Because, Jack, you volunteered to be taken down into eternal torment in place of her. This is the absolute minimum (unless I'm mistaken) that any female requires from her man.
Neal StephensonTags: women humour relationships
But when you walk through yonder gate,” Churchill said, pointing toward the Middle Tower at the end of the causeway, which was visible only as a crenellated cutout in the orange sky, “you’ll find yourself in a London you no longer know. The changes wrought by the Fire were nothing. In that London, loyalty and allegiance are subtle and fluxional. ’Tis a chessboard with not only black and white pieces, but others as well, in diverse shades. You’re a Bishop, and I’m a Knight, I can tell that much by our shapes, and the changes we have wrought on the board; but by fire-light ’Tis difficult to make out your true shade.
Neal StephensonI beg your pardon?" Robson says.
One thing Waterhouse likes about these Brits is that when they don't know what the hell you're talking about, they are at least open to the possibility that it might be their fault.
Tags: funny-because-it-s-true
Wartime lipstick is necessarily cobbled together from whatever tailings and gristle were left over once all the good stuff was use to grease propeller shafts. A florid and cloying scent is needed to conceal its unspeakable mineral and animal origins.
It is the smell of War.
Hacker with Bullhorn: "Save your money! Accept one of our free tanks! It is invulnerable, and can drive across rocks and swamps at ninety miles an hour while getting a hundred miles to the gallon!"
Prospective Station Wagon Buyer: "I know what you say is true...but...er...I don't know how to maintain a tank!"
Bullhorn: "You don't know how to maintain a station wagon either!"
Buyer: "But this dealership has mechanics on staff. If something goes wrong with my station wagon, I can take a day off work, bring it here, and pay them to work on it while I sit in the waiting room for hours, listening to elevator music."
Bullhorn: "But if you accept one of our free tanks, we will send volunteers to your house to fix it for free while you sleep!"
Buyer: "Stay away from my house, you freak!
Tags: humor
Most of Csongor's time in T'Rain had been spent blundering about in a state of hapless newbie confusion. Only his long experience as a system administrator, struggling with Byzantine software installations, had prevented hum from plummeting into despair and simply giving up. Not that any of the sysadmin's knowledge and skills were applicable here. The psychological stance was the thing: the implicit faith, a little naive and a little cocky, that by banging his head against the problem for long enough he'd be able to break through in the end.
Neal StephensonTags: persistence computers cockiness sysadmins
What he wasn't so good at was manipulating the internal states of other humans, getting them to see things his way, do things for him. His baseline attitude toward other humans wass that they could all just go fuck themselves and that he was not going to expend any effort whatsoever getting them to change the way they thought. This was probably rooted in a belief that hed been inculcated to him from the get-go: that there was an objective reality, which all people worth talking to could observe and understand, and that there was no point in arguing about anything that could be so observed and so understood.
Neal StephensonIn the center of that open space, a bony woman in a threadbare garment was hunched over a dead plant.
Sword of Divine Fire's reaction was succinct: "Fuck!" The woman cringed as if he'd hit her with a bullwhip. Then: "What has happened to our potato?
. . . if money is a science, then it is a dark science, darker than alchemy. It split away from Natural Philosophy millennia ago, and has gone on developing ever since, by its own rules.
Neal StephensonTags: money
Never been here before. It's like something on the top floor of a luxury high-rise casino in Atlantic City, where they put semi-retarded adults from South Philly after they've blundered into the mega jackpot" Hiro Protagonist - Snow Crash
Neal StephensonTags: sci-fi cyberpunk hiro-protagonist snow-crash
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