There's nothing crueler the gods can do to an artist than misalign his talents and passion.

We should probably tell you that the full title of this game is Zombies! Apocalypse - Massive Multiplayer Online Zombies Massacre, even though that's basically given away the point of it all.

If you are not found, the rest cannot follow.

Are we near the bottom? No.

It is very comforting in times of stress to go back to the fairy tales we heard as children, but it doesn't make them less false.

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

It's rather important not only to be not orthodox, but to be subversive.

Who's going to say that word, forgiveness? It's outside of nature. Essentially, we just have to suck it all up.

If you have a choice never have a job.

Let us look for the positive deviants.

It's about effectiveness -- not effort.

Procrastination is a calling away from something that we do against our desires toward something that we do for pleasure, in that joyful state of self-forgetful inspiration that we call genius.

Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it.

It's hard to get people to do something bad all in one big jump, but if you can cut it up into small enough pieces, you can get people to do almost anything.

It's possible to get accustomed to anything. Make bloody sure you are aware of what you've become accustomed to.

One passionate person is worth a thousand people who are just plodding along ...

The truth is that we are often bored to death by what we find online -- but this is boredom on the installment plan, one click a time, and therefore imperceptible.

It's not that there's not enough work, it's that there is too much of it.

If we don't get rid of the incentive to loot, the only question is what form the next round of looting will take. The human mind has a tremendous ability to rationalize, and the possibility of making millions of dollars invites some hard-core rationalization.

One person called me "Jesus of YouTube." I don't think that's right but it's a good feeling.

Success is a corollary of obscenity: you know it when you see it.

More and more of us are not interested in substance.

Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.

It's not where you take things from -- it's where you take them to.

The archetype of the dead city is a distillation of the agonies of hundreds of real cities that have been destroyed since cities and marauding armies were invented. Our only way of escape from the insanity of the collective unconscious is a collective consciousness of sanity, based upon hope and reason. The great task that faces our contemporary civilization is to create such a collective consciousness.

Everybody should, at this point, try to understand ... that we are in a D-process. The D-process is a disease of sorts that is going to run its course. If you think that restructuring the banks is going to get lending going again and you don't have to restructure the other pieces -- the mortgage piece, the corporate piece, the real-estate piece -- you are wrong.

Let's pull out the bazooka and be done with it.

We have got to the point in human history where we simply do not have to accept what nature has given us.

When you borrow a lot of money to create a false prosperity, you import the future into the present.

The short-term needs are the opposite of what is needed in the long term.

Only with hindsight can one look back and see that the smartest course may not have been the right one.

One of the big take-aways from Iraq was that you have to not lose confidence in what you are doing. We were able to go to the edge of the abyss without losing hope.

Let's not kid ourselves. We're not going to find some wonderful thing that's going to deliver large positive results at modest costs. It's not going to happen.

Quite a lot of what passes itself off as a dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others' as selfish or pathological or wrong.

First world shanty towns.

Rewilding: the process of creating a lifestyle that is independent of the domestication of civilization.

"Maybe we could" is ... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

It has always been this way. Finite. But at forty-five you realize it.

It's going to be a long, difficult struggle.

Tolerance is critical to a successful long term relationship.

Without music, time has a very different quality.

You can't write or program well in units of an hour. That's barely enough time to get started.

Some of your greatest successes are going to be the children of failure.

Poor folk love their cellphones!

What if I want something more than the pale facsimile of fulfillment brought by a parade of ever-fancier toys? To spend my life restlessly producing instead of sedately consuming? Is there an app for that?

As long as you can look fearlessly at the sky, you'll know that you're pure within and will find happiness once more.

They thought that if they had a bigger mortgage they could get a bigger house. They thought if they had a bigger house, they would be happy. It's pathetic. I've got four houses and I'm not happy.

Happiness exists just around the corner, it's just a matter of figuring out how to get there.

Is there a formula -- some mix of love, work, and psychological adaptation -- for a good life?

You can't be happy all the time, but you can pretty much focus all the time. That's about as good as it gets.

In prison, nothing is more depressing than an empty mailbox.

Will not wearing a life recorder be used as evidence that someone is up to no good?

Scarcity of attention and the daily rhythms of life and work makes people default to interacting with those few that matter and that reciprocate their attention.

I guess the world is divided into two kinds of people: those who understand quiet time and those who don't.

It is difficult to safely reveal limited information about a social network.

The great contemporary terror is anonymity. So we live exclusively in relation to others, and what disappears from our lives is solitude. Technology is taking away our privacy and our concentration, but it is also taking away our ability to be alone.

Superficial is the new intimate.

They just want theirs. That is the culture they have created.

We know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers.

There is often a mismatch between what we see when we look at our children, and what is really there.

We need to return to the culture of thrift that my mother and her generation learned the hard way through years of hardship and deprivation.

When you're close to the money, you get the first cut. Oyster farmers eat lots of oysters, don't they?

Much of the land will be given back to nature. People will enjoy living near a forest or meadow.

Your colleague's husband's sister can make you fat, even if you don't know her.

It's not as if being married means you're any less alone.

I find other people's errors very reassuring. It makes me feel better about my own deficiencies.

Paul Graham asks what living in your city tells you. Living in the north Perimeter area for 6 odd years now has told me that everybody makes way, way more money than I do. It's not inspiring so much as it makes you sympathize with class warfare.

"I like middles," said John Updike. "It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules."

The middleman acts in the middleman's interest. Google is a middleman made of software.

What you tell Google you've told the government.

Many people like to think that any child, with the proper nurturance, can blossom into some kind of academic oak tree, tall and proud. It's just not so.

Most people will do almost anything to be liked.

Giving up being liked is the ultimate public sacrifice.

No place in the United States is likely to escape a long and deep recession.

When you have a large society that consumes lots of resources, that society is likely to collapse once it hits its peak.

Richard Holbrooke must know that there will be no American victory in this war; he can only try to forestall potential disaster. But if he considers success unlikely, or even questions the premise of the war, he has kept it to himself.

If we all started thinking a bit more like friends, and a bit less like attention whores, the privacy problem would be solved at a stroke.

If anyone ever asks you to be a buffer state, just walk away. It does not look like fun.

I like the feeling of knowing that nobody is trying to reach me.

I don't mean this in a negative way, but Y Combinator is more like a cult than a venture capital fund. And Paul is the cult leader.

There is so much you can't know about your spouse when you get married, like that one day she will want to eat her placenta.

It is unlikely that we will be able to defeat the Taliban.

There is no conceivable force the United States can deploy to pacify Afghanistan.

There's no point in trying to hack apart the connections between the inside and the outside of the mind.
Instead we ought to focus on managing and improving those connections.

Schools ought to teach the high art of how to be discriminating.

If I had to name one high-cultural notion that had died in my adult lifetime, it would be the idea that difficulty is artistically desirable.

Don't make fun of grad students! They just made a terrible life choice.

So worrisome has the situation become that students at prestigious universities are even talking about becoming butchers.

Do not destroy what you cannot create.

Don't let your design make promises you can't keep.

Before you reconfigure, mount a scratch monkey.

Your code should not look hopelessly unmaintainable, just be that way.
Otherwise it stands the risk of being rewritten or refactored.

Don't forget about forgetting.

Oughts and Noughts | A Noteworthy Year