"There was a common saying in the biz/tech world that 'As hire As, & Bs hire Cs'… as long as you recruit only the best, they attract others, but as soon as you let your standards slip, the 2nd-raters would begin to seine up 3rd-raters to act as their minions & advance their agendas."
#Reamde
Abdullah Jones glanced up into Richard’s eyes.
AJ: It’s nothing more than a great bloody cat!
Richard pulled the trigger and shot [Jones] in the head.
…
His eyes locked on something out there that was unquestionably a face. Not a human face. Humans did not have golden eyes.
#REAMDE
“Zombies!!” he announced, and turned toward the nearest window.
#REAMDE
Clever Chinese people had created this gold-mining industry & sustained it in the face of Blizzard’s [WoW] most determined onslaughts, but the makers of T’Rain, using Nolan Xu as their running dog, had co-opted them & turned them into a resource extraction colony.
#REAMDE
Stephenson is awesome!
#reamde is a mind blower. Snow Crash is Excellent!
Conspicuously near the exit was a garbage bag tied in a knot, which the Russian-speaking Chinese woman had apparently meant to take with her until Sokolov vaulted in & scared her to death. He found that it was surprisingly heavy & that it contained a number of discrete rectangular objects.
#Reamde
Zula wet her lips and opened her mouth to make the last speech of her life...
There was a series of deafening bangs. The side of Ivanov’s head was ripped off by an invisible shovel and flung across the room. He dove sideways as if trying to catch his brains before they hit the floor.
#Reamde
SKIPPING WAY AHEAD:
If his experience as the creator of #REAMDE had taught Marlon anything at all, it was that something always got massively screwed up with any plan, and you never knew what that something was until it happened.
In this case, it was that Csongor rowed too hard.
What do you think of a curated feed, with paid trusted editors, like in @nealstephenson.bsky.social book #Reamde?
Harper's Magazine 1897 illustration of a Civil War Union Army cavalry screen (men on horseback rushing from one battlefield to another)
DODGE: Ok he stopped being a little fucker when he deployed 1,200 characters around his projected route of advance. I didn’t reckon that he was going to set the whole thing up like Sherman’s march to the sea.
C+: Did you notice his leapfrogging cavalry screens?
D: Yes I fucking noticed them
#Reamde
Young women demonstrating traditional Eritrean dancing. Kneeling in a circle, facing outwards, wearing colorful long skirts and long sleeved shirts.
In high school she’d been quiet, a little too assimilated…an all-American girl named Sue whose official documents happened to read Zula.
But now she had got in touch with her Zula-ness.
#Reamde
DODGE: Just the sort of can of worms that I retired to get away from.
C-PLUS: I don’t think you are actually retired
D: It’s a selective retirement, a retirement from boring shit.
C+: I think that’s called a "promotion."
#Reamde
Richard understood that the spryness he had been envying Yuxia for was at least partly an act, a willed refusal to show pain.
▶ Because she didn’t want men covering for her.
▶ Because chivalry sometimes came with a price.
#Reamde
BLOWN AND GOING DARK
Seamus had to hand it to the girl. He was getting to the point where he could not get his day started w/out a dramatic early-morning text message or phone call from Olivia. He was going to have to get into the habit of going to bed early and perhaps even sober.
#Reamde
painting of an impossibly large moose chasing some campers.
OLIVIA: lots of cops & spies were looking at video of Igor stealing that. [nods to the rifle case] Why did you bring it, by the way?
SOKOLOV: I shoot moose. We have barbecue.
O: I would love to have a moose barbecue with you. But we should probably be figuring out our next move.
#Reamde
YOUR WAFFLE'S DONE!
Yuxia figured out how to open the waffle iron & deposited its steaming load onto a plate.
The squeal stopped.
Csongor wanted to try it now. He picked up a carafe of waffle batter & poured it & watched broodingly as it infiltrated the valleys between the bumps.
#Reamde
🧇
spetsnaz
#Reamde
Sokolov watched the slow dissolution of the taxi into the crowd w/professional admiration. He was a warrior, free to hide in this building & emerge at a time of his choosing. Even so, he rated his chances of escaping from this situation at essentially 0.
#Spetsnaz
For those of you who didn't like/read #Reamde, sorry for the 2-day flurry of quotes. It seems that I was really into Reamde quotes in the first quarter of 2019.
ABDALLAH JONES: Anything else, as long as I’m in Walmart's pink & pastel aisle?
ZULA FORTHRAST: Baby-wipes, unscented; socks; a pair of pants that hasn’t been peed in.
AJ: Will there be anything else, or can I get back to planning atrocities?
ZF: Knock yourself out.
#Reamde
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 [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]
“This might be acceptable,” she said to the landlord.
#Reamde
An irregular thumping noise was emanating from somewhere, not inside this building but nearby. At first Olivia heard it only subliminally, since it was buried in ambient sound from the street. It started & stopped, 3 or 6 or 10 beats, like the pounding of a heart. #Reamde #Xiamen #SIS
Sokolov had seen many strange things already this morning. Still, he was taken aback when he swung out of the shattered window & scanned the front of the building to find it cluttered w/young Chinese men crawling around on it like spiders.
#Reamde
Waging war on his enemies had been Sokolov’s habit and his profession for a long time, but being chivalrous to everyone else was simply a basic tenet of having your shit together as a human and as a man.
#REAMDE
>And then the economy did crash, and the hip people discovered they were, in fact, blue collar & probably always would be. So you’ve got guys here who run lathes. But they have colored Mohawks & college degrees & they program the lathes in computer languages.
#REAMDE
OLIVIA: Is this a real blue-collar bar or a simulacrum thereof?
DODGE: Both. Simulacrum, before the economy crashed, when Carhartts & Utilikilts were hip. But they did such a good job of it that actual blue-collar people began to show up. >
#REAMDE Sc-Fi (ish)
More from the @mtjc_podcast book club. These by @nealstephenson. Not pictured #ReamDe and #SevenEves
This reminds me of @nealstephenson 's #REAMDE; a geology of #GameOfThrones www.stanford.edu/group/anthropocene/cgi-b...
currently reading neal stephenon's latest #reamde. wonderful to read real lit written by a geek who also a deft hand with the Pen.
