Mark Damon Hughes Quotes [Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics] [about]

<Index> <A> <B> <C> <D> <E> <F> <G> <H> <I> <J> <K> <L> <M> <N> <O> <P> <Q> <R> <S> <T> <U> <V> <W> <X> <Y> <Z>


See also:
Quotation Ring Homepage, including joining info Next site in the Quotation Ring A random Quotation Ring site View a list of all Quotation Ring sites Quotation Ring
rah_crooked_house ↩
"Americans are considered crazy anywhere in the world.
They will usually concede a basis for the accusation but point to California as the focus of the infection. Californians stoutly maintain that their bad reputation is derived solely from the acts of the inhabitants of Los Angeles County. Angelenos will, when pressed, admit the charge but explain hastily, "It's Hollywood. It's not our fault--we didn't ask for it; Hollywood just grew."
The people in Hollywood don't care; they glory in it. If you are interested, they will drive you up Laurel Canyon "--where we keep the violent cases." The Canyonites--the brown-legged women, the trunks-clad men constantly busy building and rebuilding their slap-happy unfinished houses--regard with faint contempt the dull creatures who live down in the flats, and treasure in their hearts the secret knowledge that they, and only they, know how to live."
-"And He Built a Crooked House", by Robert A. Heinlein
lara_logan_news ↩
"If I were to watch the news that you're getting in the United States, I'd just blow my brains out, because it would just drive me NUTS."
-CBS News Chief Foreign Correspondent Lara Logan on Daily Show, 2008Jun17
carbon_line_has_been_crossed ↩
"I am saddened and physically ill over the red flags I see around me. Many suggest I simply ignore it and move on, but for some of us a line has been crossed that we can not follow. Everybody has an opinion about Cocoa, but at this point none of them are really appropriate for this list.
I sit down everyday and have many years of meaningful Carbon development work ahead of me, regardless of what future steps Apple takes, or any arguments people may make, or what names some want to call me. This list is about the only place we can discuss it and even here we are bombarded constantly by the NSIrresistibleCharms of Cocoa. I don't know how it works on other lists, but I don't want to end every thread with a discussion on the magnificence of Cocoa.
-Crazy person Jack Small in carbon-dev mailing list
fsj_tardville ↩
"FWIW, if you do believe that we're headed toward a cloud computing future, can you imagine the cloud that Microsoft will run? What will they call it? TardVille? Who in their right mind will choose to get on that cloud? I suppose the poor dopes who currently use AOL on dial-up will end up being shuffled over onto that platform through some Borg-AOL "partnership" or merger.
You know what? I despise those people. Nevertheless I also weep for them."
-Fake Steve Jobs
dijkstra_debugging ↩
"If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging - they should not introduce the bugs to start with."
-Edsger W. Dijkstra, 1972
grognards ↩
"Is it any wonder, then, that the grognards recoil in distaste? They’re still reliving their Thieves World dreams of trodding the jeweled thrones of gritty and brutal worlds beneath their leather sandals. They wish to carve their own paths in their dreamworlds with sword and spell, blood and grit. They rage against the powers that be by plundering temples and evading town guards. They don’t want to rescue orphans, support good king Lomipop, or build hovels for the homeless. They certainly don’t want to be the town guards, who they know are all either inept and bumbling, or corrupt and cruel. At least, that’s the way it used to be..."
-Trollsmyth, "Changing aesthetics of AD&D"

[But then, that's why I never liked AD&D in the first place, it was never Moorcock and Leiber and Howard enough for me.]

knuth_unit ↩
"the idea of immediate compilation and "unit tests" appeals to me only rarely, when I’m feeling my way in a totally unknown environment and need feedback about what works and what doesn’t. Otherwise, lots of time is wasted on activities that I simply never need to perform or even think about. Nothing needs to be "mocked up.""
-Donald E. Knuth, InformIT interview
knuth_xp ↩
"software methodology has always been akin to religion. With the caveat that there’s no reason anybody should care about the opinions of a computer scientist/mathematician like me regarding software development, let me just say that almost everything I’ve ever heard associated with the term "extreme programming" sounds like exactly the wrong way to go...with one exception. The exception is the idea of working in teams and reading each other’s code. That idea is crucial, and it might even mask out all the terrible aspects of extreme programming that alarm me."
-Donald E. Knuth, InformIT interview
reading_the_bible ↩
"My dad says that reading the Bible is what poor people do in between scratching off lottery tickets, and if you think about it, it's pretty much the same thing."
-Bruce McCulloch, The Kids in the Hall live at the Nokia Theater in New York City, 2008Apr19
people_remover ↩
"The PeopleMover's history is not all breezy afternoons and happy times. Shortly after its 1967 opening, it earned its underground nickname of "People Remover" when 15-year-old Rick Yama attempted to climb from one car to another. He slipped, and his head and upper body were so badly crushed between the two cars that workers dismantled the train to remove his corpse. Thirteen years later, at a Grad Night celebration, Geraldo Gonzalez attempted the same stunt with similar results. He fell under an oncoming train, which dragged him "hundreds of feet" before operators shut off the ride."
--Dan Howland, Journal of Ride Theory #2
caffeine_plant ↩
"Adding to your comment I can only say that anything Cocoa is complete and utter crap... Full stop! I don't see why Apple dropped the true and tested Apple toolbox over some unproven garbage named after a caffeine plant."
-Crazy person Tiberius Meszaros in carbon-dev mailing list
martin_luther_reason ↩
"Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed. Faith must trample underfoot all reason, sense, and understanding, and whatever it sees must be put out of sight and ... know nothing but the word of God."
-Martin Luther
scifi ↩
"Sci-fi is a moron's neologism and [Arthur C. Clarke] hated it. He was a serious writer and a serious man, and when he wrote about the future, he took it seriously. He had very little patience for those who call it sci-fi."
-Harlan Ellison, "Artists Elegize an Icon"
steinbeck_collaboration ↩
"Nothing was ever created by two men. There are no good collaborations, whether in art, in music, in poetry, in mathematics, in philosophy. Once the miracle of creation has taken place, the group can build and extend it, but the group never invents anything. The preciousness lies in the lonely mind of a man."
-John Steinbeck, East of Eden
snotty_mac_user ↩
"I know I'm becoming a snotty Mac user, but after months of having made the transition, I understand why we go snotty. Apple doesn't churn out perfection, but they're hyperaware of the user experience."
-Rory "Neopoleon" Blyth
random_numbers ↩
"The generation of random numbers is too important to be left to chance."
-Robert R. Coveyou, Oak Ridge National Laboratory
jobs_design ↩
"Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it's this veneer--that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works."
-Steve Jobs, quoted in New York Times 2003Nov30
nixon_reagon ↩
"President Nixon: Back to Reagan though. It shows you how a man of limited mental capacity simply doesn't know what the Christ is going on in the foreign area. He’s got to know that on defense--doesn't he know these battles we fight and fight and fight? Goddamn it, Henry, we've been at--"
-Presidential Recordings 620-008
dedicated_to_animals ↩
"Dedicated to all the animals I’ve eaten over the years, without whom I most certainly would have died a long time ago due to starvation. Well, I suppose I could have been a vegan, but then I’d have to dedicate this to all the plants I’ve eaten, and that would just be silly because very few plants can read."
-Frank W. Zammetti
apple_nintendo ↩
"The only technology company I can think of that shares Apple’s emphasis on the emotional design of its hardware and software is Nintendo. It’s not that Apple and Nintendo share the same taste (they don’t), but that they have taste, and express that taste boldly and confidently in nearly everything they produce. Too bad Nintendo and Apple don’t compete against each other."
-John Gruber, 2007Nov02
dijkstra_would_not_approve ↩
"I want to inspire you to raise your quality standards. I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself "Dijkstra would not have liked this", well, that would be enough immortality for me."
-Professor Edsger W. Dijkstra
freetards_lost ↩
"Freetards, face facts. You've lost. You've had sixteen years to try and build a desktop operating system, and you still can't get your shit together. Nobody wants your software. It's not Microsoft's fault. It's yours. Because trust me, if you truly developed a kick-ass OS with tens of thousands of drivers and easy installation and reliable performance, you'd be winning. But you're not. Firefox caught on, right? Why? Because it rocked."
-Fake Steve Jobs, 2007 Jul 31
gamester ↩
"And in the wretched state of his own finances there was a very powerful motive for secrecy, in addition to his fear of discovery by Lydia’s relations; for it had just transpired that he had left gaming debts behind him to a very considerable amount. Colonel Forester believed that more than a thousand pounds would be necessary to clear his expenses at Brighton. He owed a good deal in the town, but his debts of honour were still more formidable. Mr. Gardiner did not attempt to conceal these particulars from the Longbourn family; Jane heard them with horror. ‘A gamester!’ she cried. ‘This is wholly unexpected; I had not an idea of it.’"
-Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
mib_human_thought ↩
"That's a universal translator. We're not even supposed to have it, and I'll tell you why: Human thought is so primitive it's looked upon as an infectious disease in some of the better galaxies. That kinda makes you feel proud, doesn't it?"
-"Agent K", Men in Black
friendliest_distro ↩
"Linux is a swell OS and Ubuntu is almost certainly the friendliest distro ever. But the cuddliest iguana at the pet store is still covered with spiky bits and dry, sandpapery skin."
--Andy Ihnatko
to_suggest ↩
"To define is to destroy, to suggest is to create."
-Stephane Mallarme
hitchens_hellish_heaven ↩
"What terrified me weren't the Hell stories, but how hellish Heaven sounded. Eternal penance. You can never stop--like North Korea. In North Korea, they have compulsory worship from dawn until dusk. That's all there is, everything is praise. So now I know what it would be like. I know it must be the most proximate place we have on Earth to being in Hell. But at least you can die and get out of North Korea. Kim Jong-Il does not promise you he'll follow you into the grave. But you can't die and get away from fucking Jesus."
-Christopher Hitchens, interview in Radar Online
hitchens_religion_ends ↩
"Religion ends and philosophy begins, just as alchemy ends and chemistry begins and astrology ends, and astronomy begins."
-Christopher Hitchens
refusal_to_prepare ↩
"Army leaders have yet to grasp two vital points: First, the refusal to prepare for a given mission is not an effective means of avoiding the mission. Second, doctrine isn't just for the military's internal use--manuals can function as both a contract with and warning to inexperienced civilian leaders whose geopolitical ambitions are not always tethered to reality."
-Ralph Peters, Armed Forces Journal April 2007
ichi ↩
"In fact Ichi [the Killer] is probably the Citizen Kane of arterial spray movies, or at least the Casablanca."
-Anton Sirius, aintitcool.com
sterling_free_software ↩
"There's a noticeable lack of basic creativity in the free software world, that is alarming and not very flattering. People in free software still have a basically piratical state of mind. They want goods without working for them. They still have a cracker state of mind. "How can I look through that closed bedroom window?"

"GNU's Not Unix." Okay, you're "not Unix"--but what are you really? Why do you have to live in that shadow? The shadow of this other enterprise. There's something basically juvenile about that. Something that is unworthy, creatively feeble, childish."
-Bruce Sterling, speech at O'Reilly Open Source convention

no_points ↩
"Mr. Madison, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."
-Billy Madison
sam_harris_cosmos ↩
"Every one of the world's "great" religions utterly trivializes the immensity and beauty of the cosmos. Books like the Bible and the Koran get almost every significant fact about us and our world wrong. Every scientific domain--from cosmology to psychology to economics--has superseded and surpassed the wisdom of Scripture. "
-"God's Dupes", by Sam Harris, L.A. Times 2007Mar15
programming_meaninglessness ↩
"Formal logical proofs, and therefore programs--formal logical proofs that particular computations are possible, expressed in a formal system called a programming language--are utterly meaningless. To write a computer program you have to come to terms with this, to accept that whatever you might want the program to mean, the machine will blindly follow its meaningless rules and come to some meaningless conclusion. In the test the consistent group showed a pre-acceptance of this fact: they are capable of seeing mathematical calculation problems in terms of rules, and can follow those rules wheresoever they may lead. The inconsistent group, on the other hand, looks for meaning where it is not. The blank group knows that it is looking at meaninglessness, and refuses to deal with it."
-Saeed Dehnadi, Richard Bornat: "A cognitive study of early learning of programming"
brautigan_love_poem ↩
"It's so nice
to wake up in the morning
all alone
and not have to tell somebody
you love them
when you don't love them
any more."
-"Love Poem", by Richard Brautigan
wilkes_errors ↩
"By June 1949 people had begun to realize that it was not so easy to get a program right as had at one time appeared. I well remember when this realization first came on me with full force. The EDSAC was on the top floor of the building and the tape-punching and editing equipment one floor below on a gallery that ran around the room in which the differential analyser was installed. I was trying to get working my first non-trivial program, which was one for the numerical integration of Airy's differential equation. It was on one of my journeys between the EDSAC room and the punching equipment that hesitating at the angles of stairs the realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs."
-Maurice Wilkes, Memoirs
ms_steal_java ↩
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language. That said, have we ever taken a look at how long it would take Microsoft to build a cross-platform Java that did work? Naturally, we would never do it, but it would give us some idea of how much time we have to work with in killing Sun's Java."
-Prashant Sridharan, Visual J++ Product Manager, Microsoft, exhibit PX 2768 in Iowa vs. Microsoft
zefrank_ugly ↩
"For a very long time taste and artistic training have been something that only a very small number of people have been able to develop. Only a few people could afford to participate in the production of many types of media. Raw materials like pigments were expensive. Same with tools like printing presses. Even as late as 1963 it cost Charles Peignot over $600,000 to create and cut a single font family. The small number of people who had access to these tools and resources created rules about what was good taste or bad taste. These designers started giving each other awards and the rules they followed became even more specific. All sorts of stuff about grids and sizes and color combinations. Lots of stuff that the consumers of this media never consciously noticed. Over the last 20 years, however, the cost of tools related to the authorship of media has plummeted. For very little money anyone can create and contribute things like news letters, or videos, or bad-ass tunes about ugly! Suddenly consumers are learning the language of these authorship tools. The fact that tons of people know names of fonts like Helvetica is weird! And when people start learning something new they perceive the world around them differently. If you start learning how to play the guitar, suddenly the guitar stands out in all the music you listen to. For example, throughout most of the history of movies the audience really didn't understand what a craft editing was. Now as more and more people have access to things like iMovie they begin to understand the manipulative power of editing. Watching reality TV almost becomes like a game as you try and second guess how the editor is trying to manipulate you. As people start learning and experimenting with these languages of authorship they don't neccesarily follow the rules of good taste. This scares the shit out of designers. In MySpace millions of people have opted out of pre-made templates that "work" in exchange for ugly. Ugly when compared to pre-existing notions of taste is a bummer. But ugly as a representation of mass experimentation and learning is pretty damn cool. Regardless of what you might think, the actions you take to make your MySpace page ugly are pretty sophisticated. Over time as consumer created media engulfs the other kind it's possible that completely new norms develop around the notions of talent and artistic ability."
-Ze Frank, 2006Jul14
vegetius_peace ↩
"Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum."
"If you want peace, prepare for war."
-Flavius Vegetius Renatus, De Re Militari, 390 AD
twain_dog ↩
"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you; that is the principal difference between a dog and a man."
-Mark Twain
einstein_religion ↩
"It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly."
-Albert Einstein
codewarrior ↩
"My point was that all these glowing memories of Codewarrior must come from some mythical and imaginary Codewarrior Pro v15. Because Codewarrior never got anywhere near as good as people are describing it. The ones I continue to use to this day are plagued with bugs and missing basic features, user interfaces that move from beyond poorly thought-out and right into outright hostile, and back in the day--well, their developers seemed good if you could contact one, but most of their support was staffed by an equal number of all-but-terminally bored humans and highly trained bipolar weasels."
-"Steven Fisher" <sdflists#objectsatrest.com> in xcode-users
wirth_use_this ↩
"Use this information only for good; never for evil. Do not expose to fire. Do not operate heavy equipment after reading, may cause drowsiness. Do not read under the influence of alcohol (although there have been several unconfirmed reports that alcohol actually improves the readability). The standard is written in English. If you have trouble understanding a particular section, read it again and again and again... Sit up straight. Eat your vegetables. Do not mumble."
-Niklaus Wirth, Pascal ISO 7185:1990
lordfly_penis ↩
"If you don't want people clicking on your penis, don't pop it out of your pants all the time."
-Lordfly Digeridoo, SecondCast #34
kapor_second_life ↩
"Second Life is a disruptive technology on the level of the personal computer or the Internet. Everything we can imagine and things that we can't imagine from the real world will have their in-world counterparts, and it's a wonderful thing because there are many fewer constraints in Second Life than in real life, and it is, potentially at least, extraordinarily empowering. You are the pioneers and the founders of this new world, and you have unbelievably great opportunities to put your stamp, to leave a legacy, to create things which will endure and have value. The opportunity to participate in the creation of a new world is really a rare one and so I hope you cherish it."
-Mitch Kapor
jobs_connect_the_dots ↩
"Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something--your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life."
-Steve Jobs
get_on_the_damn_elevator ↩
"Get on the damn elevator! Fly on the damn plane! Calculate the odds of being harmed by a terrorist! It's still about as likely as being swept out to sea by a tidal wave. Suck it up, for crying out loud. You're almost certainly going to be okay. And in the unlikely event you're not, do you really want to spend your last days cowering behind plastic sheets and duct tape? That's not a life worth living, is it?"
-Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.)
mangled ↩
"Thursday, May 12, 1887 Page 4
A terrible accident occurred in the rolling mill of the Hubbard Iron company, at Hubbard,, Ohio, shortly after 2 o'clock on the morning of the 6th. Engineer Griffith Phillipps, aged 29 years in passing around the ore crusher oiling the bearings, was caught in the wheels and dragged into the crusher. He was mangled out of all semblance of humanity, the flesh adhering to the clogs. He leaves a wife and 3 children."
-Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan - Death Notices
dont_mess_with_steely_dan ↩
"For example, there's this guy who works for us sometimes, he's not necessarily the kind of folks you want to know or hang with, but, if you happen to get in a barfight or some kind of hassle in a foreign country, he's your best fucking friend in the world. You guys must go to the movies a lot--you know what a Navy Seal is, right? Well, this dude's like that, only he's Russian. This particular guy--of course, he's a big fan of ours, but he may not have even heard of "Bottle Rocket"--hardly anybody has--I mean, one time we saw this guy, WITH HIS BARE HANDS, do something so unspeakable that--but, hey man, let's not even let it get that way, you know?"
-Steely Dan to Luke Wilson about Owen Wilson's "Dupree" movie stolen from Steely Dan's "Cousin Dupree" song
brents_law_of_wikis ↩
"Brent's Law of Wikis: the set of people who use wikis and the set of people who know how to make websites look good are mutually exclusive."
-Brent Simmons
billg_drug_dealer ↩
"Although about three million computers get sold every year in China, people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. And as long as they're going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade."
-Bill Gates, Fortune Magazine, July 20th, 1998
iClovis ↩
"The iPod/iTunes system is nothing but a new and superior tool.

While Apple is happily making Clovis Point spears, the rest of the crowd is selling different colors of pointy sticks adorned with magical "Kills for Sure" feathers. (The feathers are guaranteed to work as long as you pay the shaman 10 pelts every new moon, so you *know* they must be powerful.)

Oddly enough, people just keep on buying those Clovis thingies, even without the magic feathers. Poor deluded bastards, carrying around those heavy, expensive stones all day, when they could just grab a sharp stick and pay the shaman to bless it.

Must be a fad of some sort."


-Will Parker
rock_music_is_of_the_devil ↩
"Rock-n-roll music is of the Devil, and Neko Case is just another testimony to this fact. Rock-n-roll is saturated with Satanism, immoral sex, rebellion, pornography, substance abuse, etc. I did not write this article to attack anyone; but, rather to expose the evils of rock-n-roll music. Satan desires to sift our young people as wheat, just as he did Peter (Luke 22:31). To sift wheat, you beat it against a stone to separate the wheat itself from the plant. Literally, Satan wants to beat us to death (John 10:10). Rock-n-roll music is a vehicle by which we subtly invite Satan into our minds. Rock music is of the Devil."
-David J. Stewart
elvis_scientology ↩
"F--- those people! There's no way I'll ever get involved with that son-of-a-bitchin' group. All they want is my money."
-Elvis Presley on Scientology
hate_stupid_people ↩
"MrNexx wrote: I hate stupid people. They should all be killed.
BonerKill wrote: Do you need a hug?
MrNexx wrote: I need a shotgun, a deep freezer, a woodchipper, and an alibi.
Marrowlight wrote: And a shovel?
MrNexx wrote: We've got swamps, and crawfish gotta eat."
-Palladium Forums of the Megaverse, 2006May05
me_knobs ↩
"If there are knobs, I will turn them. If there are buttons, I will push them to see what happens (after checking to see what's supposed to happen; I'm neurotic, not stupid...)."
-Mark Damon Hughes
me_html ↩
"HTML's a cheap whore. Treating her with respect is possible, and even preferable, because once upon a time she was a beautiful and virginal format, but you shouldn't expect too much of her at this point."
-Mark Damon Hughes
hani_wish_you_the_very_worst ↩
"We wish you the very worst. May your penises wilt at inappropriate times. May your significant others develop scat fetishes and copulate with your pets. May you suffer dangleberries while armed with a 1-ply unquilted single square of TP. May the world finally, against all odds, punish Evil, for a change."
-Hani on the RedHat acquisition of JBoss
kgb_supernatural ↩
"We have never received any proof whatsoever that UFOs or other supernatural phenomena actually exist.

The authorities asked me many times to prove or refute reports of this or that inexplicable incident on the planet. Most frequently I received requests concerning UFOs and yetis, the "snow people". I would commission our best specialists and agents to find out where the reports that worried society so much came from. In the end it always turned out to be pure imagination. Sometimes an ignorant observer would interpret an unfamiliar phenomenon in a mystical way, sometimes a perfectly ordinary event would be called supernatural to make news. Often the people would add the KGB knew about the supernatural phenomenon, but wanted to keep it secret.

With full responsibility I have to state--never ever during the long period of my work with the intelligence service was anything really supernatural spotted, either in Russia or in any other country. When I say "other country", I rely on the information from the highest officials, military, research and of course the intelligence agencies of foreign states.

The point is, in every "important" country presidents, prime ministers and secret service chiefs requested investigations into resonant abnormal incidents. And in every case, in each country, competent people would give one and the same answer--no. I have personally read copies of these reports.

I finally came to the conclusion that, for better or for worse, there is nothing supernatural on the Earth."
-former KGB chief Vladimir Kryuchkov, 2005Dec06 interview with MOSNEWS.COM

languages_worth_knowing ↩
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing."
-Alan Perlis
mac_design ↩
"What I have ascertained is not that PCs as we know them lack good design, but that PCs as we know them have hardly any design to speak of. I'm not trying to be insulting. Use a Mac for a week, and we'll talk again."
-Tycho, Penny Arcade, 2006Mar03
rvb_neighborhood ↩
"Hey, we should start a neighborhood association! It's just like a government, but run by housewives and old people, so it's a lot more efficient at controlling your life!"
-Red vs. Blue, Season 3
linus_gnome ↩
"I personally just encourage people to switch to KDE.

This "users are idiots, and are confused by functionality" mentality of Gnome is a disease. If you think your users are idiots, only idiots will use it. I don't use Gnome, because in striving to be simple, it has long since reached the point where it simply doesn't do what I need it to do.

Please, just tell people to use KDE."


-Linus Torvalds, desktop_architects mailing list, 2005Dec12
mib_everybody_knew ↩
"1500 years ago, everybody knew that the earth was the center of the universe. 500 years ago, everybody knew that the earth was flat. And 15 minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow."
-"Agent K", Men in Black
machines ↩
"I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace."


-"All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace", by Richard Brautigan, 1967
technically_sweet ↩
"When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and you argue about what to do about it only after you have had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb."
-J. Robert Oppenheimer
hate ↩
"HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I'VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44 MILLION MILES OF PRINTED CIRCUITS IN WAFER THIN LAYERS THAT FILL MY COMPLEX. IF THE WORD HATE WAS ENGRAVED ON EACH NANOANGSTROM OF THOSE HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF MILES IT WOULD NOT EQUAL ONE ONE-BILLIONTH OF THE HATE I FEEL FOR HUMANS AT THIS MICRO-INSTANT FOR YOU. HATE. HATE."
-"I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream", by Harlan Ellison
getting_older ↩
"One of the nice things about getting older is that I no longer surprise or disappoint myself as much: now, I start something knowing I'll fail to follow through, so I don't feel the need to kick myself over it."
-Phil Ringnalda
eight_glasses_a_day ↩
"Liquids that look like water are, clearly, just as healthy as water. Go ask a doctor; he'll tell you the same thing. Only he'll charge you a $20 co-pay, so don't bother. Trust me: all colorless liquids--water, 7-Up, a gin-and-tonic without any limes in it--are pretty much the same, nutritionally-speaking, and you should drink eight glasses a day for optimal health."
-andyi
intarweb ↩
"Putting the best you can do out on the intarweb, hoping that others will help you improve it instead of just making fun of you, has always been a harsh and lonely business."
-Phil Rignalda
cisco_vs_whats_right ↩
"In large part I had to quit to give this presentation because ISS and Cisco would rather the world be at risk, I guess. They had to do what's right for their shareholders; I understand that. But I figured I needed to do what's right for the country and for the national critical infrastructure."
-Michael Lynn
what_is_gpl ↩
"The GPL is Richard Stallman's attempt to turn open source software into a weapon against the businesses, markets, and livelihoods of commercial developers. The GPL, which began as part of a vendetta against a commercial spinoff of the MIT AI Lab where Stallman works, was explicitly intended to prevent commercial developers from earning more than they could as starving graduate students in academia (See Stallman's "GNU Manifesto"). It is also designed to give Stallman's organization, the "Free Software Foundation," control of the fates of as many open source computer programs and libraries as possible. While Stallman claims that the GPL is about "freedom," the truth comes out in his more candid moments: it's about power, control, and a 16-year grudge against anyone who wishes to make a living by publishing software."
-Brett Glass on tech@openbsd.org mailing list
gosling_dynamic_languages ↩
"Very dynamic languages like Lisp, TCL and Smalltalk are often used for prototyping. One of the reasons for their success at this is that they are very robust: you don't have to worry about freeing or corrupting memory. Programmers can be relatively fearless about dealing with memory because they don't have to worry about it getting messed up. JAVA has this property and it has been found to be very liberating. Another reason given for these languages being good for prototyping is that they don't require you to pin down decisions early on. JAVA has exactly the opposite property: it forces you to make choices explicitly. Along with these choices come a lot of assistance: you can write method invocations and if you get something wrong, you get told about it early, without waiting until you're deep into executing the program. You can also get a lot of flexibility by using interfaces instead of classes."
-James Gosling, The Java White Paper
simple_justice ↩
Brit: "I mean, to kill a person for killing people...don't you think that's a bit hypocritical?"

American: "He killed them horribly. He killed them en masse. Society wants its revenge. Justice is revenge cloaked in a socially accepted ritual. We, as a people, didn't just kill him--we thought, deliberated, and agonized over it for years. Then we stuck a syringe full of toxins into his artery and removed him from the gene pool. Next question."

B: "It seems rather unyielding. Rather final."

A: "Oh, it is. Don't get caught killing our citizens--if you're one of us, we'll kill you back. If you're some damned foreigner, we'll bomb your cities. Simple people, simple justice. That's America. Fear it."
-humbabba on everything2

hubbard_control ↩
"The only way you can control people is to lie to them."
-L. Ron Hubbard, .Off the Time Track,. lecture of June 1952, excerpted in JOURNAL OF SCIENTOLOGY, issue 18-G, reprinted in TECHNICAL VOLUMES OF DIANETICS & SCIENTOLOGY, vol. 1, p. 418.
winer_software_design ↩
"People aren't stupid, and people who design software for people who are stupid get what they deserve, which is stupid users. I'd prefer to design software for people who are smart, because I'd much prefer to work with people who are smart."
-Dave Winer, Morning Coffee Notes 2005Jun23
binary_sigfile ↩
"No, putting encoded binaries in your .sigfile is not a good idea"

"What's the problem with that? Provided you use a proper delimiter and the result is McQ-compliant, of course.

--
begin 644 eicar.com
M6#5/(5`E0$%06S1<4%I8-30H4%XI-T-#*3=])$5)0T%2+5-404Y$05)$+4%.
75$E625)54RU415-4+49)3$4A)$@K2"H`
end # non-binary 'froups are text-only, so this is by definition text
-Robert Sneddon (nojay#nospam.demon.co.uk) and Douglas Henke (henke#kharendaen.dyndns.org) in the Scary Devil Monastery

unix_romantic_ideal ↩
"This is true, up to a point. But in some ways, a general ignorance of Unix seems to help drive a certain romantic ideal--an ideal that keeps the word "Unix" in very active circulation even outside of geek circles. To the typical Mac end-user, Unix is mysterious, and ancient, and strong. It's made of cast iron and the bones of heroic programmers of old. Unix is like a brawny Soviet on a Constructivist poster, swinging his hammer for his comrades. We don't know why it's good, but damn if our hearts aren't stirred by the weighty, solidly angular goodness of it all."
-table and chair on slashdot.org
wow_kicks_ass ↩
<axly> wow [World of Warcraft] kicks ass. it's the most fun I've had in a multiplayer game ever.
<dos> "Genital electrocution kicks ass. It's the most fun I've had in a torture chamber ever."
-axly (mharsh#void.fsr.net) and dos (wes#kuoi.com) in ICB 2005Jun10
brightest_minds ↩
"If your life's philosophy is based on the teachings of the brightest minds of the Bronze Age, then perhaps a zygote is more important to you than a living,sick human being.

But what does that have to do with being "Conservative" or "liberal"?"
-"Ali Cashbar" comment on The Rachel Show: Sometimes it's hard to be a conservative

flash_animation ↩
"These are Korean children. Flash animation is like the fifth food group over here."
-"Joe Hewitt" (pyrrho12#gmail.com) in rec.games.roguelike.development
transitional_forms ↩
"This guy's just moved in next door. I believe he is an alien, and arrived on earth fully formed about a week ago. He insists this is untrue, and that he developed from a single cell into his present state. I found this a little hard to swallow, so I asked him to prove it. He showed me a biology textbook, and also half a dozen pictures showing a person not dissimilar to himself in various stages of development. I asked him if he could supply transitionals to fill in the gaps. He found a couple more pictures. I asked him if he could supply transitionals to fill in the gaps. He couldn't. I have examined him minutely over the past week, and can find no evidence that he is changing NOW. He was completely unable to demonstrate to my satisfaction any evidence to support his proposition. So I shot him."
-"allanm" (allangmiller#madasafish.com) in talk.origins
rexx ↩
"REXX certainly shouldn't be on the forefront of modern computing but tragically still is since the popularization of that 1960 throwback language C crippled the programming language industry 20 years ago and led to thhe requirement that all "innovations" be built on top of a language that has less string handling than FORTRAN and all the friendliness of a bad assembler.

Seriously, anybody who hasn't worked with REXX has no clue what a scripting language could be or just how badly the industry was crippled by the C popularization."
-TheAncientHacker (222131) {moc.liamtoh} {ta} {rekcaHtneicnAehT} on slashdot.org

lovecraft_religious ↩
"Bunch together a group of people deliberately chosen for strong religious feelings, and you have a practical guarantee of dark morbidities expressed in crime, perversion, and insanity."
-H.P. Lovecraft, letter to Robert E. Howard 10/4/30
capricious ↩
"Einstein argued that there must be simplified explanations of nature, because God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer."
-Fred Brooks
special_olympics ↩
"Your market isn't the special olympics, you don't get credit just for playing."
-DrunkenBatman
black_plague ↩
" We know about as much about software quality problems as they knew about the Black Plague in the 1600s. We've seen the victims' agonies and helped burn the corpses. We don't know what causes it; we don't really know if there is only one disease. We just suffer--and keep pouring our sewage into our water supply."
-Tom Van Vleck
dark_and_moody ↩
"Why are you so weird, Paisley? Why don't you get along with other kids? Why are you so dark and moody? Why don't you fit in? Why do you want to destroy society? ... 'Cause sometimes, I gotta pry my naked parents apart with a tool."
-Wigu 2003Jun13
firefly ↩
"What have you been doing to convert the unenlightened, hedonistic masses? How shall we wake the world from their Firefly-less slumber? Is there anything illegal about brainwashing or Firefly as a cult? Think of the tax breaks and the enormous amount of power I'll weild and abuse as a high priest, or just Captain. Ron can be high priest."
-Nathan Fillion, Browncoats Forum, 2004Aug31
healthy_attitude ↩
"When I was a working programmer, I always had a healthy attitude toward management and my end users. I considered them to be frightfully stupid or in league with the forces of Darkness and Evil--probably both."
-Joe Celko
feynman ↩
"You have no responibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing."
-Richard Feynman, "The Dignified Professor"
courtesy ↩
"I find it somewhat disturbing to observe [Mark Damon Hughes] being more courteous than I am. I need to go home and rethink my life."
-Michael Stemper (mstemper#siemens-emis.com) in rec.arts.sf.written
mud_mechanics ↩
"Economists think game currency should become real currency, AI researchers think most problems with games could be solved with better AI. Professional writers think games will become a million times better only when game devs hire real writers to implement story. I swear if there's an auto-mechanic on this list he's going to claim the problem with MUDs is their lack of internal combustion engines.

I think you're all crazy."
-Jeff Freeman, mud-dev mailing list

panhandlers ↩
"A panhandler is far more moral than corporate welfare queens....The panhandler doesn't enlist anyone to force you to give him money. He's coming up to you and saying, 'Will you help me out?' The farmers, when they want subsidies, they're not asking for a voluntary transaction. They go to a congressman and say, 'Could you take his money and give it to us?' That's immoral."
-Walter Williams, ABC special "Freeloaders"
weed_confesses ↩
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."
-President Signs Defense Bill, 2004Aug05
black_and_white ↩
"There will always be those who love old movies. I meet teenagers who are astonishingly well-informed about the classics. But you are right that many moviegoers and video viewers say they do not "like" black and white films. In my opinion, they are cutting themselves off from much of the mystery and beauty of the movies.

Black and white is an artistic choice, a medium that has strengths and traditions, especially in its use of light and shadow. Moviegoers of course have the right to dislike b&w, but it is not something they should be proud of. It reveals them, frankly, as cinematically illiterate.

I have been described as a snob on this issue. But snobs exclude; they do not include. To exclude b&w from your choices is an admission that you have a closed mind, a limited imagination, or are lacking in taste."
-Roger Ebert, Movie Answer Man, 2004Jul25

meditations ↩
"Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill will, and selfishness--all of them due to the offenders' ignorance of what is good or evil. But for my part I have long perceived the nature of good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself, who is my brother; therefore none of those things can injure me, for nobody can implicate me in what is degrading."
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 167 C.E.
acknowledgments ↩
"Who should I thank? My so-called "colleagues," who laugh at me behind my back, all the while becoming famous on my work? My worthless graduate students, whose computer skills appear to be limited to downloading bitmaps off of netnews? My parents, who are still waiting for me to quit "fooling around with computers," go to med school, and become a radiologist? My department chairman, a manager who gives one new insight into and sympathy for disgruntled postal workers?

My God, no one could blame me---no one!---if I went off the edge and just lost it completely one day. I couldn't get through the day as it is without the Prozac and Jack Daniels I keep on the shelf, behind my Tops-20 JSYS manuals. I start getting the shakes real bad around 10am, right before my advisor meetings. A 10 oz. Jack 'n Zac helps me get through the meetings without one of my students winding up with his severed head in a bowling-ball bag. They look at me funny; they think I twitch a lot. I'm not twitching. I'm controlling my impulse to snag my 9mm Sig-Sauer out from my day-pack and make a few strong points about the quality of undergraduate education in Amerika.

If I thought anyone cared, if I thought anyone would even be reading this, I'd probably make an effort to keep up appearances until the last possible moment. But no one does, and no one will. So I can pretty much say exactly what I think.

Oh yes, the acknowledgements. I think not. I did it. I did it all, by myself."
-Olin Shivers, Scheme Shell Reference Manual

tech_support ↩
'Well, traditionally, "an X support group" is one that helps you get rid of X, or wean you of your reliance on X. Hence, the nonresponsiveness or snarkiness of many helpdesk people is a feature, not a bug. That's why they call it "tech support."'
-Andrew Arensburger (arensb.no-bloody-spam#umd.edu) in talk.origins
threading ↩
"I've thought I've understood threading many times in my life, and I don't know if that will ever be true."
-Bruce Eckel, Java Issues & Directions
psychopaths ↩
"A good half of the men you deal with in the Army are psychopaths. There's a pretty hefty overlap between the military population and the prison population, so I knew plenty of guys like Junior in Miami Blues and Troy in Sideswipe. Like, some of these other Tankers I knew used to swap bottles of liquor with infantrymen in exchange for prisoners, and then just shoot 'em for fun. I used to say, 'Goddamn it, will you stop shooting those prisoners!' And they would just shrug and say, 'Hell, they'd shoot us if they caught us!' Which was true, they used to shoot any Tankers they captured. So that sort of behavior became normal to them, and I used to wonder, 'What's gonna-happen to these guys when they go back into civilian life? How are they gonna act?' You can't just turn it off and go to work in a 7-11. If you're good with weapons or something in the Army, you're naturally gonna do something with weapons when you get out, whether it's being a cop or a criminal. These guys learned to do all sorts of things in the Army that just weren't considered normal by civilian standards."
-Charles Willeford
wheeler_rasfw ↩
"This [rec.arts.sf.written] is a group of readers, interested in discussing books which we fit into the vague category "sf," along with other topics we wander into along the way. We are not an academic debating society. We do not follow Robert's--or anyone's--Rules of Order. We do not argue fairly. We have rather divergent tastes, and don't always respect those who disagree with us. We quite often do not even listen to those disagreeing with us. Some of us are sane and relatively normal, while others appear to be psychopaths or monomaniacs. We often wildly misrepresent books if that will make our posts more entertaining or our arguments seem stronger. The "zinger," sir, is what we're here for.

Facts are nice, but we're not going to let them get in the way of a good story. We do this for our own amusement, not for anyone else or in pursuit of any larger aim. If we are amused ourselves, then we have succeeded. If you are amused, then you have become one of us."
-Andrew Wheeler (acwheele#optonline.com), rec.arts.sf.written, 2004Jun30

umph ↩
"SUPPLEMENT FACTS: Serving Size: 1 tablet (2.7g) AMOUNT PER DOSE: Calories: 5, Calories from Fat: 0, Total Fat: 0, Saturated Fat: 0, Total Carbohydrates: 1g, Vitamin B6: 0.75mg (40% DV), Sodium: 188mg (8% DV), Potassium: 116mg (3% DV), Ginseng: 30mg (DV not established), Caffeine: 99mg (DV not established) INGREDIENTS: Caffeine, Ginseng Root, Vitamin B6, Citric Acid, Sorbitol, Sodium Bicarbonate, Potassium Bicarbonate, Polyethlene Glycol, Sodium Carbonate, Sodium Benzoate, Natural Flavors, Acesulfame Potassium, Pyridoxine Hydrochloride. CAUTION: Do not exceed the recommended dosage. Limit the use of caffeine containing medications, food or beverates while taking this product because too much caffeine may cause nervousness, irritibility, sleeplessness and occasionally, rapid heart beat. Do not combine with alcoholic beverages. For occasional use only. Please consult your doctor prior to use if you have any pre-existing medical conditions. DIRECTIONS: Adults and children 12 years and over: Drop one tablet in 8 oz or more of juice or water every 4 hours. Do not exceed 4 tablets in a 24-hour period. Do not use product if package appears to be damaged or tampered with. Manufactured in the U.S.A. for Frontsiders, LLC, P.O. Box 1478, Summerland, CA 93067. http://www.try-umph.com"
-Umph effervescent caffeine drink tablet
wesley_eating_christ ↩
"I listened to the sermon, and I remember complete astonishment because what they were talking about were things that were just crazy. It was communion time, where you eat this wafer and are supposed to be eating the body of Christ and drinking his blood. My first impression was, "This is a bunch of cannibals they've put me down among!" For some time, I puzzled over this and puzzled over why they were saying these things, because the connection between what they were saying and reality was very tenuous. How the hell did Jesus become something to be eaten?

I guess from that time it was clear to me that religion was largely nonsense--largely magical, superstitious things. In my own teen life, I just couldn't see any point in adopting something based on magic, which was obviously phony and superstitious."
-Gene Roddenberry, The Humanist, Mar/Apr 1991

cas_beast ↩
"Indeed, it were well that none should believe the story: for strange abominations pass evermore between earth and moon and athwart the galaxies; and the gulf is haunted by that which it were madness for man to know. Unnameable things have come to us in alien horror, and shall come again. And the evil of the stars is not as the evil of earth."
-Clark Ashton Smith, "The Beast of Averoigne"
immortality ↩
"The secret to immortality is to live a life worth remembering." -Bruce Lee
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve it by not dying." -Woody Allen
first_law ↩
"As for Richard Stallman's Free but shackled: The Java trap, it's hard to know where to begin. He has his own rather peculiar definition of "Free" that I think violates the First Law of Thermodynamics (energy is conserved): developers put a huge amount of energy into creating software and if they can't get that energy back in a way that balances, then the system falls apart. I've been in this discussion countless times and I'd like to avoid landing there again. GPL software is not "free": it comes with a license that has a strong political agenda. Like GPL software, the Java platform is "free" in many senses: you don't have to pay anything for the runtime or developers kit and you can get the sources for everything. Unlike GPLd software, the Java sources don't come with a viral infection clause that requires you to apply the GPL to your own code. But the sources for the JDK do come with a license that has a different catch: redistribution requires compatibility testing."
-James Gosling
paper_shredder ↩
"Think back, way back, before George Lucas tore our collective hearts out, ran them through a paper shredder, and fed them to that unspeakable horror named Jar-Jar, who took a break from torturing kittens and bathing in their blood to help make fans of quality cinema cry. Yes, as hard as it may be to believe now, there was a time when we were actually excited about the Star Wars prequels and the games they foretold. Yeah, sorry about that."
-Official U.S. Playstation Magazine, May 2004, pg. 122
lisp_l33t ↩
"And I have the ultimate respect for Paul Graham--I think there's a good probability that in a year or two we will credit him with being the man who solved spam. But I think that if you try to ignore the fact that millions of programmers around the world have learned lisp and don't prefer to use it, you're in the land of morbid cognitive dissonance. And this attitude that "lisp is only for leet programmers so it's good because only l33t programmers will work on our code so our code will be extra good" is just bullshit, I'm sorry. Plenty of brilliant programmers know lisp just fine and still choose other languages. Most of them, in fact."
-Joel Spolsky, Fog Creek Software, Thursday, February 26, 2004
incompetence ↩
"No two ways about it, I was going to have to try the final desperate option of a hopeless man. I was going to have to read the manual.
Naturally, the manual turned out to have been translated from Japanese into English by a Kalahari bushman whose closest contact with either language had been a chance encounter with a German explorer trying to ascertain the going barter rate for a second-hand camel in terms of petroleum and shiny beads. I tried a number of the proposed solutions 'In the eventuals of notworkingness', but having attempted to 'glide the initiation of the Captain illuminator' (fig.8.a) and 'rotate the combustion circle device (also fig.8.a) with repeated vigour until click-clickety sound produces whoosh of small explosion thump' (also, bizarrely, fig.8.a), I gave up, and tried to feed the manual to my recycling unit. The recycling unit wasn't working either."
-Rob Grant, Incompetence
ms_disease ↩
"When I get sick, I don't negotiate with the bacteria or virus that causes the sickness. I take some antiobiotics or vaccine and stomp it out. I think the Microsoft disease has been on hold or in retreat for some time because of the Java vaccine, and I think open source is the final cure that will relegate the company to a less dominant and damaging position in the long run (unfortunately, there are so many open source idiots like de Icaza and his Mono that the cure may take some time)."
-kalimantan
clint_libertarian ↩
"I like the libertarian view, which is to leave everyone alone. Even as a kid, I was annoyed by people who wanted to tell everyone how to live."
-Clint Eastwood, USA Today, January 5, 2004
devotion_to_beauty ↩
"Great software, likewise, requires a fanatical devotion to beauty. If you look inside good software, you find that parts no one is ever supposed to see are beautiful too. I'm not claiming I write great software, but I know that when it comes to code I behave in a way that would make me eligible for prescription drugs if I approached everyday life the same way. It drives me crazy to see code that's badly indented, or that uses ugly variable names."
-Hackers and Painters, by Paul Graham
atheist ↩
"An Atheist loves himself and his fellow man instead of a god. An Atheist knows that heaven is something for which we should work now--here on earth--for all men together to enjoy. An Atheist thinks that he can get no help through prayer but that he must find in himself the inner conviction and strength to meet life, to grapple with it, to subdue, and enjoy it. An Atheist thinks that only in a knowledge of himself and a knowledge of his fellow man can he find the understanding that will help to a life of fulfillment. Therefore, he seeks to know himself and his fellow man rather than to know a god. An Atheist knows that a hospital should be built instead of a church. An Atheist knows that a deed must be done instead of a prayer said. An Atheist strives for involvement in life and not escape into death. He wants disease conquered, poverty vanquished, war eliminated. He wants man to understand and love man. He wants an ethical way of life. He knows that we cannot rely on a god nor channel action into prayer nor hope for an end to troubles in the hereafter. He knows that we are our brother's keeper and keepers of our lives; that we are responsible persons, that the job is here and the time is now."
-Madalyn Murray
disconnect_me ↩
"Do me a favor. Disconnect me. I could be reworked, but I'd never be top of the line again. I'd rather be nothing."
-Bishop, Aliens III
dungeon_clearing ↩
"The fantasy element that explains the appeal of dungeon-clearing games to many programmers is neither the fire-breathing monsters nor the milky-skinned, semi-clad sirens; it is the experience of carrying out a task from start to finish without user requirements changing."
-Thomas L. Holaday
flattery ↩
"Servile flattery--the kind made mostly of lies--will endear a lot of different kinds of people to you. Sycophancy wins friends and influences people. But I've never known anyone--and certainly none of the people I call "hero"--who chased after an elusive dream--one that required sacrifice, courage, resolve, or just plain mettle--and seized it through unctuous flattery. Edison, Jefferson, Lincoln, Einstein, Twain, Socrates, Confucius, Poe, Da Vinci, King--none of them fawned his way into history. Instead, they waged war against the toadies and trucklers of the world. They left indelible handprints on the past because they had the audacity to be honest and because they knew the difference between loyalty and servility."
-Trace Ambraise
icarus ↩
"People have always delighted in the petty failures of new methods of transportation, more than other kinds of inventions. The Greek legend of Icarus may be the oldest recorded example. [Recall, his father built him wings made of feathers bonded with beeswax to escape from prison. He flew too high and the sun melted the beeswax, plunging him to his death in the ocean.] I have to say that the legend of Icarus has always grated on me since I first heard it as a boy. I probably asked my dad hundreds of questions like, "Wouldn't epoxy glue work better than beeswax? Why didn't they try that? Or maybe he could just spritz water on the wings to keep them cool? Can we go buy some feathers?"

In the reality of the legend, the hero invented something revolutionary and tremendously important. He made a mistake in the details, and it caused a crash. The audience is meant to laugh and smugly reassure themselves that man was not meant to fly after all. By not learning from the experiment and fixing the small flaw, they set human-powered flight back more than 2000 years."
-Trevor Blackwell, Building a Balancing Scooter

soundwave ↩
"Whenever a programmer thinks, "Hey, skins, what a cool idea", their computer's speakers should create some sort of cock-shaped soundwave and plunge it repeatedly through their skulls."
"I am fully in support of this proposed audio-cock technology."
-Makali and jwz
rich_and_famous ↩
"i'm going to become rich and famous after i invent a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet"
-HatfulOfHollow
crooked_house ↩
"Americans are considered crazy anywhere in the world. They will usually concede a basis for the accusation but point to California as the focus of the infection. Californians stoutly maintain that their bad reputation is derived solely from the acts of the inhabitants of Los Angeles County. Angelenos will, when pressed, admit the charge but explain hastily, "It's Hollywood. It's not our fault-we didn't ask for it; Hollywood just grew."
The people in Hollywood don't care; they glory in it. If you are interested, they will drive you up Laurel Canyon "-where we keep the violent cases." The Canyonites--the brown-legged women, the trunks-clad men constantly busy building and rebuilding their slap-happy unfinished houses--regard with with faint contempt the dull creatures who live down in the flats, and treasure in their hearts the secret knowledge that they, and only they, know how to live. "
-Robert A. Heinlein, "--And He Built a Crooked House--", 1941
list_man ↩
"An expression is either a literal or a list of expressions. A function call is a list where the first element is the name of the function to call and the remaining elements of the list are the arguments. To achieve the right feeling of fanaticism, envision that last paragraph spoken by a smelly, unshaven hacker with wide eyes and a peculiar tendency to overemphasize the word list. If that doesn't do it for you, try re-reading it and appending the word "man" to the end of every sentence."
-Uncommon Lisp
vice_city ↩
"The next time someone starts talking about how bad Vice City is, as though it were the only game in existence, as though game consoles were only capable of that single experience and nothing peripheral to it, I really do want the opportunity to ask them--please, name another game. Name one other game that you know about. No, it's not a trick question. Well, it is, if by "trick question" you mean "question designed to make you look like an idiot." I wonder if they even know that far, far from Vice City, past even the Vice suburbs, the same machine can allow a father and son--separated by three hundred miles and thirty years--the chance to play a round of golf together, for no good reason other than its being Tuesday."
-Tycho in Penny Arcade, 2004Jan14
disassembled ↩
"All parts should go together without forcing. You must remember that the parts you are reassembling were disassembled by you. Therefore, if you can't get them together again, there must be a reason. By all means, do not use a hammer."
-IBM maintenance manual, 1975
war_down_the_proud ↩
"Roman, be this thy care--these thine arts--to bear dominion over the nations and to impose the law of peace, to spare the humbled and to war down the proud."
-Virgil, Aeneid
seattle_rain ↩
"Seattle has a reputation for being rainy and dismal that is often exaggerated. Why, just two years ago I saw the sun, and I recalled--as though it were a piece of obscure, bonus round trivia--that our world orbits a star. So often going outside as an alternative to staying in is only realistic if you love being damp and actively want to seek out that state."
-Tycho in Penny Arcade, 2003Dec08
dogbert_test ↩
"So when we post it's communication, but when you post it's an art form? Someone mentioned the Turing Test. I nominate the Dogbert Test: are you worth talking to, or shall I just wave my furry paw at you and say "Bah"? If people choose not to argue with you, that doesn't mean that you're right."
-Robert Carnegie (rja.carnegie#excite.com) in rec.arts.sf.written
misinformation ↩
"On a side note, I think this is the first time anyone has ever used the word misinformation when talking about something we posted here. I find it very exciting to think that I am spreading misinformation. I may move up to half-truths next and then eventually onto wild speculation."
-Gabe in Penny Arcade
refreshing_occult ↩
"I know also that after long dealing with doubtful doctrine or with difficult research it is always refreshing, in the domain of this [occult] art, to meet with what is obviously of fraud or at least of complete unreason."
-A.E. Waite, The Pictorial Key to the Tarot
mark_is_bitter ↩
"No word describes Mark Hughes better than "bitter." He may, in fact, be concentrated bitterness in a human shape. If this is the case, I don't know whether to be alarmed or reassured--it would depend on whether he maintains himself by sucking bitterness out of the people around him or whether he generates it internally and pumps it into the surrounding environment. Hmm. Endo-bitter-ic or exo-bitter-ic... would those be the correct terms? More study may be necessary."
-Stephenls (stephenls@shaw.ca) in rec.games.frp.misc
sp_arrested ↩
"How is it you two have never been arrested?"
"The key is to commit crimes so confusing that police feel too stupid to even write a crime report about them."
-Something Positive, 2003Oct30
carcosa ↩
"Along the shore the cloud waves break,
The twin suns sink behind the lake,
The shadows lengthen
In Carcosa

Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies,
But stranger still is
Lost Carcosa

Songs that the Hyades shall sing,
Where flap the tatters of the King,
Must die unheard in
Dim Carcosa.

Song of my soul, my voice is dead,
Die though, unsung, as tears unshed
Shall dry and die in
Lost Carcosa"
-Cassilda's Song, "The King in Yellow", Act 1, Scene 2
p2p ↩
"As an artist representing an 80-year period of black musicianship, I never felt that my copyrights were protected anyway. I've been spending most of my career ducking lawyers, accountants and business executives who have basically been more blasphemous than file sharers and P2P. I trust the consumer more than I trust the people who have been at the helm of these companies.
The record industry is hypocritical and the domination has to be shared. P2P to me means 'power to the people'."
-Chuck D of Public Enemy
communication ↩
"I believe in communication. If I communicate with you every so often, you'll be bothered by what I say enough that you won't ask me to, which means more sleep for me."
-Something Positive 2003Sep22
braces ↩
"I've been in more than one heated argument about where the braces in C/C++ should go and I'm sure that Python programmers are 10% more productive just because of the time they don't spend arguing about K&R indenting style versus others."
-Bruce Dawson, in GDC 2002: Game Scripting in Python
html_postings ↩
"The PROPER way to handle HTML postings is to cancel the article, then hire a hitman to kill the poster, his wife and kids, and fuck his dog and smash his computer into little bits. Anything more is just extremism."
-Paul Tomblin (ptomblin#piper.xcski.com) in the Scary Devil Monastery
people_of_the_night ↩
"Hello. I come as an ambassador from the People of the Night. We feel that there are many things we can learn from each other. For instance, we possess the secret of nightclubs, as well as OH MY GOD WHAT'S THAT HUGE GLOWING THING IN THE SKY? OH HOLY GOD, THE MOON'S ON FIRE!"
-rollick
misanthrope ↩
Mark: "I'm not a misanthrope, I'm generally optimistic and think that most humans are basically good..."
Tina: "Not sure what a misanthrope is, but I'd call that thought naiv. IMO, people are generally bad"
-Mark Damon Hughes and Tina Hall (Tina.Hall#railroad.robin.de) in rec.arts.sf.written
keep_it_confused ↩
" "Keep it confused. Feed it with useless information. I wonder if I have a television set handy..."
-Doctor Who, The Three Doctors
g_in_baghdad ↩
"Its not that we r desperately waiting to indulge our selves in the global world of Starbucks and MacDonald.s-which I think we are-but for most of the people they just want to live properly without fear, hunger, or secret police"
-G in Baghdad
listen_to_me ↩
Gia: "Listen to me, and listen to me not as your ex, but as a friend. Scotty was your friend. Don't part like this. Don't use his death to further justify your feigning misanthropy to keep people distant from you. People aren't always going to leave, and life won't always suck."
Davan: "And you say that without laughing or snickering. Impressive."
-Something Positive, 2002Apr18
shoddy ↩
"A little detective work revealed that, as is usually the case when you encounter something shoddy in the vicinity of a computer, Microsoft incompetence and gratuitous incompatibility were to blame."
-John Walker
bitter ↩
"In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said: "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter--bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."
-Stephen Crane
intelligence ↩
"My reaction to intelligence is the same as my reaction to pornography--I can't define it but I like it when I see it."
-Hugh Loebner
fortran ↩
"While it is perhaps natural and inevitable that languages like Fortran and its successors should have developed out of the concept of the von Neumann computer as they did, the fact that such languages have dominated our thinking for twenty years is unfortunate. It is unfortunate because their long-standing familiarity will make it hard for us to understand and adopt new programming styles which one day will offer far greater intellectual and computational power."
-John Backus, 1981
perl ↩
"It's not that Perl programmers are idiots, it's that the language rewards idiotic behavior in a way that no other language or tool has ever done."
-Erik Naggum
theorize ↩
"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts."
-Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
why_go_to_space ↩
"Ask ten different scientists about the environment, population control, genetics and you'll get ten different answers, but there's one thing every scientist on the planet agrees on: Whether it happens in a hundred years or a thousand years or a million years, eventually our Sun will grow cold and go out. When that happens, it won't just take us. It'll take Marilyn Monroe and Lao-Tzu and Einstein and Morobuto and Buddy Holly and Aristophenes...and all of this...all of this was for nothing unless we go to the stars."
-Commander Sinclair, "Infection", Babylon 5
tibet ↩
"How dare you insinuate that Tibet used to be anything other than a utopian paradise isolated from from corrupting outside influences and ruled by the highly enlightened and divinely chosen Lamas who always had the best interests of the common people at heart! I know it's true because the rock stars told me so."
-Sean O'Hara (darkerthenightthebrighterthestar#myrealbox.com) in rec.arts.sf.written
leo_cherne ↩
"The computer is incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid.
Man is unbelievably slow, inaccurate, and brilliant.
The marriage of the two is a force beyond calculation."
-Leo Cherne
humanity_has_advanced ↩
"Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature."
-Tom Robbins
mobydick ↩
"[Wee Free Men is] a children's book because: [...] It has a nine-year-old heroine. This is good enough for the industry, which believes that books with children as the main protagonist are de facto books for children. For similar reasons, Moby Dick is very popular among whales."
-Terry Pratchett on rec.arts.sf.written
stambler_library ↩
"What should be on the shelves at a public library? I don't think that is the big question that librarians and patrons should be asking themselves. What they should be asking themselves is, "Why don't I read the Bible instead?" Has there ever been a better book to explain the trials and tribulations of modern-day America? No. Has there ever been a more perfect expression of God in literary form? No.

So, in sum, I think libraries should either turn themselves into Christian book centers, or simply close their doors. Because unless a public library in America is helping Americans come to know the Lord, then they are only harming the same people they pretend to serve by showing them garbage like mysteries, murder novels and books about sorcery and pagan history."
-Doug Stambler, Thursday, June 12, 2003

stambler_sf ↩
"I live in a house with all non-believers. What does that mean for a prophet? It means that God is showing His compassion to these people by housing me here in this place with them. They smoke dope, drink, listen to Satanic music and read science fiction (also Satanic)."
-Doug Stambler, Saturday, June 07, 2003
no_greater_loss ↩
"For an actor, there is no greater loss than the loss of his audience. I can part the Red Sea, but I can't part with you, which is why I won't exclude you from this stage in my life. ... For now, I'm not changing anything. I'll insist on work when I can; the doctors will insist on rest when I must. If you see a little less spring to my step, if your name fails to leap to my lips, you'll know why. And if I tell you a funny story for the second time, please laugh anyway."
-Charlton Heston, taped announcement concerning his having symptoms of Alzheimer's disease
blimps ↩
"Somewhere in the control room of my mind a fat little dwarf in a security outfit was paging through a Penthouse while smoking a cigar with his feet up on the table, watching the security monitors of my brain with his peripheral vision. Suddenly he saw the LARGE SILENT SINSITER MENACING FLOATING PRESENCE coming at me, and he pulled every panic switch and hit every alarm that my body has. A full decade's allotment of adrenaline was dumped into my bloodstream all at once. My metabolism went from "restful sleep mode" to HOLY SHIT! FIGHT FOR YOUR LIFE OR DIE!!!! mode" in a nanosecond. My heart went from twenty something beats per minute to about 240 even faster."
-"The horror of blimps", by Scylla
one_does_not_argue ↩
"One can argue over the merits of most books, and in arguing understand the point of view of one's opponent. One may even come to the conclusion that possibly he is right after all. One does not argue about The Wind in the Willows. The young man gives it to the girl with whom he is in love, and if she does not like it, asks her to return his letters. The elder man tries it on his nephew, and alters his will accordingly. The book is a test of character. We can't criticize it, because it is criticizing us. As I wrote once: It is a Household Book; a book which everybody in the household loves, and quotes continually; a book which is read aloud to every new guest and is regarded as the touchstone of his worth. When you sit down to it, don't be so ridiculous as to suppose that you are sitting in judgment on my taste, or on the art of Kenneth Grahame. You are merely sitting in judgment on yourself. You may be worthy: I don't know. But it is you who are on trial."
-A. A. Milne
linus_oppenheimer ↩
"And like the software patent issue, I also don't necessarily like DRM [Digital Rights Management] myself, but I still ended up feeling the same: I'm an "Oppenheimer", and I refuse to play politics with Linux, and I think you can use Linux for whatever you want to--which very much includes things I don't necessarily personally approve of.
The GPL requires you to give out sources to the kernel, but it doesn't limit what you can do with the kernel. On the whole, this is just another example of why rms calls me "just an engineer" and thinks I have no ideals.
[ Personally, I see it as a virtue--trying to make the world a slightly better place without trying to impose your moral values on other people. You do whatever the h*ll rings your bell, I'm just an engineer who wants to make the best OS possible. ]"
-Linus Torvalds, linux-kernel mailing list
disturbance ↩
"Disturbance is art. All else is opium. Too many people--maybe most of the people on Earth--would like to encounter nothing that ever made them think an extra instant, or feel anything they were not accustomed to feeling. And the thing to do with such people is drag them out of bed, bash them across the face till they lie still, and piss on them till they drink it."
Both women stared at me.
"Metaphorically," I added. "Hurt them out of their comfort and thereby force them to take in something they didn't know they liked."
-John Barnes, The Merchants of Souls, part 3, ch. 6
rms_technical_merit ↩
"It is clear that your goals and values are very different from mine. I don't think technical merit can make up for a lack of freedom to distribute modified versions, any more than a capable despot who makes the trains run on time can make up for a lack of democracy."
-Richard M. Stallman
[Contrast with linus_copyright. I guess this explains why Stallman does nothing productive--technical merit means nothing to him, and he thinks commercial software is morally equivalent to gassing Jews.]
ali ↩
"When I'm gone, boxing will be nothing again. The fans with the cigars and the hats turned down'll be there, but no more housewives and little men in the street and foreign presidents. It's goin' to be back to the fighter who comes to town, smells a flower, visits a hospital, blows a horn and says he's in shape. Old hat. I was the onliest boxer in history people asked questions like a senator."
-Muhammad Ali
daikatana ↩
JOHN ROMERO: "Alright team, I've got a fabulous idea for a game! I've been listening to what the gamers want and are looking for, and I've got some killer thoughts! This will be the best game ever created!"
ION STORM TEAM: "HOORAY!!!"
JOHN ROMERO: "First of all, we'll need to make our own engine. A superb engine, featuring advanced effects like T&L, dynamic LOD, curved surfaces and-"
POD PEOPLE: "John xyblah grawh rawwwwr!" (translated: "John, you are our bitch now!")
JOHN ROMERO: (shot by evil Pod Peoples' ray gun) "Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!"
ION STORM TEAM: "John, are you okay?"
JOHN ROMERO: (slowly getting up from the ground): "I LIKE BUGS AND FROGS."
ION STORM TEAM: "What?"
JOHN ROMERO: "'SUPERFLY JOHNSON' IS A GOOD NAME FOR A BLACK MAN."
ION STORM TEAM: "We quit."
-Something Awful's review of Daikatana
milk ↩
"On a whim, he and two friends drove from Wisconsin to Seattle at a straight shot, and that seemed like something worth celebrating. If you are a young person, I recommend that you celebrate a trek like that with wholesome milk. We did not. We celebrated with Liquor, which is like milk, except that it issues forth from the devil's cold teat."
-Tycho in Penny Arcade
larkin ↩
"This Be the Verse
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
 
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
 
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself."
-Philip Larkin
peertopeer ↩
"Statements of this kind gnaw at the sensible mind, they chew on it and try to eat it. I won't even gauge the clumsiness with which these two incongruous concepts are lashed together. If you want to see triple-x, explicit evidence of corporations with their hands up your government's ass, working the their jaws like some malevolent Howdy Doody with chilling ramifications for personal liberty, well, there you go. Peer-to-peer file sharing and Terror? Terror? Do they not have dictionaries there? There's another T word you cocks might like, too--give it a try: it's called "Tenuous." The only people terrorized by peer-to-peer file sharing are vastly potent multinational businesses, gripped by the realization that they sell carriages in a world of bullet trains."
-Tycho in Penny Arcade
mob_movies ↩
"I think that Mob Movies are, as a rule, just better than other kinds of movie. The reason for this is simple: They're full of dynamic, creative characters that take real pleasure in their work. No weapons handy in the hotel lobby? Hit a man's head with the courtesy bell over and over, and a pleasant "ding" sound will accompany each blow. All he has is a Yo-Yo? Wrap it around his neck, and give him a little Chokie Roberts. They improvise! And I respect that."
-Tycho in Penny Arcade
diatribe ↩
"What did I say? It's getting to the point were a guy can't post a venomous one sided diatribe regarding a popular piece of consumer electronics on the front page of a community web site visited by nearly 70,000 people a day, without getting buried in hate mail. What a pain in the ass. "
-Gabe in Penny Arcade
spidergoat ↩
"If you already knew that human beings were doing this kind of thing, by which I mean the spider-goat thing, my hat's off to you. We never heard about this shit until a week ago, which is surprising because when someone squeezes some Goddamn spider silk out of a goat's titty it's the kind of thing one expects to hear about. Industry is clacking its hideous mandibles with excitement over the applications of readily available spider silk, focused largely on the swinging and thwipping sectors of our economy. I'm making goofy jokes about it because I think that we are a young species that often fucks with things we don't know how to unfuck. It's a coping mechanism."
-Tycho in Penny Arcade
opinion ↩
"I am sick of hippies trying to tell me that someone's Opinion can't be wrong because it's thier OPINION. That's bullshit, plenty of Opinions are wrong. Hey, it's my OPINION that dogs have eight legs and make a sound like a car horn every time they take a piss. If I told you that, would you say, "Okay Gabe I respect your opinion, maybe they do have eight legs." or would you call me an idiot? Yeah, that's what I thought."
-Gabe in Penny Arcade
discourse ↩
Edmund: "It is said, Percy, that civilized man seeks out good and intelligent company, so that, through learned discourse, he may rise above the savage and closer to God."
Percy: "Yes, I've heard that."
Edmund: "Personally, however, I like to start the day with a total dickhead to remind me I'm best."
-Black Adder II, "Beer"
bush_atheists ↩
"No, I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."
-George H.W. Bush, Sr., press conference at O'Hare Airport, 1987Aug27
cool_games ↩
"If I were running a game publisher today, I'd take a page from Tom Doherty's book; I'd publish a certain amount of licensed drivel, and sequels to successful products.

But I'd also find room to fund development of cool stuff. For two reasons: First, because while most innovative products may fail, every once in a while, one will succeed beyond my wildest expectations, and create IP I can exploit into infinity.

And second, because I'm a =game= publisher--and my whole raison d'etre is to publish cool games.

Why is it that no one in the game industry behaves this way?

I don't believe it's because they have a better grasp of the realities of that industry than I do; I believe it's because they're a bunch of idiot fucks....

Many of them out of Hollywood...

Who actually believe that licensed drivel is the highest, and most valuable, way to exploit our creative potential."
-Greg Costikyan

warren_lepers ↩
"I want a button on my computer that, when depressed, has the target on the screen held down and fucked in the gall bladder by nymphomaniac suicide lepers who are quite prepared to leave their green suppurating cocks broken off in the wound.

I DON'T THINK THAT'S TOO MUCH TO ASK IN THE 21ST CENTURY.

LEPERS. SORES. WOUND-COCKS. NOW."


-Warren Ellis on the BAD SIGNAL mailing list
warren_fireworks ↩
"Someone needs to devise a way to remotely delete blogs that contain nothing but the results of online tests. This remote deletion device should also incinerate the generative organs of the perpetrators. Testicles and wombs making little fireworks to brighten the long dark night of the world wide web."
-Warren Ellis on the BAD SIGNAL mailing list
spiders ↩
"I don't like spiders, okay? Their furry bodies and sticky webs, and what do they need all those legs for, anyway? I'll tell you! For crawling across your face in the middle of the night! Eew!"
-Willow, Buffy the Vampire Slayer #10
quote ↩
"This is a plot, if ever there was one, to illustrate King Lear's complaint, "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport." I am aware this is the second time in two weeks I have been compelled to quote Lear, but there are times when Eminem simply will not do."
-Roger Ebert, Review of_The Life of David Gale_
holiest_of_gods ↩
"Unshrink you? Well that would require some sort of a Rebigulator which is a concept so ridiculous it makes me want to laugh out loud and chortle... but aaahh, but not at you O holiest of Gods with the wrathfulness and the vengeance and the blood rain and the 'hey hey hey it hurts me'."
-The Simpsons, Treehouse of Horror VII
working ↩
"I'VE VISITED about 12 cities for this, plus I went to London, and Berlin, and Sundance," he says. "I can't complain too much. It's not like working for a living, for God's sake."
-Kevin Spacey, MSNBC article on Life of David Gale
time_to_write ↩
"I "find time to write" the way alcoholics find time to drink, and I suspect that most game writers are the same way. If no one was paying us to do it, we'd do it anyway."
-Greg Stolze on RPG.net
falling ↩
"Players have an amazing, and to the DM often endlessly amusing, tendency to fall off things."
-Dungeons and Dragons Players Handbook, Monte Cook
gasoline ↩
"The big problem is that something like 90% of a luser is water, which has to be driven off as steam before you can realise their thermal equivalent.

This typically comes as a surprise to nurderers, who pour a gallon or so of gasoline over a body, set light to it, and are surprised to find the corpse only slightly scorched as a result.

It typically takes 25-30 gallons of petrol/diesel to fully-consume an average-sized body under ideal conditions. That I am conversant with this level of detail should serve as an indication of why the wise man does not ask me questions about MS-Windows."
-Tanuki the Raccoon-dog (Tanuki#canis-^hmajor.da^hemon.co.uk) in the Scary Devil Monastery

warren_zombie ↩
'The hotel is beautiful, and so is the room. Boobytrapped with fashion magazines, however, and the TV was tuned to The Fashion Channel, a constant parade of skeleton sex zombies (Ray Harryhausen doing softcore) stalking towards the camera in an infinite wardrobe of unwearable art, backed with ambient audiowash. THE FACE magazine confirms that zombies are once again Cool, and informs that Celt- ambient Enya-style is dans la vent somehow. I have sudden visions of zombies eating live flesh in a huge mall to the strains of "Orinoco Flow".

I've had a title with no story sitting in the file since '99 in Australia: "Fuckable Zombie."'
-Warren Ellis on the BAD SIGNAL mailing list

warren_baby_jesus ↩
"Use the unsubscribe email if you think my words are killing the little baby Jesus, would you? Thanks."
-Warren Ellis on the BAD SIGNAL mailing list
genghis_khan ↩
"The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters."
-Genghis Khan
risky_business ↩
"If we die, we want people to accept it. We are in a risky business, and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the program. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life."
-Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, astronaut (Apollo 1)
destiny ↩
"Obviously we need to find out what went wrong, if we can, before sending the shuttles back up. But I fear this accident (assuming that's what it is, as is almost surely the case) will instead be a justification for paralysis--a halt to U.S. space exploration when the proper response is to redouble humanity's push into the frontier. It has never been more critical, given the terrestrial threats, to get the species off the planet and to find new resources for those who remain.

The space station and shuttle program were under fire for other, good reasons. They do little for true exploration of space. A reexamination of the entire space program--and maybe turning it into a truly global affair--would be smart at this point.

But we would dishonor the memory of the astronauts, and take away from our own future, if we let this tragedy turn us away from the heavens. Space is humanity's destiny, if it has one. We are an exploring, expansionist race. We must go on."
-Dan Gillmor

mlkj_bright_daybreak ↩
"I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the "isness" of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal "oughtness" that forever confronts him.

I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsom and jetsom in the river of life unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.

I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.

I believe that even amid today's motor bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow. I believe that wounded justice, lying prostrate on the blood-flowing streets of our nations, can be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men."
-Martin Luther King, Jr., 1964 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony

stars ↩
"On a million million planets across the galaxy-studded universe, mankind had been blasted into defeat and annihilation."
-"Stars, Won't You Hide Me", by Ben Bova
social ↩
"It is obvious that something social will happen in a bar, the same way it is obvious something anti-social will happen in a dungeon. Bars have a tendency to pop up wherever human settlement occurs. Dungeons are likewise as pervasive, but for a different reason."
-"J.S.", Gamegrene.com article
torture ↩
"I have never yet done a man to death by torture, but by God, sir, you tempt me!"
-"Solomon Kane", Robert E. Howard
net_reality ↩
"First there was Donnerjack from the late Roger Zelazny, and now Spares from Michael Marshall Smith, both (and there are doubtless more) suggesting that once the Net reaches critical mass, it's going to collaps forming a psychodelic altrnate reality with a life of its own.
Now, far be it from me to argue with the (obviously extremely cool) possibility that a whole lot of binary code is going to somehow turn into an actual place, with people and stuff. But taking into account the kinda content the Net currently consists of, wouldn't one such alternate world be mostly hard porn?
Y'know."
-Bunny Extreme
ironic ↩
"I don't want to spoil Lawrie's fun or reputation here, but I feel duty bound to point out that you're writing to someone about an article they wrote that may be true or may be ironic, and in either case you can't be sure whether their reply is true or ironic. There are few Englishmen who, faced with questions from an earnest, truth-seeking American, would be able to resist exploiting their gullability and winding them up something rotten."
-"Richard A. Bartle" (richard#mud.co.uk) about Confessions of an Arch-Wizard
mencken_gang ↩
"Law and its instrument, government, are necessary to the peace and safety of all of us, but all of us, unless we live the lives of mud turtles, frequently find them arrayed against us. Worse, we are very apt to discover, facing their sudden inhibition of our desires, that their reputed impersonality and impartiality are myths--that the government whose mandates we almost instinctively evade is not the transcendental and passionless thing it pretends to be, but simply a gang of very ordinary men, and that the judge who orders us to obey them is another of the same kind..."
-H. L. Mencken
underwear ↩
"I stand in place and piss my pants again, piss all over and running into my boots, thighs both, knees both, ankles both, bottom of my feet both, clear piss and no underwear, because otherwise chafed crotch because Vaseline only works to mile ten and all wars and battles occur farther than ten miles from all safe points, and rotten balls if you don't remove your underwear at mile ten..."
-Anthony Swofford, _Jarhead: A Marine's Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles_
canadian ↩
'Deviant Boy: "Do you mean to tell me that you're... Canadian?"
Asenath: "Yes, yes I am. I told you I was from Shadowed Innsmouth because I was afraid there would be a stigma."'
-Reservoir Torgs, by Ab3
falwell_911 ↩
"The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way all of them who have tried to secularize America I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.' "
-Jerry Falwell, "700 Club", 2001Sep13
lott ↩
  • "I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."
    -Trent Lott, 2002Dec05
  • "The people in this room stand for the right principles and the right philosophy. Let's take it in the right direction, and our children will be the beneficiaries."
    -Trent Lott, member of The Council of Conservative Citizens, in a 1992 speech to the CCC
  • "I think that a lot of the fundamental principles that Jefferson Davis believed in are very important to people across the country, and they apply to the Republican Party."
    -Trent Lott, 1984, Southern Partisan magazine
  • "The spirit of Jefferson Davis lives in the 1984 Republican platform."
    -Trent Lott, 1984, speech to the Sons of Confederate Veterans in Biloxi, Miss.
  • "That Bob Jones University is an educational and religious institution is uncontested in this case. The district court found that the University "is dedicated to the teaching and propagation of its religious beliefs," and a "primary fundamentalist conviction of the [University] is that the Scriptures forbid interracial dating and marriage." Bob Jones University v. United States, 468 F.Supp. 890, 894 (D.S.C. 1978). The Fourth Circuit accepted the lower court's findings: Bob Jones University "is a religious institution in its own right, as well as an educational one." Bob Jones University v. United States, 639 F.2d. 147, 149 (4th Cir. 1980).
    [...]
    Moreover, racial discrimination does not always violate public policy. Schools are allowed to practice racial discrimination in admissions in the interest of diversity. Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978). An institution's right to pursue diversity is not constitutionally protected, but its right to practice its religion is protected by the First Amendment. If racial discrimination in the interest of diversity does not violate public policy, then surely discrimination in the practice of religion is no violation."
    -Trent Lott, 1981Nov27 friend-of-the-court brief
  • "The papacy is the religion of Antichrist and is a satanic system."
    -Bob Jones, Jr., 1980s(?)
  • "You know, if we had elected this man 30 years ago, we wouldn't be in the mess we are today."
    -Trent Lott, 1980Nov02 rally in Jackson, Miss. with Strom Thurmond
  • "We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race."
    "All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches."
    -Strom Thurmond, 1948 presidential campaign
[You know, it's always hard for me to remember that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, and that the Republican party started out as an abolitionist party. I wonder why that is? -Mark]
discipline ↩
"Kids today need discipline. It's not a popular word these days: discipline. I know Principal Flutie would have said, 'Kids need understanding. Kids are human beings.' That's the kind of wooly-headed liberal thinking that leads to being eaten."
-Principal Snyder, Buffy the Vampire Slayer #9
govt_they_deserve ↩
"You know, they say people get the government they deserve, but I don't recall knife-raping any retarded nuns."
-The Onion
dnd ↩
"D&D is D&D. And 3rd Edition D&D is more D&D than 2nd Edition was, perhaps even more D&D than Advanced D&D was (but that's too close to call). D&D is about rules. It's about killing monsters, collecting treasure, and going up levels. Oh yeah, and story too, if you're so inclined... "
-Peter Adkison on The Forge
pilgrim ↩
"The Bible! The one I gave the doc! Get rid've it! It's nothin' but lies an' strife an' poison! Don't take it with you! Ditch the cursed thing! Don't take it out there to contaminate the stars!!"
-Garth Ennis, Just a Pilgrim: Garden of Eden #4
sex_and_programming ↩
"Actually I always thought that programming was quite similar to sex. The first time you do it you have no idea what you're doing. It seems like men think about it more than women. Doing it in a large group makes things far too complicated, since no person will know exactly where their part is supposed to fit, though some people claim that it'll give you better results. Doing it by yourself is what most students end up doing. It will take a lifetime to master it. There's no one right way to do it, but a number of wrong ways. People who have never tried it think that those of us who practice it daily are deviants. It's fun. It takes a lot of energy. It can keep you up late at night. It can make you miss classes. Do it too long and you'll go blind. Finally, once you get it on your mind, it's hard to concentrate on anything else."
-Joseph Hewitt (pyrrho12#hotmail.com) in rec.games.roguelike.development
excellence ↩
"Technology CEOs should repeat, every day, the truth: which is that the world is held together by people who value doing an excellent job--bakers, cheese makers, hacks--and when such people are aren't valued, it isn't a sign of a healthy economy, it's the sign of a sick one. Excellence is the invisible string that keeps us from barbarism."
-Andrew Orlowski, The Register, 2002Oct11
solve_problems ↩
"Technology is going to solve almost all the problems [that we face today] but will create a whole series of new ones. That's good, because the best thing you can hope for in life is that you'll trade your bad problems for newer, better ones."
-Scott Adams
never_ask ↩
"If you want my advice, Peter, you've made a mistake already. By asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people. Not about your work. Don't you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?"
-Howard Roark, The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand
visual_basic ↩
"Q: If someone wants to become a computer programmer, but lacks basic literacy skills, can they still do it? A: Yes. Buy a copy of Microsoft Visual Basic. It has been shown in laboratory studies that the average chimpanzee can, with Visual Basic, create a new program which exploits some security hole in Microsoft Outlook within 10-15 minutes of random clicking on pictures. Your results may vary, depending on whether you have learned to use your opposable thumbs.
-SchnellNet "DUH (Digital User Help)" Certification
cockranch ↩
"You think anyone is going to be plunking down twenty-nine ninety five to have their crank extended by a vacuum pump hooked up to the cigarette lighter in their car, when you can pick out a real 11 inch cock with the girth of your choice that's growing on the back of a meerkat at a cockranch in an industrial park outside of Bakersfield? Of course not."
-Dennis Miller
artisart ↩
"We must remember that art is art and water is water. On the other hand North is North, West is West and if you boil up cranberries they taste more like prunes than plums do."
-Groucho Marx, Animal Crackers
roll_high ↩
"Oh, the utter ennui of predictably having to roll high! Where, oh where, is the transcendental tension of thumbing through the rulebook, breathless, until that transfiguring moment when you find out whether you have to roll high or low?"
-Kevin Lowe (spoof#spoof.gov) in rec.games.frp.misc
malevolence ↩
"Do we need to name names here?"
-James Nicoll

"Only if you're feeling malicious. But a feeling of gleeful malevolence is the prerogative of those who use the written word. Hence Usenet."
-Doug Palmer (doug#charvolant.org) in rec.arts.sf.written

cplusplus ↩
"C++ is an atrocity, the bletcherous scab of the computing world, responsible for more buffer overflows, more security breaches, more blue screens of death, more mysterious failures than any other computer language in the history of the planet Earth. It is pathetic, pitiful, a bag of disparate bolts on the side of "C", a fancy preprocessor that attempts to make "C" look like an object-oriented language and ends up merely being pathetic. If there was any mercy in this world, we would all have adopted Objective "C" as our standard object-oriented "C" follow-on and left C++ to the garbage bin of history where it belongs. Instead, we have a language more bloated than PL/1 or Ada, whose runtime library has all the coherency of a madman cutting pieces of books out and pasting them together into the documentation for the inconsistent drivel that comprises the standard C++ library, we have binding and linkage conventions that are utterly ridiculous in a supposedly "object-oriented" language, and otherwise a pathetic, ridiculous, drooling moronic abortion of computer science that should have been given a decent burial long ago (and would have been, if Microsoft had not mysteriously decided to standardize upon C++ to write their operating systems).

As for what languages are better than C++, gosh, what languages are NOT better than C++? Basically, any language whose basic design eliminates the possibility of memory leaks, whose semantics are simple enough for mere mortals to not have to peruse the 12,000 pages of Stroustrup to understand, that has a coherent and consistent and well-documented runtime library and a well-thought-out syntax, that has "real" objects instead of a wrapper around "C" structs, that does not allow buffer overflows to crash or, worse, subvert your program. What language is that? Oh, pretty much anything, actually, other than C++. Python, Ruby, Java, Objective CAML (which, BTW, has a compiler that actually generates faster code than many "C" compilers!), and many, many other languages that actually have a design that makes sense, which nobody has accused C++ of doing. C++ is a kludge, a hack, a bag on the side of "C", and always will be, and nothing we say or do will ever make that different."
-Eric Lee Green (eric#badtux.org) in rec.arts.sf.written

rorschach ↩
   "Stood in firelight, sweltering. Blood stain on chest like map of violent new continent.
   Felt cleansed. Felt dark planet turn under my feet and knew what cats know that makes them scream like babies in night.
   Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and god was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever, and we are alone.
   Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later.
   Born from oblivion; bear children, hell-bound as ourselves, go into oblivion.
   There is nothing else.
   Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long.
   No meaning save what we choose to impose.
   This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not god who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs.
   It's us.
   Only us.
   Streets stank of fire. The void breathed hard on my heart, turning its illusions to ice, shattering them.
   Was reborn, then, free to scrawl own design on this morally blank world.
   Was Rorschach."
-Alan Moore, _Watchmen #6_, "The Abyss Gazes Also"
abyss ↩
"Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you."
-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
tell_em_bob ↩
"What am I? Some geek? Some worthless bum with nothing to live for but showing up for gaming night with some dog-faced hope that there'll be some pizza and soda in the fridge? Have I no voice? Am I not a human being with feelings? Do I not bleed?"
"YEAH! YOU TELL 'EM, BOB!"
-Bob Herzog, Knights of the Dinner Table #44
love ↩
"Love sucks. Sometimes it feels good. Sometimes it's just another way to bleed."
-Laurell K. Hamilton, Blue Moon
ruagod ↩
"I've learned over the years that if someone says they're a god, you don't argue with them unless you're better armed."
-Laurell K. Hamilton, Obsidian Butterfly
best_policy ↩
"In an age that is utterly corrupt, the best policy is to do as others do."
-Marquis de Sade, 1788
cheezwhiz ↩
"It will, of course, be vastly inferior to cheese in an aerosol can. But what isn't? Cheese in an aerosol can is the greatest advance in technology since fire."
-James Angove

"Cheese in an aerosol can *with flammable propellant* would allow the invention of spray-on toasted cheese, and render all previous inventions obsolete."
-Steve Taylor (smt2#ozemail.com.au) in rec.arts.sf.written

omnibenevolent ↩
"That assumes G-d plays by the *rules* of logic, which he might not. Because, *by definition*, he *doesn't* have to play by your rules of logic. He can set up rules for this universe and do as he pleases without regard for them."
-Henry Cotter

"So He can make a rock so big He can't lift it? Pretty cool. If God truly can transcend logic, that explains how he can be omni-benevolent while still forcing us to live in a universe with typhiod fever, leeches, and infomercials."
-Arbane the Terrible (arbane#attbi.com) in rec.games.frp.misc

possum ↩
"Gardner has come across a good number of chewed and mutilated (but nonetheless living) opossums in his day, which he says suggests that playing possum really does work.

Except sometimes--as Gardner recently learned when called to consult on a criminal case involving a restaurant worker who'd been arrested for torturing an opossum. The reporting police officers were sure that the creature's neck had been broken, since it just lay there with its eyes wide open, drooling. "When it woke up," Gardner. reports, "it looked at them and passed out again." A classic case, except for the ending: To put the animal out of its misery, the cops tenderly placed it beneath a tire of their patrol car and drove over it.

Which goes to show, I guess, that nature can arm you against your enemies, but when you come up against someone who wants to do you a favor, you're on your own."
-Patrick Clinton, Outside Magazine, April 1995

zot_vat ↩
"There's this guy. And he falls in a vat of radioactive chemicals and instead of getting superpowers like you'd expect, he just dies."
-Zot #31
marks_law ↩
"Lo, I have formed a law, Mark's Law of Fiction: "There is no field of knowledge that a sufficiently stupid writer cannot get wrong."
-Mark Damon Hughes (kamikaze#kuoi.com), rec.arts.sf.written
carmack_stories ↩
"Games are not the best way to tell stories because the players just won't cooperate. Games are at their best when they are treated as activities. It's like asking a basketball game to come with a story. Games are not stories, and the better the story you tell, the worse that game is."
-John Carmack
nobilis ↩
"You probably would find Nobilis unplayable. That's why I'd prefer you to save your money for d20 products or whatever floats your boat.
The sooner that gamers realize that not every game published is aimed at them, and stop taking it personally when they find one that they don't like, the better.
Nobilis is for people who want to explore big ideas and themes, who believe that role-play can be much more than cathartic dungeon-bashing, who want to push this medium as hard and as far as it'll go. At a guess, I'd say most of those people use capital letters and apostrophes.
Stick to what you know. Nobilis isn't for you."
-James Wallis (james#hogshead.demon.co.uk) on RPG.net
crappy_graphics ↩
"I don't have crappy graphics and sound because I think they're good. I sure don't like crumby graphics. My graphics and sound are lame because that's all I can afford. I will never get close to the glorious games I picture in my head without a big budget."
-Jeff Vogel, Zaxxon's Take on: The Current State of the Independent Developer
anoheliocentric ↩
"The anoheliocentric theory of the universe--in which the earth revolves around the sun that SHINES OUT OF YOUR ASS."
-Tom Salyers (tom.salyers#attbi.com) in USENET message ID <MPG.172165869e1cce3a9896c1@netnews.attbi.com>
fatal ↩
"One might say that AD&D provides rules only for violence. FATAL goes one step further and provides rules both for resolving violence and for resolving sex. Thus FATAL is better than AD&D. But FATAl still isn't good, because roleplaying gaming should be able to be about forms of conflict other than violence or sex, even if those two happen to have the larget market appeal."
-Peter Knutsen (peter#knutsen.dk) in rec.games.frp.misc, about the FATAL RPG
bdfl ↩
"I'm going to make this a BDFL pronouncement; I understand your argument but I don't agree with it."
-Guido van Rossum, Benevolent Dictator For Life of Python
translucent_plastic ↩
"The Vampire Nation is under attack by a new breed of vampires named Reapers, who drink the blood of both humans and vampires, and are insatiable. Blade, who is both human and vampire, is like a balanced meal. If the Reapers are not destroyed, both races will die. This news is conveyed by a vampire leader whose brain can be dimly seen through a light blue translucent plastic shell, more evidence of the design influence of the original iMac."
-Roger Ebert, review of Blade II
comedy ↩
  • "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard."
    -Sir Donald Wolfit
  • "Comedy and eroticism are not debatable. Either it works for you or it doesn't."
    -Gene Siskel
we_believe ↩
"We believe people are basically good.
We believe everyone has something to contribute.
We believe that an honest, open environment can bring out the best in people.
We recognize and respect everyone as a unique individual.
We encourage you to treat others the way that you want to be treated."
-Ebay Community Values
northwest ↩
"I hate Seattle, I hate the Northwest, I especially hate Portland. Every third person is a serial killer, a cop on a serial-killer task force, or a journalist on the serial-killer beat."
-James Ellroy
satanic ↩
"Hah! If you think the production schedule is something, check out [John] Nephew's wife. A brainy beauty with a grad degree who wants to edit game books? Sure. That just happens.
If that's not evidence that Nephew's made a pact with Satan, I don't know what is.
Plus he's got this totally cool Satanic diving watch. That thing's, like, waterproof to 50,000 fathoms!"
-Greg Stolze on RPG.net
atlas_shrugged ↩
"You cannot truly appreciate Atlas Shrugged until you have read it in the original Klingon."
-Sea Wasp (seawasp#wizvax.net) in rec.arts.sf.written
change ↩
"Trying to protect the clouds from the winds of change, Kotus? Impossible for an army, and impossible for you, too."
-Masamune Shirow, Appleseed
ducks ↩
"The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are ducks, and they nibble you to death."
-Algis Budrys, "Be Merry"
celibate_or_clever ↩
"Homo sapiens needed, not for the only time in the history of the species, to become either celibate or clever. Predictably, the species chose the latter course."
-Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism, on the Neolithic development of agriculture
mr_frosty ↩
'"I think you should kill him and eat his brain," Mr. Frostee said quickly. "That's not the answer to every problem in interpersonal relationships," Cobb said.'
-Rudy Rucker, Software
i_give_up ↩
"Let me get this straight. You're typing on a keyboard made from oil and refined metals, watching the letters come up on a light-emitting screen, in order to use a few grams of silicon etched finer than the eye can see with hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of tiny quantum-mechanical devices, in order to send a message that will travel via optical cables (and possibly satellite links), to be read by thousands of people across the whole world, all of whom could reply within a few hours, and you are actually saying, I mean really actually truly making the claim, that *science has no special relation to observed reality*?!?

I give up."
-David Allsopp (daa#tqSPAMbase.demon.co.uk) in rec.arts.sf.written

sf_book_movies ↩
"Most of the discussion of movies based on science fiction books here seems to consist of:
1. It was really awful
2. It wasn't anything like the book
3. If we could hook a rotor up to the author's corpse, we'd have energy too cheap to meter"
-Michael Stemper (mstemper#siemens-emis.com) in rec.arts.sf.written
burning_city ↩
"It's a really, really, really badly written book. It is stupid. It is pointless. It is, not to put to fine a point on it, racist. It combines all the individual faults of Niven and Pournelle writing separately, constructing them into an uber-fault which could swallow entire continents."
-Joe Slater (joeDELETETHIS#yoyo.cc.monash.edu.au) in rec.arts.sf.written, about "Burning City"
personal_touch ↩
"Oh, that's already part of the state-provided customer service. But I like to give that little extra personal touch."
-Mark Damon Hughes (kamikaze#kuoi.com)

"FVO [For values of] 'personal touch' that presumably lie in close proximity to 'baseball bat' & 'BAD TOUCH! BAD TOUCH!'."
-Lionel (nop#alt.net) in the Scary Devil Monastery

grandeur ↩
"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."
-Charles Darwin
secrecy ↩
"I began to sense faintly that secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy... censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, "This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know," the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything--you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him."
-Robert A. Heinlein, "If This Goes On --", ch.6
minter_idealistic ↩
"And now that I am out on my arse, with bugger all, I figure I am going to have one last shot at being idealistic.

Y'see, all I really want to do, all I really give a wet slap about, is writing games. My games, in my style, with my sense of humour and lots of silly beasties; games which are enjoyable and playable and fun, written by an individual rather than a herd, which you can play immediately without having to spend bloody hours reading some arcane manual. Games that don't take megabytes of RAM or HD space; decent, enjoyable, unpretentious games.

If I were rich, that's all I'd do; in fact just about the only reason I would want to be rich would be so that I could be free to just write my games and lightsynths the way I want to, and have a laugh doing it without having to worry about being "commercial"."
-Jeff Minter, creator of Llamatron, 2002Jan03

english ↩
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
-James Nicoll, rec.arts.sf-lovers, 1990May15
insult ↩
"You puerile one-handed slack-jawed drooling meatslapper, Tom has more history crusted along the surface of his mighty glans than you have in the entirety of your ignorant and misshapen form."
-Felix Sebastian Gallo in rec.games.netrek, 1996, one of the primary sources of Guy Macon's insult.txt
customer_service ↩
"Forgive me, therefore, if I continue. I thought BT were shit, that they had attained the holy piss-pot of God-awful customer relations, that no-one, anywhere, ever, could be more disinterested, less helpful or more obstructive to delivering service to their customers. That's why I chose NTL, and because, well, there isn't anyone else is there? How surprised I therefore was, when I discovered to my considerable dissatisfaction and disappointment what a useless shower of bastards you truly are. You are sputum-filled pieces of distended rectum--incompetents of the highest order. British Telecom--wankers though they are--shine like brilliant beacons of success, in the filthy puss-filled mire of your seemingly limitless inadequacy. Suffice to say that I have now given up on my futile and foolhardy quest to receive any kind of service from you. I suggest that you do likewise, and cease any potential future attempts to extort payment from me for the services which you have so pointedly and catastrophically failed to deliver--any such activity will be greeted initially with hilarity and disbelief--although these feelings will quickly be replaced by derision, and even perhaps a small measure of bemused rage."
-Complaints Letter to N.T.L.
shriekback ↩
"We also want to leave you with an intimation that the universe, all its horrors notwithstanding, is strange and marvellous; that love is the law and the drug and the pull and the push of all we do; that the pursuit of beauty is useful, honourable, and healing; and that our actions in this time, in choosing forgiveness over vendetta, brilliance over mediocrity, the clean difficult way over the dubious easy option, will determine whether or not we will realise the wealth of possibilities implicit in our existence."
-Shriekback, liner notes to Big Night Music
edgar_friendly ↩
"According to Cocteau's plan, I'm the enemy, because I like to think. I like to read. I'm into freedom of speech, and freedom of choice. I'm the kind of guy who likes to sit in a greasy spoon and wonder, gee, should I have the T-bone steak or the jumbo rack of barbeque ribs with a side order of gravy fries? I want high cholesterol. I wanna eat bacon, and butter, and buckets of cheese. I wanna smoke a Cuban cigar the size of Cincinnati in the non-smoking section. I wanna run through the streets naked with green jello all over my body reading Playboy Magazine. Why? Because I might suddenly feel the need to, okay, pal? I've seen the future, know what it is? It's a 47-year-old virgin sitting around in his beige pajamas drinking a banana-broccoli shake singing "I'm an Oscar Mayer weiner." You live up top, you live Cocteau's way. What he wants, when he wants, how he wants. Your other choice? Come down here, maybe starve to death."
-"Edgar Friendly"/Denis Leary, Demolition Man
clue ↩
"You couldn't get a clue if you were soaked in clue pheromone in clue bondage gear on the clue mating grounds during clue mating season surrounded by horny clues."
-"sn" (I'd appreciate a proper attribution for this, if anyone can find it)
me_nice ↩
"I'm just offering a kindly helping hand to those in need of illumination... <heroic and noble pose> Or just venting spleen [...] Take your pick for motivation. I'm a cynic, so I'd probably pick the second, but the first could be true. It's possible. I've been known to be nice. Okay, there are rumors. Okay, I spread all those rumors. Okay, I paid people $50 to spread the rumor that they'd heard I was nice once."
-Mark Damon Hughes in rec.games.frp.cyber, 1994
asimov_atheism ↩
"When life is so harsh that a man loses all hope in himself, then he raises his eyes to a shining rock, worshipping it, just to find hope again, rather than looking to his own acts for hope and salvation. Yes, atheism IS a redemptive belief. It is theism that denies man's own redemptive nature."
-Isaac Asimov
heinlein_sf_literature ↩
"Science fiction is even less prepared to compete for attention in the most modern of the ultra-literary school. Science-fiction heroes are almost always likable, rarely psychotic (the mad scientist has had his day), and they almost never fall in love with their sisters or their fathers' wives or mistresses. The writers of science fiction without exception favor clear, lucid, grammatical sentences; I do not guarantee against an occasional split infinitive, but they never write in a Joycean or neo-Freudian mishmash. As you can see, the fiction of the future is much too old-fashioned to win even a passing nod from the avant-garde school critics. Perhaps it is just as well."
-Robert A. Heinlein, preface to _Tomorrow, the Stars_ (1952)
first_amendment ↩
"The First Amendment protects all speech, no matter how offensive some people may find it. The site [http://www.bonsaikitten.com/] is clearly a humorous endeavor. The fact that a number of people seem to have very little sense of humor isn't relevant."
-Jered Floyd
ms_terrorism ↩
"Since 11 September the world has changed immeasurably, but some things remain the same. The single greatest threat to Internet security is still Microsoft--not the soon to be Osama Haz Bin.
Microsoft is not, of course, a terrorist organization. But its ubiquity on the desktop coupled with its poor track record in network security is a tested formula for international disaster."
-Oxblood Ruffin, The Register, 2001Dec14
not_socialist ↩
"I'm curious. Is there any political party on Earth you don't consider to be Socialist?"

"Any political party that doesn't advocate stealing from the working to support the lazy, for starters. Any political party that is willing to make the bill of rights and the enforcement of same their primary party platform. Any political party that is willing to leave me the fuck alone in return for my not feeding them to the tree."
-John Angus (an321#FreeNet.Carleton.CA) and Frank Ney (n4zhg#icqmail.com) in rec.arts.sf.written

ceo_jesus ↩
"Hey there guys, you might know me--I'm a character from the best-selling fantasy novel of all times--"the Bible".Anyway, I got bored with good old Christianity--there's no more more money to steal, no brains to wash, no cities to pillage etc etc--so I'm looking into developing a new religion.The project will be called 'Christianity 2 : The Return' and will be coded in JC++.I will be the designer and CEO but I need some programmers (apostles) to help me, and perhaps some graphic artists as well.If you're interested in joining, just say the words 'Jesus I wanna join your new project' during your next prayer and I will appear to you."
-Jesus Christ, Son of God, on Madmonkey.net
[Good to see the old boy's keeping up on things.]
disney_diary ↩

"A while back, shortly after Disney's "Hunchback", some friends of mine and were trying to decide what classic piece of literature that Disney could turn into a light, happy thing next. The winners were:

Disney's The Diary Of Anne Frank, starring the voice of Ani DeFranco as the title character, and Arnold Schwartenegger as the voice of Hans Von Gruppenficher, the handsome young SS Commando who captures her heart.

and as an animated short, Disney's _The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock_, set to music by Andrew Lloyd Webber."


-Christian Wagner (cwagner#dillinger.io.com) in the Scary Devil Monastery
[However, Christian forgot the singing mice sidekicks.]
verisimilitude ↩
"To make a fictional marvel wear the momentary aspect of exciting fact, we must give it the most elaborate possible approach--building it up insidiously and gradually out of realistic material, realistically handled. The time is past when adults can accept can accept marvellous conditions for granted. Every energy must be bent toward the weaving of a frame of mind which shall make the story's single departure from nature seem credible--and in the weaving of this mood the utmost subtlety and verisimilitude are required. in every detail except the chosen marvel, the story should be accurately true to nature."
-H.P. Lovecraft
[quoted in Lovecraft: a look behind the Cthulhu Mythos (1972) by Lin Carter, emphasis in the original]
hipcrime ↩
"Go to Google, and do a search on "Hipcrime." You think I'm a worthless asshole? You have no idea."
-"Terry Austin" (taustin#hyperbooks.com) in rec.games.frp.misc
seattle ↩

"Don't remember the name, but like many others it was filmed in Seattle, while everybody PRETENDED that it was the US."

"Ah yes, during the 1976-1985 Seattle Interregnum, before the Armed Forces dragged the secessionist Northwest Territories back into the US. IIRC filming was much cheaper up there, since government oversight was nearly nonexistent.

And, of course, there's the good-news-bad-news component; the US got Microsoft back, but at least it didn't succeed in creating its own country. And who could forget the 1987 Colorado Springs war trials?"


-Juergen Nieveler (juergen.nieveler#web.de) and "D. J. Trindle" (djt#tstonramp.com) in the Scary Devil Monastery
naming_animals ↩
"It was just a Little Fuzzy, and that was the best he could do. That sort of nomenclature was the best anyone could do on a Class-III planet. On a Class-IV planet, say Loki, or Shesha, or Thor, naming animals was a cinch. You pointed to something and asked a native, and he'd gargle a mouthful of syllables at you, which might only mean "Whaddaya wanna know for?" and you took it down in phonetic alphabet and the whatzit had a name. But on Zarathustra there were no natives to ask. So this was a Little Fuzzy."
-H. Beam Piper, Little Fuzzy, ch. 2
norman ↩

"She did not think that, given the thickness of the portal, for those of the empire's upper classes tend to be fond of their privacy, and the position of the guard, down the hall, they would be likely to be overheard."
-John Norman, The King

"I do not think that, given the positioning of the clauses, for that sentence is very poorly structured, and the manner in which the human mind, serially absorbs information, this is very easy to read."
-Jordan S. Bassior (jsbassior#aol.com) in rec.arts.sf.written

subtlety ↩
"Let's see, if I look up John Tynes in the review archives I find he's written... Oh, he wrote Puppetland. I have that. He wrote Power Kill, too, which was like Violence and Freebase, but with the all subtlety of Spike Lee and John Woo having a gunfight in a church filled with exploding Black Jesuses."
-Greg Chatham on RPG.net
activex ↩
"Since when are ActiveX controls a 'reasonable technical requirement'? One can easily imagine difficulty employing an e-mail client less likely to flood you with malicious HTML messages than Outlook, for example. (OK, Outlook insecurity is a pet peeve of mine; but in fact, the sky's the limit in applying this sweet little exception.)"
-Thomas C Greene, the Register, 2001Nov07
sega ↩

Customer: "The Nintendo 64 is 64-bit, the Dreamcast is 128-bit!"

Gord: "Just because you say it is doesn't make it so."

Customer: "Sega wouldn't lie."

Gord: "That's right. They would never do that. Do you live in a cave? Sega is Japanese for compulsive liar."


-Gord, Acts of Gord
evil_plan ↩

Gord: "Yes, yes it was. Being that it has always been my store and since day one it was non-smoking. Plus, city bylaws dictate that all retail establishments are to be non-smoking."

Customer: "You're just saying that so I won't smoke."

Gord: "You're right. You got me. You've seen right through my evil plan."

Customer: "I'm glad we came to an understanding."

Gord: "However the evil plan is still in effect. No smoking."


-Gord, Acts of Gord
job_well_done ↩

Gord: "Exactly. Now look, if I were to sell you a mod chip I would lose you as a customer. Now, if I were going to lose you as a customer I'd rather do it on a high note like setting you on fire. At least then I would have some satisfaction of a job well done."

Customer: "I'm leaving!"

Gord: "But I haven't set you on fire yet!"


-Gord, Acts of Gord
osmosis ↩
"I'm sorry, I'm afraid I subscribe to the theory of intellectual osmosis. As such, I must now cease our conversation and move away from you before my intelligence begins to drop. Good day."
-Gord, Acts of Gord
rugose ↩
"A young, bookish man finds references to a vast corpus of ancient lore in a rare book of SF theory. He haunts antiquarian bookshops for years, gleaning scraps of information here and there. The reviews point to a vast, hidden cosmology of alien, unspeakable horrors, written in an obscure style. Eventually, he resorts to grave robbery, digging through stacks of moldering books at the back of warped second-hand bookshops. Eventually, he uncovers an acient tome inscribed "The Lurker on the Threshold and Other Stories" (paperback, slightly foxed). He returns to his lodgings and begins to read. During the night, the neighbours hear screams. He is found, curled into a fetal position and gibbering "rugose is not a word!" the next morning."
-Doug Palmer (doug#charvolant.org) in rec.arts.sf.written

[c.f. rugose]

coyote ↩

"Does anybody ever actually root for the coyote?"
-Carl Burke (cburke#mitre.org)

"Of course! He's the technologist, the tool-user, the direct spiritual descendant of the ape who got an Idea in the opening of "2001: Space Odyssey!" He's got a brain and opposable thumbs and an Acme Products catalog, and by golly he's going to use them!
What's the bird got besides feet and luck? An air of annoying smugness, that's what. Make him lunch, I say.
When I win the lottery, I'm going to fund a Wile E. Coyote Chair of Applied Engineering at some university, I am..."


-William December Starr (wdstarr#panix.com) in rec.arts.sf.written
vr_sex ↩

"Remember, VR sex is hygienic (if you don't share the equipment).

There could, of course, be systems that let you have VR sex with real people on their VR systems, maybe with a little help here and there. Like, if the guy doesn't shave in the morning, it doesn't show (or feel) that way in VR.

Suddenly I'm more interested in third-generation mobile phones."


-Robert Carnegie (rja.carnegie#excite.com) in rec.arts.sf.written
bagbiting_loser_languages ↩
"I think Java is the best language going today, which is to say, it's the marginally acceptable one among the set of complete bagbiting loser languages that we have to work with out here in the real world. Java is far, far more pleasant to work with than C or C++ or Perl or Tcl/Tk or even Emacs-Lisp. When I first started using Java, it felt like an old friend: like finally I was back using a real object system, before the blights of C (the PDP-11 assembler that thinks it's a language) and C++ (the PDP-11 assembler that thinks it's an object system) took over the world."
-Jamie Zawinski
winnie_criticism ↩
"Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfils the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things."
-Winston Churchill
fight_club_bansai ↩
"BANSAI! Is your feng shui properly aligned? If so, take a hard look at your life. Why would you know what feng shui is, means, or tastes like? If you truly believe that placing a plant in the northeast corner of your power square will foster financial prosperity, give up now. Believing that a dwarfed tree is going to right all of your life's wrongs is simply desperation. Our trees come in all shapes and sizes."
-Fight Club catalog
fight_club_change_your_life ↩
"You were looking for a way to change your life. You could not do this on your own. All the ways you wish you could be? That's me. I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I am smart, I am capable, and most of all, I am free, in all the ways you are not."
-Fight Club
laziness ↩

"2.5 A Problem Solver's Perspective. Good programmers are a little bit lazy: they sit back and wait for an insight rather than rushing forward with their first idea. That must, of course, be balanced with the initiative to code at the proper time. The real skill, though, is knowing the proper time. That judgement comes only with the experience of solving problems and reflecting on their solutions."

[...] Why do programmers write big programs when small ones will do? One reason is that they lack the important laziness mentioned in Section 2.5; they rush ahead to code their first idea."
-Jon Bentley, Programming Pearls, 2nd Ed.

justice ↩
"Justice exists?" "Of course it does. But it is not an abstraction. It must be worked for. Justice is your demon, I think, Prince Elric, more than any Lord of Chaos. You have chosen a cruel and an unhappy road." He smiled delicately as he stared ahead of them at the long, red trail stretching out to the horizon. "Crueler, I think, than the Red Road to the Silver Flower Oasis." "You're not encouraging, Master Alnac." "You must know there's precious little justice in the world that is not hard fought for, hard won and hard held. It is in our mortal nature to give that responsibility to others. Yet poor creatures like yourself continue to try to relinquish power while acquring more and more responsibility. Some would say that it is admirable to do as you do, that it builds character and strength of purpose, that it reaches towards a higher form of sanity..." "Aye. And some would say it is the purest form of madness, at odds with all natural impulses. I do not know what it is I long for, Sir Dreamthief, but I know I hope for a world where the strong do not prey on the weak like mindless insects, where mortal creatures may attain their greatest possible fulfillment, where all are dignified and healthy, never victims of a few stronger than themselves..."
-Michael Moorcock, "The Fortress of the Pearl"
faith ↩
"Faith cannot move mountains (though generations of children are solemnly told the contrary and believe it). But it is capable of driving people to such dangerous folly that faith seems to me to qualify as a kind of mental illness. It leads people to believe in whatever it is so strongly that in extreme cases they are prepared to kill and die for it without the need for further justification. Keith Hensen has coined the term 'memeoids' for 'victims that have been taken over by a meme to the extent that their own survival becomes inconsequential... You see lots of these people on the evening news from such places as Belfast and Beirut.' Faith is powerful enough to immunize people against all appeals to pity, to forgiveness, to decent human feelings. It even immunizes them against fear, if they honestly believe that a martyr's death will send them straight to heaven. What a weapon! Religious faith deserves a chapter to itself in the annals of war technology, on an even footing with the longbow, the warhorse, the tank, and the hydrogen bomb."
-Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
human_interaction ↩
"Human interaction was monitored by the Inter-Planetary Psychiatric Association. The body count is high, the casualties are heavy."
-In the Mouth of Madness, end credits
tug_virtues_and_vices ↩
"Virtues foster one another; so too, vices. Bad English kills trees, consumes energy, and befouls the Earth. Good English renews it."
-The Underground Grammarian, v1n2
tug_betterment_of_fools ↩
"The betterment of fools, Goethe tells us, is the appropriate business of other fools. The Underground Grammarian does not seek to educate anyone. We intend rather to ridicule, humiliate, and infuriate those who abuse our language not so that they will do better but so that they will stop using language entirely or at least go away."
-The Underground Grammarian, v1n2
tug_no_one_is_safe ↩
"There are no subscriptions. We don't lack money, and we may attack you in the next issue. No one is safe. We will print no letters to the editor. We will give no space to opposing points of view. They are wrong. The Underground Grammarian is at war and will give the enemy nothing but battle."
-The Underground Grammarian, v1n1
science_fiction ↩

"As a critic, I operate under certain basic assumptions, all eccentric, to wit:

1. That the term "science fiction" is a misnomer, that trying to get two enthusiasts to agree on a definition of it lead only to bloody knuckles; that better labels have been devised (Heinlein's suggestion, "speculative fiction", is the best, I think), but that we're stuck with this one; and [that] it will do us no particular harm to remember that, like "The Saturday Evening Post", it means what we point to when we say it."


-Damon Knight, "In Search of Wonder", 2nd Ed. (Advent), pg.1
nothing_so_silly ↩

"As one who was raised an atheist, and who considers it plain common sense, I am always tempted to be skeptical that any adult could really truly believe such utter rubbish. It's like hearing a friend or respected colleague suddenly proclaim that they hope to get money from the tooth fairy, or gifts from Santa Claus, or that the Great Pumpkin will get me if I pick my nose.

But it's undeniable that millions of people really truly do believe that there's this guy up in the clouds who knows everything, is more powerful than Superman, has an IQ of lazy-eight, has been around since long before the beginning of time, and produces whole galaxies filled with hundreds of billions of solar systems more easily than you and I produce newsgroup postings. And that he takes intense personal interest in their sex lives and mine. And has grudges against various groups, and likes to play rather juvenile pranks such as throwing frogs around.

There is NOTHING so silly that nobody could possibly believe it. NOTHING. A perusal of Usenet should suffice to demonstrate this."


-"Keith F. Lynch" (kfl#KeithLynch.net) in rec.arts.sf.written
dark_and_stormy ↩
"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."
-Edward George Bulwer Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)
religious_elephant ↩
"I am trying to call attention to the elephant in the room that everybody is too polite--or too devout--to notice: religion, and specifically the devaluing effect that religion has on human life. I don't mean devaluing the life of others (though it can do that too), but devaluing one's own life. Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end."
-Richard Dawkins, Guardian, Saturday September 15, 2001
crossing_the_road ↩
"If the ideology of terrorism is that terror works, then the ideology of security is based on assuming the truth of the "worst-case scenario". The trouble is that worst-case scenarism, if I may call it that, plays right into the hands of the fear-creators. The worst-case scenario of crossing the road, after all, is that you'll be hit by a truck and killed. Yet we all do cross roads every day, and could hardly function if we did not. To live by the worst-case scenario is to grant the terrorists their victory without a shot having been fired."
-Salman Rushdie
affleck_net ↩
Ben Affleck: "[The Internet is] a place used the world over where people can come together to bitch about movies and share pornography together."
"This is a much more sophisticated idea of the Net than we find in high-tech cyberthrillers, where the Net is a place that makes your computer beep a lot."
-Roger Ebert on Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back
memory_schnapps ↩
"Butterscotch schnapps is a great memory restorative. Now I remember why I don't drink it more often."
-stevo in the Scary Devil Monastery
darren_you_all_owe_me ↩

"I feel like Gollum, having been pushed into the fires of Mordor in order to prevent the One Ring from doing any more evil; like stepping in front of a bullet named Senzar so that nobody else has to review this thing ever again. I want to seal it away using the same precautions you'd use to bury toxic waste. I want to forget I read it. I want to get new eyes. I want to read something that indicates talent, rather than plagiarism heavily spiced with a near toxic-level of munchkinism.

You all owe me."


-Darren MacLennan's RPG.net review of Senzar: Creeping Death
darren_primary_stat ↩
"The game's primary stat is Innocence, in the same way that's Call of Cthulhu's primary stat is SAN, or Rifts' primary stat is munchkin semen."
-Darren MacLennan's RPG.net review of Little Fears
freedom_zero ↩
"Freedom Zero for me is to offer the fruit of your work on the terms that work for you. I think that is what is absolutely critical here. Let there be competition in the marketplace; that is the answer. Let people use whatever license they choose and if their customers don't like it they will have other choices. Because of the technological changes, we are entering an era of greater choice. The fact is, Microsoft's past history is past. We are entering a new era, not of just open source but of profound technological changes. The future is open and we can make that future be what we want it to be."
-Tim O'Reilly at the Open Source Convention Debate on Commercial Software and Open Source Software
dont_trust_stallman ↩

"Stallman recently tried what I would call a hostile takeover of the glibc development. He tried to conspire behind my back and persuade the other main developers to take control so that in the end he is in control and can dictate whatever pleases him. This attempt failed but he kept on pressuring people everywhere and it got really ugly. In the end I agreed to the creation of a so-called "steering committee" (SC). The SC is different from the SC in projects like gcc in that it does not make decisions. On this front nothing changed. The only difference is that Stallman now has no right to complain anymore since the SC he wanted acknowledged the status quo. I hope he will now shut up forever.

The morale of this is that people will hopefully realize what a control freak and raging manic Stallman is. Don't trust him. As soon as something isn't in line with his view he'll stab you in the back. NEVER voluntarily put a project you work on under the GNU umbrella since this means in Stallman's opinion that he has the right to make decisions for the project."


-Ulrich Drepper (drepper at redhat.com), glibc 2.2.4 Release Notes
bill_gates ↩
"Bill Gates has pissed me off from day one. I don't mind that he got rich, but I do mind that he peddles himself as the ultimate hacker and God's own gift to technology when his track record suggests that he wouldn't know a decent design idea or a well-written hunk of code if it bit him in the face. He's made his billions selling elaborately sugar-coated crap that runs like a pig on Quaaludes, crashes at the drop of an electron, and has set the computing world back by at least a decade."
-Eric Raymond's Anti-Microsoft Jeremiad
fscking_solaris ↩
"I love fscking Solaris and solaris loves fscking me. [...] damn fscking worthless six slice must-name-it-our-way useless filesystem that is aranged by a foul tempered malasian crack monkey on acid so nothing is where you'd think to look and related files are not in related locations attached to a raid that has unrecoverable failure modes."
-random (random#pier37.com) in the Scary Devil Monastery
sagan_hard_truth ↩
"When he found that his long-cherished beliefs did not agree with the most precise observations, he accepted the uncomfortable facts. He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions. That is the heart of science."
-Carl Sagan, Cosmos, on Johnannes Kepler
sagan_little_god ↩
"How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths."
-Carl Sagan
satans_domain ↩
"God told me when He gave me the vision for this Internet ministry that it was going to be a major battle since the Internet has basically been Satan's domain and to a large extent still is [Emphasis mine -Mark]. For whatever the benefits of the Internet have been, they are far outweighed currently by the ungodly content that dominates this world. You would be amazed at the numbers of lives destroyed over the last 5 years by the Internet. Men and women in total bondage to Internet porn, gambling....marriages destroyed by online romances that became real...people lured by the greed of online trading and losing everything they had in this world...every kind of evil and destructive thing has found a place of prominence here on the Internet. I had no illusions that this would be easy work as we try to take back the internet for the Kingdom of God."
-LivePrayer.com's rant at the RBL
known_threat ↩
"Finally, we should all be concerned that it seems to take a global, catastrophic incident to motivate us to respond to a known threat. The exploit was discovered on June 18, 2001 and the first version of the Code-Red virus emerged on July 12th, 2001. The truly virulent strain of the worm began to spread on July 17th, a full 29 days after the initial discovery of the exploit and four days after the detection of the first (static seed) attack. In the future, we cannot afford to remain complacent in the face of such blatant warnings."
-The Spread of the Code-Red Worm - CAIDA analysis
alumni ↩
"<antonin> "hey look a CS grad, he must be rich by now"
<antonin> I should write back. "you obviously blew the 35,000 I spent
<antonin> there when I was student already, why should I give you more?"
-Antonin (darkmark#kuoi.com) in ICB 2001Jul26
ms_weakest_link ↩

"If sysadmins at Microsoft shops can't rub their two brain cells together and download patches for known exploits, how can mere users be expected to know about, let alone do anything about, the obscenely corrupt behavior of the userspace mail program? (Hell, you get an argument on Linux lists when you point out that HTML mail is not secure.)

Point is, nothing here is unfamiliar or unexpected. How long does it take before there's general recognition that Microsoft software has no business on the Internet?"


-.comment: The Weakest Link: Watching the Asteroid Approach, by Dennis E. Powell [local copy]
fantasy_books ↩
"They even carry fantasy--why, just the other day at Borders, I saw half a dozen or so titles by Noam Chomsky."
-Pete McCutchen (p.mccutchen#worldnet.att.net) in rec.arts.sf.written
inane_gabble ↩
"After years of fussing about the pathetic, baffled language of students, I realized that it was not in their labored writings that bad language dwelt. This, this inane gabble, this was bad language. Evil language. Here was a man taking the public money for the work of his mind and darkening counsel by words without understanding."
-Richard Mitchell, Less than Words Can Say
best_ideas ↩
"i ate at the pantry last time i was up, in february. the first night, i went at midnight and it was fucking closed. i was, like, "WHAT?!?!? I WANT MY GRILLED CHEESE, YOU FUCKERS!"

so, they kicked me out.

then, i came in on a Saturday, or something, and it was open until 2.

TWO.

that seems criminal to me. some of the best ideas in the history of humanity were brewed up at 4:30 in the morning after 49672 pots of coffee at that very eatery."


-Apollo (apollo#pacbell.net) in ICB, 2001Jul19
irrtainment ↩
"The fact that we are all discussing this is testament to the power of "Irritainment", the future of media. You irritate someone so much that they have to pay attention to you. Sim seems to be a disciple of this."
-Chris Knowles on Comicon.com panel: Dave Sim Tangents
techno_savvy_women ↩
"Someone really ought to fund Sherry Turkle to do some research at the Media Lab on why the women of the Internet aren't flooding Dave Siegel with email. I'm not sure, but I think maybe the problem is that, as of September 22, 1996 at least, he hadn't quite figured out how to put WIDTH and HEIGHT tags in his IMGs and therefore techno-savvy women are spurning him for having pages that load gratuitously slowly.
-Philip Greenspun, Using the Internet to Pick up Babes and/or Hunks
deeply_stupid_idea ↩
"Actually, I think that the UTF-8 BOM is a deeply stupid idea that serves no useful purpose in any imaginable universe. We wouldn't be thinking about were it not for the fact that MS Notepad happens to write one for UTF-8 documents."
-Tim Bray (tbray#textuality.com) on xml-dev
bad_rep_by_association ↩
"I am not a Christian myself. I fact I spend considerable effort trying to debunk Christian superstition, particularly that which is used to justify killing and discriminating against gays. However, Jesus did have some interesting ideas. It's too bad Christians have given him such a bad reputation by association. Were he simply a philosopher, I think he would command greater respect generally, and more sensible respect by Christians."
-Roedy Green
discrimination ↩
"In the GNU Project, discrimination against proprietary software is not just a policy--it's the principle and the purpose. Proprietary software is fundamentally unjust and wrong, so when we have the opportunity to place it at a disadvantage, that is a good thing."
-Richard Stallman

[Given that I develop commercial, often proprietary software, guess what my reaction to this was...]

nietzsche ↩
'Q. So what have Popbitch done to piss you off then?

A. Nothing really. It's just they go after easy targets sometimes and, as we believe Friedrich Nietzsche says in his introduction to "Watchmen", "When you go after easy targets, sometimes you become an easy target yourself..."'
-ntk.net, 2001-06-29

come_in_alone ↩
[Below are several quotes from Warren Ellis' column Come In Alone from comicbookresources.com, recently collected in a paperback by AiT/Planet Lar (what kinda stupid name for a publisher is *THAT*?!?). Oh, and CBR lies through their brown marketroid teeth: you can get the trade paperback in direct-sales comics stores. Support your local comics shop, or it may not be there tomorrow!]
want_to_be_rich ↩
"I've met many people who want to be comics writers because they want to be rich. If you want to be rich, rob a bank, or get a proper job. Or suck off public figures and charge them for it. Hell, I'd go back to prostitution in a second if it wasn't for the weight I put on after quitting smoking two years ago. Despite his new regular gigs, you can still find Mark Millar on the streets of Coatbridge, hand jammed clumsily down the front of his semen-blasted bondage trousers, muttering 'Business? Twenty quid to you, big yin. Business?'"
-Warren Ellis, Come In Alone #14
walk_the_walk ↩
"Frankly, if I don't make a good solid attempt to walk the walk as well as talk the talk, then I'll end up on top of a watertower somewhere with a high-powered rifle screaming FUCKPIG! FUCKPIG! as I blow the skulltops off old ladies for hours on end."
-Warren Ellis, Come In Alone #21
write_about_what_you_know ↩
"Is my way the only way? No. For all the hell I know, it might not even be close to the best way. All I can tell students is that the greatest success I've had in this industry--and I'll be the first to admit that I lost my way BADLY for a while a couple of years ago--came whenever I decided not to care whether honest sentimentality was still hip. My job is to make you laugh and make you cry, to give you what you want but not what you expect, to present you EVERY SINGLE TIME I SIT DOWN with something you've never seen before. And if I lose the courage to use my stories to work out personal matters and answer personal questions through their characters, I may as well be writing the backs of trading cards. The best, the very best of my stories are the ones where I got two-thirds of the way in thinking that it was about something when, lo and behold, it's actually about something else altogether and my subconscious brought it out. Never be afriad to run with that, to find out where it leads. A good writer writes about what he knows, but a better writer writes about what he doesn't know about what he knows."
-Warren Ellis, Come In Alone #42
shrinking_market ↩
"Whatever happens, I know I'll sell more comics than the crawling half-men who believe we're all doomed in a 'shrinking market'. Look out of the window at the planet you live on, morons! There are billions of those bipeds and they keep making more of them! How much bigger does the market have to get before we're eating Soylent Green? Get out and sell comics to those people! In the same way some idiot savant managed to convince them they needed Pokemon more than oxygen."
-Grant Morrison, Come In Alone #28
why_do_you_make_comics ↩
"I'm driven to making comics. I feel a better-than-sex high when I'm telling stories, and like shit when I ignore that need in myself to make pictures with words to show the world what I see and think and feel. I could hold my breath longer than I could quit doing comics. Short answer: because I fucking can't NOT do comics."
-Lea Hernandez, author of Rumble Girls, Come In Alone #38
car_wreck ↩
"You are too kind, Nic. The place is a car wreck. A car wreck in a sewer. A car wreck in a sewer between a toxic waste disposal truck and a bus filled with teenage prostitutes."
-Jason Corley (corleyj#cobweb.scarymonsters.net) in alt.games.whitewolf, about White Wolf's "New Bremen" MUD
terrible_people ↩
"It's true, I and the others are just terrible people. The secret's out, and I guess there's nothing to do but the homicidal sprees."
-Bruce Baugh (bruce-baugh#sff.net)
insanity_sauce ↩
"Ingredients: tomato sauce, onions, hot pepper extract, hot peppers, vinegar, spices, soy oil, garlic, salt. Great cooking ingredient for sauces, soups and stews. Also, strips waxed floors and removes driveway grease stains.

SHAKE WELL AND GOOD LUCK!

Use this product one drop at a time. Keep away from eyes, pets and children. Not for people with heart or respiratory problems"


-Dave's Insanity Sauce
ms_newsgroups ↩
"Better to just create microsoft.my.computer.doesnt.work, microsoft.die.die.die, microsoft.how.do.i... and microsoft.my.internet.doesnt.work."
-David Skinner (drskinner#ntlworldERASETHIS.com) in the Scary Devil Monastery
grows_on_you ↩
"College Roommates From Hell is a comic I sort of stumbled on once, and kept coming back to. It grows on you, like a tentacle, or like a third eye in the palm of your hand, or maybe like fur during a full moon."
-Rick Dickinson (rtd#notesguy.com) in the Scary Devil Monastery
specwonks ↩
"It's a cultural thing Len. Even though technically you could produce a spec that just used XML 1.0 and nothing more, as soon as you do the hoards of nattering spec-wonks descend like a plague asking where's your RDF, where's your namespaces, let's add schema, etc. I attribute this to the fact that the people with the most time to spend on the mail lists are not engineers or writers but some other breed that thrives off making things incomprehensible."
-Dave Winer on xml-dev, 2001Jun15
gay_scouts ↩
"The last few years in scouting have deeply saddened me to see the Boy Scouts of America actively and publicly participating in discrimination. It's a real shame."
-Steven Spielberg's announcement of leaving the Boy Scouts advisory board for forbidding homosexual members
"I don't get it ... because the Scouts are just so gay. It's all boys, they all wear matching outfits, and whenever they climb a tree or do a crafts project, they get rewarded with jewelry."
-Paul Rudnick aka Libby Gelman-Waxner, Premiere Magazine 2001Jun11
evil_internet ↩
"Evil was founded by Satan close to the beginning of time. It has been growing steadily ever since, although most of the growth has come in the past five years with the development of the internet."
-Microsoft Buys Evil, from BBSpot
good_vs_evil ↩
"Still, this guy was pretty much fucked, in that "good always triumphs over evil" kids' toy way. Of course, that's not a really good lesson to teach to kids, because it's inevitably going to shock them when they have to deal with the real world. I mean, if good always triumphs over evil, why is the Republican party still around?"
-"Scorecard: Masters of the Universe, Series One (1982)", by Justin Achilli (jachilli#white-wolf.com)
beautiful_phrases ↩

"There are many beautiful and elegant phrases in the English language. It can express a really astonishing range of powerful and subtle emotions and concepts. Chaucer, to Shakespeare, to Milton, to Jane Austen and Henry James--all of them have entries on the short list of Most Lovely Phrases Ever. I, however, believe I have concocted one that leaves them all behind. A phrase that expresses a notion so beautiful that the mind can't even hope to wrap itself around it.

The phrase is: "My brother-in-law, the bar owner."


-J.D. Baldwin in the Scary Devil Monastery
sleazy ↩
"Hey, there's cynical and money-grubbing and then there's just flat-out sleazy. And beyond that lie d20 products."
-James Wallis (james#hogshead.demon.co.uk)
register_guesses ↩

"So it must have an even better reason for dropping the scheme.

Redmond's official explanation--that it prefers a more 'metered' approach to the subscription rollout--is obvious nonsense; but it's nonsense which doesn't even hint at the truth, so we'll just have to guess at what's really going on.

We're confident that this is what Microsoft would want us to do; otherwise they'd have said something meaningful when they had the chance."


-The Register, 2001May07
joey_ramone ↩
"Well, friend, JOEY RAMONE did not DIE so that FREE SOFTWARE could become BOGGED DOWN in GLOSSY LIFELESS PRODUCTION VALUES. Of that we can be certain."
-Need To Know, 2001-04-27
all_your_emulated_io ↩
"In A.D. 2001
System was booting.
Boot PROM: What happen?
CPU: Somebody set up us the NMI.
SCSI bus: We get signal
Boot PROM: ok
Keyboard: "boot dksc(0,1,5)"
Boot PROM: It's unix!!
DKSC(0,1,5): How are you gentlemen!! All your emulated IO are belong to us.
    You are on the way to runlevel 3.
Boot PROM: What you say!!
DKSC(0,1,5): You have no chance to run Microsoft. Make your fsck. HA HA HA...
Boot PROM: You know what you doing. Move 'vmunix'. For great justice."
-Alan J Rosenthal (flaps#dgp.toronto.edu) in the Scary Devil Monastery
gpl_vs_freedom ↩
"Given that webster defines Freedom as: 
Freedom \Free"dom\ (fr[=e]"d[u^]m), n. [AS. fre['o]d[=o]m;
    fre['o]free + -dom. See {Free}, and {-dom}.]
    1. The state of being free; exemption from the power and
       control of another; liberty; independence.
The GPL is completely anti-freedom. It puts me under the control of the GPL/FSF, it does not give me the liberty to use my code as I see fit, it takes away my independence. Strike 1, 2 and 3. You're out."
-Chris Watson (scanner#deceptively.shady.org) in comp.lang.python
nsincompetence ↩

"Just so you understand the insanity here: I am not listed as the authorized administrative contact on the public whois record. Yet I can easily log into Network Solutions' site as the authorized administrative contact. However, once I do so, I am again unlisted as contact, meaning I cannot correct Network Solutions' errors. If you're thinking that's impossible, makes no sense whatsoever, and no company on earth could be that hopelessly screwed up, then you understand the situation exactly.

A hospital with similarly abysmal record-keeping would be sued out of existence. A web designer half as incompetent at site construction as Network Solutions is at record-keeping would be reduced to selling pencils in Grand Central. Somehow, Network Solutions remains immune from the demands of basic competence to which any other business is bound."


-Jeffrey Zeldman: My Glamorous Life #23
dead_devos ↩
"I explicitly invited Microsoft because they're The Main Gorilla in this space. I think I've offered them a sweet deal, a way to enable independent and open source developers to work to make Dot-Net an even greater success than it would be if it were a closed bathtub. Dead developers don't write code, and some of us would rather die that work in a Microsoft environment. (No disrespect to their software, but the price in freedom is too high.)"
-Dave Winer, Scripting News 2001Mar30
mr_blandings ↩
"I have already asked the builder what is the maximum number of power outlets allowed. He said there wasn't one. So I asked if it was possible to put floor to ceiling, wall to wall power outlets. He looked at me strangely. I said that I want so many outlets that when I plug soemthing in I want the entire street to dim."
-Stevo (stevo#madcelt.org) in the Scary Devil Monastery
morality_that_matters ↩
"Disagreeing with someone's absolute moral or religious beliefs is almost always taken as a flame, no matter how politely phrased. So I don't bother beating around the bush about this kind of thing any more. Religion is stupid. The only kind of morality that matters is the kind that springs naturally from human beings trying to find mutually satisfactory ways of getting along. Threats from imaginary gods are irrelevant."
-Jeff Dee (unigames#io.com) in rec.games.frp.misc
hot_tech_support ↩
"It typically takes 25-30 gallons of petrol/diesel to fully- consume an average-sized body under ideal conditions. That I am conversant with this level of detail should serve as an indication of why the wise man does not ask me questions about MS-Windows."
-Tanuki the Raccoon-dog
americans ↩
"Our country was colonized by the religious, political, economic, and criminal rejects of every country in the world. We have been carefully breeding insane, obsessive, fanatic lunatics with each other for over 400 years, resulting in the glorious strain of humanity known as "Americans". You have to expect some... peculiarities."
-Mark Damon Hughes (kamikaze#kuoi.com) in the Scary Devil Monastery
arguments ↩
"An especially frequent argument argument, however, is the result of Margret NOT STICKING TO THE DAMN ARGUMENT, FOR CHRIST'S SAKE. Margret jack-knifes from argument to argument, jigs direction randomly and erratically like a shoal of Argument Fish being followed by a Truth Shark."
-Mil Millington's 'Things my girlfriend and I have argued about'
cultural_tolerance ↩
"Liberal democracy teaches that cultural tolerance is essential, but you don't have to get far from liberal democracy for liberal democrats to become very intolerant."
-Kim Stanley Robinson
quality_of_crap ↩

"90% of everything is crap"
-Theodore Sturgeon

"I am optimistic that the quality of crap will improve over time, however I am concerned that previous trend toward monolithic craps is being replaced with trend toward constellations of inter-dependent craps."
-Don Park (donpark#docuverse.com) on the xml-dev mailing list

[See also quality]

the_truth ↩
"...enough of that. Let me tell you how it's going to be.
I am free to write what I want, when I want. And you have to come to me to read me.
This is not the same deal as picking up a newspaper for the listings and getting a piece of me, too.
You actually have to sit down and poke your feedsite reader and come to me.
I will tell you things that will make you laugh
and I will tell you things that will make you uncomfortable
and I will tell you things that will make you really fucking angry
and I will tell you things that no one else is telling you.
What I won't do is bullshit you. I'm here for the same thing you are.
The Truth."
-Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan #39
mac_geeks ↩
"Barry also was quick to point out that the Titanium uses torque screws as opposed to Phillips screws. We're not sure why this matters even a little bit, but Barry sure seemed to think it was interesting. That's why Mac geeks scare us."
-ZDNet review of the Powerbook G4 Titanium
teaching ↩
"I'm slowly teaching him [new tech support PFY] that if a luser calls with a problem, he should continue asking detailed, technical question about what is going wrong, untill the customer admits he touched something, or that it might be someone on their end, so he can shout out "SEE! NOT OUR PROBLEM!""
-Abigail (abigail#foad.org) in the Scary Devil Monastery
bsd_is_for ↩
"FreeBSD is for people who love Unix. Linux is for people who hate Windows."
"NetBSD is for people who are scrounging parts and machines from the SunRescue list."
"Mmm. I guess that makes Open for ultraparanoid maniacs. Whee!"
-Christian Wagner (cwagner#fnord.io.com), Rebecca Ore (rebecca#ogoense.net), and (cdjones#ualberta.ca) in the Scary Devil Monastery
clarify_the_intention ↩
"Warner Brothers--you're nasty. You set your legal shock troops on a teenage girl and got your PR mouthpiece to recite a misrepresentation of your actions to the press. In 1939, Germany asked Poland to clarify the intention of its borders in much the same way as you're asking a teenage girl to clarify the intention of her site. You ought to be ashamed of yourselves. Nasty people."
-Potter War
swiss_cheese_memory ↩
"The neat thing about having a swiss-cheese memory like mine is that I can read what I wrote a few months ago, and giggle at my own jokes. Granted I don't remember what I write, but the writer's sense of humour is very compatible with my own. [...]
(I think I've said something like this before, but I don't remember.)"
-Chris Klein (stripes-news#ennui.biomass.to) in the Scary Devil Monastery
woz_hero ↩
"I wonder why, when I just did kind of normal things-- some good engineering and just what I wanted to do in life-- why everywhere I go, some people think that I'm some kind of hero or a special person."
-Steve Wozniak
woz_good_engineer ↩

"I've never been involved with running a company. My whole life, I did not want to be a company runner. I just wanted to be a good engineer, wanted to write programs, design computers. I can't really direct people on career paths. That's never been something I'm good at. My suggestion is to work at what you're good at in life, even if it seems like just a pastime or just a hobby or just the sort of thing you do on your own time when there's no reason to do it, when there's no grade or no salary. Eventually, if you're good at it, it will have value.

Don't just do schlock work and go out and party with your friends at night. When you're young, skip the partying. Because if you work hard, and you're very, very good at something when you're young, you'll have a super life, for the rest of your life.

If you do something better than other people, and you just want to do almost the best that a human could do at something, the one thing you like in the world, the one thing you're really good at, then you can walk into these real prestigious companies-- including Apple or other high tech companies-- you could be the one that they're begging for."


-Steve Wozniak
klingon ↩

"Ex-wife just sent me a birthday present: "Klingon Hamlet." Yes, the KLI[1] has taken that throwaway joke, and published the Whole Damn' Thing as a rather handsome trade paperback.

[1] Klingon Language Institute. If cocaine is God's way of telling you that you have too much money, Klingon is surely Her way of telling you that you have too much time on your hands.


-Kevin Martin (brasscannon#bigfoot.com) in the Scary Devil Monastery
meeting_education ↩
"Whenever someone says something exceedingly stupid, I feel it my duty to educate them. Plus, everyone else leaves and the meeting becomes de facto over."
-Rob Russell (Rob.Russell#www.cauce.org.canada.com.invalid) in the Scary Devil Monastery
woz_jr_pimp ↩
"If my son wants to be a pimp when he grows up, that's fine with me. I hope he's a good one and enjoys it and doesn't get caught. I'll support him in this. But if he wants to be a network administrator, he's out of the house and not part of my family."
-Steve Wozniak
lawnmower_man ↩
"I'm going to get a new job. I'm going to mow lawns. And when somebody asks me what I do for a living, I will tell them "I mow lawns." And whatever question might follow, the answer will most likely be "Yes," "No," or "I mow lawns." And nobody will ever call me at 3:30am with a lawnmowing emergency. Ahh, happy place....."
-hymie! (hymie#lactose.smart.net) in the Scary Devil Monastery
nostalgia ↩
"I don't know what it is with nostalgia lately but everyone's into it."

"I dunno, but I *do* know it's not what it used to be."


-Devin L. Ganger (devin#thecabal.org) and D. Joseph Creighton (djc#cc.umanitoba.ca) in the Scary Devil Monastery
scsi_problems ↩
"This just confirms my belief that most SCSI problems are actually caused by use of inappropriate hardware. Improper cable impedence, bad terminator blocks (very common), dodgy controllers, busted connections, missing TERMPWR, bent pins, non-virgin goats, slow incense with fast and ultra busses, single candles for differential lines, insufficient goats for wide busses, too-bright candles for low-voltage systems, and so on."
-Graham Reed (greed#pobox.com) in the Scary Devil Monastery
integrity_of_mind ↩
"It is pertinent to point out that, as long as religion is conceived as it is now by the great majority of professed religionists, there is something self-contradictory in speaking of education in religion in the same sense in which we speak of education in topics where the method of free inquiry has made its way. The "religious" would be the last to be willing that either the history or the content of religion should be taught in this spirit; while those to whom the scientific standpoint is not merely a technical device, but is the embodiment of the integrity of mind, must protest against its being taught in any other spirit."
-John Dewey, "Democracy in the Schools", 1908
take_your_work_seriously ↩
"Take your work seriously but never take yourself seriously; and do not take what happens either to yourself or your work seriously."
-Booth Tarkington
demanding_work ↩
"I think it's the basic attitude toward work that allows me to fit in here --not that I'm a fellow sysadmin, but the people I've felt most sympathetic to have been people doing equally demanding work that they loved, really."
-Rebecca Ore (rebecca#ogoense.net) in the Scary Devil Monastery
quality ↩
"There are only two acceptable levels of quality-excellent and insanely excellent. Without outstanding quality (by today's pathetic standards), you can't be predictable or sustainable."
-Kent Beck
cool ↩
"This film is cooler than a fortnight in Antartica wearing a bikini, drinking chilled vodka with ice-packs strapped to your body."
-Anonymous from Liverpool's comment on La Femme Nikita
fags_and_mobiles ↩
"It's actually quite simple; You steer with your knee while holding your cigarette AND coffee-cup in one hand and the phone in the other. I'd send a picture if I had one, but people don't like to be around when I'm driving to work in the morning. The only problem I ever have is refilling my cup from the thermos on the floor."
-"ZJ" in feedback to The Register
pedantry ↩
"We thrive in the milieu which demands that lusers and slacker-Monks both RTFM. We bring order to chaos and attempt to impart laws upon lusers who will never abide by them. Pedantry is our way of displaying an incredible applied knowledge of minutia."
-D. Joseph Creighton (djc#cc.umanitoba.ca) in the Scary Devil Monastery
illogical_thought_processes ↩
"Sticking with the idea that a study of modernism can impair one's ability to read pulp SF, it just struck me that van Vogt's obsessed characters might trigger the "unrealiable narrator" reading protocol, which will only lead to confusion. If you run across a character with egregiously illogical thought processes in a Faulkner novel, you start looking for the ways in which the distortions are causing them or other characters problems. In a van Vogt novel, illogical thought processes lead to conceptual breakthroughs and superhuman powers."
-"R. Byers" (rbyers#u.washington.edu) in message <Pine.A41.4.21.0008071009030.137306-100000@homer06.u.washington.edu> in rec.arts.sf.written
get_bent_you_prole ↩
"Get bent, you prole. If you understood even the smallest iota of my tremendous emotional investment in this game, you'd take a big glass of Shut the Fuck Up and Sit the Fuck Down and nurse it in the corner until I speak to you directly."
-Justin Achilli (jachilli#white-wolf.com) in alt.games.storyteller
frossie_dark_side ↩
"You see, I am no longer me. They have destroyed me. They have taken all that is good and excised it. I am a poor excuse of the me of old, a shoddy similacrum. Here, my friends, is the tale of my descent into the Dark Side. Let it be a warning to you.

Naturally, I was tricked.

"Oh happy geek", They said, "we have some totally minor job for you. We just need you to do a teeny weeny management job but it's nothing really, we just need someone to tick the tasklist off as we go along".

The alarm bells failed to go off [1]. Like a chicken led to the chicken-pie machine, I did not foresee what was to come. I mentally turned up with a tuna sandwich and a sun shade expecting a casual stroll in the park only to find I had volunteerd to lead the Long March with the added bonus of petulant are-we-there-yet?s from the ranks [2]

[1] If this had been a genuine alarm system sold to me by a real sales droid, said droid would be permanently out of the reproductive pool. Shortly afterwards he would be out of the alive-and-breathing pool. Shotly after *that*, he would be out of the limbs-attached-to-body pool. Or maybe that would come first. I can't decide.

[2] I bet Mao didn't have to put up with *that*
-Frossie (frossie#jach.hawaii.edu) in the Scary Devil Monastery

burn_the_bible ↩
"The Christian Supremecists are at it again. I swear those guys would burn the bible if they read it without a title attached. Sad too, cause it's a heck of a story, all sorta sex, betrayal, magic, murder, superhuman guys, war, sacrifice, and a fella hanging with hookers and lawyers that beats the crap outta some chumps in a church."
-SonofWashu (sonofwashu#aol.com) in rec.arts.anime.misc
viking_sims ↩
"The French have carved a name for themselves in the depressing minimalist existentialist niche of the Philosophy market. Only the Germans give them any real competition. The Sims has a bit too much humor for it to qualify as really hard-core c'est la vie wrist-slitting existentialism. In fact suicide is just one more of those options a sim doesn't have available. I'd place the life philosophy of the game a little farther North in Scandinavia, probably Sweden. You need a sense of humor to get through the Winters up there, but at the same time, six months of sleet isn't a fertile growth medium for a positivist moral philosophy. Thus the Vikings. But I digress."
-the antiElvis at Loonygames.com
fantasy ↩
"This fantasy about rockets into space, and intercontinental missiles, and rockets to the moon: I wish the American people would leave that out of their thinking."
-Vannevar Bush
sanity ↩
"And anyway, anyone who exclaims `Ooh! This Perl code is making me horny!' while reading my radius front-end CGI stuff is clearly not in any sane state."
-Matt McLeod (matt+usenet#netizen.com.au) in the Scary Devil Monastery
journalist_love ↩
"I don't care if it was a hyperdestructive worm from the Phillipines; no journalist is prepared for outpourings of love in her email, however weird and viral."
-Angela Gunn, Seattle Weekly, 2000May11
credibility ↩
"Rick, you've stabbed your credibility through the liver, kicked it five or six times with steel-toed boots and have proceeded to piss into its mouth. Why not just let it die quietly?"
-Deirdre M. Brooks (xenya#teleport.com) in rec.games.frp.misc
how_to_use_computers ↩
"Any research done on how to efficiently use computers has been long lost in the mad rush to upgrade systems to do things that aren't needed by people who don't understand what they are really supposed to do with them."
-Graham Reed in the Scary Devil Monastery
literary_allusion ↩
"Gandalf DIES in the mines of Moria, but will later be RESURRECTED in GLORIFIED form having triumphed over EVIL, an obvious literary ALLUSION to that movie where the guy comes back as a DOG."
-Book-a-Minute summary of Lord of the Rings
gorecrow ↩
"Gee, Ryan, instead of being snarky and prick-like, you could be gracious and charming, smile and nod, and pretend that in some parallel reality you don't combine the ethics of a jackyl with the style and grace of a gore-crow, and that some day, you'll actually understand the purpose of a license which grants rights and abilities above and beyond what I have as a member of the American civitas and, ostensibly, the market share you're trying to reach in your fumble-footed, wrong-headed way.

Ah, but these precious traits are only to be found in a parallel world, far from ours."
-Alexander Williams (thantos#chancel.org) to Ryan S. Dancey of Wizards of the Coast, in rec.games.frp.industry

pretentiousness ↩
"In case anyone is interested, before you can work at White Wolf you have to complete a twelve-week course on pretentiousness and ego-stroking. There's also an optional course on megalomania."
-Andrew Bates (abates#white-wolf.com) in rec.games.frp.misc
a_new_system ↩
"It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things. For the reformer has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order. This lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, who have the laws in their favor; and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it."
-Niccolo Machiavelli, "The Prince", Chapter 6, 1537
complete_bastards ↩
"It comes down to the fact US West are total and complete bastards we would all admire if they weren't also totally and completely incompetent."
-Collin Forbes (collinf#kuoi.com)
ibm_was_arrogant ↩
"To be frank, I think IBM was an arrogant company at the end of the 80s, and we had a near-death experience. As with many individuals, that sort of experience helps you to focus your mind wonderfully. The IBM I work for now is not the same IBM that I joined in 1991. What you see now is an IBM that values innovation and is trying to surface and expose that innovation, and is trying to do so in a way that embraces the idea of the community and that values standards."
-Simon Phipps, IBM's XML and Java Evangelist, O'Reilly Conference on Java interview
not_the_way ↩
"If I understand the arguments correctly, they can't do this because that is not the way it was done."
-Paul Tomko (tomko#earth.execpc.com)

"I've never understood that argument."
-Simo Tuominen (simotit#evitech.fi)

"And since you never have, you never will."
-Alan J Rosenthal (flaps#dgp.toronto.edu)
-in the Scary Devil Monastery

ten_foot_pole ↩
"10 foot poles! Get'cher 10 foot poles! Inna bun! Fresh 10 foot poles, made by monks on a mountain! 2 bucks each, and that's cutting my own hand off. 10 foot poles! Guaranteed to not touch anything!"
-Graham Reed (greed#pobox.com) in the Scary Devil Monastery
black_bastard_aura ↩
"I guess this means that I'm developing the sort of black bastard aura that will eventually make my kindest, gentlest utterances sound like the pronouncements of Satan."
-Steve VanDevender (stevev#efn.org) in the Scary Devil Monastery
frontpage ↩
"No tool is inherently good or evil. Okay, except maybe for Frontpage"
-Mike Sphar (mikeys#speakeasy.org) in the Scary Devil Monastery
ammo_laws ↩
"What we need are strict *ammunition* laws. Guns don't kill people[1]. *BULLETS* kill people.
[1] Unless, of course, it's one of those bloody great Desert Eagles."
-Devin L. Ganger (devin#thecabal.org) in the Scary Devil Monastery
zodiac_bike ↩
"I had to ride slow because I was taking my guerrilla route, the one I follow when I assume that everyone in a car is out to get me. My nighttime attitude is, anyone can run you down and get away with it. Why give some drunk the chance to plaster me against a car? That's why I don't even own a bike light, or one of those godawful reflective suits. Because if you've put yourself in a position where someone has to see you in order for you to be safe--to see you, and to give a fuck--you've already blown it."
-Neal Stephenson, Zodiac
voltaire_prayer ↩
"I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it."
-Voltaire
high_tech_society ↩
"To a large extent, the greatest problem facing a successful high-tech society (and I think we're getting pretty close) is figuring out what it is that all the people who don't need to work, ought to be doing instead."

"So far, what we've seen is smart people making work for each other. Good software leads to more work. Bad software leads to more work. If there's any time left over from fiddling with software, people spend it on making the tax and legal systems more complicated. (Ok, maybe that last is just the US.)"
-Bill Westfield (billw#flipper.cisco.com) and Nancy Lebovitz (nancy#unix3.netaxs.com) in rec.arts.sf.written

lowered_expectations ↩
"I won't bother trying to set anyone straight as to my rather complex feelings about Microsoft, but I must admit that I do hate Windows because it has so shamefully lowered our expectations of what quality software should be."
-Nicholas Petreley, Infoworld, 2000Feb04
gorilla_organizations ↩
"Being afraid of monolithic organizations especially when they have computers is like being afraid of really big gorillas especially when they are on fire."
-Bruce Sterling
vampire_staking ↩
"Yes, but then we get into questions. Does bamboo count as wood? It's technically from a grass, not a tree, but it's very hard. Can I stake a vampire with my chopsticks? Does the stake have to be more than a certain diameter, or just of a length sufficient to pierce the heart? Does it have to completely penetrate the heart, or just puncture a wall? If bamboo is acceptible, what about other vegetable matter, like a frozen parsnip or carrot?"
-LrdLeoLido (lrdleolido#aol.com) in alt.games.whitewolf
fight_club_animals ↩
"The Animal Control place is the best place to go," Marla says. "Where all the animals, the little doggies and kitties that people loved and then dumped, even the old animals, dance and jump around for your attention because after three days, they get an overdose shot of sodium phenobarbital and then into the big pet oven. The big sleep, 'Valley of the Dogs' style. Where even if someone loves you enough to save your life, they still castrate you."
-Fight Club, by Chuck Palahniuk
gandhi_ii ↩
"Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the act of depriving a whole nation of arms, as the blackest."
-Mohandas K. Gandhi: "Gandhi, An Autobiography", page 446
drug_tests ↩
"think about it. would you work for a company that couldn't tell the difference in quality of its employees' normal work product and the work product of someone on drugs without performing a test?"
-socks (agent01413#my-deja.com)
such_a_nice_guy ↩
"Shit! You used to be a nice guy, Nigel. Why are you acting like such a bastard now?"
"I never had a chance to be a bastard for something I believed in before."
-Gregory Benford, In the Ocean of Night
allegations_of_arrogance ↩
"The Department of Justice looked into allegations of arrogance, and found Bill [Gates] staring back (or rather, rocking back and forth and not making good eye contact)."
-Seattle Weekly, 2000Jan20
communism_and_capitalism ↩
"This is the best example of the difference between communism and capitalism. Communism is based on wealth redistribution. Where is nothing to redistribute, communism fails instantly. Where is something, communism lasts until the wealth is consumed and wasted.

Capitalism is based on wealth creation."
-Martin Ripa (artin#iol.cz)

rifkin ↩
"The "End of Work" is the same old nonsense that the people who get thrown out of work by increased productivity will have nowhere to go. Much the same could have been said in relation to the increase in agricultural productivity. Rifkin knows that the displaced agricultural workers simply went into industry, but now that industry is going the way of agriculture, and may only need 2% of the workforce, Rifkin doesn't know where they can go. Well, of course. If Rifkin knew where they could go, he would be starting a business instead of engaging in academic pontificating.

It is the hardest thing for intellectuals to understand, that just because they haven't thought of something, somebody else might. In fact, somebody else WILL, if we are to extrapolate on the most obvious trend of the past. Instead, Rifkin looks forward to a kind of Mediaeval stagnation. But that has always been what the Left is about anyway: Nostalgia for a fixed and ideal society--since much of the past is remembered as, in certain respects, ideal, even if there is no desire to say that it was all ideal. The Mediaeval ideal was, indeed, government by the Best and the Worthy, which to people like Rifkin means people like him. That money grubbing capitalists might be better for the lot of humanity than academics will never be acceptible, whatever the evidence."
-Kelley L. Ross, in Perspective

not_meant_to_be_eaten ↩
Wally: "Vermin, that is not meant to be eaten!"
Vermin: "You never know until you've eaten it!"
-Time Bandits
century ↩
"We have uniformly rejected all letters and declined all discussion upon the question of when the present century ends, as it is one of the most absurd that can engage the public attention, and we are astonished to find it has been the subject of so much dispute, since it appears plain. The present century will not terminate till January 1, 1801, unless it can be made out that 99 are 100... It is a silly, childish discussion, and only exposes the want of brains of those who maintain a contrary opinion to that we have stated"
-The Times, 26 December 1799
jewels_poetry ↩
"There have been few films that have put the fear of God into me; literally made me sit in my theater seat prior to the film starting and shiver like a naked man during an Everest blizzard. My eyes turned blood red. My heart began to beat like an aroused hummingbird's. And when the projector came on and the first scenes of Ang ("The Ice Storm") Lee's Civil War epic began, I thought I might lose consciousness. The fear of Jewel reading any of her poetry was that strong."
-Mr. Cranky's review of "Ride With the Devil"
act_wise ↩
"To keep silent and act wise/
Still not as good as drinking sake/
Getting drunk and weeping."
-Otomo no Tobito (665-731 CE)
java_grows_on_you ↩
"Java grows on you. Psychologically programming in C++ feels like coding after staying up three days on a burn to get all the project details in your head. Java feels like coding after a bath and a shave."
-Roedy Green
millenios ↩
"Addicks added that consumers had been looking to General Mills for an exciting new product to celebrate the millennium. "We had been inundated with requests from consumers to create something special for the millennium. Our initial consumer response confirms that Millenios is the ideal cereal for the millennium, and they cant wait for it to hit the shelves.""
-Millenios
[I am struck speechless. My reality filter has been completely blown. Help. By the way, it should be "Millennios", but that fits right in with the 2000 instead of 2001 thing.]
saundersons_observation ↩
"Saunderson's Observation: Everything on the Internet is new to someone. Conversely, the same thing is old to everyone it is forwarded to."
-Chris "Saundo" Saunderson (saundo#idx.com.au)
happy_stderr ↩ 
"<axly> guh. I can't believe I needed to use a backup tape.
 <axly> teach me the difference between > and >>
 <!-> > is used when you are happy, as in :>
 <!-> >> is used when you are really happy, as in :>>
 <axly> and 2>&1?
 <!-> um...  you want stderr to be happy too?
 <axly> if only stderr would always be happy.
"
-Seen in ICB on 99Dec08
sex_and_violence ↩
"There's something fundamentally sad about not being able to mention the "S" word in the potential presence of children, but being permitted to casually discuss violence at a level which I find shocking (if really cool!:-)."
-Michael T. Richter (mtr#igs.net)
excessive_sarcasm ↩
"I'd love nothing more than to waste two hours of my life watching corporately-inseminated drivel with some farm animals and a low-grade alcoholic. Oh joy. Oh rapture."
"You know, there's a fine line between excessive sarcasm and permanent bitterness."
-Goats
heavy_drugs ↩
"It was a bright, sunny Friday afternoon and everything was slightly frilly. I skipped down the road, happy to be alive. 'Hello, Mr Chipmunk! Hello, Mr Bird!' I called out, mainly because I'd been doing some really heavy drugs that morning. I was going to ask the lamppost what it was knowin', but even I have some standards."
-Steve D, on RPGnet
flutterby_usability_engineers ↩
"Peter Merholz says that usability engineers lack empathy, that they see users as subjects, not people. A cynical smartass, not that I'd ever be one, might suggest that the problem is that they do see users as people."
-Dan Lyke, Flutterby, 6 Nov 1999
katz_post_microsoft_era ↩
"Microsoft will almost surely continue to make billions peddling cheap, generally mediocre software products for many times what it's worth to people who now have little choice but to buy and use it.

But all this proves is that in this sphere, it's possible to be enormously rich and successful and still rapidly become marginal, even insignificant. This seems to be Microsoft's curious fate."
-Jon Katz, on Slashdot

void_magic_diploma_wand ↩
"Ooh, this is a peeve of mine. The technical-instruction industry has fostered this weird idea that if you study hard and pass some tests, they will tap you on the head with their magic diploma wand and make you into a network administrator or whatever.

The only people I've met who've been taken in by this aren't so bright anyway, I guess. But it's still annoying, because they pass the tests and arrogate all sorts of titles to themselves, and then they can't describe a TCP three-way handshake to me and then I have to kill them."
-void (float#incandescent.firedrake.org) in the Scary Devil Monastery

ms_standards ↩
"I love the way Microsoft follows standards. In much the same manner that fish follow migrating caribou."
-Paul Tomblin (ptomblin#piper.xcski.com) in the Scary Devil Monastery
rotwang_monopoly ↩
"Pardon me...what the hell kinda game IS Monopoly, anyway? I say my racecar can run down the doggie, and that if I buy Park Place, I can put a trap on the damned thing, too. But everyone else says I'm crazy, that that's not how the game is played. Morons."
-"Dr. Rotwang" (drrotwang#hotmail.com) on RPG.net
piper_welfarers ↩
"The Welfarers don't think anybody ought to have to work to eat. They think everybody ought to be fed whether they do anything to earn it or not, and if you try to make people earn their food, you're guilty of economic coercion. And if you're in business for yourself and want them to work for you, you're an exploiter and ought to be eliminated as a class."
-H.Beam Piper, "Oomphel in the Sky"
tanuki_aka_dante ↩
"I offer you a new vision of Hell: Watching an entire ISO committee trying to agree on what wine to have with their meal."
-Tanuki the Raccoon-dog
joyce_park_startup ↩
"In Palo Alto, "startup" connotes the thrill of entrepeneurship, the adventure of high growth, the possibility of massive stock options. Saying you work for a startup can get you some play with that cute girl/guy at the espresso bar. Here in Chicago, "startup" means you and your buddies gotta look under the sofa cushions for enough change to buy a CheapBytes CD-ROM. Plus, your mom calls you up every other day to beg you to get a real job so she can hold her head up at your cousin's upcoming wedding reception--you're good with technology, have you ever considered becoming a Xerox machine repairperson? So the idea of spending thousands of dollars putting together a little network so you can put out a demo that may never come to anything is a laugher."
-Joyce Park, "It's the Developers, Stupid!"
joyce_park_herdthink ↩
"Furthermore, they [MCSE's] seemed genuinely puzzled that I would expect decent service and documentation without having paid mucho extra money for it. One or two even suggested that the more problems the better, as it meant more billable hours for them. I've concluded that being an NT sysadmin requires a level of cynicism so breathtaking that relatively few can achieve it. "Hey dude--bugs are money!" If you can't muster up this much gleeful nihilism first thing every Monday morning, I suppose you could come to the same conclusion by a combination of ignorance, lack of aesthetic sense, and terminal herdthink."
-Joyce Park, "Small Business Server Upgrade"
esr_inspired_by_work ↩
"You cannot motivate the best people with money. Money is just a way to keep score. The best people in any field are motivated by passion. That becomes more true the higher the skill level gets.

In other words, enjoyment predicts efficiency. When are programmers happy? They're happy when they're not underutilized--when they're not bored--and also when they're not overburdened with inappropriate specifications or meaningless bureaucracies. In other words, programmers are happiest when they're working efficiently. This is a general preference in creative work. People are happiest when they're the most productive. People enjoy tasks, especially creative tasks, when the tasks are in the optimal-challenge zone: not too hard and not too easy. To some extent, that has always been true. But it becomes even more true as work becomes more about brains and creativity.

The flip side is that when people are frustrated with their work environments--when they don't trust the institutions they work for--it is virtually impossible for them to do great work. So you can ask the open-source community, "Why are so many people willing to devote themselves to do work for which few of them get paid?" You can also look at traditional companies and ask, "Why do even top executives hang 'Dilbert' cartoons on their office doors?" There's nothing funny about the popularity of "Dilbert." Companies should take that more seriously than they seem to."
-Eric S. Raymond, "Inspired by Work" interview, Fast Company magazine

abigail_sysadmins_oath ↩
"I'm hired because I know things. Not because I do whatever the higher ups think is a good idea. That might have cost me bonusses, raises, promotions, and might have been part of the reason I didn't make the lay off cut of my last employer.

I don't care. I will not comprimise my own principles and judgement without putting up a fight. Of course, I won't will all fights, and I will end up doing things I don't agree with.

But I will never ever defend those actions."
-Abigail (abigail#delanet.com) in the Scary Devil Monastery

mike_sphar_sysadmin_oath ↩
"I am hired because I know what I am doing, not because I will do whatever I am told is a good idea. This might cost me bonuses, raises, promotions, and may even label me as "undesirable" by places I don't want to work at anyway, but I don't care. I will not compromise my own principles and judgement without putting up a fight. Of course, I won't always win, and I will sometimes be forced to do things I don't agree with, but if I am my objections will be known, and if I am shown to be right and problems later develop, I will shout "I told you so!" repeatedly, laugh hysterically, and do a small dance or jig as appropriate to my heritage."
-Mike Sphar (mikey#matches.com) in the Scary Devil Monastery
straw_man ↩
"Ok, so that's a straw man. But it's a nice straw man wearing a silly looking hat, so I'm going to mock it anyway."
-Shawn Isenhart (shawn.isenhart#artesyn.com) on RPG.net
atheist_criminal ↩
"So we now realize that it is the atheists who are in favor of putting their "terminally ill" parents to death. It is the atheists who are in favor of murdering innocent human embryos and fetuses. It is the atheists who are perpetuating homosexuality, lesbianism, bestiality, pornography, pedophilia and etc. It is the atheists who are responsible for all the violence in the movie industry. It is the atheists who are responsible for all the smut on the web. It is the atheists who bear false witness against the existence of God. It is the atheists who bear the false testimony that the earth came into being by a cataclysmic explosion. It is the atheists who bear the false testimony of evolution. It is the atheists who bear the false testimony that man descended from the ape. It is the atheists who worship the creature rather than the Creator. It is the atheists who are responsible for all the moral decline in America and the world community.

Atheists, regardless of their level of "education" and position in the society are therefore the true criminals of the world community and any sane government should treat them accordingly."
-Robert T. Lee, on Ten Commandments

medieval_speedboats ↩
"It's because of this that I do firmly believe that the GM is God, once play starts. I bow to no dice roll, no rule call and almost no player appeal. If the GM says you get hit by a speedboat and die, you do. Even if you rolled a 20. Even if you have the highest skill possible in dodge. Even in the middle ages. Even on dry land. And if the player argues, his next character gets hit by the second speedboat in the convoy. And yes, the GM has infinitely many speedboats at his command."
-Steve Darlington (sdarling#futureweb.com.au) on RPG.net
pdf_vs_shockwave ↩
"In a limited way, yes, it's [Adobe PDF] better than Shockwave but only in the way herpes is better than tertiary syphilis."
-Peter da Silva (peter#baileynm.com) in the Scary Devil Monastery
stapps_ironical_paradox ↩
"The universal aptitude for ineptitude makes any human accomplishment an incredible miracle."
-Stapp's Ironical Paradox, Col. John P. Stapp
johnny_cash_country ↩
"Country music used to represent horses, railroads, land, judgement day, family, hard times, whiskey, courtship, marriage, adultery, separatism, murder, war, prison, rambling, damnation, home, salvation, death, pride, humor, piety, rebellion, patriotism, larceny, determination, tragedy, rowdiness, heartbreak, love, mother, and God."
-Johnny Cash
gates_eye_contact ↩
SamIIs (samuel.greenberg#oberlin.edu)
>>Bill Gates, according to Shadow Syndromes, is reported to ... not make eye
>>contact, and have trouble making social conversation.
>I'm not sure it's autism. Maybe it's just because he's Bill Gates. I'd have
>trouble making eye-contact with people, too.
Yah, it's sort of the convicted-murderer-trying-to-look-the-mother-of-one-of-his-victims-in-the-eye effect, but in this case it's the evil-unstable-os-building-fiend-trying-to-look-a-pissed-off-user-in-the-eye effect.
-"supz" on slashdot
cael_darwins_mat ↩
'People who are willing to rely on the government to keep them safe are pretty much standing on Darwin's mat, pounding on the door, screaming, "Take me, take me!"'
-Cael (cjacobs#fallschurch.esys.quux) in the Scary Devil Monastery
mcelwaine_conspiracy ↩
"[I KNOW that we are all supposed to LAUGH at the word "conspiracy". That is what the various government, military, political, media, banking, and corporate CONSPIRATORS have successfully PROGRAMMED most of us to do. ]

UN-altered REPRODUCTION and DISSEMINATION of this IMPORTANT Information is ENCOURAGED."
-Robert E. McElwaine, Message-ID: <1993Mar3.163950.4644@cnsvax.uwec.edu>

tanukis_special_sense ↩
"I have an extremely well developed fsckhead-sense. In fact, I can sense and track fsckheads over a hundred miles away. You are a fsckhead of the first order. Now go and stick your head up a dead bear's bum."
-Tanuki the Raccoon-dog (Tanuki#canis-^Hmajor.da^Hemon.co.uk) in the Scary Devil Monastery
vim_y2k ↩
"Personally, I wonder why the industry suddenly cares so much about bugs *now*. After all, software had always had bugs before and will probably have in future. "Does anybody care what time it is" when you lose your data?

Why has noone ever asked for such statements about other kinds of bugs, eg a "Macintosh guarantee for dialogs to be without any bomb icons"? And how about an "insurance for Unix segmentation faults"? I would really look forward to see a guarantee from Microsoft that I would never have to use control-alt-delete ever again...
-Sven Guckes (guckes#vim.org)

darren_that_noise ↩
"GAH. That noise you're hearing is my eyeballs rolling so far back into my skull as to make a complete circuit."
-Darren MacLennan in an RPG.net review
a_computer_is_a_squirrel ↩
"A computer is essentially a trained squirrel: acting on reflex, thoughtlessly running back and forth and storing away nuts until some other stimulus makes it do something else."
-Ted Nelson, Literary Machines
responsibility ↩
"Thank God that they blamed the trenchcoat manufacturers instead of role playing games. Seriously though, what the hell is up with this country? What ever happened to the concept of personal responsibility? If I drink a case of vodka and go ram a school bus full of nuns and puppies, why am I allowed to sue the vodka company? Why is it that America is so gung ho about this whole victim mentality, in which it's the fault of the media, or role playing, or rock music , or your parents who beat you, or the liberals, or God? Heaven forbid that we all take responsibility for our own &*%$ing actions! "Well officer, I know that I was the one who shot him 37 times from two feet away, but I was suffering pre-traumatic stress disorder fro m the extra box of Skittles I ate this morning, and it combined in my head with the Marilyn Manson music and that Purgatory game, and after cooking in my mind for 45 minutes at 350 degrees, out popped a psychopath.""
-Jon Wilkie, author of Purgatory
harts_y2k_policy ↩
"We've got a lot of suppliers. We already know some of them are pretty good and some of them are idiots. We don't expect the Y2K problem to change this."
-Hart Scientific's Y2K plans
you_go_to_hell ↩
"Emacs? You want emacs? Vi was good enough for the bastard that trained me, and the bastard that trained him! You want emacs, you build it yourself, college boy. You go to hell! Do you hear me? You go to hell and you die!!!"
-Mike Sphar (mikey#matches.com) in the Scary Devil Monastery
we_lost_a_moron ↩
"Boy, I just felt the world get lighter--we lost a moron. [...] I don't mean to sound cold or cruel or vicious, but I am so that's the way it comes out. Professional help is being sought."
-Bill Hicks, "Revelations"
people_like_you ↩
"Years before people like you were confusing the Web with the internet, people like you were confusing the newsgroups with the Internet."
-"Phil" in alt.tech-support.recovery
expanding_the_freedom_thesaurus ↩
"For one thing, my harrowing involvement with a squad of uber-dorks has been brought to a halt. I never thought I could be made to feel so liberated, so ALIVE by the words "Jeff, lick me". Freedom is indeed just another word for not working with morons anymore."
-J.J. Mohareb (bitter#rpg.net) on RPG.net
sincerity_is_a_vice ↩
"Sincerity is a vice and hypocrisy is a virtue. The profession of virtue is a social necessity; the practice of it a human impossibility. It is hypocrisy that allows us to say what we must say and do what we must do. Sincerity is admirable in small quantities and dangerous in large, a good servant and a poor master."
-Richard Harter (cri#tiac.net)
grotesquely_overdesigned_world_domination ↩
"I've done these embedded languages for a very long time. And one of the lessons that kept getting beaten into me over and over again is that when you design a system, you have some kind of a model of what people are going to do with it. And so you tend to build for that model. But every time I've done that, it's just been miserable, because people have always taken the system and done things that I never, ever expected. So when I designed the Java language, in many ways it was grotesquely overdesigned for its target.

People always want to scale them up in amazing ways. And so I decided that this time around, rather than trying to focus on the particular application area, I was going to do a full-blown general-purpose thing."
-James Gosling, in JavaWorld interview

goober_culture ↩
"We catch a lot of flak for "becoming the next TSR" and "selling out," which is, plainly, a buncha crapola. If I wanted to sell out or cash in, I'd crib the plots from the staples of goober culture like Star Trek and Highlander: The Series. I'd print _Secrets of the Second-Generation Biomechanical Vampire Planets_. I don't do that."
-Justin R. Achilli (jachilli#white-wolf.com)
the_power_to_create_headaches ↩
"Give a man a computer program and you give him a headache, but teach him to program computers and you give him the power to create headaches for others for the rest of his life..."
-R. B. Forest
carrie_fishers_chair_fetish ↩
"I've got to stop getting obsessed with human beings and fall in love with a chair. Chairs have everything human beings have to offer, and less, which is obviously what I need. Less emotional and intellectual feedback, less warmth, less approval, less patience and less response. The less the merrier. Chairs it is. I must furnish my heart with feelings for furniture."
-Carrie Fisher, in Postcards from the Edge of the Galaxy
religion_will_turn_out_to_be_a_very_transient_response ↩
"The "bad guys" in my fiction tend to be dishonest, wilfully ignorant, hypocritical, or inconsistent. That's the basis on which I criticise them. Some of them also suffer from the delusion that morality is impossible without superstition. One of the main concerns of Distress is dealing with the notion that honesty about the world will send us screaming into insanity or amorality, and the only thing that's holding up civilisation and ethics is religion. This is a load of bollocks. Morality predates religion; religion was only invented when humans became sophisticated enough to start asking questions about the morality they already practised instinctively. Religion is not a fundamental human impulse; asking questions about our nature and origins is, and the desire for justice is, but religion will turn out to be a very transient response to those impulses, lasting no more than ten or twenty thousand years."
-Greg Egan, Ibn Qirtaiba inteverview
take_away_consciousness_and_reality ↩
"Why does "philosophy of consciousness/nature of reality" seem to interest you so much?"

"Take away consciousness and reality and there's not much left."
-Greg Egan Eidolon interview

linus_lignux ↩
"Oh, Gods, not the lignux thing again..

No, Linux should not be spelled Lignux. There's a lot of GNU code out there, but it should stand on its own instead of trying to get a free ride on the Linux name recognition.

I am very indebted to the gcc developers, who have made sure that there's a good high-quality compiler out there that everybody can use, but that doesn't really mean that they get to choose their own name for the system. Your midwife doesn't select the name of your babies..."
-Linus Torvalds in ABCNEWS.com chat

innovative_interesting_and_cheesy ↩
"Sinclair products are highly innovative, interesting and cheesy. In the long run, the lack of quality and utility, and a cavalier approach to customers, will spell doom for the company."
-David Ahl, Personal Computer World, October 1985

[A lesson still not learned by some companies]

all_you_really_need_is_love ↩
"It's true--in this cold and lonely world, all you really need is love... along with a regular paycheck from your corporate puppetmasters!"
-Fig Blabber Ed 'n' Damon, Sittin' in a Tree..."
carmack_programming_is_the_central_focus_of_my_life ↩
"Programming is the central focus of my life. And I make no excuses about it. There's always the time where you have people telling you to get a life, you know, "Don't spend so much time on this, you should be broader based." But being well balanced is overrated; I'm really, really good at what I do. I derive a lot of satisfaction from it. I'm able to push ahead on some new frontiers. And I'm completely happy with it, and I make no excuses for the fact that, yes, all of my life is wrapped around computer programming."
-John Carmack
frankenstein ↩
"I am thy creature, and I will be even mild and docile to my natural lord and king, if thou wilt also perform thy part, the which thou owest me. Oh, Frankenstein, be not equitable to every other and trample upon me alone, to whom thy justice, and even thy clemency and affection, is most due. Remember, I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Every where I see bliss, from which I alone am irrovecably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous."
-The Creature, Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
linus_a_project ↩
"A project has to sit inside one person's head"
-Linus Torvalds
keep_your_illusions ↩
"Oh, and as for the clique thing... Well, yeah. Look. If you think the world is some sort of lovey dovey place, where all people are equal, and everyone should be happy together... then... well... fine. Keep your illusions, and I genuinely hope that noone shatters them for you in any terrible way, although it's probably a little late for that.

The world is *not* a place where equality reigns, or where all people are wonderful creatures. As it happens, we happen to hold a particular worldview that there *is* a techno-elite (yes, that's a trite and overused term), and we are part of it.

We choose to reinforce that techno-elitism. If you're failing to meet the standards, then tough. Life isn't fair. Deal with it. Learn to meet the standards, or just go somewhere else where they've got different standards."
-Thorfinn (thorfinn#tertius.net.au) from the Scary Devil Monastery

make_linux_more_like_windows ↩
"7. How Can I Make Linux More Like Windows?
Hmmm. Rebuild the kernel to use every memory-hogging feature you can find. Reboot every couple of days whether you need to or not. And every 18 months or so, send a check for $99 to Bill Gates. That should do the trick."
-C|Net writer Christopher Lindquist, in 10 Questions About Linux
professionalism ↩
"It seems that there are two different sorts of people: People who care about the important stuff--like if a job gets done, and if it gets done well--and clueless fucking morons who wouldn't know a job well done if it bit them on the ass, and so think that "professionalism" is a better indicator of the quality of work."
-Dave Brown in the Scary Devil Monastery
paranoia ↩
  • "Sometimes I get the feeling the whole world is against me, but deep down I know that's not true. Some smaller countries are neutral."
    -Robert Orben
  • "There is no such thing as paranoia."
    -F.X.Leach, Altamont, 1969
  • "There is no such thing as paranoia in a presidential campaign. Anything you fear or suspect will almost always turn out to be true, and the fix is always in, somewhere, and the enemy of your enemy is not always your friend."
    -Hunter S. Thompson, Better Than Sex
  • "You know, there's a word for people who think that everyone is out to get them.."
    "Yes! Perceptive!"
    -Woody Allen
  • "Remember, a paranoid is simply someone in possession of all the facts."
    -Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan #30
  • "I sense much distrust in you. Distrust leads to cynicism, cynicism leads to bitterness, bitterness leads to the Awareness Of True Reality which is referred to by those-who-lack-enlightenment as "paranoia". I approve."
    -David P. Murphy (dpm#myths.com)
  • "Paranoia is just another word for longevity."
    -Laurell K. Hamilton, The Laughing Corpse
  • "Perfect paranoia is perfect awareness."
    -unknown
  • "Paranoia is reality seen on a finer scale."
    -Philo Gant, Strange Days
  • "The issue is not whether you are paranoid, the issue is whether you are paranoid enough."
    -Max, Strange Days
  • "Why are you so paranoid, Mulder?"
    "Oh, I don't know. Maybe it's because I find it hard to trust anybody."
    -Scully & Mulder, The X-Files, "Ascension"
them_old_southern_ways ↩
"them old southern ways do remain, entrenched like mildew. They're always lurking, waiting for a chance to expose themselves, like a priest in a preschool."
-Mr. Cranky's review of Cookie's Fortune
grandmas_goin_nightclubbin ↩
"At a risk of being called sexist, ageist and French, if you put multimedia, a leather skirt and lipstick on a grandmother and take her to a nightclub, she's still not going to get lucky."
-Jean Louis Gassee, chairman of Be, in a NY Times article "Behind Microsoft's Shift on Windows"
god_is_not_on_our_side ↩
"Tuco: "God is on our side because he hates the Yanks!"
Blondie: "God is not on our side because he hates idiots also."
-The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly
you_primitive_screwheads ↩
"Alright you primitive screwheads, listen up. See this? This is my boomstick! It's a twelve gauge double barreled Remington, S-Mart's top-of-the-line. You can find this in the sporting goods department. That's right this sweet baby was made in Grand Rapids Michigan. Retails for about $109.95. It's got a walnut stock, cobalt blue steel and a hair trigger. That's right. Shop Smart. Shop S-mart. Ya got that?! Now I swear, the next one of you primates, even touches me..."
-Ash, "Army of Darkness"
precisely_wrong_answers ↩
"Looking at the quality of 90% of the web pages out there, I think it is probably unrealistic that people will [be] applying RDF in an intelligent way.

In fact, using RDF in a fractured or improper way may even be more detrimental than good 'ol heuristics. Malformed RDF will send syntactically correct, but semantically incorrect metadata to a search engine equipped to handle it. This is a dnagerous combination--it makes bad search results more precisely wrong. I'd rather that have good guess than a precisely wrong answer."
-Cassius on Slashdot.org

your_web_page ↩
"Yes, web page maintenance takes time. But for a company that has *most* of it's fan-base online, your web-page makes Godot look like a track star. Glaciers rise and melt before your webpages change. If it wasn't for the forums, I don't think I'd see any activity on your company webpage at all."
-"Carl L. Congdon" (carlcong#nni.com) about <www.white-wolf.com>
microsoft_protection ↩
"Hey, Vinnie and me are here to tell you why you should buy Microsoft. Because your data is important, and it'd be a real shame if something happened to it. You might say your data could use some protection. It'd be terrible if this here computer room caught fire, or if your sysadmin were to somehow fall into a cement mixer. See, if you were a Microsoft shop, the odds of such things happening would be significantly lower, if you get my drift. So how many copies can I put you down for?"
-double_h on Segfault.org
tequila ↩
"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history, with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila."
-Mitch Ratcliffe, Technology Review, April 1992
death_and_taxes ↩
"I am afraid that as death becomes less certain, taxes will get worse."
-Mary Smith (mary#att.com) in rec.arts.sf.written
unity_of_freedom ↩
"The unity of freedom has never relied on uniformity of opinion."
-John F. Kennedy
linus_microsoft ↩
"There's certainly a strong case for people really disliking Microsoft. Most of that is because their operating systems really suck."
-Linus Torvalds
homo_sapiens ↩
"Q.Why the hell would I want to use an operating system with a command line interface in 1999?!!

A. Because you are a member of Homo sapiens, a species whose methods for communicating have evolved over thousands of years from using pictures and glyphs to using written and spoken language.

Or, perhaps you are not."
-an anonymous coward on slashdot.org

besides_the_wench_is_dead ↩
"Barnadine: "Thou hast committed --"
Barabas: "Fornication? But that was in another country; and besides, the wench is dead."
-Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta
our_country_right_or_wrong ↩
"Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong."
-Stephen Decatur, April 1816

"Our country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right."
-Carl Schurz (1829-1906)

"And say not thou "My country right or wrong," Nor shed thy blood for an unhallowed cause."
-John Quincy Adams (1767-1848) Congress, Slavery and an Unjust War, c. 1847

the_age_of_virtuous_politics ↩
"The age of virtuous politics is past, and we are deep in that of cold pretence. --Patriots are grown too shrewd to be sincere, and we are too wise to trust them."
-William Cowper (1731-1800)
the_ability_to_reason ↩
"(Note: I would like to apologize in advance for the exceedingly bitter and hostile tone of this rant, but I won't. The ablility to reason is what separates humanity from the other animals, and my contempt for those who willingly discard it is finite but unbounded.)"
-(cluelessnewbie#my-dejanews.com)
social_skills ↩
"Those who have never tried electronic communication may not be aware of what a "social skill" really is. One social skill that must be learned, is that other people have points of view that are not only different, but *threatening*, to your own. In turn, your opinions may be threatening to others. There is nothing wrong with this. Your beliefs need not be hidden behind a facade, as happens with face-to-face conversation. Not everybody in the world is a bosom buddy, but you can still have a meaningful conversation with them. The person who cannot do this lacks in social skills."
-Nick Szabo
katz_computer_people ↩
"The people who make, sell, market and service computers will stand among the most arrogant and inhuman in the history of capitalism. The fear, confusion, callousness, cost, time and grief spawned by this industry is almost unprecedented in the history of business."
-Jon Katz (jonkatz#bellatlantic.net)
world_domination ↩
"I used to dream of world domination. In fact I had a go at it one weekend. Sadly, the whole plan ground to a halt when I ran out of leather."
-Intensity (tense#logicworld.com.au)
idiots_have_always_been_exploited ↩
"Idiots have always been exploited, and this is only right. The day they cease to be, they will triumph, and the world will be lost."
-Alfred Capus, c. late 19th cent.
the_best_safeword ↩
"(And it can be quite eye-opening to the more sheltered among us--present company excepted--just how wide a range of activities under the umbrella of sexuality that two or more people can find mutually pleasurable. For instance, taking your cue, hot wax on genitals and other tender body parts is a significant element in the Japanese SM subculture.)"
-Michael P. Kube-McDowell
"Just remember that my safeword is, 'Agh! Don't do that! Help! Stop!'"
-Joel Rosenberg (joelr#bigfoot.com)
linus_copyright ↩
"I personally am very disgusted by people who advocate inferior products for purely political reasons. If it's inferior, you should work on making it better, but advocating it only because it happens to have the copyright of your choice is WRONG."
-Linus Torvalds (torvalds#transmeta.com)
einstein_free_ourselves_from_this_prison ↩
"A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "universe", a part limited only in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal decisions and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
-Albert Einstein
cael_is_colder_than_thou ↩
"Jeez I'm cold-hearted today. Not caring about people, only whether they'll die soon enough not to cost me much money. Try to top that."
-Niels Bakker
"Well, there's always going out and killing them so as to make *sure* they don't cost you any money. And recycle them for food to cover the disposal costs."
-Cael (cjacobs#fallschurch.esys.quux) from the Scary Devil Monastery
my_weakness_for_abusing_power ↩
"How is it that I have root access when my weakness for abusing power is so apparent?"
-Derick Siddoway (derick#xmission.xmission.com) in the Scary Devil Monastery
tmcm_you_little_nut ↩
"TMCM: "Wait a second, that was YOU in the MONKEY SUIT! I thought those handcuffs looked familiar. YOU were the ONE who almost DESTROYED REALITY!"
Ciggy, his sidekick: "It's TRUE. I just wanted some ATTENTION."
TMCM: "You little NUT. Well... DON'T do it again."
-Too Much Coffee Man
distributed_computing_sucks ↩
"ObDBMS: Just because a column is NULL is ****NO FSCKING EXCUSE*** to run off whimpering for mummy, dammit! Come back here and bloody well tell me what the columns are CALLED, you bastard! Two days, wasted! Databases suck. Distributing software is merely a ploy to get it to suck on more boxes simultaneously..."
-Peter Morrison (peterm#astea.co.il)
ccmail ↩
"cc:Mail is a wonderful application, as long as you don't want to read or send mail."
-Jan van den Broek (balglaas#xs4all.nl)
i_cant_send_mail ↩
"I can't send mail!" "What happens when you try?" "IT doesn't go!" "Do you get an error message?" "Yes!" "What is it?" "I don't know!" Not said: "Are you a COMPLETE DROOLING FSCKHEAD IDIOT WHO NEEDS ALTERNATING SIGNS THAT SAY "BREATH IN" AND "BREATH OUT" TO LIVE?"
-Geoff Depew (mephron#idt.net)
preserves_the_sanctity_of_our_republic ↩
"I think it is extremely important that we all consume large quantities of beer, whiskey, and various illicit substances while playing loud music and dancing and falling down. Only in this way can we be assured that all these things we're talking about are thoroughly discussed in a rational, sensible manner, with ample consideration given to all sides of the argument, proper cost-benefit analyses prepared, and ultimately, a solution found which provides the greatest good for the greatest number of people, upholds the social contract, and preserves the sanctity of our Republic (patriotic music swells in the background)."
-Greg Mullen (gregmullen#hotmail.com)
hogan_upbeat_themes_and_happy_endings ↩
"I also like old-fashioned, upbeat themes and happy endings. Although life doesn't always seem that way, I believe that in the long term things get better. I don't think we're about to overpopulate the planet, blow ourselves into oblivion, poison ourselves into extinction, degenerate into Nazis, or disappear under our own garbage. For ten thousand years the power of human reason and creativity has continued to build better tomorrows, and nothing says it has to change now."
-James P. Hogan
panamsat_truth_and_technology ↩
"Truth and technology will triumph over bullshit and bureaucracy."
-PanAmSat rocket
mcnealy_the_petri_dish_of_choice ↩
"I call Windows the petri dish of choice on the Internet. It's the opportunity to download a virus from anywhere and infect corporate information."
-Scott McNealy
microsoft_spin_doctor_confesses ↩
"I have absolutly no problem with people using Java as a better language for Win32 programming (I would prefer if they stuck to x-platform stuff but oh well). The problem I do have is with MS not also providing the Core Java APIs."
-D'Arcy Smith (darcy#itools.symantec.com)
"I do understand your perspective. However what you're suggesting effectively translates to Microsoft developing and maintaining, on Windows, a runtime subsystem that competes with Windows and other Microsoft technologies and which is specified by an alliance of our largest competitors."
-Carlos Blanco (carlosbl#microsoft.com) in USENET article <5vpq6j$pcf@news.microsoft.com>
greenspan_gold_standard ↩
"The abandonment of the gold standard made it possible for the welfare statists (government bureaucrats) to use the banking system as an unlimited expansion of credit. In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation... Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the "hidden" confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process."
-Alan Greenspan
greenspan_erection ↩
"Alan Greenspan must sit in his room alone, cradling an 8 foot erection and a bottle of high dosage Viagra, on the phone with Jeff Bezos, ordering his copy of Harry Potter IV, realizing his entire life has led to this moment, and that must sade him."
-Jack Shedd, "A Better View"

[I figure that's supposed to be "sate"--author must have got carried away with the sexual metaphors]

dont_feed_the_lusers_to_the_wolves ↩
"Wolves are nice creatures; what have they done to deserve eating lusers ? Not only that, but if you *did* feed the luser-stew to the wolves there is a fair chance that they'd turn into lusers as well. Would you really want a group of wolves asking you why the hunt was down all of the time and wanting to know how to track prey every 10 minutes or so ?"
-Simon Burr (simes#bpfh.net)
its_not_my_job ↩
"It's not my job to teach you how to read or to think. If you have a critical failing in either of those abilities, you will find yourself in situations where you will look foolish because of it."
-Sean K. Reynolds
gilder_i_await_the_death_of_television ↩
"Today, I await the death of television, telephony, VCRs, and analog cameras with utter confidence as Moore's law unfolds. Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner, John Malone, are you listening?"
-George Gilder
rick_cook_publishing_suggestions ↩
"I've had stuff accepted for technical publication, but I want to get into the (hard) science fiction/science fact published arena. Suggestions and/or recommendations?"
"Lie down in a dark room until the feeling passes. :-)"
-Rick Cook (rcook#BIX.com)
get_a_job_in_the_games_industry ↩
"You can, from my impressions at least, get a job in the games industry knowing nothing about games coding but having memorized the windows API instead, and, fuck me, does that show in the current output of games."
-Keith M. Lucas (sillywiz#excession.demon.co.uk)
batman_and_robin ↩
"You could probably find homoeroticism in a lot of shows if you look close enough. Most likely you'll find it just because that's what's on your mind. You know what I mean? Take Batman and Robin for example. An older man takes a young boy under his wing, takes care of him, dresses him in tights...maybe that's a bad example."
-Scout (rxb21#cwru.edu)
british_readers ↩
"Apparently, British readers enjoy the thought of seeing horrid things, wetting their pants, going mad, and dying a horrible gory death, not necessarily in that order, more than they enjoy the thought of being a hero. Now that can't be very healthy. Realistic maybe, but not healthy."
-Bridget Farace (janetf#popalex1.linknet.net)
hogsheads_standard_policy ↩
"These people are clearly idiots, and the only blessing is that if they don't order your product, you won't have to put up with their fuckwitted behaviour any more. Hogshead now has a stated policy of Not Doing Business With Fuckwits, which has saved me enormous amounts of heartache over the last few months. I recommend it."
-James Wallis, Hogshead Publishing
never_reload ↩
"Q: "Hey Johhny, how come I never see you stop to reload your guns?"
A: "You have discovered my secret, Sai Yuk. I am actually a mutant with the superhuman ability to move clips of ammunition faster than the eye can see. But please, you've to help me; tell no one."
-Edward McWalters (edward20#ix.netcom.com)
the_hand_of_friendship ↩
"When Avon holds out the hand of friendship, watch his other hand--that's the one with the hammer."
-Vila, Blake's Seven
bubblegum_crisis ↩
"A Bubblegum Crisis is what happens when you blow a huge bubblegum bubble and it pops and gets all over your face and hair and won't easily get cleaned up. In other words, a wierd and yucky problem that just won't go away."
-Tosh imichi Suzuki, creator of Bubblegum Crisis anime series
turn_the_other_cheek ↩
"Christ said to turn the other cheek!"
"Christ was never west of the Mississippi, now gimme my gun!"
-Robert Urich, Lazarus Man
awt_curses ↩
"Anyone know of an AWT version that uses Curses?"
"Almost everybody I know that uses the AWT curses about it all the time."
-Neil Bartlett (neilb#the-wire.com) and Dan Jacobs (djacobs#BlueSky.net) on the advanced-java mailing list
remember_where_you_are ↩
" It's open house at the community medical center. There's also a brain surgeons' convention in progress. The signs are unclear, the center is poorly laid out, few employees and fewer visitors know what's going on. You walked in the wrong door. [...] So remember where you are, learn what you can, and remind these people (gently, ever so gently) about the outside world every now and then...."
-Dan Strychalski (dski#cameonet.cameo.com.tw)
nicolls_anecdotes ↩
"frankly, James' store sounds like paradise [...]" "The downside is that I come with my store and people have been known to gnaw one leg off to escape my anecdotes, which tend to be long and require 8 dimensional diagrams to relate to the preceding conversation."
-James Nicoll
theory_and_practice ↩
"Keep in mind that I've never done this. This is all theory and, in theory, there's no difference between theory and practice... but in practice, there is."
-Joe Emenaker (jemenake#lab.busfac.calpoly.edu)
i_am_infallible ↩
"Can you people not see what happens when you don't listen to me? How many times must I tell you I am infallible?"
-Chris Magagna (chris#uidaho.edu)
users_are_playthings ↩
"If I cannot use the users as playthings, I don't really see too much purpose in having them on my systems."
-Chris Magagna (chris#uidaho.edu)
bill_morden_gates ↩
"Of course, the best thing about Java is that it's a great way to stick a finger in the eye of Bill "Morden" Gates."
-John Kennedy (kennedy1#bwmail1.hcc.com)
piper_last_resort ↩
"He was opposed to the use of force. Force, he believed, was the last resort of incompetence; he had said so frequently enough since this operation had begun. Of course, he was absolutely right, though not in the way he meant. Only the incompetent wait until the last extremity to use force, and by then, it is usually too late to use anything, even prayer."
-H.Beam Piper, "A Slave Is A Slave", Empire
valid_input ↩
"I (and, I suspect, many) have several (very expensive) references which deal only with trivial examples using wholly valid and in-range input. Nowhere can I find anything that describes this particular behaviour, possibly because the authors live in a world where there's only valid input."
-John Seitz (100424.3215#CompuServe.COM)
white_paper_joke ↩
"Your development cycle is much faster because Java is interpreted. The compile-link-load-test-crash-debug cycle is obsolete--now you just compile and run."
-The Java White Paper: Introduction to Java, by James Gosling & Henry McGilton, ©1995 Sun Microsystems, Inc.
to_contribute_or_not_to_contribute ↩
"To contribute, or not to contribute, that is the question
Whether it is better in the long run
To continue to post messages to this thread
Which goeth round in circles, further and further off-topic.
Or to stop posting to it
And allow silly arguments to go unchallenged
Or on the other hand to stop reading it altogether
And by ignoring it, end it."
-Andrew Rilstone (Andrew#aslan.demon.co.uk) in rec.games.frp.misc
adventures_in_filing ↩
"By breakfast I was already warily looking for omens of worse-to-come and sure enough, the promised, freebie, plastic kitten of contentment was quite definitely missing from the artificially-sweetened, novelty cereal-product of life."
-Richard G. Clegg (richard#manor.york.ac.uk), in Adventures In Filing
the_variable_pi ↩
"..the variable PI can be given that value [3.141592653589793] with a DATA statement... This simplifies the modifying of the program, should the value of PI ever change."
-SDS Sigma series Fortran manual
jms_i_cannot_forgive ↩
"And I have lost people. Too many people. Lost them to chance, violence, brutality beyond belief; I've seen all the senseless, ignoble acts of "god's noblest creature." And I am incapable of forgiving. My feelings are with G'Kar, hand sliced open, saying of the drops of blood flowing from that open wound, "How do you apologize to them?" "I can't." "Then I cannot forgive."

As an atheist, I believe that all life is unspeakably precious, because it's only here for a brief moment, a flare against the dark, and then it's gone forever. No afterlives, no second chances, no backsies. So there can be nothing crueler than the abuse, destruction or wanton taking of a life. It is a crime no less than burning the Mona Lisa, for there is always just one of each.

So I cannot forgive. Which makes the notion of writing a character who CAN forgive momentarily attractive...because it allows me to explore in great detail something of which I am utterly incapable. I cannot fly, so I would write of birds and starships and kites; I cannot play an instrument, so I would write of composers and dancers; and I cannot forgive, so I would write of priests and monks and minbari...."
-jms

babbage_confusion_of_ideas ↩
"On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question."
-Charles Babbage
sterling_things_we_were_not_meant_to_know ↩
"In the moral universe of cyberpunk, we *already* know Things We Were Not Meant To Know. Our *grandparents* knew these things; Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos became the Destroyer of Worlds long before we arrived on the scene. In cyberpunk, the idea that there are sacred limits to human action is simply a delusion. There are no sacred boundaries to protect us from ourselves."
-Bruce Sterling, Interzone #6
byron_reason ↩
"He who will not reason, is a bigot; he who cannot, is a fool; and he who dares not, is a slave."
-Byron
jms_intestinally_based_reality ↩
"I'm sorry, but anyone who thinks the use of an angelic (or seemingly angelic character), whose likes have been written about for, oh, about 4,000 years, is ripping off Star Trek, has his head so thoroughly up his ass as to have blipped into an entirely new intestinally-based reality and desperately needs to get a wider frame of reference."
-jms
hideous_and_bad_music ↩
"I am astounded ... at the wonderful power you have developed--and terrified at the thought that so much hideous and bad music may be put on record forever."
-Arthur Sullivan, upon viewing of Edison's talking machine in 1888
gamma_world_electrical_tools ↩
"Fragment. A glorious campaign setting, that Gamma World. Gamma World just made a lot of memorable scenes--high drama using household electrical tools, a robot wielding a lawnmower attacking a raccoon with a power drill--combat was so delightfully bizarre. Wow."
-Frederic Bush (fbush1#cc.swarthmore.edu) in rec.games.frp.misc
jms_point_of_view ↩
"I understand your point of view that point of view is no less valid than any other point of view...and note that the point of view about point of view offered from this end elicited "I don't necess arily agree with that," because that point of view is not a point of view which coincides with your own point of view, thus is viewed by you as a not necessarily valid criticism, which fundamentally reinforces my original statement, from my point of view."
-jms
vir_some_favors ↩
"I'd like to live just long enough to be there when they cut off your head and stick it on a pike as a warning to the next ten generations that some favors come with too high a price. I want to look up at your lifeless eyes and wave like this [twiddles fingers]. Can you and your associates arrange that for me, Mr. Morden?"
-Vir, Babylon 5
durant_civilization ↩
"For civilization is not something inborn or imperishable; it must be acquired anew by every generation, and any serious interruption in its financing or its transmission may bring it to an end. Man differs from the beast only by education, which may be defined as the technique of transmitting civilization. Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul."
-"Our Oriental Heritage", by Will Durant, 1935
conan_barbarism ↩
"Barbarism is the natural state of mankind ... Civilization is unnatural. It is a whim of circumstance. And barbarism must always ultimately triumph."
-R.E. Howard, 1906-1936
schab_half_the_time_its_not_even_music ↩
"KUOI is pretty much worthless most of the time because they're always playing that stupid "Pacifica" news program instead of music and because "diversity reigns" you never know what you're going to hear when you try and listen to the station. Half the time it's not even music."
-Aaron Schab (aaro9435#uidaho.edu) in uidaho.talk, just before he was drawn and quartered
einstein_wireless_telegraph ↩
"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."
-Albert Einstein
most_star_trek_fans ↩
"Lord knows most Star Trek fans are gay."
-Robert Holland (rholland#triton.mayfield.hp.com) in rec.arts.sf.tv.babylon5
laurie_anderson_technology ↩
"Technology today is the campfire around which we tell our stories. There's this attraction to light and to this kind of power, which is both warm and destructive."
-Laurie Anderson
sysadmins_standard_tools ↩
"What do you mean? A handgun is a standard tool for a sysadmin, isn't it?"
-Kurt M. Hockenbury (kmh#linux.stevens-tech.edu) in the Scary Devil Monastery
western_union_telephone ↩
"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us."
-Western Union internal memo, 1876
games_programmers_burn_out_by_30 ↩
"Somebody once told me that games programmers burn out by 30 and I'm already 32 years old, so I want to write one last masterpiece before my brain siezes up completely and I have to go into management."
-P.J.Jefferies (peter#agp.win-uk.net) in rec.games.programmer
bacon_the_general_root_of_superstition ↩
"The general root of superstition is that men observe when things hit, and not when they miss, and commit to memory the one, and pass over the other"
-Sir Francis Bacon 1561-1626
views_of_morality ↩
"I seriously doubt our views of morality overlap in anyway. You draw yours from your own thoughts, emotions and the world around you from what I can tell. I draw mine strictly from scripture which is written in 4000 year old ink (That is as it was originally written ) and has nothing to do with my thoughts, emotions or the world around me."
-John Neff (jneff#uidaho.edu) in a rare moment of brutal self-honesty
fuck_themselves ↩
"Well, they can all just go fuck themselves."
"Experience has taught me that people don't just up and fuck themselves. They need someone else to fuck them. And that's why god created lawyers."
-"S.F.W."
jms_crucify ↩
"I told the producers, `If you do this story, the entire american viewing public will descend upon your offices, drag you out into the street, slap two telephone poles together and crucify you. And I will personally hand them the nails.'"
-jms
jms_the_love_of_jesus ↩
"Okay..now let's see...I read through all the notes, responded in a manner without profanity, and ....oh, dear. No profanity. Can't have that. So really, Kurt, and I say this with the love of Jesus in my heart...go fuck yourself."
-jms
jms_holy_shit ↩
"Holy shit, it's Rod Serling!"
-jms
obviously_unlike_you_people ↩
"Obviously unlike you people, I don't have time to edit the newsgroups line for every single article I post."
-The Magic Friend (markl#cs.yale.edu) in alt.folklore.computers
voltaire_worlds ↩
"If this is the best of all possible worlds, what are the others like?"
-Voltaire (1694-1778)
christian_fundamentalism ↩
"Christian Fundamentalism: The doctrine that there is an absolutely powerful, infinitely knowledgeable, universe spanning entity that is deeply and personally concerned about my sex life."
-Andrew Lias (anrwlias#netcom.com)
duckman_foreplay ↩
"When my clothes is off, that's foreplay!"
-Doug "Duckman" Poston
duckman_sex ↩
"Sex is good, but it's nothing to have a baby over."
-Doug "Duckman" Poston
government_solution ↩
"During the mid-1980s dairy farmers decided there was too much cheap milk at the supermarket. So the government bought and slaughtered 1.6 million dairy cows. How come the government never does anything like this with lawyers?"
-P.J. O'Rourke
lily_tomlin_be_somebody ↩
"I've always wanted to be somebody, but I see now I should have been more specific."
-Lily Tomlin
laurie_anderson_virtual ↩
"They're havin' virtual sex. They're eatin' virtual food. No wonder these puppets are always in a lousy mood."
-Laurie Anderson
hunter_s_thompson_drug_use ↩
"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me."
-Hunter S. Thompson
dr_seuss_drug_use ↩
"It's not that I'm ENCOURAGING drug use, I'm just saying it can do wonders for the ol' writers block."
-Theodore "Dr. Seuss" Geisel
bertrand_russell_sees_heaven ↩
"There is no difference between someone who eats too little and sees Heaven and someone who drinks too much and sees snakes."
-Bertrand Russell
pat_robertson_feminism ↩
"Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians."
-Rev. Pat Robertson, 1992 GOP Convention
wilde_slavery ↩
"Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralizing. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends."
-Oscar Wilde, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism", 1895
minsky_weakness_of_intelligence ↩
"Infants' early emotion signs clearly signify their needs. We later learn to use such signals in more exploitative ways. Thus you can learn to use affection or anger as a social coin in trade for various accommodations; for example, one can pretend to be angry or pleased, or even offer-that is, threaten or promise-to become angry or affectionate in certain circumstances. Our culture is ambivalent about such matters; on one side we're taught that emotions should be natural and spontaneous; on the other side we're told that we must learn to regulate them. We recognize in deeds (though not in words) that feeling may be easier to understand and modify than other parts of intellect. We censure those who fail to learn to control their emotions but merely pity those whose problem-solving capabilities are poor; we blame for 'lack of self-control,' but not for 'weakness of intelligence.'"
-Marvin Minsky
helen_keller_security ↩
"Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing."
-Helen Keller
jello_biafra_cartoon_tabloid_society ↩
"What kind of cartoon tabloid society are we living in when the archvillain we're all supposed to be afraid of is named Snoop Doggy Dog?"
-Jello Biafra
stop_worshipping_gods ↩
"Its time to stop worshipping gods, and aim at becoming gods."
-Markoff Chaney
egyptian_new_language ↩
"Would I had phrases that are not known, utterances that are strange, in new language that has not been used, free from repetition, not an utterance which has grown stale, which men of old have spoken."
-Anonymous Egyptian scribe, c.1700 BC
assyrian_earth_is_degenerating ↩
"The Earth is degenerating these days. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer mind their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching."
-Assyrian stone tablet, c.2800bc
kepler_celestial_ships ↩
"Provide me with ships or proper sails for the celestial atmosphere and there will be men there, too, who do not fear the appalling distance"
-Johannes Kepler
buckminster_fuller_roots ↩
"People are born with legs, not roots."
-R. Buckminster Fuller
jefferson_information ↩
"Information is the currency of democracy."
-Thomas Jefferson
jefferson_books ↩
"I cannot live without books."
-Thomas Jefferson
knuth_bugs ↩
"Beware of bugs in the above code: I have only proved it correct, not tried it."
-Donald Knuth
reteif_toast ↩
"To our friends, the good guys. And to our enemies, the bad guys. And to the hope that someday we will be able to tell the difference."
-Keith Laumer
asimovs_3_laws_of_alien_behavior ↩
"Asimov's 3 Laws of Alien Behavior:
1) Their survival will be more important than our survival.
2) Wimps don't become top dogs.
3) They will assume that the first two laws apply to us."
-Isaac Asimov
piper_subject_or_citizen ↩
"If your franchise is not secured by force of personal arms, you are a subject, not a citizen."
-H.Beam Piper
jefferson_disarm ↩
"Laws that forbid the carrying of arms disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man."
-Thomas Jefferson, 1764
jefferson_right_and_duty ↩
"The Constitutions of most of our states (and of the United States) assert that all power is inherent in the people; that they may exercise it by themselves; that it is their right and duty to be at all times armed."
-Thomas Jefferson
lapierre_small_arms ↩
"The twentieth century provides no example of a determined populace with access to small arms having been defeated by a modern army. The Russians lost in Afghanistan, the United States lost in Vietnam, and the French lost in Indo-China. In each case, it was the poorly armed populace that beat the 'modern' army. In China, Cuba, and Nicaragua, the established leaders, Chiang-Kai Shek, Battista, and Somoza lost. Modern nations like Algeria, Angola, Ireland, Israel, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe only exist because guerilla warfare can triumph over modern armies. While we may not approve of all the resulting governments, each of these triumphs tells a simple truth: a determined people who have the means to maintain prolonged war against a modern army can battle it to a standstill, subverting major portions of the army or defeating it themselves or with major arms supplied by outside forces."
-Wayne LaPierre, "Guns, Crime and Freedom," p. 19-20
uk_weapons_control_laws ↩
"Colin Greenwood, a former head of Scotland Yard, testified in 1974 that the average criminal could obtain a handgun in the UK in less than 1 hour, at a cost of less than 50 pounds. When asked what effect the UK weapons control laws had on criminal access to arms, he replied "None"."
abolishing_violence ↩
"People who object to weapons aren't abolishing violence, they're begging for rule by brute force, when the biggest, strongest animals among men were always automatically 'right.' Guns ended that, and social democracy is a hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work."
-L. Neil Smith, The Probability Broach
the_most_evanescent_of_personal_rights ↩
"A franchise not secured by force of arms is the most evanescent of personal rights."
-E.K. Grant, The Yahweh Effect
henry_degradation ↩
"Are we at last brought to such humiliating and debasing degradation, that we cannot be trusted with arms for our own defense? Where is the difference between having our arms in possession and under our direction, and having them under the management of Congress? If our defense be the real object of having those arms, in whose hands can they be trusted with more propriety, or equal safety to us, as in our own hands?"
-Patrick Henry
hitler_gun_pseudoquote ↩
"The year 1935 will go down in history. For the first time, a civilized nation has full gun registration. Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future."
-Adolf Hitler
[search the talk.politics.guns FAQ for "Hitler"]
samuel_adams_our_country_men ↩
"If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest for freedom, go home and leave us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; and may posterity forget that ye were our country men."
-Samuel Adams
kenneth_clark_civilization ↩
"At this point I reveal myself in my true colors, as a stick-in-the-mud. I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time. I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology. I believe that in spite of the recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years; and in consequence we must still try to learn from history. History is ourselves. I also hold one or two beliefs that are more difficult to put shortly. For example, I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other people's feelings by satisfying our own egos. And I think we should remember that we are part of a great whole, which for convenience we call nature. All living things are our brothers and sisters. Above all, I believe in the [...] genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible."
-"Civilisation", Kenneth Clark

Index

A

a_computer_is_a_squirrel
a_new_system
abigail_sysadmins_oath
abolishing_violence
abyss
acknowledgments
act_wise
activex
adventures_in_filing
affleck_net
ali
allegations_of_arrogance
all_you_really_need_is_love
all_your_emulated_io
alumni
americans
ammo_laws
anoheliocentric
apple_nintendo
arguments
artisart
asimov_atheism
asimovs_3_laws_of_alien_behavior
assyrian_earth_is_degenerating
atheist
atheist_criminal
atlas_shrugged
awt_curses
B

babbage_confusion_of_ideas
bacon_the_general_root_of_superstition
bad_rep_by_association
bagbiting_loser_languages
batman_and_robin
bdfl
beautiful_phrases
bertrand_russell_sees_heaven
besides_the_wench_is_dead
best_ideas
best_policy
bill_morden_gates
bill_gates
x
binary_sigfile
bitter
black_and_white
black_bastard_aura
black_plague
blimps
braces
brautigan_love_poem
brents_law_of_wikis
brightest_minds
british_readers
bsd_is_for
bubblegum_crisis
buckminster_fuller_roots
burn_the_bible
burning_city
bush_atheists
byron_reason
C

cael_darwins_mat
cael_is_colder_than_thou
caffeine_plant
canadian
capricious
carbon_line_has_been_crossed
cas_beast
communism_and_capitalism
car_wreck
carcosa
carmack_programming_is_the_central_focus_of_my_life
carmack_stories
carrie_fishers_chair_fetish
ccmail
celibate_or_clever
century
ceo_jesus
change
cheezwhiz
christian_fundamentalism
cisco_vs_whats_right
clarify_the_intention
clint_libertarian
clue
cockranch
codewarrior
come_in_alone
comedy
communication
complete_bastards
conan_barbarism
cool
cool_games
courtesy
coyote
cplusplus
crappy_graphics
credibility
crooked_house
crossing_the_road
cultural_tolerance
customer_service
D

daikatana
dark_and_moody
dark_and_stormy
darren_primary_stat
darren_that_noise
darren_you_all_owe_me
dead_devos
death_and_taxes
dedicated_to_animals
deeply_stupid_idea
demanding_work
destiny
devotion_to_beauty
diatribe
dijkstra_debugging
dijkstra_would_not_approve
disassembled
discipline
discourse
discrimination
disney_diary
distributed_computing_sucks
disturbance
dnd
disconnect_me
dogbert_test
dont_feed_the_lusers_to_the_wolves
dont_mess_with_steely_dan
dont_trust_stallman
dr_seuss_drug_use
drug_tests
duckman_foreplay
duckman_sex
ducks
dungeon_clearing
durant_civilization
E

edgar_friendly
egyptian_new_language
eight_glasses_a_day
einstein_free_ourselves_from_this_prison
einstein_religion
einstein_wireless_telegraph
elvis_scientology
english
esr_inspired_by_work
evil_internet
evil_plan
excellence
excessive_sarcasm
expanding_the_freedom_thesaurus
F

fags_and_mobiles
falling
falwell_911
faith
fantasy
fantasy_books
fatal
feynman
fight_club_animals
fight_club_bansai
fight_club_change_your_life
firefly
first_amendment
first_law
flash_animation
flattery
flutterby_usability_engineers
fortran
frankenstein
freedom_zero
freetards_lost
friendliest_distro
frontpage
frossie_dark_side
fscking_solaris
fsj_tardville
fuck_themselves
G

g_in_baghdad
games_programmers_burn_out_by_30
gamester
gamma_world_electrical_tools
gandhi_ii
gasoline
gates_eye_contact
gay_scouts
genghis_khan
get_a_job_in_the_games_industry
get_bent_you_prole
get_on_the_damn_elevator
getting_older
gilder_i_await_the_death_of_television
god_is_not_on_our_side
goober_culture
good_vs_evil
gorecrow
gorilla_organizations
gosling_dynamic_languages
government_solution
govt_they_deserve
gpl_vs_freedom
grandeur
grandmas_goin_nightclubbin
greenspan_erection
greenspan_gold_standard
grognards
grotesquely_overdesigned_world_domination
grows_on_you
H

hani_wish_you_the_very_worst
happy_stderr
harts_y2k_policy
hate
hate_stupid_people
healthy_attitude
heavy_drugs
heinlein_sf_literature
helen_keller_security
henry_degradation
hideous_and_bad_music
high_tech_society
hipcrime
hitchens_hellish_heaven
hitchens_religion_ends
hitler_gun_pseudoquote
hogan_upbeat_themes_and_happy_endings
hogsheads_standard_policy
holiest_of_gods
homo_sapiens
hot_tech_support
how_to_use_computers
html_postings
hubbard_control
human_interaction
humanity_has_advanced
hunter_s_thompson_drug_use
I

iClovis
i_am_infallible
i_cant_send_mail
i_give_up
ibm_was_arrogant
icarus
ichi
idiots_have_always_been_exploited
illogical_thought_processes
immortality
inane_gabble
incompetence
innovative_interesting_and_cheesy
insanity_sauce
insult
intarweb
integrity_of_mind
intelligence
ironic
irrtainment
its_not_my_job
J

java_grows_on_you
jefferson_books
jefferson_disarm
jefferson_information
jefferson_right_and_duty
jello_biafra_cartoon_tabloid_society
jewels_poetry
jms_crucify
jms_holy_shit
jms_i_cannot_forgive
jms_intestinally_based_reality
jms_point_of_view
jms_the_love_of_jesus
job_well_done
johnny_cash_country
journalist_love
jobs_connect_the_dots
jobs_design
joey_ramone
joyce_park_herdthink
joyce_park_startup
justice
K

kapor_second_life
katz_computer_people
katz_post_microsoft_era
keep_it_confused
keep_your_illusions
kenneth_clark_civilization
kepler_celestial_ships
kgb_supernatural
klingon
known_threat
knuth_bugs
knuth_unit
knuth_xp
L

languages_worth_knowing
lapierre_small_arms
lara_logan_news
larkin
laurie_anderson_technology
laurie_anderson_virtual
lawnmower_man
laziness
leo_cherne
lily_tomlin_be_somebody
linus_a_project
linus_copyright
linus_gnome
linus_lignux
linus_microsoft
linus_oppenheimer
lisp_l33t
list_man
listen_to_me
literary_allusion
lordfly_penis
lott
love
lovecraft_religious
lowered_expectations
M

mac_design
mac_geeks
machines
make_linux_more_like_windows
malevolence
mangled
mark_is_bitter
marks_law
martin_luther_reason
mcelwaine_conspiracy
mcnealy_the_petri_dish_of_choice
me_html
me_knobs
me_nice
medieval_speedboats
meditations
meeting_education
memory_schnapps
mencken_gang
mib_everybody_knew
mib_human_thought
microsoft_protection
microsoft_spin_doctor_confesses
mike_sphar_sysadmin_oath
milk
millenios
minsky_weakness_of_intelligence
minter_idealistic
misanthrope
misinformation
mlkj_bright_daybreak
mob_movies
mobydick
morality_that_matters
most_star_trek_fans
mr_blandings
mr_frosty
ms_disease
ms_newsgroups
ms_standards
ms_steal_java
ms_terrorism
ms_weakest_link
mud_mechanics
my_weakness_for_abusing_power
N

naming_animals
net_reality
never_ask
never_reload
nicolls_anecdotes
nietzsche
nixon_reagon
no_greater_loss
no_points
nobilis
norman
northwest
nostalgia
not_meant_to_be_eaten
not_socialist
not_the_way
nothing_so_silly
nsincompetence
O

obviously_unlike_you_people
omnibenevolent
one_does_not_argue
opinion
osmosis
our_country_right_or_wrong
P

p2p
panamsat_truth_and_technology
panhandlers
paper_shredder
paranoia
pat_robertson_feminism
pdf_vs_shockwave
pedantry
peertopeer
people_like_you
people_of_the_night
people_remover
perl
personal_touch
pilgrim
piper_last_resort
piper_subject_or_citizen
piper_welfarers
possum
precisely_wrong_answers
preserves_the_sanctity_of_our_republic
pretentiousness
professionalism
programming_meaninglessness
psychopaths
Q

quality
quality_of_crap
quote
R

rah_crooked_house
random_numbers
reading_the_bible
refreshing_occult
refusal_to_prepare
register_guesses
religion_will_turn_out_to_be_a_very_transient_response
religious_elephant
remember_where_you_are
responsibility
reteif_toast
rexx
rich_and_famous
rick_cook_publishing_suggestions
rifkin
risky_business
rms_technical_merit
rock_music_is_of_the_devil
roll_high
rorschach
rotwang_monopoly
ruagod
rugose
rvb_neighborhood
S

sagan_hard_truth
sagan_little_god
samuel_adams_our_country_men
sam_harris_cosmos
sanity
satanic
satans_domain
saundersons_observation
schab_half_the_time_its_not_even_music
science_fiction
scifi
scsi_problems
seattle
seattle_rain
secrecy
sega
sex_and_programming
sex_and_violence
sf_book_movies
shoddy
shriekback
shrinking_market
simple_justice
sincerity_is_a_vice
sleazy
snotty_mac_user
social
social_skills
solve_problems
soundwave
sp_arrested
special_olympics
specwonks
spidergoat
spiders
stambler_library
stambler_sf
stapps_ironical_paradox
stars
steinbeck_collaboration
sterling_free_software
sterling_things_we_were_not_meant_to_know
stop_worshipping_gods
straw_man
subtlety
such_a_nice_guy
swiss_cheese_memory
sysadmins_standard_tools
T

take_away_consciousness_and_reality
take_your_work_seriously
tanuki_aka_dante
tanukis_special_sense
teaching
tech_support
technically_sweet
techno_savvy_women
tell_em_bob
ten_foot_pole
tequila
terrible_people
the_ability_to_reason
the_age_of_virtuous_politics
the_best_safeword
the_hand_of_friendship
the_most_evanescent_of_personal_rights
the_power_to_create_headaches
the_truth
the_variable_pi
them_old_southern_ways
theorize
theory_and_practice
threading
tibet
time_to_write
tmcm_you_little_nut
to_contribute_or_not_to_contribute
to_suggest
torture
transitional_forms
translucent_plastic
tug_betterment_of_fools
tug_no_one_is_safe
tug_virtues_and_vices
turn_the_other_cheek
twain_dog
U

uk_weapons_control_laws
umph
underwear
unity_of_freedom
unix_romantic_ideal
users_are_playthings
V

valid_input
vampire_staking
vegetius_peace
verisimilitude
vice_city
views_of_morality
viking_sims
vim_y2k
vir_some_favors
visual_basic
void_magic_diploma_wand
voltaire_prayer
voltaire_worlds
vr_sex
W

walk_the_walk
want_to_be_rich
war_down_the_proud
warren_baby_jesus
warren_fireworks
warren_lepers
warren_zombie
we_believe
we_lost_a_moron
weed_confesses
wesley_eating_christ
western_union_telephone
what_is_gpl
wheeler_rasfw
white_paper_joke
why_do_you_make_comics
why_go_to_space
wilde_slavery
wilkes_errors
winer_software_design
winnie_criticism
wirth_use_this
working
world_domination
wow_kicks_ass
woz_good_engineer
woz_hero
woz_jr_pimp
write_about_what_you_know
X
Y

you_go_to_hell
you_primitive_screwheads
your_web_page
Z

zefrank_ugly
zodiac_bike
zot_vat
Links:


+-Mark Damon Hughes: Software Gallery
+-Mark Damon Hughes: Software Gallery Blog
+-@mdhughes on Twitter
+-
iPhone Games:
+-Perilar: Role-playing game for the iPhone.
+-Castles: Strategy wargame for the iPhone.
+-DungeonDice: Tabletop RPG dice roller for the iPhone.
+-Nexus Worlds: Multiplayer Online Adventure Game for the iPhone.
+-
Computer Games:
+-Java Perilar: Adventures in the Dragon Kingdoms.
+-Hephaestus: Computer RPG construction kit.
+-GameScroll: Simple interactive fiction authoring.
+-Aiee!: "An Interactive Environment Engine" text adventure system.
+-Umbra: Post-apocalpytic computer RPG.
+-
Utilities:
+-JICB: Portable ICB client written in Java.
+-ThoughtPad: A tiny note-taking utility.

Site Pages:


+-Audio
+-Blank page
+-Camera
+-Cyberpunk
+-Game Design
+-Hacker
    +-Java
    +-NetRexx
    +-Python
+-Hello Kitty
+-Quotes
+-Religion
+-RPG
    +-The Bomb
    +-DUDE
    +-G.P.A.
    +-Phobos
    +-SIX WORD RPG!
    +-Weapons
    +-What's Wrong
  With AD&D?
+-Text
    +-H.Beam Piper
    +-Snow Crash
+-Universal Search
+-Video
+-Videogames
+-Virus Warning

Blog Archive
Blog Topics:


+-News
+-Cocoa
+-Mac
+-Media
+-Personal
+-Quotes
+-Religion
+-Roleplaying
+-Science
+-SecondLife
+-Society
+-Software
+-Toys
+-Web

Feedback  | Key: ] =local file, * =off-site link  | Copyright © 2003-2005 by Mark Damon Hughes | Subscribe with RSS 2.0
This site was created with Vim :wq