[Salt-Man Z]

A snippet of a conversation from Donaldson's The Last Dark (no spoilers):

Quote

"Nothing matters. It's all dust."

"Mortal lives are not stones. They are not seas. For impermanence to judge itself by the standards of permanence is folly. Or it is arrogance. Life merely is what it is, neither more nor less. To deem it less because it is not more is to heed the counsels of the Despiser."

[Nicodimas]

Surprised nobody used this one yet:

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

Dune

[Puck]

Thread necro!

Anyway, just came across this and it needs to go here:

Quote

“It’s insane. Friends and family grieve and go on when people die. They don’t jump in the grave after them. People live on.”
“Yeah, people do.” I brushed past him in the hall and left him behind. People mourn and move on.
Certain monsters and heroes don’t.
[Rob Thurman - Doubletake]

[Tsundoku]

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiisssssssssse ...

From Dragonfired, The Dark Profit Saga book 3, by J Zachary Pike. About presentation:

"Weaver Ortson was a hero of a more recent age, one where men and women of valor were better versed in stagecraft and public relations. The guild’s arch-choreographers had instructed the Golden Dawn carefully on the most inspiring poses. Staff beauticians and illusionists had applied makeup and magical glamours to each member of the party. The guild’s top illuminancers wove enchanted mists and glowing orbs around the room to ensure that the king and his fellows were put in the best possible light. Under Ortson’s direction, the guild’s combined efforts ensured they looked like legends striding in from the mists of history and tracking glory all over the present’s carpeting."

This post has been edited by Tsundoku: 03 August 2024 - 10:30 AM

[Tsundoku]

Another great quote from the above, regarding truth and lies:

"It has been said that a lie can make its way around the world before the truth gets its horse saddled. To be sure, when complicated facts or counterintuitive principles are involved, lies and rumors get a head start. Yet it shouldn’t be ignored that a simple truth can move as fast or faster than a convoluted lie. It’s also pertinent to note that the proverb is often cited by people unhappy with the current state of public opinion, as it may be true that false allegations about a noble’s infidelity will spread like wildfire, but—to the distress of many nobles—so will true allegations. The idea that lies are more rapid or mobile is often uttered in the hopes that people will begin to accept a story’s pervasiveness as evidence of its untruthfulness, which just goes to show that a clever idiom can walk through many gates where facts and rational arguments will be detained, questioned, and hung in the morning."

[Cyphon]

Zachary Pike writes some good stuff.

[worry]

Not as good as Jeremy Barracuda.

[Tsundoku]

worry, on 11 August 2024 - 12:19 AM, said:

Not as good as Jeremy Barracuda.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Quote

I came on command, and saw that he had surrounded himself with faces.

Every last one of them was screaming.

There was no sound. The disembodied holograms floated in silent tiers around the bubble, each contorted into a different expression of pain. They were being tortured, these faces; half a dozen real ethnicities and twice as many hypothetical ones, skin tones ranging from charcoal to albino, brows high and slanted, noses splayed or pointed, jaws receding or prognathous. Sarasti had called the entire hominid tree into existence around him, astonishing in their range of features, terrifying in their consistency of expression.

A sea of tortured faces, rotating in slow orbits around my vampire commander.

"My God, what is this?"

"Statistics." [...]

"And the expressions? What do they represent?"

"Software customizes output for user."

Blindsight - Google Books

lol

From the author's footnotes:

Quote

believe it or not, those screaming faces [...] represent a very real form of statistical analysis: Chernoff faces, which are more effective than the usual graphs and statistical tables at conveying the essential characteristics of a data set.

Chernoff, H. 1973. Using faces to represent points in k-dimensional space graphically. Journal of the Americal Statistical Association 68:361-368.

Wilkinson, L. 1982. An experimental evaluation of multivariate graphical point representations. Human Factors in Computer Systems: Proceedings. Gaithersberg, MD, 202-209.

Hmm, while I don't doubt that it could be useful for some forms of data, maybe even more "effective" than graphs and tables by some measures, but I'm very skeptical about the general claim... not sure if he's kidding or not. "This person's eyes are x % as wide as this other person's"? Have they tried it with penises?

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 25 September 2024 - 11:27 AM

[Tsundoku]

I'll give you this AVD, you certainly have a gift for putting ...unique ... sentences together.

Best version of Skynet ChatGPT yet.

This post has been edited by Tsundoku: 25 September 2024 - 11:49 AM

[worry]

Quote

He rises slowly, eyes like a pair of candles blown out.

Fever House