Search quotes

Link	Quote	Tags	Author
6468483	Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now!		Charles Stross
bcb3be6	Like the famous mad 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.)	humour	Charles Stross
53fee52	Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again.	humour idiots computers hacker-folklore it	Charles Stross
da7013d	Unfortunately it's also true to say that good management is a bit like oxygen - it's invisible and you don't notice its presence until it's gone, and then you're sorry.	management truth truisms	Charles Stross
5b7a89b	Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.	religion humor	Charles Stross
fa5a97c	but I find her personality annoying. It's like being molested by a sleeping bag that speaks in Comic Sans with little love-hearts over the i's.	comic-sans	Charles Stross
88fe4ad	I wish I was still an atheist. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos - in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever - was infinitely more comforting than the truth. Because the truth is that my God is coming back. When he arrives I'll be waiting for him with a shotgun. And I'm keeping the last shell for myself.		Charles Stross
ae773cc	Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint. And that's just scratching the surface...		charles stross
a72a512	It is a truth universally acknowledged that a sane employee in possession of his wits must be in want of a good manager.	tribute paraphrased	Charles Stross
bfb42c6	I was raised thinking that moral and ethical standards are universals that apply equally to everyone. And these values aren't easily compatible with the kind of religion that posits a Creator. To my way of thinking, an omnipotent being who sets up a universe in which thinking beings proliferate, grow old, and die (usually in agony, alone, and in fear) is a cosmic sadist.	universe death religion life cosmic-sadist theology everything	Charles Stross
86bfbbe	That was what we call in the trade an Unscheduled Reality Excursion, usually abbreviated to 'Oh fuck.'		Charles Stross
e91b59f	Bob loses saving throw vs. shiny with a penalty of -5. Bob takes 2d8 damage to the credit card.	humour cult-of-jobs d-d d20 roleplaying-games saving-throw shiny rpg saving geek consumerism	Charles Stross
140b92c	The male ego is a curious thing. It's about the size of a small continent but it's extremely brittle.		Charles Stross
b0c638f	Politics is shit; it corrupts everything it touches...	sff	Charles Stross
c96408b	To boldly go where no uploaded metahuman colony has gone before' has a certain ring to it, doesn't it?	to-boldly-go star-trek	Charles Stross
1c18677	Christmas: the one time of year when you can't avoid the nuts in your family muesli.		Charles Stross
86571bd	Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.]	software soul	Charles Stross
90e13a5	Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.	science	Charles Stross
07d1acc	I spent six hours becoming one with a shrubbery last night. There were three cloudbursts and a rain of small and very confused frogs	humor	Charles Stross
6942936	Let's see.' She fiddles with her terminal and the room card reader. 'You're in 403 and 404. Have a nice day.' I hand Persephone the Forbidden Room card and keep Room Not Found for myself. She looks at me oddly.	nerd	Charles Stross
3b116c2	I am the Eschaton. I am not your God. I am descended from you, and exist in your future. Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.		Charles Stross
863b683	In memory of Terry Pratchett, who showed us all how it's done		Charles Stross
64e0ede	They can put the code monkey in a suit but they can't take the code out of the monkey.		Charles Stross
27e6746	I argued for a Kindle but they pointed out that if it could be associated with me, then the information bleed--Amazon logging every page turn and annotation--was a potential security hazard. Not to mention the darker esoteric potential of spending too much time staring at a device controlled by a secretive billionaire in Seattle. The void stares also, and so on.		Charles Stross
32123a1	In the distance, the cat hears the sound of lobster minds singing in the void, a distant feed streaming from their cometary home as it drifts silently out through the asteroid belt, en route to a chilly encounter beyond Neptune. The lobsters sing of alienation and obsolescence, of intelligence too slow and tenuous to support the vicious pace of change that has sandblasted the human world until all the edges people cling to are jagged and br..	singularity	Charles Stross
c55dd34	One ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience - it just depends on which one's god module is overactive at the time.	religious-experience	Charles Stross
41ed93e	You wouldn't believe the scope for mischief that the Beast of Redmond unintentionally builds into its Office software by letting it execute macros that have unlimited access to the hardware. I remember a particular post-prandial PowerPoint presentation where I was one of only two survivors (and the other wasn't entirely human). However, this is the first time I've seen a Word document eat a man's soul.		Charles Stross
da53769	Some say the Internet is for porn but you know that in truth the Internet is for spam.		Charles Stross
310f4e3	My computer terminal whistles at me: YOU HAVE MAIL. No shit, Sherlock, I always have mail. It's an existential thing: if I don't have mail it would mean that something is very wrong with the world	humor	Charles Stross
3d2023c	We are Bay Aryans from Berkeley: prepare to be reengineered in an attractive range of color schemes for your safety and comfort!		Charles Stross
117bd57	Nobody ever imagined a bunch of Orcs would steal a database table...		Charles Stross
bf18d1f	The five stages of bureaucratic grieving are: denial, anger, committee meetings, scapegoating, and cover-up.	committee-meetings coverups five-stages-of-grief bureaucracy denial	Charles Stross
d80f1f8	Britain is relying on you, Bob, so try not to make your usual hash of things.	stross	Charles Stross
ff41beb	MINUS TEN POINTS FOR PUBLIC NUDITY.		Charles Stross
1d497b6	I stared at him. "You're a , Rudi! She's a mermaid. What you thinking?"	mermaid	Charles Stross
c3a08d3	What you or I would recognize as an alien invasion by tentacled horrors from beyond spacetime Angleton would see as a teachable moment.		Charles Stross
45bbb6a	Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity.	singularity	Charles Stross
de98ebb	Accelerating to speeds faster than light was, of course, impossible. General relativity had made that clear enough back in the twentieth century. However, since then a number of ways of circumventing the speed limit had turned up; by now, there were at least six different known methods of moving mass or information from A to B without going through c.		Charles Stross
a5bd1fa	They need a social mechanism to make us require conformity of one other, and the best way to do that is to provide a mechanism to make us punish our own deviants.	social	Charles Stross
ee66741	The Rapture of the Nerds has been followed by the Resurrection of the Extremely Confused. (318)	rapture-of-the-nerds singularity	Charles Stross
5343440	Basically it's a velociraptor with a fur coat and an outsize sense of entitlement. Right now it has convinced Pete that it is harmless, but I know better: just give them thumbs and in no time at all they'll have us working in the tuna mines, delivering cans from now until eternity. (Hey, wait a minute, doesn't this one have thumbs?)		Charles Stross
a0e64ec	We use committees for all the ulterior purposes for which they might have been designed: diffusion of executive responsibility, plausible deniability, misdirection, providing the appearance of activity without the substance, and protecting the guilty.		Charles Stross
b1a671f	Howard Phillips Lovecraft of Providence, Rhode Island, for cultivating a florid and overblown prose style that covered the entire spectrum from purple to ultraviolet and took sixteen volumes of interminable epistles to get to the point [...]		Charles Stross
d3be2a7	Fatal accidents never happen because of just one mistake. It takes a whole chain of stupids lining up just so to put a full stop at the end of an epitaph.		Charles Stross

Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now!

Charles Stross

bcb3be6

Like the famous mad 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.)

humour

Charles Stross

53fee52

Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting machinery work again.

humour idiots computers hacker-folklore it

Charles Stross

da7013d

Unfortunately it's also true to say that good management is a bit like oxygen - it's invisible and you don't notice its presence until it's gone, and then you're sorry.

management truth truisms

Charles Stross

5b7a89b

Any civilization where the main symbol of religious veneration is a tool of execution is a bad place to have children.

religion humor

Charles Stross

fa5a97c

but I find her personality annoying. It's like being molested by a sleeping bag that speaks in Comic Sans with little love-hearts over the i's.

comic-sans

Charles Stross

88fe4ad

I wish I was still an atheist. Believing I was born into a harsh, uncaring cosmos - in which my existence was a random roll of the dice and I was destined to die and rot and then be gone forever - was infinitely more comforting than the truth. Because the truth is that my God is coming back. When he arrives I'll be waiting for him with a shotgun. And I'm keeping the last shell for myself.

Charles Stross

ae773cc

Nothing stands for content-free corporate bullshit quite like PowerPoint. And that's just scratching the surface...

charles stross

a72a512

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a sane employee in possession of his wits must be in want of a good manager.

tribute paraphrased

Charles Stross

bfb42c6

I was raised thinking that moral and ethical standards are universals that apply equally to everyone. And these values aren't easily compatible with the kind of religion that posits a Creator. To my way of thinking, an omnipotent being who sets up a universe in which thinking beings proliferate, grow old, and die (usually in agony, alone, and in fear) is a cosmic sadist.

universe death religion life cosmic-sadist theology everything

Charles Stross

86bfbbe

That was what we call in the trade an Unscheduled Reality Excursion, usually abbreviated to 'Oh fuck.'

Charles Stross

e91b59f

Bob loses saving throw vs. shiny with a penalty of -5. Bob takes 2d8 damage to the credit card.

humour cult-of-jobs d-d d20 roleplaying-games saving-throw shiny rpg saving geek consumerism

Charles Stross

140b92c

The male ego is a curious thing. It's about the size of a small continent but it's extremely brittle.

Charles Stross

b0c638f

Politics is shit; it corrupts everything it touches...

sff

Charles Stross

c96408b

To boldly go where no uploaded metahuman colony has gone before' has a certain ring to it, doesn't it?

to-boldly-go star-trek

Charles Stross

1c18677

Christmas: the one time of year when you can't avoid the nuts in your family muesli.

Charles Stross

86571bd

Core concepts: Human beings all have souls. Souls are software objects. Software is not immortal.]

software soul

Charles Stross

90e13a5

Humans are just barely intelligent tool users; Darwinian evolutionary selection stopped when language and tool use converged, leaving the average hairy meme carrier sadly deficient in smarts.

science

Charles Stross

07d1acc

I spent six hours becoming one with a shrubbery last night. There were three cloudbursts and a rain of small and very confused frogs

humor

Charles Stross

6942936

Let's see.' She fiddles with her terminal and the room card reader. 'You're in 403 and 404. Have a nice day.' I hand Persephone the Forbidden Room card and keep Room Not Found for myself. She looks at me oddly.

nerd

Charles Stross

3b116c2

I am the Eschaton. I am not your God. I am descended from you, and exist in your future. Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.

Charles Stross

863b683

In memory of Terry Pratchett, who showed us all how it's done

Charles Stross

64e0ede

They can put the code monkey in a suit but they can't take the code out of the monkey.

Charles Stross

27e6746

I argued for a Kindle but they pointed out that if it could be associated with me, then the information bleed--Amazon logging every page turn and annotation--was a potential security hazard. Not to mention the darker esoteric potential of spending too much time staring at a device controlled by a secretive billionaire in Seattle. The void stares also, and so on.

Charles Stross

32123a1

In the distance, the cat hears the sound of lobster minds singing in the void, a distant feed streaming from their cometary home as it drifts silently out through the asteroid belt, en route to a chilly encounter beyond Neptune. The lobsters sing of alienation and obsolescence, of intelligence too slow and tenuous to support the vicious pace of change that has sandblasted the human world until all the edges people cling to are jagged and br..

singularity

Charles Stross

c55dd34

One ape's hallucination is another ape's religious experience - it just depends on which one's god module is overactive at the time.

religious-experience

Charles Stross

41ed93e

You wouldn't believe the scope for mischief that the Beast of Redmond unintentionally builds into its Office software by letting it execute macros that have unlimited access to the hardware. I remember a particular post-prandial PowerPoint presentation where I was one of only two survivors (and the other wasn't entirely human). However, this is the first time I've seen a Word document eat a man's soul.

Charles Stross

da53769

Some say the Internet is for porn but you know that in truth the Internet is for spam.

Charles Stross

310f4e3

My computer terminal whistles at me: YOU HAVE MAIL. No shit, Sherlock, I always have mail. It's an existential thing: if I don't have mail it would mean that something is very wrong with the world

humor

Charles Stross

3d2023c

We are Bay Aryans from Berkeley: prepare to be reengineered in an attractive range of color schemes for your safety and comfort!

Charles Stross

117bd57

Nobody ever imagined a bunch of Orcs would steal a database table...

Charles Stross

bf18d1f

The five stages of bureaucratic grieving are: denial, anger, committee meetings, scapegoating, and cover-up.

committee-meetings coverups five-stages-of-grief bureaucracy denial

Charles Stross

d80f1f8

Britain is relying on you, Bob, so try not to make your usual hash of things.

stross

Charles Stross

ff41beb

MINUS TEN POINTS FOR PUBLIC NUDITY.

Charles Stross

1d497b6

I stared at him. "You're a , Rudi! She's a mermaid. What you thinking?"

mermaid

Charles Stross

c3a08d3

What you or I would recognize as an alien invasion by tentacled horrors from beyond spacetime Angleton would see as a teachable moment.

Charles Stross

45bbb6a

Life begets intelligence, intelligence begets smart matter and a singularity.

singularity

Charles Stross

de98ebb

Accelerating to speeds faster than light was, of course, impossible. General relativity had made that clear enough back in the twentieth century. However, since then a number of ways of circumventing the speed limit had turned up; by now, there were at least six different known methods of moving mass or information from A to B without going through c.

Charles Stross

a5bd1fa

They need a social mechanism to make us require conformity of one other, and the best way to do that is to provide a mechanism to make us punish our own deviants.

social

Charles Stross

ee66741

The Rapture of the Nerds has been followed by the Resurrection of the Extremely Confused. (318)

rapture-of-the-nerds singularity

Charles Stross

5343440

Basically it's a velociraptor with a fur coat and an outsize sense of entitlement. Right now it has convinced Pete that it is harmless, but I know better: just give them thumbs and in no time at all they'll have us working in the tuna mines, delivering cans from now until eternity. (Hey, wait a minute, doesn't this one have thumbs?)

Charles Stross

a0e64ec

We use committees for all the ulterior purposes for which they might have been designed: diffusion of executive responsibility, plausible deniability, misdirection, providing the appearance of activity without the substance, and protecting the guilty.

Charles Stross

b1a671f

Howard Phillips Lovecraft of Providence, Rhode Island, for cultivating a florid and overblown prose style that covered the entire spectrum from purple to ultraviolet and took sixteen volumes of interminable epistles to get to the point [...]

Charles Stross

d3be2a7

Fatal accidents never happen because of just one mistake. It takes a whole chain of stupids lining up just so to put a full stop at the end of an epitaph.

Charles Stross