People love to talk about the immortality of the machine, but I’m a mechanical engineer, so I know they delude themselves. Most machines are far more mortal than flesh.
How long does a machine last? A car is a very solid machine, expensive, precision designed, and you’re lucky if you get more than three decades out of them.
Your enemy is not the flesh. It’s entropy. It’s the death knell of the energy imbalance. If you want to live as a complex machine you will, by necessity, generate a great deal of entropy until your machine breaks irrevocably.
You want to be immortal? Then don’t worship the machine, worship the stone, the forest. Seek that which is either simple enough to never know death or diffused enough to accept every death.
reading a book with a medieval setting and i was v excited for it BUT these characters have such modern hangups about touch and personal space that i keep forgetting it’s meant to be the fourteenth century. lads. get in bed together, it’s cold.
like this man is freaking out about sleeping next to someone (for warmth) because he has never shared a bed before
sir??? you are from the fourteenth century??? surely this is not such a novelty to you
also so far christianity does not exist in this book. we have not even so much as mentioned passing a church while travelling.
i repeat: sir, you are from the fourteenth century,
honestly i need somebody to write “there was only one bed with five other people in it” immediately, that sounds like it’s either going to be incredibly full of repressed yearning, incredibly funny, or just an orgy, and i would love to see it go in any and all of those directions
divorced couple energy ship will always be immaculate to me. we hate each other. we’ve seen each other naked. I know how you take your morning coffee. I will never make you your morning coffee again. get it yourself. here you go, I gave it to you anyway. you disgust me. I will always be somewhat in love with you. I will be yours forever. you’re not mine anymore. you will always be mine. fuck you. let’s fuck, for old time’s sake. did you steal my cd? no, no. keep it.
Did I daydream this, or was there a website for writers with like. A ridiculous quantity of descriptive aid. Like I remember clicking on “ inside a cinema ” or something like that. Then, BAM. Here’s a list of smell and sounds. I can’t remember it for the life of me, but if someone else can, help a bitch out <3
The black areas represent the remaining natural dark skies in the United States
I’ve been in the middle of the ocean at night and now live in texas and it is so hard to explain to people that no, they have not ever seen the night sky. It is so hard to explain to people that what they think is a proper night sky is fucking pathetic. A disgrace.
People talk about how you can’t see stars in the city and yeah, that’s true, but their concept of “seeing stars” is being able to make out orion’s belt.
So, so few people have see the sky in all its glory and it’s not sad. It’s a fucking crime. Seeing a perfectly dark night, no clouds, not a hint of light pollution? That’s a fucking religious experience.
The sky the vast vast majority of us grew up with is not the sky that inspired us to look up. It is not the sky that inspired constellations. You can’t even see most constellations.
Your ancestors looked at the night sky and said “surely, that is where the gods must live.” And you might be lucky if you can see hardly more than a handful of stars.
The sky is full, fucking FULL, of stars, and you’ve never seen them.
I remember the first time I saw a properly dark sky and was like ‘oh that’s why it’s called the milky way’ and promptly started to cry
When we were on a field trip to the middle of the red sea, I remember us all crowding at the end of the boat that didn’t have lights and just lying on our backs and staring
When you see a properly dark starscape
You understand why people wrote poems and made up legends and built rockets and said heaven’s in the sky
The universe is infinite. So are the stars
I’m trying to find a picture on google images to show you what I mean and I can’t find any
You think of the night sky like fairy lights on black velvet, but it’s not it’s not it’s like, like, dust in sunlight, like - I can’t find the words.
The stars are everywhere, like sugar, like glitter, like dust. You can’t find the constellations at first, not because you can’t recognise them, but because there’s so many stars you can’t pick out the familiar line of Orion’s belt. The North star has gone from bright familiarity to almost vanishing among a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million other lights. The milky way is a line of light arcing across the sky like a moon-trail on water only infinitely, infinitely bigger.
And for the first time in your life you’ll understand why people call it a dome, because it is, it’s three dimensional in exactly the way a city skyscape isn’t.
You’ll understand why Luthien Tinúviel danced under starlight, not moonlight, why people in a time before we knew the earth was round still looked up and wondered and built telescopes and dreamed about the stars.
The stars are endless and ancient and infinite and you will stand with your head craned back and your rucksack forgotten at your feet and you’ll feel like you’re falling upwards into that great bright sky like it’s calling you home and you’ll wonder how you ever thought the stars were beautiful before tonight when all you’d ever seen were the naked empty skyscapes of your home. And you’ll cry and you’ll spend the rest of your time there gazing up and wondering and imagining what it would be like to stand among those bright silver flecks
And then you’ll come home, and look up, and fall in a different kind of love with that handful of blazing stars to stubborn to be outdone by the whole of human invention, leading you home despite the light pollution and the clouds and the endless bustle of this shrinking planet.
pushing daisies really was a modern retelling of orpheus and eurydice in which they knew they wouldnt make it out of the underworld so instead they simply built a life together on the stairs
Not knowing that you have a villain inside you, a hero, and a bystander is a lesson that everyone should learn.
What is the quote from Jingo, by Sir Terry Pratchett, to the effect of “when someone does something terrible, we want it to be one of Them, because if it isn’t Them, then it is Us?”
“It was because he wanted there to be conspirators. It was much better to imagine men in some smoky room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over the brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn’t then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told their children bedtime stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was Us, what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things.”
Jingo. 1997. Pratchett, Terry. NY, London, and Ankh-Morpork: Harper-Collins. p. 205
You’re not a kid anymore. You have the right to choose your own life. You can start again. If you want a cat, all you have to do is choose a life in which you can have a cat. It’s simple. It’s your right.
“I’ll figure it out” is a powerful statement. Yes, you may not know what to do next or where to even begin… but you are ready and willing to do what it takes. You will in fact figure it out.
