The future belongs to those who give the next generation reason for hope.
In the future world when computation and the things which can be constructed from it become freed how does that really change how things work? That’s a future challenge to figure out.
“Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.”
The future is predetermined by the character of those who shape it.
TV: Stargate: Atlantis, episode 4x08 “The Seer”
Look, everybody else in America has already been to Prague, what’s the big deal if you send one extra? I’m sorry, you see I’ve been needing to go there for a long time, now. I mean there’s Czech and Slovakia, and the big Jewish cemetery, and the opera house… maybe that’s Vienna where the opera house is, but that’s nearby, and given the opportunity, I’d hit Vienna, too. Hell, I’d do all of Europe, given the chance. I can imagine Jane and some Praguean idiot dancing the night away… horrible image. And the coffee, see, all I know is American coffee, and the beer, and whatever is good over there. It’s gotta all be better over there. Nothing I eat has any taste. It’s been such a strange time. And what if I was there now, how would things be different? Isn’t there a big bridge with statues on it? I seem to remember that from a history class. And Jane and some guy kissing on the bridge in public. No, it’s Jane and some Czech writer. Image kills me… Just great. This is so frustrating. I’m terrible at conflict. I hate it. And if I’d imagined this problem while falling asleep one night I don’t think I would have spoken up to you. Even in my fantasy life, I just would’ve accepted it. That’s who I am. But today, I have to go. I have to. And when I tell people about this in the future, I know that, you know, it’ll be the time that I went. And I know when I review this whole episode in my head I’m not gonna know what I did or why I did it. I think they’ve done something with the real Grover. But it’ll make a good story of my young adult life. You know, the time I chose to go to Prague. I’ll look back on it and I won’t believe that I actually went, you know. I went away. So let me go. I have to, I need - just put me on the plane. Let me go.
Movie: Kicking and Screaming
The only long-term effect of copy protection is to ensure that those who defeat it are immortalized.
:: fav'd by 2 people
urthstripe /
belief, believe, candy, future, germs, jade, knowledge, life, light, politicians, sex, soap, stars, true, world
#2346
I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren’t true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they’re true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen-I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is regularly visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones who look like wrinkedly lemurs and bad ones who mutilate our cattle and want out water and our women. I believe the future sucks and I believe the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone’s ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline of good sex in America is coincidant with the decline in drive-in movie theatres from state-to-state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe they are better then the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to germs so that one day we’ll all be wiped out by the common cold like the martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the best poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed siberian shaman. I believe that man’s destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really DID taste better when I was a kid, that its aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, and that there’s a cat in a box somewhere who’s alive and dead at the same time(Although if they don’t ever open the box it’ll just be two different types of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older then the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn’t even know I’m alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of casual chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says sex is overrated just hasn’t done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what’s going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman’s right to choose, a baby’s right to live, and while all life is sacred there’s nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you’re alive and that you may as well lie back and enjoy it.
Book: “American Gods” by Neil Gaiman
Language bearers, photographers, diary makers
You with your memory are dead, frozen
Lost in a present that never stops passing
Here lives the incantation of matter
A language forever.
Like a flame burning away the darkness
Life is flesh on bone convulsing above the ground.
You with your memory are dead, frozen
Lost in a present that never stops passing
Here lives the incantation of matter
A language forever.
Like a flame burning away the darkness
Life is flesh on bone convulsing above the ground.
Movie: Begotten
Science will create new levels of meaning. The Internet already is made of one quintillion transistors, a trillion links, a million emails per second, 20 exabytes of memory. It is approaching the level of the human brain and is doubling every year, while the brain is not. It is all becoming effectively one machine. And we are the machine.
Laurie, I’m 65. Every day the future looks a little bit darker, but the past, even the grimy parts of it, well, it just keeps on getting brighter all the time.
Comic: “Watchmen” by Alan Moore
When you put your hand in a flowing stream, you touch the last that has gone before and the first of what is still to come.
It’s 2005! We should be flying around in jetpacks and snorting non-addictive vitamin-rich cocaine out of our sex robot’s nipples.
TV: Comedy Central’s Last Laugh 2005
If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run - and often in the short one - the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.
It will be happened; it shall be going to happening; it will be was an event that could will have been taken place in the future.
In 1991 I published a book called Mirror Worlds; in a way, it was a celebration of computing technology (although it was ambivalent about computers in the end). It predicted the emergence of software versions of real-world institutions that you would “tune in” by means of a global network. It claimed that this would be a good development: you would be able to tour the world “without changing out of your pajamas.” These mirror worlds would be “the new public square,” would “monopolize the energy and attention of thousands…, broadcast an aesthetic and a world-view to millions, mold behavior and epitomize the age.”
Essay: “Computers and the Pursuit of Happiness”, Commentary, January 2001
There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.
Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.
Sharing will be everywhere. It’s the next chapter of the World Wide Web.
Article: “Web Content by and for the Masses”, New York Times, June 29, 2005
The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it.
Believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.
I don’t care if it’s in high-definition or not — I’m going to play Zelda on Revolution.
The future of civilization depends on our overcoming the meaninglessness and hopelessness that characterizes the thoughts of men today.
Marty McFly: What about all this talk about screwing up future events?
Dr. Emmett Brown: Well, I figured, what the hell.
Dr. Emmett Brown: Well, I figured, what the hell.
Movie: Back to the Future
We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done.
Planning is bringing the future into the present so you can do something about it now.
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
Stop and make sure that everything you are doing right now is really what makes you happy. You can’t just live for some goal in the future and have that be everything, have that be it. Because that is what some people do. They get on this road and there are all these signs saying “This way, this way” but what if you get there, you get exactly what you wanted, but all the things that were wrong are still wrong. Then what?
Every man has his own destiny: The only imperative is to follow it, to accept it…no matter where it leads him.
We cannot live in the past, nor can we re-create it. Yet as we unravel the past, the future also unfolds before us, as though they are mirrors without which neither can be seen or happen.
Long-range planning does not deal with future decisions, but with the future of present decisions.
I had been here before, willingly placing my life into the cold hands of fate. Not a simple cold, but a cold that crosses the boundaries of the flesh and stirs memories of the infinite chill of abandonment.
I had surrendered to chance, and I felt lucky.
I had surrendered to chance, and I felt lucky.
“in a Max Payne voice”
Whenever hope and illusion become the source of the will to live, all knowledge of reality becomes highly threatening, since at any time a new piece of information might remove the grounds for this hope.
Never hesitate to sit down with yourself and make lists. The more you write things down, the more you can dictate your own future.
Book: “100 Ways to Motivate Yourself” by Steve Chandler
The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented. It was man’s ability to invent which has made human society what it is.
The future is whatever you make it, so make it a good one.
Movie: Back to the Future: Part III
The men who build the future are those who know that greater things are yet to come, and that they themselves will help bring them about. Their minds are illuminated by the blazing sun of hope. They never stop to doubt. They haven’t time.
Nothing we can do can change the past, but everything we do changes the future.