Inspired by my friend the Doctor's .plan file as well as the old rec.arts.drwho quotefile, I've decided to take the quotes.txt file I've had growing on my hard drive for years and put it online. These are quotes from friends and acquaintances of mine as well as public sources which have stuck in my head for whatever reason.
Please note that many of the quotes presented contain adult language or concepts, and that my finding something interesting enough to quote here does not always indicate my partial or complete personal agreement or endorsement of its sentiments.
If something here is yours and you would prefer me to adjust or remove it, let me know.
Nonsense is to sense, as shade to light; it heightens effect, making what is beautiful in itself still more beautiful by contrast.
Frederick Saunders, Salad for the Solitary
Information is light. Information, in itself, about anything, is light.
I panic the world, because I use my noodle.
Phroso, Freaks
We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.
You cannot take a serious, level, honest view of the world without a sense of humor. A sense of humor is part of what sees how things are.
If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they'll kill you.
If we can't have sanity, we can fake it with humor. Humor gives you the same distance from the situation, the same metaview, only laughing is easier than sanity and possibly more fun.
Nonsense wakes up the brain cells. And it helps develop a sense of humor, which is awfully important in this day and age. Humor has a tremendous place in this sordid world. It's more than just a matter of laughing. If you can see things out of whack, then you can see how things can be in whack.
Dr. Seuss, The Los Angeles Times, November 27, 1983
I'd like to be a Professor of Logic... have a day off where you just do illogical things, eat a balloon or something.
Paul Merton, Have I Got News For You (June 3, 2011)
I have complete faith in the continued absurdity of whatever's going on.
Jon Stewart, Philadelphia Inquirer interview
There's no point in being grown up if you can't be childish sometimes.
The Doctor, Doctor Who
Picture yourself when you were five. In fact, dig out a photo of little you at that time and tape it to your mirror. How would you treat her, love her, feed her? How would you nurture her if you were the mother of little you? I bet you would protect her fiercely while giving her space to spread her itty-bitty wings. She’d get naps, healthy food, imagination time, and adventures into the wild. If playground bullies hurt her feelings, you’d hug her tears away and give her perspective. When tantrums or meltdowns turned her into a poltergeist, you’d demand a loving time-out in the naughty chair. From this day forward I want you to extend that same compassion to your adult self.
If compared to an ideal world free of prejudice, the current state of things is a shameful walrus orgy of a disaster. If compared to the actual world at any point in the past, things look pretty fucking good.
J. Wisniewski, Cracked.com
Here's a simple way to gauge how healthy a society is: are the smiles real?
Pantslessness is next to godliness.
There are opposing theories on whether or not the Internet is making us dumber. I don't understand either of them.
If people don't get more educated about computer technology, it will end in a system of total surveillance (except for criminals, who will always know how to circumvent). Internet and computers are seen as simple tools of entertainment, not as skill to master. Thankfully people start to understand 1984 can become pretty real and vote for parties which will try to stop that. The most disturbing thing is that people in Syria, who use TOR get tracked using European and American surveillance software and get lynched and sent in pieces to their family members as a warning.
throwaway236236, malware coder
The mainstream says it despises social media because it isn't real human interaction, but actually they're scared of it because they know it is.
It's no wonder we're having issues with social media: the past 40 years was based in television, a passive medium. In a sense, using active media like twitter, where you can say something and get feedback and learn, requires us to relearn to walk.
For comparisons of effects of types of media on society, imagine what #occupy would have been like if we only had broadcast television.
The world isn't run by weapons anymore, or energy, or money. It's run by little ones and zeros, little bits of data. It's all just electrons. There's a war out there... and it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think, it's all about information.
Cosmo, Sneakers
In the same way that computer viruses use "exploits" in your computer's operating system to flood your desktop with gay hardcore porn, the media can use the exploits in the way your brain processes information in order to feed you bullshit, in the hope that you'll propagate that bullshit like a virus to the rest of the population, earning some newspaper or network the props for having totally broken this story first. It's called "manufactured outrage." By withholding a little information, bending a few truths and then claiming "absolutely everyone is angry about this, and so should you be," the media can actually create news out of some otherwise un-newsworthy event.
Let me state this for the record: I am a hacker! And I don't do illegal things with computers. I do, however, learn everything I can about what I'm interested in, do cool things with what I've learned, and share it with everyone who cares to gain from my experience. This is what hacking is all about. And it is fun! And peoples' lives are enhanced by it. There are millions of hackers all over the world, and we are all doing this.
Hacking is the clever circumvention of imposed limits, whether imposed by your government, your IP server, your own personality, or the laws of physics.
Normal person: "I'm too lazy to figure it out, I'll just look it up."
Programmer: "I'm too lazy to look it up, I'll just figure it out."
One description of insanity: Trying the same thing over and over while expecting different results.
I have found that the best way to fix computer problems is to turn the machine off and on again, and expect a different result.
Conclusion: Computers are designed to make us insane.
breaking news: computers are still terrible and we should put them in the road
maybe teaching sand to do math was a mistake
Developing on a closed platform is like trying to fall in love with someone who won't talk to you.
Hackers don't break software, they simply demonstrate that it was already broken.
There is something synergistic about a computer program. A computer program does things that a computer designer does not always intend. Even if you sat down from scratch. If the armed forces came to you and said, "Here's all the money and time in the world. You're going to start from scratch with the hardware and software. Build us a network that is totally secure." I don't think it could be done. That's one of the things that's so fascinating about computers - the program ends up being more than the sum of its parts.
Philip DeGuere, creator of Whiz Kids
Hackers believe that essential lessons can be learned about the systems - about the world - from taking things apart, seeing how they work, and using this knowledge to create new and even more interesting things. They resent any person, physical barrier, or law that tries to keep them from doing this.... Imperfect systems infuriate hackers, whose primal instinct is to debug them.... In a perfect hacker world, anyone pissed off enough to open up a control box near a traffic light and take it apart to make it work better should be perfectly welcome to make the attempt. Rules that prevent you from taking matters like that into your own hands are too ridiculous to even consider abiding by.
Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.
Sometimes it takes 3 hours of trying accidentally shitty ideas to get to the great idea.
I do things I'm not qualified to do, and I keep doing them until I get good at it.
"Weird Al" Yankovic, The Paris Review
The only thing I'm confident in is the fact that I have imposter syndrome.
Every time you sniff and say somebody has "too much free time," the part of you that used to love making things for pure joy dies a little.
random thought, the "punk" in things like cyberpunk is about having your own agency in spite of world that tries to stop it
🤔
Always be yourself, and wave your freak flag high.
TV's Frank, Mystery Science Theater 3000
Those who matter don't mind, and those who mind don't matter.
The act of doing something dangerous and illegal combined with totally stupid dancing? Count me the fuck in.
I benefit from a lack of curiosity in many areas. I'm like, "Nah, I'm good. I don't need to make out with ten people. I get it. I don't need to smoke that. I get it." There's no need to fake curiosity for something that's probably not going to be good for you anyway.
Tina Fey, Esquire, April 2010
I do agree I am going to hell. But for other reasons. Mostly boring tax stuff.
Amy Poehler, The Hollywood Reporter
I'll take your response as satire.
Unless you meant it in earnest, in which case I'll take your existence as satire.
I'm at that stage of my life where I keep myself out of arguments. Even if you tell me 1+1=5. You're absolutely correct, enjoy!
Keanu Reeves
It always mystifies me when people talk about how hard they partied and how drunk they were. Really, how the hell good could your times be if you cannot remember them? I tend to think I have a far better time because I am NOT drunk. Sure, I still do stupid, irresponsible and ill advised things like drunks do, but I do it with full cognizance and fully remember it all. It has its charms.
Drugs, eh? What's the point. They make you forget, make you talk funny, make you see things that aren't there. My old grandma got all of that for free when she had a stroke.
Gene Hunt, Life on Mars
I was filling up a soda at Burger King and some guy who was wearing very ragged clothes came up to me and said "I don't need drugs, my imagination kicks ass!" He filled up his soda and walked away.
If you are looking for the Key to the Universe, I have some bad news, and some good news. The bad news is, there is no Key to the Universe. The good news is, it has been left unlocked.
Is it me or is the world getting hacked?
The truth is, 2 + 2 = 5. It's just that every time someone tries to solve the problem, they make the same mistake.
Watch: 2 + 2 = 4. Dammit!
It's like the day you realize that the ABCs, Twinkle Twinkle, and Baa Baa Black Sheep have the same song, so you start singing "ABCD have you any wool? How I wonder LMNOP! Up above TUV one for the little boy Y&Z! Baa, baa, black sheep little star, next time won't you three bags full" every time.
What's better than winning gold at the olympics?
Not having dedicated your entire life to the utterly fucking pointless pursuit of running very fast in a straight line for 100m.
To a lot of people, ideologies are like sports teams, and they pick a side. People who don't have any business trying to establish guiding principles for the world create this imaginary game, and they cheer on the Christians to beat the Muslims, or the Republicans to beat the Democrats. It's all these folks can do to not make up locker signs.
In the US, there is basically one party - the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies. By and large, I am opposed to those policies. As is most of the population.
We suspect the solution to military suicide is in many ways simple: stop asking soldiers to execute horrific wars. If the job was, say, stroking bunnies all day, a lot less suicide.
Power drives people mad. I left the military because I was tired of not being able to tell people that had cooler shapes on their chest to fuck off when they had a dumb idea.
War is where the young and stupid are tricked by the old and bitter into killing each other.
Niko Bellic, GTA IV
All spelling errors are to be ingored.
I've received a fair bit of angry email, some of which was even spelled correctly. This mail ran the gamut of emotions, from Wah to Waaaah.
April Winchell, Regretsy
Very few people are really cynical; we just accuse other people of cynicism because we don't agree with their particular take on the world.
Remember, hating something is a specific kind of being excited about something.
The only "secret" is to talk to people like they're human beings, and don't get bent out of shape if someone says something mean. It's the Internet. Someone's always gonna say something mean.
Steve Lieber on online discourse
When you have nothing and are not bombarded with the confusing and distorting daily images of life that our children are exposed to, then life is simpler. When you live in the kind of poverty that third world children endure, being cool is irrelevant, as is the kind of shoes you wear or the fact that your parents don't take you to Disneyland. Civilisation brings with it a lot of baggage that perversely seems to inhibit civilised behaviour.
I have met people who looked breathtaking.. and then they said ugly things. They began to look ugly to me. And, I have met people who may not look so great on the outside, but they are kind and have a wonderful soul. It is those people who take my breath away.
Every once in a while I get a comment on something I've posted saying "Your life is so much more fun than mine!" Humored, I want to yell back, "Don't compare your raw footage to my highlight reel!"
The people who you put into office are just like the people you see everyday on the street. They may wear ties and million dollar grins and PhDs and fraternity rings but they still possess the same irrational fears, insecurities, angers, and emotions that we all do. Unfortunately their brains are linked to a structure of power and thus have a much greater chance of affecting the outside world.
Before you laugh at these people, note: often, the only real difference between a group you think is strange and one that produces potential Presidents of the United States is critical mass.
JHarris, MetaFilter
Tony Blair is an evolution of Margaret Thatcher as a villain. If you listen back to Mrs Thatcher now, her tone was incredibly weird. She sounds like a schoolteacher explaining to very thick kids why you shouldn't lick pencils. But even though what she said was garbage, people bought it because she was so emphatic. She said that Jesus wanted us all to make money and she sounded so sure that people thought there must something in what she said, despite the fact that she was saying that black was white. Tony Blair is a progression from that. He was so charming and used to being able to persuade people that the persuasion and the charm became an engine of their own, irrespective of what they were in the service of. What he believed and what he could persuade you of became blurred in his mind and that's the most dangerous thing alive - conviction and self-belief when there isn't really a self any more.
Politics and professional wrestling are the same profession.
My biggest concern is how good we've gotten at campaigns and how bad we've gotten at government. The entire system is incentivized backwards.
Jon Stewart, NYMag interview
You know, at every election from now on, I’m going to ask, “Which candidate is most like Tom Servo?” And then I’ll vote for that one.
You can always tell you're on to something good when you have to ask yourself "How can I do this without getting sued?"
Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that something else is more important than fear.
Being remarkable also means being ignored or actively disliked.
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
What we are doing now is not important for itself, but one day someone might be interested enough to carry things forwards and create something wonderful on these foundations.
There is a really difficult balance to strike between art and commerce, and it’s unfortunate that it even exists at all. Art demands that a work be produced for the sheer ability to say that the work was produced, for its own sake, in a pure and uncompromised manner. Commerce tries to steer that art in some broadly-palatable or monetizable direction. As an artist, I want to be compensated to just make what I feel. But as a businessperson, I think being able to do this in any capacity is a gift and a privilege.
in response to a post saying "i dont know what an NFT is and im too afraid to ask"
imagine if you went up to the mona lisa and you were like “i’d like to own this” and someone nearby went “give me 65 million dollars and i’ll burn down an unspecified amount of the amazon rainforest in order to give you this receipt of purchase” so you paid them and they went “here’s your receipt, thank you for your purchase” and went to an unmarked supply closet in the back of the museum and posted a handmade label inside it behind the brooms that said “mona lisa currently owned by jacobgalapagos” so if anyone wants to know who owns it they’d have to find this specific closet in this specific hallway and look behind the correct brooms. and you went “can i take the mona lisa home now?” and they went “oh god no are you stupid? you only bought the receipt that says you own it, you didn’t actually buy the mona lisa itself, you can’t take the real mona lisa you idiot. you CAN take this though.” and gave you the replica print in a cardboard tube that’s sold in the gift shop. also the person selling you the receipt of purchase has at no point in time ever owned the mona lisa.
unfortunately, if this doesn’t really make sense or seem like any logical person would be happy about this exchange, then you’ve understood it perfectly
I will do shit for money. But I'm not gonna do shit for no money. I'll do quality for no money.
Clancy Brown, The AV Club
Warhol's Campbell's Soup Cans were a brilliant parody of art, in the same way that Campbell's Soup is a brilliant parody of food.
Craig Kilborn, The Daily Show
When my stomach's full, failing doesn't seem to bother me as much.
Bo, They Came From Outer Space, "Ads R Us"
Capitalism is a master of recuperation. What first shakes it, soon motivates it, later strengthens it.
Micah White, Adbusters
A friend of mine asked me recently, was I gonna go see the new Batman movie with him. I don't respect the concept of Batman because of what I understand about politics now.
I'mma lay it out for you. Rich dude owns a corporation, has state of the art equipment, and he uses this to beat up on street-level crime. He doesn't mess with the industrialists, or the super capitalists, the Murdochs, or the Trumps. He really just fucks with the person that's just on the corner.
Batman is a conservative's wet dream. Fuck Batman.
Reginald D. Hunter, Have I Got News For You (May 9, 2008)
One of the Rules of this Reality (as I have come to learn it) is that you don't necessarily get what you deserve. It's more like, you get what you resemble. Magical things happen to magical people.
If a person displays certain characteristics, personality traits or behavioural tendencies, it's probably due to a combination of genetics, past and present socio-economic environment, education and familial/peer group relationships. It is almost certainly not because they are a fucking Pisces.
Writing is the only profession when no one considers you ridiculous if you earn no money.
If you wish to be a writer, write.
Writing is really, really, really difficult. Have I mentioned that recently? Difficult. There, I mentioned it again. DIFFICULT!!!
Writing is like making love, except that's there's no fun, constant self doubts and no cake or applause at the end.
She sees me, and waves me to sit, and as I do she asks if I want coffee. Of course I do. I'm a writer. 'Free' and 'containing caffeine' are three of the five words guaranteed to get us shaking with anticipation. Don't ask me what the other two words are, but if you guess, you'll be right.
Shit.
I just remembered I had to write the Great American Novel.
Oh well.
Life: that thing that prevents us from doing our art, and makes our art worth doing.
anonymous
People and their crazy romantic notions: "I'd be an artist if I could," or "I'd travel if I could," or "I'd do all these things if I had the time/money/motivation." Everyone would do everything if they had the fundamental resources necessary. Yeah, maybe - you do have to be realistic. Be totally realistic for ten minutes without a break and take note of how you feel. That's the crushing weight of limitations. But, the thing about limitations is there's usually a way around them. Not becoming a ballerina because you don't have legs is one thing. Not becoming a ballerina because you don't have a tutu is something else entirely.
For example: recently I had an inspiring lady tell me about another inspiring lady, a French filmmaker (I can't write her name because I don't know how to spell it or what it even sounds like; sorry, I was drunk when she told me) who wanted to make films but didn't have any money to spare for equipment. Since you can't really make a film without equipment and taking out a loan wasn't a viable option for her, she decided to attack her dream differently: she started writing, with the vague hope that someone someday would take interest in her work and translate it to film. And let her direct it.
And that actually f-cking happened.
If you really want something, you have to work with that you have.
Mila Jaroniec, "When It Feels Right"
What I do every time that I start something is convince myself that I'm completely free and that no one's going to read it or judge it. I realize that people are ultimately going to read it, but the idea that I'm free is really important to me because otherwise you can never really try and you can't fail. And that's what I'm going to have to keep doing. I look back on this book, and I was almost crazy to try to do this, and when I described it to my editor, he was looking at me thinking, Oh my God, what is this going to be? I just hope I can keep being brave enough to keep trying stuff that might not work.
Being an artist doesn't take much, just everything you've got.
"Trend" is a dirty word here. If it's a trend, it's old.
There's a standard formula for success in the entertainment medium, and that is "beat it to death if it succeeds."
When I'm looking for a job, I always have this attitude of, "Will I like this project?" I'm not real specific about, "I want to do print or I want to do animation or I want to do live action." It's, "Do I like the project?"
Anne D. Berstein, Write Now interview
Once someone told me if you’re in entertainment don’t specialize. Don’t do one thing because you’ll be doomed. [...] Do everything. Do stand up. Do improv. Be an actor or a singer. Teach. Just do whatever you can to pay the bills because every once in a while one might take a bigger place in your life and the other one will get smaller, but it will shrink again and then something else will get larger.
Live each day as though it is your last! i.e. lie in bed wheezing, wearing an adult diaper, crying out the names of those you've wronged...
Michael J. Nelson
En la vida estarás siempre diciendo adiós. Que eso no te impida amar.
In life, you'll always be saying goodbye. Don't let that keep you from loving.
I want to roll in the leaves till I smell like leaves.
Menja bé, caga fort i no tinguis por a la mort!
Eat well, shit a good deal and don't be afraid of death!
Catalan proverb
I really believe all humans are always doing the best they can and sometimes that makes me so happy and sometimes it really scares me.
Humans sure are an interesting bunch. One day, we're sending autonomous craft hurtling through space and the next day we're semi permanently inserting objects in our butts.
Relationships are when you put two people in a jar, and then, you shake the jar! And relationships are complicated and stuff, but DON'T WORRY: you know how many folks there are on the planet? Almost SEVEN BILLION FOLKS. That's so many folks; if you screw up with one of 'em, you can always start fresh with someone new! I'll say it again because it's totally worth repeating: there are SO MANY FOLKS.
T-Rex, Dinosaur Comics
Sex is vastly more than physical attraction. It's feeling, mood, interest, excitement, sensation, surprise, and intimacy. So guys who think that the best possible sex is with the most physically perfect specimen are idiots and are missing out.
I tried to figure out why I was feeling so much better after visiting the sex museum and I think it's this:
I felt light. I felt connected to humanity in a way that spanned millennia and continents. I felt better about the state of the world and the people in it. I felt like, yes, okay, we are all so different and so much time has passed and so much history is behind us but in the end, we are the same animals. We are all animals. The ancient Chinese were having sex in the same positions that the frat boys and state college girls will tonight. And I felt GREAT about that.
At our base level, humanity is ridiculous and silly. And we take it so seriously. We put so much pressure on ourselves in our lifetimes and in the end, every generation's continuation comes down to this bizarre, wonderful, life-affirming, sexual moment. We are all made from those statues in crazy positions. We are all scraps of DNA shot out of a funny-looking appendage. Isn't it grand? Isn't it wonderful? Isn't it relaxing? Don't you feel connected?
Gaby Dunn, The Paris Sex Museum Made Me Love People Again
Women love danger. If they could, they'd just date a fire.
When I was about to graduate high school, the Army Corps came in and gave us one of these tests to help decide what field or type of job we would be best suited for based on our cognitive skills. So I took this test. I got a pretty good score, and they said I would make an excellent office manager. A week later the teacher said, "Oh, the computer screwed up, there’s something wrong with the program, and we have to take this test over again." So, I went, and just as an experiment, I put myself down as a male. I took the test again, but this time Beverly Leech was a guy, and I got the same score. And you know what I was supposed to be then? A civil engineer. So based on my gender, I could only aspire to be a damned good office manager. But as a man, I could have been a civil engineer building bridges.
Beverly Leech, interviewed by Maia Weinstock
Something I found pretty funny is the oldies singer Dion's greatest hits album, the song "Runaround Sue" comes right before "The Wanderer." "Runaround Sue" is all about avoiding this girl Sue because she goes from guy to guy, breaking their hearts. "The Wanderer" is about a boy who goes from girl to girl without a care about breaking their hearts, and how happy he is.
TenBeers: Nobody's ever asked for proof of the degree I claim to have.
I also don't have crippling student loan debt.
xaronax: Careful, if you keep fucking the system that hard you might break the condom.
The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angeles. The wireless is the same, only without the cat.
I can always tell I didn't sleep enough when you guys didn't create much fresh Internet for me to read.
There's a certain comfort that comes from knowing a fact. The sun is up in the sky. There's nothing you can say that's going to change that. You can't say, 'The sun's not up there, there's no sky.' There is reality, and there's nothing wrong with accepting reality. It's when you try to distort reality, to maneuver it into accommodating your particular point of view, your particular bigotry, your particular whatever - that's when you run into problems.
I bought an orange at the store yesterday. They were on sale and I was hoping it would be good. I was hoping it was enough of the end of the off season that it was the beginning of the on season.
It's horrible.
I wish I would have kept it whole, intact. I liked it better with its skin on, when it was the promise of an orange, all that anticipation, instead of the sad reality of a poor one.
I've always wondered: how do you bat an eye, anyway? Wouldn't the owner of the eye complain?
Seeing things from others' perspective is great until you realize you are doing it unconsciously and mistaking it for yours.
When you look at someone through rose-tinted glasses, all of the red flags just look like flags.
One thing that has always disturbed me is the fact that people have two sets of clothes - a scruffy set for mucking about in and a smart set for going out in. I mean, do you change into a different person when you go somewhere 'special'? No! You're still the same bumhole you were building that tree house this morning. So why dress different? Are we living in the middle ages? Are you all suckers for that sophistication crap they pump out on T.V.? Or do you lick the boots of those big men type wankers with lots of cash?
If there's one thing I can't stand it's vanity, especially in blokes.
I love my clothes.
I always feel that I am fulfilling my role as a columnist when people tell me that they agree with 'most of what I say'. If they agreed with everything, I could be accused of being bland to the point of irrelevance; conversely, if nothing met with approval then I would clearly be from another planet.
Colin Baker, Buck's Free Press
Arguing that private industry is better than government because the government can get conned into paying for $300 toilet seats, is forgetting that private industry are the ones charging the government for $300 toilet seats.
He is a lover of his country who rebukes and does not excuse its sins.
A hacker (h4x0r) does one thing by nature: he hacks away at something until it does what he wants, stealing your internets and megahertz in the process. Do not listen to those who tell you that hackers do not have magical powers: hackers can talk to your computer and explode electric grids with their minds. Some argue that hacking is just about "messing with stuff" and "writing some cool shit for my box," but this is just a public relations ploy meant to keep you from the truth: hackers are, in reality, a race of German cyborgs who seek to repopulate the planet with their own kind. You will be nothing but a slave in their technocratic kingdom of lies.
I like big butts and I CAN lie. These things are not mutually exclusive.
Think about how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half of 'em are stupider than that.
George Carlin, Doin' It Again / Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics
If you're very, very stupid, how can you possibly realise that you're very, very stupid? You'd have to be relatively intelligent to realise how stupid you are.
There's a wonderful bit of research by a guy called David Dunning at Cornell - who's a friend of mine, I'm proud to say - who's pointed out that in order to know how good you are at something requires exactly the same skills as it does to be good that thing in the first place, which means - and this is terribly funny - that if you're absolutely no good at something at all, then you lack exactly the skills that you need to know that you're absolutely no good at it. And this explains not just Hollywood, but almost the entirety of Fox News.
What is of concern to me, especially because I teach, is that many of my students are truly lacking in reading, writing, and arithmetic skills. They can't spell, they can't cognitively figure things out. They don't want to logically think things through to the end, they want the answer to be given to them. I've actually witnessed kids using their cell phone calculators in math classes. And how many times have you gone into a grocery store, and they don't know how to count back change? They're waiting for the machine to tell them what it is. Technology has great tools to keep the accounting books up, but it can also be a crutch that keeps a person from really being able to be an independent thinker, self reliant, self sufficient.
Beverly Leech, interviewed by Maia Weinstock
Some days I wish my hand had its own, tinier hand, that it could hold up and tell you to talk to, before even getting to my own hand.
- Online advertising is broadly defined as "the technique whereby purveyors of goods and services attempt to punch you in the eyeballs until money comes out."
- $38 billion a year is spent on selling things to the Internet. That's about $23 per user. If you've spent less money than that on products you discovered through online advertising, you owe the internet money.
If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.
at least six separate people i know have had problems with their yahoo! e-mail account being hacked. i think this is why:
- we all got a yahoo! e-mail address from back in the day, when it was the big game in town
- it being back in the day, we didn't realize our passwords needed to be stronger than "mydogsname"
- then we stopped checking our yahoo e-mail when we got our own domains or started gmail.
i logged into my yahoo! recently and yahoo! it was like a third-world country in there, all pleading for drugs, offers, bonuses, hundreds of messenger-adds from dating sites, mailing list signups that i didn't okay, spambots mating with each other, having commercial intercourse with one another using garbled links and bad headers, rutting and frothing in the same inbox where my first girlfriend once told me she loved me
Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn't see their thoughts as belonging to them. When they had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving them an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love.
Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy, but now they call this free will.
At least the ancient Greeks were being honest.
Chuck Palahniuk, Lullaby
People are taking the piss out of you everyday. They butt into your life, take a cheap shot at you and then disappear. They leer at you from tall buildings and make you feel small. They make flippant comments from buses that imply you’re not sexy enough and that all the fun is happening somewhere else. They are on TV making your girlfriend feel inadequate. They have access to the most sophisticated technology the world has ever seen and they bully you with it. They are The Advertisers and they are laughing at you. You, however, are forbidden to touch them. Trademarks, intellectual property rights and copyright law mean advertisers can say what they like wherever they like with total impunity. Fuck that. Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It’s yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head. You owe the companies nothing. Less than nothing, you especially don’t owe them any courtesy. They owe you. They have re-arranged the world to put themselves in front of you. They never asked for your permission, don’t even start asking for theirs.
Banksy, Cut it Out
I was told by the producer that the guiding principle was to make the scripts complex enough to keep the kids interested, and simple enough for the adults to understand.
Douglas Adams, on Doctor Who
Well here, once and for all, is why I think Doctor Who matters.
History books tell us who we used to be. The news tells us how far we've come (if we can hold back from weeping). But imaginary heroes tell us something much more important about ourselves - they tell us who we want to be.
I'll be honest. Some of our heroes depress me. Too much running and punching and shooting. I couldn't be like that. I don't want to be like that.
But when those wise people from long ago made this hero, they told a very different story.
Instead of a gun, they gave him a screwdriver so he could fix things.
Instead of a fast car, or a tank, or a warship, they gave him a telephone box where you can call for help.
And instead of a super power - instead of a heat ray, or robot body armour, or megastrength - they just gave him an extra heart.
Think about that. Two hearts. An unarmed man, fighting the good fight, with two targets in his brave old breast, and winning because he can care twice as much.
If our stories are of a hero like that, then it's just possible that we might be okay. There will never come a day when we don't need a hero like the Doctor.
Steven Moffat, Doctor Who Magazine #468
Working on the Enterprise is one of the best jobs ever imagined in any work of fiction, ever. Your ship is the most technologically advanced piece of equipment humanity has ever developed, you have limitless resources and funding, and your mission is "screw around in space until you find something awesome, then try to make friends with it." It's like spending five years on StumbleUpon, only instead of just pulling things from the Internet, you're drawing from the entirety of things that exist in the universe.
J.F. Sargent & Kier Harris, Cracked.com
People who grow out of children's stories are people who never understood them in the first place.
El estiércol no es santo, pero donde cae hace milagros.
Poop is no saint, but where it falls it works miracles.
Spanish proverb
The reason [Adventure] games were popular in the '80s was because the only people that owned computers were the kinds of people that had to be able to solve problems. You couldn't own an IBM PC and not be a puzzle solver. You had to futz with config.sys and autoexec.bats! It was a typed interface where if you misspelled even a single word, a program wouldn't even run, let alone run properly. All those things that people had to deal with to make the computer work, those were the things we had in our games. Something went awry in the '90s, and the majority of people don't care to do that anymore. Action is addictive, much more so than thinking.
There seems to be a popular delusion that networks do people a favor by buying shows. I happen to think the truth is somewhat nearer the other direction - that a man who creates a format and offers integrity and a large hunk of his life in producing it, offers much more than networks or advertisers can give in return. Therefore, it logically follows, that side has a right to some terms too.
I think television, generally, is underestimating its audience, and people are looking for higher-quality broadcasting, and they're finding that on radio. [...] I'm never disappointed in radio, and I'm constantly disappointed in television.
Helen Atkinson-Wood, Doctor Who: "I.D." CD extras
Why would I talk to a TV executive at this point, and ask them what they think? If I have this idea for a TV show, I can just put it up on the Internet.
Jerry Seinfeld, New York Times
My children don’t think in terms of schedule on television at all, even with "Doctor Who," which their dad makes. To the next generation, they no longer watch television when they are supposed to any more than they would allow the bookcase to tell them when they can read.
Steven Moffat, on Netflix and the demise of the television "time slot"
I hereby propose Henson's Law: Even the best CGI will look crude in 10 years, but awesome puppets will always look like awesome puppets.
One of my favorite showbiz stories happened on ALF. Unfortunately, I can't repeat it, as most of the people involved are still alive. I will say this: It involves someone walking off the set screaming "PUT US ON STICKS! WE'RE THE PUPPETS! WE'RE THE PUPPETS!"
I am a bit of a snob. I worked in telly for a bit, ages ago, and I felt this huge responsibility. Millions of people will watch. You get all these resources, some of the most truly talented people in the country working to the same goal. I think there is a duty to do more than [little person] wrestling or Jordan eating kangaroo penises. I worked on Emmerdale, I'm not claiming I uplifted mankind through the medium of Mandy Dingle. But there was a story about prostate cancer on Emmerdale and people wrote in to say "I didn't realize, but I had the same symptoms and went to the doctor and it saved my life." We had a lesbian character who was just a character in the show, not the Ambassador from Gayland, and we used to get letters from old people telling us that they didn't used to approve of her lifestyle but now they think couldn't we at least have her be a little more lucky in love. People are not stupid or intolerant or lazy – or at least when we are, we hate ourselves for it. Most viewers aren't stoners or bigots looking for nothing more than validation or distraction.
Lance Parkin, The Terrible Zodin #8
I think the only reason I've had the career life that I've had is that someone told me some secrets early on about living. You can do the very best you can when you're very, very relaxed, no matter what it is or what your job is, the more relaxed you are the better you are.
That's sort of why I got into acting. I realized the more fun I had, the better I did it. And I thought, that's a job I could be proud of.
It's changed my life learning that, and it's made me better at what I do.
It's possible that Love IS all that matters in the end. But "Melting Cheese on Things" is right up there, too.
These laundry mats in movies where they always find their soul mate... where do I find these laundry mats?!
Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things.
We get to decide whether or not we laugh. So if you want to be miserable, go right ahead... whatever makes you happy.
Whenever I wonder whether or not I'm living life right, I remember that I laugh so hard that I fart at least once a week.
I am in my thirties, and I heard that your thirties are the new twenties. Which is awesome, because I had a really shitty twenties.
I'm looking forward to reliving those days, but with a fatter and slower body.
Would passengers filling in answers on their Sudokus, please accept that they are just crosswords for the unimaginative and are not in any way more impressive just because they contain numbers.
Spoof London Underground announcement by Emma Clarke
My grandma allowed two cheats at cards. If you couldn't win after cheating twice, you deserved to lose.
The key to any security system is how it was designed; that depends on why it was designed.
Vila, Blake's 7 - "City at the Edge of the World"
The senior system administrator taught me that the bad guys need to know only one way to get into an organization’s computer, but that the good guys have to know all the ways, to be able to stop the bad guys.
David Ulevitch, New York Times op-ed
Everybody knows that the more spit it takes to describe an explosion, the cooler said explosion was. And the cooler said explosion-talker-abouter is!
Strong Bad, Homestar Runner
[Hollywood] bad guys are always defeated, but somehow the bad guys in other movies never catch on to this. They're kind of like those people in zombie movies who never say "Hey, isn't this a bit like a zombie movie?"
Bad art, really bad useless shit art, is important as a negative influence, and as such is probably more important as an influence than good art, which can only lead to emulation. Bad art shows you what not to do. And that's absolutely vital.
Alan Moore, Film Threat no. 12 v. 1
Finchè c'è cinema c'è parodia.
As long as there is cinema, there will be parody.
Ezio Greggio, Box Office 3D - Il film dei film
"Whatever doesn't kill you, just makes you stronger." Bleh. I been there, too many times. It may be true, but there's a lot of heavy-duty downer stuff between nondeath and strength.
No, things will not just "be okay." Thinking good thoughts will not win out in the end. Action makes things change for the better.
If you don't think you can change the world for the better, maybe start by changing just one person's world. Not so different.
Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't.
I'm the guy that donated blood between classes because I wanted a snack of cheese and crackers and juice. I'm the guy who suffered through a semester's worth of spam emails from random clubs because I wanted free food at their introduction meeting. I joined a program called Global Kids my sophomore year of high school because I had a crush on a girl there. This is scrappiness, which I define as ingenuity without shame.
Scrappiness isn't cutting corners. It isn't beating the system or avoiding responsibility. Scrappiness is understanding a need and finding inventive ways to beat them. I aspire to be scrappy.
ktinnyc: Being a kid sucks. Anyone that says HS was the best years of their lives has fucked up.
nicemarmot: My recollection is that it was usually the adults who worked at the high school who tried hardest to convince the kids that. Which probably tells you a lot more about high school employees than it does about teenagers.
Creativity is like an itch. When you scratch it, it feels good, and then it itches more. You fulfill the aesthetic urge and it pushes you to create more.
But if you don't have the itch to begin with, it's hard to know where to scratch. There's no way to "get ideas." It can't be forced. They just happen. You're eating breakfast one day and you have an idea, and either you forget about it, or you work on it and execute it. The more of your ideas you execute, the more ideas occur to you.
Creativity can be the most horrible thing in the world. It's a piece of yourself that breaks off and wanders out into the world, where everyone else can see, on some level, who you really are. There's a mask between you and the rest of the world, most of the time, but a creative work removes that mask, asks people to judge you, on some level. That's why so many creative people never risk sharing their work. To be told it's not good enough, that they're not good enough, is simply too painful. It leads to a long, slowly decaying life of trying to find that person who thinks you're good enough, a long life of panic growing tight behind the eyes, the mask working harder and harder to contain it.
Todd VanDerWerff, The A.V. Club
Creative process:
1) This is going to be awesome
2) This is hard
3) This is terrible
4) I'm terrible
5) Hey, not bad
6) That was awesome
I do a lot of soul searching about what I do for a living. I think about it a lot. The last thing I want to do is take it for granted. And as I reflect on my one measly decade of cartooning, I see an obvious pattern. It's during the times I was most comfortable that things started falling apart. And it was during the moments of struggle, upheaval, change and dissatisfaction with my work that I turned the most important corners.
You know, all the great actors - James Mason, Robert Mitchum, Peter O'Toole, Richard Burton - they were all such open, charming, optimistic people, but they each had a little suitcase of pain, and that's what made them great.
Anthony Hopkins (via Tom Hiddleston)
The paradox of performers is that they are licensed liars. Actors can say things like, 'It's only by lies that the truth can be revealed,' without cracking up. Plus, they’ve got some truly wonderful chat-up lines at their disposal. Just so long as you're not trying it on with an actress who's also read Bernard Shaw.
Tom Baker, The Scotsman
Personally, I can't be bothered. I let other people be embarrassed for me.
I feel that it's really important to strike a balance between consuming and creating funny material. If I go too long where I'm just trying to hammer out blog posts or draw cartoons without pausing to enjoy the work of other people that I admire, other funny people... I feel like I get really burnt out fast if I don't spend some time reading and watching funny things.
You gotta carve out your little corner of peace, somewhere, in a moment where the weather happens to be sort of okay and you're on top of things, just for a second, just breathing, not wanting anything. I try to notice when it happens; I'm not always good at remembering to stop chasing the future and just be where I am.
Kat, Robot + Kitten
If ever I post blogs on this site regularly, you should worry for my well being. It will mean that I have time on my hands and am not working.
When one succeeds in ceasing to look at the world chronocentrically, assimilating the sweeping patterns of history into one's perception, one sees that disco is very important.
Kurt Harland, Information Society
Hey, this whole concept of the private ownership of culture - there's something wrong here. [...] And we're actually on something of a crusade to bring this issue out for public debate, and start talking about: Wait a minute, what are we doing here, and what are the deleterious effects on culture itself by having it all privately owned to this degree where no one can touch anything else? An example is folk music. Folk music is dead. It's impossible now because folk music used to be based on stealing lyrics and music from previous stuff and incorporating it into what you're doing, and a constant evolving of things based on other things. You can't do that today because everything is privately owned. You can't use music lyrics that exist today because they're privately owned, and so the idea, the very essence of folk music per se is impossible now because of this situation.
Don Joyce of Negativland, during Negativland's interview with The Edge of U2
Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don't bother concealing your thievery - celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: "It's not where you take things from - it’s where you take them to."
If you're not making art with the intention of having it copied, you're not really making art for the twenty-first century. There's something charming about making work you don't want to be copied, in the same way that it's nice to go to a Pioneer Village and see the olde-timey blacksmith shoeing a horse at his traditional forge. But it's hardly, you know, contemporary. I'm a science fiction writer. It's my job to write about the future (on a good day) or at least the present. Art that's not supposed to be copied is from the past.
Cory Doctorow, Little Brother
Judge a man by his questions, rather than by his answers.
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
The first man to raise a fist is the man who's run out of ideas.
Herbert, Time After Time
Blows on the head are dangerous, and children in their play, as well as older persons, should never give them.
Physiology for Young People (1884) via Obsolessons
Some cultural background for that old admonition to "Turn the other cheek":
- For the Pharisees, the left hand was considered unclean and it was taboo to use it.
- The backhanded slap was always intended as an insult -- given to someone who is considered inferior.
- The foreslap (slapping with the palm of the hand) was reserved for equals.
So, if someone strikes your right cheek, then it must be a backhanded slap (i.e. an insult), because a Pharisee must use his right hand, to avoid the taboo. If, instead of slapping the person back, you present your left cheek, you force the attacker to break a taboo, acknowledge your equality, or simply stop hitting you. In one simple act, the balance of power is shifted.
Kind of puts a whole different spin on this classic advice on non-violent response, doesn't it?
I have much more respect for that saying now...
CapriUni
There are hundreds of paths up the mountain, all leading to the same place, so it doesn't matter which path you take. The only person wasting time is the one who runs around the mountain, telling everyone that his or her path is wrong.
Hindu proverb
I do not know a single thing that can be said about America whose reverse is not also true. It is a land of opportunity and yet there are more seventeen year old black youths in prison than in college. It is a land of freedom where in many states you can't buy fireworks or alcohol or cross the street as a pedestrian where you please and where children's books are banned and educational material suppressed if they do not square with some religious dogma or other. It is a land of church-going traditionalists and a land of freaks and fancies. A nation founded in revolution where radicalism is next to Satanism. A land of industry where indolence has created an epidemic of obesity whose walking examples, or waddling examples I should say, have to be seen to be believed. One country riven by a depth of mutual bipartisan enmity, loathing and distrust that threatens entirely to divide it into two and propel the nation into a new Civil War.
Stephen Fry, "America's Place in the World"
If the terrorists hated us for our freedoms, we must be getting close to the point where they think we're pretty swell people.
You know, you can run a picture in a newspaper of the most horrifying, decapitated mutilated body, and you might even win a Pulitzer Prize. But if you run a picture of two people making love in the same paper, you might go to jail. So what does that say about a country that condemns sex but condones violence?
The USA was a pirate nation for the first 100 years of its existence, ripping off the patents and trademarks of the imperial European powers it had liberated itself from with blood. By keeping their GDP at home, the US revolutionaries were able to bootstrap their nation into an industrial powerhouse. Now, it seems, their descendants are bent on ensuring that no other country can pull the same trick off.
'You know why you're not well-liked around the globe? Because you're an island race. You think the world ends just east of Ellis Island. Only one in ten of you even owns a passport, much less uses it. You have national sports that no one else on the planet even plays, then have the barefaced gall to declare yourselves world champions. You have, what: five, six per cent of the world's population? You consume more than two thirds of its narcotics and put out more than half of its pollution. And you don't care. You couldn't give a hootenanny. You don't engage with the rest of the world, Dick. That's America for you. The Great Masturbator.'
If the Arabs had copyrighted their scientific, mapping, mathematical & medical knowledge the west would still be lost trying to find leeches.
Science is a description of reality. To hide it, or deny it, or suppress it is to avoid reality.
The more information a guy has, the more likely he is to say, ''Hey, King Charlie, you really blew that call.'' That's why democracy happened. The control of information is something the elite always does, particularly in a despotic form of government. Information, knowledge, is power. If you can control information, you can control people. And that's the good news. The bad news is that countries that do not control knowledge and information tend to do better because the average guy who is exposed to a lot of information can get ideas and profit from them. America is the most inventive country in the world. Why? Because everybody has access to information. In the Soviet Union it was illegal to take a photograph of a train station. Look what happened to them. They tried to classify everything. The more information available to the average person, the greater the synergy that develops from it.
There are people in government who don't want other people to know what they know. It's just another example of elitism. And I spit on elitism. Show me an elitist, and I'll show you a loser.
Tom Clancy, Inc. Technology, 1995
The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common. They don't change their views to fit the facts, they change the facts to fit their views.
The Doctor, Doctor Who
You know what this planet needs? An alien invasion. Not enough to destroy us, just enough to make us get along with each other.
"If life gives you lemons, make lemonade." Huh? But... but... Lemons are amongst the best and most wonderful gifts of nature. They are adaptable, versatile and delicious. A slice for your gin and tonic - juice to zing life into salads, stews, fish and seafood. Oil and sweetness from the rind and zest that is pure and perfumed and precious. They are a staple of what doctors agree is the best dietary regimen we can follow. So if life gives you lemons, shout "Thank you, Life, thank you!" But the American response is "make lemonade," in other words – just add sugar and sell it.
Stephen Fry, "America's Place in the World"
I've [fired a gun] a lot in movies, but there are too many guns in the real world. I know people with guns, and they always say the same thing. "If somebody breaks into my house, I have to be able to defend myself." But what they're really saying is, "I hope somebody breaks into my house so I can use this thing." It's so wrong.
Christopher Walken, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Craziest thing about WWI, they fought until the last second of the war. The ceasefire was set for 11am, November 11th, 1918. 11/11 at 11. Orders were passed down. It was not a secret. And still, up to the last minute, both sides would order a charge on the other’s lines, running their men directly into machine gun fire. For glory. That is insanity.
On September 1, 1939, in the middle of a Mickey Mouse cartoon, the BBC was blacked out to conceal itself from a German air raid. On June 8, 1946 BBC-TV returned, apologized for the interruption to service and re-ran the cartoon in its entirety. I love the BBC.
I never understood allowing one's nationality, or allegiance to a regime, to be a defining characteristic of one's personal identity. That is an accident of birth. Who I am, even within that historical framework, is a matter of my own invention.
Peter Chung, monican_spies interview
I honestly don't label myself much at all - in religion, politics, sexuality, etc. Talk to me if you want to know about me; a label isn't going to really tell you anything.
There's a delay in case I accidentally say the "fuck" word again.
If you want control of your content you need to lock it down in a vault and never show it to anyone. We gave up control of our content the day we started broadcasting. For years our most popular content have been available on BitTorrent and on sites like YouTube anyway. DRM doesn’t work. The only way to control your content is to be the best provider of it. If people want it on YouTube then you should publish it on YouTube or in a system that give the same experience. If people want it on BitTorrent then you should provide that. If you do it right people will come to your official publish point and you’ll end up with more control.
NRKbeta, the tech site of NRK, the first national television network to post DRM-free torrents of their own content.
People hate YouTube videos because of the comments, but that's like hating batteries because you bite them open and drink them: You shouldn't be put off of such useful technology because of poisonous stupidity.
Luke McKinney, Cracked.com
Over and over again I would take out the five most important books on X subject, and then I’d go back to The New York Times, and by God, the story that was written the day after was by far the best source. Those reporters were writing with everything in the right perspective. Sometimes I think historians are a little like saute' chefs: they cook everything up and soften the edges.
Marketing is our most advanced science. When they invent the pill that cures cancer, they will spend more on product branding and focus testing than they will on clinical research. Note: This set of priorities is why all societies end in accidental zombies.
I hear you say "Why?" Always "Why?" You see things; and you say "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say "Why not?"
I am inverse Persephone. I spend Spring & Summer IN HELL!
I wonder how many of you know that you can stay awake by subtracting sheep.
I had a dream last night where my wife got kidnapped, then I had a dream where my friends and I tracked down the kidnapper and rescued her! Good work subconscious, thanks for cleaning up after yourself.
Some times when I'm asleep I dream that I can fly. It's not really flying, sometimes I dream that I'm running away from the army down past the pub near Stevie's house .... and I start leaping, over rocks and bushes ..... and then I feel my heart kind of tugging upwards and I put my arms out like wings .... and raise my legs up to my chest like undercarriage .... then I just glide along ... leaving the army behind me ... god I'm f*cked ......
It's no wonder truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.
Quotes off the Internet may not be genuine.
I have always fought hardest for the First Amendment because free speech is not for the speech that we love, it's for the speech that we hate the most. We have to tolerate a lot of things that we don't necessarily like to be free.
Draw a crazy picture,
Write a nutty poem,
Sing a mumble-gumble song,
Whistle through your comb.
Do a loony-goony dance
‘Cross the kitchen floor,
Put something silly in the world
That ain’t been there before.
I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different.
Kurt Vonnegut, Inc. Technology, 1995
levinicus: In high school my girlfriend's parents were vegan. The first time I came over (not for dinner, just to meet and hang out) they bought me canned tuna to make a sandwich with as a courtesy. I was so humbled by their kindness that I made a lousy sandwich and ate it, even though I was absolutely disgusted by seafood at the time.
Charredcheese:That's adorable, it's like your cat bringing you a dead mouse because it just wants to please you. And then you have to sit there and eat the dead mouse raw so as not to upset the cat. You can't pretend either, the cat must witness the blood dripping down your chin as you eat that dead mouse. It watches as the tears form in your eyes as the skull crunches between your teeth. It gives a small purr of satisfaction. The cat is pleased.
So cute.
If I didn't know I was a genius, I wouldn't listen to the trash I write.
When first coming to terms with the fact that I would never speak again, I filled my head with denial and coping strategies. I would use my computer voice, for example. And I do. But that is no way to participate in the flow of a conversation, and I realize so clearly now that conversations are all about the flow, the timing, the music. Now that IBM's Big Blue has beaten a grandmaster at chess and promises to win at Jeopardy, I have a challenge that will grind it to a halt: I challenge Big Blue to tell a joke in a voice that has the tone and the timing, the words and the music, just right.
I really enjoy forgetting. When I first come to a place, I notice all the little details. I notice the way the sky looks. The color of white paper. The way people walk. Doorknobs. Everything. Then I get used to the place, and I don't notice those things anymore. So only by forgetting can I see the place again as it really is.
Simulations, emulations, and recreations of earlier eras carry their own peculiar vagaries and "character defects". Upon finding my first NES emulators in the mid-90s, I wondered why the games had "fewer colors" and actually looked worse than I remembered. Turns out that one of the prime ingredients was not just displaying the ROM sprites pixel-by-pixel, but layering it behind the color-bleed and other analog irregularities of the CRT TV I first played on. It wouldn't be for years more that video game emulators - thanks to advancing graphical processing power in the hardware and fancy pixel shaders - would allow for the vintage TVs to be copied too. After all, an accurate (let’s say 90% of the way there, or indistinguishable to most from the "real thing") simulation needs to also port the quirks and flaws that are irrevocably part of the original, ipso facto experience. Another fine example I'll briefly mention is of course the C64 SID chips (plural, including variants). Play back those chiptunes "too clean" and you are abandoning the childhood dirt that made many a night spent huddled around a digital fireplace of 16-or-less colors so memorable!
Cats are interesting, they're kind of like girls... If they come and talk to you it's great, but when you go and try to talk to them it doesn't always go so well!
God, you'd better take care of me... otherwise you'll have ME to deal with.
It is not the function of the government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.
I'm not quite a libertarian, but I like to tell the government to go fuck itself when I can.
aestetix, "Updates from the Online Identity Battlefield"
Two things inspire me to awe — the starry heavens above and the moral universe within.
I do know how Schrödinger died... An angry cat trapped him in a box, along with a flask of poison & a note that read "See how YOU like it!" Poor Schrödinger.
I don't want to say that there's nothing new in comedy, but having seen Andy Kaufman in the mid-70s in clubs in New York, nothing surprises me conceptually. There's a difference between getting the joke and liking the joke. Popularity isn't the only measure of success. Sometimes the 'public' is an idiot, but obscurity and perversity for its own sake can be a solipsistic jerk-off and real waste of time. I have no rules or expectations; I just like comedy that works.
In the modern media age, we are rarely surprised by what we see. Whether it's on television or film or in the theatre, everything is so advertised, so trailed, that most entertainment is merely what you thought it was going to be like. The idea of sitting down in front of something about which you know absolutely nothing is very rare...
Rowan Atkinson, Telegraph interview
I think [Electronic Dance Music] is no different than any other form of pop music these days, it's a boiled-down formula where everything of interest has been removed, and everyone is trying to imitate everyone else, as quickly as possible, like a dog chasing its own tail. Listening to pop music today is like a meal consisting only of sugar and salt.
If you take the beat and rhyming out of most rap music you're left with a very insecure adult man telling you how brilliant he is.
Being nerdy is literally the "punk rock" of this era. In decades past it was every last bit of flavor white people had was described as "punk rock" until the point it became obnoxious and then was relabelled "alternative", until that wore out its welcome, and it became "indie" until that wore out its welcome and then this shit happened.
One of the things we tried to do with the show [Monty Python's Flying Circus] was to try and do something that was so unpredictable that it had no shape and you could never say what the kind of humour was. And I think that the fact that 'Pythonesque' is now a word in the Oxford English Dictionary shows the extent to which we failed.
Terry Jones at the US Comedy Arts Festival, 1998
There is no such thing as laughing at something you shouldn’t. You should laugh everywhere you can find even the slightest glimmer of humour. Life is a series of heartache, tragedy and injustice, punctuated by a few cocktails and that one trip to Reno. The more you can laugh at the ugliest parts, the better off you are.
Doug Stanhope on offensive comedy
Making people laugh is the lowest form of humor.
It's not easy being a comedian... You try to entertain people and all they do is laugh at you...
Murray Langston, "The Unkown Comic"
Everyone always says comedy is harder than tragedy - but I don't know, I sometimes think it's just comedians who say that because they want to be taken seriously and get to play Hamlet one day!
Rob Shearman, The Terrible Zodin #6
The moment comedy isn't living at the boundary between what's acceptable and not acceptable, what's tasteful and not tasteful, it's not doing its job. It's meant to be there so we can get off our high horse and laugh.
The failure mode of clever is "asshole."
I am not into trying to shock people with my films, I think that's pretentious. I think there is a difference between dropping your pants down, out on a busy street corner, to try and shock people and walking down the street with your pants down because you do not understand that your pants are down, because you are insane.
Lung Leg, Film Threat no. 12 v. 1
Effects are important, they're pure imagination, and that's the prime draw for an audience. But all the glossy ribbons and wrappings are wasted if the gift inside is stupidity... such a wonderful and expensive opportunity just thrown away. Mustn't waste life-times. The content, the story, has got to be solid and strong and powerful. Most important. And I know, as I show people the story treatment, and they start gasping and jumping and can't stop turning the pages... I've got something very good.
Apparently, it’s difficult to consume an entire cake composed of icing. So shall it be with a movie made of special effects — but here’s that tricky thing: just as a country's borders may be in dispute, exacting precision over “how much is too much?” becomes that dreadful labor whose pain far surpasses watching said FX-saturated movie.
We are not born with imagination. It has to be developed by teachers, by parents. There was a time when imagination was very important because it was the major source of entertainment. In 1892 if you were a seven-year-old, you'd read a story - just a very simple one - about a girl whose dog had died. Doesn't that make you want to cry? Don't you know how that little girl feels? And you'd read another story about a rich man slipping on a banana peel. Doesn't that make you want to laugh? And this imagination circuit is being built in your head. If you go to an art gallery, here's just a square with daubs of paint on it that haven't moved in hundreds of years. No sound comes out of it.
The imagination circuit is taught to respond to the most minimal of cues. A book is an arrangement of 26 phonetic symbols, 10 numbers, and about 8 punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo. But it's no longer necessary for teachers and parents to build these circuits. Now there are professionally produced shows with great actors, very convincing sets, sound, music. And now there's the information highway. We don't need the circuits any more than we need to know how to ride horses. Those of us who had imagination circuits built can look in someone's face and see stories there; to everyone else, a face will just be a face.
Kurt Vonnegut, Inc. Technology, 1995
It is the ultimate irony for humorous crime-mystery fiction; the act of murder should never be shown. Read any murder book, not just comedy crime, anything that isn't steeped in grimness, and the murder isn't there. The victim walks into a room, the murderer is behind the door and... End of chapter, and five pages later someone opens up an ottoman and there's a body.
It’s exactly like sex in a 'Mills and Boon' romance. Murder/sex is the whole point of the book, the element by which, if removed, the reason the book exists disappears, yet if you actually dwelt this act too much (like writing a chapter depicting a murder/a sexual act in graphic detail) it would destroy what you're trying to do. The moment the murderer gets his knife out, just like the moment the 'Mills and Boon' hero unsheathes his pork sword, is the moment you have to pan away quickly to a crackling log fire.
The audience, whether they're eight years old or 48, they're not waiting to see why it's different or strange or new, they're just wanting it to be really good. It's actually an incredibly easy challenge to make something different. It's incredibly hard to make something good.
It's actually quite a funny story once you get past all the tragic elements and the overriding sense of doom.
I only believe in the conspiracies I've personally verified.
De-evolution is real, and everything just got dumber and dumber. If anybody would have told you in 1980, "here's the world you'll live in, here's your President and here's what he said, and here's Osama Bin Laden," you wouldn't have believed it! It would have looked like really bad fiction. Science fiction. And everything got incredibly worse at an exponential rate, beyond even our kind of smart ass college joke. Sure, we worked hard at our joke but we didn't really think it'd be real. You know what I mean? A really, really cautionary tale.
Actually, I'm actually more and more glad that I was alive when I was alive, because I do remember what relative freedom was like. And a world where people were a lot more involved in what was going on. You know, people were outraged with Nixon. That's why, when the information came out about what he did, he was impeached. That's why we got out of Vietnam. Today, what you have is a world where that same thing could come to light, and everybody would be like, "Yeah? So?" And they don't care about the facts.
Gerald V. Casale of Devo, Billboard.com Q&A
I'm feeling very odd of late. I've been acting very odd too, talking to myself, grinning and laughing for no reason.
Something's going on. My life seems to be coming together, taking some real direction. This just won't do ...
The times they are a changin.
They both order a pint. Two tachyons walk into a bar.
There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.
Whatever moral rules you have deliberately proposed to yourself abide by them as they were laws, and as if you would be guilty of impiety by violating any of them. Don't regard what anyone says of you, for this, after all, is no concern of yours... Let whatever appears to be the best be to you an inviolable law.
"I was six when I saw that everything was God, and my hair stood up, and all," Teddy said. "It was on a Sunday, I remember. My sister was a tiny child then, and she was drinking her milk, and all of a sudden I saw that she was God and the milk was God. I mean, all she was doing was pouring God into God, if you know what I mean.
J.D. Salinger, "Teddy"
We are not here to earn God's love, we're here to spend it!
The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see. The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land.
No matter where you go, there you are.
Buckaroo Banzai, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension
Nothing shocks me. I'm a scientist.
Indiana Jones, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Back off, man. I'm a scientist.
Peter Venkman, Ghostbusters
We made this video ourselves, and we're just idiots...
Anybody can do anything if they don't have anything else to do.
Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future.
Criswell, Plan 9 from Outer Space
Remember when we said there was no future? Well, this is it.
Blank Reg, Max Headroom
I predict that living in the now will be the wave of the future... and Time itself will become a thing of the past.
There's a fundamental truth that is far more important than getting a number-one record or not. That truth is: if you want to do something... REALLY want to do something... don't wait to be asked! Don't seek permission! Don't put off until you've passed the right exams, or paid or saved up enough money! But be prepared to risk complete failure. Don't give a shit about whatever your mates, or girlfriend, or your boyfriend says. Whatever is, start NOW, TODAY. Tomorrow is always too late.
Bill Drummond, foreword to German audiobook version of The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way)
My newest fortune cookie fortune: "Ideas not coupled with action never become bigger than the brain cells they occupied." Wise words, cookie.
You want to do something, do it. Don't blame others for your own complacency.
And ffs, get a sense of humor.
-it is possible to be a success and still hate yourself
-it is possible to hate yourself and still love other people
-you may never stop feeling like an imposter but that doesn't have to stop you from doing cool shit
Brains are dumb. Fuck 'em.
You can't build a reputation on what you're going to do.
Give yourself permission to screw-up. Start any new project by saying "I'm not going to be good at this right away, I'm going to make mistakes, and that's okay."
Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen.
Conan O'Brien, closing his final Tonight Show.
I'm willing to admit that the policeman has a difficult job, a very hard job, but it's the essence of our society that the policeman's job should be hard. He's there to protect the free citizen, not to chase criminals, that's an incidental part of his job. The free citizen is always more of a nuisance to the policeman than the criminal. He knows what to do about the criminal.
I know it's very nice to look out of our window in our comfortable home and see the policeman there protecting our home, we should be grateful for the policeman, but I think we should be grateful too, for the laws which protect us against the policeman. There are those laws, you know, and they're quite different from the police regulations.
Orson Welles, Orson Welles' Sketchbook episode 3, May 7, 1955
The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.
There's a point where something that's fail, gets so fail it becomes win.
If you limit your choices to "perfect" and "fail," the world is full of fail. If you add "good" in between, the world is full of good.
Anybody remotely interesting is mad in some way or another.
The Doctor, Doctor Who
My ideal baby present, were I in a position to require one, would be a T-shirt that said STOP TALKING TO ME IN THAT STUPID VOICE.
There's always something to smile over, to laugh about...(and when there isn't something overt, damn it, I'm going to make something to laugh over). I feel down too, sometimes, but that's to be expected. Life isn't even; it's more like an averaging. And as long as my average comes out in the normal range, I'm grateful.
Sometimes I just look at other people and think....
"Fucking REALLY!? That is what you think is of value?"
Then I leave and go eat Taco Bell and think about how awesome it is not being stupid.
Real life is so strangely written, sometimes.
Absorb what is useful. Discard what is not. Add what is uniquely your own.
Honesty is the best policy... of course, insanity is a better defense.
Oh man, wouldn't it suck if thought bubbles were real? Then people would know about all the gross stuff that I think about.
I don't know what one is required to have to make a Craigslist ad, but based on what I've seen, I'm going to guess it's "an internet connection" and "most of a keyboard."
We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire.
Whatever work you undertake to do in your lifetime, it is very important that first you have a passion for it - you know, get excited about it - and second, that you have fun with it. That's important. Otherwise, you see, your work becomes nothing but an idle chore. Then, you hate the life you live.
Julius Sumner Miller, Why Is It So? episode 1
I'm not really sure why posting this is at all relevant, but since when has being relevant ever been relevant? The Internet is for internetting!
Matthew J. Sanderson, Deep Ape
who decided that you need some deep back story in order to justify your tattoo
if you think a deer is gonna look cool as hell on your arm then go ahead and get it tattooed
Slot machines are the lint traps of society. There should be slot machines on every street corner, and every cent they collect should be spent on education.
If at first you do succeed, then by God, there's a good chance you could succeed again. And even another time after that.
Friends are God's apology for relations.
Someone I recently met at the TED conference told me "part of the magic of youth is that people are able to forgive and forget." As kids, we say stupid things, and because there's not a record of it, nobody is going to give you a hard time at 30 years old about something you said or did when you were 8 years old. Online, you have all these social networks that are moving to a state of persistent identity and in turn we're sacrificing the ability to be youthful. In 10 years, everything you say and do will be visible online and I think it's really unfortunate.
Christopher Poole, New York Times
Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.
Rita Mae Brown, Alma Mater
It's not for everyone, but the right people will get it.
Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.
Pablo Picasso
A lot of female child stars will think that to "grow up" is to "be sexy." So they feel like they have to be sexy; that it's the fast-track to adulthood. That definitely affected the way that I viewed my body, and I think this definitely happens with a lot of young women who grow up in the public eye; they feel like their bodies are not their own.
And I still get a lot of people.. any time I do any kind of appearance, "she should do her hair differently," "she should do this," "she should do that," you know, "she's really ugly now," blah-blah-blah-blah-blah... And I'm like, "guys, you know what... my appearance is not for you."
Life is not a John Hughes flick, and there's a reason why when most of us re-watch the "loser pursues the girl until she loves him" genre of film, we start to feel a little sick to our stomachs. Duckie Dale was a creep, Lloyd Dobler wasn't much better, and if anyone acted like Randy from Valley Girl around my daughter, I would have that bastard under a restraining order.
Jef Rouner, "You're Not 'Awkward' With Women, You're Just Creepy" - Houston Press
The problem with betrayal is that it takes a long time to recognize if you're not the sort that does it. Even then, it's impossible to to take it in all at once, like fitting a strangely shaped and inscrutable stone into a place a little too small for it.
As with so many things, those who spot betrayal at once tend to be practitioners.
The best way to deal with any topic is to ensure that you speak about it in extreme terms. Any other way is worse than the Holocaust.
[In space] You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, "Look at that, you son of a bitch."
Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell
There are people who can never come to Fantasia, and there are people who can but who remain there forever. And then there are a few who go to Fantasia and come back again... And they make both worlds whole.
I'm not trying to do anything spectacular except to change the fabric of our society and bring down the government.
Never do anything against conscience, even if the state demands it.
The only thing I regret about my past is the length of it. If I had to live my life again I'd make all the same mistakes, only sooner.
The beautiful thing about learning is nobody can take it away from you.
Those who know others are intelligent;
those who know themselves are truly wise.
Those who master others are strong;
those who master themselves have true power.
Those who know they have enough are truly wealthy.
Laozi, Tao Te Ching ch. 33 (tr. J.H. McDonald)
Don't follow instructions. Suspect instructions. They are something to be wary of.