“…the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
—Italo Calvino, “Invisible Cities”
Category: quotes
Essays on Programming I Think About a Lot
“Fast tools don’t just allow users to accomplish tasks faster; they allow users to accomplish entirely new types of tasks, in entirely new ways.”
—https://www.benkuhn.net/progessays
Change the tool, change the outcome.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot on Twitter: “Hey, Karen. Watch your mouth.”
Marginal Gains
“The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improved it by 1%, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together,” he explained…”
—Matt Slater, “Olympics cycling: Marginal gains underpin Team GB dominance.” BBC. August 8, 2012.
True of cycling. True of life.
Discordian Quotes
Handwashing: The Litany Against Fear
h/t Damien Williams
Political Parties are the Sam’s Club and Costco of Opinions
“The defining quality of an ideologue, whether on the left or the right, is to acquire one’s opinions in bulk.”
-:Paul Graham, “The Two Kinds of Moderate.” PaulGraham.com. December 2019.
…In Witness of the Dawn
Chaotic Principles or Robert’s Rules of Disorder
- Chaotic Principle No. I: Divest yourself of expectations.
- Chaotic Principle No. II: You will never be totally in control.
- Chaotic Principle No. III: Be a fool, not a sadist. You should be able to take it as well as dish it out.
- Chaotic Principle No. IV: Allow people the validity of their own emotions (humor is a very serious thing).
- Chaotic Principle No. V: Solidarity is a necessity.
- You’ll lose people over time. More committed people, more energy.
- Nothing is ever over when you think it is.
- Chaotic Principle No. VI: Play it out to the end.
- Agree beforehand on the desired outcome.
- Chaotic Principle No. VII: The more extreme the act, the more extreme and varied the response will be.
- Chaotic Principle No. VIII: Humor is as relative as anything else.
- Chaotic Principle No. IX: Fear is a state of mind. The fear / risk ratio is not proportional.
- Chaotic Principle No. X: We have many things to risk besides our lives.
- Chaotic Principle No. XI: We subconsciously believe we have experience things when we have only watched them. We have not.
- Chaotic Principle No. XII: When we test the fantasies of ourselves, we fall short. So we do not.
See 1977 Evolution into Chaos: A Chronology by Gary Warne
Observations on the Long Take
“It is thus absolutely necessary to die, because while living we lack meaning, and the language of our lives (with which we express ourselves and to which we attribute the greatest importance) is untranslatable: a chaos of possibilities, a search for relations among discontinuous meanings. Death performs a lightning-quick montage on our lives; that is, it chooses our truly significant moments (no longer changeable by other possible contrary or incoherent moments) and places them in sequence, converting our present, which is infinite, unstable, and uncertain, and thus linguistically indescribable, into a clear, stable, certain, and thus linguistically describable past (precisely in the sphere of a general semiology). It is thanks to death that our lives become expressive.”
-Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Observations on the Long Take.” October. Vol. 13 (Summer, 1980), p. 6.
