“
We're not freaks, Tally. We're normal. We may not be gorgeous, but at least we're not hyped-up Barbie dolls.
”
”
Scott Westerfeld (Uglies (Uglies, #1))
“
I doubt you’ve ever been forced to nonstop bang a woman hyped up on the undead voodoo version of Spanish fly, have you?”
His chuckle was soft. “Can’t say that I have, Kitten.”
“Yeah, well, consider me an original.”
This time, when his lips brushed across my skin, it lasted more than a moment.
“I always have.
”
”
Jeaniene Frost (This Side of the Grave (Night Huntress, #5))
“
Hyping your product to get funding while concealing your true progress and hoping that reality will eventually catch up to the hype continues to be tolerated in the tech industry.
”
”
John Carreyrou (Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup)
“
Logical thinking keeps you from wasting time worrying, or hoping. It prevents disappointment. Imagination, on the other hand, only gets you hyped up over things that will never realistically happen.
”
”
Jodi Picoult (House Rules)
“
This looks like the red room of pain,” she says. My mouth drops open. My little prude has been expanding her reading horizons. I choke on my laugh, and a couple of people turn to look at us. I narrow my eyes. “You read Fifty?” I ask quietly. She blushes. Amazing! — the woman is capable of blushing. “Everyone was reading it,” she says, defensively. Then she looks up at me with big eyes.
“You?” “I wanted to see what all the hype was about.” She does that blink, blink, blink thing with her eyelashes. “Did you pick up any new techniques?” she says, without looking at me. I squeeze her hand. “Would you like to try me out and see?” She turns her face away, pressing her lips together — horribly embarrassed.
”
”
Tarryn Fisher (Thief (Love Me with Lies, #3))
“
I reached for a Coca-Cola.
“Want some?” I asked.
“I do not drink caffeine,” he said.
“Wow, you make me look like a bad girl; that's hard to do.”
He cracked a big smile for the first time I'd seen, and a huge dimple appeared in his right cheek. A butterfly wing flapped in my stomach. I turned my attention back to the drinks, fumbling a little for a cup.
“Don't let me pressure you,” I said. “I was only kidding. We don't need you all hyped up on caffeine. How about ginger ale instead?"
“Is that drink not only for upset stomachs?
”
”
Wendy Higgins (Sweet Evil (Sweet, #1))
“
How does a pig hype up a crowd? Is he going to sing the national anthem?” Coach asks politely.
”
”
Elle Kennedy (The Play (Briar U, #3))
“
I know what it is! We’ve arrived at the West Coast! We’re all strangers again! Folks, I just forgot the biggest gumption trap of all. The funeral procession! The one everybody’s in, this hyped-up, fuck-you, supermodern, ego style of life that thinks it owns this country.
”
”
Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance)
“
All these beefy Caucasians with guns. Get enough of them together,looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be. The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have that four-wheel-drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream. In twenty years, ten million white people will converge on the north pole and park their bagos there. The low-grade waste heat of their thermodynamically intense lifestyle will turn the crystalline icescape pliable and treacherous. It will melt a hole through the polar icecap, and all that metal will sink to the bottom, sucking the biomass down with it.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
They leave the genitals off Barbie and Ken, but they manufacture every kind of war toy. Because sex is more threatening to us than aggression. There have been strict rules about sex since the beginning of written rules, and even before, if we can believe myth. I think that's because it's in sex that men feel most vulnerable. In war they can hype themselves up, or they have a weapon. Sex means being literally naked and exposing your feelings. And that's more terrifying to most men than the risk of dying while fighting a bear or a soldier.
”
”
Marilyn French (The Women's Room)
“
Tears are a very expensive commodity don't waste them on insignificance. - On Being Hyped Up
”
”
Lamine Pearlheart
“
These days I am in a super-acute, a hyped-up life. It never goes to sleep.
And yet all the events of this hyped-up life seem to be cut from the hyperdream. All of them turn up accompanied by a voice that murmurs to my heart "it's not going to last.
”
”
Hélène Cixous (Hyperdream)
“
These things—I call them my “tornado explosions”— are pieces of me. All the stuff that does not work gets balled up and hyped up. I can’t stop, even though I want to, even though I know I’m freaking people out. I lose myself. It can get kinda ugly. Once,
”
”
Atheneum Books for Young Readers (Out of My Mind (The Out of My Mind Series))
“
I just don’t get all the hype around pretty people. I get why they exist—for meet-cute purposes, for magazine spreads—but they’re just so stressful to be around. Who needs that kind of stress in their life? Not me.
”
”
Arvin Ahmadi (How It All Blew Up)
“
Each side, hypocritical enough to pretend that it lives up to its own hype, is equally insistent that the other side’s worst is truly all that it is. American political advertising is sinking slowly toward a level worthy of Soviet propaganda.
”
”
Os Guinness (The Case for Civility: And Why Our Future Depends on It)
“
Being with Leland in a car is like being stuck in a room with a child hyped up on caffeine and sugar that you can’t yell at because it’s not your kid. “What exactly are we doing?” I ask as I glance over at where he’s sitting in the passenger seat.
”
”
Alice Winters (The Former Assassin's Guide to Snagging a Reluctant Boyfriend (The Hitman's Guide, #4))
“
For as much as many NKOTB fans have been caught off guard by how much this has all meant, so too have some of the guys. Donnie says, "It was a surprise to me how fulfilling it was. It was a surprise to me how emotional it was, how rewarding it was. And quite frankly, how wrapped up in the fans I am. I'm not caught up in the hype. I don't need it. I don't need some fulfillment. I can live without it. But I don't want to. I love making people smile. I love sharing myself. I love the feeling of making people happy. I love the fact that, for whatever reason, I've been put in a position to change people's lives in a simple way. I'm not healing diseases. But I can make someone happy, even for a short time.
”
”
Nikki Van Noy (New Kids on the Block: Five Brothers and a Million Sisters)
“
I have always felt this
And I, I could never hear it
So I turned it up
And turned it on
And turned it down
Always the volume always the words
”
”
Sara Quin
“
Don't always stay on the light side of things, sometimes venture into the darkness and explore because sometimes what's hyped up to be a monster is actually a lonely kitten.
”
”
Anthony Palacios
“
If Every-day People Could Use Athletes’ Excuses (Surgeon, after patient dies: “I don’t know. I just came out a little flat. You can’t get hyped up every single day.”)
”
”
Rick Reilly (Hate Mail from Cheerleaders: And Other Adventures in the Life of Reilly)
“
Nothing in life lives up to the hype… except being a parent.
”
”
Brad Meltzer (The Fifth Assassin (Culper Ring, #2))
“
Most days I get hyped up to be the best version of myself as I can be, while I battle my array of multiple personalities and emotions like a badass warrior playing tennis.
”
”
Helen Edwards (Nothing Sexier Than Freedom)
“
All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't what it used to be.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
to compete. And then there is the hype. Vendors, analysts and the media talk up new technologies and trends making them sound like the ‘next big thing’, something that every company must adopt if it wants to stay
”
”
Ian Cox (Disrupt IT: A new model for IT in the digital age)
“
Consumer society thrives as long as it manages to render the non-satisfaction of its members (and so, in its own terms, their unhappiness) perpetual. The explicit method of achieving such an effect is to denigrate and devalue consumer products shortly after they have been hyped into the universe of the consumers' desires. But another way to do the same thing, and yet more effectively, stays in the semi-shade and is seldom brought out into the limelight except by perceptive investigative journalists: namely, by satisfying every need/desire/want in such a fashion that they cannot but give birth to yet new needs/desires/wants. What starts as an effort to satisfy a need must end up as a compulsion or an addiction.
”
”
Zygmunt Bauman (Consuming Life)
“
Thomas Hobbes, in the seventeenth century, resisted his era’s new-media hype: “The invention of printing, though ingenious, compared with the invention of letters is no great matter.” Up to a point, he was right. Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.
”
”
James Gleick (The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood)
“
Life in the Cause would lurch forward as it always did. You worked, slaved, fought off the rats, the mice, the roaches, the ants, the Housing Authority, the cops, the muggers, and now the drug dealers. You lived a life of disappointment and suffering, of too-hot summers and too-cold winters, surviving in apartments with crummy stoves that didn’t work and windows that didn’t open and toilets that didn’t flush and lead paint that flecked off the walls and poisoned your children, living in awful, dreary apartments built to house Italians who came to America to work the docks, which had emptied of boats, ships, tankers, dreams, money, and opportunity the moment the colored and the Latinos arrived. And still New York blamed you for all its problems. And who can you blame? You were the one who chose to live here, in this hard town with its hard people, the financial capital of the world, land of opportunity for the white man and a tundra of spent dreams and empty promises for anyone else stupid enough to believe the hype. Sister Gee stared at her neighbors as they surrounded her, and at that moment she saw them as she had never seen them before: they were crumbs, thimbles, flecks of sugar powder on a cookie, invisible, sporadic dots on the grid of promise, occasionally appearing on Broadway stages or on baseball teams with slogans like “You gotta believe,” when in fact there was nothing to believe but that one colored in the room is fine, two is twenty, and three means close up shop and everybody go home; all living the New York dream in the Cause Houses, within sight of the Statue of Liberty, a gigantic copper reminder that this city was a grinding factory that diced the poor man’s dreams worse than any cotton gin or sugarcane field from the old country. And now heroin was here to make their children slaves again, to a useless white powder.
She looked them over, the friends of her life, staring at her. They saw what she saw, she realized. She read it in their faces. They would never win. The game was fixed. The villains would succeed. The heroes would die.
”
”
James McBride (Deacon King Kong)
“
The math is unavoidable: it is an inevitable property of long-lasting exponential growth that it ends up in a singularity, a point in time when a function reaches an infinite value, making anything instantly possible.
”
”
Vaclav Smil (Invention and Innovation: A Brief History of Hype and Failure)
“
What would I really miss if I didn’t see a dozen photos of a friend’s vacation, or the latest reviews of hyped-up novels, or which viral arguments were dominating Twitter at a particular moment? In the context of my day-to-day, physical life, these bits of content had almost no impact. I feared the loss of some connection, but that connection is, after all, more ambient and less direct than chatting with neighbors when I walk my dog.
”
”
Kyle Chayka (Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture)
“
After high school, he’d passed two relatively laid-back years as a student at Occidental College in Los Angeles before transferring to Columbia, where by his own account he’d behaved nothing like a college boy set loose in 1980s Manhattan and instead lived like a sixteenth-century mountain hermit, reading lofty works of literature and philosophy in a grimy apartment on 109th Street, writing bad poetry, and fasting on Sundays. We laughed about all of it, swapping stories about our backgrounds and what led us to the law. Barack was serious without being self-serious. He was breezy in his manner but powerful in his mind. It was a strange, stirring combination. Surprising to me, too, was how well he knew Chicago. Barack was the first person I’d met at Sidley who had spent time in the barbershops, barbecue joints, and Bible-thumping black parishes of the Far South Side. Before going to law school, he’d worked in Chicago for three years as a community organizer, earning $12,000 a year from a nonprofit that bound together a coalition of churches. His task was to help rebuild neighborhoods and bring back jobs. As he described it, it had been two parts frustration to one part reward: He’d spend weeks planning a community meeting, only to have a dozen people show up. His efforts were scoffed at by union leaders and picked apart by black folks and white folks alike. Yet over time, he’d won a few incremental victories, and this seemed to encourage him. He was in law school, he explained, because grassroots organizing had shown him that meaningful societal change required not just the work of the people on the ground but stronger policies and governmental action as well. Despite my resistance to the hype that had preceded him, I found myself admiring Barack for both his self-assuredness and his earnest demeanor. He was refreshing, unconventional, and weirdly elegant.
”
”
Michelle Obama (Becoming)
“
The Patriots had picked Brady in the sixth round, and he soon turned out to be one of the two or three best quarterbacks in the League, and absolutely perfect for the Belichick system and for the team's offense. So, as the team continued to make a series of very good calls on other player personnel choices, there was a general tendency to talk about how brilliant Pioli and Belichick were, and to regard Pioli as the best young player personnel man in the League. Just to remind himself not to believe all the hype and that he could readily have screwed up on that draft, Pioli kept on his desk a photo of Brady, along with a photo of the team's fifth-round traft choice, the man he had taken ahead of Brady: Dave Stachelski. He was a Tight End from Boise State who never a played a down for New England. Stachelski was taken with the 141st pick, Brady with the 199th one. 'If I was so smart,' Pioli liked to say, 'I wouldn't have risked an entire round of the draft in picking Brady.
”
”
David Halberstam (The Education of a Coach)
“
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)
“
One of the most time-honored techniques to mobilize public animosity against the enemy and to justify military action is the atrocity story. This technique, says Professor Lasswell, has been used “with unvarying success in every conflict known to man.” The concept is as useful in peacetime as it is in war. Why? Because states get their people hyped up to fight wars by stressing the essentially defensive nature of what they are doing and the savage behavior of the enemy. But war is politics by other means, so politics is war by other means.
”
”
Balaji S. Srinivasan (The Network State: How To Start a New Country)
“
He’s ashamed of his secret hunger for hype in an academy that regards hype and the seduction of hype as the great Mephistophelan pitfall and hazard of talent. A lot of these are his own terms. He feels himself in a dark world, inside, ashamed, lost, locked in. LaMont Chu is eleven and hits with two hands off both sides. He doesn’t mention the Eschaton or having been punched in the stomach. The obsession with future-tense fame makes all else pale. His wrists are so thin he wears his watch halfway up his forearm, which looks sort of gladiatorial.
”
”
David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
“
Unlike the laws of physics, society is not time invariant. As even the world’s leading anti-tech blog once admitted: Virtual reality was an abject failure right up to the moment it wasn’t. In this way, it has followed the course charted by a few other breakout technologies. They don’t evolve in an iterative way, gradually gaining usefulness. Instead, they seem hardly to advance at all, moving forward in fits and starts, through shame spirals and bankruptcies and hype and defensive crouches — until one day, in a sudden about-face, they utterly, totally win.
”
”
Balaji S. Srinivasan (The Network State: How To Start a New Country)
“
Ultimately the danger of the New Jim Code positioning is that existing social biases are reinforced – yes. But new methods of social control are produced as well. Does this mean that every form of technological prediction or personalization has racist effects? Not necessarily. It means that, whenever we hear the promises of tech being extolled, our antennae should pop up to question what all that hype of “better, faster, fairer” might be hiding and making us ignore. And, when bias and inequity come to light, “lack of intention” to harm is not a viable alibi. One cannot reap the reward when things go right but downplay responsibility when they go wrong.
”
”
Ruha Benjamin (Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code)
“
However hyped the risk of germs may be, it is at least real. Some corporations go so far as to conjure threats where there are none. A television ad for Brita, the German manufacturer of water-filtration systems, starts with a close-up of a glass of water on a kitchen table. The sound of a flushing toilet is heard. A woman opens a door, enters the kitchen, sits at the table and drinks the water. The water in your toilet and the water in your faucet "come from the same source," the commercial concludes. Sharp-eyed viewers will also see a disclaimer a the start of the ad printed in tiny white letters: MUNICIPAL WATER IS TREATED FOR CONSUMPTION. This is effectively an admission that the shared origin of the water in the glass and the toilet is irrelevant and so the commercial makes no sense--at least not on a rational level. As a pitch aimed at Gut, however, it makes perfect sense. The danger of contaminated drinking water is as old as humanity, and the worst contaminant has always been feces. Our hardwired defense against contamination is disgust, an emotion that drives us to keep our distance from the contaminant. By linking the toilet and the drinking glass, the commercial connects feces to our home's drinking water and raises an ancient fear--a fear that can be eased with the purchase of one of the company's many fine products.
”
”
Daniel Gardner (The Science of Fear: Why We Fear the Things We Shouldn't--and Put Ourselves in Greater Danger)
“
All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for the America they always believed they’d grow up in, and they glom together like overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools, portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers, they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them, altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain’t what it used to be. The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse abuse, televangelists, and serial killers.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
Think about advertisers. Brand positioning is not something that happens overnight. As a matter of fact, positioning a brand is an endeavor that takes a long time, often years. But once the brand is positioned, they become entrenched in the minds of consumers. And while there is nothing wrong with positioning a brand over time based on quality products and good service, the manipulative aspect of this type of advertising occurs when advertisers do their best to persuade consumers of their brand. As such, there is no substantial quality of product behind the brand but just clever advertising. So, it’s up to consumers to discern if a product is really worth all the hype. Nevertheless, most consumers fall to the hype surrounding the brand.
”
”
William Cooper (Dark Psychology and Manipulation: Discover 40 Covert Emotional Manipulation Techniques, Mind Control, Brainwashing. Learn How to Analyze People, NLP Secret ... Effect, Subliminal Influence Book 1))
“
This writing thing, it ain’t like that hip hop shit, City. For li’l niggas like you,” he told me, “this writing thing is like a gotdamn porta potty. It’s one li’l nigga at a time, shitting in the toilet, funking up the little space he get. And you shit a regular shit or a classic shit. Either way,” he said. “City, you gotta shit classic, then get your black ass on off the pot.” He actually grabbed my hand. “You probably think I’m hyping you just for the money. It ain’t just about the money. It’s really not. It’s about doing whatever it takes for you to have your voice heard. So I don’t know what you’re writing in that book you always carrying around, but it better be classic because you ain’t gonna get no two times to get it right, you hear me?
”
”
Kiese Laymon (Long Division)
“
Fear and desire for pleasure. Aggressiveness comes out of fear, predominantly, and sexuality predominantly out of the other. But they mix in the middle. Anyway, both of these impulses can destroy order, which comes out of both drives, and which is another human need I haven't yet fit into my scheme. So both have to be controlled. But in fact, despite religious commands to the contrary, aggressiveness has never really been condemned. It's been exalted, from the Bible through Homer and Virgil right down to Humbert Hemingway. Have you ever heard of a John Wayne movie being censored? did you ever see them take war books off the bookstands? They leave the genitals off Barbie and Ken, but they manufacture every kind of war toy. Because sex is more threatening to us than aggression. There have been strict rules about sex since the beginning of written rules, and even before, if we can believe myth. I think that's because it's in sex that men feel most vulnerable. In war they can hype themselves up, or they have a weapon. Sex means being literally naked and exposing your feelings. And that's more terrifying to most men than the risk of dying while fighting a bear or a soldier. Look at the rules! You can have sex if you're married, and you have to marry a person of the opposite gender, the same color and religion, an age close to your own, of the right social and economic background, even the right height, for God's sake, or else everybody gets up in arms, they disinherit you or threaten not to come to the wedding or they make nasty cracks behind your back. Or worse, if you cross color or gender lines. And once you're married, you're supposed to do only certain things when you make love: the others all have nasty names. When after all, sex itself, in itself, is harmless, and aggression is harmful. Sex never hurt anyone.
”
”
Marilyn French (The Women's Room)
“
Suddenly his ringing cell phone brought him out of his deep thoughts. Los already knew who it was from the ringtone. He reached over snatching the phone up quickly to avoid waking Lucky. “Nice what’s good?” “What’s good is I just came from Mom Dukes crib and caught her and Aunt V scrapping on some WorldStar shit Bruh.” “What? Yo is you serious?” Los said rising from his back trying to ease from under Lucky without waking her. “Los listen that shit was crazy, Mom was beaten the breaks off V man. I broke that mess up and Mom was still tryna get at her. V wig ended up all cocked to the side like it was on its gangsta lean, Momz went savage on V had her leakin and everything.” “What?!” Los asked getting hyped and jumping out of bed when he heard blood was drawn. He knew his brother had the tendency to hype shit up in order to make things more entertaining but Nice sounded dead ass. “Where you at right now?” Los asked. “On my way back out to Momz crib.” “Man I’ma meet you out there, I’m on my way to check on her and find out what’s goin on.” “Say no more Bruh I’ll see you out there,” Nice responded before hanging up.
”
”
Ivory B. (It is What it is: A Hood Love Story II - Secrets (Hood Series Book 2))
“
The lumbering bagos and topheavy
four-wheelers form a moving slalom course for Hiro on his black
motorcycle.
All these beefy Caucasians with guns! Get enough of them together, looking for
the America they always believed they'd grow up in, and they glom together like
overcooked rice, form integral, starchy little units. With their power tools,
portable generators, weapons, four-wheel-drive vehicles, and personal computers,
they are like beavers hyped up on crystal meth, manic engineers without a
blueprint, chewing through the wilderness, building things and abandoning them,
altering the flow of mighty rivers and then moving on because the place ain't
what it used to be.
The byproduct of the lifestyle is polluted rivers, greenhouse effect, spouse
abuse, televangelists, and serial killers. But as long as you have that fourwheel-
drive vehicle and can keep driving north, you can sustain it, keep moving
just quickly enough to stay one step ahead of your own waste stream. In twenty
years, ten million white people will converge on the north pole and park their
bagos there. The low-grade waste heat of their thermodynamically intense
lifestyle will turn the crystalline icescape pliable and treacherous. It will
melt a hole through the polar icecap, and all that metal will sink to the
bottom, sucking the biomass down with it.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
“
I am going to end up alone," he moaned.
"Not in any conceivable universe!" One of Sadie's best qualities is the ability to say "Are you effing insane?" with such sweet conviction and nicer words.
"I am going to end up alone in a one-room apartment over a dry cleaner."
"A dry cleaner?"
"He could have said a bar," I offered.
"True," he conceded.
Frankie was on a roll. "I am going to end up alone in a one-room apartment over a dry cleaner with a cat. Who bites me."
"Oh,Frankie-"
"I am going to end up alone in a one-room apartment over a dry cleaner with a cat who bites me and pees in my closet full of moth-eaten sweaters."
"Well,maybe," Sadie said, reaching around to hug both of us. "But the sweaters will be Dolce & Gabbana." One of her other fabulous qualities is that underneath the sweet conviction, she does have a sense of humor.
Frankie did laugh. Then he gave a sigh that I could feel all the way through me. I knew Sadie did,too. "I liked him," he said, very quietly. "I really did. And I thought he felt the same way. I bent and twisted and distorted everything that happened between us to fit my pretty little picture. God, I believed my own hype. How stupid, how incredibly stupid was that?"
"Not stupid." Sadie squeezed. "Hopeful. And if we're not that, what's the point? El? Help me out here."
I wanted to.I really did. But all I could think of was the fact that at home, exactly where I'd put it in my bag, which was still exactly where I'd dumped it on the floor, was the evidence that Edward had let me down. I was keeping that to myself, at least for the moment. Twisted it to fit my pretty little picture. I didn't think I could take Frankie's complete lack of surprise that a guy (even a dead one) had let me down-or Sadie's sympathy. Not on top of my own anger.
Because,plain and simple,it wasn't okay to look at another woman like that, not when you met the love of your life and gave a big flipped finger to the people around you so you could be with her. Not okay even if she was dead, because I, Ella, really really want to believe that sometimes love does conquer all, and sometimes some things do last foever.
Truth: Yes,I really am that naive.
"You're perfect," I said to Frankie. And I meant it.
”
”
Melissa Jensen (The Fine Art of Truth or Dare)
“
With the news that he would soon be a daddy again, Steve seemed inspired to work even harder. Our zoo continued to get busier, and we had trouble coping with the large numbers. The biggest draw was the crocodiles. Crowds poured in for the croc shows, filling up all the grandstands. The place was packed.
Steve came up with a monumental plan. He was a big fan of the Colosseum-type arenas of the Roman gladiator days. He sketched out his idea for me on a piece of paper.
“Have a go at this, it’s a coliseum,” he declared, his eyes wide with excitement. He drew an oval, then a series of smaller ovals in back of it. “Then we have crocodile ponds where the crocs could live. Every day a different croc could come out for the show and swim through a canal system”--he sketched rapidly--“then come out in the main area.”
“Canals,” I said. “Could you get them to come in on cue?”
“Piece of cake!” he said. “And get this! We call it…the Crocoseum!”
His enthusiasm was contagious. Never mind that nothing like this had ever been done before. Steve was determined to take the excitement and hype of the ancient Roman gladiators and combine it with the need to show people just how awesome crocs really were.
But it was a huge project. There was nothing to compare it to, because nothing even remotely similar had ever been attempted anywhere in the world. I priced it out: The budget to build the arena would have to be somewhere north of eight million dollars, a huge expense. Wes, John, Frank, and I all knew we’d have to rely on Steve’s knowledge of crocodiles to make this work.
Steve’s enthusiasm never waned. He was determined. This would become the biggest structure at the zoo. The arena would seat five thousand and have space beneath it for museums, shops, and a food court. The center of the arena would have land areas large enough for people to work around crocodiles safely and water areas large enough for crocs to be able to access them easily.
“How is this going to work, Steve?” I asked, after soberly assessing the cost. What if we laid out more than eight million dollars and the crocodiles decided not to cooperate? “How are you going to convince a crocodile to come out exactly at showtime, try to kill and eat the keeper, and then go back home again?”
I bit my tongue when I realized what was coming out of my mouth: advice on crocodiles directed at the world’s expert on croc behavior. Steve was right with his philosophy: Build it, and they will come.
These were heady times. As the Crocoseum rose into the sky, my tummy got bigger and bigger with our new baby. It felt like I was expanding as rapidly as the new project.
The Crocoseum debuted during an Animal Planet live feed, its premiere beamed all over the world. The design was a smashing success. Once again, Steve had confounded the doubters.
”
”
Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
“
Godly grief readily confesses. After seeing your sin, and sorrowing over your sin, the worst thing you can do is to try stuffing your sin, hoping nobody ever finds out who you really are. Turns out, the best way to avoid being found out a fake is just not to be one—to be open with people about your struggles, while being equally as open in your praise of God for what He’s making of you, despite your many messes and problems. This is where the church comes in so beautifully, because it gets us around people who can help us carry the nagging issues of our hearts—people to whom we can confess our battles with sin and confess our need for a Savior—while we’re doing the same for them. When the only person that truly knows all about us is the person who uses our hairbrush, we are easy pickings for the Enemy, ripe for being outmaneuvered and outsmarted. That’s how we remain slaves to our repeated failures, by basically resisting the redeeming love of God and the needed, encouraging support of others. Because even if we’re as much as 99 percent known (or much less, as is more often the case) to our spouse, our friends, our family, and the people around us, we are still not fully known. We’re still hiding out. We’re still covering up. We don’t want them to know everything. But true sorrow over sin begs to be vented—both vertically to God and horizontally to others. So mark this down: You have no shot at experiencing real change in life if you’re habitually protecting your image, hyping your spiritual brand, and putting out the vibe that you’re a lot more unfazed by temptation than the reality you know and live would suggest. Even Satan himself cannot succeed at clobbering you with condemnation when the stuff he’s accusing you of doing is the same stuff you’ve been honestly admitting before God and others and trusting the Lord for His help with. That’s some of the best action you can take against the sin in your life. That’s responsible repentance.
”
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Matt Chandler (Recovering Redemption: A Gospel Saturated Perspective on How to Change)
“
...a long-term reputation is only at risk when companies engage in vocal launch activities such as PR and building hype. When a product fails to live up to those pronouncements, real long-term damage can happen to a corporate brand. But startups have the advantage of being obscure, having a pathetically small number of customers and not having much exposure. Rather than lamenting them, use these advantages to experiment under the radar and then do a public marketing launch once the product has proved itself with real customers.
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Eric Ries (The Lean Startup)
“
trends fade as they were usurped by competitors (those same fajitas and sushi platters giving way first to burritos and ramen soups and then to fish tacos and izakayas), while trends like espresso coffee have assumed a permanent role in my diet. I’ve also seen heavily hyped trends vanish as suddenly as they have appeared, like thin snow hitting the ground. Watching Superbowl XXVII in 1993, I, like millions of others, was spellbound by the halftime commercial for Crystal Pepsi, with its new-age messages saying, “Right now, the future is ahead of you,” set to the tune of Van Halen’s “Right Now.” Suddenly
”
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David Sax (The Tastemakers: Why We're Crazy for Cupcakes but Fed Up with Fondue)
“
Here’s what I would say is the issue he is trying to address. Often in churches, we try to get people to affirm the right beliefs, the right points of view. The real test of what I actually believe is “Does it guide what I do?” For example, if I am up on a skyscraper, I would never step off, because I believe in gravity. I don’t have to force myself to believe in gravity. I don’t have to hype myself. I just believe in gravity. So I won’t step off that roof unless I am trying to hurt myself. My actions are always a result of my intentions and my perceptions of how things are. Sometimes in churches we work to get people to affirm stuff, even though they don’t believe in it like they believe in gravity. So somebody will say, “I believe that the Bible is the inspired, authoritative Word of God.” But the Bible says it is more blessed to give than to receive, yet they are not giving. So, do they really believe that the Bible is the authoritative, inspired Word of God? Well, at one level, they think they do, but the most important level of belief is their mental map of reality. What are those perceptions that actually guide how we live, what we do? Because that is simply how reality looks to us. What we want to do is not simply teach doctrine and get people to affirm it. We want to help people have the same mental map that Jesus had of how things are.
”
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Dallas Willard (Living in Christ's Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God)
“
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, less than half of us get the annual flu vaccine, even though each year in the United States the flu kills up to twenty thousand people and lands over one hundred thousand in the hospital, and the vaccine can typically prevent or at least soften the blow of the virus if it’s contracted. In a bad year, when the flu is especially virulent, up to sixty thousand people in the United States will die if they are unvaccinated. Tens of thousands of Americans perish in car crashes each year, and more than half of those people weren’t wearing seat belts. Nearly a quarter of teenagers in fatal accidents are distracted by their cell phones; every day eleven teenagers die as a result of texting while driving (car crashes are the leading cause of death of teens in the United States). And vanity must trump sanity when it comes to tanning: more than 3.5 million individuals are diagnosed with skin cancer yearly and nearly ten thousand of them die. Today one in five deaths in the United States is now associated with obesity. Over the two-year period of the Ebola virus “outbreak,” there was one U.S. death. So, indeed, éclairs are scarier than Ebola.
”
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Nina Shapiro (Hype: A Doctor's Guide to Medical Myths, Exaggerated Claims, and Bad Advice—How to Tell What's Real and What's Not)
“
I’m not saying that there is something wrong with moving to the city to pursue an adrenaline-racing calling. And I understand the fact that advertisers have always targeted our longing for self-importance. The real problem is that our values are changing and the new ones are wearing us out. But they’re also keeping us from forming genuine, long-term, and meaningful commitments that actually contribute to the lives of others. Over time, the hype of living a new life, taking up a radical calling, and changing the world can creep into every area of our life. And it can make us tired, depressed, and mean.
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Michael Scott Horton (Ordinary: Sustainable Faith in a Radical, Restless World)
“
Innovation” may be the most overused buzzword in the world today. As the pace of change continues to accelerate and our challenges grow ever more complex, we know we need to do something different just to keep up, let alone get ahead. Finding better ways to tackle the most pressing problems facing people and the planet is no exception. Over the past few years, the notion of innovation for social good has caught on like wildfire, with the term popping up in mission statements, messaging, job descriptions, and initiatives. This quest for social innovation has led to a proliferation of contests, hackathons, and pilots that may make a big splash, but has yielded limited tangible results. So we should start by asking, What is innovation? One unfortunate consequence of the hype has been that, in common parlance, innovation has often become conflated with invention. While invention is the spark of a new idea, innovation is the process of deploying that initial breakthrough to a constructive use. Thomas Edison’s famous quote, “Genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration,” puts this in perspective. In other words, innovation is the long, hard slog that is required to take a promising invention (the 1%) and transform it into, in our case, meaningful social impact.
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”
Ann Mei Chang (Lean Impact: How to Innovate for Radically Greater Social Good)
“
Bad Thoughts Clean shots, Dark life Up hype
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Heavenpreet Singh Bhinder
“
Yet despite the excessive hype, the concept behind probiotics is still sound.19 Given all the important roles that bacteria play in our bodies, it should be possible to improve our health by swallowing or applying the right microbes. It’s just that the strains in current use may not be the right ones. They make up just a tiny fraction of the microbes that live with us, and their abilities represent a thin slice of what the microbiome is fully capable of. We met more suitable microbes in earlier chapters. There’s the mucus-loving bacterium, Akkermansia muciniphila, whose presence correlates with a lower risk of obesity and malnutrition. There’s Bacteroides fragilis, which stokes the anti-inflammatory side of the immune system. There’s Faecalibacterium prausnitzii, another anti-inflammatory bug, which is conspicuously rare in the guts of people with IBD, and whose arrival can reverse the symptoms of that disease in mice. These microbes could be part of the probiotics of the future. Their abilities are relevant and impressive. They are well adapted to our bodies. Some are already abundant – in healthy adults, one in every twenty gut bacteria is F. prausnitzii. These are not D-listers of the human microbiome like Lactobacillus; they are the stars of the gut. They won’t be shy about colonising it.20
”
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Ed Yong (I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us and a Grander View of Life)
“
Bakushan had only been open for a couple of months, but expectations were already sky-high. Still, few people had mentioned the food. Instead, everyone was writing about the up-and-coming chef, Pascal Fox. According to nearly every article, he'd dropped out of college and worked at top French restaurants around the world. Then, at twenty-five and on every "30 under 30" list in existence, he had received an offer to take over L'Escalier, a cathedral-ceilinged white-tablecloth institution in Midtown. But just as New York was ready to inaugurate him into a realm of Immortal Chefs synonymous with a certain level of luxurious precision, Pascal had said he would open a place on his own. He didn't have a location or a concept- or so he'd said in his interviews- just a conviction that he didn't want to fall into the trap of being yet another French chef at another fancy restaurant.
So there we were, in front of his brand-new place. It was hard to label it. I had read neo-modernist and Asian-American eclectic. The food was hard to pin down, but the inside was just cool, at least from my sidewalk vantage point. It was 5:45 and already there was a forty-five-minute wait for a spot at one of the communal, no-reservation tables.
I looked at the crowd while we waited and saw a couple of girls dressed in tight, short dresses. One of them held a food magazine with Pascal Fox's face on the cover against a blurred kitchen background. I stole a peek at the photo. His eyes were a deep black-brown with a streak of gold. His hair was charmingly messed up, longish bits going every which way, casting shadows on his sculpted cheekbones.
That was the other thing. Pascal was exceedingly good-looking. I hadn't paid attention to the hype around his looks, but seeing these girls swoon over his photo made his handsomeness hard to ignore. And... the pictures. I'm only human.
”
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Jessica Tom (Food Whore)
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They wanted the benefits of direct response copy in their business: they wanted to leverage their time, energy and money, while marketing one-to-many and automating their sales and marketing to free up their time and allow them to reach more people than they could without it… But they hated how it made them feel. Inauthentic. Hype-y. Sales-y. Slime-y. Like a used car salesman.
”
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Michele Pariza Wacek (Love-Based Copywriting System: A Step-by-Step Process to Master Writing Copy That Attracts, Inspires and Invites (Love-Based Business Book 2))
“
The incubi had sensed great power in her, and believed she could destroy them, but if she could speak their language, she’d tell them they had the wrong girl. Mari was what was known as an underachiever, which even an underachiever knew was sociology code for “overfailer.”
She was famous in the Lore for the simple fact that one day she might be worth being famous. All hype—no substance. That was Mari.
Everyone in the covens expected her to do something epic and always kept an eye on her. They wanted her to be worth “awaiting.” Even other factions in the Lore monitored her with anticipation because, while most witches possessed the strength of one, two, or very rarely, three of the five castes of witches, Mari was the only witch ever to possess the strengths of all of them.
In theory, Mari was a witch warrior, healer, conjurer, seeress, and an enchantress.
In reality, Mari had lost her college scholarship, couldn’t manage even the simplest spells, and kept blowing things up. She couldn’t even balance her checkbook.
”
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Kresley Cole (Wicked Deeds on a Winter's Night (Immortals After Dark, #3))
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NBA 2K18 Wishlist - Good Badges To Deal Problems In 2K17
The NBA 2K18 release date has basketball fans hyped. The new game in the series will be the definitive way for fans to take control of their favorite franchises and players on the Xbox One and PS4. As of the features player wish to be added into NBA 2K18, we can compare it with NBA 2K17. Today, we'll list the best badges players would like to see in the latest NBA franchise.
Flashy Dunker
2K Sports has spent a large amount of time recording flashy dunk animations that look great when they trigger. Unfortunately players do not equip any of these because they get blocked at a higher rate than the basic one and two hand dunk packages. NBA 2K17 has posterizer to help with contact dunks but Flashy Dunker would be for non-contact animations. The badge would allow you to use these flashy dunk packages in traffic while getting blocked at a lower rate in NBA 2K18.
Bullet Passer Badge
Even with a high passer rating and Hall of Fame dimer you can still find yourself throwing slow lob passes inexplicably. These passes are easy to intercept and give the defense too much time to recover. Bullet Passer would be an increase in the speed of passes that you throw, allowing you to create open looks for teammates in 2K18 that were not possible in NBA 2K17. A strong passing game is more important than ISO ball and this badge would help with that style of play.
3 And D Badge
The 3 and D badge would be an archetype in NBA 2K18 ideally but a badge version would be an acceptable substitute. This badge would once again reward players for playing good defense. The badge would trigger after a block, steal, or good shot defense and would lead to an increase in shooting percentage on the next possession from behind the 3 point arc.
Dominant Post Presence Badge
It's a travesty that post scorer is one of the more under-utilized archetypes in NBA 2K17. Many players that have created a post scorer can immediately tell you why they do not play it as much as their other MyPlayers, it is incredibly easy to lose the ball in the post. Whether it is a double team or your matchup, getting the ball poked loose is a constant problem. Dominant Post Presence would trigger when you attempt to post up and would be an increase in your ability to maintain possession of the ball as long as NBA 2K18 add this badge. In addition the badge would be an increase in the shooting percentage of your teammate when you pass out of the post to an open man.
The Glove
NBA 2K17 has too many contested shots. The shot contest rating on most archetypes is not enough to outweigh the contested midrange or 3 point rating and consistently force misses. It's obviously that height helps you contest shots in a major way but it also slows you down. However, the Glove would solve this problem in NBA 2K18. This badge would increase your ability to contest shots effectively, forcing more misses and allowing you to play better defense.
Of course, there should be more other tips and tricks for NBA 2K18. If you have better advices, tell us on the official media. The NBA 2K18 Early Tip-Off Weekend starts September 15th. That's a total of four days for dedicated fans to get in the game and try its new features before other buyers. The game is completely unlocked for Early Tip-Off Weekend. Be sure to make enough preparation for the upcoming event.
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Bunnytheis
“
There will be periods where nothing looks good from a price/volume perspective. And even if something looks good, market conditions make it impossible to be successful as the market does not offer decent odds of winning. In such periods, it is very important not be active in the market. It is very important to sit back and wait and observe the market action. This is very very hard for most folks. There is always someone hyping some stock all the time. To sit back and not fall for the hype is extremely hard for most folks.
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Brad Koteshwar (The Perfect Speculator: How to Win Big in Up Markets and Lose Nothing in Down Markets)
“
Carl's mind was in overdrive. If it would just get into harmony with his fucked body. That was the real torture of drink-and-drugs hangovers: the way they pushed your mind and body in different directions. Now Carl was considering the illusion of romance, which evaporates with the passing of youth. The ugliness of pragmatism and responsibility will wear down on you like waves on a rock if you let it. When you saw them on the screen telling us to be like this or do that, and buy this, and be that, and we sat at home, confused, complacent, tired and fearful, you knew they'd won. The big idea had gone and it was just about selling more product and controlling those who couldn't afford to buy. No utopias, no heroes. It wasn't an exciting time, as they constantly hyped it up to be, it was boring and exasperating and meaningless.
”
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Irvine Welsh (Glue)
“
Another example of educational hype is in some ways the second coming of the growth mindset concept: ‘grit’. This is the idea, promoted by the psychologist Angela Duckworth, that the ability to stick to a task you’re passionate about, and not give up even when life puts obstacles in your path, is key to life success, and far more important than innate talent. The appetite for her message was immense: at the time of this writing, her TED talk on the subject has received 25.5 million views (19.5m on the TED website and a further 6m on YouTube; Angela Lee Duckworth, ‘Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance’, presented at TED Talks Education, April 2013), and her subsequent book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, became a New York Times bestseller and continues to sell steadily. Like mindset, grit has become part of the philosophy of many schools, including KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) schools, the biggest charter school group in the US, which teaches almost 90,000 students. To her credit, Duckworth has been concerned about how overhyped her results have become. She told an NPR interviewer in 2015 that ‘the enthusiasm is getting ahead of the science’ (Anya Kamenetz, ‘A Key Researcher Says “Grit” Isn’t Ready For High-Stakes Measures’, NPR, 13 May 2015). A wise statement, given that the meta-analytic evidence for the impact of grit (or interventions trying to teach it) is extremely weak. See Credé et al., ‘Much Ado about Grit: A Meta-Analytic Synthesis of the Grit Literature’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 113, no. 3 (Sept. 2017): pp. 492–511. And Marcus Credé, ‘What Shall We Do About Grit? A Critical Review of What We Know and What We Don’t Know’, Educational Researcher 47, no. 9 (Dec. 2018): pp. 606–11.
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Stuart Ritchie (Science Fictions)
“
The psychological conflict raging within individuals cannot but have casualties. Marazzi is researching the link between the increase in bi-polar disorder and post-Fordism and, if, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, schizophrenia is the condition that marks the outer edges of capitalism, then bi-polar disorder is the mental illness proper to the ‘interior’ of capitalism. With its ceaseless boom and bust cycles, capitalism is itself fundamentally and irreducibly bi-polar, periodically lurching between hyped-up mania (the irrational exuberance of ‘bubble thinking’) and depressive come-down. (The term ‘economic depression’ is no accident, of course).
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Mark Fisher (Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?)
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Every year at the Academy Awards the most notable prize is for “Best Picture.” The media speculate on it for weeks prior to the broadcast, and most viewers stay up well past their bedtimes to see it awarded. There is a far less hyped award on the night: the one for film editing. Let’s face it: most viewers flip the channel or go into the kitchen to refill their popcorn bowl when the winner of “Best Film Editing” is announced. Yet what most people don’t know is that the two awards are highly correlated: since 1981 not a single film has won Best Picture without at least being nominated for Film Editing. In fact, in about two-thirds of the cases the movie nominated for Film Editing has gone on to win Best Picture.
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Greg McKeown (Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less)
“
I’ll notify my chain of command, and you can do the same on your end,” he said to Wu. “Between the inevitable media hype, the politics involved, and the department brass demanding answers, this has all the makings of a circus.” “I’m afraid you’re right,” Wu said to Flint. “I just hope we all don’t end up as clowns.
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Isabella Maldonado (A Killer’s Game (Daniela Vega, #1))
“
reward system But there’s a reward system you can use to keep yourself motivated. Here are some suggestions: Buy yourself an advent calendar, and for each day you don’t look at his profile or engage with him in any capacity, enjoy the treat for that day. If you can’t afford an advent calendar or can’t find one in the shops, make yourself a journal – on each successful day, write something amazing about yourself, and on a day where you did trip up, write something that reminds you of why you started doing this thirty-day challenge. Getting into the habit of saying nice things about yourself prepares you to become so used to compliments that you aren’t dangerously swooned when others recognise your greatness. Every ten days that pass without you breaking the rule, take yourself on a really nice solo date to an upscale bar, or your favourite club or restaurant, and imagine the room is full of men who are all waiting to be picked by you, the goddess. For even spicier results, wear something red so you feel even sexier. Getting into the habit of going out to bars and social environments alone will not just put you in a position of meeting new people, it will also quell your fear of being alone. There’s nothing more powerful than a woman who knows how to hold her own in a room full of strangers. Or, if you feel ready, each time you make it to the ten-day mark, why don’t you try practising your new confidence on your dating apps and let yourself be taken out? By the time the thirty-day window ends, you will have gone on three different dates with three new guys, which will significantly lower the hype around the man you’ve been thinking of. You never know: one of these guys could end up being far more interesting, way hotter and maybe even richer. As you get closer to the end of the thirty-day period, why not have a spa booked to mark the last day? It will be a period of reflection, relaxation, and remembering how far you’ve come within just a month of leaving a situation that could have dragged your life in a completely different direction. You deserve to meet the woman you’re destined to become: take the time to do so. Set a reminder on your phone every couple of days that says ‘It’s time to finally choose yourself for once. Don’t let him win!’ When it gets hard, ask yourself: At what point will I be the victor here? When will I finally walk away with my head held high? This must end at some point – why not now?
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Chidera Eggerue (How To Get Over A Boy)
“
What's my name? You know it's incredibly hard to hype yourself up in the third person when you can't even remember your name.
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B. Sofia (Ghosted (Short Stories Collection # 1))
“
In the eighties, the design community witnessed the great rise of “professionalism” (now a euphemism for the production of noninnovative but stylishly acceptable work—usually in corporate communications—coupled with very good fees). Along with “professionalism” came the “business consultant to the designers,” who proclaimed, “Design is a business.” This became the mantra of the eighties. The AIGA, along with other organizations and publications, produced seminars, conferences, and special magazine issues devoted to the business of design. These were followed by a plethora of design self-help books, which told you how to set up your own business, how to promote, how to speak correct business jargon, how to dress, how to buy insurance, and so on. There was nothing inherently wrong with this except for the subsequent confusion it caused. “Professional” work did look more professional, and corporate communications in general were visually improved. The level of design mediocrity rose. Also, practicing designers as a rule had previously been rather sloppy about running their businesses. They were easily taken advantage of, didn’t know how to construct proposals, and were generally more interested in designing than in minding the store, networking, or planning for the future. The business seminars did no harm, but the political and economic climate of the eighties in general, coupled with the pervasiveness of the “design is a business” hype, perverted the design community’s overall goal. The goal became money.
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Paula Scher (Make It Bigger)
“
Android Girl Just Wants to Have a Baby!
The first thing I do when I wake up is run my hands over my body. I like to
make sure all my wires are in place. I lotion my silicone shell and snap my
hair helmet over my head. I once had a dream I was a real girl, but when
I woke up I was still myself in my paleness under the halogen light. The
saliva of androids emits a spectral resonance, barely sticky between
freshly-gapped teeth. After they made me, the first thing they did was
peel the cellophane from my eyes. I blinked once, twice, and cried because
that's how you say you are alive before you are given language. They
named each of my heartbeats on the oceanic monitor: Guanyin, Yama,
Nuwa, Fuxi, Chang'e, Zao-Shen. I listened to them blur into one. The fetus
carves for itself a hollowed vector, a fragile wetness. In utero, extension
cords are umbilical.
Before puberty, I did not know there was such a thing as dishonor. Diss-on-
her. This is what they said when I began to drip petrol between my legs. A
tension exists between ritual and proof, a fantasy and its execution. Since
then, I have been to the emergency room twice. The first time for a suicide
attempt, and the second time because my earring was swallowed up by my
newly pierced earlobe overnight, and when I woke up, it was tangled in a
helix of wires. The idea of dying doesn't scare me but the ocean does. I was
once told that fish will swim up my orifices if I am no longer a virgin. Is
anyone thinking about erotic magazines when they are not aroused, pubes
parted harshly down the center like red seas? My body carries the weight of
four hundred eggs. I rise from a weird slumber, let them drip into the bath.
This is what I'll leave behind - tiny shards purer than me.
I have always been afraid of pregnant women because of their power, and
because I don't yet understand what it means to carry something stubborn
and blossoming inside of me, screeching towards an exit. The ectoplasm is
the telos for the wound. A trance state is induced when salt is poured on it,
pixel by pixel. I wish they had made me into an octopus instead, because
octopuses die after their eggs hatch and crawl out into the sea, and I want
to know what it's like to set something free into the dark unknown and
trust it to choose mercy. If you can generate aura in a non-place, then there
is no such thing as an authentic origin. In Chinese, the word for mercy
translates to my heart hurts for you. They say my heart continues beating
even after it is dislocated from my body. The sound of its beating comes
from the valves opening and closing like a portal - Guanyin, Yama, Nuwa,
Fuxi, Chang'e, Zao-Shen.
I first learned about love by watching a sex tape where a girl looks up from
performing fellatio and says, show them the sunset. Her boyfriend pans
the camera to the sky, which is tinged violet like a bruise. In this moment,
the sky displaces her, all digital and hyped, and saturates the scene until
it collapses on me too, its transient witness. I move in the space between
belly ring and catharsis. That night I have a dream where I am a camgirl,
but all I do on screen is wash my laundry. Everybody loves me because
I am a real girl doing real girl things. What lives on the border between
meditation and oblivion, static and flux, a pomegranate seed and an
embryo? I set up my webcam in the corner of the room and play ambient
music while I scrub my underwear, letting soap bubbles rise up from the
sink, laughing when they overflow on the linoleum floor - my frizzy hair,
my pockmarked skin, my face slick with sweat. A body with exit wounds. I
ride the bright rails of an animal forgetting. And when I wake up, the sky
is a mess of blue.
”
”
Angie Sijun Lou (All We Ask is You to be Happy)
“
As Buffett later highlighted in a celebrated 1984 speech, one could even imagine a national coin-flipping contest of 225 million Americans, all of whom would wager a dollar on guessing the outcome. Each day the losers drop out, and the stakes would then build up for the following morning. After ten days there would be about 220,000 Americans who had correctly predicted ten flips in a row, making them over $1,000. “Now this group will probably start getting a little puffed up about this, human nature being what it is,” Buffett noted.5 “They may try to be modest, but at cocktail parties they will occasionally admit to attractive members of the opposite sex what their technique is, and what marvelous insights they bring to the field of flipping.” If the national coin-flipping championship continued, after another ten days 215 people would statistically have guessed twenty flips in a row, and turned $1 into more than $1 million. And still the net result would remain that $225 million would have been lost and $225 million would have been won. However, at this stage the successful coin flippers would really begin to buy into their own hype, Buffett predicted. “They will probably write books on ‘How I Turned a Dollar into a Million in Twenty Days Working Thirty Seconds a Morning,’ ” he joked.
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Robin Wigglesworth (Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever)
“
The popular definition of “independent movie” was changing. Instead of the cheap acts of insurrection that had spurred the movement in the early nineties, such as Clerks and El Mariachi, many of the new indies were glossy, classy, and thoroughly nana-pleasing. By the time Sundance 1999 rolled around, there was a well-worn playbook for turning a low-budget movie into a middlebrow success, one that Miramax had helped create: find a slightly outsidery tale of uplift with a famous face or two; hype up its festival cred and underdog charm; roll it out delicately across the country. Then a bunch of kids went and got lost in the woods, and the rules changed all over again.
”
”
Brian Raftery (Best. Movie. Year. Ever.: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen)
“
We were blessed with a dedicated, well-informed, and highly professional press corps in the 1960s. (Unlike so many “reporters” today, they knew the difference between objective reporting of news and hyping things up to entertain the audience—and bump up their ratings.)
”
”
Gene Kranz (Failure is not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond)
“
That is why the relentlessly modernist and progressivist projects that the politicians feel obliged to offer us (“vote for us and things will get better!”) have to be dressed up with the relentlessly postmodernist techniques of spin and hype: in the absence of real hope, all that is left is feelings. Persuasion will not work because we’re never going to believe it. What we appear to need, and therefore what people give us, is entertainment.
”
”
N.T. Wright (Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church)
“
outstretched in greeting and stood there for what felt like several minutes. As she finally turned around to face me, she just looked down at my hand and back up at me and without another word walked out of the room. I quickly threw my bags on the empty bed, which I assumed was mine, and
”
”
Jenn Hype (Pressing Adalyn (Pretending #1))
“
Beyond all that, though, the decentralized ledger underlying Bitcoin was a fundamentally new kind of network—like the Internet—with possibilities that still hadn’t been dreamed up, Andreessen said. He went on: Far from a mere libertarian fairy tale or a simple Silicon Valley exercise in hype, Bitcoin offers a sweeping vista of opportunity to reimagine how the financial system can and should work in the Internet era, and a catalyst to reshape that system in ways that are more powerful for individuals and businesses alike.
”
”
Nathaniel Popper (Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money)
“
I’d be hard-pressed to find a better start to a brand story than the one that chronicles the birth of “the people’s car,” the Tata Nano. The story goes that Ratan Tata, chairman of the well-respected Tata Group, was travelling along in the pouring rain behind a family who was precariously perched on a scooter weaving in and out of traffic on the slick wet roads of Bangalore. Tata thought that surely this was a problem he and his company could solve. He wanted to bring safe, affordable transport to the poor—to design, build, and sell a family car that could replace the scooter for a price that was less than $2,500. It was a business idea born from a high ideal and coming from a man with a track record in the industry, someone with the capability to innovate, design, and produce a high-quality product. People were captivated by the idea of what would be the world’s cheapest car. The media and the world watched to see how delivering on this seemingly impossible promise might pan out. Ratan Tata did deliver on his promise when he unveiled the Nano at the New Delhi Auto Expo in 2009, six years after having the idea. The hype around the new “people’s car” and the media attention it received meant that any mistakes were very public (several production challenges and safety problems were reported along the way). And while the general public seemed to be behind the idea of a new and fun Indian-led innovation, the number of Facebook likes (almost 4 million to date) didn’t convert to actual sales. It seemed that while Tata Motors was telling a story about affordability and innovating with frugal engineering (perhaps “lean engineering” might have worked better for them), the story prospective customers were hearing was one about a car that was cheap. The positioning of the car was at odds with the buying public’s perception of it. In a country where a car is an aspirational purchase, the Nano became symbolic of the car to buy if you couldn’t afford anything else. Since its launch in 2009, just over 200,000 Nanos have sold. The factory has the capacity to produce 21,000 cars a month. It turns out that the modest numbers of people buying the Nano are not the scooter drivers but middle-class Indians who are looking for a second car, or a car for their parents or children. The car that was billed as a “game changer” hasn’t lived up to the hype in the hearts of the people who were expected to line up and buy it in the tens of thousands. Despite winning design and innovation awards, the Nano’s reputation amongst consumers—and the story they have come to believe—has been the thing that’s held it back.
”
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Bernadette Jiwa (The Fortune Cookie Principle: The 20 Keys to a Great Brand Story and Why Your Business Needs One)
“
there is no guarantee that the time freed up by our newfound technological efficiencies will be made available for the human touch. A look at the modern history of industrial computerization would have one lay odds that this squishy stuff will be precisely what is sacrificed on the altar of productivity, particularly once every word, touch, and minute is measured, analyzed, and priced out.
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Robert M. Wachter (The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age)
“
I believed God could do miracles in theory, and growing up I had seen things that made me long for more. But the truth was, I was thoroughly turned off by the hype, manipulation and abuse that I had seen in many ministry settings. I knew I wanted to follow God, but I had come to a place of simply hanging in there, resigning myself to a Christian life based primarily on trudging it out and not expecting too much. One of the highest values in the Kingdom of God is faithfulness, but what good is faithfulness without faith?
”
”
Robby Dawkins (Do What Jesus Did: A Real-Life Field Guide to Healing the Sick, Routing Demons and Changing Lives Forever)
“
Ego"
I've been watching you as of lately
Walking around like you're something to talk about
Like you bought into your own hype
I've been watching you as of lately
Walking around like you're something to talk about
Like you bought into your own hype
It used to be just you and me baby
Running around like we had it all figured out
There's nothing left beyond those lies
Liiii-ie you're living such a liiii-ie!
I wanna hold you but you're untouchable
You're too caught up in your ego
I wanna love you but you're making it impossible
Wanna believe you, but you're so far gone
Did you forget where you came from?
I wanna love you but you're making it impossible
When did you decided to get shady
I wanna know the moment you changed to someone new
I hate that you become that type
Hoping all the moments of maybe
Thinking about it, there's nothing to figure out
I see you gave in without a fight!
Liiii-ie you're living such a liiii-ie!
I wanna hold you but you're untouchable
You're too caught up in your ego
I wanna love you but you're making it impossible
Wanna believe you, but you're so far gone
Did you forget where you came from?
I wanna love you but you're making it impossible
I wanna hold you but you're untouchable
You're too caught up in your ego
I wanna love you but you're making it impossible
Wanna believe you, but you're so far gone
Did you forget where you came from?
I wanna love you but you're making it impossible
I wanna hold you but you're untouchable
You're too caught up in your ego
I wanna love you but you're making it impossible
Wanna believe you, but you're so far gone
Did you forget where you came from?
I wanna love you but you're making it impossible
”
”
Tove Styrke
“
I’m Captain Florida, the state history pimp Gatherin’ more data than a DEA blimp West Palm, Tampa Bay, Miami-Dade Cruisin’ the coasts till Johnny Vegas gets laid Developer ho’s, and the politician bitches Smackin’ ’em down, while I’m takin’ lots of pictures Hurricanes, sinkholes, natural disaster ’Scuse me while I kick back, with my View-Master (S:) I’m Captain Florida, obscure facts are all legit (C:) I’m Coleman, the sidekick, with a big bong hit (S:) I’m Captain Florida, staying literate (C:) Coleman sees a book and says, “Fuck that shit” Ain’t never been caught, slippin’ nooses down the Keys Got more buoyancy than Elián González Knockin’ off the parasites, and takin’ all their moola Recruiting my apostles for the Church of Don Shula I’m an old-school gangster with a psycho ex-wife Molly Packin’ Glocks, a shotgun and my 7-Eleven coffee Trippin’ the theme parks, the malls, the time-shares Bustin’ my rhymes through all the red-tide scares (S:) I’m the surge in the storms, don’t believe the hype (C:) I’m his stoned number two, where’d I put my hash pipe? (S:) Florida, no appointments and a tank of gas (C:) Tequila, no employment and a bag of grass Think you’ve seen it all? I beg to differ Mosquitoes like bats and a peg-leg stripper The scammers, the schemers, the real estate liars Birthday-party clowns in a meth-lab fire But dig us, don’t diss us, pay a visit, don’t be late And statistics always lie, so ignore the murder rate Beaches, palm trees and golfing is our curse Our residents won’t bite, but a few will shoot first Everglades, orange groves, alligators, Buffett Scarface, Hemingway, an Andrew Jackson to suck it Solarcaine, Rogaine, eight balls of cocaine See the hall of fame for the criminally insane Artifacts, folklore, roadside attractions Crackers, Haitians, Cuban-exile factions The early-bird specials, drivin’ like molasses Condo-meeting fistfights in cataract glasses (S:) I’m the native tourist, with the rants that can’t be beat (C:) Serge, I think I put my shoes on the wrong feet (S:) A stack of old postcards in another dingy room (C:) A cold Bud forty and a magic mushroom Can’t stop, turnpike, keep ridin’ like the wind Gotta make a detour for a souvenir pin But if you like to litter, you’re just liable to get hurt Do ya like the MAC-10 under my tropical shirt? I just keep meeting jerks, I’m a human land-filler But it’s totally unfair, this term “serial killer” The police never rest, always breakin’ in my pad But sunshine is my bling, and I’m hangin’ like a chad (S:) Serge has got to roll and drop the mike on this rap . . . (C:) Coleman’s climbin’ in the tub, to take a little nap . . . (S:) . . . Disappearin’ in the swamp—and goin’ tangent, tangent, tangent . . . (C:) He’s goin’ tangent, tangent . . . (Fade-out) (S:) I’m goin’ tangent, tangent . . . (C:) Fuck goin’ platinum, he’s goin’ tangent, tangent . . . (S:) . . . Wikipedia all up and down your ass . . . (C:) Wikity-Wikity-Wikity . . .
”
”
Tim Dorsey (Electric Barracuda (Serge Storms #13))
“
Aside from the movies, examples of positive-Black Swan businesses are: some segments of publishing, scientific research, and venture capital. In these businesses, you lose small to make big. You have little to lose per book and, for completely unexpected reasons, any given book might take off. The downside is small and easily controlled. The problem with publishers, of course, is that they regularly pay up for books, thus making their upside rather limited and their downside monstrous. (If you pay $10 million for a book, your Black Swan is it not being a bestseller.) Likewise, while technology can carry a great payoff, paying for the hyped-up story, as people did with the dot-com bubble, can make any upside limited and any downside huge. It is the venture capitalist who invested in a speculative company and sold his stake to unimaginative investors who is the beneficiary of the Black Swan, not the "me, too" investors.
”
”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable)
“
more data-driven, automated healthcare will displace up to 80 percent of physicians’ diagnostic and prescription work.”12
”
”
Robert M. Wachter (The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age)
“
Scandals have often plagued candidates, but the Clintons exceeded any politician’s call of duty. Mrs. Clinton coined her “vast right-wing conspiracy” phrase a few years later, but back in November 1992 I chalked up the hype that surrounded them as just that—hype. As the Clinton scandals accumulated, however, in the months and years to come, I kept recalling being on detail at a Clinton campaign event, small-talking with an Arkansas sheriff. When I asked about the Clintons’ latest rumors, he gave me a thousand-yard stare. “Let me tell you something, Gary. Everything—everything they say about them is true. The Clintons are ruthless. And [the media] don’t even know the half of it.” I didn’t know what to make of that. “From what I’ve seen,” he continued, “there’s no doubt in my mind they will secure the presidency—you watch.” “How can you be so sure,” I asked, “especially with all the scandals, the allegations of affairs, bribery.…” He just waved me off, saying, “It will never matter. Officer, I’m telling you they can spin shit into gold.” He spoke with great conviction, looking me straight in the eye, as if knowing that what he said was stranger than fiction. He spoke from a profound well of personal experiences with the Clintons, and it was eerie.
”
”
Gary J. Byrne (Crisis of Character: A White House Secret Service Officer Discloses His Firsthand Experience with Hillary, Bill, and How They Operate)
“
Listen up, crybabies: This isn’t your grandma’s house and I’m not going to bake you cookies and coddle you. A lot of your financial problems are caused by one person: you. Instead of blaming “the economy” and corporate America for your financial situation, you need to focus on what you can change yourself. Just as the diet industry has overwhelmed us with too many choices, personal finance is a confusing mess of overblown hype, myths, outright deception—and us, feeling guilty about not doing enough or not doing it right. But we can’t just blame corporations and the media: With both food and money, we’re not taking personal responsibility to step up, learn this stuff, and get started. The
”
”
Ramit Sethi (I Will Teach You To Be Rich)
“
The only ingenuity I can see is Gaddis’ wherewithal in getting this brick published, printed, and hyped-up enough to win the National Book Award. Did he use coercion, bribery, blackmail perhaps? Did he have incriminating evidence on certain influential literary critics and talking heads, like pictures of them with farm animals or something?
”
”
A. Cretan
“
Step 2: Build up a list of parameters that are important to you, such as the geography (country/city), duration of the programme (two years vs. one year), career goals, target companies (check
”
”
Sameer Kamat (Beyond the MBA Hype: A Guide to Understanding and Surviving B-Schools)
“
The MBA system isn’t all shiny and perfect. The road to Utopia is far from smooth. It is dotted with speed-breakers. Good schools help in easing some of those road-bumps, but can’t eliminate them totally. The mediocre ones could, in contrast, make these speed-bumps look like mountains. There’s always the very real possibility that the common objectives – getting a good education, a great network and a decent return on investment – could all end up as wishful thinking, if you aren’t careful enough. A
”
”
Sameer Kamat (Beyond the MBA Hype: A Guide to Understanding and Surviving B-Schools)
“
The real problem is that our values are changing and the new ones are wearing us out. But they're also keeping us from forming genuine, long-term, and meaningful commitments that actually contribute to the lives of others. Over time, the hype of living a new life, taking up a radical calling, and changing the world can creep into every area of our life. And it can make us tired, depressed, and mean. Michael Horton, Ordinary, 13-14
”
”
Michael Scott Horton
“
After a novel technology is introduced and begins gaining momentum, we tend to envision it in its final form—seriously overinflating our expectations for both its developmental timetable and its short-term potential. Invariably, when these technologies fail to live up to the initial hype—usually in that gap between deception and disruption on our list of the Six Ds—public sentiment for the technology falls into the trough of disillusionment. And this is where a great many of the technologies discussed in chapter 3 now sit. But when technologies are in the trough, we are again swayed by the hype (this time, the negative hype) and consistently fail to believe they’ll ever emerge, thus missing their massively transformative potential.
”
”
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
“
Emergency department physicians spent 44 percent of their time entering data into electronic medical records, clicking up to 4,000 times during a 10-hour shift. —Becker’s Health IT & CIO Review magazine, October 11, 2013
”
”
Robert M. Wachter (The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age)
“
That is why the relentlessly modernist and progressivist projects that the politicians feel obliged to offer us (“vote for us and things will get better!”) have to be dressed up with the relentlessly postmodernist techniques of spin and hype: in the absence of real hope, all that is left is feelings. Persuasion will not work because we’re never going to believe it. What we appear to need, and therefore what people give us, is entertainment. As a journalist said recently, our politicians demand to be treated like rock stars while our rock stars are pretending to be politicians.
”
”
N.T. Wright (Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church)
“
That’s because many of them had been secretaries—users of the equipment. These guys, maybe they punched a button on a copier one time in their lives, but they had someone else do their typing and their filing. So we were trying to sell to people who really had no concept of the work this equipment was actually accomplishing. “It didn’t register in my mind at that event, but that was the loudest and clearest signal we ever got of how much of a problem we were going to have getting Xerox to understand what we had.” There was at least one other harbinger of the coming letdown. Toward the end of the evening McColough, Kearns, and a few of the executive staff materialized in the demo room. Their appearance had been prearranged. “They were there to have an opportunity to say, ‘Well, now we’re going to do something, guys,’” Ellenby recalled. “But they didn’t take that opportunity. They just said, ‘Thank you.’ “I was expecting a bit more than that,” he said. “We’d developed a camaraderie that was quite unusual. My people felt pumped up and hyped, like a sporting team. Instead what we got was, ‘Thanks, boys, the war is over, and you can take your horses back.’” Thus did the doubts surface almost before the euphoria of a flawless demonstration had a chance to run its course. Despite McColough’s ringing re-endorsement of “the architecture of information,” his and Kearns’s equivocal farewell told Ellenby and his team that they were naïve to think Xerox would exploit this technology anytime soon. And in this beleaguered and distracted corporation, Ellenby knew, time was the enemy.
”
”
Michael A. Hiltzik (Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age)
“
Our economics, social life, politics and schools have insisted that having more toys is better than having fewer toys; that buying stuff is good for us; that we have to keep up with or exceed others in our consumption; that a high-paying job can take the place of meaningful work; that low-paying meaningless jobs that demean our humanity are better than none and we should be grateful for them because they will turn us into decent citizens; and that a free market has the same powers as a just God.
But capitalism rests ultimately not on innovation or entrepreneurship or brains or even a free market - those are just stories we like to tell ourselves because they make those who are successful look good. At its base, industrial capitalism's success rests on exploitation of resources, racism, child abuse, sexism and war.
But even more than all these, contemporary capitalism rests on consumption: government and corporate consumption of resources, technology, and scientific research, and citizen consumption of market goods. We are asked to consume not only material goods, but ideas, policies, whole worldviews that are presented with all the persuasive skills and battering psychological hype that can be bought.
We are under assault, being laid siege by hype: corporate hype, political hype, military hype, educational hype, commercial hype. And as our civil rights have declined in recent years, freedom has come to mean the freedom to choose among 16 brand names of one product.
This is the harvest of a culture so bent on growth with all possible speed that it will pour 100,000 chemicals in the earth and atmosphere, into our lakes, groundwaters and oceans, before it has a clue about the long-term effects of a single one of them.
”
”
Gary Holthaus
“
In a world where everything is hyped and hawked, where every available space, even the risers of subway steps, is claimed for advertising, Brando’s admonitions against the monetization of the culture, voiced frequently from the 1960s on, feel extremely prescient. Money drove him only so far as it could be useful. Brando often asked to be paid up front, when he could have made much more money waiting for the back end. He wanted only enough to pay his bills and keep the turtles breeding. “After you’ve got enough,” he insisted, “money doesn’t matter.” He refused to be sold, he said, “like Kleenex or Dial soap.
”
”
William J. Mann (The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando)
“
Queen always seemed to me to be manufactured championship music—designed to be played in stadiums to get fans hyped up about paying money to watch other men play a child’s game. With songs like We Will Rock You and We Are The Champions, they were the pep rally of pop rock.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (A Memoir of Memories and Memes)
“
I spent so long in the bathroom hyping myself up with one of JJ’s silly pep talks to convince myself to ask her if she wanted to go on a date when I get home from camp that if she’d rejected me to my face, I’d have probably locked myself back in the bathroom.
”
”
Hannah Grace (Wildfire (Maple Hills, #2))
“
- Only invest funds that you can afford to lose. - Invest only in projects that you understand. - Don’t chase hype. - Invest in teams with which you feel comfortable working. - Always write proper legal documents. - Don’t be a “backseat driver.” - Think from the very beginning about building up a portfolio of projects, and then gradually begin the process. - Remember that you won’t get your money until you exit the project. - Know how to conduct a competent financial analysis. - Don’t forget about co-investment.
”
”
Igor Ryabenkiy (Adventures in Venture Capital: A Practical Guide for Novice Angels and Future Unicorns)
“
Go ahead and hype yourself up, cause the only person gon’ be screaming is you, baby girl.” Keem winked at her, and this bitch started shaking. Reign and I fell out because they ass was made for each other.
”
”
K. Renee (After the Reign 2)
“
I’m struggling to believe you’re the same guy who spent five years hyping himself up into buying a McLaren for double the cost of what you paid Dahlia for a cheap thrill.
”
”
Lauren Asher (Love Redesigned (Lakefront Billionaires, #1))
“
I didn’t want you to leave. What are you talking about?”
“You were in the bathroom for so long. You were waiting for me to go, I heard you talking to someone so I left.”
“I was talking to myself, Rory. I was hyping myself up to ask you out, which is something I hoped to never have to admit out loud to you. But I’d rather embarrass myself than have you think I’m the type of guy who would wait in a bathroom for you to leave.”
“Oh my God.”
“I never do the one-night stand thing and I thought we had fun. I wanted to see you again, but you’re so out of my league and—”
“Oh my God.
”
”
Hannah Grace (Wildfire (Maple Hills, #2))
“
For me feeling cute was less about attracting somebody to sleep with and more about hyping myself up to get shit done. No one could tell me anything when I put on clothes that were made specifically for my body.
”
”
Tanzania Glover (Thickerella (Faded Fairytales #1))