Category — quote

(he de contaros que las hadas son gorditas, peludas y morenas, que están dentro de nosotras y que salen cuando dices “basta”)

I like restraint, if it doesn’t go too far.

She had lost something dark and complicated deep within herself. She was a different person now. Freer, much easier at heart. She felt footloose. Mellowed. Agile and even giggly. Full of honest joy.

She stared at a fluffy morning cloud through the tinted panels of the roof. “Oh my God,” she told the cloud, “I’ve finally become a Californian.”

Vera stared through the camp’s apparent confusion, out to sea. Morning on the Adriatic. How pure and simple that sea looked… Although, when Vera had learned analysis, she had come to see that the famous “Adriatic blue” was spectrally nuanced with cloudy gray, plankton green, mud brown, and reflective tints of sky; that apparently “simple and natural” blue emerged from a wild mélange of changing cloud cover, solar angles, seasonal changes in salinity, floods, droughts, currents, storms, even the movements of the viewer…

The sea had no “real” blue. And the camp was no “real” camp. There was a mélange of potent forces best described as “futurity”. They were futuring here, and the future was a process, not a destination.

It never takes longer than a few minutes, whenever they get together, for everyone to revert to the state of nature, like a party marooned by a shipwreck. That’s what a family is. Also the storm at sea, the ship, and the unknown shore. And the hats and the whiskey stills that you make out of bamboo and coconuts. And the fire that you light to keep away the beasts.

Vocations which we wanted to pursue, but didn't, bleed, like colors, on the whole of our existence.

found while futzing around on the Internet Anagram Server

If you’re buying weird tech gizmos, you need to know what you are trying to prove by that. You also need to tell other people useful things about it. If you are truly experimenting, then you are doing something praiseworthy. You may be wasting some space and time, but you’ll be saving space and time for others less adventurous. Good.

Bruce Sterling – The Last Viridian Note

More from The Last Viridian Note:

• Glocally nomadic life
• A design education
• Encourage the best industrial design

You should be planning, expecting, desiring to live among material surroundings created, manufactured, distributed, through radically different methods from today’s. It is your moral duty to aid this transformative process. This means you should encourage the best industrial design.

Get excellent tools and appliances. Not a hundred bad, cheap, easy ones. Get the genuinely good ones. Work at it. Pay some attention here, do not neglect the issue by imagining yourself to be serenely “non-materialistic.” There is nothing more “materialistic” than doing the same household job five times because your tools suck. Do not allow yourself to be trapped in time-sucking black holes of mechanical dysfunction. That is not civilized.

Bruce Sterling – The Last Viridian Note

More from The Last Viridian Note:

• Glocally nomadic life
• A design education

I strongly recommend that you carry a multitool. There are dozens of species of these remarkable devices now, and for good reason. Do not show them off in a beltpack, because this marks you as a poorly-socialized geek. Keep your multitool hidden in the same discreet way that you would any other set of keys.

That's because a multitool IS a set of keys. It's a set of possible creative interventions in your immediate material environment. That is why you want a multitool. They are empowering.

A multitool changes your perceptions of the world. Since you lack your previous untooled learned-helplessness, you will slowly find yourself becoming more capable and more observant. If you have pocket-scissors, you will notice loose threads; if you have a small knife you will notice bad packaging; if you have a file you will notice flashing, metallic burrs, and bad joinery. If you have tweezers you can help injured children, while if you have a pen, you will take notes. Tools in your space, saving your time. A multitool is a design education.

Bruce Sterling – The Last Viridian Note

More from The Last Viridian Note: Glocally nomadic life

If you only have time for one essay this week, make it Bruce Sterling’s Last Viridian Note, his essay marking the death of the Viridian environmentalist design movement. It is so good I’ll be forced to post more than one excerpt from it.

Rather than "thinking globally and acting locally," as in the old futurist theme, I now live and think glocally. I once had a stable, settled life within a single city, state and nation. Nowadays, I divide my time between three different polities: the United States, the European Union and the Balkans. With various junkets elsewhere.

The 400-year-old Westphalian System doesn't approve of my lifestyle, although it's increasingly common, especially among people half my age. It's stressful to live glocally. Not that I myself feel stressed by this. As long as I've got broadband, I'm perfectly at ease with the fact that my position on the planet's surface is arbitrary. It's the nation-state system that is visibly stressed by these changes – it's freaking out over currency flows, migration through airports, offshoring, and similar phenomena.

I know that, by the cultural standards of the 20th century, my newfangled glocal lifestyle ought to bother me. I ought to feel deracinated, and I should suffer from culture shock, and I should stoically endure the mournful silence and exile of a writer torn from the kindly matrix of his national culture. A traditional story.

However, I've been at this life for years now; I really tried; the traditional regret is just not happening. Clearly the existence of the net has obliterated many former operational difficulties.

Furthermore, my sensibility no longer operates in that 20th-century framework. That's become an archaic way to feel, and I just can't get there from here.

Living on the entire planet at once is no longer a major challenge. It's got its practical drawbacks, but I'm much more perturbed about contemporary indignities such as airport terrorspaces, ATM surchanges and the open banditry of cellphone roaming. This is what's troublesome. The rest of it, I'm rather at ease about. Unless I'm physically restrained by some bureaucracy, I don't think I'm going to stop this glocally nomadic life. I live on the Earth. The Earth is a planet. This fact is okay. I am living in truth.

The Viridian Design Movement – The Last Viridian Note

People rarely wanted details. They wanted hocus-pocus and John gave it to them. John had good hunches and he acted on them quickly, with almost alien accuracy. He believed that most people had at least a few good ideas each day, but that they rarely used them. John had no brakes. There was no lag time between his idea and its implementation. He was a film commando. Sometimes it frightened him how easily people would follow somebody who conveyed the appearance of direction or will.

Try to write a book or a blog post that can’t possibly be any shorter than it is.

One would think focusing on brevity makes things easier. After all, there is less to write, right? Wrong. Just ask Steve Yegge.

Me, I weasel my way into brevity by using others’ words.

Taking in new things and using them to evolve is the very meaning of existence.

hair is grey
and the fires are burning
so many dreams on the shelf

‘You know what your trouble is?’ he says when we’re under the bridge, headed up to Fourth. ‘You’re the kind who always reads the handbook. Anything people build, any kind of technology, it’s going to have some specific purpose. It’s for doing something that somebody already understands. But if it’s new technology, it’ll open areas nobody’s ever thought of before. You read the manual, man, and you won’t play around with it, not the same way. And you get all funny when somebody else uses it to do something you never thought of. Like Lise.’

Imagine an alien, Fox once said, who’s come here to identify the planet’s dominant life form of intelligence. The alien has a look, then chooses. What do you think he picks? I probably shrugged.

The zaibatsus, Fox said, the multinationals. The blood of a zaibatsu is information, not people. The structure is independent of the individual lives that comprise it. Corporation as life form.

I’ve written in the past about sci-fi tackling interesting philosophical ideas. Bruce Sterling says it better:

If poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world, science-fiction writers are its court jesters. We are Wise Fools who can leap, caper, utter prophecies, and scratch ourselves in public. We can play with Big Ideas because the garish motley of our pulp origins makes us seem harmless.

And SF writers have every opportunity to kick up our heels — we have influence without responsibility. Very few feel obliged to take us seriously, yet our ideas permeate the culture, bubbling along invisibly, like background radiation.

In a letter Rant wrote to me, he said, everybody being inside cars, you couldn’t tell women from men. Black from white. If you asked him, the tough teams to beat were always the gimps. Gimps or queers. You put hem in a car on a level playing field and you’d see some pent-up frustration. Nobody drove as hard as paraplegics with hand controls. Or skinny, hundred-pound girls.

You are your own favorite hobby. You’re an expert on you.

All a good salesman does is make eye contact, mimic your body language, nod or laugh or grunt to prove he’s spellbound — those noises or gestures, they’re called “verbal attends.” A salesman only has to prove that he’s just as obsessed with you as you are with yourself. After that, the two of you share a common passion: you.

Along with the standard computer warranty agreement which said that if the machine 1) didn’t work, 2) didn’t do what the expensive advertisements said, 3) electrocuted the immediate neighbourhood, 4) and in fact failed entirely to be inside the expensive box when you opened it, this was expressly, absolutely, implicitly and in no event the fault or responsibility of the manufacturer, that the purchaser should consider himself lucky to be allowed to give his money to the manufacturer, and that any attempt to treat what had just been paid for as the purchaser’s own property would result in the attentions of serious men with menacing briefcases and very thin watches. Crowley had been extremely impressed with the warranties offered by the computer industry, and had in fact sent a bundle Below to the department that drew up the Immortal Soul agreements, with a yellow memo form attached just saying: ‘Learn, guys.’

She was a witch, after all. And precisely because she was a witch, and therefore sensible, she put little faith in protective amulets and spells; she saved it all for a foot-long bread knife that she kept in her belt.

Management-speak deciphering tip #1457: when somebody at work says ‘unprofessional,’ substitute ‘unusual’ or ‘threatening’. See if that helps you understand better what they really mean.

The term unprofessional is often used to characterize surprising and threatening behavior. Anything that upsets the weak manager is almost by definition unprofessional. Long hair is unprofessional if it grows out of a male head, but perfectly okay if it grows out of a female head. Posters of any kind are unprofessional. Comfortable shoes are unprofessional. Dancing around your desk when something good happens is unprofessional. Giggling and laughing is unprofessional. (It’s all right to smile, but not too often.)

Conversely, professional means unsurprising. You will be considered professional to the extent you look, act, and think like everyone else, a perfect drone.

Of course, this perverted sense of professionalism is pathological. In a healthier organizational culture, people are thought professional to the extent they are knowledgeable and competent.

Ah, the contempt of it. The glut of contempt we seem to have achieved. Our own disguised contempt for ‘primitives’, the contempt of those who left the Culture when the war was declared for those who chose to fight the Idirans; the contempt so many of our own people feel for Special Circumstances… the contempt we all guess the Minds must feel for us… and elsewhere; the Idirans’ contempt for us, all of us humans; and human contempt for Changers. A federated disgust, a galaxy of scorn. Us with our busy, busy little lives, finding no better way to pass our years than in competitive disdain.

Tears came to him. He wept quietly, holding nothing back. He mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute.

Even the word ’science’ comes from an Indo-European root meaning ‘to cut’ or ‘to separate’. The same root led to the word ’shit’, which of course means to separate living flesh from nonliving waste. The same root gave us ’scythe’ and ’schism’, which have obvious connections to the concept of separation.

The word science comes through the Old French, and is derived from the Latin word scientia for knowledge, the nominal form of the verb scire, “to know”. The Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root that yields scire is *skei-, meaning to “cut, separate, or discern”. Other words from the same root include Sanskrit chyati, “he cuts off”, Greek schizo, “I split” (hence English schism, schizophrenia), Latin scindo, “I split” (hence English rescind). From the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, science or scientia meant any systematic recorded knowledge. Science therefore had the same sort of very broad meaning that philosophy had at that time. In other languages, including French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian, the word corresponding to science also carries this meaning.