📖 Recent Quotes 📖

• Karla doesn't like my being friends with Ethan. She says it's corrupting, but I told her not to worry, that I spent all of my youth in front of a computer and that I'll never catch up to all the non-nerds who spent their early twenties having a life and being jaded.
  
  Karla says that nerds-gone-bad are the scariest of all, because they turn into "Marvins" and cause problems of planetary dimensions. Marvin was that character from Bugs Bunny cartoons who wanted to blow up Earth because it obscured his view of Venus.

  an excerpt from Microserfs, written by Douglas Coupland in 1993

• "Where does morality enter our lives, Dan? How do we justify what we do to the rest of humanity?…”
  
  Karla came into the room at this point. She turned off the TV set and looked at Todd square in the eyes and said, "Todd: you exist not only as a member of a family or a company or a country, but as a member of a species-you are human. You are part of humanity. Our species currently has major problems and we're trying to dream our way out of these problems and we're using computers to do it. The construction of hardware and software is where the species is investing its very survival, and this construction requires zones of peace, children born of peace, and the absence of code-interfering distractions. We may not achieve transcendence through computation, but we will keep ourselves out of the gutter with them. What you perceive of as a vacuum is an earthly paradise the freedom to, quite literally, line-by-line, prevent humanity from going nonlinear."

  an excerpt from Microserfs, written by Douglas Coupland in 1993

• Anyway, it's a good thing we're human. We design business spread-sheets, paint programs, and word processing equipment. So that tells you where we're at as a species. What is the search for the next great compelling application but a search for the human identity?

  an excerpt from Microserfs, written by Douglas Coupland in 1993

📓 Recent Notes 📓

• This one is a Hunger Games isotope, at least structurally. I'm only halfway through, but we’ve got an Oppressive System, we’ve got a hot-tempered, lower-class oppressed Girl with Secret Talent and secret-er connections, chosen for a brutal life-or-death competition. Assigned mysterious tutor. She’s not very bright, she’s a little paranoid, and doesn’t trust the people who are obviously trying to help her. She is taken for makeover, and people buy her pretty dresses. She is moved to the center of power and society to compete for their pleasure, but the very nature of her power threatens the ruling class.
  
  In this case our heroine is a lowly kitchen maid in Inquisition-era Spain; secretly Jewish and with some minor (increasingly not secret) magic powers. Honestly the best part of the book for me is pattern-matching.

  an note about The Familiar, written by Leigh Bardugo in 2024

• I think I need a name for the situation where you read one book by an author, really really enjoy it, and then proceed to be disappointed by every other book that author writes. Maybe this is just too genre-y for me? Heck, maybe the first book I read of Bardugo’s (Ninth House) was also very genre-y but in a genre I don’t read, so maybe that's the difference here?

  an note about The Familiar, written by Leigh Bardugo in 2024

• Picked this up on a recommendation from a client - it's like, the most classic fantasy book; Earthsea-like. I wondered so many times: when was this written? Is it using all the tropes, or did it write them? There's a big third-act theme that involves an interlude of punishing psychic training with a master who clearly hates our hero, because the master hated our hero's dead father? Our hero thinks he's terrible at the physic power but actually he's preternaturally gifted. It's the harry/snape/occlumency plot, exactly, right?
  
  Turns out: this book predates the Rowling by about ten years.

  an note about Assassin's Apprentice, written by Robin Hobb in 1995

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