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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6fc91eb | I'm possessed, recursively. | Charles Stross | ||
| 45a45bb | And convincing someone that an outrageous ritual has caused them to forget the constitutional bedrock of their society is hard. | Charles Stross | ||
| b8594c5 | So once again Janice proves that not only is she a nerd, she's a useful nerd who gets to stay on the team. | Charles Stross | ||
| cb84a3b | Copyright (C) 2012 by Charles Stross | Patrick Nielsen Hayden | ||
| fb05193 | I picked you for this task, Colonel, precisely because you won't do it lightly. | Charles Stross | ||
| a592d7c | The knife-shaped thing sticking out of his throat is drinking greedily; one glance tells Johnny that the cop's beyond help. There's always a cost for using such occult weapons, and Johnny will pay it later, of that he is sure; but for now he's simply relieved to still be alive. | Charles Stross | ||
| 74e51d1 | her Jonquil overlay | Charles Stross | ||
| 52debca | The rich smell of life uneaten. | Charles Stross | ||
| 26bb92d | Firewyrms (I refuse to dignify those things by calling them dragons; real dragons should be elegant reptilian predators, not sea slugs with wings that vomit acid). | Charles Stross | ||
| 4ff9130 | There are things out there in the night where light cannot exist that make Cthulhu look like a Care Bear. | Charles Stross | ||
| 0f05822 | because there's something joyless and deadening in the air, as if what this room really holds is the decaying miscarried fetus of the human future. Anyone who lingers here will sicken and die, just as if they were stranded in the pyramid on a dead world where once the photo-reconnaissance Concordes flew. | Charles Stross | ||
| abedca5 | Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority; still more when you superadd the tendency of the certainty of corruption by authority. --Lord Acton | Charles Stross | ||
| c3de70b | The widespread belief among some politicians that government can't do anything right--that the private sector is always better--becomes a corrosive, self-fulfilling prophecy. Government isn't allowed to be bright and cheerful, helpful and efficient. | Charles Stross | ||
| bcf8ea3 | Ras is a big fan of Noam Chomsky; calling it the Propaganda Ministry keeps things honest, he says. Like having a Ministry of War rather than a Department of Defense, or Counting Other People's Murdered Children instead of talking about Collateral Damage. | Charles Stross | ||
| bc5d4ec | Our first priority is the same as it ever was," he said: "survival. Not all of us, or any of us in particular, or forever, but survival is the principal goal. It's the function of all life forms to persist for as long as possible. If nobody and nothing survives, nothing matters. And I don't know about you, but I'm deeply uncomfortable with that." | Charles Stross | ||
| 0670a81 | but on the ridgeline up by Magic Meadows there's a place where the trees are all flattened outwards in a circle and there's a scorched symbol in the dirt, kinda like a five-pointed star with an eye in the middle, like the Brotherhood | Charles Stross | ||
| e17f5bf | If he's serious about turning, I can probably walk him through the process using the tablet as a teaching tool: damn Alex for inventing such an easy-to-understand visualization. If you could broadcast it over a TV channel ... my blood runs cold at the thought.) | Charles Stross | ||
| 96a0ef7 | We fight on so that something that remembers being human might survive. | Charles Stross | ||
| 4361100 | Within the shielded darkness of the President's limousine a geas unlocks in my head, and I can finally remember the message the PM wants me to convey to his counterpart | Charles Stross | ||
| c8ce821 | This would be an extinction event for humanity. We can't let it happen. It is also a who-poisoned-my-beehives event for the Black Pharaoh, which is why He's trying to prevent it. (We bring Him honey: He keeps us around.) | Charles Stross | ||
| a8430e2 | It's a bit like cricket," Pete agrees. "Weeks of endless boredom interspersed with the occasional moment of existential terror." | Charles Stross | ||
| 1d966df | Not our circus, not our monkeys," I murmur, and he nods." | Charles Stross | ||
| bd85a3f | Some of my people are well on their way to becoming formidable practitioners (like Alex, but best not to tell the little oik that). | Charles Stross | ||
| c646818 | Oh, and if the Nazgul aren't already on the alert for reports of vampires entering the country, I'm a chocolate teapot. | Charles Stross | ||
| 3575b78 | Not that she's happy with Bob. Iris still hasn't forgiven him for unintentionally massacring most of her congregation, cocking up a very important summoning which might have shaved four years off the critical path to the New Management, and always being late with his timesheets. | Charles Stross | ||
| 7b995db | Yes, Derek," I tell him, "we hauled you four thousand miles out of your comfort zone just so you could make a saving throw vs. Cthulhu. Happy now?" | Charles Stross | ||
| 8102238 | skeletal. "It would hardly be unprecedented, don't you think? "So here's your new assignment: you will establish a new agency, recruit agents, and direct them--I have a little list of those who won't be missed, tum-de-dum, I shall send it to you presently--in order to develop and deliver a HUMINT capability directed against the United States. You are to bring the new organization to operational readiness, then lead them in penetrating the c.. | Charles Stross | ||
| f999fcd | Apocalypses are easier slept through than experienced. | Charles Stross | ||
| 93844f6 | It felt like going commando in a miniskirt on a Saturday night in town, even after Jim sent an email to ensure that there'd be a shiny new Samsung waiting for me in DC. Not knowing I could check my team's timesheets on my phone at 3 a.m. felt profoundly wrong. | Charles Stross | ||
| b3053bd | There's a fire on the hillside just above Skyland and it's like to go wild if we | Charles Stross | ||
| 053dd8b | Our new allies are weak and unreliable and mean us ill. We need a new kind of arsenal if we are to defend democracy and freedom, and the first step in rebuilding our defenses is to build a hypercomputing cloud in solar orbit, one powerful enough to summon the Lord of Sleep to lead us... | Charles Stross | ||
| 63ca5cd | Erudition, n. Dust shaken out of a book into an empty skull. | Ambrose Bierce | ||
| 2d4b9a5 | Flesh, n. The Second Person of the secular Trinity. | Ambrose Bierce | ||
| 025610f | But his former day job--he is still a vicar, and his bishop is remarkably reluctant to raise a fuss about his apparent conscription by a secret government agency devoted to issues which can best be described as ungodly (or worse, wrong godly)--taught him a lot about helping people. | Charles Stross | ||
| 3079873 | Bogons?" "Hypothetical particles of cluelessness. Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting the machinery work again." | Charles Stross | ||
| c6c2ea2 | A powerful glamour has engulfed the United States of America. It's not the first time, of course--that nation is a shining temple to amnesia with its foundations built atop the bones of vanished empires | Charles Stross | ||
| 364ecf9 | Hi, I'm Bob Howard. I'm a computational demonologist and senior field agent working for an organization you don't know exists. My job involves a wide range of tasks, including: writing specifications for structured cabling runs in departmental offices; diving through holes in spacetime that lead to dead worlds and fighting off the things with too many tentacles and mouths that I find there; liaising with procurement officers to draft the fu.. | Charles Stross | ||
| 7adfc80 | I wince at his casual disrespect as I follow Captain Perceval into the rear. | Charles Stross | ||
| b40c1aa | You're a grown-up, these days. You don't wear a kamikaze pilot's rising sun headband and a tee-shirt that screams DEBUG THIS! and you don't spend your weekends competing in extreme programming slams at a windy campsite near Frankfurt, but it's generally difficult for you to use any machine that doesn't have at least one compiler installed: In fact, you had to stick Python on your phone before you even opened its address book because not bei.. | Charles Stross | ||
| 234e7fb | But you're more at home with SQL than socialization: Innuendo wasn't a language they taught in CS lab. | Charles Stross | ||
| 98ea67a | Rita stopped, suddenly acutely aware that while curiosity was her job, too much curiosity was reputedly felicidal: | Charles Stross | ||
| 8d2a81c | Virtue is concerned with what we do, and honour is concerned with how we do it. | Gregory David Roberts | ||
| 0e768a2 | The IT worker has to know in their bones that if they make a mistake, things can go horribly wrong. Tension and cynicism are constant companions, along with camaraderie and competitiveness. It's a lot like being a spy, or necromancer. You don't get out much, and when you do it's usually at night. | Charles Stross | ||
| 78c0fe8 | I've suffered for what I know, so I'm not going to let you off the hook with a simple one-liner. I think you deserve a detailed explanation. | Charles Stross |