what Dave thinks about movies, books and everything
{5/5} “Old of heart traveled to the town, and came back not just younger, but smarter and happier. Ideas radiated from the town: weaving machines, gearboxes and windmills, factory postures. Something new had happened in this place. It wasn’t the inventions. It was the people that Woodcarver had midwifed, and the outlook he had created.” […]
I’ve mentioned David Pakman before, as someone who has brilliant videos on US politics. Here he’s interviewing Amanda Montell, a linguist who’s written a book called Cultish. They have a fascinating discussion about cults, in which she brings up this term “thought terminating cliché.” It means a phrase that always ends the debate, and is […]
{5/5} “Excuse me, but there’s something about the thickness of your neck and the broadness of your shoulders that makes me think you’d be an agile hunter and provide well for our children.” — Sally 3rd Rock from the Sun season 1, aired in 1996 Dick, Sally, Harry, and Tommy are from another planet — […]
I stayed at a house on Patterson Lake, and from there went hiking at various places. My friend James joined me at Rock Dunder. The first photo is of the lake, from the place where I was staying. The next 2 photos are taken from the side of the road. After that the photos are […]
{4.5/5} “He should have known it would be no use arguing with her. She wasn’t interested in assessing the odds of success. She wasn’t even balancing payoffs, weighing Atlantis against the rest of the world. The only variables she cared about came from inside her own head, and neither guilt nor obsession were amenable to […]
{4.5/5} “It’s not just the skin that rots when you stop coming inside. It’s not just the bones that go soft. Once a rifter goes native, the whole neocortex is pretty much a write-off. You let the abyss stare into you long enough and that whole civilized veneer washes away like melting ice in running […]
{4.5/5} “She’d been astonished to learn that there was life on the moon: microscopic life, some kind of bacterium that had hitched a ride with the first unmanned probes. It had survived years of starvation in hard vacuum, frozen, boiled, pelted by an unending sleet of hard radiation. Life, she’d learned, could survive anything.” Maelstrom […]
{4.5/5} “Outside, she watched the others change. They moved around her without speaking, one connecting smoothly with another to lend a hand or a piece of equipment. When she needed something from one of them, it was there before she could speak. When they needed something from her they had to ask aloud, and the […]
{4.5/5} “Towers sometimes lost great chunks of themselves to offensive spells, or in failed hostile takeovers. Such wounds caused the Towers pain, hindered their movements and damaged their systems; bad wounds could take years to heal. She though, too, of what Xhea had said when she first discovered the living Lower City’s presence: that it […]
{4.5/5} “I stepped on a Balrog when it was in a dispersal phase — actively looking for a new host. Now, it’s happily bonded to me and reproductively dormant. Entirely. Almost. It would only spread to someone else if the chance was too promising to pass up: a host so superior, the Balrog had to […]