Chen Long Quotes

Distance simply means separation in place but never in connections. Heart remains inseparable.

Lan XiChen was shocked, "Young Master Wei, could it be that even after you spent such a long time together with WangJi, you still do not know of his feelings?

Bei Ye didn’t respond. All this while, he only let Chen Nian gaze at his side profile, stubbornly refusing to let her look into his eyes. But Chen Nian knew. Last night, he hugged her the entire time, his tears falling onto her eyes as his body was wracked with silent sobs. He had stopped at several intervals, but it wasn’t long before his tears would begin to flow once more.

Control of sexuality is a classic tool of domination, used by men against women, by white people against people of color, by the abled against the disabled—or, to cut a long list short, by the powerful against the less powerful. It can be expressed in many ways, like rape as a form of political conquest or slave owners marrying off their slaves and splitting families apart. It can look like enforcing purity rules only for women, perpetuating racist sexual stereotypes, or assuming that some groups have no sexual desires at all.

Stanford was full of kids like me. I had new contact lenses. I’d grown my hair long enough to braid. I was ready to be seen, and if I couldn’t have a blond ponytailed jock roommate, I wasn’t going to let the one I did have get in my way.

I don’t regret the lies I’ve told, nor following his father’s orders, nor keeping that thorn tucked away for so long before I burned it. But I regret this moment, stolen from a different thread of us where we’re oblivious and happy. I should’ve never heard him laugh like that.

Yet while nobody was talking about sex, everybody learned that sex was good, a gift from God and a pleasurable reward so long as enjoyed only within marriage.

We’re all different people all through our lives, but that’s okay, as long as you remember all the people you used to be.

Every no is good enough, and that goes for every person. If we believe that people shouldn’t have unwanted sex with strangers and that strangers are not entitled to sex, we should believe that people shouldn’t have unwanted sex with partners and that partners, no matter how loving or good, are not entitled to sex either. As long as people don’t know about asexuality—hell, forget about the label, so long as they don’t know that saying no forever and for any reason and in any context is okay—sex education, sex therapy, and popular depictions of sex are incomplete and people don’t have the relevant information to fully consent.

I still don’t have any idea what this energy is. This may be the unifying ace call, one I have heard again and again from aces, whether they are sex-favorable or sex-replused, irrespective of their romantic orientation and aesthetic types. Regardless of whether we have sex, we don’t relate to sexuality the way that, seemingly, allos do. We do not center sexuality in our lives. And, so, aces spend an inordinate amount of time wondering about this energy that other people are detecting, and experiencing, and expressing, that we are not. People think about sex even if they don’t want to? What makes one person sexually attractive on that visceral level and not another? Allos can even be sexually attracted to people they find ugly? What? Like anthropologists after a day of fieldwork, we commiserate about the mysteries of the local culture, even though it is actually the culture that we were born into—just one that, for a long time, had no room for us and our way of being. There is room now.

Like anthropologists after a day of fieldwork, we commiserate about the mysteries of the local culture, even though it is actually the culture that we were born into--just one that, for a long time, had no room for us and our way of being. There is room now.

The source of stillness is in emptiness. All things and the changes they go through are but temporary conditions, which finally return to nothingness, then revert to emptiness. As long as the human mind is not still and quiet, there will be thoughts of desire remaining, which create tremendous obstacles to the cultivation of refinement.

Then she heard tiny moaning noises coming from the direction of the object. It sounded almost human. She couldn’t leave without knowing what it was. She approached it, reached out, and lifted the branch. About as long as her hand and pink, it resembled a piece of flesh. She identified it immediately…after all, she’d seen another one just this morning. It was a penis. One side had a rounded end, bisected by a gentle indentation with a small irregular hole in the center. On the other end, it still bore its testicles in their dark red sac. If it had ever belonged to a man, the wound had disappeared completely, as Vesper could see no place where it appeared hacked off or scarred.

Nobody needs to identify, nobody is trapped, nobody needs to stay forever and pledge allegiance. The words are gifts. If you know which terms to search, you know how to find others who might have something to teach. They are, like Lucid said, keys. Intellectual entryways to the ace world and other worlds. Offerings of language for as long as they bring value.

Before long our entire table was covered in food: an earthenware ramekin of pearly-pink prawns bathed in garlic butter; translucent, paper-thin slices of cured ham fanned out on the plate; tortilla espanola with nuggets of potato and sweet onion; candy-stripe beets studded with goat cheese and almond slivers; slow-cooked short ribs almost silky in their tenderness; thick chorizo stew.

Inside, the house was filled with people dressed in varying interpretations of the party's "Roaring Twenties" theme- chosen to commemorate the end of Kat's own roaring twenties. There were a couple of flapper dresses and Louise Brooks wigs, but the majority of the crowd was simply dressed up: girls in sequins, guys in blazers and jeans. They spilled out of the living room and onto the patio and garden surrounding the swimming pool; they clustered around the outdoor bar and the long table laden with finger foods: dumplings in bamboo steamer baskets, assorted sushi rolls, chicken satay made onsite by a hired cook- a wizened Malay man who'd brought his own mini grill and pandan-leaf fan.

Because I was reading today in the science section of the paper that passionate love lasts only a year, maybe two, if you're lucky. Because I want to be extra lucky. Because the article apologized specifically to poets - sorry, you hopeless saps - as though we automatically believe in love more than anyone else (more than kindergarten teachers, long-haired carpenters) & have been pushing this Non-Truth on everyone. Because who knows what will happen, but I want to, baby, want to believe it's always possible to love bigger & madder, even after two, three, four years, four decades. I want a love as dirty as a snowball fight in the sludge, under grimy yellow lights. I want this winter inside my lungs. Inside my brain & dream. I want to eat the unplowed street & fog that's been erasing evergreens. I want to eat the fog only to discover it's some giant's lost silver blanket. I want to find the giant & return to him his treasure. I want the journey to be long. & strange, like a map drawn in snow by our shadows shivering. I want to shiver against you, into you.

I saw another young man coming down the stairs from the third floor with my blanc de chine Goddess of Mercy, Guanyin, in his hand. [. . .] He swung the arm holding the Guanyin carelessly in the air and declared, 'This is a figure of Buddhist superstition. I'm going to throw it in the trash.' The Guanyin was a perfect specimen and a genuine product of the Dehua kiln in Fujian province. It was the work of the famous 17th century Ming sculptor Chen Wei and bore his seal on the back. The beauty of the creamy-white figure was beyond description. The serene expression of the face was so skillfully captured that it seemed to be alive. The folds of the robe flowed so naturally that one forgot it was cared out of hard biscuit. The glaze was so rich and creamy that the whole figure looked as if it were soft to the touch. [. . .] By this time, I no longer thought of them as my own possessions. I did not care to whom they belonged after tonight as long as they were saved from destruction.

The judges believed Uber and Lyft to be more powerful than they were willing to admit, but they also conceded that the companies did not have the same power over employees as an old-economy employer like Walmart. “The jury in this case will be handed a square peg and asked to choose between two round holes,” Judge Chhabria wrote. Judge Chen, meanwhile, wondered whether Uber, despite a claim of impotence at the center of the network, exerted a kind of invisible power over drivers that might give them a case. In order to define this new power, he decided to turn where few judges do: the late French philosopher Michel Foucault. In a remarkable passage, Judge Chen compared Uber’s power to that of the guards at the center of the Panopticon, which Foucault famously analyzed in Discipline and Punish. The Panopticon was a design for a circular prison building dreamed up in the eighteenth century by the philosopher Jeremy Bentham. The idea was to empower a solitary guard in the center of the building to watch over a large number of inmates, not because he was actually able to see them all at once, but because the design kept any prisoner from knowing who was being observed at any given moment. Foucault analyzed the nature and working of power in the Panopticon, and the judge found it analogous to Uber’s. He quoted a line about the “state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power.” The judge was suggesting that the various ways in which Uber monitored, tracked, controlled, and gave feedback on the service of its drivers amounted to the “functioning of power,” even if the familiar trappings of power—ownership of assets, control over an employee’s time—were missing. The drivers weren’t like factory workers employed and regimented by a plant, yet they weren’t independent contractors who could do whatever they pleased. They could be fired for small infractions. That is power. It can be disturbing that the most influential emerging power center of our age is in the habit of denying its power, and therefore of promoting a vision of change that changes nothing meaningful while enriching itself. Its posture is not entirely cynical, though. The technology world has long maintained that the tools it creates are inherently leveling and will serve to collapse power divides rather than widen them.

The Instagram versus Hipstamatic story is perhaps the canonical example of a strategy made famous by Chris Dixon’s 2015 essay “Come for the tool, stay for the network.” Chris writes: A popular strategy for bootstrapping networks is what I like to call “come for the tool, stay for the network.” The idea is to initially attract users with a single-player tool and then, over time, get them to participate in a network. The tool helps get to initial critical mass. The network creates the long term value for users, and defensibility for the company.40 There are many other examples across many sectors beyond photo apps: The Google Suite provides stand-alone tools for people to create documents, spreadsheets, and presentations, but also network features around collaborative editing, and comments. Games like Minecraft or even classics like Street Fighter can be played in single-player mode where you play against the computer, or multiplayer mode where you play with friends. Yelp started out effectively as a directory tool for people to look up local businesses, showing addresses and phone numbers, but the network eventually built out the database of photos and reviews. LinkedIn started as a tool to put your resume online, but encouraged you to build up your professional network over time. “Come for the tool, stay for the network” circumvents the Cold Start Problem and makes it easier to launch into an entire network—with PR, paid marketing, influencers, sales, or any number of tried-and-true channels. It minimizes the size requirement of an atomic network and in turn makes it easy to take on an entire network. Whether it’s photo-sharing apps or restaurant directories, in the framework of the Cold Start Theory, this strategy can be visualized. In effect, a tool can be used to “prop up” the value of the network effects curve when the network is small.

This is the Rocketship Growth Rate—the precise pace at which a startup must grow to break out. How do you calculate this rate of growth? First, by setting a goal of exceeding a billion dollars of valuation—thus being in a position to achieve an IPO—and working backward. Hitting a $1 billion valuation generally requires at least $100 million in top-line recurring revenue annually, based on the rough market multiple of 10x revenue. You’d want to hit that in 7–10 years, to sustain the engagement of the key employees and also reward investors who often work in decade-long time cycles. These two goals—revenue and time—work together to create an overall constraint. Neeraj Agarwal, a venture capitalist and investor in B2B companies, first calculated this growth rate by arguing that SaaS companies in particular need to follow a precise path to reach these numbers:64 Establish great product-market fit Get to $2 million in ARR (annual recurring revenue) Triple to $6 million in ARR Triple to $18 million Double to $36 million Double to $72 million Double to $144 million SaaS companies like Marketo, Netsuite, Workday, Salesforce, Zendesk, and others have all roughly followed this curve. And the rough timing makes sense. The first phase, in which the team initially gets to product/market fit, takes 1–3 years. Add on the time to reach the rest of the growth milestones, and the entire process might take 6–9 years. Of course, after year 10, the company might still be growing quickly, though it’s more common for it to be growing 50 percent annualized rather than doubling. The argument is that products with network effects both can see higher growth rates as they tap into the various network forces I’ve discussed, and can compound these growth rates for a longer period of time—and looking at the data, I think that’s generally true.

Over the years, Facebook has executed an effective playbook that does exactly this, at scale. Take Instagram as an example—in the early days, the core product tapped into Facebook’s network by making it easy to share photos from one product to the other. This creates a viral loop that drives new users, but engagement, too, when likes and comments appear on both services. Being able to sign up to Instagram using your Facebook account also increases conversion rate, which creates a frictionless experience while simultaneously setting up integrations later in the experience. A direct approach to tying together the networks relies on using the very established social graph of Facebook to create more engagement. Bangaly Kaba, formerly head of growth at Instagram, describes how Instagram built off the network of its larger parent: Tapping into Facebook’s social graph became very powerful when we realized that following your real friends and having an audience of real friends was the most important factor for long-term retention. Facebook has a very rich social graph with not only address books but also years of friend interaction data. Using that info supercharged our ability to recommend the most relevant, real-life friends within the Instagram app in a way we couldn’t before, which boosted retention in a big way. The previous theory had been that getting users to follow celebrities and influencers was the most impactful action, but this was much better—the influencers rarely followed back and engaged with a new user’s content. Your friends would do that, bringing you back to the app, and we wouldn’t have been able to create this feature without Facebook’s network. Rather than using Facebook only as a source of new users, Instagram was able to use its larger parent to build stronger, denser networks. This is the foundation for stronger network effects. Instagram is a great example of bundling done well, and why a networked product that launches another networked product is at a huge advantage. The goal is to compete not just on features or product, but to always be the “big guy” in a competitive situation—to bring your bigger network as a competitive weapon, which in turn unlocks benefits for acquisition, engagement, and monetization. Going back to Microsoft, part of their competitive magic came when they could bring their entire ecosystem—developers, customers, PC makers, and others—to compete at multiple levels, not just on building more features. And the most important part of this ecosystem was the developers.

When Wimdu launched, the Samwers reached out to Airbnb to discuss combining forces, as they had done with Groupon and eBay to facilitate a speedy exit. Discussions ensued between Airbnb and Wimdu cofounders and investors—meeting multiple times, touring the Wimdu offices, and checking with other founders like Andrew Mason from Groupon to best understand the potential outcome. In the end, Airbnb chose to fight. Brian Chesky described his thought process: My view was, my biggest punishment, my biggest revenge on you is, I’m gonna make you run this company long term. So you had the baby, now you gotta raise the child. And you’re stuck with it for 18 years. Because I knew he wanted to sell the company. I knew he could move faster than me for a year, but he wasn’t gonna keep doing it. And so that was our strategy. And we built the company long term. And the ultimate way we won is, we had a better community. He couldn’t understand community. And I think we had a better product.82 To do this, the company would mobilize their product teams to rapidly improve their support for international regions. Jonathan Golden, the first product manager at Airbnb, described their efforts: Early on, Airbnb’s listing experience was basic. You filled out forms, uploaded 1 photo—usually not professional—and editing the listing after the fact was hard. The mobile app in the early days was lightweight, where you could only browse but not book. There were a lot of markets in those days with just 1 or 2 listings. Booking only supported US dollars, so it catered towards American travelers only, and for hosts, they could get money out via a bank transfer to an American bank via ACH, or PayPal. We needed to get from this skeleton of a product into something that could work internationally if we wanted to fend off Wimdu. We internationalized the product, translating it into all the major languages. We went from supporting 1 currency to adding 32. We bought all the local domains, like airbnb.co.uk for the UK website and airbnb.es for Spain. It was important to move quickly to close off the opportunity in Europe.83 Alongside the product, the fastest way to fight on Wimdu’s turf was to quickly scale up paid marketing in Europe using Facebook, Google, and other channels to augment the company’s organic channels, built over years. Most important, Airbnb finally pulled the trigger on putting boots on the ground—hiring Martin Reiter, the company’s first head of international, and also partnering with Springstar, a German incubator and peer of Rocket Internet’s, to accelerate their international expansion.

I leaned forward and grabbed his collar, jerking him to my face and snarling, “I am the killing machine. I am the man you fear in the darkness late at night. I am worse than anything China can envision. And I’m going to kill Chen Ju-Long.

wasn’t it: I’d awakened a longing I could not control, an awareness of the spaces he could not fill.

always had when confronted with an ordeal: the possibility that the experience would prove useful for a project. She could endure anything as long as it could be bent, in recollection, to her design, the mercenary impulse as coping mechanism.

Do I really care about this relationship? Chen Nan asked herself. After a long, convoluted debate with herself, she came to the conclusion: a definitive yes. “Love” was a strong word, but no doubt she liked Garcia. They had cultivated the relationship entirely online, and she had enjoyed the time they spent together: going on missions together in the game, screaming their heads off like a pair of lunatics at virtual music festivals, or simply just communicating, via video chat, texting, or emoji wars. They came from very different cultural backgrounds, but they’d clicked almost immediately. She and Garcia were like a dumpling and a Brazilian pastel—they may look different on the outside, but their fillings were made from the same ingredients. Our souls, his and mine, are the same, thought Chen Nan.

Suchi knew now that home wasn't a place. It wasn't moments that could be pinned down. It was people, people who share the same ghosts as you, folks long gone, places long disappeared. People who knew you, saw you, loved you. When those people were far-flung, your home was too. And when those people were gone, home lived on inside of you.

They held a simple wedding at the Venice Hotel in Shenzhen. Pony’s colleagues rejoiced because when he was single, he often worked beyond 10 p.m. Now they finally could take a breather with him starting a new chapter. Little did they know, it wasn’t long before they would get bombarded again by his past-midnight emails.

Chen turned back to the box and examined the picture through the glass. White smudges were appearing on the front and back surfaces of the photograph, but he still had a long way to go. Fingerprints were nothing but sweat. After the water evaporated, an organic residue was left. The fumes from the superglue reacted with the amino acids, glucose, and peptides in the organics to form a white goo, but growing the goo took time. John figured he still had another ten or fifteen minutes before the prints would be usable.

Building a Better Battery Boyoun Kim By BRIAN X. CHEN and NICK BILTON SAN FRANCISCO — The next breakthrough smartphone, or maybe the one after that, might not have a traditional battery as its sole source of power. Instead, it could pull energy from the air or power itself through television, cellular or Wi-Fi signals. Engineers at Apple even tried for many years to build a smarter battery by adding solar charging to iPhones and iPods, a former Apple executive said. And they have continued to experiment with solar charging, two people who work at the company said. Batteries, long the poor cousin to computer chips in research-obsessed Silicon Valley, are now the rage. As tech companies push their businesses into making wearable devices like fitness bands, eyeglasses and smart watches, the limitations of battery technology have become the biggest obstacle to sales and greater profits. Consumers are unlikely to embrace a wristwatch computer like the one being worked on by Apple, or Google’s smart glasses, if they work only a few hours between charges and must be removed to be plugged in.

As if Nintendo had all the answers, at that precise moment, Princess Peach bounced across the screen in her long pink ball gown and diamond tiara.

How unfair is it that snowboarding guys can look as skanky as they want? If they don't shower for five days, who cares? So long as they tweak out more amplitude than than the next guy, go bigger and cleaner, they could be the scroungiest dirtballs on the slopes and still score sponsorships. But girls? No matter how good their tricks are, how high their jumps go, the pro snowboarding girls have got to work their sex appeal, watch their figures, stay in shape in season and out. Their bodies, not just their skills, make them marketable: boobs on boards.

I had waited a long time to say those words, and I thought it would be hard to use them, that the claim would be too big for me. Surprisingly, it wasn’t. I had grown into the words.

Do you know where the word ‘itinerary’ comes from?” Jacob asked as I scanned my perfectly formatted document of opening times and tips on how to bypass long lines and which routes to take during prime drive times. “What does this have to do with anything?” I countered. “Everything. It’s from Latin, for ‘journeys.’ So trust me. You’ll have fun.

Một triều đình không xây dựng nền chính trị nhân từ, đi ngược đạo trời, hà khắc với dân chúng, đương nhiên sẽ thất bại, đây là chân lý ngàn năm không đổi.

Scott felt a part of his brain light up. He had been repressed for too long in this restricted-bitrate zone; the turtle-like network speed and the bogged-down progress of the project made it hard for him to breathe. He suddenly understood what he needed: speed. The careless sensation of hurtling along like a lightning bolt, even if it meant placing a man’s fragile flesh and bones on the edge of a knife. A powerful desire, almost suffocating in its urgency, drove him, and he yearned to press his skin and flesh against this cold metal monster, as it trembled, growled, and bolted away, never to stop.

Kaizong watched Uncle Chen’s solemn expression; watched the young people taking photographs and recordings of the proceedings so that the files could be sent to the email addresses of dead relatives; watched the silent, praying faces, childish or lined, flickering in the flames from the candles and burning incense—and something deep in him was moved. Perhaps there would come a day when everything he was looking at would be replaced by virtual reality, by simulation, by technology, but what couldn’t be replaced was how people longed for those they loved. They needed some ceremony, some platform, some way to cross the border between life and death, to connect the past to the present, to shape the formless memories and longing into objects, acts, or ritualized performances so that the feelings that had been numbed by the passage of time might be reawakened, so that the pain of loss, once heartbreaking and bone-weary, could be recalled along with the endless memories that followed.