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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| dadb199 | Right in that or any moment of non-doing, you are already OK, already perfect, in the sense of perfectly who and what you are. And therefore, right in that moment you are already at home in a profound way, far beyond who you think you are and the ideas and opinions that may so shape and sometimes severely limit your view of the larger whole. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| a25706b | Buckminster Fuller, the discoverer/inventor of the geodesic dome, at age thirty-two contemplated suicide for a few hours one night at the edge of Lake Michigan, as the story goes, after a series of business failures that left him feeling he had made such a mess of his life that the best move would be for him to remove himself from the scene and make things simpler for his wife and daughter. Apparently everything he had touched or undertaken.. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| 79e431d | All faces resemble each other, yet how easily we see in each uniqueness, individuality, an identity. How deeply we value these differences. The ocean is a whole, but it has countless waves, every one different from all the others; it has currents, each unique, ever-changing; the bottom is a landscape all its own, different everywhere; similarly the shoreline. The atmosphere is whole, but its currents have unique signatures, even though they.. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| 5e920da | Feel free to use the following mnemonic device to help you remember: "To lay is to get laid and laid." (This is meant in the stuffiest grammatical sense and in no way implies the kind of smut a Santa Monica police officer might read into it.) "To lie," then, works as follows. "Today I lie on the beach." "Yesterday I lay on the beach." "At times, I have lain on the beach." None of those acts puts me in any danger of being arrested for lewd a.. | June Casagrande | ||
| 0d0695a | Amateur grammar snobs are a lot like amateur gynecologists--they're everywhere, they're all too eager to offer their services, and they're anything but gentle. | June Casagrande | ||
| 0ccadcf | Diplomacy, n. The patriotic art of lying for one's country. | Ambrose Bierce | ||
| 47eedec | The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill, and then make it the core of their working life, will thrive. | Cal Newport | ||
| ed5d5ed | I'm not a morning person, I just do my best worrying when I should be asleep. | Charles Stross | ||
| 0b30aa3 | He shrugs, an aw-shucks gesture quite at odds with the rest of his mannerisms, and produces a grin from wherever he keeps his spare faces when he isn't wearing them. | Charles Stross | ||
| bb952ef | pivoted the results on our Criminal Records Bureau and National Insurance database mirrors to get the place of work for everyone who's on the books, and the pre-processor is turning that into grid reference data so we can plot them on a map or query for areas where the rate of that's funny . . . | Charles Stross | ||
| 9377a6a | and that the seeds of evil usually germinated in the footprints of people who knew how everybody else ought to behave and felt the need to tell them so. | Charles Stross | ||
| e4609c2 | To boldly go where no uploaded metahuman colony has gone before | Charles Stross | ||
| ac1b0bc | when it isn't spending half its energy scanning for viruses or painting a pretty drop-shadow under the mouse pointer it runs like greased whippet shit. | Charles Stross | ||
| b484f08 | In a sufficiently large crisis, sane and measured responses go out the window. | Charles Stross | ||
| 044562b | Very strong imagery of conformity versus mold-breaking, concealing conformity disguised as mold-breaking. Ever wondered why Mac users are so glassy-eyed about their boxes? | Charles Stross | ||
| 06c77e5 | They're vermin, Bob. They've been driven inland by over-fishing and now they're spreading disease, attacking waste collections, keeping people awake in the small hours, and carrying away stray cats and small dogs. Next thing you know they'll be cloning credit cards and planning bank robberies." "Yes, but..." I see no point in arguing; it's not as if I like seagulls." | Charles Stross | ||
| b048385 | Finally, they began to investigate the prime minister, Harold Wilson. Wilson, Wright was convinced, was a KGB agent." I'm nodding along like a metronome at this point. "There was a group, a cabal if you like, of MI5 officers. About thirty of them. They actually planned a coup d'etat in 1972. They" | Charles Stross | ||
| 6f98392 | can't decide whether his next show should be a sitcom about government bureaucrats or a horror series | Charles Stross | ||
| ac20a82 | Fucking netbooks; you can't even use one to beat an alien brain parasite to death without it breaking.) | Charles Stross | ||
| 3024111 | Bet you he's a smart sociopath, the kind that does well in midlevel management, all fur coat and no knickers--and willing to shed blood without a second thought if it's to defend his position. | Charles Stross | ||
| 16a17b9 | It seems I have not been truly myself for a long time," he says, barely whispering, a dry, papery sound like files shuffling in a dead document archive." | Charles Stross | ||
| 2137250 | an autonome, a native of this continuum: | Charles Stross | ||
| fb42d00 | Viewed in the right light, a little sprinkle of free market pixie dust can turn the drabbest of public sector services (sewerage, for example) into a rainbow-hued profit unicorn. | Charles Stross | ||
| c7ccf40 | The dirty little secret of the intelligence-gathering job is that information doesn't just want to be free--it wants to hang out on street corners wearing gang colors and terrorizing the neighbors. | Charles Stross | ||
| e65a2cb | Computers aren't as powerful as most people think; running even a small and rather stupid intern can really bog down a server.) | Charles Stross | ||
| 7318812 | Mug of Joe," grunts Johnny. "Mocha venti with an extra shot for me, no cream," I add. "Anything else?" I shake my head and she wanders off. Johnny looks suspicious. "Since when do you speak Starbucks?" I shrug. "It's not as if I can help it; they've got our office surrounded, and they don't like it if you try to order in English." We wait" | Charles Stross | ||
| 2d20f28 | Desks are to executives what souped-up Mitsubishi Colts with low-profile alloys, metal-flake paint jobs, and extra-loud, chrome-plated exhaust pipes are to chavs; they're a big swinging dick, the proxy they use to proclaim their sense of self-importance. If you want to understand an executive, you study his desk. | Charles Stross | ||
| 7ea81e3 | Hopefully we don't end up as someone else's dinner." For a moment I feel a stab of remorse for the lamb: born into an infinite, hostile universe and destined from birth to be nothing more than fodder for uncaring alien intelligences vaster by far than it can comprehend. "'Scuse me, I'm having a Heather Mills moment here." Mo" | Charles Stross | ||
| c28710f | Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence or overwork? | Charles Stross | ||
| 1af7385 | To a many-angled one, we impoverished entities who are stranded in three-plus-one dimensions are fairly harmless; nevertheless, even the inhabitants of flatland can inflict a nasty paper cut upon the unwary on occasion. | Charles Stross | ||
| e046bf0 | No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complac.. | Charles Stross | ||
| 025d8af | Some knowledge is inherently corrupting, | Charles Stross | ||
| d908b84 | But I can't be in three places at once!" "Tough," says Mo, and that shell-like expression cracks into a grin. "You're management now; isn't it time you learned to delegate?" | Charles Stross | ||
| 24c935d | 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. The | Charles Stross | ||
| 85d81c6 | his arms. Human. Cat. Human. Cat. No doubled vision: it's a cat, singular. A solitary diurnal ambush hunter with good hearing and binocular vision and a predilection for biting the neck of its prey in half while disemboweling it with the scythe-like claws on its hind legs. Basically it's a velociraptor with a fur coat and an outsize sense of entitlement. | Charles Stross | ||
| 3ba27bd | What is this eigenplot you keep talking about? I ask. I'm dangerously close to whining. I really hate it when everyone else around me seems to know more about what's going on than I do. The geas Billington's running. It's the occult equivalent of a stateful firewall. It keeps out intruders, unless they run through the approach states in a permitted sequence. | Charles Stross | ||
| e1cbfb3 | Ah, the warm fuzzies of decisive action. | Charles Stross | ||
| cfb5887 | April 5th. You know what that means to me? That means the budget for the project expired at the end of financial year 1968 and was not renewed. (Yes, British government budgets--and the tax year--start on April 6th. Why are you looking at me like that? Don't your tax years start and stop on a random date in April?) I | Charles Stross | ||
| 673186c | The most efficient kind of censorship isn't the heavy-handed black inking of the secret policeman; it's the self-censorship we impose on ourselves when we're afraid that if we say what we think everyone around us will think us strange. | Charles Stross | ||
| 98a7f4d | I'm a believer. And like I said, 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. A | Charles Stross | ||
| 66a06a2 | And because this is now a political problem, the usual political syllogism applies: (a) is a problem: Something Must Be Done, (b) is Something, Therefore (b) Must Be Done. | Charles Stross | ||
| 2d0c630 | La culpa es mia por ser el informatico del departamento: cuando las maquinas se estropean, agito mi pollo muerto y escribo encantamientos vudu en los teclados hasta que vuelven a funcionar. | Charles Stross | ||
| 161a9a7 | Toma un puro, Sherlock. - Lo siento; solo echo humo cuando me enchufan a la red electrica. | Charles Stross | ||
| 9e91788 | Egotist, n. A person of low taste, more interested in himself than in me. | Ambrose Bierce |