Bleeding Edge

Quotes

When Irish eyes are not smiling, you should have a better story or a good pair of running shoes.

- Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon) - Highlight on Page 28 - Loc. 430-31 - Added on Friday, October 11, 2013, 10:58 AM

reruns of the well-known seventies sitcom have drawn comment all up and down his client list. He can footnote certain episodes as other teachers might the sutras, with the three-part family trip to Hawaii seeming to be a particular favorite—the bad-luck tiki, Greg’s near-fatal wipeout, Vincent Price’s cameo as an unstable archaeologist . . .

- Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon) - Highlight on Page 31 - Loc. 456-58 - Added on Friday, October 11, 2013, 11:01 AM

“So,” shrugging away any scold signifiers in face and voice, “a mom-approved first-person shooter.” “That’s exactly the slogan we’re gonna use in the ads.” “You’re advertising where, on the Internet?” “The Deep Web. Down there advertising is like still in its infancy? And the price is what Bob Barker might call ‘right’?” Air quotes, Vyrva’s hair, back in braids, bouncing to and fro.

- Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon) - Highlight on Page 35 - Loc. 519-22 - Added on Friday, October 11, 2013, 11:06 AM

“The game is just a promotional freebie,” Vyrva frowning cute-apologetic. “Our product is still totally DeepArcher?” “Which is . . .” “Like ‘departure,’ only you pronounce it DeepArcher?” “Zen thing,” Maxine guesses. “Weed thing. Just lately everybody’s been after the source code—the feds, game companies, fuckin Microsoft? all have offers on the table? It’s the security design—like nothing any of these people’ve ever seen, and it’s makin them all crazy.”

- Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon) - Highlight on Page 36 - Loc. 527-30 - Added on Friday, October 11, 2013, 11:06 AM

the address from the other side of the street, and as soon as she catches sight of it, her heart, if it does not sink exactly, at least cringes more tightly into the one-person submarine necessary for cruising the sinister and labyrinthine sewers of greed that run beneath all real-estate dealings in this town.

- Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon) - Highlight on Page 42 - Loc. 608-10 - Added on Friday, October 11, 2013, 08:36 PM

Culture, I’m sorry, Hermann Göring was right, every time you hear the word, check your sidearm. Culture attracts the worst impulses of the moneyed, it has no honor, it begs to be suburbanized and corrupted.”

- Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon) - Highlight on Page 56 - Loc. 795-97 - Added on Friday, October 11, 2013, 08:57 PM

No more dangerous than a chess game, it seems to Reg. Defense, retreat, deception. Unless it’s a pickup game in the park where your opponent turns violently psychopathic without warning, of course.

- Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon) - Highlight on Page 59 - Loc. 843-44 - Added on Saturday, October 12, 2013, 12:29 AM

Wreck, wearing a green glow-in-the-dark T-shirt reading UTSL, which Maxine at first takes for an anagram of LUST or possibly SLUT but later learns is Unix for “Use The Source, Luke.”

- Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon) - Highlight on Page 69 - Loc. 970-72 - Added on Saturday, October 12, 2013, 01:12 PM

Somewhere back in the Valley, among those orange groves casually replaced with industrial campuses, they came to a joint epiphany about California vis-à-vis New York—Vyrva thinks maybe more joint than epiphany—something to do with too much sunshine, self-delusion, slack. They’d heard this rumor that back east content was king, not just something to be stolen and developed into a movie script. They thought what they needed was a grim unforgiving workplace where the summer actually ended once in a while and discipline was a given daily condition. By the time they found out the truth, that the Alley was as much of a nut ward as the Valley, it was too late to go back.

- Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon) - Highlight on Page 72 - Loc. 1024-28 - Added on Saturday, October 12, 2013, 02:57 PM

“What’s known as bleeding-edge technology,” sez Lucas. “No proven use, high risk, something only early-adoption addicts feel comfortable with.”

- Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon) - Highlight on Page 78 - Loc. 1112-13 - Added on Saturday, October 12, 2013, 11:47 PM

According to Justin, DeepArcher’s roots reach back to an anonymous remailer, developed from Finnish technology from the penet.fi days and looking forward to various onion-type forwarding procedures nascent at the time. “What remailers do is pass data packets on from one node to the next with only enough information to tell each link in the chain where the next one is, no more. DeepArcher goes a step further and forgets where it’s been, immediately, forever.” “Kind of like a Markov chain, where the transition matrix keeps resetting itself.” “At random.”

- Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon) - Highlight on Page 78 - Loc. 1116-20 - Added on Saturday, October 12, 2013, 11:48 PM

“At pseudorandom.”

- Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon) - Highlight on Page 78 - Loc. 1120-21 - Added on Saturday, October 12, 2013, 11:48 PM

“You heard about this from Eric?” “He has a tap in a back office at hashslingrz.” “Somebody’s in there wearing a wire?” “It’s, actually it’s a Furby.” “Excuse me, a—” “Seems there’s a voice-recognition chip inside that Eric was modifying—” “Wait, the cute fuzzy little critter every child in town including my own had to have a couple of Christmases back, that Furby? this genius of yours hacks Furbys?” “Common practice in his subculture, seems to be a low tolerance there for cuteness. At first Eric was only looking for ways to annoy the yups—you know, teach it some street language, emotional-outburst chops, so forth. Then he noticed how many Furbys were showing up in the cubicles of code grinders over where he works. So we took the Furby he was messing with, upgraded the memory, put in a wireless link, I brought it in to hashslingrz, sat it on a shelf, now when I want I can stroll by with a pickup inside my Nagra 4 and download all kinds of confidential stuff.” “Such as this hawala that hashslingrz is using to get money out of the country.” “Over to the Gulf, it turns out. This particular hawala is headquartered in Dubai. Plus Eric’s been finding that to even get to where hashslingrz’s books are stashed, they put you through elaborate routines written in this, like, strange Arabic what he calls Leet? It’s all turning into a desert movie.”

- Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon) - Highlight on Page 81 - Loc. 1145-55 - Added on Saturday, October 12, 2013, 11:52 PM

Some conspiracies, they’re warm and comforting, we know the names of the bad guys, we want to see them get their comeuppance. Others you’re not sure you want any of it to be true because it’s so evil, so deep and comprehensive.”

- Bleeding Edge (Thomas Pynchon) - Highlight on Page 118 - Loc. 1658-60 - Added on Friday, October 18, 2013, 08:06 AM