“In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost.”
-Dante Alighieri, Inferno
Switch
“Above all, video games are meant to be just one thing: Fun for everyone.”
-Satoru Iwata
Rome never looks where she treads.
Always her heavy hooves fall
On our stomachs, our hearts or our heads;
And Rome never heeds when we bawl.
Her sentries pass on—that is all,
And we gather behind them in hordes,
And plot to reconquer the Wall,
With only our tongues for our swords.
We are the Little Folk—we!
Too little to love or to hate.
Leave us alone and you’ll see
How we can drag down the State!
We are the worm in the wood!
We are the rot at the root!
We are the taint in the blood!
We are the thorn in the foot!
Mistletoe killing an oak—
Rats gnawing cables in two—
Moths making holes in a cloak—
How they must love what they do!
Yes—and we Little Folk too,
We are busy as they—
Working our works out of view—
Watch, and you’ll see it some day!
No indeed! We are not strong,
But we know Peoples that are.
Yes, and we’ll guide them along
To smash and destroy you in War!
We shall be slaves just the same?
Yes, we have always been slaves,
But you—you will die of the shame,
And then we shall dance on your graves!
-Rudyard Kipling, A Pict Song
“Golf is a game that is played on a five-inch course – the distance between your ears.”
-Bobby Jones
“Negative space is important. When I teach students to read critically I advise them to look for what the author isn’t saying just as carefully as for what he or she is.”
-Aaron Belz
Hey, listen, NPCs! Happy October and happy anniversary to the love of my life,…
“When the brain is whole, the unified consciousness of the left and right hemispheres adds up to more than the individual properties of the separate hemispheres.”
-Roger Wolcott Sperry
“Wherever he saw a hole he always wanted to know the depth of it. To him this was important.”
-Jules Verne, Journey to the Center of the Earth
“And again there are mornings when ecstasy bubbles in the blood, and the stomach and chest are tight and electric with joy, and nothing in the thoughts to justify it or cause it.”
-John Steinbeck, East of Eden
“It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation.”
-Herman Melville, Hawthorne and His Mosses
“But here I am in July, and why am I thinking about Christmas pudding? Probably because we always pine for what we do not have. The winter seems cozy and romantic in the hell of summer, but hot beaches and sunlight are what we yearn for all winter.”
-Joanna Franklin Bell
“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!”
―Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
“I think what a lot of action movies lose these days, especially the ones that deal with fantasy, is you stop caring at some point because you’ve lost human scale.”
-Harrison Ford
“If everything seems under control, you’re not going fast enough.”
-Mario Andretti
“No art or learning is to be pursued halfheartedly…and any art worth learning will certainly reward more or less generously the effort made to study it.”
― Murasaki Shikibu, The Tale of Genji
“Napalm, son. Nothing else in the world smells like that. I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
-Lt. Colonel Bill Kilgore, Apocalypse Now
“You take the blue pill; the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill; you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.”
-Morpheus, The Matrix
“An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come.”
—Victor Hugo
“He was after a sensational story and this, of course, could not be constructed out of mere truth; not out of officially released truth, anyway. It was essential that the news-reading public should feel, first, that the community was in danger and secondly that people—well-off people, “official” people—who ought to have known better, were to blame for it.”
―Richard Adams, The Plague Dogs
So a tiny paper weight from a 3rd-world country video game company was recently released and it set the internet on fire like so much dog crap in a big, runny paper bag. Ladies and leotards, the Nintendo Switch, a device so inflammatory it summoned the shock jocks and mouthbreathers from the dark recesses of their dimly lit parents’ basements to spew their bile and record close-ups of their in-grown hairs. The Switch, if you forgot to have your mom pay your internet bill, is the lovechild of John Podesta and Anthony Weiner, in other words, it’s a home system and a handheld, or as I prefer: a homewreck and a port-a-potty. For some reason, this is exactly what a world of over-privileged whiners needed for a punching bag.
“In everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive.”
― Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
“When one is frightened of the truth then it is never the whole truth that one has an inkling of.”
-Ludwig Wittgenstein
“If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.”
-Rudyard Kipling
“The suspense is terrible! …I hope it’ll last.”
-Gene Wilder, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
“Much have I fared, much have I found,
Much have I got of the gods:
What shall live of mankind when at last there comes
The mighty winter to men?”
-The Ballad of Vafthruthnir
