/lit/ - Literature

>>11903074
First person present tense, obviously

>I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. It was created by Richard Stallman; enough said. It is written in Lisp, which is the only computer language that is beautiful. It is colossal, and yet it only edits straight ASCII text files, which is to say, no fonts, no boldface, no underlining. In other words, the engineer-hours that, in the case of Microsoft Word, were devoted to features like mail merge, and the ability to embed feature-length motion pictures in corporate memoranda, were, in the case of emacs, focused with maniacal intensity on the deceptively simple-seeming problem of editing text. If you are a professional writer – i.e., if someone else is getting paid to worry about how your words are formatted and printed – emacs outshines all other editing software in approximately the same way that the noonday sun does the stars. It is not just bigger and brighter; it simply makes everything else vanish.
>-- Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning was the Command Line

>>9132643

I don't suppose that graduate students of either gender are exactly sought out by sexual connoisseurs for their great fucking skills. We think about it too much. Everything has to be verbalized. A person who believes that fucking is a sexual discourse is simply never going to be any good in the sack.

I have a thing about stockings. They have to be sheer black stockings, preferably with seams up the back. When I was thirteen years old I actually shoplifted some black pantyhose from a grocery store just so that I could play with them. Walking out of that store with those L'eggs in my backpack, my heart was pounding, but the excitement of the crime was nothing compared to opening up the package and pulling them out, rubbing them against my fuzzy, adolescent cheeks. I even tried pulling them on, but this just looked grotesque--what with my hairy legs--and did absolutely nothing for me. I didn't want to wear them. I wanted someone else to. I masturbated four times that day.

It disturbed the shit out of me when I thought about it. I was a smart boy. Smart boys are supposed to be rational. So, when I was in college I figured out a rationalization for this. There wasn't that many women who wore sheer black stockings in college, but sometimes I would go into the city and see the well-dressed office workers walking down the street on their lunch breaks and make scientific observations of their legs. I noticed that where the stocking stretched itself thin to go over a wide part of the leg, such as the muscle of the calf, it became paler. just as a colored balloon becomes paler when it is inflated. Conversely, it was darker in narrow regions such as the ankle. This made the calf look more shapely and the ankle look more slender. The legs, as a whole, looked healthier, implying that just above the place where they joined together, a higher class of DNA was to be found.

Q.E.D. My thing about black stockings was a highly rational adaptation. It merely proved how smart I was, how rational even the most irrational parts of my brain were. Sex held no power over me. It was nothing to fear.