#so technically it’s not connected to america america since it’s different continents no

[usacountryguide]

Explore 10 stunning natural wonders in United states

You don't have to travel far in the United States to find stunning natural beauty, but some places are simply magical. The country has a land area of approximately 3.8 million square miles, so it should come as no surprise that it has some spectacular scenery so it's time to get your US visa now!

Arches National Park

Arches National Park has the highest density of natural stone arches in the world, with over 2,000 natural stone arches. The park is located in eastern Utah, right next to the Colorado River, and most visitors will spend at least some of their time driving or cycling along the scenic 18-mile road that winds through the park.

Black Canyon of Gunnison

The Black Canyon of Gunnison, natural wonders of the united states, carved out by the Gunnison River over two million years, contains some of North America's steepest and most majestic cliffs and rock spires. Hiking trails suitable for most ages and abilities can be found along the canyon's north and south rims, and those in peak physical condition may be tempted to try one of the extremely strenuous trails that lead down into the inner canyon.

Caddo Lake

Caddo Lake, which straddles the border between Texas and Louisiana, is a great place to boat, fish, canoe, and hunt for geocaches. The lake contains over 70 different species of fish, and canoes and fishing equipment are available for rent in the park. There's plenty to keep visitors entertained for days, and overnight accommodations include 46 campsites and several historical cabins.

Crater lake

Crater Lake, located in south-central Oregon, was formed approximately 7,700 years ago by the collapse of a large volcano. The lake is entirely fed by rain and snow, making it one of the cleanest bodies of water on the planet. It is the deepest lake in the United States and the third deepest in the world.

Denali National Park

Denali National Park is best known for being the home of North America's tallest mountain, Denali Peak (20,310 feet). The first known ascent of the mountain occurred in 1913, and the difficult peak has since drawn mountaineers from all over the world. All climbers must register with the Denali National Park and Preserve at least 60 days before attempting the ascent.

Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore

This, which spans a 65-mile stretch of Lake Michigan's coastline, is best natural wonders in USA for its massive sand dunes perched 400 feet above the lake. Visitors can head up to the sandy bluffs for excellent views of Lake Michigan, admire the views from the seat of a canoe on one of the many inland lakes.

Everglades National Park

Covers 1.5 million acres of wetland on Florida's southern tip, and is made up of mangrove forests, sawgrass marshes, and pine flatwoods. The endangered leatherback turtle and the West Indian manatee are among the many species of flora and fauna found here. The park is accessible via Miami, Everglades City, or Homestead, and park permits can be purchased at any of the three entrances.

The Garden of the Gods

Located in the heart of Colorado Springs, has been designated as a National Natural Landmark since 1971. The park has more than 15 miles of hiking, cycling, and horseback riding trails, including a 1.5-mile paved trail that runs through the park's heart. Other popular activities here include technical rock climbing, Segway or Jeep tours..

Glacier National Park in Montana

Also known as the "Crown of the Continent," is the source of streams that flow all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. No trip to the park is complete without a drive down the Going-to-the-Sun road, which connects the park's east and west sides, but there are also over 700 miles of trails for visitors to enjoy. It is one of the best natural attractions in USA.

The Grand Canyon

It is easily one of the most famous landmark in the USA; stretching 277 miles through the Arizona desert, the colorful canyon is a true natural wonder with numerous recreational opportunities. There are three rims to the canyon: the South Rim, the North Rim, and the West Rim.

#best natural wonders in USA #natural landmarks in the USA

[monstrousroommates]

Raspberry Morbs

(On ao3)

The Christmas season was incredibly busy. Roman’s theatre was putting on a very grand panto, and the Cairnhills wanted him to come to their holiday parties. He was very concerned that they planned to set him up with one of Patricia's friends. Probably the one who loved cerise and arsenic green.  Tiffany? Something like that. She had dark eyes and a strong jaw, leaning towards handsome instead of pretty. Patrica wrote to him about her a lot, about the difficulty she was having with her season, despite her aristocratic connections.  Roman wondered if revealing what he was actually doing with his time would dissuade them. Exactly how much of a social disaster would being an actor be?

Meanwhile, Remy’s correspondence heated up as he wrote back and forth with Johan, or Jean for now, setting things up for him to take his house and small staff back, while at the same time, Remy tried to decide where he was going to go next. He supposed he could get another house in town, or even move to a different part of the country. Either way he’d probably lose Roman’s company. He could go back to France, it had been a while. Maybe he could even sneak by his family’s old home and see which of his sisters had inherited it. 

That didn’t appeal to him in the least, now that he’d thought of it. He couldn’t go back. That wasn’t how it worked. Besides the idea of going back to the continent itched like a healing sunburn. It was a familiar sort of itch. He’d felt it as a teenager, before he’d ended up in the army- not a place Remy was really suited to.  Something was coming. Maybe not soon in a human’s life, but soon enough for him. Besides, a whole new century was coming up quickly. Maybe he should try something really different.  

Remy started a new letter.  Not much would actually happen until after Christmas Time, but letters took a while to get places, even with the RMS ships. 

Remy was sitting in the smoking room, avoiding the crowd at the Christmas party. Ed had invited him since he was hosting it and still considered Remy a good friend, not to mention the best friend of his cousin, and Patrica was showing off a substantial engagement ring, having managed to land a third son from a titled family. As was easily predicted, she was trying to fix up the last of her brother’s bachelor friends with people she knew. Remy was slightly jealous of Ernest who had disappeared head first into academia, and was quite aimed quite happily at confirmed bachelorhood. Remy personally suspected that Louis, Ernest’s man, had an extended relationship with him. At any rate, Ernest wasn’t attending, and Remy was only hiding a little. 

Roman sat down across from Remy ungracefully. Remy looked up from the book he was pretending to read. 

“So, it turns out admitting I’m working as an actor is exactly scandalous enough that they’re worried about me, but not enough for them to abandon me, when they could find me more appropriate employment. And a wife.”

Remy couldn’t help it. He snorted with laughter.

“What would you do with a wife?”

“Give her a good dress allowance, I suppose.” Roman shrugged, and ran his fingers through his hair, making it stand up wildly. “And probably her own bedroom.” He shook his head. “That … sounds familiar somehow.” he grumbled under his breath in a language Remy didn’t speak; probably either Greek or Egyptian, Remy hadn’t bothered to learn the difference between them. 

“Her name is in fact Tiffany, by the way.”  He sighed, and brought his feet up on the couch beside him, a habit Roman only exhibited when he was distracted. “She’s a lovely dancer. Dark hair, dark eyes, good family.” Roman rolled his hand. “Apparently her father was an officer in India, and got himself forcibly married to a local girl. Sort of.” He sighed. “I’m sure if I don’t escape, I’ll get the less romantic version.”  Roman shook his head. “Ah, buggerment, what time is it?” he pulled out his watch. “I’ve got to get off. Would you cover my absence?” 

“I’ll throw a cloth over it.” Remy agreed. “Pussy stays in the sack.” 

“You’re a grand pal.” Roman flashed a winning smile and kissed Remy’s cheek before heading out.  

Technically, bringing a few of their friends out to a Panto wasn’t telling them where Roman was. Remy had already bought the tickets and arranged it ahead of time, so it wasn’t as if he could back out at that late juncture. It was hardly his fault if Roman hadn’t been listening when he told everyone. At least everyone had a good time, and it did Ed some good to cut loose as he used to, even with a wife on his arm.

It was a pretty good show, to boot. 

In late February, Remy had gotten his answers, and was making plans.  Jean would be showing up in the spring, and he’d warned Marié and Albert. While they were both fond of Remy, they appeared to be glad that he’d be returning in their lifetimes, Johan being the one to initially employ them. Beyond that, he was more of a homebody, and there would be a greater staff to the house. Remy took most of his enjoyment outside the house, and had rarely thrown parties, the one where he ‘met’ Roman being something like unusual. 

He was sitting at the desk in his room, glasses off and pinching at his nose. Going far enough he wouldn’t actually need to alter much, but things were bound to be different. 

“Remy?” Roman stuck his head in, and finding his friend came in to sprawl on an armchair.  “You’ve been busy of late.”

“And you?”

Roman sighed. “They hired a new director, and he does not appreciate my talents. I have been shoved from the limelight and given no reason for it!” 

“Dreadful!” Remy shook his head, and rested on his elbow. “Nothing so terrible for me. I’ve been working up to reset.” 

“Ah.” Roman’s face looked a bit sad. “That means you’ll be leaving, doesn’t it?” 

“I’m heading to America.”

“Ah! Quite the change I’m sure. Good plan.” he curled up into the chair for a long moment, then looked up at Remy, and smiled. “... There is theatre in America.”

“Yes?”  Remy put his tinted glasses back on and turned to look at Roman. 

“I’m not quite ready to part your company.” Roman said fondly. “Let’s go together. Besides, I hear the Americans are doing marvelous things with photography.” 

“Are you sure?”

“Better to leave now, before I end up with a wife, or someone notices my continued good looks, hrm?” Roman smiled.  “Ah!” he came to his feet and struck a pose. “I will tell my darling aunt that I have taken her words to heart, and am heading to America to make something more of myself than a mere thespian,” he struck a pose. 

Remy leaned back in his chair and burst into laughter. 

“Tops, Pidge! Let’s do it!” He leapt up himself and gathered Roman into a hug spinning them around. “We’ll take the colonies by storm, the two of us!” 

Roman started laughing as well. 

“It’s my pleasure to continue as your companion!”

“And I won’t even make you travel in a box!” Remy teased, squeezing the other man close. “Owch!” he laughed. “I’m the one who bites things!” he teased.  

“Well you shall suffer the curse of this mummy’s company.”

“A fate worse than death- oh wait.” 

It wasn’t anything Remy had expected, but he was so glad to keep Roman’s friendship.

#Monster AU #TS Remy #ts roman #sanders sides fic

[fatehbaz]

On soil degradation and the use of non-native plants as weapons to change landscapes and sever cultural relationships to land; and on the dramatically under-reported but massive scale of anthropogenic environmental change wrought by early empires and “civilizations” in the Bronze Age, Iron Age, and ancient world (including the Fertile Crescent, Rome, and early China): I didn’t want to add to an already long post.

This is a Roman mosaic, from when Rome controlled Syria, depicting an elephant (presumably the Asian species, Elephas maximus) interacting with a tiger (the Caspian tiger, a distinct subspecies of tiger, lived in Mesopotamia, the shores of the Black Sea, and Anatolia up until the mid-1900s). This mosaic is striking to me, because I guess you could say that this is clear evidence of the higher biodiversity and more-dynamic ecology of the Fertile Crescent in the recent past, until expanding militarism and empire led to extensive devegetation. After all, does the popular consciousness really associate elephants and tigers with the modern-day eastern Mediterranean and Anatolia? Not really. But for the majority of human existence, lions, tigers, elephants, and cheetah were all living alongside each other in Mesopotamia. Pretty cool.

Anyway, I wanted to respond to this:

Which was in response to a thing I posted:

Pina: Thanks for the addition! I don’t know much about the technicality Rome’s devegetation of the Mediterranean periphery, but - like you - I’ve read some cool articles about it, and then forgotten to bookmark them. (I know that I have at least one good article in print form, about Roman devegetation; I’m going to try to find it.) I’m glad you mentioned it!

The first image is in the public domain and depicts a rhino-shaped ritual wine vessel made of bronze, from about 1100 to 1050 BC, during the Shang era. (The piece is housed at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.) The second image is another bronze wine vessel from a site in Shaanxi Province, this time inlaid with gold and hailing from later in history during the Western Han period, about 205 BC to 10 AD. (Photo by Wikimedia user Babel/Stone.) The rhinos in both of these pieces are depicted with two horns, meaning that they likely depict the Sumatran rhinoceros; this is corroborated by the existence of fossil remains of Sumatran rhinos from across China prior to 1000 AD.

On devegetation in the ancient world:

Yes, it feels like the ecological effects of empires prior to the Middle Ages are not just “under-discussed,” but dramatically overlooked. Some “quintessential and iconic African fauna” like lions and cheetahs lived throughout the Fertile Crescent, until devegetation during the late Bronze Age and, a few centuries later, the ascent of Rome. Caspian tigers (a distinct subspecies of tiger) also lived nearby, in Anatolia, the Caucasus, the shores of the Black Sea, and Persia - right up until the 20th century, in fact! (Other iconic species present on the periphery of ancient Mesopotamia were Asian elephants; leopards are still present.) Aside from the devegetation of the Fertile Crescent and the later landscape modifications of Rome, I also don’t see a lot of popular discussion (there is academic discussion, though, obviously) of ecological change in Zhou-era and early imperial China, either. While early Mesopotamia is famous for the amount of social prestige ascribed to irrigators and engineers, who were evidently essential to maintaining the domesticated crops so important to “hydraulic civilization,” early China (apparently) also revered irrigators and engineers. At least according to folklore and written histories, before the Han period, seasonal floods, especially in the Yangtze watershed, would regularly destroy human settlements. Also, there far more tigers, leopards, rhinos, and elephants present; rhinos and elephants lived as far north as the Yellow River until empire really expanded, and the animals lived as far north as the Yangtze River into the European Renaissance era. So, those people with the technical expertise to “tame the wilderness” by damming rivers or calming floodwaters were given prestige and sometimes treated as folk heroes. [Chinese history is not a subject that I really know a lot about. I’m just relaying the observations made in one of the better books on environmental history in East Asia, which is Mark Elvin’s The Retreat of the Elephants - 2006.]

------

On empires’ use of soil degradation to “sever connections to land” and “indirectly” destroy alternative or resisting cultures:

Seems that empire uses ecological degradation to enact a “severing of relations” (in Zoe Todd’s words). Basically: If you destroy somebody’s gardens, then they have to come to you to buy food. Furthermore, destroying someone’s connection to land will also harm their cultural traditions rooted in that land, eliminating a threat to the imperial cultural hegemony and erasing “alternative possibilities and futures” from the collective imaginary. (And destroying the imagination doesn’t just harm the invaded cultures, it also prevents the relatively privileged people living in the metropole or imperial core from “achieving consciousness” or whatever, wherein someone living in 150 AD Rome or 1890s New York City might imagine an alternative system and potentially dismantle the empire from within.)

It’s violence; destroying soil, cutting forests, it’s violence. But when empires destroy soil, they get to maintain a little bit of plausible deniability: “Ohhh, it’s not like we outright killed anybody, we just accidentally degraded the soil and now you can’t grow your own food. Damn, guess you have to rely on our market now, which also means you have to assimilate/integrate into our culture.”

Europe, the US, and the World Bank did this in West Africa after “independence.” They said “oh, yea, sure, we’ll formally liberate you from colonial rule.” But since the palm and sugar plantations were already installed, and many of the ungulate herds of the savanna had already been killed, what were new West African nations supposed to do? Miraculously resurrect the complex web of microorganism lifeforms in the soil? So what the US and its proxies are essentially doing is saying: “If you want loans, you have to keep the plantations and also install supermarkets to sell Coca-Cola.”

Todd: “The Anthropocene as the extension and enactment of colonial logic systematically erases difference, by way of genocide and forced integration and through projects of climate change that imply the radical transformation of the biosphere. Colonialism, especially settler colonialism – which in the Americas simultaneously employed the twinned processes of dispossession and chattel slavery – was always about changing the land, transforming the earth itself, including the creatures, the plants, the soil composition and the atmosphere.” [Heather Davis and Zoe Todd. “On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene.” ACME An International Journal for Critical Geographies. December 2017.]

-----

On the use of non-native plants as a sort of “biological weapon”:

The use of non-native plants and agriculture to enforce colonization and empire is the whole focus of this influential book from Alfred Crosby. (I have some issues/criticisms of some of his work/theories, but his work is generally interesting.) Crosby popularized the term “neo-Europes,” and he proposes that European empires attempted to subjugate the native ecology of landscapes in Turtle Island, Latin America, Australia, etc., while attempting to introduce European species, cattle ranches, pastures, dairy farms, gardens, etc. in an effort to “recreate” a European landscape.

-----

Speaking of Rome’s devegetation of the Mediterranean: One of the famous cases of Roman devegetation that made the rounds recently was that of silphium. A couple of excerpts:

[From: The Original Seed Pod That May Have Inspired the Heart Shape This historical botanical theory has its roots in ancient contraceptive practices.” Cara Giaimo for Atlas Obscure, 13 February 2017.]

Silphium, which once grew rampant in the ancient Greek city of Cyrene, in North Africa, was likely a type of giant fennel, with crunchy stalks and small clumps of yellow flowers. From its stem and roots, it emitted a pungent sap that Pliny the Elder called “among the most precious gifts presented to us by Nature.”

According to the numismatist T.V. Buttrey, exports of the plant and its resins made Cyrene the richest city on the continent at the time. It was so valuable, in fact, that Cyrenians began printing it on their money. Silver coins from the 6th century B.C. are imprinted with images of the plant’s stalk -- a thick column with flowers on top and leaves sticking out -- and its seed pods, which look pretty familiar: 

[End of excerpt.]

Silphium is extinct now. There is a lot of conjecture about what, specifically, caused the extinction. But it looks like the expansion of Rome across the North African coast of the Mediterranean, and Rome’s development leading to soil degradation, is a likely cause.

-----

Thanks @pinabutterjam​  :3

The scale of ecological imperialism’s effects ... planetary, no escape. It’s exhausting.

#long #sorry #sorry sorry #thank you pina

[palimpsessed]

The Welsh Red Dragon, Kurt Vonnegut, and Social Activism

The inspiration behind Shepard’s pins

(original post with full artwork here.)

So, I spent A LOT of time thinking about the kind of pins our good friend Shepard (from Omaha, NE) would have on his denim jacket. Like a lot. Like an obsessive amount of time. I made a list, which seemed appropriate for this fandom. And because I’m a nerd and this sort of thing really interests me, and I’m proud of what I came up with, and because I think some of these items open up the possibility for some good, good literary analysis, I decided to make a whole post dedicated to Shepard’s pins. You’re welcome.

First, a little bit about my thought process. How did I decide what kind of pins to give Shepard? Well, he’s a guy full of stories. Stories that he can’t wait to tell anyone and everyone. And stories that others (mostly Maybes) have told him, once he’s earned their confidence. So, I wanted his pins to tell a story, his story in particular. What is the story that Shepard wants to tell about himself? More precisely, what is the story he wants to tell his new magickal friends on a disastrous summer holiday? The story is that of his own magickal credibility. His journey to magic (his come to Crowley moment, perhaps?) (I’d apologize, but I’m not sorry…) and his trustworthiness as evidenced by all of the Maybes he’s met along the way. He’s gotten drunk off dandelion wine with a creek dryad, given a toothbrush to a Sasquatch. spilled the tea with a jackalope, midwifed a centaur foal. Shep’s journey is just as impressive as Simon’s, and while Simon has been collecting notches on his dead dark creature bedpost (that’s a weird fucking metaphor…) (and now I’m thinking about dark creatures and Simon’s bedposts…so, you’re welcome, Basilton), Shep’s been collecting notches of the friendly variety. (Shoutout to @adamarks who did some super lovely analysis on Simon and Shep as mirrors here: https://adamarks.tumblr.com/post/188046272067/ok-so-when-shepard-said-he-was-cursed-the-first). So, I decided that I wanted to use Shep’s pins as a way to show the notches on his bedpost, so to speak. (Okay, I’m really losing this metaphor, but I think you’re still with me.)

Let’s dive in!

(I’m working my way down one side of his jacket at a time, for those following along at home.)

RIGHT SIDE

Welsh Dragon: I made this one very large, and easy to spot on his right shoulder. Of all of his accoutrements, this one felt like the most important. Mainly, because of Simon. Simon is, after all, half-Welsh. (The Mage, may he rest in pain, came to Watford from Wales.) And, of course, Simon, just like the Welsh Dragon, is a red dragon. (Or in the process of becoming one? Or a half-dragon? Or a dragon kitten?…) And the dragon that Simon and Baz fought on the Watford lawn, when they first worked together, and first shared magic, was a red dragon. Of course, the actual dragon in question here is Margaret. Shepard would absolutely have a pin to commemorate his friendship with her. And since I was going to give him a pin with a dragon, I knew I was going to have to use the Welsh Dragon because it would perfectly capture his burgeoning friendship with Simon, as well. Now, I want to go on a slight detour here (this blog post will be its own Odyssey) and talk more about the Welsh Red Dragon. I took the design for the pin from the Welsh flag, which is the thing that first made me think more about Simon’s Welsh connection. I’m not really making a point here, I just think it’s fascinating! There’s a lot of Welsh lore about the Red Dragon (and Margaret herself calls Simon “Great Red” - that ‘R’ is capitalized, by the way, so this seems to be a proper name for the kind of dragon that she thinks Simon is). Full disclosure, I am not Welsh and I am not a scholar on any of this by any means. That being said, a cursory, and super academic, perusal of the Wikipedia article on the Welsh Dragon led me to a few different history websites that linked the symbol of the red dragon with Merlin and King Arthur (son of Uther Pendragon, literally dragon head). Merlin, one of the most well-known magical figures and Arthur, one of the most well-known Chosen One figures in literary tradition. I know very little about Arthurian legend, and Welsh history, and dragon lore, though, so I’m going to just say, do a little research on your own when you’re bored and feeling nerdy!

Resist!: Shep is a young black man (and reasonable human being) living in the U.S. during the [redacted] Administration. I should hope this one is self-explanatory.

Hoover Dam: At some point in his visits to see Blue, I’m sure Shepard stopped off at the gift shop and bought himself a souvenir pin to mark the incredible experience he had making friends with an actual river. (This pin design is based on an actual souvenir pin of the Hoover Dam I found on Google Images—along with most of the other pin designs. I think it’s vintage, which just felt even more like Shepard to me, because he’s the kind of guy who would appreciate stuff that’s got a past.)

Deathly Hallows: I mean, IF the Harry Potter books/movies exist in the Simon Snow universe (which hasn’t been confirmed, as far as I know, by our Queen) I’m sure Shepard would have been totally into it as a kid, and probably would have found greater significance in its magical lore once he discovered that ACTUAL MAGIC EXISTS! So, he would have a pin to show his belief in the magickal world, and maybe also as a nostalgic reminder of when magic was still just something fictional he could turn to for escapism (and not something that would result in being cursed by a demon…).

The Truth is Out There: So, I know virtually nothing about The X-Files (my sister was obsessed with it to the point that she wanted to become a FBI agent for a few years, but I never watched it), but I’m sure Shepard is a fan. If nothing else, the sentiment is awfully apropos.

So It Goes: This one is very hard to see. It sort of looks like a black teardrop with a bar on top of it (it’s supposed to look like a bomb). The pin I based this off of reads “So It Goes”, which from my very superficial research, is a line repeated in Vonnegut’s anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five every time someone dies. I don’t know anything more about it, other than that it is a Kurt Vonnegut-inspired pin available for purchase on Etsy, and Shep mentions that he wanted to get a Vonnegut quote tattoo, even though “everybody has those.”

Green Alien Head: You will never be able to convince me that Shepard does not 10,000% believe in the existence of aliens. If he were still in the U.S. during the Area 51 Raid, I’m sure he would have stopped by, just, you know, for science…(I’m thinking he was probably still in the UK, but I guess we’ll see in AWTWB.)

Centaur: This one is also hard to see, but I took the design from a pin I found of one of the centaurs (the blue-haired, blue-bodied one, if that rings a bell for you) from Disney’s Fantasia. (Fun fact: I was super into Fantasia as a littlun, and I attribute my lifelong love for classical music in large part to the centaur sequence and my latent lesbianism—I mean, it was ludicrously erotic. Watch it sometime and tell me it would not make an impression on a sapphic three-year-old.) Midwifing a centaur foal was probably a very emotional and formative experience for Shepard. Buying this pin would be his way of remembering that experience, and the excitement and gratitude he likely felt to have been entrusted with that kind of acceptance from the centaur(s).

Jackalope: It doesn’t help that this pin is almost the same color as Shepard’s jacket, but it’s based off a design of a jackalope’s head that, again, I found on Google Image search (honestly, I don’t know how I ever made art without it). We know that Shepard once got some gossip from a jackalope, who vented to him about magicians calling “themselves ‘magicians’”, like “they’re the only ones with magic”. (This is totally irrelevant, but I always think of Americans when I read this. I am an American, by the way. America is a continent, but those of us living in the U.S. calls ourselves Americans, like everyone else living in America doesn’t matter.) Anyway, the jackalope offered Shepard some valuable insight into the political workings of the magickal world, so it gets its own pin.

LEFT SIDE

Pansexual Pride Flag Pin: I mean, technically, canonically, we don’t know what Shepard’s sexuality (or asexuality) is, but I just get some vibes from him. Plus, if we take him as a mirror for Simon (who is somewhere on the bi-plus spectrum), it’s not a far cry to imagine he also identifies somewhere on that spectrum.

Pentagram: This is another symbol that I chose based on my interpretation of Shepard’s character, and not so much on a Maybe or a story that he mentioned. The pentagram, or pentacle, is typically associated with the occult and witchcraft, which is something that could potentially also be said of Shep.

Sasquatch: You don’t go backpacking—or not backpacking—and introduce a Sasquatch to the benefits of dental hygiene without getting yourself a souvenir of the hike.

I [heart] Mystery Spot: The Mystery Spot is a weird sort of phenomenon in California (my home state). It’s a place outside the beach town of Santa Cruz that boasts of a “gravitational anomaly” on its website. I went once, years ago, and while you’re there, it can feel pretty convincing. (Also, I was probably like 10, so…) People outside of California will likely never have heard of this place, but driving around here (at least in the Bay Area, where I am, which isn’t that far from Santa Cruz) you’ll see yellow Mystery Spot bumper stickers on cars everywhere. I’m not really sure what the thing is with the bumper stickers. Like, I’m sure not that many people actually think it’s legit, and maybe it’s like one of those things that Californians just do (like freak out and forget how to drive when we feel water falling from the sky). But yeah, these bumper stickers are everywhere. Anyway, Shepard drives around a lot. He knows about the Vampires of Las Vegas (how is that not an indie rock band?) and the Katherine Hotel, and the Next Blood. So, he’s probably made it past Nevada and into California before. And while he was there, it’s not a great stretch of the imagination that someone who chases after magic wouldn’t wind up at a place called the Mystery Spot and get himself a pin while he was there. (And maybe even a bumper sticker.)

Black Power Fist: Unfortunately, this one is also hard to see, because the fist is black and I didn’t have anything to go over the outlines of the fingers with, which I sort of didn’t think about when I colored it. This one also feels self-explanatory. Shepard is black. Blackness has long been treated in itself as a crime by non-black members of law enforcement, and just the general racist population of the U.S. Young black men are especially vulnerable to racially motivated violence. I’m sure Shep, who drives all over the country by himself and gets into high speed chases at night in the middle of nowhere Nebraska while hunting super shifty rando Maybes has had a run-in or two. Stay safe, Shep!

Every Pronoun Belongs Here [Trans Pride Flag background]: Also, super hard to see because the letters are too small to read. I found this exact pin in a basket by the register at my local bookshop. (Support local bookshops, people!) They were being sold as a fundraiser for a LGBTQ club at one of the high schools, and I loved the idea that I could help them raise money and add this pin to my own growing collection to show off my support for trans rights. (Support trans rights and trans people, people!) I decided to give Shepard this same pin, because I could imagine him having an almost identical book buying experience in a dozen other towns that he’s probably visited. And I love the simplicity of the message, because it’s one of belonging, which EVERYONE is desperately seeking, no matter who they are or how they identify, and Shepard, and every character in this picture, is no exception. (Plus, it seemed like a cool way to connect my pin collection with Shep’s. Maybe I should have mentioned the fact that I’m also a pin person at the beginning? I walk to work and on my lunch breaks, so I carry all of my stuff in a backpack. And I proudly display my random pin collection on my backpack. Including several Simon Snow-related pins.)

Don’t Panic: This was based off a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy pin. I don’t really know anything about the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (including if it’s okay to abbreviate it as HGG? THGTTG? whatever), even though I did watch the movie years back when it was on TV and I still lived with my parents who had a TV. But the sentiment felt appropriate, and Shepard is a sort of magickal hitchhiker. Apart from managing to hold down a job at Dick Blick, he appears to lead a somewhat nomadic lifestyle. He tells Penny, “the road is my teacher”, and if that’s not a hitchhiker slogan, I don’t know what is. (Ass, gas, or grass?)

Black Lives Matter: They do. Just sayin’.

Magic Troll Doll: When I was growing up, the Troll doll was all the (nightmare-inducing) rage. Trolls are one of those magickal creatures that are continually mentioned in the series. Shepard talks about lonely trolls under bridges. Simon talks about killing trolls. Agatha would rather kiss a troll. And Baz was kidnapped by numpties, who are sort of like trolls. I couldn’t not include a troll. And the Troll doll specifically felt perfect, because the full name was Magic Troll Doll. You can bet if Shepard had to pick a troll-related pin, it would be a magic(k)al one.

[Asshole]: This is another Kurt Vonnegut pin. It looks like a messily drawn asterisk (*), but it’s actually meant to be an asshole (taken from the preface of Vonnegut’s novel Breakfast of Champions, and drawn by Vonnegut himself). I just thought, why the fuck not? So, here. Have an asshole pin. (I should have put it on a buttonhole…)

HONOURABLE MENTION

Shepard’s Phone Case: Remember that line I quoted earlier, about Shep wanting to get a Vonnegut quote tattoo? Well, when I was trying to figure out what to put on his phone case, I thought that seemed like a reasonable place to start. So, I googled Vonnegut quotes, to see if I could find one that I thought Shepard would like. Here’s the quote: “a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.” I just loved that for Shepard.

#shepard #from omaha #hi im shepard #im from omaha nebraska #my art #headcanons #carry on fanart #simon snow series #carry on #wayward son #any way the wind blows #rainbow rowell #simon snow #tyrannus basilton grimm pitch #agatha wellbelove #baz pitch #penny bunce #are not in this but i'm tagging them anyway #random british spellings for no reason #penelope bunce

[kuratoki]

Distance 02

There wasn’t a day Jeno didn’t regret not making things official with you sooner. What he also didn’t expect was his soon to be ex best friend to act on his feelings towards you either. Now a whole continent away with a ten hour time difference, will the two of you survive the distance and all the obstacles that come with?

Genre: Fluff, Angst

Pairing: Ballerina OC x Dancer Jeno

Words: 3481

Warnings: Swearing

~Updates Ever/other day at 8AM PST~

Later that night, Yukhei, Yeeun, Yuta, Sicheng and Chenle had invited the transfer students to your shared house in order to get to know them better. Chenle had been spending more time with Sicheng as of late since both Renjun and Jisung were gone. He felt lonely.

“Do you live here alone?” Kun asked, looking around the well lived space. There were picture frames of a family and an unknown girl and some even had a boy that remotely looked like Jeno and it had him wondering.

“Now I do.” Sicheng said with a nod, “This is Y/N’s house. The girl that you heard everyone talking about during the meeting today. I’m just renting it while I’m here since her parents moved to America and are currently traveling.” 

“Like parents like offspring.” Yuta commented, “You should get her to make her famous chocolate cake when you meet her. Soooo good. I still have one in my freezer.” he grinned remembering the payment of chocolate cakes you had to give him for letting you use his apartment in Osaka during that one spontaneous trip.

Tzuyu tried not to roll her eyes at the mention of your name again. All she heard during the meeting was Y/N this, Y/N that. She was even starting to doubt that you were a real person cause it all sounded too good to be true. In their eyes, you were perfect and she highly doubted that.

“Where is she again?” Xiaojun curiously asked, he only heard briefly that you were in Germany but he wasn’t so sure for what.

“She’s in London working with the Junior Selects Performance Group.” Chenle explained, “She and her ballet partner Renjun were asked to reprise their roles as Odette and the Prince in Swan Lake for their spring performance.” 

“Wait, the Selects Dance Company? Isn’t that the prestigious one that has the intensive training camp for it’s competition team auditions?” YangYang asked, he had only heard of it a few times while he was in Germany but had yet to meet anyone associated with it. “How did she get into that?” 

“Long story.” The three who knew chorused.

“You have to either be attending school there already or get a letter of recommendation from an existing team member.” Sicheng explained, “Y/N was already studying abroad and she caught the eye of one of the team captains. So she technically got in with both.”

“I heard that the head of the board lost her son to cancer recently.” Tzuyu commented, she had a few friends who attended schools in Europe so news got around fast “Are you sure they’re still putting the performance on?”

“Considering Y/N and Renjun are there helping plan the whole thing right now…” Yeeun answered, resisting the urge to roll her eyes but felt Yukhei squeeze her hand, “Y/N and Renjun were close friends with her son so they’ve decided to dedicate the performance In memory of him.”

“They took on a lot of responsibility like finding the orchestra, coming up with audition dates for the other roles and at which locations. You saw the large ass binder I was carrying home..I’ll be playing the piano for them.” Chenle added, “I have three months to get this all down, this is going to be sooo much practice. Goodbye, life.”

“Not like you had one anyways since Jisung and Renjun left anyways.” Yeeun teased.

“She sounds too good to be true.” Tzuyu muttered, crossing her arms, “How is she so connected?”

“You’ll understand when you meet her.” Chenle advised, “She’s one of the kindest, humblest and talented dancers I have ever met.” 

“Thanks Chenle.” Yukhei, Yuta, Yeeun and Sicheng said dryly.

“Those words could get you injured.” Yuta joked, “Do you notice how snippy Jaemin gets when people talk about Y/N?” 

“I’m more scared of Jeno.” Chenle said with a straight face, “Did you see how he crushed Haechans hand when he smeared chocolate icing on Y/N’s face? I’m surprised he didn’t get the whole bowl thrown at him.” 

“That’s because she was there to stop him.” Yukhei reminded, “I remember the chill that went down my spine when he gave me his death glare when Y/N first got here.” he shivered thinking about the past, “Bless her soul for holding him back.”

“He does tend to act up when it concerns Y/N…” Sicheng said thinking about all the scenarios, “I wonder if it’s a childhood thing or if it’s recent.” 

“Definitely childhood.” Yeeun said with a nod. She had heard stories from both Hana and Jaemin recounting tales of how Jeno was always super protective of you growing up even before you realized you had feelings for the other. 

“Is she the girl in the photos?” Kun asked, looking around the room and Sicheng nodded, “Does she have a brother too?” he asked again seeing a small boy in some of the photos near the fireplace.

“That’s...Jeno guys. Didn’t Jaemin and Hana tell you that they grew up together?” Chenle asked, confused.

“Jaemin said that the three of them went to school together.” YangYang said, “Wait so the little boy in that photo’s Jeno?” he asked pointing to the photo where it showed a boy and a girl lying on their stomachs in a tent, the biggest grins the two could muster at their young age.

“Yep.” Sicheng said, “Their families travelled together too if I remember. I remember him visiting from time to time when they came to see my family in China.”

“The only continent we haven’t been to now is Africa.” Jeno’s voice said as he walked in and was shocked to see the big crowd in your living room. The only people who were missing were Hana and Jaemin. 

“Oh hey, you’re back.” Sicheng said, “Did you grab my food?” 

“It’s in the fridge. I put some extra stuff in there too so you won’t starve and Yuta won’t eat you out of house and home.” he said walking past the group, making a beeline for the stairs, “Do you need anything from Y/N’s room?” he called down.

“No” Sicheng called back and shook his head, “At least he’s thinking about me.” 

“More like Y/N probably told him not to let you starve.” Chenle snorted and jumped when he felt something brush against his leg, “HOLY SHIT WHAT WAS THAT.” 

Everyone looked at Chenle weirdly before Tzuyu shrieked when she felt the same thing brush against her leg, “What the heck!?” 

Suddenly, something jumped out from under the couch but before it could land on Tzuyu’s lap, a strong arm quickly caught it mid-air. Looking up, she was shocked to see Jeno who pretty much had his arm wrapped around her from behind as he used his other hand to secure the animal.  She couldn’t help but feel the blush form on her cheeks as she felt his toned arm brush gently against her shoulder and she looked up at him, frowning when she saw him cooing as he held a cat in his arms.

“What the heck is Seol doing here?” Yuta asked, knowing all three of Jeno’s cats.

“Jaemin left my window open when he left for school this morning.” Jeno muttered checking his cat over, “And Sicheng left Y/N’s window open to air it out so she probably jumped across since it’s not that far. She did that a lot after she left too. Also, this is Nal, not Seol.” He corrected. 

“Awe, she also misses Y/N.” Yeeun said giggling, remembering your instagram post before you left, “Y/N said that if this ever happens that it was your fault that you let the two bond so closely before she left.” 

“Nal’s always liked Y/N better than me.” Jeno easily admitted, “I’ll be right back, gonna put her back in the house before-” Jeno let out a big sneeze.

“Too late.” Yuta and Chenle said as Jeno quickly walked out of the house only to come back not even three minutes later.

“I still don’t get why you have three cats when you’re allergic.” Yukhei commented, “Why don’t you get a dog or something?” 

“Y/N and I rescued Seol and Nal together when we were ten and I’ve had Beonsik forever.” Jeno said and looked down at his phone, “I’m gonna get what I need from her bedroom and then get going.”

“What are you getting exactly?” Chenle asked pointedly, “Does she even know you’re doing this?” 

“Pffft, no.” Jeno snorted, “She’d murder me if she found out. But the surprise will be so worth it.”

“Then we don’t want to know..” Yukhei said, “Shouldn’t you hurry up though? Your scheduled nightly call should be happening soon no?”

“Right.” Jeno said and ran back up the stairs only to come down with a large box of things, “See you guys tomorrow!” and with that, he was out the door.

“This is the third time he’s done that.” Sicheng commented, “I wonder what he’s up to…” 

“I know.” Yeeun said with a shit eating grin, “But I’m sworn to secrecy.” 

“Wait, so Jeno and this Y/N person aren’t dating?” Xiaojun asked confused, “But he seems so…”

“Domesticated.” YangYang finished his friends sentence.

“They’re kind of in a complicated situation.” Yukhei answered, “They have a lot of history and they only met up again this year after not talking for four. They have a few things to sort out and with Y/N currently on a different continent, they’re taking things slow.”

“Hey, the man has his priorities straight.” Yuta added,”I would do the same if I felt that way about her.”

“He just doesn’t want to fuck up cause he’s whipped.” Chenle commented, “Plus, he still sees his best friend as a threat.” 

“I thought Jaemin was dating Hana.” YangYang said. He was confused and Chenle quickly shook his head to correct himself.

“I’m talking about Jisung. You would have met him had he stayed and left for training camp when he was supposed to but he decided to follow Y/N and the rest of them to Europe early.” he explained, “Y/N and Jisung are best friends from summer camp, Jeno and Jisung are best friends from SMAA.” 

“So when Y/N transferred back, her two worlds collided.” Kun said and the group nodded, “Dang, must’ve been hard.”

“Ooooo yea.” Sicheng said remembering all the drama that happened in their small group, “And we all didn’t expect her to leave again so soon either but for now, it’s obvious where his focus is.”

“Well I mean, he’s going to be seeing her sfafjsalkfjl” Yukhei started but was muffled by Yeeuns hand.

“I think it’s time for Yukhei and I to go.” she said quickly, “Does anyone need a ride?” 

No one but a select few knew of Jeno’s leadership offer with the prestigious dance academy, not even Jaemin or Hana who were the closest to him. Yukhei and Yeeun happened to find out by chance since Renjun and Yukhei became close again and let it slip but outside of that, Jeno was acting perfectly.

A few weeks later, Tzuyu was walking around the empty hallways alone. She had a free period since her instructor was sick that day and she decided to check out the various departments. She could have asked Xiaojun or YangYang to join her but she decided to take a breather and think about the happenings over the last few weeks. 

She was so confused. She had tried to talk to him on multiple occasions but she only saw him during their first period class. He would remain unresponsive, focussing solely on the choreography as if his mind was elsewhere. Despite Hana and Yeeun warning her to leave him alone, Jeno was doing a good job at deflecting her himself and she had no idea if it was intentional or not.  As the weeks went on, she noticed that he got noticeably colder towards the transfer students, often leaving early from hangouts or not even showing up at all. When he was around, he focussed on talking to the guys only and only answered her questions when she asked, often with one word or a small sentence. It was like he was isolating himself from his friends too.  Something was obviously bothering him and she was determined to get to the bottom of it.

As she walked by a practice room, she couldn’t help but hear a voice she recognized along with a much more feminine one.

“You need to lighten up.” the girl's voice said and Tzuyu peaked in to see Jeno sitting at a table he set up with his laptop open. Various papers and notebooks spread across. She knew it was a bad idea, but she couldn’t help but listen in on the conversation at hand.

“You’re only stressing yourself out more this way. Your duties don’t even start for another few months.” you said through the computer. The two of you and Renjun were having a video chat since Jeno was pretty much done school for the day and you were currently at your apartment working on performance preparations with Renjun. Jeno was going through the paperwork that he needed to fill for his application. The whole process in itself was stressful and on top of that, Soonyoung had asked for a few favors that he happily took, in order to distract him from everything else.

“But it’s going to help in the end won’t it?” Jeno asked, trying to reason with you and Renjun let out a sigh.

“Dude, I get that you want to be involved and everything but you’re still new to the system. I mean look at Jisung, the poor kid has complained EVERYDAY that training camp is so intensive.” he said, “Y/N’s right. You’re stressing yourself out for no reason.”

Tzuyu froze, so the female voice she heard was you. You didn’t sound all that special from what she could hear but the giggle you emitted when Jeno groaned before chuckling himself was what got her. 

“Where is Jisung anyways?” Jeno asked, curiously looking around the apartment through the camera.

“Unlike us, he has a strict schedule.” Renjun explained, “Remember, Xander wrote him the letter of recommendation so he has a lot to live up to. It’s no secret here either. Poor kid cried on Y/N’s shoulder the first day cause all the other students ridiculed his skill..” 

“Okay, now you’re just being mean.” you reprimanded, “YOU cried for the first TWO weeks of training camp. At least Jisung can suck it up. Plus his programs are harder because its for next years senior team. Hello, have you SEEN how Chan and Mia run their workshop?” 

“She got you there dude.” Jeno said looking at you with a soft smile, the softest smile Tzuyu had ever seen from him in all her time here, “Chan can be intense when he wants to be. I won’t say anything about your girlfriend in fear that she’ll find out and haunt me later.” 

“Shut up.” Renjun snapped, “Just you wait Lee Jeno, just you wait.” 

“Is that a threat small shoulders?” Jeno challenged.

“I don’t threaten, I promise.” Renjun said, “I will make you suffer.” 

“I mean, it won’t be as bad as Y/N and Mia making you suffer so I mean…” Jeno trailed off, “Plus, your girlfriend likes me better anyways.” 

“I always wonder about that.” Renjun admitted with a sigh, “Anyways, real talk. How are the transfers?”

The group in Europe which consisted of You, Renjun and Jisung were all aware of the suffering Chenle felt when he had to take on three dance majors since Renjun had left abruptly. You had heard a few things about one of them during your video calls with the girls and Jeno was also honest with everything during your phone calls. Did you see one of them as a potential threat? Kind of since the two of you agreed not to set things in stone until you were back for good and everything else settled down but you trusted him. 

“Outside of first period I don’t really see them.” Jeno admitted, he’d been taking more time to himself mentally. He had a lot of responsibilities within the NCT Dance club as a junior rep and the work he willingly took on for the Selects Team kept him busy most of the time.

“Ah, so that’s why Hana’s asked if I’ve talked to you.” you said finally understanding your friends words, “Why aren’t you hanging out with them? I heard that Kun, Xiaojun and YangYang joined NCT.”

“That they did.” Jeno confirmed with a nod, “I wonder if WinWin makes royalty’s off the club for all the transfer students he brings in.” he added as an after thought.

“What about the girl?” Renjun asked, “What’s her name again? Chou Tzuyu?”

“Sounds like it. I don’t talk to her much but she hangs around Yeeun and Hana a lot.” Jeno said nodding, “She’s actually a pretty good dancer.” 

“I’ve heard.” Renjun said, “A few of the dancers in my club talk about her. Heard she’s really talented despite her age.” 

“Just like Y/N back in the day.” Jeno said and the two of you looked at each other through the screen.

Renjun gagged and pushed you to the side, “Right in front of my lunch too. I thought we agreed flirting was meant for the night time conversations.” 

“You’re just salty that Mia’s been spending more time with Jisung and Chan lately.” you said pushing him back.

“Wait really?” Jeno asked, astonished. Chan was supposed to be helping out with the production so Jeno wondered what changed his mind.

“Yea, suddenly Soonyoung wanted to switch roles and Chan agreed since he wanted to get to know Jisung more.” Renjun explained, “Soonyoung, Jongin, Y/N and I are taking full control of the performance and Chan, Mia and the Senior team captains took over training camp. Anne-Marie is currently relaxing in the Carribean until new leaders are announced.” 

Jeno was shocked that Soonyoung switched places with Chan. It was obvious Chan had originally wanted to work with training camp but Soonyoung had a higher position so called dibs. Jeno wondered if it was because of a conversation the two had a few weeks back.

“So how do you feel about Y/N being so far away again?” Soonyoung asked.

The two had started meeting up more often, evening inviting Jaemin along at times. It was like ever since the day they met, a brotherhood had formed.  Today, Jeno had driven up to visit Soonyoung since it was the weekend and the two were meeting over some hot pot.

“What do you want me to say?” Jeno asked, “I just got her back and she’s gone again. Like, we talk every night but I still miss her you know.” 

“It’s understandable. But you guys talk everyday right? It’s not like anythings really changed, minus her being a 12 hour flight away part.” Soonyoung tried to reason and Jeno shrugged.

“I think towards the end, we spent so much time together that it was harder to let go and now she’s over there with Jisung and I don’t know what that kid has planned.” Jeno said, his voice getting lower at every word.

“Wait what about Jisung?” Soonyoung asked, “I thought he and Y/N were best friends.”

“They are…” Jeno said, running a hand down his face, “It’s just I don’t think his feelings for her are platonic. They way he was acting towards her in the end, he was just so protective, intent on keeping her away from me.”

Soonyoung hummed to himself, leaning back in his seat, “Is that what’s really bothering you right now?”

“It’s been on my mind for a while. There were times times when I’d be on video call with her and Jisung would randomly walk into her room and throw himself on her bed and other times, he’s already there with her…”  Jeno confessed, “I get they’re best friends but the look in his eye tells me otherwise.” 

“I’ll take care of it.” Soonyoung said and Jeno gave him a confused look and Soonyoung smiled, reaching over to pat his shoulder, “Just focus on making things official with Y/N.” 

Jeno wondered if Chan was playing a role. Jisung had been showing up less frequently in your video calls and the two of you had been actually able to talk about personal things. 

“Interesting. When do the two of you start rehearsals?” Jeno asked, changing the subject.

As the three of you continued to converse, Tzuyu was about to walk in but was quickly pulled back by the wrist, coming face to face with Yeeun.

#nct imagines #nct imagine #nct #nct dream imagine #nct dream #lee jeno #jeno #jisung #jaemin #kpop #kpop scenario #kpop imagines #nct scenario #nct fiction #nct dream fiction #nct dream scenario #jeno imagine #jeno fiction #jeno scenario #jeno scenarios #nct dream scenarios #kpop scenarios #nct dream imagines

[keystonewarrior]

Actually Older Than Dirt

Actually Older than Dirt

They called themself Vajra Tiglitolf these days. They had slipped into the United States in 1946 along with countless other Europeans, unheralded, unnoticed.  It was actually their second time in North America (third if you counted living underwater on the continental shelf), having resided with coastal communities stretching from modern day British Columbia south to Sinaloa, but that was when there was still a land bridge to Asia and long before the Spanish arrived on the continent.

They worked quietly at a deli in Princeton, NJ until 1961, then moved over to Philadelphia where they bagged groceries at an A&P and later attended classes as a liberal arts history major at Temple until 1968.  They always enjoyed the liberal arts classes more than the technical coursework, science and math just weren’t their thing.  Art courses were nice reminders of what they had seen and done over the millennia and they often thought it was a shame that nobody would ever see any of Leonardo’s really good stuff.  The original three-panel cartoonist, the church meticulously destroyed every last copy of those satirical hit-jobs while he was still under house arrest.  Music appreciation always took them back to the times and places where they first heard many of those stirring performances, sometimes overcome with emotion at the memory of being in the same room as the great composers.  Nakisha was little remembered among music historians and was a more accomplished harpist than anything else but as rock and roll grew in popularity in the US in the 50s they could almost hear her singing and playing, and then stopping to take her notes.  The hippies sounded a lot like Nakisha’s less serious work, the stuff she played for crowds in the market instead of the Persian palaces.  Literature classes were always fun but they often felt Chaucer would get more credit if they understood the man better and Shakespeare less credit if they’d really known him.  The most amusing classes were the history classes, especially when publishers, professors, and students got almost everything wrong and left out some of the critical tipping points and most hilarious details about so-called important people and places.  Egypt was terribly misunderstood and India all but forgotten.  But Vajra could not provide any evidence, and had spent intermittent and sporadic decades in each region and travelling between them for three thousand years, so mostly they simply asked questions about details they knew nobody could respond to and provoking debate.

The most memorable detail about those four years at Temple was the accounting class where a football player would crack jokes and hassle the TA, openly - if jokingly - copying answers from other students’ tests in class.  Vajra felt bad for the little TA but if she was ever going to make it as a mathematician she had better toughen up.  In the arts, you can often make up for a little talent with a lot of panache, but in math you have to prove it or you’re less than zero.  Zero was probably the thing historians never really got right about math - people died for zero.

There was tension in the American air as Vajra moved towns and changed careers again that summer.  Vajra had a nose now for avoiding war, but this didn’t quite feel that bad.  When the Democratic Convention in Chicago went down Vajra was working at a high school near Washington DC.  They were active in the environmental movement, civil rights movement, equal rights movement, but mostly ardently against the draft.

Vajra hated the draft most of all and when that came to an end they spent a few more years involved in various movements but saw the wind going out of the sails.  Without any skin in the game in the draft, most of the white, suburban US mosied out of protest movements and into adult family life.  The environmentalists couldn’t see the climate change writing on the wall, a few could but they didn’t have the data needed to really fight that battle even though Arrhenius had made everything very clear eighty years earlier.  Vajra was back in Europe in the late nineteenth century and had read Arrhenius’ work.  After Angstrom had argued against the climate change model, Vajra had gone to work with the Swedish physicist because (while they weren’t particularly talented at math and science) they had personally endured hundreds of environmental transformations and could see the path humanity was on.  Far too many in the environmental community thought they had essentially won the war and had the corporate polluters on the ropes.  Vajra knew how persistent - like mold inside the walls of a house - money and wealth could be, but nobody was willing to listen to a high school history teacher and low-level staffer working part-time and voluntarily across multiple national movements who actually liked disco.  When the Equal Rights Amendment fell short and Reagan and the NeoCons came to DC, Tiglitolf moved to Kissimmee, FL.  It was actually their second time in FL, but their previous abode had been underwater.

They had been to Disney twice before on summer working-vacations and decided it was a good enough place to work and hideout for maybe even several decades before having to move on again.  That was the trouble with dwelling within a body that could self-heal, it also maintained the same age and appearance if no changes were demanded of it.  There were subroutines in core memory Vajra could activate to simulate aging and to make changes to their physical form in different environmental and battlefield conditions.  A few were near-instantaneous (response to a chemical attack) while others took time and resources to manifest (changing from male to female).  The worst had been the years watching the dinosaurs die.  That particular rock had been a visible comet for weeks prior to impact and Vajra’s were the only intelligent eyes on the planet to see it coming.  A military draftee, a slave really, their body and mind had been laid open to the foundation - while they were aware and conscious - and rebuilt as the ultimate weapon.  They felt forced to fire up old diagnostics and activate telescopic sights and telemetry trackers.  Of course the computers immediately sought connection to higher headquarters, but Vajra kept shutting them down almost as soon as they booted up, but they were also distracted by the impending doom and the changes they were making to their body to survive the impact event.  Back then they looked more like a dinosaur.  Hey, above a certain size a reptile has no natural predators, except for big rocks from space.  The comet calved.  As it broke up it was clear one of the smaller pieces was going to hit the planet now, followed by a second larger impact a few weeks later as the comet’s orbit and the orbit of the Earth met again.  In the end there were essentially millions of impacts.  Rocks and ice hit the moon and the Earth and smaller rocks got pulled into other radical orbits and scattered around the solar system.  The millions of little ones might have been enough to kick the dinosaurs into the ditch along the evolutionary roadside, but it was the capital letter impact at the beginning of that death sentence followed by the exclamation point at the end that sealed the fate of almost every life on the planet.  Fourteen years later, resting in an ice-free estuary, quietly photosynthesizing and chewing on whatever corpse happened to float by, Vajra felt the tickle of communications programs being queried by a robot probe passing through the mesosphere overhead.  They had mercifully, if painfully, ripped out their IFF antenna a billion years earlier, so the communications and slave-chain programs could not be remotely activated, but Vajra nervously sat in that pond as glaciers crept closer for seventeen years before the probe finally exited the system.  They crept out of there and swam and crawled to the sea, then made their way around the planet closer to the second impact site.  The shallow seas in the area that would later become the Lake Wales Ridge on the Florida peninsula made for an excellent place to shake off this boring semi-plant existence and start eating food again.

Their first job in modern Florida was actually at Circus World.  They worked part-time there and at the Magic Kingdom waiting for Epcot to open.  They painted faces, told children the same silly jokes children had laughed at in Mesopotamia, and dropped agonizing puns on the parents.  Disney was going to be a beast, with thousands of anonymous employees, and every few months Tiglitolf could change jobs and nobody would ever say, “You haven’t aged a day” while they hid unnoticed and unheralded among the masses of workers.  Epcot ended up Vajra’s favorite park, even though between 1981 and today they had worked in almost every guest area.  Epcot ended up nice, but hardly a world’s fair, and Vajra had worked at three - Paris and Brussels in the late nineteenth century and Barcelona thirty years later.  World War One had been a disaster but they had weathered that shitstorm in Tunisia.  Nursing experience helping as a volunteer during the flu pandemic 1918-1920 led to work in Portugal through the 20s and when the Germans practiced mechanized warfare in Spain in the 30s Vajra quietly moved back to Egypt and reopened their old bakery and brewery almost on the same spot it had been over a century earlier.

Of course their name had not been Vajra Tiglitolf back then.  They’d had hundreds of names ever since that sort of thing had been important among people, but every name had been some variant of their name as a slave-soldier: Diamond Twelve.

#older than dirt #diamond twelve

[mitigatedchaos]

Super-Governance

The chief question of super-governance is, of course, how to create a functional government when the ability to vaporize houses is distributed throughout the population at random.

The Super-Emperor’s Super-Feudalism

As super powers are effectively distributed randomly, there is no way to ensure that only those loyal to your regime will receive them.  As someone keenly aware of how his superhuman abilities allowed him to come to power, the self-proclaimed “New Tsar” sought to manage this.  All superhumans in the territory are tested according to a system that determines their martial power.  Lesser superhumans serve superior ones under a few ground rules set by the New Tsar, until the least superhumans serve as officers ruling the ordinary humans.  They are given wide authority to do as they will with the mere humans under their command.

A subject may formally challenge their superiors to show their martial prowess and advance in rank, including mundane humans.  In practice, most of those who have risen the farthest have built powerful organizations which support themselves at a level beyond that of their super powers, generally shaping their subordinates into martial units.  Neo Russia has become a mix of various fiefdoms of wildly varying technological and economic capacity.

Trade is generally allowed, but not if the New Tsar believes it will undermine the super-feudal system.

States: Neo-Russia

The Eternal Chairman’s Super-Communism

With the emergence of “super powers,” assigned seemingly at random, the Eternal Chairman recognized that these metahuman abilities could not be allowed to concentrate in the hands of a few, or they would form a ruling class from which not even Communist revolution could liberate humanity.

The Eternal Chairman died leading the revolutionary vanguard, but the vanguard soon found themselves subject to a powerful psychic link which evenly distributed metahuman ability between them and connected their minds, and prevented intrusive counter-revolutionary thoughts.  They reached true understanding between human beings, becoming able to work in nearly perfect coordination, free from the corruption of selfishness and greed.

They now diligently work to liberate all of humanity by connecting them all to this link, which has placed them in a state of conflict with most other major powers.  Fortunately for them, the power of the link has made human wave tactics viable against super-powered enemies.  Reports by experts indicate that psychic manifestations of the Eternal Chairman have been becoming slower but more powerful as Super-Communism has expanded.

States: People’s Republic of Southern China

Psycho-Technocracy (Lastau variant)

Mundane humans have weak but non-zero latent psychic potential.  A weak bidirectional channel is formed with those who accept it, with some degree of control over its influence - it might weakly communicate feelings or intuitions, but not true thoughts or words.  This allows the distribution of latent psychic energy to both mundane human citizens and metahumans in order to meet peak demands - valuable for the citizens, since a small boost can mean the difference between life and death.

A small group of high-psychic-potential technical experts are the receivers in this system, who shape the flow and are shaped in turn.  As the focal point, the effect of the others’ thoughts is much stronger on them than what they exert on any individual, but it enables them to act, and therefore govern, with hyper-intuition, chewing through enormous possibility spaces or rapidly evaluating the potential effects of a policy before implementation.

The psychic guidance has reduced the emergence of supervillains in Lastau, making it a major political power simply due to infrastructure not being destroyed as often, even before its efficient administration and technical innovation are taken into account.  Though not unified, superhuman abilities within the territory have started to converge on various themes, allowing some standardization of equipment and military roles.

States: Lastau (a mysterious landmass in the Southwest Pacific)

Super Republicanism

All citizens are tested in order to determine their super aptitude.  Those testing above a certain threshold are the only ones permitted to hold public office, or delegate their authority to someone who will hold this office on their behalf.  These super-citizens are elected by the mundane public, and also carry a number of special obligations, such as military service, which enables the country to draw up enough super-martial-force to prevent its domination by super villains.

States: Greater France

Super Liberalism

Blessed with a relative surplus of superheroes relative to its number and capability of supervillains for reasons that are still unknown, including the most powerful superhero of all, the United States has remained a country where superhumans hold effectively the same legal status as ordinary citizens, with the exception of various programs that deal with the complications of “good samaritans” with superhuman abilities and so on.

The United States fought valiantly to bring an end to Super-Hitler and has, in general, used its relative surplus of super-force to combat potential world-ending threats - though the sheer amount of major threats to combat prevents the Joint Super Team from dealing with lesser super-violence that continues to crop all over the world.  The relative lack of destruction has helped America retain its economic lead compared to much of the world.  Many metahumans are also involved in the super-construction industry that rebuilds infrastructure after monsters get punched through it.

Politicians are unusually focused on performing effectively, perhaps out of inspiration from and respect for the noble diligence of the world’s greatest superhero, or perhaps out of the terrifying fear that if they don’t, superheroes will decide to get involved in politics.

States: United States of America

Crypto-Super-Oligarchy

A test is administered to all citizens.  Those who test positive for superhuman abilities are inducted into the secret order that runs the country.  Anyone who uses powers with their identity unhidden is generally either exiled or destroyed.  Representatives acting on behalf of the secret super-order run the day-to-day tasks of the country.

States: Australia-Hungary

The World in 2014

It has been one hundred years since the first superhuman abilities emerged near the end of the Great War and threw the world into chaos.  The geography of the Earth has changed.  Technology has advanced rapidly in the areas where it could afford to, while repeated waves of destruction have left large areas under-developed and with nearly medieval technology levels.  Birth rates remain relatively high, even in many developed countries, as it is a routine event for tens of millions of people to be killed once every 5-10 years by invaders from space, or from the underworld, or from some lost future.  Combined with the destruction these conflicts bring, this cancels out a lot of the economic growth that would otherwise be expected from applying super powers to economic production, which is regularly carried out to avoid large-scale famines.

Life has become, in some senses, significantly more random.  While it seems as though some of the promises of mid/late-20th century were met in this world, mankind’s first orbital space colonies were obliterated without warning by aliens seeking the head of a rival alien territory’s prince that was hiding on Earth.  Enormous quantities of materials are sometimes zipped across the surface of the planet in a matter of minutes, while at other times relying on a more conventional surface container ship fleet that might take weeks or months to arrive.  Cities have been dispersed into smaller cities in an effort to make them harder targets, and over half of Europe has fled as significant portions of the continent have been taken over by feuding mad scientists.

It is said that there may be a path to a world where super powers do not exist.  To this day, there are those who seek to find it.

#mitigated fiction

[cookwithjess]

Blog Post #4: Let's Talk About Ratatouille: the dish, not the movie.

Bonjour readers! Welcome to my 4th and final Blog Post.

Today I will be talking about French culture. Learning more about my roots and my family background, I found out that I am part French and I have a couple relatives living in Paris that my grandmother visits once every few years. I thought it would be exciting and fun to learn more about French culture while also learning the recipe for a famous dish called Ratatouille. Come along!

Origin:

Since the 17th century, France has been known to be a “center of high culture”. French culture has played a big role in shaping the world’s arts, cultures, sciences, and most of all being internationally recognized for its fashion, cuisine, art, and cinema. French culture was also historically shaped by Celtic, Roman, and Germanic cultures. As the largest Western European nation, France continues to be a powerhouse within the European continent. French ideas developed in the Enlightenment period, can all be seen as influencing present-day Western culture.

Connection to Class:

The French are known for their motto: "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité”, which means Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. Connecting this to class, this motto can have different definitions with a few back translations. Back translation is defined as the process of translating a phrase back to its original language. An example of this would be if we back translate the French motto, in English, it means “Freedom, Equality, and Fraternity”. Another thing connecting the French to class is their religious life.

Most French citizens consider themselves to be Christian. Catholicism played an important role in shaping French culture and was the state religion until 1789. In the French tradition, kings were even crowned within the Notre-Dame de Reims cathedral until 1825. Most of the remaining population today identifies as agnostic or atheist. However, there are also significant groups of Muslim, Jewish, and Buddhist residents in modern France. The citizens in the French have a discrepancy in beliefs and have changed their belief from catholic to agnostic or atheist. As more people moved into France through time with the difference in religions and the lack thereof, religions like agnostic and atheist are becoming more predominant.

Yoga is gaining more popularity in France today. French citizens are not known for being passionate about exercise or fitness, but France has become a welcoming place for Yoga as a holistic practice, rather than a function of body manipulation or change. While Yoga is an ancient practice dating back thousands of years, French interest is more recent as they just adopted it in the 1960s, first based in India. As modern life expands and accelerates, Yoga is a touchstone for personal peace when everything else seems to speed up. Yoga in the French culture is typically done in groups at festivals and classes for people to come together as one.

The French immigrants coming to America is also a connection that can be made to this class. French chefs and restaurants bolstered the popularity of French cuisine and made the first yeast bread in North America while bringing technical farming skills all of which helped improve American rice and wines. America will always be different from French culture, but they were able to adapt and include the most beneficial parts of it including more effective farming. French culture does not just stay in one place, but rather it tries to spread its customs to other nations.

My Dish: Ratatouille

When we hear the word “Ratatouille”, many relate back to the Disney movie that came out in 2007, but it’s more than that. Ratatouille is a well-known vegetable stew from a region in France called Provence. It is a dish that contains eggplant, tomatoes, onions, bell peppers, zucchini, garlic, and herbs all cooked in olive oil and tomato sauce. It may not sound like much but it is considered a healthy and filling dish. The word “ratatouille” originated from Occitan ratatolha in the late 18th century in French, meaning to “stir up”. There are multiple methods of making this dish, which causes a debate as to what is the right way of cooking this meal. You can cook the vegetables together, or cooked separately then combined them at the end. You can even add protein to this dish if you want to. Ratatouille is a balanced meal suitable for vegetarians, vegans, and easy to make for anyone wanting to try it. Ratatouille is usually served as a side dish, but you can combine it with pasta, rice, or other protein so it can be served as a main dish. When I was making this dish, I added rice to it and it was very appetizing.

Overall Reflection:

This Ratatouille dish was my favorite dish out of my 4 dishes. Finding the ingredients was easy and it turned out just like I imagined it would taste in the film Ratatouille. Doing my research on French culture was interesting and being half French I am excited to tell extended family all about what I have learned and even fix this dish for my other family members in the future. Cooking dishes for this class has been an amazing experience and I can’t wait to find more recipes from different cultures to make in the future.

Thanks for reading! See you soon.

Sources:

https://thegoodlifefrance.com/yoga-in-france/

https://www.livescience.com/39149-french-culture.html

https://www.familysearch.org/blog/en/french-culture-traditions/

https://www.frenchcountryfood.com/recipes/vegetarian/ratatouille.html

https://americansall.org/legacy-partner/french-americans-contributions-our-nation#:~:text=French%20Americans%20mainly%20disseminated%20information%20and%20acted%20as,skills%20that%20vastly%20improved%20American%20rice%20and%20wines.

https://culturalatlas.sbs.com.au/french-culture/french-culture-core-concepts

https://www.thedailymeal.com/what-is-ratatouille

https://78.media.tumblr.com/9312bbd8c12df5b3cd572199ac78ce39/tumblr_omsq8nqDxF1qdqw3ro3_r1_500.gif

https://th.bing.com/th/id/R0b92cd77aed00a7e5d0a1483511b9e62?rik=F2xcqOjRptz7uw&riu=http%3a%2f%2fwww.badyogi.com%2fblog%2fwp-content%2fuploads%2f2018%2f11%2f34051846_911801859006058_4644739829039366144_o.jpg&ehk=D3SbIKeoWhGfUCkHLIHj30InP73wNB1jKusEjN0RUhc%3d&risl=&pid=ImgRaw

https://th.bing.com/th/id/R20ed9ad1b5dedcd848293191595b19fc?rik=yVGXA7e7shDJKA&riu=http%3a%2f%2f1.bp.blogspot.com%2f-pvtXgeafeIM%2fUQgNer8SWeI%2fAAAAAAAAjq8%2fUc8kd039seU%2fs1600%2feiffil-tower-eiffel-paris-france-park-cities-269184.jpg&ehk=JNzB3Rs1WjNHbZIGh4YwvyCK4mtgTK47gmTCzsvKCEA%3d&risl=&pid=ImgRaw

[orbemnews]

Why thousands of Brazilian politicians changed their race last year Interviews with several Brazilian candidates revealed a range of reasons for race changes — some said they or campaign officials had simply made a mistake while filling their candidacy form, some said their family background gave them a claim to multiple racial groups, and some said they had recently started to feel a sense of belonging in a new racial category. Brazilian politicians do “have some latitude to fluctuate on how they present themselves” in order to connect with supporters, Andrew Janusz, a political scientist at the University of Florida who has studied the race changes of candidates extensively, told CNN. Nevertheless, “individuals don’t have total freedom of choice, so if someone is really fair-skinned, they might not be able to say that they are Black, for example,” he said. Official demographic categories in Brazil have traditionally focused on what demographers call marca — each individual’s external appearance — rather than family origins, unlike the US. The most common racial change for politicians last year was from White to Black or Brown, a shift made by more than 17,300 candidates. But vast numbers of candidates also moved in the opposite direction: About 14,500 switched from Black or Brown to White — the second-most common change. Adriana Collares, who ran for city council in Porto Alegre, told CNN that her racial declaration changed only because her previous party had mistakenly described her as White in 2016, against her wishes. “I never considered myself White, but there was no name for what I was,” she says. “I never felt like I had the right to call myself Black. I was always recognized as ‘tanned,’ as ‘mulatta,’ as anything but Black. Then came this term, ‘Pardo,’ and I found my place in the world.” “Pardo” translates literally to “Brown,” but can also mean mixed-race. Though not commonly used colloquially among Brazilians, it has been used by national statistics agency IBGE, including in the census, as an official category since the 1950s, and is currently the largest group in Brazil. Since the 2016 election, Collares left her old party and moved to a new one. In the 2020 election, she again requested to be described as Brown. This time, the party respected her choice. In contrast, Adriana Guimarães, who ran for city council in Manaus, switched her racial declaration in the opposite direction. She told CNN that she selected Brown in 2016 after being ideologically conditioned by the left. “In Brazil, we have a mixture of races. In my case, I also have that mixture, of Black, White, and Indigenous. But under Lula and Dilma, there was a push for Brazilians to identify as Brown,” she said, referring to campaigns sponsored by the administrations of former presidents Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff that described Brazil as a mixed-race nation. After an economic crisis and a corruption scandal hit the country in the early 2010s, Guimarães, like many other Brazilians, began to embrace a more conservative view of the world. She was also reacting to what she perceived as government overreach in the private sphere. “I started participating in conservative movements,” she says. “I started researching conservatism, reading about Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom, and I ended up noticing that I’m conservative.” She also noticed her racial identity in a new way. “My race change happened due to my new political ideology,” says Guimarães, now a supporter of President Jair Bolsonaro. In 2020, she declared herself White. “I could say that I’m Parda because my grandmother was Black. But my color is White. My color is not Parda. I’m not a ‘neutral burned Yellow.’ I believe that saying that I’m Parda is like saying that I’m neutral. But I have my position, I have my strength, I’m not neutral. It’s the same thing with that neutral gender. It’s like being undecided,” she said. Picking an identity Brazil’s official racial categories have evolved over time, and some contemporary efforts to change them are part of a broader push to rectify inequalities rooted in the country’s history. Slavery lasted longer in Brazil than in other places in the West, and involved more people than in other countries in the Americas — of the 10.7 million slaves who arrived alive on the continent, about 5.8 million were brought to Brazil, compared to about 305,000 taken to the United States, according to the Slave Voyages database. “Violence has characterized Brazilian history since the earliest days of colonization, marked as they were by the institution of slavery,” write Heloisa Starling and Lilia Schwarcz in their history “Brazil: A Biography” Even after slavery ended, “its legacy casts a long shadow.” To this day, the country continues to suffer from steep social and racial inequality. While the nation shows “cultural inclusion” — exemplified in diverse participation in popular traditions like samba, football, and capoeira — they warn that “social exclusion” still means that “the poor, and above all Black people, are the most harshly treated by the justice system, have the shortest life span, the least access to higher education, and to highly qualified jobs.” That exclusion can be seen in politics too. According to the national statistics agency, Black and Brown people are the majority in Brazil, but in 2018 made up only about 40% of candidates for Congress. The disparity increased even more after the election — only about 25% of successful candidates were Black or Brown, according to the Institute of Socioeconomic Studies, an independent research institute. Brazilian legislators elected in 2018 were overwhelmingly White. In the early 2000s, then-president da Silva created a government agency to promote racial equality, and in the early 2010s, his successor Rousseff approved ambitious affirmative action programs to address lingering racial inequality, including the 2012 law that reserves spots for poor, Black and Brown, and Indigenous students in federal universities and federal technical high schools, and the 2014 law that reserves 20% of public service jobs for Black and Brown applicants. These initiatives became rarer under the right-wing administration of later president Michel Temer and the current far-right administration of Bolsonaro. So progressive politicians have sought to advance social equality by pushing judges to interpret existing legislation, including the constitution, which repudiates racism. Putting money behind representation in politics In 2018, a group of female senators and deputies asked Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court to rule on whether male and female candidates should receive funding and advertising proportionally. Judge Rosa Weber, who ruled in their favor, wrote in her decision that the Superior Electoral Court “had been trying to encourage female participation in politics,” but existing measures had not done enough. When it comes to funding and advertising, she wrote, proportionality mattered — meaning that if a party has 30% of female candidates, those women should get 30% of the party’s total allocated funds and 30% of its airtime. The new rule was approved in time for the 2018 federal election. Two years later, the same court received a similar inquiry from Benedita da Silva, a deputy in Congress and an iconic Black politician in Brazil, who asked the court if there should be a minimum quota for Black and Brown candidates within parties, and the same proportional mechanism for their funding and airtime. The court denied the quota, but approved the proportionality. These rules could make a significant difference in driving funds to some candidates from underrepresented groups and even increase their chances of being elected, says Luciana Ramos, a professor of law at Fundação Getúlio Vargas who has tracked the application and impact of the two new parity rules. Tracking how political parties manage their electoral decisions is relevant in Brazil because most party activities and electoral campaigns are publicly funded. In 2020, Brazilian political parties received a total of R$3 billion ($540 million) from national coffers. Politicians also get free airtime on television and radio. Last year, that was at least 1h30 per day distributed among parties for about 30 days before the election, according to figures published by the Electoral Justice. In part because of the new racial equality rule, in part because of Black Lives Matter protests in Brazil and around the world, and in part because of growing awareness of racial inequality issues, more attention has been paid to the declarations of candidates in 2020 than in previous cycles. Some politicians are clearly sensitive to the scrutiny. Kelps Lima, who ran for mayor of Natal and declared himself as White in 2016 and Black in 2020, answered a broad question about his race change with a vigorous denial that it had anything to do with funding. “I declare to be Black since always and I NEVER USED QUOTAS in any moment of my life,” he wrote to CNN. “In 2016, the party made a MISTAKE and declared me as WHITE.” Lima added that he didn’t use campaign funds reserved for Black and Brown candidates and said that he had declared to be Black in two previous elections. A small portion of politicians who changed race in 2020 had made consistent declarations until that year: CNN’s analysis identified about 360 candidates who declared themselves White for two or three elections, between 2014 and 2018, then changed their race to Black or Brown as the new racial equality rule came into force in 2020. “I owed this to my origins,” said Marcio Souza, a candidate for city council in Porto Alegre who identified as White in two previous elections before changing to Black. “I’m absolutely a result of miscegenation,” he wrote in an email to CNN. “My mother was White, green eyes, Portuguese and Spanish, and my father was dark brown, dark brown eyes, Portuguese and Black.” He says he made the change as a conscious statement of solidarity. “For a long time, I have been thinking about this subject,” he wrote. “Due to the occurrences of racial crimes, I decided to adopt, in a positive manner, one of the elements of my racial composition, following my consciousness.” “From that decision, I didn’t receive financial benefits,” he added. “I’m at peace and I believe to be contributing to the fight against racism.” Another candidate, Vanderlan Cardoso, who ran for mayor of Goiânia, declared himself White for three consecutive elections, before selecting Brown in 2020. He gave a partial explanation for the race change during his electoral campaign last year, telling Goiás newspaper Popular that different people filled his candidacy forms. “In 2018, whoever filled it considered that I’m White,” he said. “Whoever did it now, instead, thinks that I’m Brown.” He also said during the campaign that he didn’t plan to use funds reserved for Black and Brown candidates. Cardoso did not answer requests for comment from CNN that mentioned his 2014 and 2016 racial declarations. He lost the election and returned to his job in Brasília as a senator representing the state of Goiás. But the electoral data shows that tens of other candidates who made the same move from White to Black or Brown ended up winning their races, including mayors of state capitals. Verifying racial claims Could Brazil’s racial fluidity end up weakening affirmative action rules designed to bolster under-represented groups, when those rules depend on stable racial categories to work? “Most everyone will say that racial inequality is a major issue in Brazil, and that things need to be done to ameliorate equality,” says Janusz, the political scientist who studies the race changes. “But to do that, you have to identify some boundaries, some procedures to identify beneficiaries.” In other affirmative action systems in Brazil, commissions exist to check if people are telling the truth. When Collares, the city council candidate from Porto Alegre, made use of the affirmative action programs approved under Lula and Dilma and took advantage of a racial quota to get her current job as a civil servant, she had to go through an interview with a commission that checked if she was really Brown. “I believe they wanted to know if I had experienced life as a non-White person,” she says. “I had to do an interview. I had to bring family photographs, childhood photographs. They asked about my family life, the culture inside our house, family habits. I spoke a bit about my life. I thought it was kind of surreal, but fine.” But political parties are not required to verify candidates’ racial declarations, and multiple parties that spoke to CNN said they were unaware that their politicians had changed race. Both PT, the left-wing party of former presidents Lula and Dilma, and PSDB, the right-wing party of former president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, said that they had not recorded race changes among their candidates, even though the electoral data reveals thousands of changes in each party. Some parties benefitted candidates who had recently switched races. A list of Black and Brown candidates who received more funds due to the new rule sent to CNN by PSDB included one politician who had run for office as White in 2018 and as Brown in 2020. The party did not answer a question about that specific candidate. Gabriela Cruz, the leader of the Black wing of the PSDB party, told CNN she believed there might have been fraud in the 2020 election. “I observed cases in which the self-declared person was White,” she said, but added that making any further claims was complicated. “I don’t have enough evidence to say if it was only to access funds or if it was a question of racial awareness.” Cruz thinks parties should be required to check candidates’ physical traits against their racial declarations, “with the support of the Black wing of the party.” Though she respects people’s self-identification, she argues that physical traits matter. “Racism in Brazil is practiced through social constructions that exclude people by function of their physical characteristics, like skin color, facial features, and hair texture,” she says. “That is what places people in their racial group, and not their genetic composition.” Ramos, the law professor studying the funding rules, says that there could have been instances of deceit in 2020, but noted that fraud could also take other forms. “A party leader could direct campaign resources to a Black candidate and order her to transfer those resources to a White candidate, for instance,” she said. The Superior Electoral Court told CNN that it has not received any reports of fraud from the 2020 vote so far, in part because parties are still making their campaign budgets public. It said that potential punishments would include forcing a candidate to return the funds used in the campaign and, in more serious cases, removing them from office. Brazil is changing Representation matters more and more as Brazil itself changes. Population data from the national statistics agency shows that the share of Brazilians declaring to be Black and Brown increased during the 2010s, and that now represent about 56% of the entire population. Meanwhile, the share of Brazilians declaring to be White fell — they now make up 43%. Only recently have Brazilians had the option to declare their own racial identity — historically, census interviewers assigned their subjects a racial category. But Brazil’s political arena is failing to reflect the country’s diversity, despite the new equality rules approved in 2018 and 2020. Ramos, the law professor, points to a preliminary tally by 72 Horas, a watchdog group, that shows that, based on the budgets that have been made public so far, parties failed to distribute support proportionally, either by race or gender. Parties gave only 42% of their available campaign funds to Black and Brown candidates in 2020, according to 72 Horas, even though they were 50% of all candidates, according to the statistics released by the Electoral Justice. And parties gave only 30% of their funds to female candidates, even though they were 33% of all candidates. Since both women and Black and Brown people are the majority in Brazil, the figures above suggest that they were underrepresented within parties in relation to their true size in the population, and that their campaigns were underfunded in relation to their size within parties. Closing the gap between genders and races is important if Brazil wants to create better policies for specific groups, says Collares, the city council candidate from Porto Alegre. She believes that when a politician belongs to a certain group, their work is informed by the life experience of being a member of that group. “If you don’t experience it in your life, if you don’t feel it on your skin, it’s difficult to understand, it’s difficult to prioritize,” she says. “A man thinking policies for women is different from a woman thinking policies for women.” “We need to try to reach this parity, this representation,” she adds. “The majority of our people are Black and Brown, and we don’t see that.” Source link Orbem News #Brazilian #changed #Politicians #Race #thousands #Year

[sportsavourblog]

“Our vision is to provide a perfect structure to Pickleball in terms of ranking and organizing tournaments….” Jan Papi

Since its inception in 1965 at Bainbridge Island by three American gentlemen, Pickleball has travelled far and wide. The sport is now played in several countries across North America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australia.

Pickleball is a highly social sport that can be played by person of all ages, even by those having no active sporting background. If you have a Pickleball paddle and some balls then you can start it on any hard surface; may be at your backyard or in a playground, at a local club or in a stadium. Thus, there is a minimal infrastructural requirement for playing this sport.

However, as players increased across countries and continents, more tournaments and leagues are initiated. Players have come up with amazing skills, matches have become exciting and ‘competition’ has found its way in this very ‘social’ sport.

There are some efficient world bodies and regional organizations that are perpetuating the development and growth of Pickleball throughout the world. These governing bodies provide strong technical and technological support to the players and the organized tournaments.    

Pickleball Global stepped into the world Pickleball scenario some 8 years ago to provide a technological base to the development of the sport. The organization has introduced ranking system for Pickleball players, provide software support to tournaments and organize tournaments and leagues. Pickleball Global’s newest venture is its association with Asia Federation of Pickleball (AFP) where Mr Jan Papi, the head of Pickleball Global, has been appointed as the Technological Director. Here are some excerpts from a conversation with Mr Jan Papi, the founder of Pickleball Global with Poulomi Kundu, editor of Sportsavor.

Development of a concept-

Jan Papi: “For the last 15 years we have a Tennis store. It was 8 years ago that we shifted to this new location at Bonita Springs. We were approached by a community at that time to carry Pickleball paddles in our store. I had no clue initially about what they were talking about. But eventually I found out that it was a growing sport. So we started keeping Pickleball paddles and balls in our store. My interest grew; I looked around, further communicated with those people and found out that might be there was something missing. It was because there was a community but there was no platform to bring people together. So that is where it all started. I wanted to create that platform where Pickleball players could come, connect and communicate.

Pickleball Global- the platform to connect

Jan Papi: It is a portal where Pickleball players can meet, they can connect; not only they can connect but running the tournaments, running the league and all other things basically leading into the rankings.

Ranking System-

Jan Papi: Pickleball Global ranks players as per their result in the best 12 events in one year. Men’s Singles, Men’s Doubles, Women’s Singles, Women’s Doubles, Mixed Men and Mixed Women’s are the categories in which they are divided. But it was not that easy when I started. In America, Pickleball players opposed ranking system as they thought that they would lose their uniqueness. Ranking would lead them to Tennis-like atmosphere. But gradually they understood that it was needed and that they had to perform to keep their uniqueness intact.

Software Support-

Jan Papi: Yes, we provide software support to organizers for tournament entries, creating leagues, live scores and other technological help needed by them. I have travelled to different countries for smooth working of Pickleball Global during tournaments. I travelled to India twice- for Indian Open Season 2 and Season 3. I love the country, it really has amazing Pickleball players. They are so talented and skillful and I can undoubtedly say that India will definitely climb to the top of Pickleball ranking very soon.

Tournaments and Leagues-

Jan Papi: Pickleball Global started organizing tournaments in America but gradually moved on to European countries like Denmark, Netherlands, Germany, Belgium. We have other tournaments lined up; we are waiting for the pandemic to end in order to start organizing and playing tournaments.

From America to Europe and now in Asia-

Jan Papi: I have been offered by Asia Federation of Pickleball to become a part of the organization. I am immensely excited for being a part of this organization because I really feel that the model of this project is to be followed. This organization has started operating from the bottom. There are clear distinctive departments to operate in different fields. Pickleball Global will look after the technological part.

Association with AFP-

Jan Papi: We would like to help the Federation to run the tournament meaningfully and bring everything into the ranking. Pickleball is growing in Asia, there will be more players, there will be more tournaments and that requires some structure. The structure needs to be in place before you start playing continent-based tournaments. That is where, I humbly want to say, we want to be beneficial- the tournaments will be played, the rankings will be produced and based on that we will see the best players in Asia. So the structure which is not so much present anywhere in the world will be seen in Asia right away.

Mutual benefits of Pickleball Global and AFP-

Jan Papi: Our association with AFP is an opportunity for us. When we go for a hiking or a biking, we see the mountain. There’s one point of view from there, but if we go around a mountain then there’s another point of view. So same is with our lives. As we go through the lives, we find new opportunities. Now we will try to add new features to the website that will be beneficial both for us and AFP. We are open to ideas from AFP because collective effort always brings out the best.

#Sportsavour Pickleball PickleballGlobal

[irregularwebcomic]

[Irregular Webcomic! #1946 Rerun](https://ift.tt/2HOWMwT)

Glasgow isn't quite in the actual Scottish Highlands, but it's close enough for some giant snakes.

Go find a map of Scotland. Wait a minute, what am I saying? This is the Internet! Here's one. :-) This map is copyright-free, since it is produced by the C.I.A., and is available in full from the astonishingly brilliant Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection at the University of Texas.

Okay, had a good look? Scotland is at the north end of the United Kingdom. The Scottish Highlands cover the entire rugged looking region north of Glasgow. Note the intriguing feature of the geography, in that Inverness and Fort William are connected by an obvious straight line cutting across the peninsula. Along this line lies Loch Ness, the second largest but probably the most famous lake in Scotland. Loch Ness itself is highly elongated in shape, running directly along the line previously mentioned. This line is actually a long series of valleys, known as the Great Glen, cutting right across Scotland from one coast to the other, and bisecting the craggy highlands that rise on either side. All in all, it's a rather striking geological feature.

The Great Glen in fact, as some of you have no doubt realised by now, marks the location of a major fault in the Earth's crust. The land north-west of the fault has slipped northwards relative to the land south-east of the fault. And it doesn't stop in Scotland. The fault runs right through Ireland as well, straight through the bay near Londonderry that you can see on this map, and out the western side of that island.

Okay, now let's go even further afield. Take a look at this map of north-western Europe. (Click it for a larger version.)

There are mountains in Scotland. Where else do we see mountains? There's a whole big chain of them running up the back of Norway. In fact, with a tiny bit of imagination, you can picture the chain of mountains running along Scandinavia as continuing across the North Sea into Scotland. It makes a nice arc.

In fact, the mountains of Scotland and Scandinavia are part of the same mountain range. This immense range of mountains was produced during an event known as the Caledonian orogeny. Caledonia is the ancient Roman name for Scotland, and orogeny is a technical term combining the Greek oros, meaning mountain, and genus, meaning generation.

The generation of the mountains of Caledonia and Scandinavia occurred roughly 400 million years ago, at which time the continents of the Earth were in very different locations to where they are now. They were so different, that we can't even sensibly refer to them with our familiar names. At that time, there was an ocean known as the Iapetus Ocean. Don't go looking for it on a modern map, because it doesn't exist any more. On one side of the Iapetus Ocean was the continent of Laurentia. On the other side were two landmasses known as Baltica and Avalonia.

The movements of plate tectonics slowly but inevitably caused the shrinkage of the Iapetus Ocean, with Laurentia moving closer to Baltica and Avalonia, until the fateful period of history when these continents collided. In exactly the same way as the collision of India with Asia has more recently produced the crumpling of the Earth's crust that we know as the Himalaya Mountains, this titanic altercation gave rise to a great range of mountains.

The now combined landmasses of Laurentia, Baltica, and Avalonia eventually formed part of the single supercontinent of Pangaea, which existed around 250 million years ago. So this collision and mountain building was by no means a sudden thing; it took many millions of years to occur.

Pangaea eventually broke apart again into pieces, to form the continents with which we are familiar today. Baltica and Avalonia were essentially the forerunners of what is now Europe. The mountains of the Caledonian orogeny can be seen today, weathered and eroded into less spectacular peaks than the Himalayan heights which they may well have reached shortly after their birth, running down the spine of Scandinavia, across Scotland, and...

What became of Laurentia?

Take a look at this map. (The big version - click on this small one.)

Norway, Scotland... look west...

Look for mountains.

The Appalachian Mountains. That enormous range of mountains running diagonally across the eastern USA. You can mentally extend them north-east, up the peninsula of Maine and New Brunswick, across the Gulf of St Lawrence, across Newfoundland, and then... you are forced to a stop by the Atlantic Ocean.

Only imagine the ocean isn't there. Slide Newfoundland across to nestle next to Ireland. Then the Appalachian Mountains can continue right through the Scottish Highlands and on into Norway. We were looking for Laurentia. We've found it. Laurentia is North America.

The Appalachians are the same mountain range as the Scottish Highlands and the mountains of Scandinavia.

How do we know this? Because we can see the evidence in the rocks. If you examine the rocks and fossils of the Appalachians, you can see that these mountains were also generated around 400 million years ago, in an event known as the Acadian orogeny. So at this time, the Iapetus Ocean closed up, Laurentia, Baltica, and Avalonia collided, and produced an enormous range of mountains. Later, the movements of the plates of Earth's crust separated Laurentia from Baltica and Avalonia again, sundering the mountain chain in the middle, and producing the new (and still expanding) Atlantic Ocean between them. But let's have a closer look at the area where these great landmasses were ripped apart.

On the American side we have the island of Newfoundland. Here's what it looks like from space. Remind you of anything?

Have another look at Scotland (at the top of this annotation). Remember that Great Glen fault line running right across the country, from north-east to south-west? There's also a major dislocation running across Newfoundland, from north-east to south-west. It's so big, it almost separates the island into two pieces. Only a tiny isthmus remains to connect the bulk of the island to the irregular blobby peninsula dangling off the south-east corner. Note also that many of the obvious geographical features run north-east to south-west, just like the Appalachian Mountains, and the arc of Scotland to Scandinavia.

Now here's the really interesting bit. If you go to Newfoundland and have a look at the rocks and the fossils contained in them, you find that they confirm the idea that the island is really an extension of the Appalachian Mountains. The rocks and the ages of the fossils all match. Except for that almost-detached peninsula on the south-east of the island. There, the rocks are strangely very different. What's more, the fossils in the rocks are completely different to the fossils found on the rest of the island.

The fossils of the time when these rocks and mountains were laid down include a lot of graptolites and trilobites. These are great fossils for palaeontologists to find in rock beds, because they were very prolific across the world at the time, and because they varied with geographical distribution. The graptolites and trilobites found in one part of the world were noticeably different from those found in another part of the world. In particular, the fossils found on the Baltica/Avalonia side of the closing Iapetus ocean were very different from those on the Laurentia side. In other words, the graptolites found now in the Scottish Highlands are different to the ones found in the Appalachians, and to the ones found in Newfoundland.

Except for that dangling peninsula. The graptolites there are an exact match to the ones found in present-day Scotland. What's more, the rocks of the peninsula themselves are of a type not found elsewhere on Newfoundland, or in the Appalachians, but are precisely the same as the rocks found in Scotland.

Well, not all of Scotland. The rocks and fossils found in the highlands west of the Great Glen are very peculiar. They don't look like anything seen anywhere else in Scotland. What they look like, in fact, is rocks and fossils from the western side of Newfoundland.

When Laurentia collided with Baltica and Avalonia, the Laurentian side ended up with a characteristic set of rocks and fossils, and the Baltica/Avalonia side gained a different set of rocks and fossils. Hundreds of millions of years later, when the Atlantic Ocean ripped the melded continents apart once more, it didn't use the same boundary to separate them. Laurentia left behind a part of itself. The north-western part of Scotland used to be part of what is now North America. And the south-eastern tip of Newfoundland used to be part of what is now Europe.

Anyone who knows Canadian geography reasonably well will know that that part of Newfoundland is called the Avalon Peninsula. It was the evidence from this part of Newfoundland that allowed geologists to piece together the history of the North Atlantic and the continents on either side, and this is why they decided to call the proto-continent that would later become the bulk of Europe: Avalonia.

2019-03-23 Rerun commentary: I must admit my own knowledge of Canadian geography before writing this annotation wasn't quite up to scratch. I could tell you roughly where Newfoundland was, but didn't really know much beyond that and a basic knowledge of the other provinces and a handful of major cities. Usually, unless you're visiting, there's not really much need to know geography of foreign places. It's nice to know, but not knowing isn't really going to bother most people. Geographical knowledge is highly concentrated in the areas where you live and work. You know names of streets, and intersections, and where certain businesses are located, and even finer details like where you can find mailboxes and bus stops and a bench to sit on. And expanding your circle, you probably know the names of all the cities and towns within a few hours drive, and you have a general idea of places in your own country further afield. But think about a country on the other side of the world and you may be lucky to be able to name the capital city, let alone any of the political subdivisions or second-tier cities and towns, or identify any of them on a map. In the future, people living on Mars are going to know all the craters and valleys and stuff around them, but won't be able to locate North America on a map of Earth.

#Irregular Webcomic!

[soundsgoodfeelsgood]

Thursday 14th may, day 66

NOTE: i actually wrote this as a presentation letter to a guy on Slowly, but i really liked how it turned out so i thought “hm, might as well post this”. Here you go.

So here are 10 maybe-not-that-interesting facts about me. 

1. My name in italian literally means "clear" and yet i have the same expression capability of a 5-year-old. It takes me forever to express myself in my native langue and I find it easier to speak in english, which can be quite a challenge when talking to my friends as you can imagine. Actually nobody calls me by my name, people usually refer to me by my surname, even my closest friends. (that's Cili if you where wondering, like red hot chili pepper) 

2. In just a month i'll be graduating from high school and in september i'm going to start med school. I don't actually know why i'll be attending it since the very last thing i want to be when i grow up is a doctor. I have really, really low empathy so i don't think i could ever pull that off. Whant i want to be when i grow up is a resercher in neurosciences. There is nothing more fascinating then the human brain. I find utterly...disarming how everything we are, everything we do, all of our thought and movements are decided by how some tiny-iny particles of living matter interact with each other. The human body is the most beautiful of mysteries and everything it does is the result of a tiny miracle. I worship science. I love to find all the science that surrounds me and learn about it. And while i'm quite a thinker the subject i hate the most is philosophy. The only two authors i ever sincerely liked are Plato and Popper. The rest is garbage. 

3. I have quite a memory. I perfectly remember stuff that has happened to me over 10 years ago. Like that one time when i was 8 and i was angry at my friend Dave so i started to throw comic books at him. Or how i used to go around my grandma's garden with my cousins dressed up in Sandocan costumes looking for pinecones that we would later smash in order to eat the pine nuts inside them. And how could I not mention when at 10 my friends and I organised a whole funeral for a ladybug that had drowned in their pool? we made this little raft out of a plastic plate, put the ladybug on it with some flowers and plants and then had a full celtic-like ceremony (we even wrote a eulogy). But the thing i remember the easiest are songs. I know hundres of thousands of song lyrics by heart. My playlist has over 600 songs and i can recognise any of them within 5 seconds (no kidding). Also i have the weirdest music taste. I like Queen as much as One Direction as much as early-2000s pop rock as much as indie as much as musicals. I believe music to be the expression of one's soul. Like, there are some songs that literally speak to the deepest part of me and if i didn't know any better i'd think they were written especially for me. 

4. I'm an INTJ like Christopher Nolan, Elon Musk and Moriarty from Sherlock Holmes. I'm also a Ravenclaw even though Pottermore keeps putting me in Hufflepuff.  As for the zodiac (in which i don't believe in but still read) i'm technically a scorpio but because i was born on the first day of scorpio at five past midnight, my zodiac-obsessed friend keeps telling me i'm a cusp which is something i had no idea existed until she pointed that out. As they say, you never stop learning. 

5. I can solve rubik's cube in under a minute. My friend from robotics clubs tought me. Also, i'm in my schools robotics club. Last year we built a piano-playing robot and we're currently second in italy and forth in europe in our category.  This year we were planning on going to the international competitions but then coronavirus happened so...yeah. Still, robotics is one of the best thing that has ever happened to me. Not for the club itself but for the people I met and for all the beautiful experiences and for that one time in october when we sneaked wine into our hotel room and the next morning i was so hungover i slept the whole day while tecnically competing. 

6. I have a thing for alpacas. I don't know why, i think they're cute. I have a mug with an alpaca on it where i store my markers (i also have a thing for markers). One of my dreams is to see them in Machu Pichu (the alpacas, not the markers). I loooooooove travelling. It's the one thing i could never get tired of. I have an endless list of places i want to visit. My goal is to visit every continent before i turn 30 (the earlier, the better). So far i've been to North America (the USA, twice), Africa (Morocco and Egypt) and i've visited most european capital cities (London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Luxemburg, Bruxelles, and many other). As of right now there's Singapore on top of my list, immediatly followed by Peru. Travellig is such a unique experience. Every where you go there's always something new to learn and to discover. Different culture, different food, different languages. I adore languages of all kind. I'm fluent in italian (duh) and english (even tho i make tons of mistakes - i'm sorry), advanced in french and currently learning spanish. 

7. I'm writing a book. Let me rephrase that - I'm writing a trilogy. It's actually a little more complicated than that to be honest. When i started high school i started writing this fairly awful teen-fiction-like novel and than i though to myself: why not make another book where i write the same exact story but from a different point of view and with a totally different style with no reason whatsoever? Five years later, i'm still not even halfway done with a first draft of any of the three books. I mostly use them as a creative outlet, something i do when i'm bored, just for the fun of it. But as stupid as they can be, they're still my creatures and i love them. Even though i'm sort of embarassed of them - no one i know has ever read them. I once tried to show the first few chapters to a group of friends and they still make fun of me for it (but they do it in that friend way that doesn't really offend, you know what i mean?). I just love words so much. I even have a list of favourite words written in my journal. Some exemples are "scrosciare", which is the italian word for the noise of heavy rain falling, and words that are what they mean, like obsolete and cacophonic.

8. if i were to write this last year, i'd tell you i don't believe in friendship. Now, my mind hasn't change that much, i still believe to have no friends in the way i consider a friend is supposed to be. And i know i talked about my friends quite s few times throughout this letter but i usually use this word in absence of something that better explains what i really feel. I'll try to make this as clear as i can. I struggle to make a connection with people. i always feel like people click with each other in misterious ways i have yet to understand. Most of those i identify as my friends are just the people i hang out with. There is no...spiritual connection? It's a little complicated to explain. As if at the beginning of times we were handed some instruction booklets on "human interaction and realtionships" and i lost mine, while everyone else carfully guarded theirs. The word that best describes what i think of most people is afecionado. I don't know where i read it but it pretty much explains it all - someone i feel affection for, but nothing else. I do have a best friend tho. I mean, best friend is quite a big word. I have a human being i feel more connected with in comparison to others. I’ve known him since forever and i hate him. I dont hate hate him as in i want him dead. I love him as a friend, he's a great friend. but i hate him as a human being. He's so goddam perfect it bothers me so much. Have you ever met someone that is just so annoingly good at any thing? well that's him. 

9. I have never fallen in love. Not once. The last time i had a crush i was 11. This is what happens when you are an hopeless romantic who grew up reading love stories and at the same time a creepingly logical human. You have incredibly high expectations. And the only time i kissed someone it was more of a lips-touching-for-a-second kind of experience and we were both very much drunk (it was actually the first out of the three times in my life i ever got drunk, the third being the wine experience in october) When i first met said best friend everyone we knew shipped up ("shipped" as in the fandom term meaning two people should date) and there was a moment this summer when i thought i was developping feelings for him but it was just a second. And i may or may not have dreamed of dating this french guy i saw twice at a drama festival. 

10. I love quotes. I think it's part of the memorising thing - learning quotes by heart. Songs, books, speeches, vines, stand up comedians. I also have a very weird sense of humor, basically anything makes my laugh like bad puns and dank memes. Anyway, i have this thing on my door where i write all the quotes i like. Mostly they're from songs, but i also have two from Dante's Divine Comedy. In italy we study it our third year of high school and my teacher is so obsessed with it that she made us learn over 200 verses by heart. 

[cryptodictation]

An analog uchronia: this would have been the coronavirus crisis without the Internet | Technology

The killer application, the definitive application that would turn our lives completely digital has been a virus. And not a computer virus, but a biological one. During this quarantine, the Spanish spent an average of 79 hours out of the 168 that the week has connected in one way or another to the Internet, according to a study by Nielsen and Dynadata. Almost half of our time. Network traffic has grown 80% since the start of the crisis. The use of WhatsApp has grown to six times. Platforms like Netflix, HBO or the newcomer Disney fill their income accounts and our movies and series with our time at home with euros. Becoming addicts, the possibility that we could go offline terrifies us. The operators reassure us: the collapse is impossible. But what if it never existed? Now that David Simon's television adaptation of Philip Roth's fabulous novel The conspiracy against America ucronía (fiction based on alternative versions of history) has become fashionable, let's consider an analog. What would this crisis be like if it had come before the Internet entered our lives? What would this pandemic have been like in 1995?

We traveled less. Viruses too

Globalization already existed in 1995, but it was different. Thomas Friedman says that we are now living globalization 3.0. The first wave was led by countries. The second, companies. This third, the people. Empires or multinationals are no longer the protagonists of this process. We are. The Internet largely succeeded in defeating space, killing distances. Anyone can have friends they've never hugged on another continent or meet their better half on the other side of the ocean without having kissed her.

According to the World Organization for Migration, in 2019 there were 271 million migrants in the world. The virtual country that would make up all the people who inhabit a different one from the one that saw them born would be the fourth most populous on the planet. More relevant are the tourism figures. According to the World Tourism Organization, in 2019 1.5 billion international visitor arrivals were registered in the world. In 1995, before Expedia was created, the first online travel agency, 527 million.

The Internet has democratized travel. Come fly with me Sinatra sang. Flying was a special experience until the arrival of airlines in the twilight of the century low cost. According to a study by the University of Oxford, flying abroad in the 21st century is 70% cheaper than in the 20th. You traveled less times and to fewer places. According to OAG data, in 1990 there were 7,000 direct air connections in the world. In 2010 they exceeded 15,000. Tourists want to be travelers and begin to leave the traditional routes in a diaspora that reaches everywhere. Thousands of people discover destinations on blogs, networks and Instagram accounts such as Paula Solís. For her “the networks have brought destinations closer. Traveling today is less expensive and complicated. People run away from packages looking for places with fewer tourists. ” A paradox, tourists fleeing from tourism.

Without wanting to, these travelers for professional reasons or in search of the “authentic” are transmission mechanisms as were the Spanish conquerors in the epidemics that decimated the indigenous population of America. In 1995 much less was traveled than today, to fewer places and in a much shorter season. So it is possible to think that if a pandemic had devastated the world then its global spread would have been slower. The expansion from one country to another would not have been hours or days, but weeks or months as in the 1918 Spanish flu, which was accelerated by the movement of troops in the First World War.

The COVID-19 crisis will have a major impact on the mobility of people and tourism. For Solís, “international travel will take time to recover. We will be afraid, nobody wants to quarantine outside their home. ” Furthermore, “some airlines will fail, supply will decrease, prices will rise and international tourism will no longer be so affordable for everyone.” Traveling after the coronavirus will be more like how we traveled in 1995. It will be more expensive, more complicated, and less destinations with numerous countries forcing quarantines of their visitors. In the summer of 1996 an advertising spot popularized the “Where's Curro?” Maybe for a while Curro will stay in Spain.

The phone kept communicating

This confinement has supposed the explosion of the videoconference. It is used to drink canes remotely with friends – the sales of beer, potatoes and olives do not stop rising -, to have meetings with the family and even to form some with virtual weddings. Pedro Sánchez and his ministers used it in their press conferences without journalists and they are on the way to becoming a television genre in itself used in each live set to connect with one of the hundreds of experts in pandemics that have suddenly appeared on the programming morning. Zoom, the fashion app to carry them out, is, according to Statista, the most downloaded in the quarantine, although that success has caused multiple problems. Friends no longer argue over the bar where they can drink vermouth, but rather over the platform where they can see their faces out of focus and poorly lit.

In 1995 we would have had to settle for the voice. If in this crisis the traditional calls have doubled growing even more than the data, then, when they were the only channel to care and be cared for in the middle of the isolation, they would have exploded. Not being able to see the receiver's face would have been the least of the problems. At the end of 1995 only 2% of Spaniards had a mobile phone. Telefónica, the only operator to provide service, closed the year with 928,955 users. Although in 1993 Moviline phones had begun to be marketed, with prices close to 100,000 pesetas (600 euros) and since 1976 in Madrid and Barcelona huge and heavy devices could be used for the car, it was not until 1995 when in Spain it began to offer, as a luxury item, GSM digital mobile telephony.

The fixed monthly fee was 4,000 pesetas, about 24 euros, and the price of the call ranged between 45 and 18 pesetas per minute, depending on the time slot. All mobile numbers started with 909 and SMS was free because no one thought they could interest someone. So the telephony was overwhelmingly fixed. And at home, although it was usual to have several receivers, there was only one line, so parents and children shared a single communication channel. The “cut now” was one of the most repeated phrases and it is difficult to explain to the one who has not lived through the experience of the adolescent who does not call his girlfriend, but the home phone of his parents. A confinement with a single telephone in each home, always communicating, would have been a matter of dispute. Perhaps cabins should have been decreed as an essential service to avoid family schisms.

Teleworking was impossible … and allegal

Although the first Spanish web server, that of the Jaume I University that took advantage of the CERN directory, appeared in 1993, in 1995 practically no home had an Internet connection. In September of that year, Telefónica would launch Infovía, a slow connection. The flat rate would not arrive until almost the year 2000. In 1995 teleworking would have been impossible, although his oldest ancestor could have been launched: work from home. In 1665, when Cambridge University was forced to temporarily close due to the spread of the bubonic plague, physicist Isaac Newton developed the key idea of ​​his law of universal gravitation from his home.

The concept of teleworking is also not new. In 1973, in the midst of the oil crisis in the United States, physicist and engineer Jack Nilles began to think of ways to optimize non-renewable resources such as fossil fuels. His idea was to “take the job to the worker” and not the other way around. He tried to implement it in the insurer where he worked by connecting the keyboards and screens of his colleagues to remote stations. But the idea was technically unfeasible then and it was still in Spain in 1995.

Pablo Teijeira, director for companies of VmWare, a multinational specialized in virtualizing the workplace, assures that “although technology already allows it and 71% of large companies include it in their human resources policies, in 2018 only 3, According to the INE, 2% of employed persons teleworked in Spain, far from 25% in Sweden or 43% in the USA ”. Despite this, many companies have managed to implement contingency plans in record time that have allowed their employees to continue working from home. “Those who were prepared immediately took the step. Many even recommended it days before the state of alarm, “explains Teijeira.” For those who were not, we have given access to critical applications from anywhere to more than 20,000 users in less than five business days. “

25 years ago, technology was not the only limitation to transfer productive activity to homes. The first proposal for a law to regulate teleworking in Spain was presented in 2010. It was rejected and until 2012 it was not included in article 13 of the Workers' Statute. “Without teleworking, the impact would have been devastating,” says Teijeira. Many companies would have been forced to close, the destruction of employment would have been enormous and workers in essential sectors would have had to continue going to their workplaces, making confinement measures less effective.

The online classes that these days are followed by millions of students at home would also be impossible. Perhaps the Government would have had to organize a large-scale training course for all of them through public radio or through some kind of paper bulletins sold at newsstands.

New technologies have not only helped launch telework and maintain teaching activity. In 1995, perhaps the Internet would not have saved the economy or the school year, but it would have saved the lives of many of the people who are now receiving home help and remote diagnosis.

Fewer leisure options and less fear of boredom

In 1995, as today, the main entertainment for a confinement was television. But the meaning of that word today is very different. Following the famous phrase of Paul L. Klein, in 1995 people did not watch programs, they watched television. According to Klein's own theory of the “least objectionable program,” this should not delight a few, but dislike almost no one. That generalist television was tremendously removed from the ultra-segmentation and personalization that digital platforms allow today: from group and simultaneous consumption we have passed to the individual and asynchronous.

In a hypothetical confinement in 1995, leisure would have been based on “let's see what they throw”, according to the professor at the Rey Juan Carlos University, José María Álvarez Monzoncillo, who wrote in 2004 The future of home entertainment. Monzoncillo believes that this future, which is now past, changed radically in three aspects: we went from scarcity to abundance, from family to personal consumption and from homogeneity to segmentation.

The private channels had been released in our country in 1990 with what the television offer was four free channels and Canal +, the only payment option, still broadcast in analogue and therefore in a linear way and without any ability to choose. To these were added the autonomic ones in some communities, the international channels that provided the satellite dishes that had survived the fashion of the 80s and the video tapes. Perhaps a crisis like this in '95 would have served to see those home recordings from camcorders, the last cry in the early '90s, documentary memory of those who were children at that time.

But no matter how large the family home video library was, and considering that the video club would hardly have made an essential service (perhaps the poster had changed to rewinding and disinfecting before delivering), the menu on the audiovisual menu was infinitely less extensive. Children's channels did not yet exist and children's programming was reduced to very specific time frames. The only possibility to see cinema away from mainstream was the video or wait for Monday at 22.30 in This movie theater is so big, released in 1995, the first contact that many had with the classic cinema that is consumed today in Filmin.

The shortage of supply led instead to the concentration of the audience. Family doctor, which premiered that year averaged 8.5 million viewers and its final chapter, two years later exceeded 10.5. The paper house, which is an indisputable success today in our country, has just over 2 million and not simultaneously. For Professor Monzoncillo, today we are more addicted to content: ”We want everything now. There is a new cycle of anxiety, frustration, and tedium. In a cyberfetish environment, boredom is considered a failure and having fun is an obligation. ”

Since not everything is television, in 95 music would have been a fundamental companion to isolation. Hi-fi equipment had come home since the late 1980s, and the CD had banished the cassette tapes to gas stations. In 1995 there was no Spotify but it was the year of Tricky and Pj Harvey's debut from Common People Pulp and Wonderworld from Oasis. Now we have a trap.

Glues for the paper newspaper

The information that we would have had about the pandemic would also have been radically different in 1995. So the only daily content accessible online was the BOE and the Valencian cultural magazine Els Temps with an electronic version on the Servicom network since 1994. EL PAÍS did not have an Internet presence until May 1996, coinciding with the 20th anniversary of its launch. A curious phenomenon and today almost forgotten is that of electronic publications on CD. The pioneering experience had been the Expo 92 newspaper, available on CD-ROM and electronic kiosks installed at the Seville fair connected by fiber optics. Some media had joined this trend, but in 1995 the press was almost exclusively on paper. EL PAÍS sold more than a million copies every Sunday and in a situation like the present one it would have triggered the circulation, probably with more than one daily edition.

Radio consumption, which has increased significantly during this pandemic and is also, according to a study by the Havas Group, the most trusted medium to inform us of the coronavirus, would have been equally significant in 1995. We would not listen to podcasts or radio streamming or apps but we would do it in the late middle wave, but Iñaki Gabilondo or Encarna Sánchez would join us in our running of the bulls as Angels Barceló and Carlos Alsina do today. Television was still, in the words of Román Gubern, “a pulpit disguised as a window.” Generalist and flow, with enormous power in public opinion and in the creation of social consensus, it would also have played a key role in information.

There would also be fake news although we would call them only fake news. In fact, the Spanish flu of 18 October owes its name to the information manipulation that prevented the information on the pandemic from being published in the countries that were fighting in the Great War. The Spanish media, with the neutrality of their country in the war, were the first in the world to write about the virus and thus gave the epidemic its name forever.

The fundamental difference with the current situation would be in the propagation of those hoaxes. Without the Internet or social networks it would be more difficult for them to go viral. The health authorities would have easier to control the disinformation and without the tension that has taken over Twitter, the public debate would surely be calmer. In Professor Álvarez Monzoncillo's opinion, “informatively, television, radio and the press would have been the controlled reference. Now the news is flowing in other ways. In fact, during this confinement the political conflict, and the public agenda itself, have been marked by users and digital networks, which is promoting polarization. ” It is one more example of what Moisés Naím calls “the end of power.”

Science would slow down

In 1995, as today, it would be science that would get us out of this crisis. But research back then was very different without the technologies that have become popular later. As explained by the Professor of Physical Chemistry at the Complutense University of Madrid and former Secretary of State for Innovation, Science and University, Ángeles Heras, “The Internet is an invention of scientists.”

In the 80s, first in some North American Universities and later at CERN in Europe, they were deploying networks to interconnect their research centers. The impact was enormous, both in science itself and in the way of thinking and reading bibliography to propose projects, design experiments, analyze results, publish articles and disseminate knowledge. The scientific method remains the same, but before the Internet we needed much more time to obtain the same results.

Heras tells his own story as an example. His doctoral thesis was the first to be written in a word processor at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Córdoba in 1983. The bibliography was requested from CINDOC (CSIC), the results were analyzed in ballpoint pen and the articles were written in a specific machine. He still remembers the first article that he sent from the University of Córdoba in 1989 by email and not by certified mail, as was customary until then.

“We have gained a lot in immediacy and facilities. The network has allowed collaboration and knowledge sharing. In the early 90s “, explains the professor,” we had a single computer with email for the entire Faculty of Sciences. In the Congresses of each area, it was a matter of meeting scientists who knew each other from the articles and mainly by letter. I started collaborating with the UCM and the CSIC from Córdoba in 1986. I visited the Instituto Rocasolano del CSIC, because it had and still has one of the best Physics and Chemistry libraries. I arrived in Madrid with many references to articles that I photocopied and took me on paper to my Faculty of Córdoba. From so many trips and many scientific conversations, in 1990 I ended up moving to UCM. “

Letters, conferences, photocopies, and trips of a hundred kilometers to consult a library made the research much slower. Today, Heras explains, “more ideas are shared and there is a very natural collaboration between scientists from any country in the world. The human genome program would have been impossible without the Internet, which will also be key to finding a coronavirus vaccine. “

In 1995, scientists would work tirelessly to find treatments and vaccines, but without being able to share this information globally, the process would have been much longer. However, we cannot demand miracles either. The Internet can speed up the research and discovery phases, but the preclinical and clinical phases have their times. Perhaps this crisis will help us to trust more in science and less in the siren songs of technology. This pandemic has killed the Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari. We were told that technology would allow us to dominate nature. Covid-19 has shown that they lied.

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Internet Quotes

Official Website: Internet Quotes

• A lot of people can be afraid of the masking because people can misrepresent themselves [in the Internet] and they can pose as people they’re not. Well, yeah; that’s true. That’s one side of it. But the other side of it is that it equalizes you and if you happen to be a person who is not equal in the eyes of the greater society that’s a damn good thing. – Augusten Burroughs • A lot of rumours on the Internet are wrong and horrible. – Carine Roitfeld • Access to science is greater than ever before. There are more vehicles out there that grant the public access to science. Not to mention the Internet. – Neil deGrasse Tyson • According to new statistics, Pope Francis is the most talked about person on the Internet. And not only that, he has the most viewed profile on Christian Mingle. – Conan O’Brien • After Memory Keepers Daughter, it took me a few months to shut out the world. I really had to turn off the Internet and sort of cloister myself away from the world again and sink into that psychic space to write again. – Kim Edwards • Am I going to regret leaving Wall Street? No. Will I regret missing the beginning of the Internet? Yes. – Jeff Bezos • America Online customers are upset because the company has decided to allow advertising in its chat rooms. I can see why: you got computer sex, you can download pornography, people are making dates with 10 year-olds. Hey, what’s this? A Pepsi ad? They’re ruining the integrity of the Internet! – Jay Leno • America should be cooling down the tensions in the internet, making it a more trusted environment, making it a more secure environment, making it a more reliable environment, because that’s the foundation of our economy and our future. – Edward Snowden • An attitude of only taking what you need was built into the protocols of the Internet itself.- Danny Hillis • Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin. – John von Neumann • As a graduate student at Oxford in 1963, I began writing about books in revolutionary France, helping to found the discipline of book history. I was in my academic corner writing about Enlightenment ideals when the Internet exploded the world of academic communication in the 1990s. – Robert Darnton • As long as you have markets, you’ll have excesses. People went crazy with tulip bulbs. They went crazy with the South Sea Bubble, they went crazy internet stocks, they went crazy with the uranium stocks back when I was first getting started. I mean, you know, you’re not going to change the human animal. And the human animal really doesn’t get a lot smarter. – Howard Warren Buffett • As the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed, the Internet deserves the highest protection from government intrusion. – Stewart Dalzell

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  jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Internet', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_internet').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_internet img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Because of the control of the media by corporate wealth, the discovery of truth depends on an alternative media, such as small radio stations, networks, programs. Also, alternative newspapers, which exist all over the country. Also, cable TV programs, which are not dependent on commercial advertising. Also, the internet, which can reach millions of people by-passing the conventional media. – Howard Zinn • Because the Internets there, I have access to a lot of the legends, like Fela Kuti. I used to watch a lot of Fela Kuti videos, just to see how he performed. He inspired me a lot, actually, because he was a man of many words, many good words. – King Krule • Before there was an Internet, before there was an AOL, the circulation of newspapers was going down. – Donald E. Graham Before you marry a person, you should first make them use a computer with slow Internet to see who they really are. – Will Ferrell • Being connected to the Internet means being vulnerable to coordinated actions that can knock down walls of secrecy and shatter mechanisms of control. – Jamais Cascio • Beware of addictive medicines. Everything in moderation. This applies particularly to the Internet and your sofa. The physical world is ultimately the source of all inspiration. Which is to say, if all else fails: take a bike ride.- Aaron Koblin • By placing intelligence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Internet has created a platform for innovation. – Vinton Cerf

[clickbank-storefront-bestselling] • Chinese national Internet policy is very simple: Block and clone. – Michael Anti • Cloud computing offers individuals access to data and applications from nearly any point of access to the Internet, offers businesses a whole new way to cut costs for technical infrastructure, and offers big computer companies a potentially giant market for hardware and services. – Jamais Cascio • Crackdowns on Internet content make clear the need for an anonymized Web. Now, someone just needs to implement it. – Jamais Cascio • Cryptography is the essential building block of independence for organisations on the internet, just like armies are the essential building blocks of states, because otherwise one state just takes over another. – Julian Assange • Cutting through the acronyms and argot that littered the hearing testimony, the Internet may fairly be regarded as a never-ending worldwide conversation. The government may not, through the CDA, interrupt that conversation. – Stewart Dalzell • Cyberspace undeniably reflects some form of geography.- Sandra Day O’Connor • Describing the Internet as the Network of Networks is like calling the Space Shuttle, a thing that flies. – Jon Lester • Don’t ever, ever try to lie to the internet. – Gabe Newell • Dont you think dreams and the Internet are similar? They are both areas where the repressed conscious mind vents.- Yasutaka Tsutsui • During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. – Al Gore • Email is a 40-year-old technology that is not going away for very good reasons – it’s the cockroach of the Internet. – Jason Hirschhorn • Entire new continent can emerge from the ocean in the time it takes for a Web page to show up on your screen. Contrary to what you may have heard, the Internet does not operate at the speed of light; it operates at the speed of the DMV. – Dave Barry • Eventually, somewhere – be it on the Internet or somewhere else – I will host some version of ‘The Daily Show.’ – Marcus Brigstocke • Falling in love and having a relationship are two different things but yeah I can imagine that you can kind of – I think it depends on one’s psychological state. I think there are some people who are on the internet and can fall in love and seem to be in a certain psychological state and other people who are – who couldn’t quite do that. – Keanu Reeves • Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant. – Mitchell Kapor • Government investment unlocks a huge amount of private sector activity, but the basic research that we put into IT work that led to the Internet and lots of great companies and jobs, the basic work we put into the health care sector, where it’s over $30 billion a year in R&D that led the biotech and pharma jobs. And it creates jobs and it creates new technologies that will be productized. But the government has to prime the pump here. The basic ideas, as in those other industries, start with government investment. – Bill Gates • Guys should not be allowed to use the Internet all day long. So sad.- Natasha Leggero • Human beings are attracted to novelty: to probe the adjacent possible. We didnt stay in the caves. We didnt stay on the planet, and soon we wont stay within the limitations of our biology. We move forward. We transcend our limits. We go to the moon, and we create the Internet. – Jason Silva • I agree completely with my son James when he says ‘Internet is like electricity. The latter lights up everything, while the former lights up knowledge’. – Kerry Packer • I always had faith in the internet. I believed in it and thought it was obviously going to change the way the world worked. I really did not understand why others were selling their stock. As stock prices plunged, I just bought them, one after another, since I had the money. I guess I was rather lucky. – Takafumi Horie • I always try and tell dudes that are younger than me is that because of the Internet everyone can just be by themselves doing something, but the importance of a group is being able to have some sort of competition. – Earl Sweatshirt • I always use the Internet. It’s a great marketing tool. It’s a great starting point, allowing you to show your trailer and have people all over world be able to see it. It was much harder in the old days. – Tom Six • I am possibly thinking about doing an Internet show in the future that will highlight political organizations that I seek out to let people know about them, volunteer opportunities, and donation opportunities. – Kathleen Hanna • I coauthored my first nonfiction book by the time I was 25. I have been involved in nonfiction documentaries, newspapers, TV and internet since that time.- Julian Assange • I do get offered a lot more roles than I choose to do. I’m very busy as a producer and a writer, especially with my Internet stuff, and I tend to only accept the roles that I know will have an impact and has a fanbase. – Felicia Day • I don’t sweat the Internet. You know, it’s still something I enjoy as a movie geek myself to get on and, like, look at all the websites; however, when it comes to marketing a movie, the Internet is still not the thing that gets people to the theatre. – Michael De Luca • I don’t worry about anything in the Internet age. I have been online since I was aware of it: 1985 in San Francisco. It has changed everything in my life. I would not want to even be alive in an era that did not have it because it is essential to our evolution as a species. – Augusten Burroughs • I graduated from high school in 1963. There were no computers, cell phones, Internet, credit cards, cassette tapes or cable TV. – Jeffrey Gitomer • I had had a lot of experience in bringing the Internet to Australia, and I saw that knowledge in the hands of people achieves reform.- Julian Assange • I hate auditioning; it makes me more nervous than anything ever, and I always feel like I wasted my time and I could have been creating my own thing. With the Internet, you have so much freedom that ‘gatekeepers’ make me terrified. – Grace Helbig • I have a very low tolerance for boredom and often think I would have missed out on books entirely if Id grown up in the Internet and video game age. Now I enjoy books for people of all ages, including children. – Rick Yancey • I have always had stuff on the internet, way back in the Myspace days, I had a lot of friends on Myspace. And it is just all about like networking – contacting people and showing people, like, your mind. – Kreayshawn • I have an almost religious zeal… not for technology per se, but for the Internet which is for me, the nervous system of mother Earth, which I see as a living creature, linking up. – Dan Millman • I have no internet savvy whatsoever, but I love researching things. The Internet is my library… beyond that, I’m completely intimidated by it. – Drew Barrymore • I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially… They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck. It’s a series of tubes. – Theodore Stevens • I live in a bubble. I don’t read the blogs, or go on the internet, and I really just don’t know what people are saying because, well I guess I’m afraid to. – Ron Perlman • I love the Internet, and I love wasting time on the Internet – even though it sometimes ends up being not being a waste of time. – Claire Cameron • I sometimes wonder how we spent leisure time before satellite television and Internet came along…and then I realise that I have spent more than half of my life in the ‘dark ages’! – Arthur C. Clarke • I think [the virtual choir] speaks well to a benevolent future for the Internet. – Eric Whitacre • I think it’s a bit silly to brand the Internet as the ‘downfall of youth.’- Ernest Cline • I think middle America has changed very, very much. I think people are way more open-minded. I think – I think it’s because the Internet. I think they’re exposed to so much. All the men talked about how much they love their wife, which I don’t hear all the time in art communities.- John Waters • I think that online harassment has become so ubiquitous on the Internet that a lot of women do feel safer, whatever that means, in spaces where they know like people are not going to bother them in that kind of way. – Jessica Valenti • I think that the Internet is our most profound and beautiful achievement. It is magnificent. We have the Internet as a layer of our thinking that doesn’t control us, we control it, yet we don’t have to be aware of it. It will be like a suit that really fits well. – Augusten Burroughs • I think there is a possible future where maybe we do just take a hard turn away from the Internet and we do start valuing our privacy again. – Brian K. Vaughan • I think with every successful consumer Internet business, there will be lawyers that are interested in going after your company, especially when they think that there’s a financial incentive. – Jeremy Stoppelman • I use the Internet for what it’s for: to learn. – Danny Brown • I want to preserve the free and open Internet – the experience that most users and entrepreneurs have come to expect and enjoy today and that has unleashed impressive innovation, job creation, and investment. – Julius Genachowski • I wanted to highlight the destruction in Gaza by posting photos on my website – but on the internet, people only look at pictures of kittens. – Banksy • I wanted to reexamine the idea of the album for generations of people who are not my age, who love music or learning about music or are finding this band called R.E.M. or have just previously heard “Losing My Religion” and “Everybody Hurts” as their elevator music. I wanted to present an idea of what an album could be in the age of YouTube and the Internet. – Christopher Bollen • I was inspired by the Hole in the Wall project, where a computer with an internet connection was put in a Delhi slum. When the slum was revisited after a month, the children of that slum had learned how to use the worldwide web. – Sugata Mitra • I wont deny that I have a far more productive writing life without the Internet, mostly because I rekindle my ability to concentrate on one thing for a period of longer than three minutes. My curiosity is channeled inward rather than Internet-ward. – Heidi Julavits • I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she’s too young to have logged on yet. Here’s what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say ‘Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?’ – Mike Godwin • I’d like to know what the Internet is going to look like in 2050. Thinking about it makes me wish I were eight years old. – Vinton Cerf • If I do need to make money suddenly, I prefer to just draw something I want to draw and have someone else sell it for me on the Internet. – Chester Brown • If some unemployed punk in New Jersey, can get a cassette to make love to Elle McPherson for $19.95, this virtual reality stuff is going to make crack look like Sanka. – Dennis Miller • If the Internet can be described as a giant human consciousness, then viral marketing is the illusion of free will. – George Pendle • If the Internet is worth its salt, it has to help arrest the forces that promote inequality, monopoly, hypercommercialism, corruption, depoliticization and stagnation. – Robert Waterman McChesney • If the Internet turns out not to be the future of computing, we’re toast. But if it is, we’re golden. – Larry Ellison • If you and I got on an airplane, you’re going to L.A., Los Angeles, and I’m going to Senegal, we get there about the same time. The world is just that small. So a world that is so tightly bound by science and technology and now Internet and the web page, that world is too small for bullies. It has no room in that world for arrogance. – Jesse Jackson • If you have a kid and you try irony out on them, they don’t get it at 7, 8 years old. You can’t really hide the Internet from kids. It worries me some particularly because I’ve done Disney and Pixar stuff. – Randy Newman • If you hear an expert talking about the Internet and saying it [does] this, or it will do that, you should treat it with the same skepticism that you might treat the comments of an economist about the economy or a weatherman about the weather.- Danny Hillis • If you look at the evolution of games from console to Internet to mobile, and look at social networking from Web to mobile, everything is fragmenting. – Chris DeWolfe • If you offer people a decent service, if you give them you know Internet access, if their phones are not cut off on the trains, you know if you have plugs where they can plug in their computers, and if you have a smiling, cheerful staff; and if you can travel really quickly, then you can make a success out of the rail business. – Richard Branson • I’m a great believer in particularly being alert to changes that change something, anything, by an order of magnitude, and nothing operates with the factors of 10 as profoundly as the Internet. – Andy Grove • Im accustomed to Internet forums where rudeness and incivility are the rule, where too many people seem to take pride in their insults. – Bryan Burrough • I’m lucky enough to have been in the age before the internet and now during the internet. I’m grateful to be a witness to that. It’s horse and buggy versus car. To see how quickly things change has given me a renewed sense of optimism. Does that make sense? – Kathleen Hanna Impact, Roles, Stuff • In a way, the whole music industry is just catering to the inherent esteem issues all these artists have – it lays it all out on the line and baits the artist, like a light baits a mosquito. And you go right into it. With every comment on the internet, you go up, you go down, and it’s a big shitshow full of uneducated people. – Willis Earl Beal • In much the same way, motherhood has become the essential female experience, valued above all others: giving life is where it’s at. Give birth in cities where accommodation is precarious, schools have surrendered the fight and children are subject to the most vicious mental assault through advertising, TV, internet, fizzy drink manufacturers and so on. Without children you will never be fulfilled as a woman, but bringing up kids in decent conditions is almost impossible. – Virginie Despentes • In order for us [people] to progress, we need brilliance and brilliance isn’t fair and it’s not polite and we can’t grow it. It happens. Genius happens and it doesn’t always happen in a zip code where we can access it. Therefore, we kind of need [Internet] not to keep tabs on everybody but we need to give them access to everybody else. – Augusten Burroughs • In production, in the first couple of weeks of production, that it was more like making an internet musical. – Joss Whedon • In the Internet age, with the screaming on the radio, etc., it is hard to know what to believe and who is informed and who is not. – Michael Specter • In this business, by the time you realize you’re in trouble, it’s too late to save yourself. Unless you’re running scared all the time, you’re gone. – Bill Gates Information, Pickles, Turns • Innovation is what America does best. Whether it is the Apollo Project to the moon, developing the most advanced defense technologies available, the rise of the Internet or the latest advancements in biomedical gene therapies, our nation leads the world in transformative innovations. – Martin Heinrich • Internet technology, like anything else that mankind creates is a tool and that tool can be used for good or for evil, like a light saber. Technology is supposed to bring people together, streamline things and make life easier and in a lot of ways it does that. However, technology can also disconnect you from other people and break down the social network, the real social network of family and friends and interpersonal communication, and isolate people, make them feel alone, make them feel small. So it’s a tool that needs to be used correctly. – Rainn Wilson • Internet users, that blue screen of death you were looking at this morning? That’s the sky. If you’re still confused, look it up on Wikipedia tomorrow. – Stephen Colbert • It all stems from the same thing – which is that when we are face to face – and this is what I think is so ironic about Facebook being called Facebook, because we are not face to face on Facebook … when we are face to face, we are inhibited by the presence of the other. We are inhibited from aggression by the presence of another face, another person. We’re aware that we’re with a human being. On the Internet, we are disinhibited from taking into full account that we are in the presence of another human being. – Sherry Turkle • It is possible to think that the Internet will be a net positive for society while admitting that there are significant downsides – after all, it’s not a revolution if nobody loses. – Clay Shirky • It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that the Internet has evolved into a force strong enough to reflect the greatest hopes and fears of those who use it. After all, it was designed to withstand nuclear war, not just the puny huffs and puffs of politicians and religious fanatics. – Denise Caruso • Its flattering that there are lots of Internet fan sites about me. Im a bit of a technophobe and I dont even own a laptop, but its probably a good thing Im not logged on, checking up on what everyone is saying about me. – Jonas Armstrong • It’s important for us to explain to our nation that life is important. It’s not only life of babies, but it’s life of children living in, you know, the dark dungeons of the Internet. – George W. Bush • It’s like they say in the Internet world — if you’re doing the same thing today you were doing six months ago, you’re doing the wrong thing. Parents can learn a lot from that. – Bruce Feiler • It’s very advantageous to be sensitive with your work – and, yet, being sensitive, in reality, when criticized, it can annihilate you. It can destroy you. And with the internet there sometimes is a lot of harm, which I find must be very difficult for youngsters coming on – it can be very harsh; the criticism. And, sometimes, it can be a little cruel – which makes it hard for young performers coming on. – Michael Crawford • I’ve learned a lot about things because of the Internet. I’m happy with it, but it’s a long road for me. I’m still definitely a little anti. – Patrick Stump • John Kerry is finding out that it is no fun to be the front runner, that’s when you get all the heat. He had to deny internet rumors this week that he had Botox treatments. The Republicans say Kerry should have a clear, unfurrowed brow the old fashioned way by not giving a sh–. – Bill Maher • Just as the Internet drops transaction and collaboration costs in business and government, it also drops the cost of dissent, of rebellion, and even insurrection. – Don Tapscott • Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects. – Stewart Dalzell • Just as we could have rode into the sunset, along came the Internet, and it tripled the significance of the PC. – Andy Grove • Magazines that depend on photography, and design, and long reads, and quality stuff, are going to do just fine despite the Internet and cable news. – Jann Wenner • Most Internet business theorists are really looking at preserving the necks of giant, Fortune 500 companies, rather than promoting the digital, peer-to-peer economy that actually wants to happen. – Douglas Rushkoff • Most kids come home from school. They don’t go to their TVs first. They go to the Internet. They check their emails, or some blogs, or some sites. Then they go watch TV. Other people are at work all day 9-5 in front of a computer. They see certain clips. We’re not going to hide the fact that people use the Internet. We’re going to try to be as interactive as possible with our fans. I’m currently on Twitter and Facebook and Flicker and Dig. I’m on all that stuff. – Jimmy Fallon • My favorite thing about the Internet is that you get to go into the private world of real creeps without having to smell them.- Penn Jillette • My wife and I have purchased two hybrids. We bought a 3 kw photovoltaic unit. We recycle and offset our carbon emissions on the Internet. We turn things off. But we also spend two nice salaries every year, and here’s the dirty little secret – our environmental footprint is HUGE, I’m sure. We’ve all got to do what we can in our individual lives, but we’ve also got to drive the systemic changes that will make the big differences. – James Gustave Speth • Net Neutrality’ is Obamacare for the Internet; the Internet should not operate at the speed of government. – Ted Cruz • Net neutrality was essential for our economy; it was essential to preserve freedom and openness, both for economic reasons and free speech reasons, and the government had a role in ensuring that Internet freedom was protected.- Julius Genachowski • Newspapers and magazines didn’t want pictures of musicians behaving badly back then. Now, because of the Internet, that’s all the media wants. – Mick Rock • Nowadays we have so many things that take our attention – phones, Internet – and perhaps we need to disconnect from those and focus on the immediate world around us and the people that are actually present. – Nicholas Hoult • Nowadays, anyone who cannot speak English and is incapable of using the Internet is regarded as backward. – Al-Waleed bin Talal • On Chinese Internet, freedom is a targeted and precise window. – Michael Anti • On the Internet you get continuous innovation, so every year the streams are a little better. – Reed Hastings • On the Internet, everyone is writing. There is a great flowering of writing.- James Salter • On the Internet, there are an unlimited number of competitors. Anybody with a Flip camera is your competition. What makes it even worse is that YouTube is willing to subsidize the cost of your bandwidth. So anybody can create and distribute for free basically, but the real cost is marketing. And that’s always the big cost – how do you stand out and what’s the cost of standing out? And there’s no limit to that cost. – Mark Cuban • One of the Internet’s strengths is its ability to help consumers find the right needle in a digital haystack of data. – Jared Sandberg • One of the myths about the Internet of Things is that companies have all the data they need, but their real challenge is making sense of it. In reality, the cost of collecting some kinds of data remains too high, the quality of the data isn’t always good enough, and it remains difficult to integrate multiple data sources. – Chris Murphy • One of the things I like about making stuff in the age of the Internet, is that people make stuff in response to it. You can see people respond to your work visually or musically or with writing.- John Green • One of the things that I realized when I left office was that in the 1990’s citizens across the world applied more power than they had ever had, as compared with the government, because of more people living under democracies than dictatorships for the first time, the power of the internet, which the young Chinese used to basically change China’s policy on the SARS epidemic, and shut it down, and because of the rise in non-governmental organizations like my foundation. – William J. Clinton • One of the wonderful things about Internet is its like a salon. It brings people together from different intellectual walks of life. – Eric Kandel • People are mostly focused on defending the computers on the Internet, and there’s been surprisingly little attention to defending the Internet itself as a communications medium. And I think we probably do need to pay some more attention to that, because it’s actually kind of fragile.- Danny Hillis • People depend on the Open Internet to connect and communicate with each other freely. Voters need it to inform themselves before casting ballots. Without prompt corrective action by the Commission to reclassify broadband, this awful ruling will serve as a sorry memorial to the corporate abrogation of free speech. – Michael Copps • People over the age of thirty were born before the digital revolution really started. We’ve learned to use digital technology-laptops, cameras, personal digital assistants, the Internet-as adults, and it has been something like learning a foreign language. Most of us are okay, and some are even expert. We do e-mails and PowerPoint, surf the Internet, and feel we’re at the cutting edge. But compared to most people under thirty and certainly under twenty, we are fumbling amateurs. People of that age were born after the digital revolution began. They learned to speak digital as a mother tongue. – Ken Robinson • People wouldn’t go on Facebook unless they wanted to share with groups of people. But there is this perception that you have been on a course to push people’s information where it’s visible across the Internet unless they do a bunch of stuff. – Walt Mossberg • Privacy is not an option, and it shouldn’t be the price we accept for just getting on the Internet. – Gary Kovacs • Reddit is not a public utility or a public square; its a privately owned space on the Internet. – John Scalzi • Science fiction does not remain fiction for long. And certainly not on the Internet. – Vinton Cerf • Social media and the Internet haven’t changed our capacity for social interaction any more than the Internet has changed our ability to be in love or our basic propensity to violence, because those are such fundamental human attributes. – Nicholas A. Christakis • Some jerk infected the Internet with an outright lie. It shows how easy it is to do and how credulous people are. – Kurt Vonnegut • Thanks is part to our education system, we tend to think that we’re smarter than the stupid guys in funny wigs who came before us. But that’s because we are mistaking technology, progress, and access to information for intelligence. We think that because we know how to use iPhones (but not build them), browse the Internet (but not understand how it works), and use Google (but not really know anything), our educational system is working just great. By the same token, we think that those dumb aristocrats who used horses to get around and didn’t have electricity were neanderthals. – Glenn Beck • That is, we’re into a whole new world with the Internet, and whenever we sort of cross another plateau in our development, there are those who seek to take advantage of it. So this is a replay of things that have happened throughout our history. – William J. Clinton • The American revolutionaries believed in the power of the word. But they had only word of mouth and the printing press. We have the Internet. – Robert Darnton • The artistic desire reveals itself in dark form – in karaoke bars [or] trolling on the Internet. – Young-Ha Kim • The big change, the really radical change in communication, was in the late 19th century. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph is astronomical. Everything since then has been small increments, including the internet. – Noam Chomsky • The big downside to the global village that the Internet has created is that nothing has time to grow out of the public gaze and, even more dangerous, whatever your personal interests might be, there will always be someone somewhere to provide validation and encouragement. – Derek Ridgers • The boom was healthy too, even with its excesses. Because what this incredible valuation craze did was draw untold sums of billions of dollars into building the Internet infrastructure. The hundreds of billions of dollars that got invested in telecommunications, for example. – Andy Grove • The constant buzz and pressure and noise and static of the Internet, and the way it makes young people feel makes it difficult to grow up and develop the way one might want to. – Ethan Hawke • The day I made that statement, about the inventing the internet, I was tired because I’d been up all night inventing the Camcorder. – Al Gore • The Internet “browser”… is the piece of software that puts a message on your computer screen informing you that the Internet is currently busy and you should try again later. – Dave Barry • The Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime and for hundreds of years. Someone the other day said, “It’s the biggest thing since Gutenberg,” and then someone else said “No, it’s the biggest thing since the invention of writing.”- Rupert Murdoch • The Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime and for hundreds of years. – Rupert Murdoch • The Internet has really democratized ideas. There are no real gatekeepers any more, because if you have a great idea, and you put it online, people will find it and it will get in front of who it needs to get in front of. – Justin Halpern • The Internet is a giant international network of intelligent, informed computer enthusiasts, by which I mean, “people without lives.” We don’t care. We have each other. – Dave Barry • The Internet is a giant international network of intelligent, informed computer enthusiasts, by which I mean, “people without lives.” We don’t care. We have each other…. While you are destroying your mind watching the worthless, brain-rotting drivel on TV, we on the Internet are exchanging, freely and openly, the most settings, uninhibited, intimate and, yes, shocking details about our “CONFIG.SYS.” – Dave Barry • The Internet is a telephone system that’s gotten uppity. – Clifford Stoll • The Internet is a very intimate entertainment experience. I’m in my own apartment talking to people, and I want them to feel like they’re with me in my apartment. So if I’m listening to them and taking ideas from them and being honest with how I’m feeling, it resonates even more that we’re having a real, actual conversation. – Grace Helbig • The Internet is all about accessing entertainment. Realistically, 50 to 80 percent of all traffic is people downloading stuff for free. If you can turn that huge market share into something that you can monetize, even if it is just with ads, you will end up making more money than with all other revenue streams combined. – Kim Dotcom • The internet is an amazing medium for languages. – David Crystal • The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow. – Bill Gates • The Internet is disrupting every media industry…people can complain about that, but complaining is not a strategy. And Amazon is not happening to book selling, the future is happening to book selling. – Jeff Bezos • The Internet is just a world passing around notes in a classroom. – Jon Stewart • The Internet is like a gold-rush; the only people making money are those who sell the pans. – Will Hobbs • The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect. – Esther Dyson • The Internet is merely a new means of communication, that’s all it is. It serves the purpose of getting information, which it is fantastic at. I mean, I live by the Internet in terms of research and it’s incredible – there’s nothing that you can’t find out about. It’s not stopped me going to bookshops but I must say that I don’t go into as many because any book I want. – David Bowie • The internet is necessarily public. It can be filtered-public or censored-public, but it necessarily has to be open and available. – John Green • The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had. – Eric Schmidt • The Internet is the great equalizer.The technology which emanated from the Silicon Valley of California has more potential to ameliorate social inequality than any development in the history of the world, including the industrial revolution. – Benazir Bhutto • The Internet is the greatest thing that ever happened to the entertainment industry. – Michael Ovitz • The Internet is the most important single development in the history of human communication since the invention of call waiting. – Dave Barry • The internet makes everything not enough. – Alec Sulkin • The Internet nowadays is all sensationalism, and it’s just terrifying when you’re actually experiencing it as a person.- Bradford Cox • The Internet seems like a safe house for the opposite mentality, for cynics and for jerks and for people who want to lash out. And it’s a valid thing. It’s a valid forum and I’m not going say that they aren’t valid feelings. But it’s sad. Considering the potential that something like the Internet, that connects so many people, has for good. I think it’s sad that it’s used so often for nothing but unfounded, overzealous negativity. – Chris Gethard • The Internet shapes my life and work so completely that I couldn’t imagine living without it. – Nicola Formichetti • The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs. – Alan Kay • The Internet will help achieve “friction free capitalism” by putting buyer and seller in direct contact and providing more information to both about each other. – Bill Gates • The Internet, I’m trying to point out, is a kooks’ paradise. Anybody with a keyboard and a modem can spread fear, loathing, and just plain asinine ideas among hundreds of thousands of people with the click of a button. Discouraging, but true. – David F. Emery • The Internet, of course, is more than a place to find pictures of people having sex with dogs. – Philip Elmer-DeWitt • The Internet, too, has strong attributes of a public good, and has undermined the “private good” attributes of old media. Internet service providers obviously can exclude people, but the actual content -the values, the ideas- can be shared with no loss of value for the consumer. It is also extremely inexpensive and easy to share material. Sharing is built into the culture and practices of the Web and has made it difficult for the subscription model to be effective. – Robert Waterman McChesney • The Internet]is a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.- Theodore Stevens • The Internets distinct configuration may have made cyberattacks easy to launch, but it has also kindled the flame of freedom. – Jonathan Zittrain • The internet’s perfect for all manner of things, but productive discussion ain’t one of them. It provides scant room for debate and infinite opportunities for fruitless point-scoring: the heady combination of perceived anonymity, gestated responses, random heckling and a notional “live audience” quickly conspire to create a “perfect storm” of perpetual bickering. – Charlie Brooker • The key is really just saying my brain isn’t big enough to figure out why everything happens. It would be like an ant trying to understand the internet. – Rick Warren • The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules, that will stifle innovation. – Sergey Brin • The most important thing for people to understand is that the basic rule that people have a right to send information over the Internet – even when they are using a wireless device – is part of the framework. – Julius Genachowski • The new information technology… Internet and e-mail… have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications. – Peter Drucker • The old internet is shrinking and being replaced by walled gardens over which Google’s crawlers can’t climb. – John Battelle • The penetration of society by the Internet and the penetration of the Internet by society is the best thing that has ever happened to global human civilisation. – Julian Assange • The remarkable social impact and economic success of the Internet is in many ways directly attributable to the architectural characteristics that were part of its design. The Internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services. – Vinton Cerf • The screen is a window through which one sees a virtual world. The challenge is to make that world look real, act real, sound real, feel real. – Ivan Sutherland • The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.- Tim Berners-Lee • The serialization through the Internet or through digital portals, means of ways of communicating, and I think that’s great. – Keanu Reeves • The web site and the Internet are a whole new ball game. – Johnny Ramistella • The whole, ‘Is the internet a good thing or a bad thing’? We’re done with that. It’s just a thing. How to maximise its civic value, its public good – that’s the really big challenge. – Clay Shirky • The worst and the best that the internet ever did was give everybody a voice. – Simon Pegg • There are two things in particular that it [the computer industry] failed to foresee: one was the coming of the Internet(…); the other was the fact that the century would end. – Douglas Adams • There is a very personal price to public humiliation, and the growth of the Internet has jacked up that price. – Monica Lewinsky • There was more data transmitted over the Internet in 2010 than the entire history of the Internet through 2009. – Ben Parr • There’s no real organised body, … so through the internet people have spread their videos, spread photos, and spread word of a new urban movement. – Chris Hayes • Think about this: It was illegal for most people to connect to the internet before 1992.- Steve Case • Thousands of people were producing new Web sites every day. We were just trying to take all that stuff and organize it to make it useful. – David Filo • To get a big company moving fast, especially on a many-headed opportunity like the Internet, you have to have hundreds of people participating and coming up with ideas. – Bill Gates • To seek Truth is automatically a calling for the innate dissident and the subversive; how many are willing to give up safety and security for the perilous life of the spiritual revolutionary? How many are willing to truly learn that their own cherished concepts are wrong? Striking provocative or mysterious poses in the safety of Internet [social media] is far easier than taking the risks involved in the hard work of genuine initiation. – Zeena Schreck • Today with technological advancement, with the Internet, with planes, with the rate at which we travel – even if you wanted, you cannot hide from the rest of the world. And whether you like it or not, you are part of this global marketplace, and so you might as well understand it, you might as well embrace it, because even if you hide, it will find you. – • Together with the rise of the internet, September 11 and its aftermath has changed most of our lives. – Hedi Slimane • Trade on the Internet is becoming very widespread. The problem is our laws have not caught up with electronic commerce. – Susan Bysiewicz • Turns out, theres not a lot of information about pickles on the Internet. – Brian Posehn • US has to be able to rely on a safe and interconnected internet in order to compete with other countries. – Edward Snowden • US spend more on research and development than the other countries, so we shouldn’t be making the internet a more hostile, a more aggressive territory. – Edward Snowden • Use the Internet to get off the Internet! – Scott Heiferman • Video for the Internet has become a testing ground for mediums that actually have revenue. – Mark Cuban • We are excited about Internet access in general. With better access to the Internet, people do more searches. – Larry Page • We believe we’re moving out of the Ice Age, the Iron Age, the Industrial Age, the Information Age, to the participation age. You get on the Net and you do stuff. You IM (instant message), you blog, you take pictures, you publish, you podcast, you transact, you distance learn, you telemedicine. You are participating on the Internet, not just viewing stuff. We build the infrastructure that goes in the data center that facilitates the participation age. We build that big friggin’ Webtone switch. It has security, directory, identity, privacy, storage, compute, the whole Web services stack. – Scott McNealy • We didn’t know the importance of home computers before the Internet. We had them mostly for fun, then the Internet came along and was enabled by all the PCs out there. – Burt Rutan • We have a strong and credible broadband policy because the man who has devised it, the man who will implement it virtually invented the Internet in this country. – Tony Abbott • We must also promote global access to the Internet. We need to bridge the digital divide not just within our country. But among countries. Only by giving people around the world access to this technology can they tap into the potential. Of the information age. – Al Gore • We’re into tech stuff, gadgets, phones, video games. We’ll treat a video game premiere like a movie premiere. I’m just going to be honest with what I like and what I do. What I enjoy. We’re not going to hide the fact that people are on the Internet all day. I think a lot of shows don’t really mention that. – Jimmy Fallon • What we need is a plan B … independent of the Internet. [It] doesn’t necessarily have to have the performance of the Internet, but the police department has to be able to call up the fire department. – Danny Hillis • What, exactly, is the internet? Basically it is a global network exchanging digitized data in such a way that any computer, anywhere, that is equipped with a device called a ‘modem’, can make a noise like a duck choking on a kazoo – Dave Barry • When Bill Clinton assembled the top minds of the nation to discuss the economy in 1992, no one mentioned the Internet. – David Leonhardt • When people conceptualize a cyber-attack, they do tend to think about parts of the critical infrastructure like power plants, water supplies, and similar sort of heavy infrastructure, critical infrastructure areas. And they could be hit, as long as they’re network connected, as long as they have some kind of systems that interact with them that could be manipulated from internet connection. – Edward Snowden • When the Internet first came into public use, it was hailed as a liberation from conformity, a floating world ruled by passion, creativity, innovation and freedom of information. When it was hijacked first by advertising and then by commerce, it seemed like it had been fully co-opted and brought into line with human greed and ambition. – Neil Strauss • When you find yourself on the Internet when you’re supposed to be writing, you’ve already lost. It’s even beyond procrastination when you end up on the Internet. – Noah Baumbach • When you get a small group of fans who hate something, it becomes compounded by the internet. The press picks up the internet like it’s a source. They don’t realise it is just one person typing out their opinion. – George Lucas • When you make the claim that something on the Internet is going to be good for democracy, you often [hear], ‘Are you talking about the thing with the singing cats?’ – Clay Shirky • When you use any kind of internet based capability, any kind of electronic capability, to cause damage to a private entity or a foreign nation or a foreign actor, these are potential acts of war. – Edward Snowden • Who needs evidence when you’ve got the Internet? – Christopher Buckley • Will the highways on the Internet become more few? – George W. Bush • With the development of the Internet…we are in the middle of the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire. I used to think that it was just the biggest thing since Gutenberg, but now I think you have to go back farther. – John Perry Barlow • With YouTube – with the Internet in general – you have information overload. The people who dont necessarily get credit are the curators. – Chad Hurley • You can always find a stray negative comment on the Internet. It’s like everybody loves to put negative comments on the Internet under the cloak of anonymity. – John Legend • You can go back to tulip bulbs in Holland 400 years ago. The human beings going through combinations of fear and greed and all of that sort of thing, their behavior can lead to bubbles. And it may have had and Internet bubble at one time, you’ve had a farm bubble, farmland bubble in the Midwest which resulted in all kinds of tragedy in the early ’80s. – Howard Warren Buffett • You could have these crazy Internet valuations in the late 1990s, but they prove themselves out in the market. The next day they were selling for more than they were the day before, and people said, you know, you’re crazy if you don’t get in on this. So it’s very human. – Howard Warren Buffett • You have to be very clear with yourself about how you’re going to spend your time. When a child is at school or napping, you need to realize that this is your writing time and you don’t spend it surfing the Internet or reading. – Elizabeth Hoyt • You spend money on Internet connection for your employees. Why not spend money on the energy that fuels their brains? – Shawn Achor • Younger feminists actually care about stuff that came before them, the same way that I totally cared about and loved and felt so lucky to have access to the feminism that came before me. To have younger people take what me and my friends have done, and to say ‘We have access to that, but we’re going to put that through our own Internet generation filter and we’re going to make it into something that speaks to us and is a lot smarter.’ – Kathleen Hanna

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[equitiesstocks]

Internet Quotes

Official Website: Internet Quotes

• A lot of people can be afraid of the masking because people can misrepresent themselves [in the Internet] and they can pose as people they’re not. Well, yeah; that’s true. That’s one side of it. But the other side of it is that it equalizes you and if you happen to be a person who is not equal in the eyes of the greater society that’s a damn good thing. – Augusten Burroughs • A lot of rumours on the Internet are wrong and horrible. – Carine Roitfeld • Access to science is greater than ever before. There are more vehicles out there that grant the public access to science. Not to mention the Internet. – Neil deGrasse Tyson • According to new statistics, Pope Francis is the most talked about person on the Internet. And not only that, he has the most viewed profile on Christian Mingle. – Conan O’Brien • After Memory Keepers Daughter, it took me a few months to shut out the world. I really had to turn off the Internet and sort of cloister myself away from the world again and sink into that psychic space to write again. – Kim Edwards • Am I going to regret leaving Wall Street? No. Will I regret missing the beginning of the Internet? Yes. – Jeff Bezos • America Online customers are upset because the company has decided to allow advertising in its chat rooms. I can see why: you got computer sex, you can download pornography, people are making dates with 10 year-olds. Hey, what’s this? A Pepsi ad? They’re ruining the integrity of the Internet! – Jay Leno • America should be cooling down the tensions in the internet, making it a more trusted environment, making it a more secure environment, making it a more reliable environment, because that’s the foundation of our economy and our future. – Edward Snowden • An attitude of only taking what you need was built into the protocols of the Internet itself.- Danny Hillis • Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin. – John von Neumann • As a graduate student at Oxford in 1963, I began writing about books in revolutionary France, helping to found the discipline of book history. I was in my academic corner writing about Enlightenment ideals when the Internet exploded the world of academic communication in the 1990s. – Robert Darnton • As long as you have markets, you’ll have excesses. People went crazy with tulip bulbs. They went crazy with the South Sea Bubble, they went crazy internet stocks, they went crazy with the uranium stocks back when I was first getting started. I mean, you know, you’re not going to change the human animal. And the human animal really doesn’t get a lot smarter. – Howard Warren Buffett • As the most participatory form of mass speech yet developed, the Internet deserves the highest protection from government intrusion. – Stewart Dalzell

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  jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Internet', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_internet').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_internet img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Because of the control of the media by corporate wealth, the discovery of truth depends on an alternative media, such as small radio stations, networks, programs. Also, alternative newspapers, which exist all over the country. Also, cable TV programs, which are not dependent on commercial advertising. Also, the internet, which can reach millions of people by-passing the conventional media. – Howard Zinn • Because the Internets there, I have access to a lot of the legends, like Fela Kuti. I used to watch a lot of Fela Kuti videos, just to see how he performed. He inspired me a lot, actually, because he was a man of many words, many good words. – King Krule • Before there was an Internet, before there was an AOL, the circulation of newspapers was going down. – Donald E. Graham Before you marry a person, you should first make them use a computer with slow Internet to see who they really are. – Will Ferrell • Being connected to the Internet means being vulnerable to coordinated actions that can knock down walls of secrecy and shatter mechanisms of control. – Jamais Cascio • Beware of addictive medicines. Everything in moderation. This applies particularly to the Internet and your sofa. The physical world is ultimately the source of all inspiration. Which is to say, if all else fails: take a bike ride.- Aaron Koblin • By placing intelligence at the edges rather than control in the middle of the network, the Internet has created a platform for innovation. – Vinton Cerf

[clickbank-storefront-bestselling] • Chinese national Internet policy is very simple: Block and clone. – Michael Anti • Cloud computing offers individuals access to data and applications from nearly any point of access to the Internet, offers businesses a whole new way to cut costs for technical infrastructure, and offers big computer companies a potentially giant market for hardware and services. – Jamais Cascio • Crackdowns on Internet content make clear the need for an anonymized Web. Now, someone just needs to implement it. – Jamais Cascio • Cryptography is the essential building block of independence for organisations on the internet, just like armies are the essential building blocks of states, because otherwise one state just takes over another. – Julian Assange • Cutting through the acronyms and argot that littered the hearing testimony, the Internet may fairly be regarded as a never-ending worldwide conversation. The government may not, through the CDA, interrupt that conversation. – Stewart Dalzell • Cyberspace undeniably reflects some form of geography.- Sandra Day O’Connor • Describing the Internet as the Network of Networks is like calling the Space Shuttle, a thing that flies. – Jon Lester • Don’t ever, ever try to lie to the internet. – Gabe Newell • Dont you think dreams and the Internet are similar? They are both areas where the repressed conscious mind vents.- Yasutaka Tsutsui • During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. – Al Gore • Email is a 40-year-old technology that is not going away for very good reasons – it’s the cockroach of the Internet. – Jason Hirschhorn • Entire new continent can emerge from the ocean in the time it takes for a Web page to show up on your screen. Contrary to what you may have heard, the Internet does not operate at the speed of light; it operates at the speed of the DMV. – Dave Barry • Eventually, somewhere – be it on the Internet or somewhere else – I will host some version of ‘The Daily Show.’ – Marcus Brigstocke • Falling in love and having a relationship are two different things but yeah I can imagine that you can kind of – I think it depends on one’s psychological state. I think there are some people who are on the internet and can fall in love and seem to be in a certain psychological state and other people who are – who couldn’t quite do that. – Keanu Reeves • Getting information off the Internet is like taking a drink from a fire hydrant. – Mitchell Kapor • Government investment unlocks a huge amount of private sector activity, but the basic research that we put into IT work that led to the Internet and lots of great companies and jobs, the basic work we put into the health care sector, where it’s over $30 billion a year in R&D that led the biotech and pharma jobs. And it creates jobs and it creates new technologies that will be productized. But the government has to prime the pump here. The basic ideas, as in those other industries, start with government investment. – Bill Gates • Guys should not be allowed to use the Internet all day long. So sad.- Natasha Leggero • Human beings are attracted to novelty: to probe the adjacent possible. We didnt stay in the caves. We didnt stay on the planet, and soon we wont stay within the limitations of our biology. We move forward. We transcend our limits. We go to the moon, and we create the Internet. – Jason Silva • I agree completely with my son James when he says ‘Internet is like electricity. The latter lights up everything, while the former lights up knowledge’. – Kerry Packer • I always had faith in the internet. I believed in it and thought it was obviously going to change the way the world worked. I really did not understand why others were selling their stock. As stock prices plunged, I just bought them, one after another, since I had the money. I guess I was rather lucky. – Takafumi Horie • I always try and tell dudes that are younger than me is that because of the Internet everyone can just be by themselves doing something, but the importance of a group is being able to have some sort of competition. – Earl Sweatshirt • I always use the Internet. It’s a great marketing tool. It’s a great starting point, allowing you to show your trailer and have people all over world be able to see it. It was much harder in the old days. – Tom Six • I am possibly thinking about doing an Internet show in the future that will highlight political organizations that I seek out to let people know about them, volunteer opportunities, and donation opportunities. – Kathleen Hanna • I coauthored my first nonfiction book by the time I was 25. I have been involved in nonfiction documentaries, newspapers, TV and internet since that time.- Julian Assange • I do get offered a lot more roles than I choose to do. I’m very busy as a producer and a writer, especially with my Internet stuff, and I tend to only accept the roles that I know will have an impact and has a fanbase. – Felicia Day • I don’t sweat the Internet. You know, it’s still something I enjoy as a movie geek myself to get on and, like, look at all the websites; however, when it comes to marketing a movie, the Internet is still not the thing that gets people to the theatre. – Michael De Luca • I don’t worry about anything in the Internet age. I have been online since I was aware of it: 1985 in San Francisco. It has changed everything in my life. I would not want to even be alive in an era that did not have it because it is essential to our evolution as a species. – Augusten Burroughs • I graduated from high school in 1963. There were no computers, cell phones, Internet, credit cards, cassette tapes or cable TV. – Jeffrey Gitomer • I had had a lot of experience in bringing the Internet to Australia, and I saw that knowledge in the hands of people achieves reform.- Julian Assange • I hate auditioning; it makes me more nervous than anything ever, and I always feel like I wasted my time and I could have been creating my own thing. With the Internet, you have so much freedom that ‘gatekeepers’ make me terrified. – Grace Helbig • I have a very low tolerance for boredom and often think I would have missed out on books entirely if Id grown up in the Internet and video game age. Now I enjoy books for people of all ages, including children. – Rick Yancey • I have always had stuff on the internet, way back in the Myspace days, I had a lot of friends on Myspace. And it is just all about like networking – contacting people and showing people, like, your mind. – Kreayshawn • I have an almost religious zeal… not for technology per se, but for the Internet which is for me, the nervous system of mother Earth, which I see as a living creature, linking up. – Dan Millman • I have no internet savvy whatsoever, but I love researching things. The Internet is my library… beyond that, I’m completely intimidated by it. – Drew Barrymore • I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially… They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck. It’s a series of tubes. – Theodore Stevens • I live in a bubble. I don’t read the blogs, or go on the internet, and I really just don’t know what people are saying because, well I guess I’m afraid to. – Ron Perlman • I love the Internet, and I love wasting time on the Internet – even though it sometimes ends up being not being a waste of time. – Claire Cameron • I sometimes wonder how we spent leisure time before satellite television and Internet came along…and then I realise that I have spent more than half of my life in the ‘dark ages’! – Arthur C. Clarke • I think [the virtual choir] speaks well to a benevolent future for the Internet. – Eric Whitacre • I think it’s a bit silly to brand the Internet as the ‘downfall of youth.’- Ernest Cline • I think middle America has changed very, very much. I think people are way more open-minded. I think – I think it’s because the Internet. I think they’re exposed to so much. All the men talked about how much they love their wife, which I don’t hear all the time in art communities.- John Waters • I think that online harassment has become so ubiquitous on the Internet that a lot of women do feel safer, whatever that means, in spaces where they know like people are not going to bother them in that kind of way. – Jessica Valenti • I think that the Internet is our most profound and beautiful achievement. It is magnificent. We have the Internet as a layer of our thinking that doesn’t control us, we control it, yet we don’t have to be aware of it. It will be like a suit that really fits well. – Augusten Burroughs • I think there is a possible future where maybe we do just take a hard turn away from the Internet and we do start valuing our privacy again. – Brian K. Vaughan • I think with every successful consumer Internet business, there will be lawyers that are interested in going after your company, especially when they think that there’s a financial incentive. – Jeremy Stoppelman • I use the Internet for what it’s for: to learn. – Danny Brown • I want to preserve the free and open Internet – the experience that most users and entrepreneurs have come to expect and enjoy today and that has unleashed impressive innovation, job creation, and investment. – Julius Genachowski • I wanted to highlight the destruction in Gaza by posting photos on my website – but on the internet, people only look at pictures of kittens. – Banksy • I wanted to reexamine the idea of the album for generations of people who are not my age, who love music or learning about music or are finding this band called R.E.M. or have just previously heard “Losing My Religion” and “Everybody Hurts” as their elevator music. I wanted to present an idea of what an album could be in the age of YouTube and the Internet. – Christopher Bollen • I was inspired by the Hole in the Wall project, where a computer with an internet connection was put in a Delhi slum. When the slum was revisited after a month, the children of that slum had learned how to use the worldwide web. – Sugata Mitra • I wont deny that I have a far more productive writing life without the Internet, mostly because I rekindle my ability to concentrate on one thing for a period of longer than three minutes. My curiosity is channeled inward rather than Internet-ward. – Heidi Julavits • I worry about my child and the Internet all the time, even though she’s too young to have logged on yet. Here’s what I worry about. I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, she will come to me and say ‘Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?’ – Mike Godwin • I’d like to know what the Internet is going to look like in 2050. Thinking about it makes me wish I were eight years old. – Vinton Cerf • If I do need to make money suddenly, I prefer to just draw something I want to draw and have someone else sell it for me on the Internet. – Chester Brown • If some unemployed punk in New Jersey, can get a cassette to make love to Elle McPherson for $19.95, this virtual reality stuff is going to make crack look like Sanka. – Dennis Miller • If the Internet can be described as a giant human consciousness, then viral marketing is the illusion of free will. – George Pendle • If the Internet is worth its salt, it has to help arrest the forces that promote inequality, monopoly, hypercommercialism, corruption, depoliticization and stagnation. – Robert Waterman McChesney • If the Internet turns out not to be the future of computing, we’re toast. But if it is, we’re golden. – Larry Ellison • If you and I got on an airplane, you’re going to L.A., Los Angeles, and I’m going to Senegal, we get there about the same time. The world is just that small. So a world that is so tightly bound by science and technology and now Internet and the web page, that world is too small for bullies. It has no room in that world for arrogance. – Jesse Jackson • If you have a kid and you try irony out on them, they don’t get it at 7, 8 years old. You can’t really hide the Internet from kids. It worries me some particularly because I’ve done Disney and Pixar stuff. – Randy Newman • If you hear an expert talking about the Internet and saying it [does] this, or it will do that, you should treat it with the same skepticism that you might treat the comments of an economist about the economy or a weatherman about the weather.- Danny Hillis • If you look at the evolution of games from console to Internet to mobile, and look at social networking from Web to mobile, everything is fragmenting. – Chris DeWolfe • If you offer people a decent service, if you give them you know Internet access, if their phones are not cut off on the trains, you know if you have plugs where they can plug in their computers, and if you have a smiling, cheerful staff; and if you can travel really quickly, then you can make a success out of the rail business. – Richard Branson • I’m a great believer in particularly being alert to changes that change something, anything, by an order of magnitude, and nothing operates with the factors of 10 as profoundly as the Internet. – Andy Grove • Im accustomed to Internet forums where rudeness and incivility are the rule, where too many people seem to take pride in their insults. – Bryan Burrough • I’m lucky enough to have been in the age before the internet and now during the internet. I’m grateful to be a witness to that. It’s horse and buggy versus car. To see how quickly things change has given me a renewed sense of optimism. Does that make sense? – Kathleen Hanna Impact, Roles, Stuff • In a way, the whole music industry is just catering to the inherent esteem issues all these artists have – it lays it all out on the line and baits the artist, like a light baits a mosquito. And you go right into it. With every comment on the internet, you go up, you go down, and it’s a big shitshow full of uneducated people. – Willis Earl Beal • In much the same way, motherhood has become the essential female experience, valued above all others: giving life is where it’s at. Give birth in cities where accommodation is precarious, schools have surrendered the fight and children are subject to the most vicious mental assault through advertising, TV, internet, fizzy drink manufacturers and so on. Without children you will never be fulfilled as a woman, but bringing up kids in decent conditions is almost impossible. – Virginie Despentes • In order for us [people] to progress, we need brilliance and brilliance isn’t fair and it’s not polite and we can’t grow it. It happens. Genius happens and it doesn’t always happen in a zip code where we can access it. Therefore, we kind of need [Internet] not to keep tabs on everybody but we need to give them access to everybody else. – Augusten Burroughs • In production, in the first couple of weeks of production, that it was more like making an internet musical. – Joss Whedon • In the Internet age, with the screaming on the radio, etc., it is hard to know what to believe and who is informed and who is not. – Michael Specter • In this business, by the time you realize you’re in trouble, it’s too late to save yourself. Unless you’re running scared all the time, you���re gone. – Bill Gates Information, Pickles, Turns • Innovation is what America does best. Whether it is the Apollo Project to the moon, developing the most advanced defense technologies available, the rise of the Internet or the latest advancements in biomedical gene therapies, our nation leads the world in transformative innovations. – Martin Heinrich • Internet technology, like anything else that mankind creates is a tool and that tool can be used for good or for evil, like a light saber. Technology is supposed to bring people together, streamline things and make life easier and in a lot of ways it does that. However, technology can also disconnect you from other people and break down the social network, the real social network of family and friends and interpersonal communication, and isolate people, make them feel alone, make them feel small. So it’s a tool that needs to be used correctly. – Rainn Wilson • Internet users, that blue screen of death you were looking at this morning? That’s the sky. If you’re still confused, look it up on Wikipedia tomorrow. – Stephen Colbert • It all stems from the same thing – which is that when we are face to face – and this is what I think is so ironic about Facebook being called Facebook, because we are not face to face on Facebook … when we are face to face, we are inhibited by the presence of the other. We are inhibited from aggression by the presence of another face, another person. We’re aware that we’re with a human being. On the Internet, we are disinhibited from taking into full account that we are in the presence of another human being. – Sherry Turkle • It is possible to think that the Internet will be a net positive for society while admitting that there are significant downsides – after all, it’s not a revolution if nobody loses. – Clay Shirky • It shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that the Internet has evolved into a force strong enough to reflect the greatest hopes and fears of those who use it. After all, it was designed to withstand nuclear war, not just the puny huffs and puffs of politicians and religious fanatics. – Denise Caruso • Its flattering that there are lots of Internet fan sites about me. Im a bit of a technophobe and I dont even own a laptop, but its probably a good thing Im not logged on, checking up on what everyone is saying about me. – Jonas Armstrong • It’s important for us to explain to our nation that life is important. It’s not only life of babies, but it’s life of children living in, you know, the dark dungeons of the Internet. – George W. Bush • It’s like they say in the Internet world — if you’re doing the same thing today you were doing six months ago, you’re doing the wrong thing. Parents can learn a lot from that. – Bruce Feiler • It’s very advantageous to be sensitive with your work – and, yet, being sensitive, in reality, when criticized, it can annihilate you. It can destroy you. And with the internet there sometimes is a lot of harm, which I find must be very difficult for youngsters coming on – it can be very harsh; the criticism. And, sometimes, it can be a little cruel – which makes it hard for young performers coming on. – Michael Crawford • I’ve learned a lot about things because of the Internet. I’m happy with it, but it’s a long road for me. I’m still definitely a little anti. – Patrick Stump • John Kerry is finding out that it is no fun to be the front runner, that’s when you get all the heat. He had to deny internet rumors this week that he had Botox treatments. The Republicans say Kerry should have a clear, unfurrowed brow the old fashioned way by not giving a sh–. – Bill Maher • Just as the Internet drops transaction and collaboration costs in business and government, it also drops the cost of dissent, of rebellion, and even insurrection. – Don Tapscott • Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so the strength of our liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects. – Stewart Dalzell • Just as we could have rode into the sunset, along came the Internet, and it tripled the significance of the PC. – Andy Grove • Magazines that depend on photography, and design, and long reads, and quality stuff, are going to do just fine despite the Internet and cable news. – Jann Wenner • Most Internet business theorists are really looking at preserving the necks of giant, Fortune 500 companies, rather than promoting the digital, peer-to-peer economy that actually wants to happen. – Douglas Rushkoff • Most kids come home from school. They don’t go to their TVs first. They go to the Internet. They check their emails, or some blogs, or some sites. Then they go watch TV. Other people are at work all day 9-5 in front of a computer. They see certain clips. We’re not going to hide the fact that people use the Internet. We’re going to try to be as interactive as possible with our fans. I’m currently on Twitter and Facebook and Flicker and Dig. I’m on all that stuff. – Jimmy Fallon • My favorite thing about the Internet is that you get to go into the private world of real creeps without having to smell them.- Penn Jillette • My wife and I have purchased two hybrids. We bought a 3 kw photovoltaic unit. We recycle and offset our carbon emissions on the Internet. We turn things off. But we also spend two nice salaries every year, and here’s the dirty little secret – our environmental footprint is HUGE, I’m sure. We’ve all got to do what we can in our individual lives, but we’ve also got to drive the systemic changes that will make the big differences. – James Gustave Speth • Net Neutrality’ is Obamacare for the Internet; the Internet should not operate at the speed of government. – Ted Cruz • Net neutrality was essential for our economy; it was essential to preserve freedom and openness, both for economic reasons and free speech reasons, and the government had a role in ensuring that Internet freedom was protected.- Julius Genachowski • Newspapers and magazines didn’t want pictures of musicians behaving badly back then. Now, because of the Internet, that’s all the media wants. – Mick Rock • Nowadays we have so many things that take our attention – phones, Internet – and perhaps we need to disconnect from those and focus on the immediate world around us and the people that are actually present. – Nicholas Hoult • Nowadays, anyone who cannot speak English and is incapable of using the Internet is regarded as backward. – Al-Waleed bin Talal • On Chinese Internet, freedom is a targeted and precise window. – Michael Anti • On the Internet you get continuous innovation, so every year the streams are a little better. – Reed Hastings • On the Internet, everyone is writing. There is a great flowering of writing.- James Salter • On the Internet, there are an unlimited number of competitors. Anybody with a Flip camera is your competition. What makes it even worse is that YouTube is willing to subsidize the cost of your bandwidth. So anybody can create and distribute for free basically, but the real cost is marketing. And that’s always the big cost – how do you stand out and what’s the cost of standing out? And there’s no limit to that cost. – Mark Cuban • One of the Internet’s strengths is its ability to help consumers find the right needle in a digital haystack of data. – Jared Sandberg • One of the myths about the Internet of Things is that companies have all the data they need, but their real challenge is making sense of it. In reality, the cost of collecting some kinds of data remains too high, the quality of the data isn’t always good enough, and it remains difficult to integrate multiple data sources. – Chris Murphy • One of the things I like about making stuff in the age of the Internet, is that people make stuff in response to it. You can see people respond to your work visually or musically or with writing.- John Green • One of the things that I realized when I left office was that in the 1990’s citizens across the world applied more power than they had ever had, as compared with the government, because of more people living under democracies than dictatorships for the first time, the power of the internet, which the young Chinese used to basically change China’s policy on the SARS epidemic, and shut it down, and because of the rise in non-governmental organizations like my foundation. – William J. Clinton • One of the wonderful things about Internet is its like a salon. It brings people together from different intellectual walks of life. – Eric Kandel • People are mostly focused on defending the computers on the Internet, and there’s been surprisingly little attention to defending the Internet itself as a communications medium. And I think we probably do need to pay some more attention to that, because it’s actually kind of fragile.- Danny Hillis • People depend on the Open Internet to connect and communicate with each other freely. Voters need it to inform themselves before casting ballots. Without prompt corrective action by the Commission to reclassify broadband, this awful ruling will serve as a sorry memorial to the corporate abrogation of free speech. – Michael Copps • People over the age of thirty were born before the digital revolution really started. We’ve learned to use digital technology-laptops, cameras, personal digital assistants, the Internet-as adults, and it has been something like learning a foreign language. Most of us are okay, and some are even expert. We do e-mails and PowerPoint, surf the Internet, and feel we’re at the cutting edge. But compared to most people under thirty and certainly under twenty, we are fumbling amateurs. People of that age were born after the digital revolution began. They learned to speak digital as a mother tongue. – Ken Robinson • People wouldn’t go on Facebook unless they wanted to share with groups of people. But there is this perception that you have been on a course to push people’s information where it’s visible across the Internet unless they do a bunch of stuff. – Walt Mossberg • Privacy is not an option, and it shouldn’t be the price we accept for just getting on the Internet. – Gary Kovacs • Reddit is not a public utility or a public square; its a privately owned space on the Internet. – John Scalzi • Science fiction does not remain fiction for long. And certainly not on the Internet. – Vinton Cerf • Social media and the Internet haven’t changed our capacity for social interaction any more than the Internet has changed our ability to be in love or our basic propensity to violence, because those are such fundamental human attributes. – Nicholas A. Christakis • Some jerk infected the Internet with an outright lie. It shows how easy it is to do and how credulous people are. – Kurt Vonnegut • Thanks is part to our education system, we tend to think that we’re smarter than the stupid guys in funny wigs who came before us. But that’s because we are mistaking technology, progress, and access to information for intelligence. We think that because we know how to use iPhones (but not build them), browse the Internet (but not understand how it works), and use Google (but not really know anything), our educational system is working just great. By the same token, we think that those dumb aristocrats who used horses to get around and didn’t have electricity were neanderthals. – Glenn Beck • That is, we’re into a whole new world with the Internet, and whenever we sort of cross another plateau in our development, there are those who seek to take advantage of it. So this is a replay of things that have happened throughout our history. – William J. Clinton • The American revolutionaries believed in the power of the word. But they had only word of mouth and the printing press. We have the Internet. – Robert Darnton • The artistic desire reveals itself in dark form – in karaoke bars [or] trolling on the Internet. – Young-Ha Kim • The big change, the really radical change in communication, was in the late 19th century. The shift from sailing ships to telegraph is astronomical. Everything since then has been small increments, including the internet. – Noam Chomsky • The big downside to the global village that the Internet has created is that nothing has time to grow out of the public gaze and, even more dangerous, whatever your personal interests might be, there will always be someone somewhere to provide validation and encouragement. – Derek Ridgers • The boom was healthy too, even with its excesses. Because what this incredible valuation craze did was draw untold sums of billions of dollars into building the Internet infrastructure. The hundreds of billions of dollars that got invested in telecommunications, for example. – Andy Grove • The constant buzz and pressure and noise and static of the Internet, and the way it makes young people feel makes it difficult to grow up and develop the way one might want to. – Ethan Hawke • The day I made that statement, about the inventing the internet, I was tired because I’d been up all night inventing the Camcorder. – Al Gore • The Internet “browser”… is the piece of software that puts a message on your computer screen informing you that the Internet is currently busy and you should try again later. – Dave Barry • The Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime and for hundreds of years. Someone the other day said, “It’s the biggest thing since Gutenberg,” and then someone else said “No, it’s the biggest thing since the invention of writing.”- Rupert Murdoch • The Internet has been the most fundamental change during my lifetime and for hundreds of years. – Rupert Murdoch • The Internet has really democratized ideas. There are no real gatekeepers any more, because if you have a great idea, and you put it online, people will find it and it will get in front of who it needs to get in front of. – Justin Halpern • The Internet is a giant international network of intelligent, informed computer enthusiasts, by which I mean, “people without lives.” We don’t care. We have each other. – Dave Barry • The Internet is a giant international network of intelligent, informed computer enthusiasts, by which I mean, “people without lives.” We don’t care. We have each other…. While you are destroying your mind watching the worthless, brain-rotting drivel on TV, we on the Internet are exchanging, freely and openly, the most settings, uninhibited, intimate and, yes, shocking details about our “CONFIG.SYS.” – Dave Barry • The Internet is a telephone system that’s gotten uppity. – Clifford Stoll • The Internet is a very intimate entertainment experience. I’m in my own apartment talking to people, and I want them to feel like they’re with me in my apartment. So if I’m listening to them and taking ideas from them and being honest with how I’m feeling, it resonates even more that we’re having a real, actual conversation. – Grace Helbig • The Internet is all about accessing entertainment. Realistically, 50 to 80 percent of all traffic is people downloading stuff for free. If you can turn that huge market share into something that you can monetize, even if it is just with ads, you will end up making more money than with all other revenue streams combined. – Kim Dotcom • The internet is an amazing medium for languages. – David Crystal • The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow. – Bill Gates • The Internet is disrupting every media industry…people can complain about that, but complaining is not a strategy. And Amazon is not happening to book selling, the future is happening to book selling. – Jeff Bezos • The Internet is just a world passing around notes in a classroom. – Jon Stewart • The Internet is like a gold-rush; the only people making money are those who sell the pans. – Will Hobbs • The Internet is like alcohol in some sense. It accentuates what you would do anyway. If you want to be a loner, you can be more alone. If you want to connect, it makes it easier to connect. – Esther Dyson • The Internet is merely a new means of communication, that’s all it is. It serves the purpose of getting information, which it is fantastic at. I mean, I live by the Internet in terms of research and it’s incredible – there’s nothing that you can’t find out about. It’s not stopped me going to bookshops but I must say that I don’t go into as many because any book I want. – David Bowie • The internet is necessarily public. It can be filtered-public or censored-public, but it necessarily has to be open and available. – John Green • The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had. – Eric Schmidt • The Internet is the great equalizer.The technology which emanated from the Silicon Valley of California has more potential to ameliorate social inequality than any development in the history of the world, including the industrial revolution. – Benazir Bhutto • The Internet is the greatest thing that ever happened to the entertainment industry. – Michael Ovitz • The Internet is the most important single development in the history of human communication since the invention of call waiting. – Dave Barry • The internet makes everything not enough. – Alec Sulkin • The Internet nowadays is all sensationalism, and it’s just terrifying when you’re actually experiencing it as a person.- Bradford Cox • The Internet seems like a safe house for the opposite mentality, for cynics and for jerks and for people who want to lash out. And it’s a valid thing. It’s a valid forum and I’m not going say that they aren’t valid feelings. But it’s sad. Considering the potential that something like the Internet, that connects so many people, has for good. I think it’s sad that it’s used so often for nothing but unfounded, overzealous negativity. – Chris Gethard • The Internet shapes my life and work so completely that I couldn’t imagine living without it. – Nicola Formichetti • The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs. – Alan Kay • The Internet will help achieve “friction free capitalism” by putting buyer and seller in direct contact and providing more information to both about each other. – Bill Gates • The Internet, I’m trying to point out, is a kooks’ paradise. Anybody with a keyboard and a modem can spread fear, loathing, and just plain asinine ideas among hundreds of thousands of people with the click of a button. Discouraging, but true. – David F. Emery • The Internet, of course, is more than a place to find pictures of people having sex with dogs. – Philip Elmer-DeWitt • The Internet, too, has strong attributes of a public good, and has undermined the “private good” attributes of old media. Internet service providers obviously can exclude people, but the actual content -the values, the ideas- can be shared with no loss of value for the consumer. It is also extremely inexpensive and easy to share material. Sharing is built into the culture and practices of the Web and has made it difficult for the subscription model to be effective. – Robert Waterman McChesney • The Internet]is a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.- Theodore Stevens • The Internets distinct configuration may have made cyberattacks easy to launch, but it has also kindled the flame of freedom. – Jonathan Zittrain • The internet’s perfect for all manner of things, but productive discussion ain’t one of them. It provides scant room for debate and infinite opportunities for fruitless point-scoring: the heady combination of perceived anonymity, gestated responses, random heckling and a notional “live audience” quickly conspire to create a “perfect storm” of perpetual bickering. – Charlie Brooker • The key is really just saying my brain isn’t big enough to figure out why everything happens. It would be like an ant trying to understand the internet. – Rick Warren • The kind of environment that we developed Google in, the reason that we were able to develop a search engine, is the web was so open. Once you get too many rules, that will stifle innovation. – Sergey Brin • The most important thing for people to understand is that the basic rule that people have a right to send information over the Internet – even when they are using a wireless device – is part of the framework. – Julius Genachowski • The new information technology… Internet and e-mail… have practically eliminated the physical costs of communications. – Peter Drucker • The old internet is shrinking and being replaced by walled gardens over which Google’s crawlers can’t climb. – John Battelle • The penetration of society by the Internet and the penetration of the Internet by society is the best thing that has ever happened to global human civilisation. – Julian Assange • The remarkable social impact and economic success of the Internet is in many ways directly attributable to the architectural characteristics that were part of its design. The Internet was designed with no gatekeepers over new content or services. – Vinton Cerf • The screen is a window through which one sees a virtual world. The challenge is to make that world look real, act real, sound real, feel real. – Ivan Sutherland • The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation.- Tim Berners-Lee • The serialization through the Internet or through digital portals, means of ways of communicating, and I think that’s great. – Keanu Reeves • The web site and the Internet are a whole new ball game. – Johnny Ramistella • The whole, ‘Is the internet a good thing or a bad thing’? We’re done with that. It’s just a thing. How to maximise its civic value, its public good – that’s the really big challenge. – Clay Shirky • The worst and the best that the internet ever did was give everybody a voice. – Simon Pegg • There are two things in particular that it [the computer industry] failed to foresee: one was the coming of the Internet(…); the other was the fact that the century would end. – Douglas Adams • There is a very personal price to public humiliation, and the growth of the Internet has jacked up that price. – Monica Lewinsky • There was more data transmitted over the Internet in 2010 than the entire history of the Internet through 2009. – Ben Parr • There’s no real organised body, … so through the internet people have spread their videos, spread photos, and spread word of a new urban movement. – Chris Hayes • Think about this: It was illegal for most people to connect to the internet before 1992.- Steve Case • Thousands of people were producing new Web sites every day. We were just trying to take all that stuff and organize it to make it useful. – David Filo • To get a big company moving fast, especially on a many-headed opportunity like the Internet, you have to have hundreds of people participating and coming up with ideas. – Bill Gates • To seek Truth is automatically a calling for the innate dissident and the subversive; how many are willing to give up safety and security for the perilous life of the spiritual revolutionary? How many are willing to truly learn that their own cherished concepts are wrong? Striking provocative or mysterious poses in the safety of Internet [social media] is far easier than taking the risks involved in the hard work of genuine initiation. – Zeena Schreck • Today with technological advancement, with the Internet, with planes, with the rate at which we travel – even if you wanted, you cannot hide from the rest of the world. And whether you like it or not, you are part of this global marketplace, and so you might as well understand it, you might as well embrace it, because even if you hide, it will find you. – • Together with the rise of the internet, September 11 and its aftermath has changed most of our lives. – Hedi Slimane • Trade on the Internet is becoming very widespread. The problem is our laws have not caught up with electronic commerce. – Susan Bysiewicz • Turns out, theres not a lot of information about pickles on the Internet. – Brian Posehn • US has to be able to rely on a safe and interconnected internet in order to compete with other countries. – Edward Snowden • US spend more on research and development than the other countries, so we shouldn’t be making the internet a more hostile, a more aggressive territory. – Edward Snowden • Use the Internet to get off the Internet! – Scott Heiferman • Video for the Internet has become a testing ground for mediums that actually have revenue. – Mark Cuban • We are excited about Internet access in general. With better access to the Internet, people do more searches. – Larry Page • We believe we’re moving out of the Ice Age, the Iron Age, the Industrial Age, the Information Age, to the participation age. You get on the Net and you do stuff. You IM (instant message), you blog, you take pictures, you publish, you podcast, you transact, you distance learn, you telemedicine. You are participating on the Internet, not just viewing stuff. We build the infrastructure that goes in the data center that facilitates the participation age. We build that big friggin’ Webtone switch. It has security, directory, identity, privacy, storage, compute, the whole Web services stack. – Scott McNealy • We didn’t know the importance of home computers before the Internet. We had them mostly for fun, then the Internet came along and was enabled by all the PCs out there. – Burt Rutan • We have a strong and credible broadband policy because the man who has devised it, the man who will implement it virtually invented the Internet in this country. – Tony Abbott • We must also promote global access to the Internet. We need to bridge the digital divide not just within our country. But among countries. Only by giving people around the world access to this technology can they tap into the potential. Of the information age. – Al Gore • We’re into tech stuff, gadgets, phones, video games. We’ll treat a video game premiere like a movie premiere. I’m just going to be honest with what I like and what I do. What I enjoy. We’re not going to hide the fact that people are on the Internet all day. I think a lot of shows don’t really mention that. – Jimmy Fallon • What we need is a plan B … independent of the Internet. [It] doesn’t necessarily have to have the performance of the Internet, but the police department has to be able to call up the fire department. – Danny Hillis • What, exactly, is the internet? Basically it is a global network exchanging digitized data in such a way that any computer, anywhere, that is equipped with a device called a ‘modem’, can make a noise like a duck choking on a kazoo – Dave Barry • When Bill Clinton assembled the top minds of the nation to discuss the economy in 1992, no one mentioned the Internet. – David Leonhardt • When people conceptualize a cyber-attack, they do tend to think about parts of the critical infrastructure like power plants, water supplies, and similar sort of heavy infrastructure, critical infrastructure areas. And they could be hit, as long as they’re network connected, as long as they have some kind of systems that interact with them that could be manipulated from internet connection. – Edward Snowden • When the Internet first came into public use, it was hailed as a liberation from conformity, a floating world ruled by passion, creativity, innovation and freedom of information. When it was hijacked first by advertising and then by commerce, it seemed like it had been fully co-opted and brought into line with human greed and ambition. – Neil Strauss • When you find yourself on the Internet when you’re supposed to be writing, you’ve already lost. It’s even beyond procrastination when you end up on the Internet. – Noah Baumbach • When you get a small group of fans who hate something, it becomes compounded by the internet. The press picks up the internet like it’s a source. They don’t realise it is just one person typing out their opinion. – George Lucas • When you make the claim that something on the Internet is going to be good for democracy, you often [hear], ‘Are you talking about the thing with the singing cats?’ – Clay Shirky • When you use any kind of internet based capability, any kind of electronic capability, to cause damage to a private entity or a foreign nation or a foreign actor, these are potential acts of war. – Edward Snowden • Who needs evidence when you’ve got the Internet? – Christopher Buckley • Will the highways on the Internet become more few? – George W. Bush • With the development of the Internet…we are in the middle of the most transforming technological event since the capture of fire. I used to think that it was just the biggest thing since Gutenberg, but now I think you have to go back farther. – John Perry Barlow • With YouTube – with the Internet in general – you have information overload. The people who dont necessarily get credit are the curators. – Chad Hurley • You can always find a stray negative comment on the Internet. It’s like everybody loves to put negative comments on the Internet under the cloak of anonymity. – John Legend • You can go back to tulip bulbs in Holland 400 years ago. The human beings going through combinations of fear and greed and all of that sort of thing, their behavior can lead to bubbles. And it may have had and Internet bubble at one time, you’ve had a farm bubble, farmland bubble in the Midwest which resulted in all kinds of tragedy in the early ’80s. – Howard Warren Buffett • You could have these crazy Internet valuations in the late 1990s, but they prove themselves out in the market. The next day they were selling for more than they were the day before, and people said, you know, you’re crazy if you don’t get in on this. So it’s very human. – Howard Warren Buffett • You have to be very clear with yourself about how you’re going to spend your time. When a child is at school or napping, you need to realize that this is your writing time and you don’t spend it surfing the Internet or reading. – Elizabeth Hoyt • You spend money on Internet connection for your employees. Why not spend money on the energy that fuels their brains? – Shawn Achor • Younger feminists actually care about stuff that came before them, the same way that I totally cared about and loved and felt so lucky to have access to the feminism that came before me. To have younger people take what me and my friends have done, and to say ‘We have access to that, but we’re going to put that through our own Internet generation filter and we’re going to make it into something that speaks to us and is a lot smarter.’ – Kathleen Hanna

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