Game Stores Quotes

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The robbers of time are the past and the future. Man should bless the past, and forget it, if it keeps him in bondage, and bless the future, knowing it has in store for him endless joys, but live fully in the now.
Florence Scovel Shinn (The Game of Life and How to Play It)
I just love the smell of an old book store and the feel of the crisp pages along my fingertips.
Leah Spiegel (Foolish Games (Foolish Games, #1))
He advances like a floating Dracula. The menace is ruined by the sporting-goods-store bag loudly crinkling against his leg. A shoebox is in it, judging from the shape. Imagine the wretched sales assistant who had to help Joshua choose shoes.I require shoes to ensure I can effectively run down the targets I am paid to assassinate in my spare time. I require the best value for my money. I am size eleven
Sally Thorne (The Hating Game)
Real love feels less like a throbbing, pulsing animal begging for its freedom and beating against the inside of my chest and more like, 'Hey, that place you like had fish tacos today and i got you some while i was out', as it sets a bag spotted with grease on the dining room table. It's not a game you don't understand the rules of, or a test you never got the materials to study for. It never leaves you wondering who could possibly be texting at 3 am. Or what you could possibly do to make it come home and stay there. It's fucking boring, dude. I don't walk around mired in uneasiness, waiting for the other shoe to drop. No parsing through spun tales about why it took her so long to come back from the store. No checking her emails or calling her job to make sure she's actually there. No sitting in my car outside her house at dawn, to make sure she's alone when she leaves. This feels safe, and steadfast, and predictable. And secure. It's boring as shit. And it's easily the best thing I've ever felt.
Samantha Irby (We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.)
Art is not, as the metaphysicians say, the manifestation of some mysterious idea of beauty or God; it is not, as the aesthetical physiologists say, a game in which man lets off his excess of stored-up energy; it is not the expression of man's emotions by external signs; it is not the production of pleasing objects; and, above all, it is not pleasure; but it is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feelings, and indispensable for the life and progress toward well-being of individuals and of humanity.
Leo Tolstoy (What Is Art?)
...But the heart is not a computer that can be upgraded so quickly and easily with the latest version of love. Love cannot be sealed hermetically inside a tight box like any other on the store shelf; even though the word itself is in public domain, its quality is not. Love cannot promise a full customer satisfaction garanteed or a whole lifetime of dreams shared refunded, with no questions asked. Love cannot be agreed to in terms and conditions as quickly as the "Next" button being clicked. These unspoken terms and conditions grow and develop over time until it gets very messy, and no one remembers how such a mess of accusation and anger was able to overshadow their pure ecstasy of love, the spark between two people turning on a new operation system of togetherness for the first time. Love is always beta; never a golden master. If love were a computer, constant bug reports and subsequent fixes are the name of the game, and there are many unexplained breakdowns. The heart is too stubborn for explanations and too impatient for forgiveness, and there is usually no one at the tech support line. Forgive me stan, if I've crashed so often. It's just to hard to boot up to a whole new future without you. I am an empty monitor in search of a "hello.
Raymond Luczak
They were the reason that he kept faith with his stars, that reinforced him in his belief that the universe had more in store for him than the mug's game of working for a modest salary until he retired or died,
J.K. Rowling (The Casual Vacancy)
The Cold Within" Six humans trapped in happenstance In dark and bitter cold, Each one possessed a stick of wood, Or so the story's told. The first woman held hers back For of the faces around the fire, She noticed one was black. The next man looking across the way Saw not one of his church, And couldn't bring himself to give The fire his stick of birch. The third one sat in tattered clothes He gave his coat a hitch, Why should his log be put to use, To warm the idle rich? The rich man just sat back and thought Of the wealth he had in store, And how to keep what he had earned, From the lazy, shiftless poor. The black man's face bespoke revenge As the fire passed from sight, For all he saw in his stick of wood Was a chance to spite the white. The last man of this forlorn group Did naught except for gain, Giving only to those who gave, Was how he played the game. The logs held tight in death's still hands Was proof of human sin, They didn't die from the cold without, They died from the cold within.
James Patrick Kinney
The hand that stocks the drug stores rules the world. Let us start our Republic, with a chain of drug stores, a chain of grocery stores, a chain of gas chambers, and a national game. After that we can write our Constitution.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Cat’s Cradle)
Always choose to be smart There are two types of people in the world, the seekers of riches and the wise thinkers, those who believe that the important thing is money, and those who know that knowledge is the true treasure. I, for my part, choose the second option, Though I could have everything I want I prefer to be an intelligent person, and never live in a game of vain appearances. Knowledge can take you far far beyond what you imagine, It can open doors and opportunities for you. and make you see the world with different eyes. But in this eagerness to be "wise", There is a task that is a great challenge. It is facing the fear of the unknown, and see the horrors around every corner. It's easy to be brave when you're sure, away from dangers and imminent risks, but when death threatens you close, "wisdom" is not enough to protect you. Because, even if you are smart and cunning, death sometimes comes without mercy, lurking in the darkest shadows, and there is no way to escape. That is why the Greek philosophers, They told us about the moment I died, an idea we should still take, to understand that death is a reality. Wealth can't save you of the inevitable arrival of the end, and just as a hoarder loses his treasures, we also lose what we have gained. So, if we have to choose between two things, that is between being cunning or rich, Always choose the second option because while the money disappears, wisdom helps us face dangers. Do not fear death, my friend, but embrace your intelligence, learn all you can in this life, and maybe you can beat time and death for that simple reason always choose to be smart. Maybe death is inevitable But that doesn't mean you should be afraid because intelligence and knowledge They will help you face any situation and know what to do. No matter what fate has in store, wisdom will always be your best ally, to live a life full of satisfaction, and bravely face any situation. So don't settle for what you have and always look for ways to learn more, because in the end, true wealth It is not in material goods, but in knowledge. Always choose to be smart, Well, that will be the best investment. that will lead you on the right path, and it will make you a better version of yourself.
Marcos Orowitz (THE MAELSTROM OF EMOTIONS: A selection of poems and thoughts About us humans and their nature)
I believe your trouble, which is a congestion, has come from having things stored away. Congestion of things causes congestion in the body.
Florence Scovel Shinn (The Game of Life and How To Play It)
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)
We have all heard such stories of expert intuition: the chess master who walks past a street game and announces “White mates in three” without stopping, or the physician who makes a complex diagnosis after a single glance at a patient. Expert intuition strikes us as magical, but it is not. Indeed, each of us performs feats of intuitive expertise many times each day. Most of us are pitch-perfect in detecting anger in the first word of a telephone call, recognize as we enter a room that we were the subject of the conversation, and quickly react to subtle signs that the driver of the car in the next lane is dangerous. Our everyday intuitive abilities are no less marvelous than the striking insights of an experienced firefighter or physician—only more common. The psychology of accurate intuition involves no magic. Perhaps the best short statement of it is by the great Herbert Simon, who studied chess masters and showed that after thousands of hours of practice they come to see the pieces on the board differently from the rest of us. You can feel Simon’s impatience with the mythologizing of expert intuition when he writes: “The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.
Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
He flashed Neil a triumphant grin, oblivious to the way the store clerks were staring at them. "I am a master at persuasion." "Or self-delusion," Neil said. Nicky's eyebrows shot up. "Oh my god, did you try to make a joke? Did it hurt a little? No, really," he said when Neil turned as if to leave him. "What put you in such a good mood?" Turning put Andrew in Neil's line of sight again.
Nora Sakavic (The King's Men (All for the Game, #3))
Some people read for instruction, which is praiseworthy, and some for pleasure, which is innocent, but not a few read from habit, and I suppose that is neither innocent nor praiseworthy. Of that lamentable company am I. Conversation after a time bores me, games tire me, and my own thoughts, which we are told are the unfailing resource of a sensible man, have a tendency to run dry. Then I fly to my book as the opium-seeker to his pipe. I would sooner read the catalogue of the Army and Navy stores or Bradshaw's Guide than nothing at all, and indeed I have spent many delightful hours over both these works. At one time I never went out without a second-hand bookseller's list in my pocket. I know no reading more fruity. Of course to read in this way is as reprehensible as doping, and I never cease to wonder at the impertinence of great readers who, because they are such, look down on the illiterate. From the standpoint of what eternity is it better to have read a thousand books than to have ploughed a million furrows? Let us admit that reading with us is just a drug that we cannot do without — who of this band does not know the restlessness that attacks him when he has been severed from reading too long, the apprehension and irritability, and the sigh of relief which the sight of a printed page extracts from him? — and so let us be no more vainglorious than the poor slaves of the hypodermic needle or the pint-pot. And like the dope-fiend who cannot move from place to place without taking with him a plentiful supply of his deadly balm I never venture far without a sufficiency of reading matter. Books are so necessary to me that when in a railway train I have become aware that fellow-travellers have come away without a single one I have been seized with a veritable dismay. But when I am starting on a long journey the problem is formidable.
W. Somerset Maugham (Collected Short Stories: Volume 4)
Travis nursed his beer silently, looking out over the water. “What are you thinking about?” Laird asked. “It’s not important.” “What is it?” Travis turned toward him. “Did you ever notice how some colours are used for people’s names but others aren’t?” “What are you talking about?” “White and Black. Like Mr. White, the guy who owns the tire store. And Mr. Black, our third-grade teacher. Or even Mr. Green from the game Clue. But you never hear of someone named Mr. Orange or Mr. Yellow. It’s like some colours make good names, but other colours just sound stupid. You know what I mean?” “I can’t say I’ve ever thought about it.” “Me neither. Not until just a minute ago, I mean. But it’s kind of strange, isn’t it?” “Sure,” Laird finally agreed. Both men were quiet for a moment. “I told you it wasn’t important.” “Yes, you did.” “Was I right?” “Yep.
Nicholas Sparks (The Choice)
Danny Fletcher has a cliched evening in store for you. Italian restaurant, checkered tablecloth. Probably a candle. he'll push the last meatball to you with his nose,
Sally Thorne (The Hating Game)
the Super NES, which would hit stores on August 23, 1991. All systems would come with the groundbreaking new Super Mario World game, while four others would immediately be available for purchase: F-Zero, Pilotwings, Gradius III, and SimCity.
Blake J. Harris (Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation)
Actually, this is a poem my father once showed me, a long time ago. It has been bastardized many times, in many ways, but this is the original: The Cold Within Six men trapped by happenstance, in bleak and bitter cold Each possessed a stick of wood, or so the story's told. Their dying fire in need of logs, the first man held his back For of the faces round the fire, he noticed one was black. One man looking cross the way, saw one not of his church And could not bring himself to give the fire his stick of birch. The third one sat in tattered clothes, he gave his coat a hitch Why should his log be put to use to warm the idle rich? The rich man just sat back and thought of the wealth he had in store And how to keep what he had earned from the lazy, shiftless poor. The black man's face bespoke revenge as the fire passed from his sight, For all he saw in his stick of wood was a chance to spite the white. And the last man of this forlorn group did naught except for gain, Giving only to those who gave, was how he played the game The logs held tight, in death's still hands, was proof of human sin They didn't die from the cold without, they died from the cold within.
James Patrick Kinney
The saddest thing of all was that their party represented a deviation from the conditions of the time. It was impossible to imagine that in the houses across the lane people were eating and drinking in the same way at such an hour. Beyond the window lay mute, dark, hungry Moscow. Her food stores were empty, and people had even forgotten to think of such things as game and vodka. And thus it turned out that the only true life is one that resembles the life around us and drowns in it without leaving a trace, that isolated happiness is not happiness, so that duck and alcohol, when they seem to be the only ones in town, are not alcohol and a duck at all.
Boris Pasternak (Doctor Zhivago)
Stars are everything and nothing that we think they are. They are their own world, but through an act of will we make them part of ours. They are the diamonds of the gods, the lights at a stadium where angels play a midnight game of baseball. They’re fairy farts that have been set ablaze! Mostly, they’re just an untouchable beauty that’s so far away, it’s the only place safe enough to store our secret hopes and dreams. When we see a shooting start, we all make a wish. But what nobody admits is how afraid they are of actually catching something that fell from heaven. I’m not afraid to burn. ~Hadrian
J.M. Evans
A young man is the perfect soldier. He has great potential for aggression and a limited critical capacity—or none at all—with which to analyze it and judge how to channel it. Throughout history societies have found ways of using this store of aggression, turning their adolescents into soldiers, cannon fodder with which to conquer their neighbors or defend themselves against their aggressors.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Angel's Game (The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, #2))
During the Gulf War, an American soldier with a Gameboy was involved in an explosion. His Gameboy was severely burnt but was still operational. What is more bizarre is that it is still operational today. You can see it in the Nintendo World Store in New York.
James Egan (3000 Facts About Video Games)
Bezos is like a chess master playing countless games simultaneously, with the boards organized in such a way that he can efficiently tend to each match.
Brad Stone (The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon)
I also found out why i should never reveal "why" to others. A little knowledge withheld is a great advantage one should store for future use. That is the power of chess. It is a game of secrets in which one must show and never tell.
Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club)
My short-term factual memory can be like water; events are a brief disturbance on the surface and then it closes back up again, as if nothing ever touched it. But it’s a strange fact that my long-term memory remains strong, perhaps because it recorded events when my mind was unaffected. My emotional memory is intact too, perhaps because feelings are recorded and stored in a different place than facts. The things that happened deeper in the past, and deeper in the breast, are still there for me, under the water. I won 1,098 games, and eight national championships, and coached in four different decades. But what I see are not the numbers. I see their faces. 'Pat should get a tattoo!' The kids laughed. 'What kind should she get?' 'A heart. She should get a heart.' Little did they know. They are the tattoos.
Pat Summitt (Sum It Up: 1,098 Victories, a Couple of Irrelevant Losses, and a Life in Perspective)
I also found out why I should never reveal the "why" to others. A little knowledge withheld is a great advantage one should store for future use. That is the power of chess. It is a game of secrets in which one must show and never tell.
Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club)
It is understandable that there has been a good deal of joking about purely learned works of this type. Their actual value for the future of scholarship and for the people as a whole cannot be demonstrated. Nevertheless, scholarship, as was true for art in the olden days, must indeed have far-flung grazing grounds, and in pursuit of a subject which interests no one but himself a scholar can accumulate knowledge which provides colleagues with information as valuable as that stored in a dictionary or an archive.
Hermann Hesse (The Glass Bead Game)
His weekly golf game no longer keeps his love handles in check, he's recently resorted to a slight comb-over to cover that growing bald spot, he squints to avoid wearing the bifocals he hides in his desk drawer, and he spends his days in an office filled with decades-old sports trophies.
Kelley Armstrong (Dime Store Magic (Women of the Otherworld, #3))
It was a future they couldn’t quite see, where the richness of all they had brought to the great land of promise would one day be zapped into nothing, the glorious tapestry of their history boiled down to a series of ten-second TV commercials, empty holidays, and sports games filled with the patriotic fluff of red, white, and blue, the celebrants cheering the accompanying dazzle without any idea of the horrible struggles and proud pasts of their forebears who had made their lives so easy.
James McBride (The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store)
To be in a position of being able to ignore the reality of what this system does and continues to do is to be wholly complicit in it. Is to benefit hugely from it. To be able to not think about how the winners in this game came by their vast stores of mineral wealth is to profit from that wealth. The long list of ransacked nations, installed dictators, insurgencies financed by corporate interests, jailed bodies, ruined land. Death, disease and pipelines. To be able to ignore the inequality in your own city is to prosper from that inequality.
Kae Tempest (On Connection)
He pulled to the side and saw, to his chagrin, that Mrs. Prince of the $2,100 bill at the Star Store was just leaving. She waved at him merrily and grinned and Seth waved back gamely. He wondered how Ralph had reacted to the news that his grandson had managed to screw up running the Star Store’s cash register. He could easily imagine Mrs. Prince’s words: “Ralph, I hate to ask, but can that boy even count?
Elizabeth George (The Edge of Nowhere (Saratoga Woods, #1))
There is a neat economic explanation for the sexual division of labour in hunter-gatherers. In terms of nutrition, women generally collect dependable, staple carbohydrates whereas men fetch precious protein. Combine the two – predictable calories from women and occasional protein from men – and you get the best of both worlds. At the cost of some extra work, women get to eat some good protein without having to chase it; men get to know where the next meal is coming from if they fail to kill a deer. That very fact makes it easier for them to spend more time chasing deer and so makes it more likely they will catch one. Everybody gains – gains from trade. It is as if the species now has two brains and two stores of knowledge instead of one – a brain that learns about hunting and a brain that learns about gathering.
Matt Ridley (The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves)
This is meant to be in praise of the interval called hangover, a sadness not co-terminous with hopelessness, and the North American doubling cascade that (keep going) “this diamond lake is a photo lab” and if predicates really do propel the plot then you might see Jerusalem in a soap bubble or the appliance failures on Olive Street across these great instances, because “the complex Italians versus the basic Italians” because what does a mirror look like (when it´s not working) but birds singing a full tone higher in the sunshine. I´m going to call them Honest Eyes until I know if they are, in the interval called slam clicker, Realm of Pacific, because the second language wouldn´t let me learn it because I have heard of you for a long time occasionally because diet cards may be the recovery evergreen and there is a new benzodiazepene called Distance, anti-showmanship, anti-showmanship, anti-showmanship. I suppose a broken window is not symbolic unless symbolic means broken, which I think it sorta does, and when the phone jangles what´s more radical, the snow or the tires, and what does the Bible say about metal fatigue and why do mothers carry big scratched-up sunglasses in their purses. Hello to the era of going to the store to buy more ice because we are running out. Hello to feelings that arrive unintroduced. Hello to the nonfunctional sprig of parsley and the game of finding meaning in coincidence. Because there is a second mind in the margins of the used book because Judas Priest (source: Firestone Library) sang a song called Stained Class, because this world is 66% Then and 33% Now, and if you wake up thinking “feeling is a skill now” or “even this glass of water seems complicated now” and a phrase from a men´s magazine (like single-district cognac) rings and rings in your neck, then let the consequent misunderstandings (let the changer love the changed) wobble on heartbreakingly nu legs into this street-legal nonfiction, into this good world, this warm place that I love with all my heart, anti-showmanship, anti-showmanship, anti-showmanship.
David Berman
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania had blue laws that didn’t allow bars to be open on Sunday. No stores were open. It was the day of worship. Even later on when night baseball came in, the Philadelphia Phillies and the Philadelphia Athletics could play baseball at Shibe Park on Sunday only while there was daylight. They weren’t allowed to turn on the stadium lights on Sunday. Many a Sunday game was called on account of darkness.
Charles Brandt ("I Heard You Paint Houses", Updated Edition: Frank "The Irishman" Sheeran & Closing the Case on Jimmy Hoffa)
The hand that stocks the drug stores rules the world. Let us start our Republic with a chain of drug stores, a chain of grocery stores, a chain of gas chambers, and a national game. After that, we can write our Constitution.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Cat's Cradle)
Finding a taxi, she felt like a child pressing her nose to the window of a candy store as she watched the changing vista pass by while the twilight descended and the capital became bathed in a translucent misty lavender glow. Entering the city from that airport was truly unique. Charles de Gaulle, built nineteen miles north of the bustling metropolis, ensured that the final point of destination was veiled from the eyes of the traveller as they descended. No doubt, the officials scrupulously planned the airport’s location to prevent the incessant air traffic and roaring engines from visibly or audibly polluting the ambience of their beloved capital, and apparently, they succeeded. If one flew over during the summer months, the visitor would be visibly presented with beautifully managed quilt-like fields of alternating gold and green appearing as though they were tilled and clipped with the mathematical precision of a slide rule. The countryside was dotted with quaint villages and towns that were obviously under meticulous planning control. When the aircraft began to descend, this prevailing sense of exactitude and order made the visitor long for an aerial view of the capital city and its famous wonders, hoping they could see as many landmarks as they could before they touched ground, as was the usual case with other major international airports, but from this point of entry, one was denied a glimpse of the city below. Green fields, villages, more fields, the ground grew closer and closer, a runway appeared, a slight bump or two was felt as the craft landed, and they were surrounded by the steel and glass buildings of the airport. Slightly disappointed with this mysterious game of hide-and-seek, the voyager must continue on and collect their baggage, consoled by the reflection that they will see the metropolis as they make their way into town. For those travelling by road, the concrete motorway with its blue road signs, the underpasses and the typical traffic-logged hubbub of industrial areas were the first landmarks to greet the eye, without a doubt, it was a disheartening first impression. Then, the real introduction began. Quietly, and almost imperceptibly, the modern confusion of steel and asphalt was effaced little by little as the exquisite timelessness of Parisian heritage architecture was gradually unveiled. Popping up like mushrooms were cream sandstone edifices filigreed with curled, swirling carvings, gently sloping mansard roofs, elegant ironwork lanterns and wood doors that charmed the eye, until finally, the traveller was completely submerged in the glory of the Second Empire ala Baron Haussmann’s master plan of city design, the iconic grand mansions, tree-lined boulevards and avenues, the quaint gardens, the majestic churches with their towers and spires, the shops and cafés with their colourful awnings, all crowded and nestled together like jewels encrusted on a gold setting.
E.A. Bucchianeri (Brushstrokes of a Gadfly, (Gadfly Saga, #1))
We live during a time in which some shoppers shiver all Thanksgiving night only to trample one another to death in a sunrise race through the electronics store to buy gaming consoles that allow them to create avatars of themselves.
Joe Dilley (The Game Is Playing Your Kid: How to Unplug and Reconnect in the Digital Age)
Do we sleep? I don’t know. We spend the night holding each other, in some halfway land between dreams and waking. Not talking. Both afraid to disturb the other in the hope that we’ll be able to store up a few precious minutes of rest.
Suzanne Collins (Catching Fire (The Hunger Games, #2))
shopping became a game of chance played with a string avoska, or “what-if” bag, carried in the hope of stumbling upon a store recently stocked with anything useful—whether sugar, toilet paper, or canned ratatouille from Czechoslovakia.
Adam Higginbotham (Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster)
The odd group of well-wishers slowly moved down the hallway as Moshe’s sobs cascaded up and down the walls, bouncing from one side to the other. The discourse on Doc Roberts was forgotten now as the group tromped forward, a ragtag assortment of travelers moving fifteen feet as if it were fifteen thousand miles, slow travelers all, arrivals from different lands, making a low trek through a country that claimed to be so high, a country that gave them so much yet demanded so much more. They moved slowly, like fusgeyers, wanderers seeking a home in Europe, or erú West African tribesmen herded off a ship on a Virginia shore to peer back across the Atlantic in the direction of their homeland one last time, moving toward a common destiny, all of them—Isaac, Nate, and the rest—into a future of American nothing. It was a future they couldn’t quite see, where the richness of all they had brought to the great land of promise would one day be zapped into nothing, the glorious tapestry of their history boiled down to a series of ten-second TV commercials, empty holidays, and sports games filled with the patriotic fluff of red, white, and blue, the celebrants cheering the accompanying dazzle without any idea of the horrible struggles and proud pasts of their forebears who had made their lives so easy. The collective history of this sad troupe moving down the hospital corridor would become tiny blots in an American future that would one day scramble their proud histories like eggs, scattering them among the population while feeding mental junk to the populace on devices that would become as common and small as the hot dog that the dying woman thought she smelled; for in death, Chona had smelled not a hot dog but the future, a future in which devices that fit in one’s pocket and went zip, zap, and zilch delivered a danger far more seductive and powerful than any hot dog, a device that children of the future would clamor for and become addicted to, a device that fed them their oppression disguised as free thought. Had the group of stragglers moping down the hallway seen that future, they would have all turned en masse and rushed from the hospital out into the open air and collapsed onto the lawn and sobbed like children. As it was, they moved like turtles toward Chona’s room as Moshe’s howl rang out. They were in no hurry. The journey ahead was long. There was no promise ahead. There was no need to rush now.
James McBride (The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store)
Last year, Pandora, who had always loved toys and parlor amusements, had designed a board game. With Mr. Winterborne's encouragement, she had filed for a patent and intended to produce and distribute the game. Mr. Winterborne owned the largest department store in the world, and had already agreed to place an order for five hundred copies. The game was a guaranteed success, if for no other reason than that there was hardly any competition: Whereas the board game industry was flourishing in America, thanks to the efforts of the Milton Bradley company, it was still in its infancy here in Britain. Pandora had already developed two more games and was almost ready to file patents for them. Someday she would earn enough money to make her own way in the world.
Lisa Kleypas (Devil in Spring (The Ravenels, #3))
I am that man, the sum of him, the all of him, the hairless biped who struggled upward from the slime and created love and law out of the anarchy of fecund life that screamed and squalled in the jungle. I am all that that man was and did become. I see myself, through the painful generations, snaring and killing the game and the fish, clearing the first fields from the forest, making rude tools of stone and bone, building houses of wood, thatching the roofs with leaves and straw, domesticating the wild grasses and meadow roots, fathering them to become the progenitors of rice and millet and wheat and barley and all manner of succulent edibles, learning to scratch the soil, to sow, to reap, to store, beating out the fibers of plants to spin into thread and to weave into cloth, devising systems of irrigation, working in metals, making markets and trade routes, building boats, and founding navigation—ay, and organizing village life, welding villages to villages till they became tribes, welding tribes together till they became nations, ever seeking the laws of things, ever making the laws of humans so that humans might live together in amity and by united effort beat down and destroy all manner of creeping, crawling, squalling things that might else destroy them.
Jack London (The Star Rover (Modern Library Classics))
But to be furious, murderously furious, is to be alive. No longer young, no longer pretty, no longer loved, or sweet, or lovable, unmasked, writhing on the ground for all to see in my utter ingloriousness, there’s no telling what I might do. I could film my anger and sell it, I could do some unmasking of my own, beat the fuckers at their own game, and on the way I could become the best-known fucking artist in America, out of sheer spite. You never know. I’m angry enough to set fire to a house just by looking at it. It can’t be contained, stored away with the recycling. I’m done staying quietly upstairs. My anger is not a little person’s, a sweet girl’s, a dutiful daughter’s. My anger is prodigious. My anger is a colossus. I’m angry enough to understand why Emily Dickinson shut out the world altogether, why Alice Neel betrayed her children, even though she loved them mightily. I’m angry enough to see why you walk into the water with rocks in your pockets, even though that’s not the kind of angry I am. Virginia Woolf, in her rage, stopped being afraid of death; but I’m angry enough, at last, to stop being afraid of life, and angry enough—finally, God willing, with my mother’s anger also on my shoulders, a great boil of rage like the sun’s fire in me—before I die to fucking well live. Just watch me.
Claire Messud (The Woman Upstairs)
The charm of a city, now we come to it, is not unlike the charm of flowers. It partly depends on seeing time creep across it. Charm needs to be fleeting. Nothing could be less palatable than a museum-city propped up by prosthetic devices of concrete. Paris is not in danger of becoming a museum-city, thanks to the restlessness and greed of promoters. Yet their frenzy to demolish everything is less objectionable than their clumsy determination to raise housing projects that cannot function without the constant presence of an armed police force… All these banks, all these glass buildings, all these mirrored facades are the mark of a reflected image. You can no longer see what’s happening inside, you become afraid of the shadows. The city becomes abstract, reflecting only itself. People almost seem out of place in this landscape. Before the war, there were nooks and crannies everywhere. Now people are trying to eliminate shadows, straighten streets. You can’t even put up a shed without the personal authorization of the minister of culture. When I was growing up, my grandpa built a small house. Next door the youth club had some sheds, down the street the local painter stored his equipment under some stretched-out tarpaulin. Everybody added on. It was telescopic. A game. Life wasn’t so expensive — ordinary people would live and work in Paris. You’d see masons in blue overalls, painters in white ones, carpenters in corduroys. Nowadays, just look at Faubourg Sainte-Antoine — traditional craftsmen are being pushed out by advertising agencies and design galleries. Land is so expensive that only huge companies can build, and they have to build ‘huge’ in order to make it profitable. Cubes, squares, rectangles. Everything straight, everything even. Clutter has been outlawed. But a little disorder is a good thing. That’s where poetry lurks. We never needed promoters to provide us, in their generosity, with ‘leisure spaces.’ We invented our own. Today there’s no question of putting your own space together, the planning commission will shut it down. Spontaneity has been outlawed. People are afraid of life.
Robert Doisneau (Paris)
Steam Greenlight. With Greenlight, Valve crowdsourced its approval process, allowing fans to vote on the games they’d want to play. Games that hit a certain number of votes (a number that the famously secretive Valve kept quiet) would automatically get a spot in the store.
Jason Schreier (Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made)
The bartender is Irish. Jumped a student visa about ten years ago but nothing for him to worry about. The cook, though, is Mexican. Some poor bastard at ten dollars an hour—and probably has to wash the dishes, too. La Migra take notice of his immigration status—they catch sight of his bowl cut on the way home to Queens and he’ll have a problem. He looks different than the Irish and the Canadians—and he’s got Lou Dobbs calling specifically for his head every night on the radio. (You notice, by the way, that you never hear Dobbs wringing his hands over our border to the North. Maybe the “white” in Great White North makes that particular “alien superhighway” more palatable.) The cook at the Irish bar, meanwhile, has the added difficulty of predators waiting by the subway exit for him (and any other Mexican cooks or dishwashers) when he comes home on Friday payday. He’s invariably cashed his check at a check-cashing store; he’s relatively small—and is unlikely to call the cops. The perfect victim. The guy serving my drinks, on the other hand, as most English-speaking illegal aliens, has been smartly gaming the system for years, a time-honored process everybody at the INS is fully familiar with: a couple of continuing education classes now and again (while working off the books) to get those student visas. Extensions. A work visa. A “farm” visa. Weekend across the border and repeat. Articulate, well-connected friends—the type of guys who own, for instance, lots of Irish bars—who can write letters of support lauding your invaluable and “specialized” skills, unavailable from homegrown bartenders. And nobody’s looking anyway. But I digress…
Anthony Bourdain (Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook)
My smell stays with you? I ruined you…for what?” “Your smell keeps me going all the time. I’m in a clutch game or at practice and it’s full count? Your cloves and vanilla scent calms me down. I spray it on the front of my uniform and rub my right hand across like this.” I demonstrate by rubbing my chest and she watches me in fascination like a starstruck teenager watches a rockstar play his bass. “I went to three different stores before I found the exact scent. Expensive. French perfume. Chamade by Guerlain.” She nods looking fascinated or charmed by me at least for a few seconds. “I got it in Paris when I was there a few years ago. I love it.” “I do too. So yes, you ruined me. For anyone else.” She’s smiling but then it slowly disappears like a countdown does as it goes from ten to zero. “What are you doing to me, Elvis?” she asks, looking troubled.
Katherine Owen (The Truth About Air & Water (Truth in Lies, #2))
She had apparently decided that Marra could be withdrawn from the game of merchants and princes and safety set aside. Marra both resented her mother for being so clear-eyed and was grateful to be free of the game, and she added this to the store of complicated things piled up beneath her heart.
T. Kingfisher (Nettle & Bone)
She had apparently decided that Marra could be withdrawn from the game of merchants and princes and safely set aside. Marra both resented her mother for being so clear-eyed and was grateful to be free of the game, and she added this to the store of complicated things piled up beneath her heart.
T. Kingfisher (Nettle & Bone)
After nearly two years of never knowing whether to believe the worst, of trying to focus on the demands of their day-to-day lives and then helplessly absorbing every rumor about what the government had in store for them, of never being able to justify either their alarm or their composure with hard fact—after so much perplexity, they were so ripe for delusion that, when the parents gathered on their beach chairs to chat together in the alleyways at night, the guessing game that invariably started up could go on without letup for hours: Who would be vice president on the Winchell ticket?
Philip Roth (The Plot Against America)
Terence, this is stupid stuff: You eat your victuals fast enough; There can’t be much amiss, ’tis clear, To see the rate you drink your beer. But oh, good Lord, the verse you make, It gives a chap the belly-ache. The cow, the old cow, she is dead; It sleeps well, the horned head: We poor lads, ’tis our turn now To hear such tunes as killed the cow. Pretty friendship ’tis to rhyme Your friends to death before their time Moping melancholy mad: Come, pipe a tune to dance to, lad.’ Why, if ’tis dancing you would be, There’s brisker pipes than poetry. Say, for what were hop-yards meant, Or why was Burton built on Trent? Oh many a peer of England brews Livelier liquor than the Muse, And malt does more than Milton can To justify God’s ways to man. Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink For fellows whom it hurts to think: Look into the pewter pot To see the world as the world’s not. And faith, ’tis pleasant till ’tis past: The mischief is that ’twill not last. Oh I have been to Ludlow fair And left my necktie God knows where, And carried half way home, or near, Pints and quarts of Ludlow beer: Then the world seemed none so bad, And I myself a sterling lad; And down in lovely muck I’ve lain, Happy till I woke again. Then I saw the morning sky: Heigho, the tale was all a lie; The world, it was the old world yet, I was I, my things were wet, And nothing now remained to do But begin the game anew. Therefore, since the world has still Much good, but much less good than ill, And while the sun and moon endure Luck’s a chance, but trouble’s sure, I’d face it as a wise man would, And train for ill and not for good. ’Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale Is not so brisk a brew as ale: Out of a stem that scored the hand I wrung it in a weary land. But take it: if the smack is sour, The better for the embittered hour; It should do good to heart and head When your soul is in my soul’s stead; And I will friend you, if I may, In the dark and cloudy day. There was a king reigned in the East: There, when kings will sit to feast, They get their fill before they think With poisoned meat and poisoned drink. He gathered all that springs to birth From the many-venomed earth; First a little, thence to more, He sampled all her killing store; And easy, smiling, seasoned sound, Sate the king when healths went round. They put arsenic in his meat And stared aghast to watch him eat; They poured strychnine in his cup And shook to see him drink it up: They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt: Them it was their poison hurt. —I tell the tale that I heard told. Mithridates, he died old.
A.E. Housman (A Shropshire Lad)
A large country house was likely to have a gun room, lamp room, still-room, pastry room, butler’s pantry, fish store, bakehouse, coal store, game larder, brewery, knife room, brush room, shoe room and at least a dozen more. Lanhydrock House in Cornwall had a room exclusively for dealing with bedpans. Another in Wales, according to Juliet Gardiner, had a room set aside for ironing newspapers. The grandest or oldest homes might also have a saucery, spicery, poultery, buttery and others of more exotic provenance, such as a ewery (a room for keeping water jugs; the word is somehow derived from aquaria), chandry (for candles), avenery (for game beasts), napery (for linen) and more.
Bill Bryson (At Home: A Short History of Private Life)
Much of what it takes to succeed in school, at work, and in one’s community consists of cultural habits acquired by adaptation to the social environment. Such cultural adaptations are known as “cultural capital.” Segregation leads social groups to form different codes of conduct and communication. Some habits that help individuals in intensely segregated, disadvantaged environments undermine their ability to succeed in integrated, more advantaged environments. At Strive, a job training organization, Gyasi Headen teaches young black and Latino men how to drop their “game face” at work. The “game face” is the angry, menacing demeanor these men adopt to ward off attacks in their crime-ridden, segregated neighborhoods. As one trainee described it, it is the face you wear “at 12 o’clock at night, you’re in the ‘hood and they’re going to try to get you.”102 But the habit may freeze it into place, frightening people from outside the ghetto, who mistake the defensive posture for an aggressive one. It may be so entrenched that black men may be unaware that they are glowering at others. This reduces their chance of getting hired. The “game face” is a form of cultural capital that circulates in segregated underclass communities, helping its members survive. Outside these communities, it burdens its possessors with severe disadvantages. Urban ethnographer Elijah Anderson highlights the cruel dilemma this poses for ghetto residents who aspire to mainstream values and seek responsible positions in mainstream society.103 If they manifest their “decent” values in their neighborhoods, they become targets for merciless harassment by those committed to “street” values, who win esteem from their peers by demonstrating their ability and willingness to insult and physically intimidate others with impunity. To protect themselves against their tormentors, and to gain esteem among their peers, they adopt the game face, wear “gangster” clothing, and engage in the posturing style that signals that they are “bad.” This survival strategy makes them pariahs in the wider community. Police target them for questioning, searches, and arrests.104 Store owners refuse to serve them, or serve them brusquely, while shadowing them to make sure they are not shoplifting. Employers refuse to employ them.105 Or they employ them in inferior, segregated jobs. A restaurant owner may hire blacks as dishwashers, but not as wait staff, where they could earn tips.
Elizabeth S. Anderson (The Imperative of Integration)
Top Choices of Metroid Prime 2 Rom And, once you're at the local game store, have a peak at their used section. Nearly all the initial theme and game play will be preserved intact within this 24-Meg cart, together with some new characteristics which are certain to blow away all of the hardcore metroid fanatics everywhere. Just head over to the website and hunt for the sport you desire. Fortunately for you, your preceding pal Casey is here to assist you outside. If you are not able to accomplish this, the boss will regain hitpoints and you have got to fight. All the original weapons are here plus a completely different roster! The most obvious positive about buying a hard copy of a game is it could be shared with other folks.
allsuperrom.com
And so the game went on in this manner, a throng of children playing keep-away from a bowling ball tossed back and forth between two plump ogres. The air filled with shrieks and cheers and shouts of laughter as daring players thrilled at the sport. That is, all but the few poor souls knocked flat and captured. No laughter rose from behind bars because those in the birdcage knew what was in store. They would soon be lunch for a couple of hungry ogres. Now you might be thinking—didn’t Gavin call it fun when he was swallowed by a wolf earlier? And didn’t he tell that raven-haired girl it doesn’t hurt to be swallowed whole by a bear? All true, all true. But here’s a secret you might not know. Ogres chew their food. Luckily, it’s only the first bite that stings.
Richelle E. Goodrich (Secrets of a Noble Keykeeper)
The noise of the town some floors below was greatly muted. In a state of complete mental detachment, he went over the events, the circumstances and the stages of destruction in their lives. Seen in the frozen light of a restrictive past, everything seemed clear, conclusive and indisputable. Now it seemed unthinkable that a girl of seventeen shoudl be so naive; it was particularly unbelieveable that a girl of seventeen should set so much store by love. If the surveys in the magazines were to be believed, things had changed a great deal in the twenty-five years since Annabelle was a teenager. Young girls today were more sensible, more sophisticated. Nowadays they worried more about their exam results and did their best to ensure they would have a decent career. For them, going out with boys was simply a game, a distraction motivated as much by narcissism as by sexual pleasure. They later would try to make a good marriage, basing their decision on a range of social and professional criteria, as well as on shared interests and tastes. Of course, in doing this they cut themselves off from any possibility of happiness--a condition indissociable from the outdated, intensely close bonds so incompatible with the exercise of reason--but this was their attempt to escape the moral and emotional suffering which had so tortured their forebears. This hope was, unfortunately, rapidly disappointed; the passing of love's torments simply left the field clear for boredom, emptiness and an anguished wait for old age and death. The second part of Annabelle's life therefore had been much more dismal and sad than the first, of which, in the end, she had no memory at all.
Michel Houellebecq
Everywhere I went during those days, the streets were filled with talk of the Mets. It was one of those rare moments of unanimity when everyone was thinking about the same thing. People walked around with transistor radios tuned to the game, large crowds gathered in front of appliance store windows to watch the action on silent televisions, sudden cheers would erupt from corner bars, from apartment windows, from invisible rooftops. First it was Atlanta in the playoffs, and then it was Baltimore in the Series. Out of eight October games, the Mets lost only once, and when the adventure was over, New York held another ticker-tape parade, this one even surpassing the extravaganza that had been thrown for the astronauts two months earlier. More than five hundred tons of paper fell into the streets that day, a record that has not been match sense.
Paul Auster
For the middle majority of us all, knowledge of Negroes firsthand is probably limited—limited to the colored cleaning woman, who comes twice a week, limited to the colored baseball player who saves or loses a home game, limited to the garage mechanic, or dime-store clerk, or blues singer seen and heard on a Saturday night. To this white majority, the black man is as unknown as once was the heart of the Dark Continent of Africa.
Irving Wallace (The Man)
We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy. Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. If a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24 x 7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country 3 months after the US release, and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate’s service is more valuable.
Gabe Newell
Do you have our frequent gamers card?” “No.” “Do you want to sign up for our frequent gamers card?” “No, thank you.” “Do you want to put ten bucks down on the pre-release of Need for Speed 53?” “No.” “Do you want to put money down on any other upcoming titles?” “No.” “Do you want to sign up for our email service to notify you of gamer news?” “No.” “Do you want to sign up for a subscription to Techtaphonic, our store’s magazine?” “Good lord, no. Can I just buy the game?
Sarah Daltry (Backward Compatible)
fad is a wave in the ocean, and a trend is the tide. A fad gets a lot of hype, and a trend gets very little. Like a wave, a fad is very visible, but it goes up and down in a big hurry. Like the tide, a trend is almost invisible, but it’s very powerful over the long term. A fad is a short-term phenomenon that might be profitable, but a fad doesn’t last long enough to do a company much good. Furthermore, a company often tends to gear up as if a fad were a trend. As a result, the company is often stuck with a lot of staff, expensive manufacturing facilities, and distribution networks. (A fashion, on the other hand, is a fad that repeats itself. Examples: short skirts for women and double-breasted suits for men. Halley’s Comet is a fashion because it comes back every 75 years or so.) When the fad disappears, a company often goes into a deep financial shock. What happened to Atari is typical in this respect. And look how Coleco Industries handled the Cabbage Patch Kids. Those homely dolls hit the market in 1983 and started to take off. Coleco’s strategy was to milk the kids for all they were worth. Hundreds of Cabbage Patch novelties flooded the toy stores. Pens, pencils, crayon boxes, games, clothing. Two years later, Coleco racked up sales of $776 million and profits of $83 million. Then the bottom dropped out of the Cabbage Patch Kids. By 1988 Coleco went into Chapter 11. Coleco died, but the kids live on. Acquired by Hasbro in 1989, the Cabbage Patch Kids are now being handled conservatively. Today they’re doing quite well.
Al Ries (The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing)
During its first week in stores, Battlefield 3 sold more than 5 million copies. The financial people at Electronic Arts established that the game had added about $370,000 to the company’s coffers—significantly more money than Avatar, one of the most lucrative films ever, earned during its first weekend in the theaters. For the uninitiated, the numbers may seem sky-high, but they were exactly in line with what the bosses at Electronic Arts had predicted. Battlefield 3 was just more proof that computer games are big business.
Daniel Goldberg (Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus "Notch" Persson and the Game that Changed Everything)
Since their invention about half a century ago, video games have come to play a vital role in modern human civilization. I think this is because we modern humans were never designed to live like we do now—sitting in traffic, working in offices, shopping in stores. We are, by design, hunter-gatherers. Millions of years of evolution have wired our brains with an inherent need to hunt, gather, explore, solve puzzles, form teams, and conquer challenge after challenge in order to survive as we claw our way to the top of the food chain. For most people, day-to-day life no longer requires many of those experiences or challenges, and so those primal, instinctive needs inside us have no natural outlet. To keep our minds and bodies healthy, we have to simulate those old ways in the midst of our modern, technological lives, where everything on the planet has already been hunted and gathered. Thankfully, the technology that created this problem also gave rise to its solution—a way for us modern city dwellers to exorcise our inner evolutionary demons: video games.
Ernest Cline (Press Start to Play: Stories)
Billy Dent stared in the mirror. He didn't quite recognize himself, but that was nothing new. Billy had almost always seen a stranger in mirrors, ever since childhood. At first he had hated and feared the figure that seemed to pursue him everywhere, stalking him through mirrors and store windows. But eventually Billy came to understand that what he saw in the mirror was what other people saw when they looked at him. Other people somehow did not see the real Billy. They saw something that looked like them. Something that looked human and mortal. Something that looked like a prospect.
Barry Lyga (Game (I Hunt Killers, #2))
We had another game where he was the doctor making a house call and I was the proper Victorian lady besieged by hysteria (also known as sexual frustration) which could only be relieved by a paroxysm (also known as an orgasm) the doctor brought on with either his hand or my vibrator. (At first Quinn didn’t believe me when I told him that this actually happened in history, and that vibrators were, in fact, invented by doctors whose hands were cramping up from flicking sexually frustrated Victorian beans all day long, but I swear to God it’s true. Just another one of those fun facts stored up in my brain.)
Melanie Harlow (Man Candy (After We Fall, #1))
Elane scan the room and takeing in the white antiseptec decor of Buzzfeed office in Soho. Her eyes land on a wall decoratien, a glareing yellow butten about the size of a parasol. It read simply: LOL. It seem to mock her. Honestly? Elane just dosent fit in here. No one here is under 30 and to Elane it is almost like nobody speaking Englesh. Everything is "HTML 5" this and "Keven Ware sports injery" that and "Game Of Throans recap" this and "Downten Abby parady tumblr" that. She have no idea what any of that mean. She open her face book and feal deep pit of emptynes as she click thru the profiles of her 17 face book frends.
Seinfeld 2000 (The Apple Store)
They really haven’t told you anything about the future, have they? This is my phone.” “A phone. You use it as a phone. You carry around a device that’s the size of a deck of cards and is more powerful than a Cray supercomputer, and you use it as a phone?” “I also play games on it, and watch a movie occasionally.” “You can watch movies on that?” “Not many. I mean, I only have a sixteen-gig memory card in it.” Phillip muttered, almost to himself, “My Commodore has sixty-four kilobytes of memory and a floppy drive that stores one hundred and seventy K. You can double that, but you have to cut a notch in the disk.” Then, loud and clear, Phillip said, “I kind of hate you right now.
Scott Meyer (Off to Be the Wizard (Magic 2.0, #1))
When K & I returned to the gingerbread house after taking Nana home, I was beyond exhausted. But I couldn't sleep, not for a long time. I stayed awake. Thinking of boys, of myself, & of all the intersections in between. ... Regardless, there were times when I was at least part boy. A femme boy deep down. Shy sweater fag, my cardigan on hand to comfort me in the cold world. Bookworm queer boy at heart, K told me on more than one occasion. Certain moods & I was the most enviable of drag princesses, eyelashes all a-flutter & my fingers tickling the air with each gesture. Sometimes I was full of flirtatious swagger, but that playful swag could turn fierce snarl for defense, if need be. Never, I promised myself one line I wouldn't cross, never would I be the mean kind of boy that laughed me back inside the store's red doors when I did no good at hot afternoon sour pissing contests. Of course, there were plenty of times I was such a fairy lady that I ceased to be even part boy. Yes, Rob would have accused me of bringing the communal growl down for saying I'm part boy. And pre-Stonewall dykes would have wanted to call my game. What kind of dyke was I, anyway? Good question. Simple & complicated all at once, I wasn't a pigeon to be tucked away neatly into a hole. I didn't wear a fixed category without feeling pain. I was more, or less, or something different entirely.
Felicia Luna Lemus (Trace Elements of Random Tea Parties)
I love the way the rain melts the colors together, like a chalk drawing on the sidewalk. There is a moment, just after sunset, when the shops turn on their lights and steam starts to fog up the windows of the cafés. In French, this twilight time implies a hint of danger. It's called entre chien et loup, between the dog and the wolf. It was just beginning to get dark as we walked through the small garden of Palais Royal. We watched as carefully dressed children in toggled peacoats and striped woolen mittens finished the same game of improvised soccer we had seen in the Place Sainte Marthe. Behind the Palais Royal the wide avenues around the Louvre gave way to narrow streets, small boutiques, and bistros. It started to drizzle. Gwendal turned a corner, and tucked in between two storefronts, barely wider than a set of double doors, I found myself staring down a corridor of fairy lights. A series of arches stretched into the distance, topped with panes of glass, like a greenhouse, that echoed the plip-plop of the rain. It was as if we'd stepped through the witch's wardrobe, the phantom tollbooth, what have you, into another era. The Passage Vivienne was nineteenth-century Paris's answer to a shopping mall, a small interior street lined with boutiques and tearooms where ladies could browse at their leisure without wetting the bustles of their long dresses or the plumes of their new hats. It was certainly a far cry from the shopping malls of my youth, with their piped-in Muzak and neon food courts. Plaster reliefs of Greek goddesses in diaphanous tunics lined the walls. Three-pronged brass lamps hung from the ceiling on long chains. About halfway down, there was an antique store selling nothing but old kitchenware- ridged ceramic bowls for hot chocolate, burnished copper molds in the shape of fish, and a pewter mold for madeleines, so worn around the edges it might have belonged to Proust himself. At the end of the gallery, underneath a clock held aloft by two busty angels, was a bookstore. There were gold stencils on the glass door. Maison fondée en 1826.
Elizabeth Bard (Lunch in Paris: A Love Story, with Recipes)
Did you see anything?” Piper asked. “Anything at all?”  Trevor was slumped on the couch, his NexFlight game system’s power cord creating a tripping hazard in the underground bunker. It was supposed to be plugged while charging, but the batteries had dwindled to useless over a month ago. There were vast stores in a cold cellar near the bedrooms, reserved for flashlights and lanterns in case of emergency. Meyer would have a fit if Trevor used them for games. But Meyer wouldn’t throw a fit because he was gone. And, Piper felt more certain by the day, was never coming back.  “I didn’t look.” Trevor’s eyes never left the game.  “You didn’t look? Go look, Trevor.”  Trevor sighed and met Piper’s
Sean Platt (Contact (Alien Invasion, #2))
I can’t abandon my dad’s store.” “Abandon what? Look around you, fool. There ain’t nothin’ here left to protect!” “You’re right.” She sobs harder. “We have nothing left.” “This can all be replaced. Can’t replace us if someone comes in here and cracks our head open because they want a power tool or a hammer. Or if the cops run up in here and want to put my ass in jail because they think I’m the one takin’ things.” “You don’t get it,” she says, tears running down her face. “This place is all my dad has.” “I don’t understand? You got us sitting in a broken window like ducks at a carnival game lined up to get popped. Quit crying over a store! You so busy feeling sorry for yourself, we gonna get killed.
Kimberly Jones (I'm Not Dying with You Tonight)
The wonderful science behind taking the chastity pill is to preserve honor, respect, purity and worth. Again, the value of a woman’s future is dependent on how well she blocks any advances, foul balls, interceptions or explorations. It’s no surprise I question everything. What does going to the movies have to do with my vagina? What does going to the grocery store at ten pm at night to pick up a package of brownie mix have to do with my vagina? Why is ok for me not to go to a high school football game? Does wearing a tank top instead of a short sleeve shirt compromise my vagina shield? Do I have an Anti-Vagina Defense security chip installed on me that I’m not aware of, one that only works with loose clothing?
Sadiqua Hamdan (Happy Am I. Holy Am I. Healthy Am I.)
If this were a game, like the countless stupid things I’ve played over the years, I’d be heading down there to pick off the guards one by one and free them. Then we’d take back the colony and put an end to this terror. But I don’t have the skills or the weapons that my character would have. There aren’t handy weapon caches stored in secret places that I can raid to arm myself and my fellows. None of the games I’ve ever played have built in total failure from the start. I wouldn’t have the first idea of how to tackle one of the guards and take their weapon. There’s no engine to interpret my clumsy actions and translate them into flawless silent assassinations. There is no heroism in me without the supporting game narrative.
Emma Newman (Planetfall (Planetfall, #1))
Ezra asked me to bring you this,' I said and handed him the jar. 'He said you would know what it was.' He took the jar and looked at it. Then he threw it at me. It struck me on the chest or the shoulder and rolled down the stairs. 'You son of a bitch,' he said. 'You bastard.' 'Ezra said you might need it,' I said. He countered that by throwing a milk bottle. 'You are sure you don't need it?' I asked. He threw another milk bottle. I retreated and he hit me with yet another milk bottle in the back. Then he shut the door. I picked up the jar which was only slightly cracked and put it in my pocket. 'He did not seem to want the gift of Monsieur Pound," I said to the concierge. 'Perhaps he will be tranquil now,' she said. 'Perhaps he has some of his own,' I said. 'Poor Monsieur Dunning,' she said. The lovers of poetry that Ezra organized rallied to Dunning's aid again eventually. My own intervention and that of the concierge had been unsuccessful. The jar of alleged opium which had been cracked I stored wrapped in waxed paper and carefully tied in one of an old pair of riding boots. When Evan Shipman and I were removing my personal effects from that apartment some years later the boots were still there but the jar was gone. I do not know why Dunning threw the milk bottles at me unless he remembered my lack of credulity the night of his first dying, or whether it was only an innate dislike of my personality. But I remember the happiness that the phrase 'Monsieur Dunning est monté sur le toit et refuse catégoriquement de descendre' gave to Evan Shipman. He believed there was something symbolic about it. I would not know. Perhaps Dunning took me for an agent of evil or of the police. I only know that Ezra tried to be kind to Dunning as he was kind to so many people and I always hoped Dunning was as fine a poet as Ezra believed him to be. For a poet he threw a very accurate milk bottle. But Ezra, who was a very good poet, played a good game of tennis too. Evan Shipman, who was a very fine poet and who truly did not care if his poems were ever published, felt that it should remain a mystery. 'We need more true mystery in our lives, Hem,' he once said to me. 'The completely unambitious writer and the really good unpublished poem are the things we lack most at this time. There is, of course, the problem of sustenance.
Ernest Hemingway (A Moveable Feast)
When I first started hearing about the places that give people joy, I realized that many of them evoke this giddy feeling of abundance: carnivals and circuses, dollar stores and flea markets, and giant old hotels like the Grand Budapest of director Wes Anderson’s imagining. The same feeling also exists on a smaller scale. An ice-cream cone covered in rainbow sprinkles is like a candy store held in your hand. A shower of confetti, a multicolored quilt, a simple game of pick-up sticks, have this irresistible allure. Even the language of joy is rife with excess. We say we’re overjoyed or that we’re brimming with happiness. We say, “My cup runneth over.” And this is very much how it feels to be in a moment of joy, when our delight is so abundant it feels like it can’t be contained by the boundaries of our bodies.
Ingrid Fetell Lee (Joyful: The Surprising Power of Ordinary Things to Create Extraordinary Happiness)
A wealth of research confirms the importance of face-to-face contact. One experiment performed by two researchers at the University of Michigan challenged groups of six students to play a game in which everyone could earn money by cooperating. One set of groups met for ten minutes face-to-face to discuss strategy before playing. Another set of groups had thirty minutes for electronic interaction. The groups that met in person cooperated well and earned more money. The groups that had only connected electronically fell apart, as members put their personal gains ahead of the group’s needs. This finding resonates well with many other experiments, which have shown that face-to-face contact leads to more trust, generosity, and cooperation than any other sort of interaction. The very first experiment in social psychology was conducted by a University of Indiana psychologist who was also an avid bicyclist. He noted that “racing men” believe that “the value of a pace,” or competitor, shaves twenty to thirty seconds off the time of a mile. To rigorously test the value of human proximity, he got forty children to compete at spinning fishing reels to pull a cable. In all cases, the kids were supposed to go as fast as they could, but most of them, especially the slower ones, were much quicker when they were paired with another child. Modern statistical evidence finds that young professionals today work longer hours if they live in a metropolitan area with plenty of competitors in their own occupational niche. Supermarket checkouts provide a particularly striking example of the power of proximity. As anyone who has been to a grocery store knows, checkout clerks differ wildly in their speed and competence. In one major chain, clerks with differing abilities are more or less randomly shuffled across shifts, which enabled two economists to look at the impact of productive peers. It turns out that the productivity of average clerks rises substantially when there is a star clerk working on their shift, and those same average clerks get worse when their shift is filled with below-average clerks. Statistical evidence also suggests that electronic interactions and face-to-face interactions support one another; in the language of economics, they’re complements rather than substitutes. Telephone calls are disproportionately made among people who are geographically close, presumably because face-to-face relationships increase the demand for talking over the phone. And when countries become more urban, they engage in more electronic communications.
Edward L. Glaeser (Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier)
She hoots like a monkey and pulls me back onto a shelf in the tub. I fall between her legs, I fall on top of her, we sink … and then we’re twirling, spinning in the water, me on top, then her, then me, and giggling, and making bird cries. Steam envelops us, cloaks us; light sparkles on the agitated water; and we keep spinning, so that at some point I’m not sure which hands are mine, which legs. We aren’t kissing. This game is far less serious, more playful, free-style, but we’re gripping each other, trying not to let the other’s slippery body go, and our knees bump, our tummies slap, our hips slide back and forth. Various submerged softnesses on Clementine’s body are delivering crucial information to mine, information I store away but won’t understand until years later. How long do we spin? I have no idea. But at ,some point we get tired. Clementine beaches on the shelf, with me on top.
Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex)
I learned about opening moves and why it’s important to control the center early on; the shortest distance between two points is straight down the middle. I learned about the middle game and why tactics between two adversaries are like clashing ideas; the one who plays better has the clearest plans for both attacking and getting out of traps. I learned why it is essential in the endgame to have foresight, a mathematical understanding of all possible moves, and patience; all weaknesses and advantages become evident to a strong adversary and are obscured to a tiring opponent. I discovered that for the whole game one must gather invisible strengths and see the endgame before the game begins. I also found out why I should never reveal “why” to others. A little knowledge withheld is a great advantage one should store for future use. That is the power of chess. It is a game of secrets in which one must show and never tell.
Amy Tan (The Joy Luck Club)
Among the best shows were these, some of which have attained cult followings: The Most Dangerous Game (Oct. 1, 1947), a showcase for two actors, Paul Frees and Hans Conried, as hunted and hunter on a remote island; Evening Primrose (Nov. 5, 1947), John Collier’s too-chilling-to-be-humorous account of a misfit who finds sanctuary (and something else that he hadn’t counted on) when he decides to live in a giant department store after hours; Confession (Dec. 31, 1947), surely one of the greatest pure-radio items ever done in any theater—Algernon Blackwood’s creepy sleight-of-hand that keeps a listener guessing until the last line; Leiningen vs. the Ants (Jan. 17, 1948) and Three Skeleton Key (Nov. 15, 1949), interesting as much for technical achievement as for story or character development (soundmen Gould and Thorsness utilized ten turntables and various animal noises in their creation of Three Skeleton Key’s swarming pack of rats); Poison (July 28, 1950), a riveting commentary on intolerance wrapped in a tense struggle to save a man from the deadliest snake in the world—Jack Webb stars
John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
When Elon was nearly ten years old, he saw a computer for the first time, at the Sandton City Mall in Johannesburg. “There was an electronics store that mostly did hi-fi-type stuff, but then, in one corner, they started stocking a few computers,” Musk said. He felt awed right away—“It was like, ‘Whoa. Holy shit!’”—by this machine that could be programmed to do a person’s bidding. “I had to have that and then hounded my father to get the computer,” Musk said. Soon he owned a Commodore VIC-20, a popular home machine that went on sale in 1980. Elon’s computer arrived with five kilobytes of memory and a workbook on the BASIC programming language. “It was supposed to take like six months to get through all the lessons,” Elon said. “I just got super OCD on it and stayed up for three days with no sleep and did the entire thing. It seemed like the most super-compelling thing I had ever seen.” Despite being an engineer, Musk’s father was something of a Luddite and dismissive of the machine. Elon recounted that “he said it was just for games and that you’d never be able to do real engineering on it. I just said, ‘Whatever.’” While
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future)
Which meant, if somehow GameStop did start to go up, the people who had shorted the company would begin to feel pressure to buy; the more the stock went up, the heavier that pressure became. As the shorts began to cover, buying shares to return them to their lenders, the stock would rise even higher. In financial parlance, this was something called a 'short squeeze.' It didn't happen often, but when it did, it could be spectacular. Most famously, in 2008, a surprise takeover attempt of the German automaker Volkswagen by rival Porsche drove Volkswagen's stock price up by a factor of 5 — briefly making it the most valuable company in the world — in two quick days of trading, as short selling funds struggled to cover their positions. Similarly, a battle between two hedge fund titans — Bill Ackman, of Pershing Square Capital Management, and Carl Icahn — led to a squeeze involving supplement maker — and alleged pyramid marketer — Herbalife, which cost Ackman a reported $1 billion. And perhaps the first widely reported short squeeze dated back a century, to 1923, when grocery magnate Clarence Saunders successfully decimated short sellers who had targeted his nascent chain of Piggly Wiggly grocery stores.
Ben Mezrich (The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees)
The biggest fear for homeschooled children is that they will be unable to relate to their peers, will not have friends, or that they will otherwise be unable to interact with people in a normal way. Consider this: How many of your daily interactions with people are solely with people of your own birth year?  We’re not considering interactions with people who are a year or two older or a year or two younger, but specifically people who were born within a few months of your birthday. In society, it would be very odd to section people at work by their birth year and allow you to interact only with persons your same age. This artificial constraint would limit your understanding of people and society across a broader range of ages. In traditional schools, children are placed in grades artificially constrained by the child’s birth date and an arbitrary cut-off day on a school calendar. Every student is taught the same thing as everyone else of the same age primarily because it is a convenient way to manage a large number of students. Students are not grouped that way because there is any inherent special socialization that occurs when grouping children in such a manner. Sectioning off children into narrow bands of same-age peers does not make them better able to interact with society at large. In fact, sectioning off children in this way does just the opposite—it restricts their ability to practice interacting with a wide variety of people. So why do we worry about homeschooled children’s socialization?  The erroneous assumption is that the child will be homeschooled and will be at home, schooling in the house, all day every day, with no interactions with other people. Unless a family is remotely located in a desolate place away from any form of civilization, social isolation is highly unlikely. Every homeschooling family I know involves their children in daily life—going to the grocery store or the bank, running errands, volunteering in the community, or participating in sports, arts, or community classes. Within the homeschooled community, sports, arts, drama, co-op classes, etc., are usually sectioned by elementary, pre-teen, and teen groupings. This allows students to interact with a wider range of children, and the interactions usually enhance a child’s ability to interact well with a wider age-range of students. Additionally, being out in the community provides many opportunities for children to interact with people of all ages. When homeschooling groups plan field trips, there are sometimes constraints on the age range, depending upon the destination, but many times the trip is open to children of all ages. As an example, when our group went on a field trip to the Federal Reserve Bank, all ages of children attended. The tour and information were of interest to all of the children in one way or another. After the tour, our group dined at a nearby food court. The parents sat together to chat and the children all sat with each other, with kids of all ages talking and having fun with each other. When interacting with society, exposure to a wider variety of people makes for better overall socialization. Many homeschooling groups also have park days, game days, or play days that allow all of the children in the homeschooled community to come together and play. Usually such social opportunities last for two, three, or four hours. Our group used to have Friday afternoon “Park Day.”  After our morning studies, we would pack a picnic lunch, drive to the park, and spend the rest of the afternoon letting the kids run and play. Older kids would organize games and play with younger kids, which let them practice great leadership skills. The younger kids truly looked up to and enjoyed being included in games with the older kids.
Sandra K. Cook (Overcome Your Fear of Homeschooling with Insider Information)
[...]Telecomputer Man is assigned to an apparatus, just as the apparatus is assigned to him, by virtue of an involution of each into the other, a refraction of each by the other. The machine does what the human wants it to do, but by the same token the human puts into execution only what the machine has been programmed to do. The operator is working with virtuality: only apparently is the aim to obtain information or to communicate; the real purpose is to explore all the possibilities of a program, rather as a gambler seeks to exhaust the permutations in a game of chance. Consider the way the camera is used now. Its possibilities are no longer those of a subject who ' 'reflects' the world according to his personal vision; rather, they are the possibilities of the lens, as exploited by the object. The camera is thus a machine that vitiates all will, erases all intentionality and leaves nothing but the pure reflex needed to take pictures. Looking itself disappears without trace, replaced by a lens now in collusion with the object - and hence with an inversion of vision. The magic lies precisely in the subject's retroversion to a camera obscura - the reduction of his vision to the impersonal vision of a mechanical device. In a mirror, it is the subject who gives free rein to the realm of the imaginary. In the camera lens, and on-screen in general, it is the object, potentially, that unburdens itself - to the benefit of all media and telecommunications techniques. This is why images of anything are now a possibility. This is why everything is translatable into computer terms, commutable into digital form, just as each individual is commutable into his own particular genetic code. (The whole object, in fact, is to exhaust all the virtualities of such analogues of the genetic code: this is one of artificial intelligence's most fundamental aspects.) What this means on a more concrete level is that there is no longer any such thing as an act or event which is not refracted into a technical image or onto a screen, any such thing as an action which does not in some sense want to be photographed, filmed or tape-recorded, does not desire to be stored in memory so as to become reproducible for all eternity. No such thing as an action which does not aspire to self-transcendence into a virtual eternity - not, now, the durable eternity that follows death, but rather the ephemeral eternity of ever-ramifying artificial memory. The compulsion of the virtual is the compulsion to exist in potentia on all screens, to be embedded in all programs, and it acquires a magical force: the Siren call of the black box.
Jean Baudrillard (The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena)
I left Brookstone and went to the Pottery Barn. When I was a kid and everything inside our house was familiar, cheap, and ruined, walking into the Pottery Barn was like entering heaven. If they really wanted people to enjoy church, I thought back then, they should make everything in church look and smell like the Pottery Barn. My dream was to surround myself one day with everything in the store, with the wicker baskets and scented candles, the brushed-silver picture frames. But that was a long time ago. I had already gone through a period of buying everything there was to buy at the Pottery Barn and decorating my apartment like a Pottery Barn outlet, and then getting rid of it all during a massive upgrade. Now everything at the Pottery Barn looked ersatz and mass-produced. To buy any of it now would be to regress in aspiration and selfhood. I didn’t want to buy anything at the Pottery Barn so much as I wanted to recapture the feeling of wanting to buy everything from the Pottery Barn. Something similar happened at the music store. I should try to find some new music, I thought, because there was a time when new music could lift me out of a funk like nothing else. But I wasn’t past the Bs when I saw the only thing I really cared to buy. It was the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, which had been released in 1965. I already owned Rubber Soul. I had owned Rubber Soul on vinyl, then on cassette, and now on CD, and of course on my iPod, iPod mini, and iPhone. If I wanted to, I could have pulled out my iPhone and played Rubber Soul from start to finish right there, on speaker, for the sake of the whole store. But that wasn’t what I wanted. I wanted to buy Rubber Soul for the first time all over again. I wanted to return the needle from the run-out groove to the opening chords of “Drive My Car” and make everything new again. That wasn’t going to happen. But, I thought, I could buy it for somebody else. I could buy somebody else the new experience of listening to Rubber Soul for the first time. So I took the CD up to the register and paid for it and, walking out, felt renewed and excited. But the first kid I offered it to, a rotund teenager in a wheelchair looking longingly into a GameStop window, declined on the principle that he would rather have cash. A couple of other kids didn’t have CD players. I ended up leaving Rubber Soul on a bench beside a decommissioned ashtray where someone had discarded an unhealthy gob of human hair. I wandered, as everyone in the mall sooner or later does, into the Best Friends Pet Store. Many best friends—impossibly small beagles and corgis and German shepherds—were locked away for display in white cages where they spent their days dozing with depression, stirring only long enough to ponder the psychic hurdles of licking their paws. Could there be anything better to lift your spirits than a new puppy?
Joshua Ferris (To Rise Again at a Decent Hour)
Walking back through the mall to the exit nearest our part of the parking lot, we passed one shop which sold computers, printers, software, and games. It was packed with teenagers, the kind who wear wire rims and know what the new world is about. The clerks were indulgent, letting them program the computers. Two hundred yards away, near the six movie houses, a different kind of teenager shoved quarters into the space-war games, tensing over the triggers, releasing the eerie sounds of extraterrestrial combat. Any kid back in the computer store could have told the combatants that because there is no atmosphere in space, there is absolutely no sound at all. Perfect distribution: the future managers and the future managed ones. Twenty in the computer store, two hundred in the arcade. The future managers have run on past us into the thickets of CP/M, M-Basic, Cobal, Fortran, Z-80, Apples, and Worms. Soon the bosses of the microcomputer revolution will sell us preprogrammed units for each household which will provide entertainment, print out news, purvey mail-order goods, pay bills, balance accounts, keep track of expenses, and compute taxes. But by then the future managers will be over on the far side of the thickets, dealing with bubble memories, machines that design machines, projects so esoteric our pedestrian minds cannot comprehend them. It will be the biggest revolution of all, bigger than the wheel, bigger than Franklin’s kite, bigger than paper towels.
John D. MacDonald (Cinnamon Skin (Travis McGee, #20))
Motor-scooter riders with big beards and girl friends who bounce on the back of the scooters and wear their hair long in front of their faces as well as behind, drunks who follow the advice of the Hat Council and are always turned out in hats, but not hats the Council would approve. Mr. Lacey, the locksmith,, shups up his shop for a while and goes to exchange time of day with Mr. Slube at the cigar store. Mr. Koochagian, the tailor, waters luxuriant jungle of plants in his window, gives them a critical look from the outside, accepts compliments on them from two passers-by, fingers the leaves on the plane tree in front of our house with a thoughtful gardener's appraisal, and crosses the street for a bite at the Ideal where he can keep an eye on customers and wigwag across the message that he is coming. The baby carriages come out, and clusters of everyone from toddlers with dolls to teenagers with homework gather at the stoops. When I get home from work, the ballet is reaching its cresendo. This is the time roller skates and stilts and tricycles and games in the lee of the stoop with bottletops and plastic cowboys, this is the time of bundles and packages, zigzagging from the drug store to the fruit stand and back over to the butcher's; this is the time when teenagers, all dressed up, are pausing to ask if their slips shows or their collars look right; this is the time when beautiful girls get out of MG's; this is the time when the fire engines go through; this is the time when anybody you know on Hudson street will go by. As the darkness thickens and Mr. Halpert moors the laundry cart to the cellar door again, the ballet goes under lights, eddying back nad forth but intensifying at the bright spotlight pools of Joe's sidewalk pizza, the bars, the delicatessen, the restaurant and the drug store. The night workers stop now at the delicatessen, to pick up salami and a container of milk. Things have settled down for the evening but the street and its ballet have not come to a stop. I know the deep night ballet and its seasons best from waking long after midnight to tend a baby and, sitting in the dark, seeing the shadows and hearing sounds of the sidewalk. Mostly it is a sound like infinitely patterning snatches of party conversation, and, about three in the morning, singing, very good singing. Sometimes their is a sharpness and anger or sad, sad weeping, or a flurry of search for a string of beads broken. One night a young man came roaring along, bellowing terrible language at two girls whom he had apparently picked up and who were disappointing him. Doors opened, a wary semicircle formed around him, not too close, until police came. Out came the heads, too, along the Hudsons street, offering opinion, "Drunk...Crazy...A wild kid from the suburbs" Deep in the night, I am almost unaware of how many people are on the street unless someone calls the together. Like the bagpipe. Who the piper is and why he favored our street I have no idea.
Jane Jacobs
5. Move toward resistance and pain A. Bill Bradley (b. 1943) fell in love with the sport of basketball somewhere around the age of ten. He had one advantage over his peers—he was tall for his age. But beyond that, he had no real natural gift for the game. He was slow and gawky, and could not jump very high. None of the aspects of the game came easily to him. He would have to compensate for all of his inadequacies through sheer practice. And so he proceeded to devise one of the most rigorous and efficient training routines in the history of sports. Managing to get his hands on the keys to the high school gym, he created for himself a schedule—three and a half hours of practice after school and on Sundays, eight hours every Saturday, and three hours a day during the summer. Over the years, he would keep rigidly to this schedule. In the gym, he would put ten-pound weights in his shoes to strengthen his legs and give him more spring to his jump. His greatest weaknesses, he decided, were his dribbling and his overall slowness. He would have to work on these and also transform himself into a superior passer to make up for his lack of speed. For this purpose, he devised various exercises. He wore eyeglass frames with pieces of cardboard taped to the bottom, so he could not see the basketball while he practiced dribbling. This would train him to always look around him rather than at the ball—a key skill in passing. He set up chairs on the court to act as opponents. He would dribble around them, back and forth, for hours, until he could glide past them, quickly changing direction. He spent hours at both of these exercises, well past any feelings of boredom or pain. Walking down the main street of his hometown in Missouri, he would keep his eyes focused straight ahead and try to notice the goods in the store windows, on either side, without turning his head. He worked on this endlessly, developing his peripheral vision so he could see more of the court. In his room at home, he practiced pivot moves and fakes well into the night—such skills that would also help him compensate for his lack of speed. Bradley put all of his creative energy into coming up with novel and effective ways of practicing. One time his family traveled to Europe via transatlantic ship. Finally, they thought, he would give his training regimen a break—there was really no place to practice on board. But below deck and running the length of the ship were two corridors, 900 feet long and quite narrow—just enough room for two passengers. This was the perfect location to practice dribbling at top speed while maintaining perfect ball control. To make it even harder, he decided to wear special eyeglasses that narrowed his vision. For hours every day he dribbled up one side and down the other, until the voyage was done. Working this way over the years, Bradley slowly transformed himself into one of the biggest stars in basketball—first as an All-American at Princeton University and then as a professional with the New York Knicks. Fans were in awe of his ability to make the most astounding passes, as if he had eyes on the back and sides of his head—not to mention his dribbling prowess, his incredible arsenal of fakes and pivots, and his complete gracefulness on the court. Little did they know that such apparent ease was the result of so many hours of intense practice over so many years.
Robert Greene (Mastery)
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THE OBEDIENCE GAME DUGGAR KIDS GROW UP playing the Obedience Game. It’s sort of like Mother May I? except it has a few extra twists—and there’s no need to double-check with “Mother” because she (or Dad) is the one giving the orders. It’s one way Mom and Dad help the little kids in the family burn off extra energy some nights before we all put on our pajamas and gather for Bible time (more about that in chapter 8). To play the Obedience Game, the little kids all gather in the living room. After listening carefully to Mom’s or Dad’s instructions, they respond with “Yes, ma’am, I’d be happy to!” then run and quickly accomplish the tasks. For example, Mom might say, “Jennifer, go upstairs to the girls’ room, touch the foot of your bed, then come back downstairs and give Mom a high-five.” Jennifer answers with an energetic “Yes, ma’am, I’d be happy to!” and off she goes. Dad might say, “Johannah, run around the kitchen table three times, then touch the front doorknob and come back.” As Johannah stands up she says, “Yes, sir, I’d be happy to!” “Jackson, go touch the front door, then touch the back door, then touch the side door, and then come back.” Jackson, who loves to play army, stands at attention, then salutes and replies, “Yes, sir, I’d be happy to!” as he goes to complete his assignment at lightning speed. Sometimes spotters are sent along with the game player to make sure the directions are followed exactly. And of course, the faster the orders can be followed, the more applause the contestant gets when he or she slides back into the living room, out of breath and pleased with himself or herself for having complied flawlessly. All the younger Duggar kids love to play this game; it’s a way to make practicing obedience fun! THE FOUR POINTS OF OBEDIENCE THE GAME’S RULES (MADE up by our family) stem from our study of the four points of obedience, which Mom taught us when we were young. As a matter of fact, as we are writing this book she is currently teaching these points to our youngest siblings. Obedience must be: 1. Instant. We answer with an immediate, prompt “Yes ma’am!” or “Yes sir!” as we set out to obey. (This response is important to let the authority know you heard what he or she asked you to do and that you are going to get it done as soon as possible.) Delayed obedience is really disobedience. 2. Cheerful. No grumbling or complaining. Instead, we respond with a cheerful “I’d be happy to!” 3. Thorough. We do our best, complete the task as explained, and leave nothing out. No lazy shortcuts! 4. Unconditional. No excuses. No, “That’s not my job!” or “Can’t someone else do it? or “But . . .” THE HIDDEN GOAL WITH this fun, fast-paced game is that kids won’t need to be told more than once to do something. Mom would explain the deeper reason behind why she and Daddy desired for us to learn obedience. “Mom and Daddy won’t always be with you, but God will,” she says. “As we teach you to hear and obey our voice now, our prayer is that ultimately you will learn to hear and obey what God’s tells you to do through His Word.” In many families it seems that many of the goals of child training have been lost. Parents often expect their children to know what they should say and do, and then they’re shocked and react harshly when their sweet little two-year-old throws a tantrum in the middle of the grocery store. This parental attitude probably stems from the belief that we are all born basically good deep down inside, but the truth is, we are all born with a sin nature. Think about it: You don’t have to teach a child to hit, scream, whine, disobey, or be selfish. It comes naturally. The Bible says that parents are to “train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6).
Jill Duggar (Growing Up Duggar: It's All about Relationships)
The odd group of well-wishers slowly moved down the hallway as Moshe’s sobs cascaded up and down the walls, bouncing from one side to the other. The discourse on Doc Roberts was forgotten now as the group tromped forward, a ragtag assortment of travelers moving fifteen feet as if it were fifteen thousand miles, slow travelers all, arrivals from different lands, making a low trek through a country that claimed to be so high, a country that gave them so much yet demanded so much more. They moved slowly, like fusgeyers, wanderers seeking a home in Europe, or erú West African tribesmen herded off a ship on a Virginia shore to peer back across the Atlantic in the direction of their homeland one last time, moving toward a common destiny, all of them—Isaac, Nate, and the rest—into a future of American nothing. It was a future they couldn’t quite see, where the richness of all they had brought to the great land of promise would one day be zapped into nothing, the glorious tapestry of their history boiled down to a series of ten-second TV commercials, empty holidays, and sports games filled with the patriotic fluff of red, white, and blue, the celebrants cheering the accompanying dazzle without any idea of the horrible struggles and proud pasts of their forebears who had made their lives so easy. The collective history of this sad troupe moving down the hospital corridor would become tiny blots in an American future that would one day scramble their proud histories like eggs, scattering them among the population while feeding mental junk to the populace on devices that would become as common and small as the hot dog that the dying woman thought she smelled; for in death, Chona had smelled not a hot dog but the future, a future in which devices that fit in one’s pocket and went zip, zap, and zilch delivered a danger far more seductive and powerful than any hot dog, a device that children of the future would clamor for and become addicted to, a device that fed them their oppression disguised as free thought.
James McBride (The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store)
That night, Marjan dreamt of Mehregan. The original day of thanksgiving, the holiday is celebrated during the autumn equinox in Iran. A fabulous excuse for a dinner party, something that Persians the world over have a penchant for, Mehregan is also a challenge to the forces of darkness, which if left unheeded will encroach even on the brightest of flames. Bonfires and sparklers glitter in the evening skies on this night, and in homes across the country, everyone is reminded of their blessings by the smell of roasting 'ajil', a mixture of dried fruit, salty pumpkin seeds, and roasted nuts. Handfuls are showered on the poor and needy on Mehregan, with a prayer that the coming year will find them fed and showered with the love of friends and family. In Iran, it was Marjan's favorite holiday. She even preferred it to the bigger and brasher New Year's celebrations in March, anticipating the festivities months in advance. The preparations would begin as early as July, when she and the family gardener, Baba Pirooz, gathered fruit from the plum, apricot, and pear trees behind their house. Along with the green pomegranate bush, the fruit trees ran the length of the half-acre garden. Four trees deep and rustling with green and burgundy canopies, the fattened orchard always reminded Marjan of the bejeweled bushes in the story of Aladdin, the boy with the magic lamp. It was sometimes hard to believe that their home was in the middle of a teeming city and not closer to the Alborz mountains, which looked down on Tehran from loftier heights. After the fruit had been plucked and washed, it would be laid out to dry in the sun. Over the years, Marjan had paid close attention to her mother's drying technique, noting how the fruit was sliced in perfect halves and dipped in a light sugar water to help speed up the wrinkling. Once dried, it would be stored in terra-cotta canisters so vast that they could easily have hidden both both young Marjan and Bahar. And indeed, when empty the canisters had served this purpose during their hide-and-seek games.
Marsha Mehran (Rosewater and Soda Bread (Babylon Café #2))
It’s so funny you should say this, because if you were one of my students, you’d be wearing your pain like a badge of honor. This generation doesn’t hide anything from anyone. My class talks a lot about their traumas. And how their traumas inform their games. They, honest to God, think their traumas are the most interesting thing about them. I sound like I’m making fun, and I am a little, but I don’t mean to be. They’re so different from us, really. Their standards are higher; they call bullshit on so much of the sexism and racism that I, at least, just lived with. But that’s also made them kind of, well, humorless. I hate people who talk about generational differences like it’s an actual thing, and here I am, doing it. It doesn’t make sense. How alike were you to anyone we grew up with, you know?” “If their traumas are the most interesting things about them, how do they get over any of it?” Sam asked. “I don’t think they do. Or maybe they don’t have to, I don’t know.” Sadie paused. “Since I’ve been teaching, I keep thinking about how lucky we were,” she said. “We were lucky to be born when we were.” “How so?” “Well, if we’d been born a little bit earlier, we wouldn’t have been able to make our games so easily. Access to computers would have been harder. We would have been part of the generation who was putting floppy disks in Ziploc bags and driving the games to stores. And if we’d been born a little bit later, there would have been even greater access to the internet and certain tools, but honestly, the games got so much more complicated; the industry got so professional. We couldn’t have done as much as we did on our own. We could never have made a game that we could sell to a company like Opus on the resources we had. We wouldn’t have made Ichigo Japanese, because we would have worried about the fact that we weren’t Japanese. And I think, because of the internet, we would have been overwhelmed by how many people were trying to do the exact same things we were. We had so much freedom—creatively, technically. No one was watching us, and we weren’t even watching ourselves. What we had was our impossibly high standards, and your completely theoretical conviction that we could make a great game.
Gabrielle Zevin (Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow)
How do you decide what video game to choose in the vast ocean of online gaming nonsense? There are 100s if not thousands of options permeating the internet. They range from honestly free, pay to win, and all the way up to an actual subscription based model. One of the first decisions you need to make is quite simply, what kind of game do I enjoy? Are you more of a first person shooter type person? If so you will most likely want to ignore role playing games or real time strategies. conversely if you are more of a role playing or real time strategy fan perhaps first person shooters are not for you. Once you have the type of game you are looking for nailed down games the next step: do you want to pay money? This is a big one and a tricky one. So many games out there present themselves as 'free'. I assure you, they are most certainly not free. Think a simple little game like Candy Crush is free? Next time you are in the Google Play or iTunes store Improve WoW PvP check on top grossing apps. You will very quickly change your mind on that. On a more relevant note some games are both free and pay, but maintain a respectful balance. By this I mean you do not HAVE to fork out hard earned cash in order to compete. League of Legends is an amazing example of this. A player cannot obtain any upgrade which will make their character better through monetary expenditures. What you can do; however, is purchase cosmetic items or other no stat gain frill. On the other end of the spectrum you have a game such as the behemoth World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft has managed to maintain a subscription based model for 10 years now. Multiple 'WoW Killers' have risen up since the inception of World of Warcraft using the subscription base as well. Damn near every one of them is now free to play. Rift and Star Wars are the two that really stick out. Leading up to their release forums Wow XP Off PvP Stream across the internet proclaimed them the almighty killer of World of Warcraft. Instead Warcraft kept on trucking and both of those games changed style to f2p not long after their release. These are just a few different games and styles of games for you to choose from. Remember, you get what you pay for in almost every case. (LoL being the exception that proves the rule)
Phil Janelle
Cam let go of Evie and approached Sebastian as the room emptied. “You fight like a gentleman, my lord,” he commented. Sebastian gave him a sardonic glance. “Why doesn’t that sound like a compliment?” Sliding his hands into his pockets, Cam observed mildly, “You do well enough against a pair of drunken sots—” “There were three to start with,” Sebastian growled. “Three drunken sots, then. But the next time you may not be so fortunate.” “The next time? If you think I’m going to make a habit of this—” “Jenner did,” Cam countered softly. “Egan did. Nearly every night there is some to-do in the alley, the stable yard, or the card rooms, after the guests have had hours of stimulation from gaming, spirits, and women. We all take turns dealing with it. And unless you care to get the stuffing knocked out of you on a weekly basis, you’ll need to learn a few tricks to put down a fight quickly. It causes less damage to you and the patrons, and keeps the police away.” “If you’re referring to the kind of tactics used in rookery brawls, and quarrels over back-alley bobtails—” “You’re not going for a half hour of light exercise at the pugilistic club,” Cam said acidly. Sebastian opened his mouth to argue, but as he saw Evie drawing closer something changed in his face. It was a response to the anxiety that she couldn’t manage to hide. For some reason her concern gently undermined his hostility, and softened him. Looking from one to the other, Cam observed the subtle interplay with astute interest. “Have you been hurt?” Evie asked, looking over him closely. To her relief, Sebastian appeared disheveled and riled, but free of significant damage. He shook his head, holding still as she reached up to push back a few damp amber locks that were nearly hanging in his eyes. “I’m fine,” he muttered. “Compared to the drubbing I received from Westcliff, this was nothing.” Cam interrupted firmly. “There are more drubbings in store, milord, if you won’t take a few pointers on how to fight.” Without waiting for Sebastian’s assent, he went to the doorway and called, “Dawson! Come back here for a minute. No, not for work. We need you to come take a few swings at St. Vincent.” He glanced back at Sebastian and remarked innocently, “Well, that got him. He’s hurrying over here.
Lisa Kleypas (Devil in Winter (Wallflowers, #3))
It did not take long for the entire town of Beldingsville to learn that the great New York doctor had said Pollyanna Whittier would never walk again; and certainly never before had the town been so stirred. Everybody knew by sight now the piquant little freckled face that had always a smile of greeting; and almost everybody knew of the "game" that Pollyanna was playing. To think that now never again would that smiling face be seen on their streets—never again would that cheery little voice proclaim the gladness of some everyday experience! It seemed unbelievable, impossible, cruel. In kitchens and sitting rooms, and over back-yard fences women talked of it, and wept openly. On street corners and in store lounging-places the men talked, too, and wept—though not so openly. And neither the talking nor the weeping grew less when fast on the heels of the news itself, came Nancy's pitiful story that Pollyanna, face to face with what had come to her, was bemoaning most of all the fact that she could not play the game; that she could not now be glad over—anything. It was then that the same thought must have, in some way, come to Pollyanna's friends. At all events, almost at once, the mistress of the Harrington homestead, greatly to her surprise, began to receive calls: calls from people she knew, and people she did not know; calls from men, women, and children—many of whom Miss Polly had not supposed that her niece knew at all. Some came in and sat down for a stiff five or ten minutes. Some stood awkwardly on the porch steps, fumbling with hats or hand-bags, according to their sex. Some brought a book, a bunch of flowers, or a dainty to tempt the palate. Some cried frankly. Some turned their backs and blew their noses furiously. But all inquired very anxiously for the little injured girl; and all sent to her some message—and it was these messages which, after a time, stirred Miss Polly to action. First came Mr. John Pendleton. He came without his crutches to-day. "I don't need to tell you how shocked I am," he began almost harshly. "But can—nothing be done?" Miss Polly gave a gesture of despair. "Oh, we're 'doing,' of course, all the time. Dr. Mead prescribed certain treatments and medicines that might help, and Dr. Warren is carrying them out to the letter, of course. But—Dr. Mead held out almost no hope.
Eleanor H. Porter (Pollyanna (Pollyanna, #1))
St. Louis Blues (1929) I hate to see de evenin' sun go down, Hate to see de evenin' sun go down 'Cause ma baby, he done lef' dis town. Feelin' tomorrow like I feel today, Feel tomorrow like I feel today, I'll pack my trunk, make ma git away. Saint Louis woman wid her diamon' rings Pulls dat man 'roun' by her apron strings. 'Twant for powder an' for store-bought hair, De man ah love would not gone nowhere, nowhere. Got de Saint Louis Blues jes as blue as ah can be. That man got a heart lak a rock cast in the sea. Or else he wouldn't have gone so far from me. Doggone it! I loves day man lak a schoolboy loves his pie, Lak a Kentucky Col'nel loves his mint an' rye. I'll love ma baby till the day ah die. Been to de gypsy to get ma fortune tole, To de gypsy, done got ma fortune tole, Cause I'm most wile 'bout ma Jelly Roll. Gypsy done tole me, "Don't you wear no black." Yes, she done told me, "Don't you wear no black. Go to Saint Louis, you can win him back." Help me to Cairo, make Saint Louis by maself, Git to Cairo, find ma old friend Jeff, Gwine to pin maself close to his side; If ah flag his train, I sho' can ride. Got de Saint Louis Blues jes as blue as ah can be. That man got a heart lak a rock cast in the sea. Or else he wouldn't have gone so far from me. Doggone it! I loves day man lak a schoolboy loves his pie, Lak a Kentucky Colonel loves his mint an' rye. I'll love ma baby till the day I die. You ought to see dat stovepipe brown of mine, Lak he owns de Dimon' Joseph line, He'd make a cross-eyed o'man go stone blin'. Blacker than midnight, teeth lak flags of truce, Blackest man in de whole of Saint Louis, Blacker de berry, sweeter am de juice. About a crap game, he knows a pow'ful lot, But when worktime comes, he's on de dot. Gwine to ask him for a cold ten-spot, What it takes to git it, he's cert'nly got. Got de Saint Louis Blues jes as blue as ah can be. Dat man got a heart lak a rock cast in the sea. Or else he wouldn't have gone so far from me. Doggone it! I loves day man lak a schoolboy loves his pie, Lak a Kentucky Col'nel loves his mint an' rye. I'll love ma baby till the day ah die. A black-headed gal makes a freight train jump the track, said a black-headed Gal makes a freight train jump the track, But a long tall gal makes a preacher ball the jack. Lawd, a blonde-headed woman makes a good man leave the town, I said Blonde-headed woman makes a good man leave the town, But a red-headed woman makes a boy slap his papa down. Oh, ashes to ashes and dust to dust, I said ashes to ashes and dust to dust, If my blues don't get you, my jazzing must.
Bessie Smith
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We need to be humble enough to recognize that unforeseen things can and do happen that are nobody’s fault. A good example of this occurred during the making of Toy Story 2. Earlier, when I described the evolution of that movie, I explained that our decision to overhaul the film so late in the game led to a meltdown of our workforce. This meltdown was the big unexpected event, and our response to it became part of our mythology. But about ten months before the reboot was ordered, in the winter of 1998, we’d been hit with a series of three smaller, random events—the first of which would threaten the future of Pixar. To understand this first event, you need to know that we rely on Unix and Linux machines to store the thousands of computer files that comprise all the shots of any given film. And on those machines, there is a command—/bin/rm -r -f *—that removes everything on the file system as fast as it can. Hearing that, you can probably anticipate what’s coming: Somehow, by accident, someone used this command on the drives where the Toy Story 2 files were kept. Not just some of the files, either. All of the data that made up the pictures, from objects to backgrounds, from lighting to shading, was dumped out of the system. First, Woody’s hat disappeared. Then his boots. Then he disappeared entirely. One by one, the other characters began to vanish, too: Buzz, Mr. Potato Head, Hamm, Rex. Whole sequences—poof!—were deleted from the drive. Oren Jacobs, one of the lead technical directors on the movie, remembers watching this occur in real time. At first, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Then, he was frantically dialing the phone to reach systems. “Pull out the plug on the Toy Story 2 master machine!” he screamed. When the guy on the other end asked, sensibly, why, Oren screamed louder: “Please, God, just pull it out as fast as you can!” The systems guy moved quickly, but still, two years of work—90 percent of the film—had been erased in a matter of seconds. An hour later, Oren and his boss, Galyn Susman, were in my office, trying to figure out what we would do next. “Don’t worry,” we all reassured each other. “We’ll restore the data from the backup system tonight. We’ll only lose half a day of work.” But then came random event number two: The backup system, we discovered, hadn’t been working correctly. The mechanism we had in place specifically to help us recover from data failures had itself failed. Toy Story 2 was gone and, at this point, the urge to panic was quite real. To reassemble the film would have taken thirty people a solid year. I remember the meeting when, as this devastating reality began to sink in, the company’s leaders gathered in a conference room to discuss our options—of which there seemed to be none. Then, about an hour into our discussion, Galyn Susman, the movie’s supervising technical director, remembered something: “Wait,” she said. “I might have a backup on my home computer.” About six months before, Galyn had had her second baby, which required that she spend more of her time working from home. To make that process more convenient, she’d set up a system that copied the entire film database to her home computer, automatically, once a week. This—our third random event—would be our salvation. Within a minute of her epiphany, Galyn and Oren were in her Volvo, speeding to her home in San Anselmo. They got her computer, wrapped it in blankets, and placed it carefully in the backseat. Then they drove in the slow lane all the way back to the office, where the machine was, as Oren describes it, “carried into Pixar like an Egyptian pharaoh.” Thanks to Galyn’s files, Woody was back—along with the rest of the movie.
Ed Catmull (Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration)
So, what did you want to watch?’ ‘Thought we might play a game instead,’ he said, holding up a familiar dark green box. ‘Found this on the bottom shelf of your DVD cupboard … if you tilt the glass, the champagne won’t froth like that.’ Neve finished pouring champagne into the 50p champagne flutes she’d got from the discount store and waited until Max had drunk a good half of his in two swift swallows. ‘The thing is, you might find it hard to believe but I can be very competitive and I have an astonishing vocabulary from years spent having no life and reading a lot – and well, if you play Scrabble with me, I’ll totally kick your arse.’ Max was about to eat his first bite of molten mug cake but he paused with the spoon halfway to his mouth. ‘You’re gonna kick my arse?’ ‘Until it’s black and blue and you won’t be able to sit down for a week.’ That sounded very arrogant. ‘Really, Max, Mum stopped me from playing when I was thirteen after I got a score of four hundred and twenty-seven, and when I was at Oxford, I used to play with two Linguistics post-grads and an English don.’ ‘Well, my little pancake girlfriend, I played Scrabble against Carol Vorderman for a Guardian feature and I kicked her arse because Scrabble has got nothing to do with vocabulary; it’s logic and tactics,’ Max informed her loftily, taking a huge bite of the cake. For a second, Neve hoped that it was as foul-tasting as she suspected just to get Max back for that snide little speech, but he just licked the back of the spoon thoughtfully. ‘This is surprisingly more-ish, do you want some?’ ‘I think I’ll pass.’ ‘Well, you’re not getting out of Scrabble that easily.’ Max leaned back against the cushions, the mug cradled to his chest, and propped his feet up on the table so he could poke the Scrabble box nearer to Neve. ‘Come on, set ’em up. Unless you’re too scared.’ ‘Max, I have all the two-letter words memorised, and as for Carol Vorderman – well, she might be good at maths but there was a reason why she wasn’t in Dictionary Corner on Countdown so I’m not surprised you beat her at Scrabble.’ ‘Fighting talk.’ Max rapped his knuckles gently against Neve’s head, which made her furious. ‘I’ll remind you of that little speech once I’m done making you eat every single one of those high-scoring words you seem to think you’re so good at.’ ‘Right, that does it.’ Neve snatched up the box and practically tore off the lid, so she could bang the board down on the coffee table. ‘You can’t be that good at Scrabble if you keep your letters in a crumpled paper bag,’ Max noted, actually daring to nudge her arm with his foot. Neve knew he was only doing it to get a rise out of her, but God, it was working. ‘Game on, Pancake Boy,’ she snarled, throwing a letter rack at Max, which just made him laugh. ‘And don’t think I’m going to let you win just because it’s your birthday.’ It was the most fun Neve had ever had playing Scrabble. It might even have been the most fun she had ever had. For every obscure word she tried to play in the highest scoring place, Max would put down three tiles to make three different words and block off huge sections of the board. Every time she tried to flounce or throw a strop because ‘you’re going against the whole spirit of the game’, Max would pop another Quality Street into her mouth because, as he said, ‘It is Treat Sunday and you only had one roast potato.’ When there were no more Quality Street left and they’d drunk all the champagne, he stopped each one of her snits with a slow, devastating kiss so there were long pauses between each round. It was a point of honour to Neve that she won in the most satisfying way possible; finally getting to use her ‘q’ on a triple word score by turning Max’s ‘hogs’ into ‘quahogs’ and waving the Oxford English Dictionary in his face when he dared to challenge her.
Sarra Manning (You Don't Have to Say You Love Me)