> of the Forthrast farmhouse in Iowa, passing the time with a video game & she had looked up to see Uncle Claude, spry & curious at 83, standing in the doorway looking at the big screen perfectly aghast. It was hard to tell how long he’d been standing there trying to make sense of it. >>
#FoDiH
ENOCH: My goodness. Religion as such—as it has existed and flourished for thousands of years—doesn’t stand a chance. But each person out there is getting a personalized stream of algorithmically generated alternate reality that is locked in a feedback loop with their pulse & blink rate.
#FoDiH
At the Forthrast family old home place:
Stepping into this bathroom was like time-traveling to 1970. Its autumn-toned daisy Formica countertop, its op-art wallpaper, its light fixture, even its shower knobs were straight out of a Nixon administration Sears, Roebuck catalog. >>
#FoDiH
Illustration of philosopher Immanuel Kant writing in a book. He is surrounded by visions of clocks and measuring tape. Kant holds that neither space nor time are substance, entities in themselves, or learned by experience; he holds, rather, that both are elements of a systematic framework we use to structure our experience. Spatial measurements are used to quantify how far apart objects are, and temporal measurements are used to quantitatively compare the interval between (or duration of) events. Although space and time are held to be transcendentally ideal in this sense—that is, mind-dependent—they are also empirically real—that is, according to Kant's definitions, a priori features of experience, and therefore not simply "subjective," variable, or accidental perceptions in a given consciousness.
CORVALLIS: Years ago I had a conversation w/Dodge about Kant. Whom he had never heard of. Kant’s idea that humans simply could not think w/out hanging everything on a space-time lattice. Used it to take down Leibniz.
JAKE FORTHRAST: You think it sank in?
C: Got him to Google Kant.
#FoDiH
ZULA: ...
ZULA: You are correct.
CSONGOR: You & Yuxia are just friends. [said with relief so evident that Zula felt her face heat up.]
Z: Just friends who have known each other for all of, like, 24 hours. #Reamde [ #FoDiH ]
Csongor’s expression indicated this wasn’t just a foray into urban American slang, but of direct bearing on his future happiness. Zula permitted herself a moment of amazement on how the male reproductive drive could obtrude on situations where it was worse than useless.
#FoDiH sofia-daisy-angeldeath
CSONGOR [blushing]: They heard Yuxia call you "girlfriend," so they think maybe you are lesbians.
ZULA: Holy crap.
C: But I think that this "girlfriend" is a way that black women greet each other, even if they are heterosexuals.
#Reamde [ #FoDiH]
Crazytown was repelled by facts and knowledge, as oil fled from water, but was fascinated by the absence of hard facts, since it provided vacant space in which to construct elaborate edifices of speculation.
#FoDiH
SOPHIA: What was it like?
ROOT: What was it like when people agreed on facts?
S: Yeah, Walter Cronkite and all that?
R: The ability of people to agree on matters of fact ramped up from 0 to high in the scientific revolution, & globally thru the Cronkite era. Dropped to 0 w/the Internet.
#FoDiH
PETE: Jake Forthrast asked me if I'd consider going across the river today in a peaceable/neighborly way to sort things out. SOPHIA: You control more money than the Roman Empire at its peak.
P: Yup.
S: Don’t you have people for this?
#FoDiH
#Nebraska
#Ameristan
TED: The conspiracy of the church was powerful. They staged a fake Reformation to get people to believe that reform was possible. All a show. Orchestrated from the Vatican.
PHIL: So, Martin Luther ran a false-flag op for the Pope. In that case—
SOPHIA: *stomps Phil's foot*
#FoDiH
PHIL: So, to be clear, all Christianity is just flat-out wrong. The 4 gospels—
TED: First thing the church did: enshrine their story about "meek liberal Jesus who gave food away to poor people & healed the sick" and so on.
PHIL: So what DID Jesus do?
TED: Fought #Romans.
#FoDiH
Massive crosses, towering over streetlights, at the Southern Baptist megachurch that I grew up in. The white crosses are illuminated by powerful floodlights.
PASTOR TED: There’s all kinds of confusion about us Leviticans. Some kind of imagined link to the Ku Klux Klan.
PHIL [Princeton kid]: Maybe it’s because of the [60 meter] burning crosses.
TED: ~Supposedly~ the KKK burned crosses. If that's even true, no connection to ours.
#FoDiH #Ameristan
#Ameristan
PETE: Their fathers believed city people actually gave a shit about them enough to take their guns. So they put $$ they didn’t really have into stockpiling trillions of rounds & hunkered down for nothing. They come to the river sometimes & "vote with bullets.”
#FoDiH
And at some point, the display simply froze up. Zula heard a man, an *older chap,* making a joke about needing to reboot the projector—a reference that meant nothing to most of the people in the room.
#FoDiH [Fall; or, Dodge in Hell] #Root
Ben and C-plus began to wander through a permanent museum exhibit that occupied the first 3 stories.
This looked expensive. One sensed that serious people had come over from London and worked on it for years. It was intended to be here for a long time.
#FoDiH
ENOCH: This is where I leave you.
ZULA: Where on earth are you going?
[His voice was clear. It was the only sound in the world.]
E: I’m not entirely sure, but I’m done here. I did what I was sent to do.
[The golden light grew until it was all she could see, and his voice was heard no more.]
#FoDiH
Capitol Hill neighborhood in Seattle. It's on a steep ridge, shrouded in fog.
OLD MAN: I don’t know about you but I could use some fresh air and a leg stretch.
[Without really talking about it, they walked in the general direction of the place where she had been living for the last few years, on the top of Capitol Hill {Seattle}.]
#FoDiH
OLD MAN: You can’t have an effect until the cause has arrived. And causes can only travel so fast.
OLD WOMAN: Never completely made sense to me when it was explained that way. Seemed arbitrary. Like a rule that had been imposed ~from outside the system.~
OM: *nods/smiles*
#FoDiH
OLD WOMAN: I UNDERSTAND THE SPEED OF LIGHT!
PARTY GUESTS: ...
OLD MAN: Explain it. I’ve always wanted to understand.
OW: I’ve been hearing since childhood that nothing can travel faster than. That it would break the universe somehow. Something to do with causality.
#FoDiH
