08 October 2014 @ 04:04 pm
 
I can believe that things are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen—I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it’s aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time (although if they don’t ever open the box to feed it it’ll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know that I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, that while all human life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
/American Gods by Neil Gaiman/

(Jo dalīties ar random gabaliņiem ir tik labi, kā man nupat bija tā laime tikt atgādinātai.)
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deestructa: toutalī kortnija[info]neoplasm on October 8th, 2014 - 04:30 pm
man patīk tas, kas notiek viņa galvā un kā viņš to māk izlikt uz papīra. also, it only makes sense that he's married to amanda :))
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falter ego: save the wolf[info]shiry on October 8th, 2014 - 04:43 pm
He really is just so very effing awesome all-around, isn't he.
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302cc9b4780f8cbef6f70c3a8417913050b6aafb[info]mindbound on October 8th, 2014 - 04:31 pm

"There's nothing down there at all," he said, finally. "Nothing that thinks. I never liked it down there, it's all just... raw instinct, at the center. Left over from way back when the limbic system was the brain. Only now it's just unskilled labour, right? Just one small part of the whole, to do all that petty autonomic shit the upstart neocortex can't be bothered with."

"You die from the outside in, did you know that?" he said, when the silence hurt more than the words. "And then, just for a moment, the center is all you are again. And down there, nobody wants to... you know, even the suicides, they were just fooling themselves. Intellectual games. We're so fucking proud of thinking ourselves to death that we've forgotten all about the old reptilian part of the brain sleeping inside, the part that doesn't calculate ethics or quality of life or burdens on the next of kin, it just wants to live, that's all it's programmed for, you know? And at the very end, when we aren't around to keep it in line any more, it comes up and looks around and at that last moment it knows it's been betrayed, and it... screams."

"Something waking up in the core of ourselves, after a hundred million years for that one last moment, scared to death."

/Flesh Made Word, P. Watts/

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falter ego: scallywag's day off[info]shiry on October 8th, 2014 - 04:41 pm
You stop it, you stop it right now. XD Tagad man vēl īsie stāsti būs jāpiekabina visam milzu sarakstam, nu, I can't even.
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302cc9b4780f8cbef6f70c3a8417913050b6aafb[info]mindbound on October 8th, 2014 - 04:44 pm
OK, tad one last one from Blindsight, kas jau ir tikusi piekabināta. XD

"Evolution has no foresight. Complex machinery develops its own agendas. Brains - cheat.

Feedback loops evolve to promote stable heartbeats and then stumble upon the temptation of rhythm and music. The rush evoked by fractal imagery, the algorithms used for habitat selection, metastasize into art. Thrills that once had to be earned in increments of fitness can now be had from pointless introspection.

Aesthetics rise unbidden from a trillion dopamine receptors, and the system moves beyond modeling the organism. It begins to model the very process of modeling. It consumes evermore computational resources, bogs itself down with endless recursion and irrelevant simulations.

Like the parasitic DNA that accretes in every natural genome, it persists and proliferates and produces nothing but itself. Metaprocesses bloom like cancer, and awaken, and call themselves I."
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falter ego: scallywag's day off[info]shiry on October 8th, 2014 - 04:51 pm
Vai, paldies, es tā vien jūtu, ka šis būs tieši laikā depresētiem novembra vakariem, kuros apcerēt savas eksistences būtību, khh.
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302cc9b4780f8cbef6f70c3a8417913050b6aafb[info]mindbound on October 8th, 2014 - 04:53 pm
Not exactly my thoughts, but - "When­ever I find my will to live be­com­ing too strong, I read Peter Watts." /James Nicoll/
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falter ego: scallywag's day off[info]shiry on October 8th, 2014 - 05:03 pm
Lūk, lūk, tieši tā pēc šiem dažiem citātiem arī izklausās.
Well, I guess I'll see for myself, eventually.
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302cc9b4780f8cbef6f70c3a8417913050b6aafb[info]mindbound on October 8th, 2014 - 05:03 pm
Yeah.
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