“
Over the centuries, mankind has tried many ways of combating the forces of evil... prayer, fasting, good works and so on. Up until Doom, no one seemed to have thought about the double-barrel shotgun. Eat leaden death, demon...
”
”
Terry Pratchett
“
You cannot!' Tatiana said sharply. 'If you order a gun there is only a single shot, and once delivered the doors are locked and will not open until it has been fired.
”
”
R.D. Ronald (The Zombie Room)
“
To this day, I can never shake the connection between this boy, Peeta Mellark, and the bread that gave me hope, and the dandelion that reminded me that I was not doomed.
”
”
Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1))
“
A writer never forgets the first time he accepted a few coins or a word of praise in exchange for a story. He will never forget the sweet poison of vanity in his blood and the belief that, if he succeeds in not letting anyone discover his lack of talent, the dream of literature will provide him with a roof over his head, a hot meal at the end of the day, and what he covets the most: his name printed on a miserable piece of paper that surely will outlive him. A writer is condemned to remember that moment, because from then on he is doomed and his soul has a price.
”
”
Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Angel's Game (The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, #2))
“
To this day, I can never shake the connection between this boy, Peeta Mellark, and the bread that gave me hope, and the dandelion that reminded me that I was not doomed. And more than once, I have turned in the school hallway and caught his eyes trained on me, only to quickly flit away. I feel like I owe him something, and I hate owing people. Maybe if I had thanked him at some point, I'd be feeling less conflicted now. I thought about it a couple of times, but the opportunity never seemed to present itself. And now it never will. Because we're going to be thrown into an arena to fight to the death. Exactly how am I supposed to work in a thank-you in there? Somehow it just won't seem sincere if I'm trying to slit his throat.
”
”
Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1))
“
you can have all the knowledge and skills in the world, but if your “blueprint” isn’t set for success, you’re financially doomed.
”
”
T. Harv Eker (Secrets of the Millionaire Mind: Mastering the Inner Game of Wealth)
“
But does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end-and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it's possible to play it with a kind of joy?
To try to make some meaning out of all this seems unbelievably quaint. Maybe I only see a pattern because I've been staring too long. But then again, to paraphrase Boris, maybe I see a pattern because it's there.
”
”
Donna Tartt (The Goldfinch)
“
Lucky!" she shouted. The creature pulled up and pranced excitedly before her, front hooves pawing at the ground. Laughing with happiness, Kelley flung her arms around the kelpie and buried her face in his mane. Lucky nuzzled her shoulder and head-butted at her in delight.
Besides Sonny, Fennrys gestured with his good arm. "Isn't that...?"
"The Roan Horse, Harbinger of the Wild Hunt and Fearsome Bringer of Doom. Yeah" Sonny nodded. "Used to be."
"Thought so." Lucky kicked up his back hooves like a frolicking colt, and Fennrys snorted is disgust. "Evil really needs to step up its game.
”
”
Lesley Livingston
“
I know you not quite well
Yet I foolishly surrender my mind to you.
Slowly and carefully you have cast a spell
Now my virgin heart only longs for you.
There is no need to push, I am already falling.
Once proudly tall, I’m no longer standing.
Knowing well that I am doomed to misery,
I will roll the dice and take delight in my suffering.
”
”
Kamand Kojouri
“
If you cannot understand my argument, and declare "It's Greek to me", you are quoting Shakespeare; if you claim to be more sinned against than sinning, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you recall your salad days, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you act more in sorrow than in anger; if your wish is farther to the thought; if your lost property has vanished into thin air, you are quoting Shakespeare; if you have ever refused to budge an inch or suffered from green-eyed jealousy, if you have played fast and loose, if you have been tongue-tied, a tower of strength, hoodwinked or in a pickle, if you have knitted your brows, made a virtue of necessity, insisted on fair play, slept not one wink, stood on ceremony, danced attendance (on your lord and master), laughed yourself into stitches, had short shrift, cold comfort or too much of a good thing, if you have seen better days or lived in a fool's paradise -why, be that as it may, the more fool you , for it is a foregone conclusion that you are (as good luck would have it) quoting Shakespeare; if you think it is early days and clear out bag and baggage, if you think it is high time and that that is the long and short of it, if you believe that the game is up and that truth will out even if it involves your own flesh and blood, if you lie low till the crack of doom because you suspect foul play, if you have your teeth set on edge (at one fell swoop) without rhyme or reason, then - to give the devil his due - if the truth were known (for surely you have a tongue in your head) you are quoting Shakespeare; even if you bid me good riddance and send me packing, if you wish I was dead as a door-nail, if you think I am an eyesore, a laughing stock, the devil incarnate, a stony-hearted villain, bloody-minded or a blinking idiot, then - by Jove! O Lord! Tut tut! For goodness' sake! What the dickens! But me no buts! - it is all one to me, for you are quoting Shakespeare.
”
”
Bernard Levin
“
Eric penned nearly a dozen new journal entries in the next two months.
"I have a goal to destroy as much as possible," he wrote, "so I must not be sidetracked by my feelings of sympathy, mercy, or any of that."
It was a mark of Eric's ruthlessness that he comprehended the pain and consciously fought the urge to spare it. "I will force myself to believe that everyone is just another monster from Doom," [the computer game he played day and night] he wrote. "I have to turn off my feelings.
”
”
Dave Cullen (Columbine)
“
Life is Beautiful?
Beyond all the vicissitudes that are presented to us on this short path
within this wild planet, we can say that life is beautiful.
No one can ever deny that experiencing the whirlwind of emotions
inside this body is a marvel,
we grow with these life experiences,
we strengthen ourselves and stimulate our feelings every day,
in this race where the goal is imminent death
sometimes we are winners and many other times we lose and the darkness surprises us
and our heart is disconnected from this reality halfway
and connects us to the server of the matrix once more,
debugging and updating our database,
erasing all those experiences within this caracara of flesh and blood,
waiting to return to earth again.
"Life is beautiful gentlemen" is cruel and has unfair behavior
about people who looked like a bundle of light
and left this platform for no apparent reason,
but its nature is not similar to our consciousness and feelings,
she has a script for each of us
because it was programmed that way, the architects of the game of life
they know perfectly well that you must experiment with all the feelings, all the emotions and evolve to go to the next levels.
You can't take a quantum leap and get through the game on your own.
inventing a heaven and a hell in order to transcend,
that comes from our fears of our imagination
not knowing what life has in store for us after life is a dilemma
"rather said" the best kept secret of those who control us day by day.
We are born, we grow up, we are indoctrinated in the classrooms
and in the jobs, we pay our taxes,
we reproduce, we enjoy the material goods that it offers us
the system the marketing of disinformation,
Then we get old, get sick and die. I don't like this story!
It looks like a parody of Noam Chomsky,
Let's go back to the beautiful description of beautiful life, it sounds better!
Let's find meaning in all the nonsense that life offers us,
'Cause one way or another we're doomed
to imagine that everything will be fine until the end of matter.
It is almost always like that.
Sometimes life becomes a real nightmare.
A heartbreaking horror that we find impossible to overcome.
As we grow up, we learn to know the dark side of life.
The terrors that lurk in the shadows,
the dangers lurking around every corner.
We realize that reality is much harsher
and ruthless than we ever imagined.
And in those moments, when life becomes a real hell,
we can do nothing but cling to our own existence,
summon all our might and fight with all our might
so as not to be dragged into the abyss.
But sometimes, even fighting with all our might is not enough.
Sometimes fate is cruel and takes away everything we care about,
leaving us with nothing but pain and hopelessness.
And in that moment, when all seems lost,
we realize the terrible truth: life is a death trap,
a macabre game in which we are doomed to lose.
And so, as we sink deeper and deeper into the abyss,
while the shadows envelop us and terror paralyzes us,
we remember the words that once seemed to us
so hopeful: life is beautiful. A cruel and heartless lie,
that leads us directly to the tragic end that death always awaits us.
”
”
Marcos Orowitz (THE MAELSTROM OF EMOTIONS: A selection of poems and thoughts About us humans and their nature)
“
Does it matter whether we achieve our outer purpose, whether we succeed or fail in the world? It will matter to you as long as you haven't realized your inner purpose. After that, the outer purpose is just a game that you may continue to play simply because you enjoy it. It is also possible to fail completely in your outer purpose and at the same time totally succeed in your inner purpose. Or the other way around, which is actually more common: outer riches and inner poverty, or to "gain the world and lose your soul," as Jesus puts it. Ultimately, of course, every outer purpose is doomed to "fail" sooner or later, simply because it is subject to the law of impermanence of all things. The sooner you realize that your outer purpose cannot give you lasting fulfillment, the better. When you have seen the limitations of your outer purpose, you give up your unrealistic expectation that it should make you happy, and you make it subservient to your inner purpose.
”
”
Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment)
“
All they needed was a title. Carmack had the idea. It was taken from The Color of Money, the 1986 Martin Scorsese film in which Tom Cruise played a brash young pool hustler. In one scene Cruise saunters into a billiards hall carrying his favorite pool cue in a stealth black case. “What you got in there?” another player asks.
Cruise smiles devilishly, because he knows what fate he is about to spring upon this player, just as, Carmack thought, id had once sprung upon Softdisk and as, with this next game, they might spring upon the world.
“In here?” Cruise replies, flipping open the case. “Doom.
”
”
David Kushner (Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture)
“
To the sound of this voice, to the music of the chessboard's evil lure, Luzhin recalled, with the exquisite, moist melancholy peculiar to recollections of love, a thousand games that he had played in the past... There were combinations, pure and harmonious, where thought ascended marble stairs to victory; there were tender stirrings in one corner of the board, and a passionate explosion, and the fanfare of the Queen going to its sacrificial doom.
”
”
Vladimir Nabokov (The Luzhin Defense)
“
Bruce Lee was proof: not all Asian Men were doomed to a life of being Generic. If there was even one guy who had made it, it was at least theoretically possible for the rest. But easy cases make bad law, and Bruce Lee proved too much. He was a living, breathing video game boss-level, a human cheat code, an idealized avatar of Asian-ness and awesomeness permanently set on Expert difficulty. Not a man so much as a personification, not a mortal so much as a deity on loan to you and your kind for a fixed period of time. A flame that burned for all yellow to understand, however briefly, what perfection was like.
”
”
Charles Yu (Interior Chinatown)
“
Many rookie software managers think that they can "motivate" their programmers to work faster by giving them nice, "tight" (unrealistically short) schedules. I think this kind of motivation is brain-dead. When I'm behind schedule, I feel doomed and depressed and unmotivated. When I'm working ahead of schedule, I'm cheerful and productive. The schedule is not the place to play psychological games.
”
”
Joel Spolsky (Joel on Software)
“
Kevin was raised at Evermore, surrounded by the best and practically born with a racquet in his hand, whereas Andrew learned Exy while he was locked up in juvie. Neil had a page-long article about it in his notebook. It was crassly titled "The Prince and the Pauper", and its focus was on how doomed their friendship was.
”
”
Nora Sakavic (The King's Men (All for the Game, #3))
“
Have you forgotten yet?...
For the world's events have rumbled on since those gagged days,
Like traffic checked while at the crossing of city-ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heaven of life; and you're a man reprieved to go,
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
But the past is just the same--and War's a bloody game...
Have you forgotten yet?...
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you'll never forget.
Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench--
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, 'Is it all going to happen again?'
Do you remember that hour of din before the attack--
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads--those ashen-grey
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?
Have you forgotten yet?...
Look up, and swear by the green of the spring that you'll never forget.
”
”
Siegfried Sassoon
“
They held each other close and turned their backs upon the end.
The hills that split asunder and the black that ate the skies;
The flames that shot so high and hot that even dragons burned;
Would never be the final sights that fell upon their eyes.
A fly upon a wall, the waves the sea wind whipped and churned —
The city of a thousand years, and all that men had learned;
The Doom consumed it all alike, and neither of them turned"
―Tyrion Lannister and Jorah Mormont, quoting a poem about the Doom
”
”
George R.R. Martin (A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1))
“
Australian shrimp barbecue, when the beers and the rums mix with the hard sun headaches and widespread Saturday night violence spreads across the country behind closed front doors. Truth is, Bich said, Australian childhoods are so idyllic and joyous, so filled with beach visits and backyard games of cricket, that Australian adulthoods can’t possibly meet our childhood expectations. Our perfect early lives in this vast island paradise doom us to melancholy because we know, in the hard honest bones beneath our dubious bronze skin, that we will never again be happier than we were once before. She said we live in the greatest country on earth but we’re actually all miserable deep down inside and the junk cures the misery and the junk industry will never die because Australian misery will never die.
”
”
Trent Dalton (Boy Swallows Universe)
“
If you play a video game on your computer, such as "Doom" or "Uncharted", you see compelling 3D worlds with 3D objects. Yet the information is entirely 2D, limited by the number of pixels on the screen. The same is true when you look away from your computer to the world around you. It too has pixels, and all the information is 2D.
”
”
Donald D. Hoffman (The Case Against Reality: Why Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes)
“
When he was eleven, id Software released the video game Doom, and Eric found the perfect virtual playground to explore his fantasies. His adversaries had faces, bodies, and identities now. They made sounds and fought back. Eric could measure his skills and keep score. He could beat nearly everyone he knew. On the Internet, he could triumph over thousands of strangers he had never met. He almost always won, until later, when he met Dylan. They were an even match.
”
”
Dave Cullen (Columbine)
“
I don't know that you'll understand this, but once upon a time, long ago, I was a scholar and a marathon man, but that fella's gone now, dead I suppose, but I remember something he thought, which was that if you don't learn the mistakes of the past, you'll be doomed to repeat them. Well we've been making a mistake with people like you, because public trials are bullshit and executions are games for winners - all this time we should have been giving back pain. That's the real lesson. That's the loser's share, just pain, pure and simple, pain and torture, no hotshot lawyers running around trying to see that justice is done. I think we'd have a nice peaceful place here if all you warmakers knew you better not start something because if you lost, agony was just around the bend. That's what I'd like to give you. Agony. Not what you're suffering now. I mean a lifetime of it, 'cause that's the only degree of justice I think we're ready for down here yet, and I know any humanist might disagree with me too, but I don't think you will, because you had a lot to do with educating me, I'm like you now, except I'm better at it, because you're going to die and I've still got a long way to go.
”
”
William Goldman (Marathon Man)
“
Your heart is a weapon the size of your first. Keep fighting. Keep loving. More than bombs, fire, guns or arrows, love is the most powerful weapon in the Hunger Games. It stirs and feeds the rebellion. It saves the doomed. It destroys the bereaved. And it gives even the most devastated survivors a reason to go on.
”
”
Leah Wilson (The Girl Who Was on Fire: Your Favorite Authors on Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games Trilogy)
“
Offhand, I can think of no other sport in which the world's champions, one of the great teams of its era, would not instantly demolish inferior opposition and reduce a game such as the one we had just seen to cruel ludicrousness. Baseball is harder than that; it requires a full season, hundreds and hundreds of separate games, before quality can emerge, and in that summer span every hometown fan, every doomed admirer of underdogs will have his afternoons of revenge and joy.
”
”
Roger Angell (The Summer Game (Bison Book))
“
Carmack was of the moment. His ruling force was focus. Time existed for him not in some promising future or sentimental past but in the present condition, the intricate web ol problems and solutions, imagination and code. He kept nothing from the past–no pictures, no records, no games, no computer disks. He didn’t even save copies of his first games, Wraith and Shadowforge. There was no yearbook to remind of his time at Shadowforge. There was no yearbook to remind of his time at school, no magazine copies of his early publications. He kept nothing but what he needed at the time. His bedroom consisted of a lamp, a pillow, a blanket, and a stack of books. There was no mattress. All he brought with him from home was a cat named Mitzi (a gift from his stepfamily) with a mean streak and a reckless bladder.
”
”
David Kushner (Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture)
“
The game industry is a culture created by the outsiders—the kids who didn’t fit in, the ones who listened to and loved Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, D&D, and Aliens.
”
”
John Romero (Doom Guy: Life in First Person)
“
day, I can never shake the connection between this boy, Peeta Mellark, and the bread that gave me hope, and the dandelion that reminded me that I was not doomed.
”
”
Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1))
“
Nine runs to the bad, doomed, insanely hopeful, they pleaded raucously for the impossible.
”
”
Roger Angell (The Summer Game (Bison Book))
“
If we can get this done, [Doom] is going to be the fucking coolest game that the planet Earth has ever fucking seen in its entire history!
”
”
David Kushner (Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture)
“
Miles swallowed icy spit. Those who do not know their history, his thought careened, are doomed to keep stepping in it. Alas, so were those who did, it seemed.
”
”
Lois McMaster Bujold (The Vor Game (Vorkosigan Saga, #6))
“
These games sprang from their deep need to close their eyes and flee from unsolved problems and anxious forebodings of doom into an imaginary world as innocuous as possible.
”
”
Hermann Hesse (The Glass Bead Game)
“
Billy's native arrogance might well have been a gift of miffed genes, then come to splendid definition through the tests to which a street like Broadway puts a young man on the make: tests designed to refine a breed, enforce a code, exclude all simps and gumps, and deliver into the city's life a man worthy of functioning in this age of nocturnal supremacy. Men like Billy Phelan, forged in the brass of Broadway, send, in the time of their splendor, telegraphic statements of mission: I, you bums, am a winner. And that message, however devoid of Christ-like other-cheekery, dooms the faint-hearted Scottys of the night, who must sludge along, never knowing how it feels to spill over with the small change of sassiness, how it feels to leave the spillover on the floor, more where that came from, pal. Leave it for the sweeper.
”
”
William Kennedy (Billy Phelan's Greatest Game)
“
Though games were barely acknowledged as a legitimate form of expression, let alone a legitimate art form, Tom was convinced that they were almost sublime forms of communication, just as films or novels. After
”
”
David Kushner (Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture)
“
Strip away the community bond and the seduction business interests that united us, and what was left? Six guys chasing after a limited subset of available women. Wars have been fought, world leaders shot, and tragedies wrought by males claiming territorial rights over the opposite sex. Perhaps we’d just been too blind to see that Project Hollywood was doomed from the start by the very pursuit that had brought it together. After
”
”
Neil Strauss (The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists)
“
He sank back into his black-and-white world, his immobile world of inanimate drawings that had been granted the secret of motion, his death-world with its hidden gift of life. But that life was a deeply ambiguous life, a conjurer's trick, a crafty illusion based on an accidental property of the retina, which retained an image for a fraction of a second after the image was no longer present. On this frail fact was erected the entire structure of the cinema, that colossal confidence game. The animated cartoon was a far more honest expression of the cinematic illusion than the so-called realistic film, because the cartoon reveled in its own illusory nature, exulted in the impossible--indeed it claimed the impossible as its own, exalted it as its own highest end, found in impossibility, in the negation of the actual, its profoundest reason for being. The animated cartoon was nothing but the poetry of the impossible--therein lay its exhilaration and its secret melancholy. For this willful violation of the actual, while it was an intoxicating release from the constriction of things, was at the same time nothing but a delusion, an attempt to outwit mortality. As such it was doomed to failure. And yet it was desperately important to smash through the constriction of the actual, to unhinge the universe and let the impossible stream in, because otherwise--well, otherwise the world was nothing but an editorial cartoon.
”
”
Steven Millhauser (Little Kingdoms (Vintage Contemporaries))
“
I venture to say Kierkegaard meant that truth has lost its force with us and horrible pain and evil must teach it to us again, the eternal punishments of Hell will have to regain their reality before mankind turns serious once more. I do not see this. Let us set aside the fact that such convictions in the mouths of safe, comfortable people playing at crisis, alienation, apocalypse and desperation, make me sick. We must get it out of our heads that this is a doomed time, that we are waiting for the end, and th rest of it, mere junk from fashionable magazines. Things are grim enough without these shivery games. People frightening one another--a poor sort of moral exercise. But, to get to the main point, the advocacy and praise of suffering take us in the wrong direction and those of us who remain loyal to civilization must not go for it. You have to have the power to employ pain, to repent, to be illuminated, you must have the opportunity and even the time.
”
”
Saul Bellow (Herzog)
“
Bullseye. The problem wasn’t Gerald, or the chair, or what the Rescue Services guys might think when they got down here and saw the situation. It wasn’t even the question of the telephone. The problem was the space cowboy; her old friend Dr. Doom.
”
”
Stephen King (Gerald's Game)
“
Septon Barth’s claim that the Valyrians came to Westeros because their priests prophesied that the Doom of Man would come out of the land beyond the narrow sea can safely be dismissed as nonsense, as can many of Barth’s queerer beliefs and suppositions.
”
”
George R.R. Martin (The World of Ice & Fire: The Untold History of Westeros and the Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire))
“
You don't know much about guns, other than the guns you've used in video games, like Doom. And even when you play Doom, guns are not your weapon of choice. You prefer a chainsaw or a rocket launcher, weapons with more Grand Guignol-style thrills to them.
”
”
Gabrielle Zevin (Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow)
“
Because of the kind of programming that goes into games, they were (and still are) the most taxing form of programming. You can use a computer to crunch a bunch of numbers, sure, but spreadsheets don’t generally need sound cards and GPUs (graphics processing units).
”
”
John Romero (Doom Guy: Life in First Person)
“
I take the comb from a pocket of my new dress and then hesitate. If I begin to untangle my nimbus of snarls, he will see how badly my hair is matted and be reminded of where he found me.
He stands.
Good. He will leave, and then I will be able to wrangle my hair alone.
But instead he steps behind me and takes the comb from my hands. 'Let me do that,' he says, taking strands of my hair in his fingers. 'It's the colour of primroses.'
My shoulders tense. I am unused to people touching me. 'You don't need to-' I start.
'It's no trouble,' he says. 'I had three older sisters brushing and braiding mine, no matter how I howled. I had to learn to do theirs, in self-defence. And my mother...'
His fingers are clever. He holds each lock at the base, slowly teasing out the knots at the very end and then working backward to the scalp. Under his hands, it becomes smooth ribbons. If I had done this, I would have yanked half of it out in frustration.
'Your mother...,' I echo, prompting him to continue in a voice that shakes only a little.
He begins to braid, sweeping my hair up so that thick plaits become something like his circlet, wrapping around my head.
'When we were in the mortal world, away from her servants, she needed help arranging it.' His voice is soft.
This, along with the slightly painful pull against my scalp, the brush of his fingertips against my neck as he separates a section, the slight frown of concentration on his face, is overwhelming. I am not accustomed to someone being this close.
When I look up, his smile is all invitation.
We are no longer children, playing games and hiding beneath his bed, but I feel as though this is a different kind of game, one where I do not understand the rules.
With a shiver, I take up the mirror from the dresser. In this hair, and with this dress, I look pretty. The kind of pretty that allows monsters to deceive people into forests, into dances where they will find their doom.
”
”
Holly Black (The Stolen Heir (The Stolen Heir Duology, #1))
“
PRIOR: Why does everyone here play cards?
...
RABBI CHEMELWITZ: Cards is strategy but mostly a game of chance. In Heaven, everything is known. To the Great Questions are lying about here like yesterday's newspaper all the answers. So from what comes the pleasures of Paradise? Indeterminacy! Because mister, with the Angels, may their names be always worshipped and adored, it's all gloom and doom and give up already. But still is there Accident, in this pack of playing cards, still is there the Unknown, the Future. You understand me? It ain't all so much mechanical as they think.
”
”
Tony Kushner
“
Billie wants me to stroll with her down towards the caves but I dont want to get up from the sand where I’m sitting back to boulder—She goes alone—I suddenly remember James Joyce and stare at the waves realizing “All summer you were sitting here writing the so called sound of the waves not realizing how deadly serious our life and doom is, you fool, you happy kid with a pencil, dont you realize you’ve been using words as a happy game—all those marvelous skeptical things you wrote about graves and sea death it’s ALL TRUE YOU FOOL! Joyce is dead! The sea took him! it will take YOU!
”
”
Jack Kerouac (Big Sur)
“
It must be granted that many aspects of the intellectual life of that era showed energy and grandeur. We moderns explain its concomitant uncertainty and falseness as a symptom of the horror which seized men when at the end of an era of apparent victory and success they found themselves suddenly confronting a void: great material scarcity, a period of political and military crises, and an accelerating distrust of the intellect itself, of its own virtue and dignity and even of its own existence. Yet that very period, filled though it was with premonitions of doom, was marked by some very fine intellectual achievements,
”
”
Hermann Hesse (The Glass Bead Game)
“
a new console generation was on the way, but analysts and pundits were predicting that console gaming was doomed thanks to the rise of iPhones and iPads. Publishers didn’t want to invest tens of millions of dollars into big games without knowing that people would actually buy the next-generation Xbox One and PS4.*
”
”
Jason Schreier (Blood, Sweat, and Pixels)
“
If we’re doomed, as you say, why not strive with every fiber in you to defeat the night? Why go quietly down to death? Let’s fight oblivion together. Let’s fight to live longer and do more than simply quit. If you admit defeat, the game is already up. If you strive, well, who knows, maybe we’ll produce another wonder.
”
”
Vaughn Heppner (The Lost Starship (Lost Starship, #1))
“
That’s why just about every top professional athlete has been laid low by injury, sometimes a career-ending injury. There was a moment in my career when I seriously wondered whether I’d be able to continue competing at the top level. I play through pain much of the time, but I think all elite sports people do. All except Federer, at any rate. I’ve had to push and mold my body to adapt it to cope with the repetitive muscular stress that tennis forces on you, but he just seems to have been born to play the game. His physique—his DNA—seems perfectly adapted to tennis, rendering him immune to the injuries the rest of us are doomed to put up with.
”
”
Rafael Nadal (Rafa)
“
From a policy perspective, the Democratic Party faced a dilemma that it could not solve: finding ways to maintain support within the white blue-collar base that came of age during the New Deal and World War II era, while at the same time servicing the pressing demands for racial and gender equity arising from the sixties. Both had to be achieved in the midst of two massive oil shocks, record inflation and unemployment, and a business community retooling to assert greater control over the political process. Placing affirmative action onto a world of declining occupational opportunity risked a zero-sum game: a post-scarcity politics without post-scarcity conditions. Despite the many forms of solidarity evident in the discontent in the factories, mines, and mills, without a shared economic vision to hold things together, issues like busing forced black and white residents to square off in what columnist Jimmy Breslin called “a Battle Royal” between “two groups of people who are poor and doomed and who have been thrown in the ring with each other.”10
”
”
Jefferson R. Cowie (Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class)
“
Darren says his mum told him a secret recently about Australians. She said this secret would make him a rich man. She said the greatest secret about Australia is the nation's inherent misery. Bich Dang laughs at the ads on telly with Paul Hogan putting another shrimp on the barbie. She said foreign visitors should rightfully be advised about what happens five hours later at that Australian shrimp barbecue, when the beers and the rums mix with the hard sun headaches and widespread Saturday night violence spreads across the country behind closed front doors. Truth is, Bich said, Australian childhoods are so idyllic and joyous, so filled with beach visits and backyard games of cricket, that Australian adulthoods can’t possibly meet our childhood expectations. Our perfect early lives in this vast island paradise doom us to melancholy because we know, in the hard honest bones beneath our dubious bronze skin, that we will never again be happier than we were once before. She said we live in the greatest country on earth but we’re actually all miserable deep down inside and the junk cures the misery and the junk industry will never die because Australian misery will never die.
”
”
Trent Dalton (Boy Swallows Universe)
“
One answer turned up in the violent video games the two were obsessed with playing. Graphic effects realistic enough to blur the line between fantasy and reality allow these kill-for-thrill games to be used to break down a person’s aversion to killing. At the time of the massacre, Doom, the game favored by one of the mass murderers, was being adapted by the Marine Corps for its own training purposes.
”
”
Marlene Steinberg (The Stranger in the Mirror: Dissociation--the Hidden Epidemic)
“
Most Romans defended the gladiatorial games on the ground that the victims had been condemned to death for serious crimes, that the sufferings they endured acted as a deterrent to others, that the courage with which the doomed men were trained to face wounds and death inspired the people to Spartan virtues, and that the frequent sight of blood and battle accustomed Romans to the demands and sacrifices of war.
”
”
Will Durant (Caesar and Christ (Story of Civilization, #3))
“
Truth is, Bich said, Australian childhoods are so idyllic and joyous, so filled with beach visits and backyard games of cricket, that Australian adulthoods can’t possibly meet our childhood expectations. Our perfect early lives in this vast island paradise doom us to melancholy because we know, in the hard honest bones beneath our dubious bronze skin, that we will never again be happier than we were once before.
”
”
Trent Dalton (Boy Swallows Universe)
“
a poem called “The Night Before Doom”: “ ’Twas the night before Doom, / and all through the house, / I had set up my multi-playing networks, / each with a mouse. / The networks were strung, / with extra special care / in hopes that Doom, / soon would be there.” The publisher of a computer magazine had a darker vision he printed in an editorial called “A Parent’s Nightmare Before Christmas”: “By the time your kids are tucked in and dreaming of sugar plums, they may have seen the latest in sensational computer games . . . Doom.
”
”
David Kushner (Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture)
“
We were picking apart a problem in linguistic history and, as it were, examining close up the peak period of glory in the history of a language; in minuets we had traced the path which had taken it several centuries. And I was powerfully gripped by the vision of transitoriness: the way before our eyes such a complex, ancient, venerable organism, slowly built up over many generations, reaches its highest point, which already contains the germ of decay, and the whole intelligently articulated structure begins to droop, to degenerate, to totter towards its doom.
”
”
Hermann Hesse (The Glass Bead Game)
“
there was this family who had two boys who were twins, and the only thing they had in common was their looks. If one felt it was too hot, the other felt it was too cold. If one said he liked the cake, the other said he hated it. They were opposites in every way. One was an eternal optimist, and the other a doom and gloom pessimist. Just to see what would happen, on the twins’ birthday, the father loaded the pessimist brother’s room with every imaginable gift – toys and games, and for the boy who always sees the brighter side of life, with horse manure. That night, the father went to check on the doom guy’s room and found him sitting amidst his new gifts sobbing away bitterly. “Why,” the father said in anguish, “after all this?” The boy replied, “Because my friends are going to be jealous, I will have to read all these instructions before I can do anything with this stuff, I will constantly need batteries, and my toys will eventually be stolen or broken.” Passing by the optimist twin’s room, the father found him dancing for joy on the pile of manure. “What are you so happy about?” the father asked. The boy replied, “There’s got to be a pony in here somewhere!
”
”
Sadhguru (Mystic’s Musings)
“
In a very real sense, it was a game, the very subtle and entirely serious game of comparative rank which is played by all social animals. It is the method by which individuals arrange themselves—horses in a herd, wolves in a pack, people in a community—so that they can live together. The game pits two opposing forces against each other, both equally important to survival: individual autonomy and community welfare. The object is to achieve dynamic equilibrium. At times and under certain conditions individuals can be nearly autonomous. An individual can live alone and have no worry about rank, but no species can survive without interaction between individuals. The ultimate price would be more final than death. It would be extinction. On the other hand, complete individual subordination to the group is just as devastating. Life is neither static nor unchanging. With no individuality, there can be no change, no adaptation and, in an inherently changing world, any species unable to adapt is also doomed. Humans in a community, whether it is as small as two people or as large as the world, and no matter what form the society takes, will arrange themselves according to some hierarchy. Commonly understood courtesies and customs can help to smooth the friction and ease the stress of maintaining a workable balance within this constantly changing system. In some situations most individuals will not have to compromise much of their personal independence for the welfare of the community. In others, the needs of the community may demand the utmost personal sacrifice of the individual, even to life itself. Neither is more right than the other, it depends on the circumstances; but neither extreme can be maintained for long, nor can a society last if a few people exercise their individuality at the expense of the community.
”
”
Jean M. Auel (The Mammoth Hunters (Earth's Children, #3))
“
Third: Why are we playing? In a finite game, the Church’s objective would be to defeat a competitor. Except that Christians believe that the battle is already won: Unlike Adam, who gave in to the devil’s temptation and doomed mankind to an existence of sin and death, Jesus resisted Satan in the wilderness, conquered the grave, and in so doing extended redemption and eternal life for all of Adam’s descendants. Because of this, the objective of the Church is infinite: to shed our earthly selves, to become sanctified, to transform more into the likeness of Christ. “We don’t win at holiness,” Winans said. Instead, “We strive to become more mature and become better than ourselves.
”
”
Tim Alberta (The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism)
“
these sources were particularly helpful to my thinking about and understanding of 1990s- and 2000s-era game culture and designers: Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made, by Jason Schreier; Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture, by David Kushner; Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (specifically the section on Sierra On-Line), by Steven Levy; A Mind Forever Voyaging: A History of Storytelling in Video Games, by Dylan Holmes; Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, by Tom Bissell; All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture, by Harold Goldberg;
”
”
Gabrielle Zevin (Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow)
“
These games sprang from their deep need to close their eyes and flee from unsolved problems and anxious forebodings of doom into an imaginary world as innocuous as possible. They assiduously learned to drive automobiles, to play difficult card games and lose themselves in crossword puzzles—for they faced death, fear, pain, and hunger almost without defenses, could no longer accept the consolations of the churches, and could obtain no useful advice from Reason. These people who read so many articles and listened to so many lectures did not take the time and trouble to strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread of death within themselves; they moved spasmodically on through life and had no belief in a tomorrow.
”
”
Hermann Hesse (The Glass Bead Game)
“
These games sprang from their deep need to close their eyes and flee from unsolved problems and anxious forebodings of doom into an imaginary world as innocuous as possible. They assiduously learned to drive automobiles, to play difficult card games and lose themselves in crossword puzzles—for they faced death, fear, pain, and hunger almost without defenses, could no longer accept the consolations of the churches, and could obtain no useful advice from Reason. These people who read so many articles and listened to so many lectures did not take the time and trouble to strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread of death within themselves; they moved spasmodically on through life and had no belief in a tomorrow. For
”
”
Hermann Hesse (The Glass Bead Game)
“
If anything, the current state of the world is already a testament to our inability to either imagine a possible world different to ours or to abandon the raft of the medusa that is our present. The reality of this world seems to have bottomed out into a Hobbesian jungle in which we are stuck and which constantly grows and is cut back in vain. In the Hobbesian or game-theoretic jungle, no matter how drastically your social and political convictions differ from those of your supposed adversary, no matter how much your experience of the world seems truer or more authentic, auto-cannibalization is unavoidable. In the Hobbesian jungle, all groups not only gnaw at one another, but will also end up eating their own kin alive.
We as either Hobbesians or as Platonic Universalists ought to pay attention to the truth of particularity. Universalists think that the commensuration between human experiential or local particularities is an easy path. The true enemies of universalists—the neoreactionaries—think what is universalist is misguided but they nevertheless go on and build island-utopias. The problem of both factions is that the real issue is not the universal which both camps to different degrees endorse, but the specific and discrete particularities of the human experience. Not paying attention to the problems of the latter is a sure recipe for failure, not just for rationalist universalism but also for the neoreactionary craft of methodological individualism. Without the proper attention to the depth of particularities or local conditions, we are all doomed to the cannabalistic jungle for which Hobbes is a prophet.
”
”
Reza Negarestani
“
We're not disposable,' I tell him, anger burning away the last of my despair. 'Mortals. You gods toy with us like you think we are.'
Hades lets loose a sigh almost as heavy as I feel. 'The others do because for them, mortals come and go. Blips. If you think about the lifespan of a butterfly from a mortal's perspective, so short compared to yours...' He shrugs. 'You think of it as a beautiful but doomed thing that is here, then gone too fast to get attached.'
...
'You don't think of mortals like that?'
'No.'
'Why not?'
That expression, the lost one, returns. 'Because they all come to me in the end.' Those nine words are so laden with burden, I don't know how they don't crush him.
...
'We're not butterflies to you,' I whisper. 'We're eternity.'
His eyes flare briefly with something savage, but he doesn't speak.
”
”
Abigail Owen (The Games Gods Play (The Crucible, #1))
“
Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made, by Jason Schreier; Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture, by David Kushner; Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (specifically the section on Sierra On-Line), by Steven Levy; A Mind Forever Voyaging: A History of Storytelling in Video Games, by Dylan Holmes; Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, by Tom Bissell; All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Video Games Conquered Pop Culture, by Harold Goldberg; and the documentaries Indie Game: The Movie, directed by James Swirsky and Lisanne Pajot, and GTFO, directed by Shannon Sun-Higginson. I read Indie Games by Bounthavy Suvilay after I finished writing, and it’s a beautiful book for those looking to see how artful games can be.
”
”
Gabrielle Zevin (Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow)
“
Senator Lieberman took it as a call to arms. "After watching these society. violent video games," he said, "I personally believe it is irresponsible for some in the video game industry to produce them. I wish we could ban them."
This wasn't the first time that America's political and moral estab lishment had tried to save youth from their own burgeoning culture. Shortly after the Civil War, religious leaders assailed pulp novels as "Satan's efficient agents to advance his kingdom by destroying the young. rupter "In the twenties, motion pictures were viewed as the new cors/ of children, inspiring sensational media-effects research that would be cited for decades. In the fifties, Elvis was shown only from the waist up on television; AD magazine's publisher, William Gaines. was brought before Congress. In the seventies, Dungeons and Dragons with all its demons and sorcery, became associated with Satanist particularly after a player enacting the game disappeared under the steam tunnels of a Michigan university. In the eighties, heavy metal artists like Judas Priest and Ozzy Osbourne were sued for allegedly invoking young listeners to commit suicide. In the nineties, video games were the new rock 'n' roll-dangerous and uncontrolled.
”
”
David Kushner (Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture)
“
It is a shame that War should have flung all this aside in its greedy, base, opportunist march, and should turn instead to chemists in spectacles, and chauffeurs pulling the levers of aeroplanes or machine guns. But at Aldershot in 1895 none of these horrors had broken upon mankind. The Dragoon, the Lancer and above all, as we believed, the Hussar, still claimed their time-honoured place upon the battlefield. War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now become cruel and squalid. In fact it has been completely spoilt. It is all the fault of Democracy and Science. From the moment that either of these meddlers and muddlers was allowed to take part in actual fighting, the doom of War was sealed. Instead of a small number of well-trained professionals championing their country's cause with ancient weapons and a beautiful intricacy of archaic manoeuvre, sustained at every moment by the applause of their nation, we now have entire populations, including even women and children, pitted against one another in brutish mutual extermination, and only a set of blear-eyed clerks left to add up the butcher's bill. From the moment Democracy was admitted to, or rather forced itself upon the battlefield, War ceased to be a gentleman's game. To Hell with it! Hence the League of Nations.
”
”
Winston S. Churchill
“
Here’s the four point battle plan, which we’ll return to at the end of the book: Disregard the Doomsayers: The misguided belief that “it’s too late” to act has been co-opted by fossil fuel interests and those advocating for them. It’s just another way of legitimizing business-as-usual and a continued reliance on fossil fuels. We must reject the overt doom and gloom that we increasingly encounter in today’s climate discourse. A Child Shall Lead Them: The youngest generation is fighting tooth and nail to save their planet, and there is a moral authority and clarity in their message that none but the most jaded ears can fail to hear. They are the game-changers that climate advocates have been waiting for. We should model our actions after theirs and learn from their methods and their idealism. Educate, Educate, Educate: Most hard-core climate-change deniers are unmovable. They view climate change through the prism of right-wing ideology and are impervious to facts. Don’t waste your time and effort trying to convince them. But there are many honest, confused folks out there who are caught in the crossfire, victims of the climate-change disinformation campaign. We must help them out. Then they will be in a position to join us in battle. Changing the System Requires Systemic Change: The fossil fuel disinformation machine wants to make it about the car you choose to drive, the food you choose to eat, and the lifestyle you choose to live rather than about the larger system and incentives. We need policies that will incentivize the needed shift away from fossil fuel burning toward a clean, green global economy. So-called leaders who resist the call for action must be removed from office.
”
”
Michael E. Mann (The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet)
“
We cannot provide a definition of those products from which the age takes it name, the feuilletons. They seem to have formed an uncommonly popular section of the daily newspapers, were produced by the millions, and were a major source of mental pabulum for the reader in want of culture.
They reported on, or rather "chatted" about, a thousand-and-one items of knowledge. The cleverer writers poked fun at their own work. Many such pieces are so incomprehensible that they can only be viewed as self-persiflage on the part of the authors.
In some periods interviews with well-known personalities on current problems were particularly popular. Noted chemists or piano virtuosos would be queried about politics, for example, or popular actors, dancers, gymnasts, aviators, or even poets would be drawn out on the benefits and drawbacks of being a bachelor, or on the presumptive causes of financial crises, and so on.
All that mattered in these pieces was to link a well-known name with a subject of current topical interest.
It is very hard indeed for us to put ourselves in the place of those people so that we can truly understand them. But the great majority, who seem to have been strikingly fond of reading, must have accepted all these grotesque things with credulous earnestness.
If a famous painting changed owners, if a precious manuscript was sold at auction, if an old palace burned down, the readers of many thousands of feature articles at once learned the facts.
What is more, on that same day or by the next day at the latest they received an additional dose of anecdotal, historical, psychological, erotic, and other stuff on the catchword of the moment.
A torrent of zealous scribbling poured out over every ephemeral incident, and in quality, assortment, and phraseology all this material bore the mark of mass goods rapidly and irresponsibly turned out.
Incidentally, there appear to have been certain games which were regular concomitants of the feature article. The readers themselves took the active role in these games, which put to use some of their glut of information fodder.
Thousands upon thousands spent their leisure hours sitting over squares and crosses made of letters of the alphabet, filling in the gaps according to certain rules.
But let us be wary of seeing only the absurd or insane aspect of this, and let us abstain from ridiculing it. For these people with their childish puzzle games and their cultural feature articles were by no means innocuous children or playful Phaeacians.
Rather, they dwelt anxiously among political, economic, and moral ferments and earthquakes, waged a number of frightful wars and civil wars, and their little cultural games were not just charming, meaningless childishness.
These games sprang from their deep need to close their eyes and flee from unsolved problems and anxious forebodings of doom into an imaginary world as innocuous as possible.
They assiduously learned to drive automobiles, to play difficult card games and lose themselves in crossword puzzles--for they faced death, fear, pain, and hunger almost without defenses, could no longer accept the consolations of the churches, and could obtain no useful advice from Reason.
These people who read so many articles and listened to so many lectures did not take the time and trouble to strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread of death within themselves; they moved spasmodically on through life and had no belief in a tomorrow.
”
”
Hermann Hesse
“
Let's imagine... if you glimpsed the future, you were frightened by what you saw, what would you do with that information? You would go to... the politicians, captains of industry? And how would you convince them? Data? Facts? Good luck! The only facts they won't challenge are the ones that keep the wheels greased and the dollars rolling in. But what if... what if there was a way of skipping the middle man and putting the critical news directly into everyone's head? The probability of wide-spread annihilation kept going up. The only way to stop it was to show it. To scare people straight. Because, what reasonable human being wouldn't be galvanized by the potential destruction of everything they've ever known or loved? To save civilization, I would show its collapse. But, how do you think this vision was received? How do you think people responded to the prospect of imminent doom? They gobbled it up like a chocolate eclair! They didn't fear their demise, they re-packaged it. It could be enjoyed as video-games, as TV shows, books, movies, the entire world wholeheartedly embraced the apocalypse and sprinted towards it with gleeful abandon. Meanwhile, your Earth was crumbling all around you. You've got simultaneous epidemics of obesity and starvation. Explain that one! Bees and butterflies start to disappear, the glaciers melt, algae blooms. All around you the coal mine canaries are dropping dead and you won't take the hint! In every moment there's the possibility of a better future, but you people won't believe it. And because you won't believe it you won't do what is necessary to make it a reality. So, you dwell on this terrible future. You resign yourselves to it for one reason, because *that* future does not ask anything of you today. So yes, we saw the iceberg and warned the Titanic. But you all just steered for it anyway, full steam ahead. Why? Because you want to sink! You gave up!
”
”
Hugh Laurie playing Governor Nix in Tommorowland
“
Bobby ran up on the deck and skidded to a stop in front of them. “It’s time for the Kowalski Fourth of July Football Game of Doom!”
Cat laughed and pushed herself out of her seat. “We’ll talk about this some other time, Emma. Go have fun.”
“I’m not sure I want to play football. Especially if there’s doom involved,” she said, but Bobby grabbed her hand and dragged her off the deck.
They were divvied up into teams roughly by size, each with an assortment of men, women and children. Emma was on Sean’s team, which was good. She’d just hide behind him, because the only thing she knew about football was that it involved a lot of hitting.
It only took a few plays to see that the Kowalskis played by their own rules and the few they had were fluid. Mostly they served to ensure the smaller kids didn’t get plowed over, victims of the adults’ competitive streak.
Five minutes into the game, Emma somehow ended up with the ball. She squealed and looked around for somebody—anybody—to hand it off to, but there was nobody. Well, there was Danny, but he was doubled over in laughter.
“Run, Emma,” Lisa yelled.
She ran in the direction her friend was frantically waving her hand, but she only went a few feet before two very strong arms wrapped around her waist and then she was falling. Luckily, she landed on a body instead of the ground.
“I love football,” Mitch said, grinning up at her.
Emma grimaced and managed to get one of her knees on solid ground so she could push herself to her feet. He was quicker and freed himself to stand and help her up.
“They should give you the ball more often,” he said, his blue eyes sparkling and the grin so like Sean’s—but not quite as naughty—in full force.
“Hands off my girl,” Sean told him, pulling on Emma’s elbow.
“You should do a better job of blocking for her.
“Let’s go,” Brian shouted.
The very next play, Mitch intercepted Mike’s pass to Evan and turned to run toward the other end zone. He was halfway there when Sean took him down hard. They hit the ground with a bone-jarring thud that made Emma wince, and came up pushing and shoving.
When Sean drew back his arm to throw the first punch, Mary blew her whistle from the sidelines. “Boys! Enough!”
Instead of heading straight for the huddle, Sean walked to Emma and pulled her into his arms for a hard, almost punishing caveman kiss that made her skin sizzle and her knees go wobbly. Then he glared at his brother for a few long seconds and went back to his team, leaving Emma standing there breathless and discombobulated.
”
”
Shannon Stacey (Yours to Keep (Kowalski Family, #3))
“
These senators and representatives call themselves “leaders.” One of the primary principles of leadership is that a leader never asks or orders any follower to do what he or she would not do themselves. Such action requires the demonstration of the acknowledged traits of a leader among which are integrity, honesty, and courage, both physical and moral courage. They don’t have those traits nor are they willing to do what they ask and order. Just this proves we elect people who shouldn’t be leading the nation. When the great calamity and pain comes, it will have been earned and deserved. The piper always has to be paid at the end of the party. The party is about over. The bill is not far from coming due. Everybody always wants the guilty identified. The culprits are we the people, primarily the baby boom generation, which allowed their vote to be bought with entitlements at the expense of their children, who are now stuck with the national debt bill that grows by the second and cannot be paid off. These follow-on citizens—I call them the screwed generation—are doomed to lifelong grief and crushing debt unless they take the only other course available to them, which is to repudiate that debt by simply printing up $20 trillion, calling in all federal bills, bonds, and notes for payoff, and then changing from the green dollar to say a red dollar, making the exchange rate 100 or 1000 green dollars for 1 red dollar or even more to get to zero debt. Certainly this will create a great international crisis. But that crisis is coming anyhow. In fact it is here already. The U.S. has no choice but to eventually default on that debt. This at least will be a controlled default rather than an uncontrolled collapse. At present it is out of control. Congress hasn’t come up with a budget in 3 years. That’s because there is no way at this point to create a viable budget that will balance and not just be a written document verifying that we cannot legitimately pay our bills and that we are on an ever-descending course into greater and greater debt. A true, honest budget would but verify that we are a bankrupt nation. We are repeating history, the history we failed to learn from. The history of Rome. Our TV and video games are the equivalent distractions of the Coliseums and circus of Rome. Our printing and borrowing of money to cover our deficit spending is the same as the mixing and devaluation of the gold Roman sisteri with copper. Our dysfunctional and ineffectual Congress is as was the Roman Senate. Our Presidential executive orders the same as the dictatorial edicts of Caesar. Our open borders and multi-millions of illegal alien non-citizens the same as the influx of the Germanic and Gallic tribes. It is as if we were intentionally following the course written in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The military actions, now 11 years in length, of Iraq and Afghanistan are repeats of the Vietnam fiasco and the RussianAfghan incursion. Our creep toward socialism is no different and will bring the same implosion as socialism did in the U.S.S.R. One should recognize that the repeated application of failed solutions to the same problem is one of the clinical definitions of insanity. * * * I am old, ill, physically used up now. I can’t have much time left in this life. I accept that. All born eventually die and with the life I’ve lived, I probably should have been dead decades ago. Fate has allowed me to screw the world out of a lot of years. I do have one regret: the future holds great challenge. I would like to see that challenge met and overcome and this nation restored to what our founding fathers envisioned. I’d like to be a part of that. Yeah. “I’d like to do it again.” THE END PHOTOS Daniel Hill 1954 – 15
”
”
Daniel Hill (A Life Of Blood And Danger)
“
It seemed as if everyone I met knew me, and as if everyone were playing an elaborate double-game.
”
”
Roger Zelazny (Trumps of Doom (The Chronicles of Amber, #6))
“
Mia felt suddenly sure that she and her mother and Gordey were not replicas of one another, doomed to repeat the same mistakes. They were just rotating through the roles of parent and child, child and parent, taking turns at worrying and causing worry, at needing care and giving it. They would continue to do that for the rest of their lives, shining brighter and then dimmer.
”
”
Katherine Heiny (Games and Rituals)
“
She had heard that the first dragons came from the east, from the Shadow Lands beyond Asshai and the islands of the Jade Sea ... Magic had died in the west when the Doom fell on Valyria and the Lands of the Long Summer, and neither spell-forged steel nor stormsingers nor dragons could hold it back, but Dany had always heard that the east was different.
...
"A trader from Qarth once told me that dragons came from the moon," blonde Doreah said...
”
”
George R.R. Martin (A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1))
“
She had heard that the first dragons had come from the east, from the Shadow Lands beyond Asshai and the islands of the Jade Sea ... Magic had died in the west when the Doom fell on Valyria and the Lands of the Long Summer, and neither spell-forged steel nor stormsingers nor dragons could hold it back, but Dany had always heard that the east was different.
...
"A trader from Qarth once told me that dragons came from the moon," blonde Doreah said...
”
”
George R.R. Martin (A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1))
“
Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed.” —HOMER, THE ODYSSEY
”
”
Scarlett St. Clair (A Game of Gods (Hades Saga, #3))
“
toys,” I told Santiago. “Think about it this way. When you were young, you only had three toys. But more importantly, you knew that wasn’t going to change. You had three, that’s it. So you were forced to make do with what you had and find happiness in it. That was your only choice.” My friend was nodding, so I knew he was with me so far. I went on: “Your daughter, on the other hand, is in a completely different circumstance. Whenever she wants something new, whether it’s something she saw in a commercial or something her friend has, she just asks for it and then she gets it. You allow her to keep looking for happiness in the next toy, the next game, the next purchase. Heck, you practically encourage it. Maybe if she was forced to find happiness in the toys she already has, she just might find it. But for now, she is able to live under the impression that the next toy is going to bring it.” My friend’s face grew sadder because he knew that what I was saying was true. His own decisions were contributing greatly to the unhealthy relationship his daughter had formed with possessions. This is a reminder all of us parents need: Our kids need boundaries! If we don’t give them a sense of how much is too much, they’ll just keep wanting more. And if we let them grow up without considering the downsides of overaccumulation, we could be dooming them to repeat the errors of excess that are so common in our world today. Don’t you want to spare your kids the bondage that comes with having too much stuff? Start early to teach them that less is more — more fun, that is! It’s one of the best ways you can show them your love.
”
”
Joshua Becker (The More of Less: Finding the Life You Want Under Everything You Own)
“
A few thousand miles away, Nine Inch Nails' rock star Trent Reznor sauntered off a concert stage as the crowd roared. Security guards rushed to his side. Screaming groupies pushed backstage. Trent nodded and waved, heading back through the crowd. He didn't have time for this. There were more important things waiting. He stepped onto his tour bus, forsaking the drugs, the beer, the women, for the computer awaiting him. It was time again for Doom.
Scenes like these had spread around the world since the game crashed the University of Wisconsin's network on December 10. With out an ad campaign, without marketing or advance hype from the mainstream media, Doom became an overnight phenomenon
”
”
David Kushner (Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture)
“
Schools, corporations, and government facilities blessed with fam computers, high-speed modems and, most important, people familia enough to make them work were overtaken by the game-sometimes literally. Over the first weekend of Doom's release, computer networks slowed to a crawl from all the people playing and downloading the game. Eager gamers flooded America Online. "It was a mob scene the night Doom came out," said Debbie Rogers, forum leader of AOL game section. "If we weren't on the other side of a phone line, ther would have been bodily harm."
Hours after the game was released, Carnegie-Mellon's compute systems administrator posted a notice online saying, "Since today's lease of Doom, we have discovered [that the game is] bringing the campus network to a halt.... . Computing Services asks that all Doom players please do not play Doom in network-mode. Use of Doom is network-mode causes serious degradation of performance for the > player's network and during this time of finals, network use is already at its peak. We may be forced to disconnect the PCs of those who ar playing the game in network-mode. Again, please do not play Doom is network-mode."
Intel banned the game after it found its system swamped. Tens A&M erased it from its computer servers. ...The once-dull PC now bursts with power.... For the first time, arcade games are hot on the PC... the floodgates are now open.
”
”
David Kushner (Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture)
“
Woz was equal parts programming genius and mischievous prankster, known around the San Francisco Bay Area for running his own dial-a-joke phone number. In computers, Woz found the perfect place to combine his humor and his math skills, creating a game that flashed the message "Oh Shit" on the screen when the player lost a round. Jobs recruited Woz to design Breakout, a new game for Atari. This alchemy of Jobs's entrepreneurial vision and Woz's programming ingenuity gave birth to their company, Apple. Created in 1976, the first Apple computer was essentially a prototype for the Homebrew crowd, priced devilishly at $666.66.
”
”
David Kushner (Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture)
“
They also threw in something they called a Death Cam. After the final enemy, known as "the boss" of an episode, got killed, a message would appear on the screen saying, "Let's see that again!" Then a de tailed animation would slowly play, showing the big, bad boss meeting his grisly demise. This Death Cam was id's version of a snuff film. They decided to include a screen at the beginning of the game that would say, 'This game is voluntarily rated PC-13: Profound Carnage.' Though tongue-in-cheek, it was the first voluntary rating of a video game.
”
”
David Kushner (Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture)
“
hand and pulled the door right into his suit. Eric’s suit stumbled for just a moment, which gave Eric enough time to squirm free, roll into the blue light,
”
”
Dustin Brady (Trapped in a Video Game: Return to Doom Island)
Dustin Brady (Trapped in a Video Game: The Complete Series)
“
And so my daughters will continue to play the game, even with the threat of nightmares, just as Jane and I once did. Because we long for home, even as it lies in ruins, doomed. Even as we have never seen it with our own eyes. Only in dreams do we behold it.
”
”
Rebecca Ross (Dreams Lie Beneath)
“
Overcrowding works in a different way for creators than for viewers. For creators, the problem becomes—how do you stand out? How do you get your videos watched? This is particularly acute for new creators, who face a “rich get richer” phenomenon. Across many categories of networked products, when early users join a network and start producing value, algorithms naturally reward them—and this is a good thing. When they do a good job, perhaps they earn five-star ratings, or they quickly gain lots of followers. Perhaps they get featured, or are ranked highly in popularity lists. This helps consumers find what they want, quickly, but the downside is that the already popular just get more popular. Eventually, the problem becomes, how does a new member of the network break in? If everyone else has millions of followers, or thousands of five-star reviews, it can be hard. Eugene Wei, former CTO of Hulu and noted product thinker, writes about the “Old Money” in the context of social networks, arguing that established networks are harder for new users to break into: Some networks reward those who gain a lot of followers early on with so much added exposure that they continue to gain more followers than other users, regardless of whether they’ve earned it through the quality of their posts. One hypothesis on why social networks tend to lose heat at scale is that this type of old money can’t be cleared out, and new money loses the incentive to play the game. It’s not that the existence of old money or old social capital dooms a social network to inevitable stagnation, but a social network should continue to prioritize distribution for the best content, whatever the definition of quality, regardless of the vintage of user producing it. Otherwise a form of social capital inequality sets in, and in the virtual world, where exit costs are much lower than in the real world, new users can easily leave for a new network where their work is more properly rewarded and where status mobility is higher.75 This is true for social networks and also true for marketplaces, app stores, and other networked products as well. Ratings systems, reviews, followers, advertising systems all reinforce this, giving the most established members of a network dominance over everyone else. High-quality users hogging all of the attention is the good version of the problem, but the bad version is much more problematic: What happens, particularly for social products, when the most controversial and opinionated users are rewarded with positive feedback loops? Or when purveyors of low-quality apps in a developer platform—like the Apple AppStore’s initial proliferation of fart apps—are downloaded by users and ranked highly in charts? Ultimately, these loops need to be broken; otherwise your network may go in a direction you don’t want.
”
”
Andrew Chen (The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects)
“
I smile despite the doomed sensation dripping into my blood. I love the energy we create between us when we banter like this. It’s the most intense sensation of pleasure, knowing he’ll always have the perfect response ready. I’ve never known anyone like him; as addictive to talk to as he is to kiss.
”
”
Sally Thorne (The Hating Game)
“
In all the days that followed, I sometimes felt like I was dreaming.
All my life, I had known I would marry the Gentle Lord, and all my life, I had expected it to be a horror and a doom. I had never thought that I would know love at all, much less in his arms. Now that every hour was a delight, I couldn't quite believe it was real.
We still looked for an answer. We still hunted through the library and prowled the corridors. But it seemed less like a quest and more like a game. And we played in that house. We chased each other through the rose garden, hiding and seeking in turns; we built castles in a room full of sand; I made him sit in the kitchen while I tried to cook for him and set the pans on fire.
And I was his delight and he was mine. I had read love poems when studying the ancient tongues, though I had never sought them out like Astraia; I had learnt the rhythm of the words and phrases, but I had always thought them empty decorations. They said that love was terrifying and tender, wild and sweet, and none of it made any sense.
But now I knew that every mad word was true. For Ignifex was still himself, still mocking and wild and inhuman, terrible as a legion arrayed for war; but in my arms he became gentle, and his kisses were sweeter than wine.
”
”
Rosamund Hodge (Cruel Beauty)
“
Truth is, Bich said, Australian childhoods are so idyllic and joyous, so filled with beach visits and backyard games of cricket, that Australian adulthoods can’t possibly meet our childhood expectations. Our perfect early lives in this vast island paradise doom us to melancholy because we know, in the hard honest bones beneath our dubious bronze skin, that we will never again be happier than we were once before. She said we live in the greatest country on earth but we’re actually all miserable deep down inside and the junk cures the misery and the junk industry will never die because Australian misery will never die.
”
”
Trent Dalton (Boy Swallows Universe)
“
I should take you to an ice cream shop or something so your visit isn’t all doom and gloom.”
“It’s okay. I didn’t come for the ice cream.” I came for you.
”
”
Ana Huang (The Striker (Gods of the Game, #1))
“
Every man and woman should play the noblest games and be of another mind from what they are at present.
”
”
David Kushner (Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture)
“
Gentle Sir Conan, I'll venture that few have been
Half as prodigiously lucky as you have been.
Fortune, the flirt! has been wondrously kind to you.
Ever beneficent, sweet and refined to you.
Doomed to the practise of physic and surgery,
Yet, growing weary of pills and physicianing,
Off to the Arctic you packed, expeditioning.
Roving and dreaming, Ambition, that heady sin,
Gave you a spirit too restless for medicine:
That, I presume, as Romance is the quest of us,
Made you an Author-the same as the rest of us.
Ah, but the rest of us clamor distressfully,
"How do you manage the game so successfully?
Tell us, disclose to us how under Heaven you
Squeeze from the inkpot so splendid a revenue!"
Then, when you'd published your volume that vindicates
England's South African raid (or the Syndicate's),
Pleading that Britain's extreme bellicosity
Wasn't (as most of us think) an atrocity
Straightaway they gave you a cross with a chain to it
(Oh, what an honor! I could not attain to it,
Not if I lived to the age of Methusalem!)
Made you a knight of St. John of Jerusalem!
Faith! as a teller of tales you've the trick with you!
Still there's a bone I've been wanting to pick with you:
Holmes is your hero of drama and serial:
All of us know where you dug the material!
Whence he was moulded-'tis almost a platitude;
Yet your detective, in shameless ingratitude
Sherlock your sleuthhound with motives ulterior
Sneers at Poe's "Dupin" as "very inferior!"
Labels Gaboriau's clever "Lecoq," indeed,
Merely "a bungler," a creature to mock, indeed!
This, when your plots and your methods in story owe
More than a trifle to Poe and Gaboriau,
Sets all the Muses of Helicon sorrowing.
Borrow, Sir Knight, but in decent borrowing!
Still let us own that your bent is a cheery one,
Little you've written to bore or to weary one,
Plenty that's slovenly, nothing with harm in it,
Give me detective with brains analytical
Rather than weaklings with morals mephitical
Stories of battles and man's intrepidity
Rather than wails of neurotic morbidity!
Give me adventures and fierce dinotheriums
Rather than Hewlett's ecstatic deliriums!
Frankly, Sir Conan, some hours I've eased with you
And, on the whole, I am pretty well pleased with you
”
”
Arthur Guiterman
“
Carmack was building the guitar that Romero would bring to life. But their friendship was not traditional. They didn't discuss their lives, their hopes, their dreams. Sometimes, late at night, hey would sit side by side, playing a hovercraft racing game called F-Zero. For the most part, though, their friendship was in their work, their unbridled pursuit of the game.
”
”
David Kushner (Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture)
“
The best way to sell yourself is to sow what you have produced, rater than tell people what you know, what you want to do, or what degrees you have. You want to be able to go to your prospective employer and say "There is a community of then thousand people actively playing a mod that I wrote in my spare time. Give me a job and I will be able to devote all of my energy to gaming, and produce something vastly superior.
”
”
David Kushner (Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture)
“
She took one look at me and fireworks shot out of her ears. I think she hates me. At least, she’s still mad. But it could mean she still cares,” he added hopefully. “If I knew where to run into her again, I could try my persuasive charm on her without crowding her. I might’ve tried something like that the first time around. Like being at the officers’ club every time I thought she’d be there, till she got so sick of me shadowing her, she gave in.” Luke laughed. “Suave,” he said. “Think I should throw myself on her mercy? Nah,” he answered for himself. “From what I saw, she doesn’t have a lot of mercy in her right now. Besides, humility really isn’t my strong suit.” Luke laughed at him. “And, God forbid, we manly Riordans always play our best cards.” “You know what I mean. What woman wants a man who grovels? Did you grovel? When you and Shelby—?” “I hate to burst your bubble, pal, but I said I’d do anything that would make her happy. I know—it’s hard for you to imagine your tough big brother caving like that, but when I got down to it, I was doomed without her. She’s the breath in me.” Then he grinned. “But she doesn’t make me grovel anymore. She lets me pretend to be the big man.” “Swell,” Sean said, a long way from understanding all the rules for this game.
”
”
Robyn Carr (Angel's Peak (Virgin River #10))
“
Death told me the Fool showed you a vision with ten swords in your back.”
I nodded. “The ten of swords card indicates that a devastating catastrophe is headed one’s way and will strike without warning. Bingo, Matthew.”
“Hmm.”
“Hmm, what?”
“That card is also about letting go and accepting one’s current circumstances.”
Accepting that you can’t change fate. As my mom had done with my dad. “Should I let go of Jack? Like you let go of the man you lost?”
She lifted one slim shoulder. “You’d already fallen for another.”
“I swore revenge on Richter. How can I think of surrendering that need?” Richter, I’m . . . not coming for you? “Do you know what I fear more than marching off to die fighting him? That I might have to live with what he did.”
“No one’s suggesting you give up your revenge. But what if we can’t find him for half a year? Two years? Will you cease living till then? Will you force Death to stop as well? He yearns to be a normal man. Even if just for a day. Will you not give that to him?”
“I made the point to him about our limited time,” I said, still cringing at my clumsiness. “All I did was insult him.”
“He wanted a wife. Not a buddy.”
Was she listening to everything in the castle? “I don’t want to hurt him, but I don’t know what to do.”
She pinned my gaze with her own. “Therein lies the lesson of the card, Evie Greene. The lesson of life. When you can’t change your situation, you must change yourself. You must rise and walk—despite the ten swords in your back.”
What was harder than dying? Living a nightmare.
Mom had learned to live without Dad. I had learned to live without Mom. Could I go on without Jack? “I shouldn’t even be thinking about Aric. I disobeyed the dictates of the game, and I got Jack killed. What if I do the same to Aric?”
Circe made a sound of amusement. “You always did think highly of yourself. Do you believe you had something to do with that massacre? Think logically. Richter could have reversed the order of his attacks—targeting Fort Arcana earlier, vaporizing the Magician, one of Fauna’s wolves, and the stronghold of his enemies. He could have shot at the army by helicopter afterward. Instead he targeted mortals and one player. The Moon.”
My lips parted. “Because she was more of a threat to him.”
“She was the only one in the area who could slay him from a distance. Richter will target the Tower as well, since Joules shares that ability,” she said. “So if we should blame any card for your mortal’s death, blame the Moon.”
“I’ll never blame her.”
“Yet you’ll blame yourself?” Circe shook her head, and the river swirled. “I say we blame the Emperor.” Could it be that easy?
Had Richter always had Selena in his sights? If fate couldn’t be changed—then she’d been doomed to die the second we’d saved her from the Lovers.
”
”
Kresley Cole (Arcana Rising (The Arcana Chronicles, #4))
“
When I stepped out of my family’s station wagon and walked onto the playground, the “Leia Do” served as a beacon announcing to my classmates which game we’d be playing at recess.
I jumped and climbed and flew around the jungle gym while Thomas and Mike and Scott sliced the air with imaginary light sabers and shielded me from impending doom. It was glorious. Gloria Steinem would not have approved, but she wasn’t there and I didn’t care.
”
”
Melissa Francis (Diary of a Stage Mother's Daughter: a Memoir)
“
Romero himself couldn’t believe the way people were harping on Doom, a game that was six years old. It just showed how clueless the politicians had become. It was just the same old crap from the same old people. And Romero was tired of the blame. Those kids were defective, he thought, so don’t blame it on my game. Don’t blame the games. Blame the fucking parents.
”
”
David Kushner (Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture)
“
Marco, remember early on when we discussed your frustration, and you determined that it was the defender part that wanted you to get back into the game of life? And that your anxiety was your fear-based defender part that was alerting you of the impending doom if you slipped and went back to your inappropriate behaviors? Or how about when the depression part stepped in, and you resolved that it was a reminder of your past actions? These are the physical symptoms of the defender parts.” I felt that if a light bulb was hanging over my head, it had now lit up. I was impressed with Keith’s memory of what I had said and the affection in his tone. At this moment, I trusted my therapist implicitly— he was the real deal. “Marco, identifying the defender part’s physical symptoms first is key to acknowledging when that part is coming in to control a situation or thought and identifying which one it is. Catching the defender part at this point is crucial to prevent it from starting to control the situation in an unhealthy manner or overwhelming your emotions with negative judgments.
”
”
Marco L. Bernardino Sr. (Sins of the Abused)
“
Activision was promoting an adventure game called Pitfall Harry and had built a little jungle scene in which passersby could swing on a makeshift vine. In another room, a company called Zombie had a metal sphere that shot blue electric bolts through the air. But the id installation had a bit more in store: an eight-foot-tall vagina. Gwar, the scatological rock band that id had hired to produce the display, had pushed their renowned prurient theatrics to the edge. The vagina was lined with dozens of dildos to look like teeth. A bust of O. J. Simpson’s decapitated head hung from the top. As the visitors walked through the vaginal mouth, two members of Gwar cloaked in fur and raw steak came leaping out of the shadows and pretended to attack them with rubber penises. The Microsoft executives were frozen. Then, to everyone’s relief, they burst out laughing.
”
”
David Kushner (Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture)