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557
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| Feb 27, 2016
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 19, 2024
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Sep 19, 2024
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Sep 19, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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556
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| 1538707551
| 9781538707555
| 1538707551
| 3.61
| 2,147
| Sep 07, 2021
| Sep 07, 2021
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Hedge fund managers, they go on CNBC all the time to pump up a stock. All I do is post my balance sheet on WallStreetBets after market close.
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Notes are private!
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Sep 19, 2024
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Sep 19, 2024
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Sep 19, 2024
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554
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| 1637744765
| 9781637744765
| 1637744765
| 4.49
| 762
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| Jul 09, 2024
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it was amazing
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It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes. —Charlie Munger my first business, MetaLab, which designed ap It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes. —Charlie Munger my first business, MetaLab, which designed apps for Silicon Valley startups in high school I was making thousands of dollars a week running an Apple news website out of my bedroom. being public has its benefits. “Sometimes Mr. Market is fearful and undervalues your company. Other times, he’s euphoric, sending your stock to the moon." It gives you the ability to buy back your shares at a great price, or to use them to buy other companies. Munger went on to outline how such a deal could work. For example, Chris and I might become majority owners of the new company, and Munger and the other Daily Journal shareholders would own the rest of the combined company. We’d be the public face of it; he’d stay on the board and coach us through it. We’d run all of the day-to-day operations, and we’d be able to enjoy the benefits of being a public company without the headaches of actually going public. He concluded by telling us to think it over. We often rented our spare bedroom to foreign exchange students as a way to supplement our income Dad used these dinners to teach us about the world. He’d make a statement and our job was to take the other side and debate him my parents wanted us to read books At dinner one night, I asked my dad about his retirement savings. He quipped with a playful smirk that he didn’t have a pension, so I was his retirement plan. A joke that filled me with a dread vacation at Club Med I kept seeing similar websites that reviewed tech products. I asked around and I realized that these companies were sent “review units.” Free computers, speakers, headphones, hard drives—you name it—by the companies that made them, in hopes that they would be reviewed and written up, getting the companies press. My eyes lit up. It seemed too good to be true, but this could be the holy grail: free, unlimited tech gear. Like an email spammer, I started sending hundreds of emails. I’d rush downstairs at five in the morning to hit publish and watch as hundreds of thousands of visitors came to the site. Some of our stories even got picked up by mainstream media outlets like CNBC and the Boston Globe. Mecca for Apple nerds—the Macworld conference in New York—where Steve Jobs usually launched Apple’s new products. I sent an email to my contacts on the Apple PR team: “I’m going to be at Macworld next week and was hoping to interview Steve. Possible?” While I was upset that I wouldn’t get to meet Steve Jobs, I realized something important. I had asked for something amazing and gotten something great in exchange. If I’d asked for a tour of the Apple Store, I probably would have gotten a “nice try, kid,” but by shooting for the moon and asking for something that was hard to give, I was met with a compromise that was better than I could have hoped for. A couple of years ago, this scene would have been my fantasy. I wanted money, girlfriends, and friends to party with. I wanted the penthouse suite, even the hickeys. I was making $6 an hour as a trainee barista “So, how’d you guys learn HTML and CSS?” “What do you charge someone for a website like that?” “How do you find your customers?” they were able to do three to four projects at a time, and that they charged five to ten thousand dollars per website. By my almost-failed-junior-year math, that was twenty to forty thousand dollars per month in revenue. A veritable fortune compared to my $1,500 a month barista paycheck. I realized that I had it all wrong: I was the guy making the espresso, but I wanted to be the guy drinking it My bible became a book called Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm. another book, called “skeuomorphism”—popularized by Apple I was an “autodidact,” a pretentious way of saying I preferred teaching myself to being taught. It was all in a book. reverse engineering famous websites a job board called Authentic Jobs for contract web design. I applied for every single project This was how every business worked—creating the demand, building the systems and processes, hiring other people to do the work, then charging enough for whatever it is that you’re selling that you turn a profit. Counterintuitively, you didn’t actually do most of the work yourself, and yet you earned the profits for putting it all together. He’d started with a street-side coffee cart, working long hours himself, before signing a lease for the café. He’d come up with the concept, hustled to get some press and generate word of mouth in the neighborhood; he’d hired, trained, and bet on his employees. Ultimately, the buck (and a huge amount of stress) stopped with him. When it worked, you could reap the benefits of the reward. I still hadn’t learned the lesson of what happened when it didn’t work. Rather than rely on job boards to find new customers, I started networking. I flew to every conference I could find online. TED, Summit Series, and Y Combinator’s Startup School in Palo Alto. I started to cold-email CEOs of startups that had just raised ungodly sums from venture capital. I had a simple insight: most CEOs checked their own emails Whenever I saw a company announce a big raise on TechCrunch, I’d figure out the CEO’s email and contact them. With the confidence that only a one-line email can convey, I’d send mysterious messages like, “Hey, big fan of your business. Would love to work together.” Believe it or not, these random cold emails—most of which took me less than a minute to send out —ended up winning some of MetaLab’s biggest clients and helped me build friendships with some of the most successful people in business. Every agency in the world is chronically two to three months away from going out of business, and MetaLab was no different. Forget sleeping in, Jason and David got paid while they slept. “We’re the top interface design firm in North America,” I would tell a throng of startup founders in a packed bar at the SXSW conference My sales technique was simple: be fun to drink with and ask a ton of questions about whomever I happened to be talking to. It worked surprisingly well. At conferences, I quickly started to learn that the most important business connections were made in bars, gossiping with drunk executives. Buying a round of drinks often generated a huge return on investment. For instance, there was a big Facebook party in Austin, where I got a crowd of startup founders wasted on my credit card. I must have bought a hundred tequila shots that night. It was a monstrous bar bill, but it more than paid for itself a few months later, when they needed design help and one of them (whom I clearly didn’t get drunk enough) remembered my name and reached out to see if my “interface design firm” was accepting new business. “We’d like to move you from a per-project basis, to a monthly retainer. We need to move faster.” Unfortunately, I was too young and inexperienced to realize I was being greedy, or to align our incentives so we both made more money as the company grew. Instead, I quelled his concerns with a small raise and started going on spending sprees. I vowed that, going forward, I would never spend more than 10 percent of my profits on my lifestyle. Everything else would be saved, invested, or used to start new businesses. we worked on a redesign of YouTube. We helped build Walmart’s e-commerce technology. We even did top-secret projects for Apple. The project was to design a then unknown app for a guy called Stewart Butterfield. That’s when he described his idea: a chat platform for teams. “We’re thinking of calling it Slack,” he told me. “I can pay you an $80,000 flat fee. Slack sold for $27.7 billion eleven years later in 2020. While I didn’t get any of that money from Slack’s sale, our work helped shine a spotlight on MetaLab, and it grew 5x over the next few years. Suddenly, everyone wanted a sprinkle of the same magical fairy dust that had propelled Slack to a multibillion-dollar company. I needed to befriend the project and product managers who had enough power within a company to hire my design firm (which in turn would make them look good to their bosses). my weekly calendar, which was filled so neatly it looked like someone who lost a game of Tetris I had underinvested in friendships “Worst Capitalist in History,” managing to create a business that, unbelievably, lost more and more money with every sale. Before long, I was losing $10,000 a month. I knew I was failing, throwing good money after bad, but I had no idea how to fix it. If I raised prices, my sales plummeted. If I spent more on Facebook and Google ads, that just cost me more money when people made purchases, compounding my losses. In fact, everything I did just seemed to make it worse. It felt like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall. my cat furniture business was fundamentally unprofitable. I had gotten extremely lucky with my first business. Partly because it was astonishingly simple, with an uncomplicated formula: Find clients. Charge them an hourly rate. Pay contractors a lower hourly rate. The difference was all profit. There was no office or physical location required, just a computer with an internet connection. My biggest overhead was an Adobe Photoshop license. If business slowed down, my contractors found other work and I could always cancel my software subscriptions. It was almost impossible to fail. I dropped out of college after a semester, but Mark was tougher than me and stuck it out. As MetaLab had grown, I started referring Mark freelance copywriting jobs from my clients. He always delivered on time, on budget, and his copy complemented our work perfectly. So, I called him and asked if he’d be interested in running MetaLab for a few weeks while I was in Europe. “What do you mean, run it?” Mark asked me. “It’s more like house-sitting than anything else,” I told him. “You just need to water the plants, feed the cats, and make sure the place doesn’t burn down.” “I have an idea,” I told him. “Why don’t you shadow me for a few days, and I’ll teach you the ropes?” He heard me deal with complaints, send bills, make sales calls, and work through the design process. Like so many aspects of business, these aren’t discrete skills; they are instead often qualitative skills you can’t teach in a class. It turned out that not only did MetaLab still exist, but Mark had managed to sign new clients in my absence, and had even improved several of our processes. He’d been in business for over a decade by this point and the library in his office was stacked wall-to-wall with business books that he’d read. He seemed to have advice on just about any topic, from accounting, to HR, to hiring. Over lunch, I’d ask him about all manner of business problems and he always seemed to have the perfect answer—he’d been there, done that He began analyzing our profit margins, finding opportunities to run more efficiently. He’d negotiate everything, from our office rent to the coffee beans we bought in bulk for the office. “chicken skin,” a harmless cosmetic skin condition that was easily resolved with an over-the-counter skin cream the pickaxe seller envious of the gold miners At a tech conference in Vancouver, I ran into Harley Finkelstein, who, at the time, was the COO of Shopify. He told me that they were looking for a partner to design templates for their platform and he liked our work. Essentially, they wanted to offer a wide range of well-designed themes for merchants to choose from when starting their online stores. each theme selling for prices ranging from $49 to $249. thirty thousand dollars a month. I realized that we had stumbled into an incredible business model: we’d build a theme just once, which was a week or two of work, then sell it an infinite number of times. Our only ongoing cost was a trickle of bug fixes and support tickets. Before long, everyone from tiny startups to huge companies like Tesla and the LA Lakers were using our themes. As Shopify grew, we grew alongside. A barnacle on the whale that was Shopify Choosing the right business partner is as important as who you marry. If your romantic partner defines your happiness at home, your business partner defines your happiness at work. But it’s more intense than a romantic partner: you can’t easily divorce your business partner. Unless you are able to negotiate buying them out, you’re locked in forever. Chris proved to be a genius. Where I was spendy, he was cheap. He drove a ten-year-old car, ate a bagged lunch, and negotiated his every purchase relentlessly, in one case spending six months haggling over a different used car (he ended up waiting out the salesman and getting it for just above cost). On a relatively modest income from managing a McDonald’s in high school, then working his way up at the bank, he had squirreled away savings, which he had grown into hundreds of thousands of dollars via conservative stock market investing. I was the complete opposite. Spending on a whim, never negotiating price and stocks that frankly sounded boring. Who’d want to do that when you could start a company? We shared a few key qualities: an ability to understand people in a deep way, an obsession with reading and learning, and a shared sense of right and wrong. MetaLab, Pixel Union (Shopify themes), Flow (project management software), Ballpark (invoicing software), and Clients From Hell (a popular blog we’d spun up) Bob was interested in buying the business in what he called his “family office.” (I’d later learn this is business speak for “I’m so rich I have a team of people managing my personal money.”) My hesitation led Richard to increase his offer. He doubled it to $4 million. If someone was willing to double their offer that quickly, was I giving away something that could grow to be worth more than that? Richard called me and raised his offer again. Then it happened again. There’s a ceiling to every negotiation. A point where you end up negotiating against yourself, and I knew if I didn’t take this deal at that number, they would probably grow frustrated and walk away. Finally, at the behest of Brian, I signed on the dotted line. As soon as I signed the “letter of intent,” a document that locked me in and prevented me from negotiating with any other potential buyers while they looked through my financials, bank statements, tax filings, and operational structure, the tone immediately changed. Richard went from being my best buddy, gushing praise and complimenting the business, to having a seemingly endless number of concerns about the company. One in particular made me laugh: There was a small discrepancy in revenue between months due to an arcane accounting rule. A few hundred dollars, an irrelevant sum, didn’t add up. In reality, there was nothing wrong with our revenue and this was just a negotiation tactic, but he told me this raised “serious concerns” about the quality of our accounting and said that we would need to renegotiate. Richard pointed out other troubling issues, such as our complete lack of diversification and our precarious dependence on Shopify. With no executive team to speak of and a staff composed almost entirely of juniors, our company appeared to be rudderless. As Richard spoke, I could feel my anxiety mounting, and I wondered if our ship was already sinking. “Look, the only way I can see this deal going forward is with an earnout. Andrew, if you’re so confident it will be double the size in two years, why don’t you commit to that?” “You still get your $7 million, but…we do $3 million paid up front. Another $2.5 million once the business doubles.” More writing on the whiteboard. “Then $1.5 million in stock that you continue to hold and can sell at a later date.” “This one has a hot tub and an infinity pool.” Some places had wine cellars and built-in minibars. Little movie theaters to entertain friends. Ten-car garages. Manicured gardens and sprawling maple, chestnut, and Liriodendron trees. Even one that had a helicopter pad (which would clearly be pointless without a helicopter). the next rung of the latter. Bigger planes. More expensive houses. Faster cars. Another thing surprised me: instead of strengthening my relationships with my friends, it seemed to hamper them. when I struck it rich, I decided to share my newfound wealth. When I took my friends out, I’d always be the one to grab the check, pay for the tickets to the concert, buy the drinks; later, the plane and hotel. What I soon realized, though, was that in many instances this generosity backfired and had the opposite effect. At one dinner with an old friend and his girlfriend, I preempted the bill and paid it on my way back from the bathroom. He seemed miffed that I had paid the bill. Like I was showing off, or implying he couldn’t afford it. After that experience, I started to default to splitting the bill or letting the other person pay for it if they went for it. But oddly enough, a different annoyance cropped up. People would be equally upset with me. They felt I was being cheap and that I should just pay given my newfound wealth. It was a catch-22. The tallest blade of grass, which needed to be cut down to size. Business awards. Exclusive conferences like TED and Davos. Events like Burning Man and Art Basel. What’s sad about this mimetic phenomenon is that it convinces people to sacrifice their own happiness to achieve whatever goal their peers have assigned value to, even when it’s not an authentic desire of theirs. The Warren Buffett Way mercurial CEO burn unholy amounts of cash He had an incredible knack for calibrating himself from person to person. He’d figure out what they liked to talk about and what their personality was, and dial himself up or down accordingly. It was impressive to watch. Upton Sinclair quote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Munger said that “problems are often easiest solved in reverse” and explained that it’s much easier to think about what you don’t want than what you do. We made a list of what we called our “Anti-Goals.” Make a few good decisions, then do nothing. The quantitative side—the numbers —those could be sketched on a napkin. If it required any more thought, he said, it was best to pass. “Hey Dan, Hope you’re well. Not sure if you’ve ever considered selling Dribbble, but I’d love to talk about it if you’re interested.” “Hey Dan, just checking in. I know I’m being annoying, but please let me know if you guys change your mind.” a top employment lawyer ‘Never wrestle a pig. You’ll both get dirty, but the pig will enjoy it.’ You need to catch him red-handed.” ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 2024
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Aug 2024
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Aug 26, 2024
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Hardcover
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553
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| 1416562591
| 9781416562597
| 1416562591
| 3.77
| 195,040
| Apr 22, 2008
| 2008
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From 1-1000 AD India constituted roughly 30% of the world's GDP. In the old days, there were over 1000 castes in India. But today, there are only two: From 1-1000 AD India constituted roughly 30% of the world's GDP. In the old days, there were over 1000 castes in India. But today, there are only two: those born to be masters and those to be servants. Rich men are born with opportunities they can waste. But a poor man...? Over the next weeks, I learned the ways driver’s cheat their masters: 1) give your master phoney invoices for repairs that are not necessary. 2) sell your master’s petrol to other drivers. 3) As you gain confidence, cruise around picking up and dropping off paying customers. Delhi has many pick-up points. Over time you will learn them all. White Tiger Drivers! I’ve got thirty drivers who work in shifts with twenty-six vehicles, all airconditioned for the summer months. Put together with my bank holdings, and I am worth fifteen times the sum I borrowed from Mr. Ashok. But for the poor there are only two ways to get to the top, crime or politics. Is it like that in your country too? I have switched sides. I’ve made it. I’ve broken out of the coop. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 18, 2024
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Jun 18, 2024
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Jun 18, 2024
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Hardcover
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552
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| 006228665X
| 9780062286659
| 006228665X
| 4.05
| 204
| Jan 10, 2017
| Jan 10, 2017
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I was lucky to be the son of a scientist and explorer—my father was a NASA astronaut the adage that luck is the intersection of preparation and opport I was lucky to be the son of a scientist and explorer—my father was a NASA astronaut the adage that luck is the intersection of preparation and opportunity. computer games and commercial spaceflight. On the surface, these two areas would seem to have nothing to do with one another. But both are about exploring new frontiers, creatively envisioning ways to go places no one has before. it was pointed out that the Titanic lies in international waters and an American court did not have the jurisdiction to dictate what anyone could or could not do at the site. 1977 University of Oklahoma for seven weeks to study geometry, statistics, and computer programming. I learned to play Dungeons & Dragons. D&D is a role-playing game. reading The Lord of the Rings I took everything apart—and most of the time I was able to put them back together. I was considered the scourge of the family in anything electrical or mechanical. Anything that came into the house with motors, gears, or switches in it became my victim. the little 1½-volt slot car motors were insufficient. I needed more power. “I need more power” is not a statement that most parents like to hear. The only place we knew with computers was NASA, and with my father being an astronaut we had strong connections there, so we solicited the support of one of the space agency’s prime contractors, Lockheed-Martin. They allowed us to use their computer room Most of their computers ran Fortran, an early programming language that relied on punch cards. Some of them were written in an exotic text called assembly language, and sometimes they were in a version of BASIC. But there wasn’t even a universal BASIC. Bill Gates, for example, wrote his own BASIC that was put on an Apple. My father was an upper-atmosphere physicist who studied wave propagation and communication with satellites in the ionosphere. Radio waves normally can only communicate with something within their line of sight, which is why we have relay towers across the country. But under certain conditions it is also possible to bounce radio waves off the ionosphere to communicate with people over the horizon. Before computers existed it was difficult to determine precisely what frequency to use when transmitting and at what angle the antenna should be focused. That early generation of NASA scientists literally used slide rules to make those calculations, but it was largely guesswork. I wondered how—not if, but how—I could do that on a computer. And with a great deal of guidance and advice from my father on the physics involved, I wrote a program that solved that problem. It took the prevailing ionospheric conditions into consideration and showed graphically where the radio waves would go. My junior year project was called “Radio Wave Propagation with Computer Analysis.” That same approach could solve a variety of problems, including underwater sonography and a technique in which people looked for oil and other deposits by setting off explosions and tracking how sound waves bounced off rock formations. That also became my senior year project and it won a lot of awards, including fourth place in an international competition. While it couldn’t handle a business spreadsheet, it could be used to balance a simple checkbook. Manufacturers were boasting that eventually you would be able to use it to open and close your garage door. That we were able to sell any of them at $3,000 a pop was amazing. The real benefit of working at ComputerLand was that I had access to an Apple II, and I was able to write my games on it. I would estimate that at the time, there were probably fewer than a couple of dozen people anywhere in the world creating computer games, and not one of us could have imagined we were creating an industry that in less than three decades would become the largest and most successful entertainment industry in history, that a game would gross more in a few weeks than the most successful movie in history had earned in decades. California Pacific’s version of Akalabeth was priced at $34, of which I received $5; and they sold thirty thousand copies. I had earned $150,000, more than twice my father’s yearly salary as an astronaut. I had to grow into my success That $150,000 return on a $200 investment was phenomenally high; every game since then has had a much lower return on its investment. meteorites is evenly distributed across the earth. On average there is at least one visibly sized meteor lying on the ground per every kilometer on earth. there are two environments on earth in which meteorites may still be found in abundance. One is in desert regions like the Sahara, where people search for them with ultralight airplanes or large magnetometers. While they can be quickly buried by the shifting sands, the desert winds may expose them months or years later. The other region, arguably the best place on earth to find meteorites, is Antarctica. There is only one private company arranging tours throughout the interior of Antarctica: Adventure Networks International, founded by my business partner Mike McDowell. Antarctica some of the natural laws we take for granted just don’t apply. Antarctica is literally silent. It is a silence so profound that when the wind stops blowing there is nothing to be heard. There are no insects in Antarctica. In our normal environment we all know, for example, the size of objects like cars and telephone poles, and we know that as we get farther away from them they become smaller in our field of vision. In Antarctica there are no cars or telephone poles or other man-made objects of any kind. There is nothing to use as a basis for size comparison. Antarctica is larger than North America, but it is the least populated place on the surface of the earth. It is an environment in which every decision you make can have an impact on your survival. Like space, it is unforgiving. We were equipped with the most technologically advanced safety gear and still had to be extremely cautious. We made it to the South Pole and along the way found over forty meteorites, ranging from the size of a raisin to the size of a Ping-Pong ball. Initially, meteorites look no different from black rocks Unlike in the movies, piranha, I learned, will not generally attack unprovoked. vacuum-tube TV to watch Muhammad Ali’s fights. It didn’t interest me. When I became an adult I liked it even less, considering it a blood sport that often exploited economically disadvantaged young men. I watched the promoters making a bunch of money, but it was rare that a fighter walked away from the sport uninjured and financially secure. I used to think boxing was a pretty simple sport; two guys stand toe to toe beating the hell out of each other until one guy can’t take it anymore and falls down and the other person wins. Well, that was wrong. Boxing is very much like fencing; it is very difficult to hit someone who knows how not to get hit. For Robert, it was all about shareholder return and return on capital. If the leader comes in late and departs early, that becomes the way the rest of the company operates. As I wasn’t being paid a salary, but only earned an income after a game was published and successful, I felt like I was clearly doing enough to create the next best-selling game. I’ve always believed that creativity can’t be produced on demand. Sometimes the spark is there and sometimes it’s not. unimpeded I learned how to run a business in an industry that was changing drastically every month. “Occasionally wrong, but never in doubt,” In less than six months, the IBM PC became the dominant machine in the market; everything else, including the Apple II, was suddenly irrelevant. Those half-completed games were essentially valueless, forcing us to start from scratch without any employees who knew how to program on the IBM PC; it used a completely different language that was not easy to learn. We would have to retrain our existing staff and/or hire new people. Robert calculated it would cost at least $2 million to finish the games, which was almost $2 million more than we had in the bank at the time. When you make a mistake like this, you can either take your loss or you can double down. The odds of success were relatively slim. In the video game industry about 90 percent of games fail. The logical decision was to close the company. I’ve long wondered about is, when we finally make contact with other civilizations, how will they communicate with us? It’s possible their language will have a symbolic representation language and writing is the foundation of a society In school, the Runic script I had learned from Tolkien proved to be very important. It was at least part of the reason I was a B or C student rather than failing many courses. Because no one else could read my Runic, including my teachers, I could write down anything I wanted and keep it in plain view. Before an exam I simply would write all the information I might need, in Runic, on the cover of that subject’s folder and when I came into class I would drop the folder down on my desk or on the floor where I could easily see it. I discovered the key to the creation of my next language—a book entitled Semantography/Blissymbolics by Charles Bliss. Blissymbolics is universal pictographic writing system that enables people to communicate with mentally handicapped children. what we in the gaming industry call “min-maxing” the game: players were spending the minimum time and effort to reach the maximum reward, victory. They didn’t care very much about the story, only about advancing. I think much of the Old Testament dogma is no longer relevant. How could I proclaim that people should not eat pork if I believed that law had been made specifically to protect people from diseases common at that time but that were no longer a threat? I wanted people playing my games to believe their character accurately reflected their own feelings and beliefs. At that time the concept of a gaming “avatar” did not yet exist. I learned about avatars while doing research on philosophy and virtue; Hindus use the word to describe the physical manifestation of an earthly belief or philosophy. When Hindu gods manifest on earth, they take the form of the god’s avatar. I thought, This is the player’s manifestation in my world, the world of Britannia. For a time I actually owned the trademark on the word, but it became so common so quickly that it was impossible to protect. Quest of the Avatar was published in 1985 it was very successful, with sales surpassing all previous Ultimas. we used to joke that if we really wanted to, we probably could make a pretty darn good religion. As we all know, there is a lot of money to be made in the business of selling belief systems. The reason we didn’t is because I consider it immoral. The entire concept of creating a fictional philosophy based on positive virtues in order to gain power and notoriety, and make a lot of money, is reprehensible to me. My goal each time I design a new game is to create a world that requires only the smallest suspension of disbelief for the player to believe it is real. Before D&D the only games I knew were board games like Monopoly in which players follow a strict set of rules, and the only way to win is to follow the instructions. If you draw a Go Directly to Jail card, you have to go directly to jail. You can’t plead for a lesser penalty, you can’t hire a great lawyer, you must go directly to jail. While initially D&D did have a rulebook, the rules mostly were storytelling guidelines. And most players ignored them. Growing up in Houston, just outside the front gates of NASA, I thought most everybody’s father went into space. Austin, Texas. The slogan proudly used by people who live there is “Keep Austin Weird,” You Imagine” were replaced by the web address magicatthemanor.com. When the invitation was put in a freezer, that phrase disappeared and the poem “magically” reappeared. It was printed with a special ink called FriXion, which is normally sold as erasable ink. I have a problem, for instance, with people who claim to be able to speak with animals and dead relatives. This is a very well-known, easily learned technique known as cold reading. It’s “magic” being used to exploit deep emotions and, too often, to steal money, and obviously is unscrupulous. Our servers couldn’t handle it. This is commonly referred to as “the m-squared problem.” Buyers for the largest game retailers like GameStop, Best Buy, Target, and Walmart didn’t have the time to meet with a hundred different game makers to review their games and decide how to fill their limited shelf space. They were interested in speaking only to the industry leaders, the top four or five publishers who controlled a large percentage of the market. in order to compete, we just had to get bigger. We either had to gang up with several other small companies to become a single larger entity We tried to knit together a consortium of smaller companies, which we then planned to take public. “Taking it public” was always a pretty enticing phrase. The reality is that EA earns most of its revenue with terrific games like Madden Football. Every year they publish a new edition, which reflects the changes in the NFL. They don’t have to create much that’s new—they just tweak their football game engine and update the rosters. The rules of football change slowly. At the deadline they wrap it up and release it. The audience is presold. at age thirteen, when our NASA doctor told me that because of my eyesight I would not qualify to become an astronaut. I wondered who had made this NASA doctor the gatekeeper to outer space? NASA was not an entrepreneurial program, it was established to be a space-research program. Singularity University —part university, part start-up accelerator He was the person capable of transforming Peter’s concept into real dollars. Three months later Roscosmos informed us the cost for an individual to be launched into space to live on the International Space Station for two weeks was exactly what we had guessed, $20 million. ...more |
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life was about more than sunsets and romance If it was a good movie, the experience felt like somebody was resetting a compass in my brain so I could f life was about more than sunsets and romance If it was a good movie, the experience felt like somebody was resetting a compass in my brain so I could feel what was important in life and what wasn’t. they said they felt like they already knew me after reading my book While you’ve written a good book, thoughts don’t translate onto the screen very well. The audience can’t get inside your head like they can in a book. A story has to move in real life and real time. It’s all about action. We are going to take the essence of you and find the story. there is a purpose in every scene, in every line of dialogue. A movie is going somewhere. is that your real life is boring. Nobody is talking about you I wondered whether a person could plan a story for his life and live it intentionally. A story is a character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it “She’s not a bad girl,” my friend said. “She was just choosing the best story available to her.” mesmerized by his existence. I was romanticizing the situation when people say life is meaningless, what they really mean is their lives are meaningless. I wonder if they’ve chosen to believe their whole existence is unremarkable, and are projecting their dreary life on the rest of us. “What kind of eggs?” “Chicken ones,” the point of life is character transformation “Don can’t make a move on Penny” “Why not?” “It’s too early,” “we need the tension,” a book called Save the Cat. I told him I hadn’t. He said it was a screenwriters In the first twenty minutes of the story, Ben said, your protagonist has to do something good. He can be crabby and have a drinking problem and even be a bit of a jerk, but unless he does something good, the audience won’t want things to work out for him, and they’ll lose interest in your story. “We have to see that Don has a good heart,” Ben said. “He has to save a cat.” meet people and have a rich series of experiences Annie Dillard, who won the Pulitzer while still in her mother’s womb A general rule in creating stories is that characters don’t want to change. They must be forced to change. Nobody wakes up and starts chasing a bad guy or dismantling a bomb unless something forces them to do so. The bad guys just robbed your house and are running off with your last roll of toilet paper, or the bomb is strapped to your favorite cat. It’s that sort of thing that gets a character moving. Characters don’t really choose to move. They have to be forced. great stories go to those who don’t give in to fear The most often repeated commandment in the Bible is “Do not fear.” It’s in there over two hundred times. it’s also a manipulative emotion that can trick us into living a boring life. I was watching the movie Star Wars recently and wondered what made that movie so good. I could point toward any major character and say exactly what that person wanted. No character had a vague ambition. the people around us, have no clear idea what we want. marketing is a three-step process. The first step is to convince people they are miserable. The second step is to convince people they will be happy if they buy your product, and the third step is to include a half-naked woman in your pitch. Wilson Bentley, who coined the phrase “No two snowflakes are alike.” painstakingly photographed more than five thousand crystals of snow By the time we reached Delaware, we’d raised nearly $200,000 becoming a fatalist. I was starting to believe you couldn’t feel meaning in life because there wasn’t any meaning to be found. Nietzsche did it with relative success. Not personal success, mind you, because he rarely got out of bed. ...more |
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In 2016, on the precipice of selling Bonobos, the startup I’d been building for the previous nine years bipolar disorder—affects 3 percent of the popul In 2016, on the precipice of selling Bonobos, the startup I’d been building for the previous nine years bipolar disorder—affects 3 percent of the population and, by one estimate, is seven times more prevalent in entrepreneurs. That might mean 20 percent of entrepreneurs have bipolar disorder. all forms of hedonistic consumption He was a walking encyclopedia. Our parents were expert savers, lived within their means, and invested everything above our cost of living in us. $58,000: the starting salary of my upcoming job at Bain & Company, the consulting firm, which I am slated to begin in August 2000 two states, manic and depressive transpired The medication I was prescribed was called Depakote. In the heavy dosage I took, 500 milligrams, it’s a big pink pill. ...more |
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it was amazing
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commercialize genetic engineering Biotechnology is going to transform every aspect of human life: our medical care, our food, our health, our entertain commercialize genetic engineering Biotechnology is going to transform every aspect of human life: our medical care, our food, our health, our entertainment, our very bodies. engineer paler trout for better visibility in the stream, square trees for easier lumbering, and injectable scent cells so you'll always smell of your favorite perfume expected sun and relaxation a field biologist from Yale Ordinarily you couldn't contract rabies unless you were bitten by an animal. But Biosyn modified the rabies virus to cross the pulmonary alveoli; you could get an infection just inhaling it. "Squirrelsize." Dinosaurs had died out in the Cretaceous period, sixty-five million years ago. They had flourished as the dominant life form on the planet in the Jurassic, 190 million years ago. And they had first appeared in the Triassic, roughly 220 million years ago. It was during the early Triassic period that Procompsognathus had lived-a time so distant that our planet didn't even look the same. All the continents were joined together in a single landmass, called Pangaca, which extended from the North to the South Pole-a vast continent of ferns and forests, with a few large deserts. The Atlantic Ocean was a narrow lake between what would become Africa and Florida. pushing the envelope animatronic environments Although many fields of science, such as physics and chemistry, had become federally funded, paleontology remained strongly dependent on private patrons. first creature brought back from extinction solely by reconstruction of its DNA there was no theoretical barrier "What they have done," Dodgson said, "is build the greatest single tourist attraction in the history of the world. As you know, zoos are extremely popular. Last year, more Americans visited zoos than all professional baseball and football games combined. And then there is the merchandising. The picture books, T-shirts, video games, caps, stuffed toys, comic books, and pets. Bioengineered DNA was, weight for weight, the most valuable material in the world. A single microscopic bacterium, too small to see with the naked eye, but containing the genes for a heart-attack enzyme, streptokinase, or for "ice-minus," which prevented frost damage to crops, might be worth five billion dollars to the right buyer. And that fact of life had created a bizarre new world of industrial espionage. Dodgson was especially skilled at it. In 1987, he convinced a disgruntled geneticist to quit Cetus for Biosyn, and take five strains of engineered bacteria with her. The geneticist simply put a drop of each on the fingernails of one hand, and walked out the door. black is an excellent Color for heat. If you remember your black- body radiation, black is actually best in heat. Efficient radiation. In any case, I wear only two colors, black and gray." "But don't you find it boring to wear only two colors?" "Not at all. I find it liberating. I believe my life has value, and I don't want to waste it thinking about clothing," Malcolm said. "I don't want to think about what I will wear in the morning. "Physics has had great success at describing certain kinds of behavior: planets in orbit, spacecraft going to the moon, pendulums and springs and rolling balls, that sort of thing. The regular movement of objects. These are described by what are called linear equations "But there is another kind of behavior, which physics handles badly. For example, anything to do with turbulence. Water coming out of a spout. Air moving over an airplane wing. Weather. Blood flowing through the heart. Turbulent events are described by nonlinear equations. They're bard to solve-in fact, they're usually impossible to solve. So physics has never understood this whole class of events. Until about ten years ago. The new theory that describes them is called chaos theory. "Chaos theory originally grew out of attempts to make computer models of weather in the 1960s. You hit a pool ball, and it starts to carom off the sides of the table. In theory, that's a fairly simple system, almost a Newtonian system. Since you can know the force imparted to the ball, and the mass of the ball, and you can calculate the angles at which it will strike the walls, you can predict the future behavior of the ball. In theory, you could predict the behavior of the ball far into the future, as it keeps bouncing from side to side. You could predict where it will end up three hours from now, in theory." But in fact," Malcolm said, "it turns out you can't predict more than a few seconds into the future. Because almost immediately very small effects-imperfections in the surface of the ball, tiny indentations in the wood of the table-start to make a difference. And it doesn't take long before they overpower your careful calculations. So it turns out that this simple system of a pool ball on a table has unpredictable behavior." emphasized the feeling that they were entering a new world, a prehistoric tropical world, and leaving the normal world behind. A mammal could metabolize food to produce bodily warmth, but a reptile could not. First was posture: lizards and reptiles were bent-legged sprawlers, hugging the ground for warmth. Lizards didn't have the energy to stand on their hind legs for more than a few seconds. But the dinosaurs stood on straight legs, and many walked erect on their hind legs. Among living animals, erect posture occurred only in warm-blooded mammals and birds. Thus dinosaur posture suggested warm-bloodedness. Crocodiles and turtles abandon their eggs. But dinosaurs probably did not. a large pyramidal skylight Using the Loy antibody extraction technique, we can sometimes get DNA directly from dinosaur bones. His technique is so refined it can work with a mere fifty nanograms of material. That's fifty-billionths of a gram. The reason is that mammalian red cells have no nuclei, and thus no DNA in their red cells. To clone a mammal, you must find a white cell, which is much rarer than red cells. Hamachi-Hood automated gene sequencers. They are being run, at very high speed, by the Cray XMP supercomputers Now the computers can do it in a couple of hours. But, even so, the DNA molecule is too big. We look only at the sections of the strand that differ from animal to animal, or from contemporary DNA. Only a few percent of the nucleotides differ from one species to the next. That's what we analyze, and it's still a big job. "Nobody could be analyzing a DNA molecule." He knew biologists were talking about the Human Genome Project, to analyze a complete human DNA strand. But that would take ten years of coordinated effort, involving laboratories around the world. It was an enormous undertaking, as big as the Manhattan Project, which made the atomic bomb. "This is a private company," Nedry said. some of the most virulent poisons in the world, "Helotoxins, colchicinolds, betaalkaloids," he said, pointing to a series of syringes set out under the UV light. ...more |
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There's an app for that, you know. Yeah, it's called the App-nea. You have a hero complex, Mickey, and it's kind of dangerous. There's an app for that, you know. Yeah, it's called the App-nea. You have a hero complex, Mickey, and it's kind of dangerous. ...more |
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Where I come from you never miss an opportunity to serve a bully a slice of humble pie. Rich, white, and old is our target audience. "When everyone's ju Where I come from you never miss an opportunity to serve a bully a slice of humble pie. Rich, white, and old is our target audience. "When everyone's junk is broken and forgotten, you'll still have your stars." ...more |
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keeping him close enough to the action so that he’d later be able to claim that he’d been there at the battle, but not so close that he risked actuall
keeping him close enough to the action so that he’d later be able to claim that he’d been there at the battle, but not so close that he risked actually getting involved with any fighting. grow less substantial the closer the event creeps I can think of no one more fitted to the task. “I suppose it is a once-in-a-lifetime experience.” “End-of-a-lifetime experience for the father! Ha ha!” to migrate, en masse using a decent dynamic star chart, you could feed in the current positions of those which were still extant, backtrack eight hundred million years and see where they had all started out. She glanded quickcalm to take the edge off the internal shock. Part of the training of a Special Circumstances agent was learning a) that the rules were supposed to be broken sometimes, b) just how to go about breaking the rules, and c) how to get away with it, whether the rule-breaking had led to a successful outcome or not. which gave him what he liked to term a high contortionality factor he was likely to die before old age took him There was a degree of margin in the system here, of course. observe the niceties She was about to click out when That’s the all and end of it. Being a king has its expectations. One is letting people know you’re alive. He tipped continually between contempt for anyone who could cut themself off from so much that made life fun just to pursue this abstraction they called learning By not praying he was leaving the floor of the divine court that little bit less crowded and so free for more deserving She was from . . . Nottle? Gottle? Dottle? Something like that. I don’t know which would be the more confounding; that all you say is true, or that your skills in fictive composition have suddenly improved a million-fold. arced electricity greatness lay in doing the best you could with what you were given The King always sought harmony, even if through initial conflict Your father was the bravest man I ever knew. I cannot imagine he met death with anything other than the fierce composure with which he faced its threat so many times during life. Also, though, he was never one to dwell excessively on the past. Even having made a mistake, he took what he might learn from it and then dismissed it. We must do as he would have done, and turn our attention to the future. I’d know how my father was in those last minutes. This is a matter of some importance to me. I feel I can’t put him fully to rest in my mind until I know. Please – can you recall? Death is not rest, no; death is the end of rest. Death is decay and rotting down, not building up! heliograph (a telescopic apparatus for photographing the sun.) I think we have the better side of the bargain. chronometer (a piece of equipment that measures time very accurately) Scholastery full of offended scholars. they were all the product of health and choice, not disease and fate a cornucopia of life was there a simple drug-gland suite inside her head and a modest choice of mixtures of trace chemicals she could now choose to release into her bloodstream and brain whenever she wanted at least on the Eighth, every drug had at least one unwanted and unpleasant side effect. Here; nothing. You got what you wanted, no more. both in person and via screens and sims Now she gained fully augmented senses – so that, for example, her vision became sharper and brought her information about the infrared and the ultraviolet – now she could sense radio waves, now she was able to interface directly with machines via a thing called a neural lace that had grown about and through her brain like a flimsy, three-dimensional net, now she could switch off pain and fatigue like the best and most accommodating, most encouraging and helpful friend a fellow could ever have effectiveness and inability, might and weakness, cunning and gullibility deference (polite submission and respect.) subservience (a willingness to do what other people want, or the act of considering your wishes as less important than those of other people) It was the turning point of his life. robustly pragmatic view of religion as he’d had of everything else a place in history itself – would be their prize after death which he only realised was recorded when he tried to ask it questions. Special Circumstances the module was designed to carry over a hundred people its unheeding vastness drew the breath out of her unheeding (ignoring or not listening to something) progress according to their own developmental timetable information osmoses facile (ignoring the true complexities of an issue; superficial. "facile intervention") In life you hoped to do what you could but mostly you did what you were told and that was the end of it. ‘One hundred idiots make idiotic plans and carry them out. All but one justly fail. The hundredth idiot, whose plan succeeded through pure luck, is immediately convinced he’s a genius.’ It is an old proverb. apropos (very appropriate to a particular situation.) stipend (a fixed regular sum paid as a salary or as expenses to a clergyman, teacher, or public official.) impertinent (not showing proper respect; rude.) There are those who hold that, statistically, we must live in a simulation; the chances are too extreme for this not to be true. By this reasoning we must, after all, be at the most base level of reality simulation-eers only base reality cannot be fully replayed constables (a police officer.) militia (a military force that is raised from the civil population to supplement a regular army in an emergency.) Her suit, until now coating her body as closely as paint, promptly frizzed up, forcing the water to slide off and letting it assume the look of something a fashionable young lady would choose to wear in an air-breathing environment. what the Minds call Infinite Fun Space. had signalled nothing amiss An avatoid. A ship’s avatar of such exquisite bio-mimicry it could pass for fully human. lay something to rest If you were being asked to do something according to a plan, then the way the Culture saw it, you should have had at least some say in what that plan actually was. And if circumstances changed during the course of trying to follow that plan then you were expected to have the initiative and the judgement to alter the plan and act accordingly. You didn’t keep on blindly obeying orders when, due to an alteration in context, the orders were in obvious contradiction to the attainment of whatever goal it was you were pursuing, or when they violated either common sense or common decency. You were still responsible, in other words. story she’d been barely half listening to Infinite Worlds theory, which held that all possible things had already happened, or were happening now, all together. This alleged that life was very like a game or simulation where every possible course and outcome has already been played out, noted down and drawn up, as though on an enormous map, with the beginning of the game – before a piece has been moved. five peta-cycles in his personal cloudcraft He knew that there were levels of science and technology, and of understanding and wisdom, well above those he was privy to privy (sharing in the knowledge of (something secret or private).) rode a little tube-car along a gauzily transparent tunnel He was worried that ‘knowledge-sharing’ might be a similar lie dressed up pretty. decieons ago No more’s to say. Indulge me in silence. Believe me, I long for it. It had not cared about such aesthetic considerations they had agreed it would push its engines to a profile consistent with a one per cent possibility of total failure, thus shaving another hour off their ETA reconfigure engine and other matter to reaction mass. She used her neural lace to listen in to the Liveware Problem’s systems talking to each other, quickly took in a compensated view of the gulf of space ahead of the rushing ship, updated herself on any news from Sursamen and then from elsewhere, shared a casual handshake with Turminder Xuss, quiescent in her cabin, and then monitored her brother closely, listening to his heartbeat, sensing his skin conductivity, his blood pressure, implied core temperature and temperature distribution as well as the state of his slightly tense, tautened muscles. He was grinding his teeth, though he probably wasn’t aware of it himself. High-end exchanges happen too fast for human reactions so the suits will do the aiming, firing and dodging for you. You ask impossibles societies progress until they Sublime spigot (a faucet, a device to turn water on and off) Broadcast this, disseminate as widely as possible disseminate (spread (something, especially information) widely.) Behave honourably and wish for a good death Was it more honourable to starve than to steal when others had the means to feed you but chose not to, unless you paid with money you did not have? He thought not. given that you had to die, why want a bad one? Xinthian. The other name for the WorldGod. Energy profile the like of which I have not seen before. Who’d have thought something so ancient would be so potent? It’s generating anti-matter short-range line-gun particle gun scintillations (a flash or sparkle of light. "scintillations sparking") The money will be coming from a fund set aside for special circumstances by some new friends I’ve made. inexhaustible supply of money Demagogue (a political leader who seeks support by appealing to the desires and prejudices of ordinary people rather than by using rational argument.) ...more |
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it produced what seemed like a subtraction of noise now falling with no wind to accompany it seemed to defy nature; it was like watching a screen with it produced what seemed like a subtraction of noise now falling with no wind to accompany it seemed to defy nature; it was like watching a screen with the sound off, it was like being deaf. for people to back-up and have their bodies wholly renewed or new ones regrown, or to have their personalities transferred into android replicas Mortality as a life-style choice? gangway (a passage between rows of seats, especially in a theatre or aircraft.) Once, holidays meant the time when you went away. Yes, I remember hearing that. Primitive stuff. Age of Scarcity. People had to do all the work and create wealth for themselves and society and so they couldn't afford to take very much time off. So they worked for, say, half the day, most days of the year and then had an allocation of days they could take off, having saved up enough exchange collateral- Did they all go away at once? How could they? Things would stop working if they all did nothing at the same time. But sometimes they had days when a sort of skeleton crew operated infrastructure. Otherwise, they staggered their time off. Whereas nowadays what we call holidays, or core time, is when you all stay home, because otherwise there'd be no period when you could all meet up. Maybe I should get a lace. One of those implant things. Undeniably, forgetting your head would pose considerable difficulties. assuming that none of your ship Minds were lying. it's a commissioned piece The Idirans had committed the acts, the gigadeathcrimes -their monstrous weaponry, not that of the Culture, had been directed first at one star, then the other - yet still, arguably, the Culture might have prevented what had happened. The Idirans had attempted to sue for peace several times before the battle started, but the Culture had continued to insist on unconditional surrender, and so the war had ground onwards and the stars had died. You could always do nothing, Tersono,' he told it. 'Though such a course usually brings its own regrets. It wants us to know it has its own motive power She seemed to be trying to sound more like a machine than machines ever did. The device is no larger than a small finger the device is a crystalline nanofoam matrix with links to my brain. So I'd just be along for the ride? It is believed that your presence and advice would increase the likelihood of the mission's success. What bizarre fates our technologies dream up for us, he thought as he lay there. Here I am, a male, becoming pregnant with the ghost of an old dead soldier, to travel beyond the bounds of light older than our civilisation and carry out some task I have spent the best part of a year training for but of which I presently have no real knowledge whatsoever. when you look at something through another person's eyes and you think something, after a while you start to wonder if it's really what you think or some sort of bleed-over from what they're thinking Looks like our ride's arrived. I'm flying it, but if I did anything really stupid the automatics would take over and haul us out of trouble. I think I see what you're getting at There are VR wing-flier purists who make a point of never doing the real thing! No, she's not backed-up. Feli Vitrouv was one of about half of the wing-fliers for whom no recording of her mind-state existed to revive them if they dived into the ground and were killed. It gave Kabe an unpleasant feeling just thinking about it. They call themselves the Disposables That sounds slightly better than being upper-caste pets. my not bringing servants reflects some of the changes that have occurred in our society since your body-death Like all revived constructs, Huyler's personality still needed to sleep and dream to remain stable, though this coma-like state could be achieved in a sort of fast-forward time which meant that instead of sleeping all night Huyler could get by on less than an hour's rest. For two people in such intimate contact we haven't really told each other that much about ourselves. What do you say, Major? The General Systems Vehicle Sanctioned Parts List She'd pulled strings to make it happen the timing was tight glyph-writing tablet She spoke in Marain, the Culture's language. A Very Attractive System This is a great simulation. the medium for a new sport lava-rafting became a pastime. On Masaq' the tradition was that you did it without the aid of field technology or anything clever in the way of material science. The experience would be more exciting and you would come closer to its reality if you used materials that were only just up to the demands being made in it. It was what people called a minimal-safety- factor sport. gregarious (ending to associate with others of one's kind) of course any technology can go wrong and, sensibly, the culture of backing-up as a matter of course is still common. Perhaps the risk is deemed so tiny they have given up bothering. Kabe selected a ripe sunbread. He had had his intestinal flora altered to enable him to eat common Culture foods. More unusually, he had had his oral and nasal senses modified so that he could taste food as a standard Culture human would. Glacier-caving naked blade-fencing They socialise, they have work-hobbies, they play in more gentle forms, they read or watch screen, they go to entertainments. They sit around grinning in one of their glanded drug states, they study, they spend time travelling- They spend time. having carefully constructed their paradise from first principles to remove all credible motives for conflict amongst themselves and all natural threats the Culture is so insistent in its utopianism They are like an infant with a toy, demanding it only to throw it away. caste system (a fixed social group into which an individual is born within a particular system of social stratification) Very Fast Picket - called Resistance Is Character-Forming Culture - while it had a sprinkling of ships with names of similar natures - usually went for ironic, meticulously obscure, supposedly humorous or frankly absurd names. Most civilisations that had acquired the means to build genuine Artificial Intelligences duly built them, and most of those designed or shaped the consciousness of the AIs to a greater or lesser extent; obviously if you were constructing a sentience that was or could easily become much greater than your own, it would not be in your interest to create a being which loathed you and might be likely to set about dreaming up ways to exterminate you. So AIs, especially at first, tended to reflect the civilisational demeanour of their source species. Even when they underwent their own form of evolution and began to design their successors - with or without the help, and sometimes the knowledge, of their creators - there was usually still a detectable flavour of the intellectual character and the basic morality of that precursor species present in the resulting consciousness. That flavour might gradually disappear over subsequent generations of AIs, but it would usually be replaced by another, adopted and adapted from elsewhere, or just mutate beyond recognition rather than disappear altogether. What various Involveds including the Culture had also tried to do, often out of sheer curiosity once AI had become a settled and even routine technology, was to devise a consciousness with no flavour; one with no metalogical baggage whatsoever; what had become known as a perfect AI. solipsism (the view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist.) Soulkeeper-scale technology the Army had tried to stage a coup after the first Equalitarian election democratise Chel's armed forces and ensure that through a system of power balances no single branch of the armed forces could take control of the state trans-shipped by a giant ceremonial barge of gilded wood one of those vacant expressions you got used to when people were consulting a neural lace or other implanted device However we haven't met or talked since then. We are more one-time friends than old friends. titles that were not titles and job descriptions that had nothing to do with jobs With one of these silvery things and an implant people here probably never have to actually remember the name of a single other person. I wonder if they ever forget their own. The soldiers were calling it the Not-Our-Fault prize. In the old days people died and that was that; you might hope to see them in heaven, but once they were dead they were dead. It was simple, it was definite. Now ... ' He shook his head angrily. 'Now people die but their Soulkeeper can revive them, or take them to a heaven we know exists, without any need for faith. We have clones, we have regrown bodies - most of me is regrown; I wake up sometimes and think, Am I still me? I know you're supposed to be your brain, your wits, your thoughts, but I don't believe it is that simple. As you pointed out yourself, we live in a time when the dead can return In places like the Culture the consequences were that people could take back-ups of themselves if they were about to do something dangerous, they could create mind-state versions of themselves which could be used to deliver messages or undertake a multiplicity of experiences in a variety of places and in an assortment of physical or virtual forms, they could entirely transfer their original personality into a different body or device, and they could merge with other individuals having a symbolic rather than a literal truth - was one which still spoke of a mythical afterlife, where the good would be rewarded by an eternity of noble joy and the evil would be condemned - no matter what their caste had been in the mortal world - to servitude forever. was to build heaven. They made matter of fact what had until then required an act of faith to believe in. subliming (culture wiki: a process that allows a civilization to transfer the consciousness of its individual members (biological and/or artificial) from the material universe that we experience to another plane of existence.) it had been proved to the satisfaction of even the most sceptical of observers that the personalities of dead Chelgrians did survive after death, and could be contacted through suitably enabled devices or people. But are the returned dead really the people we knew, Custodian? Tibilo, you might as well ask when we awake whether we are the same person who went to sleep. The dead escape death in heaven, and the living escape life in dreams. It was not uncommon, nowadays, for people with terrible memories either to have them excised, or to retreat into dreams, and live from then on in a virtual world from which it was relatively easy to exclude the memories and their effects that had made normal life so unbearable. It is hard to believe, feeling as you do at the moment, that there will come a time when life seems good and worthwhile, but it will come. Is your life to be submerged in grief until you die? Is that what you want? Chelgrian-Puen, who made it clear that those who killed themselves just to get to heaven more quickly would not be allowed in there at all. They would not even be held in limbo; they would not be saved at all. Sufficiently sure. abattoir (a slaughterhouse.) She was aware of some part of her mind using the information in the sky to calculate her position, the time and the precise compass direction she was facing in. if, for example, those birds had moved in a manner so as to imply that they were heavier than they were supposed to be - then her attention would have been drawn to the anomaly. So far, everything seemed to be reassuringly normal. So you might choose to forget something then choose to forget forgetting it? It was one of those rolling campaigns where they had to vote on who would be allowed to vote if I'd built the pylons I'd have anchored them into the base material. That's the main reason the lines have collapsed or are unsafe a present of a replacement. The Lady Colonel told me this is a one-way mission. Which is why they kept me backed-up in that substrate. They equipped him with an improved Soulkeeper, but that was the only implant they touched or introduced. He had heard of agents and people on special missions being fitted with brain-linked communications rigs, poison-detection nasal glands, poison-producing sacs, subcutaneous weapon systems your precious romanticism faded away after the first few years of marriage and you were left to confront not just your own inadequacies but those of your mate. Not all tests are passed or failed as one might expect. planets don't need anybody to run them. They're just sort of ... there. I mean, you wouldn't want a person in charge of stuff like that, would you? That'd be scary. That would be like the old days, like barbarism or something. barbarism (absence of culture and civilization.) manufactured heaven our medicine effectively became perfect about eight thousand years ago, and we've had all that time to get used to evaluating other species rapidly to develop a full understanding of their physiology, so any ordinary disease, even a new one, is unable to establish a foothold thanks to the body's own defences and will certainly be utterly helpless against external medical resources. However, somebody did once develop a genetic signature-keyed brain-rotting virus which worked so quickly it proved effective on more than one occasion. Five minutes after the assassin had sneezed in the same room as the intended victim their brains - and only theirs - were turning to soup. Somebody once thought of a way they might outwit the security of Contact. it would be safe from any Culture scan, because we famously do not look inside people's heads. Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory. I Blame The Parents. I am a Hub Mind. I have an entire - and if I may say so - quite fabulous Orbital to look after, not to mention having fifty billion people to tend to. Have you not heard of the idea that a promise made under duress does not count? Aquime's altitude and consequently cold winters meant that a lot of the life of the city took place indoors rather than out, and as a result what would have been ordinary streets in a more temperate city, open to the sky, here were galleries, roofed-over streets vaulted with anything from antique glass to force fields. It was possible to walk from one end of the city to the other under cover and wearing summer clothes, even when, as now, there was a blizzard blowing. They call them airspheres,' Visquile said. He looked warily pleased, and not especially impressed. 'This is a rotating twin-lobe example. Its name is the Oskendari airsphere. The behemothaurs are sensitive to force-field technologies There are some decisions you just can't anticipate until you must really make them. He could only sleep fitfully Can memory be drip-fed so accurately, Estodien? The reason we are doing this is specifically because the mission involves the Culture. We are told that they never read people's minds, that the inside of your head is the one place they regard as sacrosanct. So the deeper I go into my mission the more I'll know about it? your Soulkeeper. It contains, or will contain, a small payload and what is commonly known as a matter transmitter. There is no precedent that we know of for this sort of process; no book to refer to. You will be helping to write that book. The Hub has millions of human-form representative entities called avatars with which it deals on a one-to-one basis with its inhabitants. 'Masaq' is known for the high rate of back-up of its inhabitants. This is sometimes held to be because a lot of them take part in dangerous sports They were in an underground car, a comfortably fitted- out capsule which sped beneath the underside of the Orbital's surface, in the vacuum of space. There may be an additional reward involved, beyond the payment we have already agreed. If you tried, if any Mind tried, could you impersonate my style?' the Chelgrian asked. 'Could you write a piece - a symphony, say - that would appear, to the critical appraiser, to be by me, and which, when I heard it, I'd imagine being proud to have written? are you concerned that Minds - AIs, if you like - can create, or even just appear to create, original works of art? The point, of course, is that the people who spent days and sweated buckets could also have taken an aircraft to the summit if all they'd wanted was to absorb the view. It is the struggle that they crave. The sense of achievement is produced by the route to and from the peak, not by the peak itself. I've put a version of me into a group mind in case anybody wants to ask me anything at any time, but really I can't be bothered living any more. Maybe I'll come back when the end of the universe happens. She'd wanted to be reawakened in time to see the light from the second of the Twin Novae shine down upon Masaq'. A clone of her original body had been grown for her and her personality was to be quickened inside it within the hour, so she would have the next five or so days to re- acclimatise herself to life before the second nova burst upon the local skies. It was like standing in the front of a glass-nosed spaceship woven by the underground car tracks transmitted its mind- state - effectively its soul - to another GSV which then sent the recording onwards to another Culture Mind on the far side of the galaxy, where it might be held, dormant and safe the events are all entirely a matter of public record. remember and replay the experience in perfect detail, any time I wish. keeping an eye to windward for approaching storms the soup of life is salty enough without adding tears to it. His most available memories would be kept safe from intrusion the Culture had, during their separate ages of scarcity, spent vast fortunes to make virtual reality as palpably real and as dismissibly virtual as possible. virtual environments available on demand to any Culture citizen had been raised to such a pitch of perfection that it had long been necessary - at the most profoundly saturative level of manufactured-environment manipulation - to introduce synthetic cues into the experience just to remind the subject that what appeared to be real really wasn't. Reinventing money Expiring Light This attempt does not absolve us. ...more |
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I was friendly with Sue Lefferts, but we weren't friends. This is the city of the angels and you haven't got any wings. You get the girl, I get the coro I was friendly with Sue Lefferts, but we weren't friends. This is the city of the angels and you haven't got any wings. You get the girl, I get the coroner? You were the supervising officer in that case It's a private investigation. I messed something up. I'm trying to make amends. docile (ready to accept control or instruction; submissive. "docile cooperation") I want you to ask a judge to authorise wire taps on their home phones. All I ever wanted was to measure up to my father. ...more |
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profundity (being thoughtful, deep, and wise.) what we have done, not what we have thought, is the result we are judged by. veracity (conformity with tr profundity (being thoughtful, deep, and wise.) what we have done, not what we have thought, is the result we are judged by. veracity (conformity with truth or fact "I cannot confirm its veracity") Truth, I have learned, differs for everybody. Just as no two people ever see a rainbow in exactly the same place and yet both most certainly see it, while the person seemingly standing right underneath it does not see it at all so truth is a question of where one stands, and the direction one is looking in at the time. She seemed to take an almost childish delight in life in general which was never far from being embodied in the sparkle of those eyes Perrund said with an unladylike snort. sometimes everybody can be wrong. Once everybody thought the world was flat. You can draw the blinds in a brothel, but people still know what you're doing. mollified (appease the anger or anxiety of (someone).) A family heirloom. Some diseases are not treatable. Happily some are also not transmissible. I have been able to do nothing. Perhaps you feel I deserve nothing. pestilence (a fatal epidemic disease, especially bubonic plague.) They had no war, famine, pestilence, taxes? People still managed to make their own unhappinesses, as people always do. In the land of make-believe. And the lakes are fruit juice. And all the game animals grow on trees, ready cooked. And other trees grow their own tree-houses, and catapults and bows and arrows grow on them like fruits. The dagger was a gift from . . . the state. A double-edged gift. Do they not think that there is good and bad? And that one deserves to be emulated and the other not, but rather punished? A very small number would say that there are no such entities. Most agree there are, but that they only exist in our minds. The world itself, without us, does not recognise such things, just because they are not things, they are ideas, and the world contained no ideas until people came along. One believed what one was told to believe, what it made sense to believe I don't believe in any of the old gods. No one does any more. No one of sense, at any rate. Providence is the rule of laws, mistress. The laws of Nature determine the ordering of the physical world and the laws of Man determine the ordering of society, mistress. magnanimous mood there were more than one set of rules regarding how the game should be played. What it boiled down to was that Sechroom said that as in life in general you should always do what seemed like the right thing to do at the time, while Hiliti said that sometimes you had to do what appeared to be the wrong thing at the time in order to do the right thing eventually. Do you see? He rubbed his lower back. 'Occasionally my body chooses to remind me of my true age,' he said. People can gather an inhuman strength in certain circumstances. That is why I wanted to talk to you. May I rely on your discretion? I wish to speak of something that would have to be done without the King's knowledge, even though it would be done solely to protect him. Go on. Nothing will go beyond these walls. is proving more resilient than expected. my faith is shaken I myself find it takes all my concentration just minding my own steps without attempting to scrutinise somebody else's. she did seem under the impression that I was a nobleman of some distinction, an illusion which I was probably rather too slow to dispel. a loyal and faithful servant of the crown. candelabrum (a large branched candlestick or holder for several candles or lamps.) People wanted to get away from sweet-rocks?' Lattens asked incredulously. Yes, and from being able to fly, and from having hot water gush from wash basins and from having servants pander to their every whim, too. People are strange like that, Lattens. Give them every comfort and they start to pine for the rougher life. as you have observed with such penetrating accuracy They each looked at the other. They did not need to speak. Here was a woman, by herself. This pale body exposed before them excited them even more than the one they had just lost sight of, and an instinct even deeper than that of hunting flooded their hearts, taking them over and extinguishing all rational thought. How poorly is he? At death's door. But then one day the fair came to town, with players and stages and tents and jugglers and acrobats and fire-breathers and knife-throwers and strong men and dwarves and people on stilts and all their servants and performing animals. The performers from the fair gave Dawn her life back. They expect to return with treasure. Usually all they bring back is the diseases they picked up from the whores. Might there not be some collusion between the two sides of the war Our monarch Duke Ulresile duke (a male holding the highest hereditary title in the British and certain other peerages.) I suspect one only finds out if one has done the right thing after some considerable time has passed. Bit like planting trees, really.' He uttered this last sentence with a look of mild surprise at his own words. Ulresile seemed to swallow something bitter. Finally found a sliver of backbone Sometimes the truth is too much to bear. I have a strong constitution. constitution (the composition of something.) In the harem of the chief I was thinking remarkably clearly. gangplank (a movable plank, typically with cleats nailed on it, used by passengers to board or disembark from a ship or boat.) colonnaded (a row of evenly spaced columns supporting a roof, an entablature, or arches.) scabbard (a sheath for the blade of a sword or dagger, typically made of leather or metal. "sliding the sword back into its scabbard") We must apply ourselves to the world. To do so we have to recall the past, attempt to foresee the future and cope with the demands of the present. in exceptionally good health until the very end. ...more |
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starboard (the side of a ship or aircraft that is on the right when one is facing forward.) holo screens (a type of 3D display that utilizes light diff starboard (the side of a ship or aircraft that is on the right when one is facing forward.) holo screens (a type of 3D display that utilizes light diffraction to display a three-dimensional image to the viewer.) neutrinos (a neutral subatomic particle with a mass close to zero and half-integral spin, which rarely reacts with normal matter.) extending a disc-field through the air Outside Context Problem some wanted simply to be woken after a set time had passed to see what had changed while they'd been gone, some desired to come back when something especially interesting was happening The Sleeper Service Technically, it was a branch of metamathematics, usually called metamathics. Metamathics; the investigation of the properties of Realities (more correctly, Reality-fields). Metamathics led to everything else, it led to the places that nobody else had ever seen or heard of or previously imagined. The Land of Infinite Fun. it didn't matter what it could do or how many different ways it could amaze; if you pulled its plug out, or just hit the Off button, all it became was a lump of matter It was, also, like the dependency of the human-basic brain on the human-basic body; no matter how intelligent, perceptive and gifted you were, no matter how entirely you lived for the ascetic rewards of the intellect and eschewed the material world and the ignobility of the flesh, if your heart just gave out… The Culture's problem with the Affront was like an itch they couldn't scratch hedonism-focused society of the Culture had to offer selfishness - which to them was indistinguishable from genuine altruis handing over the real control of one's society to machines Churt Lyne didn't reply in speech. Instead - astonishingly - it spoke through her neural lace The drone fed convincing-looking pictures of the ex-warship's interior into Ulver's brain through the neural lace. she switched out of the view her neural lace had imported into her head and turned to the drone He'd resolved to have his neural lace removed for the month of the Festival, deciding that as this year's theme was Primitivism he ought to give up some aspect of his amendment She wore some sort of gelsuit; basically deep blue but covered with a pattern like gold wire wrapped all over it and dotted with little diamonds of contrasting, subtly glowing red. Stunning perfume. The neural lace would have handled his orgasm sequence better, controlling the flow of secretions from his drug glands so that they more precisely matched and enhanced the extended human-basic physiological process taking pla communicating by neural lace Mind if I turn on my lace? stunningly, heart-stoppingly beautiful woman Her voice… her voice was something to immerse yourself in. succulently perfect mouth the idea of a chance meeting with somebody else, another free, independent soul with their own desires and demands, their own reservations and requirements; that, just because it was all up to chance and up to negotiation, just because it all might end in nothing, in rejection, in the failure to impress and connect, in being found wanting rather than being wanted baroqued (relating to or denoting a style of European architecture, music, and art of the 17th and 18th centuries that followed Mannerism and is characterized by ornate detail.) There was the time that even hyperspacially transmitted information took to traverse the significant percentages of the galaxy involved, there were complicated routes to arrange, other Minds to talk to, sometimes after setting up appointments because they were absent in Infinite Fun space for a while. retreatism (the tendency of some people to withdraw from the society of which they are a part, rejecting both the goals and the means of achieving those goals.) autoeuthenise cantankerous (bad-tempered, argumentative, and uncooperative.) Using these broad-brush figures, it was a simple matter for anybody to work out the craft's approximate maximum speed from the cubic kilometrage of its engines, the number of ships of any given size it could contain according to the volume given over to the various sizes of bays and engineering space, and the total number of humans it could accommodate by simply adding up how many cubic kilometres were given over to their living-space. Some of those souls were far from human; one third of each of the system's Orbitals was given over to ecosystems designed for quite different creatures; gas-giant dwellers on one, methane atmospherians on another and high temperature silicon creatures on another. there is a tracer nanotech on you - in you - which will make it a simple matter to follow you. That will be eight hundred Tier-sintricate-hour equivalents. The sky was filled with hundreds and hundreds of winged aircraft with four or six piston engines each psychotropic mixture; taking a suck on its pierced top cap was like sliding two distorting lenses in front of your eyes, sticking your head underwater and shoving a chemical factory up your nose while standing in a shifting gravity field. pleased with his new suit. It was made of his own skin, genetically altered in various subtle ways, specially vat-grown and carefully tailored to his exact specifications. He'd donated a few skin cells to - and left the order and payment with - a gene-tailor the ultimate new experience echnologically advanced society, occasionally after some sort of limited access to hyperspace one which had proved impenetrable to intelligent investigation recalcitrant (having an obstinately uncooperative attitude towards authority or discipline.) his library, his clothes and keepsakes Death, he remembered somebody saying once, was a kind of victory. To have lived a long good life, a life of prodigious pleasure and minimal misery, and then to die; that was to have won. To attempt to hang on for ever risked ending up in some as yet unglimpsed horror-future. We can practise on yours and then get it right with mine. every human in the Culture had been able to do for many millennia - to change sex. It took anything up to a year to alter yourself from a female to a male, or vice-versa. The process was painless and set in action simply by thinking about it. Your body would already be starting to change, glands sending out the relevant viral and hormonal signals which would start the gradual process of conversion. A couple would have a child, then the man would become female and the woman would become male, and they would have another child. licentiousness (promiscuous and unprincipled in sexual matters.) infantile obsession with penetration and possession exobiology (the branch of science that deals with the possibility and likely nature of life on other planets or in space.) Dajeil was regarded as a natural for it. we have so few resources we cannot afford to squander them There were thousands of instruments of torture, clubs, spears, knives, swords, strangle cords, catapults, bows, powder guns, shells, mines, gas canisters, bombs, syringes, mortars, howitzers, missiles, atomics, lasers, field arms, plasma guns, microwavers, effectors, thunderbolters, knife missiles, line guns, thudders, gravguns, monofilament warps, pancakers, AM projectors, grid-fire impulsers, ZPE flux-polarisers, trapdoor units, CAM spreaders her neural lace threw across her left eye's field of vision as she walked, one half of her brain paying attention to the business of walking and the other half watching the virtual screen. There's a modified neural lace in place in your skull; it'll take a day or so to bed in properly. Congratulating itself on its perspicacity gormlessness (lacking intelligence; stupid.) The tube car was slowing; suddenly it was stopped. The avatar gestured to the door that rolled open. The traveltube had gone. he ship had converted all its external spare mass to engine. heinous ((of a person or wrongful act, especially a crime) utterly odious or wicked.) perpetually pregnant Unbelievable. I'm in a fucking Outside Context situation, the ship thought And you have your likes and dislikes; the people you do the polite minimum for and are glad to see the back of, the ones you like and who interest you more than the others, the ones you treasure for years and decades if they remain, or wish could have stayed longer once they've gone some tales which will fizzle out rather than conclude neatly self-lacerating spite Try to understand, try to see things from her perspective, try to forgive, or allow yourself to be forgiven. back-pedalled furiously Warhead stocks down to forty per cent; remanufacturing from first principles would take four to seven hours, depending on the exact mix it chose. was demilitarised (supposedly) by it seventy years ago. disembodied voice send off its mind-state The avatar was preparing the humans for the entry into simulation mode. She quizzed her neural lace. You can tell me whether you each wish your mind-state to enter the simulation Jaundiced outlook (exhibiting or influenced by envy, distaste, or hostility.) To live for ever and die often a cloud of warships. approximately eighty thousand craft. The Attitude Adjuster told you to obey us! He glanced at the comms screen. I have been rather more constructively employed over the past few decades than might have been imagined. The following have been manufactured: She kept a watch on developments outside through her neural lace while she looked down at the bird. These consisted mostly of Ren's birthdays, which according to her occurred on a weekly basis. ...more |
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Culture weaponry is sentient lakelet (a little lake) having a smart suit agoraphobic (fearing and avoiding places or situations that might cause panic an Culture weaponry is sentient lakelet (a little lake) having a smart suit agoraphobic (fearing and avoiding places or situations that might cause panic and feelings of being trapped, helpless or embarrassed.) talisman (an object, typically an inscribed ring or stone, that is thought to have magic powers and to bring good luck.) a satellite; they, too, only stay up by forever falling forward. mud-press for constructing bricks in a low-technology situation. phlegmatically (in a way that shows you are not easily made angry or upset) a matter transmission machine kerfuffle (a commotion or fuss, especially one caused by conflicting views.) How about freedom of speech? skulduggery (underhand, unscrupulous, or dishonest behaviour or activities.) eccentric ships. Shall I name names? The ... Cantankerous, Only Slightly Bent, I Thought He Was With You, Space Monster, A Series Of Unlikely Explanations, Big Sexy Beast, Never Talk To Strangers, It'll Be Over By Christmas [*3*], Funny, It Worked Last Time ... Boo!, Ultimate Ship The Second doorfields vat-grown meats brooch (an ornament fastened to clothing with a hinged pin and catch.) Beauty is something that disappears when you try to define it. badness without removing goodness, or pain without pleasure, or suffering without excitement Prime Directive Free Enterprise got there first and set up the house rules unbe-fucking-lievably halation effect (the spreading of light beyond its proper boundaries to form a fog round the edges of a bright image in a photograph or on a television screen.) ravity-wave experiment osmosis from fiction to reality ...more |
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arboretum (a botanical garden devoted to trees.) chiding (full of rebuke; critical.) languorous (mentally or physically tired or not active, in a way th arboretum (a botanical garden devoted to trees.) chiding (full of rebuke; critical.) languorous (mentally or physically tired or not active, in a way that feels or looks pleasant) two-places-at-once sort of busy retro-ageing treatment Ethnarch (the ruler of a people or province, as in parts of the Roman and Byzantine Empires.) pantaloons (women's baggy trousers gathered at the ankles.) reprieve (cancel or postpone the punishment of (someone, especially someone condemned to death).) stanchions (an upright bar, post, or frame forming a support or barrier.) ejecta (material that is forced or thrown out, especially as a result of volcanic eruption, meteoritic impact, or stellar explosion.) roquelaure (a knee-length cloak worn especially in the 18th and 19th centuries.) crock (an earthenware pot or jar.) a million-tonne starship flotsam (the wreckage of a ship or its cargo found floating on or washed up by the sea.) prurient (having or encouraging an excessive interest in sexual matters, especially the sexual activity of others.) Genetechnology meatbrained loonies two diagonals made an X inside the square terraforming ((especially in science fiction) transform (a planet) so as to resemble the earth, especially so that it can support human life.) brush fire (a fire that is difficult to control and often spreads quickly) inviolable (never to be broken, infringed, or dishonoured.) trite ((of a remark or idea) lacking originality or freshness; dull on account of overuse.) traveltube port passive and reactive armour Vanguard Foundation djellaba (a kind of loose cloak with a hood, worn by men esp in North Africa and the Middle East.) rimrock (an outcrop of resistant rock forming a margin to a gravel deposit, especially one forming a cliff at the edge of a plateau.) malevolently (in a way that causes or wants to cause harm or evil) driverless car heretic (a person believing in or practising religious heresy.) Infidel (a person who has no religion or whose religion is not that of the majority.) minute-to-minute changes in conditions fastidiousness (the fact of giving too much attention to small details and wanting everything to be correct and perfect) tobogganing (the activity or pastime of sliding downhill over snow on a toboggan.) kept high by tiny field projectors turnpike (a toll gate.) matriarchs (a woman who is the head of a family or tribe.) the highest articulation of power cretin (a stupid person (used as a general term of abuse).) plasma rifle younger, unencumbered minds, and those not afraid to act. it'd be a payment, not a bribe. The ship was over eighty kilometres long and it was called the Size Isn't Everything. Minds - fancy computers, apparently - controlling everything does not really signify on the cosmic scale of events he linked into one of their direct-link sensory entertainments Culture does not believe in luck immerse himself in the old books, trying to understand ancient ideas and histories, hoping to make sense of them, one day, and perhaps explain his own ideas, try to point out the lessons of these elder histories, perhaps make people think again about their own times and ideologies. Did he have any right not to try and do something, even if the Culture was wrong about his stature in the civilisation? Was it right to sit back and just let things happen, however much it might be the easiest, least stressful course? If there was a war, and he knew he'd done nothing, how would he feel afterwards? a man with a direct neural implant Starlight Lounge fogbank (a dense mass of fog, especially at sea.) smashed irretrievably beatific (feeling or expressing blissful happiness.) Hegemony (leadership or dominance, especially by one state or social group over others.) quagmire (a soft boggy area of land that gives way underfoot.) bereft (deprived of or lacking (something).) truce (an agreement between enemies or opponents to stop fighting or arguing for a certain time.) sitting back with his hands behind his neck an elevator shaft that extended from living unit to drive unit. held the woman's recorded brain patterns, backed-up onto the little blue cube. coup de grace (a final blow or shot given to kill a wounded person or animal.) warble ((of a bird) sing softly and with a succession of constantly changing notes.) Maglev train ...more |
Notes are private!
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Mar 31, 2024
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Paperback
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539
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| 0385340559
| 9780385340557
| 0385340559
| 4.22
| 95,339
| Apr 02, 2007
| May 15, 2007
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He was tortured. Nothing but mucus in his stomach. Dehydrated. No food, no water. Chucked out of a plane. They didn't throw him from a plane. He was found He was tortured. Nothing but mucus in his stomach. Dehydrated. No food, no water. Chucked out of a plane. They didn't throw him from a plane. He was found in the middle of nowhere with injuries consistent with a fall from 3,000 feet. An airplane has a stall speed of what? They would've shoved him out of the door's plane horizontally into the slipstream. He'd bang into the wing or tail. There'd be perimortem injuries and there aren't. He was thrown from a helicopter. His broken legs weren't from the fall, anyway. Because? Look at his blood work. Full of free histamines. Massive pain reaction. You don't get these kind of levels from injuries sustained at the time of death. Broken legs were a few days old. That's why ferrous oxide powder was found in his pants fabric. He was hit with a rusty iron bar. ...more |
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Hardcover
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538
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| 0425266516
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| Dec 03, 2013
| Dec 03, 2013
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Men make the worst patients. They don't take their medication. They don't do what their told. They won't admit when they're sick. In fact, it's probab
Men make the worst patients. They don't take their medication. They don't do what their told. They won't admit when they're sick. In fact, it's probably easier to give a pill to a cat, than a man. Then again...a man can't scratch you.
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my rating |
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557
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556
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554
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it was amazing
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551
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550
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May 28, 2024
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Jun 01, 2024
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555
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it was amazing
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548
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547
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546
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Apr 08, 2024
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545
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Apr 08, 2024
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544
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Apr 07, 2024
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543
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Apr 06, 2024
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542
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Apr 05, 2024
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541
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Apr 01, 2024
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540
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| 4.16
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Mar 31, 2024
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Mar 31, 2024
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539
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| 4.22
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Mar 24, 2024
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Mar 24, 2024
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538
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Mar 19, 2024
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Mar 19, 2024
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Laden...
