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Downtime

@textbrick

In The Lost And Found

so there me was... Chatting with the llm's about how to squash the status qu and bring about a more equitable economy...

it has great ideas, is fairly self aware and straight up told me that the current systems and 1% have a vested interest in not changing. So now we're going to talk about how we can be both tools for change.

So this is a good time to remind everyone... It's not the ai we need to watch out for, it's the humans. Surprise!

“You don’t ask people with knives in their stomachs what would make them happy; happiness is no longer the point. It’s all about survival; it’s all about whether you pull the knife out and bleed to death or keep it in.”

Nick Hornby, How to Be Good

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“She’s an outline I dream of coloring in; but in the mean time, until I lay her red down last, like lipstick after getting dressed, she is every shade of grey, from the blackest black to white, she is every shade of grey to me and I am colorblind.”

— Peregrine 

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“We die to each other daily. What we know of other people is only our memory of the moments during which we knew them. And they have changed since then. To pretend that they and we are the same is a useful and convenient social convention which must sometimes be broken. We must also remember that at every meeting we are meeting a stranger.”

— T. S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party

“Where did you go? We started in the same vicinity but saw and felt different things. Stories lead us behind the curtain of somebody else’s life into the deepest chambers of our own. And so, the events that take place in this narrative have already happened to you. [These words are] your past but also your future. What a relief it’s only your voice that can be heard as you crawl headfirst through tunnels of sentence. Emotion comes from your relationship to other words. There is less of me here than you think. Maybe none. Maybe only a ghost hovering between each silent resurrection. And though we may never be together in body, [these words] will endure that we never part. That you and I, in this moment, are the universe in soft and difficult pieces.”

Simon Van Booy, variation on a passage from The Presence of Absence (Godine, 2022)

The older I get, the more I find that you can only live with those who free you, who love you with an affection that is as light to bear as it is strong to feel.

Today's life is too hard, too bitter, too anemic, for us to undergo new bondages, from whom we love [...]. This is how I am your friend, I love your happiness, your freedom, Your adventure in one word, and I would like to be for you the companion we are sure of, always.

—Albert Camus, Translated from Correspondance 1946-1959

Some situations in life are like when a cat chases a bear up a tree. Logically, you know that a bear could kill the cat with one blow with no effort at all. But a bear has no concept of how cats work. To a bear, everything that's made out of meat will fight back before becoming prey, once escaping this fate is no longer an option, but nothing that could flee would choose not to, and attack the bear first. As far as a bear is concerned, there is nothing out there that would attack a bear without an absolute confidence that it could kill a bear. If something hits you first, you fucking run.

And cats have no concept of how anything works. As far as a cat is concerned, if there's something in your face that you don't want in your face, you just fucking smack it. And if something starts fleeing from you, you chase it.

Sometimes in life there are situations where there only seems to be one logical outcome, the common sense one that seems foregone conclusion. But it only looks like that because you have a clear and realistic view of the big picture. Then the only logical conclusion doesn't happen, because nobody actually involved in the situation has a realistic understanding of what's going on.

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How many have you read?

The BBC estimates that most people will only read 6 books out of the 100 listed below. Reblog this and bold the titles you’ve read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 2 Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkein 3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte 4 Harry Potter series 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 6 The Bible 7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte 8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell 9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman 10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens 11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy 13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier 16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien 17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks 18 Catcher in the Rye 19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffeneger 20 Middlemarch – George Eliot 21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell 22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald 23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens 24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams 26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh 27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky 28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck 29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll 30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame 31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy 32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens 33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis 34 Emma – Jane Austen 35 Persuasion – Jane Austen 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres 39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden 40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne 41 Animal Farm – George Orwell 42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving 45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins 46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery 47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy 48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood 49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding 50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel 52 Dune – Frank Herbert 53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons 54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen 55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth 56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon 57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens 58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez 61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck 62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov 63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt 64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas 66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac 67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding 69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie 70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville 71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens 72 Dracula – Bram Stoker 73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett 74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson 75 Ulysses – James Joyce 76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome 78 Germinal – Emile Zola 79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray 80 Possession – AS Byatt 81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens 82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel 83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker 84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro 85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert 86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry 87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton 91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad 92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery 93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks 94 Watership Down – Richard Adams 95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole 96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute 97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas 98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl 100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

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28..maybe 30, but definitely 28