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[...] It's interesting that the two false administrative styles--the tyrant and the fake friend--are also the two main stereotypes that books and television shows and comic stripes present administrators as. One suspects, in fact, that the mental picture the insecure administrator erects inside himself is based partly on these pop culture stereotypes.
[...] Jay Landauer feels absently at his face. Every love story is a ghost story. Ryne Hobtratschk turns a page. [...]
the idea of random gems being hidden among descriptions of banality ... something similar for tech? bug reports? spam emails? programming?
[...] It's not unlike the religious confidence that one is 'loved unconditionally' by God--as the God in question is defined as something that loves this way automatically and universally, it doesn't seem to really have anything to do with you, so it's hard to see why religious people claim to feel such reassurance in being loved this way by God. [...]
relevant for when MC thinks church might be his way of finding a reason to live?
Under the sign erected every May above the outer highway reading IT'S SPRING, THINK FARM SAFETY and through the north ingress with its own defaced name and signs addressed to soliciting and speed and universal glyph for children at play [...] and then hard left along the length of a speed bump into the dense copse [...] along the north park's anfractuous roads [...] skirting the corrugate trailer where it was said the man left his family and returned sometime later with a gun and killed them all as they watched Dragnet and the torn abandoned sixteen-wide half overgrown by the edge of the copse where boys and their girls made strange agnate forms on pallets [...]
description of toni ware, embedding human tragedy in factual input in a way that might be lost or glossed over
something similar but for Silicon valley woes? startups dying, corruption, people breaking down, homelessness caused by rent going up
Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the A.M. heat: shattercane, lamb’s-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak’s thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day. A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding. Electric sounds of insects at their business. Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow. Insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.
Some crows come overhead then, three or four, not a murder, on the wing, silent with intent, corn-bound for the pasture’s wire beyond which one horse smells at the other’s behind, the lead horse’s tail obligingly lifted. Your shoes’ brand incised in the dew. An alfalfa breeze. Socks’ burrs. Dry scratching inside a culvert. Rusted wire and tilted posts more a symbol of restraint than a fence per se. NO HUNTING. The shush of the interstate off past the windbreak. The pasture’s crows standing at angles, turning up patties to get at the worms underneath, the shapes of the worms incised in the overturned dung and baked by the sun all day until hardened, there to stay, tiny vacant lines in rows and inset curls that do not close because head never quite touches tail. Read these.
2A inspo
Sai let go of Jenny’s hand and turned back to Rinn. “Maybe they did use me. But they’re right. You’ve turned the world into a panopticon and all the people in it into obedient puppets that you nudge this way and that just so you’d make more money.”
“You yourself pointed out that we were fulfilling desires, lubricating the engine of commerce in an essential way.”
“But you also fulfill dark desires.” He remembered again the abandoned houses by the side of the road, the pockmarked pavement.
????? thinking undialectically
The other man, dressed in a crisp suit, looked skeptical. “Are you the man who came up with the idea of using a larger flywheel for the old engine?”
I nodded. I took pride in the way I could squeeze more power out of my machines than dreamed of by their designers.
“You did not steal the idea from an Englishman?” His tone was severe.
I blinked. A moment of confusion was followed by a rush of anger. “No,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm. I ducked back under the machine to continue my work.
“He is clever,” my shift supervisor said, “for a Chinaman. He can be taught.”
“I suppose we might as well try,” said the other man. “It will certainly be cheaper than hiring a real engineer from England.”
loool
It had taken a decade of hard work. But now mechanical arms served drinks in the bars along Central and machine hands fashioned shoes and clothes in factories in the New Territories. In the mansions up on the Peak, I heard—though I’d never seen—that automatic sweepers and mops I designed roamed the halls discreetly, bumping into walls gently as they cleaned the floors like mechanical elves puffing out bits of white steam. The expats could finally live their lives in this tropical paradise free of reminders of the presence of the Chinese.
that's the dream
Her legs, what I could see of them, were made of shiny chrome. I bent down to look closer: the cylindrical joints at the knees were lathed with precision, the pneumatic actuators along the thighs moved in complete silence, the feet were exquisitely molded and shaped, the surfaces smooth and flowing. These were the most beautiful mechanical legs I had ever seen.
“He had me drugged,” she said. “When I woke up, my legs were gone and replaced by these. The pain was excruciating. He explained to me that he had a secret: he liked machines more than flesh, couldn’t get hard with a regular woman.”
I had heard of such men. In a city filled with chrome and brass and clanging and hissing, desires became confused.
this part was kinda mawkish but i liked the general reflection on the social impacts of modernity
“But here’s the thing. Even though the Communists had even worse equipment than we did, and less training, they kept on winning. I couldn’t understand it until one day, my unit was ambushed by the Communists, and I surrendered and joined them. You see, the Communists really were bandits. They would take the land from the landlords and distribute it to the landless peasants, and this made them very popular. They couldn’t care less about the fiction of laws and property rights. Why should they? The rich and educated had made a mess of things, so why shouldn’t the poor and illiterate have a chance at it? No one before the Communists had ever thought much of the lowly peasants, but when you have nothing, not even shoes for your feet, you are not afraid to die. The world had many more people who were poor and therefore fearless than people who were rich and afraid. I could see the logic of the Communists.
indeed