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normal_ellis [2017-02-17 16:26] – created niknormal_ellis [2019-01-18 16:24] (current) nik
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-==== Normal Warren Ellis ====+==== Normal — Warren Ellis ====
  
 [[reading notes]] for Normal (1-4) by Warren Ellis [[reading notes]] for Normal (1-4) by Warren Ellis
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 +<blockquote>He was one of the generations who typed all day, and his handwriting had lost the fluency of daily practice. The note read, "You won't find me. I am returning to the cycle of nature while I still can. I don't want to see the end of the future. Tell my father I'm glad he has cancer. Goodbye."</blockquote>
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 +<blockquote>Inside the boundary of Normal Head Experimental Forest's thirteen thousand acres lay, over the bones of a ghost town called Normal Station, the Normal Head Research Station</blockquote>
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 +<blockquote>She was somewhere deep in the basement of the Uncanny Valley of faux-human speech</blockquote>
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 +<blockquote>"Bad case of abyss gaze," he said. "You?"</blockquote>
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 +<blockquote>Professional demarcation," she said. "Foresight strategists on this side. Nonprofits, charitable institutions, universities, design companies, the civil stuff. On the other side? Strategic forecasters. Global security groups, corporate think tanks, spook stuff. You know the score."</blockquote>
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 +<blockquote>counting off every single networked object on city street corners, like botanists identifying every single obscure poisonous plant in sight. Staring into the abyss of the future while being acutely aware of being watched by every device, every piece of street furniture and every strand of modern infrastructure.</blockquote>
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 +<blockquote>"It's a real question. Some of our guests come in with a serious aversion to phones. They can be like a huge symbol of everything that's weighing on them? Someone told me once that it's hard to talk when you don't know how many people are listening. Like phones are half-trained demons always ready to betray you."</blockquote>
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 +<blockquote>He sat there for a little while, feeling like he was waiting for his ears to pop from the change in pressure. It came to him that he didn't even know where his cell phone was. He wasn't able to tend the eight different messaging apps on it. He couldn't clear the email from either of his accounts (one open to anyone, one that was nominally private but which suffered significant bleed-through from the other). No Twitter, no Instagram, none of the public-facing services he farmed hourly. No podcasts! He was subscribed to a hundred podcasts. He winced at the gigabyte load that would be waiting for him when he retrieved his phone and reached some signal. The news apps would spin and churn away, kicking out notifications until the phone's battery was sucked dry. His quant band was gone, he noticed: he wouldn't be tracking his steps, his blood oxygen, heart rate, local EF field activity, or the five other things it automagically quantified and uploaded and shared. Digitally, he would actually appear dead. A few of his services would send updates to social media daily. The weather report in his last recorded location would post[...]</blockquote>
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 <blockquote>“Money,” Clough declaimed, “is the dark unknown god driving us all towards certain bloody doom. A giant formless thing from beyond space with a million genitals. It’s the thing in the horror films that you should not directly look at lest you go mad and all that bollocks. It’s crushed the world into new shapes and all we want to do is drink its dark milk because that is the nature of its horrible fucking magic</blockquote> <blockquote>“Money,” Clough declaimed, “is the dark unknown god driving us all towards certain bloody doom. A giant formless thing from beyond space with a million genitals. It’s the thing in the horror films that you should not directly look at lest you go mad and all that bollocks. It’s crushed the world into new shapes and all we want to do is drink its dark milk because that is the nature of its horrible fucking magic</blockquote>
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 <blockquote>The grim impetus of deep history that looks out of his eyes and tells him what to do.</blockquote> <blockquote>The grim impetus of deep history that looks out of his eyes and tells him what to do.</blockquote>
  
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 <blockquote>"Adam searched for the word to describe the nostalgia for things you never knew. He was sure there was one, and that he’d once known it. Nostalgia for a word you once knew. Adam chuckled again, and forced the childproof lid off the plastic canister of pills.</blockquote> <blockquote>"Adam searched for the word to describe the nostalgia for things you never knew. He was sure there was one, and that he’d once known it. Nostalgia for a word you once knew. Adam chuckled again, and forced the childproof lid off the plastic canister of pills.</blockquote>
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 <blockquote>He hadn’t noticed, it seemed. Maybe everyone else had. Maybe everyone else saw that he had the fog of the abyss around his shoulders and kept their distance, and he really was just the last one to see it.</blockquote> <blockquote>He hadn’t noticed, it seemed. Maybe everyone else had. Maybe everyone else saw that he had the fog of the abyss around his shoulders and kept their distance, and he really was just the last one to see it.</blockquote>
  
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 <blockquote>Sehnsucht. That was the word, wasn’t it? Unusually short for a German compound word with a complex meaning. Nostalgia for a distant country to which we have never been, but which nonetheless may be home. An intense yearning for a comforting alien perfection</blockquote> <blockquote>Sehnsucht. That was the word, wasn’t it? Unusually short for a German compound word with a complex meaning. Nostalgia for a distant country to which we have never been, but which nonetheless may be home. An intense yearning for a comforting alien perfection</blockquote>
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 <blockquote>“There’s been a slow burn of unrest in Namibia for the last few years. A protester got shot dead the other summer. The elections that winter didn’t do much for it. High unemployment, lots of weird sociopolitical tensions. There’s a whole subsection of youth who were orphaned during their war for independence, and they weren’t being looked after by the state. The U.S. State Department calls it a ‘critical crime threat location,’ which always kind of stuck in my head as a great piece of, you know, official language.”</blockquote> <blockquote>“There’s been a slow burn of unrest in Namibia for the last few years. A protester got shot dead the other summer. The elections that winter didn’t do much for it. High unemployment, lots of weird sociopolitical tensions. There’s a whole subsection of youth who were orphaned during their war for independence, and they weren’t being looked after by the state. The U.S. State Department calls it a ‘critical crime threat location,’ which always kind of stuck in my head as a great piece of, you know, official language.”</blockquote>
  
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 <blockquote>Antigonish</blockquote> <blockquote>Antigonish</blockquote>
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