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As if somehow irony, ” she recaps for Maxine, “as practiced by a giggling mincing fifth column, actually brought on the events of 11 September, by keeping the country insufficiently serious – weakening its grip on ‘reality.’ So all kinds of make-believe–forget the delusional state the country’s in already–must suffer as well. Everything has to be literal now.”“ Yeah, the kids are even getting it at school.” Ms. Cheung, an English teacher who if Kugelblitz were a town would be the neighborhood scold, has announced that there shall be no more fictional reading assignments. Otis is terrified, Ziggy less so. Maxine will walk in on them watching Rugrats or reruns of Rocko’s Modern Life, and they holler by reflex, “Don’t tell Ms. Cheung! ”“You notice, ” Heidi continues, “how ‘reality’ programming is suddenly all over the cable, like dog shit? Of course, it’s so producers shouldn’t have to pay real actors scale. But wait! There’s more! Somebody needs this nation of starers believing they’re all wised up at last, hardened and hip to the human condition, freed from the fictions that led them so astray, as if paying attention to made-up lives was some form of evil drug abuse that the collapse of the towers cured by scaring everybody straight again. .Thomas Pynchon
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The grandeur of space, dig it. Zillions of stars, each one gets its own pixel.”“ Awesome.”“ Maybe, but it’s code’s all it is.Thomas Pynchon
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I don't do lunch. Corrupt artifact of late capitalism. Breakfast maybe?Thomas Pynchon
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The innocent are guilty, the guilty are beyond hope, everything’s on its head, it’s a Twelfth Night of late-capitalist contradiction…Thomas Pynchon
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And what we’ve been always been is…?”“ Is living on borrowed time. Never caring about who’s paying for it, who’s starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs … planetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering. And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the innocent dead. Boo fuckin hoo. You know what? All the dead are innocent. There’s no uninnocent dead.” After a while, “You’re not going to explain that, or…”“ Course not, it’s a koan.Thomas Pynchon
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Look at it, every day more lusers than users, keyboards and screens turning into nothin but portals to Web sites for what Management wants everybody addicted to, shopping games, jerking off, streaming endless garbage-Thomas Pynchon
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When the earliest Vikings started moving into the northern oceans, there’s one story about finding this huge fuckin opening at the top of the world, this deep whirlpool that’d take you down and in, like a black hole, no way to escape. These days you look at the surface Web, all that yakking, all the goods for sale, the spammers and spielers and idle fingers, all in the same desperate scramble they like to call an economy. Meantime, down here, sooner or later someplace deep, there has to be a horizon between coded and codeless. An abyss.”“ That’s what you’re looking for?”“ Some of us are.” Avatars do not do wistful, but Maxine catches something. “Others are trying to avoid it. Depends what you’re into.Thomas Pynchon
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Only the framing material, " Lucas demurely, "obvious influences, Neo-Tokyo from Akira, Ghost in the Shell, Metal Gear Solid by Hideo Kojima, or as he's known in my crib, God.Thomas Pynchon
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Meantime the Newspaper of Record goes around in a little pleated skirt shaking pompoms, leaping in the air with an idiot grin if so much as a cement mixer passes by.Thomas Pynchon