Unreal Game Quotes

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things..

Oh, Neil, unpredictable as he is unreal.

In marching, in mobs, in football games, and in war, outlines become vague; real things become unreal and a fog creeps over the mind. Tension and excitement, weariness, movement--all merge in one great gray dream, so that when it is over, it is hard to remember how it was when you killed men or ordered them to be killed. Then other people who were not there tell you what it was like and you say vaguely, "yes, I guess that's how it was.

Among all the occurrences possible in the universe the a priori probability of any particular one of them verges upon zero. Yet the universe exists; particular events must take place in it, the probability of which (before the event) was infinitesimal. At the present time we have no legitimate grounds for either asserting or denying that life got off to but a single start on earth, and that, as a consequence, before it appeared its chances of occurring were next to nil. ... Destiny is written concurrently with the event, not prior to it... The universe was not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game. Is it surprising that, like the person who has just made a million at the casino, we should feel strange and a little unreal?

What kind of shit was I? I could certainly play some nasty, unreal games. What was my motive? Was I trying to get even for something? Could I keep on telling myself that it was merely a matter of research, a simple study of the female? I was simply letting things happen without thinking about them. I wasn't considering anything but my own selfish, cheap pleasure. I was like a spoiled high school kid. I was worse than any whore; a whore took your money and nothing more. I tinkered with lives and souls as if they were playthings. How could I call myself a man? How could I write poems? What did I consist of? I was a bush-league de Sade, without his intellect. A murderer was more straightforward and honest than I was. Or a rapist. I didn't want my soul played with, mocked, pissed on; I knew that much at any rate. I was truly no good. I could feel it as I walked up and down on the rug. No good. The worst part of it was that I passed myself off for exactly what I wasn't - a good man. I was able to enter people's lives because of their trust in me. I was doing my dirty work the easy way. I was writing The Love Tale of the Hyena.

A vision had seized hold of me, like the demented fury of a hound that has sunk its teeth into the leg of a deer carcass and is shaking and tugging at the downed game so frantically that the hunter gives up trying to calm him. It was the vision of a large steamship scaling a hill under its own steam, working its way up a steep slope in the jungle, while above this natural landscape, which shatters the weak and the strong with equal ferocity, soars the voice of Caruso, silencing all the pain and all the voices of the primeval forest and drowning out all birdsong. To be more precise: bird cries, for in this setting, left unfinished and abandoned by God in wrath, the birds do not sing; they shriek in pain, and confused trees tangle with one another like battling Titans, from horizon to horizon, in a steaming creation still being formed. Fog-panting and exhausted they stand in this unreal misery - and I, like a stanza in a poem written in an unknown foreign tongue, am shaken to the core.

The believability of virtuality is oft superior to the unrealness of reality

I felt a sudden momentary sense of unreality, as if the play yard, with its black asphalt floor and its white base lines, were my entire world now, as if all the previous years of my life had led me somehow to this one ball game, and all the future years of my life would depend upon its outcome. I stood there for a moment, holding the glasses in my hand and feeling frightened. Then I took a deep breath, and the feeling passed. It's only a ball game, I told myself. What's a ball game?

Elaine (de Kooning) wrote, "For the bureaucrat, reality is found in . . .the radio with the advertisements that make claims that he accepts a s false. Reality is the baseball game, Hollywood, Washington, D.C. Reality is conspicuous consumption. All of this in short, is the reality that someone else has made for him. This to the artist is unreality . . .

It is perplexing to wonder why we ever leave the here and now. Here and now are the only place and time when one ever enjoys himself or accomplishes anything. Most of our suffering takes place when we allow our minds to imagine the future or mull over the past. Nonetheless, few people are ever satisfied with what is before them at the moment. Our desire that things be different from what they are pulls our minds into an unreal world, and consequently we are less able to appreciate what the present has to offer. Our minds leave the reality of the present only when we prefer the unreality of the past or future.

I’m not gettin’ off, not goin’ away, not playin’ anymore games or wastin’ anymore fuckin’ time. I don’t believe in fate or destiny or any of that bullshit. What I know is that, as far as I can tell, there isn’t another woman I’ve met who fits my life. Who doesn’t care if I get home late after she’s made a special dinner. Who doesn’t have a hemorrhage when I talk about one of my men gettin’ shot, goin’ off about how she feels about my work. You got up and made everyone coffee, for fuck’s sake. You’re a woman who tells me to be careful when I tell her I’m out hunting humans instead of bitchin’ and wantin’ to process how my career choice makes her feel. If an employee walked into their kitchen with a gun and shot at their neighbor, most people would lose their fucking minds. You spent the morning makin’ brownies and the afternoon sleepin’ in the sun. You live hard, play hard and don’t seem to be scared of anything, but manage to keep a softness about you that’s almost unreal. You wanted me to tell you why I’m sure about you, that’s why I’m sure. You grew up and your only parent was a cop. You know the drill. I don’t have any interest in trainin’ someone to get it and I need someone strong enough to live with it. That’s you.

Greek writers of the fifth century B.C. have a way of speaking of, an attitude towards, religion, as though it were wholly a thing of joyful confidence, a friendly fellowship with the gods, whose service is but a high festival for man. In Homer sacrifice is but, as it were, the signal for a banquet of abundant roast flesh and sweet wine; we hear nothing of fasting, of cleansing, and atonement. This we might perhaps explain as part of the general splendid unreality of the heroic saga, but sober historians of the fifth century B.C. express the same spirit. Thucydides is assuredly by nature no reveller, yet religion is to him in the main 'a rest from toil.' He makes Pericles say: 'Moreover we have provided for our spirit very many opportunities of recreation, by the celebration of games and sacrifices throughout the year.

oh neil, as unpredictable as he is unreal. the last time we spoke you were afraid riko would notice you. either you lied to me or you changed your mind. i do hope it’s the latter, because i hate being lied to.” “i didn’t change my mind, but i didn’t have a choice.” “there is always a choice.” “i had to say something.” “and what a thing to say! you took a swing at riko on live tv. he’s not going to take that sitting down, you know. how’s the target on your back?” “familiar.” - andrew & neil

The Greenland fjords are peculiar for the spells of completely quiet weather, when there is not enough wind to blow out a match and the water is like a sheet of glass. The kayak hunter must sit in his boat without stirring a finger so as not to scare the shy seals away. Actually, he can only move his eyes, as even the slightest move otherwise might mean game lost. The sun, low in the sky, sends a glare into his eyes, and the landscape around moves into the realm of the unreal. The reflex from the mirror-like water hypnotizes him, he seems to be unable to move, and all of a sudden it is as if he were floating in a bottomless void, sinking, sinking, and sinking.... Horror-stricken, he tries to stir, to cry out, but he cannot, he is completely paralyzed, he just falls and falls.

Our life is like a journey…’ – and so the journey seems to me less an adventure and a foray into unusual realms than a concentrated likeness of our existence: residents of a city, citizens of country, beholden to a class or a social circle, member of a family and clan and entangled by professional duties, by the habits of an ‘everyday life’ woven from all these circumstances, we often feel too secure, believing our house built for all the future, easily induced to believe in a constancy that makes ageing a problem for one person and each change in external circumstances a catastrophe for another. We forget that this is a process, that the earth is in constant motion and that we too are affected by ebbs and tides, earthquakes and events far beyond our visible and tangible spheres: beggars, kings, figures in the same great game. We forget it for our would-be peace of mind, which then is built on shifting sand. We forget it so as not to fear. And fear makes us stubborn: we call reality only what we can grasp with our hands and what affects us directly, denying the force of the fire that’s sweeping our neighbour’s house, but not yet ours. War in other countries? Just twelve hours, twelve weeks from our borders? God forbid – the horror that sometimes seizes us, you feel it too when reading history books, time or space, it doesn’t matter what lies between us and it. But the journey ever so slightly lifts the veil over the mystery of space – and a city with a magical, unreal name, Samarkand the Golden, Astrakhan or Isfahan, City of Rose Attar, becomes real the instant we set foot there and touch it with our living breath.

The incorporeal newness that so intoxicated the earliest women online has morphed; it has become what the games critic Katherine Cross aptly calls a "Möbius strip of reality and unreality," in which Internet culture "becomes real when it is convenient and unreal when it is not; real enough to hurt people in, unreal enough to justify doing so.

It was many hours before I was cognizant of what we’d done; days (months? hours?) before I began to comprehend the magnitude of it. I suppose we’d simply thought about it too much, talked of it too often, until the scheme ceased to be a thing of the imagination and took on a horrible life of its own… Never, never once in any immediate sense, did it occur to me that any of this was anything but a game. An air of unreality suffused even the most workaday details, as if we were plotting not the death of a friend but the itinerary of a fabulous trip that I, for one, never quite believed we’d ever really take.

We celebrate the dedication of Olympic athletes who diet and train and exercise daily for years in order to prepare for the games. They give up not only physical comfort but also any hope of a normal social and family life. When police officers or firefighters die, often thousands turn out for their funerals. We honor our children who die in military service in much the same way—often arranging public ceremonies and holidays. We expect television celebrities such as actors, news correspondents and musicians to sacrifice any kind of normal life in order to entertain us around the clock—and they are paid millions of dollars to do so. The names of astronauts become household words because they risk their lives in order to forward the conquest of space. But the minute a Christian young person starts to fast and pray, consider the mission field or give up career or romance for Christ—concerned counselors, family and friends will spend hours trying to keep him or her from “going off the deep end on this religious stuff.” Even devout Christian parents will oppose Christian service when their own son or daughter is about to give up all for Christ. Discipline, pain, sacrifice and suffering are rewarded with fame and fortune in the world. Why then do we refuse to accept it as a normal part of giving spiritual birth in the kingdom of our Lord?

As I took off the rumpled sheets, the smell of the people who had slept in them would lift up into the air. There was the round, almost sweet sweat smell of a child who had spent a day happily exploring, or the sharper-edged odor of one who'd gone to bed unhappy. With the bigger beds, I came to understand the way the scents of two people could mingle as effortlessly as rainwater, and to recognize the times they stayed apart, the smells resolutely separate. Sometimes there were those unreal perfumes, jumbling and talking too loudly- but underneath them I could always find the person. Sadness, like the dark purple juice of a blackberry. Fear, like the metallic taste of an oncoming storm. Love, which smelled like nothing so much as fresh bread. In an odd way, the game wasn't that different from reading the smells of our island. Scents were always about what was growing and what was dying. What would last through the next season. This was just with people instead of trees or flowers or dirt.

In front of the mound: a mile of naked strangers. In groups of twenty, like smokes, they are directed to the other side by a man with a truncheon and a whip. It will not help to ink in his face. Several men with barrows collect clothes. There are young women still with attractive breasts. There are family groups, many small children crying quietly, tears oozing from their eyes like sweat. In whispers people comfort one another. Soon, they say. Soon. No one wails and no one begs. Arms mingle with other arms like fallen limbs, lie like shawls across bony shoulders. A loose gray calm descends. It will be soon . . . soon. A grandmother coos at the infant she cuddles, her gray hair hiding all but the feet. The baby giggles when it’s chucked. A father speaks earnestly to his son and points at the heavens where surely there is an explanation; it is doubtless their true destination. The color of the sky cannot be colored in. So the son is lied to right up to the last. Father does not cup his boy’s wet cheeks in his hands and say, You shall die, my son, and never be remembered. The little salamander you were frightened of at first, and grew to love and buried in the garden, the long walk to school your legs learned, what shape our daily life, our short love, gave you, the meaning of your noisy harmless games, every small sensation that went to make your eager and persistent gazing will be gone; not simply the butterflies you fancied, or the bodies you yearned to see uncovered—look, there they are: the inner thighs, the nipples, pubes—or what we all might have finally gained from the toys you treasured, the dreams you peopled, but especially your scarcely budded eyes, and that rich and gentle quality of consciousness which I hoped one day would have been uniquely yours like the most subtle of flavors—the skin, the juice, the sweet pulp of a fine fruit—well, son, your possibilities, as unrealized as the erections of your penis—in a moment—soon—will be ground out like a burnt wet butt beneath a callous boot and disappear in the dirt. Only our numbers will be remembered—not that you or I died, but that there were so many of us. And that we were.

Dear troubles, my amigo Accolades to your valour and vigour in battling Me. Though each time you have lost the crusade, your persistent effort in drubbing me down with tiresome regularity, is remarkable. Sadly your trials have all been clunkers, and your lingering rage at being unceremoniously busted by snippy woman storm trooper inside me to boot is axiomatic. I know it’s not your fault, fighting me is not a cake walk. You can’t quash my acquaintance with the strategic moves you make, or the unreal-fleeting bonds you break. I am rather familiar with aimless, exasperated steps you take and that Duchenne smile you fake. I can, for sure, guess any rare cryptic word you say or sinister cat and mouse game you play. My dear old stinging Gordian’s Knot, I love the way you have always tailed me, but to your dismay I guess I was always ahead of the curve. My love, my darling, quandary little Catch-22, I suggest you kill me now, shoot me now, show no mercy bury me deep, deport me to hellhole, coz I have right to die. Hang me and close me in a gas chamber, entomb me and put my soul in a bottle, cap it tight and throw it in the deep sea. Get rid of me else if slightest of me comes back then my lovely, ‘stumbling hornets nest’, you are bound to fizzle out and evanesce into nothingness. Run, I say, run now and never return, you know I am kinda tried and tested………..

Ok, this farmer is driving down the road in his truck and he comes to a state cop in the middle of the road with the blue flashing and everything, and the farmer asks, What's the problem, Officer? The cop looks worried and nods on ahead where this pig is sitting right in the middle of the road-big damn pig- and the cop says, Got a problem with this pig in the road. So the farmer says, Hmmm. And the cop says, Hey I got an idea, Why don't we load this pig into your truck and then you take him to the zoo? And the farmer says, Well, I reckon we could do that. So they load they pig into the farmer's truck and off the farmer drives and that's that. So the next day the cop is out there on the road again because that is his usual speed trap, and who do you think drives by? The farmer--and sitting right next to him in the cab is the pig. And the pig's wearing a baseball hat! The farmer and the pig just go cruising by. So the cop shakes off the unreality of the whole situation, fires up the blue flashing light and sirens and gets scratch in 3 gears tearing out after the farmer, and caught up pretty soon and pulls the farmer over and walks up to the truck. The farmer looks real casual and says, Yessir. The cop says, Hey, I thought I told you to take that pig to the zoo! And the farmer says, I did! We had a good time, too, so today I thought we'd go to the ball game. HA! HA! HA!

I. The Burial of the Dead April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. [...] (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you, I will show you fear in a handful of dust. [...] Unreal City, Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many. [...] II. A Game of Chess [...] Under the firelight, under the brush, her hair Spread out in fiery points Glowed into words, then would be savagely still. III. The Fire Sermon [...] The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers, Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed. [...] At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights Her stove, and lays out food in tins. [...] I Tiresias, old man with dugs Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest-- I too awaited the expected guest. [...] IV. Death by Water [...] A current under sea Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell He passed the stages of his age and youth Entering the whirlpool. [...] V. What the Thunder Said [...] A woman drew her long black hair out tight And fiddled whisper music on those strings And bats with baby faces in the violet light Whistled, and beat their wings And crawled head downward down a blackened wall And upside down in air were towers Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.

Unreal chats For the drizzle my "I am" is a toy death. When the drizzle wants to be here, where the earth is earth and the sky is heaven, it comes to me. Only in my "I am" the drizzle can boast that she does not need me to rejoin herself But that's what the drizzle does. And I follow your game. And with open pores we liquidate each other without haste.

Rather than concentrating on fast action and unreal scenarios, some arcade games replicate a mundane real-life experience as closely as possible. This allows the player to fantasize about living a different life, an alluring concept in a country where lifetime employment with one company is the norm and career change is very rare.

BOOKS/AUTHORS ON THE BACKS OF LIBRARY CARDS #1 Miguel Fernandez Incident at Hawk’s Hill by Allan W. Eckert/ No, David! by David Shannon #2 Akimi Hughes One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish by Dr. Seuss/Nine Stories by J. D. Salinger #3 Andrew Peckleman Six Days of the Condor by James Grady/ Eight Cousins by Louisa May Alcott #4 Bridgette Wadge Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume/ Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling #5 Sierra Russell The Egypt Game by Zilpha Keatley Snyder/ The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin #6 Yasmeen Smith-Snyder Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne/The Yak Who Yelled Yuck by Carol Pugliano-Martin #7 Sean Keegan Olivia by Ian Falconer/Unreal! by Paul Jennings #8 Haley Daley Turtle in Paradise by Jennifer L. Holm/ A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle #9 Rose Vermette All-of-a-Kind Family by Sydney Taylor/ Scat by Carl Hiaasen #10 Kayla Corson Anna to the Infinite Power by Mildred Ames/Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein #11 UNKNOWN/CHARLES CHILTINGTON #12 Kyle Keeley I Love You, Stinky Face by Lisa McCourt/ The Napping House by Audrey

Life is like a game; strive to be the boss, not just an NPC.

Shamanism is a mode of action entailing a mode of knowl­edge, or, rather, a certain ideal of knowledge. In certain respects, this ideal is diametrically opposed to the objectivist epistemol­ogy encouraged by Western modernity. The latter's telos is pro­vided by the category of the object: to know is to objectify by distinguishing between what is intrinsic to the object and what instead belongs to the knowing subject, which has been inevitably and illegitimately projected onto the object. To know is thus to desubjectify, to render explicit the part of the subject present in the object in order to reduce it to an ideal minimum (and/or to amplify it with a view to obtaining spectacular critical effects). Subjects, just like objects, are regarded as the results of a process of objectification: the subject constitutes or recognizes itself in the object it produces, and knows itself objectively when it succeeds in seeing itself "from the outside" as a thing. Our epistemologi­cal game, then, is objectification; what has not been objectified simply remains abstract or unreal. The form of the Other is the thing. Amerindian shamanism is guided by the inverse ideal: to know is to "personify," to take the point of view of what should be known or, rather, the one whom should be known. The key is to know, in Guimaraes Rosa's phrase, "the who of things," with­ out which there would be no way to respond intelligently to the question of "why." The form of the Other is the person.

Shamanism is a mode of action entailing a mode of knowl­ edge, or, rather, a certain ideal of knowledge. In certain respects, this ideal is diametrically opposed to the objectivist epistemol­ ogy encouraged by Western modernity. The latter's telos is pro­ vided by the category of the object: to know is to objectify by distinguishing between what is intrinsic to the object and what instead belongs to the knowing subject, which has been inevitably and illegitimately projected onto the object. To know is thus to desubjectify, to render explicit the part of the subject present in the object in order to reduce it to an ideal minimum (and/or to amplify it with a view to obtaining spectacular critical effects). Subjects, just like objects, are regarded as the results of a process ofobjectification: the subject constitutes or recognizes itselfin the object it produces, and knows itself objectively when it succeeds in seeing itself "from the outside" as a thing. Our epistemologi­ cal game, then, is objectification; what has not been objectified simply remains abstract or unreal. The form of the Other is the thing. Amerindian shamanism is guided by the inverse ideal: to know is to "personify," to take the point of view of what should be known or, rather, the one whom should be known. The key is to know, in Guimaraes Rosa's phrase, "the who of things," with­ out which there would be no way to respond intelligently to the question of"why." The form ofthe Other is the person.

This is the sort of thing we accepted as normal. Yet for all of us there were moments when the game we were all agreeing to play simply could not stand up to events: we would be gripped by feelings of unreality, like nausea. Perhaps this feeling, that the ground was dissolving under our feet, was the real enemy… or we believed it to be so. Perhaps our tacit agreement that nothing much— or at least nothing irrecoverable— was happening was because for us the enemy was Reality, was to allow ourselves to know what was happening.

But of course, the most important trick in beating the S-chool game is to know that it is a game, as abstract, unreal, and useless as chess, and that beating it is a trick. The game is important only because (as with chess) there are rewards for playing it well, and (unlike chess) penalties for playing it badly. This is something that almost all successful students know, almost by instinct. I sensed it at ten, and knew it thoroughly and consciously by the time I was thirteen.

The universe was not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game. Is it any wonder if, like the person who has just made a million at the casino, we feel strange and a little unreal?

Sports are among the increasingly rare moments of totally unscripted television. The human element informs everything, in confounding and inconsistent ways. And since these are only games, and since all games are ultimately exhibitions, the stakes are always low. Any opinion is viable. Any argument can be made. It’s a free, unreal reality. Yet everything about the trajectory of analytics pushes us away from this. The goal of analytics is to quantify the non-negotiable value of every player and to mathematically dictate which strategic decisions present the highest likelihood of success; the ultimate goal, it seems, would be to predict the exact score of every game before it happens and to never be surprised by anything. I don’t see this as an improvement. The problem with sports analytics is not that they are flawed; the problem is that they are accurate, to the benefit of almost no one. It’s being right for the sake of being right, in a context where there was never any downside to being wrong. The fact that my twelve-year-old self would have loved this only strengthens my point.

[...] 'other people provide me with my existence'. On his own, he feels that he is empty and nobody. 'I can't feel real unless there is someone there.... ' Nevertheless, he cannot feel at ease with another person, because he feels as 'in danger' with others as by himself. He is, therefore, driven compulsively to seek company, but never allows himself to 'be himself in the presence of anyone else. He avoids social anxiety by never really being with others. He never quite says what he means or means what he says. The part he plays is always not quite himself. He takes care to laugh when he thinks a joke is not funny, and look bored when he is amused. He makes friends with people he does not really like and is rather cool to those with whom he would 'really' like to be friends. No one, therefore, really knows him, or understands him. He can be himself in safety only in isolation, albeit with a sense of emptiness and unreality. With others, he plays an elaborate game of pretence and equivocation. His social self is felt to be false and futile. What he longs for most is the possibility of 'a moment of recognition', but whenever this by chance occurs, when he has by accident 'given himself away', he is covered in confusion and suffused with panic.

IN THE 1970S, not long before he died, the sci-fi writer Phil Dick moved into an apartment in Orange County a few miles from Disneyland, an irony not lost on him. There he wrote a perfect summary of his dread about the transformation of American society and culture as the real and unreal became indistinguishable. “We have fiction mimicking truth, and truth mimicking fiction. We have a dangerous overlap, a dangerous blur. And in all probability it is not deliberate. In fact, that is part of the problem.” I can’t do better, so I’ll quote him at length. The problem is a real one, not a mere intellectual game. Because today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups—and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener…. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes…. I consider that the matter of defining what is real—that is a serious topic, even a vital topic. And in there somewhere is the other topic, the definition of the authentic human. Because the bombardment of pseudo-realities begins to produce inauthentic humans very quickly, spurious humans—as fake as the data pressing at them from all sides….Fake realities will create fake humans. Or, fake humans will generate fake realities and then sell them to other humans, turning them, eventually, into forgeries of themselves. So we wind up with fake humans inventing fake realities and then peddling them to other fake humans. It is just a very large version of Disneyland.

The insatiable need for more processing power -- ideally, located as close as possible to the user but, at the very least, in nearby indus­trial server farms -- invariably leads to a third option: decentralized computing. With so many powerful and often inactive devices in the homes and hands of consumers, near other homes and hands, it feels inevitable that we'd develop systems to share in their mostly idle pro­cessing power. "Culturally, at least, the idea of collectively shared but privately owned infrastructure is already well understood. Anyone who installs solar panels at their home can sell excess power to their local grid (and, indirectly, to their neighbor). Elon Musk touts a future in which your Tesla earns you rent as a self-driving car when you're not using it yourself -- better than just being parked in your garage for 99% of its life. "As early as the 1990s programs emerged for distributed computing using everyday consumer hardware. One of the most famous exam­ples is the University of California, Berkeley's SETl@HOME, wherein consumers would volunteer use of their home computers to power the search for alien life. Sweeney has highlighted that one of the items on his 'to-do list' for the first-person shooter Unreal Tournament 1, which shipped in 1998, was 'to enable game servers to talk to each other so we can just have an unbounded number of players in a single game session.' Nearly 20 years later, however, Sweeney admitted that goal 'seems to still be on our wish list.' "Although the technology to split GPUs and share non-data cen­ter CPUs is nascent, some believe that blockchains provide both the technological mechanism for decentralized computing as well as its economic model. The idea is that owners of underutilized CPUs and GPUs would be 'paid' in some cryptocurrency for the use of their processing capabilities. There might even be a live auction for access to these resources, either those with 'jobs' bidding for access or those with capacity bidding on jobs. "Could such a marketplace provide some of the massive amounts of processing capacity that will be required by the Metaverse? Imagine, as you navigate immersive spaces, your account continuously bidding out the necessary computing tasks to mobile devices held but unused by people near you, perhaps people walking down the street next to you, to render or animate the experiences you encounter. Later, when you’re not using your own devices, you would be earning tokens as they return the favor. Proponents of this crypto-exchange concept see it as an inevitable feature of all future microchips. Every computer, no matter how small, would be designed to be auctioning off any spare cycles at all times. Billions of dynamically arrayed processors will power the deep compute cycles of event the largest industrial customers and provide the ultimate and infinite computing mesh that enables the Metaverse.

This is the thing about drugs–if you have never taken them, you might have been led to believe that they take you to an unreal state, where things suddenly feel magical and crazy and wild. In fact, they do the exact opposite, and take you to a state where everything suddenly feels absolutely real and normal, in a way that things never do in so-called real life.

The English word 'illusion' is almost always used as a translation for the Eastern word 'maya'. Ordinarily, the word 'illusion' means unreal, but that is not its true meaning. It comes from a Latin root, ludere, which means to play.'Illusion' simply means a play, and that is the real meaning of maya. Maya does not mean illusory; it simply means playful: God is playing with Himself. Of course, He was nobody except Himself, so He is playing a hide-and-seek with Himself. He hides one of His hands and tries to find it with another hand, knowing all the time where it is.

There was something about this that felt completely unreal, like every fucking fantasy he'd ever had was coming true in this tempting form. He'd never had any doubt that she was made for him, but she proved it every day.

In marching, in mobs, in football games, and in war, outlines become vague; real things become unreal and a fog creeps over the mind. Tension and excitement, weariness, movement—all merge in one great gray dream, so that when it is over, it is hard to remember how it was when you killed men or ordered them to be killed. Then other people who were not there tell you what it was like and you say vaguely, “Yes, I guess that’s how it was.

the reason I took it apart. I got angry every time I looked at it after he died. I put another piece of tangerine in my mouth and reroute my thoughts. “I can’t believe she’ll be five.” Grace sighs. “I know. Unreal. Unfair.” Patrick pops into the kitchen and tousles my hair like I’m not almost thirty and three inches taller than him. “Hey, kid.” He reaches around me and grabs one of the tangerines. “Did Grace tell you we can’t make the game today?” “I haven’t yet,” Grace says. She rolls her eyes, her annoyed gaze landing on me. “My sister is in the hospital. Elective surgery, she’s fine, but we have to drive to her house and feed her cats.” “What’s she getting done this time?” Grace waves a hand at her face. “Something with her eyes. Who knows? She’s five years older than me, but looks

The Oxford scholar and apologist C. S. Lewis, whose spirit will accompany us through this book, once closed a lecture to a group of apologists like this: 'I have found that nothing is more dangerous to one’s own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as the one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate. For a moment, you see, it has seemed to rest on oneself: as a result when you go away from the debate, it seems no stronger than that weak pillar.' Lewis understood what it was like to know an argument like the back of your hand and win with it. But he also understood what it was like to still be haunted by lingering questions: What if I’ve missed something? Am I just playing intellectual games?

We were spying, pure and simple, with cover from Trinidadian leaders. It felt bizarre—unreal—to be observing what people were watching on a tiny, faraway island, somehow more like we were playing a video game than intruding on the private lives of actual people. Even today, thinking back on it, Trinidad seems more like a dream than something we actually did. But we did do it. The Trinidad project was the first time I got sucked into a situation that was grossly unethical, and, frankly, it triggered in me a state of denial

If a light hits a surface, bounces off, and continues to travel without ever hitting another surface, UE4 continues to process the light until it leaves the level. To minimize this processing, you can set Lightmass Importance Volume to define the area beyond which the light is no longer processed

Who can say when subversive play will subvert its own rules? Sometimes a jester's wit might cut too close to the bone and the king would lop off his head. The uncertainty — that straddling of the boundaries of real and unreal — is a source of the peculiar emotional power of subversive play.

The moment you treat math as an abstraction, as unreal, as manmade, as a branch of logic, as a technical game, as a bunch of axioms, as some mere formalism, you are lost. Math, ontologically, is energy, and the study of math is the study of the existence, relations, interactions and symmetries of energy. That’s exactly why math can replace science wholesale. Anyone who approaches math as anything other than noumenal, ontological energy – energy in itself – will never get anywhere with relating math to reality.

Prisons exist to hide the fact that the entire system is a jail. Shopping malls conceal the reality that the whole of America is a shopping mall. America is a vast shop. It is not a nation. It does not exist these days to land men on the men and do “the difficult thing”. It exists to shop and do the easy thing. The purpose of America is to create maximum profits for the 1% who run America. Everything is designed to serve that end, and everyone goes along with it. One of the 1% is now the President. The middlemen – the politicians – have been cut out. America creates apparent perimeters around explicitly imaginary domains (such as Disneyland), but the truth is that reality no more exists outside the limits than inside the limits. The effect of the “imaginary” is to conceal the loss of the real. The more energy that America devotes to the imaginary – via Disney, Hollywood, “reality” TV (actually unreality TV), video games, virtual reality, social media, “fake news”, post-truth, and so on – the further the real recedes into the distance. Is it possible for America to return to the real now? Would it even know what the real was? How would it recognize it? America has become hyperreal. It’s not real at all. It is “more real than real” and also “less real than real”, the problem being that “more” and “less” would make sense only if there were a reality to serve as a comparison point. That’s exactly what is lacking.

The atmosphere became more chaotic afterwards as the crowd really began screaming and the officials tried to restore order. It was unreal. I felt like I was in the middle of the movie 'Slap Shot' with the Hanson brothers on a rampage. All this craziness just for a midget house league game!