Tuesday, August 25, 2026

It's About Time for Me to Re-Read the Novels

 


Modern Times

Ordinary authoritarians are content to forbid people to say things they believe to be true. Totalitarians want to force people to say things they believe to be false.

- Robert P. George

First Paragraph

Her name is Ana Alvarado, and she's having a bad day. She spent all week preparing for a job interview, the first one in months to reach the videoconference stage, but the recruiter's face barely appeared on-screen before he told her that the company has decided to hire someone else. So she sits in front of her computer, wearing her good suit for nothing. She makes a half-hearted attempt to send queries to some other companies and immediately receives automated rejections. After an hour of this, Ana decides she needs some diversion: she opens a Next Dimension window to play her current favorite game, Age of Iridium.

- From "The Lifecycle of Software Objects" - a short story in Exhalation by Ted Chiang

Saturday, August 22, 2026