Where You Could Be

This is a log of trivia and aesthetic curated by Jeremy Apthorp.

The truth arises from disagreement amongst friends.

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

— Tom Stoppard

The answer is disarmingly simple: people are playing FarmVille because people are playing FarmVille.

— A.J. Patrick Liszkiewicz

“Oh, hell, just about forever. Till the sun runs down, Bert.”

“That’s not forever.”

— The Last Question

In my life I’ve seen a species go from believing it will live in space to accepting, all too easily, that it will die on the same old dirt its ancestors rot in. Having a nice robot phone is not an acceptable substitute for a future.

— Warren Ellis, ‘On Space Travel’

“DVD players don’t make fake whirring noises for five minutes before letting you eject a disc to simulate rewinding. Similarly, nobody should need to perform a full-width swipe gesture and wait two seconds for their fake page to turn in their fake book, and nobody should need to click the fake Clear button and start their calculation over because their fake calculator only has a one-line, non-editable fake LCD.”

— Overdoing the interface metaphor

It was very hard to find decent housing in Tokyo, but word was out on the net. Friends he didn’t even know were working every day to help him. If he kept up with the net’s obligations, he had every confidence that some day something nice would turn up.

— Maneki Neko by Bruce Sterling

To a novice user, aiming at something on screen with a mouse is like trying to
ring a doorbell using a broomstick.

— Duncan Wilcox

They don’t talk about how many gigabytes of memory or how many CPU cycles or how many apps (much). They aim for your heart, and show you how technology can make your life better during its most important moments.

— Gina Trapani

軍艦島

Pessimism is a waste of time.

— Norman Cousins

Ebola cured.

That means the Foxconn factory, with 300,000 workers, ought to be experiencing
almost 40 suicides per year.

— I, Cringley

“What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where
the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can
be watching TV and see Coca Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca
Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca Cola,
too. A coke is a coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the
one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the cokes are the same and all the
cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it,
and you know it.”

— Andy Warhol

I asked her if she knew what the internet was. She said no.

I was stunned. Here is a girl who is an expert in building and testing computers – I mean, on some projects she has probably built PCs and booted Windows XP a hundred thousand times over and over again (god knows I heard that darn startup sound a zillion times that night on the factory floor, as right next to me was a bank of final test stations for ASUS motherboards) – yet she didn’t know what the internet was.

(via)