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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6afb24c | I said 'not so much,'" Dr. Russell said. "Not so much as what? Having your head stepped on by an elephant?" "Not so much as when the sensors connect to each other," Dr. Russell said. "The good news is that as soon as they're connected, the pain stops. Now hold still, this will only take a minute." He tapped the PDA again. Eighty thousand needles shot out in every direction in my skull. I have never wanted to punch a doctor so much in my lif.. | John Scalzi | ||
| b473fc2 | Just because I look like a human being doesn't mean I am. This body has more genetic material that's not strictly human than it does material that is human. And it heavily integrates machines as well. My blood is actually a bunch of nanobots in a fluid. I am and every other CDF soldier is a genetically-modified cyborg." "But you're still you, right?" Lowen asked. "You're still the same person you were when you left Earth. Still the same con.. | John Scalzi | ||
| bd31240 | Hickory clicked something to Dickory in their native tongue; Dickory clicked back. Hickory responded, and Dickory replied, it seemed a bit forcefully. And then, God help me, Hickory actually sighed. | John Scalzi | ||
| ac863eb | Just accept you're drinking from the fire hose and open wide. | John Scalzi | ||
| 75c2454 | I don't think it matters what age you are when you figure it out," Brous said. "I think the important thing is to figure it out before someone else tells you what you want to be, and they get it wrong." | John Scalzi | ||
| 7d48e2c | Really really really difficult," Tony allowed. "But theoretically possible because, hey, it's a quantum physics universe." | John Scalzi | ||
| 02fca76 | I was just talking about you," Cardenia said, coming up to him. "To your imaginary friends, I see." "They're not imaginary. They're just not real." "Very subtle distinction." -- | John Scalzi | ||
| 605b158 | It's like Wednesday morning at the world's biggest Denny's, | John Scalzi | ||
| 3181ea3 | God is a hack," he said. "He's a writer on an awful science fiction television show, and He can't plot His way out of a box. How do you have faith when you know that?" | John Scalzi | ||
| 9825d33 | Destiny gets compressed, you know, into just that small fraction of a second you have right in front of you at any one time. And there's nothing romantic about keeping your head down to avoid getting shot, or trying to save a friend who's been injured, or coming face to face with a creature who is as smart and mean and as terrified of dying as you are, and who wants to make sure that if someone is left on the ground there, it's you and not .. | time romantic destiny fraction second ground head shot friend someone | John Scalzi | |
| ba4f29b | Don't bring a spoon to a toothbrush fight, | John Scalzi | ||
| 0e5c9e9 | Hey, you know what, basing an entire system of social, political and economic control on the vague, all-too-easily misinterpreted words of a single person claiming divine inspiration is probably not actually all that smart, now, is it. | John Scalzi | ||
| 1d48505 | Hiding the past never works as well as simply neglecting it. | history-repeating-itself | John Scalzi | |
| eaa35e3 | If someone is telling you to live in interesting times, they are basically telling you they want you to die horribly, and to suffer terribly before you do. Seriously, they are not your friend. This is a tip I am giving you for free. | John Scalzi | ||
| 2f74fe6 | But if one's dreams having to come true was the only referendum on whether they were beautiful, or worth dreaming, well then, no one would wish for anything. And that would be so much sadder. | David Rakoff | ||
| ce8c127 | But even this gives rise to another central tenet, attendant to the Comedy Is Good myth: Comedy Is Hard. Certainly well-rendered comedy is hard. All things done well require practice and work. But for the most funny people, being funny is as inevitable as being double-jointed; it is a worldview formed long before words. One is born funny. The adage, as is, is incomplete. It should be Comedy is hard... if you're not funny. Pirouettes are alm.. | David Rakoff | ||
| 53d03aa | The central drama of my life is about being a fraud, alas. That's a complete lie, really; the central drama of my life is actually about being lonely, and staying thin, but fraudulence gets a fair amount of play. | David Rakoff | ||
| 7b7acb9 | Childrens ilogic can be an exquisitely structured mistake. | David Rakoff | ||
| e7c8d52 | It was turning out to be an anxious Christmas season. Too many were the early mornings spent sitting at the table, insomniac in the gray dawn, thinking to myself, Eggs would be good. Not for eating but for the viscous wrath of my ovobarrage. It seemed only a matter of time before I was lobbing my edible artillery out the window at the army of malefactors who daily made my life such a buzzing carnival of annoyance. I could almost feel the sa.. | David Rakoff | ||
| 01027be | While at the University of Chicago a couple of friends and I went to dinner at some restaurant in China Town night. Oblivious to the fact that my idiocy can be heard outside of a five-foot radius, I started in with the "You been here four hour. You go now," routine. Ha ha, we all laugh because infantile racism is funny. A little while later I walked back to the bathroom, and as I went down the hall to the "Male Room," I passed this rickety .. | Tucker Max | ||
| 36fe779 | credit, youre jewish, your best friend is black, and your girlfriend is a cheating whore. Even if I wore gay, I'd still have it better than you. | Tucker Max | ||
| fb4f889 | I prefer to keep fooling myself, at least for a little while longer. | Tucker Max | ||
| a12b4b9 | The first step off this downward spiral is to acknowledge these bad feelings as natural. When women feel this way, our society has sympathy, and Oprah gives them cars. But when men feel this way, our society demonizes these feelings as signs of weakness, amplifying the shame and self-judgment, repeating the macho advice to "suck it up" and "get over it." This bullshit makes the problem worse. It's impossible to pull yourself out of depressi.. | Tucker Max | ||
| 80d826f | The poet John Ciardi pointed out, "Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at women and persuade themselves they have a better idea." | Tucker Max | ||
| c5ce7bc | she was quite promiscuous, to the point where dating her was similar to the experience of sitting on a warm toilet seat: | Tucker Max | ||
| 08bd4a5 | 5:15 I have never put makeup on. It's hard. "You assholes are crowding my mirror space. Gimme some room, I keep smearing my blush." Everyone's glares at me. I feel like a gay homosexual." | Tucker Max | ||
| 4fa21df | Of course, I'm not a doctor; I just watch a lot of ER and House. | Tucker Max | ||
| ee8be82 | In 1948, long before the louder, faster, and busier world of Twitter and social media, Paul Lazarsfeld and Robert Merton wrote: The interested and informed citizen can congratulate himself on his lofty state of interest and information and neglect to see that he has abstained from decision and action. In short, he takes his secondary contact with the world of political reality, his reading and listening and thinking, as a vicarious performa.. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 893ce34 | Roger Ebert calls snarking "cultural vandalism." He's right. Snark makes culture impossible, or rather, it makes the conditions that make culture possible impossible. Earnestness, honesty, vulnerability: These are the targets of snark. "Snark functions as a device to punish human spontaneity, eccentricity, nonconformity, and simple error. Everyone is being snarked into line," he wrote." | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 6b1e4b7 | Nothing has sunk more creators and caused more unhappiness than this: our inherently human tendency to pursue a strategy aimed at accomplishing one goal while simultaneously expecting to achieve other goals entirely unrelated. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 7e57099 | It doesn't matter whether this is the worst time to be alive or the best, whether you're in a good job market or a bad one, or that the obstacle you facie is intimidating or burdensome. What matters right now is right now. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 53de6d1 | The responsibility/fault fallacy allows people to pass off the responsibility for solving their problems to others. This ability to alleviate responsibility through blame gives people a temporary high and a feeling of moral righteousness. Unfortunately, one side effect of the Internet and social media is that it's become easier than ever to push responsibility--for even the tiniest of infractions--onto some other group or person. In fact, t.. | Mark Manson | ||
| a72c8c0 | A critical test of any product: Does it have a purpose? Does it add value to the world? How will it improve the lives of the people who buy it? | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 1fb1ff6 | Publicity does not come easily, profits do not come easily, and knowledge does not come easily. | free easily nothing-is-free easy | Ryan Holiday | |
| ba65fc4 | When you have a goal, obstacles are actually teaching you how to get where you want to go--carving you a path. "The Things which hurt," Benjamin Franklin wrote, "instruct." -- | Ryan Holiday | ||
| dc61e42 | Would you have a great empire? Rule over yourself. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 3bc333a | Marcus Aurelius had a version of this exercise where he'd describe glamorous or expensive things without their euphemisms--roasted meat is a dead animal and vintage wine is old, fermented grapes. The aim was to see these things as they really are, without any of the ornamentation. We can do this for anyone or to anything that stands in our way. That promotion that means so much, what is it really? Our critics and naysayers who make us feel .. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 2f209db | An entrepreneur is someone with faith in their ability to make something where there was nothing before. To them, the idea that no one has ever done this or that is a good thing. When given an unfair task, some rightly see it as a chance to test what they're made of--to give it all they've got, knowing full well how difficult it will be to win. They see it as an opportunity because it is often in that desperate nothing-to-lose state that we.. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| dfdecf8 | Like any good school, learning from failure isn't free. The tuition is paid in discomfort or loss and having to start over. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 3f73a71 | In Silicon Valley, start-ups don't launch with polished, finished businesses. Instead, they release their "Minimum Viable Product" (MVP)--the most basic version of their core idea with only one or two essential features. The point is to immediately see how customers respond. And, if that response is poor, to be able to fail cheaply and quickly." | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 3402854 | For instance, in the design stages for a new mouse for an early Apple product, Jobs had high expectations. He wanted it to move fluidly in any direction--a new development for any mouse at that time--but a lead engineer was told by one of his designers that this would be commercially impossible. What Jobs wanted wasn't realistic and wouldn't work. The next day, the lead engineer arrived at work to find that Steve Jobs had fired the employee.. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| eb6e112 | As Gavin de Becker writes in The Gift of Fear, "When you worry, ask yourself, 'What am I choosing to not see right now?' What important things are you missing because you chose worry over introspection, alertness or wisdom?" | Ryan Holiday | ||
| f73066a | There are too many famous Steve Jobs anecdotes to count, but several of them revolve around one theme: his unwillingness to leave well enough alone. His products had to be perfect; they had to do what they promised, and then some. And even though deadlines loomed and people would have to work around the clock, he would regularly demand more from his teams than they thought they could provide. The result? The most successful company in the h.. | Ryan Holiday | ||
| 8aba0f7 | Just because the conditions aren't exactly to your liking, or you don't feel ready yet, doesn't mean you get a pass. If you want momentum, you'll have to create it yourself, right now, by getting up and getting started. | Ryan Holiday |