Gerhard > Recent Status Updates

I know you used to write. Do you still? If so, always remember that every great writer gets manuscripts rejected. So, keep at it. You'll get there one day. In the meantime, you may want to look for another job.

"Yes. The plot is really interesting, but the world of rare books isn't really the story, is it? What you're really writing about is love. Searching for it. Finding it. Losing it. I wonder if your hero finds it again. I hope so. I really do. You make him sound so messed up, but I kept rooting for him."

Humans think in very narrow categories. They assumed that the rest of the universe was like them ...

‘After millennia of human despoliation. At the very least – tens of millennia if you want to go back to the beginning of farming, and the forest clearings, the stone-tool users who inflicted the first mass extinctions—’

there will always be subversion ...

Just about every political system humans ever devised was about control by a central few, generally with the use of monstrous lies. Look up religions – it took generations of geniuses like Kepler to start cutting through all that hierarchy of controlling untruth. The maturing of political science, and the development of a truly rational, truly fair form of democracy, didn’t happen until it was born on the Moon ...

There was no reason why people had to drive every extraction opportunity to its limit.

What are the odds of being born in a war-torn shithole? Considering most of the planet lives on nothing, and considering there’s never been an era of peace in all of recorded history, you’d say pretty high.

A slow, archaic cycle, like the breathing of a very old person. Archaic, and yet imposed on peoples and colonies who had otherwise lost touch with the home world – who, perhaps, had otherwise forgotten about their origins altogether. A kind of institutional memory.

'A guy called Einstein figured it all out ...'

He did?

‘You don’t get many visitors on a generation starship.’

"Hanif! Hanif! Give me a break! You've been reading too many spy stories!"
"This is a spy story!" Hanif, too, raised his voice. "You know that already!"

'A glass dildo thus resembles a well-made poem. We can pay attention to the thing as a thing, to its appearance, shape and craftsmanship, or look past its materials to its function, or attend to the thing it represents.'

‘When they chop up your corpse, it doesn’t matter if you’re campus Marxist or café Marxist. Grass-roots socialist or champagne socialist. The flies will shit on you and the maggots will munch.’

'You told him your grand theories of the penis. How Asians do more screwing despite having the smallest ones. How the average member is both muscular and fleshy, moist and dry, hard and soft, smooth and wrinkled. It is the only part of your meat suit that can shape-shift. Imagine a nose growing inches whenever you lied. Or your little toe turning into a thumb.'

'Poets are the last heretics of the world.'

'The English taught us a lot about hygiene.'

'Maybe I should admit shamefully that I knew of General de Wet's heroics before I heard of Christ's miracles...'

'Reading, writing, and literary analyses would fill their days. That, and fucking like bunnies.'

'There should be a plaque of remembrance, a day, something. But then, many gay people get killed in South Africa because of rampant discrimination. There should be more awareness, but it seems like rich and middle-class queer people don't really care.' - Herman Lategan

Mario used words like that. Callous. Egregious. Horrid. He read a lot of Victorian fiction, whether it was really Victorian or not.

In the medical world, they called it triage. In the real world, they called it the once-over.

One day he hadn't a worry in the world and the next he was being probed by machines. The thought made him think of aliens, the kind that abduct you and have their way.

Fuck engineering, Tux replied. First thing I’m doing when we’re done with this job? Walking down to Big Sur. I want to spent a year doing nothing but talking to trees and rocks.

Worse, it’s a ghost kitchen. Everything is made by machines, and some kind of esports robot mixer in the back. There are people in this city who need jobs, and now we’re supposed to give our hard-earned coin to robots. Authentic Noodle? More like Automatic Noodle.

“I was already thinking we could hang some nice curtains there to hide you guys from people looking in the windows. I don’t want to attract robophobes.”

'Cayenne surveyed the group with satisfaction. It was the perfect team: a chef, a marketer, an ops manager, and a security expert who could fix things. Plus, a human for camouflage.'