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b077b01
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Clyde had a theory that women had a book, a homemade, photocopied three-ring binder called "Surprising Things to Do in a Relationship," which they passed around to one another, adding pages from time to time, hiding it under the bed. He figured that Desiree could run home tonight and add a new page."
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Neal Stephenson |
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9a87635
|
The first woman who spent any amount of time aboard this ship was Elizabeth de Obregon, whom we salvaged from the wrack of the Manila Galleon at the same time as him who burned it, one Edouard de Gex." "He's dead, by the way." "Again? I am glad to hear it."
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Neal Stephenson |
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4244cb1
|
Hiro's father, who was stationed in Japan for many years, was obsessed with cameras. He kept bringing them back from his stints in the Far East, encased in many protective layers, so that when he took them out to show Hiro, it was like watching an exquisite striptease as they emerged from all that black leather and nylon, zippers and straps. And once the lens was finally exposed, pure geometric equation made real, so powerful and vulnerable..
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Neal Stephenson |
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f762724
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It's just like the reviews promised--other people's ordinariness is more rewarding than your own. Their banality is soothing to your own sense of failure. Because being you is so much more interesting than being me.
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Neal Stephenson |
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17a4eae
|
No linear indexing system is adequate to express the multi-dimensionality of knowledge," Dr. Waterhouse reminds him."
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Neal Stephenson |
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c2d9a26
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It's--my God--like you stretched a tarp across a stadium to turn it into a giant tom-tom and crashed a 747 into it.
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sf
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Neal Stephenson |
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c34ac17
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What if the places you went and the things you encountered in your work were more interesting than what was available in the physical world around you?
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Neal Stephenson |
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09d5901
|
Reader, if you don't know what a database is, rest assured that an explanation of the concept would in no way increase your enjoyment in reading this account.
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Neal Stephenson |
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c9141ab
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Most of Csongor's time in T'Rain had been spent blundering about in a state of hapless newbie confusion. Only his long experience as a system administrator, struggling with Byzantine software installations, had prevented hum from plummeting into despair and simply giving up. Not that any of the sysadmin's knowledge and skills were applicable here. The psychological stance was the thing: the implicit faith, a little naive and a little cocky,..
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computers
persistence
sysadmins
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Neal Stephenson |
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043d127
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Do you reject the glamor of Evil, and refuse to be mastered by it?
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Neal Stephenson |
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080428e
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He had come home late with take-out Thai and slammed into the sofa and tried to watch a movie, but kept drifting from it to the screen of his laptop. This was part of Corporation 9592's strategy; they had hired psychologists, invested millions in a project to sabotage movies--yes, the entire medium of cinema--to get their customers/players/addicts into a state of mind where they simply could not focus on a two-hour-long chunk of filmed ente..
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Neal Stephenson |
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1277c6a
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there is no honour among consultants.
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Neal Stephenson |
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a563469
|
Dr. Turing of Cambridge says that the soul is an illusion and that all that defines us as human beings can be reduced to a series of mechanical operations.
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soul-searching
technology
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Neal Stephenson |
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bc12c6e
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Felt-tip markers, always a scarce resource even on Earth, became objects of great value as people used them to mark directions on the walls of hamster tubes and habitat modules.
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Neal Stephenson |
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8cff1af
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If a zombie attack had actually materialized, then they might have had a clue as to how to respond. But a stupendous machine-gun free-for-all in the apartment above them was not an eventuality that they had ever thought of and so it froze them for a time.
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Neal Stephenson |
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596a32b
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He is just your type," Uncle Meng said gently. "Please, do try not to fuck him." "How come it's okay for James Bond?"
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Neal Stephenson |
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bf1f4a1
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Generally you pick the unoccupied workstation that's closest to the door. That way, whoever came in earliest sits closest, whoever came in latest is way in the back, for the rest of the day it's obvious at a glance who's on the ball in this office and who is--as they whisper to each other in the bathrooms--having problems.
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Neal Stephenson |
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2abdfd4
|
This is a very odd conversation," Dappa observed. "On an arbitrary numerical scale of conversational oddness, ranging from one to ten, with ten being the oddest conversation I've ever had, and seven being the oddest conversation I have in a typical day, this rates no better than five," Daniel returned."
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Neal Stephenson |
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331c5f5
|
Why do they believe that?" "Because we are hackers," Csongor said, "and they have seen movies."
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Neal Stephenson |
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3ea9a29
|
Ng Security Industries Semi-Autonomous Guard Unit #A-367 lives in a pleasant black-and-white Metaverse where porterhouse steaks grow on trees, dangling at head level from low branches, and blood-drenched Frisbees fly through the crisp, cool air for no reason at all, until you catch them.
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Neal Stephenson |
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b47d361
|
Dinah said, "Ivy, you want to take this or should I?" "I'll do it. You're busy," Ivy said. Dinah could hear her twisting around in the pilot's seat to look at Julia. She spoke as follows: "Julia. Shut up. If you say another fucking word I'll stave your fucking head in and put your corpse out the airlock. Nothing about this is acceptable. Starting with the fact that you are flapping your gums, posing a distraction to Dinah while she is carry..
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Neal Stephenson |
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94ae3c0
|
These simple terms--"come about," for example--denote procedures that are as complicated and tradition-bound as the installation of a new Pope."
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Neal Stephenson |
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0cd3add
|
there was nothing you couldn't accomplish if you crowded a few tens of millions of peasants together on the best land in the world and then never stopped raping their brains out for a thousand years.
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Neal Stephenson |
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3011a7c
|
Consciousness amplifies the weak signals that, like cobwebs spun between trees, web Narratives together. Moreover, it amplifies them selectively and in that way creates feedback loops that steer the Narratives.
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Neal Stephenson |
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a2ed1cd
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There's no way to get from the point in Hemn space where we are now, to one that includes pink nerve-gas-farting dragons, following any plausible action principle. Which is really just a technical term for there being a coherent story joining one moment to the next. If you simply throw action principles out the window, you're granting the world the freedom to wander anywhere in Hemn space, to any outcome, without constraint. It becomes pret..
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Neal Stephenson |
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1e7de25
|
The cosmos seems oblivious to time. It only matters to us. Consciousness is time-constituting. We build time up out of instantaneous impressions that flow in through our sensory organs at each moment. Then they recede into the past. What is this thing we call the past? It is a system of records encoded in our nerve tissue--records that tell a consistent story.
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Neal Stephenson |
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deb376b
|
A causal domain is just a collection of things linked by mutual cause-and-effect relationships." "But isn't everything in the universe so linked?" "Depends on how their light cones are arranged. We can't affect things in our past. Some things are too far away to affect us in any way that matters." "But still, you can't really draw hard and fast boundaries between causal domains." "In general, no. But you are much more strongly webbed togeth..
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Neal Stephenson |
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a7c81eb
|
When the Bolide Fragmentation Rate shot up through a certain level on Day 701, marking the formal beginning of the White Sky, a number of cultural organizations launched programs that they had been planning since around the time of the Crater Lake announcement. Many of these were broadcast on shortwave radio, and so Ivy had her pick of programs from Notre Dame, Westminster Abbey, St. Patrick's Cathedral, the Imperial Palace in Tokyo, Tianan..
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Neal Stephenson |
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6ccdc9a
|
Menopause had finally terminated her fantastically involved and complex relationship with her womb: a legendary saga of irregular bleeding, eleven-month pregnancies straight out of the Royal Society proceedings, terrifying primal omens, miscarriages, heartbreaking epochs of barrenness punctuated by phases of such explosive fertility that Uncle Thomas had been afraid to come near her--disturbing asymmetries, prolapses, relapses, and just pla..
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Neal Stephenson |
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a20e27e
|
Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be--or to be indistinguishable from--self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.
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trolls
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Neal Stephenson |
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80ac62a
|
Reality is what we make it. Or what is made for us by the companies we keep. It is our clay from which we fashion ourselves.
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Neal Stephenson |
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40d5364
|
If it's wearing red, yellow, or both, it's a lama," he said. "Bow to it." "Isn't that a camel from South America?"
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Neal Stephenson |
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4ee957b
|
From the Son of Heaven down to the mass of the people, all must consider the cultivation of the person the root of everything
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Neal Stephenson |
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6a7eba2
|
At the entrance of this street, a Janissary was pinned to a wooden door by an eight-foot-long spear, which Jack looked on as proving that Yevgeny had passed by there recently.
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Neal Stephenson |
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2cc1874
|
Oh, god!" Carl Hollywood said, and collapsed into a big, tatty, overstuffed chair they kept backstage for such purposes."
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Neal Stephenson |
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74df5c9
|
It's when a society plunders its ability to look over the horizon and into the future in order to get short-term gain--sometimes illusory gain--that it begins a long slide nearly impossible to reverse.
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Neal Stephenson |
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cab0883
|
The suit's got a cervical airbag that blows up when you fall off the board, so you can bounce on your head. Besides, helmets feel weird. They say it doesn't affect your hearing, but it does.
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Neal Stephenson |
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102a616
|
Until he reached thirty, Randy felt bad about the fact that he was not socially deft. Now he doesn't give a damn. Pretty soon he'll probably start being proud of it.
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Neal Stephenson |
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33b6b39
|
Holding one of those things in your hands, cleaning the barrel and shoving the rounds into clips, really brings you face-to-face with what a desperate, last-ditch measure they really are. I mean, if it gets to the point where we are shooting at people and vice versa, then we have completely screwed up. So in the end, they only strengthened my interest in making sure we could do without them.
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Neal Stephenson |
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ec227d9
|
I am an Aleut." "Oh, I've never heard of that." "That's because we've been fucked over," the big scary Aleut says, "worse than any other people in history."
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Neal Stephenson |
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3b5fb85
|
Julia Bliss Flaherty, as Ivy now realized, was of the same stripe. Pinned down and obliged to justify herself, she would explain her actions in terms of some altruistic plan. And she might even believe it. But it wasn't that at all. She was like Ivy's grandmother. If you paid fealty to her, she would favor you, and your reputation and power would grow among all the others who did likewise.
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Neal Stephenson |
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8b5d070
|
It's ironic that Juanita has come into this place in a low-tech, black-and-white avatar. She was the one who figured out a way to make avatars show something close to real emotion. That is a fact Hiro has never forgotten, because she did most of her work when they were together, and whenever an avatar looks surprised or angry or passionate in the Metaverse, he sees an echo of himself or Juanita - - the Adam and Eve of the Metaverse. Makes i..
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Neal Stephenson |
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5449b94
|
I gotta say this," Scott says as the guy is sitting on his new bike, getting his swords adjusted, doing something incredibly unauthorized to the bios, "you look like one bad motherfucker."
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Neal Stephenson |
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73cefb6
|
But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education Ph.D.s, the Deliverator's report card would say: "Hiro is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills."
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Neal Stephenson |