Sourdough Robin Sloan Quotes

Here’s a thing I believe about people my age: we are the children of Hogwarts, and more than anything, we just want to be sorted.

The internet: always proving that you're not quite as special as you suspected.

I have come to believe that food is history of the deepest kind. Everything we eat tells a tale of ingenuity and creation, domination and injustice-and does so more vividly than any other artifact, any other medium.

Greatest among us are those who can deploy “my friend” to total strangers in a way that is not hollow, but somehow real and deeply felt; those who can make you, within seconds of first contact, believe it.

Baking, by contrast, was solving the same problem over and over again, because every time, the solution was consumed. I mean, really: chewed and digested. Thus, the problem was ongoing. Thus, the problem was perhaps the point.

I felt the disorientation of a generous offer that in no way lines up with anything you want to do: like a promotion to senior alligator wrestling, or an all-expenses paid trip to Gary, Indiana.

I told them I didn't have time for this bullshit, and if either of them wanted to ask a lady out, he could do it by text message like a normal person.

feeding people is really freakin’ great. There’s nothing better.

I needed a more interesting life. I could start by learning something. I could start with the starter.

Southeastern Michigan is flat, almost concave; here was a world with a z-axis.

my great weakness: if a task was even mildly challenging, any sense of injustice drained away and I simply worked quietly until I was done.

It felt, also, like an empty spaceship, and, as a rule, you do not enter an empty spaceship without first knowing the fate of the crew.

I know I have strong opinions about everything - I can’t help it, I do - but this one’s the strongest. I waited too long to get out of that office. Much too long. I weep for those years.

IT’S A MESS when strange events smack into the windscreen of a resolutely rational mind.

It's always new and astonishing when it's yours. Infatuation; sex; card tricks.

It's always new and astonishing when it's yours

There had to be a scale somewhere—the scale of stars, the scale of far-off cosmic super-beings—upon which we ourselves, we humans with our cities and bridges and subterranean markets, would look like the lactobacilli and the yeast.

It was a fungal party hellscape.

I told them both I didn’t have time for this bullshit, and if anybody wanted to ask a lady out, he could do it via text message like a normal person.

On top of the city with my Loises all around me, I felt a tremor of something. Was it possible? I had become interesting.

The house was large and deeply lived-in, all the shelves and surfaces stacked with books and boxes, framed pictures, old greeting cards set up like tent cities...Every single surface told a story. A long one. With digressions.

The menu charmed me, and as a result, my night, and my life, bent off on a different track.

yeast, which is a fungus, and lactobacillus, a bacteria. They eat flour—its sugars—and poop out acid—thus, sour—

Did I see faces? I did not see faces. The power outlet looked like a little dude, but power outlets always look like little dudes.

And even if I fail-this is always the archivist's consolation-perhaps I will have laid a foundation for someone wiser.

In your message, you told me about your family, how you don’t have any traditions. The first time I read that, it made me sad, but then I thought about it for a while and started to feel jealous. Lois, think about it! No one cares if your restaurant has tables. You can build robots, or bake bread, or do something else entirely. You’re unencumbered by culture. You’re... light!

On both sides, they've failed us...of course, we know about the industrialists. Their corn syrup and cheese product. Their factory farms ringed by rivers of blood and shit, blazing bonfires of disease barely contained by antibiotic blankets. These are among the most disgusting scenes in the history of this planet... But on the other side...the organic farms, the precious restaurants...these are toy supply chains. 'Farm to table,' they say. Well. When you go from farm to table, you leave a lot of people out...I think more poorly of these people than I do of the industrialists, because they know better. They know it's all broken, and what do they do? They plant vegetables in the backyard.

The internet: always proving that you’re not quite as special as you suspected

The loaf had a face. It was an illusion, of course. Jesus Christ in an English muffin. It’s called pareidolia. Humans see faces in everything. Even so, the illusion was

She was on her fifth espresso and seemed finally to have found her equilibrium.

I’ll attach the album. I like some tracks better than others (it gets oonce-y...), but mostly, I’m proud of my brother for making something that’s truly his.

I felt the disorientation of a generous offer that in no way lines up with anything you want to do: like a promotion to senior alligator wrestler, or an all-expenses-paid trip to Gary, Indiana.

I could see why [Candide] appealed to Charlotte Clingstone. It was a rejection of ambition, a blueprint for her small, perfect, human-scale restaurant-- a safe space set apart from the scrum of the world.

At General Dexterity, I was contributing to an effort to make repetitive labor obsolete. After a trainer in the Task Acquisition Center taught an arm how to do something, all the arms did it perfectly, forever, In other words, you solved a problem once, and then you moved on to other more interesting things. Baking, by contrast, was solving the same problem over and over again, because every time, the solution was consumed. I mean, really: chewed and digested. Thus, the problem was ongoing. Thus, the problem was perhaps the point.

Is it an eggageration to say Clement Soup and Sourdough saved me? At night, instead of fitfully reviewing the day's error while my stomach swam and churned, I... fell asleep. My course steadied. I had taken on ballast in the form of spicy broth and fragrant bread and, maybe, two new friends, or sort-of-friends, or something.

Compaq Lois spoke. Her voice was not kind or coddling, but stern. “Do you like your job?” My hesitation answered for me. “I know I have strong opinions about everything—I can’t help it, I do—but this one’s the strongest. I waited too long to get out of that office. Much too long. I weep for those years.” The seriousness of her statement quieted the room.

One Friday, after a particularly shattering day at the office, in which my code reviews had all come back red with snotty comments, and my manager, Peter, had gently inquired about the pace of my refactoring ("perhaps not sufficiently turbo-charged"), I arrived home in a swirl of angst, with petulance and self-recrimination locked in ritual combat to determine which would ruin my night. On the phone with Beoreg, I ordered my food with a rattling sigh, and when his brother arrived at my door, he carried something different: a more compact tub containing a fiery red broth and not one but two slabs of bread for dipping. "Secret spicy," he whispered. The soup was so hot it burned the frustration out of my, and I went to bed feeling like a fresh plate, scalded and scraped clean.

I could start with the starter.

Scattered in the foreground were various signifiers of bohemian tranquility: a guitar, a surfboard, a book with VOLTAIRE on the spine. It's always new and astonishing when it’s yours. A market in the Bay Area needs, at minimum, three things. It needs fancy coffee, weird honey, and sourdough bread.

we are the children of Hogwarts, and more than anything, we just want to be sorted.

Or we could try feeding it Slurry,” Jaina Mitra said, and Dr. Klamath nodded gamely. Would the Clement Street starter eat Slurry? Possibly. Would its farts be as fragrant as mine had been? Probably.

They're just bacteria. They don't think or plan. They just...exist.' 'Just exist? They do things we only dream of. They are fecund and potent, they can speak to one another with chemicals and light, they can form teams -- oh, the teams they can form. Millions strong, all working together perfectly. If we could cooperate like that -- if we could even get close-- we would have all of our problems solved.

You went to Greenland...on purpose," Naz said.

Inside, I found a middle-aged woman sitting on a stool behind a countertop, absorbed in a Thomas Pynchon novel.

the Pacific, and the Spanish sent tomatoes to Italy

Garrett’s in love with you.” “Arjun’s in love with you.” I told them both I didn’t have time for this bullshit, and if anybody wanted to ask a lady out, he could do it via text message like a normal person.

I was drunk and tired and happy. More than happy: delighted. Proud of myself—not just for making the bread, but for sharing it, and for making a few friends, even if they were all programmers and Loises. Maybe programmers and Loises are all you need.

Thwack, crack, pull—after only a few attempts, I could do it as neatly as my faceless tutor. Thwack, crack, pull. There’s a technical term for this: “one-shot learning.” You see something once; you can do it. Programmers who work on artificial intelligence and robot locomotion regard it with nearly mystical awe. Having mastered the elegant, one-handed egg-crack in if not one, then maybe three shots, I set myself to the deeper task of understanding it.

Now I created a module from whole cloth. It was concise, not even a hundred lines of code, built in perfect symmetry around a single action. One by one, in exactly the right order, I suspended the arm’s motor control loops. Then I loaded the action directly into the PKD 2891 Stepper Motors, which most people didn’t realize you could do; they all had their own MCUs, with just enough memory for what came next. Then, one by one, I brought the motor control loops back online. I finished my new module, named it, tried to compile, was informed of several embarrassing syntax errors, corrected them, compiled again. I flashed the Vitruvian with the new code and said aloud, “Try again.” It plucked up an egg, moved it lightly into position, paused, and thwacked the egg against the rim of the bowl. Just after the thwack, my new module took over. The motor control loops went dark. The arm wasn’t running blind; it was more like … a blink. Not even a hundred milliseconds, during which my new module said: Just go for it. In the ArmOS codebase, as part of the Control package, I had created something new—a tiny space without feedback or self-awareness—and I had named it Confidence. The yolk flowed out with the albumen while the shell came apart cleanly in the Vitruvian’s six-fingered grip. The arm swiveled and dropped the shell neatly into the small bowl I had set up for that purpose—the bowl that had never before this moment actually been needed. I had solved the egg problem, and I had done so in the simplest way possible: not by adding code, but by taking it away. During the blink, the Vitruvian was no longer caught in a wash of continuous feedback. It was no longer second-guessing its second guesses a thousand times every second.

There’s something you need to know,” Arjun hissed as I was walking out of the HR debrief. “There’s something you need to know,” Garrett whispered as I was preparing for the Proprioception handoff. “Garrett’s in love with you.” “Arjun’s in love with you.” I told them both I didn’t have time for this bullshit, and if anybody wanted to ask a lady out, he could do it via text message like a normal person.

Culture,” he said. “The word meant this—making cheese—before it meant that—art and opera. And before it meant anything, it just meant working the land. That’s a better definition. That’s who we are. Not our music, our books. Psh, books. They’re all dead. We’re alive. We eat, we grow. But, but but but, here’s the thing! We’re amateurs.

These are Meyer lemons,” Horace said as we passed the trees. “Named for Frank Nicholas Meyer. Dutch by birth, but an agent of the United States government. He worked for the Department of Agriculture’s Office of Seed and Plant Introduction before the First World War. I thought of him when Jaina Mitra spoke of her microbial survey. Meyer and his cohort were hunters for larger prey. They canvassed the world and sent back living samples of plants thought to be useful to the advancement of the American economy. Meyer worked in China. He sent the first soybean to America. And persimmons! Any persimmon grown in this country today comes from that lineage. And of course, there are these lemons—named for him. Meyer died in China. He drowned in the Yangtze, pushed from a riverboat.

On both sides, they’ve failed us,” the fish said. “Of course, we know about the industrialists. Their corn syrup and cheese product. Their factory farms ringed by rivers of blood and shit, blazing bonfires of disease barely contained by antibiotic blankets. These are among the most disgusting scenes in the history of this planet.

Here’s a thing I believe about people my age: we are the children of Hogwarts, and more than anything, we just want to be sorted. Sitting there in my car in the little parking lot behind Crowley Control Systems on West 10 Mile Road in Southfield, my world cracked open a tiny bit.

The depot was wreathed in gentle effort. It percolated.

It is no small thing to change a culture,” Horace said simply. “But I think interesting things are growing here. Lucrative enterprises. Provocative tastes.

The internet: always proving that you’re not quite as special as you suspected.

Scoping myself out in my standup mirror, I turned and gently twerked.

Maybe that was my great weakness: if a task was even mildly challenging, any sense of injustice drained away and I simply worked quietly until I was done.

She was suddenly sweet and solicitous, and it was very strange. She should have stayed sharp and brusque. She should have commanded: Let me work with that muck of yours! I would have complied in a moment.

I returned to the airfield the next day because the others had spoken the truth: Agrippa was a genius. Maybe also an asshole. But I believed he had something to teach me; I believed he understood the starter in a way that I didn’t, or couldn’t.

At Crowley Control Systems in Southfield, the message we received from Clark Crowley, delivered in an amble around the office every month or so, was: Keep up the fine work folks! At General Dexterity in San Francisco, the message we received from Andrei, delivered in a quantitative business update every Tuesday and Thursday, was: We are on a mission to remake the conditions of human labor, so push harder, all of you. I began to wonder if, in fact, I knew how to push hard. In Michigan, my family all had families and extremely serious hobbies. Here, the wraiths were stripped bare: human-shaped generators of CAD and code.

I looked down at the loaves on the baking stone, which, just as before, carried in their crusts the overwhelming illusion of dark eyes, upturned noses, fissured mouths. Upon closer inspection, these faces were different from the last loaf's. They were disturbing. Their eyes squinted merrily and their mouths curled into ragged, jack-o'-lantern grins. The bread knife was the solution to all my problems. I sawed and sawed and sawed until the faces were no more.

He pressed his lips together and I saw the muscles of his jaw working. This was Peter's being-a-manager face. It meant he was figuring out how to help you.

There was more to upgrade. I went to a shop in downtown Oakland that sold salt of every kind and color, black and pink and blue. Each variety sat shimmering in a glass canister, priced by the ounce, with a handwritten card recounting its biography: here, salt from the beaches of Gujarat; there, salt from the pans of Brittany; behold, salt from the suburbs of Portland. I backed slowly out the door. I would stick with Diamond Crystal.

I agree," Mona said. As if she had any choice.

As I was doing this, I was also reading the book that Charlotte Clingstone had selected from Horace's library and left for me, Candide-- her cafe's namesake. It was, unexpectedly, a screwball action comedy. The hapless main character, whose name was Candide, travelled with a band of companions from Europe to the New World and back. Along the way, characters were flogged, ship-wrecked, enslaved and nearly executed several times. There were earthquakes and tsunamis and missing body parts. One of Candide's companions, Pangloss, whose name I recognized from the hundred-dollar adjective he inspired-- I'd never known the etymology-- insisted throughout that all their misfortunes were for the best, for they delivered the companions into situations that seemed, at first, pretty good. Until those situations, too, went to shit. The story concluded on a small farm outside Istanbul, where Candide plunked a hoe into the dirt and declared his intention to retreat from adventure (and suffering) and simply tend his garden. The way the author told it-- the book was written in 1959-- it was clear I was supposed to think Candide had finally discovered something important.

I’m sure you like your work here,” Kate said. “I have no idea what you do. No, please don’t try to explain it. But I feel like I have to tell you, for what it’s worth … feeding people is really freakin’ great. There’s nothing better.