rage-space

bookworm playing the part of a human. badly, I might add. 

[rage-space]

(Skilled maintainers advise never trying to solve a new or complex problem without a thorough mulling first.)

— Stewart Brand, Maintenance: Of Everything p.22

[rage-space]

The darkest things are the hungriest and they’ll eat what shines.

- Hallorann

[sewercentipede]

Silent Hill 2 (PS2, 2001)

[rage-space]

"having" something is an artificial notion. it's a judgment call

Juice, 17776

[JUICE] . [JUICE] . [JUICE] . [JUICE] . [JUICE] . [JUICE] so ok. the thing about this game is that you don't really "watch" it. ok? because

[rage-space]

Who was it who said, uh, "even if life is forever, each moment of it is a miracle?" I think that's just something we tell ourselves. We're just ordinary and forever, I think.

Lori, 17776

(https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football/nashville-tennessee-west-virginia)

[rage-space]

"Even if man is indeed capable of anything, he surely cannot achieve it in just any way. He will eventually achieve every goal if he so desires, but he will understand before that that the price he would have to pay for achieving such a goal would reduce this goal to absurdity."

Summa Technologiae, Stanislaw Lem p.91

[rage-space]

This universe was not planned as a comfortable home for humans.

- Bernd Graefrath, LEM’S PHILOSOPHY OF CHANCE IN HIS FICTION AND NON-FICTION, doi:10.37240/FiN.2022.10.1.4

[rage-space]

"The Earth rushing through the emptiness of space, spinning on its axis, but you don’t feel it. For to feel it is to be scared and happy at once and to know that nothing matters but that you do what you do and what you do you are. And I felt it, and I knew I was moving into the future. There is no past anybody can get to, to alter things or even to know for sure what they were, but there is definitely a future, we are already in it."

Joyce Carol Oates

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1994/10/24/zombie

[rage-space]

“Nothing in life, I think, ordinarily happens in great, thunderous episodes of obvious and dramatic force. Life is a series of small things, and most of them mean much or little depending on how the observer thinks of them.”

- william sloane, to walk the night (1937), chapter 13

[rage-space]

The Haunting of Hill House opening paragraph.

[70sscifiart]

Victor Valla’s 1971 cover to Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror

[homoquartz]

i’ve warmed up significantly towards the concept of small talk ever since i learned that its sole purpose is to make friendly noises.

as long as you smile and nod, people are satisfied. it’s just to show that you are nice and there with good intentions. we’re small in a big world and have to rely on other people to be decent to us. so we do our little human dance to each other to say, “i’m not here to hurt you. here’s something we have in common, like the weather or sports or itchy sweaters, so we both know we’re on the same team. we both agree on a basic fact, like that it is rainy or that being itchy is uncomfortable, and this proves we can get along. i’m being light-hearted and non-threatening right now.”

small talk isn’t to get to know a person. it’s just a greeting to affirm you’re buddies in the universe.

i am motivated by wanting the other person to know i am friendly, so i have gotten pretty decent at small talk when i used to hate it.

[bestiolin]

Sila Sehrazat Yucel

[rage-space]

Everything is public now, potentially: one’s thoughts, one’s photos, one’s movements, one’s purchases. There is no privacy and apparently little desire for it in a world devoted to non-stop use of social media. Every minute, every second, has to be spent with one’s device clutched in one’s hand. Those trapped in this virtual world are never alone, never able to concentrate and appreciate in their own way, silently. They have given up, to a great extent, the amenities and achievements of civilization: solitude and leisure, the sanction to be oneself, truly absorbed, whether in contemplating a work of art, a scientific theory, a sunset, or the face of one’s beloved.

Oliver Sacks - The Machine Stops (2019) https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/02/11/the-machine-stops

[cruelmiracles]

I had missed the precious moment when the planet first came into view. Now it was spread out before my eyes; flat, and already immense.

Stanislaw Lem ǁ Solaris (1961)

[smarterinabsentia]

[quotation--marks]

A silent storm had set the cloudless horizon ablaze. A streak of light, the first ray of the blue sun, penetrated the room and broke up into sharp-edged reflections; there was a crossfire of sparks, which coruscated off the mirror, the door-handles, the nickel pipes. The light scattered, falling on to every smooth surface as though it wanted to conquer ever more space, to set the room alight.

Stanisław Lem, Solaris (trans. Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox)