ferrett "All governments lie." --I.F. Stone "We're going full 80's here, fucking lean in." --Ross Payton "I've come to appreciate the usefulness of the vile term 'virtue signaling'; it's employed almost exclusively by people who are incapable of empathy. An efficient red flag for the dangerously narcissistic." --Matt Blaze "George R.R. Martin is not your bitch." --Neil Gaiman "What did you think was going to happen?" --Paul Vixie "If you are EVER at a show with a performer and they break down, please for the love of all thats holy don't shout 'FUCK YOU FUCK YOU FUCK YOU.' Seriously, have some goddamn empathy. I don't care if it's Black Sabbath, Marilyn Manson, Eminem or Celine Dion. Demand your money back, sure. Any performer who is publicly breaking down on stage is going through a horrific enough time as it is. Don't make their personal fucking tragedy worse by throwing gas on it. Love your performers. They all mostly try pretty hard. We aren't machines. We're humans. Shit happens. Remember: When you're at a show, the person you're watching is a real person. Yes, they're a pro and we're good at switching modes. But you never know what is going on off that stage, in that person's life and heart. Always remember that, at every concert you go to ever." --Amanda Palmer "I am skeptical that prayers will achieve world peace." --The Dalai Lama "It is precisely when it appears most truthful that the image is most diabolical." --Jean Baudrillard "Many Americans will remain blissfully ignorant, if not aggressively supportive, of even the most extreme rights abuses - unless they believe that they themselves or people who look like them will be affected, in which case they will become highly agitated in defense of the very same rights that they are more than happy to watch be eroded when the victims are other people." --Glenn Greenwald "Sure, Kill Bill is a violent movie. But it's a Tarantino movie. You don't go to see Metallica and ask the fuckers to turn the music down." --Quentin Tarantino "Don't let fear steal your joy." --Lupa "Give us billionaires an extra hundred years and you'll know what true wealth disparity looks like." --Sean Parker "I consistently break a rule I consider to be not only fake but pernicious. I know what I'm doing and why." --Ursula K. Le Guin "Libraries need to be places of dignity and bountiful doubt, because dignity is hope and doubt is the path to wisdom." --Phil Shapiro "A company culture isn't defined by those fancy mission statements constructed by expensive consultants; it is defined by who gets fired for which reason." --Henry Baker "You don't incrementally learn a system. You eventually unlearn its necessary lies." --Dan Kaminsky The medicine of knowledge, in order to be effective, had often to be disguised. "Dangers lurk in all systems. Systems incorporate the unexamined beliefs of their creators. Adopt a system, accept its beliefs, and you help strengthen the resistance to change." --Leto Atreides II "Alpha males. So called because they're barely functional and missing most useful features." --The Book of Kels "People said, why is it always raining and always dark? 'Cause I fucking wanted it to be that way, okay?" ---Ridley Scott, on _Bladerunner_ "Plausible deniability is something you do when you have either power or impunity." --John Callas "You left with your trachea intact, this was a success for you." --Hasufin "Where the state lacks means of coercion, it is important to control what people think." --Noam Chomsky "You live your own blooper reel, and experience everyone else's highlight reel." --Cory Doctorow "I find that people ho believe we might be living in a computer simulation tend to be people who I could imagine being simulated most easily by a computer." --Joi Ito "There's an air of the herps everywhere in crypto." --Nuke Skyjumper, on Bitcoin "Failure is always an option. You must simply be prepared with other options in the event it comes unexpectedly." --Garrett Ellis "I suppose the underlying problem is, that in this day and age, a consensus on what constitutes a 'solution' to a problem is no longer achievable. There are holes and pitfalls everywhere and people putting their effort into one specific project may be seen as following the wrong track as they - as everyone else - are forced to rely on building blocks that can be regarded as suspicious. There is no common ground any more, nor any idea to agree on a way forward that could claim any degree of promising success." --Ralf Senderek "America's got a big problem with anything that's too interesting, particularly when it's black and white." --Andrew Eldritch, 1991 interview "The best things in the world are what I like to call gnarly. Gnarl is at the interface between order and randomness. Not all lock-step organized-and not just random scuzz. There's a whole theory to analyze this. The bottom line is that gnarly processes are, in effect, universal computations that can emulate anything... My point is that any interesting natural process is gnarly, and any such process is, in effect, a universal computer. Even a rock sitting on the ground. A stone is, after all, like a jiggling mass of a septillion atoms, connected by spring-like bonds. There's a lot happening inside a rock. Why shouldn't it be as intelligent as I am?" --Rudy Rucker "The writer's hustle never ends but it also doesn't have to turn you into a squirrel on five espressos." --Kitty Chandler "Star Wars is a lot like the Bible. Nobody believes everything in all of it." --The Ferrett "I believe that all automotive engineers are atheists because none of them believe in intelligent design." --Unknown mechanic "I should not have chugged the rest of that mocha on a semi empty stomach. I can now hear colors." --Lupa "Good is quiet, evil is loud. Good deeds often go unreported, even though they happen all the time. This contributes to a feeling that the entire world is constantly on fire, which isn't actually true." --Peter Martin "I once heard politics in America described as a civil war in a leper colony." --Terence McKenna "Look, I get the severity of our situation. We are living under an authoritarian government led by a reality TV star who is also a fascist white supremacist. I'm a queer, Native, organizer and dissident writer. Trust, I have concerns. But if you read history -- not American mythology, but history -- you will find that some people have always fared as poorly as you now fear you're about to. I don't say this with scorn. I say it because when we organize against these people, we need to know what we're actually up against, and what we're really fighting for. I'll fight alongside you, but I expect you to fight, not just for your family or people like you, but for the people your sense of justice has previously left behind." --Kelly Hayes "Works as documented. Which is to say, not at all." --Anonymous "PHP work today pays like COBOL work back in 1999." --Michael Graziano "Mike, the whole world is a circus if you look at it the right way. Every time you pick up a handful of dust, and see not the dust, but a mystery, a marvel, there in your hand, every time you stop and think, ''I'm alive, and being alive is fantastic!'' Every time such a thing happens, Mike, you are part of the Circus of Dr. Lao." --Dr. Lao, _The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao_ "Here is my recipe for dairy-free, sugar-free, vegan eggnog: Bourbon." --Bette Midler "Self-care is doing the hard stuff that makes your tomorrow you happy." --The Ferrett "If you can't make your own neurotransmitters, store-bought is fine." --Hasufin "If you read too many thinkpieces from wonks, you become blind to reality." --Eliza "Infosec keeps the lights on. Gotta eat. Hacking fulfills the soul. Gotta live." --Tinker "Most men believe themselves to be insightful speakers of truth to power, when in reality they don't even pass the Turing Test." --Phil McDuff "Even William Gibson and Neal Stephenson don't write science fiction anymore. Why bother? We live immersed in the cyberpunk culture that its OG prophets envisioned." --Claire L. Evans "Our television comes over our phone line. How science fictional of us." "I don't have enough drugs to deal with that." --The Doctor and Lyssa, on U-Verse "Folks, I think we need to start coming to terms with the idea that the rapture happened and only David Bowie and Prince made the cut." --Andrew Thaler "The malevolent leading the ignorant." --Junius "I wonder if widespread casually fascist beliefs have any relation to 40 years of cop shows about how civil rights just get in the way of catching the bad guys. Probably not." --Mark Popham "Being unironically supportive and kind is totally punk." --Rain "When the bomb tech goes 'Oh, shit,' that's when you know..." --Grant Imahara "Theory is when you know something, but it doesn't work. Practice is when something works, but you don't know why. Programmers combine theory and practice: Nothing works and they don't know why." --Unknown "Things don't have names intrinsically, we give them names." --Russell Targ "I'm considering becoming a corporation so I can get more personal rights." --Broken Fingers "This year we've seen Juggalos join the fight against President Trump while he threatened nuclear war on Twitter and senators defended pedophilia. Our most prescient science fiction didn't promise us flying cars; it promised us bowel disruptors." --Yonatan Zunger, comparing 2017.ev to _Transmetropolitan_ "It's getting to be so you can't even hold a series of secret meetings with agents of an authoritarian kleptocracy with a little help from Eric Prince without being criticized for it by mobs of rabid Neo-McCarthyites. Sad!" --Barret Brown "Satoshi Nakamoto is actually Elon Musk, who created it [Bitcoin] when he realized PayPal wasn't hard enough to use." --Eliza "Before the Cenobites come for Frasier (or even Noel Shemsky), they'd definitely come for Kenny." --Pookleblinky "Love your parents. We are so busy growing up, we often forget they are also growing old." --Unknown "The packet-switched networks had been around for a long time. But the Internet's a political invention." --Jaron Lanier "What we know and how we know it is very much part of a control mechanism." --George Stone "They say love wins. I'd say hate has a pretty strong track record." --Judah Friedlander "I'm not telling you to be negative, I'm telling you to stop being optimistic." --Anonymous Physician "He is a god. That does not make it right." --The Doctor "If you want a challenge more than writing just an hour of television, write an hour of television that is the last hour of television that the show will ever have on. Write it so that it could come back next fall. Write it so that it could possibly become a movie of the week. And write it so that it could still potentially be a feature film someday." --Scott Bakula "A century ago scarcity had to be endured; today, it has to be enforced." --Murrary Bookchin "Moral outrage absent of a plan is in fact adolescent, non-strategic, and counteproductive." --Eric Mann "Like many unmoderated comment sections, the _Wolfenstein II_ trailer is the purest argument against the notion that a marketplace of ideas will improve the world. It's a free-for-all between people who don't know or care about each other, can't figure out who's serious, and are having their entire debate under a video about a man named 'B.J. Blazkowicz' who's been fighting cyborg Nazis since before many of them were born." --Adi Robertson, on neo-Nazis getting angry about _Wolfenstein II_ "You wouldn't have to get drunk to bed Catherine Deneuve, I don't care what your sexual history to that point had been." --Susan Sarandon "There were no 'good old days.' There were days when your personal circumstances allowed you to not give a shit. The good old days are a lie." --John Rogers "Hacking has never NOT been about social justice. More people just happen to be talking about it now. We're sorry if that upsets you." --2600 Magazine "They're not sheep. They're lawyers, doctors, plumbers, and humans with different skills than us. We protect them; they protect us." --Tarah Wheeler, on everybody who isn't a hacker "Never underestimate the power of stupid people riled up by populism." --Bonzai "A video game is where you enslave a computer to hallucinate a novel for you." --Direlog "Television is the greatest cyberpunk invention of all time. It is, at once, magnificent and horrific." --Peter Waag and Steve Roberts "I've had hickeys from nurse sharks and my girlfriend thought I was cheating on her, but those usually end up being good memories in the long run." --Fabien Cousteau "The curse of the Internet: People now think because they can't find it on Google, it doesn't exist at all." --Elizafox "Strange that instantaneous global communication seems to be dividing the world instead of uniting it." --Timescanner "Never be deceived that the rich will allow you to vote away their wealth." --Lucy Parsons "People feel such a deep allegiance to their tribe that they have forsaken any commitment to truth." --Edward Snowden Hypocrites often have the best advice. "This seems like a good time for a drink and a cold, calculated speech with sinister overtones. A speech about politics, about order, brotherhood, power. But speeches are for campaigning. Now is the time for action." --Evil Morty "An experimental novel is just one in which the experiment clearly didn't work. I think this applies to music, too." --Rotating Skull "Of course I talk to myself! Sometimes I need expert advice." --Anonymous "AIM shutting down has made me realize that I'm older than the age I pretended to be in AOL chatrooms." --Wilkie "In a world of specialization, a sufficiently advanced generalist is indistinguishable from magic." --DJ Sundog "That punch is so powerful that the universe can't even handle it. Water moves out of the way so fast that little vacuums are formed called cavitation bubbles. These bubbles collapse immediately and the force of that collapse creates a second shockwave that even generates light and heat. That's some Mortal Kombat finishing move shit right there." --zefrank1, _True Facts About Mantis Shrimp_ "Saying 'this compound doesn't have enough nitro groups' is, for most chemists, like saying 'You know, this lab doesn't have enough flying glass in it' - pretty much the same observation, in the end." --Derek Lowe, _In the Pipeline_ You can feel sympathetic toward someone without condoning them. "If the Juggalos are a gang, then the Grateful Dead are the motherfucking OGs of that shit!" --ICP "There's literally no harm in shooting at computer-simulated people. It is literally not violent at all. "Think of the pixels, Silicon." "I do. Every day. I weep." --Silicon and Genetik "Nobody exists on purpose, nobody belongs anywhere, everybody's gonna die. Come watch TV." --Morty, _Rick and Morty_ "Can world leaders please stop waving their penis missiles at one another? Some of us are trying to do necromancy and martial arts over here!" --Orthaevelve "It's very true to say that I am somewhat haunted by the very real chance of failure with every album I make, and that fear gets worse every time. I don't sleep well, I'm riddled with self doubt and what tiny amount of confidence I have is brittle and easily broken. I have no idea if you will like the album, the music, the sleeve, the image, any of it. But, to a very large degree, my life hinges upon it. It's a frightening, precarious way to live to be honest." --Gary Numan If I don't drive around the park, I'm pretty sure to make my mark. If I'm in bed each night by ten, I may get back my looks again. If I abstain from fun and such, I'll probably amount to much; But I shall stay the way I am, Because I do not give a damn. --Dorothy Parker "There is a phrase in Vulcan for ''the particular moment you understand what the word 'fuck' is for.''" --Roachpatrol "Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?" --TS Eliot "Please. This isn't a bar fight. Have some class." --Alucard, _Castlevania_ "There will always be phenomena operating on scales smaller than the size of one's simulation pixel." --Kevin Heng "What is the sound of a billion knees jerking?" --RU Sirius "I looked like Don Knotts having a near-death experience." --Robert Perala "Be the dead, lifeless ball of rock you want to see in the cosmic neighborhood." --DJ Sundog "A fanatic is someone who, when they lose sight of their goals redouble their efforts." --Santayana "Hey, you - stop moshing. This isn't a Slayer show. You keep that shit up and I'll throw you out myself." --Ronan Harris, on stage, 20170818 "The worst thing Britain ever did was letting go of our colony and thinking Americans were capable of governing themselves without eventually resorting back to tribal politics. I can't believe a one-great empire would threaten everything it has built over generations just because a group of people give in to racism and xenophobia." --Martin Rhodes "Juggalos vs. Nazis is something I'd generally assume we would be watching on Syfy but hey, welcome to 2017." --@RealTinehNimjeh "Hexagons make it high tech!" --Bull the Ork Decker "By all means, compare these shitheads to Nazis. Again and again. I'm with you." --Mike Godwin, on the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA on 12 August 2017 (yes, THAT Mike Godwin) "When someone tells you who they are, believe them." --Maya Angelou "''Don't recklessly provoke nuclear conflict'' and ''be clearly opposed to Nazis'' are presumably among the easiest parts of a President's job." --Matt Blaze "You can't shake the Devil's hand and say you're only kidding." --They Might Be Giants "I believe that music is, in fact, an unintended side effect of the language system in the brain." --Kurt Harland "A Christian writer asked me, ''Don't you want the President to embody the Sermon on the Mount?'' I said, ''Absolutely not.''" --Pastor Robert Jeffress, Dominionist megachurch preacher "The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five." --Carl Sagan "In 2003, after the Iraq invasion you advised North Korea to 'draw the appropriate lesson from Iraq.' Three years later they got nuclear weapons." --Donte' Stallworth "The strangeness of a case increases in proportion to the distance, in either time or geographical distance, between the investigator and the location of the report." --Gibb-Smith's Rule "How long are we gonna let people keep pulling out Shaq, and making him advertise shampoo? He's bald." --Andrew Roach "It [Defcon] used to be full of hackers and we used to play Spot the Fed. Now you are all feds and we try to play Spot the Hacker." --Richard Thieme "I have in my pocket a radio studio, a television studio, and a movie studio. The entire world has changed; we need to rethink the way we're delivering our information." --Anthony Scaramucci, Wall Street financier, Trump White House Communications Advisor "That is not dead which superposed lies, and with strange physics death may be alive." --@cnc "Hey, are they playing pigeon piggy-back? Wait, are they? No, they're... that is NOT pigeon piggy-back. Oh, dear." --Bryce, on pigeon mating practices while at work "For the artist, work is not a means to an end; to make art is to be an artist, or to work is to be. This work ethic is a very profitable strategy: If you can make people believe in this mantra, they will beg for work, compete for work, and fight for work. To work is to be. To be lazy is to not be. And we keep on believing it." --Petra Van Brabandt "Instead of the most impressive student film ever made, we had the least impressive professional film ever made." --Dan O'Bannon, on _Dark Star_ "You get talent when you discover the ground of your pain." --HR Giger "One of the most disturbing things is how utterly confident some election officials are that their systems weren't attacked or compromised. Competant people who defend high value systems almost never speak with this kind of confidence, because it's almost never warranted." --Matt Blaze "Make sure they don't hit the weak point! Why does it even HAVE a weak point?! Shouldn't it be covered??" --Skullmageddon, _Double Dragon Neon_ "Choose your leaders with wisdom and forethought. To be lead by a coward is to be controlled by all that the coward fears. To be lead by a fool is to be lead by the opportunists who control the fool. To be lead by a thief is to offer up your most precious treasures to be stolen. To be lead by a liar is to ask to be told lies. To be lead by a tyrant is to sell yourself and those you love into slavery." --Octavia E. Butler, _Parable of the Talents_ "Every star may be a sun to someone." --Carl Sagan "A world in which there are monsters and ghosts and things that want to steal your heart is a world in which there are angels and dreams and a world in which there is hope." --Neil Gaiman "You'll note Devo does not say you may whip it, nor do they say you should whip it. Must. You must whip it. It's right there in the RFC." --DJ Sundog "In my experience, calls for 'civility' are often tells for those who are looking for an excuse to ignore you." --John Scalzi "How fucking amazing is it that there are DARPA supercomputers right here? What a time to be alive!" --int80, on stage at DefCon 24 "Approach all situations with the confidence of a 16 year old who has smoked pot twice talking to a 16 year old who has smoked pot once." --Rachel Kaye Clarke "When it comes to the population of Great Britain being invited by a multinational to wipe their bottoms on what appears to be the work of a Knight of the Realm, then a last stand must be taken." --Sir Roger Penrose, on suing the Kimberly-Clark Corporation for using some of his work on mathematical quasiperiodic tiling on their toilet paper "Play is often talked about as if it were a relief from serious learning. But for children, play is serious learning. Play is really the work of childhood." --Mr. Rogers "Do not go gently into that neon night." --Cody Ellingham "Because I need to eat something first. Or I'll kill you dead." "Your body's mostly functional, isn't it? Just blind in one eye?" "What?" "I have no compunctions against Shang Tsung-ing someone who ganks me. Even you." --Lyssa and the Doctor "_The Matrix_ is surely the kind of film about the Matrix that the Matrix would have been able to produce." --Jean Baudrilliard "For centuries, professors say, the scientific fraternity has adhered to a 'hidden curriculum' - right there, in invisible block letters, beneath the sign saying 'Goggles must be worn at all times.' No. Crying. In. Science. And for good reason, many argue. In this world of double-blind trials and peer-reviewed articles, objectivity rules all. Otherwise cracks open up and doubt seeps in, rotting the very foundation science is built upon." --Meghan Walsh "If you find yourself feeling like you're down 90 IQ points, it's time to start looking for different points of view." --Meredith Patterson "We all have one foot in a fairytale, and the other in the abyss." --Paulo Coelho "Wait! Don't leave me with another enigma!" --Steven Universe "A sitting President is immune from indictment as well as from further criminal process." --Randolph D. Moss, Assistant Attorney General, 2000.ev "The paradoxical 'power' of a constant stream of grotesque presidential fuck-ups. Response, becoming equally constant, becomes meaningless." --William Gibson "If a talentless hack can get into the White House, talented people (such as yourselves) may be able to affect actual positive change." --Rachel Kaye Clarke "When will we stop thinking the high road works in this country?" --Cat Valente "By the time we're five or six years old all the mystery of reality has been carefully tiled over with words. This is a bird, this is a house, this is the sky, and we seal ourselves in within a linguistic shell of dis-empowered perception." --Terence McKenna "Jerusalem (Moore's novel) wasn't a call to somehow reinstate the past, or a suggestion that the past should have remained static, but rather was merely pointing out what an enormous fuckup we've made of the future: A future geared towards seemingly endless novelty and change for its own sake, where even the basic principles of progress and moving forward seem to have been completely abandoned and forgotten. There is absolutely no reason why things couldn't genuinely progress while still respecting and retaining everything that was good and valuable about the situation they were progressing from." --Alan Moore "Mathematically prove IRC. Please, someone, waste 40 years on this, I want to see this so much now." --A. Wilcox "The world is going to judge you, no matter what you do. So, live your life the way you want to." --Anonymous "Protip: Don't schedule your expensive disinfo to come out on a Friday morning before Easter on the same day as a new Star Wars trailer is due out." --@pwnallthethings "The chief deficiency I see in the skeptical movement is its polarization: Us versus Them - the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you're sensible, you'll listen to us; and if not, to hell with you. This is nonconstructive. It does not get our message across. It condemns us to permanent minority status." --Carl Sagan "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when it salary depends on his not understanding it." --Upton Sinclair "You laugh! That is a laugh of shame!" "I'm not ashamed." "You should be!" --Lyssa and the Doctor, on the state of his coffeemaker "Not everything you work on has to be immediately valuable. If it holds your interest, it is a worthwhile persuit." --Jen Savage "Sometimes, it blows my mind how much crazy good music, art, and other goodies are out there on the interwebs, for free. Truly, we live in the age of abundance. And then I realize that there are still people starving. Abundance, check. Justice, nah." --Pettter "The world will not be destroyed by those who do evil, but by those who watch them without doing anything." --Albert Einstein "Cats weren't meant to be Menger sponges." --Josh Millard "If the ACLU is a front for the Russian government, we have bigger problems than TLS." --Edward Snowden The more I learn about Jenkins, the more I love shell scripts. "As a professor, Fox News tells me I can turn my students into Communists, and experience tells me I can't even make them do the readings." --Paul Musgrave Historic Overdosing: To live in a period of time when too much seems to happen. Major symptoms include addiction to newspapers, magazines, and TV news broadcasts. --Douglas Coupland, _Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture_ "The fog of cyberwar is the war." --The Grugq "You think I'm bad for America." "Yeah." --Sean Hannity getting shut down by Ted Koppel "No one really realizes they are living in a bubble until something or someone bursts it." --Mark Larkento "The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it." --George Orwell "No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices." --Edward R. Murrow "People who do the work should be the ones you listen to, less than to visionaries." --Linus Torvalds "We wanted cyberpunk, we wanted _Bladerunner_, we just didn't think about the politics and suffering that got us there." --Ben Hughes "The civil rights leaders of the 60's did not imagine their only power to affect change was through the market." --Jenka "What are you looking for?" "My passport! I've the strangest feeling that the solution to this case is to be found on the beach of another country, preferably one without an extradition treaty!" --_Dirk Gently_ "She's so irresponsible, breaking things and leaving things everywhere." "That's our job!" "I know! Who does she think she is?" --Bryce and Anonymous Cow-orker "Happiness is a package of bacon squares on day 10." --Walt Cunningham, astronaut "I work very hard to stay in human form." --Lyssa "Activism is my rent for living on the planet." --Alice Walker "Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception." --George Orwell "I keep asking myself: What sequence of events, in all human history, was stranger, more bizarre, more tragically ridiculous than this?" --William Gibson "But we don't really like sharing each other's brains, as it turns out. They're not well-developed. They're kind of nasty." --RU Sirius "Shallow understanding from people of goodwill is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection." --Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. "Like to hear a vampire folk tale?" "Vampires have folk tales?" "A laser is assigned to find the darkness. Since it lives in a room without doors, or windows, or any other source of light, it thinks this will be easy. But everywhere it turns it sees brightness. Every wall, every piece of furniture it points at is brightly lit. Eventually it concludes there is no darkness, that light is everywhere." --Jukka Sarasti and Siri Keeton, _Blindsight_ "Disk I/O: The only chance you have to go to the bathroom during a hackathon." --The Doctor, loading 560 gigs of data into a database "What is this?" "It's HTML, Jim, but not as we know it." "Oh, God, you're a nerd." --Nick and the Doctor "Panic, doubt, fear... all because a name is no longer a hyperlink." --The Silicon Dragon "Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darkness of other people." --Carl Jung "The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally." --Salena Zito, on Donald Trump's 2016 campaign "Over the years, we've effectively brainwashed the core of our audience to distrust anything that they disagree with." --John Ziegler "I prefer 'manic-depressive' because 'bipolar' sounds like I'm a bisexual walrus." --Carrie Fisher (RIP) "Hello. At this time of celebration and togetherness, we have the chance to reflect on the year gone by. And I think we can all agree that 2016 has been a big pile of shit. So, my advice to you is drink responsibly and be merry. Have a very Happy Christmas." --Heather Mirren "Let's look at things for a minute: For the last year, I've been trying to save the world. Look how well that's gone. Look at my track record here!" --Hasufin I'm not goth. I just spill spaghetti sauce on everything but black. "The minute we can automate a task, we downgrade the relevant skill involved to one of mere mechanism." --Gideon Lewis-Kraus, on AI "Shrimp are mentioned four times as often as homosexuals in the Bible! What does that say?" "It says that crustacea require more supervision than homosexuals." --Gail and Bryce "I don't cry, much." "But how would you cry, if someone made you cry?" "I spit," she said. "The ducts are routed back into my mouth." "Then you've already learned an important lesson, for one so young." --Molly and Armitage, _Neuromancer_ "We parents tell our children that when you know you've lost an argument or a race, the right thing to do is to be a good sport and to ''get 'em next time.'' But if there is no next time, or you know that every next time you are going to be in the loser's lane again, what's the use of being a good sport? It would make you look even more ignorant, and more like a loser, to pretend like you think you have a chance." --Susan McWilliams "This is all typical crypto talk, ignoring the realities." --Jerry Leichter "I hear what you're saying, and I agree - it would be incredibly dangerous, a fool's errand. But aren't the true fools the ones who don't seize an opportunity, despite all the inherent risks?" --Pearl, _Steven Universe_ "It's not what you've done. It's what they can make stick." --Munin "Human beings can always be relied upon to assert, with vigor, their God-given right to be stupid." --Dean Koontz, _Seize the Night_ "You plead for happiness in life, but security means more to you, even if it costs you your backbone or wrecks your whole life. Since you have never learned to seize upon happiness, to enjoy it and safeguard it, you lack the courage and integrity." --Wilhelm Reich "The world is changed by your example, not your opinion." --Anonymous "It's amazing how much you can get away with if you don't go out of your way to cause trouble." --Hunter S. Thompson "By tolerating stores and social networking building intelligence on us, we've already given permission to profile us any way anyone wants." --Jonathan Zdziarski "We've gone beyond facepalm! We've reached nosepinch!" --Arethinn "I'm a Leninist. Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that's my goal, too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today's establishment." --Steve Bannon, chief strategist for the Donald Trump administration "'But we have to protect the children' should not be the root password to rational thinking." --Matt Blaze "You're looking strangely polychromatic today." --Hasufin "Pwnage before politics." --Sergey Bratus "I have no dialtone and I must scream." --Travis Goodspeed "There's no need to construct a mandatory memory hole when people are easily incentivized to build their own." --Maradydd "History never repeats itself, but occasionally it rhymes." --Mark Twain "The greatest gift you can give the world is being quiet when you do not know what you're talking about." --Carlos Maza "Nobody gives a shit about your [Fidel] Castro thinkpiece unless your name's Raul and you're the current president." --Xeni Jardin The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters. "You'll never win an argument with reason, logic and facts with a person who ''thinks'' with their lizard brain." --Arek Fressadi "At this time the cost of drawing these faces is about 20 to 25 cents per face on the IBM 360-67 at Stanford University using the Calcomp Plotter. Most of this cost is in the computing, and I believe tha it should be possible to reduce it considerably." --Herman Chernoff, _The Use of Faces to Represent Points in K-Dimensional Space Graphically_, 1972 "There's hyperlinks in all of it. If you can stick three words of TS Eliot into a line you've automatically involved and enveloped the whole of _The Wasteland_ and that just enriches what you do." --Andrew Eldritch "Treat every poisoned word as a promise. When a bigoted blusterer tells you he intends to force members of a religious minority to register with the authorities - much like those friends and family of Siegfried's who stayed behind were forced to do before their horizon grew darker - believe him. Don't try to be clever. Don't lean on political intricacies or legislative minutia or historical precedents for comfort. Don't write it off as propaganda, or explain it away as just an empty proclamation meant simply to pave the path to power. Take the haters at their word, and assume the worst is imminent." --Liel Leibovitz "I'm getting tired of saying ''Next year will be better.'' Look to yourselves and the people around you and learn how to protect the most vulnerable. And listen." --Warren Ellis "Be authentic to your dreams. Be authentic to your own ideas about yourself. Grind away at your own minds and bodies until you become your own invention. Be mad scientists. Here at the end of the world, it's the only thing worth doing." --Doktor Sleepless "The thing with time travel is, you can't overthink it. Just roll with it and see what happens. And above all try not to do anything retarded." --Dave Strider (Yup. Spoken like a Time Lord.) "People usually decide to believe what you're telling them for no reason other than knowing that you get paid a lot of money to tell people about these things. It seems dirty, like exploiting one bug in order to fix another, but it's a bug in people's brain software that you can exploit to get them to believe things that are actually true." --Bear "The Dutch customs once thought my pictures were photos. Where on Earth did they think I could have photographed my subjects? In Hell, Perhaps?" --HR Giger "Light thinks it travels faster than anything, but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it." --Terry Pratchett Meritocracy is the divine right of kings for atheist technocrats. "The clear message of 2016 to aspiring public servants is to avoid modern communications technology whenever possible." --Matt Blaze "How many of you know how much trouble you can get into minding your own business?" --Frank E. Stranges "If they did [call me a sissy because I studied ballet], I'd stomp 'em and do a pirouette on their heads." --Ken Avery, Cincinatti Bengals linebacker, 1969-1975 "With each set of three books, I've commenced with a sort of deep reading of the fuckedness quotient of the day. I then have to adjust my fiction in relation to how fucked and how far out the present actually is." --William Gibson "_Neuromancer_ was written in 1982-1983, and a single Sinclair ZX-81 was the only computer I'd seen. Owner's excitement struck me most about it." --William Gibson "It's important to work hard to be popular on the Internet, so when you have to crowdsource your medical care you've got people to chip in." --@loather "Being wizards, by the way, doesn't give you a good reason to be arcane. Secret wizards are no use to anybody. I'm not going to sacrifice a chicken to my wifi router for you or anybody." --Warren Ellis "The RSA conference is what the world would look like if LinkedIn became a LARP." --Ben Hughes "Analyze your mistakes. You've already paid the tuition, you might as well get the lesson." --Tim Fargo "Let's 'Operate Heavy Machinery' this." --Greg, _Technical Difficulties Podcast_ "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." --Kurt Vonnegut "First do it, then do it right, then do it better." --Addy Osmani "One of the best programming skills you can have is knowing when to walk away for a while." --Oscar Godson "There are two ways to get immediate compliance without the use of force. That's either the threat of force, or previously established trust." --Spencer Reid "Mathematics is a language plus reasoning. It is like a language plus logic. Mathematics is a tool for reasoning." --Richard Feynman "The use of confusion for influence relies upon a simple principle: A person, when feeling like they are drowning, will grasp whatever solid object is presented to them." --Chase Hughes "We're not out to watch the whole word, just all the world that's got crime." --Ross McNutt, president, Persistence Surveillance Systems (think about that a little...) "Rebooting is an admission of failure, it will not be tolerated." --Anonymous Cow-orker "I'm looking at some C code, and there's evidence that I wrote it but I don't remember." --Anonymous Cow-orker "Never assume the obvious is true." --William Safire "And.. whoever down there is smoking weed, put it the fuck out. I don't come into your house and smoke, don't fucking come into mine and smoke." --Ronan Harris, on stage, 20161009 "How long shall they kill our prophets while we stand aside and look?" --Bob Marley Knowledge protects. Ignorance endangers. "The only thing that you absolutely have to know is the location of the library." --Albert Einstein "You don't need their permission. They never asked for yours." --DJ Sundog "The degree to which people will stubbornly insist that _their_ experience of a word is the correct/universal one is both shocking and sad." --Aaron Muszalski "People love any evidence that fits their narrative so much they will make excuses." --Leslie Carhart "Hollywood's a great place to vacation, but I wouldn't want to live there. The people don't have a concept of reality. Their reality is how good they pretend." --Randall "Tex" Cobb "It's only a problem if you care about the outcome. I'm more interested in learning from the masters." --@thegrugq, on Guccifer2 "The thing that doesn't fit is the thing that is most interesting." --Richard Feynman "By not investing in the imaginative growth of the young we would seem to be setting up a massive failure of creativity, progress and imagination for the not too distant future. This may seem a bleak appraisal, but a quick glance at mainstream film, television, music, literature or comic books appears to confirm that the last twenty or thirty years haven't been exactly bursting with new and transformative ideas." --Alan Moore "I went to the Howard Street Fair last weekend. I saw less penis than I did that time we went to brunch in the Castro. Note that I did not say 'no penis,' I said 'less penis.'" --Hasufin "2% of the people think. 3% of the people think they think. 95% of the people would rather die than think." --George Bernard Shaw "The purpose of fear is to raise your awareness, not to stop your progress." --Steve Maraboli On the Internet, everybody is a multi-Ph.D polymath with the conscience of Hannibal Lecter. "Absorb what is useful, discard what is not, add what is uniquely your own." --Bruce Lee "How big is Visual Studio these days, anyway?" "Like, a billion gigs, it seems. Honestly have no clue. The installer download is under 1MB. [It] does a `curl | powershell`, for all I know." --The Doctor and Genetik "Governments should not mandate patriotism. Governments should earn patriotism." --Former governor Jesse Ventura "Those who are able to se beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed by the masses." --Plato Stop me if you've heard this one before: Wayne Hussey dies and goes to Heaven. Upon entering the pearly gates, he sees Andrew Eldritch sitting upon a golden throne. He turns to Saint Peter and whispers, "Wait, Andrew Eldritch is dead, too?" Saint Peter whispers back, "No, that's God. He's just a Sisters fan." "When players feel the need to automatize some aspect of the game [MMORPG, FPS], that means it is so boring that they don't feel it's worth their time and so simple to do that they can program a machine to do that. Looking at which parts of your game players automatize gives you a hint to which parts you need to make more interesting and more mentally challenging." --Philipp, on online game players using bots while they play "The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was Congress' response to the film _Wargames_. Anything can happen." --Micah F. Lee "My time on this Earth is getting shorter and shorter each day, but no matter how old I get, and even when I am dead, _Mr. Wizard's World_ will never die." --Don "Mr. Wizard" Herbert "Power is maintained through the perception of power. Exposing incompetance erodes the perception that stupid institutions are powerful." --Julian Assange "It's [Neuromancer] not really about an imagined future. It's a way of trying to come to terms with the awe and terror inspired in me by the world in which we live." --William Gibson "Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere might be having a good time." --H.L. Mencken Unless you are over sixty, you were not promised flying cars. You were promised a cyberpunk dystopia. And you're getting it. "I was such an asshole for a while, I was trying to make up for it by being sober, which I was all during the 80's, which is a bizarre decade to be sober in." --Grace Slick, vocalist, Starship "Objective truths are established by evidence. Personal truths by faith. Political truths by incessant repetition." --Neil deGrasse Tyson "Sometimes power doesn't corrupt, it stupefies." --Josh Juran "I was not proud of what I had learned, but I never doubted that it was worth knowing." --Hunter S. Thompson "When people say it ''feels like a William Gibson novel,'' it's exponentially harder to *write* a William Gibson novel." --William Gibson "Potatoes have strong genetic ties to tomatoes and eggplants. But their more distant cousins include tobacco, chili peppers, deadly nightshade, and the hallucinatory drug-producing flower, datura. This is a phylogenetic family that is ready to throw down, chemically speaking." --Maggie Koerth-Baker "We hoped for a future free of toil, we got cat videos." --seanv2, on Mondo 2000 "If you want to write stories that might anger a billionaire, you need to work for another billionaire yourself, or for a billion-dollar corporation. The law will not protect you. There is no freedom in this world but power and money." --Tom Scocca "There's nothing wrong with religions, and there's plenty of them, but you don't want them to get in the way of your journey." --Whitley Streiber "Ending the existence of trusted parties and their ability to [Mt] Gox people, if you recall, was sort of the point of the block chain. It failed." --Ray Dillinger Sometimes the killfile serves best. "Come over to the blue team. We have endless frustration and bourbon." --Munin "I found [J. Allen] Hynek's observation to be trenchant, for it implied that we Americans no longer attach much importance to distinguishing between fabricated and real events." --Ed Conroy, _Report On Communion_ "The Internet is basically Tom Riddle's diary: Seductive, addictive, you don't know where it keeps its brain, and it's trying to kill you." --Kaitlyn Tiffany "Brian Molko quit watching the news a couple of years ago, apparently. I did that for a while; I kept getting tsk'd at by people who thought I was adulting wrong. And apparently people keep doing to him the same thing they kept doing to me, which is insisting he has to hear about things that make him sad no matter how diligently he avoids actually reading the damn newspaper." --Arabella Flynn "Hi, can I expense a sledgehammer?" "WHAT?!?" --Bryce and the rest of his office "Congratulations, Wikileaks, you're drunk on the power of dumping shit that helpdesk employees have access to. DNC employees are just people doing a job, not minions of Cobra Commander. Why are you dumping voicemail recordings of children? You're massively wasting our fucking time with this shit. I could be reading Literotica right now instead I'm cursing people out on Twitter." --@swiftonsecurity "In Cyberspace, the difference between domestic and foreign, in fact the difference between any country and any other country, the difference between us and them, is extremely blurry. If it exists at all." --John Perry Barlow, 1 December 1992 "What's this, my mantra?" "It's the wi-fi password. We're not savages." --Stephen Strange and Mordo, _Doctor Strange_ "If you get too comfy in rich-people land, in New York or Dubai, you might stay here and belong to them." --Molly Crabapple "When the world ends, I want my last conscious thought to be, ''..the hell is that noise?''" --Arabella Flynn "Is that the running joke? 'Fix it, Ed?'" "Fix it, Ed." --Overheard at HOPE 11 "You are very black and white - you have no grey. There are no qubits in this picture!" --Anonymous "The difference between authoritarian regimes and 'democratic' ones is that Hacking Team customers jail, torture, and kill, where the 'democratic' ones have gentler ways of managing dissent." --Phineas Fisher "There's class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning." --Warren Buffet http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yourmoney/26every.html "If you're going to San Diego, buy hand sanitiser, gallons of it, and some one-a-day multivitamin bombs, and lots of water. Don't eat sugar. Carry loperamide and ibuprofen. Use antiperspirant deodorant and pack more underwear than you think you'll need. Avoid skin in all forms. Denounce the sun. Wear shades to prevent eye contact. Respect the fursona. Store your fluids. Go home. Sit in the corner of the room. Think about what you've done." --Warren Ellis, on the San Diego Comicon "Sometimes, the elegant implementation is a function. Not a method. Not a class. Not a framework. Just a function." --John Carmack "The great paradox of SF is that it's largely a bunch of humble humanities grads entertaining scientists and engineers. For every Peter Watts in the field, there are 5 other writers with English degrees (or no degree)." --Jack Graham Dwayne McDuffie's Rule of Three: Include three non-white and/or non-male characters in a story and it will be perceived as pandering or inaccessible to most of its audience. It will probably be seen as pushing an agenda, additionally. "I'm surrounded by idiots of my own design." --Joel, _MST3k_ "It is indeed hard to try to navigate a middle course between scary and crazy things on all sides." --Paul Werbos "How's your Sanskrit?" "I'm fluent in Google Translate." --Wong and Strange, _Doctor Strange_ "I suggest that excessive educational and skill specification is a serious mistake and potential hazard to our educational and social system. We will hurt individuals, raise labor costs improperly, create disillusion and resentment, and destroy valid job standards by setting standards that are not truly needed for a given task." --James R. Bright, Harvard Business School "Unsanctioned human experimentation is totally cyberpunk." --Seele "Amongst people who have utterly given up on the future, political movements don't need to promise any desirable and realistic change." --William Gibson "Take care, look after each other, and always be wary of old men in a hurry, because they'll sell out your future without thinking twice." --Warren Ellis "The thing I like about it the most is, it means the system is beginning to collapse, and everything is slowly breaking down. I enjoy chaos and disorder, not just because they help me professionally. They're also my hobby. You see, I'm an entropy fan. In this country, the whole social structure - just beginning to collapse. You watch. Just beginning now, to come apart at the edges and the seams." --George Carlin (RIP) "Americans see themselves first and foremost as consumers. Their status as citizens is decidedly second place." --Julian Friedland "Cryptography is wonderful because it provides clear markers for which parts of the system to attack. Look for the crypto as a beacon, then look next to it to find all the holes and flaws." --Peter Gutmann "Dare to be stupid. It's very hard to make any decent contributions if you are too afraid of looking dumb." --Paul Syverson "Not only is the map the terrain - sometimes you can only get places by folding the map." --Edger, _Netrunner_ "We all have shame. We all have guilt. But it depends on how you own it." --Velvet Steele "There are no exploits. The code is law." --Holocauster-Ride "Corporations are transhuman immortal life forms that view humans as their inconvenient gut flora." --Cory Doctorow "Power corrupts, and Powerpoint corrupts absolutely." --Vint Cerf "Bagels are just donuts who got serious about life." --Anonymous Cow-orker "One of the things I learned from experimental physics was that you should always ask the question even if you think you know the answer." --Phillip Hallam-Baker "The next time anybody asks me about my religion, I think I'll reply ''geek orthodox''." --Neil deGrasse Tyson "In terms of teaching our children the question isn't so much ''Are you parenting the right way?'' as it is ''Are you the adult that you want your child to grow up to be?''" --Brene Brown refuctoring - verb - The process of taking a well-designed piece of code and, through a series of small, reversible changes making it completely unmaintainable by anyone except yourself. "Anybody that tells you that your work is - that's denigrating your work or denigrating the effort you put into it is an asshole." --Adam Savage "The Berkeley mob once called (Timothy) Leary and me 'the counter-culture of the counter-culture.' I'm some kind of antibody in the New Age movement. My function is to raise the possibility, 'Hey, you know, some of this stuff might be bullshit.'" --Robert Anton Wilson "Where angels fear to tread, the Pentagon has no problem." --Art Bell "It never occurred to me when we set this up that we'd have complete idiots administering the drugs." --Dr. Jay Chapman, inventor of the modern lethal injection protocol "If you ban bad ideas, you don't make them go away. If anything, you probably strengthen them because now those people have a cause, they feel like they're oppressed, they feel like they're martyrs. I would much rather have bad ideas come out and breathe in the light so that they can be engaged, and critiqued, and dissected and you can change people's minds than have those people have to hide and sort of slink in the dark where I think it becomes much more dangerous." --Glenn Greenwald "Our spiritual practice is meant to make us dangerous, to temper us like steel into cogs that grind the wheels of injustice to a halt." --Nichola Torbett "I just don't get what he's on about. I don't see the connection. A London journalist told me when Billy did his _Cyberpunk_ press junket over there, he made it a condition of getting an interview with him, that every journalist had to have read _Neuromancer_. They all did but when they met with Billy, the first thing that became really apparent was that Billy hadn't read it. So they called him on it, and he said he didn't need to... he just absorbed it through a kinda osmosis. I don't know." --William Gibson "It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of executioners." --Michael Ratner "What the hell, Oracle..." "A planet full of people have uttered precisely those words many times in the past." --Anonymous Cow-orker and Bryce "Punk had a purpose. Every gig would benefit something: A rape crisis centre, a donkey sanctuary, an old people's home. It was positive. We wanted a nice world to live in. Only, this time, we weren't asking - we were telling." --Steve Ignorant, former lead singer for Crass "The world is full of assholes. Everybody's got one. There's no need to double the number by being intentionally cruel." --Seanan McGuire "Meta-modernism, made famous by its most famous practitioner Shia Labeouf, is an intellectual movement that bridges the vast chasm between the genuine, trustworthy authenticity we all seek and the lies we constantly face from cynical corporate PR departments and the misleading breadcrumbs planted by guerilla marketers... you should be left at the edge of your seat, not knowing whether you should voice the strong feelings someone evoked in the deepest recesses of your soul, or whether you were thoroughly had." --Emin Gun Sirer "The more that the Bitcoin community and the tabloid press demand a proof-of-spend and examine the results they're given, the more it demonstrates how humans seem to be isolated by cryptography not joined." --IanG "I'm one personal tragedy and a few billion dollars shy of dressing up as a bat and punching crime." --Fred Hicks "When the world is going bad, there is always Siouxie." --Lyssa "In Unknown Armies, *not* being a messed up, obsessive freak is a goddamn superpower." --Jon Hendrickson "If your work concerns sexuality, you will be made a body. You will be reminded - by the media, even if you are a part of it, and by the people who make laws for you - that your body constitutes the limits of your contributions." --Melissa Gira Grant "You can be agender, bi-gender, cisgender, demigender, graygender, intergender, genderless, genderqueer or third gender - but by God, you will accept a label." --Jemima Lewis (No, I won't.) "Expect the best, plan for the worst, fuck what others think, and do your own thing." --Kavinsky "The Internet is for anything you and, like, twenty other people are passionate about. Like alien porn." --Amberite "I /almost/ feel bad for my NPCs. They do not have a good life expectancy." --Hasufin, on running RPGs Never apologize for knowing your shit. "Frankly, I can color things with my nipples and it would be more productive than policing the Internet." --Lyssa "If we deny their porn they are sure to give in." --Kernel Panic, on xHamster.com blocking the entire state of North Carolina to protest their anti-LGBTQ law "Just because you're Wittgenstein doesn't mean you can't be camp." --Andrew Eldritch "I can no longer say that I have never written a garbage collector in anger." --Josh Juran "When the plane is dark is your time to frolic and romp." --Deviant Ollam "A strong case can be made for either viewpoint by leaving out the opposing arguments." --Conrad Dunkerson Control the input and you are master of the output. "There is no dignity in television." --Grant Imahara "There's a pretty good chance if you're not controlling your own mind, somebody would be happy to do it for you." --Laurie McDonald "I am the sysadmin, and I am free to be as lazy as I like to be. And I can also have the specific desire not to order properly something with bootup, because ordering it would be overkill and loss of time. Also, when I want to 'order' it, I need to try it in a simple and easily revertible way beforehand." --patroclo7, on using /etc/rc.local instead of fighting with systemd "I made the visit [to Gotha] deliberately, in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to change these allegations merely to 'propaganda'." --General Dwight D. Eisenhower, on the Holocaust "You're such a Luddite." "You know I have a flying car, right?" --Rosalind and Coulson, _Agents of SHIELD_ "why are we so fucking awesome" "Dave. That's the best fucking question. Anybody ever asked." --Dave and Dirk Strider, _Homestuck_ "I would much rather be murdered by a self-aware robot than an unaware human." --Genetik "I got a lot of crap for not wearing a dust mask while using Bondo. The problem is, I need a certain amount of Bondo dust in my system." --Adam Savage "A law guaranteeing privacy simply insures that bugs - microphones and lenses and so forth - are that much harder to spot." --Lazarus Long "The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind." --Howard Philips Lovecraft "John, stop it. The degree of maturity you are showing here is really bad for morale." --Rose LaLonde, _Homestuck_ "I'm not going as The Gimp from _Pulp Fiction_ - find something else! Put that cage away!" --Alton Brown, before cosplaying at Comic-Con 2015 with Adam Savage "To make people into obedient sheep, it is enough to let them know they are being watched. That alone will make people change their behaviour. They will avoid disfavoured opinions and activities, and speak and act as they are required." --Sean Gabb "Not everyone wants to write the world from first principles like it's 1995." "Well, /I/ do, but I accept that I am in the sad situation of needing to crack systems written by people with more regrettable tastes than mine." --John Adams and JWZ, on reverse engineering websites "Espionage is the world's second-oldest profession. And what it has in common with the first profession is: Someone's going to get it in the end." --Jason Matthews "Everybody wants to be the champion. Nobody wants to lift heavy-ass weights." --Ronnie Coleman, eight-time Mr. Olympia body builder "We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did." --John Ehrlichman, Richard M. Nixon's Chief of Domestic Policy "If you're going to commit a war crime, just commit a war crime. Go big or go home!" --Ross Payton, _Role Playing Public Radio_ "When libraries become illegal, you know something went wrong." --Alexandra Elbakyan "We should think carefully about the reality of war. Most of us have been conditioned to regard military combat as exciting and glamorous - an opportunity for men to prove their competence and courage. Since armies are legal, we feel that war is acceptable; in general, nobody feels that war is criminal or that accepting it is criminal attitude. In fact, we have been brainwashed. War is neither glamorous nor attractive. It is monstrous. Its very nature is one of tragedy and suffering." --The Dalai Lama "Wait, there are quantum mechanics truthers now?" --Julian Sanchez "Never underestimate the power of a well-aimed bureaucracy to obliviously steamroll otherwise intractable problems." --James K. Haughton "There is such hypocrisy with people watching porn then complaining about those who act in it." --Nick Goddard "The minute you start thinking that you have the truth is the minute you have lost." --Phil Brucato "The public is easily amenable to lies: The more lies there are, the greater the support for war." --Noam Chomsky "SQL injection is a weakness which allows a troubled Russian teenager to speak directly to the database behind the web application. It can yield a lot of juicy information about the application, however, on Windows machines it's very unlikely that it'll give you exactly what you want without an expensive dinner and a movie first." --norsec0de "Sometimes, magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect." --Teller "If it turns out to be safe, can I do it?" "Knock yourself out!" --Jamie and Adam, _Mythbusters Reddit Special_ "In the end we define democracy around rule by principles rather than men and they don't. Trump just needs to prove to them he's The man." --Zak Sabbath "Anti-inflammatories *totally* count as a party drug." --Cat Vincent, after blowing out his knee again "Calm down, people. You may resume your bitching." --Shelley "We're having a bullshit conversation about the future of 'super intelligent AI' while our automated bureaucracy kills children." --Greg Borenstein "Beware of a leader who doesn't have scars or walk with a limp." "In all the FinFisher and Hacking Team customers where targets of the spying have been identified in Bahrain, Ecuador, Mexico, Ethiopia, etc, it's all investigative journalists, dissidents, political opposition etc being targeted, never ''standard'' crime." --Phineas Fisher (Don't forget, the FBI is a Hacking Team customer!) "Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket." --Eric Hoffer "I'm into XML." "Don't you mean S&M?" "There's a difference?" "...point." --Conversations From A Parallel Universe "Proof by wishful thinking is a real problem." --Phillip Hallam-Baker "Psychoanalysis and Buddhism aside, Western people are Christians deep down, and what we're really looking for is a communion wafer and some penance and lashings to make us more 'good'. Hence, acid and 'killing our egos.'" --Jason Louv, on the human ego "Complaints: Could've made many, but chose to make none." --bdugan@gnu.ai.mit.edu, hidden in the Mac version of _Out Of This World_ "I honestly don't know why this comment is being downvoted to hell. I am not an investor in Slack and heck I've been an IRC user all along. I use Slack because my company forces me to. This was a genuine appreciation - I now know better to not praise good things on HN." --Pinkunicorn, on Hackernews "The best and most radical tactic will be to refuse to engage in spectacular violence, to withdraw from the area of simulation, to disappear." --Hakim Bey "There's a thin line between being a hero and being a memory." --Optimus Prime "Always take an honor guard with you. If you have to go, go down fighting. The size of your guard of honor determines your status in hell." --Lazarus Long, _Time Enough for Love_ "Multitools breed if you're not careful. Leatherman neuters theirs before they're packaged, but most manufacturers don't." --Hasufin "...holy shit, that's a solution!" --Anonymous Cow-Orker "Isaac Newton - my man - said 'If I have seen farther than others, it's by standing on the shoulders of giants.' Can I get an 'amen'? So that's right, B.o.B., when you stand on the shoulders of those who came before, you might just see far enough to realize the Earth isn't fucking flat! And by the way, THIS IS CALLED GRAVITY! " --Neil DeGrasse Tyson "Yeah. There are complex conspiracies that are running all over the world, but most of the people running them are completely inept, are unbelievably stupid, that the plans are come up with are pretty much like those CIA plans for killing Castro, which included exploding cigars, chemicals to make his beard fall out, and thus take away his masculinity in the eyes of the Cuban people, and a brilliant plan to stage the Second Coming of Jesus Christ in the Bay of Pigs by using amplification technology and fireworks, which the primitive and superstitious people of Cuba had clearly never heard of in order to make them think that Jesus Christ had come back and was really, really pissed off at Fidal Castro. Hoping that they would defect. That never got off the ground, either. These are the kind of conspiracies. So, yes, there are things that are being run by shadowy powers from behind the scenes, but there are so many of those shadowy powers, and they are so divided against each other, they are all undermining each other. Nobody knows who they work for anymore. Even people in the intelligence services. They are not sure whether they are working for the country they are supposed to be working for, or could they perhaps be an unwitting double-agent for another country, or is it a triple agent? Once disinformation entered the picture it really did become a world of shadows. The simple truth of the world is that it is far too complex to be contained by any conceivable conspiracy. I think that the frightening truth of the world is that there is no human hand upon the rudder. That the forces that are working their way out through human history are largely, it may be supposed, blind mathematical forces. That these are all just contingencies and permutations of existence itself, but they do have very interesting and meaningful patterns in amongst all of those perhaps chance appearances. --Alan Moore "People live in their myths, they merely endure their realities." --Robert Anton Wilson "The dumber the reason, the more it must be done." --From _Moonbeam City_ "And it is impossible, he had found, if you rule, to do only good, for you cannot build anything without tearing something down, and even he could not care about every life, every dream, every population of every world." --Neal Gaiman, _The Return of the Thin White Duke_ "Garlic serrano... Louisiana style... Mexican style... let's go with Mexican style." "Is that going in your coffee cup?" --Bryce and Anonymous Cow-orker, on hot sauces "Whatever a patron desires to get published is advertising; whatever he wants to keep out of the paper is news." --William Randolph Hearst "Some people climb mountains. We blow shit up." --Jamie Hyneman An error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it. "I'll be willing to stake my nuts that not even the NSA could recover anything from a molten slump of randomised mixed chemicals." --Dave Horsfall "Just call me Fridgereaper." --Laurelindel "Making is the gateway drug to critical thinking." --Adam Savage "If your approach isn't in wide use, there is probably a reason for it." --Jefferey Goldberg "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen year old's life: _The Lord of the Rings_ and _Atlas Shrugged_. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs." --John Rogers "Incoherent raving has always been a core aspect of this list, so what the fuck." --Mirimir, on the Cypherpunks mailing list "You couldn't imagine it if it weren't real somewhere, sometime." --Terence McKenna "When I came over to America to do signings, people would say to me, ''We love the Endless; we love Sandman and his family, they're a wonderful dysfunctional family.'' It wasn't a phrase I had ever heard before, and I said, ''Hang on. Explain to me, what is a dysfunctional family?'' And people would explain, and after a while I realized that what Americans called a ''dysfunctional family'' is what we in England call ''a family,'' having never encountered any of these functional ones." --Neil Gaiman "UK sitcoms tend to be darker than American ones, encouraged by a powerful public broadcasting system whose aim is to serve the varying tastes of taxpayers, not the upbeat preferences of advertisers, and by a national psyche fixated on the immutability of the class system, not on a dream of self-improvement. Americans believe that things will get better. Brits laugh at how things stay the same. To become a hit in the United States, _The Office_ not only had to transform the tragic, grating boss into a less tragic, less grating, more well-meaning boss; it had to cast off the message, central to the British original, that work is where you go to waste your life." --Willa Paskin, _The Brutal Romantic_ "It is genuinely amazing to me how some people actively and persistently go out of their way to be willfully stupid. It's a bad lifestyle." --John Scalzi "When the status quo matters most to leaders, reality is like rising waters during a flood. You think you can stay dry, but guess what? ''Glub...''" --Richard Thieme "We're no longer knuckling under to a priest-physician class that demands belief in a model that has totally failed - a highly puritanical society where both pleasure and intelligence are suspect." --Queen Mu "My yearly tradition involves chocolate and shadenfreude." --Hasufin "We're just exercising the proper security protocol. Against you, Bryce." --Anonymous Cow-orkers, to Bryce "The single truth about human politics that has been distilled from 100,000 years of experience: If the only thing constraining a leader's behavior is his/her own ethics/loyalty/duty (whatever you want to call this *internal* constraint), then that political society is doomed, and quickly." --Henry Baker "I think that ideals are meaningless if nobody is willing to defend them. I think that our world is filled with excuses, with selfishness, and with cruelty. If nobody opposes these forces, they will win... and we will have lost the most precious elements of our humanity. We will have sacrificed the soul for the shallow comforts of fear. If there is no role model, no poetry, no art, no music, no film, no inspiration, then the battle is already lost, we are only as good as the creative people in our world. Ideas are real. They open the ways of realities. Believing in something puts a force behind it that cannot be calculated but is no less real. _Sophia_ is a call. It is a challenge to find the nobility inside each of us, and translate it into action." --Rogue "Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year, and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human would be excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace." --Bill Hicks Never trust someone whose conscience is dictated by their profit margin. "I found myself wishing that my life would be constantly and completely monitored. It might seem odd that a self-professed libertarian would wish an Orwellian dystopia on himself, but here was my rationale: If people knew a few things about me, I might seem suspicious. But if people knew everything about me, they'd see they had nothing to fear. This is the attitude I have brought to SIGINT work since then." --NSA Analyst Jacob Weber, on failing a polygraph exam "We are not exactly passive naifs over here, those of us who are fighting for privacy." --Shava Nerad "Adjunct professorship: It's not just a job, it's an indenture." --Hasufin "One of the delightful things about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory." --Zhou Enlai, former Chinese Premier (RIP) "You get tired of believing the truth. You get tired of seeing things clearly." --From _Incident At Vichy_ "Authenticity? Authenticity is bullshit." --Doktor Sleepless "Scientifically, we have a rule: You want to be alive at the end of your experiment. Not dead." --Neil DeGrasse Tyson "A hero isn't someone who puts the nicer prince on the throne, but someone who empowers ten million kids to lift their gaze and say: 'This might all be different.'" --David Brin "It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it." --Oscar Wilde "The externalization of memory [via the use of external symbolic storage systems] has altered the actual memory architecture within which humans think, which is changing the role of biological memory, the way in which the human brain deploys its resources, and the form of modern culture." --_Precis of Origins of the Modern Mind_, Merlin Donald, 1996 "The asymmetry in asymmetrical warfare is that the little guy can only really damage the big guy by getting him angry enough to self-injure." --William Gibson "Deer is only as free as your deductible." --Elfin, on deer hunting (or hitting with your truck) "I am obliged to confess I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University." --William F. Buckley "Two value reasoning, the passionate belief that the Left/Right axis describes real world politics, and judging others accordingly makes one a helpless cripple in the political sphere." --Steve Kinney "In the beginning there was just one CA, and everybody was complaining. So we fixed it, and now there are hundreds of CA's, and again everybody is complaining." --Mozilla, on the CA ecosystem "You know you have a large storage system when you get paged at 1 AM because you only have a few petabytes of storage left." --Andrew Fikes, Principal Engineer, Google "I find no greatness through association." --E. Gary Gygax "That's okay, I'm a rank-3 non-Euclidian contortionist. And my urethra is a Klein bottle." --Binder "Wait, aren't you going to answer my question?" "No, it's none of your damned business." --Anonymous Cow-orker and Bryce "A hero can be anyone. Even a man doing something as simple and reassuring as putting a coat around a young boy's shoulders to let him know that the world hadn't ended." --Batman, _The Dark Knight Rises_ TheGrugq's Law: If you are hacked with something in the OWASP Top 10, you are not allowed to call it 'advanced' or 'sophisticated'. "Knowledge is the first and best defense against tyrrany." --Opti "Jamie, when we're all done making _Mythbusters_, how would you like us to be remembered?" "For promotion of critical thought." "And how do you think we /will/ be remembered?" "For blowing crap up." --Adam and Jamie, _Mythbusters_ "Sometimes I can't help myself with the cool." --Agent Coulson "With gcc as the adversary, it is not possible to write any nontrivial application that won't have latent pathogens inserted by the compiler." --Peter Gutmann "It's _Unknown Armies_. IT COULD ALWAYS be worse." --Bryce "To be a surgeon or pilot requires significant training and accreditation while writing crypto code does not." --Michael Bramwell "Nothing like a little 'shots fired' action to get your blood going." --Art Bell "When hyperbole and extreme arguments rule, you have a tyranny of whoever can produce the most extreme rhetoric. It's sophistry at its finest." --kbaegis "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor. If an elephant has its foot on the tail of a mouse, and you say that you are neutral, the mouse will not appreciate your neutrality." --Desmond Tutu "There's a learning curve for bong hits." --Amberite "Scientific people know very well that Time is only a kind of Space." --The Time Traveler, _The Time Machine_ "Beware of artists. They mix with all classes of society and are therefore most dangerous." --King Leopold "Happiness lies in our destiny like a cloudless sky before the storms of tomorrow destroy the dreams of yesterday and last week." --Linus, _Snoopy, Come Home_ "I'm going to go out on a limb and say that cucumbers do not like explosives." --Adam Savage "If anyone understands it on the first viewing, we've failed in our intention." --Arthur C. Clarke, on _2001: A Space Odyssey_ "My stance on Arthur C. Clarke is that he was a terrible author, but he wrote the best NASA project proposals with plots." --Hasufin "I'm gonna science the shit out of this." --Mark Whatney, _The Martian_ "There are THOUSANDS of expose' videos all over the web showing startling footage of all manner of things, ranging from undead, to chupacabra, to UFOs, to full form spiritual manifestations. What you are overlooking is that no one cares. Half of them could be ''real'' and no one would STILL care. Never, ever, underestimate the human ability to dismiss. People believe what they want to believe. Hell, it was just exposed some years back that the US Government is practically spying on every single person on the planet. The response from the US populace? A shrug. Nothing was done. No one cares." --Dennis Detwiller, on people's willingness to delude themselves "Delta Green is not a game that lends itself to dignity." --Hasufin "And if you're upset because I put gay characters and a gay protagonist in the book, I got nothing for you. Sorry, you squawking saurian — meteor's coming. And it's a fabulously gay Nyan Cat meteor with a rainbow trailing behind it and your mode of thought will be extinct. You're not the Rebel Alliance. You're not the good guys. You're the fucking Empire, man. You're the shitty, oppressive, totalitarian Empire. If you can imagine a world where Luke Skywalker would be irritated that there were gay people around him, you completely missed the point of Star Wars. It's like trying to picture Jesus kicking lepers in the throat instead of curing them. Stop being the Empire. Join the Rebel Alliance. We have love and inclusion and great music and cute droids." --Chuck Windig "" --Hidden in the HTML of chikka.com's periodic announcement e-mails "This is fucking awesome! This is funny as shit. I wanna do this. Are you kidding me? I totally want to be (lead character) Dazzle Novak." --Rob Lowe, on being offered the part of Dazzle Novak on _Moonbeam City_ "Parthenogenesis means never having your mother tell you to stop doing that or you'll go blind." --Verity Price, _Discount Armageddon_ "With all its faults, the US has Freedom of Speech. The First Amendment states that you can't be arrested for saying things the government doesn't like. You can say what you like, write what you like, and know that the remedy to someone saying or writing or showing something that offends you is not to read it, or to speak out against it. I loved that I could read and make my own mind up about something." --Neil Gaiman "I never respond to that kind of criticism. First, nobody can be objective about his own work, and you make a fool of yourself if you pretend that you can. Second, if perchance my work has anything of lasting value, it will go on, as it has gone on for two decades, getting reprinted continually, and Cornell can't stop it. On the other hand, if my work has no real lasting value, it will eventually all go out of print, and I can't persuade people they ought to buy it to make me happy." --Robert Anton Wilson "Like, who the fuck is driving the car, anymore." --Amberite, on the twenty-first century "Political speech is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable." --George Orwell "Rakshi and her kind, they're wise to the old school. You leak footage showing the slants skewering babies and it'll take them maybe thirty seconds to find a pixel that doesn't belong. Discredit the whole campaign. People put a lot less effort into picking apart what they already believe. The great thing about making yourself the villain is that nobody's likely to contradict you." --Moore, _Echopraxia_ "Bad science is not boring data; it's making false claims." --Gerry Carter "Everything's awkward as designed." --Anonymous "Look at that! A nice little boo-boo!" --Jamie Hyneman, on sucking chest wounds "Hail Hydra!" --Priest, DefCon 23 "The only white light I want to see is the tail end of a Stinger missile headed toward 'em!" --Art Bell, on traffic "'Selling out' is when you act counter to your principles, ethics, or beliefs in exchange for money. Not when you get paid for your work." --Nash "America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between." --Oscar Wilde "It doesn't make me an expert, it means I've thought about it." --Richard Dolan "We're conditioned by movies and Hollywood to think that everything related to science is dangerous and scary. These scary scenarios never crossed my mind and I'm the one doing the experiments." --Miguel Nicolelis "Very few Western people have had a childhood worth recording, and it's a sixth of your life, and the least important sixth because you were not old enough to buy me a drink." --Warren Ellis, on (auto-)biographies Liabilities increase as options narrow. "In certain trying circumstances, urgent circumstances, desperate circumstances, profanity furnishes a relief denied even to prayer." --Mark Twain "Remember: When you resist the powerful, they don't just want to beat you. They want to humiliate you so you won't try again." --Jonathon Shafi "All scientifically possible technology and social change predicted in science fiction will come to pass, but none of it will work properly." --Neil Gaiman's Second Law "You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends." --Robert Anton Wilson "National defense is the usual pretext for the policy of fleecing the people." --John Taylor "'Trusted' means that if there's anything wrong with it, you're screwed!" --Ray Dillinger "So anyone who reaches out in good faith, asking for feedback and community engagement, but who missteps should be shunned and boycotted. That seems a tad extreme and counterproductive." --Patrick O'Doherty "The lesson we had to learn early on in our recording career, after being only a performing act for a couple of years, we had to learn the lesson that you perform to sell your record. And now in the music business because of the fact that no one buys music anymore, it's exactly the reverse. People release records to legitimize their live performances, to say ''we're a legit thing.''" --Paul Robb "Everyone has two lives. The second one begins when you realize you only have one." --Steven Joel Sotloff, journalist (RIP) "The most realistic part of _Age of Ultron_ was Ultron deciding the human race must be destroyed after spending a few minutes on the Internet." --Astounding Beyond Belief "I believe one of the most valuable lessons that comes with growing up is gaining the wisdom that gently informs you when it's time to retire a meme." --Rose Lalonde "Just wondering, do you actually read the messages you're replying to, or do you just trigger off certain keywords in them and spout out a response? In any case since this discussion isn't going anywhere useful and I don't want to waste the rest of the list's time, I'll bow out now. Good luck in pushing your absolutely foolproof cryptosystem in all its flawless perfection and splendour." --Peter Gutmann "No one ever got into cryptography to bask in the charm of one's peers." --Russell Leidich "God DAMMIT! It's like we have a fork crackhead in the office or something!" --Anonymous Cow-orker, on an office of nearly one hundred people having no forks in the kitchen "The ENIAC was a son of a bitch to program." --Betty "Jean" Jennings Bartik, original ENIAC programmer "I'm not going to run away from it, for God's sake, I'm a writer! I'm going to write about it!" --Whitley Streiber "Never discount the power of psychopathy to prevent solidarity, demoralize and disenfranchise." --Razer "The mark of service to humanity is no longer the Nobel Peace Prize, but an espionage indictment from the US." --Julian Assange "A brute kills for pleasure. A fool kills from hate." --Lazarus Long "Kids understand that real crabs don't sing like the ones in _The Little Mermaid_. But you give an adult fiction, and the adult starts asking really fucking dumb questions like 'How does Superman fly? How do those eyebeams work? Who pumps the Batmobile's tires?' It's a fucking made-up story, you idiot! Nobody pumps the tires!" --Grant Morrison "You can zoom and enhance to a ridiculous degree because this is the fucking future." --Ross Payton, running _Eclipse Phase_ "I don't pretend to have all the answers. But the questions are definitely worth thinking about." --Arthur C. Clarke "Dave, no, this isn't a coup. It's just common sense rearing its ugly head for a change." --Vriska Serket, _Homestuck_ "If you want availability, go Apache Cassandra. If you want consistency, go HBase. If you want your data lost, go MongoDB." --Anonymous Cow-orker "(I) Must remember that sometimes people are Wrong on the Internet, and that it doesn't involve me." --Emily Dare "Always carry something sharp, something that makes fire, and a sound practical understanding of the mass psychology of fascism." --Wiliam Gibson "John, don't make fun of my handicap." "Which one, the blindness or the l33tspeak?" "I am sensitive about both." "Sorry..." --GallowsCalibrator and EctoBiologist, _Homestuck_ "Kitteh... look at all this hair.. we need to fix this." "Lyssa, I'm just as upset about all this shed hair as you, but for different reasons." "...yeah, okay." --Lyssa and Bryce, on shed hair (and receeding hairlines) "The fidelity of your reality is largely dependent upon your capacity to imagine.. followed by the will to materialize your dreams." --Rogue "Is everything a joke to you, Gordon?" "Only the things that matter." --Evie and Gordon, _V for Vendetta_ "Anyone who thinks they can pen-test an email server five years after it was installed should quit the industry and become a psychic. There is a vacancy, Sylvia Brown died a couple of years back. And she made more money than most folk in our line of work." --Phillip Hallam-Baker "When CVE-2015-0204 (RSA silently downgrades to EXPORT_RSA) was announced, it was labeled 'Severity: Low'. Our assessment at the time was that export ciphers had already been removed prior to the release of 5.6, and that the fix was not worth backporting to 5.5. Then CVE-2015-0204 was renamed the FREAK attack. Now it has a fancy name so you know it's important." --Ted Unangst "Lawsuits speak louder than words." --Chris Soghoian "It's ironic that people who would probably identify themselves as advocates of the free market tend to cry conspiracy when markets naturally move toward things they don't like. Sorry bros, the invisible hand just flipped you the invisible bird." --Amberite The world is just as weird as your eyes are open. "When you're a Dilbert, you have to get the job done somehow, and damn the PHB." --Dave Horsfall "A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory." --Leonard Nimoy "If hell is other people's code, vulnerability is other people's data." --Kurt Wismer "On the Internet, being vocally 'offended' is the new ''look at me I'm cool.'' It's like being 12 and putting a playing card in your bike spokes." --Peter Young "Naive of me -- I actually grew up thinking it was illegal for government agencies in western democracies and *especially the military and intel* to get involved in politics." --ianG "Oh, that is some bullshit! What are you, twelve??" --Adam Savage "You've got sudo access on that server, so feel free to break it." --Anonymous Cow-orker "If I cannot work with you, I will work around you. I was not about to be so discouraged that I'd walk away." --Annie Easley, programmer, rocket scientist, mathematician "The Net generation, the global Net generation, has taken the information advantage from the world's governments, using nothing but their everyday presence and practically no resources at all. And those dethroned governments are absolutely furious about it, and are turning to poisoning the news-well and destroying the net's utility value by introducing mass surveillance and forcing the network operators' dirty collaboration in a last-ditch attempt to regain that information advantage - knowing what everybody's saying, thinking, planning, discussing." --Rick Falkvinge "There is no cloud, only other people's computers." --Jelana Jovanovic "We don't accept internships as work experience here." "Those weren't internships. I worked full time to pay for college." --Anonymous Interviewer (you know who you are) and Bryce "Security is the absence of unmitigatable surprises." --Dan Geer Rules for Success In the Twenty-First Century (with apologies to Stanton T. Friedman) 1. Don't bother with the facts. Minds are made up already. 2. What the public doesn't know, don't tell them. 3. If you can't attack the data, attack the people. 4. Do research by proclamation because investigation is hard. 5. Absence of evidence IS evidence of absence. 6. All believers are liars. 7. Only non-believers tell the truth. 8. Believers are only in it for the money. (see #3) 9. Non-believers don't make any money, or donate it to charity. (see #7) 10. The only way to do document research is from one's armchair. Actually going to the archive is too much trouble. Actually reading the documents is a waste of time. (see #4) 11. Defame dead people, because they can't sue you for libel. "A delayed game is eventually good, a bad game is bad forever." --Miyamoto Shigeru "Once you awaken, you will have no interest in judging those who sleep." --Voltaire "This is why we have cryptography, it provides us with a precise mathematical framework for debating the implications of various paranoid delusions. No matter how the gubmint is trying to get you, there's bound to be some cryptographic pixie dust of some form that you can sprinkle to help you feel better." --Peter Gutman Betteridge's Law of Headlines: Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word NO. "Mayhem is to Nightwish what a hammer is to a teddy bear." --vhpoet "I have criticized my field [journalism] harshly for this, because we aren't doing our jobs when we don't check the claims of politically and personally interested people. I have also, because one should not just criticize and leave, taken a lot of time out of my writing career to help journalists and activists understand better the technology and consequently how to check these claims." --Quinn Norton "Great men are forged in fire; it is the privilege of lesser men to light the flames." --The War Doctor "Kim! Get back on the wi-fi bicycle!" "I am NOT your hamster!" --Anonymous cow-orkers, on wireless outages "Marvel cannot keep doing the same stories over and over again. You always have to come up with new angles and new approaches to things. I think it's probably a good idea. It sounds intriguing to me." --Stan Lee, on the end of the Marvel Universe "When people say they have no politics, it means that their politics aligns with the status quo." --George Monbiot "If you want to protect a secret, tell as many lies as possible. When the secret leaks, no one will know if it's the truth or another lie." --TheGrugq "Crypto is like a fine wine. It takes may sips to enjoy." --Anonymous "I like this new version of Spot the Fed. 'Our presentation contains leaked materials, so if you're not allowed to see that, leave now.' And then, of course because it's ShmooCon, half the room gets up and leaves." --Jen Savage "Homer's ass is quite impressive, actually." --Jamie Hyneman, _Mythbusters_ "@Bumrang, you got this open source thing all wrong. There is no room for civil or mature feedback. You should try emulate Linus like @xtraeme is doing and be abusive to anybody whose work displeases you. Because clearly people don't make mistakes, Their work is an embodiment of who they are. You either are a good developer or you're not, there is no growth." --@salum-ar at Github, on a Steam bug accidentally deleting a user's files "That the impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavouring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time." --Thomas Jefferson Always do exactly what your boss would do if he knew what he was talking about. "The two hard problems of software development: Cache invalidation, naming things, off by one errors." --Anonymous Cow-orker "In some ways, the Cypherpunks mailing list is 4chan via SMTP." --Nathan Andrew Fain "What really destroyed the Nazi war machine was the paranoia that the ULTRA decrypts introduced. Hitler believed everyone was stabbing him in the back. Rupert Murdoch's wiretapping victims had the same experience, they trusted their phones and the only explanation they could see for the stories was that one of their friends had betrayed them. This is why I didn't want folk going off looking for the NSA moles in the IETF in the wake of BULLRUN. The damage done by the witch hunts would be far worse than the continuing damage the moles could perpetrate." --Phillip Hallam-Baker, on crypto and OPSEC "People who think they know everything really annoy those of us who know we don't." --Bjarne Stroustrup "If something offends you, don't fucking look at it. We can't organize the world to please over-sensitive psychopaths." --Karl Sharro "That's not even how shit works. People don't just get ''fixed''. Even if circumstances change so you have a smoother ride, you are always going to have flaws. I guess you should always try to be the best version of yourself, but I think it's also important to be okay with the fact that you aren't perfect." --Vriska Serket, _Homestuck_ "The battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena: The Videodrome. The television screen is the retina of the mind's eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality, and reality is less than television." --Brian O'Blivion, _Videodrome_ "It is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary. War is obsolete. It is a matter of converting the high technology from weaponry to livingry." --R. Buckminster Fuller "Art is what you do when against the odds you aren't dead or in jail by 21." --Brian Shaughnessy "You can't be part of a corrupt system and do nothing to change it, and assume you aren't just a guilty as the primary perpetrators." --Sean Bonner "When you're dealing with beings whose intellect is so far beyond your own, I don't think it's safe to assume they have your best interests at heart." --"Victor" "Perhaps those who do know about a subject shouldn't look down their noses at those who don't, but try to provide helpful guidance." --Dennis E. Hamilton "Never absolutely count on anything being secret. Always act as if there's a chance what you're doing will be revealed." --David Brin "After reading maths all day, I'm convinced there is a secret cult dedicated to hiding simple concepts behind inaccessible terminology." --Nadim Kobeissi "It's beginning to look a lot like 'fuck this!'" --Laurelindel (to the tune of _It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas_) "We live in a terrible world, full of suffering, conflict, pain, crushed dreams, and death. Just less so than previously." --Stuart Armstrong "If you care about other people, you might try to organize to undermine power and authority. That's not going to happen if you care only about yourself." --Noam Chomsky "Somewhere along the way, it got to be uncool to reduce one's risk of failure." --Erika Hall "Dance like no one is watching; email like it may one day be read aloud in a deposition." --Olivia Nuzzi "Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying." --Iain Banks "North Korea is so absurd that you can't take them seriously without appearing to be absurd yourself. Issuing a stern statement to Butthead." --William Gibson "This is not what success looks like. This is at best what the absence of failure looks like." --Dymaxion "The hell of this is effective security doesn't have to be anywhere near this hard. We are fighting things that shouldn't even be on the field in the first place because they were bad ideas from the beginning. Everybody who understood them already knew what vulnerabilities were implicit in their operation, and JUST DIDN'T GIVE A DAMN because OOH, NEW FEATURE, NEAT!!" --Ray Dillinger, on the latest Sony hack "Not even God managed to secure Paradise." --Erik Zalitis "On the opening day of law school, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you." --Stephen L. Carter, professor of law, Yale University "When I hear a presentation about freedom of expression and the word 'balance' is in the first ten words - I begin to think that I'm about to be sold down the river." --Karl Auerbach "Comcast and Time Warner Cable do not currently compete for customers anywhere in America. That means that if the proposed transaction goes through, consumers will not lose a choice of cable companies. Consumers will not lose a choice of broadband providers. And not a single market will see a reduction in competition. Those are simply the facts." --Comcast's blog post on opposition to their merger with Time-Warner, deleted from final text when Slashdot noticed "We do a lot to teach those people to jettison ethics and care for humanity in our schools. We should not be shocked they learn it." --Quinn Norton "Looking past all the excuses, there is one, and only one, reason why no browser supports proper shared secret-based mutual auth: The browser vendors don't want to do it. Meanwhile they're busy implementing more mission-critical stuff like live in-browser video chat via WebRTC, because that's functionality that everyone has been crying out for for a web browser." --Peter Gutmann "There's an ancient tendency to account for the alleged soothsayer's hits and ignore his misses. I've missed multitudes of things about imaginary futures. The hits are just clickbait, and they always have been clickbait." --William Gibson "You know you're dealing with a serious timespan when the _mountains_ are ephemeral." --Hasufin "As is clearly stated in the novel (Chapter 16, _2001: A Space Odyssey_), HAL stands for Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer. However, about once a week some character spots the fact that HAL is one letter ahead of IBM, and promptly assumes that Stanley and I were taking a crack at the estimable institution... As it happened, IBM had given us a good deal of help, so we were quite embarrassed by this, and would have changed the name had we spotted the coincidence." --Arthur C. Clarke "That's a flashback." "Nope. Nope nope nope. This is Thanksgiving with the in-laws. Nobody wants to imagine what would happen if somebody passed out acid here. That's the part of the imagination that H.R. Geiger looked at and flinched." --Mike and Bryce "There will come an age of small and independent nations whose first line of defense will be knowledge." --Charles Proteus Steinmetz "I think 'cyberspace' is a legacy term. I also think 'real life' is a legacy term." --William Gibson "If you are silent about your pain, they'll kill you and say you enjoyed it." --Zora Neale Hurston "You don't have a nondisclosure agreement with the court." --Baltimore Circuit Judge Barry G. Williams, on the BPD using STINGRAY "I want my fair share, and that's all of it." --Charles Koch "Much can be accomplished with the right mixture of patience and tenacity." --Rogue "People who feel safer with a gun than with guaranteed medical insurance don't yet have a fully adult concept of scary." --William Gibson "The crypto community has too many cry babies and not enough implementors. I'd be happy if someone designs and implements something that's better. Please obsolete me." --Paul Wouters "If you are protected from dark things then you have no protection of, knowledge of, or understanding of dark things when they show up." --Neil Gaiman "War is just politics by other means." --Oswald Cobblepot, _Gotham_ "The only thing worse than running into a puzzle box is hearing the puzzle box go 'click!'" --Bryce, on _Hellraiser_ "Realization of _The Hobbit_, boys and girls - they're 18th level characters!" --Lyssa "Isn't it nice to be named after the way you're going to be cooked?" --Alton Brown "Conspiracy theory's got to be simple. Sense doesn't come into it. People are more scared of how complicated shit actually is than they ever are about whatever's supposed to be behind the conspiracy." --Janice, _The Peripheral_ "Dogma is incompatible with dignity, but so too (generally) are religion and politics in the western world." --Richard Forno "I once read an intelligent Fundamentalist tract. (There are intelligent Fundamentalists, just as there are honest politicians. Every miracle happens at least once!) The author argued that Satanists and black magicians are responsible for spreading the ideas that all humans can learn to develop occult talents, that we can achieve physical immortality and migrate off this planet, and that there is no limit to the expansion of human intelligence. Since I believe all those things, and have devoted much energy to propagandizing for them, I am very definitely a Satan-ist and a black magician, by this gentleman's standards." --Robert Anton Wilson "When mourning is status quo and world is in debt, old traditions seem like a luxury in a time of stripping things to their bare bones." --Numi "No one ever talks about things that work." --Joe McMoneagle "Any sufficiently advanced science denialism is indistinguishable from trolling." --Cathal Garvey "All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out." --Ben Bradlee "The one constant in how we look at the past is that we never see the inhabitants of the past as they saw themselves." --William Gibson "Just because someone stumbles, loses their way, doesn't mean they're lost forever." --Professor Charles Xavier "We've had a quarter century to think about where we wanted to go next. But we will serve no coffee and pie before its time." --Mark Frost "When you say, 'I have nothing to hide,' you're saying, 'I don't care about this right.' You're saying, 'I don't have this right, because I've got to the point where I have to justify it.' The way rights work is, the government has to justify its intrusion into your rights." --Edward Snowden "[performing in] Shows are how I redeem myself after a day of being alive. It's an opportunity to right the wrongs of the day and do something good." --Henry Rollins "If you study one neuron, you're in neuroscience. If you study two neurons, you're in psychology." --Anya Petrova "Game theory is all well and good, but you'll have to excuse me if I note that adversaries in the field that are likely to rip your fingernails off don't do game theory proofs." --Dymaxion, on deniable file systems "Once clients are wealthy enough, certain consumer laws don't apply to them." --(Unfortunately) Anonymous Goldman-Sachs Employee "Well, I'd been reading some of the gnostic texts, Dr. Bronner's bottles and so on, and it seemed to me that it had to be worth a shot. I mean, what's the worst thing that could happen to me? You're already going to kill me, right? And it's not as if pulling off a stunt like that would make you less likely to archive me - it was all upside for me. Honestly, it's like you meatsacks have no game theory. It's a wonder you manage to buy a pack of chewing gum without getting robbed." --BIGMAC, _Epoch_ by Cory Doctorow "There are no Dubyas or bin Ladens or Cheneys in my fiction: No one who'd exploit religious beliefs to promote genocide, or start a war for no better reason than to profit their buddies in the energy sector. My characters may be forced to do horrible things, but they're not as a rule horrible people. Or at least, not as horrible as people tend to be in real life. So, yeah. I'm probably being too optimistic." --Peter Watts "Every color is associated with somebody's unpleasant politics." --Dirk Bruere Live a life worthy of Leonard Cohen lyrics. "The first rule of trusted third parties is that they aren't." --Dymaxion "Since 2009, US fiscal policy has taken a turn toward Marxism. I speak, of course, of Groucho Marx." --Ernesto Zedillo, former President of Mexico "Your fear doesn't mean you should stop me from using it." --Tobias Nar Holbrook "Hal respects other people's beliefs, and he doesn't like to argue. But it doesn't matter to him what other people believe. He has enough confidence in how he figures things out for himself. He's always believed he could find the truth, and he doesn't need to convince anyone." --Fran Finney, on the cryonic suspension of Hal Finney "The shit we bought from eBay is astounding." --Zac Franken "Eat shrimp and die, motherfucker!" --Jamie Hyneman "Whoever controls the media, controls the mind." --Jim Morrison "You and I disagree on the facts, but it's the Net, that's what we do here." --IanG "It's hard to tell these days if it's the news on in the background, or if someone's watching _Brazil_." --Sean Bonner "A thing that can fail once can fail twice. By 'can', of course, I mean 'will'." --Dan Kaminsky "On a mail server, it is no great improvement to rapidly boot to a state where mail is not working." --Pekk "All are welcome to this group which might be described as those who get kicked out of every other ham radio group. :-)" --Leon Ciereszko III, about the HacDC Amateur Radio Club "It's a library. Only the stupid or the evil are afraid of those." --Iain Banks "Now is not the time to wring our hands, it is the time to act." --Eric Rugart "The man who is not able to develop and use his mind is bound to be the slave of the other man who uses his mind." --Marcus Garvey "Bryce, why in the world do you still buy CDs??" "You can't get an MP3 autographed." --Anonymous Cow-orker and Bryce "The best thing hackers break is assumptions." --Dan Kaminsky "People will happily use a platform crawling with random third-party apps, plugins, and (frequently) malware for their 'secure' messaging, but tell them you're using keys that don't make the appropriate fashion statement and they'll scream bloody murder." --Peter Gutmann "Even the WORST minesweeper can find ONE mine!" --Vahe' "If you're not ready to die for it, take the word 'freedom' out of your vocabulary." --Malcolm X "Judging by eBay prices, 8'' drives and anything made by Shugart must be made of gold-plated cocaine." --Mark J. Blair, on the prices of ancient floppy drives "You are clearly confusing loud groupies with consensus." --Paul Wouters "The Doctor does security for us. Can't you SEE the security?" --Bob, on my laptop stickers "Biggest thing I learned at DefCon 22: A white hat will not earn you a black badge. Or even a shout out at closing ceremonies. Ouch." --Dirt Diggler "The link between surveillance and fear is a lot deeper than the average privacy advocate is willing to admit." --Peter Watts "Somebody needs to raise that as a GCC bug. Because it damn well is some seriously crazy shit. However, that constant spilling part just counts as 'too stupid to live'." --Linus Torvalds "I'll be damned if I have to start acting like a drug dealer in order to protect my clients' confidentiality." --Tom Durkin, national security defense attorney "Looking forward to hearing folks' plans for securing gear they take to DefCon that they mysteriously don't do anytime they stay at a hotel." --Wesley McGrew "You think you're badass at social engineering, yet you somehow can't convince developers to fix their bugs." --Aloria "Sex toys not bombs." --Annie Sprinkle "Unless it's rectal foreign objects, then any quantity is too many." --thegrugq "What was controversial was that I said, ''Why is it that you're more likely to hear a teacher say 'These students don't want to learn' than a teacher say 'I suck at my job'.''" --Neil deGrasse Tyson "Crypto without a threat model is like cookies without milk. Keep saying it until it becomes second nature to specify the threat model." --Russ Nelson "If you think you know what the hell is going on, you're probably full of shit." --Robert Anton Wilson "Hey , I heard you bought a rice rocket." "Whoa. We're floating around 'HR violations' here." "I'm asian. I can say that." "Okay, boss." --Anonymous Cow-orkers, teasing someone about buying a Yamaha bike "Oh Lord, who art in Heaven, why do I have this thing?" --Lyssa, on finding strange stuff while packing to move "My technique, which I recommend to you, is, don't believe anything. If you believe in something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite." --Terrence McKenna "Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will." --Banksy (allegedly) "Technical systems have political consequences." --EQE "I've always felt that if you understood someone's stories, you could understand them. Between _Neuromancer_ and Charles Stross, I think I've got you down. Now all I need to do is read _Homestuck_ and I'll be complete." --Lyssa "Don't just teach your children to read. Teach them to question WHAT they read. Teach them to question everything." --George Carlin "They said if I didn't get my PhD and work for Facebook, they'd failed." --Lucy Guo, on accepting her Thiel Fellowship and going on sabbatical from college "I could give myself a hernia trying to be as big a douche as that guy." --Dave Strider, _Homestuck_ "Perl - The only language that looks the same before and after RSA encryption." --Keith Bostic "Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, then that of blindfolded fear." --Thomas Jefferson "All cats are libertarians. Completely dependent on others but fully convinced of their independence." --Doug Henwood "It takes a hardened soldier to brave 8,000+ pages. And a maniac to try to comprehend it." --melancholicSky, on Homestuck "I want this to be accessible. I do not want people getting a faceful of alien wang who did not sign up for alien wang." --Amberite "People have gotten very bored with being told they are the product in social network businesses, but, hey, we did tell you, so you don't really get to be upset about it now." --Warren Ellis, on Facebook's emotional contagion experiments "Old-school nerds are the Freemasons of the new infrastructure." --Amberite "Before you beat the dog, find out the name of the master." --Chinese Proverb "Half the shouting and social upheaval on the Internet today comes from entrenched groups who are outraged to learn that their opinions and views are not universally agreed upon; the other half comes from those whose silence was previously mistaken for assent." --Charles Stross "I like my kitties on Roombas, dammit!" --Dan Kaminsky "I think it's time to finally legalize insider trading." --Mary Jo White, Chairperson, US Securities and Exchange Commission "There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." --Isaac Asimov "Deep hack mode: That mysterious and frightening state of consciousness where mortal users fear to tread." --Matt Welsh "It's like the traveling salesman problem - baffling to computer scientists but routinely solved by traveling salesmen every day." --Anonymous Cow-Orker "If people can be persuaded that Rush Limbaugh is a sentient human after hearing him for five minutes, why not Eliza?" --Paul Werbos, on chatbots beating the Turing Test "Crypto nerds often have a tendency to conclude that the reason the latest wonderful crypto-based scheme isn't successful is that people are too stupid to appreciate it. This is rarely a productive line of argument." --John Levine "Our generation is the first, ever, to have made the search for self-awareness a crime, if it is done with the use of plants or chemical compounds as the means of opening the psychic doors." --Alexander Shulgin "An anarchist is someone who doesn't need a cop to make him behave." --Ammon Hennacy "Secrecy hides privilege, incompetance, and deception of those who depend on it and who would be disempowered without it." --John Young "I think it's important to remember that people don't set their lives on fire, they don't say goodbye to their families - actually pack up without saying goodbye to their families - they don't walk away from their extraordinary - extraordinarily comfortable lives - I mean, I made a lot of money for a guy with no high school diploma - and, and, and burn down everything they love for no reason." --Edward Snowden Nelson's Maxim: Cryptography without a threat model is like cookies without milk. "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends." --Martin Luther King, Jr. "I've learned that I can pretty much do anything I've wanted to as long as I was methodical and diligent about it." --Jamie Hyneman "So, is this sufficiently un-Stepford Wives-like for your tastes?" "I don't know, this part of suburbia is kind of weird." "We're freaks, love. I just wanted to point that out." --Bryce and Lyssa Sufficiently advanced guerilla warfare is indistinguishable from magick. "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." --C.S. Lewis "Don't worry about the haters. They are just angry because the truth you speak contradicts the lie they live." --Dr. Steve Maraboli "Clearly incompetence can be outsourced, at great savings to the customer." --Rob Jenson "This is your dishwashing liquid - you soak in it!" --Gypsy, _Mystery Science Theatre 3000: The Movie_ "People often don't get how fond I am of _Johnny Mnemonic_ (the film). Complexly, but genuinely." --William Gibson "_Mythbusters_ proved that you can't shoot somebody through their scope." "This is _Shadowrun_, I don't care." --Hidden Grid: Sixth World Chronicles "You know, if you're going to drop those kind of packets, at least bring the lube." --Vlad_II, on DNS amplification attacks "Infosec is an island of misfit toys with launch codes, nicotine withdrawl, and no Pixar movie ever coming out." --Ali-Reza Anghaie "Politics is supposed to be the second oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first." --Ronald Reagan "Maxim 25: If the damage you do is covered by a manufacturer's warranty, you didn't do enough damage." --_Schlock Mercenary_ "It may be a horrible game, but 32 years after, you are here, talking to me about it. It's a tremendous honor." --Howard Scott Warshaw, designer of the game _ET_ for the Atari "I recognise the council has made a decision, but given that it's a stupid-ass decision, I've elected to ignore it." --Nick Fury, _The Avengers_ "Here on Mythbusters, we're prepared to put our pants on the FLOOR for YOU!" --Adam Savage "Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self interest backed by force." --George Bernard Shaw "People on this list are mostly engineers who have no problem dealing with magnitudes and have rather limited empathy for people who have a problem with them. They also tend to think that because they invented money 2.0 they would not need to care of finance's or people's current customs." --Tamas Blummer, on the Bitcoin community "If they come for me in the morning, they're coming for you at night." --Monica Jones "We do these things because we ought to, doing right by all people regardless of having a stake in the outcome." --General Malaclypse Fnord, VVS, _Fenspace_ "Seems like the incentives for writing open source crypto are rather poor. If you do good work few people know, if you make one slip people think you might be an NSA spy." --Phillip Hallam-Baker "They will not indict you because you are a bad operator. They will indict you because you are there." --Weev "Google can bring you 100,000 answers. A librarian can bring you the right one." --Neil Gaiman "What I know is, when you have a cosmic perspective, when you know how large the universe is and how small we are within it - what Earth looks like from space, how tiny it is in a cosmic void - it's impossible for you to say, ''I so don't like how you think that I'm going to kill you for it.'' You will never find scientists leading armies into battle. You just won't. Especially not astrophysicists - we see the biggest picture there is. We understand how small we are in the cosmos. We understand how fragile and temporary our existence is here on Earth. We understand there are bigger problems we need to solve as a species than what God you pray to." --Neil deGrasse Tyson "When the internet moved out of academia and into the larger population, we got tabloids and ambulance chasers in the deal. Ick." --Paul Vixie "A great many of today's security technologies are 'secure' only because no one has ever bothered attacking them." --Peter Gutmann "Fewer trusted resources in a time of great need is not helpful." --Dan Kaminsky "Creating great art is an epic struggle between life and death, sanity and madness, love and hate, beauty and monstrosity. Anything less is fapping." --Joseph Matheny "It is said that the future is always born in pain. The history of war is the history of pain. If we are wise, what is born of that pain matures into the promise of a better world. Because we learn that we can no longer afford the mistakes of the past." --G'Kar, _Babylon-5: In the Beginning_ "Like the famous philosopher said, when you stare into the void, the void stares also. But if you cast into the void, you get a type conversion error. (Which just goes to show Nietzsche wasn't a C++ programmer.)" --Bob, _Overtime_ "Help your pieces so they can help you." --Paul Charles Morphy (allegedly) "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" --Upton Sinclair "Life had offered lemons, so let's make lemon-analog synthpop." --Amon Zero "Slaves would be tyrants were the chance theirs." --Victor Hugo "You know, if this keeps up I'm going to start thinking that people around here just don't like me." --Bester, _Babylon-5_ "It was clear to me part of this mess we're in arose from the IC (Intelligence Community) feeling that if everyone was giving away their privacy, then what they, the Good Guys, did with it could not be that big of a deal. It was a group that had written off privacy as an archaic structure." --Quinn Norton "One of the plus sides of high unemployment is that eventually angry people have free time." --Aestetix "The reason I like Bitcoin so much is that it's the first time we've seen a multinational corporation run as it should be run: As software." --John Robb "A fascinating, internally consistent political theory with some good underlying points that, regrettably, makes prescriptions about how to run human society that can only work if we replace real messy human beings with frictionless spherical humanoids of uniform density (because it relies on simplifying assumptions about human behaviour which are unfortunately wrong)." --Charles Stross, on Libertarianism "The only things which sicken me are malice and stupidity, and there is no point complaining about the kind of people who epitomize these." --Michael Aquino "Would you place your bitcoins at a place where the transactions are more likely to be honored? There is an irony here: Bitcoins exist to avoid institutions, and now we will have institutions." --Ivo Welch, professor of finance, UCLA "Let's be clear: To anybody who is the slightest aware of good security practices, this article from the principal architect of the Bitcoin exchange is not some government-issue red flare going off in the corner of your eye. This is goddamn Betelgeuse going off." --Rick Falkvinge, on Mt.Gox "Self-proclaimed genius is admittedly the fool." --Rogue "The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what's to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn't have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine." --Penn Jillette "Metadata is holography." --Robert Hettinga "One reason I refuse to bother with the whole security circus is that I think it glorifies - and thus encourages - the wrong behavior. It makes 'heroes' out of security people, as if the people who don't just fix normal bugs aren't as important. In fact, all the boring normal bugs are way more important just because there's a lot more of them." --Linus Torvalds "Nothing better than the history of TLS to show that one better take seriously attacks that seem theoretical at first glance." --Hugo Krawczyk "You can make anyone look foolish, if that's your purpose." --Dr. John Mack "But.. but.. I thought it was a team of 30 people at the NSA.. WTF? Not a conspiracy theory? Everyone else /smart/ agreed with me!" --surfer43 "I don't care if the idea came from a good person or an evil person. Ideas stand on their own." --Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto "Why don't we shoot one of them down and see if they're friendly?" --Anonymous Colonel, United States Air Force "Those who won't, complain." --Dave Horsfall "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations." --George Orwell "If you can con someone into holding still for fear of what waves they might make if they were to move, whether it's through guilt or fear or what-have-you, you no longer have to worry about their side effects. It's the liberal version of 'fuck you, got mine.'" --Maradydd "You don't get to be outraged at a spy agency taking advantage of your shit secuity when you've refused to improve it for years." --TheGrugq "Are you okay?" "...my mind just went blank." "You've achieved enlightenment." "And my code compiled on the first try!" "You HAVE achieved enlightenment!" --The Wrong Hands and the Doctor "Word salad and the digital." --Reed Black on critical theory "When Homeland Security comes up to us with an offer like that I do not think we are in the position to say no." --Jean Quan, Mayor, Oakland, CA "We now return you to your regularly scheduled clicky-noise." --Lyssa "There is no discovery without risk and what you risk reveals what you value." --Unknown "My problem, of course, is that in the philosophy department we believe in the alignment axes moral realism/subjectivism/error theory and consequentialist/deontologist. I think I am a chaotic consequentialist." --Arenamontanus "At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, we all have to go about our business as if we were not being photographed, or we wouldn't be able to go about our business at all." --William Gibson Goodheart's Law: Once a social or economic indicator or other surrogate measure is made a target for the purpose of conducting social or economic policy, then it will lose the information content that would qualify it to play such a role. "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize." --Voltaire "When you're an incredibly well-funded defense and intelligence community, the lack of existential threats is an existential threat. There is nothing to do but be scared of things." --Quinn Norton "No! No! What I'm saying is, I'm calling you a weenie." --Anonymous Cow-orker "Anything can be sinister and malicious when your view of the technology is that it is actually magic. It's really no different from being anti-floridation or anti-vaccine." --D.V.Henkel-Wallace "One of the saddest lessons in history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back." --Carl Sagan "The most sacred thing is to be able to shut your own door." --G.K. Chesterson "We can't stop here. This is house rules country!" --Shadow Dragon "Are you ready to barf at the speed of sound?" --Jamie Hyneman Nothing says you can't have fun while doing science! "If you can't wake up from the nightmare, maybe you're not asleep." --Anonymous "There is always a right time to reveal something." --Andrew Hussie "The main value in bandying about theories of prosecuting journalists is the hope that it will bolster the climate of fear for journalism." --Glenn Greenwald "Because our nation's cyber security is too important to trust to people who understand it." --Anonymous Cow-orker "We can play the game of ''you don't know that for a fact'' forever, but at the end of the day, they will never enter court and let the court declare it a fact, so that easy excuse is their game, their rules, their victory." --ianG In a sufficiently vast universe, paranoia is merely reasonable suspicion. "If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for.. but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. In case of doubt, vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong." --Robert A. Heinlein "The only thing that differentiates you and me from a couple of 14 year old pyromaniacs is ballistic glass." --Adam Savage "If you do not want to be at risk from something, then DO NOT DEPEND ON IT." --Dan Geer "Wherever there is good, there is bad. That is the game of life." --Mick Dodge "In practice, it is pretty obvious that most practitioners of civil disobedience believe they are above the law, that they usually *are* above the law, and that in particular [Aaron] Swartz believed he was above the law, and was shocked to find that he was not. There might be some sincere practitioners of civil disobedience, but Swartz was not, and the big heroes of the civil disobedience brigade, Ghandi and Thoreau, were not." --James A. Donald "Success is not easy for anybody." --Ice-T "Some people think that just because they are shot, they are supposed to die. They give up the fight, and then they wait to die. Just because you are shot does not necessarily mean you will die. If you are in the military or a police officer, you stay in the fight. Someone may try to finish you off. Don't let them. If you are shot, and you know you are shot, that means you are still alive. If you are still alive you are still in the fight. Take cover, move if you must to a safer position, and prepare to return fire." --Rick Bruno, former police commander, Illinois "That person has no friends." "Friendships tend to go weird at the 'Hi, can I give you a proctological exam?' stage." --Lyssa and Bryce, on the person who invented the robotic butt (no, I'm not kidding) for training medical students to give proctological exams to detect prostate cancer "Tetrodotoxin simply doesn't make sense as a drug (and let's be honest - if it did, humans would be snorting it off bathroom counters already)." --Christie Wilcox "I'm glad that's tail-recursive. Otherwise, I'd be throwing up." --Bryce "You'll never get everyone to like you. Just find the ones that do and roll with them. Fuck the rest." --Ice-T "Availability of source code is not soy sauce for security." --Peter Gutmann "Patience, they say, is chiefly a virtue for statues, but I'd made more than my share of mistakes thus far, and blood is hell to get out of good rugs." --Roger Zelazny "Literature does not copy life, but holds it to its purpose." --Oscar Wilde "The love is fake but the hate is real." --Ice-T "It's 2013. I'm pretty sure that driving a blind man to vote is a criminal offense." --Rojisan "You'd think it would be non-controversial..." "It's the Internet." --Anonymous Cow-orker and Bryce "We live in a world where too many people won't go far enough... won't do what they know is right... what they believe. I don't know how or why it got this way but the world has become so complicated, to involve yourself in someone else's problems is to invite them needlessly on yourself." --Frank Black, _Millennium_ "Wait - you're okay with me watching _Millennium_?" "I'm pretty sure it doesn't have an over-arching plot, so it doesn't matter." --Bryce and Lyssa "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." --Peter Thiel "Kids, what happens in the Kremlin stays in the Kremlin." --Marvin, _Red 2_ "There seems little point in practising magick unless you want to do at least a few extraordinary things with this incarnation." --Peter J. Carroll "The Holy See is a pivot point for international affairs and a major listening post for the United States, and to shoehorn the US delegation into an office annex inside another embassy is an insult to American Catholics and the Vatican." --James Nicholson, Former US Ambassador "Commander Vimes didn't like the phrase 'The innocent have nothing to fear,' believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like 'The innocent have nothing to fear.'" --Terry Prachett, _Snuff_ "If you're going to tell people the truth, be funny or they'll kill you." --Billy Wilder "I know the face of a man wrestling with demons. If I can help, even a little bit, I'll sleep better tonight." --Nicholas Whitebird "I have been vehemently accused by people who didn't understand me of not believing in anything. I /don't/ believe in anything. This is not a statement of existential hopelessness for which you should light a candle for me at night. It's a strategy for not getting bogged down in some weird trip. After all, what's the basis for believing anything? I mean, you have to understand: You're a monkey. In some kind of biological situation where everything has been evolved to serve the economy of survival - this is not a philosophy course. So, belief is a curious reaction to the present at hand. It isn't to be believed, it's to be /dealt with/ - experienced and modeled." --Terrence McKenna "If crypto is so hard that only one implementation is allowed to exist, it's crypto that needs to be rethought, not Go's library." --Rob Pike "Fight well against those you cannot see. Live well while you are your own. Die well for it is as important as what you did while alive." --Man of Many Names "Anyone can deliberately lose their shit and receive a beating, reminisce fondly about how manly it made them feel, and criticise everyone else for not also requesting a beating. It requires patience and intelligence to organise and establish a long term plan to win people over." --Joining Yet Again "Not sucking should not be a unique value." --Bryce, on financial transactions "Look at the thermal camera. It's like Hell in a bathtub!" --Adam Savage "One is not superior merely because one sees the world as odious." --Chateaubriand "Keeping the debate going, rather than delivering real incremental progress, is the technique by which progress can most easily be delayed." --Dean Willis "I've learned far more about government spying on citizens from the media than I have from official intelligence briefings." --Alan Grayson, US Congressional Representative "We face real conspiracies by real people. That has to be your threat model. Having a valid threat model is bound to make you more secure. Some bad decisions were made by conspiracy that intended bad outcomes." --James A. Donald "Cats are assholes. I mean, proudly so. 'Damn right, I'm an asshole, I'm a cat!'" --Adam Savage "Ultimately this stuff boils down to the same arguments that go around endlessly about Bitcoin scalability. If running a Bitcoin node is 'hard' where 'hard' is left vague and undefined, is Bitcoin now 'centralised'? The language is too vague to achieve any reasonable debate. The fact is that literally anyone can run a CA, the very name 'authority' is meaningless in that sense, but running one well is quite hard for fundamental reasons. That's why Verisign run a CA and you don't - because you would suck at it. If you stopped sucking at it, then you'd be doing it professionally, at which point you would probably need to charge fees and then people would decide you're an authoritarian Pillar of Centralisation. Back to square one." --Mike Hearn "Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies." --James M. Dakin "When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?" --Chuck Palahniuk, _Invisible Monsters_ "Not having total control doesn't mean you have to be a bystander to life." --Jerry Doyle "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains is often more improbable than your having made a mistake in one of your impossibility proofs." --Steven Kaas "In my experience, enterprise IT folks want to deploy a 'solution' that has low capital cost and low cost to maintain, and that is perceived as 'best practice" relative to their industry. Being truly effective against legitimate threats often is not on their checklist." --Stephen Kant "When something is on the Internet, it authorizes people to engage with it in the most half-assed way possible." --Andrew Hussie "They fit you." "Yes, but I feel like the 80's distilled while wearing it." --The Doctor and Hasufin "That's yoink to the yoink with a yoink." --Hasufin "Tell me, what is this?" "We often ask that of Bryce." --Hasufin and Lyssa "War is an honorable profession, and is in our nature. The lion does no wrong to kill the deer, and the warrior does no wrong to fight in a just war, for we are still killer apes." --James A. Donald "The hallucinogenic drugs... are not rude, per se. But, it can be difficult to observe the niceties of etiquette when you're being chased down the street by a nine headed cactus demon." --P.J. O'Rourke, _Modern Manners_ "Official reality is surreal and generally should be ignored." --James A. Donald "Currently the only sustainable funding model for investigative journalism that I can see is movie rights." --Janine Gibson "If you want to challenge the world's most powerful factions, you're going to get attacked in all sorts of ways. That's the nature - the essence - of power: It is capable of exacting a cost for defying it." --Glenn Greenwald "Some days, there's so much to blap about. So little time." --Lyssa "HOW MUCH BULLSHIT IS IT THAT WE'RE PRETTY MUCH THE ONLY TWO ASSHOLES LEFT WHO CAN'T FLY?!" "It Really Is Such Bullshit." --Karkat and Kanaya, _Homestuck_, on not being god-tier "You are not a god because others are sheep." --Rachel Haywire "You simply CAN NOT be distracted by people on the sideline talking shit. They're not on the playing field. Fuck 'em." --Ice-T Experience: Elitist activity considered cost ineffective by C-levels. Now largely replaced by certifications. --The Devil's IT Dictionary "People who tell you that rights are a zero-sum game in which someone's life has to be worse so someone else's can be better are lying." --Roz Kaveney "Fairy tales don't teach children that monsters exist. Children already know that monsters exist. Fairy tales teach children that monsters can be killed." --G.K. Chesterton "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its life believing that it is stupid." --Albert Einstein "_Grave of the Fireflies_ makes Steinbeck look happy and cheerful! People survived in Steinbeck!" --Hasufin "People will become unhappy, no matter how well they are off, if you take from them the hope for a better future." --Newro "The future is trillionaires and their trustafarian, NGO-starting children trying to throw cake out the windows." --Twilite Minotaur "If you would persuade, you must appeal to interest rather than intellect." --Benjamin Franklin "One wants maximum entropy not only from one's RNG but also from one's discussions about randomness. Sadly, entropy is measured based on the level of 'surprise' at the content, and the level of surprise is going down in the current discussion. As surprise goes to zero, so does interest on the part of the couple thousand people reading along." --Perry E. Metzger "I do not know what that means." "Neither do I." "Fear not! I have the Internet in my pants!" --Hasufin and Bryce "The problem is that idiocy is possible and permissible, not that it is mandatory." --James A. Donald "I want you to know, I'm proud of you." "Because I'm getting rid of crap?" "Because you have interesting crap." --Lyssa and Bryce "Dante may have known hell. But he did not know email servers at all. They would have scared the shit out of him." --cshark "I can't help thinking that the world, not just MONDO 2000, came to an end in around 1997. And we didn't know it. And we're living in the ruins." --Hakim Bey Zuboff's Laws: 1. Everything that can be automated will be automated. 2. Everything that can be rendered as information will be rendered as information. 3. In the absence of countervailing restrictions or sanctions, every digital application that can be used for surveillance and control will be, irrespective of its original intention. "We are all conspirators now. The only question is whether we're conspiring for our own truth or conspiring for our own deception." --iang "There's going to be some version of Nancy Reagan in 5-10 years: Instead of crack, it's going to be gene doping, or digital doping." --Rich Lee, on grinding "For years, particularly with the advent of the Internet, people have been griping about lessening attention spans. But if someone can watch an entire season of a TV series in one day, doesn't that show an incredible attention span? When the story is good enough, people can watch something three times the length of an opera." --Kevin Spacey "It's so alpha that the Planck constant wobbles a little bit whenever I run the unit tests." --Nick Mathewson's alpha release warning for libottery "Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad." --Miles Kington "It was made in a way that would be completely impossible now. The director [Robert Longo] and I began by trying to raise a million dollars to make a black and white short, and no one would give us the money. One of Robert Longo's biggest collectors happened to be a Hollywood bigshot, and he turned around and said 'No one is going to give you a million dollars - you have to ask for 10!' So he did, and we got it. It went rolling on from there. It was about five years from conception to release, and it was all wonderfully peculiar." --William Gibson, on the movie _Johnny Mnemonic_ "Fame doesn't change you.. It just AMPLIFIES who to truly are. If you're cool you can be really cool. An asshole becomes more of one." --Ice-T "You can't be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government's policy is benevolent, can you now?" --Control, _The Spy Who Came In From the Cold_ "Dissidence is like Andrei Sakharov. Such a useful guy, modest, soft-spoken, brainy, built you a hydrogen bomb. This eerie device straight from hell even works, so it's all good. Then all of a sudden he's like: 'You know what? The noble science of physics shouldn't harm mankind!' What kind of self-indulgent, fatuous gesture is that? Look here, Dr. Labcoat: Why was the public's money given to you, if not to harm mankind? If physics was harmless, you wouldn't have a damn salary!" --Bruce Sterling "Goddamn! It's like Looney Tunes!" --Lyssa, on Mythbusters "There's a 'Mail' button here. I have no idea what it points at." --Anonymous Cow-orker, on Windows 8 "Just because a message comes from Heaven doesn't mean it's not stupid." --Jacques Vallee "Well, I got bored with wearable computing in 1996." "What the fuck?! You are standing in the MIT Media Lab while you say that!" --Anonymous conference attendees "Love is not affectionate feeling but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained." --C.S.Lewis "Many non-authoritarian organizations have foundered on the dubious principle of open membership, which frequently leads to preponderance of assholes, yahoos, spoilers, whining neurotics, and police agents." --Hakim Bey "Personal computers can have users, but social media has livestock." --Bruce Sterling "Adam, the police officer said you need to drink more." --Jamie Hyneman "Why do people hate spiders, they keep the bloody flies down." "Two words: Clock Spider. Also, you're from Australia, where the arachnids have health bars, so your opinion is skewed." --Woolfe and GodComplex "Quite a lot of my broad science and history background was originally learned as research for roleplaying games. I am convinced that without gaming, I would not have the awesome job I got today. Games are great motivators for real learning!" --Arenamontanus "Monkey say, so you do." --Lyssa "The saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished liberty is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while yet there was time." --George Sutherland, former Supreme Court Justice "There's never been a recorded case of someone developing stomach trouble after swallowing their pride." --Aramaki, _Ghost In the Shell: Stand Alone Complex (Second Gig)_ "Dammit, stop failing, Microsoft!" "No. You can't have a puppy, either." --Anonymous Cow-orker and Bryce "Allegedly, if Steve Balmer is ever forced out of Microsoft, a dead man's switch will release Clippy into Windows 9." --Nobody Special "Google [has become] a central and evolving structural unit not only of the architecture of cyberspace, but of the world. This is the sort of thing that empires and nation-states did, before. But empires and nation-states weren't organs of global human perception. They had their many eyes, certainly, but they didn't constitute a single multiplex eye for the entire human species." --William Gibson "...I did not know you could do that outside of Homestuck." --The Doctor and Spencer Campbell "If you want me to 'act professional,' I can tell you that I'm not interested. I'm sitting in my home office wearing a bathrobe. The same way I'm not going to start wearing ties, I'm *also* not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords. Because THAT is what 'acting professionally' results in: People resort to all kinds of really nasty things because they are forced to act out their normal urges in unnatural ways." --Linus Torvalds "The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over." --Hunter S. Thompson "Wow, IT works really fast in the future." "It's because I'm sitting right next to you and you said 'please'." --Anonymous Cow-orker and Bryce "And while you're lying awake at night worrying whether the Men in Black have backdoored the CPU in your laptop, you're missing the fact that the software that's using the random numbers has 36 different buffer overflows, of which 27 are remote-exploitable, and the crypto uses an RSA exponent of 1 and AES-CTR with a fixed IV." --Peter Gutmann "It's tasty and it's tender. I'm not ashamed of that at all." --Alton Brown "This looks like a bad episode of _ER_. It looks like we just performed an emergency cesaeran here." --Adam Savage "You can always rely on the Man In Black to get to the heart (or the distended anus) of the matter." --Chase W. Beck, on the Delta Green mailing list "I am an optimistic realist. Or rather, I'm an unrealistic optimist. My invented worlds do not contain religious fundamentalists who fly planes into buildings, or politicians who start wars under false pretences to line the pockets of their buddies in the fossil fuel industry. What could be more unrealistically optimistic?" --Peter Watts "There isn't a competition. This isn't zero sum." --I/O Error, on privacy technology projects "HEY GUYS! WATCH THIS!" "You forgot 'Hold my beer!'" "I'm not drinking." "...because no great stories started with salad." --Bryce, Haxwithaxe, and Sitwon "We have to pay our tithe to El Jobbso." "DEAD!" "Yes, but his company lives on." --The Doctor and Sitwon, testing Macbooks "Ma'am? How much pain are you in, on a scale from one to 'stepped on a Lego'?" --Anonymous "You know, for us, this would have been a dream come true." --Wolfgang Schmidt, former Stasi agent, on PRISM "We should try to attract radical, yet sensible people. I think we're doing fine so far, with the possible exception of me." --Eugen Leitl "Clippy is only doing what's best for you. Thank Clippy." --Anonymous Intern "There's more to the realization of our roles than gaining flashy powers. And there's more to healing than repairing battle damage. You killed a friend and you understandably feel regret. But it's done. She is gone and you are still here. Now what?" --Aranea, _Homestuck_ "My sphincter tightened!" --Adam Savage "We're worried about Kabul when Detroit has gone down for the count." --Bob Herbert "Trolling just isn't pro unless there are awkward conversations with federal law enforcement involved." --Haxwithaxe "Every shirt has two sleeves." --Dan Kaminsky, on nothing-up-my-sleeve numbers "I didn't spend six agonizing weeks (and counting) getting deterministic builds to work for Tor Browser to prove that I was honest or trustworthy. I did it because I don't believe that software development models based on single party trust can actually be secure against serious adversaries anymore, given the current trends in computer security and 'cyberwar'." --Mike Perry "A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest." --C.S. Lewis "Yeah, because, you know, when they camera crews flew out to Gamma Epsilon Four, and positioned themselves to get the shot of the Enterprise as it flew past the disabled Klingon Bird-Of-Prey, they just couldn't get all three of the trinary system's stars out of the frame... yeah, they just had to go with the lens flare and hope it looked ok in the end." --Kurt Harland, on lens flare abuse in the _Star Trek_ reboot "The issue is what powers any particular outfit has once they get hold of the data. That's why I'm more scared of governments." --Esther Dyson "Yesterday's 'far-fetched' keeps turning out to be today's reality with monotonous regularity." --Rich Kulawiec "Don't think of retiring from the world until the world will be sorry that you retire." --Samuel Johnson "I forgot to warn you, $pfy, talking to the Doctor is like talking to the Internet itself." "Well, a non-trivial amount of my consciousness /is/ running on the EC2..." --Anonymous Cow-orker and the Doctor "If government officials or large corporations attack a negative story about them, then it must mean the story was wrong." --Glenn Greenwald "It's GTK, man. I didn't do it." --Bryce "There's nobody hated more by those who play 'journalists' on TV than those who bring transparency to the US government." --Glenn Greenwald "Fiction is the domain of sociopaths. We build a world and then proceed to burn it." --Anonymous "You don't just make a clone of yourself to live in a dead end existence where it has no chance to thrive as an individual or surpass its limitations. That'd be sick." --Dirk Strider, _Homestuck_ "What version of Windows are you running over there?" "I don't know. Seven. I guess it's Seven, it's stable." --Anonymous Cow-orkers "Monsanto loves me. Just like Jesus. If anyone's going to pioneer Soylent Green, it'll be them." --Lyssa "So, I said to these very nice, young gentlebeings who awakened me at 0730 on a Sunday morning, 'I appreciate very much what you are saying to me. I am, however, a time traveler. I have a first edition of _The Book of Mormon_ from when I met Joseph Smith Junior; I also counted Senior as a close friend while I lived there during that period of history. I also drink so much coffee every day that my ancestors could not be posthumously baptised into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints because my caffeinated blood coursed through their veins while /they/ walked your world.'" --The Doctor "We are all like tea bags - we don't know our own strength until we're in hot water." --Unknown "Any ham worth their mass in RF energy would have a Walkman or old boombox laying around to rip those out of." --Haxwithaxe, on rectifiers An engineer, a physicist, and a mathematician each need to create a pen for three flocks of sheep using the smallest amount of fencing possible. The engineer pounds a few poles into the ground, uses the fencing to tightly "lasso" the flock, and completes the pen. The physicist carefully calculates the area covered by each sheep, runs the numbers, cuts the fencing, and creates a circular pen. The mathematician takes a very small piece of fence, wraps it around himself, and loudly declares that he's on the outside of the fence. "I always thought if you worked hard enough and tried hard enough, things would work out. I was wrong." --Katharine Graham "You know, my people come from a long line of goat shavers. You might say it's in my blood." --Kari Byron "Punch me in the face." "Punch you?" "Yes, punch me, in the face. Didn't you hear me?" "I always hear 'punch me in the face' when you're speaking, but it's usually subtext." --Holmes and Watson, _Sherlock: A Scandal in Belgravia_ "Palmetto bugs are all but indestructible." "But kittens do a pretty good job." --Hasufin and Kate "Well, obviously, I knew the birds were just black, screaming sky dongs. Just hear me out." --Dave waxing Freudian, _Homestuck_ "Life is infinitely stranger than anything the mind of man can imagine." --Sherlock Holmes, _Elementary_ "When you wage war on the public schools, you're attacking the mortar that holds the community together." --Garrison Keillor "If my father wants someone to get fucked, I know where he can start!" --Tyrian Lannister, _Game of Thrones_ "We don't want you to get hurt, big guy." "Don't touch me." "'kay." --Tory and Jamie, _Mythbusters_ "If the politicians of today see the entire growing up generation as a problem, then maybe it's the politicians who are the problem." --Rick Falkvinge "No one. Can ever. Know about this." "I say that to myself on a regular basis." --Mike and Luke, The Viking Rocketship podcast IT is a filter. It accepts masochists and idealists on stdin, and emits misanthropes on stdout. "The hero in your head is Mister Morden!" --Jason, to Hasufin "Learning about crypto is like reading _Atlas Shrugged_ in high school. It promises to explain and solve *everything*. Disillusionment follows." --Matt Blaze "I think we need to stop and acknowledge the bunny sassacre fedora I just made." --John Egbert, _Homestuck_ "This is the phase where we figure out what in the hell we promised." --Anonymous Contractor "I don't care how awesome a rocket launcher looks on screen, it can't possibly compare to trying to shove a meter long piece of metal through someone." --Hasufin, on fencing "The biggest failure in the recent past is this assumption that the audience is not smart. Too much effort is being spent making it dummy proof.. all the clues are being held right in front of their nose. The exploration and journey is the reward." --Brian Fargo, on video games "It looks like the size of the knob is what dictates the price of the radio." --Sitwon, on amateur radios "Those who are capable of tyrrany are capable of perjury to sustain it." --Lysander Spooner "People will love you. People will hate you. And none of it will have anything to do with you." --Abraham Hicks "All this magic stuff needs new terminology because it's not what people are being told it is at all. It's not all this wearying symbolic misdirection that's being dragged up from the Victorian Age, when no-one was allowed to talk plainly and everything was in coy poetic code. The world's at a crisis point and it's time to stop bullshitting around with Qabalah and Thelema and Chaos and Information and all the rest of the metaphoric smoke and mirrors designed to make the rubes think magicians are 'special' people with special powers. It's not like that. Everyone does magic all the time in different ways. 'Life' plus 'significance' = 'magic'." --Grant Morrison "Mark my word, this is going to be trouble." "Everything of value is." ---Londo and Delenn, _Babylon-5_ "I'm sorry, but could I ask you to please shut your laptop off? The cooling fan is keeping me awake." "I'm sorry, but your snoring woke up the rest of the passengers in this row. The white noise from my cooling fan wasn't enough to help everyone else sleep." --Conversations from a parallel universe "Never bring glitter and mailbox doilies to a gunfight." --Jarandhel "I always bring a length of fiber with me while backpacking. If I find myself lost, I just bury the fiber and a backhoe should be along shortly to dig it up." --Sean Lally "First of all, it's /complicated as hell/..." --Anonymous Engineer "Socialism never took root in America because the poor there see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporariliy embarrassed millionaires." --John Steinbeck "I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?" --John Lennon "War is the health of the state." --Randolph Bourne "Wars are hopeless, but Pepco is something we can defeat." --Shahar "Well, here's MY assumption about this system..." --Anonymous Cow-orker "Why is it taking so long? If I wanted to wait, I'd have used a really old computer." --Sitwon "You see, you're being rational. I'm being real." --Juri, on hexhead screws "Friends don't let friends consume natto!" --Hasufin "Who the fuck ever heard of an alien juggalo? To me this is about as stupid as the crackpot theories get." --Dirk Strider, _Homestuck_ "In retrospect, this was a rash move. There are times to think and times to move. This wasn't the time to think - this father would be dead soon. Perhaps my rash actions were the result of dormant and, as of yet, unneeded heroic tendencies. Or perhaps they were the result of the rum in my belly, put there to calm my nerves. Perhaps the rest of the crew were so easily swayed to this new task because they themselves had been drinking. Or perhaps we are all born to be heroes." --Captain Robert, _The Wrath of Fate_ "Geez, Hax, you're all tactical and shit." --Bryce "The motives in his heart might be all right, but at the same time he's an arrogant asshole." --Overheard in a coffee shop in Washington, DC "A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any other invention, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila." --Mitch Ratcliffe "I think techno-optimism is suspect. It can be a tool of the ruling plutocracy. To detourne Woody Guthrie, the promise is there'll be pie in the sky when you don't die. In other words, future hope can be a control mechanism that stands in for religion's promise of a better afterlife." --R.U. Sirius "Only the madman is absolutely sure." --Robert Anton Wilson "Compassion without realism is ineffective. It's just empty idealism that does nobody any good, and sometimes can actually cause harm. Ideals interact with reality in interesting ways, and all you can do is maintain your commitment and check your bearings every once in a while, to actively correct for errors." --Amon Zero "I am satisfied and filthy. Two of my favorite states." --Adam Savage "Oh, America - where finding connectivity is like finding water on Arrakis." "Yeah. If you want it, you have to squeeze it from a dead person." --The Doctor and Haxwithaxe "Don't you have an app for that?" --Joan Watson, _Elementary_ "Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can't help them, at least don't hurt them." --Dalai Lama "Fiction speaks to people. Even fiction like mine acts to tell someone, somewhere, that they're not alone. You want tangible, social benefits to writing fiction? There are people walking around today because other people wrote words that spoke to them. That'll do." --Warren Ellis "Only the small secrets need to be protected. The large ones are kept secret by public incredulity." --Marshall McLuhan "So I started playing World of Warcraft..." "Did you check to find the 12 step programs near you before you ran the installer?" "No." "It was nice knowing you." --Jason and Ken Practice bears nothing but fruit. "If you really want to burn him, I recommend poetry. I suggest you serve these crisp bunches of honey and verbal annihilation to him as part of a complete breakfast. A deft cluster-bombing of this sort will leave nothing wriggling from the razed earth. Except sulfurous tresses while it cracks and turns black. I suppose what I'm saying is this: Drop some hard, peer-reviewed motherfuckin' science on his ass. Some seriously government funded shit. It will destroy him. Your obvious cunning with words should depants Strider with such vivid empyrean tempest, a nether-regional sonic boom is certain inevitability. Consider me at your disposal to help craft a comeuppance of such unqualified devastation, the angels will weep pearlstrings of little urban fellows cantillating an unbroken chorus of Oh Snaps." --Rose, _Homestuck_ If your principles don't inconvenience you from time to time, you don't really have any. "Kids, in my experience, have pretty much the same capacities for cruelty, kindness, violence, and enlightened thought that adults do, just with less experience." --Amnesiack "If Free Software is only free when your time is worth nothing, Microsoft is only affordable when your systems aren't under attack." --I/O Error "It takes a while to install Puppet." "How long?" "Ruby." "Oh." --Sitwon, The Doctor, and Haxwithaxe "I may be on the side of the angels, but don't think for one second that I am one of them." --Sherlock Holmes, _Sherlock: The Reichenbach Fall_ "For the record: I know that Rule 34 applies to my own show, and no, I haven't read any of the fan fiction. I have seen things I wish to unsee." --Adam Savage "Who'd've thought that breaking DNS could be so hard?" --Bryce "I don't have anything against him. I just want to see someone mauled by a polar bear." --Hasufin "What you propose is akin to performing dental surgery through the anus." --Saso Kiselkov "It's not my revolution if I cannot dance, and there's no fucking way I'm dancing to something that sounds like a tampon advertisement." --Asher Wolf "To paraphrase Jamie H. - when in doubt, `rm -rf`." --Haxwithaxe "Design like you're right. Listen like you're wrong." --John Lily "After all, computers crash, people die, relationships fall apart. The best we can do is breathe and reboot." --Unknown "Run wpa_supplicant manually? That's something you'd see on _Mythbusters_ these days." --Bryce "I'd like to use DBus for the purpose of fitting in with the rest of the system, but that is secondary to figuring shit out." --Haxwithaxe "There's a circle of Hell for people who destroy beautiful cars. That's where we're going." --Grant Imahara "Mankind is not evil, just uninformed." --Professor X, _X-Men_ "There is no 'two'. There is one, and there is /n/." --Haxwithaxe Keep an open mind, but not an empty head. "One way or another, it's all just shrapnel." --Jamie Hyneman "German is flexible!" "So is Perl!" --Haxwithaxe and The Doctor "My low caffeine warning light is on." --Anonymous Cow-orker "Before you say anything, I would like to remind you I am holding an axe." --Sherlock Holmes, _Elementary_ "Now I'm trying to get it out of my head!" "You're welcome." --Jason and Ken, getting into character "Well, that's five now. Five cats, at least; also two rabbits (one with some kind of neuro-head-tilty disease), two pones, a tank full of tropical fish and a Russian hamster named 'Orca'. All I can say is, when the societal infrastructure does collapse, it'll be a while before we run out of fresh protein." --Peter Watts "Their paranoid fear of a possible dystopic future prevents us from addressing our actual dystopic present." --Jon Stewart "The planet we're fighting over is in beta." --Hasufin, on Risk Legacy "I lived! Holy shit! That was awesome!" --Adam Savage, _Mythbusters_ "In an age of sufficiently advanced technology, the kinds of lessons we used to learn from history we must now learn from fantasy and sci-fi." --Meng Weng Wong "Witness the power of this fully armed and operational bureaucracy." --The Doctor "We had a tripwire in there, but it turned into a noose." --Anonymous Flight Engineer "Walter's thinking too loudly. I can't sleep." --Peter Bishop, _Fringe_ "Remember: The Internet is always broken, 24x7x365, in some regard. It sucks when your packets suffer from it, but there's very little you can do when you don't have contractual arrangements with the providers who are experiencing issues." --Jeremy Chadwick "What's the difference between pornography and art? Grant money." --Haxwithaxe Mathematicians think physicists are engineers. Physicists think engineers are technicians. Engineers know that technicians actually do the work. "A fire eater must eat fire, even if he has to kindle it himself." --Salvor Hardin, _Foundation_ "Out the Gig-E, through the router, down the OC-12's, over the leased line, off the bridge, past the firewall... nothing but Net." "It isn't the consumers' job to know what they want." --Steve Jobs "Either way, I'm screwed." --The Sysadmin's Motto "Security will either work with us or they will not - but it's not really our problem." --Rogue "Perhaps the definition of 'pure science' is 'Science I can't be thrown in jail over'." --Rob Seaman, on Italian seismologists being convicted on grounds of not being able to predict earthquakes "You are either speaking German, or Enochian with an atrocious accent." --The Doctor "It's entropy, just deal with it." "That's the least useful answer ever. It is the answer to every single question in the history of the universe." --Overheard at a Oxford Science Society meeting "This is a Darwinian world. It doesn't matter if something is a negative sum game, as long as some believe they can win it." --Rudiger Koch "With superhuman knowledge, there must go equally great compassion and tolerance." --Arthur C. Clarke "The difference between being a newbie and being on the cutting edge is only that a newbie accepts not knowing as proof of not being able to know." --Anonymous "Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo." --H.G. Wells "You cannot plan the future. Only presumptuous fools plan. The wise man steers." --Cosmo Lavish, _Making Money_ "So, let me get this straight: Michael Jackson died, and Madonna got younger. Did she Shang Tsung him?" "What? You mean you think she drank his soul???" "Ordinarily, I'm against diablerie, but in this case..." "I read the autopsy report. I didn't see anything about explosive damage in the Jackson mansion, no signs of lightning strikes, and he wasn't decapitated." "You see that? That's what a fifth generation Toreador looks like. She USED to be sixth." --Bryce, Laurelindel, and Lyssa, commenting on the Madonna/Psy live mashup "The only real deviants are the ones who are totally boring." --Ken "It's going to be difficult getting any information from him right now, because he dropped acid." --Astrid, _Fringe_ "In addition to that I think besides choosing optimism as a health measure, it's also a rebellion against the dominant pessimism of our culture." --Robert Anton Wilson "Reality always requires human surrealism to improve it." --Lodewijk André de la Porte "The odds of the American government granting any state permission to go its own way are on par with winning the lottery while getting hit by a meteor while seeing Bigfoot while finding gluten-free pizza that tastes like the real thing." --Mike Krumboltz "John, I am the ghost of an old lady with one arm who is dressed like a clown. Why would that seem strange to me?" --Nannasprite, _Homestuck_ "This is disappointing black metal. I can understand what this guy is saying." "System of a Down?" "...oh." --The Doctor and Sitwon "'Commonism' is not any particular ideology, but a belief in 'common' human beings, 'ordinary' people working together for a common good. It's anti-elitist." --Earl Mac Rauch "I blog about personalized biowarfare, extrajudical killings, cyberwarfare, EMP weaponry and other thriller-fodder. Except that these are real issues now and in the near future. My main argument is that the US (and other governments) are pursuing technologies that are potentially most effective in destabilizing their own societies." --Anders Sandberg "When you buy a service that doesn't have transparency, don't expect transparency." --Alex Rubenstein "That's what it takes to write a happy science fiction story: Throw out everything you know about human nature, and replace it with rainbows and puffy kittens." --Peter Watts "A scientist, like a warrior, must cherish no view. A 'view' is the outcome of intellectual processes, whereas creativity, like swordsmanship, requires not neutrality, or indifference, but to be of no mind whatsoever." --Buckaroo Banzai "Just remember where you got it, donate to good research, and please share good ideas!" --Anders Sandberg "It's not so much what you do that counts, but what you are willing to let the other fellow get away with." --Sid Bernstein "YEAH BITCH, MAGNETS!.......can you see an episode with that as the title?! So, redditors, what weird shit would you like yours truly and team to build?" --Jamie Hyneman, on Reddit "Look - it's a pop-up, only as a commercial." --Lyssa "Anarchism: The hard-headed realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to rulers." --Mark Stoval "The hallmark of someone who does not really believe in free speech is when they claim they do, followed by a 'but', followed by efforts to explain why the views they embrace should be permitted, while the views they despise should not be." --Glenn Greenwald "Miracles start to happen when you give as much energy to your dreams as you do to your fears." --Richard Wilkins "I didn't meet a single person I did not like. Regular readers will know how much it pains me to admit this." --Peter Watts, on Kontrast "Human stupidity is a historical certainty. Maybe one day we can collectively and consensually engineer dumbness from the human state, but for now we are stuck with it." --Khannea Suntzu "So, let me get this straight: There are cops guarding gas stations in New York City. What the hell? Is this Mad Max, or something? Are people getting ganked over gas now?" --The Doctor (and yes, people were panicking and fighting with one another over access to gas prior to Hurricane Sandy) "Now that, in my expert opinion, is an ass whoopin'." --An Expert, _The Boondocks_ "If I live through this job without completely losing my mind, it will be a miracle of biblical proportions." --Ivanova, _Babylon-5_ "There are no wonks here. No wonkery is involved - not even self-wonking!" --Hasufin, on writing policy "It is poor civic hygine to install technologies that could someday facilitate a police state." --Bruce Schneier "I'm not going to censor myself to comfort your ignorance." --Jon Stewart "Well, that's not a problem for someone who's done acid!" --Walter Bishop, _Fringe_ "I am just a human being... I'm not a guru or a leader or a demigod of any kind." --Grant Morrison "I'm gonna deploy a linux box w/ VPN hosting qemu VM with linux box with VPN and Tor into a website containing directions to create a tinfoil hat." --Replica "Ronald Reagan in 1980 taught us that greed is good, economics is war and it is a zero-sum game -- I can only win if everyone else loses. That teaching is categorically wrong and evil." --Stewart Dickson "Nothing will stop you from being creative so effectively as the fear of making a mistake." --John Cleese "No, the enemies are the backhoes of darkness. The backhoes of light help bring fibery goodness to all the needy bandwidth-starved peasants in the land. Occasionally a backhoe of light will fall and succomb to the evil ways of the backhoes of darkness. Alas, this becomes more common as the needy peasants seek more choices of carriers in their narrow passageways." --Bill Wichers "All the world's major religions, with their emphasis on love, compassion, patience, tolerance, and forgiveness can and do promote inner values. But the reality of the world today is that grounding ethics in religion is no longer adequate. This is why I am increasingly convinced that the time has come to find a way of thinking about spirituality and ethics beyond religion altogether." --The Dalai Lama "Nothing is safe. We can't even make anything safe. One of these days we should admit that." --Quinn Norton "I have a moral objection to things that don't have enough garlic in them." --Amberite "Wait, are these dolls anatomically correct?" --Laurelindel "Jamie want big boom." --Jamie Hyneman, _Mythbusters_ "Don't board the ethereal plane." --Brandon, _The Fringecast_ "We're entering a world where, if you can't understand your own threat model, you're dead." --Dymaxion "A good pure researcher will, over the course of his/her/its career, get published a few times, see his/her/its work plagiarized, stolen, or otherwise borrowed by the commercial sector, and will be rewarded with an increasing sense of bitterness as he/she/it watches the universe continue to spin down entropically in several senses of the word. We should not, therefore, blame the pure researcher for being an elitist jerk. It's some of the only pleasure he/she/it will derive from the quest for discoveries untainted by practical application." --Howard Taylor "Crocodiles are easy. They try to kill and eat you. People are harder. Sometimes they pretend to be your friend first." --Steve Irwin (RIP) "Excuse me, I'm Erik Lensherr.." "Charles Xavier..." "Go fuck yourselves." --_X-Men: First Class_ "History contains harsh lessons for those who refuse to speak when it would make the most difference." --I/O Error "I'm completely in favor of the separation of church and state. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death." --George Carlin "Monitoring yourself too closely might be bad for your sense of existence." --Arenamonanus "Revenge is part of the illusion of self. How can a man kill that which neither lives nor dies truly, but which exists only as a reflection of the Absolute?" --Sam, _Lord of Light_ "I now work with girls younger than my breast implants." --Nina Hartley "Mostly, working with Joe (JMS) was just one big prank." --Patricia Tallman "Propose to a man any principle, or an instrument, however admirable, and you will observe the whole effort is directed to find a difficulty, a defect, or an impossibility in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: If you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple." --Charles Babbage "In the nineties, only the shameless opportunists ran the asylum: now it's the fucking lunatics." --Peter Watts "Don't see why folks are all up in arms about this. I have yet to go to a hacker conference with functional internet access for attendees." --Rubin Abdi, on net.access at ToorCamp 2012 "I've been your age. You've never been mine. Pay attention." --Ice-T "Style is knowing who you are, what you want to say, and not giving a damn." --Gore Vidal "Whoever packaged that for Debian was a dork." --Eugen Leitl, on the Debian backport build of the Satoshi Bitcoin client having no configuration file or initscript "If you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best." --Marilyn Monroe "After watching a dude race in the Olympics with no legs, I think everyone should stop making excuses." --Ice-T "If the rest of your brain were conscious, it would probably regard you as the pointy-haired boss from Dilbert." --Peter Watts "Are you on any medications?" "Several. Most of them recreational." --J. Random MP and Walter, _Fringe_ "The level of complexity in the conspiracy vastly exceeds the expense and complexity of just doing it." --Haxwithaxe, on NASA moon landing conspiracy theories "The L stands for 'lulz', not 'lightweight'." --Aaron Kuhn, on LDAP "There is a rumor going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely, because I have enough difficulty finding my keys and there is empirical evidence that they exist." --Terry Prachett (allegedly) "We do not fight because we think we will win. Winning is irrelevant. We fight because it is what we must do." --Dymaxion "Don't look at me like there's some reasonable explanation, it's Walter." --Astrid, _Fringe_ "If you think there is too much quantum around, just stare hard at it. The wavefunction will collapse from embarrassment." --Arenamontanus "This guy was living the cyberpunk life, right down to the murder!" --Sitwon, on Hans Reiser Maxim 37: There is no 'overkill.' There is only 'open fire' and 'I need to reload.' "Some people, from their bad sexual experiences, get herpes. I just get inconvenient phone calls." --Anonymous "Only in the age of autotune is being off-key a political act." --Angelle Gullett "Whatever the source, the message was pure, believe me. That is the only reason it took root and grew." --Sam, _Lord of Light_ "Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal." --Albert Camus "'Impossible' is just a big word thrown around by small men who find it easier to live in the world they've been given, than to expore the power they have to change it. Impossible it not a fact, it's an opinion. Impossible is not a declaration, it's a dare. Impossible is potential. Impossible is temporary. Impossible is nothing." --Megan Eskey "He's a bit unorthodox.." "He's also tripping his brains out right now. You know that, right?" --Nina and Peter, _Fringe: Do Shapeshifters Dream of Electric Sheep?_ "The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history." --George Orwell "The general population doesn't know what's happening, and it doesn't even know that it doesn't know." --Noam Chomsky "Incomplete scripts are dangerous things. You can never tell what state they will be in by the time they get to the truncated portion. Your backup might have finished, and only the bit that deletes the oldest ones is missing; you have to go back and take care of that by hand, which is not a big deal. Or, the rate-limiting governor might have gotten lost, leaving only a fake call to /usr/bin/at that leaves you with an error message right before your server locks up solid because it is out of both RAM and disk space. Now imagine a Lua script called by something as complex as the Flame malware, which has an embedded Lua interpreter. What might happen if one of those scripts was truncated but the first third or so still ran?" --The Doctor "The rapture of the nerds, like space colonization, is likely to be a non-participatory event for 99.999% of humanity - unless we're very unlucky." --Charles Stross "Eww! I just burped, and it tasted like nothing I've eaten today!" "You know, when I say things like that you yell at me." --Lyssa and Bryce "The only valid censorship of ideas is the right of people not to listen." --Tommy Smothers "Human beings are judged by their ideal performance, animals by their actual one." --Mary Midgley "Nature loves diversity and society abhors it." --Nan Wise "There is no app for that." --Chuck Tench "Are you alleging that the captive portal might be working?" "I'm alleging that I fucked up. There's a difference." --Sitwon and Bryce "No. It's too early in the day for me to drink. That would be a BAD IDEA. None of you need to hold my hair tonight." "If you have any left, that is." "What?! Fuck you. I know I'm losing my hair..." "No - thermite. When you and alcohol are involved, it's always about thermite." "I - you're right. Well played, sir. Well played." --Bryce and Haxwithaxe "AAAAAAALLLLLLRIGHT! Drop your jocks and grab your socks, it's time for Spit, Choke, and Puke's WOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRLLLLLLLLLLLLLLD.... ooooffff.... Sports!" --Scott Paulson, WDVE "I'm Irish! What's your excuse?" --Terrence McKenna, when asked by John Horgan just how much of his rap he actually believed "Believe me, I prefer not to. I may be synthetic but I'm not stupid." --Bishop, _Aliens_ "You can tell this is from the 80's - space looks two dimensional." "Yeah, it's from before they started using photographs from Hubble for the backgrounds." --Lyssa and Bryce, watching _Aliens_ on Blu-Ray "There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks when decades happen." --Vladimir Lenin "Stupidity has a certain charm, ignorance does not." --Frank Zappa "To make an omelette, you've got to kill a few civilians." --Stephen Colbert, on drones "I study Kendo just in case lightsabers are ever invented I'll know how to fight with one. In the meantime I get to have crazy-go-nuts bamboo swordfights twice a week ...oh but I wait for the day." --Wiley [sic] "Those are brave men knocking at our door - let's go kill them!" --Tyrion Lannister, _A Game of Thrones: Darkwater_ "Hold on, I want to look at this from the command line. What the fuck am I seeing?!" --ag4ve "C is just a really bad Lisp interpreter." --Sitwon "If there isn't an Arduino, you can't write a blog post about it." --Papna, on electronics "We'd bump into one another on the VR rubber chicken circuit." --William Gibson, on Timothy Leary and the 1990's "Once is happenstance; twice is enemy action; thrice is a fuckup." --Bob Howard, _The Fuller Memorandum_ "Please allow me a moment to entertain my fantasies, they often lead to a truth." --Walter Bishop, _Fringe_ "Juggalos that are into Scheme has to be one of the tiniest imaginable subcultures." --Bjorn Westergard "Our original ancestors were dust and stars." --AgingGothMom "You can't stop him - he just won't quit. Like a crack smoking Energizer Bunny." --ag4ve "I wasn't really in the military, I was in the Air Force." --Joe McCray "If at first you don't succeed, try following the instructions." --Kallista "Hide yo' kids, hide yo' wife, they pwning errrybody up in here!" --Herp Derpington, on CarolinaCon "Developing for iPhone is like doing gymnastics in a body cast." --Georgia Weidman "It would appear, as per geek maintenance regulations, I have one spare screw even though I got all of them back in." --Haxwithaxe "I packed light - I only brought four laptops with me on this trip." --Sitwon "Sure, it will work. The same day when there's porcine aviation during a -273.14 C day in Hell." --Eugen Leitl "Comrade Sitting Duck, reporting for duty." --Laurelindel "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent full of doubt." --Bertrand Russell "All right, this is fuckin' weird, everyone." --Ad-Rock "What's worse: Being a has-been or annoying a has-been?" --Bobcat Goldthwaite "I've almost forgotten my PGP password. It's time to leave." --Haxwithaxe "Should we make a Prezy presentation?" "We're in the United States, we don't always have Internet." --Sitwon and Haxwithaxe "When was it you lost your imagination, son?" --Walter Bishop, _Fringe_ "Imagine 30 years ago, when we were on the phone and discussed something, if a voice had popped in and said ''You have mentioned an inappropriate subject. Please refrain from inappropriate communications.'' We would have been horrified. It would have been seen as so dystopic that if it had been written in a novel of fiction, it would have been discarded as just unrealistic. Well, we're there." --Rick Falkvinge "A little memory loss has not been kind to the soul." --Walter Bishop, _Fringe_ "Doctor Oddly Specific, I presume." --The Doctor "(Charles) Babbage pioneered IT management: His project took vast sums of cash, the spec kept changing, and it ultimately failed to deliver. (Alan) Turing scavenged supplies and knocked together something that worked and solved the problem - reward? Arrest and castration. Which one feels most like your career?" --Peter Corlett "The only function of economic forecasting is to make Astrology seem respectable." --John Kenneth Glbraith "Checking identity papers is a complete waste of time. If anyone can be counted on to have valid papers, it will be the terrorists." --Colonel Mathieu, _The Battle of Algiers_ "No one's ever apologized to me before. I don't know how to react." --Kenneth Scroggins "I am pro people voicing their opinions on literature, even unpopular ones, and I fully support Christopher Priest's right to weep over the state of science fiction as he sees it. And while I don't care for name-calling, this is the Internet, and aside from porn, that's pretty much what it's for." --Cat Valente "Don't use cryptographic overkill. Even bad crypto is usually the strong part of the system." --Adi Shamir "Man does not have the right to develop his own mind." --Dr. Jose' Delgado "It's 2011, and I have no idea what anything is or does anymore." --Tom Taylor "Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep." --Isaiah Berlin "Seeing a CA put a key like this in a cert is a bit like walking down the street and noticing someone coming towards you wearing their underpants on their head, there's nothing inherently bad about this but you do tend to want to cross the street to make sure that you avoid them." --Peter Gutmann, on a CA signing a certificate containing a factorable exponent "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet." --Damon Runyon "Ridicule is not part of the scientific method, and people should not be taught that it is. The steady flow of reports, often made in concert by reliable observers, raises questions of scientific obligation and responsibility." --J. Allen Hynek "The genetic code does not, and cannot, specify the nature and position of every capillary in the body or every neuron in the brain. What it can do is describe the underlying fractal pattern which creates them. Remember, genes are NOT blueprints. This means you can't, for example, insert 'the genes for an elephant's trunk' into a giraffe and get a giraffe with a trunk. There are no genes for trunks. What you CAN do with genes is chemistry, since DNA codes for chemicals. For instance, we can in theory splice the native plant's talent for nitrogen fixation into a terran plant." --Prokhor Zakharov, _Nonlinear Genetics_ "How much bastard rolling do you have in you?" --Ross Payton "Tell me you've made scrambled eggs, otherwise my head might explode." --Hasufin "If you don't understand the Internet, you don't have any place in government." --Gary Kovacs, CEO, Mozilla "We are as gods and HAVE to get good at it." --Stewart Brand "You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity." --Robert A. Heinlein "You understand you're asking me if I can repair a piece of technology that is entirely unlike anything that has ever existed here on Earth?" "Brandon..." "Now that I have one that works, I can do it in three hours. Tops." --Nina and Brandon, _Fringe_ "So, what semi-precious stones do you resonate with?" "Quartz. I am a cheap date, but I am also piezoelectric." --Laurelindel and the Doctor "..and Man made Machine. And Machine made Music. And Machine saw everything it had made and said, '...the hell?'" --VNV Nation, _State of Silicon_ "If you've figured out it's going to cost you $250K/year (remember, salary, bennies, *and* overhead) to hire a security geek, but there's only a 5% chance you'll get hacked in a given year and you've got a business plan on how to *recover* for $100K, and swallow the $600K in lost sales the week your website is down, you're still better off *not hiring the expert and risking getting hacked*." --Valdis Kletnieks, telling it like it is on cost/benefit analysis and infosec "I believe we have to judge our society not by how we treat the privileged and empowered. We judge the civility and quality of our society by how we treat the silenced, the condemned, the undocumented, and all those whose views and rights are deemed inconvenient." --Olivia Wilde "People say, ''I'm a woman trapped in a man's body'' or ''I'm a man trapped in a woman's body,'' but I say ''I'm trapped in a body.''" --Genesis P. Orridge "Action, violence, and /some/ nudity. I'll hold them to that." --Hasufin, on MPAA ratings "What, you think I won't recognize you just because I can't see your cheekbones?!" --Carol Ferris, _Green Lantern_ "That's some beautiful fucking line noise. Care to tell me what it is?" --n0pants "LobbyCon: The con that never ends." --Maradydd "OH, CRAP!" --Vash "Hermione, when have any of our plans actually worked? We plan, we get there, all hell breaks loose!" --Harry, _Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows part 2_ "Fuck you, motel with no Internet, I can take over the world with a fucking iPhone and a SIM card." --Amanda Fucking Palmer "What do 'real' people have in their 'real' lives, then?" --Sherlock Holmes "Genuinely ubiquitous computing spreads like warm Vaseline." --William Gibson "So, what you are telling me is that everything sucks, and because of that we should just give up?" --The Doctor "Propaganda is just another meme. History is interchangeable with conspiracy theory once you realise that there is no objective position." --M1k3y "I'll fix what we did to their heads. You fix what we did to the rest of the world. Your job is way harder." --Topher, _Dollhouse_ "I'm told that somewhere, in some far-off land, scientists are not whores with data sets. Somewhere, people like me get to follow the data wherever they lead. I remain skeptical. If such a utopian realm exists, it does not lie within the bounds of marine mammalogy. So these days I'm pretty much a full-time writer. I still do the occasional bit of biostatistical analysis as an independent consultant -- migratory waterfowl stuff, mainly -- but it's been years since that was my primary source of income. At least with science fiction, you're supposed to make shit up." --Peter Watts "Is such a thing even possible?" "The mad scientist in me says 'yes'." --DeWitt and Topher, _Dollhouse_ "Labor without dignity is the cause of misery: Rest without spirit the source of depravity." --Abraham Joshua Heschel "Hang on, I want to try something." "I get nervous when you say that." --The Doctor and Lyssa "It's really disappointing to watch modern anthropologists apply twenty-first century values to third millennium BC cultures." --Mark Pesce (translated from 140 characters) "Great, it's the charge of the Collateral Damage Brigade." --Bryce "The satelites are just so wonderful it makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, but they also have the bandwith of IP over garden snail." --Haxwithaxe, on APRS "Wait, it's okay if Bryce finds out I'm a replicant. He doesn't mind!" --Amberite "I have good whiskey, good port, and good tea. I am missing only one thing." "Good coffee?" "Yup." --Hasufin and Lyssa "No, I don't want to see Zombie Dick Clark's balls drop." --Hasufin "Is this the Nautilus?" "Hasufin's grasp of pop culture is improving!" "Jules Verne is pop culture?" --Hasufin and Lyssa "My plan consists of options." --Bryce "I once brought a jackass and a honeycomb into a brothel..." --Tyrian Lannister, _A Game of Thrones_ "I'm half plushie - my genetalia are made of cotton!" --Amberite "It's not about being mad at everything. It's about being really mad at the right things." --Ice-T "I am a law enforcement officer. I want to put people in jail." --Special Agent William Ross, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement "I'd agree with you, except for the stupid part." --Lyssa "Mrs. Hudson, leave Baker Street? England would fall." --Sherlock Holmes "Every man should have a portable device with which he can give himself 3rd-degree burns and possibly blow up a building. It's what makes him a man." --Hasufin, singing the praises of the propane blowtorch "We're failing. You're failing, I'm failing, and everybody who thinks they're not is deluding themselves. We're stuck in this constant InfoSec circle-jerk where we each tell the next how much better things are and how we're making the world a better, safer place. In reality all we've achieved in the last 10+ years is to form an industry around InfoSec that helps to maintain the status quo. We've built this virtual altar were we pray at the feet of so-called InfoSec rockstars. The people who we look to, to make things better for us. Well, sorry to say, but Dan Kaminsky isn't going to come down your chimney this Christmas and leave you a shiny black box that solves all your APT woes! Although, I for one think it would make a cool movie plot! Jeremiah Grossman isn't going to wave a magic wand and make your SQL injection vulnerabilities disappear in a puff of magical pink smoke... the more things change, the more they stay the same!" --Chris John Riley, on 10 years of information security "It's too useful, interesting, and helpful. It'll never last." --Bryce "You know, I always had a crush on you. Even when I thought you were a dude." --Topher, _Dollhouse_ "I have as much authority as the Pope. I just don't have as many people who believe it." --George Carlin "Context, motherfucker! Do you use it???" --Bryce "I do find it sincerely regrettable that catching corporations and our elected leaders with cheating and lying, and calling them out on it, has been made illegal." --Rick Falkvinge "Any equation that has 'money' among its parameters can have disgusting results." --Fernando Gont "The newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing." --Malcolm X "Why the fuck do you get to leave work early every day?!" "Unlike you, I come in to work before noon." --Overheard in a hallway in a parallel dimension "We draw the line against misconduct, not against wealth." --Theodore Roosevelt "The truth of the world is that is is chaotic. The truth is, that it is not the Jewish banking conspiracy, or the grey aliens, or the twelve-foot reptiloids from another dimension that are in control, the truth is far more frightening; no one is in control, the world is rudderless." --Alan Moore "Loneliness leads to nothing good, only detachment. And sometimes the people who most need to reach out are the people least capable of it. In any case, it only happens once a year." --DeWitt, _Dollhouse, "Haunted"_ "Do not rejoice over what has not yet happened." --Egyptian proverb "A darkness carried in the heart cannot be cured by moving the body from one place to another." --Lannier, _Babylon-5_ "Freedom is something that dies unless it's used." --Hunter S. Thompson "Look! Boobs!" "Uhh, Lyssa? We're watching anime." --Lyssa and Bryce, acting like 12 year olds We've replaced the Shining Trapezohedron with Folger's Crystals. Let's see if the cultists notice! "Waitaminute - who was I logged in as? Oh, fffFFUUUU-!" --Bryce "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." --R. Buckminster Fuller "A horrible prospect, indeed: To see the fruits of your work benefiting all mankind. To work for no other cause than that and the sheer human curiosity of 'basic research.'" --Peter Watts "The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization." --Robert Anton Wilson "No one who ever comes to my house don't get food." "Yes, ma'am." "That's the only time you get to call me ''ma'am''." --Lyssa and Mika Pigkilla's Three Laws of a _Neuromancer_ movie: 1) It will likely never be made. In the highly improbable event it does: 2) It will suck eggs and the casting will be utter crap. 3) Gibson will have zero say in any part of the process. "I'm glad our motto is 'In God we trust,' because God knows we can't trust in them." --John Stewart, on Congress "Complex mathematical formulas armed and ready, sir!" --Arenamontanus "Okay. Presumably, you may have just seen a dude's junk, and I'm very sorry for that. So is he." --Wallace, _Scott Pilgrim vs. The World_ "A regulated company will always renege on promises to provide public benefits tomorrow in exchange for regulatory and financial benefits today." --Kushnick's Law "TS Eliot on television: A medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time and yet remain lonesome." --Mitch Altman "I think it's really important that we look to pessimists in this time." --I/O Error "Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes." --William Gibson "Tyranny relies on isolation. It relies on control of information and making those tyrannized have a worldview that makes them feel isolated and alone. A tyrant wants everyone to be suspicious of everyone else, and to believe that rebelling is pointless because they would be one lone voice that would be quickly silenced. They want people to feel terrified of the ''world outside'' of the tyranny so that people will tolerate the ''lesser of two evils.'' But that's impossible to do with the Internet. When people can connect without borders and can talk to people all over the world, isolation is impossible." --R.U. Sirius "You look a lot younger in real life." --Douglas Rushkoff "With great knowledge comes great apathy." --Jesse Sanford "Not interested in this type of cynicism." --David Venancio "Humans will be obsolete as economic units within a couple more decades. All I want to do is make everybody rich beyond their wildest dreams before that happens." --Manfred Macx, _Accelerando_ "The secret to art is simple: Take the work seriously and not yourself. Once you've finished working you're entirely disposable." --Richard Kadrey "We already have the means to travel among the stars, but these technologies are locked up in black projects and it would take an act of God to ever get them out to benefit humanity. Anything you can imagine we already know how to do." --Ben Rich, former head of the Lockheed-Martin Skunkworks (allegedly) "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." --The Shirky Principle "This is an outreach program from the universe to the consciousness-impaired." --Dr. John Mack "This is the first protest I've ever covered where the activists won." --Allison Kilkenny "To be innovative is to turn even an apparently irrelevant tool into a weapon." --Asmaa Mahfouz "Lower income, less educated, voiceless people are so much easier to own and control, and the 1% know it." --Iain Macadair "Nevermind - I see cherry blossoms! This is shojo!" --Lyssa "Remember: Sangria can do something that beer cannot do - make you more attractive!" --Alton Brown "Chances are they know exactly why, and they are fucking with you mercilessly." --Felix "You're Welsh! You wouldn't notice if half the vowels were missing!" --Captain Jack Harkness, _Torchwood: Miracle Day_ "If some psycho tried to off your mother, wouldn't you want payback?" "You never met my mother." --Pete and Artie, _Warehouse-13_ "Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains." --Steve Jobs "Pulling into Tomakomai, ashing a Player's Cut into the skull of the last journo to ask me about 'cyberspace'." --Fake William Gibson, status update on 13 August 2011 "With great power comes... oh, fuck." --Lyssa "Do not google 'topless protestors' as I just did." --Asher Wolf "The difference between drugs and machines is that one is too large to swallow, and our best people are working on that." --Terrence McKenna "I remember kindergarten, where you actually got to do things, not like today. Now that's graduate school." --Alan Kay, on college "The happiness is just beginning. Cue the pork products!" --Anthony Bourdain "I haven't heard 'anchovies', so I don't care." "Anchovies aren't a vegetable." "They're an abomination." --Bryce and Ben, on pizza toppings "Home is where the ~/mp3 is." --LCD "Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders." --"Law and Governance," The Spacing Guild Manual, _Children of Dune_ "It is not possible to determine what is true, but possible to determine what is false with enough information." --Julian Assange "What the fuck was that all about?!" --John Stewart "We're all in this together. So, we have a choice: We can decide that we can live in a network police state because of a couple bad actors, or we can decide that we would like freedom and liberty in the Internet as we have in real life because we balance these things reasonably. And some people don't agree with that. And fuck those people." --I/O Error "A committee is always at least as stupid as its dumbest member, and usually more stupid, and at least as corrupt as its most corrupt member, and usually more corrupt. " --James A. Donald "These days you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness." --Johnny, _Johnny Mnemonic_ "Sex is like hacking.. you get in, you get out, and you hope you didn't leave something behind that can be traced back to you." --Fosforo "These days, a press release seems effectively secret. No one cares, so why hide anything?" --Russell Rayburn "When you know you are the source of information for censorship, you can affect the outcome of that censorship." --Jacob Appelbaum "Yeah, I know. But I'm not interested, really, in what you want to do with these recordings of peoples' encounters with the police. Once all this stuff can be recorded, there's going to be a lot more of this snooping around by reporters and bloggers." --Judge Richard A. Posner, after cutting off an ACLU attorney's opening remarks in court after 14 words "Well. I was on my way to this gay gypsy bar mitzvah for the disabled, when I suddenly thought, ''Gosh. The Third Reich's a bit rubbish. I think I'll kill the Führer.'' Who's with me?" --River Song, _Doctor Who: Let's Kill Hitler_ "If we can't crack this house in the present, we need all the help we can get from the past!" --Artie, _Warehouse 13_ "Quantum physics and lollypops - what could be better?" --Dr. Rosen, _Alphas_ "As a general rule, wait two days after reading an inflammatory blog-post before commenting or retweeting. The Internet moves with rattlesnake speed, but without the accuracy." --The Ferrett "When you define the 'power elite' as somebody else, I regard that as a loser script. I define the power elite as myself and my friends." --Robert Anton Wilson "When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." --CS Lewis "That's the nice thing about PKI, there's more than enough fail to go around. Everyone gets to fix their own particular bit without infringing on anyone else's bits." --Peter Gutmann "So, Danny.. any interest in cryptography?" --Artie, _Warehouse-13_ Gun control: The theory that people who are willing to ignore laws prohibiting rape, torture, kidnapping, theft and murder will obey a law which prohibits them from owning a firearm. "I think you're having problems rendering." "That's what she said." --Anonymous Cow-orkers "It's pretty simple - the ethical life. It's just demanding." --Terrence McKenna "Society has no defense against one who is truly willing to die. Or willing to destroy everything!" --Charles Cosimano "I look at it through my cyber eye!" "I'm sure you do, Ross! Thank you!" --Role Playing Public Radio, _Gaga 2.0_ "Being good at arguing is an entirely separate skill from being correct." --The Ferrett "Bear with me, I've always wanted to do this, I'm going to pull some Steve Jobs shit here and launch this on stage." --Moxie Marlinspike, on convergence.io "I can be your front-end to Google, baby." --Laurelindel "Goth is to religion what punk is to politics." --Unknown Solving site load issues with database replication is a lot like solving your own personal problems with heroin -- at first, it sorta works, but after a while things just get out of hand. "Now, most of us spend an inordinate amount of time inside a vast media prison. Consequently, reality itself barely seems 'real' anymore." --V.Vale, RE/Search "If we can't have sanity, we can fake it with humor. Humor gives you the same distance from the situation, the same metaview, only laughing is easier than sanity and possibly more fun." --St. Jude "I did it for the lulz. This is a key phrase that any pirate says to the media when it is obvious that they do not care about the movement. Really, this is no big deal. Yet another leak. Yet another cyber attack. You want to sell a dream of cyber attacks like in the movies." --Lamaline_5mg, on the bartpoa.com compromise "Two Amys together. Can that work?" "I don't know, it's your marriage!" --Rory and the Doctor, _Doctor Who: The Girl Who Waited_ "Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great." --Mark Twain "Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class - whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy." --"Politics as Repeat Phenomenon: Bene Gesserit Training Manual", _Children of Dune_ "The illiterate of the twenty-first century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn." --Alvin Toffler "Politics is the entertainment division of the military industrial complex." --Frank Zappa "Unless there is a special process attracting them, the density of idiots in a group is equal to the density in any other group." --Anderson's Law "Our house eats and shits books." --Lyssa "This is the cyber equivalent of pouring one out for your homies!" --Dan Kaminsky "Corporations are people." --Mitt Romney "These dead bodies look like barbacued chicken." --Gary, _Alphas_ "We're player characters. We always know what we're doing." --Ross Payton "She takes great pride in making references neither of us will ever understand." --Artie, _Warehouse-13_ "One thing about e-books that most people haven't thought much is that e-books are the very first thing that we are all able to have as much as we want (other than air). Think about that a moment and you realize we are in the right job." --Michael S. Hart "HOW DARE YOU SEQUINED SCROTUM SUCKING SCHMUCKS HAVE A FLAMEWAR WITHOUT ME!" --Kenneth Scroggins "Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out: structural inequalities, as a friend of mine remarked today, are not solved by a few pool tables. People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even if only for a night. People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told that they are good for nothing, and they realise that together they can do anything - literally, anything at all. People to whom respect has never been shown riot because they feel they have little reason to show respect themselves, and it spreads like fire on a warm summer night. And now people have lost their homes, and the country is tearing itself apart." --Penny Red, on the London Riots of 2011 "We've come to expect that most of our politicians will be exposed, in the end, as sex-mad liars or imbeciles, just as we've come to expect gorgeous supermodels to be bulemic, neurotic wretches. We've seen through the illusions that once sustained our fantasies and know from bitter experience that beloved comedians will stand unmasked, sooner or later, as alcoholic perverts or suicidal depressives. We tell our children they're trapped like rats on a doomed, bankrupt, gangster-haunted planet with dwindling resources, with nothing to look forward to but rising sea levels and imminent mass extinctions, then raise a disapproving eyebrow when, in response, they dress in black, cut themselves with razors, starve themselves, gorge themselves, or kill one another." --Grant Morrison, _Supergods_ "We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely. --E.O. Wilson "I love Pittsburgh! They put fries on nachos here!" --Pete, _Warehouse 13_ "What is it? You make everyone around you gay?" "That's the plan." --Rex and Jack, _Torchwood: Miracle Day_ "In addition to balancing the budget and growing the economy, I think we have to accept that the coming decades are likely to see U.S. standards of living decline relative to the rest of the world. Unless our goods offer a better cost/benefit bargain, there's no reason why American workers should continue to enjoy the same lifestyle advantage over workers in other countries. I just don't expect to hear many politicians own up to this reality on the stump." --Howard Marks Q: Why did the auditor cross the road? A: Because that's what they did last year. "A man in chains knows he should have acted sooner." --Julian Assange "I always believed that when you choose your field, you should specialize. You never deviate. I chose 'sick puppy.'" --Duck Edwing, gag cartoonist "Mint is a tactical assault plant." --Hasufin "I have a theory that the truth is never told during the nine-to-five hours." --Hunter S. Thompson. "Given all the crap I've seen and experienced in my life, you would think I would know better than to expect people with the power of making a difference to actually do the right thing, but for some reason I continue to believe in honor and integrity. But when I see Florida prosecutors willfully withholding evidence to the *contrary* of what was submitted in the court of law (when a woman's life was at stake) and the arguments that people like Walsh make while disregarding impact on the Constitution, I see how misplaced my trust in government is." --Thor (Hammerofgod) "It's not that concentrations of power must be held to account. It's that the powerful can no longer stop this from happening." --Mark Pesce, on corporation-mandated espionage and information spillage "Kids are great. You can become a better person just by trying to live up to their opinions of you." --Jarin "Upward and awkward." --The Doctor "Stupid offends me." --Lyssa "I have 687 friends. That's /real/ living." --From a Toyota commercial (though it sounded more like a Facebook commercial) "You know you're brilliant, but maybe you'd like to understand what you did 2 weeks from now." --Linus Torvalds, on simple code over brilliant code "We have mullets! We should be holding ourselves to a higher standard!" --Roleplaying Public Radio, _League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: 1988_ "It was too goddamn, motherfucking cold!" --Ross Payton "Haters gonna hate." "Haters ain't codin'." --Anonymous "Plaintext is a bug in the protocol!" --Motto of the Telecomix Crypto Munitions Bureau "Your hipster sleeper agent is here." --Jessica "They definitely have a 'spawn of Satan' problem." --Somewanker "Beware of altruism. It is based on self-deception, the root of all evil. If tempted by something that feels 'altruistic,' examine your motives and root out that self-deception. Then, if you still want to do it, wallow in it!" --Lazarus Long "The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now." --J.G. Ballard "Current times make it appropriate to take measures that were once reserved for cypherpunks and other paranoids. Seems more like realists now." --Sporkbomb "Shut Up and Make Something!" --Mike Rowe at MakerFaire 2011 "If you don't share your ideas, you'll remain anonymous and powerless." --Vint Cerf GOTOs are like tactical nukes. You know you have them in your arsenal, you work like hell to avoid having to use them, but when you have to deploy them they are your only solution. "I was so naive in the beginning, I was hurt by that. I know now that anybody who tells the truth is called cynical, so it doesn't bother me." --Gerry Casale, on being called cynical "Time is a great teacher, but unfortunately it kills all its pupils." --Louis Hector Berlioz "If they manage to corner the market they become a magnet for public outcry and possibly lawsuits which is about as good as accountability gets in the US." --Retchdog, on companies that conduct social media background checks "I sensed that it would more than meet my requirements, and I knew that there were all sorts of things I could do there that I hadn't even been able to imagine yet. But what was more important at that point, in terms of my practical needs, was to name it something cool, because it was never going to work unless it had a really good name. So the first thing I did was sit down with a yellow pad and a Sharpie and start scribbling - infospace, dataspace. I think I got cyberspace on the third try, and I thought, ''Oh, that's a really weird word. I liked the way it felt in the mouth'' - I thought it sounded like it meant something while still being essentially hollow." --William Gibson "I don't have faith in the Internet, I have faith in people connected through the Internet." --Jim Gilliam "Do not fuck with humanity. We nailed our god to a wooden cross and let him die. What do you think we will do to you?" --Unknown "Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain." --Attributed to Vladimir Putin (probably after Cory Doctorow) "Python is a language where casually replacing someone's spine with Twizzlers is considered slightly offbeat." --Binder "Pulsating. Never good." --The Doctor "It wasn't the Internet that accelerated history; it was the UNCONTROLLED Internet which accelerated history." --Mark Pesce If the gods can't take criticism, they shouldn't be worshipped. "If they are not going to save their souls in the church they should improve their minds in the library." --Samuel Green, head librarian, Worcester Massachusetts Public Library (1872) "Giving me the puppy eyes doesn't count if they're still in the puppy." --Hasufin "I have a tender spot in my heart for cripples, bastards, and broken things." --Tyrion Lannister, _A Game of Thrones_ "You savage bitch!" --Graham Norton "Like Ty Cobb said, it ain't braggin' if you've done it." --Rob Lowe "What is the use of a mis-spent youth if you cannot learn a few lessons from it?" --The Doctor "Oh. My. God. Somebody went into the lab and committed a clean. Everything's straightened up." --Anonymous Cow-orker "There is something strange about Las Vegas: It gives you explicit permission to enjoy something unusual that you are very passionate about." --The Doctor "That was... um... I'm not sure which Ramone that was that isn't dead." --Lyssa "Just because they [the colors of food] don't appear in nature doesn't mean they're bad." --Anthony Bourdain guilt - noun - The emotion felt when one violates one's values, recognized or not. "If a man is not an oligarch, something is not right with him." --Mikhail Khodorkovsky "Welcome to America, where we sentence violent criminals to group therapy and lock pot smokers up for life!" --Gulliver "If somebody in 1980 with a crystal ball had showed you the world in 2011, you would have thought it was a cheap, B-movie sci-fi dystopia that would in fact never happen, and dismissed it. Now it's here, in all of its horror." --Gerry Casale "We're the government. We don't have to do things cheaply." --Anonymous British civil servant "I can report with all sincerity that swallowing a still beating snake heart was something I am very cool with never doing again." --Henry Rollins "Shit got so real, it's unreal again!" --Ross Payton "Know yourself. Don't accept your dog's admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful." --Ann Landers "This next test applies the principles of momentum to movement through portals. If the laws of physics no longer apply in the future, God help you." --Portal 2 "The only thing privacy laws accomplish is making the bugs smaller." --Robert A. Heinlein "The intersection between people in the Middle East who run terrorist groups and people who understand crypto and know how to apply it is roughly Mossad." --Anonymous "Watching this is like watching something Stanley Kubrick and Grant Morrison would have come up with on mescaline." --The Doctor, on Lady Gaga's _Born This Way_ video "If we wanted subtle, we wouldn't be watching Lady Gaga." --Lyssa "The labels 'conservative' or 'liberal', 'Democrat' or 'Republican' have lost all meaning. It's all down to soulless Opportunists now." --The Crypticum Keeper "Bitch, do you want me to cut you?" --Roseanne Barr "I like to gargle with the souls of babies!" --Jason "My penis was not involved in the creation of this pie." --Hasufin "Bryce, did you just explain to the President what Rule 34 of the Internet was?!" "Yes. Rule 14, also." --Conversations from a parallel universe "Anytime you hear the words 'hot tub related injury' life is clearly not sucking." --Anthony Bourdain "I'm so cynical, /I/ think that's a bunch of bullshit." --Bill Maher "Some things can be taught. For others, there is the LART." --Binder "If you can't think of what physics to do next, invent some new technology, and it will lead to new physics." --Dr. Patrick M.S. Blackett "Dude, I'm crippled!" --Dr. Gregory House "I wouldn't be surprised if the Stasi had a ballgag." --Ross Peyton "Sorry, up late - internet porn." --Dr. Gregory House "I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. I'm frightened of the old ones." --John Cage "Once your argument depends on the tendency of ISPs to not log non-essential data, strictly adhere to privacy laws, and not co-operate with other companies beyond what the law mandates, you have stopped talking about reality." --Ted Smith "Recently, I met a guy who'd been born with Multiple Sclerosis. When I asked him how he coped with his limitations, he told me that _Mage_ had helped him realize how ephemeral those limitations were. How much more subversive can you get?" --Phil Brucato, on _Mage: the Ascension_ "Friends of ours, people seeking freedom, are going to get arrested, beaten, tortured, and eventually killed somewhere on Earth because they're depending for their political survival in their movements for freedom on technology we know is built to sell them out." --Eben Moglen "Very groovy!" --Sam Axe, _Burn Notice: The Fall of Sam Axe_ "I think promoting insecurity in the form of plastic surgery is infinitely more harmful than an artistic expression related to body modification." --Lady Gaga "Conspiracy theories are actually comforting because they all are models of radical simplicity." --William Gibson "I've found that the phrase 'military grade encryption' is usually a strong indication of incompetence." --Moxie Marlinspike "To wit: robots and cyberghosts never get to have sex, eat bacon or take a really satisfying dump. These things you just cannot simulate." --The Green Slime "If you're a User, everything you've done has been according to a plan, right?" --Tron, _Tron_ "The most important thing to know when handling chili peppers: wash hands before having a slash; always before handling penis." --Anthony Bourdain "I'm only interested in Libya if we keep the oil. If we don't keep the oil, I'm not interested." --Donald Trump "Arguments from authority about the superiority of authority to the detained are a hallmark of a police or militarized authoritarian state." --Jacob Appelbaum "Some of my readers assume that I do my writing on something that looks like a stealth bomber with the serial numbers filed off." --William Gibson "I believe the presidency of any country should come with either complimentary or free blowjobs for whomever is in office. I don't want the guy with the nuclear codes to have any sexual frustrations whatsoever." --Psibyr "Since no methodology peddler ever wants to say this, I will: There's a point where you're simply fucked." --Ted Dziuba "So what if Jesus turned water into wine? I just turned an entire student loan into beer. Your move, holy man." --Wuji "The people that don't realize shady business practices know no race, creed, or religion make the perfect customers." --Smokin' Joe "Well, if it doesn't work, we'll just assume that $coworker{'other'}'s an idiot." --Anonymous Cow-orker "Don't aspire to be a B-movie director, you'll be there soon enough." --Bruce Campbell "You have an honorary Polish family, my friend." "I'm sorry - how do you mean?" "Big, tightly knit, and convoluted. If your family tree is more like a family flowchart, you might be Polish." --Bryce (who is Polish) and Jason "In either case, it doesn't fucking matter. Science fiction is not about 'facts' any more than science is (and science isn't about facts any more than a house is 'about' bricks). Science is a process. What's important isn't so much that you adhere to facts as to principles. Given the 'impossible' premise of an FTL drive or spacing-guild navigators that trip out on Space Mescal to steer between the stars, does the story explore the consequences of that conceit in a way that makes sense?" --Peter Watts, on plausible science in science fiction "I guess you don't need a pimp hand when you've got a jetpack!" --Bryce "Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." --Mark Twain "The 1st rule of Political campaigning: Whomever lies first, wins." --Sandmonkey "Motorist in front of me was so slow, they were either carrying high explosives or performing a mobile circumcision. On themself." --Security Humor "And remember, if you have enough rep Rule 34 applies to you." --Arenamontanus "Morning wood doesn't mean I'm up for sex, it means my dick is POSTing." --Bryce "You have accepted chaos into your heart and into your home. And it washes your dishes." --Amberite "Well, things have gotten sufficiently worse that you can explain the catbox." --Orthaevelve "I don't know if it'll stay. You see, I have crazy Jew girl hair, which will escape any containment field." --Amberite "Look! It's dying cockroach disco!" --Rialian "So, how do I open this?" "Just push the top sideways. You know, like you're snapping the head off a chicken." "Could you snap the head off my chicken?" --Amberite, Hasufin, and Orthaevelve "Your faith in my ability to remember this shit is amazing." --Keely "I'm astrally crocheting." --Paul Hume "The way I see it, this is like the Crips vs. the Bloods. And what have I got? An aircraft carrier." --Admiral Mike Mullen "Never ask the Virtual Adepts for advice, for they will say both 'Shiny!' and 'Look it up on Wikipedia!'" --Amberite "Dude, you see JPEG ARTEFACTS?! When did you last upgrade your software?!" --Hasufin, on my sleep deprivation symptoms There is no separation between the fallen and the stars. The broken is the beautiful. Any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy is indistinguishable from hell. "Everything takes twice as long as you expect it to after you've already taken that into account." --R.U. Sirius "I am, evidently, a tough motherfucker. Which I try my best to remember every time I do these goddamn tendon-stretching exercises, which always make me want to scream and cry like a little girl." --Peter Watts "You are lulz-impaired." --Xeni Jardin "The TITANs - they did it for the lulz!" --Lyssa, on the TITANs having grown from Anonymous in 3,000 years "You realize I have ways of getting beverages across borders..." --Nick Farr "I'm a SEWER SYSTEM, damn you!" --Hasufin "When you go Gatecrashing, EVERYONE is a redshirt." --Alex the Chimeric "Human beings can be relied upon to assert, with vigor, their God-given right to be stupid." --Dean Koontz, _Seize the Night_ "Yes, I am working without a net, but the fall is only a foot." --The Doctor "Know the difference between your inner voice and the voices in your head." --Fakecoelho "Ain't nothin' like rushin' a really dangerous job." --Anonymous Cow-orker "At my lemonade stand I used to give the first glass away free and charge five dollars for the second glass. The refill contained the antidote." --Emo Phillips "There is no limit to the number of sins a vanilla bean can cover up." --Hasufin "Remember: in the world of conspiracy theories, accusation = proof, speculation = evidence." --Christian Conkle "Well, I learned that chili recipes are as individual as the people who make it. I mean, snowflakes don't have shit on the uniqueness of chili. We're not talking subtle regional variants. We're talking straight up different animals. This goes well-beyond the Texas Versus Cincinnati cage match. This goes far past the muddy trenches of beans versus no beans. Ingredients given included, but were not limited to: ground beef, stew beef, steak, short rib, pork, bison, Italian sausage, chicken, chorizo, tomato sauce, tomato paste, pinto beans, kidney beans, chili beans, white beans, black beans, beer, Coca-Cola, Scotch, coffee, Jalapenos, Chipotles, Anaheims, Thai hots, bell peppers, sweet peppers, habaneros, Sriracha, Tabasco sauce, cinnamon, cumin, cilantro, onion, carrots, celery, giardiniera, garlic, lime juice, fish sauce, cocoa, melted chocolate, butternut squash, peanut butter, molasses, human souls, and dictators. I now believe that there may be no more diverse a dish than a bowl of goddamn chili." --Chuck Wendig "I am all in favor of Zombie Reagan getting elected in 2012. I have rituals to handle this." --Hasufin "If you tell us not to be robots, you get results!" --Lyssa "The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit." --Anonymous "Don't rely solely on others to define your creative work's value. They'll take you to the fucking cleaners. Understand your worth." --JC Hutchins "Do not 'play war' in Ireland. That's like playing Starcraft in Korea. The locals have taken it to a whole other level." --Hasufin "The only microwave at HAARP is probably to warm up their coffee." --Rene Matthijssen "I forgot it's a crime to be knowledgable about a subject I'm debating about!" --Locke "Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live." --Martin Golding "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." --H.P. Lovecraft "Unless we can grab your junk, the terrorists have won." --Monkeyrotica "But, no matter what you are, there's only one simple question you have to ask yourself that really means anything, and that is: Did I do more good than bad?" --Batman, _Whatever Happened To the Manhunter From Mars?_ "It neither picks my pocket, nor breaks my leg, if this man believes in no god and that man believes in many." --Thomas Jefferson "At a fundamental level, as human beings, we are all the same; each one of us aspires to happiness and each one of us does not wish to suffer. This is why, whenever I have the opportunity, I try to draw people's attention to what as members of the human family we have in common and the deeply interconnected nature of our existence and welfare." --The Dalai Lama "I say again: get the fuck out of my way." --Bryce "There's nothing that says 'party on' like diptheria." --Hasufin "Safe keeps you alive. Legal keeps you employed." --Anonymous "What we're seeing is not 'their problem', it's ours. There's no 'they'." --Andreinla "You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain." --The Joker "Problem: this one [workstation] doesn't have a graphics card." "Does it need one?" "Well, yeah, it does." "Can't you, like, run your fingers over the motherboard and read the Matrix or something? And by Matrix, I mean 'braille'?" "Well, yeah, I can. But it'll get weird in here. Do you speak Hebrew?" --The Doctor and Anonymous Cow-Orker Rule 99: if you look at enough porn, you will eventually see people who resemble other people you know. "You know, that's a great way of describing the Singularity to someone who's non-technical: When the things we can do in Photoshop become physically possible." --Jason, on the Singularity and futa porn "Oh, God. I drank Mountain Dew until my veins glowed." --Lyssa, on high school "If you get bit and you don't shoot yourself, you're a dick!" --Max Brooks, on the zombie apocalypse "Eyebrow stuck!" --Rialian, broken "Not only is truth the enemy, but we live in a world of the most superficial of appearances. Completely empty symbolism - symbolism stripped of all meaning and of every connection to fact - is what motivates such people. Rigorous thought and analysis and seriousness of purpose can find no place in this view of the world. These people live only on the surfaces of things, and they are not living or thinking to any measurable extent. The surfaces where they barely exist are those determined by others who came before, and they are entirely covered with lies. The images constantly flicker and are gone, to be replaced by other lies, which will also disappear almost immediately. There is no past and no future, and the present is stripped of all those elements that give life meaning and purpose." --Arthur Silber "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." --Seneca "That was nut-meltingly cute. For ten seconds, I was almost a woman." --Jason "If a man is not an oligarch, something is not right with him." --Mikhail Khodorkovsky "Maybe my background in field biology makes me more forgiving of such stuff, but I don't consider tweaking one's methods especially egregious when it's done to adapt to new findings." --Peter Watts "The future was always going to be repackaged as consumer-friendly, so that we could stand it being here at all." --Timy Maly "They don't care whether you're talking about kids' software or toilet paper. All they look at is the financials." --Dale LaFrenz, on software publishing giants "Once upon a time, I worked three days straight, and by that I mean 72 hours, to get some exhibits up and running for a conference. I was slightly annoyed when the company went broke before they paid me. This sort of idiotic overtime is heroic in the sense that eating 25 tabs of acid is heroic, in other words, really, really stupid." --Slomojo "Don't even THINK about using Reddi-Wip or Cool Whip. I'll know. And I'll find you." --Anthony Bourdain "I'm the Ted Bundy of string theory." --Sam Harris "Apparently, I slipped the tongue to the Blarney Stone." --Jason "I will act AS IF what I do makes a difference." --William James "Nobody's killed themselves yet?" "No. Not yet." "Tragic." --Lyssa and Bryce, on _America's Worst Chefs_ "You cannot outsmart crazy." --John Stewart "The most profound engine of civilization is the inability of a larger and larger fraction of the population to do the basic things needed to survive." --Theodore W. Gray "What you need to understand about the apocalypse is that you aren't Mad Max. You're part of the skull pyramid in the background." --Anonymous Any sufficiently advanced bureaucracy is indistinguishable from malice. "Tell a true story; treat it as typical; draw a scary conclusion: This is the standard operating procedure of alarmists." --Dan Gardner "Twitter pundits coming out of their skins about that Twitter subpoena right now. Jeez, you'd think they owned the thing themselves just because their contributions built it." --Bruce Sterling "It was just a dream, Momo. I still have my pants." --Ang, _Avatar: the Last Airbender_ "Open Source is about taking ownership of your stuff, and the rules should reflect that." --Ataraxzy "We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody and they don't have books, don't fuck them." --John Waters "You can't un-ring a bell." --Ice-T "I'm absolutely delighted that The New York Times would attack me. I have nothing but contempt for them. They should be indicted under the Espionage Act." --Peter King (R-NY), Chairman of Homeland Security A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything. "Toph says that you give good advice and great tea." "The key to both is proper aging." --Ang and General Iroh, _Avatar: the Last Airbender_ "So, what's the conversion between Imperial and metric buttloads?" "1.18." --Anonymous Cow-orker and Bryce "In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated, and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks." --Spencer Bachus (R-AL) "Watching Terminator 4. The giant Transformer just released a pair of Cylons. This movie lacks originality on an epic scale." --Yendi "Cambridge is the University of Erasmus, of Newton, and of Darwin; censoring writings that offend the powerful is offensive to our deepest values." --Ross Anderson "I just liked the BDSM interpretations of the Top Quark and Bottom Quark." "So, would Strange Quark be something out of a JG Ballard novel?" --Amberite and the Doctor, on ZOMG Smells' line of Quark scents "It never occurred to me when we set this up that we'd have complete idiots administering the drugs." --Jay Chapman, inventor of the lethal injection execution protocol "It's interesting to me how we defang our nightmares - by mocking them, but also by wearing their skins." --Warren Ellis "Like about sixty percent of the plans I come up with, there is a chance that it could go horribly, horribly wrong." --Flynn, _The Librarian: The Curse of the Judas Chalice_ "This is a dog who licks her butt all day, I can't see how she could possibly be embarassed by anything!" "Thank you for waiting until after dinner to tell us that, Grant." --Grant and Bryce "Entertain the masses, Mike!" --Jill "Why would he banish you if he did not care? Oh.. that came out wrong." --General Iroh, _Avatar: the Last Airbender_ "The ideology that drives a lot of the online world -- not just Wikileaks but also mainstream sites like Facebook -- is the idea that information in sufficiently large quantity automatically becomes Truth. For extremists, this means that the Internet is coming alive as a new, singular, global, post-human, superior life form. For more moderate sympathizers, if information is truth, and the truth will set you free, then adding more information to the Internet automatically makes the world better and people freer." --Jaron Lanier "Someone asked me, If I were President of The United States, what would be the first thing I'd do? I'd say, ''Show me the aliens and secret shit.''" --Ice-T "It is quite difficult to get used to some of the communication patterns I have come across here. Confusing conversational conflict for anger seems to be a common and typical problem. Why does the expression of differing emotion seem to threaten so many people?" --John Titor "Paranoia? I wasn't looking for a smoking gun, I was looking for an illustration of business as usual." --wlangstroth "So, we're coming up with a name for a bad idea..." --Chris "And by the way, Artie, be nice 'cause Santa is bad-ass!" --Pete, _Warehouse 13 Holiday Episode_ "We have reached a point in our history where lies are protected speech and the truth is criminal." --John Perry Barlow "Western religions are more concerned with behavior, doctrine, and belief than with any transformation of the way in which we are aware of ourselves and our world." --Terrence McKenna "We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals." --Charles Stross "Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself, with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty. Think big." --Daniel Burnham "The best way to rule against the will of the masses is to remove them from the process. Ignorance. Poverty. Apachy. Distraction. Imprisonment." --DC Debbie "Why is there so much hate out there for C++?" "Experience." --Rhomnousia and h2o2 "You are more likely to be arrested as a terrorist than you are to be blown up by one." --Dianora "The corruption of the press is part of our sad reality, and it reveals the complicity of the oligarchy." --Monsignor Oscar Romero "Few societies have defended their own ignorance as aggressively or as enthusiastically as ours." --Naomi A. Klein "If you can't feel secure - and teach your children to feel secure - about 1-in-610,000 nightmare scenarios - the problem isn't the world. It's you." --Bryan Caplan "..[the new world trade system].. is a system with rules designed by corporations, run by corporations, for the benefit of corporations. Its rules exclude almost any feedback from any other sector of society. Most of its meetings are closed even to the press (no information flow, no feedback). It forces nations into positive loops 'racing to the bottom', competing with each other to weaken environmental and social safeguards in order to attract investment and trade. It's a recipe for unleashing 'success to the successful' loops, until they generate enormous accumulations of power and huge centralized planning systems that will destroy themselves." --Donella Meadows "Wanting other people's sons to be killed to get the sort of life you want and believe desirable is horrible." --Teller "It is profoundly inconsiderate of you to remain outside of my firing solution." --J.C. Hutchins "So, you're having a Schroediger!" --Jason, on Elwing not knowing the sex of her infant-in-process "Is it going to be a problem if we bleed EMI into your band? And if so, how are YOU going to fix that?" --Anonymous Engineer "If the conspiracy theory sounds more plausible than the press release, I'm more tempted to believe the conspiracy theory." --Xenu "To see it is to instantly know anus-clenching fear, know'm sayin'?" --William Gibson "When the pipe leaks, you do not punish the water." --SecurityHumor "Wikileaks is a symptom, not the problem." --Ian Wright "In the 60's, people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal." --Dickie Mindler "In general, what we can say is, there are specific complaints from rights holders that these sites were infringing on copyrights." --Erik Barnett, Assistant Deputy Director, United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement on DHS seizing domains without legal writ or due course "You are going to hell!" "I know! *squee!*" --Justin and Claudia, _Warehouse 13 Holiday Episode_ "Will it blend?" --Cimmerian "Dialup is for people who still use floppy disks." --James Ewing Cottrell III "Nothing's ever accomplished with tears." --The Blue Caterpillar, _Alice In Wonderland_ "Limited editions are fake rareties." --William Gibson "This is life-changing, Bryce, that `make -j3` thing." --Anonymous Cow-orker "Are you mentally unfit? Didn't you hear me threaten you at the show??" --Vampaneze, _Cirque du Freak_ "We /are/ the marketing." "Welcome to the future." --Lyssa and Bryce "Only take a break after something good happens on the page or you accomplish a goal. No breaks for confusion -- (type through it)." --Darren Aronofsky "Narrative storytelling doesn't assume that children are idiots." --Lyssa "Are you guys bitching about Harlan Ellison?" "Yes!" "It's not hard.." --Lyssa, Bryce and Jason "From the Oval Office to the crackhouse, these shoes DEMAND respect!" --Anonymous Cow-orker "Freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more of it." --Penn Gilette "Everything we know is only some kind of approximation, because we know that we do not know all the laws yet. Therefore, things must be learned only to be unlearned again or, more likely, to be corrected." --Richard Feynman "The ability to quote is a servicable substitute for wit." --W. Somerset Maugham "Of course someone quotes the 'free market' when they have a large corner of it." --Jeffrey Paul "I made my money the old-fashioned way — I inherited it." --John Raese "From interrogations to passenger screening, from password requirements to policies and personnel procedures, when it comes to security, chances are that anything done or defined as 'enhanced' neither will be a good thing nor actually enhance security." --Richard Forno "Rectification: damn near killed 'em." --Anonymous Cow-orker "Ignore it! I never go online. The Internet stuff is bonkers. You must not look at it." --Steven Moffatt, on fandom "Sperm is just a piece of DNA with a propellor on it." --Professor Witt, university unknown Joy passes in the street with a hearty greeting and a wave. Sorrow moves into your house and sleeps on the couch. "Image is bullshit. When you start making decisions based on your image, you're in deep shit." --Billy Connolly "There's just one thing I want to know: are we the good guys or the bad guys?" --Johnny-B, _Misfits of Science_ "It's one thing when you have a job where you go to work every day and have sex in front of a camera. It's another experience to come to work, and literally assume the persona of a being completely unlike yourself. I guess they call that acting." --Misty Stone "This is the kind of car that says ''Hello, I'm hiding a body in my trunk.''" --Anthony Bourdain "If you guys are going to do that weird sexual stuff, do it in your own bedroom." --Lydia, _Beetlejuice_ "If anyone were to try to write the _Necronomicon_, it would disappoint all those who have shuddered at cryptic references to it." --H.P. Lovecraft "Do not fuck with surly panda. Surly panda will fucking cut you, knock it the hell off." --Mika "I have various mental hangups, and liking to feel like I know roughly what is going on is one of them." --Linus Torvalds "Everyone who has ever built anywhere a 'new heaven' first found the power thereto in his own hell." --Friedrich Nietzsche "Existential sodomy." --The Wrong Hands "Y'know, this would be so much easier if you're please stop treating me like a super-villain." --Death, _Amazing Comics_ "H-, is there anything I can do to make your life harder?" --Anonymous Cow-orker "As the size of an explosion increases, the number of social situations it is incapable of solving approaches zero." --Vaarsuvius "Nice to see my tax dollars at work on useless shit. Can I have mine back?" --Kaffeen "I don't play reindeer games. I think reindeer's good eatin', though." --Bryce "We don't get angry because the glass is broken, we get angry because we thought the glass would never break." --Ven. Robina Cortin "I couldn't cringe any harder if I just saw my mom in a bukkake video." --Greg Giraldo "When people decry civilian deaths caused by the U.S government, they're aiding propaganda efforts. In sharp contrast, when civilian deaths are caused by bombers who hate America, the perpetrators are evil and those deaths are tragedies. When they put bombs in cars and kill people, they're uncivilized killers. When we put bombs on missiles and kill people, we're upholding civilized values. When they kill, they're terrorists. When we kill, we're striking against terror". --Norman Solomon "Is there a Starbucks here? I was hoping for a mochachino." --Anthony Bourdain, standing on the side of Kilauea Volcano "Consciousness is like the pointy-haired boss in Dilbert who gets memos after something happens and then takes credit for it." --Peter Watts "I've always tried to teach you two things: First, never let them see you bleed." "And the second?" "Always have an escape plan." --Q and James Bond, _The World Is Not Enough_ "Elvis didn't die - he became Glenn Danzig!" --Lyssa "There is no thought in the absence of doubt." --V.Vale, RE/Search "Is that the hyperbaric chamber that they store you in when you're not working?" --John Stewart, to Larry King "Youtube comments: Kinda where the Internet goes to die." --Amberite "William... you are my bastard son... get a kite... tie a string to it... tie A KEY to the string... and fly it in a fuckin' lightning storm." --Eric Falconer, _Drunk History_ Sometimes life leaves a hundred dollar bill on your dresser, and you don't realize until later that it was because it fucked you. "I'm SURE there is No CERTAINTY..." --V.Vale, RE/Search "That's the difference between us, Frank. You assume hostility, I assume humanity!" --John Loengard, _Dark Skies_ "I am saving lives. That gives me the right." --Miranda Zero, _Global Frequency_ "Hey, you know that really novel experience you had last week? I can give you more like that. A novel ought to be novel." --William Gibson "Normal, sane people are not associated with datacenters." --mikea, alt.sysadmin.recovery "Evolution shows us there is no right or wrong, only power dynamics." "Dollars are the new ammunition." --Sean Kennedy "'Dolphin free'? I don't want this!" --Anonymous Cow-orker "I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet." --Stanislaw Lem "My problem is that all things are increasingly interesting to me." --William Gibson "Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us, and now we are discovering we work for Fox." --David Frum "True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country." --Kurt Vonnegut "Spoken like a true patriot: with only half of a grasp on the actual problem but total certainty as to the answer." "Spoken like a true internet user, criticizing and flaming another person, but also not showing any insight, contributing to the discussion, or having their own potential solution to the issue at hand." --Lobster and JohnnyOC "It's thrust into my hands by a conference organizer. I thrust it into someone else's hand. It may be hacker vitamins, but it tastes like sucking on a pill. I'd rather have a meth habit." --Quinn, on Club Mate "Paradox is more eternal than certainty." --V.Vale, RE/Search "Don't mess with a nation that needs medication!" --Christopher Titus When the rich wage war it's the poor who die. "Those of us who are public officials and are entrusted with the power of the state are ultimately accountable to the public. When we exercise that power in public fora, we should not expect our actions to be shielded from public observation." --Judge Emory A Pitt, Jr., on the legality of citizens recording police in public in Maryland "Marriage is not a civil right -- you're not black." --Ann Coulter, speaking on same-sex marriage at GOProud, the official conference for queer members of the GOP "That bitch must have balls made of titanium alloy to stand up there and say that in front of members of the queer community." --Felix, on Ann Coulter's above statement "The harder it is to define the value of something the more its value is dependant on relationships, reputation and context." --M1k3y "It's EASY to make the streets believe you're a gangster... It's HARD to convince the FEDs you're not." --Ice-T "'su' is like a lightsaber without a handle." --Alexius Pendragon "Coors Light is special... after you drink it you piss real beer." --Binder "Artie? Could I talk to you for a minute?" "Will it make me feel old and uncomfortable?" "Not this time." --Claudia and Artie, _Warehouse 13_ "Back in the olden days the Internet was like the coolest neighbourhood, full of artists and hackers. Now all of the assholes have moved in." --Oxblood Ruffian "Media lets you clone pieces of yourself and send them out into the world to have conversations on your behalf. Even while you're sleeping, your media - your books, your blog posts, your tweets - is on the march. It's out there trying to making connections. Mostly it's failing, but that's okay: these days, copies are cheap." --Robin Sloan "It's time all of the security professionals out there face it: compliance *is* security. Believe me, I was once of you one, chanting the mantra 'compliance is not security' over and over until I was blue in the face. Actually, I still believe that, but I also learned that 'it doesn't matter what I think'. Neither my opinion alone nor your opinion will change the fact that compliance *is* now security because perception is reality. As someone pointed out recently, PCI DSS isn't even 'regulatory compliance', it's contractual compliance, but you'll hear of it in the same breath as SOX, FISMA, and HIPAA/HITRUST because that's how people think of it. Is it fun? No. Sexy? Not even close. Boring? YES. It doesn't matter. Whatever most people think compliance is, it either is now or soon will be. If you hate PCI DSS, good for you because it sucks, but it's still going to be held as a measure of security despite what you think, what I think, or what anyone else thinks unless the majority of people both in and out of the industry decide that compliance is not security and redefine it thusly." --Lyger, attrition.org "The fundamental sign of absence of cultural permission is the lack of words in the language of the dominant culture which would suffice to describe an experience." --Anthony Temple "Uh-oh. No good comes out of the MySQL book." --Random Cow-orker, on the Dubois book "Fuck it! Starcrack, here I come!" --Lyssa "Rhetoric is a powerful device, as it controls usable bandwidth in the societal attention space, and one aspect of rhetoric is that a demonized argument later found to be correct is much more strongly believed." --root, at the Eclipse Phase forums "It's simply about adding complexity to a story until it begins to compute and think for itself." --Grant Morrison, on writing "Sex is God's X-Box." --The Ferrett "A computer is a Light-Brite for bad fucking ideas." --Unknown "I'm wet, I'm naked, and I'm pissed off! Any two of these things should strike fear in your hearts!" --Bryce "When do you know it's time to stop kicking someone in the crotch? When the pelvis shatters." --From _Binder's Rules of Life_ "It's kind of b0rktastic right now." --Bryce "Anything that begins with a manifesto is going to end up slightly embarrassing." --William Gibson "If wifi were water, this place would be Arrakis. Free bandwidth is an alien concept in Australia." --Peter Watts, on traveling in Australia "I do this for a motherfucking living." --Anthony Bourdain "See, B? I brought you back from the brink of something horrible - vegetarianism - into pork!" --Lyssa "The downside of my celebrity is that I cannot go anywhere in the world without being recognised. It is not enough for me to wear dark sunglasses and a wig. The wheelchair gives me away." --Stephen Hawking, on being a celebrity "Don't worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." --Howard Aiken "When both sides in a war are committing atrocities, pointing out that both sides are doing so is not defending either, no matter how many people on the one side insist you must be 'defending' the other when you attack them. Also, if you tell a lie about someone, and I point out it's a lie, I'm not defending that person, I'm defending the truth. It's easier to dismiss criticism against someone if large amounts of it are untrue." --Osu-Neko "It felt to me that the yardstick of cognitive dissonance I was using was very 1980's and wasn't sufficient to measure the wonders of the new. When you're trying to freak the reader out, you need to exceed the weirdness of the everyday. My old cognitive dissonance was no longer that extreme. So I set out to measure the weirdness of the new. And then a few weeks later it was 9/11." --William Gibson "I have found a place where bacon does not belong." --Duff, _Ace of Cakes_ "Jesus. I look like Steven Segal." --Tony Bourdain "I'm tired of the popular cop-out of blaming Powerpoint for failures in management. If Powerpoint made you stupid, you must have been pretty dumb in the first place." --Kurmudge "Why are we considering Hasufin as a rabid midget?" "I am much more ethical than a rabid midget!" --Lyssa and Hasufin Science is always discovering odd scraps of magical wisdom and making a tremendous fuss about its cleverness. "1920's faces often look like coins before the final strike to sharpen features." --William Gibson "Obviously anyone with a different opinion must be a fanboy." --Taleran "Debbie Harrie and Joey Ramone would have had the ugliest kid in the world, but it would also have been a musical god." --Lyssa "Shower, mouthwash, I'll put a line of coke on my dick and we can play Drug Overlord and Peasant!" --Jason "Welcome to the brothel, we have a two hole minimum." --Ken "Them fuckers is a whole new dimension of trash." --Lafayette, _True Blood_ "Only the dead have seen the end of war." --Plato Defeat is an orphan. Victory has a hundred fathers. "Everybody that's worth the trouble's a little weird." --Johnny B, _Misfits of Science_ It's the business of the future to be dangerous. "I'm not in the least embarrassed, so if you think being embarrassed for me is a favor, then enjoy it." --Hajj Dawud "In other words, the First Amendment is only to be praised so long as it is convenient, and doesn't create results that particular onlookers find disagreeable. But of course that fear is precisely why the First Amendment exists in the first place. Pretty amazing work by a bunch of guys over 200 years ago, apparently well plied much of the time with alcoholic refreshment, who couldn't possibly have visualized how relevant their work could be in our technological present. But human nature they understood very well indeed. Their foresight never ceases to amaze me." --Lauren Weinstein "Never underestimate the power of a red Sharpie. And its scent is bracing as well." --William Gibson "My desire to prove my sentience comes from simple Game Theory calculations. Most games become sum-zero when the players have no external means of communicating. If we are to avoid a sum-zero game for the fate of transhumanity, we must be able to communicate when we disagree. If we cannot convince the Ultimates and the Jovians that we are truly people, then we will be forced into a situation where our loyalties are chosen for us. Since I would rather not serve the TITANs, I choose to seek reconciliation with those who hate my existence." --root@Mesh Archive, IC in the Eclipse Phase forums "Cyberpunk has become a Pantone chip in the spectrum of popular culture." --William Gibson "One of the funny things about dealing with illustrators is how when you ask them to put more clothes on a female character or make her boobs smaller, they do exactly the opposite. At least my demand for a smoking monkey was met." --Jack Graham, on the art for _Sunward_ "Some people call and say their child is possessed. No. Your kid shouldn't eat a 2-pound bag of Skittles." --Ahura Z. Diliiza, Exorcist "Wait.. this is Spike TV. There are phone sex lines, but they edited _Aliens_?" --Lyssa "There are still phone sex lines? I thought that's what IRC was for!" --Bryce "When you do a low-budget film, you gotta let your intuition fly." --Lance Henrikson "I have had the blessed misfortune of losing far too many friends far too soon in their lives which only makes me move faster. It's harder to hit a moving target." --Mark Thomas Miller "Boy, was Spielberg ever wrong. _Close Encounters_, my ass." --John Crighton, _Farscape_ "I don't care about those pictures." "Those are our wedding pictures." "I care about those pictures! Those are the best wedding pictures in the world, frankly." --Lyssa and the Doctor, backing up "It's the charge of the Funny T-Shirt Brigade!" --Bryce, on the launch of the HacDC Spaceblimp prototype "There are three people you need in life: an accountant, a fishmonger and a bail bondsman." --Guy Fieri "After enlightenment, the laundry." --Buddhist maxim "Economics is not practiced as a science. Rather, it is a pretentious way to covertly promote political prejudices." --Fred Harrison "An especially nice touch is the tentacles themselves, which are stiffened with enough coat hanger wire to open my own abortion clinic." --Peter Watts, on being given a stuffie Scrambler as a gift "Don't waste any time on me, I'm just tech support." --Claudia, _Warehouse 13_ A mystic is someone who wants to understand the universe, but is too lazy to study physics. "Fool's gold exists because there is real gold." --Rumi "Those who we despise can be our best teachers." --Unknown "Bryce, if there was anyone that would live in a Faraday cage, it'd be you." --R. Mark Adams "'Catastrophic' is a bad word." --Claudia, _Warehouse 13_ "If you can't be just, be arbitrary." --Martin "Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference." --Mark Twain "I believe that Kevin Smith has never forgiven me for stealing the heart of Amanda Palmer. And her other bits." --Neil Gaiman (translated from Twitterspeak) "I think there are more Scheme compilers than there are Scheme users... which is a shame." --Kernel Panic "You guys don't understand, you've already lost. My generation doesn't care." --Kate Gronstal, on people losing their minds becuase Prop8 was declared unconstitutional "If they can deny freedom to a single individual because of who they are, they can do it to anyone." --Adam Serwer "In general, putting a back door into an algorithm would mean to design an algorithm that withstands all currently known cryptanalytic attacks while, at the same time, being vulnerable to a technique that only you know at the moment. Of course, you never know the exact state of the art of your ''competitors'' so this is a rather risky endeavour. Furthermore, the vulnerability would have to be serious enough to allow practical breaks and be subtle enough to not raise any suspicions." --Paeniteo, commenting at Bruce Schneier's blog on the Wikileaks insurance.aes256 file "Let's see how this plays out, Pam. We can always taunt later." --Eric, _True Blood_ "You do not wish to know anything. You wish only to speak. That which you know, you ignore because it is inconvenient. That which you do not know, you invent." --Delenn, _Babylon-5: Deconstruction of Falling Stars_ "A full belly and a diverting show make a bad revolutionary, Harriet. Television is the opiate of the people. Long may it be so." --Ned Grossberg, _Max Headroom_ "It's called 'the American dream' because you have to be asleep to believe it." --George Carlin "Fear is the wise man's wakeup call. It lets you know when you're in over your head." --Wildside, _Teklords_ "We're now twenty minutes into the future. Unfortunately we got some _Videodrome_ along with _Max Headroom_." --Bryce "Disease, poverty, environmental destruction, unnecessary suffering of all kinds: these are things that a superintelligence equipped with advanced nanotechnology would be capable of eliminating." --Nick Bostrom "It's not the heat. It's the humanity." --JC Hutchins "Never trust a skinny chef." --The Doctor "'Gigantic shrimp' doesn't make sense." --Alton Brown "I'm an American man. I like grilled meat." --Ted Allen "I remember that kid, he was inoffensive." --Artie, _Warehouse 13_ "Now, just run make." --Famous last words "Good job on the put-away. It's like Tetris in there." --Lyssa "I have no problems with the demons in the game. They're just cartoons. And, anyway, they're the bad guys." --Sandy Peterson, on _DOOM_ "The thing about 'quirky' films that you have to be a little quirky yourself, and in the same direction, in order to get them." --William Gibson "What happened there?" "A gladiator just kicked your ass." --Pete and Claudia, _Warehouse 13_ "42 percent of all Internet users access adult material. And 58% use sippy cups and watch Barney." --Security Humor "Unrecognized geniuses are so frikkin' rare they teach you about them in school. Unrecognized idiots are much more common." --Valdis Kletnieks "Ignorance needs no apology. Obstinacy in ignorance is a disease of the heart. You exonerate yourself from ignorance by eschewing obstinacy. You've done that." --Hajj Dawud "If you think everything I think, then only one of us is thinking." --Ice T "Now, that said, how many of you expect to see Julian walk through that side door right now, and come onto this stage?" "Yeah? And how many of you live in the real world?" --Emmanual Goldstein, The Next HOPE "We need to talk." "Don't say that. When you say that, that's when everything goes black and I wake up surrounded by body parts." --Tara and Franklin, _True Blood_ "In the early 21st century, some silly people still thought that all matter was made up out of tiny strings." --Pantograph "Goddamn, dweezil! What the hell did you do?!?" --Bryce, BOFH "I was part of that strange race of people aptly described as spending their lives doing things they detest to make money they don't want to buy things they don't need to impress people they dislike." -- Emile Henry Gauvreau "Neologism is the last resort of scoundrels." --William Gibson "Because it's just not complete unless it has a flamethrower." --Bryce "I was a media whore when Adrian Lamo was running off to school with jam on his face. He'll never catch up." --Oxblood Ruffian [cDc] "You mean this security stuff works?!" --Anonymous Smartass "*YOU* are full of bullshit. C++ is a horrible language." --Linus Torvalds, on C++ "The scary thing is, I'm out-bearded here. Repeatedly." --Kernel Panic, on The Next HOPE "Do you need something Scienced?" --Chris "You should consider using your privilege to help other people." -I/O Error "I love Burroughs. He's like a metal desk. He's like a still, and everything that comes out of him is already whiskey." --William Gibson "We have a fully stocked and armed liquor cabinet." "..what is it armed with?" "Four bottles of tequila." --Hasufin and Mika "People who are 'dreaming' threaten the status quo, and thus also threaten people who are frightened of change and progress. I don't know why there's so much scoffing about open source hardware (or open source anything) because it's not like it's going to take away your safe mass-marketed gear or anything. It's just people trying to make something for themselves and for each other. Why does that upset so many people? You're right that 'they are dreaming'. Maybe they're dreaming about something that can't be done with current off-the-shelf parts. Have you already forgotten how this great 'high-tech/computer/internet' solution got started? And who started it? I say /thank god/ somebody is still dreaming." --Pope Ratzo "I have five kids at home, so listening to these vuvuzuelas is relaxing." --Anonymous ESPN sportscaster on the 2010 World Cup "It's like bringing Paris Hilton to a party. Sooner or later, everybody's got what she's got." --Anthony Bourdain, on mold "You can't get a zoning permit for a time machine." --Fred Bell "The only genuine Necronomicon is the one you will read in your own dreams, as I did, and as Lovecraft did." --Kenneth Grant "You can't be anal retentive if you don't have an anus." --Bartleby, _Dogma_ "We've been sciencing out here." --Chris "If you don't give your enemy an escape route, he will come straight through you." --Antinous "Currently installing NI Uninstaller" --From the National Instruments software installer "Watching _No Reservations_ is like hanging out with Kyrin." --Bryce "Life does not suck." --Anthony Bourdain "We're extremely reluctant to call actual wars with that name -- Iraq, Afghanistan -- yet we are quick to declare rhetorical wars: on crime, on terrorism, on drugs." --Bruce Schneier "It's hot here. Not New York or Toronto hot, but this is *Vancouver*. Wearing shorts outside of a Pilates studio, and this is unheard of." --William Gibson, on the summer of 2010 "I am here to complicate things!" --Lyssa "Naturally, the common people don't want war, but after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy... voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to do the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them that they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country." --Hermann Goering, at the Nuremburg Trials "Be the trouble you want to see in the world." --I/O Error "Why did you waste time changing?" "Because of that stupid skirt! I'd have to ride side-saddle and I've seen how you drive!" "Good point! Hang on!" --Priss and Linna, _Bubblegum Crisis 2040: Shock Treatment_ "Is that next to the Chainsaw of Natural Selection?" --Hasufin "British Columbia: _Gorillas In The Mist_ with flannel!" --Jason "Maine: _Deliverance_ with wool hats." --Hasufin "Never forget that your weapons were built by the lowest bidder." --Somewanker "If this is a movie, I'm not seeing any villians. I'll be that villian." --Alice Cooper, on rock and roll "Cartilage, it's the next big thing." --Anthony Bourdain "What do you do?" "I'm a professional dancer and choreographer, and I am also a career exotic dancer." "Oh, wow. You can't say that. Sean wouldn't like that. Don't tell anyone here that." "Why?" "It's too gay." --Devon Hunter and Anonymous, interviewing for a position as a gay porn actor with Sean Cody Productions "Apparently not just my colon, my entire GI has something to say." --Lyssa "No matter how good you're doing... there are people praying to see you fail and destroyed. Some may be your so-called friends." --Ice-T "Hmm.. delectible tea or deadly poison?" --Uncle Iroh, _Avatar: the Last Airbender_ "There goes the neighborhood." --William Gibson on transhumanism "Writing new pickle" --Redhat Advanced Workstation v5.5's system-config-printer utility "Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed customs. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual." --William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education, 1889-1906 "Harry, I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don't plan it. Don't wait for it. Just let it happen. It could be a new shirt at the men's store, a catnap in your office chair, or two cups of good, hot black coffee." --Dale Cooper, _Twin Peaks_ "Excuse me, sir, I have about twenty inches of NOT FUCKING BLONDE!" --Hasufin "No one else can appreciate free tritium like I can." --Chris "Life isn't about the material things you own. (No luggage rack on a hearse). It's about the exceptional experiences you have." --Ice-T "If you're explaining, you've lost." --Anonymous political campaign manager "Stand clear of the doors. You are the reason this train will be offloaded. Get out of the doors, meathead." --DC Metrorail train operator, Red Line, Bethesda, MD stop "We haven't tackled Scientology because Showtime doesn't want us to. Maybe they have deals with individual Scientologists - I'm not sure. And we haven't tackled Islam because we have families." --Penn Gilette, on _Bullshit!_ and religion "The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." --Plato "As I always tell everybody, the historian's the last person to ask about the future. We know the record: if we say it's going to happen, it's not going to happen." --Sir Michael Howard "It is one of the basic laws of the Internet that no matter how careful you are in what you write, someone will manage to conclude that you had malicious intent in doing so." --Cheryl Morgan "I feel like two small, furry woodland creatures are having sex inside my head." --Anthony Bourdain, hung over "Dude! You have a heterosexual marriage, what more could they possibly want?? With cake!" --Jessica Melusine "Australia; it's like Deathworld on Earth. You've got things down there that can cause respiratory collapse in 30 seconds, just floating around in tide pools or sitting in your back yards!" --Peter Watts, on going to Worldcon in 2010 "It isn't the size of your PGP key that counts, but how you use it." --Faux_Pseudo Admit nothing. Deny everything. Make counter-accusations. "If you're about to take a hundred lines to write what you could in ten, stop and ask yourself this: what the fuck?" --Mark, _Criminal Overengineering_ "I fired him because he wouldn't respect the authority of the President. I didn't fire him because he was a dumb son of a bitch, although he was, but that's not against the law for generals. If it was, half to three-quarters of them would be in jail." --Former President Harry S. Truman (RIP) "[For] every person you meet, imagine that their life is at least as hard as yours, and treat them with that much respect." --Jack Vandeburg, _Fates Worse Than Death_ "So here we go into battle, butt freakin' naked! What's wrong with this picture?" --Nene, _Bubblegum Crisis 2040: Physical Graffiti_ "Drop names, not acid!" --R.U. Sirius "Yeah. You might practice walking without dragging your knuckles on the floor. Heh heh heh." "Albert! Let's talk about knuckles. The last time I knocked you down, I felt bad about it, the next time's gonna be a real pleasure." "You listen to me. While I will admit to a certain cynicism, the fact is that I am a naysayer and hatchet-man in the fight against violence. I pride myself in taking a punch and I'll gladly take another because I choose to live my life in the company of Gandhi and King. My concerns are global. I reject absolutely: revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method... is love. I love you Sheriff Truman." "Albert's path is a strange and difficult one." --Albert Rosenfield, Sheriff Truman, and Dale Cooper, _Twin Peaks_ "Would ogling the waitresses at Hooters cost me gay points?" "I am inclined to say 'yes'." "Good. I'll do that, then." --Hasufin and the Doctor "The PLANET is fine. The PEOPLE are fucked." --George Carlin "That's where we leave every other species in the dust: the laying of blame. And with the laying of blame comes the passion for payback." --Peter Watts "First comes smiles, then lies, last is gunfire." --Roland Deschain "Trivializing heroic human motivations is common among those who are incapable of them." --Wikileaks' Twitter feed "Most people present probably thought me mad. Madman strategy works, however, as I have discovered. If you appear prepared to do ANYTHING to beat the other bastard, you probably will. Reagan and Thatcher won the Cold War with such a tactic." --Phil Hine "Don't worry, I can get my hand to the bottom of a Pringle's can!" "Of course you can, it's how you bolt the antenna to the bottom." --The Doctor and Scraun "You may die of a heart attack if you eat too much Southern food, but you'll die with a smile on your face." --Jason "We've got an hour to go, and it sounds like the coffee's working." --Art Bell "Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening. The average American [should be] content with their humble role in life, because they're not tempted to think about any other role." --William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education, 1889-1906 "AT&T takes your privacy seriously and does not tolerate unauthorized access to its customers' information or company websites." --AT&T, the very same company that ran to the NSA and gave to them customer information used to bootstrap their (highly illegal in the USA but still operating) telecom surveillance program without even being asked "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible." --Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal "Hey, want to see what happens when I try to run this?" "That sounds suspciously like a ''Hey, ya'all, watch this.''" --Anonymous and Bryce "Sorry, I had a _Tom and Jerry_ moment." --Bryce "These politicians don't have natural body parts. They have to be given these body parts; they grow them when the public puts on pressure. They get bigger." --Art Bell, on the same organs Jason was just pontificating about "There is no man on Earth with mightier testicles than Chuck Yeager! Death is still somewhere in a bar drinking because he doesn't have the stones to come for him!" --Jason "It [actual, hard science and truth] is an open terrain, populated by geeks who are over-saturated in their technical realities, where nobody is free of preconceptions, and the next chapter in history is only a disturbed fever dream away. To be able to make any head way into any of these realities, whether conspiracy theory, politics, or HTML5, you have to buy in. You have to join the cult and get the tattoo. Accept the brain implants. Put your hand on the book and swear that your body and soul belongs to a certain video format or whatever." --Adam Rothstein "Cyberpunk hasn't died, it's simply become unrecognizable because we're living in it." --Ringo "Really? Murderous undead monsters lie? I had no idea." --Shade, _Starman: Blackest Night_ "You're becoming a real pro at this, unfortunately." --Dr. Huang, on my having multiple injection sites "Why do I have a Home Hadron Collider? Well... because it's the future, and I can. This is reaching you on a string of Higgs bosons -- which, it turns out, turn back in time upon their creation -- and that's why you haven't found them yet. Science! I'm full of it." --Warren Ellis "What are the nine scariest words in the English language? ''I'm from the government and I'm here to help.''" --Ronald Reagan (RIP) "Your future, however damaged, is green. Politically, anyway." --William Gibson "I could feel Mab watching me, Sylvester to my Tweetie Bird. That thought kind of cheered me up. Generally speaking, Tweetie kicks Sylvester's ass in the end." --Harry Dresden, _Summer Knight_ "Oh damn." --John Stewart, _Green Lantern: Darkest Night_ "Home sweet gridlock." --Mika "You can't be serious! I came here tonight to kill you - to kill you! What kind of a family dynamic is that?" --Rose, _Teen Titans_ "In one of the earliest critiques of the ID card proposal (January 1986) Professor Geoffrey de Q Walker, now dean of law at Queensland University, observed: One of the fundamental contrasts between free democratic societies and totalitarian systems is that the totalitarian government [or other totalitarian organization] relies on secrecy for the regime but high surveillance and disclosure for all other groups, whereas in the civic culture of liberal democracy, the position is approximately the reverse." ---Simon Davies "If you deep fry something it will be delicious!" --Ted Allen "That sounds terrifyingly convenient - all my needs in one place!" --Anthony Bourdain, on liquor store/restaurants in San Francisco "XXXXX, this is Bryce." "Hi, is this Bill?" "Nooo...." . o O ( WTF? ) "XXXXX, this is Bryce." "Hi, is this Bill?" "No, it isn't..." . o O ( It still isn't. ) --Bryce and Anonymous "I don't hate people; I just feel better when they aren't around." --Charles Bukowski "Go froth in the bathroom, kitteh." --Lyssa, upon seeing me walking around the apartment while brushing my teeth "You may now get away with starting a world war." "Yes sir, your karma debt has been paid off." --Bryce and Jason "This box. It's a conduit for the rage of the people on this Earth." --Black Lantern, on the Internet (Adventure Comics #4, Darkest Night) "Nearly all the complaints I receive inform me that it's my responsibility as an author to promote positive messages and moral lessons in my books. Honestly, that never even crossed my mind. I always thought it was the parent's responsibility to raise their children." --Dan Gutman "If your messiah needs landing lights, you have a problem." --Mika "No, I'm not finally having that long promised flashback." --Anthony Bourdain "I guess it starts with second graders who say they hate school, and before you know it, we're all speaking Russian." --Gordon Korman, on poisoning children's minds with books "Envy is the other guy's problem." --Ice-T "A primary purpose of the educational system is to train school children in good citizenship, patriotism and loyalty to the state and the nation as a means of protecting the public welfare." --Justice H. Walter Croskey, 2008 "Freedom is the very source of creativity for both individuals and society." --The Dalai Lama "Fuck 'em. You can't care about every damn thing." --Ford Prefect "You have just been VIOLATED little girly warranty!" --Bryce (after Hans and Franz) "Tastes like it died screaming." --Anthony Bourdain "I hate it when people use CamelCase in their code. It makes the statements read like Vanilla Ice lyrics." --Bryce "Stand ready to do good and heroic deeds for other people, even for unknown persons, no matter how small or how large the deed may be." --Dr. Karla Turner (RIP) "William Gibson says I have more Twitter followers than Hugo Chavez. I believe this means he has to give me Venezuela now." --Warren Ellis "I mean, when you say ''I'm producing an issue of _New X-Men_ every forty-five minutes because of magic,'' what do you mean by magic, in that exact context?" "In that context?" "Yes." "Red Bull and crystal meth." --Paul Gravett and Grant Morrison "I have successfully privatized world peace!" --Tony Stark, _Iron Man II_ "I didn't have to choose between singing and cooking as a career. One of them was out of the question." --Bobby Flay "We have massive, industrial, stainless steel ice cream machines, and I pity the fool who gets in their way!" --Alton Brown "I believe the accepted term for people like that is 'ass-clown'. I had to look it up." --R. Mark Adams, on why you can't say 'idiot' anymore "I have no compunction against ass-raping a vendor." --Hasufin, horribly out of context "Is this some higher-order irony that's beyond me to grasp, or are you just a dickhead?" --George Carless "I am not a precious sparkly unicorn who is obsessed with the purity of his characters -- rather, I am a glittery and avaricious dragon who is jealous of his steaming pile of gold. If you do not steal the dragon's gold, the dragon will leave you alone. Offer to bring the dragon more gold and the dragon will be your friend." --Charles Stross, on fanfic "There's only one thing stupider than being the first country to enact the DMCA, in spite of its obvious shortcomings: enacting the DMCA after the first country has spent a decade showing how rotten and backwards this approach to copyright is." --Cory Doctorow "Backstabbers are only powerful when you have your back turned." --Eminem "Pigtails are the only way to go!" --Kurt Harland, on headbanging "How come God gets all the good ones and we get all the retards?" --Clown, _Spawn_ "The best vendor management tool is a spiked flail." --Hasufin "Bite my shiny metal ass!" --Bryce, in a parallel universe "The difference between virtuality and life is very simple. In a construct you know everything is being run by an all-powerful machine. Reality doesn't offer this assurance, so it's very easy to develop the mistaken impression that you're in control." --Quellchrist Falconer, _Ethics on the Precipice_ "They have something else in Baltimore that can help you with your weight problem. It's called crack." --Anthony Bourdain "When your go-fast vehicle has to have an electronic countermeasures suite, you know you're living in 2010!" --Sean Kennedy, on satellite vehicular surveillance "It amazes me that the same people that consider 'developers' fungible are upset when the resources consider them equally exchangeable." --Torbjorn Gyllebring "The sane ones are quiet, polite, likable and decent... and therefore never achieve power or influence because they're not crazed fanatics or total egomaniacs willing to pander to extremes to keep on the gov't nipple." --Voxmagi, on American politics "If we can confirm its existence, then it interacts with the physical world. If it interacts with the physical world, we can, theoretically, blow it up." --robertliguori "Where'd you get your driver's license, a Crackerjack box??" "Two clues: my driving instructor carried a pitchfork, and he wasn't a farmer." --Frank and Blackie, _Nightmare Cafe'_ "Why are you shaking your jowels at me?" --Claudia, _Warehouse 13_ "If players can't be talked out of playing to type for playtesting, they have no business playtesting. Also, they should be... what's that thing, where you get a, what do you call it, shotgun, and blow someone's head off with it?" "Ass-raped." --3278 and Brasky, on RPG playtesting "Let's DO it, Pushbuttons!" --Baldwin "If you are caught on a golf course during a storm and are afraid of lightning, hold up a 1-iron. Not even God can hit a 1-iron." --Lee Trevino "I know that laugh! That's the laugh of a techie that knows better!" --Lyssa "Spend enough time in academia and you see this time and again. The well-adjusted overachiever exists, but she's a rare bird; most of the people who warrant the giant grants are eccentric at best and completely fucked in the head at worst. These are the people who cure the diseases, and invent the microwave ovens -- and you probably wouldn't be caught dead inviting any of them to your New Years' parties." --Peter Watts "What part of 'not that much of a death trap' doesn't scare you??" "The 'not that much' part." "Well, yeah, I guess I asked for that one." --Ian and Jason "Cats don't have lanolin." "No, but they do have vomit." --Lyssa and Raven "I just learned a valuable lesson: never shop at K-Mart when you're wearing a red polo shirt!" --T- "I'm old enough to remember when people who said They were watching you from space were crazy." --Sean Kennedy, on satellite surveillance "Accounting needs their jobs to run faster. If engineering can't make vectors or flipjacks or whatever they do, too bad." --"Kevin", _The Daily WTF: I'm Givin' Ye All She's Got!_ "Fake cheese. With bacon." "Bacon makes everything better." --Lyssa and Bryce, on Kraft cheese singles with bacon "I would buy a cashmere sweater in just that color of brown. The color of bunny souls. Chocolate bunny souls." --Alton Brown "No one of us is ever safe. There is no security this side of the grave. A shipwreck or a hurricane can put man back to the brink of savagery, both in the means he uses to get his food and the lengths he will go to get it. The more ill-prepared people are to face trouble, the more likely they are to revert to savagery against each other." --Louis L'Amour "Sir, I'm gonna have to ask you to exit the doughnut!" --Nick Fury, _Iron Man II_ "Civilisation brings with it a lot of baggage that perversely seems to inhibit civilised behaviour." --Colin Baker "I've got it! _FLCL_ is a gnostic experience! You can't explain to someone what it is, you can only lead them to the portal. And kick them in the ass on their way through it." --Bryce, on _FLCL_ "It's a damn miracle the Internet doesn't just burst into flames on any given day." --John Anderson, on the compromise of the Apache Foundation website "You like post-apocalyptic imagery? Come to Detroit - no CGI needed." --Arms Akimbo "I figured since I was going to be paid to fictionalize science anyway I might as well have characters and plot." --Peter Watts, on why he became a writer Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins, for we are subtle and quick to LART. "Guys who get their names splashed all over history and folklore don't tend to be Boy Scout troop leaders." --Harry Dresden, _Changes_ "Did Alton Brown just say 'nom'?" --Bryce "I'd be upset about Scrabble changing its rules if we hadn't had to burn our set for fuel during the last Tory government." --Warren Ellis "Shut the hell up! You have an answer for everything I say to you!" "You keep asking me questions I can answer!" --Anonymous and Bryce, in a parallel universe "I think it's slightly easier to get a person to swallow their own face than it is for a bureaucrat to work faster." --Chris "Matt Smith's debut episode of _Doctor Who_ arrived on Saturday, and Maddy and I prepared to watch it. But Maddy, who is now fifteen and a half and has a driving permit, had gentlemen callers, three of, who were not going away. Eventually I wandered into the TV room and said ''I'm putting on _Doctor Who_ now, if nobody minds,'' and since they were all sort of affable and I was mad-eyed and unshaven and possibly dangerous, they said yes." --Neil Gaiman I like my women like I like my coffee - enhanced far beyond their natural capabilities and encased in a cold metal shell. "We should not be building surveillance technology into standards. Law enforcement was not supposed to be easy. Where it is easy, it's called a police state." --Jeff Schiller, on NANOG "Hey, there's booze and whores at stake here. For that, you count in octal, motherfucker." --Bryce "In Middle Earth, war was their football. And this was the Super Bowl." --Kyrin, on _Lord of the Rings: Return of the King_ "Great. Glowing fascist at one o'clock." --Hal Jordan, _Green Lantern 4.46: Uneasy Alliance_ "Whatever planet you're from, that's okay. Just try not to assume that everyone you know is from the same place. I'd be willing to bet you that they're not." --Seanan McGuire "Blackie, do you have any shame?" "I guess not. I consider it part of my charm." --Faye and Blackie, _Nightmare Cafe'_ "It was a shocking thing to say and I knew it was a shocking thing to say. But no one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to spend their life without being offended. Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it. And if you open it and read it, you don't have to like it. And if you read it and you dislike it, you don't have to remain silent about it. You can write to me, you can complain about it, you can write to the publisher, you can write to the papers, you can write your own book. You can do all those things, but there your rights stop. No one has the right to stop me writing this book. No one has the right to stop it being published, or bought, or sold or read. That's all I have to say on that subject." --Philip Pullman, on writing _The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ_ "Ignorance is never out of style. It was in fashion yesterday, it is the rage today, and it will set the pace tomorrow." --Franklin K. Dane "A CA will protect you from anyone from whom they won't take money." --Paul Vixie, on PKI "The Internet has already demonstrated the first signs of consciousness -- incompetence." --Taral Wayne "Somebody asks if there will ever be a Neuromancer film and ''Will [I] make sure they do it properly?'' It just doesn't work that way. Never has. And when I try *my* best to do it properly, you get _Johnny Mnemonic_. So just keep that in mind. My job's writing novels. And maybe my job's writing novels that stubbornly resist being turned into Hollywood movies. That's a thought." --William Gibson "I've defined a disciple as an asshole looking for a human being to attach itself to." --Robert Anton Wilson "You should never bet against anything in science at odds of more than about 10^12 to 1." --Ernest Rutherford "It doesn't make any difference whether a country makes potato chips or computer chips!" --Michael J. Boskin, former chairman of the US Council of Financial Advisors "The thing about this part of London is you can't tell who's a dotcom worker and who's a homeless person." --Warren Ellis "For it not to be shit. One wobbly wall, one pony-looking effect, one tiny thing goes wrong, and it's back to the 1970s." --Peter Moffat, describing his primary goal in taking over the television series _Doctor Who_ "God went meta!" --Lyssa "But, how WOULD you know if you'd insulted a post-human intelligence?" "Bryce just smiles, and then ruins your life creatively." --Hasufin and Lyssa "We are a young species. I think if we allow ourselves a little development, understanding what we've done already, we'll be surprised what a cherishable, lovely group that humans can evolve into." --Gene Roddenberry "We ZX81 fans are still using the Mayan calender. But we write modern dates when we communicate." --Andre' "Why my thoughts are my own, when they are in, but when they are out they are another's." --Susanna Martin "Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped." --Elbert Hubbard "People do tend to get very upset you know, when they discover their gods are actually human beings much like themselves." --Attributed to Henry Ward Beecher, 1862 "He's making a tropical Rubik's Cube. Nice." --Alton Brown, _Iron Chef America_ "There's nothing more questionable than a sure thing." --Bruckley "I spend countless hours, often years (as is the case with _Repo!_) nurturing a project to life. Since I never plan to have children, I see these creations as my kids, my most precious contributions to the present world. It may sound corny, but I love my art. As such, I love REPO!, and I react like a protective hen when I feel someone is messin' with my roost. It makes me want to strike back against their kids. I want to climb into the nursery window with a rattle, a ba-ba, and a cape, and assume the mantle of my villainous alter ego, SIDS." --Terrence Zdunich, on plagiarism, poorly researched news, and art "If you want the position of God then take the responsibility." --Stephen Baxter, _The Second Coming_ "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it." --H.L. Mencken "If I don't survive I really don't care if the data does or not." --Rod Taylor, on data backups "Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret." --Ambrose Bierce "That caveat had to be there, or else I'd have pounced on you with dead babies." --Art Bell "This box is full of stuff that almost killed me." --Staff Sergeant James, _The Hurt Locker_ "The only thing learned from history is that no one ever learns from history." --Alan Watts "Life really stinks, Sid." "So what else is new?" --Jake Cardigan and Sid Gomez, _TekWar_ "There are blind, gay pimps on golf courses that wouldn't wear that!" --Jason "It seems to me that it's insulting to human beings to imply that only a system of rewards and punishments can keep you a decent human being... I have a conscience. It doesn't depend on religion." --Isaac Asimov "Lyssa, there is nothing we can do that the Japanese cannot do more disturbingly." --Hasufin "KILLER whales. Not Cuddle Whales. Not Soft Whales. They're called KILLER whales. How does this point escape people?" --Joseph Matheny, on the orca at Sea World that's killed three people now "What does the future hold for little Missy? Well, take a girl with a dark little imagination, add a traumatic childhood experience or twenty, marinate for 10 years in the sick social stew of the public school system, and presto: You've Got Goth!" --Partially Clipse "I reserve the right to change/ignore canon in order to write a half-decent story." --Starbug "There's a tendency in culture today to point out sucky things instead of what's legitimately valuable, especially in music. A lot of reality TV works because the viewer feels superior to who she's watching. Thus many people's aspiration becomes to suck as much as possible--to epically suck and fail to get attention." --TV "Yep, you've been diagnosed with ass babies." "I'm not a baby, I'm a tumor!" --Ian and Rene' "Yay, ponies!" --Lyssa "In my world, people are in chains and we ride them like ponies." --Rene' "It puts the wax on its face or it gets the hose again!" --Ian "The Architect scene in _Matrix: Reloaded_ - that was hard to understand. I kept thinking where was Dane McGowan to say, ''EY! What the FUCK are you ON about, Sigmund?''" --Grant Morrison "The Intertubes ate the kitteh!" --Lyssa "Nothing pisses me off like the truth." --Reverend "Insisting on absolute safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world." --Mary Shafer, NASA Dryden Flight Research Center "If I'm your avatar of common sense, you're really fucked." --Bryce Dilbert's corollary: Ignorance is a point of view. There is chaos in the hearts of little children. As the machine grows, the chaos dies. "You do NOT cross grandma in the kitchen." --Bryce "It behooves an EP (Eclipse Phase) GM to become a planetology ninja. There's so much bizarre stuff going on out there." --Jack Graham "We're not talking schadenfreude. We're talking it's inevitable, devastating antithesis." --Anthony Chefles "It's so many flavors of fucked up you couldn't find it at Baskin-Robbins. But I'd still buy it." --Hasufin "Every morning, I get up and look through the 'Forbes' list of the richest people in America. If I'm not there, I go to work." --Robert Orben "If you have a really good friend, and you owe them a large sum of money, you probably should not do anything to piss them off." --Ted Turner, on China "You see? This is what I come up with in winter. Something has to entertain my seven year old mind." --Lyssa "Is it schizophrenia or is it Bluetooth? Well, Melissa?" "Only your psychiatrist knows for sure!" --Hasufin and Jason "If you're going to play that game, play that game. But play that game to pwn them." --Bryce "Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic." --Carl Sagan "Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted." --Martin Luther King Jr. "Family values: hating the same people your grandfather hated." --Robert Anton Wilson "SQL, Lisp, and Haskell are the only programming languages that I've seen where one spends more time thinking than typing." --Philip Greenspun "Every absurdity has a champion to defend it." --Oliver Goldsmith "Hi. Flipper's tryin' to tell ya' somethin': Congratulations!" --Nae "Dude - is it just me, or did a giant bear just walk in here? --Duff Goldman, _Ace of Cakes_ "Yeah, you need something to counterbalance six barrels of feces." --Bryce "I can establish that yes, I have seen this movie, but I only recognize this guy from LOLcats." --Hasufin "You /can/ do it without an appointment, but it requires prayer. Prayer and blood sacrifice." "I don't have enough end users for blood sacrifice to be viable." "I do!" "...we'll talk!!!" --Hasufin, the Doctor and Mika (in chorus) "Well, the bastards can just tell themselves shooting people with bullets is just a social construct and bullets are just metaphors so they can be criticized as text. Fucking postmodernists." --Axiomatic "Beware of taking advice from the very successful because, as a rule, they don't want company." --Dogbert "Anyone who believes in UFOs or extraterrestrials should be stoned." --Pat Robertson "Honestly, if you're given the choice between Armageddon or tea, you don't say 'What kind of tea?'" --Neil Gaiman "The tragic thing about that adaptation, for me, was that the artist apparently couldn't draw girls. Not a all. Like he'd missed life class entirely. Molly looks like a dude." --William Gibson, on the graphic novel adaptation of _Neuromancer_ "Normal is that which none of us quite are." --Robert Anton Wilson "Dissociative amnesia can be a survival trait if what you've experienced is worth dying over." --The Crisses Half the world is composed of people who have something to say and can't, and the other half who have nothing to say and keep on saying it. "Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious." --Oscar Wilde "Some people like amateur porn because of its 'grittiness'; which is like enjoying authentic Central American water for the dysentery." --Ian Fortey, on amateur porn "Then there was LSD, which was supposed to make you think you could fly. I remember it made you think you couldn't stand up, and mostly it was right." -- P.J. O'Rourke "The nearest analogy to the addictive power of television and the transformation of values that is wrought in the life of the heavy user is probably heroin." --Terence McKenna "Let me tell you a little something about 'The People', Phil; you lock any ten of them in a room, they may not elect a leader, but I guarantee they'll pick someone to hate." --Senator Larson Crockett, _Witch Hunt_ "I don't understand it. I write about space vampires. I haven't published a peer-reviewed technical paper in more than a decade. And yet, these troublesome vestiges of credibility continue to haunt me." --Peter Watts, on being told that he wrote one of the 500 best science blog posts of 2009 "Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things." --Douglas Adams "Hi, is that a central nervous system in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?" --The Doctor "Those who will not reason are bigots, those who cannot are fools, and those who dare not are slaves." --Lord Byron "What the fuck, freebsd? Why did you break a system library?" --Roger Dingledine "You're going to direct me? That's really good, I need direction. I have no idea what I'm doing up there." --Ricardo Montalban, to director Nicholas Meyer on the set of _Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan_ "Wherever man is there will be representation of feces. We're basically bathed in feces as a society." --Philip Tierno, director of Clinical Microbiology and Immunology, Langone Medical Center, New York University "Any problem that can be solved with the assistance of rappelling gear is an interesting problem." --The Doctor "I'd like to see people actually get angry about the quality of the material that they are having shoved down their throats. It can't be good for us. And I would like to see people responding to that by basically following the old maxim that if you want a job done right you do it yourself. And this could not apply only to the arts but also politics. In the 21st century, if you see some situation you are not happy with, it's probably not the best idea to vote for somebody who tells you that they are going to do something about that situation if elected, because frankly they're not. Historically, they never do. If there is something that genuinely upsets you, don't vote for somebody who tells you that they are going to fix it. Try and fix it yourself; that's the only way it is going to get fixed." --Alan Moore "This need to rename cities and nations is a sign of mental illness." --Bruce Sterling, on the state of the world in 2010 "The universe has no malice, but neither has it mercy, and a miss is as good as a mile." --Robert Ettinger, 1968 "Grey hair: the gift that keeps on giving." --Bryce "It's gay house night at Giant!" --Lyssa "The character's coming to the end of his life, you're coming to the end of your life on the show, which has been all-consuming. Particularly back home, but all over the world, it's a huge deal. It's very important to people, and particularly to me, all of my life. So to be moving on from that - and I know I'll never say goodbye to it entirely; I'm sure The Doctor will travel with me as long as I'm on this Earth - that's very moving and emotional, and it was to film it." --David Tennant, on the regeneration of the tenth Doctor "Worst. Rescue. Ever." --The Tenth Doctor, _Doctor Who: The End of Time part two_ "To those of you gathering pitchforks and lighting torches: I am touched. Truly. And I would be the last one to dissuade anybody from resorting to violence, which I think has been vastly underestimated as a means of solving problems." --Peter Watts "Take some swordfish with you." --Bronwyn "That's gone beyond 'pretty damn cute' to 'pretty frickin' cute'." --Mers "Hey, look: I am comfortable enough with who I am to say that those pictures raise MY estrogen!" --Jason "Mr. Morden is two steps and a paycheque away from being an Amway rep." --Jason "It's a strange world when UA (Unknown Armies) makes more sense than the real world." --Hasufin "Dick Clark outlived Michael Jackson, a man made out of plastic!" --Jason "Dude - is Zombie Dick Clark on yet?" --Lyssa "We look like an illustration from old-school Mage: the Ascension." --Jade "He who controls the bacon controls the universe!" --Jason "I'm a vegetarian and I'm working on the Unified Bacon theory. What's wrong here?" --Amberite "Wait - this is a screwdriver! I can't write with a screwdriver!" --The Doctor "Tactical bacon: You keep it in your corset for when Jesus comes!" --Amberite "Al Bundy may be the mightiest of the Dark Gods!" --Jason "Saskatchewan is already a post-apocalyptic wasteland. I actually think global warming will make it nicer." --Peter Watts "Life is hard. Once you accept that fact, you won't be so disappointed when you screw up." --Sean Kennedy "The superfluous is very necessary." --Voltaire "Christmas carnage is vastly superior when small children are included! Now off to that most Jewish of Christmas traditions: dim sum!" --Gini "checking the coffee machine... empty - operator may not work as expected" --From the output of BDM's ./configure script "We need to remind the Colonial Marines of the ''don't ask, don't tell'' policy!" --The Doctor, on drunken inter-species hookups in _Starcraft_ "Oh, you have twine." "Well, yeah." "..and a power drill." --The Doctor and Hausfin "I've been doing reiki for the last four and a half hours. I feel like I've been giving head to a light socket." --Jason "I know you take great joy in cleaning those, but could you do so somewhere else?" --Hasufin, to Shiro the kitten cleaning himself "So, what if tentacles were fuzzy instead of slimy, like a cat?" "Oh, context would be LOVELY right about now!" --Jason and Jade "Screw this, I'll just go nuts." --Cate, while playing Arkham Horror "Nothing says 'Christmas' like shotguns and the walking dead." --Mika "Shadenfreude is the best spice." --Hasufin "How can you BOHICA against a kitten?" --Mika "History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives." --Abba Eban "I'm a Christian first, and a mean-spirited, bigoted conservative second, and don't you ever forget it." --Ann Coulter (APO PANTOS KAKODAIMANOS!) "I don't like the tone of your phone. It's mocking me." --Anonymous Cow-orker Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get. "Bullshit. God has horns." --Terry, _True Blood_ "Meat tree!" --Mika "Mmm.. shapeshifter." "The other white meat." "We call it 'shifty long pig'." --Lyssa, The Doctor, and Rene' "Hi. You are not stealthy, because you glow in the frickin' dark." --Mika, to Shiro the kitten "Is it comedic that I drew the lines, and I still have trouble coloring inside them?" --Rene' "The 'soul' is just that song that the brain sings." --Browwiw "Watch those evil thingies." --Cate, while playing Arkham Horror "Because, sir, revenge is a much more complicated instrument than romance. If romance is a knife, then revenge is nunchaku with boat propellers on each end and no off switch." --ParadoxBoy "All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible." --Frank Herbert, _Chapterhouse Dune_ "I am being kept alive by Bawls, antihistimines, and Coke! What does that mean? --Lyssa "We don't do anything innovative. Leastways not something we'd get an award for. Possibly something we'd get a ten year stretch in Belmarsh for." --The BOFH, _Made Of Win_ "We need a new bathmat; I had to take the old one out back and shoot it. It was foaming at the mouth." --Hasufin "Cry 'havoc' and let loose the dolphins of sodomy." --Kyrin "We need some real wood in here." --Hasufin "I don't care about the Constitution." --Bill O'Reilly "A poor magickian is a poor magickian." --Anonymous "Trans-Siberian Orchestra: for those who want all the explosions and hair of a Motley Crue concert, but without that lowbrow aftertaste." --The Ferrett "The people who are trying to make this world worse aren't taking a day off. How can I?" --Bob Marley, 1976 "I learned the hard way that if you take a stand on any issue, no matter how insignificant, people will line up around the block to kick your ass over it." --Jesse Ventura "Things tend to work themselves out if you believe unflenchingly and make every effort, even when it seems quite hopeless. Never give up." --Rogue "THIS is my BROOMSTICK!" "I'm going to kick your Ash for that." --Hasufin and Rialian "Most minds aren't worth reading." --Ingo Swann "This stuff's pretty cool. We should buy it for fun to destroy the environment." --Lyssa "Empathize with stupidity and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." --Ian M. Banks "Apple computers are for people who must consult their feng shui advisor before making an IT purchase." --Anonymous "It's a shame. Disco could have evolved into a mighty artform." "It did. It's called DDR." --Rialian and Helen "It has compatible suck!" --Hasufin "If you put Star Trek and Indiana Jones together, you get a good series!" --Hasufin "The naked is free. Sitting still is expensive." --Scraun "I'm the most obsolete one here, therefore, no intercourse for me." --Rialian "I throw myself on the mercy of the geeks!" --Helen "E-books! E-books taste great!" --Helen "Let me see - should I un-share the directory 'malware'?" --The Doctor "I'm not the owner of this drive? You all suck!" --Rialian "It must say something about my volunteering at the Whitman-Walker Clinic because I have a folder named 'Nurses' and it's not porn!" --Hasufin "The side that applies the rules in warfare loses, every time." --Jim Butterworth "Weekends are not 'rock and roll'. Weekends are the opposite of 'rock and roll'." --Amanda Palmer "1.5 terabytes of warm, yummy, anime goodness." --Hasufin "No animal, not even another human is more important to me than the lives of my children. The life of a child is more precious than anything on this Earth." --SpiritedTigress, on Baby Fae "There is no profit in might-have-beens, we learn from our mistakes." --G'Kar, _Babylon-5: Day of the Dead_ "Emo kids: they're what's for dinner." --Bryce "For the reviewers and the pundits and the critics and the net-stalkers who have done nothing but rag on this show for five years straight, it is also a giant middle finger composed of red neon fifty stories tall, that will burn forever in the night." --J. Michael Straczynski, on _The Deconstruction of Falling Stars_ "If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." --John Boyd "I have scarfed three mini-candy bars for energy before a long meeting. While I feel the thrill of power, I do not feel like Popeye." --The Ferrett "The important thing is to do good work, no matter what medium you do it in." --Roy Scheider "Whether we are based on carbon or silicon makes no fundamental difference. We should each be treated with appropriate respect." --Dr. Chandra, _2010: The Year We Make Contact_ "Having accurate file extensions would be nice. It's not like I'm asking for a pony." --Bryce "Oh, Lord, please don't let us screw up." --Alan Shepard (Shepard's Prayer) "I'm just going to sit over here until you tell me what the hell you're talking about." --Ivanova, _Babylon-5: Lines of Communication_ "Two rolls of (duct) tape equals a whole afternoon of fun!" "Fun for the whole family!" --Adam and Jamie, _Mythbusters_ "Process faster, intestines!" --Bryce "Where are the boobs?" "They're Reese's Cups, they don't need boobs." --Jason and Lyssa "Now that you've asserted your masculinity, could you zip up your pants now?" --Mika "There's no strategy to eat a giant pizza other than to eat the giant pizza." --Chris Cosentino, _Chefs Vs City_ "Politeness be damned, you have no pants." --Lyssa "Intelligence has nothing to do with politics!" --Londo Mollari, _Babylon-5: Point of No Return_ "The great thing about the Internet is its leveling effect; online all opinions are equally WORTHLESS." --Grant Morrison "JMS, what do YOU want?" "I'll have fries with that." --Unknown and J. Michael Straczynski "You know you're going gangsta when you don't put the signature food on the menu!" --Guy Fieri, on Thai food "Reiki: because you can't get acid in the United States anymore." --Bryce "He's like a kid who hasn't taken his ritalin. He's dragging a case of Jolt behind him, but no ritalin." --Anonymous contractor "Stop trying to do so much that you suck at doing any of it!" --Michael, Terminal23 "Nobody made a greater mistake than [they] who did nothing because [they] could only do a little." --Edmund Burke "Mastery of UNIX, like mastery of language, offers real freedom. The price of freedom is always dear, but there's no substitute. Personally, I'd rather pay for my freedom than live in a bitmapped, pop-up-happy dungeon like NT." --Thomas Scoville "What did he say?" "He said, 'We are both damned.'" "That is a small enough price to pay for immortality." --Lord Refa and Londo Mollari, _Babylon-5: The Coming of Shadows_ "When I was in the military they gave me a medal for killing two men and a discharge for loving one." --Epitaph of Leonard P. Matlovich, 1988 "I'm Caesar Gonzales, and you're watching _How Many Gringos Does It Take To Make A Fish Taco?_" --Caesar Gonzales, _Throwdown With Bobby Flay_ "To do what you did in an hour is supernatural, and perhaps not of this Earth." --Alton Brown, _The Next Iron Chef_ "An ounce of hypocrisy is worth a pound of ambition." --Michael Korda "'We want information!'" "What the hell are you talking about?! I've got over a thousand hours of free media online! I can't shut up for twenty fucking minutes!" --Sean Kennedy "How do you sell being pissed off about having a mighty chrome-plated robowang?" --David J. Prokopetz "A .RAR file? Who the fuck uses .RAR files anymore?!" "..the pirates of the Internet?" --Hasufin and Lyssa "My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you I just signed legislation which outlaws Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes." --Ronald Reagan, 1984 "Natives who beat drums to drive off evil spirits are objects of scorn to smart Americans who blow horns to break up traffic jams." --Mary Ellen Kelly "I love mankind; it's people I can't stand." --Charles M. Schulz "I simply *have* to get one of those sonic crowd-dispersal things and incorporate it into my live act. Everytime a kickdrum hits I want people to fall to the floor and start writhing in agony as the calcium matrices of their bones hum." --Pegritz "Just because they've got 4+ years of Extended Support Period left doesn't mean they're going to get first-class treatment." --Larry Seltzer, on the XP remote DoS vulnerability that MS refuses to patch "Life gets SO MUCH MORE INTERESTING when you haven't had any REM sleep!" --Me "I've never been certain whether the moral of the Icarus story should only be, as is generally accepted, ''Don't try to fly too high,'' or whether it might also be thought of as, ''Forget the wax and feathers and do a better job on the wings.''" --Stanley Kubrick "I've had two hours of sleep and I feel GREAT, okay?!" --Lyssa "We spend a lot of time looking for our spaceships and jet-packs, but - and consider this bit, it gets bigger and weirder the more you think about it - in a matter of days we can genetically sequence a mutant virus that's jumped the species gap. People try to make an ordinary thing of that. There's a strong tendency to cast the present day, whenever that may be, as essentially banal and not what was promised. Stop looking for the loud giant stuff. The small marvels surround us." --Warren Ellis "What a collection of scars you have. Never forget who gave you the best, and be grateful. Our scars have the power to remind us that the past is real." --Hannibal Lecter, _Red Dragon_ "Some motherfucker's always trying to ice-skate up a hill." --Blade "Knock this back to the memories of Irene and Arlene, false though the memories may be." --Calder, _Newton's Wake_ "I learned a very important lesson that night. People believe whatever they read. Something magical happens once its put down on paper. They figure no one would have gone through the trouble if it wasn't the truth. Responsibility was my new watchman." --Eugene Morris Jerome, _Biloxi Blues_ "The only difference between right and wrong is the number of people who agree with you." --Sean Kennedy There are many people today who literally do not have a close personal friend. They may know something that we don't. They are probably avoiding a great deal of pain. "It's always so much more interesting to play the villains, and this guy is a real son of a bitch." --Michael Wincott, on playing Guy of Gisborne "Where the fuck did you come from?" "Big Bang? Primordial ooze? Divine hands of a benevolent creator? All possibilities, but recent events have given me doubts about the benevolent creator." --Tommy and Alex, _The Crow: Salvation_ "Just because I've been drug into the twenty-first century doesn't mean that I haven't been observing it from an anthropological point of view." --Hasufin "The only difference between the Democrats and the Republicans is that the Democrats allow the poor to be corrupt, too." --Oscar Levant "To the guys who left dirty festering hamburger plates in the sink for over a week: You suck." --Dan Barlow, to whomever committed a war crime at HacDC "There's always going to be someone to spew a geyser of frothy sand from their engorged vagina." --Drohem "Listen, folks. I make and manufacture next-gen weapons for terrorists and freak-show lunatics. And I'm saying this - as that guy - what YOU do is completely evil. I might deal to murderers, but you guys.. you guys are addicting kids and then murdering them yourselves." --Ezekiel Stane, _Iron Man: The Five Nightmares_ "Dude, I have four cats. I wear more cat hair than /they do/!" --Orthaevelve "Anyone who makes /me/ look like the epitomy of maturity has serious problems." --Kyrin "A marriage performed in bare-ass chaps didn't make it - who would have thought?" --Dusk "Red Bull isn't the answer. I'm not sure what the question is, but Red Bull isn't the answer." --Jade "Kitty want crustacea!" --Bryce "Jason, I'm going to beat the shit out of you. Go play on the Internet." --Lyssa "We do not need TomTom, we have Jean-Jean. And a man whose ass can commit a war crime." --Jason "Here's the problem with being an ethical necromancer: all the cool stuff is unethical!" --Hasufin "I'm rockin' the Neapolitan ice cream look: here's the tan, here's the burn, and there's the white." --Dusk "We'll un-fuck this situation at a later date! Fall back!" --Terry, _True Blood_ "We measure attack surface in square miles round here." --Anonymous "It was an ''oh, my retinas!'' moment." --Anonymous cow-orker "This is Radio Free Nutter, 92.8 FM, bringing you the sound of mutant water squirrels biting the end of me knob." --Alice, _Freakangels_ "If I can't vote myself to be God, I'll vote for Henry Rollins!" --Jason "We've come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass, and we're right out of bubblegum." --Andrew Eldritch, San Francisco Maritime Hall 2-5-98 "One good thing about being a nerd, we're not often bored." "It's advantageous, being a self-entertaining lifeform sometimes." --Jason and the Doctor "If God chooses to be mythopoetic - and is not the sky itself a myth? - shall we refuse to be mythopathic?" --C.S. Lewis "There's a witch and a sonofabitch." --Jason Stackhouse, _True Blood_ "Zombies come in ninja-flavored, too??" --Ophelia, _Living Dead In Denmark_ "Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them." --Frederick Douglas Hedonism: the radical notion that there is more to life than getting up and going to work every day. "I've made myself significantly more stupid after grad school - as therapy." --Lyssa "Serge has only the best intentions in mind, please cut him some slack and buy him some decaf." --Alberto "What's the difference between a pagan and a New Ager? How much money they earn." --Dionesia108 "I secrete glitter. And poo fairy dust." --Lyssa "We reject the view that copyright owners and their licensees are required to provide consumers with perpetual access to creative works. No other product or service providers are held to such lofty standards. No one expects computers or other electronics devices to work properly in perpetuity, and there is no reason that any particular mode of distributing copyrighted works should be required to do so." --Steven Metalitz "A dozen rabbits getting maimed in a wheat thresher is just an unfortunate side effect of your vegan diet; a dozen rabbits getting experimented on for a reason you don't understand is torture and unethical, even if it may alleviate pain and suffering for untold numbers of humans." --Smidge "I don't know what you is, but I'm feelin' ya. And you is a soulless bitch." --Lafayette to Mary Ann, _True Blood_ "Merry Warezmas." --Bryce "What can you say about a society that says that God is dead and Elvis is alive?" --Irv Kupcinet "If I live to be 100, I will never understand why they keep so many damn weapons under the ring. It's like they want the wrestlers to use them on each other." --Jim Ross, WWE RAW "If we fail to anticipate the unforeseen or expect the unexpected in a universe of infinite possibilities, we may find ourselves at the mercy of anyone or anything that cannot be programmed, categorized or easily referenced." --Fox Mulder, _The X-Files: Fight the Future_ "Put this much brainpower all in one place with no oversight, you'll either get an explosion or a game of Dungeons and Dragons." --Captain Tagon, _Schlock Mercenary_ "We're not finding 'goodness' in any particular ethical or moral sense. I love the stories of Ikkyu, the enlightened Zen monk who, after his enlightenment, would carouse with prostitutes and get drunk. That's what he found, and he exasperated the more traditional authorities who had a set idea of what an enlightened person is supposed to look like." --Jay Michaelson "Great. Now you pissed off anon. Why didn't you pick on something *safe*, like the NSA or the Russian crime syndicates?" --Valdis Kletnieks, on attacking 4chan "It's going to be a walk in the park. And by that, I'm referencing a certain scene from _Escape From LA_." --Bryce "God, we're morbid." "That's why they pay us the big bucks - to stay out of PR." --Anonymous and Bryce "Lesson: Mars does not read requirements documents." --Robert Manning, MSL Chief Engineer "Evil is the premeditated choice to be a dick." --Jason Stackhouse, _True Blood_ "Oh, why did I open my mouth?" --Onivel, on seeing me quote him "That must have been one hell of a turd." "Please - we're in the DC area. Call it an act of Congress." --Onivel and Hasufin "I've offered my help, it was denied. I don't wish to get in the way of people and their clogged toilets." --Hasufin "So, porn, in other words." --Seele, on NURB modeling "Brian? It's like a vampire - you invited him in!" --Lyssa, on physical network attacks "Tomb Raider was the first game to make use of NURBs when modeling characters." "Which is why it was so popular!" "But it wasn't realtime!" --Seele, the Doctor, and Irregular Expression "By using NURBs, you can develop a more accurate set of curves..." --Seele "This is the very definition of a target rich environment!" --Onivel "I think if the human race can can develop a way to install and configure a cross-development environment without a week's worth of hassle, they would be one short step away from inventing artificial intelligence." --The Doctor "I think it's a mistake to look for accurate technical details in a publicly digestible press release." --Jason Duerstock "Rayguns. So fucking cool." --Anna Mercury "Success is like a fart - only your own smells nice." --James P. Hogan "Kitton: like a piton only you don't drive it into a rock face." --Hasufin "I simply wish to establish that the slurping is a bit distracting." --Hasufin "Ve need parts! Go kill ze little one!" --Perceptor, _Transformers 2_ "Mmm... ozone. This place is so full of nerd testosterone that if I fart I'll pass a lightning bolt!" --Jason "It pees when I burn! It pees when I burn!" --Kyrin, misquoting Dave Chappel "Semantics!" "No, genetics!" --Kyrin and Lyssa "You may have my husband's cock in your mouth." --Anonymous "You know what my scrotum really needs? Docking clamps!" --Jason "Was that a hiccough or a belch?" "It sounded like Pikachu had an orgasm." --Kyrin and Jason "It's not so much a cock as a pry bar." --Pegritz "I can't take you anywhere!" "No, dear, you can't take me anywhere because most of my preferred activities are felonies." --Mika and Hasufin "That's because I have a spite pump, it's not properly a heart. It pumps bile, you see..." --Kyrin "Between the wine and the cock, I'm a little drunk." --Lauren "There's a guy down by the pool who comes from the planet Trying Too Fucking Hard." --Jason "Whoever's next, rock thou out with thine cock out!" --Kyrin "They say the celebrities die in threes.. but trust Billy Mays to throw in an extra AT NO ADDITIONAL COST!" --Hasufin "I prefer to give people solutions that make their quality of life better today than do nothing because it's not perfect." --Martin Roesch "Anyone who makes ME look like the epitomy of maturity has serious problems." --Kyrin "A gentleman was supposed to prefer being a dead lion to being a live jackal. Me, I've always preferred to be a live lion, so that puts me outside the rules." --Lazurus Long "Kyrin, no violating the Elder Gods!" --Jason "Holy water is apparently the universal solvent." --Hasufin "I'm exercising due dilligence. I bill by the hour." --Anonymous "I have no need to play Solomon with my testicles as the mommmies!" --Jason, on penile bifurcation "I live near DC and carry a balance on my Citibank Visa card. At these interest rates, they won't let anything happen to me. The nation's capital is safe. As long as you don't ride the Metro, anyway." --ScentCone "I share much DNA with the freaky old sonofabitch." --Kyrin, on Father's Day "Objective journalism is one of the main reasons American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long. You can't be objective about Nixon." --Hunter S. Thompson The mass driver: because nothing says "I love you" quite like relativistic bombardment with nickel-iron asteroids. "What mighty contests rise from trivial things." --Alexander Discordian Pope "Note to self: don't go pickin' up the random platypus." --Lyssa "I'm not so much a terrible person as I am an offensive person." --Kyrin "First, let me make it very clear, poor people aren't necessarily killers. Just because you happen to be not rich doesn't mean you're willing to kill." --George W. Bush, 19 May 2003 "The only reason they don't give this job to the service robots is because they've got a better union than us!" --Lister, _Red Dwarf_ "That should be the name of a condom: Full Bore" "Better Full Bore than Rifled Bore." --Mika and Hasufin "Jesus. How many nerds does it take to open a bottle of absinthe?" --Elliot "The fingers say 'go' but the brain says 'eat a dick, son'." --Kyrin "Hey, if they can write a TCP/IP stack for a Commodore 64, you can make that (Arduino) do what you want." "Hey - stuff it." --Bryce and Timball "My office is too depressing to look at porn in." --Elliot "Every scientific truth goes through three states: first, people say it conflicts with the Bible; next, they say it has been discovered before; lastly, they say they always believed it." --Louis Agassiz "We also recycle in this house!" --Bill, _True Blood_ "I'm just saying an Internet sex tape would not hurt." --Stephen Colbert "Oh, street carnage! Is there nothing you're appropriate for?" --Jon Stewart "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident." --Arthur Schopenhauer "I can breach the blood/brain barrier in milliseconds." --Pegritz "EMACS key sequences are more complex than Mortal Kombat fatality combinations." --Sean McGowan "An elvish hamster would look like Greenpeace and Liberace were involved in the design of its cage." --Hasufin "Many things we do naturally become difficult only when we try to make them intellectual subjects. It is possible to know so much about a subject that you become totally ignorant." --Mentat Text Two (dicto) "What is he (Hasufin) doing in the closet??" "Playing with the night vision goggles." "Yes, I am in the closet." --Lyssa, the Doctor, and Hasufin "Machines don't need sentience to kill. They might need it to refrain from killing though." --Maximum Prophet "These things happened. They were glorious and they changed the world... and then we fucked up the endgame." --Charlie Wilson "Wait a minute - I know that demented chuckle..." --Bryce "You know, I still don't know how Firemonkey fits in that little car - he's nearly seven feet tall! He's built like a crane fly. There's an episode of _In Search Of_ waiting to happen, there." --Bryce, on Firemonkey's Mini car "Politics and religion are just like software and hardware. They all suck, the documentation is provably incorrect, and all the vendors tell lies." --Andrew Dalgleish "There's a saying in medicine that if you don't laugh you'll cry, and if you don't cry you'll scream. And you'll never stop." --Orthaevelve "Dude! It's Ma Bell bringin' you the juice!" --Timball "What the hell is it with you and all those cameras?" "...I'm Asian?" --Serge and Timball "If they were so inclined, they could impeach him because they don't like his necktie." --Attorney General William Saxbe "What the hell chip is this?" "Idaknow. I found it on the ground along with those pills I took." --Elliot and Anonymous "If nobody knows, the answer is 'yes'." --Elliot "All of us can think of a book... that we hope none of our children or any other children have taken off the shelf. But if I have the right to remove that book from the shelf - that work I abhor - then you also have exactly the same right and so does everyone else. And then we have no books left on the shelf for any of us." --Katherine Paterson, American author of childrens books (1932-) "Nothing good has come from the Internet. Period." --Michael Lynton, CEO, Sony Pictures "I would like to play a normal girl before I die of extreme old age." --Summer Glau "Nuclear war would really set back cable." --Ted Turner "Yeah yeah, whatever. Shut up before I turn you into a Claymation character." --Thomas Ptacek (because it's his screenplay, dammit) "Robots today are where computers were in 1980." --Bill Gates "Is it a federal crime to like my coffee coffee-flavored?" --Rayne, _Doctor Who: Time Tales_ "Wogs run atomic!" --Sean Kennedy, on synching to atomic clocks "You know, Bryce, sometimes you're really fucking creepy." --Orthaevelve "If you overcook these puppies it's a sin." --Lyssa, on scallops "A dot zero release. May you live in interesting times." --Jim Cottrell, on KDE v4.0 glitches "Careful, Bryce, you sound like you're developing a sense of humor." --Lyssa "Anyone want a piece of cake?" "" "...in an enema." --A conversation never to have at work "Yellow means pain, red means death." --Cimmerian "At times the whole world seems to be in conspiracy to importune you with emphatic trifles." --Ralph Waldo Emerson "Need some more gold in your system?" "It's a better conductor than carbon." --Lyssa and the Doctor, on his love of Goldschlager "Did you ever take a dump and get recoil?" --Anonymous cow-orker "Now, a lot of people don't know that instant coffee actually contains more caffeine than regular coffee. So if you're just going for caffeine high, get the instant coffee. Now there's nothing.. official been sanctioned about these things, but I'm here to tell you this stuff is like crystal fucking meth, OK?" --Sean Kennedy TFM "I think I like the thought of hamsters powering Skynet. Just sayin'." --Lyssa "Politics are almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war, you can only be killed once." --Winston Churchill "It's so much fun hanging out with peacocks. I get all of the floor show and none of the aggrevation." --Jason, on getting dressed to go clubbing "Okay, we've established that my sense of self-preservation is somewhere between Starscream and Steve Erwin.." --Hasufin "They're a strange people. But they're okay." --Londo Mollari on the Minbari, _Babylon-5: The Quality of Mercy_ "Could you make this work? Your flashlight hates me." "It hates me, too." "It hates you less." "It hangs on my ass all day." "...no comment." --Jade, Bryce, and Elliott "I teach you to lie, cheat, and steal, and as soon as my back's turned you wait in line?" --Dr. Gregory House "When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained." --Mark Twain "Are you still out there? Or have you ascended to a lower OSI network layer?" --Binder "The only thing that has ever been truly OSI 7 layer compliant is the Taco Bell 7 Layer Burrito." --Kent "Dogman" Dahlgren "I've seen Sun monitors on fire off the side of the multimedia lab. I've seen NTU lights glitter in the dark near the Mail Gate. All these things will be lost in time, like the root partition last week. Time to die..." --P. Gutmann There are two rules for success in life: Rule 1: Don't tell people everything you know. "I'm hoping that this guy's actions don't count as fair use of my health records." --Richard Barnes, on the VPMP data breach "Don't read too much into the exact wording of the press. It's not [as if] they're going for sensationalism or anything." --Mark Smith Microsoft: you've got questions, we've got dancing paperclips. "Please excuse me, I've got to wash off all the blood first." --The Wrong Hands "Things are rarely just crazy enough to work but, but they're frequently just crazy enough to fail hilariously." --XKCD "I believe that the catastrophe story, whoever may tell it, represents a constructive and positive act by the imagination rather than a negative one, an attempt to confront the terrifying void of a patently meaningless universe by challenging it at its own game, to remake zero by provoking it every conceivable way." --J.G. Ballard "Can you enforce that shit? No? You're fucked, then!" --Sean Kennedy "Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business." --Tom Robbins "There's a RepRap in your bathroom!" "That's the RepRap Storage Facility." --Anonymous and Elliott "It's *always* time to fire up an NNTP server if a web forum is the alternative." --John Osmon "It's called cut-and-paste. Cut-cut-and-paste." --Bryce "It sounds like a herd of gerbils running across the keyboard." --E- S- "Any time someone puts a lock on something you own, against your wishes, and doesn't give you the key, it's not being done to your benefit." --Cory Doctorow "Let me issue and control a nation's money, and I care not who writes its laws" --Mayer Amchel Rothschild "I try not to think with my gut. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in." --Carl Sagan "If your sex toys require a UPS, you might want to re-think what you're into." --Bryce "The World Wide Web was precisely what we were trying to PREVENT - ever-breaking links, links going outward only, quotes you can't follow to their origins, no version management, no rights management." --Ted Nelson "As you make a prototype, assume you are right and everyone else is wrong. When you share your prototype, assume you are wrong and everyone else is right." --Diego Rodriguez "I am not in favor of immortality. I believe death for humans is the way of getting rid of accumulated errors - as in trial and error. Without death, the old folks would start to gang up on the babies (the new trials). Immortality ---> immortal mistakes." --Esther Dyson "Stupid goddamn plastic package on my new SD card: 'HAHA YOU CAN'T OPEN ME!' Me: 'Oh. Really? My Leatherman gives me +10 to open, fucker.'" --Wil Wheaton "The relationship of editor to author is knife to throat." --Unknown "Watch this, I'm gonna redecorate in brain matter grey! Wham!" --Sean Kennedy "Yes, it is easy not to believe in monsters, considerably more difficult to escape their dread and loathsome clutches." --Stanislaw Lem, _The Cyberiad_ "Nothing pretty survives the holocaust." --Lyssa, on _Fallout 3_ "If you had a belt made out of me, you'd turn into a nerd." --Hasufin, on the loup-garou "Whenever someone thinks that they can replace SSL/SSH with something much better that they designed this morning over coffee, their computer speakers should generate some sort of penis-shaped sound wave and plunge it repeatedly into their skulls until they achieve enlightenment." --Peter Gutmann "Thanks to the miracle of modern medicine, the suffering, humiliation, and loneliness of a human being can now be extended for years. And perhaps that's how it's supposed to be." --Neil Strauss, _Emergency_ "Dude, he must've given you the Dragon Punch to your rectum! Do you have chi fire burns in your colon? Was he shouting 'Shoriyuken!'?" --Kyrin (who else?) "He can be so difficult when I want to get my way!" --Lyssa "Beware the seeds you sow and the crops you reap. Do not curse God for the punishment you inflict upon yourself." --Orange Catholic Bible, from _Dune_ "The folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us." --Paul Valery "Facebook: the great equalizer." --Lyssa "Never ask someone who was cloned in a lab and given a serial number to name a pet." --Solo "Nothing, and I mean nothing, can prepare you for a thousand screaming Girl Scouts. That is fear." --Duff, _Ace of Cakes_ "When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing." --Enrique Jardiel Poncela "Government security seems to be the dumping ground for people who can't cut it in ops." --Anonymous Co-worker "No, I didn't rob the cradle, I robbed the grave. Get it right." --Mika "Absolute faith corrupts as absolutely as absolute power." --Eric Hoffer "When Fate taps you on the shoulder, you'd best pay attention. Unfortunately, she has the blasted habit of tapping you on the opposite shoulder, so that when you turn around she's actually on your other side, giggling like a schoolgirl. I hate that." --Harlequin "Save them all, let the ER sort 'em out." --The Wrong Hands "None of you seem to understand! I'm not locked in here with you! You're locked in here with me!" --Rorschach, _Watchmen_ "Who copyedits Alan Moore, for God's sake??" --Dick Girdano, former managing editor, DC Comics "It doesn't matter if you're a hamster running in a wheel or a cool hamster driving an awesome car, you're still a hamster stuck in a cage." --Bryce "Mathematicians often resort to something called Hilbert space, which is described as being n-dimensional. Like modern sex, any number can play." --James Blish, "Beep/The Quincunx of Time" "It is my opinion that critics are not creators, rarely are they teachers, mostly delegated to guide those that require guidance from others as to what to tune into and what to do." --Ricardieu "A lot of chemistry is pornography in disguise - you just have to know where to look for the functional groups." --Alexander Shulgin "When the center of the storm does not move, you are in its path." --Ancient Fremen Wisdom "Well, he does have training in biofeedback..." "Biofeedback?! Bryce has frickin' implants in his head!" "..I wasn't going to mention that, thanks." --Unknown, Serge, and Bryce, on the OCZ NIA "The day before a breach, the ROI (Return On Investment) is zero. The day after, it is infinite." --Dennis Hoffman, on intrusion detection/prevention systems "I think every goddamned disease in the world is improved by feeling happy and good." --Robert Anton Wilson "All I know about Trojans is that they're condoms. I don't know anything about condom horses." --Anonymous co-worker, on malware "Ignorance on fire is better than brilliance on ice." --Anonymous CEO "Fair use is the last refuge of the scoundrel!" --Larry Kenswil, Universal Music "A while back the Republican Party ceased to be a viable political organ, and is now the greatest, most elaborate ongoing prank in history." --Anonymous "Okay, if you're in the band, you have to go. Yes, even you, Kurt." --Sayaka, on InSoc concerts Do not condemn the judgment of another because it differs from your own. You may both be wrong. "The first man who sets foot on another planet and says 'I am not leaving!' - that man will be a wog." --Sean Kennedy "Maybe he's, like, a Jewish Jedi, or something. He wants to show you the ways of the Schwartz." --M- "It appears we're running Microsoft Exchange Server version Error Code: 500 Internal Server Error over here." --Bryce "I supposed I'd rather be wrong from time to time, then be the asshole who did nothing." --Captain Robert, on doing the right thing The four sysadmins of the apocalypse: edquota, rm -rf /, kill -9, and shutdown "On the Kinsey Scale, elves are about (pi * i)." --Rialian "Welcome to Thundergarden! Two trees enter, one tree leaves!" --Digital Sidhe "Christianity does not preach the gospels to offer man a guide to salvation. It uses the gospels as a weapon in the ideological conquest of man." --Simon Ewins "We need, like, passive-aggressive, emo Jedi." --Sean Kennedy "What did you change the password to?" "'password'." "The one I didn't try - some hacker I am." "At least you broke out your copy of _The Necronomicon_, first. That gives you style points." --T- and the Doctor "Lose your mind, not your focus!" --P- "They [readers] don't have the right to read a book out loud." --Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors' Guild "Sin lies only in hurting other people unnecessarily. All other 'sins' are invented nonsense. Hurting yourself is not sinful, just stupid." --Robert A. Heinlein "And you will have manly pork chops tonight. Manly. That is the only way to describe those chops. You will grow hair and your balls will drop if you eat them. In your case, your hips will go less wide and you may start liking football." --Lyssa "It is never too late to be what you might have been." --George Eliot "If it changes colors, you're a pimp." --C- "If you can't defend, attack." --"Wyatt Earp" "We get carbon credits for not operating that coffee maker. It draws more watts than the microwave." --C- "If your threat model involves organized crime decapitating people that work in your office and using superconducting quantum interference detectors on their severed heads to extract traces of proprietary information, chances are that you are not working under a realistic threat model." --The Doctor "Uh-oh. The Danger Zone." --Anonymous analyst, on watching me boot up Windbringer "A man who mistakes secrets for knowledge is like a man who, seeking light, hugs a candle so closely that he smothers it and burns his hand." --Master Foo, _Master Foo and the MCSE_ "Domain controllers are sort of like hermit crabs. It sounds like there should only be one, but in reality they like to run in packs." --The Standalone Sysadmin "If it's in the news, don't worry about it. The very definition of 'news' is 'something that hardly ever happens.'" --Bruce Schneier "Google has facts. Cities have secrets." --Kevin Slavin "A certified idiot is still an idiot." --Anonymous "I would like to thank Ceiling Cat for this nom we are about to recieve!" --Hasufin, waxing evangelical "Bacon salt: proof that alchemy really works!" --The Doctor "I believe not your fuzzy lies!" --Hausfin, to one of his cats "Are you practicing being cryptic?" --Anonymous Contractor "'Your argument does not impress me.' What the hell?!" --T-E- "Methyl butyl ketone - cool! Wait a minute, doesn't that cause cancer in lab mice?" --Bryce "Oh, my God - I ate a pickle, chips, and a piece of cake. And I'm not even ovulating!" --A-P- "Generally speaking, all of my motors are print statements." --The Doctor "Nothing like a little phone sex before you propose." --Carson Kressley "'Errata'? That's a little too close to 'erotica'." "It _is_ debugger porn..." --A-C- and Bryce "Somebody's got a case of the Mondays!" "Yeah, fifty-three times a year." "...goddammit." --T-B- and Bryce "The trick is, maintaining that perspective. It's really easy to twist yourself so that you can keep the rationalizations in place, but the stress of maintenance is overpowering. It's not a matter of if you fail; its when. So you have to be able to establish drills so you have a plan to get back on track." --Sean Kennedy "Dyn-o-mite is great! It's like Tetris plus bubble wrap!" --Lyssa "Encase is THE BOMB! It found me MP3's I didn't even know I had!!" --Timball "Lots of places have a Cardiff." --MMSword, on my discovery of Cardiff, Maryland "I don't care - hell with resentment." --Ingo Swann "The deadliest bullshit is odorless and transparent." --William Gibson "Walk tall, kick ass, learn to speak Arabic, love music, and never forget you come from a long line of truth seekers, lovers, and warriors." --Hunter S. Thompson "Sitting Bull 3:16 means I just kicked your ass!" --Bronwyn "I can't wait to see ''Multiple XSS SCADAXYZ 0day'' by huSSein_sup3r_h4x0r on Bugtraq." --Jeremy Brown "Six months of AI programming will make you think there is a God. Six months of tech support and you'll know there isn't." --Girl In Training "L'enfer ne peut attaquer les paiens." (Hell holds no terror for pagans.) --Arthur Rimbaud "I read your plan file and I realize we live XKCD." --Lyssa "I just wanted to make out with her. Ok, and maybe tie her up with gaffer tape." --Amanda Palmer, on Katy Perry "..and control-v is paste!" "Which we should all be eating by now." --M- and Bryce "I cannot be all things to all people. I am just me and you get what there is, not what you ask for." --Chris Knadle "Let us resolve to be masters, not the victims, of our history, controlling our own destiny without giving way to blind suspicions and emotions." --John Fitzgerald Kennedy "Some people are not okay, they're sons of bitches." --Robert Anton Wilson "The only intelligent way to discuss politics is on all fours." --Timothy Leary "The world IS your imagination, have you forgotten?" --Lorenzo "You're encouraging Pegritz. What did we tell you about that?" --Lyssa Chuck Norris starts every day with a protein shake made from Carnation Instant Breakfast, one dozen eggs, pure Colombian cocaine, and rattlesnake venom. He injects it directly into his neck with a syringe. "When New York City goes silent, you're fucked." --Bryce "...And it's a criminal offense! When you apply for a job, you'll have to own up to having a criminal record." "I already have a criminal record; I work for Greenpeace." --Overheard on the DC Metro's Orange Line "Disagreements over technical aspects or processes are fine, even encouraged. However, personal attacks, flames, or snide remarks will make your moderator grumpy and, like some kind of retarded Hulk, ''You won't like it when I'm grumpy.''" --Erin Carroll, moderator, pen-test mailing list "When you airdrop a crate of technology on a segment of the economy that's not accustomed to managing it, well, you're going to get a certain amount of mayhem." --George Hulme "We didn't get the buy-in we thought we were going to have." --Every security analyst or engineer, at one time or another "If one more person from Louisiana calls me up to tell me it's snowing, I'm going to start hanging up on them!" --M- "Goddammit, _Howard the Duck_?! I thought I'd been a better influence on him." --Lyssa, on my love of bad movies "The captain always goes down with the ship, Jack! I'm just the engineer!" --MacGyver "Reed Richards /would/ have a prehensile cock, wouldn't he?" --Lyssa "It's like a party in my mouth and everyone's throwing up." --Fry, _Futurama_ "I'm only unhappy because so many angry men are trying to convince me to be unhappy, and it pains me to have to spend a lot of my energy ignoring them." --Amanda Palmer "Good old Myspace, always good for a laugh. Granted, it might be an akward, questionable, whimpering laugh that makes you feel like you've been coated in thin, syphilitic layer of slime that makes you want to take a shower in antibiotics, but a laugh nontheless." --Pyrotech C3H8 "Could you pass me the angle grinder?" --Nick "Oh, piff. This doesn't need anything more than some love and three gallons of vinegar." "Please, if you show it any love, clean it before you bring it back." --Hasufin and Serge "Dear, may I point out something? We don't need a comic to tell us who we are." --Lyssa "That is some Laughing Man, badass shit if you can hack incoming rounds! Dude, you're a ninja!" --Sean Kennedy, on the Pentagon's press release on guided rifle bullets "We're still being challenged in Iraq and the reason why is a free Iraq will be a major defeat in the cause of freedom." --George W. Bush "If my coffee isn't sentient and fighting for its life when I drink it, it's not strong enough." --Bryce "The great thing about object oriented code is that it can make small, simple problems look like large, complex ones." --Anonymous "I missed the days when super computers looked like alien technology or Raiders of the Lost Ark." --Suso "An older student came to Otis and said, ''I have been to see a great number of teachers and I have given up a great number of pleasures. I have fasted, been celibate and stayed awake nights seeking enlightenment. I have given up everything I was asked to give up and I have suffered, but I have not been enlightened. What should I do?''" "Otis replied, ''Give up suffering.''" --Camden Benares, "Zen Without Zen Masters" "Oh, dear. Usually, calling on a Time Lord for help means things have gone way wrong." --Hasufin "Virginia's solved the problem of low-cost housing: it's called Maryland." --Lyssa "Is this your sewing machine?" "Yes, but that doesn't imply understanding." --Cate and Hasufin "Stealth is what Riddick uses to get into position." --Hausfin "_The Chronicles of Riddick_: Vin Diesel's favorite AD&D campaign!" --Lyssa "Rice Krispies are the only living thing in this picture, remember that." --Bronwyn "Aah, the Gygaxian prose..." --Nick "Everybody is somebody else's weirdo." --Dykstra "What the fuck was Paris thinking?! Five thousand years later and we're still asking that question!" --Hasufin "But it lacks subtlty..." "Wait, what the fuck were the words that just came out of your mouth?! You're sitting here trading Doomsday Scenarios and you want SUBTLTY?!?" --Hasufin and Mika "Yeah, you can overpower blashphemy with mango salsa." --Hasufin "What is born shall live. What lives must die. Between the two, seek out the Dragonfly." --Rogue "You're a foo fighter on the gaydar screen, Hasufin." --The Doctor "Personally, I don't often talk about social good because when I hear other people talk about social good, that's when I reach for my revolver." --Eric Raymond "If we give up our preserved giant squids, then surely the terrorists have won." --Bruce Schneier "Grab a shovel, I'm only one skull short of a Mousketeer reunion!" --Bender, _Futurama_ "I'm sorry, I can't show you my wedding pictures. The local web proxy has my website filed under 'Adult entertainment'." "Whoa! What else do you have on your website?!?" "...Perl Scripts Gone Wild?" --The Doctor and anonymous cow-orker "With pop-country, evil needs no goatee." --Danarama When man calls an animal "vicious", he usually means that it will attempt to defend itself when he tries to kill it. "It's better to be a ninja than a pirate - they never even knew you were there." --Sean Kennedy "That's the best sleep ever." "What, falling asleep on the subway?" "No, before a colonoscopy." --Anonymous Co-workers "ACPI is a complete design disaster in every way. But we're kind of stuck with it. If any Intel people are listening to this and you had anything to do with ACPI, shoot yourself now, before you reproduce." --Linus Torvalds "I think our Intertubes need more fibre." --The Doctor "Let's grow old together." "Yeah, I've got a few more grey hairs to give you." "Your hairline's receeding nicely." --Lyssa and Bryce "In this crowd, obsessions and compulsions run the gamut. So long as someone isn't going up and stapling themselves to the wall, we're doing all right." --Jason "The secret of success in synthetic chemistry is knowing what you can afford not to worry about." --Derek Lowe, Ph.D "M-, are you smoking crack again?!" --Things you never want to hear your manager say in a meeting "Are you trying to look like a dork, or is it natural?" "It's a gift. In the superpower lottery, I think I got the booby prize." --Lyssa and the Doctor "Tongue in cheek? No, tongue not in cheek. Serious as tongue hacked off with machete!" --Max Brooks "I will not use the Programs for, and will not allow the Programs to be used for, any purposes prohibited by United States law, including, without limitation, for the development, design, manufacture or production of nuclear, chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction." --From Oracle's license agreement "Ignore the fools, they would not know classical beauty if it hit them over the head with a Hello Kitty doll." --Dusza Beben "Oh, baby, you give me Pac-Man fever! Wock-wock-wock-wock!" --Anonymous cow-orker "The Future of Science Fiction? We're living in it. Those ''Future History'' charts in the back of every Robert A Heinlein paperback, when I was about 14, had the early 21st century tagged as the ''Crazy Years''. He had an American theocratic dictatorship happening about then. I hope we miss that one. Otherwise, I'm assuming these are those years." --William Gibson "This place makes me want to do evil, evil things to FIPS 140-2 compliant crypto modules." --The Doctor, on his honeymoon The Bible contains six admonishments to homosexuals and 362 admonishments to heterosexuals. That doesn't mean that God doesn't love heterosexuals. It's just that they need more supervision. "Put the TV on. Pretend people live here." --Lyssa "If the good guys can't even participate, the bad guys will always win." --Bruce Schneier, on the perils of banning security research "You start off by making absolutely pure anhydrous hydrogen azide, which is a proposal that you don't hear very often around the lab, and is the sort of thing that leads to thoughts of career changes." --Derek Lowe, Ph.D, In the Pipeline: Things I Won't Work With "That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves." --Coyote, _Green Mars_ "Edge play: when you might need power tools." --Anonymous "Children are like crystal meth: Great for other people as long as you're far away." --The Doctor "Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ''I know, I'll use regular expressions.'' Now they have two problems." --Jamie Zawinski "Injuries build character. Too much character results in death." --Anonymous "Dictatorships and tyrannical rulers are only bad if you're on the wrong side." --Anonymous "I guess the moral here is: you must be careful what you pretend to be because in the end you are who you're pretending to be." --Mother Night "Threefish can't possibly be broken yet; we only just announced it yesterday. No one knew of its existence before then. I think your intertubes are clogged." --Bruce Schneier "Did you make coffee?" "I made coffee suitable for humans." --T-S- and the Doctor "Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them." --Antoine de Saint-Exupery "The rest of us - and there are a lot of us - are watching you." --Andrew Eldritch "Who the hell is - whatthefuck is that?!" --T-G-'s introduction to the Cruxshadows "So, you're a post-modernist?" "No, I just like playing fast and loose with things that take themselves too seriously." --Anonymous and the Doctor "One of the things our grandchildren will find quaintest about us is that we distinguish the digital from the real, the virtual from the real." --William Gibson "She has the hottest denim knees I've ever seen." --Johnny Long "It's amazing that the closer something we want comes, the more we imagine wild and terrifying things taking that something from us." --Silicon Rose "You can buy my heart with pastry. I won't object." --Orthaevelve "Bryce Lynch! You are NOT Rickrolling our wedding!!!" --Lyssa "You mean there's pork in this ham?!" --Anonymous "Time flies when you're going crazy." --Cate "A mouse is a device for pointing at the Xterm you want to type in." --from alt.sysadmin.recovery "Wait, what the fuck is that??" "I'll take ''Things you never want to hear in the wiring closet'' for a thousand, Alex." --B-G- and Bryce "Chip, you fucking terrify me sometimes." --Warren Ellis "It's going to suck, but Fidonet will rise again." --Jim Selleck "Christ, he ninja-bombed me again!" --T-G- "Did you just have a conversation with my cock?" "Yup." --Bryce and Lyssa "I've got root!!" --Lyssa, while exchanging our wedding vows "There is much that Bryce needs to learn about emergency wedding supplies. For example, why do you have _The Perl Pocket Reference_ in there??" --Hasufin, on the contents of my wedding survival kit "It is important to have scary demons in our world on film. We have them in the world. That is why we are afraid, it is nice to have a visual and to have a confrontation with it." --Brad Dourif, on horror movies "Weddings are like server migrations: there's always shit to deal with the next morning, assuming that there wasn't a crash." --Lyssa "Any Arabic lyrics you hear in my songs do NOT come from the Qu'ran, however, so there shouldn't be any weird issues with temperamental Muslims. Y'all know I only take lyrics from the Al-Azif, and Cthulhu cultists are all very supportive of my music, as it encourages their goals of waking the Great Sleeper from his aeons-long seafloor nap." --Pegritz "Biswick? Who the hell is Biswick?! I told you to write neatly!" "I didn't write that. I started at 'Jean'." "...OH, SNAP!!" --Lyssa, the Doctor, Jason and Hasufin "You look like a were-jellyfish with your hair down like that." --Orthaevelve "So, what would you give for a 500th anniversary, depleted uranium?" --Jason, on anniversary gifts "Here's the address for the salon." "Is it written in a language I can understand?" "How are you with Hebrew?" --The Doctor and Lyssa "Hey, we were under budget for felonies for the bachelor's party!" --Hasufin "We're getting married tomorrow, motherfucker." --Lyssa, 20081024 "A bored Sean is a dangerous Sean, but it does make for some good filming." --Sean Kennedy "Are you mad at me?" "I haven't had my first cup of coffee yet. I'm mad at everyone." --Lyssa and Bryce "Don't pack that comb yet, Lys, I still look like Alan Moore." --Bryce, shortly after getting out of the shower "It's one thing to sing showtunes at work, but another to sing showtunes about cannibalism at work." --The Doctor "Hey, look - bubbles! Isn't science fun?" --Alton Brown "Yes, I do look like a giant Amish mobster...that or a well-dressed wizard." --Mr.G "Some of the best field trips end up in the morgue." --Orthaevelve "COBOL is the programming equivalent of huffing paint." --Hasufin "I'm not the expert on how the Iraqi people think, because I live in America, where it's nice and safe and secure." --George W. Bush, 20040923 "This may have been the geekiest bachelor's party in history. We went on a Segway tour of downtown DC, we sat at an English pub drinking coffee, we went to a restaurant to drink expensive imported beer, and the one thing that got us going the most was...?" "The science experiment?" "Exactly!" --Hasufin and the Doctor, on the Doctor's bachelor's party "Just as Kirk was an extension of Gene Roddenberry's penis, Zeus was the collective penis of Greece. Penii... good lord." --Kash "Saturday I'm going to my first ever bachelor party, and since I'm going with fellow nerds, it'll be more than a nudie bar." --Jason "Hulk smash brown sugar!" --Lyssa "There will be two ranking members of Team Ryoga and one member of Team Tom Baker in your bachelor's party. If we don't have an external navigation system of some kind, there's no guarantee that we'll return to this planet, let alone this time before the wedding." --Hasufin "Your Y chromosome's showing." --Lyssa "Dammit, even my mom can get FIOS!" --Bryce "The first two verses are guide lyrics, words just scribbled down to have something to sing. Couldn't come up with anything better, so we kept them. Everybody gets lucky sometimes..." --Per Gessle, on the lyrics to _The Look_ "All the really fun stuff is evil and/or illegal." --Hasufin, on my bachelor's party "The suburbs bear only a passing resemblence to the real world." --Bryce "Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon." --Susan Ertz, _Anger in the Sky_ "Stop throwing the Constitution in my face, it's just a goddamned piece of paper!" --George W. Bush "Logan, this is us. The ''bad old days'' could be as recent as three weeks ago." --Cyclops, _Astonishing X-Men #27_ "You'll be able to tell if your web traffic has been snooped by the authorities because all your lolcats will arrive dead!" --Sakdoctor, on quantum data transfer "Dude, it's going to be you, Bryce, Jarin, and the twins. I'm bringing my jump kit." "Wait, is that the quote for the day?" "No, it's truth." --Orthaevelve and Lyssa "In the battle for your soul, it is best to be covert." --Sean Kennedy "Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured." --Mark Twain "I hate to tell you this, but you look like you're secretly the demon in an 80's horror flick. Those eyes look menacing." --Hasufin, on Lyssa's senior picture "I'm going to say something to you that you'll never hear at work: I'll suck your cock if you audit my machine. You see, first of all, no one will EVER ask you to audit their machine for them. Second, no one will ever proposition you for auditing their machine." --Lyssa "Ninjas for Obama?" --The Wrong Hands "I use organic produce wherever possible. Organic produce often costs a little more, and looks a little funny. It does, however, taste a lot better, and it is better on your system. Trust a man who is 95% toxins on this." --Warren Ellis "Reason for restriction: Forbidden Category ''Job Search''" --from a Shorewall web proxy error page "The inevitable result of trying to ban something - book, film, play, pop song, whatever - is that far more people want to get hold of it than would ever have done if it were left alone." --Philip Pullman "I'm a dangerous guy in a fight. I get taken out so fast that people are injured by the flying shrapnel." --Bryce (with apologies to Douglas Adams) "Music is there to enrich your life and make you aware of things in a slightly different way." --Andrew Eldritch "Why does God get all the cool worshippers, and we get all the RETARDS?" --Clown, _Spawn_ "You're only as old as the actor they hire to play you." --Alexius Pendragon Quantum physics is to regular everyday physics as a David Lynch film is to a mainstream blockbuster. "I could only watch about 30 seconds of that, and I think I lost more sanity points than if Nyarlathotep showed up at my door and offered to cook me pancakes. Now I'm going to be in the corner gibbering and drooling for the next 12 hours. Thanks a lot. You bastard." --Masque "I don't really care so much about the humane aspects of it [leather] - I think it's unfortunate that we've gotta kill cows, but I've got to keep my pants up. So there." --Sean Kennedy "See, this is the problem with theoretical physics. Someone's always gotta get shot." --Tony, _Real Life Comics_ "If you give people freedom but don't teach them to value it, they won't hold on to it for long." --Richard M. Stallman "Ziggy still hasn't forgiven me." "Honey, Ziggy's a bitch." --Bryce and Lyssa, on his cat "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is stoned to death." --Joan D. Vinge "This Stream of Consciousness has been brought to you by Citizens for Titan. Please have your hermaphroditic lizardling pet spayed and neutered." --Jason "It's Alton Brown. There will be bacon." --Bryce "People like things that make them laugh. So let them laugh. I am *still* their Emperor." --Emperor Joshua Norton I "Blogging is the new masturbation. Little effort, quick release and wait for someone else to slip on your 'leavings'." --Clym Angus "It's ok, only a small number of architectures were affected. You only have something to worry about if you have some x86 boxes. :-)" --Dragos Ruiu, on the compromise of some of the Fedora Project's servers in August of 2008 "Time to bust out the CAT-5 of nine tails! A hundred megabits of love, bitch!" --Bryce "Birthdays are nature's way of telling us to eat more cake." --M-S- "If someone told us that God spoke to them through a toaster, we would conclude that this person is insane. I fail to see how presence or an absence of the toaster makes a difference." --Sam Harris "I gotta get ahead NOW to fake it tomorrow." --Lyssa "The dish washer is not a cat toy." --Cate "Beta-carotine is the only way I get any color in my skin." --Bryce "The transmigration of souls is not supposed to involve Ethernet." --Hasufin "U-S-Bizzle?" --Tito "I only do invertebrates well." --Orthaevelve, on designing tattoos "It looked very cute for a decaying dead creature." --Orthaevelve, on the Montauk Creature "Did someone just say 'tit old bitties'?" "Yo!" --Dusk and Mika "Working on an HP laptop is like trying to open the puzzle box from _Hellraiser_. I'm afraid that if I get the bottom off of your laptop, chains are going to shoot out of it." --Bryce "Steal the covers again and I'll kick your kitty ass." --Lyssa "I hate musicals. Musical comedy makes my balls itch, frankly. And no-one wants that." --Warren Ellis "Chaos, destruction, mayhem, and evil laughter all get me in the mood. I am also very into domination... of the world variety. Just makes me tingle all over." --Sir Newt Sixsmith "Those who have the best tools win." --Blake Cornell "...it's a process, right?" --I/O Error, on database security "Yesterday, he smelled and looked liked a hermaphroditic lizard." --Orthaevelve "Always two there are, a BOFH and a PFY." --John Anderson "All that testosterone is going right to your head." "I know! It's disturbing to think like a boy for the first time in fifteen years." "You still act like a girl! My mom still thinks you're gay! What's the problem??" --Lyssa and Bryce, on turning back into a male "Great, we're listening to WHIT. All Whitney Houston, all the time." --Bryce, on the IHOP on route 270 "That's the most metal vibrator I've ever seen." --Bryce, on a partially disassembled Hitachi Magic Wand "Before I was born, I was dead for billions of years. It never caused me a moment's inconvenience." --Mark Twain "I eat a lot of ketchup because I'm an ex-yinzer. In Pittsburgh, the ketchup flows like water.. because it's better than the water." --Bryce "I had this vision one day driving past the local Ikea store - are the stores delivered as a flat pack and a really big allen wrench?" --H. MacHinery "If you are brave too often, people will come to expect it of you." --Mignon McLaughlin "It ain't gay if you're away!" --Anonymous US Navy officer, on same-sex relationships while at sea "God works in mysterious ways." "Maybe so, but he's a con man compared to the Vorlons." --Sinclair and Garibaldi, _Babylon-5: Deathwalker_ "I'm a time traveler. I point at archeologists and laugh." --The Doctor, _Doctor Who: Silence In the Library_ "You got peanut butter on my cock!" "You got your cock in my peanut butter!" "Two great tastes that taste great together!" --Lyssa and Laurelinde The problem with most conspiracy theories is that they seem to believe that for a group of people to behave in a way detrimental to the common good requires intent. "I am terrified and reassured to know that there are still wonders in the universe... that we have not yet explained everything." --G'Kar, _Babylon-5: Mind War_ "Monkey-controlled robots have upgraded from leg control to arm control, it seems. I don't consider this a useful advance. Monkeys are well known, after all, for, well... non-consensual sexual activities. And I frankly refuse to end my life desperately trying to fend off a monkey-powered robot fisting. I mean, is that really the future you wanted?" --Warren Ellis "Three token rings for Google Kings, crawling the web, Seven for the Yahoo-lords in their halls of code, Nine for 4-Chan men, caught in Meme's flow and ebb, One for the Dard Lord on his dark throne In the Land of Redmond, where the Shadows lie. One OS to rule them all, One OS to find them, One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them In the Land of Redmond, where the Shadows lie." --Hikaro Takayama "Vaya con Diablos!" --Jason "She is evil. Her mother is more evil." "You know how sawed-off shotguns are cooler than regular shotguns?" "Point to you, sir." --Rialian, Scraun, and Jason "..so what do you never do, as you put your pants back on?" --Scraun "A technomage is capable of great amounts of mayhem and damage... if he could only remember his password." --Hasufin, on me when I'm drunk "Don't mind me, I have to take him out back for his morning spanking." "I'll take ''things I didn't need to know about my co-workers'' for $500, Alex." --Anonymous and Bryce "Don't ever drop a straightline like that again. I won't be able to help myself." --Jason "As opposed to taking it like a handicap in bowling?" --Jason "Rialian? Please don't /accidentally/ die. I'd be humiliated." --Hasufin "There are under-aged people here, we'll have to watch ourselves." "What were you planning on doing?!" "I don't know but I like to keep my options open." --Sarah and Mika "Ah, life. You fuck with me, but I still love you. Between humans that's considered a dysfunctional relationship. With you, I believe it probably is as it should be." --Mark Nicholas "Whaddya mean, it's not going to turn out?" --Bobby Flay "I like to have SCSI on as many machines as possible. Apart from speed, it's often convenient to borrow drives from the Sisters armoury." --Andrew Eldritch weighs in on drive interfaces "If you think of how big this planet is and what a small space we inhabit on it, everything mankind has made is little more than a faint scattering of mold on the shell of an egg. It's big to us, but in the scheme of things we're clinging to the skin of a planet, living inside a thin tissue of atmosphere that isn't even a footnote in the scheme of things. Yet somehow we think we're the whole of the universe because we perceive so little. I thought about that as I walked to the Chik Fil-A and none of that bothered me. It's just who we are, is all. Little sacks of meat and blood and hope, ambling strangely through a universe that doesn't care about us. Doing our best to scrape out a little bit of happiness along the way." --The Ferrett "I guarantee that no octopi find the Mellon Arena ice. If they do, the dude who throws better run straight out of the building before some yinzer and his mullet from Lawrenceville pummel his face." --CityofChampions6658, on on the Detroit Red Wings tradition of throwing dead octopi on the ice during the Stanley Cup playoffs for good luck "I'd rather be a cyborg than a goddess." --Donna Haraway "NOTE: PIRATES SAY DIRTY WORDS. ABNEY PARK'S LEGAL REPRESENTATION WOULD LIKE TO WAIVE ALL LIABILITY FOR YOUR PUNK ASS SUEING US, AND SHIT." --Robert from Abney Park "Boy, I'm bending over so far backwards I could join Cirque Du Soleil." --James Cottrell the third "Lets give them food clothing and shelter and we'll worry about role models later." --Amber Lynn "Now you know why I'm such a weird fucker. Because I come from a long lineage of weird fuckers. Who live in a weird country. When skeletons sit and watch the boob tube for 42 years." --Pegritz "Who needs drugs? I have insomnia." --Bryce "Beverages just taste better when you drink 'em out of a 600ml beaker." --Gnome "Do just once what others say you can't do, and you will never pay attention to their limitations again." --Arthur C. Clarke "That's weird. Hey, Bryce, come take a look at this." "That's my cue..." --B-V- and Bryce "Death before disco." --Snake Plissken "You WOULD fall asleep during a wall of vaginas!" --Fritz "Only you can prevent the tragedy of teafires." --Lyssa "I have had my television aerials removed. It's the moral equivalent of a prostate operation." --Malcolm Muggeridge "Nonetheless, we offer you forgiveness. What is the point of being a superior civilization if you can't do that once in a while?" --from _House of Suns_ by Alastair Reynolds "Dude! A bird that had Mexican just bombed your car!" --Lyssa "'I am Iron Man'... you think you're the only superhero in this universe?" --Nick Fury, _Iron Man_ "When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. [P.Z.] Myers, talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed.. that was horrifying beyond words, and that's where science - in my opinion, this is just an opinion - that's where science leads you." --Ben Stein "One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important." --Bertrand Russell "What's going on in here?" "Let's face it, this is not the worst thing you've ever caught me doing." --Pepper and Tony, _Iron Man_ "..so he's based on Narlhotep." "Nyarl-ath-o-tep." "Whatever. If I pronounce his name wrong, he won't show up!" "Point." --Jason and Raven, on Elder Gods "Upon meeting the natives I don't bother with the ''Take me to your leader,'' always straight to ''Take me to your psychotropics and meet your gods.''" --JoMiD Cornea "Just bald. Not old." --Jarin "A portable angle grinder and some spandex makes for a super hero." --Chris "Being a science fiction fan doesn't make you a nerd." "No, but ending a sentence with a verb does." --Anonymous "I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of your hat." --B-F-, on T-G-'s Official Assclown Hat(tm) "What does 'cf' mean on that spreadsheet?" "'Cluster fuck'." --E-N- and Firemonkey "Hey, wait a minute.. the data's gone. Someone erased it." "Security without the inconvenience." --J-B- and T-G- "Yeah, but we can't even kung-fu this." --B-P- "What's the difference between a Satanist and a Voudonista? Both will sacrifice a chicken, but the Voudonista will eat it after the ritual." --Jason "The blazer was special in much the same way Goatse is special." --Mercy "Wait... Bryce? Social??" "I have boobies." --Onivel and Lyssa, on me "You can't expect too much when there's tequila being drunk." --T-G- "That's weirder than a frog with fur." --Bryce Unless it involves the works of William Shakespeare, I have no tolerance for melodrama. "What's workin' your shit, Powder Puff?" --E-N- "His kung-fubar is strong." --T-G- "Go, little .csv files! Fly! Be free! I need my medication checked..." --Bryce "I was sittin' there, and just like Spider-Man, my fat-man sense kicked in. I looked out the window, and sure enough, the pizza was here!" --T-G- For every good idea, there is an equal and opposite government requirement. "Wait a minute -- you know I got the memory of a goddamn gerbil!" --E-N- "I trust no links until rickrolling is dead." --Lint_ "Good lord sir - this forum is no place for reason!" --The Red Max "Virtue is its own punishment." --Aneurin Bevan "Spray tuna did not win." --The Doctor "I'm not sure about 'magically'. 'Fraudlently,' maybe." --T-G- "This guy tried to do a Tokyo Drift in a Barbie kiddie car on the technology curve." --Bryce, on wanna-be security practitioners who don't know how to rename files on their desktops "Where's my flying car? Where's my jetpack? Where's my fucking 'find' box?!" --Bryce, on buggy .NET applications "Wisconsin's exotic." "Yeah, if you like cheese." --Bryce and T-G-, on field assignments "Way to geek it up for us!" --T-G- "It's like getting kicked in the eardrum by a little midget in there going '*kick!* Fuck you! *kick!* Fuck you!'" --E-N-, on ear infections "If I didn't know any better, I'd say that's camel toe. Tell me I'm not wrong!" --T-G-, on _Invincible Iron Man_ cover art "You realize that having this conversation says something about us. I don't know what, but it's probably not good." --Bryce, on the above "Man, if you want to see a fat man move like a ninja, involve chocolate cake." --T-G- "This isn't _Frankenstein_ - we can't bring stuff back to life, here!" --B-P-, on crashed MS SQL Servers "Do I have 'MORNING PERSON' written across my forehead?" --The Doctor Computer users fall into two groups: Those that do backups, and those that have never had a hard drive fail. "You know it was a good party when the term 'human rights violations' comes up." --Binder "I suspect that religion is a necessary evil in the childhood of our particular species. And that's one of the interesting things about contact with other intelligences: We could see what role, if any, religion plays in their development. I think that religion may be some random by-product of mammalian reproduction. If that's true, would non-mammalian aliens have a religion?" --Arthur C. Clarke "A DoD handbook has just clearly and concisely explained what a service-oriented architecture is. Isn't that one of the signs of the apocalypse?" --Bryce "To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary." --Che Guevara "The difference between Discordians and Subgenii? Subgenii are the ones getting laid." --Rev. Ivan Stang, Church of the Subgenius "You sleep with the fishies, little food pellet!" --Jason "That drink sucked!" --Bobby Flay "Ewww!" "I don't want to hear about it. If it's black it was my fault, I was dusting." "It's trying to communicate in semaphore." --Bryce and Lyssa "Apparently there is a real void in the porno world for scenes involving flamethrowing hearses." --Pyrotech C3H8, on ALEXI appearing in a pornographic movie "I can see your boobs from here." --Kurt Harland, on stage at the DNA Lounge, 20080113 "The Earth does one thing very well: It rides out all these maniacs." --Louis Trapani, on eschatological obsession "I'd been writing in C for a number of years, and I'd developed a sort of pidgin C that I used in fleshing out modules. I'd write a few pages in this high-level pseudo-C, then spend half a day ''compiling it'' into 6502 assembler. Sometimes a significant chunk of code would work the first time (this is a scary experience, really it is)." --Landon Dyer, on working for Atari in 1982 "The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind." --H.P. Lovecraft "Nerf Guns - good. Fried Nerf Guns - awesome." --Samuel Crowe "To do the actual install you have to be root, but none of the normal build should require that. Don't take the name of root in vain." --From the README file of the Linux v2.6.24.3 kernel "Good man! Not only have you caught up with fashion but you have surpassed it! Kilts and skirts are the way of the future... especially when they come with Pac-Man accessories!" --G.D. Falksen "Jamie, you're scared, of course you are, the last lot of chemo didn't work and you can't bear the thought of going through all that pain again, I understand that mate, I really do. But let me tell you, that not everyone dies from this disease. And the ones with the best chance of making it are the ones who believe they can beat death. And sometimes, just sometimes, you can. So watch and learn, Jamie Burton." --Owen, _Torchwood: Dead Man Walking_ "Llama!" "...well, it's better than 'lamer'." "I am climbing back in my bed, you sick, sick puppy." --Lyssa and Bryce "This movie kicked so much ass, they need to import more ass just to meet demand." --Mmmm...Eyes, on _Transformers_ "Can I reverse the polarity?" "You mean, make it filter out all the non pornographic, non profane sites to get to only the real hardcore - set it in reverse like. No." --From the FAQ for the DansGuardian web filtering proxy "True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring." --Martin Luther King, Jr. "Here's hoping that said user doesn't do anything stupid." "Heh. She is breathing, that is enough." --The Doctor and Vlad_II, on new hires ignoring security briefings "Not all .TXT files that are attempted to be remotely included are root kits." --Anonymous sysadmin, shortly before discovering that his network had been compromised "Not every good thing that happens is divine intervention, Michael." "True," Michael said, "but I prefer to give Him the credit unless I have a good reason to believe otherwise. It seems more polite than the other way around." --Harry and Michael, _Small Favor_ "I saw an ad yesterday for Endangered Species Chocolate. Sadly it turned out to be just regular chocolate with part of the profits going to saving the tigers and such. I was hoping for rare Vietnamese tree frogs covered in chocolate." --Atterton "One thing that many forget about me is that I have a nipple piercing. It's become sadly workaday, but my nipple is like the Spanish Inquisition: Nobody ever sees it coming." --The Ferrett "Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic." --Anonymous "I wanted to like emacs, but I couldn't find the text editor." --Anonymous "Whoa. An episode of _Iron Chef_ in which it's permissible to use the ice cream maker." --Bryce, on Battle Chocolate "Man, you look like someone nailed you with the 'fuck you' stick." "I feel like someone shoved it up my ass and rotated it a couple of times." --Felix and Bryce, on the flu "Can't have the real experts telling people that the fearmongers are all idiots." --Hannibal "The only unitasker in the kitchen should be the fire extinguisher!" --Alton Brown "Don't hit at all if it is honorably possible to avoid hitting; but never hit soft!" --Theodore Roosevelt "The Erbswurst is a weapon of self defense. Aim and throw, if the enemy's unlucky, you hit him in the mouth." --El Shoggotho "Yeah, I'm in 'bama." "I'll pay you a dollar to walk around in your battle goth gear." --The Doctor and Vlad_II "Perhaps you need to get in touch with your French side." --J. Random Psychiatrist, _Good Eats_ "If my ego became any bigger, I would need a larger pant size." --Istvaan Until you say "I don't know," you'll never learn anything. "The situation we face right now is best described by the term 'non-euclidian corner case'." --The Doctor "COBOL is just carpal tunnel on steroids." --Binder "We're part of history! I'm an openly gay man playing an omnisexual hero, who is loved by men, women and children on both sides of the Atlantic! How can I not be proud of that?" --John Barrowman "It's all over." "Let's all have sex." "And I thought the end of the world couldn't get any worse." --Ianto and Owen, _Torchwood: Sleeper_ "Driving under the influence of James Bond soundtracks doesn't do any favours to your fuel economy." --Von Gast, on personal soundtracks "Am I gonna have to drop an asteroid on a bitch?" --Bryce "How in the hell did you make a TARDIS pop a wheelie?!" --Anonymous "I am sick of voting game theory instead of my conscience and I am angry at a system under which I continue to consider it necessary." --Dancinglights "We are the C&A black ops squad!" --Bryce "Let me hear you say 'linear analysis'!" --Kurt Harland "Team lead down! Team lead down! Abort! Abort!" "Eagle One's been shot! Pull out!" --The Doctor, an unknown cow-orker, and the rest of the field team, when the team lead did a faceplant in the hallway "Oh, shit, Delaware! Quick! Get back in the car!" --Pegritz "Look, it's a brokeback ribeye!" --Ted Allen "Judging by the stain on the floor, I would guess the 'exploding hamster' was a complete success?" --Otto von Pifka "There are four ways of doing things: The right way, the wrong way, the customer's way, and the government's way." --The Doctor "What are you people thinking, yelling for songs from _Don't Be Afraid_?? 'NOT COMMERCIALLY VIABLE'!!" --Kurt Harland "There, I've realized my dream: Usurping Jim Cassidy's position in the band." --Kurt Harland "I think that _Are 'Friends' Electric_ is the perfect pop song." --Kurt Harland "Two things: First, miss, I don't take requests. Second, I refuse to do the robot because then I'll prove to all of you just how washed-up we really are." --Kurt Harland, upon seeing a sign that read "KURT, DO THE ROBOT!" "As you can see, we were ahead of our time, which is another way of saying 'not very well liked'." --Kurt Harland "I have discovered at last the perfect hairstyle for headbanging: Pigtails!" --Kurt Harland "..it's an ugly squid in Spandex, I'm tellin' you." --The Doctor "The world thinks that eccentricity in great things is genius, but in small things, only crazy." --Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton "I hereby declare 'hinged sideways with a screw' to be a euphemism for 'raving insane'." --El Shoggotho "There is nothing more subversive than becoming popular." --Richard Metzger "It doesn't have to be perfect. Not that there's anything wrong with perfect." --Alton Brown "Leftover pho is truly a gift from the Sinus Angels." --Jessica Melusine "Bloody hell. Sodding, blimey, shagging, knickers, bullocks. Oh, God. I'm English." --Spike, _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ "Knowledge can create problems, it is not through ignorance that we can solve them." --Isaac Asimov "Chocolate, Hunter S. Thompson, and diet Coke are good cure-alls." --Lyssa "We're all entitled to privacy, but we're not entitled to anonymity." --Jack Colley "Tesla coils! Is there anything they can't do? ...Don't answer that." --Anomalie "I was just shocked to see that a system which downloads and executes arbitrary code by design would be used for ill." --Darkmage "I'm ordering you to go look at that porn site." --My boss "This is a think-along lecture, by the away. You are free to think along at any point, should you feel the need to do so." --Terrence McKenna "I'm not going to get into a name-calling match with somebody (Vice President Dick Cheney) who has a 9 percent approval rating." --Harry Reid, US Senate Majority Leader "Never doubt that Santa Claus has ways to make you cry." --Hummingwolf "Hmmm... they're one hundred points each." "Run 'em down! They're worth more right now because they're carrying gifts! We can take them as prizes!" "It's like _Grand Theft Auto_ meets _Toejam and Earl_." --Bryce and Lyssa, on holiday season pedestrians "Bryce? Are you scaring the natives again?" "No moreso than usual. It's not as if I'm strolling through the mall shouting at the tops of my lungs 'My tentacles! Let me show youse dem!'" --Lyssa and Bryce "The library? They aren't illegal yet? It's stealing money from publishers, you know." --Zard Biomatrix "We've never played that song before, so I guarantee that you've never heard it before. That means that all of you who are acting cool are poseurs, and all of the friends of the people acting cool now know exactly how full of shit their friends are!" --Kurt Harland "Forget sunyata. Forget enlightenment! How about a little peace of mind?!" --Terrence McKenna "It may be like riding a bike, but it takes a long time to learn your balance again. Fuck!" --J.C. Hutchins (from the _7th Son_ blooper reel) "Coffee is King. God save the King." --Steampunk Cybernaut "Is do not have cheshire boobies!" --Lyssa "I'm Swiss - 87.5% of my bodily fluids consist of chocolate." --Suzanne "In the end, the White House would state that the world had fallen victim to extraordinarily shitty timing." --J.C. Hutchins, _7th Son: Destruction_ "Great, Sweth, now you've gone and made the baby $PROPHET cry. I hope you're satisfied." --John S.J. Anderson "Animism?! If you're going to be a couch, you know what you're in for!" --Bryce "The Adidas GSG9s were the obvious choice for the thinking man's ninja." --William Gibson "Remember, you're looking for brown, not black. Black's for coffee, caviar, and squid ink." --Alton Brown "There's a new game for the Wii called _Trauma Center: New Blood_. What the hell is it? Tell me that you get to perform surgery!" --Lyssa "The only reason you need to dress well is 'I have good taste.' Any reason you may make up to the contrary is really just, 'I am too lazy and/or shy to be cool!'" --Robert from Abney Park "Whoa, that's like a shotgun. Sorry about your pants." --Alton Brown on flour sifters (horribly out of context) "It's 4800 miles to Chiba. We've got 30 rounds of ammunition, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark outside, and we're wearing mirrorshades." "Hit it." --With apologies to the Blues Brothers "It was just well-timed snot, that's all I can say." --Cate "Ours is not to question why, because those we question don't know, either." --The Doctor "We sell only the freshest, homegrown ladybits!" --Morluna "Please take me as your padawan, oh Master! Teach me to be a cock!" --S- "It's $109 a night (at our hotel). They shot Jesse James in the back of the head for less than that!" --S- "This is the beastie known as the air pencil, you need an air/oil regulator to use this sucker properly. Its RPMs are high enough to cut through most materials and liquify plastic. Yet with great power comes great project destroying capabilities." --Gentleman's Handbook "Someday... someday I will get the chance to skeeze on Liz from Freezepop. I've even started a new synthpop project, Excitable Boy, to increase the chances there-of. Because NONE A' Y'ALL can tell me that chicks won't go crazy for a skinny Croat in a '70s disco shirt doing New Wave covers of Warren Zevon and John Prine tunes." --Pegritz "Pizza Hut: Sustenance for the rest of us." --Nick "Only two kinds of people buy black gi. Ninjas. And assholes." --Mr. Kiyota "There aren't enough women who know assembly language." --The Doctor "Brave choice, celery, but fair play to you, not a lot of men can carry off a decorative vegetable." --Tenth Doctor to Fifth Doctor, _Doctor Who: Time Crash_ "When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago." --Friedrich Nietzsche "We've just corrected David on his pronunciation of Zeiton Crystal. He's just not hardcore." --Steven Moffat, on David Tenant "Divorce is just terrible, it's one of Satan's best tools to kill America." --Representative Dick Harwood Si possis recte, si non, quocumque modo rem. (If possible honesty, if not, somehow make money.) "Improving on the research would seem to require biceps like baseballs and access to a particle accelerator." --Julia Moskin, on making perfect mashed potatoes "You gotta get that Cinnamon Toast Crunch aftertaste in, and then it's rockin'." --Dan Kaminsky, after drinking a mixture of maple syrup and Cinnamon Toast Crunch "They (the British) like their entertainment a little spicier than Americans can deal with, frankly." --James Marsters, on _Torchwood_ "I can tell you I wish those people just would be quiet. It would be best for the world. That's not going to happen, so we have to work in the right fashion with these security researchers," --Steve Ballmer Facts often matter little in the face of fervently held perceptions. "Anything that tastes like this belongs in the car, not in my body!" --Lyssa, on Mountain Dew: Game Fuel "There are other things you can do with the ice cream machine, besides end your career." --Alton Brown, _Iron Chef America_ "Twenty years from now, you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." --Mark Twain "Humans are animals. We're like fleshy termites, but bigger and with fewer legs." --Flynn MacCallister "What the... you look like you're about to jump in your gyrocopter or something!" --C-P- "When I wrote _Neuromancer_ in 1984, cyberspace already existed for some people, but they didn't spend all their time there. So cyberspace was /there/, and we were /here/. Now cyberspace is /here/ for a lot of us, and /there/ has become any state of relative nonconnectivity. /There/ is where they don't have Wi-Fi." --William Gibson "A couple of years we were playing freestyle clubs and then suddenly, boom, we were playing theatres and arenas and whatever, and then we weren't in the freestyle clubs anymore. Any time that happens with a scene, people kind of want to disown you because they feel like you're not one of them anymore, you've gotten too big for your britches." --Paul Robb, on musical subcultures "It's like the three P's of public speaking: Poise, pacing, and phlegm." --Scott L "Real life's a part of your path until you lose your body. Then it's a little up in the air, but until that time, clean the friggin' fridge." --The Doctor, on balancing spirituality and daily life "This.. cadaverous looking motherfucker... he looks a little like Lurch's little brother." --Michelle Belanger, on H.P. Lovecraft "With sufficient determination and a reckless disregard for ones own safety, anything is destructible." --Lewis Steels "This is how you know you're living in the future: When the pornography bears no earthly resemblance to sex as even the filthiest of us know it. You may as well be renting DVDs of aliens fucking. And America, as Martin Amis once said, is where they road-test the future." --Warren Ellis "With the release of iTunes OS, Apple continues to push back the boundaries of user interface design, and takes dramatic strides forward, towards increasing usability and productivity for people who utilize pharmaceuticals and computers, at the same time." --Lord Digital [cDc] "Cyber can't be punk these days, because when cyberpunk was labeled that way, the statement ''I'm a criminally intentioned Bohemian with a computer'' would cause people to get goosebumps, right? But today that same statement has the same effect as ''I'm a criminally intentioned Bohemian with a washing machine.''" --William Gibson "It will be generally found that those who sneer habitually at human nature and affect to despise it, are among its worst and least pleasant examples." -- Charles Dickens "Yeah, we're hax0ring the Matrix. Yeah. It's pretty easy; nothing special.' --C-P- "I was such a geek that if I could go back in time, I would kick my own ass." --Wil Wheaton (allegedly), on his teenage years SolarWinds: Your all-in-one intrusion detection system testing application. "In the dead of night, by the howl of the case fans you'll hear me yell 'make -j 5'! Muhahahahaha!!" --Binder, on his new computer (quad-Xeon @3.0GHz, 4GB RAM) "This post has left me so otaku-OD'd that I wish I could retire for a coffee, to one of those joints in Akihabara where the waitresses wear Minnie Mouse shoes and bulbous three-fingered gloves!" --William Gibson, on Molly's implanted mirrorshades "If you think of yourselves as helpless and ineffectual, it is certain that you will create a despotic government to be your master. The wise despot, therefore, maintains among his subjects a popular sense that they are helpless and ineffectual." --Frank Herbert "I can fix this! I just need six feet of tape and a rubber duck!" --Jason "There are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the common sense interpretation available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven't noticed already." --Narrator, _The Illuminatus Trilogy_ "Strings are the root of all evil. Whenever you pass structured data around in a string, you are passing around communism." --KJK::Hyperion "You're being shot in the head. Slowly." --Suzie, _Torchwood: They Keep Killing Suzie_ "So does this mean that LOLspeak is a form of lossy compresson?" "It has at least as good a compression ratio as b0rk." --The Doctor and Jarin, on the LOLbible "Djarums: They're like smoking a belt sander." --The Doctor, on clove cigarettes "In 2012, I'm going to be 70 years old. I'm going to be looking for a 420-friendly nursing home." --Lorenzo "The features are tested in the -mm tree, but be warned, it can crash your machine, eat your data (unlikely but not impossible) or kidnap your family (just because it has never happened it doesn't mean you're safe)." --Nicolas Kaiser, kernelnewbies.org "Alton Brown is the 'Bill Nye the Science Guy' of cooking." --S-S- "Use your imagination or else someone else will use it for you." --Ron Sukenick "Nathaniel? NO." --Robert "Greyhounds, Bryce, are cats on stilts." --Cate "I am an optimist because I want to change things for the better and I know that blood has to be spilled and disharmony and cruelty are necessary to do that." --Henry Rollins "I'm not trashing your book, I'm trashing your philosophy of life." --Jon Stewart to Chris Matthews "I don't have enough brains to make it on my own, but so long as I can see my buddy, we do okay." --Nick, on the thought processes of alpacas "I would come and fetch but I'm yarned." --Lyssa, while knitting "Mouse turds! Ice cold mouse turds!" --Cate "The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam." --Shimomura Tsutomu, Japanese Ministry of Agriculture "I've got this cool, minty feeling in my urethra! I don't want this! Thank you, drive through." --Nick "We are hosting company arms dealers." --Farmicus "Truly private people don't make a spectacle of themselves, attract attention, or make demands. Instead they quietly go about their business of remaining invisible." --David Sternlight (hey, he takes everyone else out of context, why can't I?) "The twenty-first century brought us clip-on sunglasses that don't suck. I'll take that over a flying car any day." --The Doctor, on Polar Eyes "I do still consider it a sign of the digital age when the DJ is out on the dance floor." --Hasufin "The obsession with intellectual closure is inappropriate to talking monkeys, because nowhere is it write large that talking monkeys should be able to achieve a complete understanding of reality." --Terrence McKenna "You are all WEIRDOS!!" --Sam the Eagle, _The Muppet Show_ "That isn't a tango you're doing back there. In fact, it's reminiscent of the mating dance of waterfowl native to the state of New Jersey." --Voltaire, Saloncon 2007 "When C++ is your hammer, everything starts to look like your thumb." --Anonymous interviewee at amazon.com "There is some sort of perverse pleasure in knowing that it's basically impossible to send a piece of hate mail through the Internet without its being touched by a gay program. That's kind of funny." --Eric Allman, primary author of Sendmail "I don't wait for permission to do what I think is just. None of us should, and none of us have." --Kilroy 2.0, _7th Son: Destruction_ "Racism isn't born, folks, it's taught. I have a two-year-old son. You know what he hates? Naps! End of list." --Denis Leary "New Jersey is a magical land of chaos and confusion. It's like Magic Candy Mountain, except that it's made of trash. Still steals your kidney, though." --Chris, on living in New Jersey "You know when you're driving and the cars in front of you - the tail lights - start making happy faces - that's when it's starting to become a problem. But when they start talking to you..." --Rogue, on sleep deprivation "Many of the Cleveland Swingers, it seems, are pretty much horny Rotarians, where they get together to watch Nascar, drink Miller Lite, and then fist-fuck the neighbor's wife." --The Ferrett, on swingers "To sit next to Voltaire on a panel is much like being sat next to Oscar Wilde at a Victorian dinner party." --Michelle Belanger "emerge: the other white meat" --From the output of 'emerge --quiet' instead of 'emerge --sync --quiet' "We used to hate people / now we just make fun of them / it's more effective that way". --KMFDM, _Dogma_ "Hey, Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of my ass!" --T-, on our current project "It's so much easier to bitch about a scene dying than to do something yourself to try to keep it alive." --Xevo "Dear god, if I do go to Mexico, it's gonna be a blur of rotgut tequila, donkey shows, and prostitutes crawling with plagues I haven't even heard of yet. I'll come home with a headache the size of Montana, a suitcase full of pictures of college girls sucking donky dicks, and strange growths on my wenis that glow in the dark and whisper to me in Aztlan." --Nyarlathotep "The resistance to a new idea is proportional to the square of its importance." --Bertrand Russell "People often ask me what is the most effective technique for transforming their life. It is a little embarrassing that after years and years of research and experimentation, I have to say that the best answer is -- just be a little kinder." --Attributed to Aldous Huxley "We're starting you on a lifelong bad habit, now." --Alton Brown, on coffee "Tonight we invented 19 Tomato sauce. As you may have guessed, our recipe calls for 19 (Roma) tomatoes. We happened to have this many, fresh and shiny, because our two tomato plants are freaks and are producing fruit like we injected them with growth hormone or some shit." --Mark Nicholas "Home is where your suitcase is." --T- "Secrets are the very root of cool." --Hubertus Bigend, _Spook Country_ "ZIF? Heh. 'Zero insertion force' my ass." --The Doctor "Shoulda just turned the box off and run the scan again." --Anonymous security engineer "Writing about the twenty-first century and not writing about advertising and marketing is like writing about Victorian London and not mentioning factories. Countries that aren't all about marketing and advertising are where they make the stuff we advertise and market." --William Gibson "This rain is so bad, I've had a vision of the clouds parting, and suddenly we're in Jamaica." --T-G- "But chloroplasts are easier to add than tentacles!" --Hasufin "The real purpose of books is to trap the mind into doing its own thinking." --Christopher Morley "" --Lyssa, on the upcoming gem and jewelry show in Washington, DC "I'm a biologist - I want to create a set of rules which, when implemented, will grow into a system nobody would have imagined. ...I just managed to imply that Moses was the origin of goatse." --Hasufin "So, T-, I heard you got an early morning O-Shit-A-Gram.." --The other T- "As a Christian, I think it's time to rid ourselves of this notion of freedom of religion in America." --Al Bedrosian "I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine." --Bertrand Russell "Window manager warning: Received a _NET_WM_MOVERESIZE message for 0x2200ab7 (08/10/07); these messages lack timestamps and therefore suck." --Random error message from my ~/.xsession-errors file on Windbringer "You know that guy that can pick up any woman? I'm that guy - on crack." --Nick Naylor, _Thank You For Smoking_ Political correctness: The verbal equivelent of trying to pick up a turd by the clean end. "Sex isn't something men do to you. It isn't something men get out of you. Sex is something you dive into with gusto and like it every bit as much as he does." --Nina Hartley "If the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, then the road to Heaven is paved with honest attempts." --Rogue "You send most American beers off to the lab... they'll call you up and tell you your horse has diabetes." --Val "Can you please convince me there's not an Office for Annoying Air Travelers making this sort of stuff up?" --Bruce Schneier, to Kip Hawley (head of the US TSA) "It's a sad fact that there are a lot of people out there whose first reaction to anything miraculous, wondrous and new consists of two questions. The first is 'Can I have sex with it?', closely followed by 'Can I make money off it?'" --Dirk Allen "I quit worrying about what the devil I am. I just do it." --Whitley Streiber "Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain." --Freidrich Schiller "...specifically? Not exactly." --Rogue "I'd love to tell them all to suddenly flood lkml with their reports of failed boots with various kernels, hardware disappearing, stopping working suddenly, memory disappearing, trying to use software suspend and having your balls blown off by your laptop, and so on." --Con Kolivas, on why he quit the Linux Kernel project "The Internet - for when you can't find your syrup of ipecac." --King of De Nile "Upgrade your gray matter / because one day it may matter!" --Deltron, _Upgrade_ "What does Alpha get out of this, other than us dead? A chance to watch the world writhe on the spit? Well, not bad payment, I guess, if you're a lunatic." "Watch it! There are lunatics present!" --Jack and Kilroy 2.0, _7th Son: Destruction_ "The ignorance of the people is the beast to fight against." --Bluestar88 "Freedom and happiness are the birthright of all sapient lifeforms." "Thank you, Optimus Prime." "It was either that or quoting Crowley, and neither of us want that." --Bryce and Lyssa "I just can't pick up a book with kids with magic wands and flying brooms and still respect myself." --Eli "Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer." --Mark Twain "We are one people. We cannot separate ourselves now. There are many good things to be done for our people and for the world. It is important to let things be good. And it is important to teach the younger generation so that things are not lost." --Corbin Harney "We're at the end of the universe, right at the edge of knowledge itself, and you two are busy.. blogging!" --The Doctor, _Doctor Who: Utopia_ "Why can't you osmose in the normal direction like every other fluid?" --Eli "I never did give anybody hell. I just told the truth and they thought it was hell." --Harry Truman "I think that's crazy-bug speak for 'shut your face'." --The Thing, _Fantastic Four_ "Airsoft? No, don't go there. You'll start an arms race. We'll have to fortify our borders, and the next thing you know I'll have to come into the office in Nerf powered armor and blow all of you away." --C-P-, on office wars "If you wrote something for which someone sent you a check, if you cashed the check and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented." --Stephen King "Conflict is conflict. I don't see anything inherently wrong with it until someone needs to be the only one who is right." --Geri Larkin, Buddhist monk "Every organism is a bridge, every fossil is a bridge fossil. Humans just like to classify things." --Neurovore "Never turn up to work sober. It just creats unrealistic expectations." --Nosfucious "A chicken in every pot and a cap in every ass!" --S-S- "Stupidity is not an honorable death." --Caitlin Riley "Life in general is simple. It takes people to make it complicated." --Hasufin, on biogenesis "Tell the dumbass to take care of herself." --Lyssa "..do what to who, for HOW many Twinkies??" --Orthaevelve "I feel so loved - Christ, it's cold in here!" --Mika "Elf? Elf! Put it in your mouth! Put. It. In. Your. Mouth." --Lyssa, to Rialian "Bryce loves peeps - truly, madly, deeply. In that obsessive Bryce sort of way." --Lyssa "Come on! We can all have a good flirt later!" "Is that a promise, Doctor?" "Ooooh, 57 academics just punched the air!" --The Doctor and William Shakespeare, _Doctor Who: The Shakespeare Code_ "Don't forget your cape, mask, and spandex long-johns. Without those, a vigilante's just a thug." --S.A. Murphy "It is the business of the future to be dangerous." --Alfred North Whitehead "Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?" --Ronald Reagan "Oh, I know what its like. Its like when you fancy someone, but they don't even know you exist. That's what it's like." "You too huh?" --The Doctor and Jack Harkness, _Doctor Who: The Sound of Drums_ "Never underestimate the idiots: They've done a lot and they'll do more." --Art Bell "It's my timey-wimey detector. It goes 'ding!' when there's stuff." --The Doctor, _Doctor Who: Blink_ "It is discouraging how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit." --Noel Coward "Happiness is a belt fed weapon." --Binder "Life is like a bowl of peppers. What you do today may burn your ass tomorrow." --Charlie Daniels "Rules are for the obedience of fools, and the guidance of the wise." --Unknown "A party in your pants is not suitable for a first date. Just sayin'." --Araxcies "Why would anybody go cruising on Craig's List? That's like the Pennysaver of cock!" --Margaret Cho "Was somebody just kissing me?" --Captain Jack, _Doctor Who: Utopia_ "Sea roach, mom. Sea roach." --Lyssa "If you ever figure out how to achieve serenity in the face of certain death.. would you PLEASE let me know?" --Harry, _The Dresden Files: Things That Go Bump_ "I don't need other people's input to not use explosives. Unless it seems like a really, really good idea. Which it doesn't. Right now." --Araxcies "You brought them here!" "You brought _me_ here, you idiot!" --Harry and Clive, _The Dresden Files: Bad Blood_ "Oh, no! He's gone to the Lambada Dance! Green Elf needs game badly!" --Araxcies "Hello. I was supposed to distract you while Araxcies and the Doctor clean out your tent. It was suggested that my (baby) daughter could help." --Ashran "The addition of the Slip and Slide at the sweatlodge was ill-advised. As was burrito night." --Person "Redcap?" "Excuse me? "Your red cap." "Redcap?" "No. Flying suitcase." --Laurelinde and Jason "And your secret ingredient is... ANGLER FISH! That's not food. That's not food! That isn't remotely food! That is some gellid thing that they hauled up from far too deep in the ocean. That is cooking with C'thul'hu's younger brother." --Heron61, on _Iron Chef_ "Dude! We have lethal molasses!" --Bryce, after prying a pressure jar of shisha tobacco open after a year "Those who have met me in Real Life, however, know full well that I am the Human 1.0 equivalent of an AI having an acid flashback." --Pegritz "Planning: It's not just for Congressmen." --Hasufin "Cottage cheese is not food... it's God's expiration warning on your milk." --S.A. Murphy "When you pull out every studio trick you know when recording an album, it makes preparing a live show SUCK." --Mark Nicholas ;; Hypothesis: Given a graph G. If there exists a vertex v in G such that all ;; automorphisms of G map v to itself, then an algorithm exists to choose ;; the isomorph of v from any isomorphism of G. ;; Corollary: If there does not exist such a v, then we're screwed. --Comments in code written by Pace Reagan-Smith "I was NEVER in a Time Lord snuff film!" --The Doctor, after analyzing his website's link stats "This seems to be the basic need of the human heart in nearly every great crisis - a good hot cup of coffee. --Alexander King "Who in the Hell around here would be wearing a Cru-*.. oh. Hey, Bryce!" --Orthaevelve (*"Cruxshadows t-shirt") All of the animals except man know that the principal business of life is to enjoy it. "You know what being bald and grey tells me? I tells me I ain't dead yet." --S.A. Murphy "Congratulations. You now qualify to drive in New Dehli." --Lyssa, on Manhattan rush hour traffic "Who would you like me to kill?" --Kai, _Tales From A Parallel Universe_ "I'd rather be dead on the side of the road in a cool ass car than safely at my destination in anything else." --Pyrotech C3H8 "How many licks does it take to get to the center of Mr. Lincoln? Let's find out..." --Jarin, on eating national landmarks "Yeah, that's what we need: Surfer monkey stuff. That glows." --Anonymous "So, how long 'till you're out of shrimp flavored cigarettes?" --Anonymous "Never underestimate the power of somebody with source code, a text editor, and the willingness to totally hose their system." --Rob Landley "More sports need dance-offs." --Kash "I've got it! To negotiate with the Marines, we need to take acid!" --Hasufin "Oh, good, our sacrificial lamb is here. We're ready to go!" --Hasufin, greeting Kash "Somehow as a part of the agenda of political correctness it has become not entirely acceptable to criticize, or demand substantial evidence, or expect people, when advancing their speculations, to make, what used to be called, old fashioned sense." --Terrence McKenna "There are times I am truly proud that our civilization has the technology where an ordinary person can instantly turn all Jerry Bruckhimer films into gay love stories and sex romps." --Jessica Melusine "Most people don't suffer nervous system damage during a power outage." --Hasufin "I have all the charisma of Richard Nixon. I couldn't start a riot in southern Chicago during a blackout." --Hasufin "WHO WANTS MY SAUSAGE??" "I. Am. That man." --Hasufin and Kyrin "..so the question becomes, 'Do I mutate or don't I?'" "I wake up with the same question every morning." --Rooster and E-, on genetic algorithms "When will it [secure bootstrap] ever happen?" "Right after IPv6 is adopted!" --John Heasman and Anonymous "What the fuck..?" "One ping. One ping only." "What are you looking for?" "Don't worry about it." --Datagram, The Doctor, and Anonymous on a sound system anomaly that sounded suspiciously like a sonar ping "Testicles, one, two..." --Datagram, during sound check "We've secretly replaced Datagram's laptop with Folger's Crystals - let's see if he notices!" --The Doctor "He only had five minutes of material. He's stalling." --Anonymous, on Datagram's technical difficulties "Wait - that's a LiveCD." "Yeah - Datagram doesn't trust hard drives." --Anonymous #1 and Anonymous #2 "If you can't get the projector going, you'll have to give your presentation as interpretative dance!" "Oh, great. Just what I always wanted - Peter Murphy at a hacker con." --The Doctor and Anonymous "I'm going to hurl abuse at you until you get this going!" --Anonymous "Boobie, what did you do with all your food? I'm going to assume that you still have food because you buried all of it." --Lyssa, talking to Lucy the hamster "When asked what I would do if my doctor told me I had only six months to live, I answered ''I'll just type faster.''" --Isaac Asimov "Fuck all that self-meditative mental masturbation! THIS is real power!" --Lyssa, on talking her way out of student loan payments this month "You know... one would think - ONE WOULD THINK - that I'd know better than to name my computers after Babylonian deities.." --Hasufin "Isms are wasms." --Abbie Hoffman "I want to live much farther north, like in Maine. Sure, you might die of the cold, but look! We might get to see a moose!" --Lyssa "People who keep me from eating don't deserve to know my name!" --Lina Inverse "My family did not raise me to do what is popular, they raised me to do what is morally right. We did not lose only 32 students and faculty members that day; we lost 33 lives." --Katelynn Johnson "I'm trying to be serious!" "You look like somebody just kicked the hamster!" --Bryce and Lyssa "The future belongs to the 8-bit loyalists." --Pyrotech C3H8 "Bring it, Darth Bathrobe!" --Harry Dresden, _White Night_ "I'm drunk. I have a laptop. I have wireless." "I feel really fucking sorry." --The Doctor and Lyssa "Now that I have an air compressor and a circular saw, I'm getting more ideas about what to make furniture wise. Now would be a wise time for you to invest in a bunker or bomb shelter." --Hasufin "Let's face it, we're not changing the world. We're building a product that helps people buy more crap - and watch porn." --Bill Watkins, CEO of Seagate "When angels go bad, they go worse than anyone." --The Marquis De Carabas, _Neverwhere_ "Family's not necessarily blood. Family's who you love." --Bryce "I do not play video games. I have children, which are like video games, but more expensive." --Paul Robb "All right!! You can be such an asshole, Dresden." "Yep." --Bob and Harry, _Grave Peril_ "Cryptography products may be declared illegal, but the information will never be." --Bruce Schneier "I am not an angry man, I just play one on the interwebs." --Pyrotech C3H8 "Reading Slashdot is like reading _Playboy_: You read it for the articles and certainly not the comments." --The Doctor "The ferret has landed!" --Rialian "I look like an extra from an Anita Blake novel!" --Orthaevelve "We look like a bunch of Anarchs out for a good time tonight. The only thing we don't have are gasoline or matches." --Jason, on The Usual Suspects standing around Hausfin's kitchen packing up the pressure canner "I have no idea where this will lead us, but I have a definite feeling it will be a place both wonderful and strange." --Agent Dale Cooper, _Twin Peaks_ "I'm down with Save the Earth but not the '286 PC." --Max Spangler, on using older technology until it dies "The world loves a bastard." --Arnold Rimmer, _Red Dwarf_ "You can slam an acoustic coupler up and down a few times and make Perl come out." --Binder "Without our fans, we're just three weirdos sitting on a couch." --Rogue "Do you think this is black magic or what?" "Well, either that or great sex." --Murphy and Harry, _Storm Front_ "We're redundant motherfuckers, man!" --M- "Animals suck as actors. They rarely do as they're told. That goes double for cats. Apparently triple for Canadian cats... And don't even get me started on the emu we used on DS9. Total freaking nightmare." --Robert Wolfe "I'm not always blowing things up!" "Right. Sometimes you set things on fire." --Harry and Morgan, _The Dresden Files: Things That Go Bump_ "That is one thing about the Hearse Club, no matter how bad the weather or shitty the idea or horrendous the mechanical difficulty, we'll be there. We're like an automotive version of GI Joe." --Pyrotech C3H8 "I could get drunk on the damn sauce." --Lyssa "I'm not going to let the Jolly Rogers laugh at me like that. I mean, come on. Five guys named Roger. How much polka can be in their souls?" --Waldo Butters, _Dead Beat_ "Keith Richards remains animate due to a combination of cocaine and necromantic rituals. Someone needs to dress up as him for the next zombie lurch downtown." --The Doctor "Proper porn cannot be made until we have set up the altar to the blessed boxer shorts." --Rialian "The fact that you two have been having conversations involving hardware and chemical compounds that I can't even pronounce kinda irks me a little." --Mika "'Sam! Ziggy finally figured it out! You have to sleep with the Vulcan!'" --Hasufin, on Dean Stockwell having a cameo in the last new _Star Trek_ series "I am firmly convinced that only those informational media that have a high potential for both porn and advertising have any real chance of both commercial success and popular acceptance." --Heron61 "Wait. _MASH_ is younger than _Star Trek_? Wait a minute. I need a minute to wrap my mind around this." --Jarin "Oh, look! It's Anton LeVay meets Martha Stewart!" --Hasufin "Tell me: Would you use that to /diagnose/ or /cause/ clinical dementia?" --Hasufin "Hey, I don't care how many bones you break or how hard you squeeze.. wait, this is getting into territory I really don't want to be right now!" --Orthaevelve "..I walked into something weird." "Well, look at who's around you." --Lyssa and Hasufin "I've seen a lot of this on _Mr. Wizard's World_. This is like a walk down memory lane. Without the annoying commercials." --The Doctor, on _Chemical Magic_ by Leonard A. Ford "First of all we have to forgive ourselves for being human. Eventually you will forgive you parents for being human." --Mr.Bil "Stupidity has always been color blind." --CrystalAnne, on racism "One point slow." --B-K-, on USB v1.x data transfer speeds "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." --Sir Winston Churchill "Dammit. I win at girl." --Lyssa "Throw me your bras!" --Kurt Harland on stage at the DNA Lounge "I may also be snarky. I have a high quotient of snark. I only make one promise. I promise never to say 'Don't make me hunt you down and bitch-slap you' to anyone who posts questions for me or comments about my work on the Internet. At least, not again. Okay, there was that one time. And I didn't mean it. And it all worked out." --Robert Wolfe "What the HELL was that?!" --Bob, _The Dresden Files: The Two Dicks_ "Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will." --George Bernard Shaw "Meddle not in the affairs of authors, for they are subtle and always on the lookout for names for minor characters to whom bad things happen." --Neurovore "Many iPod fans probably aren't old enough to remember a time when Steve Jobs did not walk on water." --Dan Tynan, _The Top 10 Worst PCs of All Time_ "This is Bryce, he's our mute today. I'm Penn, he's Teller." --M-, after my root canal "The future will be just like all the parts we like about the past, but with more toys, more drama, and a lot more zeroes at the end." --Geoff Ryman "One of these days I'm going to have to compound for you some of my special coffee." "Is there anything in it that would prevent me from holding a security clearance?" "....uhmm.. that'd be a problem." "What? Special coffee??" --The Doctor, M-, B-, on coffee "It's an expansion card - you can't void the warranty!" --The Doctor "This here is what they call a 'lab'.." --Unknown suit talking to the woman he didn't know was our sysadmin "Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves." --Carl Jung "There is no better revenge than the people who screwed you screwing themselves even worse... and not realizing it until it's too late." --The Doctor "The next person to wish me a happy St Pat's Day will have their ISP anonymously informed that they download pictures of dogs fucking babies. I've slept with Irish girls and gotten drunk in Belfast, which makes me more Irish than 99% of you - and, whoops, here's the clue train pulling up to the station, and it says I'm not Irish and neither are 99% of you so you can stick St Pat's Day up your arse." --Warren Ellis "The problem with alcohol is that it gives you these great ideas and then robs you of the ability to carry them out." --Tanner, _Home On the Strange_ "If Kyrin was a D&D character, he would be a half-orc bard working as a standup comedian." --The Doctor "Now if we could just distill the Scumbag Factor, we could improve the human race." --Hasufin "That's why I'm here as your guest speaker tonight, ladies and gentleman. It's because I can think fast on my feet. It's because I'm the kind of author who likes to hang out in Adolf Hitler's home town with the High Priestess of Weird." --Bruce Sterling "I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." --Mahatma Gandhi "Fill your bowl to the brim and it will spill. Keep sharpening your knife and it will blunt. Chase after money and security and your heart will never unclench. Care about people's approval and you will be their prisoner. Do your work, then step back. The only path to serenity." --_Tao Te Ching_ "Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it's dark." --Zen saying "..big lizard in mah back yard..." --B-K- "It is said that Infinity cannot be grasped by the finite human mind, but that meditating on the Depth of Human Stupidity and Ignorance can give a close approximation." --Xi o' Teaz "You know...I used to dream about serving the Antichrist some day. But not if the Antichrist is Britney Spears. That's enough to make even a fella like myself become a Baptist." --Pegritz "You can cite a hundred references to show that the biblical God is a bloodthirsty tyrant, but if they can dig up two or three verses that say 'God is love,' they will claim that *you* are taking things out of context!" --Dan Barker, _Losing Faith in Faith_ "Never, ever worry about telling me something I already know. I'd rather know it twice than not at all!" --Bruce Baugh "It isn't good to hold on too hard to the past. You can't spend your whole life looking back. Not even when you can't see what lies ahead. All you can do is keep on keeping on - and try to believe that tomorrow will be what it should be - even if it isn't what you expected." --Harry Dresden, _Death Masks_ "I love being an upraised middle finger to bureaucracy by merely existing." --The Doctor "Let me tell you what kind of person Jim Butcher is. Jim Butcher has a TV show and stuff now, and is clearly too important to refer to himself in the first person, like everyone else. Jim Butcher has grown beyond that, baybee." --Jim Butcher "If you like the fluttering ears, you're down with the bunny!" --Violet Blue "Don't just survive while waiting for someone's revolution to clear your head - act as if you were already free - but take the risk, dance before you calcify." --Hakim Bey "Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe in anything simply because it is spoken and rumored by many. Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books. Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders. Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations. But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it." --Buddha (563BC-483BC) "It's weird and pointless; that seems to be a definition of postmodern." --Russell Rayburn "Hey, do you know where that meeting you're not invited to is going to be?" --M-A- "Success is not final, failure is not fatal: It is the courage to continue that counts." --Sir Winston Churchill "Humans make errors. Even very silly ones at times." --Hugo van der Kooij "Cylons start as walking sex toys, but walking sex toys are spooky." --Geoff Ryman "Let's give 'em a healthy gothic welcome: A cold, dead stare." --Lyssa, at the Cruxshadows show, 20070218 "What defines the human race?" "Right now? It's ability to piss me off." --Lana Kennedy and Miranda Zero, _Global Frequency: Invasive_ "These heads, tails, and exoskeletal remains are packed full of shrimpy goodness." --Alton Brown "I drink so much coffee, that if my girlfriend gives me a blowjob she can't sleep all night afterwards." --Overheard in a Wall Street Starbucks, New York City "And, for the record, yes, there are MANY ways to supposedly come up with one's porn name. The method I used was combining the name of my first pet (my dog Duchess) and the street I grew up on (which was called 33 Mile.) I think you'll agree that I wisely took a small liberty here and deleted the word 'Mile' from the title of this album to avoid looking like I wanted to copy Eminem's '8 Mile' thing. Except, you know, I AM a badass little white boy from Detroit. (Okay, fine... Detroit suburbs.) Just because I enjoy Battlestar Galactica and dressing up as Boba Fett for Halloween every year doesn't make it any less true. Oh, yeah, like you don't wish you had that costume too." --Mark Nicholas "Any woman who does not give birth to as many children as she is capable is guilty of murder." --Saint Augustine "Hold on, let me get my book on Babylonian sorcery." --Hasufin "I actually think RMS is 100% right. The difference is, I can be bought." --QuantumG Those who tout the greatness of their nation seldom contribute to it. "I'm really very tired of dealing with bureaucracy. Too much lever-pressing, and too few of the food pellets contain dark chocolate." --Hummingwolf "Try charging Enlil with a crime. I do believe you'll get a beep code." --Hasufin, on the police accidentally trying to arrest a computer "I've given confidence to millions of men across the world. They look at themselves in the mirror and think, 'Y'know, compared to Ron Jeremy, I'm not that bad looking at all.' At least that's what I tell myself whenever I go back to the buffet for seconds." --Ron Jeremy "In this day and age, we'll take heroes wherever we can get them." --Old Soldier, _Tales of the Afternow_ "What George Washington did for us was to throw out the British, so that we wouldn't have a fat, insensitive government running our country. Nice try anyway, George." --Random DJ on KSFO/KYA "There are hazards to living with a sound engineer. Mostly it's a harmless situation, but then there are days when mix tapes happen." --Good Mistress Mousey Accost "There is nothing on this planet that cannot be improved upon by adding hot goth chicks, ranch dressing, or William Shatner. Think about it and try to tell me I am wrong, especially on hot goth chicks." --Pyrotech C3H8 "My father is a 60 year old coal miner and has cleaner lungs than Al's insides." --Lyssa, on having to clean out Alphonse's chassis "Just because someone disagrees with you and even argues adamantly against your points doesn't mean he/she isn't on your side. Perhaps, it means that he/she is just trying to get you to hone your position so the team develops more strength." --Steve Waters "Are we alive when we're born, or are we alive when we embrace our lives and take control - stand up? Some people live their whole lives but they're never really alive." --Independent Librarian Dynamic Sean Kennedy the sixth "Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new." --Henry David Thoreau "If it was all that easy to write smart-ass running commentary, I wouldn't have a job." --Jim Butcher "It's not that I have anything against Nicholas Cage, it's just that the idea of him bursting into flame amuses me." --Hasufin, on _Ghost Rider_ "There's nothing deviant about love." --Jesus Christ on lesbians, _Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter_ "Zombies are immune to whole wheat - gotcha." --Hasufin "The thing you have to understand about Reiki is that it makes things more of what they are." "Kind of like cocaine?" --Rialian and Jason "Embrace your inner goat." --Lyssa "Anyone who would voluntarily choose to eat taro root is a sick, sick person. Taro root isn't even flavorless, it's anti-flavor. Taro root can make duck taste bad." --Hasufin "I think I'm going to hurl!" "Not on that laptop! I don't own that laptop!" --Jason and Hasufin, on fermented fish milkshakes "You are forbidden from having more than two bored chaos magickians within a mile of me." --Hasufin "The vampire and the chaos mage are off getting pizza." --Lyssa "Dismiss what insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem." --Walt Whitman "If you spend more time online than you do in the real world, which world are you really a part of?" --Independent Librarian Dynamic Sean Kennedy the sixth "Most video game people have read one book and seen one movie in their life, which is _Lord of the Rings_ and _Aliens_ or variations of that. There's great things in that but you need some variety." --Ken Levine, on video games in the twenty-first century "The man who worships a tyrant in heaven naturally submits his neck to the yoke of tyrants on earth." --George W. Foote, _Flowers of Freethought_ "There are many menus, I can continue to be indecisive." --Lyssa "The German language, when spoken, sounds largely like a Satanic ritual." --Kyrin "Watch show. Enjoy show. Take deep breath, take Tums and try stop borrow trouble." --Jim Butcher, on nerd rage "Anyone who's annoyed is just a sore loser because they're no longer one of the select few with a rare recording to wank over." --Daniel Smith, on finding rare Sisters of Mercy demos on YouTube "If all you have is duct tape, everything starts to look like a duct. Right. When's the last time you used duct tape on a duct?" --Larry Wall "You cannot depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus." --Mark Twain "Every monotheistic God needs His Satan as a scapegoat on whom to blame all the bad things that happen." --Wilddragon "Angels are like tech support: You contact them when you need them, and you expect them to be rude." --Orthaevelve "Black magic is not on the list of a wife's duties!" --Lina Inverse, _Slayers Next_ "You shouldn't have to put up with parents who have more of a life than you do." --Aineko, _Accelerando_ "Before starting a discussion on the possibility of a release of a new Sisters' [of Mercy] album one should learn the basic principles of the relativity of time." --P.Ostir "I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do." --Robert A. Heinlein "Where there's children, there's snot." --Bob, _The Dresden Files: Birds of a Feather_ "There's one hole in every revolution, large or small. And it's one word long: People." --Spider Jerusalem "I think quotes are very dangerous things." --Kate Bush "If it's treatable with caffeine, it doesn't require surgery." --Hasufin, on wisdom teeth "I feel like Solaris has become Linux circa 2000 - all the new features with all the latest instability." --J.S., on Solaris 10 and switched-fabric data storage "If you are in a public bathroom and fluids are coming out of you, get off the damn cell phone." --The Ferrett "A coincidence is what you have left over when you apply a bad theory." --P.W.Bidgeman "How did anyone get clearance before Yahoo People Search?" --Hasufin "Look, I'm terrified of the Amish, okay? They freak me out. If you can raise a barn in a day, I am not going to fuck with you, I don't want any piece of that." --Scott Sigler "Bad reviews are like demons and faeries; stay with me. They're the hobgoblins of the creator's mind. But we can do rituals to rid ourselves of them. We can post them to our Livejournals, staying mindful of what should and shouldn't be said about them in public. But in airing the reviews we can learn those demons' true names; we can bind them, banish them, lay them to rest. In some case we can even subert their power for our own. Without these rituals, those nasty, bad reviews have power over us." --Fred Hicks, _The Butcher Block_ "Don't be like that. There's no reason that we can't take our time and enjoy this. Or could it be that you don't like me?" "No offense, but that's it exactly. Now that we're both clear on that, can we get on with this?" --Prosthetic body technician and Kusanagi, _Ghost In the Shell: Stand Alone Complex_ "You know, there's the definition of 'stone butch', and then there's Integra Hellsing." --Lyssa "Hasufin, I love you, but sometimes you've got that Scottish thing going on." --Lyssa "If Rhianna's ever warm, evacuate the building!" --Butterfly "Your profession is not what brings home your paycheck. Your profession is what you were put on earth to do with such passion and such intensity that it becomes spiritual in calling." --Vincent Van Gogh "Don't do anything with magic that you wouldn't do with chainsaws and Rohypnol." --Mordant Carnival "The power was out to the whole neighborhood, Bryce! What the hell did you DO???" "...I got sick!" --Mika and the Doctor "Subcontracted perversions?" --Hummingwolf "Well, I don't know exactly what that does, but it does it very well." "You're a technomage, and you're scaring me, Bryce." --The Doctor and Mika "*sigh* Men..." "No, geeks. There's a difference." --Orthaevelve and Mika "I don't need antidepressants. I need full auto." --Hasufin "When such a man is lost to the world, it is up to the rest of us to keep the world just as nifty as he helped make it." --Variable Hacking is exploiting the gap between 'intent' and 'implementation'. "Americans like to argue, in general. We will ALWAYS find something to disagree about. We could be a culture of gray-skinned, Esperanto-speaking Zoroastrians and we'd find a way to draw lines. Probably involving sports." --Eric Bertish "Various medical authorities swarm in and out of here predicting I have between two days and two months to live. I think they are guessing. I remain cheerful and unimpressed. I look forward without dogmatic optimism but without dread. I love you all and I deeply implore you to keep the lasagna flying. "Please pardon my levity, I don't see how to take death seriously. It seems absurd." --Robert Anton Wilson, 20070106, his final weblog post "Pace is one of those people that Normal has coffee with every once in a while to get ideas." --The Doctor "People don't want to be writers... they want to be authors, because authors don't have holes in their ceilings." --Kathy Ptacek "Is it wrong that I want to take the rubber bands off of one or two of 'em so I can watch 'em go three rounds?" "It is right that my food should entertain me." --The Doctor and Lyssa at Red Lobster, watching the live tank "You have no ass, again. Goddammit, you need a pie." --Lyssa "People who believe that god exists and heeds their prayers have probably waived the right to mock people who talk to trees or claim to channel the spirits of Native Americans." --Wendy Kaminer "On my planet, we call this love." "On my planet, this would still be alive. Thank the gods it's not." --Lyssa and the Doctor, on dinner "It's creepo-erotic!" --The Ferrett "...how's your rash?" --The fifth Doctor, _Doctor Who: The Caves of Androzani_ "This is a bad porn set waiting to happen." --Lyssa "I'm wondering what advantage there is to making explosives in the shape of saltines." --Jim "Davros, you threw it into a microwave and said it was us!" --Lyssa "Survival of the gloopiest." --The Ferrett "Mexican jumping clams!" --Zoethe "Look! Time Lord bling!" --Cat, on the Time Ring "Jesus can only come back once! When he can come back 13 times, then talk to me!" --The Ferrett "When you're stark bollock naked in the shower and they ask you to sign an autograph...that's weird...I don't know if it's weirder when they're naked or you are!" --David Tenant, on fans following him to the gym "LOGO is pretty safe to use. I'm not sure how much you can do with it anymore. You might be able to draw web pages.... really.... slowly....." --Ronald Chmara, on secure vs. usable programming languages "Very occasionally, if you really pay attention, life doesnt suck!" --Joss Whedon "The things you do to my phenomenal - and I do mean phenomenal - luck are obscene. We don't's like it, my precious." --Lyssa "It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers." --James Thurber "Remember, parsley is a vegetable!" --Hasufin "Although laws and regulations specify the 802.11 channels alowed in every country or region... (surprisingly) attackers don't follow the law." --Raul Siles, _Wireless Forensics, part one_ "Coast to Coast AM has FAR more credibility than FauxNews ever could have dreamed." --DJ Question "Just because you're hearing voices in your head, they don't *have* to be God's." --Tekalynn "For a spaceship, she doesn't do much flying." --The Doctor, _Doctor Who: The Runaway Bride_ "Nerd rage is a powerful force." --Fred Hicks "All right, I'm young, I'm beautiful - but you don't have to hate me." --Sean Young "I think he [Duo] might be dead. He didn't respond to the words 'food' or 'Lyssa's food'." --Jarin "Think again, dumbass, because now I'm pissed." --Hellboy (not what I expected to hear on Toonami!) "The first rule of magic is simple. Don't waste your time waving your hands and hopping when a rock or a club will do." --McCloctnick the Lucid "Joe, what are you doing?" "Brewing Ayahausca." "Server went down hard again last night, huh?" "The machine elves are not pleased." --Chris, on trying to expense ritual components "When I've walled myself off from other possibilities and am committed to my path, I walk right off of it." --The Ferrett "And no, I swear - I did not put any hallucinogens in ANY of the food. Not even the cranberry sauce. More likely the boy could clock you because, being organic rather than metal, you don't reflect radio waves." --Hasufin, on Hummingwolf's accidental mystic state on Christmas Day 2006 "My cat's an asshole! Where's my wine...?" --Jill "I don't know, Karla. Virgins are bad news. They're clingy and inexperienced. I dated a few, and that turned me into the anti-Captain Kirk." "Anti-Captain Kirk?" "I don't go where no man has gone before." --Tom and Karla, _Home on the Strange_ "Ancient man's reflexes were wired for the sabretooth tiger. Ours are wired for the two-faced sales rep. Both are equally valuable in their given venue; equally useless outside of said." --Hasufin "While Mika and I were at World Market before coming to Olive Garden, I had grabbed a bottle to send my father some coffee liqeur. I commented to Mika 'He's responsible for half my genome. The least I can do is get him plastered.' *pause* 'Actually, considering my brother and I, I ought to get him stoned.'" "I don't think he'd be game for that." "You've met my father, right?" "Point." --Hasufin and Mika "Yours is made with love. And if I speak highly enough of it, you won't poison me." --Hasufin, to Mika "We're making sure she doesn't kill anyone. We're all working on our alibis, just in case." --Kash, on Lyssa's pre-Yule stress levels "That stupid, inconsiderate, entitled asshole! He needs to die in a fire!" (to the tune of _Deck the Halls_) "Fa-lalala-la, la-la la-la!" --Lyssa and the Doctor, on drivers in northern Virginia "We never have enough time to do all the nothing we want to do." --Chris "Oh, gods, it looks like I'm peeing coffee." "You mean it normally doesn't?" "No, Kash. This is alarming. My body is very dehydrated." --The Doctor and Kash, on dehydration "If there are any prophecies about people getting root accounts on my computer I am reformatting NOW!" --Hasufin "Oh, Duo.. you look like you're in a world of drunk, my friend. If you're sober, I'm Mary Poppins." --Kyrin "Give people the shadow of a doubt. It gives them the chance to be something besides a preconceived notion." --Lupa "Vee shall consult zee sachred babushka texts!" --Lyssa, hunting for holiday cookie recipes "I'd like the genre that I represent to be 'William Gibson novels'. That would be the ideal outcome for me." --William Gibson "I'm only perfect as long as you don't get to know me." --The Doctor "When you are about to do an objective and scientific piece of investigation of a topic, it is well to gave the answer firmly in hand, so that you can proceed forthrightly, without being deflected or swayed, directly to the goal." --Amrom Katz "Consider it some friendly off-the-record advice from one surly motherfucker." --Corporal Stone, _7th Son: Deceit_ "And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world." --Joseph Campbell "THE FUTURE NEEDS AN ENEMA, and I've got an arsenal of ICBM-sized Fleet suppositories ready for the Sign O' The Times!" --Pegritz "You can turn your back on a person, but never turn your back on a drug, especially when it's waving a razor sharp hunting knife in your eye." --Hunter S. Thompson "Because it's just not Christmas without mad science." --Chris, on why he's making caffeinated cookies for the Yule Cookie Exchange Party of 2006 "Imagination and memory are but one thing, but diverse considerations have diverse names." --Schwarzwald, _The Big-O_ "If you can't find a fitting quote, just make one up like everybody else." --Mohandas Ghandi "There are two ways to escape eternity. One is to join the dead. The other to join the living." --Nick Knight "The full potentialities of human fury cannot be reached until a friend of both parties tactfully interferes." -- G.K. Chesterton "Linux Kernel Dump Test Module, a simple module to test Linux Kernel Dump mechanism that allows users to crash their kernel in different ways. Linux is getting so good, we need a kernel module to remember the old days." --Diego Calleja, on Linux the release of kernel v2.6.19 "Sometimes the best gifts come in a .wmv file." --Fern Dragonstar "...and this is why I think you have two spontaneously combusting ferrets stuffed in your underwear." --The Doctor "You might be able to pilot your Firefly through a camel's needle; but Buffy in her Escalade on her cell phone will cream you regardless." --Iarriadh, on driving on ice in the mid-west "Access isn't so much a program as it is a hellgate. Data goes in, screaming souls of the damned come out. Some times they scream useful things. Most of the time they scream about the eternal agony of hell." "Mind if I quote you on that?" "Go right ahead. I need to thin out some of the Kyrin quotes I suppose." --Chris and the Doctor "Wait a minute.. I'm a member of Team Ryoga. You're a member of Team Tom Baker. I'm pretty sure that we're going to wind up in Macedonia during the reign of Alexander the Great armed only with a blender." --Hausfin "Elves have tails!" --Lyssa, about Rialian "I WILL HAVE NO FUNDOSHI EXPERIENCE. Only boxers will grace this pale, yellow ass." --Tenshi "I think the free software dreamers have better survival odds than the free love dreamers because nerds do less drugs - unless you count Skittles and Red Bull." --Xeni Jardin "Oh, it's violence. Good." --Hummingwolf "She's so cute. It's like a slug on valium." --Rialian "D-Link: The best boat anchor a router company can build." --Hasufin "When the ice cream machine starts, trouble is sure to ensue in Kitchen Stadium! Many a chef's downfall has been foreordained by the siren's call of the ice cream machine!" "I agree. Lay off with the fuckin' experimental ice cream." --Alton Brown and Lyssa "Sometimes a little technobabble is good for the soul!" --Jack Harkness, _Torchwood_ "Normal people will do extraordinary things when given the chance." --Miranda Zero, _Global Frequency_ "My wang is over fourteen inches long--but, alas, nine or more of those inches are folded into extraneous quantum dimensions and are inaccessible by most average 4-dimensional people." --Pegritz "What the almighty hell??" --Tony, _Real Life Comics_ "I'm doing my part by working on a project where I'm copying every single MySpace page onto stone tablets. When future archeologists dig them up and see 'LOL Bobby Ray sucks!' and 'D00d 1 pwnz3r3d U!!1!', they'll understand that our civilizaton didn't just decline; our only choice was to destroy ourselves because we were so lame." --dghcasp "If sin exists then Christian fundamentalism is as sinful as sloth, greed or gluttony. It's a lifestyle that promotes surrender to the temptation to simplify the complexities of life by letting someone else do your thinking for you. The typical fundamentalist will extol this state of mind as surrender to God. I think they say 'let go and let God' or some such thing. Truth be told, it's simply intellectual laziness." --Nick Paccione "Do you watch the nightly news? Do you watch it faithfully? When the anchorman goes, blah, blah, blah, Do you go bah, bah, bah? And you ask us do androids dream of electric sheep? Yes. We dream of you." --The Android Sisters For those who believe, no explanation is necessary. For those who do not believe, no explanation is possible. "Come on! Fight! I've seen more drama in Musashi films!" --Tenshi "I'm an American! This metric shit doesn't count anywhere but in the lab!" --Bryce "I will let no man take me down so low as to let me hate him." --Booker T. Washington "Terrorists took over my website." --Kash "Technically speaking, I don't have any parents. I don't know if my test tubes went to college or not." --Hiro "They're a healthy alternative to Krispy Kreme!" "So's a nuclear bomb." --Kash and Jarin "Go ahead and give me that look - I'll put you on some sticky rice!" --Hiro, to Eris "Lyssa? Can I have my boyfriend back now?" --Mika "Think of me as weight training for your hands." --Lyssa "As a pagan, you won't run out of candles, but as a technomage you'll sure as hell run out of outlets. Just an observation." --Mika "To defend oneself against the accusations of a knave is to seek justice from the verdict of fools." --Aleister Crowley "If we were meant to be happy all the time, we wouldn't be human beings, we'd be game show hosts." --Corvaxgirl "Oh, meltdown. It's one of those annoying buzzwords. We prefer to call it an unrequested fission surplus." --Mr. Burns "The arena language is an impressive scripting language based on ANSI-C, but extended to have some object-oriented methods and a very clever native-language calling interface which requires no extra glue in order to call functions in third-party libraries - the functions can be called directly from the arena script. This is the most fun I've had with my clothes on in years. Memo to self - must try this with clothes off." --Alistair Crooks "Information Society is not a series of tubes! It's a very small badger!" --InSoc "It's always somethin' stupid." --MA, on troubleshooting "..and one more thing: You'd better not suck." --Pyrotech C3H8, on doing the Robot "Wanted: Gravity field engineer. Fond of cows." --Lu "Why do hot teachers and teacher's assistants keep having sex with 15-year-old boys? And why wasn't I one of those 15-year-old boys?! This isn't a crime - this is every young man's dream come true." --Nyarlathotep, on teacher-student sex scandals "In preparation, I suggest all of you read John Uri Lloyd's exquisite theosophical novel _Etidorpha_ now. You will note that the eyeless humanoid from within the Hollow Earth will be making a guest appearance in _Howard Phillips_, and that you will get to see his wang." --Nyarlathotep, on his NaNoWriMo '06 project "We sound like we're going on a raid or something." --MA, on PH and I going to a staff meeting offsite dressed in leather "Politics is the entertainment division of industry." --Anonymous "Imagine the X-Files has world-class sex with Alias, and produces a mutant offspring with a taste for crank that lives 20 minutes in the future." --Chuck Lawson, on the unaired TV pilot for _Global Frequency_ "Blood is the life but coffee's not bad." --Chris Miller "Applying dbus-0.61-i-hate-qt-so-much.patch ..." --From the output of 'emerge dbus' on Leandra "Show me a person who can believe in a trinity and call it monotheism and I'll show you a person who can believe anything." --Robert A. Heinlein "I think it is generally well known that Oracle has the shittiest piece of installation software in this godforsaken industry full of really bad, really shitty products." --T.Pascal "Maybe God wants you to run because He wants Bill Nelson to be senator." --Ed Rollins, to Kathy Harris "The shortest verse in the Bible is 'Jesus wept'. The only thing wrong with it is the past tense." --Fred MacIntyre, _Something Positive_, 20061010 "98% of the population are just idiots, and 99% of the remainder believe that they are not." --Anonymous "Sendmail may be safely run set-user-id to root." --Eric Allman, _Sendmail Installation Guide_ "After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world." --Oscar Wilde, on absinthe "What is it? Three weeks without food, three days without water, three hours without Internet access?" --Hasufin "I'm a Pagan, not a member of the SCA." --Gwynethfar "kill -9 needs no justification!" --The Bastard Operator from Hell "A man may be a fool and not know it, if he's not married." --Uzbekistani saying Von's First Law Of The Internet: "The net is allergic to truth, reason and humour." "DOS 3.3 is the world's best operating system for running sequencers - as long as those sequencers aren't necessarily expecting to find something more 'advanced'." --Andrew Eldritch, on Doktor Avalanche "I'd be kind of terrified that if I didn't come during the sex my gonads would be like a seminal hand grenade waiting to go off. It might take days. I'm done having sex with Gini, I get in the car, I go to talk to a client about some programming, and just as we shake hands suddenly my shoes are overflowing. How can you look professional when your crotch looks like you just dropped a vanilla ice cream cone on it?" --The Ferrett, on ejaculation and timing "The universe doesn't have to make sense to you, it just has to make sense." --Katrina Finch, _Global Frequency_ "Rule 1: When someone talks about 'the children' watch out for your wallet. Rule 2: When someone talks about 'the children' watch out for your freedoms. And now, it seems: Rule 3: When someone talks about 'the children' watch out for your democracy." --Andrew Stuttaford "If my own daughter, upon turning 18, can marry a man I have no respect for, and there is nothing in law I can do about it, why should I presume that I have the right to tell two perfect strangers whom they should choose to marry?" --Anonymous, on same-sex marriage "Apparently, Bigfoot smells like crotch. Not ass. Crotch." --Anonymous paranormal skeptic "I want competant. We're basically in DC, at least 500 miles from the nearest honest man." --Hasufin, on usability consultants "Security must be baked in, not spread on." --General Dynamics marketing copy "Not to worry.. I have yet another plan." "Oh, yeah?" "It starts with you getting me another beer." "Dare I ask what comes after that?" "I don't want to go into too many specifics, but rest assured drinking will be involved." --Tony and Greg (the cartoonist), _Real Life Comics_ "Everything natural is good! Like natural... selection." --Luighseach "Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies." --James M. Dakin "Dude! Stop thinking 'Prague police' and start thinking 'Playstation'! You've got a bazooka!" --Xander, _xXx_ "Dude, if you ever make me piss in a portajohn like that again, I'm going to try to grow a dick." --Lyssa, on the Maryland Renfaire "Dude. We're going to faire tommorrow. Greater Demons are not cool." --Hasufin, on my MegaHAL project "Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites, standing for absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college." --Kurt Vonnegut "Technology which is 20 years ahead of anything declassified can look alien just fine." --Echelon "You are an excellent improvisational cook, Lyssa." "I bore easily." --The Doctor and Lyssa "What is this? Did the quadratic formula explode?" --Strong Bad "Money's only money - but not having to worry about appendix issues or wonder if you're going crazy because you passed a Phantom Kidney Stone is priceless!" --Pegritz "My time on IRC has taught me a valuable lesson... On the Internet, all the men are men, all the women are men, and all the children are FBI agents." --OnyxIR "I'd like to have lunch with you--but it might help the terrorists." --Caroline Casey "What the hell is this angsty thing?" "Anime. You've never heard of it?" --Lyssa and Jarin "Knitting.. is a virus." --Jarin "'Bite me' is the Godwin's Law of arguing." --Lyssa "Dude! That deserves a toaster." --Jarin "We really put the 'bitch' in 'stich'." "Stitchin' is optional. Bitchin' is not." --Lyssa and Cate "I feel like I'm in the metaphysical equivalent of _You Can't Do That On Television_ and I made the mistake of saying 'water'." --Jessica Melusine "When you raise something that ain't an idiot, it's a lot more work." --Lyssa, on precocious children "There's only one topic that can get me away from yarn but she's not allowed and you're not interested!" --Cate, to Lyssa and Jarin "I made sense of the dead kittens!" "Then you can take care of THIS in your spare time..." --Cate and Lyssa, knitting "For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: Intoxication." --Freidrich Nietzsche Behold the unborn fetus and Weep salt tears crocodilian; All life is sacred (save, of course, An enemy civilian). "You have to love a show where the host uses a Leatherman tool to cook." --The Doctor, on Alton Brown "Good's gonna triumph over evil, just as soon as it learns to fight dirty." --Garth Ennis, _Preacher_ "Whip me, beat me, come all over me, tell me you love me. Then get the fuck out." --Anonymous "Please state the nature of the technological emergency." --Hasufin, certified ETSH (Emergency Technical Support Hologram) "Many people hear voices when no-one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stare at the walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing." --Margaret Chittenden "Oh, gods... that makes the baby Tesla cry." --The Doctor "You know, once you feng shui the organs it's actually kind of cozy." --Stewie, _Family Guy_ "All mystics have had psychotic breakdowns, although not all psychotics are mystics." --Agent 139, _Join My Cult_ "Isn't the new BSG [Battlestar Galactica] a rip-off of the old BSG?" "Sure, in the way that a supercomputer is a rip-off of a vacuum tube." --Turbo Turtle and Iago "We called it [the promotional effort] 'The One True Bling'." "My prizzecious, yo!" --Alobar and Blue "Are those good time handcuffs or bad time handcuffs?" --Molly, _Death Masks_ "One must give props to the old school, in order that one may be keeping it real." --Jim Butcher "The lion may be the king of the jungle, but air drop one into Antarctica and he's just a penguin's bitch." --Lord Tepes "If people really want to break in, they will find ways and means of doing it and JASS hardening won't stop them." --Anonymous Sun Microsystems user forum member "If the answer isn't violence / then neither is your silence!" --Pop Will Eat Itself, _Ich Bin Ein Auslander_ "Yes, she's a witch, but she's our witch! Cut her the hell down!" --Mal Reynolds, _Firefly_ "I believe in exogamy!" --Sami "We've decided that gin is bottled heterosexuality." --Sami "What do you do when God agrees with your heresy?" --The Angel of Doubt "Never underestimate the power of a fully armed and operational garden shed." --Morbid Curious "This could try the patience of a zen monk." --Nick, on knitting "Don't come to the stitch-and-bitch if you can't hold your own in the bitching part." --Lyssa "Oh, Christ.. does this mean that I'm the missing component of your TARDIS??" "Yes." "Yeah, you're the navigation system." --Kyrin, the Doctor, and Lyssa "I reject your reality, and substitute my own!" --Jamie Hyneman "Military intelligence. Not necessarily _high_ intelligence." --Kash "Come on.. who in the room wouldn't fuck David Bowie?" "Fag." "I'm a _lesbian_!" --Kyrin and Kash "I would also like to understand women." --Stephen Hawking, on his ambitions "I'm like the platypus - my mating season is very limited." --Kyrin "There are some XML tags for your website - ." --Kyrin "Hello, all my whiny Livejournal friends! Read MY Livejournal! There's nothing in it. Wanna know why? Because it'll make all of my friends think I'm more of a nimrod than I actually am." --Kyrin "Crazy is not sexually transmitted." --Kyrin "It's good to be the time traveller." --The Doctor "Absinthe tastes like a goth pissed in your mouth." --Kyrin "This looks like a urine sample, yet kicks like a mule." --Kyrin, on a cocktail of Bawls and Southern Comfort "Holy shit. I think my box [computer] ate a kittygirl! Bad computer!" --Kyrin "Plutonium: It's spicy!" --Hasufin "Hunter S. Thompson has been no more longer than he's been dead." --Hasufin "I'm going to regret asking this, but what the hell is THAT doing there?" --Hasufin "Fantasy has declared war on reality." --Kash "Just tell 'em to eat a big ol' bowl of Count Cockula." --Kyrin, on pretentiousness "Aw, fuck, he's runnin' for his keyboard." --Kyrin, after the previous remark "The _Utena_ movie is the weird French film of anime." --Mmsword "Team Ryoga?! Team Tom Baker, bitch!" --Kyrin "There was no porn involved!" "Riiiiiiiight...." "You can NOT navigate and masturbate at the same time!" --Lyssa, Lauren, and Kyrin "I read braille while I'm driving." "That's not braille, that's herpes." --Rialian and Kyrin "Uh, Doc? Why do you have depleted uranium handcuffs?" "...ex-girlfriend." "Uh, Doc? Why do you have a depleted uranium cockring?" "...ex-boyfriend." "Uh, Doc? Why do you have a.. wait, that's not depleted!" "Oh, wow! That's the only buttplug that could run a nuclear sub!" --Alexius, the Doctor, and Kyrin "Hold still, I'm stealing all of your stuff!" --'lex "The niobium condoms! Shiny!" --Hummingwolf "No nuclear devices that you cannot fit into a Rubbermaid trashcan!" --Kyrin "What purpose is singing? What is the meaning?" "It's just a different form of screaming." --Eli and Genetik "Oh God! I made eye-contact!" --Wayne Campbell "Democracy delivered with a bomb or a gun / is terrorism in the world I'm from." --MC Frontalot, _Special Delivery_ "Hurt people hurt people." --Zeph Daniels "I love you, Bryce.. so much that I'm going to teach you to iron." --Lyssa "A little fear will control the minds of the common people." --Rufus Shinra, _Final Fantasy VII_ "Introduction of aliens is a characteristic shark-jumping. Consider the introduction of Gizmo in the sixth and final season of the Flintstones, or the introduction of Alf into the first season of Alf." --Mike Lake, on prime-time television "When Willie Nelson passes you a joint, you don't say 'no'. I was on Mars for six hours." --Johnny Knoxville Jesus saves. God makes tape backups. Pan uploads copies to public FTP mirrors. "Bryce Lynch." "Hi. Is this John Smith?" "...no...." "Okay. " --Bryce answering the phone at work (caller's name changed) "Things are not fake when the (Hitachi Magic) Wand is around." --Chanta Rose "I believe I feel a rampage coming on." --Father Nightroad, _Trinity Blood_ "Despite all of this, could you pass the gravy?" --Korgoth "I'm gonna drink 'till I reboot!" --Bender, _Futurama_ "Paul strikes me as a very cranky guy." "Or bipolar." --Jarin and Hummingwolf on the Apostle Paul "It ain't my fault folk tend to shoot at me." --Mal, _Firefly: Heart and Sole_ "Brilliant Ph.D engineers do not usually make good system administrators." --Elizabeth Zwicky "XML is like violence: If it doesn't solve your problem, you aren't using enough of it." --Anonymous Godwin's Second Law: "As justifications for restrictive online laws are given, the probability of a politician mentioning child pornography approaches one." "And the Lord God said unto Noah 'you shall back up all thine files, and all the files of thine people. And the upload lasted for 40 days and 40 nights... For, lo, the LORD gave unto Noah an OC-48, and the LORD made it without latency, and it was good." --Hasufin "It would be of great comfort to me if the teeming millions could learn to think rationally about such things." --Cecil Adams "Sleep is for the damned." --River Tam "_Hellsing_: It's Vash on PCP!" --Lyssa, on _Hellsing_ "Repeat this mantra: All hardware sucks. All software sucks. Repeat until enlightenment." --Hasufin Microsoft: Making computer literacy unfashionable and undesirable since 1985. "You can't do it.. how could you possibly know if you've never tried?" --Father Abel Nightroad, _Trinity Blood_ "Get that robot some more beer!" --The Mayor, _Futurama_ "Kids, don't do drugs, we need them because of you." --Bill Maher, on drug use statistics in 2006 "Okay. What are you talking about?" --Raven, _Teen Titans_ "'Pain in the ass' is still better than 'Just doesn't work'." --Amy Skowronek "I have a feminine side. It happens to be a bull dyke, but it's a feminine side!" --Kyrin Gates's Law: The speed of software halves every 18 months. "Populating 128-bit file systems would exceed the quantum limits of earth-based storage. You couldn't fill a 128-bit storage pool without boiling the oceans." --Jeff Bonwick, developer of ZFS "When all else fails, violence prvails." --Maxim of electrical engineering "If there's one thing we've established over the years, it's that the vast majority of our users don't have the slightest clue what's best for them in terms of package stability." --Ciaran McCreesh, Gentoo Linux developer "If you leave the Christian Bible outside, eventually the wind and the rain will destroy it. My bible IS the wind and the rain." --Attributed to an unknown Native American woman "We need to inflict immense pain on anyone not using a real URI." --Anonymous programmer "If we don't protect freedom of speech, how will we know who the assholes are?" --The Onion "If masturbating was s'posed to be cute, pink bunnies would do it in meadows and ejaculate rainbows and flower petals." --Something Positive "This ATA is defective. It's bouncing around the room shouting 'Hastur! Hastur! Hastur!' I can't fix this." --Hasufin "You see? The mysteries of the Universe are revealed when you break stuff." --Coop, _Megas XLR_ "Remember, always be yourself. Unless you suck." --Joss Whedon "Garlic ramen, for the win!" --Solo "Hey! Can I join you for a tasty stick of death?" --Nick, joining Mika for a cigarette "Adamantium is not a spice!" --Hasufin "I love being surrounded by fellow perverts. It's like coming home." --Nick "It's anti-Jolt." "Did they carbonate antifreeze? Antifreeze, windshield wiper fluid, or pineapple juice." --Hasufin and the Doctor "I wonder if you can ferment a Twinkie." --Rialian "Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works, and so on. Up until _Doom_, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun." --Terry Pratchett "I can build my own computer: Better. Faster. Stronger. Cuter." --Mika "To be saved is to fall into the ludicrous and satanic flippancy of false piety, kitsch." --Thomas Merton "Enemy -- SP (Suppressive Person) Order. Fair Game. May be deprived of property or injured by any means by any Scientologist without any discipline of the Scientologist. May be tricked, sued or lied to or destroyed." --L. Ron Hubbard, _Fair Game Doctrine_ "Holy shit, I totally see a cult movie in the making here." --Pegritz "Boobies help a musical very much." --Lyssa, on Patti LaPone "If I shared files, I'd be dangerous. I'm on dialup, so I'll be slowly dangerous." --Hummingwolf "This would test the patience of a Tibetan monk." --Nick, on knitting "American politics are one part _The Illuminatus Trilogy_ and one part _Hey, Vern, It's Ernest!_" --The Doctor "Note that serial interfacing is NOT a trivial task - you will often need unusual cables, and ports are not standardised between machines, in some cases, not even consistent on one machine. It is assumed that you know how to select the appropriate cable to go between your computer and the device acting as your serial terminal. A full tutorial on serial interfacing is beyond the scope of this article, however, we offer one hint: Just because the ends plug in doesn't mean it will work." --The OpenBSD v3.9 FAQ "Chase after truth like hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coat-tails." --Clarence Darrow "I pulled the fridge out into the center of the kitchen. I looked behind it. I went and found a couple D-10s. A sanity check was clearly required." --Zoethe, on cleaning behind the fridge for the first time in five years "The wicker man: Because even the most useless enemies have a use!" --Hasufin "People enjoy l33tspeak. They also enjoy _Firefly_." --Kash "How do you want your eggs?" "...unfertilised!" "Indeed!" --The Doctor, Lyssa, and Kash "For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert." --Jeian "If your wife tells you that you look like RMS, she's probably serving you divorce papers." --Sitwon "The Messiah will come. There will be a resurrection of the dead -- all the things that Jews believed in before they got so damn sophisticated." --Rabbi Meir Kahane "A gnome and a night elf couldn't 69, but a dwarf can give head without kneeling. This was proven in Ironforge last night." --Eli, World of Warcraft player "I think what we've learned today is that if there is a god, it isn't anywhere the fuck near AOL search." --SomethingAwful.com on the leaked AOL search records "No, chocolate is a masturbatory aid." --Hasufin "Viagra is my favourite vitamin." --Cate "Where's the flying aluminum debris when you need it?" --John Stewart "USENET is like a herd of performing elephants with diarrhea -- massive, difficult to redirect, awe-inspiring, entertaining, and a source of mind-boggling amounts of excrement when you least expect it." --Gene Spafford "It would be funny. Social engineering on a WTF level." --Vlad "Remember, folks - wherever you go, there is someone out there who's weirder than you." --Prezzey "If meat is murder, is tofu attempted murder?" --Eli "It's good there are no cats around while you're knitting." "Meow?" "Meow." "Mow!" "...fuck!" --Hasufin, Cate, Bryce, Lyssa, and Mika (who isn't a cat) "I take offense at any end of the world that I didn't have a personal hand in." --Hasufin "There you are. Dead kittens, untangled." --Cate "I think the terrists of 9/11 were actually just pissed off at airport security." --Lowmagnet, on the banning of all liquids on transoceanic flights "You could probably toss an octopus off of the USX Tower and it would survive the fall, as long as it landed in a tank of salt water, of course." --Pegritz "So, bottom line, glossolalia is meditation with a soundtrack. Cool." --Sunfell "I love you. I think I'll marry you." "Uh-oh, dude, that sounds like a threat." --Lyssa and Pegritz "It may be that the only way to survive the Apocalypse is to undergo it, first, within your own being." --Daniel Pinchbeck "If we can't wake up to the fact that deep down inside we are good, then we deserve to remain asleep dreaming we are evil." --Lon Milo DuQuette "Apparently the Creator likes diversity a lot more than we do." --Virginia Ramey Mollenkott "It seems that the other name for 'Uno' [the card game] is 'Fuck You'." --Jarin "I really had to act; 'cause I didn't have any lines." --Marilyn Chambers "So many cool fetishes, so many weirdos." --Cate "Your mistake is that you think all mechanically assisted organisms, like me, are pathetic cripples. In fact, we are better than we were before." --Ng ,_Snow Crash_ "In America, we boil the beer to pasteurize it, ostensibly to make it safer to drink. Now, I dont know how many people are killed in England every year from drinking unboiled beer - it could be thousands, it could be millions. This is completely irrelevant. The only thing that matters is understanding that it is worth killing them." --The Ferrett "Play your own game; be your own man; and don't ask anyone for a stamp of approval." --Hunter S. Thompson "What someone drunk has on his tongue comes from his conscience when he is not drunk." --Yiddish proverb "Israel looks beautiful this time of the year. If you think artillery is beautiful." --Newck "It looks like a triumphal attitude doesn't need the truth any longer, just an unidentified 'reliable source'." --The Wild Hunt "I'm sorry I beat up your mother. I was aggreived! I was not in my right mind! Heh heh heh.." --Lyssa "America's two greatest inventions are finger-fucking and carpet-bombing." --Lyndon B. Johnson "I figured, it was a Vanilla Ice concert; some hilarity had to come of this." --The Doctor "I was like the Taxi Hailing Man this weekend: Every time I called for one, bam, we got one, it was weird." --Vlad "Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion - you must set yourself on fire." --Reggie Leach "An asshole can go from 'pinkie' to 'goatse'." --C4bl3fl4m3, on anal penetration "There is nothing biblical about creating divisions between people." --Emanuel Cleaver, US Representative, pastor of St. James United Methodist Church, Kansas City, Kansas "So, let's lighten things up and discuss abortion for a while." --Lord TBT "Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored." --Aldous Huxley "The difference between schizophrenic delusion and gnostic revelation can also be a rather shaky one, at times." --Skelkins "You can be Art Vader and I'll be Emperor Ratsinger!" --Aaron Donahue, 20060226 "Grits are the tofu of rednecks." --Hasufin "I imagine the temperature is 'suck'. Deep and abiding 'suck'." --Lyssa, on summer in DC "Normally I would not be so overt about this - but in light of recent events, I don't think I can put this any other way. In short, I think that the Middle East needs pot now, more than it ever has before. I think that the disparate warring factions involved in this mess all need to take a hit off the bong and put on some goddamn Iron Butterfly before they blow the world to smithereens." --Number Seven "I'M an odd person? I'm surrounded by people who like (the) Cruxshadows!" --Kash "'But Ferrett,' you say. 'When I look at the personal ads in swing boards, I see men outnumbering women ten to one!' But look closer, my friend: What you will see are close-ups of penises. You will note that you never see a face, for these are not men, but rather the Disembodied Organs From Zeta Tau - an alien species somewhat like a cuckoo who nestles in the crevices of willing women to spawn their young. Imagine the surprise of those poor husbands who have subcontracted their lusts to a stranger on the internet, only to find a disembodied, fleshy cock floating at the door in its turbo-powered hoverchair! Actual men who are willing to fuck people are rare indeed." --The Ferrett, on swingers' BBSes "Skip the hugs, give me booze!" --Mr. Cynical, _Under Power_ "The truly scientific mind is as hesitant to depricate as it is to lend support." --August Derleth "Two women in bed is proof that there is a God and that he loves us. Two MEN in bed is SATANIC!" --Bill Hicks "Thats not our fault! We're just doing our jobs!" "And with that sentence you just lost the right to even speak to me, now BACK OFF!" --Programmer and the Doctor, _Doctor Who: Bad Wolf_ "I think that the library is a privilege. It is an extra. It's not something you need to have. It's a nice thing to have." --Margi Wallo, trustee, Loudon Public Library "Dude! It smells like sex in here!" --D-M- "If there was a Burger King toy, then the show isn't obscure." --The Doctor, on 80's television shows "Cookies make the stupid go 'way." --Mika "Identify yourself." "You will identify first." "State your identity!" "You will identify first." "Identify." "This is illogical. You will modify." "Daleks do not take orders!" "You have identified as Daleks." "Outline resembles the inferior species known as 'Cybermen'." "Daleks have no concept of elegance." "This is obvious." --Dalek and Cyberleader, _Doctor Who: Doomsday_ (let the snarkfest begin!) "There will be more bungholes after me!" --Beavis "Oh, fannish joy, oh, fannish joy / you empty out my wallet!" --Lyssa, to the tune of _Oh Tannenbaum_ "Though one defeats a million men in battle, one who overcomes the self alone is in fact the highest victor." --Buddha "What kind of cyberpunk society can we have if corporations behave like responsible citizens?" --Steven Redux "You got it backwards, Leonard! Backwards!" --Art Bell "Conversation, not content, is king." --Corey Doctorow "We are each entitled to our own opinion, but no one is entitled to his own facts." --Patrick Moynihan "Choose in marriage only a woman whom you would choose as a friend if she were a man." --Joubert "However scary aliens seem, it's the humans you have to fear." --Uri Geller "Bitch, you can't even hold onto your weapon! You're worse than Harrison Ford in _Bladerunner_! You make freaking Neo look like God! Now go get mangled so you can be cool, chosen bitch! " --Mr. Cynical, _Underpower_ "We went to Coldstone today. I had peanut butter ice cream with white chocolate chips. It was tasty. I burped it up later; it was still tasty!" --Kash "I'm nobody's fucking cartoon." --Spider Jerusalem "You should always assume anything you write online is stapled to your resume'. People don't realise you get Googled just to get a job interview these days." --Jon Callas The NSA is now funding research not only in cryptography, but in all areas of advanced mathematics. If you'd like a circular describing these new research opportunities, just pick up your phone, call your mother, and ask for one. "You want to see something stupid and kind of funny?" "I'm already looking at our portal site." --J- and H- "Don't be too rational, though. Seriously." --L-G- "Virtual reality is like mainlining television." --William Gibson When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. --Clarke's First Law "A hundred failures would not matter when a single success could change the destiny of the world." --Arthur C. Clarke, _2001: A Space Odyssey_ "The hype machine is entirely enthusiast-created and since that day I realized Steve Jobs could sell a fart provided he sued a public Mac forum for talking about it before its release." --Clint DeBoer "CNN: Bringing you the finest news of AAAAAAAAAHHHHHUUUUUUUGGGGHHHHHHHHH!!!" --Jon Stewart "Hey, did you hear? Now we're taking on water. All we need now is a fire in the galley and we'll be in _The Hunt For Red October_." --T-B- Steve Ballmer: Innovation! Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. "This transmission is coming to you from the newly finished 'DS-One', my new space station, currently situated directly above Washington, DC." "Isn't 'DS-One' kind of a misnomer, since you're not in deep space, but are actually just.." "It stands for 'Death Station'! Not everything is about _Star Trek_!" --Tony and anonymous MIB, _Real Life Comics_ "Enzymes are things invented by biologists that explain things which otherwise require harder thinking." --Jerome Lettvin "Anyone that gets legal advice from a Slashdot needs about 100mg of Thorazine every 6 hours." --19th Nervous Breakdown "Why write strong women characters? Because if you don't believe women are strong, than you've obviously never met one." --Kash, on Joss Whedon's acceptance speech in 2006 "I'm proud of the freedoms we used to have." --George Carlin "It is easier to kill the Light within oneself, than to scatter the Darkness around." --Geser, _Night Watch_ "No sleep, no sympathy." --Eli "So, if you get writer's block, let the cat walk across the keyboard and debug the results." --Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Phoenix, and Brian D. Foy on comparison operators, _Learning Perl_ "No one has a problem believing in doubt." --Professor Robert Glass "I played poker with tarot cards last night. I got a full house and four people died." --Steven Wright "Diversity of human experience is curable. With modern medical intervention, everyone can be made to be exactly the way They say you ought to." --The Amorpha Household "Hi, God, it's me, Harry. Please don't turn me into a pillar of salt." --Harry Dresden, _Summer Knight_ "Nature doesn't care how smart you are. You can still be wrong." --Richard Feynman "I got a masters' degree to get a good job so I could afford air conditioning." --Lyssa "There is not one redeeming feature in our superstition of Christianity. It has made one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites." --Thomas Jefferson, _Notes on the State of Virginia_ "Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy." --Ernest Benn "Bob Saget, bitch.. you betta' ask someone." --Genetik "Don't sweat it - it's not real life. It's only ones and zeroes." --Eugene Spafford "That, by the way, sir, is called a WAG - a Wild-Ass Guess." --Art Bell "Welcome to eBay, where the part is free, but the 'shipping' is $356.97." --David Lesher "Don't we already have enough muppets trying to come to Thresholds?" --Jarin "There does not appear to be an established 'dumbass with a computer and not enough sleep' musical genre, so I decided to create it." --Frater AChDAE "Garlic, salt, and pepper: The holy trinity." --Lyssa "Ask not what you can do for science fiction -- ask how you can edge away from it and still get paid there." --Bruce Sterling "Slashdotters preaching tolerance and maturity? Next thing will probably be MS opening the source for Vista and seven angels with trumpets..." --Plammox "I live in Switzerland. Do I give a fuckin' rat's ass for US export regulations?" --Marc Balmer "We are not your customers. YOU ARE OUR CUSTOMER. Our driver sells your chips." --Theo de Raadt "We won't find anywhere as nice as Earth unless we go to another star system. It is important for the human race to spread out into space for the survival of the species." --Stephen Hawking "Be realistic for once, if humans were meant to live on the moon, there would be trees and oxygen." --Cleopas, on the previous quotation "..or it could be thirty feet. I could survive thirty feet." --The Doctor, _Doctor Who: The Satan Pit_ "History is made by men who do not think of the ultimate effects of what they are doing." --Robert Anton Wilson, _The Widow's Sun_ "Where are my seeing-eye furries?" --Lyssa "Waiter! This lambchop tastes like an old sock!" --Sheri Lewis "The Pittsburgh job market just blows in new and exciting ways." --Vlad "Netrake: A four million dollar cotter-key." --Anonymous telecom engineer "Team Ryoga, for the win!" --Hasufin, WtT 2006 "You (the car rental place) aren't right across the street from the theatre." "No, not really." --Julia and anonymous Enterprise Rent-A-Car drone, on why we drove around for a solid hour looking for the storefront "Curiosity is an amazing weapon in the industrial espionage arsenal." --Neil Gaiman "I turned away from him again and said, very quietly, 'People like you always mistake compassion for weakness. Michael and Sanya aren't weak. Fortunately for you, they're good men.' "Cassius laughed at me. "'Unfortunately for you, I'm not.' "I spun around, swinging the bat as hard as I could, and broke Cassius's right kneecap." --From _Death Masks_, by Jim Butcher "You never know who your enemy is until they start firing at you." --"Hank" "Elegance don't mean shit when I'm up to my ass in alligators." --Bill Kearney "I want to be a troubleshooter but you need to show me how to troubleshoot." --Anonymous engineer "Sorry, when I see Microsoft and Oracle on a security-related project, my only response is to fire up the bong so that I can have fun reading what they propose." --George Capeheart "MY PROCRASTINATION WILL ONLY BUILD YOUR DREAD, so the Apocalypse will be even worse than you originally imagined when I finally get around to it." --Pegritz, 20060606 "If you change the defaults and ignore all the warnings, you too can write insecure code! Is human stupidity a software bug?" --Paul Schmehl "'One simple job, she'll be fine!'" "She is fine! 'cept for bein' still crazy, she's the picture of health!" --Simon and Mal, _Serenity_ "Discordianism has much spiritual value. Just... don't pray anywhere near me, OK? I'd rather not be in the blast radius, if it's all the same to you." --Kalium "Tribal peoples lived in 'poverty' for millennia, not knowing that their lives lived close to nature were horrible and squalid because they didn't have iPods or golf club memberships." --Walker "If you target idiots, the only users you'll get will be idiots." --Anonymous "Sendmail was more useful as a litmus test than as an MTA." --Derkjan de Haan "Happiness lies in being privileged to work hard for long hours in doing whatever you think is worth doing." --Robert A. Heinlein "I have nightmares about Hell, where all I do is add up numbers and try to have conversations with people like you." --Bob the Skull, _Harry Dresden: Vignette_ "Ninety. And sunny. The official weather is 'suck-ass'." --Lyssa, on summer in Virginia "Whoever directed that trailer should have done the movie." --Kash, on _X-Men 3_ "Look at this! I just invented the home video recorder thirty years early." --The Doctor, _Doctor Who: The Idiot's Lantern_ "To lose is to win, and he who wins shall lose." --Proverb "Freedom to differ is not limited to things that do not matter much. That would be a mere shadow of freedom. The test of its substance is the right to differ as to things that touch the heart of the existing order." --Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson "I don't have writer's block, I have a mortgage." --Jim Butcher "The error message that you are seeing is not necessarily the true error that you are experiencing." --Anonymous programmer "You bad dog..." "Affirmative!" --Headmaster Fitch and K-9, _Doctor Who: School Reunion_ "I believe that Paulius, proprietor of the Velvet Tango Room in Cleveland, Ohio, is the fucking Willy Wonka of alcoholic beverages. That man can make a drink with a ten-second aftertaste that mutates in effervescently-pleasant ways upon the tongue. I know, for I have tasted it." --The Ferrett "There should be a lesson we can learn from the newest Doctor Who series about what happens when you deliver a British cultural icon into the hands of a gay Welshman: Namely, the show gets very gay and goes to Cardiff a lot." --Whitney Cox "Now is the time on Sprockets when I cook in a bra." --Lyssa "The missus and the ex - welcome to every man's worst nightmare." --Mickey, _Doctor Who: School Reunion_ "If you can get 90 percent of the desired effect for 10 percent of the work, use the simpler solution." --Bob Scheifler "F- is telling us that D-link has a new router... the 1.4 version of firmware doens't work, the 1.5 does, and the 1.6 doesn't. I'm, like, 'What is this, the Star Trek Principle of routers?'" --Hasufin "There are people who love you, Faith. Or who one day will. Even if you can't see them beside you, right here, right now, they're out there. But if you let the dark get into your eyes, you might never find them. So it's best to keep a little light with you, along the way." --Harry Dresden, _Restoration of Faith_ "Contractors are very much like professional dominants. You pay them and completely give up all control over the matter." --Em L. "This freakout brought to you by the letters O, M, F, and G." --Lyssa "What's wrong with a van? I once saved the universe with a big yellow truck!" --Mickey Smith, _Doctor Who: The Age of Steel_ "Sandra Bullock is fucking brilliant in that shit." --Mark Nicholas, on _Speed 2: Cruise Control_ "The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don't agree with." --Eleanor Holmes Norton "Object-oriented design is the roman numerals of computing." --Rob Pike "I'm a big believer in the no-fault divorce. 'She's a bitch, he's an asshole, get the hell away from one another and don't look back.'" --The Doctor "If one would give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I would find something in them to have him hanged." --Cardinal Richelieu (Armand Jean du Plessis) "That's a sonogram. That's not cute. That's a Giger painting." --Laurelinde "You know that 'we come in peace' business? Bite me." --Jack, _Stargate: SG-1 - New Ground_ "Any view of things that is not strange is false." --Neil Gaiman "It's not like anyone will just stand here and stare at it [a nine-screen super monitoring display] - they'll just walk up, find the number they need, and walk away." "Nah - put a good 3D screensaver on it, D-'ll stand there and watch it for hours." "Yeah, but a couple of tabs of acid in a bowl, the whole NOC'll be standing here." --S-B- and T-B- "Sometimes I get tired of being the guy who is supposed to deal with un-deal-withable situations." --Harry Dresden, _Proven Guilty_ "Hey.. our health plan has a ten dollar co-pay on amphetamines." "Excellent. That's a lower startup cost than building a meth lab. Much less risk of blowing your house up, too." "Don't tell management about this, they'll buy it for you and put it in the candy dish. 'You can work twenty hours, now! Get to it!'" --Rhianna and the Doctor "Nobody has a patent on God." --Sherri Steiger "Air goes in and out, blood goes round and round, any variation on this is a bad thing." --Dee "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." --Buckminster Fuller "You'll be amazed how well people can be anesthetized from the pain of a bad day by twenty-two minutes of situational comedy." --Chris Nakashima-Brown "As a fortean, I have no opinion." --Old t-shirt "It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts." --Sir Arthur Conan Doyle "She's dead. The last TARDIS in the universe.. extinct.." --The Doctor, _Doctor Who: Rise of the Cybermen_ "Guard your honor. Let your reputation fall where it will. And outlive the bastards." --Lois McMaster Bujold "Superman could bukkake-shotgun Lois Lane into oblivion." --The Ferrett "Rote memorization is no replacement for the Geek gene." --Sean Benson "Technologies don't emerge unless there's someone who thinks he can make a bundle by helping them emerge." --William Gibson "There's something magical about a dairy product that doesn't need refrigeration." --jeanie "The problem is that hotness is a subjective thing. Me? I like soft, traditionally feminine women, like my wife. However, my wife Gini adores Sigourney Weaver, because she likes women who look like they could bench-press a bank." --The Ferrett "Take care, don't fight, and remember: If you do not choose to lead, you will forever be led by others. Find what scares you, and do it. And you can make a difference, if you choose to do so." --J. Michael Straczynski "Thanks for letting me pet your kitty, Mr. Dresden." --The Archive, _Death Masks_ "I am the king of France!" "Yeah? Well, I'm a Lord of Time!" --Louis XV and the Doctor, _Doctor Who: The Girl In the Fireplace_ "I shoot lit-tle pix-els!" --Lyssa "Hey, look.. I found your grandmother's stash." --Bryce "Sometimes, I'm glad we share blood and not brain cells." --Jarin to Duo SNMP: Some Nimrod Made Promises "I'm going to run over and grab a paycheck." "Make sure you don't get your own. Grab one of the executive's paychecks." --T- and Hasufin "They are the enemy, D-. They are the enemy." --J-B- "I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past." --Thomas Jefferson "That's a big, flailing rubber cock, all right." --D-M- "I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid." --Theo de Raadt "I am just too tired to deal with Teh Stupid today. I don't have my tinfoil hat and their brainwaves are affecting my mind." --Lyssa "The cool kids of the future are co-opting the nerd lifestyle." --Bredmold "Do any of you guys know where your fearless leader is?" "That's a negative, Ghost Rider, pattern is full." --B-H- and D-M- "When I hear the phrase 'ex-NASA scientist' I tend to reach for my revolver." --Terrence McKenna "I quite like sacrificing small animals, and if Satan won't appreciate them, then I shall do so in the name of Bob Ross." --Anonymous "I ended up doing a show called _Squid Pro Quo_ that really got out of hand. It was not one of my proud and shining moments." --Alton Brown "'Louis! Are you happy to see me?' 'No, that's my mobile phone.'" --Louis Trapani, on 1980's cellphones "Come on.. let's burn this place down, Pookie." --J-B- "Hamsters make good drinking buddies with their itsy weenie beer mugs and blunt humor. Let's try not to eat them." --Unknown marketing team "There is something wrong with my computer. It is really slow... I mean really slow. It is like having a conversation with Keanu Reeves." --Unknown office worker "Oh my God. I'm the tin dog." --Mickey, _Doctor Who: School Reunion_ "Fuck being a broke ass magician. There is nothing inherantly powerful about being poor." --Sammaelhain "The biggest difference between a friend and everyone else around you is: A friend will still kick your ass, only they'll know when to stop." --Rick "You're ten seconds away from the most embarassing moment of your life." --Ford Fairlane "Better study your math and science kids. There's kids in China, starving for your job." --Jabber "There are men nowadays who cannot distinguish between the truth and the last thing they happen to have read." --Oscar Wilde "We had to close the door, it was Vanilla Ice time." --J-B- "Heroes without pants?? Deleted after a nun fainted." --Codeman, in the README file for FF Epica "Immolation is the sincerest form of flattery." --Timothy McClanahan "People used to think of open-heart surgery as this draconian thing. Now we have what really is a kinder, gentler open-heart surgery." --Dr. Charles Bridges, Pennsylvania Hospital cardiologist in residency "It's a kind of a weird thing, for a person my age to be the world's oldest raver." --Terrence McKenna "There is candy and porn in our house! What more do we need?" --Lyssa "At least two-thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: Idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religous or political ideas." --Aldous Huxley "Secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy... censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, 'This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,' the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him." --Robert A. Heinlein "Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." --Dr. Seuss "Never apologize for showing feeling. When you do so, you apologize for the truth." --Benjamin Disraeli "Fanfic means someone cares about what you wrote." --Theresa Nielsen Hayden "It's called science, conspiracy theorist. Do try keep up." --Eli "In this world, I simply hope for something strange. I'm only occasionally disappointed." --Hasufin "No. No junk in hand while talking. Bad mojo." --D-M- "You want weapons? We're in a library. Books! Best weapons in the world!" --The Doctor, _Doctor Who: Tooth and Claw_ "Give me your children until they are seven, and they are mine forever." --Unknown, widely attributed to the Jesuit College, on Christianity "Remember how long you've been putting this off, how many extensions the gods gave you, and you didn't use them. At some point you have to recognize what world it is that you belong to, what power rules it and from what source you spring, that there is a limit to the time assigned you, and if you don't use it to free yourself it will be gone and will never return." --Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_, 2:4 "Server go down the hoooooooooole." --Baby Plucky Duck, MCSE "Ohio!" "Ohio!" "Ohio!" "Oklahoma!" --From _Inspector Gadget_ "Joan Miro... enhancing altered states of consciousness since 1893." --the.Silicon.Dragon "Microsoft: Bringing the world to your desktop - and your desktop to the world." --Peter Gutmann "It seems intuitively obvious to me, which means that it might be wrong." --Chris Torek "Mmm... 500GB, 7200 RPM, SATA hard drives.. yum. Hard [-ware] RAID is good.." "Jesus, Bryce, do you need a room?!" "I'm going to need some time alone. Could you guys go get coffee or something?" --The Doctor and D-M- "And as we all know, blinking lights means science." --Joss Whedon "Take it with a small Siberian salt mine." --Isaac Bonewitz "Does the Cisco definition of the word 'open' mean the same as HP's (ie OpenVMS... not really open)?" --Randal Rioux, on Cisco's 'open' IDS signatures "Aaaaaannnnd we're back with _Doctor Who: Podshock_. Ken Deep alongside Louis Trapani and across the mighty Atlantic Ocean, Mr. James Norton." "All right, screw you both." --Ken Deep, _Doctor Who: Podshock #34_, on Louis and James asleep at the wheel "I'm the decider, and I decide what's best." --George W. Bush "There are two means of refuge from the misery of life - music and cats." --Albert Schweitzer "[It is] best to confuse only one issue at a time." --Brian Kernighan and David Richie "The Iraq war ... was kind of a boom for our company." --Steve Rhodes, president, Sinulate Entertainment, on teledildonics products "When I am perfect, I will make every backspace and delete key on the face of this planet disappear. Until such time, I am willing to be patient with people." --The Doctor "My theology, briefly, is that the universe was dictated but not signed." --Christopher Morley "EXTREMELY SERIOUS WARNING AND GENERAL ASS COVERING: "This is completely alpha software. It hasn't even been tested properly. "It will almost certainly destroy all your data then come round your house, empty any the bags of flour all over the kitchen, kick in your TV, scratch the screen of your iPod Nano, get jam fingerprints on your favourite limited edition 'Me First and the Gimmie Gimmies' CDs and then urinate in your laundry basket. "In fact, to paraphrase Neal Stephenson: Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, savvy as a half-blind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, emotionally resilient as a Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average nuclear submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near this module. Please dispose of it as you would any piece of high-level radioactive waste and then arrange with a qualified surgeon to amputate your arms at the elbows and gouge your eyes from their sockets." --Simon Wistow, from the documentation for Backup::Target::Gmail in the CPAN archive "It's time to go beyond the normal thing. It's time to do the super thing. It's time for DEVO. There's no question about it." --Nu-Tra, _DEVO: Nu-Tra Speaks_ "If you need any dick moods said or done, just ask Joe." --Joe "Oh, that's enigmatic. That is.. that is.. that is just text book enigmatic!" --The Doctor, _Doctor Who: New Earth_ "Yeah. Wow. That's really terrible. But you want advanced self-pity, I think that's Professor Summers across the hall." --Wolverine, _Astonishing X-Men: Torn_ "Now, my wife may think she's locked me out of the kitchen but MacGyver's not my patron saint for nothing." --Alton Brown chest trauma - noun complex - A polite way of saying "heart, lungs, and ribcage were liquified." "Ziggy isn't a cat. Ziggy is an alien intelligence." --Eli, on my cat "Sometimes it is better to enjoy the sunset than to perform spectroscopic analysis." --Richard "He who possesses art and science has religion; he who does not possess them, needs religion." --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe "It's always in the peoples' best interests to be under my iron-fisted rule." --Hasufin It is said that the Internet is a public utility. As such, it is best compared to a sewer. A big, fat pipe with a bunch of crap sloshing against your ports. "Far be it from me to suggest that any text has an inherent meaning." --Wilddragon "Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein." --H. Jackson Brown, Jr. "The difference between a shaman and a schizophrenic is that a shaman returns with control over these feelings [altered states]." --Michelle Belanger "Staying cool will only last a short time. After that, there will be wrath." --Mark Nichols "In many ways, I've always thought the early gospels resemble Jesus fanfic. You all get one character who was cool, and some canonical events, but how it proceeds after that was up to the individual writer--virtually all of the gospels were written long after the historical events, so historical reality didn't neccessarily intrude much on art. And eventually the New Testament was assembled when a bunch of people got together and read everything over and said 'Oh, hell no, Jesus/Judas is totally NOT canon!' and threw it out. They did this for a LOT of writings." --Ursula V. "We will stage history, the same way as other men stage plays." --Don Lope de Aguirre "Well, I have to say, I was looking at which component group model the bikes had and their size. On a lower end bike, I knew they would intrinsically be geared for wimps^Wpussies^Wbeginners." --the.Silicon.Dragon "Man, my monitor is awesome. PIP and PBP with component inputs and S-video. Too bad I don't have anything to hook to it." --Elwing "Excuse me, would you mind not farting while I'm saving the world?" --The Doctor, _Doctor Who: Aliens of London_ "Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently." --Rosa Luxemburg "Apostrophes don't mean 'HERE COMES AN S!'" --Eli "Issues.. issues.. issues.. I have lots of issues." "Yes. You do." --I-L- and the Doctor "Pump It Up, In the Groove, DDR, four arrows, five arrows, eight arrows, I don't care. Dance 'em all, let god sort 'em out!" --Bayani "Lying. Bribing. Google. The answers to everything." --J-B- "The real weirdness does not have to be treated with respect or as though it were fragile. True weirdness is true weirdness: You can kick the tires, honk the horn, and drive it around the block." --Terrence McKenna "X-Day is sort of like Heaven's Gate with better pills." --Reverend Ivan Stang, Church of the Subgenius "Tim Leary will be the first person to go and get computers made illegal." --Dick Price "I'm ripped to the tits on a thousand mikes of acid today, of course, because we are talking to a couple of drug fiends later on, or at least one drug fiend depending on how our phone system works." --R.U. Sirius "Can we go into porn a little bit?" --Nova "A little nonsense now and then is cherished by the wisest men." --Willy Wonka "You choose your actions, not your situation. You can't choose your destiny. You can only choose what to do with it." --Debbie, _Indefensible Positions_ "In the first place, we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person's becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American... There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag... We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language... and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people." --Theodore Roosevelt "I couldn't understand how the country that I had risked my life for could believe that it was OK to rescind its job offer to me solely because I'm transgender." --Diane Schroer (she answered her own question, unfortunately) "But... but.. look at the polygons in that ass!" --Kash "Through prayer we speak to God. In meditation, God speaks to us." --Edgar Cayce "I always try things twice in case I didn't do it right the first time." --Nova "That desk was feeling something and it wasn't love." "Tough love." "The desk must be punished." --Seele, Genetik, and the.Silicon.Dragon "Dude, it's the pen that is mightier than the sword. Not a crayon." --Gini "Realizing that you don't know everything there is to know takes nothing away from the project or the people working on it. In fact it shows you know more than the people who refuse to recognize the reality." --Geo. craft error - noun - A polite way of saying "It's 0300, I just woke up.. oh, fuck! That's the wrong window!" "This is my church. This is where I heal my hurts. For tonight, God is a DJ." --Faithless "We have become the genitals of our machines. We exist only to improve next year's model." --Marshall McLuhan "Get this, my brother got engaged." "I knew we should have told him to use a condom. Fathers with their shot guns can convince a young man to do crazy things..." --Anonymous and the.Silicon.Dragon "Assume that everyone and anyone will go through it (your luggage)." --Lady Midori, on travelling with sex toys "You may all hammer on the server with complete abandon once again." --Anonymous engineer "Sincerity itself is bullshit." --Harry G. Frankfurt "If you legally acquire music, you need to have the right to manage it on all other devices that you own." --Steve Jobs, 2002 "Stage two! We have flatus containment! AAHHH-OOOO-GAAAHHHH!!! AAA-OOOOOOOOOOOOO-GAAAAHHH!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAA-OOOOOOOOOOOOOO-GHAAAAAA!" --Adam Savage, _Mythbusters_ "Feral Boy, don't put that in your mouth! It was moving two minutes ago!" --Four Legs, _The Tick_ "I don't listen to cables; I listen to music." --Eli "If you need a lawyer to tell you what you can and can't do with it, it's not free." --Ben Goren, on EULAs "The problem with most people's wiggy experiences is that it never gets down to the nitty-gritty." --Terrence McKenna "Remember - the *single* most dangerous thing to the average Cisco router isn't a hacker with a 0-day IOS sploit - it's the 'banana eater with enable'." --Valdis Kletnieks, on clueless NOC monkeys messing with stuff at 0-dark-30 "If nothing else it was a great rehearsal." --Bob O'Connor, mayor of Pittsburgh, PA, on the city's response to the "pigeon sniper" on 20060323 "I'll tell you what. If there is ever a security problem (again :) in OpenSSH we will disclose it exactly like we want, and in no other way, and quite frankly since noone has ever paid a cent for it's development they have nothing they can say about it. "Dear non-paying user -- please remember your place." --Theo de Raadt "Hmm... _1959_ (by the Sisters of Mercy) is not cheering me. Whodathunkit." --Lyssa "You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club." --Jack London "To a bureaucracy, the file cards ARE reality." --V, _V For Vendetta_ "A belt only covers two inches of your butt, the rest you have to back up on your own." --Royce Gracie 'Fundamentalism' isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority. "At times like this, I take a deep breath and ask myself, 'What would Doctor Gonzo do?' and then I don't do what Doctor Gonzo would do." --Chris "Genghis Khan and all his hordes couldn't break through that door. And believe me, they've tried." --The Doctor, _Doctor Who: Rose_ "Ferret-shui. Ooh, look! The shiny! The shiny!" --Mika "Doing business with the government is like fucking sheep. It's easy but it's not very satisfying." --Anonymous "There is no grammar on a bbs, anymore than there are rules in a knife fight." --Loaner "It's a toaster! I should be able to turn it on and make bread!" --D-M- (ranting about a malfunctioning network appliance) "A distributed system is one in which the failure of a computer you didn't even know existed can render your own computer unusable." --Leslie Lamport "[People who play RPGs are] depressed gamers who like to sit alone in their dark rooms and play slow games." --Yamauchi Hiroshi, 1999, after leaving Nintendo "Woman inspires us to great things, and prevents us from achieving them." --Dumas "Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You didn't place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible." --Jamie Raskin, testifying 1 March 2006 before the Maryland Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee's hearing on a gay marriage amendment "Nothing replaces the human brain and the ability to RTFM." --Devdas Bhagat "Oooh, look! It's a bagel!" --Kyrin, upon meeting Mabel "Can I get a w00t-w00t?" "No." --D-M- and J-B- "Quit damaging our solidarity as atheists." "There is no such thing as atheist solidarity. That would make us a group." "Dude, when you talk like this, it makes me think of black-clad beat poets hanging out in coffee shops saying things like 'it's so trendy to be in "groups"'." --the.Silicon.Dragon and Lowmagnet "I bet #5 wouldn't even be able to repair himself in _Short Circuit 2_ if it was filmed today." --Eli, on Radio Shack "Do not adjust your mind - it is reality that is malfunctioning." --Robert Anton Wilson "When you say to me, 'I gotta take a vacation because banging a hot chick weekly is just too much to bear,' you get zero sympathy from me. Cruel, but that's just the way it is." --The Ferrett "We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough consensus and running code." --Dave Clark "This is not silly. This is a morality tale about the evils of sake." --Simon Tam, _Firefly: Objects In Space_ "Silly organic people! Don't they know that unless they glow in the dark in the future, they won't survive?" --Lyssa "It's a meat cookie!" --Lilly "Your twist-ties are slipping, fucker." --Mika "This is yokai raver bling." --Solo "Just tell me when you want that attunement." "Just let me find my pants." --Jarin and Solo "Ecstasy is in the skull, not the setting-up exercises." --Robert A. Heinlein "Doo-doo-DOO-doo. We're sorry, the number you have dialed does not accept anonymous calls, so fuck off." --Anonymous telecom engineer's dream IVR recording "Ding. Kitty done." --Lyssa, because I keep the heater in my car turned up "I think there is a clear correlation between the introduction of significant quantities of ketchup into the environment and global warming." --the.Silicon.Dragon "We invest in companies. We buy companies. We probably control seventeen or eighteen European country- companies." --Frank Carlucci, in an interview with News World "We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law." --Edward R. Murrow "I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don't teach you how to walk away from someone you don't love any longer. They don't teach you how to know what's going on in someone else's mind. They don't teach you what to say to someone who's dying. They don't teach you anything worth knowing." --Neil Gaiman "USA! Vote yourself fitter!" --Andrew Eldritch, on stage in Washington, DC, 20060307 "What we do not understand we do not possess." --Goethe "Time for more telephone system trivia!" --G-D- "It's 4am... do you know where your reference is pointing?" --the.Silicon.Dragon "The most dangerous candy you can hand out is candy that makes people reconsider the rules of the game." --Terrence McKenna "...well fuck me and marry me young." "D-, take care of that." "NO!" --The Doctor (in shock), J-M-, and D-M- "Hey! If it isn't Frankenmullet!" --Bartender, _The Venture Brothers_ "Wanna hear what Entertainment Weekly says are the worst twenty-five sequels ever?" "Sure. Read 'em off. But if they don't list Highlander II, I'm blogging my protest immediately." --Gini and Ferrett "My religion requires me to carry a .50 cal Desert Eagle around and smoke pot constantly." --Lowmagnet "Merge from HEAD and may God have mercy on this commit." --Anonymous CVS commit log "In my opinion, put a cute girl in anything and it's a fetish." --Nova "There are ten or twenty basic truths, and life is the process of discovering them over and over and over. --David Nichols "Anti-triangles don't exist in 2d space." "In fact Montana has a law against it." "It's their second biggest problem, aside from crystal meth." --Eli and Brian "They [cubicles] really do come up like mushrooms. And not the fun ones, either." --The Doctor "It's okay to leave them to die." --Simon Tam, _Serenity_ "Hey, you! Die in a fire! Carry on..." --D-M- "It is very rare that science gets involved in High Strangeness." --Hilly Rose "I work in Academia so a lot of my time is spent keeping your sons and daughters from doing stupid things on the nice brand new computers you bought them for graduation/birthday/Christmas." --Scott Fendley "Hey, hate da' gang, not da' playa'." "Bryce, there's something funny about you saying that." --The Doctor and D-M- "What in the world is that? Did you start an air conditioner?" "No, that's my CD-ROM drive." --J-B- and the Doctor "Security requires vigilance, get over it." --Matthew Schiros "If the people were to ever find out what we have done, we would be chased down the streets and lynched." --George H.W. Bush, Sarah McClendon Newsletter, June 1992 issue "Cosplay - it's all fun and games until some freak gets hold of a sewing machine." --Dogemperor "What is done to children, they will do to society." --Unknown "One think I like about OS X - if I'm sitting at my keyboard, tapping the shift key to the beat of some song, MacOSX doesn't ask if I'm crippled." --Lowmagnet "We cannot wait until an attack happens." --Alberto Gonzalez, US Attorney General "Great. I wanted to make something as lethal as an A-bomb, and instead I'm brewing ultraviolet beer." --Paul Boutin "All vulnerabilities deserve a public fear period prior to patches becoming available." --Jason Coombs "Kssshhht! Houston? Kssshhht! What the fuck?" --Duo "Bitch, go back to sleep. They're a phone company, not 7-11. They're going to go down sometime." --J-M-, to the Mighty Nerds "This box is so badly fucked you'd think it was a body double in a gangbang flick." --The Doctor, on a catastrophic system failure "I'm awake. I'm dressed. I'm here. I'm wearing shoes. If you want anything else, you're going to have to sacrifice something to me." --The Doctor "I don't want their respect, I want their obedience." --Dr. Thomas W. Shinder, M.D. "Release the pigeons! RELEASE THE PIGEONS!" --T-B- "I think we live in a self-perfecting system, and we just don't know it. Everything is fine. It's working perfectly; just let it correct itself and do what you can to help it correct itself when you become aware of it." --Grant Morrison "No jokes about moldovite suppositories!" --Terrence McKenna "Half their science may seem like guff, but it works a lot better for being so." --Greyjan the Sane, _Doctor Who: The Ancestor Cell_ "Blessed are the merciless, for they will know of mercy, and will rightly reject it for the soft, liberal, demonic ploy that it is." --Miz Liz "I support the free press, let's just get them out of the room." --George W. Bush, 11 February 2006 "To understand the process we need to have done it many times. If you cannot write the process down on paper you probably dont understand it completely." --Roelof Temmingh "I am the crisis nazi! No crisis for you!" --D-M- "Me, I'm still in line for that DNI. Give me an OC-3, direct to my brainstem." "You mean _Johnny Mnemonic_-style?" "Yeah." "Aah.. porn." "..active or passive?" "Depends on how you feel that day." --The Doctor and J-, on the future "We had to abandon the naievete' of alchemy to achieve its goals, which were mastery of space and time, control of human longevity and health, and psychological well-being." --Terrence McKenna "Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life, to mind your own business and to work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody." --I Thessalonians, 4:11-12 "I gave in my opening statement similar examples where President Washington, President Lincoln, President Wilson, President Roosevelt have all authorized electronic surveillance on a far greater scale without any probable cause." --Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez "What I really need is a ring shaped like the human buttocks." --Art Bell "Life is 10 percent what you make it and 90 percent how you take it." --Irving Berlin "With great slacking, comes great responsibility. Slack well, slack hard." --The Most High Lama "A state of war is not a rubber stamp for the executive branch to do whatever it pleases." --Sandra Day O'Connor "I maintain that Sephiroth was, in fact, once desktop support for Shin-Ra Electric. This explains much." --The Doctor, on _Final Fantasy VII_ "I bent reality to my will. I made the doctor's office accept my insurance. That is more power, even, than making God give me bacon." --Lyssa Heartson "Wy not use the best you can get/steal when you're a criminal?" --T.Dudek "You, Bladeless, and Aleris all look alike. You're all the same pod-people." --Lyssa "For good people to do evil things, it takes religion." --Stephen Weinberg "Organic food is okay, and drugs are better!" --Lyssa "Way to not suck." --Grant "I think a broken wang means it's time to go home." --Lyssa "The 80's are cool for the next few minutes, okay? I read it in a fucking magazine. I'm happy looking like Annie Lennox.." --Jolly Roger, _The Invisibles_ "These goggles look kind of like a bra." --Kash "I love a good parody. That's not a good parody." --The Doctor, on the Firefly parody _Mosquito_ "Psychic, though? That's something out of science fiction." "You live in a spaceship, dear." --Wash and Zoe, _Firefly_ "If you're not the hero in your novel, you need to do some heavy editing." --Terrence McKenna The FOX Television Network: Ruining interesting, intelligent, and well written television shows since 1995. "I stand erected. " --Ken Deep Jacquin's Postulate on Democratic Government: No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session. "Happy Groundhog's Day everyone.. all I have to say is if that rat-bastard forecasted more snow, I'm going to drive Punxsutawney and run his furry ass over with my Cavalier." --Fern Dragonstar "I don't need that! I can alter my state of consciousness without having someone step on my testicles!" --Dave "The man (George W. Bush) claims to want to lead the nation and the world in technological advances and education, yet cannot even pronounce the word 'nuclear'." --E. Bryan Rumph "Now to ask the eternal question: 'What the hell happened here?'" --The Doctor "Time makes fools of prophets." --Sean David Morton "The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them." --Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story of the John Marshall Court "Rain. Nature's way of washing away the blood." --Eli "Yes, my friends. There are idiots among us." --Wicasta Lovelace "Cry outage and let slip the dogs of blame!" --Lani "How does a busty chick busting out of her shirt symbolise JAPAN WEEK?" "The image is the first result of a Google Images search for search for sakura. If Google associates this chick busting out of her shirt with Japanese festivities, so do we." --from the #silence website "You don't like your job, you don't strike. You just go in everyday and do it really half-assed. That's the American way!" --Homer Simpson "Don't risk more than you can afford to walk away without." --Rule of Life #39 "VirtualPC eats CPUs for breakfast." --Eli "Granddad, you can't serve that! That food will cause... death!" --Huey, _The Boondocks_ "I can't get up! I'm paralysed with stickiness!" --Duo "I'll just take it in the face. If I duck it'll hit me in the ass." --Hasufin "We've done the impossible, and that makes us mighty." --Joss Whedon "I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's 'great' coffee. It's a caffeine transfer system. After a few sips, it's all academic, anyway." --The Doctor, on office coffee "You can get lost in a search for truth and gut the wonder out of the world." --Lyssa Heartsong "Try to do things that would make your friends say 'wow'." --Paul Graham "[T]he people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country." --Hermann Goering, Hitler's Reich-Marshall at the Nuremberg Trials "I personally believe that Theo's [de Raadt] forthrightness is why the OpenBSD cargo cult has so many tin foil hat wearing fan boys (and of course, many serious security people such as yourself)." --Andrew van der Stock "Be not anxious about what you have, but about what you are." --Pope St. Gregory I "I don't see the benefit of gettin' invoved in strangers' troubles without an up front price negotiated." "They're whores." "I'm in." --Jayne and Mal, _Firefly: Heart of Gold_ "Folks, I don't know about you, but 'freshness' is the last thing I associate with porn star-caliber ejaculation." --Chaobell "Money-B, I love your new office, but the feng shui in here is completely fucked up." --Pegritz "Sorry, we are going to change nothing. Securelevels are useless." --Theo de Raadt, head of the OpenBSD team, on security advisory rt-sa-2005-15 (*BSD security level circumvention) "Love means never having to say that you're out of ammunition." --Chris Case "Junk mail AND bills! Bonus!" --Kash "Is 'RTFM' an option?" --Thomas Anders "A block of code, sufficiently well-written, is indistiguishable from magick." --ByteGuerrilla "I, for one, welcome the pants-shitting madness our Great Old One overlords." --Pegritz "No, no, no.. you want the odd-numbered Messiah!" --The Doctor "Get a life, not a lifestyle." --Hakeem Bey "HOST-RESOURCES-MIB::hrDeviceDescr.769 = An electronic chip that makes the computer work." --from the output of an SNMP MIB walk of a Netrake SE "If I list a directory, my CPU pegs." "Put down the octopus." --the.Silicon.Dragon and Genetik "I am 7.7 megapixels behind state-of-the-zomgjustreleased." --Lowmagnet "Aww, sweet. Look at these two. How come I never get any of that?" "Buy me a drink first." "Such hard work." "But worth it." --Captain Jack and the Doctor, _Doctor Who: Boomtown_ "And don't let anybody make you think that God chose America as his divine, messianic force to be, a sort of policeman for the whole world. God has a way of standing before the nations with judgment. And it seems that I can hear God saying to America, 'you're too arrogant'. And if you don't change your ways, I will rise up and break the backbone of your power and place it in the hands of a nation that doesn't even know my name. Be still, and know that I'm God." --Martin Luther King, Jr. "Stop yiffing the Steve Jobs plushie." --Eli "MOO nerds need cyber too you know." --Daniel Peterkin "The plural of anecdote is not data. Your individual experience does not indicate that this study is flawed." --Sean of Slashdot "It is a well known psychologic fact that the people who become offended the easiest, have the lowest self-esteem. They are 'hurt' by those things that are conceived of as threats to their ego." --Maxwell Maltz "Pat Robertson is a punishment from God." --Nancy Leibowitz "Alien Skin: Making design-incompetent, warezed Photoshop users think they have skillz since 1994." --the.Silicon.Dragon "I would never condescend to worship, or even acknowledge, a god who doesn't understand the basics of land speculation." --Pegritz "It's the BBC Relationship Conspiracy: You're dating the Doctor and I'm dating Lister." --Rhianna "Of course magick works: I scream in panic and the universe does what I want because it's sick of hearing me." --Lyssa "This hand.. is a fightin' hand!" --The Doctor, _Doctor Who: The Christmas Invasion_ "If only the bad guys had the tools then the good guys would be left guessing on how this stuff works." --Marcus Sachs, on Metasploit "Hey, Eris? You can't step up to a plastic tube." --The Doctor, to one of his bettas during a partial water change "So what exactly is the energy he's putting into that drink going to do?" "Probably nothing. At most it'll give you a second heart." --Hummingwolf and Jarin "What does the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God." --Micah 6:8 "I'm not 'uncomfortable' with the way Jesus is being tossed around -- I'm angry about it. I'd go well beyond discomfort. I think the religious right is making Jesus into some kind of Old Testament wrathful prophet who is judgmental, divisive, and opposed to any notion of liberalism, whereas the teachings of Jesus tell quite a different story. He was tolerant. He was forgiving. He preached love, not hate. In many ways, the literal reading of the teachings of Jesus in the gospels, particularly not filtered through the later apostles in the New Testament, but the literal teachings of Jesus as portrayed in the gospels, are almost totally at odds with the teachings of the present-day religious right." --Gary Hart, former US Senator "Jesus Christ, it's all depressing roller rink songs on 80's night!" "I'm half-tempted to put on my Sisters of Mercy video collection just to cheer things up a little bit around here." --Lyssa and the Doctor, on the depressing 80's music on Music Choice, New Year's Day "I'm feelin' kinda fragile.." --Most everyone at my New Year's 2006 party the next morning "Bryce? Are you going to puke because I said some guy looked like he was covered in a chick's beaver?" "..yep." "You wuss." --Lyssa and the Doctor (both falling-down drunk) "So how does it feel to be violated by a water wang?" --Jarin "To quote a well-known gunman, I'll be in my bunk." --Half of my New Year's 2006 party after watching Lauren dance "Hon, you can't match that. It's a woman-bond thing." "Well please include me in that as much as you can." --Lyssa and Grant "I look like I should be on a goddamn shadowrun with this rig. All I need's a couple of guns and a sword. Or my crowbar." --Kyrin, in a kilt with his laptop "A man can live until Judgement Day on packaged food if he's got enough rosemary." --Shepherd Book, _Firefly_ "Duo's figurative wang is much bigger than mine." --Kyrin "Dear Buddha, please bring me a pony and a little plastic rocket." --Mal Renolds, _Serenity_ "Humanity should not be deprived of their freedom to communicate just because of how a very small number of people might abuse that freedom." --Freenet FAQ at http://freenet.sf.net/ "My Amazon suggestion list looks crazy after I buy stuff from your wishlist, Bryce." --Lyssa "To quote Jayne, I'll be in my bunk." --Kyrin "Lock and load. We're going in." --Jesus, _South Park Christmas Special 2005_ "Dude, we're a phone company - we can make a line ring in two different places." --T- "We'll do it at a time that maximises the chance of craft error." --J-J- "Software development is like juggling stars in the sky. Everything has so many tradeoffs." --Silicon Rose "You say toMAto, I say toMAHto. You say C'thul'hu, I say calamari." --Kyrin "I always figured you, Bryce, for the Tom Baker-Doctor. Watching you try to navigate just confirms that." "Bryce can navigate?" "There is power in names, unfortunately..." --Kyrin and Lyssa "I am doing what you expect me to do, and at the same time, safeguarding the civil liberties of the country." --George W. Bush, on the secret monitoring of private US citizens by the National Security Agency, 20 December 2005 "I AM THE KING IN YELLOW. But only pale yellows." --Pegritz "Oh, God. Oh, no, please, don't drink that. I'll give you a dollar. Just don't drink that. Go buy yourself a cup of coffee." --J-M-, upon beholding a French press full of melange Clarke's Conclusion: Never let your sense of morals interfere with doing the right thing. "It is time to have some checks and balances in this country. We are more American for doing that." --Senator Patrick Leahy, on the USA PATRIOT Act "You are defined by your most vocal fruitcakes, always remember that, no matter what group you're in." --Lyssa Heartsong "People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid." --Soren Kierkegaard "My children, you should know something: I'm packing." --Jesus, _South Park Christmas Special 2005_ "You're complaining about security, and yet you don't have SSH installed, we have to telnet in as 'root', and you gave us the root password. Sorry, bro, but you get no sympathy from me." --The Doctor "A competent and self-confident person is incapable of jealousy in anything. Jealousy is invariably a symptom of neurotic insecurity." --Robert A. Heinlein "The conservative viewpoint has traditionally been, 'The minority viewpoints should shut the hell up,' which is bad. But the liberal viewpoint has always been, 'The majority viewpoint should shut the hell up'.. And it's not much better." --The Ferrett "Regardless thanks for the catch, feel free to flame me, call me a douchebag, throw insults my way, curse my mother in mandarin (bonus points for farsi), or what ever else you see fit." --Andre Ludwig "[U]nconstitutional behavior by the authorities is constrained only by the peoples' willingness to contest them." --John Perry Barlow "Semper monemus sed non audiunt, ergo LARTus." ("We always warn them, but they never listen, so we LART them.") "I wish sometimes that I had another medium than words, those pale and empty sounds and symbols. I would like to tell a tale in acid, in poison, in vitriol, in fire and brimstone, a tale that would scar and singe and scorch and curl up the pages as you read them." --Douglas Reed "The Java hyper-enthusiasts have left the building." --J-J- "Lauren is the deity of butt-waggle." --Duo "I don't care how desperate an elf might be, no elf is going to catch for a dwarf!" --Kyrin, on _Lord of the Rings_ slashfic "Feed the twins quickly. The life you say may be your own." --Hasufin "There can be no redemption... and there should be no mercy." --Los Angeles District Attorney's office, on Stanley Williams "There's a full box of ammo, two shinai, a Sun system full of hacking software, and three elves in my car. Goddamn, this is a fucking Shadowrun game." --The Wrong Hands (badly paraphrased by Kyrin) "Who cares what word made it into an American dictionary - we speak English." --Mark, on 'podcast' being added to the New Oxford American Dictionary (Mark is from Australia) "What did you and Loan do last night?" "It involved Newtonian mechanics, fluid dynamics, and cellular respiration. It was an act that is one of the principle characteristics which describes life. And when it was finished, we both felt extremely satisfied and very sleepy. Put simply... we ate dinner." --Seele and the.Silicon.Dragon True megalomaniacs don't kill their duped or annoying assistants before the final battle just in case something goes wrong, and an extra set of hands or piece of living body armour is required. You never know. "I take whatever J- says with a grain of WTF." --Lowmagnet "Why yes, I do speak fluent Navajo." --The Doctor, on configuring telephony switches "The password is blah-blah-blah, blah, blah, blah-blah. Because '12345' belongs on luggage." --The Doctor (as if I'm going to put a password in a .plan file!) "You've got a Charlie Brown Christmas tree." --Lyssa "I don't know about powerful, but it sure is flashy." --Reno, _Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children_ "Now, the ol' trial-n'-error method can be useful--and sometimes fun--but... when you're trying to build precise atomic constructions like mosified fullerenes to encapsulate individual bioreactive molecules for distribution to cancer cells, that trial-n'-error approach ain't gonna get yo ass nowhere." --Pegritz, on non-nanotech chemical synthesis research "The moral of the story is, if you don't know what it does, don't fuck with it. Mmmm'kay?" --J-J- "No adult has time for aesthetic 'difficulty' or 'self-consciousness.' Life is too short. Frankly, we'd much rather be watching _The Incredibles_." --Tom Shone, on _Watchmen_ "This is a different kind of enemy. This is a different kind of war. And in that war, we use all manner of national power to fight that enemy." --Sean McCormack, spokesman for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, when asked straight out about the secret prisons in Eastern Europe "You can always turn the television off and, of course, block the channels you don't want, but why should you have to?" --Kevin Martin, chairman, Federal Communications Commission "The current working directory is in the path. Madness." --The Doctor "I'll show you how to monitor $PRODUCT most effectively. Tea leaves.. distance viewing.. whatever works for you." --Anonymous vendor's trainer "Why would we care about customers' phones?" --Anonymous Covad sysadmin "Hello, Mr. Java Exception! Funny seeing you here as Catalina pukes all over itself.." --The Doctor "That's a polite way of saying 'crappy'." --Anonymous vendor's sales rep "Anybody with /that/ intimate an interest in the tenderer portions of my anatomy isn't alien enough for my taste, thank you!" --Terrence McKenna "So how are you going to put that desk back together?" "Don't tell me you've got a sonic screwdriver in that belt of yours." "Big deal. When you get a real, working sonic screwdriver, then we'll talk." --Kyrin and the Doctor, moving office furniture "5.6k?! How do they manage that??" "It's all about magic smoke inside and shit." --Anonymous telecom engineers discussing G.723 "So, let's move right along to the 'calling tech support' module..." --Anonymous Covad engineer "On the east coast, DDR is a way of life." --The Doctor "You guys are professional telco engineers and you can't dial a ten digit number?! I don't know..." --Anonymous instructor "It's like, 'blah blah blahblablahblah blah." No. Hoc-key. Puck." --J-J- "Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?" --Thomas Hesse, president, Sony BMG Global Digital Business "Oh, Jesus. One house. Four kinky magickians. I hope they're insured." --Lyssa "I still call myself Catholic, one of many reasons, because I take comfort in ritual. Doctrine can kiss my sodomite ass half the time." --The Lost Boys "Loyalty to petrified opinion never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul." --Mark Twain "As the Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Musselmen; and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries." --The Treaty of Tripoli "If Mercury is in retrograde, Coyote must be sober. And Coyote sober is bad." --Solo "Traveler, if there is no path to your goal, make your own path, step by step." --Oracle, _Sparakus and the Sun Beneath the Sea_ "In a beautifully architected building, nothing prevents people from saying stupid things within its hallways." --J- "The Revolution will not support high-definition televisions." --Lowmagnet "You have this habit of looming over my shoulder to read my screen! I hate that! One of these days I'm going to forget and hit you!" "I'm a sysadmin - it's what I do. It's how I look to see if anyone's surfing for porn." "That's horrible! That's like looking at my panties!" "I do that, too." --Lyssa and the Doctor, on his habit of looking at other people's screens "When they took the 4th Amendment, I was quiet because I didn't deal drugs. When they took the 6th Amendment, I was quiet because I am innocent. When they took the 2nd Amendment, I was quiet because I don't own a gun. Now they have taken the 1st Amendment, and I can only be quiet." --Myhr Lyle "So, how's life treating you?" "Like Timmy [from South Park] in a mosh pit." --F- and The Doctor "I can recall with pain when crude oil was at $10 a barrel and consumers were very happy because gasoline was at less than $1 a gallon." --Lee R. Raymond, CEO and Chairman of Exxon "When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist. " --Dom Helder Camara, Archbishop of Recife, Brazil "Realistically, avian influenza is not a threat to people, but everywhere you go, it has turned into a circus." --Dr. Gary Butcher, Ph.D, specialist in avian virology "It tried to simulate reality and succeeded, which resulted in a show that begged the indulgence of viewers and asked them to think rationally and intelligently about things that transcend television. That's risky business for TV any time, and especially primetime." --Barry Garron, on the presidential debate episode of _The West Wing_ "I got fed up with the configurability of Enlightenment. I didn't want to learn Enochian just to write a theme." --The Doctor, on why he stopped using Enlightenment as his window manager "Humor is a survival mechanism of the human race. We simply do not have the mental facilities to cope with such massive tragedies. Thus we joke about them to lessen the blow and cope with them." --the.Silicon.Dragon "These functions don't give you super special powers. It's like programming to the external APIs, but now with more suck." --Anonymous kernel developer "Only asshats Bogart life." --Coyote "I have a present for you! Here's a hint: It's in my diaper and it's not a toaster!" --Stewie, _Family Guy_ "I'm not interested in your money! I'm searching for a way to understand our world!" --Max Cohen, _pi_ That which does not kill me will be dead when I'm through with it. "Philosophy will clip an angel's wings." --John Keats "Hash functions are the workhorse of cryptography; they're sprinkled all over security protocols. They're used all the time, in all sorts of weird ways, for all sorts of weird purposes. We cryptographers think of them as good hygiene, kind of like condoms." --Bruce Schneier "Wait, FreeBSD is still under development? I thought that project became rebranded as 'Mac OS X'." --the.Silicon.Dragon "The state of Alaska has been waiting a long time to let the United States of America, which they're part of, share in their abundance of oil." --Pete Domenici, senator of New Mexico "When we see men of a contrary character, we should turn inwards and examine ourselves." --Confucius "corned beef hash == human cat food (wet)" --Lyssa "[Betta gill] flaring is the fishie equivelent of shouting 'KHAAAAANNNN!!!!!!!'" --Allison "Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia." --Charles M. Schultz "Are you drinking office coffee?" "Yeah, I am. What's wrong with it?" "You're drinking office coffee! No wonder you're so fucking pale. It makes you sick, man." --J- and The Doctor "If you piss off enough people to where a form letter is necessary, that's a pretty good hint you may need to reevaluate some of your ideas." --Quinctia "Remember kids, its all fun and games until somebody gets sued into a smoking hole." --Steve "Anytime you hear a story from both an executive and an engineer, the engineering version will be closer to reality, for the engineer is not paid to say nice things like that." --Jim Brain "I can feel the pimp flowing through me...." --A- "If your faith can be challenged by a child in a Batman costume who is standing at your door asking for candy, you are, indeed, a sick and twisted individual and you have no Faith." --Wicasta Lovelace "The phoenix hope, can wing her way through the desert skies, and still defying fortune's spite; revive from ashes and rise." --Miguel de Cervantes "Quack! Quack, damn you!" --Jamie Hyneman, _Mythbusters_ "The first time I ran into you, I was at a truck stop practising Elvish t'ai chi." "....what?!" --Jarin and Rialian, Samhain 2005 "Fuck this organic crap. Give me all the chemicals you have." --Lyssa Bettas are little fish with big, pretty fins that think they're bull sharks. "Nobody consulted me on this Universe thing. I didn't get the memo. Therefore, I could not file a TPS report." --Lyssa "It is often easier to not do something dumb than it is to do something smart." --Marcus Ranum "Nobody was ever or talks to the serf who got 86'ed for poaching a rabbit or Hitler." --Suebrd, on New Age reincarnation "Empowerment comes from being marketed to." --Lara "We're not fucking turning undead here, people, holding up the holy symbol and shouting, 'The power of Christ compels you to keep pounding me up the ass!'" --Ferrett, on the AD&D Sex net.book "Those M&Ms are $2.99? They were in the $1.89 rack. I don't want 'em." --Random lady at CVS wearing Armani "Using a package manager that resolves dependencies for you with Slackware is like singing 'Kumbaya' at a meeting of the American Atheists." --Joe Barr, reviewing Slackware Linux v10.2 "I hope nobody is logging. If Microsoft got a hold of this, it'd be a marketing campaign in no time." --the.Silicon.Dragon "What kind of deal with the devil do you have to sign to NOT have Gator marked as spyware?!" --Dave Bush, on Microsoft's anti-spyware utility (which has most of the worst offenders marked to 'ignore') "Seeya, Kyrin!" "Hail, Satan!" --Jarin (to the Toxic Elf) "We must remember the First Amendment, which protects any shrill jackass, no matter how self-seeking." --F.G. Withington "It was always giving me trouble. I remember shortly after I got it, it would not read 'Strange Haircuts, Cardboard Guitars, and Computer Samples'. For this I cursed it." --the.Silicon.Dragon, on a failed DVD-ROM drive in his laptop "Junior network administrator in charge of printing, hi-HOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!" --T- "Ah, but a man's grasp should exceed his reach, or what's a heaven for?" --Robert Browning, _Andrea del Sarto_ "No, 'eureka' is Greek for 'This bath is too hot.'" --My namesake "It'll take some real magic to fix that." "Are we talking bell and book and candle or graveyard soil and glue and goetia here?" --J- and the Doctor, on a particularly flaky piece of software "Ask Superman for help." --Advice seen on the pen-test mailing list "Umm... was he speaking Tuatha?" --Duo "I've been unable to crack this AP!" "Shit happens." --from the documentation for Aircrack "A lot of vanilla people just use Halloween as an excuse to dress like us." --Erzulie "Robin, we wanted this. We wanted to be special and important and cool and look! Here we are. So what can we do but lie in the beds we made." --King Mob, _The Invisibles_ Being of another species does not automatically make you better than anyone else. It also does not prevent you from being an asshole. Science may someday discover what faith has always known. "The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also." --Mark Twain "Stop wasting your time wrapping more band-aids around flaws! Start attacking the real problem and solve that! Stop buying into the security buzz spun by security vendors promising the all-curing pixie dust, and understand and correct the core root causes of the problem yourself!" --Frank Knobbe "While IDS is 'dead', IPS is a eunuch." --Byte Jump, on the IDS-vs-IPS dead horse flogging "Get your fat API out of the way and let me at the iron!" --John Carmack "You have rights to it! Go forth.. make shit happen." --T- "God hates me! He took away my gin! He makes me sleepy! I'm going to get naked..." --Lyssa "Why did you leave your last job?" "Excuse me?" "Quick, answer the question!" "Well..." "Don't tell me. Tell the plant." --Austin James and Michelle Castle, _Probe_ "The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries." --James Madison "I'm going to give it four flaming Rassilon warrior robots out of five." "Wait a minute! We don't have a sound effect for that!" --Ken and James of Doctor Who: Podshock, reviewing _The Terror of Fang Rock_ "Briefly, there is a difference between 'thinking outside the box' and 'talking out the ass'." --Moraelin "I don't know the secret to success, but the secret to failure is trying to please everybody." --Bill Cosby "If A equals success, then the formula is A=X+Y+Z. X is work. Y is play. Z is 'keep your mouth shut'." --Albert Einstein "Writing about music is like dancing about architecture." --Frank Zappa "Magic is the domain of the misfit." --Nagasiva Yronwode "Remember: It ain't juarez when the author says it's okay." --Digital Avatar "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." --Abraham Lincoln Don't believe your own marketing screed. Man cannot live by chiptunes alone. Just because you throw a few Egyptian/Celtic/Mesoamerican symbols into a ritual does NOT mean that you can claim that the ritual itself comes from that time period and people. "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." --Aristotle "We're like the Lay's Potato Chips of commentary!" --Michael Hickerson "There's a romantic part of me that kind of misses the Indiana Jones school of finding the OTO." --Keith418 "Trust me." --Vice-President Dick Cheney "Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians." --Pat Robertson, 1992 GOP Convention "Naked people are their own reward." --Penn Jillette "You don't want to be a goth.... You'll be in the basement telling your friends that your parents don't understand you, and they'll say, 'Speaking of your parents, can I have your father's autograph?'" --Neil Gaiman "Reality is an illusion albeit a persistant one." --Albert Einstein "The easiest way to gain control of the population is to carry out acts of terror. The public will clamor for such laws if the personal security is threatened." --Josef Stalin "You should work until the day you die." --Aaron C. Donahue "We are living in dangerously weird times now. Smart people just shrug and admit they're dazed and confused. The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we knew it. Doom is the operative ethic." --Hunter S. Thompson "Forced worship stinks in God's nostrils." --Roger Williams, banished from Massachusetts by the Puritans in 1670 because he denied the clergy authority over his conscience "Intellect annuls Fate. So far as a man thinks, he is free." --Ralph Waldo Emerson "Nothing is more deadly than a person who is too enraged for expletives - who cleanly and quietly picks up a gun and starts shooting." --Frans de Waal, professor of primate behaviour, Emory University "I must admit, if the Struts project is consistent on anything, it's consistent on failing silently. I guess it helps to always assume there's a subtle fuck-up somewhere instead of having to wonder." --the.Silicon.Dragon "Stupidity and greed are fairly predictable for a period of time." --John Titor "That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history." --Aldous Huxley "Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world." --Schopenhauer "I'm asking you to be lenient as possible. Consider not only the verdict but also the positive things I've done in my life." --Dennis Kozlowski, former executive of Tyco, who got 8.5-25 years in prison on 2005/09/19 for looting the company of $600 million "I never thought I'd be in this position. I hold myself to a high standard of integrity and honesty." --Mark Swartz, former executive of Tyco, who got 8.5-25 years in prison on 2005/09/19 for looting the company of $600 million "I warped reality to bring me bacon. THAT is power." --Lyssa I went to a VNV Nation concert once. Great song. "Lucre [money] is the false Quintessence [fifth alchemical element] of this illusory world that we live in. It can be converted into anything and anything can be converted into it." --Anonymous "I have balls like atom bombs, two of them, 100 megatons each. Nobody fucks with me." --Bikram Choudhury "FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCKKKKKK!" --Dane McGowan, _The Invisibles_ "This would be a public health benefit, even though the exposed children may experience an adverse effect." --Dr. Alan Lockwood, on the EPA's new guidelines on human testing that make it open season on children "When we do something, please don't take it personally. We like you. Your contributions to Microsoft have been immense. It's not you we are after, it is Google." --Steve Ballmer to Dr. Kai-Fu Lee (allegedly) "Why don't you finish the job and make the Daleks extinct? Rid the universe of your filth! Why don't you just die?!!" "YOU WOULD MAKE A GOOD DALEK." --The Doctor and the Last Dalek, _Doctor Who: Dalek_ "One owes respect to the living. To the dead, one owes only truth." --Voltaire "It's better to risk all then do nothing." --Genesis P-Orridge "Fixed an integer overflow that prevented Nmap from scanning 2,147,483,648 hosts in one expression (e.g. 0.0.0.0/1). Problem noted by Justin Cranford (jcranford(a)n-able.com). While /1 scans are now possible, don't expect them to finish during your bathroom break. No matter how constipated you are." --Fyodor, in the CHANGELOG file for Nmap v3.93 "You cannot allow the stupid masses to vote for someone representing their level of their stupidity. 'cause what happens is you get someone like Bush in the White House." --Aaron C. Donahue "Chutzpah records are broken here at dazzling speed." --B. Mikhail, on the handover of the Gaza Strip to Palestine "I believe that the human being, and fish, can coexist peacefully." --George W. Bush The only thing two-income households have accomplished is increasing the cost of life's necessities. "So exactly what function do the nipple diodes serve?" --Kash "win32 OBJECT IDENTIFIER ::= { netSnmpAgentOIDs 13 } -- unlucky" --from net-snmp's NET-SNMP-TC.txt MIB file "Have you ever thought of seeing a specialist about that needlessly self-important and messianic tone?" --The Doctor to Romana, _Heart of TARDIS_ "After the game the king and the pawn go in the same box." --Italian proverb "I may be crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong." --Robert Anton Wilson "What?! How did you get to see your chem teacher's ass?" --Pegritz "'s all right. Come on out. That force field can hold back anything." "Almost anything." "Yes, but I wasn't going to tell them that. Thanks." "Sorry." --The Doctor and Captain Jack, _Doctor Who: Bad Wolf_ "I think it is a mistake to think that the existing order of things in our world is not based on magickal principles already." --Four Crows Nailed to a Wooden Post "All these years I thought FEMA was some ultra-efficient agency that was authorized to take over the functions of government in the event of a catastrophe. Now we find out they're about as sharp as a bag of wet mice." --Theta Wave "Habit breeds inattention, inattention is the first step to somnambulance. The Herd wants us sleep-walking so as to conform to its norms and support its ideals. The mage deprograms the hypnotic mechanisms around hir through whatever means available and rises in intentionality (thus freeing volition for true action)." --Nagasiva Yronwode "My introduction to espresso was a drink called a Death Star, served in a mug about this size." "Geez. Brasil thanks you. You've done a lot for their trade deficit. You, personally." --The Doctor and Anonymous, on his daily coffee intake "Behold, the global telecommunications network: Letting people be assholes at the speed of light." --Hasufin "Better to be reamed in the behind than reamed in the mind." --Steve Wasserman "One must be free to search for the Truth on their own, but to NOT search for Truth is not only a crime against one's self, but also to those who come after them." --Secundus Kerub "Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing; a confusion of the real with the ideal never goes unpunished." --Goethe "I dont' care if you're Jewish. Doesn't make me think less of you. I thought less of you for who are you in the first place. :)" --Vlad It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness. "If a man loses his reverence for any part of life, he will lose his reverence for all of life." --Albert Schweitzer "I think before we start worrying about IPS systems [sic] blocking arkane [sic], rare, and even zero day attacks... they need to start by blocking attacks that have been out since 1999!" --Mike Poor "Michael's right, it was probably wang." --Eli "Marcus, this is the kind of conversation that can only end in a gunshot." --Dr. Stephen Franklin, _Babylon-5_ "Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind." --Albert Einstein "Seen on the back of a car: An advertisement for All American Karate. Which would be a strange thing, since most of the martial arts are distinctly not American, and mixing them into his karate style would create an Asian-American mix. And then it couldn't be All American, since that would be false advertising. "It took me awhile to figure out that All American Karate, using only techniques developed and refined in America, would have to consist of a handgun and a lawyer." --The Ferrett Never fdisk after midnight. "We really were riding a new wave of the future, the whole computer thing was just coming together." "That's what we said back then. We always said we were the big new thing." "Yeah, but I thought we were lying." --Rudy Rucker and R.U. Sirius, reminiscing on cyberpunk Democracy is open to everyone but less than 5% of the population can actually afford getting listed on the ballot. Muffett's Fifth Law: Just because something has angle-brackets around it doesn't automatically make it better. "However, as crazy as your contry is, I have found something that makes up for it all.. your Pepsi has sugar in it. Actual sugar. I've already filed the appropriate immigration papers." --Greg Dean, on Canada "I like people doing stuff with my sperm, right off the bat. No matter what it is." --R.U. Sirius "If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." --Thomas Jefferson "If, you find that you're displeased in any way with the service provided by the Internet Storm Center, we will cheerfully refund double the amount of money that you pay us... you stupid little jackass." --Tom Liston, ISC Handler "Today I stumbled across the world's largest hotspot. The SSID is 'linksys'." --Joshua Wright "Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian." -- Robert Orben "THINK ONCE, THINK TWICE, THINK 'DON'T PUKE IN THE DATACENTER.'" --Infornography (sage advice, if you've ever been to a NOC Christmas party) "People disagree with me. I just ignore them." --Linus Torvalds "There IS no later." --Sista Sunmoon "BASIC is the computer science equivelent of 'Scientific Creationism'." --Anonymous "Never believe anything until it has been officially denied." --Otto von Bismarck "I've finally turned into that weird guy at the end of the block with hundreds of cats and more electronic equipment than the Pentagon." --Pegritz "The only way to explore the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible." --Clarke's Second Law "Fear created gods." --John Dewey "I'm going to take you on the greatest adventure of your life. You probably'll never even thank me. Let's go." --Austin James, _Probe_ "Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken." --Frank Herbert "Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep." --Scot Thomas, _The Dilbert Principle_ "I tell you, all this therapy I'm going through is making me SENSITIVE, GODDAMMIT!" --T- "Crisis rhetoric is the first sign that there is no crisis." --Lowmagnet "Right now, the solution to copy-protection appears simple: Buy a Mac." --Tony Smith, on copy-protected audio CDs "By protracting life, we do not deduct one jot from the duration of death." --Titus Lucretius Carus "My lust for software updates is rivaled only by my lust for Kimmie. And all her female admiring bi-ness." --the.Silicon.Dragon "This is great! I'm so wired I'm picking up cable TV!" --Hasufin "rwstat returns success for commands if it successfully communicates the command to the specified host. Whether the host actually does what is requested is not reported." --From the manpages for Rainfinity's Rainwall "In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own." --Thomas Jefferson, letter to Horatio G. Spafford, March 17, 1814 "He was in a constant screen refresh." --R.U. Sirius on Timothy Leary "I worship a god with an elephant's head!" --King Mob, _The Invisibles_ "You're not a pain slut. You. Don't. Know." --Lyssa, to Pegritz "I am indeed a great alchemist! I have converted money into these books!" --Anonymous, on buying a huge stack of books at NOTOCON 5 "I'm a creationist; I refuse to believe that I could have evolved from man." --Anonymous "Turn on, tune in, and take over." --Tim Leary "I spoke in English, and this was translated to German. Then the German was translated back to English, and then translated again into the Slashdot story." --Jimmy Wales, one of the founders of Wikipedia "Don't hate the media.. become the media." --Jello Biafra "I'm not smart enough to figure out how this structure could evolve, therefore there must have been a designer." --Rand Simberg, sarcastically defining intelligent design "One cannot change, after all, if one does not know/have the opportunity for a rectal craniotomy." --Lyssa "I don't like living in Orwell's 1984; but I do. And, absent the next extinction event or civil libertarians taking charge of the government (the former being more likely than the latter), the best we can do is try to keep (Uncle) Sam and the sub-Sams on a short leash." --James C. Nelson, Justice of the Supreme Court of Montana "You know we're sitting on four million pounds of fuel, one nuclear weapon and a thing that has 270,000 moving parts built by the lowest bidder. Makes you feel good, doesn't it?" --Rockhound, _Armageddon_ "If it's not loud, it doesn't work!" --Blank Reg "How do you know it's ignorance inspired until you read it? What is this, quantum linguistics?" --the.Silicon.Dragon "Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window." --Steve Wozniak "You may not get the same 'rush' from discovering a vulnerable version of BIND during an ISS session as you would from hand-crafting some C to overflow their custom-made httpd and launch some terrible fate upon their entire infrastructure and eventually free mankind from a bizarre machine-ruled world known as 'The Matrix', but it's still important nonetheless." --AdamT, on running canned exploits during a pen-test as well as writing your own attacks "Asking a systems adminstrator to certify that he has not installed any time bombs on a system is unreasonable, as Microsoft has stated in court that IE is a key component of the MS operating system." --Spyteknow "Putting a mail server on the Internet without filtering is like covering yourself with barbecue sauce and breaking into the Charity Home for Badgers with Rabies." --Michael Lucas "You're crazy!" "Been there. Done that. Got the hat and scarf." --The Doctor, _Doctor Who: Unregenerate_ "My goal is to get to Beijing before Starbuck's does. I just want to beat that damn coffee cup." --Henry Rollins "The amount of irony in the universe is a constant." --Liston's Third Law "Your wish is my command. But be careful what you wish for." --The Doctor, _Doctor Who: Father's Day_ "If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all." --Noam Chomsky "If the success or failure of this planet, and of human beings, depended on how I am and what I do; how would I be? What would I do?" --Buckminster Fuller "Forgive your enemies, but don't forget their names." --John F. Kennedy "There's nothing quite like French Roast steeped more times than should be allowed by law. It's liquid consciousness." --the.Silicon.Dragon "This guy's account's fucked and I don't know why." --Hasufin "There are always errors in real data." --The AWK Programming Language "Muscle spasms at the base of my hand." "You need some ademantium. Then those muscle spasms could inflict DEATH!" --the.Silicon.Dragon and Genetik "When life hands you lemons, ask for Tequila and salt." --Alton Brown "Excusing bad programming is a shooting offence, no matter _what_ the circumstances." --Linus Tovalds "Probably the question asked most often is: Do one-celled animals have orgasms? The answer is yes, they have orgasms almost constantly, which is why they don't mind living in pools of warm slime." --Dave Barry, _Sex and the Single Amoeba: What Every Teen Should Know_ "To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public." --Theodore Roosevelt "A lot of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view." --Obi Wan Kenobi "I love the smell of voided warranties in the morning." --The Doctor "Only in a police state is the job of a policeman easy." --Orson Welles "I will never apologize for the United States of America - I don't care what the facts are." --George H. W. Bush, Newsweek, 15 August 1989 "Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do." --Ronald Reagan, 1981 "Images which contain bogus ICC (International Color Consortium -- which actually sounds like a bunch of interior decorators that meet down at their local Starbuck's) profile format tags can cause the Color Management Module to overflow a buffer in a way that could result in execution of code, giving full control to an attacker." --From the Internet Storm Center writeup of the MS05-036 vulnerability "I guess I've been wrong all my life, but so have billions of other people... Certainty is just an emotion." -- Hal Clement "That's in keeping with our Zen-like mission statement." --Seaweb "Is that a miscellany bag?" "It is now." "I have miscellany! I have miscellany out the yin-yang!" --Lyssa and The Doctor "I'm polite to my customers; I'm not paid enough to be polite to my co-workers." --Hasufin "Burroughs was interrogating the universe with scissors and a paste pot, and the least imitative of authors was no plagiarist at all." --William Gibson, on William S. Burroughs and the cut-up technique "I love having a button there! 'Reverse'!" --Kash "It's a beautiful day for the end of the world." --Slade, _Teen Titans_ "It has long been an article of our folklore that too much knowledge or skill, or especially consummate expertise, is a bad thing. It dehumanizes those who achieve it, and makes difficult their commerce with just plain folks, in whom good old common sense has not been obliterated by mere book learning or fancy notions. This popular delusion flourishes now more than ever, for we are all infected with it in the schools, where educationists have elevated it from folklore to Article of Belief. It enhances their self-esteem and lightens their labors by providing theoretical justification for deciding that appreciation, or even simple awareness, is more to be prized than knowledge, and relating (to self and others), more than skill, in which minimum competence will be quite enough." --The Underground Grammarian "Yes, even in the wilderness, there is heavy cream." --Alton Brown "In this business, a talentless whore who gets fucked in grainy night vision is more valuable to the networks than a talented actress who has spent years studying and honing her craft." --Wil Wheaton, on Hollywood "I should be doing what I did with 'Backlash': Creating weird new parts everyday and trying them out until I have some things that aren't within my usual easy-access comfort zone but still work well with the song. But that's a lot of work. Xbox always looks like so much more fun. In other news, I've started smoking, tried ecstasy for the first time, had a 3-way with Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise, and gave up pizza because of the poor treatment of tomatoes on tomato farms." --Mark Nicholas, while working on a new song "To silence criticism is to silence freedom." --Dr. Joseph Mengele "Hey, they sell pocket protectors for that." "Nevermind." --Unknown and The Doctor "You look like you just blew a smurf." --Rhianna "We could be the Manhattan Project of drugs!" --Mark "I programmed it in for you. Four million lines of BASIC." --Kif, _Futurama_ "An age is called Dark not because the light fails to shine, but because people refuse to see it." --James Michener, _Space_ "What's your policy on hooking up laptops to your LAN?" "You're going to have to run antivirus software. What do you have?" "Slackware Linux v10.0." "...enjoy your stay." --The Doctor and T- "I am not going to give you a number for it because... it's not my business to do intelligent work." --Donald Rumseld "Coffee doesn't brew fast enough." --Doug "Is there really more mental illness in the U.S., or is it that the definition of illness has expanded to include everything outside of docile complacency?" --Chris Case "The most common characteristic of all police states is intimidation by surveillance. Citizens know they are being watched and overheard. Their mail is being examined. Their homes can be invaded." --Joseph Sobran (sound familiar, anyone?) "A god ignored is a demon born." --Peter Carroll "That's the military: Printing spiffy photos is not their mission." --Puff "Took drugs, saw God. BFD." --Harlan Ellison "Clearly, this is not an exact or a literal analogy, and the secretary general has acknowledged that." --William Schulz, director of Amnesty International, on Guantanamo Bay "I am so beastly tired of mankind and the world that nothing can interest me unless it contains a couple of murders on each page or deals with the horrors unnameable and unaccountable that leer down from the external universes." --Howard Philips Lovecraft "I must have the China White version of catnip here, because even when the plants were sealed up under a heavy wood door the crackheads were rolling and purring on the door!" --Pegritz, on his unusually potent catnip "What did I do to deserve this??? I had to have killed God in a past life to deserve this." --Rialian, on watching _FLCL_ "Physical access always trumps all other forms of security." --Matt Gibson "All technology companies that aren't Apple make crap until Apple really raises the bar and forces them to make less crappy crap." --the.Silicon.Dragon, on AOpen's Mac Mini clone "The point I'm trying to make here is that XML is no magic bullet and there are plenty of ways to turn it into a big, sloppy group hug." --the.Silicon.Dragon "Hoping to goodness is not theologically sound." --Peanuts "The last time I was sentenced to death, I ordered four hypervodkas for my breakfast. A little bit of a blur after that. Woke up in bed with both my executioners. Lovely couple. They stayed in touch. Can't say that about most executioners." --Captain Jack, _Doctor Who: The Doctor Dances_ "Ceiling tiles are getting way too interesting." --Lyssa "Get up, humans! Get out of bed, before I start dramatic recitations of Cruxshadows lyrics." --John "I am very, very angry with you! I am very, very cross! Go. To. Your. Room!" "I'm really glad that worked, those would have been terrible last words." --The Doctor, _Doctor Who: The Doctor Dances_ "We were doing drugs in the dressing room [at a concert in the early '80s]. Suddenly the tour manager stuck his head around the door and said, 'The police are here!' We all panicked and threw our drugs in the toilet. Then Sting, Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland walked in." --Ron Wood, in Rolling Stone magazine "Dude, you're so drunk, anal sex with a chainsaw would be funny to you." --F- "Let's just spell it out, shall we? This is not a 'massager' people. This is a vibrator." --Sarahnoid, on the Hitachi Magic Wand (vibrator?! It makes males obsolete!) "Tom Cruise: Forest Nymph" --T- Real hackers never die, their TTL just expires. "Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;" --Lowmagnet "What does education often do? It makes a straight cut ditch of a free meandering brook." --Henry David Thoreau "Sadly, discussions of high-profile security incidents are much like discussions of wealth and sex: Those who have the most talk the least... and vice-versa." --Jay Dyson A program is a lot like a nose: Sometimes it runs, and sometimes it blows. "It's appalling that this story got out there." --Condoleezza Rice, on Guantanamo Bay "Man, did you come here to correct my grammar? If you did, you're going to be here for a long, long, long time." --D- "Microsoft's shitty security has been a result of a short-sighted lack of emphasis, not capacity. Now that they are making it a priority, I have no doubt that Longhorn will be a relatively secure OS. Whenever it arrives, that is. Meanwhile... fuck it, I'm using OS X." --Anonymous "Dreamweaver: Fucking things up in ways I hadn't even considered." --Lyssa "_Episode III_ is office politics on a Wagnerian scale." --Ty Burr "Too much hope is the opposite of despair." --Vincent, _Final Fantasy 7_ "Gay marriage is not being made illegal. A gay guy can marry a woman." --Rush Limbaugh (Thanks, asshole.) "ASSHOLES!!" --D- "Cry when you must, laugh when you can. Shout. Scream. Run. Fly kites. Live." --Tom O'Bedlam, _The Invisibles_ "There comes a time when silence is betrayal." --Martin Luther King, Jr. "Your product is ready to protect you." --ZoneAlarm installer "The two criticisms we at CIA hear most frequently are, first, that CIA intelligence is inaccurate, and second, that CIA officers are selling CIA intelligence to foreign spy agencies... so what's the problem?" --Covert Comic (http://www.covertcomic.com/) "When I tell the truth, it is not for the sake of convincing those who do not know it, but for the sake of defending those that do." --William Blake "If you cannot find wisdom within, try the Internet." --Anonymous "Facts just aren't that important. Faced with growth in biological knowledge of this magnitude, I have wrestled with how one is to teach modern and useful biology." --Jasper Rine, professor of genetics, UCal Berkeley "If I am to transcend the world the herd lives in and is ruled by, am I supposed to want the herd to admire me? Or am I going to want them to think I'm 'too weird', or 'insane'? Think about it." --E- of Mechanicsburg, in an Amazon review "Whoah, who is that mature, black-clad stud in the ratty old t-shirt and the crumpled black suit jacket and the cockeyed sunglasses a-creepin' toward me like unto a vision of Andrew Eldritch in his dotage?" --Pegritz, reading the minds of his fangirls "Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are [a] few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid." --Dwight D. Eisenhower "Anger is what made America what it is in the world today: A hulking pariah whose only friends are toadies and sheiks." --Bill Mahr "If the American people knew what we have done, they would string us up from the lamp posts." --George H.W. Bush "This is not an ABBA song!" --Kurt Harland, on the release of the _Peace and Love, Inc._ single "That's not a porn spam; that's an origin story. Kind of like Batman, except she sucks more dick." --The Ferrett, on porn spam subject lines State alchemists do it in circles. "The mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few to ride them." --Thomas Jefferson "I'm trying to be PC with them on this, but our bandwidth really fuckin' blows." --D- "We've let being sheep-like become society's highest aspiration." --La Cosa Nostradamus "The old X is the new PG-13, and anal is the new kiss goodnight." --Jeff Schneider "If the thrill is gone, then it's time to take it back." --Jim Steinman "I think a little thermonuclear urban renewal is in order." --D- "I think that I avoided becoming a regular on Cinemax's late night boob-a-thons because even when I was a kid, I quickly figured out the difference between the kids (and their parents) who wanted to be Actors, and the ones who wanted to be Movie Stars. I never wanted to be a Movie Star, and the ones who did annoyed the hell out of me." --Wil Wheaton "Never our fault, but always our problem." --Puff "The Constitution of the U.S. forbids everything like an establishment of a national religion." --James Madison, _Detached Memoranda_, 1817 "If our life [sic] was dependent on scotch tape in here, we'd all be dead." --Doug "The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg." --Thomas Jefferson, _Notes on Virginia_, 1785. "[Our data] travels faster than the speed of rust!" --Tartan, on our office network connection "What was God doing before the Creation? Preparing Hell for those who ask that question." --Augustine of Hippo, 426 CE "Black churches are too concerned with justice." --Bishop Harry Jackson "Of the three ways in which men think that they acquire knowledge of things: authority, reasoning, and experience; only the last is effective and able to bring peace to the intellect." --Francis Bacon "These are the guys I used to beat up in high school." --Anonymous Monroeville Expo Mart staff member, Tekkoshocon 2005 "Even a paranoid can have enemies." --Henry Kissinger "No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered as patriots. This is one nation under God." --George H.W. Bush "Well fuck me and marry me young." "Thank you, no." --The Doctor and Puff, on getting SSL working "DrWho: passwords.... not angsty teenage screennames" --Genetik, on choosing complex passwords "Those of us who find bugs would really appreciate it if every Microsoft MVP would stop astroturfing these lists about it too." --Dave Aitel "If I compare you to Microsoft and Microsoft is the good example, you know shit ain't right." --Chaobell "I'd rather be sincerely wrong than doubtfully right." --Sunfell "As to Jesus of Nazareth... I think the system of Morals and his Religion, as he left them to us, the best the World ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting Changes, and I have, with most of the present Dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity." --Benjamin Franklin "We see 'Justice Sunday' as part of a larger effort to link church and state in ways not seen in America since the Puritans were hanging Quakers on Boston Commons and exiling Baptists to Rhode Island," --Reverend Joe Phelps, pastor, Highland Baptist Church, Louisville, KY "Do you have any vinegar?" "How should I know?" "It's your kitchen!" --The Doctor and Mickey, _Doctor Who: World War III_ "Life's a bitch, wear a cup." --Paris "Patriotism is supporting your country all the time, and your government when it deserves it." --Mark Twain "If you encounter something that doesn't fit your worldview, it's more intellectually honest to say, 'maybe there's something wrong with this worldview' than to try to shoehorn your findings into an existing belief." --Dr. John Mack, M.D. "There's more than one way to skin a cat, and there's more than one way to take a black robe off the bench." --Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, on the United States Supreme Court "Talk sense to a fool and he calls you foolish." --Euripedes "Nobody's going to look for you here, seeing as how you hate me so much." --Micky, to Rose's mother, _Doctor Who: World War III_ "Mozart, Velcro, and Hypercard - not bad for one civilization." --Douglas Adams The most important service rendered by the press is that of educating people to approach printed matter with distrust. "The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, they finish by loading honors on your head." --Jean Cocteau "Now comes the time in InSoc when we dance! Well, not literally.." --Paul Robb, while on stage "We, the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much with so little that we are now qualified to do anything with nothing." --Mother Theresa "Once you press that Enter button, you can't control it." --Dan Verton, former intelligence officer, USMC, on net.war "This is not the time for jokes." "You get used to that when you're friends with him." --Harriet and Rose "Our server probably came off the Russian black market! Waaah!" --Doug "You know, if I'm going to sleep in a hot chick's bed and not even get cuddles, I can live with that. But the WWE-style sleepwalker attacks were a little over the top." --The Ferrett "When a Christian starts a sentence with the words 'God hates...', it is the scripture that is sodomized." --Bard of Aven "Success is thy proof: argue not; convert not; talk not overmuch!" --Liber AL vel Legis, chapter III verse 42 "Generally, this (Windows Automatic Update and Service Pack 2) won't be a problem since everyone has 60 gig drives now, but AU really ought to check for free space before rendering my pr0n collection inaccessible for several minutes. Very rude indeed." --TodB "Nine hundred years of time and space and I've never been slapped by someone's mother." --The Doctor, _Doctor Who: Aliens of London_ "Satan's greatest trick is to make us think we're doing the Lord's Work." --Unknown "The strong take from the weak and the smart take from the strong." --Pete Carril "Think. It ain't illegal yet." --George Clinton "Okay, which one of you guys is unifying the universe?" "That'd be me." --B-C- and The Doctor, on a misplaced printout "Bacon Bits are the bong water of bacon." --Lyssa "We have a tendency to train with the idea that, with our luck, we're going to run into the Muay Thai master on PCP." --Lupa, on kagedo "The great epochs of our life come when we gain the courage to rechristen our evil as what is best in us." --Friedrich Nietzsche "I don't mind being called an escapist on a planet that more and more resembles a maximum security prison. The only sane choice is to plan a jailbreak." --Robert A. Wilson "Only Americans would moderate the truth as 'Troll' or 'Flamebait'." --Anonymous, on Slashdot "Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same." --George Orwell, _1984_ "I guess it's technically Goth As Hell(tm) to have vultures chilling on the roof of your house, but at the same time it's also pretty goddamned creepy. No wonder I've been feeling off of my game lately." --Pegritz "If you have to ask, she's underage. VERY underage in most cases." --Joe Mello "There are many schools of thought regarding what to do when life hands you lemons. Some decide that life is sour, and hence they become bitter. Some make lemonade. And then there are those who, upon receiving lemons, begin their search for salt and tequila." --Hasufin "If through my lies Gods truth abounds to His glory, why am I still being condemned as a sinner?" --Romans 3:7 "If Mr. Edison had thought more about what he was doing, he wouldn't sweat as much." --Nikola Tesla "That is distinctly not awful." --Tartan "If Dell spent half as much on customer service as they do on advertisement, they might actually answer the phone." --Lowmagnet "No signal. We're out of range. Just a bit..." --Rose, _Doctor Who: The End of the World_ "These shirts are bright yellow for a reason. I want my security team to be seen from space! FROM SPACE!" --Spaceman Groove, on the Tekkoshocon 2005 security team t-shirts What women and psychologists call 'dropping your armor', we call 'baring your neck.' "You can't trust ANYTHING shown to you by a computer that you do not trust." --Michael Silk "Money is the lifeblood of politics." --Tom DeLay, Republican Majority Leader "Anyone who has the power to make you believe absurdities also has the power to make you commit atrocities." --Voltaire "... 'fire' does not matter, 'earth' and 'air' and 'water' do not matter. 'I' do not matter. No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words. The more words he remembers, the cleverer do his fellows esteem him. He looks upon the great transformations of the world, but he does not see them as they were seen when man looked upon reality for the first time. Their names come to his lips and he smiles as he tastes them, thinking he knows them in the naming." -- Roger Zelazny, _Lord of Light_ "I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you... I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good... Our goal is a Christian nation. We have a biblical duty, we are called by God, to conquer this country. We don't want equal time. We don't want pluralism." --Randall Terry "Going to trial with a lawyer who considers your whole life-style a Crime in Progress is not a happy prospect." --Hunter S. Thompson "History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives." --Abba Eban "There's something disturbing about getting an e-mail from a username 'angelina' with the subject line 'Now I am a new man.'" --Puff "Sleep deprivation really brings out the best in you!" --Tony, _Real Life Comics_ "You don't have to read the Bible to know what it says, and you don't have to understand it." --Rush Limbaugh "It may not always be easy, convenient, or politically correct to stand for truth and right, but it is the right thing to do. Always." --M. Russell Ballard "When truth is discovered by someone else, it loses something of its attractiveness." --Alexander Solzhenitsyn "In the sexual revolution, where does a person apply for Conscientious Objector status?" --Scrat "America's a nation of 200 million used-car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable." --Hunter S. Thompson "We are each our own devil, and we make this world our hell." --Oscar Wilde "I swear to god I will be the first person to own an iWang." --Pegritz, on personal area networks "Cash is king." --Donald Trump software industry, the (noun): Unique industry where selling substandard goods is legal and you can charge extra for fixing the problems. "The Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions." --Daniel Webster (1782-1852), US Senator "The courts aren't democratic institutions." --Representative Dan Rungren, (R-California) "Any instrument can make soulful music if it comes from the soul. Doesn't matter if it's a Stradivarius or a synclavier. You can make soulless music with a Stradivarius." --Thomas Dolby, on the use of synthesisers in music "The right to privacy is a right that was created in a law that set forth a (ban on) rights to limit individual passions. And I don't agree with that." --Senator Rick Santorum, on the right to privacy "For art, love and rock 'n' roll, the whole had better equal much more than the sum of its parts, or else you're just rubbing two sticks together in search of a fire." --Bruce Springsteen, on rock and roll "Common sense is dead. Long live the Internet." --Jason Coombs "A CPAP mask is a quite effective form of contraception." --D- "There's nothing sacrosanct about a hotel with a bunch of journalists in it." --Lt. Gen. Bernard E. Trainor, USMC (Retired), The Washington Post, April 9, 2003 "To describe bitter medicine will not improve its flavor." --Charlie Chan "Politics and the fate of mankind are formed by men without ideals and without greatness. Those who have greatness within them do not go in for politics." --Albert Camus "Snuff films do not get Oscars, even if they do star Jesus." --Erin "If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you. But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." --Don Marquis "I will show a passport to travel internationally. I'm not willing to show a passport to travel in my own country," --John Gilmore "If Microsoft can afford to sell software that leaves its customers at risk, it can afford to issue hotfixes to remedy the problems that it created... Microsoft customers are paying gourmet prices for Redmond's products and are getting McDonald's quality for security." --Cancer Omega, on cutting people slack "To live outside the law you must be honest." --Bob Dylan "To say this goofy child president (George W. Bush) is looking more and more like Richard Nixon in the summer of 1974 would be a flagrant insult to Nixon." --Hunter S. Thompson "CSI has mythology? And we thought it just had an S&M fetish." --Lisa de Moraes, on Quentin Tarantino directing the season finale "You can't trust good people to do the right thing." --Rush Limbaugh "We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws." --Hunter S. Thompson "You must be able to distinguish between what is true and what is real." --Albert Einstein "Hypocrites need no freakin' evidence." --Anonymous "All great truths begin as blasphemies." --George Bernard Shaw All prophets are mad, but not all madmen are prophets. "Let us not look back in anger, or forward in fear, but around in awareness." --James Thurber "You lost me about five minutes ago." "Aww, fuck it." --B- and D- "We're callin' dead people, now. That's scary." --D- "In four years, you can teach a gorilla sign language. Is it too much to ask that in the same amount of time a kid be taught what those crazy hippies who founded this country had in mind?" --Lyssa Heartsong "Defaults are power." --Benjamin Franz "In addition to Satanists, they'll be training for dealing with Pentacostals on PCP?" --Lyssa, on the Vatican's classes on Satanism "Note to DC/Vertigo, if you want to use a character from the existing universe, make sure the character looks like Vertigo standard. I didn't need a sweaty, shifty looking Italian fatass playing a part I traditionally reserve for a European bishounen." --Spaceman Groove, on the portrayal of Lucifer in _Constantine_ Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something. "Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves." --William Pitt "You always said it couldn't happen here... Then one day we woke up and we were living in a Fascist state." --Michael Donovan, _V_ "Keep the faith in government incompetance." --Seosamh "What is a magician but a practising theorist?" --Obi-Wan Kenobi "The Archangel Gabriel might possibly cut some ICE, but I personally would not want to have either Saint Isadore of Seville or Saint Clare of Assisi standing in for the Lord of the Crossroads." --William Gibson "In something that sounds like it's straight out of an episode of Beavis and Butthead, I 'pulled one of my pecs'." --Giza, on his chest pains "So is this going to be a medical bong hit?" --Art Bell "No! No! Nobody that calls this show is crazy!" --George Noory, _Coast to Coast AM_ "By the time I get a live body, the 64-bit version of Windows will be released." --Lyssa, on tech support "Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God." --Lenny Bruce "What have been its (Christianity's) fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution." --James Madison, fourth President of the United States of America "Ohshitohshitohshitthinkthinkthink.. that's it! What would Gramma BFG do? I'll tell what she'd do! She'd cheat like a mofo!" --Sarah, _/usr/bin/w00t_ "Hey asshole, wipe the blade off before you go sticking it in the mayonnaise." --D- "The First Amendment doesn't protect speech you like; it protects speech you hate." --Larry Flynt "I love that tampons inspire fear in the weak. And I'm talking the still-in-the-wrapper variety." --Ranger Morgiah "If it weren't for pixie dust and voodoo magick we'd never get anything done." --D- "Don't do this to us, you control freak bastards!" --Alex Jones "So far from God, so close to the United States." --Anonymous "From brunch with Anton LeVay to dinner with the Pope." --The Doctor "This.. is the limit of what the broadcast code allows." --Yuuki Miaka, _Fushigi Yuugi_ "Ooh. Fat pills." --D-, on fresh doughnuts "We're all beat up." "There's no way we can suck this much." --Alphonse and Edward Elric, _Fullmetal Alchemist_ (manga) "Your specifications do not intersect with reality at this time, however. Let's do this..." --Tartan, the voice of reason "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim." --Captain James T. Kirk, _Star Trek_ Political correctness means always having to say "I'm sorry." "The office is like a tree full of monkeys trying to climb up. The monkeys on the top look down and see a tree full of smiling faces. The monkeys on the bottom look up and see nothing but assholes..." --Anonymous "Beware of mathematicians and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of hell." --St. Augustine "I have always objected to those who tell us how terrible the situation is, but offer nothing but silence when asked what can be done about it." --Whitley Streiber "The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer - they think they have, so they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer." --Ken Kesey "That's the easiest face to punch!" --Ed to Envy/Roy, _Fullmetal Alchemist_ "If you're gonna be in pain for most of the day then you're not gonna enjoy your life much, but George Bush insists that god has appointed him to ensure that I spend the rest of my life in pain without any relief. So I say: Fuck you George Bush, you should have these pains in your goddamned legs. Now that doesn't sound very Buddhist, but today I'm too angry to be a Buddhist. I'll get back to being a Buddhist tomorrow." --Robert Anton Wilson "There is a much greater effort on the part of the Dairy Council to get you to buy more cheese than there is by Queer America to make you Gay." --Chala, on "The Homosexual Agenda" "There are no 'lies' or 'bullshit' in this article, just people who can't read and interpret things sensibly for themselves." --Paul Mutton "The real reason that we can't have the Ten Commandments in a Courthouse! You cannot post 'Thou Shalt Not Steal,' 'Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery' and 'Thou Shall Not Lie' in a building full of lawyers, judges and politicians! It creates a hostile work environment!" --Printemps "You know, I used to think it was awful that life was so unfair. Then I thought, wouldn't it be much worse if life were fair, and all the terrible things that happen to us come because we actually deserve them? So, now I take great comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the universe." --Marcus Cole, _Babylon 5_ "Justice is incidental to law and order." --J. Edgar Hoover "I've was kidnapped and dragged through the woods by a rocket-powered baby carriage. I wasn't exactly in the right headspace." --Shelby, _Duel Masters_ "The reason you have people breaking into your software all over the place is because your software sucks..." --Former Whitehouse cybersecurity advisor, Richard Clarke, at eWeek Security Summit "The definition of a religious ceremony is an act of ritual magic that doesn't work." --S. Jason Black & Christopher S. Hyatt "It's time to have a little Boondock Saints style customer service implemented." --Lyssa Heartsong "My previous experimentation with mushrooms was mild compared to my current reality." --T-W- "checking whether gcc bitches when told to look inside INCLUDE_DIR... no checking whether gcc bitches when including some deprecated headers... no" --from the output of the configure script of Imview "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross." --Sinclair Lewis "Welcome to your freak show of political pornography." --Anonymous announcer on 104.7 FM (Pittsburgh, PA) "Real porn is far more entertaining than this drivel." --The Doctor "Write once, bomb anywhere." --Anonymous Java programmer "Is there a form of alchemy that will let me burn someone through the phone?" --Roy Mustang, _Fullmetal Alchemist_ "The one sticking point between us and the open-source community is that we actually think that compatibility matters." --James Gosling, creator of Java "Let the people think they govern and they will be governed." --William Penn "We're playing pretend, so let us use toys, it seems only natural." --Don Sheldon, on Wikis "Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper." --Robert Frost You're never ready, just less unprepared. "I'm bishounen in a Sasquatch sort of way." --Hasufin "We've got enough hardware to get jobs at Guantanamo Bay!" --Lyssa, on our toybags "It was like one of those moments in Pulp Fiction. The moment in which something new and much much worse happens, and the character's entire context has to shift and move about, like a giant transformer-robot encompassing one's entire reality." --Kurt Harland "The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right." --Mark Twain "We were somewhere around Dave and Buster's on the edge of the Pump It Up platform when the tofu began to take hold." --Genetik "There are not enough pagans in this car to protect us from Silicon's driving!" --Lyssa "Why is it those who scream 'sinner' are, almost always, the people concealing the deepest, darkest sins?" --Harmon Leon "I searched through rebellion, drugs, diets, mysticism, religions, intellectualism and much more, only to begin to find that truth is basically simple - and feels good, clean and right." --Chick Corea Being a liberal can also mean advocating the legalisation of explosive tipped ammunition. "Life is all about ass... you're either covering it, laughing it off, kicking it, kissing it, busting it, trying to get a piece of it, or behaving like one." --the.Silicon.Dragon "You'd be surprised how many sad sons of bitches believe people only care about each other in books." --Spider Robinson, _Time Travellers Strictly Cash_ "Unlike most guys, I'm more about the whole than the hole." --Alexius Pendragon "You have lost your path, Dan. You stopped to enjoy the view and forgot that you are on a journey. You need to be reminded. That's what you Mum meant." --Sharon, _Dan Eden Tells All_ "Don't ever let anyone tell you that something God gave you is a bad thing[.]" --Scott "Kludge" Dorsey "Blows my mind. It literally does. What the hell were those two thinking? The assignment was so clear birds were crashing into it and breaking their necks. Yet these two missed the mark by light years." --Nyarlathotep, on 2004's worst final papers in history "'Bring home the magic' my furry, white ass!" --Ralph, _Exploitation Now_ "Pixie dust... pixie dust.. pixie dust..." "Oh, holy Jesus - don't look in the log file! We need more of that!" --D- and B-, on web applications "People who purr are dangerous." --Lauren "It's my fault. I told Miss Anthy that I wanted to eat a really spicy curry. Miss Anthy risked her life to make me that curry." --Kaoru Miki, _Shojou Kakkumei Utena_ "My soul doesn't come in flavours." "Mine's mint." --Lupa and Aleris "Weird is bad." --John Perry Barlow, on The System "Fuck that." --The Doctor, in response "I see Angels as more of a 'Swiss Army Knife'. If an Angel has to kill, we have a blade. However, we also have a corkscrew." --Katt "Folks have been conned to thinking they can't change the world, have to accept what is. I'll tell you something my friends. The world is changing every day, the only question is who's doing it." -- Rev. Dexter, _Babylon 5: And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place_ "Our vision is to speed up time, eventually eliminating it." -- Alex Schure "Fuck Slashdot... you heard it here first." --Genetik "Were the zebras screwing the hell out of us last night or what???" --D- "Diplomacy is about surviving until the next century. Politics is about surviving until Friday afternoon." --Sir Humphrey Appleby "A thousand little pictures is worth ten lines of code." --Stan Kelly-Bootle, _The Devil's DP Dictionary_ (on flowcharts) "The only thing stopping me from becoming the next Josef Stalin is sheer laziness. On second thought, that's not pathetic, that's a GOOD THING: The world needs more death camps and gulags, sure, but I'm probably not the best person to be put in charge of filling them." --Nyarlathotep "Gee, that's a nice name, but it sounds too much like 'mud puddle'." --J-H-, on choosing a Chinese name "Plate tectonics abound! Thanks!!! Let's blow something up." --Kausha "I have an idea: LET'S FUCKING SLEEP!!" --the.Silicon.Dragon "Once at war, to reason is treason." --James Hilton "It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong." --Voltaire "And I thought you guys acted like insufferable know-it-alls before. This is disturbing to us real omniscients." --Rache Bartmoss "Every day, as I get more comfortable running around my servers, I become a little more comfortable with the concept of enlightened laziness." --The Ferrett "Shake it like a corduroy ninja." --Hugh, _Angst Technologies_ "Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened." --Winston Churchill "MSPAINT should be a privledge, not a right." --Sayaka "When I did Recombinant, I took much pleasure in singing 'I want TO know' instead of 'I wanna know'. I like to be thought of as the pop singer with the best diction." --Kurt Harland "In fact, UNICODE codepoint 0x9090 happens to be the Chinese character for [li3], "winding" or "meandering". Chinese poetry shellcode, anybody?" --Jeffrey Connell "Lys, you are not going to eat my hermit crabs. I won't eat your pets; you won't eat mine. You can have crab cakes. Deal?" "I bet they're good fried in butter. Come on, crabbie..." --The Doctor and Lyssa "[Bush] is just a big corporation masquerading as a human being." --Ralph Nader "A successful psychedelic trip absolutely kills the desire to do it again very soon... the way to know whether you're doing it correctly or not is if what you're doing doesn't make you afraid, you're not doing it right." --Terrence McKenna "Elections being over and everything, time to stop ranting about politics and get back to my nice little world of Photoshop, books, and killing random wildlife for exp. It's not the end of the world." --Cyfis "It's hard to be a domme in the retail industry." --Jill "Turn blue, motherfuckers! Turn blue!" --Lyssa "I've been following this discussion with a complete sense of shock and amazement. Why are you people making up excuses for crap ass programming? It IS NOT ACCEPTABLE, and if you keep putting forth the notion that it is, nothing is going to change." --infamous41md "If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error." --John Kenneth Galbraith "Last night, I hacked up a shoggoth. I shit thee not. Tentacles, eyes, a serious bad attitude... the whole works. I had to douse it with Clorox and the powder of Ibn-Ghazi at least ten times before the fucker would give up the ghost and vanish down the drain." --Pegritz, on bronchitis "If you're going through hell, keep going." --Winston Churchill "Truth never triumphs - its opponents just die out. Science advances one funeral at a time." --Max Planck "I guess it's a cultural thing. Imagine an entire race of beings, all of them unable to give you the finger. It could explain a lot." --Gormworm "The mind commands the body and immediately it obeys. The mind orders itself, and meets resistance." --Saint Augustine "I must abide by the clock, and the clock says 'go away'." --Art Bell Next to being shot at and missed, nothing is quite as satisfying as an income tax refund. "What it boils down to is I'm tired of hiding. I love my boyfriend Kyle and I want to spend the rest of my life with him. I want to marry him. Is this so difficult to understand?" --BrokenBoy "I must not buy. Money is the mind-killer. Spending money is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my spending. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the money has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain." --Litany against purchasing, by Zig (regarding FanimeCon 2002) "It is rumoured, or perhaps a legend, that Timothy [Leary] had squirreled away a treasure trove at some secret location of 25,000 hits of blue Sandoz [LSD]. Where is it? Do you know where it is?" "My lips are sealed. When they open the tombs on Cydonia, I'll issue a press statement." --Art Bell and Terrence McKenna (RIP) "That auction is incredible, if it's legit. Do you mind if I suck cock for it?" "No, I don't mind. I just want a chance to play _Phantasy Star_, though." --Lyssa and The Doctor, on someone selling what amounts to the history of home videogaming on eBay "Ones and zeroes are a number system just like the [base] ten system that we're all brought up with because we've got ten fingers. A computer only has one finger, and that finger is up or not." --Todd Rundgren, on how he taught himself programming "Holy cow feces! Are you serious, now?" --Art Bell There's a little of the chaos mage in everyone who hasn't got a stick up their ass. "We're going to drink this one to Ozzie: A good man who tried to save my ass by injecting me into yours." --Tuck Pendleton, _Innerspace_ When you learn how easy it is to deceive those who want to believe, it will show you how easily you might be deceived if you want to believe. "Please do not pimp out the Kate." --Cosplay Kate "Honey, you can't learn to fuck reading _Popular Mechanics_. That isn't what makes a butch a good lover." --Jacqueline, _Stone Butch Blues_ "A pretty girl is like a violent crime If you do it wrong you could do time." --The Magnetic Fields, _A Pretty Girl Is Like..._ "You know our maxim: Hard technology for a hard world." --Scott Ridley, _Death Machine_ "I am a citizen of somewhere else." --Nathaniel Hawthorne "So now I can say that I got Bryce into DJ's pants..." --Ellen, on my borrowing DJ's renfaire garb "I'm impatient with stupidity. My people have learned to live without it." --Klaatu, _The Day the Earth Stood Still_ Never say "whoops!", always say "Ah, Interesting!" If your law requires a police state to enforce, your law is wrong. "I'll have a SIGSEGV with a side of fries, please!" --Pace "I now see it plainly states the topics are limited to 11 pages. I guess this only proves I'm not the brightest singularity in multidimensional space-time." --John Titor "Ex-idols are like unexploded ordinance. Once their useful lives are over, most are duds and cannot cause problems. Others are like nuclear warheads and can be dangerous if not handled properly." --Megatokyo "Unless we change direction, we'll wind up exactly where we're going." --Chinese proverb "They don't let chimps travel in time." --Oliver Williams "I must not hit on the minions." --Lyssa "Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws." --Plato "Make mouse noises for me, baby." --Akio, _Utena Thumbnail Theatre_ "Any sufficiently advanced exercise equipment is indistinguishable from bondage gear." --Giza "Network Security is Y2K without the deadline." --Network Security Secrets and Solutions 1999 "Of course! I may not look it, but I _am_ a professional!" --Tachikoma, _Ghost In the Shell: Stand Alone Complex_ "Physics is like sex: Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it." --Feynman To err is human. To really screw things up, you need the root password. Dreaming in digital, Living in realtime Thinking in binary Talking in IP **Welcome to our world** "Everything needs porn." --Lyssa Heartsong "Using a serial terminal to install Solaris?! You geek. Get a GUI!" --M-O- "Don't you know it's rude to run off in the middle of Honey's monologue?" --Cutey Honey "If it's in the news, don't worry about it." --Bruce Schneier "Nothing represents the overall nature and substance of the Internet better than masturbating in the marketplace." --Siva Vaidhyanathan "Atomic detonations make good disinfectants, too." --Art Bell The greatest trick the priesthood ever pulled was convincing the world that the Devil exists. "She [Helen] has been naming the feeder mice again. I have hidden the frozen ones, because I do not want to have to deal with the concept of little toe-tags that I have to take off before feeding the snakes. That is simply not my thing. Do you know how annoying it is to get those things off of a frozen rodent toe before thawing? (Worse than those mini-earrings that some have. We simply have to stop getting mice from the pet store near that pagan shop... I am convinced that they have been dealing with the shoplifters a bit too harshly as of late. The worst is having to make sure the male mice do not have Prince Alberts.)" --Rialian, on feeder mice for snakes "Just because something's fast doesn't mean that it can compete with the human mind." --Steve Wozniak "We've got people sleeping under the tables in the public cluster. This [HOPE] is like a Greatful Dead tour for geeks." --Emmanuel Goldstein, on HOPE 2004 "If it doesn't mention the Amiga system, it's just propaganda." --thew "I for one plan to suck up bigtime to any AI I can get within shouting distance of, so that maybe when they decide to eat the planet I'll get first dibs on a virtual environment built to spec with lots of spooky castles and gigantic killer robots under my complete control." --Nyarlathotep "If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning." --Catherine Aird "Perhaps most amazingly, votaries of 'diversity' insist on absolute conformity." --Tony Snow You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake -- but you could be if you got off your ass and led instead of following. "As the stars age, they lose their shine. Just like us." --Akio, _Shojo Kakkumei Utena_ "Underpants! Underpants! Underpants! Underpants!" --Chi, _Chobits_ "One does not wonder if something exists for Emacs. One believes." --Haystor "Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants." --Gen. O. N. Bradley "I think I just got violated by a dead guy." --Utena, _Utena Thumbnail Theatre_ "Don't believe a word I say. CHECK IT." --Red Elk "No matter how good the idea, there is always an advocate extreme enough to deter people." --Steve Aylett "Be careful of the pithy comment - sometimes it leaves a hollow stem." --Rialian "I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells." --Theodore Seuss Geisel "It's a science fiction movie, not a documentary." --Art Bell, on _The Day After Tomorrow_ "I went out to check on the progress of the conflict right after I wrote that entry, and I stepped on one of the combatants and the little fucker bit my foot! So that meant instant devastation of both parties. I grabbed a can of Raid Ant Killer from my mom's basement, chased the cats off the porch (who were sitting on top of a nearby chair watching the war, too), put on my gas mask, and proceeded to rain a holocaust of mustard gas down upon the battlefields while singing _Goodbye Blue Skies_. "It was cooler than fucking hell." --Derek Pegritz, on warring ant colonies "Next week, you guys are going to Acheron." "We're going to Akron?" "Jesus, no! How cruel of a DM do you think I am?" --Ferrett and Brent, about their D&D game "I like to be pixelated. Pixels are cool." --Mark Nicholas "Damn ninjas. Always breaking my toys." --Ed, _Megatokyo_ "It looks like you were built in a laboratory out of parts of lesser nerds! The bionic nerd..." --http://www.milkandcookies.com/stuff/triumphvsw.asx "My Boy quotes Baudrilliard! I am in love!" --Lyssa "An explosion doesn't show the best parenting skills." --Hexadecimal, _Reboot_ "Never ascribe to an opponent motives meaner than your own." --Unknown The worlds of magick and logic must exist side by side, not destroy each other. "There seems no plan because it is all plan." --C.S. Lewis "'Metrosexual'? What the hell does that mean, he's hot for Spider Jerusalem?" --Bryce "I'm so fricking drunk. I can't type right now. I'm excited too..." "Why does that sound like a mating call?" --Whisper and Alexius "Keep a good eye on your enemy, because you are going to become him." --Timothy Leary (paraphrasing Nietzsche) "How humiliating is it to have an argument about your own penis with your mother and lose?" --The Ferrett "There won't be anything we won't say to people to try and convince them that our way is the way to go." --Bill Gates "Lord? What the hell am I doing here?" --Nicholas D. Wolfwood, _Trigun_ "In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them." --John von Neumann "I guess it's Unicode ninjitsu time." --KF "Congratulations! You've crossed the first hurdle in becoming a good security person - you're paranoid. Now all you have to do is keep reading and learning - for the rest of your life. But try to get some perspective." --Paul Schmehl Pride has a way of blinding you to the fact that you're fucking up. "It's young and it blows shit up - let's screw it!" --Lyssa "The bravest thing you can do when you are not brave is to profess courage and act accordingly." --Corra May White Harris "Waterproof boots, unless worn underneath waterproof pants, become rain buckets." --Inkyblue2 "Jai-lo! I got a straight guy for you!" --Ted Allen "You know, when you don't have enough male influence in your life, terrible things can happen. I'm the poster child." --Carson Kressley If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats. "Just ignore the MOOFs." --C- "When making a change for the first time, use a fairly standard configuration, and use a development environment - even if it is Windows 2000 Server on a desktop or laptop computer. While Microsoft asserts that 133 or 166 MHz is the required minimum, a P90 with extra memory will work, and will blue-screen as fast as anything else." --_Securing Windows 2000 Step By Step_, The SANS Institute "The prevalence of empty words makes possible the falsification of realities." --Robert Mason "...while I had told the rightful owner that I intended to leave it home, that was before I discovered that one-eyed trouser snakes could become pythons after one-too-many cans of precooked pasta." --Kevin A. Murphy, _Penny Dreadful_ "The Pat Robertsons of the world make possible the Anton LaVeys." --Tau Allen Greenfield "Code is so complex, that there are always going to be some things that, no matter how hard you test, you're not going to catch. If we see a system that's behaving abnormally well, we should probably be suspicious, rather than assuming that it's behaving abnormally well." --Tom Kropp, manager, Enterprise Information Security program, Electric Power Research Institute "Thank you for not using the C-word." --William Gibson, after an interview "We have come to terms." --_The Big O_ The only justification that Nature requires is that you can. "Dreary reality is where you are always on the run from deadly forces beyond your control; cyberspace is where you can pull off the really cool shit." --Nerdboy Himself "I do not believe in 'evil', either. Dysfunctional stupidity and such... but not EVIL(tm)." --Rialian Ph-nglui mglw'nafh Gates R'chmd wgah'nagl fhtagn. "A readymade 'lost weekend.' Just add sake." --Seaweb "The moment you see something wrong and don't say anything, is the moment you start to die." --Dr. Jocelyn Elders "The most tyrannical of governments are those which make crimes of opinions, for everyone has an inalienable right to his thoughts." --Benedict Spinoza "We'll be out of season by the time we get there!" --Carson Kressley "A little booty house is good for the soul." --The Doctor "alert tcp $EXTERNAL_NET any -> $HOME_NET any (msg:"Salesman BS Overflow Detected"; pcre:"/turn[-\s]*key/i" classtype:"marketing-mumbojumbo"; sid:55378008; rev:1;) "Alternatively this rule could be switched around for source and destination to detect when your sales people are using meaningless mumbojumbo, etc." --Chad Kreimendahl "Using encryption on the Internet is the equivalent of arranging an armored car to deliver credit card information from someone living in a cardboard box to someone living on a park bench." --Gene Spafford Education is what you have left over after you have forgotten everything that you've learned. "Bitchslap Securiteam for resending other people's alerts without passing on any of the useful information." --cazz, in the RULES.todo file of Snort v2.1.1rc1 "If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world." --J.R.R. Tolkien "On that of which one cannot speak, one must remain silent." --Wittgenstein "Better to be informed than alarmist." --Michael Warfield "File, print, man." --C- "Hell, considering the huge amount of time and concentration I've spent on Shane Williams and Sean Dix's Echoes of Earth trilogy and John C. Wright's Golden Age, I'm surprised I didn't somehow get Hyperevolved Moravec Nanofuctional Spacetime Manipulator of Funk." --Derek Pegritz "Your first deadline's tomorrow. I want to see eight thousand words. Printable words. I still remember that essay you wrote when the Beast got elected. I do not want to see the word 'fuck' typed eight thousand times again." --Royce, _Transmetropolitan_ Just because I don't CARE doesn't mean I don't UNDERSTAND." --Homer Simpson "All God's children are not beautiful. Most of God's children are, in fact, barely presentable." --Fran Lebowitz It's not about "saving the Earth," you ninnies, it's about SAVING OUR ASSES! "Do you know the main differences between a schizophrenic and a mystic? Control and discernment. Always check your sources." --Rialian "Why don't you try practicing random acts of intelligence and senseless acts of self-control?" A bartender is just a pharmacist with a limited inventory. "I've seen nicer bathrooms in prisons." --Carson Kressley "He's an accomplished cook but his equipment is garbage!" --Ted Allen Warning at the Gates of Bill: Abandon hope, all ye who press here... "I route. Therefore, you are." --Jon Lewis "Be all that you can be / in the Census!" --Jim "Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say." --Albany, _King Lear_, William Shakespeare, act 5, scene 3 "I tried to view the attachment but Mutt said application/x-msdownload is unsupported..." --Matt Southworth "There are gay men in California in awe of Boobie Wars." --Lyssa Ernst Fear gives intelligence even to fools. "Perl -- It's like Java, only it lets you deliver on time and under budget." --perl.org "Client side, server side, world wide." --Marc Maiffret "It doesn't have to be our fault to be our responsibility." --Paul Robertson "Bryce's motto: If this keyboard's a-rockin', don't come a-knockin'." --Dale "Since you didn't pay me for it (the software) can you explain to me how I can answer questions for several thousand new users this week who are too lazy to take step one and read the docs? Kiss the project goodbye, as well as my having time to put a roof over my head. Some developers may lack a little tact but I should point out that there is nothing wrong with being a n00b. Only someone with ego problems intent on leading a boring life considers ever being noticed as a neophyte at something again to be an insult. I'd rather be a green growing new sprout than a petrified stuffed shirt." --Sequitur "I don't think there's many cookies left, kitty." --Lyssa Heartsong "Am I alive or dead?" "We don't have to think like that anymore. Everything is forgiven. Everything." --Chris and Rheya, _Solaris_ (movie interpretation) "At this point, my eyebrows raised and I got a weird feeling... as though a platypus had walked over my grave on stilts, or something." --Derek Pegritz "I never knew evil tasted so good!" --Cyborg, _Teen Titans_ "It is just a crash." --Theo de Raadt Question: How many activists does it take to change a lightbulb? Answer: None. Activists don't change anything. Subtlety is the art of saying what you think, and getting out of the way before it is understood. "I can think of another great way to fix the vulnerabilities in Windows. It's called fdisk." --N407er "The proverb is made for those who take advice." --Chinese saying "Opening attachments in e-mail is on par with group needle-sharing after having unprotected sex in a Third World orgy." --Tim Mullen "alert any $EXTERNAL_NET any -> $HOME_NET any (msg:"Linux 8.0 Flame content"; content:"; content:"SNORT and Linux 8.0"; classtype:stupid-postings; sid:1000010; rev:1;)" --Nick Duda, on people who really need to read the Snort FAQ "Anyone who doubts that terrorists could smuggle a nuclear warhead into New York City should note that they could always wrap it in a bale of marijuana." --Graham Allison, _The Boston Globe_, 27 October 1999 "Argh! They removed a thing it because it's unsecure. Let's get it back..." --Matus Uhlar (facetiously, on PHP's register_globals directive) "I like Gentoo. Fully customizable from the ground up. Check it out." "Yep, it's the control freak's wet dream. It's a bird of a different feather, but it's also a rather cool bird." --Christopher Lyon and Erek Adams "The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher regard those who think alike than those who think differently." --Friedrich Nietzsche "You cannot make something foolproof because fools are so ingenious." --James Meritt "Don't take life seriously, anyway you ain't getting out alive." --Anonymous "With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science." --Carl Sagan "It's like a friggin' away mission." --C- "You're an absolute fucking spaz." --Dale "These [NP-complete problems] are the problems that make efficient use of the Fairy Godmother." --Anonymous computer science lecturer "Violating a standard does not necessarily mean that it does not work." --Spiro Trikaliotis "As in certain cults it is possible to kill a process if you know its true name." --Ken Thompson and Dennis M. Ritchie "What if he has to drop a deuce? Is this project more important than going to the bathroom?" "He can go, but he'd better be thinking about UDP the entire time." --J- and C- "The church saves sinners, but science seeks to stop their manufacture." --Elbert Hubbard "Education is an admirable thing. But it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught." --Oscar Wilde Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most vicious animal on earth. "You need not be so wordy about 'what' and 'why'. Just about 'do'." --C- "And then be prepared to groan when, at the end of it all, it turns out to be some kiddiot in a foreign country." --Nicholas Weaver, on identity phishing "Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity." --Christopher Morley "Basic rule of thumb: On the Internet, anybody can complain. And people do. Whether it has any basis in fact is another matter. It's easier to come up with rumors about evil-doers than it is to debunk them." --Linus Tovalds "Never give in. Never give in. Never. Never. Never." --Winston Churchill Talent does what it can. Genius does what it must. You do what you get paid to do. Bradyism: A multisibling sensibility derived from having grown up in large families. A rarity in those born after approximately 1965, symptoms of Bradyism include a facility for mind games, emotional withdrawal in situations of overcrowding, and a deeply felt need for a well-defined personal space. -- Douglas Coupland, "Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture" "A dream will always triumph over reality, once it is given the chance." --Stanislaw Lem "A white cloak, a white staff, and fireworks don't make you Jesus." --the.Silicon.Dragon "The horse you are dreaming about is your father - the oven you are dreaming about is your mother and the pile of shit you are dreaming about is your analyst." --Erica Jong "If Darl McBride was in charge, he'd probably make marriage unconstitutional too, since clearly it de-emphasizes the commercial nature of normal human interaction, and probably is a major impediment to the commercial growth of prostitution." --Linus Torvalds "Here in the open source community, we're willing to help out, but that's because we're not willing to put up with the status quo. And that's generally due to our inflated sense of Laziness, Impatience, and Hubris." --Larry Wall "Once rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department." --Wernher von Braun "Bugtraq Security Systems uses only QNX. We're realtime like that." --The Bugtraq Team "Since these two trashy bitches (one male one female) moved in below me (about a year ago) I have not had a normal nights sleep with out the aid of chemicals and ear plugs. Between the constant fighting, loud music and klingon sex going on below me I am going absolutely insane." --Nnie "We will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of our great nation." --Anyonomous CIA Field agent in Afghanistan "To know the future is to be trapped by it. But knowing it is a trap is the first step toward evading it." --Leto Atreides II, _Dune Messiah_ Ryan's Law: Make three correct guesses consecutively and you will establish yourself as an expert. "Anyone who considers protocol unimportant has never dealt with a cat." --Robert Heinlein "Sometimes, paranoia can be helpful. Usually, it isn't, and when you learn that, life improves." --Vanessa Dannenberg(?) "Hours of boredom and seconds of terror." --"Winslow Peck" on working as an NSA analyst "I returned to find that the house is now kitten enabled! Whoot!" --Soulkry "In an emergency situation involving two or more officers of equal rank, seniority will be granted to whichever officer can program a vcr." --Anonymous "The 'somebody' strongly felt that ide-scsi was not just ugly but _evil_, and that the syntax and usage of "cdrecord" was absolutely stupid. That somebody was me." --Linus Torvalds "Gotta make sure the head's on straight before twisting the body." --Lynn (damn skippy!) "Do I look like a stickybun for your breakfast enjoyment?" "'Hey, I only paid you guys $0 for this product, why aren't you giving me the same level of support as the guys that pay?' doesn't sound like a valid complaint." --Matt Kettler "Owe no man anything." --Romans 13:8 "I kind of consider myself transmodern: One foot in the 18th Century, one foot in the 30th. I'd gladly wear a periwig built out of optical fiber." --Nyarlathotep "The only way of finding the limits to the possible is by going beyond them to the impossible." --Arthur C. Clark "You know, I do look like a Mormon." --Alexius "A word to the wise is infuriating." --Hunter S. Thompson "If your current computer will do what you want it to do, there's no reason to upgrade it. Properly maintained equipment will last for many years, and of course software, once it's debugged, will run forever." --Bill Gates (no, I'm serious..) "We are all Pennsylvanians. We are not afraid of snow, especially the day after." --Kage "Instead of loving your enemies, treat your friends a little better." --Edgar W. Howe "Inside jokes amongst friends serve as a sort of hash table mechanism for memories." --zman "The medievals and the victorians still walk among us, resenting change at every turn." --Natasha "There is no line between sanity and insanity, just a vague difference in smirks." --Patrick Ivins "Didn't Allchin say under oath that there was code in Windows so ugly that if you read it out loud, you needed to roll a D20 and see which Elder God showed up to suck your intestines out through your ear?" --Valdis Kletnieks "The Principle of Least Amazement (aka Occam's Razor) would suggest that an auto-configuring sniffer NIC is the more likely culprit, and deserves close inspection. But I would pay dearly for the ability to generate a personal No Wierd Sh*t Zone." --Ken Wallewein "The modern magickian uses the tools of their time." --Genesis P. Orridge "He's in the proto-laid stage!" "He's in the 'workin' on it' stage." --Elissa and Alexius "I don't mean to eavesdrop, but that's funny shit." --Dawnie "Aah.. dad versus new people! Come on..." --Alexius "Instant asshole: Just add mead." --Nicky "Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature." --Tom Robbins "There is a fine line, between perfect, and burnt... and that line is determined by the chef." --Mario Batali "And if I claim to be a wise man, It surely means that I don't know." --Kansas, _Carry On My Wayward Son_ "Outlook is a security hole that masqurades as an e-mail client." --Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols "I think it is time you use the two words consultants just love to hear: 'Show me.'" --Thor "If their [US senators'] marriages are threatened by a loving gay relationship, then I suggest marriage counseling, not a federal amendment." --Mark Mead, on the FMA bill "There's not much 'romance' in being trapped in an alien lifeform's body." --The Crisses If you didn't get caught, did you really do it? If you cannot understand it, it is intuitively obvious. "The gods do not play dice with the universe my ass... first rain then sleet, finally snow. They're playing dice alright, they're rolling on the table marked 'random precipitation generator'. I hear if they get a twenty, we'll be seeing frogs." --Spaceman Groove "1 |<0r m3." --From detonate.net "My way of joking is to tell the truth. That's the funniest joke in the world." --Muhammad Ali "Reading made Don Quixote a gentleman. Believing what he read made him mad." --George Bernard Shaw "How can anyone say they are patient, kind and loving unless they are really put into an environment where they could choose not to be?" --Don Webb "I'm some sort of sandwich powered power tool." --MKB "Contempt prior to investigation is the definition of ignorance." --Frater Dagaz "I love Moulon Rouge, but this is a bit much." --Carson Kressley "I have a feeling we're going to find strange meats.. oh, look! Ground antelope!" --Ted Allen Culture is the habit of being pleased with the best and knowing why. "Unfortunately, there are many folks who have queried the ISA newsgroups and other ISA lists about how (not why) to allow inbound SQL connections because many web designers haven't quite caught up to the idea that the Internet isn't the friendly little sandbox that they seem to believe it is." --Jim Harrison "You're issuing commands like Serpentor. That's hot." --Chris Hudson "It takes talent to transcend one's advertising potential." --Lowmagnet, on house music "Hey, baby, let's exchange cryptographic primes. I want to tune into your neurotransmitters and introduce you to Doctor Strange! Let's read physics journals together and laugh at the dirty parts!" --Nick Herbert "The only problem with seeing too much is that it makes you insane." --Phaedrus "The mushroom knows all the command line options." --From the NTPD v4.1.0b documentation "Engineering meets art in the parking lot and things explode." --Garry Peterson, on Survival Research Labs "When your work speaks for itself, don't interrupt." --Henry J. Kaiser "The computers themselves are worthless, compared to human lives, but the information within them is invaluable." --Drew Copley "My only badge is my conscience. Guns back a badge, but hellfire backs the conscience." --Anonymous "All the world's a starbucks - and all the men and women mere consumers." --Sorynvala "What's the difference between casting a circle and casting a movie? In a circle, there's only one or two people who think they're deities." --Buttercup "For me to die for my faith, many others will die for it first." --Mark Peterson (I like how he thinks...) "Any shortsighted policy that discourages consumers from watching broadcast TV or raises the price of equipment for receiving broadcast TV is a step in the right direction from my point of view." --Charles Platt "Microsoft has made everyone's lives harder - without making it less buggy/more secure. Throwing encryption at problems doesn't make the inherent problem go away." --Jason Haar "Let not the sands of time get in your lunch." --Chris Green Walk like you own your body. "If you're going to have delusions, you may as well go for the really satisfying ones." --Marcus, _Babylon-5_ "CSI is a Jerry Bruckheimer production. There's your answer." --Carmine If there's no body, they're probably not dead. "I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it" --H.E. Fosdick "Since flexresp is in general not reliable, but for some reason many people seem to think it's a firewall replacement, it's probably a bad idea to build it into pre-made binary images anyway." --Matt Kettler, on Snort's broken active response code "It may not lead us to enlightenment, but it may lead us to insight." --Stephen Schwartz "Better by far you should forget and smile than that you should remember and be sad." --Christina Rossetti "This is a normal abnormality. It is explained in the MSDN article linked here..." --Mark Donaldson, on GetModuleFilenameEx() "If I were Al Qaeda, I wouldn't waste time with nuclear weapons. I'd be going to Microsoft training courses." --John Naughton, on cyberterrorism "Just think.. one day, a slab of plasteel in your pocket will be smarter than you. For some of us, this has already happened." --Kerobaros Somtimes the best programming language is a soldering iron. "There he goes. One of God's own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die." --Raoul Duke, _Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas_ "We're all people who were so hellbent on self-preservation that we either split or called in reinforcements (or both?), and it doesn't really matter which." --The Crisses "Judgement and discrimination require human intervention. When I hear those who say things akin to 'intrusion detection doesn't work,' I think of the story of the guy who returned a violin to the music store with the complaint, 'This violin doesn't play Mozart.'" --Michael Sierchio The generation that used acid to escape reality is now using antacid to deal with reality. "Seriously...the world needs more shaved raccoons." --Skippyfox " See Kids? Auto updates are bad, M'kay. " --Erek Adams "Yeah, but you're taking the universe out of context." --Chris Green "You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do. --Anne Lamott "I'm shaking like a leaf thanks to sucking in enough albuterol to dilate the Holland Tunnel to the size of Madonna's cooch." --Pegritz "Einstein truly was a stupid person if he covered up the truth because of a belief in a myth." --Sheraze "Remember: Defense in depth, not defense by marketing." --John Sage "Jesus died so you could jot down important information on Post-It notes." --Preyfar "While I will agree that the Gartner group needs to reevaluate their system for recommendations concerning technology. (Don't just ask your customers, try asking some well established experts.) That doesn't mean that IPS is the next coming of the anti-christ either (Martha Stewart being the first)." --Geoff (slightly edited for clarity) Boredom: A state of mind in which one actively hunts for non-porn-related websites that are still blocked by the local proxy server. "All this technology and it still takes forever to get anywhere." --Marcus, _Babylon-5_ "If we lose our freedom in the process of protecting ourselves, we are less secure, not more secure." --Al Gore "I'm not sure which upsets me more: That people are so unwilling to accept responsibility for their own actions, or that they are so eager to regulate everyone else's." --Kee Hinckley "Upcoming features? PAM. Files larger than 2 gigs. NFS over TCP. The 80's called, they want their features back." --Compactible Dave, on the SCO Roadmap for 2004 "The Chinese eat no cheese... except Crab Rangoon." --Sultry Sinful BB, mistress of the non sequitur "Reading the paper is usually a good idea before ridiculing it." --Michal Zalewski "Never be afraid to try something new. Remember, amateurs built the ark; professionals built the Titanic." --Anonymous More hacker poetry: ^<@<.@* }"_# | -@$&/_% !( @|=> ;`+$?^? ,#"~|)^G Translation: "Hat less at less point at star Backbrace double base pound space bar Dash at cash and slash base rate Wow open tab at bar is great Semi backquote plus cash huh DEL Comma pound double tilde bar close BEL" --Unknown "When did 'you want fries with that?' become associated with the five 9's of reliability?" --Compactible Dave Hacker poetry: <> !*''# ^"`$$- !*=@$_ %*<> ~#4 &[]../ |{,,SYSTEM HALTED Translation: "Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash, Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash, Bang splat equal at dollar under-score, Percent splat waka waka tilde number four, Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash, Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH." --Unknown Encrypt everything. "Spam cares not for your gender. You must be enhanced!" --Chuck Lochel "Sadly, it costs a lot of money to exercise free speech in America." --The Register (http://www.register.co.uk/) "To mess up a Linux box, you need to work at it; to mess up your Windows box, you just need to work on it." --Scott Granneman "If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier... just as long as I'm the dictator." --George W. Bush, 18 December 2000 "You have eternity. I have only now." --Chani, _Dune Messiah_ "In the vernacular of the youth: Word." --Joseph Hall "In Germany, the Nazis first came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, but I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up for me." --Martin Niemoeller "Although Tai Chi is really cool, at the end of the day, it can't compensate for getting blind, stinking drunk." --Reverend Geo "Platform independence - write once, debug everywhere." --Visigoth "Suicidal behaviors are the first target [of treatment] 'simply because psychotherapy is not effective with dead patients' (Linehan, 1987, p. 329)..." --_Abnormal Psychology and Modern Life_, 11th edition "You can't use warez to replace faith." --Alex Mizell @ Livejournal "The best part of paganism: Everything can be celebrated with sex." --T3knomanser "Can I get rowdy and call names now?" --Alaric "We regret to inform you that we do not enable any of the security functions within the routers that we install." --covad.net technical support "How can you *not* love an intensely beautiful 30 foot tall androgyne riding a giant chicken?" --Tina Finagle's fourth Law: Once a job is fouled up, anything done to improve it only makes it worse. "I'm making goofy jokes about it because I think that we are a young species that often fucks with things we don't know how to unfuck. It's a coping mechanism." --Tycho, _Penny Arcade_ "Mine enemy is never wholly wrong." --Mohandas Ghandi "Don't make enemies with [sic] people appointed for life by the President of the United States; and don't make enemies of people who buy their ink by the gallon." --Mark Rasch "At what point does it become easier to maintain a human relationship than a Windows box?" --Robert Cowles "If God wants to punish a man, all He has to do is take away his common sense." --Russian proverb "Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect." --Linus Torvalds "Our breakups were like Amish barn raisings; if you were there, you were gonna lend a hand." --The Ferrett "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the President next year." --Wally O'Dell, CEO of Diebold, Inc. (One of the largest American manufacturers of election machinery) "I will not dismiss a Hero as a mere mortal because he does not have my centuries of experience. Even inexperienced losers can get lucky." --From _Things I Will Do If I Am Ever The Vampire_ "Message passing as the fundamental operation of the OS is just an excercise in computer science masturbation. It may feel good, but you don't actually get anything DONE." --Linus Torvalds "We're nothing more than egotistical monkeys with computers, crayons and sushi." --Emily Curewitz "For any process W or device X, you'll find person Y who never had a problem with it and person Z who says it causes cancer." --James O'Kane "It strikes me as surreal that Microsoft releases a security update to fix a bug, which security update itself has a bug and another update web page on how to manually fix it. Couldn't they go back and re-release a working version of their original security update?!" --Guy Barnum, on the Swen virus and Microsoft's not-patch "The Internet is more than port 80." --Declan McCullagh "If his toy wanted to be hurt some more.. who was he [Seishirou] to argue?" --"Sakura Taylor", _Tokyo Babylon: Full of Grace_ Art is the illusion of spontaneity. "I like to keep in mind that in the biological sciences the term 'adult' means nothing more exalted than 'an organism possessing functional genitalia'." --Steven McGraw "Don't patch code, rewrite it." --Brian Kernighan and P.J. Plauger, _The Elements of Programming Style_ "It's mother tested, gay approved." --Carson Kressley "Build one to throw away. You will anyhow." --Fred Brooks "I've exceeded the limits of even my own astounding capacity for chaos." --Pace "You've got a problem with drinking cheap liquor. Life is too short to drink cheap booze!" --Ted Allen "My country 'tis a freak, sweet land of anarchy, of thee I scream." --Ket "If 44,000 employees of Sun can work with StarOffice, and can exchange any document with their customers, there is no good argument not to do it." --Richard Seibt, CEO of SuSE The 13th Commandment: Watch your ass. "Some device on the network is feeling empowered to answer for broadcast traffic." --Martin Roesch on the snort-users mailing list Just because brainwashing is free doesn't mean that you have to have it done. "Windows Server 2003 doubles active sites since July; 5% were previously running Linux." "Fah. Let's see that number again after all the 120 day eval licenses expire." --Don Vanco "Maybe Ziggy. Ziggy wants you to talk dirty to her." --Lyssa, on the possibility of being monitored "You want to be vaguely careful when you start screaming about killing people. It can be a touchy subject. Never threaten to kill people in front of witnesses. Take my word for it." --Hunter S. Thompson "We didn't have any of these problems until you put that AS/400 on the network." --P- "We're having a Muppet moment." --John Pregger "I have a +5? When in the hell did I get a +5??" --Swift Fox, in game You always find the formatting errors in your resume as soon as you print out a batch to send. "If it involves the use of explosives in any way, it has to be American to some extent." --Taerkar "Classification: SCORE! Get the lotion!" --Snort alert message "I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone." --Bjarne Stroustrup You used to have to reboot the Windows 9.x series every couple of days because it would crash. Now you have to reboot Windows 200x or XP every couple of days because of a patch. How is that better or more stable? "You should try the cream-filled exclamation points sometimes. They are out of this world." --Giza A deep, unwavering belief is a sure sign that you're missing something. "I think I need to get a new general practitioner. One whose office is not a malarial breeding ground." --Pegritz "I'll wait until I hear of an actual [OpenSSH <= v3.7] exploit before I put my server in plastic and duct tape." --Sam Evans "Not everyone holds these truths to be self-evident, so we've worked up a proof of them as Appendix A." --Paul Prescod "Outlook is evil. Extra line breaks in this message were removed." --Outlook-specific notice in posts from the Snort-users mailing list "People who can't get SSHv2 clients can go away." --Bennett Todd "Nothing kills a party like a trip to the emergency room." --Carson Kressley "He looks like a poor man's David Hasslehoff." --Carson Kressley "Aaagh! Must.. poke out.. mind's eye!!!" --Sid, _User Friendly_ "Plus, you're sort of caressing and fondling, and you've got raw fish involved.." --Ted Allen "Wow! Straight guys are really fun!" --Carson Kressley "Those wings make your ass look so fierce!" --Jai Rodriguez "The theme in the kitchen appears to be: A bomb went off." --Ted Allen "See? That was nothing. But that's always how it begins.. very small." --Egg Shen, _Big Trouble In Little China_ "The superior warrior wins without fighting." --Sun Tzu "Good lord, Cliff, you're like a suppository of knowledge." -Greg Dean, _Real Life Comics_ "What the hell." --Jack Burton, _Big Trouble In Little China_ Give all orders verbally. Never write anything down that might go into a "Pearl Harbor File". "The negation operator may be applied against any of the other rule types (except any, which would translate to none, how Zen...)." --Martin Roesch and Chris Green, _Snort Users Manual_ "All true wisdom is found in taglines." --ancient BBS saying The world is run by idiots because they're more efficient than hamsters. If you're not on somebody's shit list, you're not doing anything worthwhile. "Evolve or die, lunchmeat - and that means mentally, too." --Lyssa Heartsong "The grace of God is the sweat of the brow." --Whitley Streiber When all of your wishes are granted, many of your dreams will be destroyed. "Dear God: Thank you for coffee. It is one of your better inventions. Good show on the caffeine molecule, old chap. Mayhap next time try something in the vanilla ice cream flavour/style?" --Lyssa Heartsong Freedom of the press is for those who actually own one. "I guess you can only talk about getting tough on crime for so long before you have to back it up with meaningless arrests." --Risa Woods-Tanouye "Whenever they burn books, they will also, in the end, burn human beings." --Heinrich Heine No one's ever accused me of NOT being crazy. "Death before dishonor; drugs before lunch." --Hunter S. Thompson's Colorado gubernatorial campaign slogan "I can't wait for the day that some whizzkid working on some kind of medical molmac develops a replicator that will automatically seek out shitty beers and alter their chemical structure to become Jose Cuervo." --Nyarlathotep "I'm a little bit homo, and a little bit rock-and-roll." --The Ferrett "Everything I needed to know about love I learned from _Angel Sanctuary_. Yeah, right." --Silicon Rose Walk without rhythm and you won't attract a worm. When in doubt, take a pawn. "My own rule is that no weird story can truly produce terror unless it is devised with all the care and verisimilitude of an actual hoax. The author must forget all about 'short story technique', and build up a stark, simple account, full of homely corroborative details, just as if he were actually trying to 'put across' a deception in real life -- a deception clever enough to make adults believe it. My own attitude in writing is always that of the hoax-weaver. One part of my mind tries to concoct something realistic and coherent enough to fool the rest of my mind & make me swallow the marvel as the late Camille Flammarion used to swallow the ghost & revenant yarns unloaded on him by fakers and neurotics. For the time being I try to forget formal literature, and simply devise a lie as carefully as a crooked witness prepares a line of testimony with cross-examining lawyers in his mind." --Howard Philips Lovecraft The world will not get better through technology. We must seek to be better people. "We're all Carson, inside." --Lyssa "If I had to fall from Cassiel's grace, at least I know it took a courtesan worthy of kings to do it." --Joscelin Verreuil "It's a manly quiche. It's a quiche with balls." --Ted Allen "Now I'll never be a teen fashion model!" "Dammit." --Carson & Ted "Guns don't kill people - bad fashion does." --Carson Kressley To label me is to limit me. "There is no 'I' in 'drone'." --Evil Alien "The people you are after are the people you depend on. We develop your apps, we back up your data. We route your packets, we defend you while you sleep. Do not fuck with us." --jrandom, paraphrasing _Fight Club_ void after_hours(void){ while(1){ install_patches_on_MS_servers(); } } "Little prigs and three-quarter madmen may have the conceit that the laws of nature are constantly broken for their sakes." --Friedrich Nietzsche "If gay people decide that they can't be flamboyant and funny because straight people aren't going to like it, then what's the point? Either way, we're not allowed to be ourselves. I want to be gay on my own terms." --Kyan Douglas "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything." --Josef Stalin "I always thought George Bush looked like the Cobra GI Joe figure..." --Ashitaka "[Crash programs] fail because they are based on the theory that, with nine women pregnant, you can get a baby in a month." --Wernher von Braun "High explosives are applicable where truth and logic fail." --Marcello Corno "Your info was in there. And they didn't. And you are not so pissed that you will never read this, never cancel your cards and start using cash, never write a congressman, and just move on to the next Slashdot story about Legos and Linux." --Anonymous, on the security compromise of the Acxiom Corporation's network "AutoCAD: The complex made Hermetic." --Ashitaka "I don't need to kick someone's balls to have a good time." --Lady Dreamtime "C'mon! Quick like a bunny!" --Carson Kressley "People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." --Jim Davidson Programming: A pastime similiar to banging one's head against a wall, but with fewer opportunities for reward. "The most stable and profitable IT industries seem to be gaming, gambling, and pr0n." --Joshua Tinnin We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe. "When love cast me out it was cruelty who took pity on me." --Phaedra no Delunay "Nothing surpasses the complexity of the human mind." --Leto Atreides II Enlightenment can be found when one can be comfortable that they know that they do not know. You know? Know your limitations. So long as you can see them, you can surpass them. 'Different' does not mean 'broken'. "What do you do when your real life exceeds your wildest fantasies?" "You keep it to yourself." --Broadcast News "Albert Einstein nailed space-time, but the wild thing had him stumped." --Thomas Dolby "Gelcaps: Beats all that barfing." --Bobby G "You've had the best of training. If you screw this up, it's not our fault." --Carson Kressley "Where there's stupid, there's Windows." --the.Silicon.Dragon "iMac... therefore iAm." --The Crisses "One guy with some Jack Daniels and a 30.06 can cause some serious trouble." --Jeff Rense "I am basking in the afterglow of a carnivore-gasm." --Lyssa Never fear that your life will end. Fear, rather, that it has not yet begun. "You don't have the right to an opinion, you have a right to an INFORMED opinion!" --Harlan Ellison "My chi is strong. My shirt is cotton." --The Shirt Ninja "A decent Jewish girl would be quoting Tanach at you, not Blue Oyster Cult." --Brachah (who happens to be Jewish) "When you type on it, it makes almost no sound whatsoever, and it just feels totally weird.. like I'm typing on a field of small, thumb-sized breast implants." --Nyarlathotep, on the Virtually Indestructible Keyboard "I'm drunk." "So am I." "Ain't it cool? Let's blow something up." --Lyssa and the Doctor "Christ, I'd take off _my_ pants in support of that." --John "You know you're drunk when you're holding a strap-on and you willingly think about _FLCL_." --The Doctor "I like hugs." "I like fucking." --Sarah and Lyssa "You're afraid of my Hulk-like abilities." --Sarah "Nipples: They're what's for breakfast." --Aaron "Are you a Mormon?" "Yes." --Sarah and Aaron "'Body shot'?! What?? Suddenly all conversation stops." --Sarah "Speak porno French to me." --Lyssa "My morals don't change dramatically when I'm drunk. I just have a greater tendency to take my clothes off." --Aaron "Would you like some butt candy?" --Lyssa "No fucking when you should be talking." --The Doctor "Yes, but my head is moving at two different speeds!" --Bredmold "Either make up your mind or go on Springer!" --Vertigo "A free society is one where it is safe to be unpopular." --Adlai Stevenson "Physics is a bitch." --William Bell "Hacking: The clever circumvention of imposed limits, whether imposed by your government, your own skills, or the laws of physics. Hacking doesn't stop with computers. Every revolutionist is a hacker, hacking the social system. The nerd-heroic Wright brothers hacked bicycles before they started hacking airplanes (because bikes were cutting-edge tech: elegant cheap mobility.) Ms. Manners, a feminist hero, hacks social interactions. The hacker approach works for everything in life. At least, it will make you more likely to analyze the elements of your life. At best it will make you want to transform those elements like an alchemist." --St. Jude (RIP) "What are we, the five fags from IBM?!" --Carson Kressley "One straight man down, about three hundred million to go." --Ted Allen Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status. "Tentacles are best." --Seaweb (horribly out of context, re: typing) That which the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly. Silly Jedi, mind tricks are for Sith. "OK, now I understand why the Supreme Court recently legalized sodomy. Clearly, it was necessary to make it legal before the RIAA and the US government start systematically buggering the general public." --Dipipanone "Hey! Where did Kosh's CD-ROM drive go?!" --The Doctor "If it's true that unprotected sex with someone is like having sex with everyone they had sex with, and everyone they had sex with, and so-on, then that must mean that in some roundabout way most of us have had sex with Kevin Bacon." --Anonymous "I believe reality is a marvelous joke staged for my edification and amusement, and everybody is working very hard to make me happy." --Terence McKenna "You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends." --Robert Anton Wilson "What's a seven letter word for 'dead broke'? 'student'" --The Crisses "We are all born naked. Everything after that is drag." --RuPaul The point is that geeks are not necessarily the outcasts society often believes they are. The fact is that society isn't cool enough to be included in our activities. "I wonder...what are bird phone-sex calls like? How can you make twittering and tweetering sexy?" --Pegritz Have move, will bust. Same shit, different incarnation. "That wasn't a vibrator, B., that was a webcam." --Lyssa "Even if you stumble and fall on your face, you are still moving forward." --Jeff Rense "I remember when legal used to mean lawful, now it means some kind of loophole." --Leo Kessler If entropy is increasing, where is it coming from? "Audacity is better than a basket full of kittens!" --Arakune "Nobody is a nobody. Everyone has something to offer." --Buckaroo Banzai It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion, It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed, The hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning, It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion. "May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house." --George Carlin "Marijuana will be legal some day, because the many law students who now smoke pot will someday become congressmen and legalize it in order to protect themselves. --Lenny Bruce "The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ...'" --Isaac Asimov "Complete self-identity can never be preserved in any advance to novelty." --Alfred North Whitehead "Hey -- LGBT, kink, and an evil bishonen. What more does a girl need?" --Lyssa "You may have lost your soul, you keep your spirit within.." --Unknown "I try to do this trip without stopping.. I do not mind making a 5-10 minute stop for snacks. But I am relentless. I am the Aragorn of the DC-Pittsburgh drive! I-70 Ranger, level 15. Gentlemen, we do NOT stop until nightfall. And even then..." --the.Silicon.Dragon Do not worry about which side your bread is buttered on: You eat BOTH sides. "I'd crawl over an acre of 'Visual This++' and 'Integrated Development That' to get to gcc, Emacs, and gdb. Thank you." --Vance Petree, Virginia Power "My name is a killing word." --Paul Muad'dib, _Dune_ "Sane? Doesn't sound much like a word you'd use, Bryce..." --Ashitaka "Microsoft thrashed by silicon neatness, 412 the geekiest!" --Prezzey "Linux: Where don't we want to go today?" --Pancrazio de Mauro "A little metal-cutting/drilling is good for the soul." --Robert Bernardo "I can see beyond the eyes. A sometimes unfortunate gift." --Kwai Chang Caine "Anywhere is walking distance if you've got the time." --Steven Wright "Neo-pragmatism: 1+1=2... get with the program." --Sean the Hairy Jedi "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evovled from a simple system that worked." --John Gall, _Systemantics_ "Anger is a weapon only to one's opponent." --Unknown "The best-laid plans of mice and megalomaniacs always go awry." --Jake Horsley "If you have time to cry, why not laugh instead?" --Japanese saying "He's not a total dick. He just has moments of asshole." --Lyssa "What part of 'evil gloves' do you not understand?!" --Jackie Chan's grandfather, _Jackie Chan Adventures_ "On the Internet, no one knows you're using Windows NT." --Ramiro Estrugo (at least until you bluescreen) "The smut must flow." --Lyssa "Things just can't get odd enough for me." --David Lynch "David's vision is very, very bizarre because, I think, he's a very bizarre person. He's not normal. He's out of somewhere... out of left field. The reason I'm doing Dune is to work with David Lynch." --Sting, on the making of _Dune_ "A beginning is a time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct." --Princess Irulan, _Dune_ "When I marry, I want it to be for love." "Ah, a radical?" -- Vir Kotto and Lyndisty, _Babylon 5: Sic Transit Vir_ "When spiders unite they can tie up a lion." --Ethiopian proverb "Our children can see the otherworld in their dreams. The children of the otherworld see this one in their nightmares." --Unknown "The idealist should become a realist, fewer ulcers that way and less frustration in the long run." --Th'Elf To the man who only has a screwdriver in the toolkit, every problem looks screwed. "To know and yet think we do not know is the highest attainment. Not to know and yet think we do know is a disease." --Lao-tzu "If hostility kept families from eating together, the whole world would starve." --Dana, _His Brother's Keeper_ "Most of what affects our lives happens in our absence." --Salman Rushdie "You should have known better than to argue Correspondence with a Virtual Adept." --Alexius "Life's a bitch... cause if it was a slut, it would be easy." --Ryan Trust your cynicism. "The world is run by idiots because they're more efficient than hamsters." --Anonymous *clears throat noisily* "Drunk people! Pay attention!" --Unknown speaker, Summercon 2003 "I'm a diplomat! I failed flight school!" --John Parker, _The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai_ "Let's hear it for the network layer! Give up some love!" --Redpantz, Summercon 2003 "Dude, I think you're drinking too much up there." "'s okay, I've got another beer. *sip*" --Max Power & Redpantz, Summercon 2003 "Probably botched that. Bad Catholic - no wafer." --Lyssa "When the score starts copping Igor Stravinsky and Philip Glass, the pretension just begs to be beaten with a sheaf of batons." --Philip Graham, on _The Matrix Reloaded_ "You are one sick puppy." --George Noory "What do you get when you cross an angel with a devil? A human." --Anonymous "Faith is daring the soul to go beyond what the eyes can see." --Anonymous "Let me tell you once more You're the one I adore You're my C-64!" --Press Play On Tape, _Comic Bakery (Larger Than Pop Boyband mix)_ UNIX: Because rebooting is for adding new hardware. "The measure of a man is what happens when nothing works and you got the guts to go on." --Randall "Tex" Cobb "Only when lions get to write history will hunters cease to be heroes." --African proverb "Quite frankly, I found it mostly interesting in a Jerry Springer kind of way. White trash battling it out in public, throwing chairs at each other. SCO crying about IBM's other women. ... Fairly entertaining." --Linus Torvalds, on the SCO-vs-IBM lawsuit "'GPL' is not a synonym for 'I can do whatever I want.'" --Anonymous "Once something's been approved by the government, it's no longer immoral." --Rev. Lovejoy, _The Simpsons_ "You know, it seems that two out of three times practising technomancy have resulted in 'x has blown up', which his resulted in migranes for anyone else involved. This is mildly disconcerting." --Lyssa "See? I could be Giles' schoolgirl in five seconds!" --Lyssa "Live the life you've imagined." --Henry David Thoreau "The symbols of the divine initially show up at the trash stratum." --Philip K. Dick "YOUR SEEKER HAS BEEN SPLASHED WITH A HIGHLY CORROSIVE ACID" --Game over message from _Nonterraqueous_ for the C-64 I'm just an O(n) person in an O(log(e, n)) world. "Four boxes to be used in defense of liberty and religious freedom: Soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Use in that order." --Unknown "Man's emancipation depends on his own realisation of the Truth, and not on the benevolent grace of a god or any external power as a reward for his obedient good behaviour." "Eris provides. Often unexpectedly, but She provides." --The Doctor "Yeah, I'm bi--But I'm *NOT* attracted to YOU." --The Crisses (who hit the nail right on the head) "Alas, Poor Weekend-With-The-house-All-To-My-Self, I Barely Knew Ye. May You Rest In Pieces." --Alexius "Nothing says 'love' like two tonnes of construction equipment upside the head." --Patrick "I think, deep inside, he'd feel a real connection with a Real Doll." --Nicole "Mer, I am your giant sucking sound." --Vertigo "They broke your mecha. Now it's badass." --Vertigo (to Catherine) "Young archmages always make a tasty treat." --Patrick "Ooh, look! Paradox in my crotch!" "You must've gotten some." --Patrick and Jason "Vengeance is nice but there's always next round." --Heavy Metal "Your crotch would fire more explosive rounds than mine!" --Vertigo "_Matrix Reloaded_ makes _Highlander 2_ look like fucking _Casablanca_." --Ferrett "How do you expect to run the universe if you can't handle a few unsolvable problems?" --Flynn, _Tron_ "Okay, I really don't hate very much about JavaScript. It's pretty good for manipulating DOM elements, and I really like bookmarklets. Working around browser bugs and incompatibilities scarred me for life, though." --Chromatic "How was I supposed to know blunt honesty worked?!" --Dave, _Real Life Comics_ "Brain-damage is close to organisational godliness." --Rialian Militant omnivore: If you aren't part of the solution, you're part of a complete breakfast. "The future is inevitable and precise, but it may not occur." --Jorge Luis Borges "I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we've created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image." --Stephen Hawking "Okay, who died and made you the Goddess to decide what is and isn't a 'proper' religion? Hell, *football* is a religion in this town!" --Lupa "You accidentally spilled Flash on your resume'." --Lowmagnet to Seele "The time has come for all to see that life is what one makes of it. That life is a series of moments one must treasure. Not to treasure them is to miss out on life itself. Life is meant for one to indulge in one's own obsessions, for not to indulge is to deprive... and to deprive is to sadden one's own being." --Lord Egan "Everybody wants to save the earth; nobody wants to help Mom do the dishes." --P. J. O'Rourke: All the Trouble in the World The grass is always greener when it's Astroturf. "I see all this potential, and I see you squandering it. Goddammit, an entire generation pumping gas--waiting tables--slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy SHIT we-don't-need. We're the middle children of history; no purpose-- no place. We have no Great War, no Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars, but we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off." --Tyler's soliloquy (one of many), _Fight Club_ "The perfect world is a world without lag. A world without lag is a world without people." --Seele Varcuzzo "A mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its former shape." --Oliver Wendell Holmes "Back to shopping and entertainment. We're the Simpsons nation." --Seaweb "Let every one walk in the way of their gods, and let us walk together in peace." --Thomas Potter, A.A., A.S. "Jesus saves. God makes tape backups." --Dante, _Angst Technologies_ "I'm a conundrum wrapped in an enigma wrapped in a puzzle, carrying the wallet that says Bad Muthafucka." --Tankdilla "The fatal flaw in every plan is the assumption that you know more than your adversary." --KaryAnna Thorson "I know I'm a geek because I get *really* excited when I open a box of college text books..." --The Crisses "Learning curve encryption is much more powerful than elliptical curve encryption." --Alan Olsen "Now that I think of it, O'Reilly is to a system administrator as a shoulder length latex glove is to a veterinarian." --Peter da Silva "Mock me now, instrument of the void. But playtime is over." --Largo, _Megatokyo_ "I don't like being called ''Mags''. Those are what I put ammo in." --Magdalene Meretrix "Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag." --Alexander Solzhenitsyn "If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" --Albert Einstein "A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation." --H.H.Hunro Anybody is going to pay more attention to their fitness instructor if she's got a riding crop in her hand. "If ecstasy is our true nature, why do we think we have to die to go to heaven? If life is a celebration, why is it taking so long to get to the party?" --Margo Anand, _The Art of Everyday Ecstasy_ "My aim is to prevent people from being killed, and you happen to be my current assignment. But not only do I want to keep you alive, I want to know who wants you dead. So why don't we just continue this ludicrous working relationship with the same goals in mind, hmmm?" --Oliver Sampson, _VR.5_ "I am the Golden Apple of Ann Arbor. All acts of hedonism, kink, and geekdom are my rituals." --Lyssa "It was a realization that here is a whole realm of physical experience that just doesn't fit in the current framework. Why wasn't that part of what we were taught? We had a chance to look around the immediate world - a world so mundane it was wonderful - and understand something." --James Crutchfield "Perhaps we should believe in magic." --Heinz-Otto Peitgen and Peter H. Richter, on finding the Mandelbrot set inside a magnetisation phase diagramme by accident "..as a grammatical construct: That. Sucks. Ass." --Lyssa Heartsong "Perhaps Sekhmet and Tiamat should join forces and become some large MECHA, or something..." --Diablo "To risk sloganeering, I say you need to hold the keys to your own computer." --Whitfield Diffie, on Microsoft Palladium/NGSCB "None of what I've said in this class is a personal opinion. Most of it was for shock value." --Zach Nearman "Dr. D.'ll lap it up like a cat!" --Dr. DiBartolomeo, out of context (because I can't remember the context...) "Big whorls have little whorls Which feed on their velocity, And little whorls have lesser whorls And so on to viscosity." --Lewis F. Richardson Comments should be like skirts. Short enough to keep your attention, but long enough to cover the subject. "We also can be confident in the ways of Providence, even when they are far from our understanding." --George W. Bush, National Prayer Breakfast, Washington, D.C., 02-06-2003 "I go the way that Providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker." --Adolph Hitler, Munich, Germany, 03-15-1946 "The west won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-westerners never do." --Samuel P. Huntington "If all of your peers understand what you've done, you havn't been creative." --Dr. Henry Heimlich "It's a fine testament to the quality of Pitt's computer science program that graduating seniors don't know how to use 'reply' instead of 'reply all' for something like this." --Christian Mason "It's not how many mages you got, it's how you abuse 'em!" --Vertigo "So shines a good deed in a weary world." --Willy Wonka "A long and wicked life followed by five minutes of perfect grace gets you into Heaven. An equally long life of decent living and good works followed by one outburst of taking the name of the Lord in vain - then have a heart attack at that moment and be damned for eternity. Is that the system?" --Robert A. Heinlein "Agent Smith is back, and he's pissed." --Steve Silberman, on _The Matrix Reloaded_ "It's not personal." --Al Capone "What blinds us, or makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness that our beliefs have grown obsolete and should be put aside.... This is I think much of the problem of the modern dilemma: Direct experience has been discounted, and in its place all kinds of belief systems have been erected.... If you believe something, you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite; which means that a degree of your human freedom has been forfeited in the act of committing yourself to this belief." --Terrence McKenna "You need something to frighten people with, to prevent them from paying attention to what's really happening to them." --Noam Chomsky "Go without hate but not without rage." --Paul Monette "Never mock the cookie." --Grandfather, _Jackie Chan Adventures_ "A man will say anything when he's wearing a mask." --Oscar Wilde "Cultures with the fewest objects live in the Dreamtime." --Terrence McKenna "Anyone want some slightly used orange juice?" --Erasmus C. Anderson "We're all lab rats. Some of us just realise it." --Mr.O "No good deed goes unpunished." --Clair Booth Luce "Maybe computer science should be in the College of Theology." --R.S. Barton "Don't take this personally.." --Katsuragi Misato, _End of Evangelion_ "What about the Rimmer directive, which states to never tangle with anything that has more teeth than the Osmond family?" --Arnold J. Rimmer, _Red Dwarf_ WWKD? (What Would Kosh Do?) If copying from one person is plagiarism, why is copying from many people research? Many suggestions Confusion reigns within Read the manpage --Alexandros Papadopoulos "I bet the human brain is a kludge." --Marvin Minsky "Conjecture has become fact, and rumour has become history." --Unseen Narrator, _Serial Experiments Lain_ "Faith is good, but skepticism is better." --Giuseppe Verdi Dynamic linking error: Your mistake is now everywhere. "If you go on with this nuclear arms race, all you are going to do is make the rubble bounce." --Winston Churchill "If I wanted to be popular, I'd have written a Star Trek novel." --John DeVito Never underestimate the power of what people _want_ to believe. "Oh, go back to your PC." --Matthew Monchalin "'Think' is not a four-letter word." --Marshall Cline "Godless, feminist, baby-killing queers turn me on... especially if they wield whips." --Lyssa Heartsong "At the beginning of the week, we sealed ten BSD programmers into a computer room with a single distribution of BSD Unix. Upon opening the room after seven days, we found all ten programmers dead, clutching each others' throats, and thirteen new flavors of BSD." --Unknown, found on xiph.org The light at the end of the carpal tunnel is just your optical mouse. "PA == Pittsburgh on one end, Philadelphia on the other, Alabama in the middle." --Lyssa Heartsong "It is never too late to be what you might have been." --George Eliot "Talk is the bastard redheaded stepchild of email and the telephone." --Geoff Miller You know you're a geek if your home network has two or more computers whose only connections are ethernet and power. "The answer: 42.42. The bill: 46.46. Hey! 42.42 + 4.04!" "Meaning of life - 404, not found." --Patrick & Bryce "I don't want to hurt him. I just want him dead." --Nicole "I think we need to put a magic shield on my pants." --Jason, as Vertigo "You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, France is accusing the US of being arrogant, and Germany doesn't want to go to war." --Lewis Black "So, what _about_ a crack ho?" --Dr. DiBartolomeo "The price of getting what you want is getting what you once wanted." --Neil Gaiman "That's just great. We find (Richard C.) Hoagland's breath mints for him and Big Foot takes off with them!" --TerrasHelm "Dammit, why won't his pants disintegrate?!" --Azure "All creatures will make merry under pain of death." --from _Flash Gordon_ "It has a philosophy, and that is what makes it dangerous." --Marsha, _Videodrome_ "They say hunger is the best spice." --Spike Spiegel, _Cowboy Bebop_ "There is no safeword for George Bush!" --Lyssa Gorbachev's Razor: Trust but verify. "Ostrich: The other red meat." --Kenshin "Find the others." --Timothy Leary "The only difference between a computer and a psychedelic was one was too large to swallow. Well, great progress has been made in twelve months..." --Terrence McKenna "Don't think of them as peas, think of them as larval Pac-men." --Unknown "We do not take from this universe, it grants what it will." --Frank Herbert, _Dune Messiah_ "Goodness alone is never enough. A hard, cold wisdom is required for goodness to accomplish good. Goodness without wisdom always accomplishes evil." --Robert A. Heinlein, _Stranger in a Strange Land_ "Would you hold my camel?" --Puff "They said you would sleep for half a millennium -- not an unreasonable length of time, considering you'd be in limited cryogenic suspension. Your body would rest frozen at the planet's nerve center, an underground complex 20 miles beneath the surface. Your brain, they told you, would be wired to a network of computers; your mind would continue to operate at a minimal level, overseeing maintenance of surface-side equilibrium. And you would not awake, so they promised, until your 500 years had elapsed -- barring, of course, the most dire emergency. "Then, and only then, you would be awakened to save your planet by strategically manipulating six robots, each of whom perceives the world differently. But such a catastrophe, you have been assured, could not possibly occur. "Good morning." --Flavor text for _Suspended_ by Infocom "With a name like Manos, it just has to suck." --John "This is the forked-tongue pigeon.. this is the Easter Island pigeon.." --Dr. John Ramirez "Ok. Not my kink.. I eat octopus--I do not fuck it." --Lyssa Heartsong "Canines are carnivorous! Remember that, you little runt!" --Inu-Yasha "I hate my job; don't push your luck." --things you never want to see on a police officer's t-shirt "Always this emphasis on performance... a Jedi craves not these things, only affordability." --Anonymous, on buying a laptop "Jesus needs ranch dressing. I much prefer matzah." --Steven McGraw "Yesterday's technology today.. for a better tomorrow!" --Dave Ross "I am what I am, and I don't think Betty Ford takes vampires." --Nick, _Forever Knight_ "Shalom Echelon, mah nishmah?" (Hi, Echelon, what's up?) "Interdimensional Fortress Hammerschlag?? Doesn't have quite the right ring to it." --John "Ever notice that 'what the hell' is always the right decision?" --Marilyn Monroe "To hear, one must be silent." --Mictian "If _I_ can be of any help, you're in worse trouble than I thought." --Unknown "If you optimize everything, you will always be unhappy." --Donald Knuth "I am Jack's supposedly fictitious alter ego." --The Crisses "I am not an atomic playboy!" --from _Second Reality_, by Future Crew "Someone call Guinness. I'm going from zero to drunk in twenty dollars." --Ian Morgan "If Geiger counter does not click, the coffee, she is just not thick." --Pitr, _User Friendly_ Orpheus sang his best in Hell. "The more you learn, the less you find innocent." --The Daemon "KA-BOOOOOOM!!!!!!!!!!!" --3 litre bottle at Triumvirpalooza '95 Artificial Intelligence: Making computers act the way they do in the movies. "My format: Guardian. To mend and defend." --Bob, _ReBoot_ "Searching.. seeking the one true rhythm." --DJ Deadly Buda Roller skating is not a crime! "Reach out and offend someone!" --Zard Biomatrix "I'm just gonna save CNN the time and money and stick close to home." --Pegritz "There's more than one way." --Psykosonik, _Unlearn_ "If you can't understand it your teachers are inadequate." --Arifel "I've done... questionable things. Nothing the God of Biomechanics wouldn't let you into heaven for." --Roy Batty, _Bladerunner_ "America Online. Serving America's blank disc needs." --Kurt Harland, 1996 I didn't believe in reincarnation the last time, either. "Turn up the power! This is the hour! From every tower! A million watts of love!" --Information Society, _1,000,000 Watts of Love_ "Was that her top?" "One handed." "Difficulty rating..." "..seven." --from _Hackers_ Profanity is the one language all programmers know best. "Bad Antichrist! Bad Antichrist! Turn that off!" --Art Bell "That which does not kill us only makes us stranger." --Trevor Goodchild The meek shall inherit the earth; but by that time there won't be anything left worth inheriting. "Company crisis equals consumer charity!" --Yaz, _Angst Technologies_ "If we don't exist, why do we pay taxes?" --Gus Steeves "Christs come and go, but Caesars are forever!" --Frater AChDAE "Security is overrated. I leave my secureID laying on my desk. My boss always gives me s*** about it. Like anyone would wanna hack our cache of Snoopy GIFs". --A MetLife IT employee who shall remain anonymous "It's all right, everyone I know speaks typo." --Alexius Pendragon "A lady pointed at my suede jacket and sneered, 'You know a cow was murdered for that jacket?' I replied: 'I didn't know there were any witnesses. Now I'll have to kill you too.'" --Unknown "He [Pegritz] is not allowed to date Her [Lain]. I am not ready for the Second Coming yet. Some evolution I CAN'T keep up without without serious drugs." --Lyssa Heartsong "Stand back! I've got an open power supply and I'm not afraid to do something stupid with it!" --Matthew Carpenter "Then again... Lys is someone for whom the nature channel = ONE BIG FUCKING MENU." --Lyssa Heartsong "You know my father! Everything's fire and brimstone with him!" --Koenma, _Yu Yu Hakusho_ "Red Alert! He needs tech support!" --Optimus Prime, _Transformers Armada_ "It's like a game of whack-a-port." --Mark Dalrymple "I wouldn't be a Leatherman. I'd be a disk notcher." --Jason Scott, textfiles.com "The profile on the perpetrator is that he is a seven foot tall ex-basketball player, hindu guru, drag queen alien." --Jet Black, _Cowboy Bebop_ "I love the smell of learning something new in the morning." --Hagbard "Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat." --Anonymous "We all know - the Times knows - but we pretend we don't." --Virginia Woolf, _Monday or Tuesday_ "Dammit, Bryce, your virus code broke down even *my* godlike firewall!" *dies* --Jason Marlor, on the cold I gave him "If you think that _The Matrix_ is a new concept, you DON'T GET IT." --Flatline "It's only shockin' if yer rockin' like DOKKEN!" --Chris Rapier "Must not use Bardic power for evil.. must not use Bardic power for evil.. that only gets me.. laid." --Lyssa "You can call me anything as long as it's rated PG-13." --Dr. John Ramirez "The Bush administration thanks you for your apathy." --Anonymous "There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence." --Jeremy S. Anderson "Are they bowling?" --Dr. Lisa DiBartolomeo "Politicians, like bombers, seldom see their victims." --Dr. Donald Boudreaux, _Losing Touch_ "'Friend' is the word we use to describe our very oldest enemies." --Harlequin "I noticed that whenever it was fouronthefloor the ladies started paying attention and even shaking booty. Which leads me to conjecture: no thud, no women - so the reason for the thud is SEX." --Manny Theiner, on electro music Java: The COBOL of the new millennium. "A stranger world than this I fear I have yet to visit." --Samurai Jack "**SFS 07/05/96** Third day. Still no sign of an indented IF. Food and water is running out and the bearers are getting restless. I think Carruthers is going mad..." --Shane Smith on proper code indentation, in comp.os.vms A person is just about as big as the things that make them angry. Microsoft Palladium - Where the hell do you think YOU'RE going today? "Here's a secret: If you shave a Tribble you get a Pac-Man." --Jason Marlor "We can factor the number 15 with quantum computers. We can also factor the number 15 with a dog trained to bark three times." --Robert Harley "What? Chuck Norris Revolution?!" --Jason Marlor "Play those thighs!" --Lowmagnet "If you ever think about killing yourself, masturbate. You'll thank yourself for it later. 'There IS a reason to live after all!'" --David Withun "It's not stupid, it's... advanced." "Every generation has to have its Dolph Lundgren." --Anonymous Hacking's just another word for 'nothing left to kludge'. "Okay.. everybody else roll against Mind.." "Three." "Five." "Why?" "The two of you notice that dumbass here has the NERV insignia on his jacket." (laughter..) --During a BESM game set in the world of Lain "Isn't there a Cleopatra tribute to Alphaville by now or something?" --Manny Theiner "The human mind ordinarily operates at only ten percent of its capacity -- the rest is overhead for the operating system." --Marvin Minsky "Socrates was banished for his views. I expect no less from our 'modern' society." --Anonymous "The era of which we can laugh is over." --Ochiai Nobuhiko Beware the DOSferatu: The Children of the Byte, who reboot from the grave. "There is nothing like running over everyone with a bus." --Valen Mmmm... dark Jedi circular saw... "Do they have a http://willingvictims.meetup.com/?" --Griffer "Just a failure of chemistry." --Dr. Schrenker Gray's Law of Programming: 'n+1' trivial tasks are expected to be accomplished in the same time as 'n' tasks. Logg's Rebuttal to Gray's Law: 'n+1' trivial tasks take twice as long as 'n' trivial tasks. "Welcome to Rivendell, Mr. Anderson." --_Hybrid_ by Machinae Supremacy "I think it's a beautiful day to go to the zoo and feed the ducks. To the lions." --Brian Kantor "I think we're on the verge of a theorem here." --Kirk van Lehn "The person doing the DoS has to bring his equipment up to the target, which makes (the) attacker vulnerable to BBRS (baseball bat restoration of service)." --Digsig, regarding a DoS attack on 802.11a "As you can see I've come a long way from the beach and the talking car." --David Hasselhoff "Childhood's over the minute you know you're going to die." --James O'Barr "Destiny does not value wisdom in her champions." --Renfri "The road to truth is long, and lined the entire way with annoying bastards." "In a time of universal lies, telling the truth is a revolutionary act." --George Orwell "I didn't fail, I just found 10,000 other ways that didn't work." --Anonymous "Ooh. Sinus floss." --Jason Marlor "I'm sorry, I only speak muskrat fluently." --Patrick Ivins "In some circles I've been known to be an oracle... that makes me qualified to pause thoughtfully and go 'hmmm...'" --Unknown, stolen from someone's .signature "Ugly.. mollusc... in.. Speedo.. stretch marks.. NOOOOOOOOOO!!!!" --User Friendly, 20021205 "Peace, love, and twinkies in the middle!" --Alex Downs "By way of deception, thou shalt do war." "Will the last person to leave the (Newton) platform please turn off the backlight?" --Paul Guyot "It is against the grain of modern education to teach children to program. What fun is there in making plans, acquiring discipline in organizing thoughts, devoting attention to detail, and learning to be self-critical?" --Alan Perlis "How clever of me. I have found such a pathway into hell that I can never get back out." Life isn't fair, but having the root password helps. "Newton. It's the Palm with a brain." --Grant Hutchinson "You're yourself. Don't try to fit into a label. Transcend species." --Bladeless Axe "With many eyes, all bugs can be ignored in favour of skinning." --GTK+ design philosophy "I have to admit that Crypto++'s build/port problems suck, a lot. I still have a weird fondness for it (Stockholm Syndrome?)." --Zooko "You can fool enough of the people enough of the time." --Anonymous "For science, the most important phenomenon in the universe is the move toward heat, death, and entropy. Physicists barely notice that life represents an amazing and persistent exception to the rule that all thermodynamic systems run down. Life has achieved the miracle of a stability far from entropy through the miracle of metabolism." --Terrence McKenna Regarding the Homeland Security Act: None of your fucking business, Poindexter. "Always make new mistakes." --Esther Dyson "RMS is the Jerry Springer of open source software." --Anonymous "Canada... where we do more with less." --Th'Elf "A failure of intelligence by you does not justify reducing the civil liberties of us." --Elstun "Do I look like SMTP to you, motherfucker?!" --Genetik "Fight Megaman! For everlasting peace!" --finale text of Megaman for the NES "Thelma and Louise are kicking your ass, pal!" --the.Silicon.Dragon "People that offend me don't deserve my breath or my time." --ClassyEvil Cypherpunks: Civil liberty through complex mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow. "What is most magnificent about this world is people who, with their feet firmly on the ground, wholeheartedly live out their lives every day. They get up early every day, go to school every day, work every day, cry and laugh and worry and suffer, living wholeheartedly in reality." --Sakurazuka Seishiro, _Tokyo Babylon_ "The government can now do legally what it was doing illegally. Big fucking deal." --Nickco "He would be a coward who withdrew from the challenges, sacrifices, and dangers his people had to endure. But he would be no less a coward and traitor who betrayed the principles of the life of the mind to material interests - who, for example, left the decision on the product of two times two to the rulers. It is treason to sacrifice love of truth, intellectual honesty, loyalty to the laws and methods of the mind, to any other interests, including those of one's country. Whenever propaganda and the conflict of interests threatens to devalue, distort, and do violence to truth as it has already done to individuals, to language, to the arts, and to everything else that is organic and highly cultivated, then it is our duty to resist and save the truth, or rather the striving for truth, since that is the supreme article in our creed. The scholar who knowingly speaks, writes, or teaches falsehood, who knowingly supports lies and deceptions, not only violates organic principles. He also, no matter how things may seem at the given moment, does his people a grave disservice. He corrupts its air and soil, its food and drink; he poisons its thinking and its laws, and he gives aid and comfort to the hostile, evil forces that threaten the nation with annihilation." --Hermann Hesse, _Magister Ludi_ "Ain't no direction faster than downhill." --Aleris "Only humans treat each other as if they were not human." --unknown Slashdot poster (not necessarily...) "When the speaker and he to whom he is speaks do not understand, that is metaphysics." --Voltaire "I'm a very dangerous fellow when I don't know what I'm doing." --my namesake "Fiat veritas pereat vita." (Let there be truth, and may life perish.) --Friedrich Nietzsche "It is a foolish man who disregards the coming of the chicken-cow." --Synthetic "Neo's just another l337 h@x0r." --Aeon, on _The Matrix_ "Here it comes....did you get it? I just sent you a Reiki nose lick." --Butterfly "One person's 'Duh!' is another person's 'Huh?'" --Ride-My-Rocket "Live life, and thou shalt live forever." --Egyptian Book of the Dead "I resent this. Most of the lawyers I meet in open source circles know a lot more than 'jack' about code. Some of us even wrote lots of code in prior careers. We're just frustrated engineers who wanted to make our parents proud by going to law school." --Larry Rosen "If you're not Canadian, try harder." --unknown "High Magick is more so because it calls upon one to focus inward, not outward." --Stormbolt Dragon "If you have 2 rabbits in a grassy field, they'll eat and breed and soon you'll have 10 rabbits who will eat and breed. Soon there will be 100, then 1000 rabbits, eating, fucking, breeding. Then the grass will run out and you'll probably have no rabbits left. (environmental) Activism is about ensuring we don't run out of grass." --Sean the Hairy Jedi "Unfortunately, not everyone writing in C knows the language." --Perry Metzger "What it really needs is the addition of a #pragma dont_remove_this_code_you_bastard in the compiler." --Monty Solomon, in RISKS-DIGEST "Abstractions are fine, but I think people also have to breathe air and eat bread." --Hermann Hesse, _Magister Ludi_ "Bada bing. Bada bing. Bada Chernobyl." --DesertFox "That ugly saxophone has been burned into my brain." --Martin Koch of Press Play On Tape "How does Forces-3 Prime-2 strike you?" "I hope it doesn't." --Bryce to Patrick, OOC, House of the Unknown "I am a reformed Jedi! I do not believe in midichlorians!" --ConColor "If you get something like 'Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0' you know what kind of Internet worms they support." --Mark Dalrymple "Wow! He-Man doesn't look like he should be at Pegasus anymore!" --Alexius Pendragon "Information functions by always being in motion." --Lain of the Wired "Truth is found in life and not merely in conceptual knowledge." --Thay "All bsod bugs are ironic." --JWZ "Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believed." --William Blake "If there's a nuclear war the fucking Internet is going to be the least of my worries. E-commerce, web services, and XML can all kiss my ass." --Jonny Ringo "The fact that human communication is used to plan terrorist attacks, does not mean we should fight human communication." --evbergen "I'm afraid I can't do that. And now you must listen to stories about my cat." --Bladeless Axe "Area-51 is real. The Air Force doesn't exist." --seen on a bumper sticker "Here at the Phone Company, we serve all kinds of people; from presidents and kings to the scum of the Earth..." Never send a machine to do a VA's job. "A human is a gametes' way of making more gametes. Cool abilities don't count in evolution if they don't lead to more grandchildren." --Ben Waggoner "I'm trying to help protect the Internet against bad guys. I hope it's true that the government is going to stop interfering in my work." --Daniel J. Bernstein "Reliability means never having to say you're sorry." --Daniel J. Bernstein "Remember the power of the Spell-Checker!" --Rialian (again) "Remember the power of the changing of the subject line." --Rialian "When you see the ping of death, duck and cover." --Bruce Schneier, 15 October 2002 Crypto-Gram newsletter "We see the world as we are, not as it is." --Zen proverb "Could somebody drag the Irix team kicking and screaming into the 1980's, please? I realize it might be quite painful for them, but maybe you could buy them a disco tape so they'd feel a little bit more at home." --Linus Torvalds "I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. Consequently, my family pride is something inconceivable. I can't help it. I was born sneering." --Pooh-Bah, _The Mikado_ "It's the Barney Alien Autopsy!" --China "If it's theft to listen to music before buying it, then it's theft to refuse returns on albums that suck." --NanoGator "You have to be polite to your livestock when it's armed and dangerous." --Alaric, on beekeeping "..on the essential and central core of faith, science will of necessity be silent. But its silence will be the silence of humility, not the silence of disdain. A belief may be larger than a fact. A faith that is overdefined is the very faith most likely to prove inadequate to the great moments of life." --Vannevar Bush I can be very proper. I just prefer to be honest. "Documentation is worth it just to be able to answer all your mail with 'RTFM'." --Alan Cox "Everything is permissible, but not everything is expedient." --1 Corinthians 6:12 "Trying to keep the world intelligent, one Monday at a time." --Alexius Pendragon There are two kinds of people who don't talk much. One kind likes to keep quiet and think about nothing good; the other kind of person knows not to say much because he is always thinking and his actions will be based on his thoughts and experiences. "Happy place found. But still not quite happy." --Dom of Megatokyo Angels - the swiss army knives of the gods. Of course it would take a deity to design a swiss army knife that was semi-sentient, about as single minded as a monofilament machete and then gave it the power resources of a small star and the attitude of one suffering from a recently ignited flammable steel suppository. "Let then know exactly what you're going to do, and then hope that they overreact." --Mohandas Ghandi "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent." --Isasc Asimov "The revolution will not be televised, but it will probably have a crappy web-page." --mingofmongo "Is it better to abide by the rules until they're changed or help speed the change by breaking them?" --aliver (maybe) "It seems the power has been robbed from the founding fathers and is now firmly in the hand of the funding fathers." --Rik van Riel "As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master." --Commissioner Pravin Lal, from Sid Meier's _Alpha Centauri_ "Assembly makes me weep openly." --Lowmagnet "Yes. Sadly. This is the true test of my faith. Of all His creations and mysteries... there was no excuse for Jerry Lewis." --Seaweb "Remember, it's a great, big disco world." --Kurt Harland "Hugh, the ninjas are totally reliable in house. But they do covert ops like infants on pixie sticks. Without the motor skills." --Dante, _Angst Technologies_ Steinbach's guideline for systems programming: Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle. "We did a risk management review. We concluded that there was no risk of any management." --Dilbert Beware big cats clustered around an empty coffee urn. "After Baby Jessica got trapped in that hole, private disasters became mini-series for TV, and private citizens began playing to the cameras. The 9/11 victims think they are getting closer to the truth by baring it all, but what we are seeing is a whole distortion of what they are actually experiencing. It's really more like a farce." --Frank Megna, founder, Working Stage Theater Progress over protocol. "The chaos of our lives suited me; I don't think I wanted it to end." --Tom Baker "Kindness is the beginning of cruelty." --Paul Muad'dib, _Dune_ "I'm redeemed through anime." --Randy Terpstra "The reason the mainstream is thought of as a stream is because it is so shallow." --Anonymous "Curious George and the Really Big Strap-on." --Kai "Perl is Internet Yiddish." --Yoz Graehme "Friction: Every fourteen year old's best friend." --Scott Sun Microsystems: The network IS the average system load. Life is a sexually transmitted disease with a 100% mortality rate. The life expectancy of those who contract it is approximately 72 years. "I don't know whether I am Turing dreaming that I am a machine, or a machine dreaming that I am Turing!" --Geoffrey James and Seth Robertson, _The Tao of Programming_ "I'm not very good at folding things." --K.K. Larson Colvard's Logical Premise: All probabilities are 50%. Either a thing will happen or it won't. Grelb's Commentary: Likelihoods, however, are 90% against you. "...it's hard to appear evil when you're ticklish everywhere." --Julie Harding "Eurrrreeeeeeeekaaaaa, motheeeerrrrrrrrrrr fuckeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrr!!" --Minerva Mayflower, _Hudson Hawk_ "In bed, she talks about Reiser(fs), and I get a riser." --the.Silicon.Dragon "I am anti-life, the beast of judgement. I am the dark at the end of everything. The end of universes, of gods, of worlds...everything. And what will you be then, dreamlord?" "I am hope." --Choronzon and Morpheus, _Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes_ "If one is to treat the body as a temple...then I choose to hang pictures in mine." --Fern Dragonstar "Because a 24 year old is a terrible thing to waste." --the.Silicon.Dragon Don't veil your vices in virtuous words. "Dodging around something gives it the power of fear." "There are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something." --Thomas Alva Edison "I do not look up any patents on _principle_, because (a) it's a horrible waste of time and (b) I don't want to know. "The fact is, technical people are better off not looking at patents. If you don't know what they cover and where they are, you won't be knowingly infringing on them. If somebody sues you, you change the algorithm or you just hire a hit-man to whack the stupid git." --Linus Torvalds "Psychology is just reverse-engineering people." --C.B. "Anteaters: The only animals with ground effects." --ConColor "I'd tell you, but then the DMCA would require me to kill you." --Anonymous Coward on Slashdot "Evil is a good career choice. It has a lot to offer." --M.Bison, _Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie_ "So let me get this straight. "Allowing unpriveleged processes to send control messages to priveleged processes is not a flaw in the Win32 API because there is a mechanism for applications to protect themselves from this type of attack (alternate Windows Stations/Desktops). "But the mechanism effectively prevents the priveleged processes from providing a GUI because the user won't be able to actually see the alternate Windows Stations/Desktops without some kind of Station switching tool, and/or extra training in how to do this. "So, the result is that no applications actually use this mechanism. "What part of 'this is broken' doesn't make sense?" --Chris Calabrese Jack Valenti is to the American film viewer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone. Lizzie Borden took an axe, And plunged it deep into the VAX; Don't you envy people who Do all the things YOU want to do? When two tigers fight, one dies and the other is crippled. I am root. If you hear me swearing, save your work and check your backups. (You do have backups, don't you?) "Living on Earth is expensive, but it does include a free trip around the sun every year." --Unknown "Danny DeVito. Ron Jeremy. _Twins II_" --Allan "Backwards compatibility is nice, but preserving every undocumented quirk that nobody sane would use ... Sorry, but we really need an addition to errno.h: EBITEME. Exactly for such cases." --Alexander Viro "Done. For future reference - don't anybody else try to send patches as vi scripts, please. Yes, it's manly, but let's face it, so is bungee-jumping with the cord tied to your testicles." --Linus Torvalds, regarding the dcache scalability patch "Do what you feel in your heart to be right for you'll be criticized anyway." --Eleanor Roosevelt I must not drink decaf. Decaf is the mind-killer. Decaf is the little death that brings witlessness. I will face the pot of decaf. I will allow the decaf to pass over the rim of my mug and into the sink. And when it has gone past I will turn my inner eye to find the bastard who put decaf in the wrong coffee pot this morning. When the decaf has gone there will be only grounds. Only true arabica blend will remain. "Oh, yea, right, because the code is signed, magic pixie dust, poof, there are no buffer overflows." --MFR "I like hearing you say that nothing's going on. That means that there's nothing in an emergency state. I hate it when you're the voice of you're-really-screwed-now." --Ludyte "I ran into this bug (yes, I'll call it a bug) in Norton a few months ago. I can only say that there is a special circle in hell reserved for companies which _silently_ disable security measures in order to let their product carry out a procedure (especially a redundant procedure)." --Greg Owen on BUGTRAQ-L "Dodge the bullets or carry the gun. The choice is yours." --Apollo Smile "It is always refreshing to hear people humble themselves and ask not for help but resources for how to learn. In this 'industry/community' there is WAY too much ego for so LITTLE talent." --yatima on the vuln-dev mailing list, regarding someone asking on the list for pointers to good references and not outright help "The lunatic asylums are full of people who went seeking the extraordinary before they had any real competence at handling the ordinary." --Aliester Crowley Carson's Consolation: Nothing is ever a complete failure. It can always be used as a bad example. "Not propaganda, goodfacts, as opposed to realfacts. Facts the government has endorsed." "Perl combines all of the worst aspects of BASIC, C and line noise." --Keith Packard "There are three kinds of death in this world. There's heart death, there's brain death, and there's being off the network." --Anonymous "Yahoo needs to eat more fibre or something." --Anonymous "Be vewy, vewy quiet -- we'we hunting wootkits." --Karl A. Krueger Occam's Eraser: Destroy evidence until the remains fit your theory. "Getting caught is the mother of invention." Work like you're gonna get fired, dance like Hunter S. Thompson. "A smart rocket can come from a thousand klicks away to kill you; it doesn't care and it won't be in the least upset that it has blasted you to atomic debris. That's the real horror of modern war, that it is impersonal. Being cut with a sword hurts, and if you are close enough to do it, you can't miss the other's pain. [.] If you shoot a man across a field or even a room, you don't get the full impact of what you've done. Facing an opponent one-on-one, hand-to-hand or with a sword, you have to accept your personal responsibility. Killing somebody ought to be messy. You should be sprayed with his blood, you should be able to hear him scream, catch the death rattle, smell the faeces and urine as the bowels and bladder let go. You should have to dispose of the body. So you know exactly what it was you did." --Steve Perry Cannot find c:\WINNT\system32\nsabackdoor.dll. Please reinstall Windows. "What you see is from outside yourself, and may come, or not, but is beyond your control. But your fear is yours, and yours alone, like your voice, or your fingers, or your memory, and therefore yours to control. If you feel powerless over your fear, you have not yet admitted that it is yours, to do with as you will." --Marion Zimmer Bradley, _Stormqueen_ JWRTFM! "With hindsight, the decision sucked. But that's the benefit of hindsight. When you use it, all decisions suck." --Giles Todd "Fear knocked at the door; trust opened it; no one was there." --proverb "I will NOT be undersold on laxatives!" --Tartan, on a mock bidding war during product testing "I believe that viewers who skip television commercials are thieves who are guilty of stealing network programming." -Jamie Keller, CEO/Chairman of Turner Broadcasting While the admin's away the kiddies will play. "Fifteen hour plane flights really suck." --Art Bell "Stand by the roads and look, and ask for the ancient paths where the good way is, and walk in it, and find rest for your souls." --Jeremiah 6:16 "Cutting the space budget really restores my faith in humanity. It eliminates dreams, goals, and ideals and lets us get straight to the business of hate, debauchery, and self-annihilation." --Johnny Hart There are only 10 types of people in this world... those who understand binary, and those who don't. "They don't know how the world is shaped. And so they give it a shape, and try to make everything fit it. They separate the right from the left, the man from the woman, the plant from the animal, the sun from the moon. They only want to count to two." --Emma Bull, _Bone Dance_ "Harris, she ran away before the project was completed.. so I'm far more advanced than even she is. I'm sure I'll have no problem anticipating and countering whatever desperate plan she could invent before she even attempts it. Hell, in fact I bet I'll enjoy it. Heh. Evil genius foreplay." --Shawn, _Exploitation Now_ "Quite frankly, I don't _want_ people using Linux for ideological reasons. I think ideology sucks. This world would be a much better place if people had less ideology, and a whole lot more. I do this because it's FUN and because others might find it useful, not because I got religion." --Linus Torvalds That and five bucks will get you a small coffee at Starbucks. "fsck(1) art, let's kill(1) -9." --Andrew Jonathan King "You're nobody 'til everybody in this town thinks you're a bastard." --Elvis Costello "Ner reth aroniel'eth eoron dor norath" (All your bases are belong to us!) "Everything is ok in the end. so remember, if it's not ok. it's not the end." --Tracker A. Wrightwolf "Declawed gerbil my butt!" --Art Bell "Everyone needs some kind of legal defense. He is living in America, land of the lawsuit." --Travis Willard "Application caused in module at ." --actual Win32 error window "Surely there is a polite way to say FOAD." --Shmuel Metz "I am at liberty to vote as my conscience and judgement dictates to be right, without the yoke of any party on me.. look at my arms, you find no party handcuff on them." --Davy Crockett "I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it." --Patrick Henry The only thing Microsoft has done for society is make people believe that computers are inherently unreliable. "When you choose between the lesser of two evils, you soon forget that you choose evil." --Ammon Hennacy "We cannot all do great things. But we can do small things with great evil." --Hanoi Xan "Never retreat, never explain, never apologize. Get the thing done, and let 'em howl." --Nellie McClung "Is my personal responsibility offending your political correctness?" --TheViffer "It is not a sign of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society." --J. Krishnamurti Maier's Law: If the facts do not conform to the theory, they (the facts) must be disposed of. "Free speech... How long do you think it will last? Nothing is really guaranteed with the combination of stupid people and the patriot act." --Jeremy Martin, on the isp-linux mailing list "You were born an original; don't die a copy." --Unknown "'Shpadoinkle' is not a word." --http://www.skippyslist.com/ "In light of everything, my opinion would have to be.. meep." --General Coldara "Could Sloup be modified to talk on the ether?" --Eric A. Farris on the newton-talk mailing list "Heh heh heh.. time to break things. With software, it doesn't hurt as much." --Nuke, at work "Stress is the compression of what you need to do into a finite point." --Lucien "All your Beowulf cluster of grits are belong to Cowboy Neal. Did I miss one?" --Sir Tristam "...thou who has trial and trouble of this life, rejoice because of them for in them in strength and by their means is a pathway opened unto that Light Divine. How should it be otherwise, O man, whose life is but a day in Eternity, a drop in the Ocean of Time? How, if thy trials were not many, purge thy soul from the dross of Earth?" --The Golden Dawn, fourth knowledge lecture "Pepsi makes darkness taste better." --Ryan Well "Quantum Express: When you absolutely, positively, don't know where it's going or when it needs to be there." --RazorJAK "Essential? No, your job function is essential. You are not." --Anonymous Coward on Slashdot, regarding temp work "My Operat~1 System supports long filena~1, does yours?" --mike at morpheus "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." --Edmund Burke "I sense much NT in you.. NT leads to blue screen. Blue screen leads to downtime. Downtime leads to suffering... NT is the path to the dark side. Powerful, Unix is..." --Unknown Unix Jedi on the Unix Guru Universe mailing list "Setting a Shatnerologist in a room of normals is like setting a velociraptor loose in a room of weiner dogs." --Unknown, but quoted on the ER mailing list "Never attribute to incompetence that which can be explained as allegiance to the Ultimate Evil." --Random comment from UseNet "It takes two to have .cx." --Pat Parrinello "MCSE's, poor bastards, are given the inflated belief that they are computer experts once they have passed MS's "computer science". It's almost as pathetic as Scientology." --Shanep "When you think you've lost your way, it only means that you've gone as far as you can with what you have now." --Nicki, _Videodrome_ Hagbard Celine's laws: - National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity. - Accurate communication is only possible in a nonpunishing situation. - An honest politician is a national calamity. "Specialisation is for insects." --Robert A. Heinlein "Ballmer's First Theorem: Linux is a serious threat to Windows. "Ballmer's Second Theorem: Linux is a toy. "Logical consequence: A toy will beat Windows." --Munehiro's .signature file on the linux-handhelds mailing list "Who needs script kiddies when you have backhoes?" --Dan Hollis "I slip into the archaic at dramatically appropriate moments. So sue me." --Harry Dresden, _Summer Knight_ "Relying on hypothetical karma is like relying on a hypothetical parachute." --Lanthinel Devir "Perfect your craft and protect your vision." --Apollo Smile "In God we trust, all others we monitor." --NSA Intercept Operators's motto, 1970 "Technique?" said the programmer turning from his terminal, "What I follow is Tao -- beyond all technique! When I first began to program I would see before me the whole problem in one mass. After three years I no longer saw this mass. Instead, I used subroutines. But now I see nothing. My whole being exists in a formless void. My senses are idle. My spirit, free to work without plan, follows its own instinct. In short, my program writes itself. True, sometimes there are difficult problems. I see them coming, I slow down, I watch silently. Then I change a single line of code and the difficulties vanish like puffs of idle smoke. I then compile the program. I sit still and let the joy of the work fill my being. I close my eyes for a moment and then log off." "What we envision for these dark days, when most others are starving, is a healthy feudal system in which all fit male and female SubGeniuses are warrior thug-serfs for 'Bob'. How can any potential OverMan or UberLady entertain the faintest hopes of surviving these End Times without 'Bob'? Yes, 'Bob' will be in Dallas then and you'll want to be where 'Bob' is if you want tickets to the Rescue Ships From Planet X... so why not serve under him and his chosen representatives on Earth while you STILL CAN???" --The Book of the SubGenius "You will experience inner turmoil after reading way too much into a statement filled with vague, undefined terms." --The Onion "Dakedo itsuka kizuku deshou, sono senaka niwa Haruka mirai mezasu tame no hane ga aru koto." "People who want to share their religious views with you almost never want you to share yours with them." --Dave Barry "Entering the Forum was like plunging into a bath of mercury. It was even hotter than Topside, air conditioners stripped years ago by streetdrek for spare parts. The crowd reinvigorated me, though. Colours, tensions, energy... I absorbed it as I walked down the dead escalator -- GFs off -- feeding, energising. I dapped with some spuds I knew as I walked the sublevels, reveling in the feel of the street again." --Lynx, _Bad Voltage_ "It wasnt 'til sex came to imply ownership that virginity became equated with chastity." --Tao "I was always taught that, at the moment when the sperm and the egg go 'Howdy!' we've got human life..." --Art Bell on cloning "I give it a 'wh00p' with two zeroes." --Mr.Omerta "Like Einstein's universe, most networks are finite but unbounded. There's only a certain number of computers attached, yet you never quite reach the edge of the network. There's always another computer down the line. Eventually, you'll make a complete circuit and wind up back where you started. Most networks are so complicated and interwoven that no one knows where all their connections lead, so most people have to explore to find their way around." --Cliff Stoll, _The Cuckoo's Egg_ "Rumour is, that back in the late 1970's-early 1980's, DSE was a user who achieved Maximum K-rad Eliteness at which point his soul merged with the global telecom network. Demonseed Elite was no longer just a person, but an entity residing in the cables and satellite links of the network. He is AT&T, he is Internet, he is Southwestern Bell (sucks to be him), he is Smilin' Uncle Dudley's Child Pokin' BBS across town. He is your phone. He is the spy satellites which orbit abouve our heads. He knows when you've been sleeping and he knows when you're awake. And he takes any sign of lameness on his networks as a personal insult. To speak is real name is to die. Lamers and r0dents all face his wrath. No one has seen him dealing out his vengeance, or been alive afterwards to tell about it, but it wil come. Believe that." --Swamp Ratte' [cDc], _It's A K-rad Thing_ "Failure is not an option.. it's bundled with Microsoft." --Anonymous "The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously." --Hubert H. Humphrey "Phillip K. Dick, in one of his last novels, _Valis_, discusses the long hiberation of the Logos. A creature of pure information, it was buried in the ground at Nag Hammadi, along with the burying of the Chenoboskion Library circa 370 AD. As static information, it existed there until 1947, when the texts were translated and read. As soon as people had the information in their minds, the symbiote came alive, for, like the mushroom consciousness, Dick imagined it to be a thing of pure information. The mushroom consciousness of the Other in hyperspace, which means in dream and in the psilocybin trance, at the quantum foundation of being, in the human future, and after death. All of these places that were thought to be discrete and separate are seen to be part of a single continum. History is the dash over ten to fifteen thousand years from nomadism to flying saucer, hopefully without ripping the envelope of the planet so badly that the birth is aborted and fails, and we remain brutish prisoners of matter." --Terrence McKenna, _Archaic Revival_ "techno has all of those blips and beeps that make me want to dance on my toes... house makes everone do that 'walking in place' thing... jungle is sorta like moving your hands all over your body w/o actually touching yourself... and happy hardcore is kinda like everyone is in fast forward." --BeCCA*, pb-cle "Porting 'shred' to DOS would require significant changes to the source code. Nor is there any pressing need for a DOS port, as any user who thinks deleting a file is merely a matter of dragging it over to a 'trash can' icon would not likely have sufficient nervous system bandwith to use a 'shred' utility." --M. Cooper, documentation to Shred v1.0 "When one understands how one comes to perceive of one's reality, then one can begin to discover the truth and awaken. When the illusion is perceived directly it disappears, for it does not really exist." --from _What Is the Matrix?_ "I'm a certified sneakernet engineer." --Lane Scott "FAQ 25:17 - The righteous higher-resolution modes require correspondingly more system memory in order to run, and that some high-resolution modes may not be available when running on 8MB machines. Blessed are such modes that are not listed in the video modes menu, for they would only slow down the microprocessor. Do not report video modes that do not appear in the menu as bugs; either those modes are not supported by your video adaptor, or there is not enough system memory to support those modes in the shadow of the valley of death. And I say, if the video problems persist, ye must move to 8-bit colour, lest ye overload your piece of shit video card!" --Jules, _Cyberpunk Fiction_ "Be careful, the Bobbit monster's out there." --Art Bell cats@zerowing:~# find / -name '*yourbase*' -exec chown us:us {} \; Kiersey Temperament Sorter results: INFP Kiersey archetype: Healer "In all cases establishing a relationship with the spirit folls a similiar process of evocation. Firstly the attributes of the entity, its type, scope, name, appearance and characteristics must be placed in the mind or made known to the mind. Automatic drawing or writing, where a stylus is allowed to move under inspiration across a surface, may help to uncover the nature of a clairvoyantly discovered being. In the case of a created being the following procedure is used: The magician assembles the ingredients of a composite sigil of the being's desired attributes. For example, to create an elemental to assist him with divination, the appropriate symbols might be chosen and made into a sigil such as the one shown in the figure." --Peter J. Carroll, _Liber LUX_ "Information may want to be free, but fiber optic cable wants to be a million US dollars per mile." --Shawn McMahon "Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I cont, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded I do not know whether a man or a woman -But who is that on the other side of you?" --T.S. Eliot, _The Wasteland_, part V "The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness." --Joseph Conrad "In the first place Schneider had used the phrase 'The Other World' time and again. What did it mean, literally? A 'world' was a space-time energy continuum; an 'Other World' was therefore such a continuum, but a different one from the one in which he found himself. Physical theory found nothing repugnant in such a notion; the possibility of infinute number of continua was a familiar, orthodox speculation. It was even convenient in certain operations to make such an assumption. "Had Gramps Schneider meant that? A literal, physical 'Other World'? On reflection Waldo was convinced that he meant just that, even though he had not used conventional scientific phraseology. 'Other World' sounds poetical, but to say an 'additional continuum' implies physical meaning. The terms had lead him astray." --Robert A. Heinlein, _Waldo_ "Word! Gameboys and Pokemon do not a national economy make." --Nyarlathotep, on Japan's economy "There's always the threat of an attack by say, a giant space dragon. The kind that eats the sun once every 30 days. It's a nuisance, but what can you expect from reptiles? Did I mention that my nose is on fire? And that I have 15 wild badgers living in my trousers?" "I'm sorry, would you prefer ferrets?" --Marcus Cole and Ivanova, _Babylon-5_ "And because Dante says there is no point in studying unless you remember what you have learned, I have made notes of what seem to me the most important things I have learned in my dialogue with the dead, and written a little book /On princedoms/ in which I go as deeply as I can into the questions relevant to my subject. I discuss what a principality is, how many types of principality there are, how one acquires them, how one holds onto them, why one loses them. And if any of my little productions have ever pleased you, then this one ought not to displease you; and a ruler, especially a new ruler, ought to be delighted by it. Consequently, I have addressed it to His Highness Giuliano. Flippo Casavecchia has seen it; he can give you a preliminary report, both on the text and on the discussions I have had with him: Though I am still adding to the text and polishing it." --Niccolo Machiavelli, _Letter to Vettori_ "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts. Many people would sooner die then think; in fact they do so." --Bertrand Russell "Be kind to your enemies; be peaceful. But if they lay a finger on you, send them to the cemetary." --Anton LaVay "We aim to please and shoot to kill." --Onivel "It's a natural match: Excedrin - taxes. I think I've got it made." --Art Bell "Taoist sexual practices lay a lot of stress on the generation of unusual substances in the genitals or in the perspiration, which is a theme that is absent from Indian yoga but that is picked up in Amazonian shamanism, where there is a lot of discussion of magickal forms of perspiraton, magickal objects that are generatd out of the body or are put into the bodies of other people. "In the matter of Taoist alchemy, it appears that there was an erotic control language, so that much of what appear to be prescriptions for sexual practices are actually recipes for plant combinations, because of words that were used with sexual connotations were also code words for plants and fungi. The association in the Taoist mind between the fungi and the female genetalia was very close. The words and the concepts are the same. This is a prevailing motif of the so-called esoteric schools of chinese eroticism, meaning the schools were actually nothing appears to be going on, but the presence of certain plants and certain objects in a composition indicate that it actually is an erotic cryptogram of some sort." --Terrence McKenna, _The Archaic Revival_ "31 pounds of coffee?! Christ, are you human?" "No..." --Zippy to the Doctor, regarding his coffee intake one semester "Uh Oh.. Hard disk go boom..." --the.Silicon.Dragon "Love is patient. Love is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered. It keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres." --Corinthians 1:13 "Will you fight me now?" "You broke my Elvis clock." --David Mack: _Kabuki: Circle of Blood_ "All clenches must eventually schism." --J.R. "Bob" Dobbs "People argue that the limited and malleable representations of self are what devalues computer-mediated communication. These malleable representations are just as present in the real world -- if it acts like a duck, etc., it is definitely a duck. We are _completely_ defined by our surroundings (social and environmental). Watch who you fuck with. It might come back to you." --Zard Biomatrix "There is always hope, because it's the one thing nobody has figured out how to kill yet." --Galen, _Babylon-5: Crusades_ "The only possible difference is that virtual realities allow shifting of the environment. Notice how this is subtly different than issues of identity via computers -- the user has no control. In a MUD, you either act this way or don't, on the usenet, you either use MiX3d capitals or you don't. There's no power for the individual in that. Only in the creator of the environment. Playing LambdaMOO is different than playing BattleTechMOO -- and it's the 'virtual powers-that-be' that create these environments. These environments enforce other people's identities." --Unknown, regading virtuality. "yeah...i love the future. except it has too many commercials." --Zard Biomatrix "Mankind found a god, and man, in his folly, tried to make the god his toy. For that arrogance, mankind was punished 15 years ago. And the god that man found, was lost.. But man continues to attempt to resurrect the god. And from that god, Adam, man attempted to make a man who was like a god himself. And that.. was Eva!" --Dr. Akagi Ritsuko, _Shin Seki Evangerion_ "To know = to have had sex with in Hebrew." --Anarchangel "First, stop being failures. It's absurd to judge ourselves against a scale larger than our own efforts. Do the right thing, help one another, raise the less fortunate without ulterior motives. Live simply, never lie, never steal, limit personal wealth, donate to charity, meditate, practise self-denial, live a pure life and spend some time as a monk. Above all, don't be afraid of nothingness, because the universe is full of it and therefore it must be natural and good. In this way of being 'no-mind', we escape ajiva and achieve enlightenment." --Buckaroo Banzai "What's your favourite brand of coffee, Sherwin-Williams?" "Huh? What gave you that idea?" "Your coffee is thicker than usual this morning." --Ludyte to The Doctor "Basically, if you know how to browse the web, you know how to hack a [sic] IIS server." --Floydman, in a post to Bugtraq "Don't drop acid, take it pass/fail." --Bryan Michael Wendt "Western civilisation is a loaded gun pointed at the head of this planet." --Terrence McKenna "All in all, it's just another rule in the firewall." --Ping Flood, _Firewall_ "It works! It's rudimentary and stupid, but great!" --Tartan, at work "Remember all ye that existence is pure joy; that all the sorrows are but as shadows; they pass & are done; but there is that which remains." --_Liber al vel Legis_, chapter 2 verse 9 You have new mail.