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“To play requires trust and love. There is no more intimate act than play, even sex”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“She walked over to him, still smiling—one dimple on her right cheek, an almost imperceptibly wider gap between the two middle teeth on the top—and he thought that the crowd seemed to part for her, in a way that the world never moved for him.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“You know what I keep thinking? I keep thinking how easy it was to make that first Ichigo. We were like machines then—this, this, this, this. It’s so easy to make a hit when you’re young and you don’t know anything.”
“I think that, too,” Sadie said. “The knowledge and experience we have—it isn’t necessarily that helpful, in a way.”
“So depressing,” Sam said, laughing. “What’s all of this struggle been for?”
“There must be some other versions of us that don’t make games.”
“What do they do instead?”
“They’re friends. They have a life!” Sadie said.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“They had the rare kind of friendship that allowed for a great deal of privacy within it. One of the reasons they had become such good friends originally was because she had not insisted he tell his sad stories to satisfy her own curiosity. The least he could do was return the favor.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“You're flying more slowly than last time, because you don't want to miss any of it. You're flying over the strawberry field, but you know it's a trap. This time you keep flying.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“You would think women would want to stick together when there weren't that many of them, but they never did. It was as if being a woman was a disease that you didn't wish to catch. As long as you didn't associate with the other women, you could imply to the majority, the men: I'm not like those other ones.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“Sadie didn't know why she bothered. You would think women would want to stick together when there weren't that many of them, but they never did. It was as if being a woman was a disease that you didn't want to catch. As long as you didn't associate with the other women you could imply to the majority, the men: I'm not like those other ones. - Sadie Green”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“But people—the ordinary, the decent and basically honest—couldn’t get through the day without that one indispensable bit of programming that allowed you to say one thing and mean, feel, even do, another.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“Why do you think we never got together?”
Sadie sat next to Sam on the bed. “Sammy,” she said. “We were together. You must know that. When I’m honest with myself, the most important parts of me were yours.”
“But together together? The way you were with Marx or Dov.”
“How can you not know this? Lovers are…common.” She studied Sam’s face. “Because I loved working with you better than I liked the idea of making love to you. Because true collaborators in this life are rare.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“The alternative to appropriation is a world in which artists only reference their own cultures."
"That's an oversimplification of the issue."
"The alternative to appropriation is a world where white European people make art about white European people with only white European references in it. Swap African or Asian or Latin or whatever culture you want for European. A world where everyone is blind and deaf to any culture or experience that is not their own. I hate that world don't you? I'm terrified of that world and I don't want to live in a that world, and as a mixed race person, I literally don't exist in it. My dad, who I barely knew, was Jewish. My mom was an American-born Korean. I was raised by Korean immigrant grandparents in Korea Town Los Angeles and as any mixed race person will tell you-- to be half of two things is to be whole of nothing.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“As Sam often said to Sadie, “Why make anything if you don’t believe it could be great?”
It is worth noting that greatness for Sam and Sadie meant different things. To oversimplify: For Sam, greatness meant popular. For Sadie, art.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“You try again. You fail better.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“How much of your life had been happenstance? How much of your life had been a roll of the big polyhedral die in the sky? But then, weren’t all lives that way? Who could say, in the end, that they had chosen any of it?”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“Maybe it was the willingness to play that hinted at a tender, eternally newborn part in all humans. Maybe it was the willingness to play that kept one from despair.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“She had once read in a book about consciousness that over the years, the human brain makes an AI version of your loved ones. The brain collects data, and within your brain, you host a virtual version of that person. Upon the person's death, your brain still believes the virtual person exists, because, in a sense, the person still does. After a while, through, the memory fades, and each year, you are left with an increasingly diminished version of the AI you had made when the person was alive.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“Sam used to say that Marx was the most fortunate person he had ever met-he was lucky with lovers, in business, in looks, in life. But the longer Sadie knew Marx, the more she thought that Sam hadn't truly understood the nature of Marx's good fortune. Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know-were persimmons his favorite fruit, or had they just now become his favorite fruit because there they were, growing in his own backyard? He had certainly never mentioned persimmons before. My God, she thought, he is so easy to love.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“This is what time travel is. It’s looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently. And that mode of transport only worked with those one had known a significant time.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“She realized what a gate was: it was an indication that you had left one pace and were entering another.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“Your cousin Albert told me that, in business, they call this a pivot. But life is filled with them, too. The most successful people are also the most able to change their mindsets.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“The most successful people are also the most able to change their mindsets.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“I devour, and I am devoured," Marx said.
"After Dov, I think I'm through with devouring," Sadie said.
"I understand why you'd say that, but I also don't think you should give up on the devouring yet." Marx growled at her and pretended to bite her, and then he kissed her on the cheek.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“Time was mathematically explicable; it was the heart—the part of the brain represented by the heart—that was the mystery.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“There are no ghosts, but up here”—she gestured toward her head—“it’s a haunted house.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“…he had learned to tolerate the sometimes-painful present by living in the future.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“Why wouldn’t you tell someone you loved them? Once you loved someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it. You said it until it ceased to have meaning. Why not? Of course, you goddamn did.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“So, what do I do?' she asked.
'You go back to work. You take advantage of the quiet time that a failure allows you. You remind yourself that no one is paying any attention to you ... You try again. You fail better.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“To return to the city of one's birth always felt like retreat.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“She had resisted returning there [to Los Angeles, the city of her birth] because to return to one's home town felt like surrender.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“There is a time for any fledgling artist where one's tastes exceed one's abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“This life is filled with inescapable moral compromises. We should do what we can to avoid the easy ones.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“What you have with Sadie is nothing like what I have with Sadie, so it doesn't even matter. You can fuck anyone," he says. "You can't make games with anyone, though."
"I make games with both of you," you point out. "I named Ichigo, for God's sake. I have been with both of you every step of the way. You can't say I haven't been here."
"You've been here, sure. But you're fundamentally unimportant. If you weren't here, it would be someone else. You're a tamer of horses. You're an NPC, Marx."
An NPC is a character that is not playable by a gamer. It is an AI extra that gives a programmed world verisimilitude. The NPC can be a best friend, a talking computer, a child, a parent, a lover, a robot, a gruff platoon leader, or the villain. Sam, however, means this as an insult---in addition to calling you unimportant, he's saying you're boring and predictable. But the fact is, there is no game without the NPCs.
"There's no game without the NPCs," you tell him. "There's just some bullshit hero, wandering around with no one to talk to and nothing to do.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“You are a gaming person, which is to say you are the kind of person who believes that "game over" is a construction. The game is only over if you stop playing. There is always one more life. Even the most brutal death isn't final. You could have taken poison, fallen into a vat of acid, been decapitated, been shot a hundred times, and still, if you clicked restart, you could begin it all over again. Next time, you would get it right. Next time, you might even win.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“...Sam could not quite identify what seeing Marx in Sadie's game had made him feel, It was not just pain, or sadness, or happiness, or nostalgia, or longing, or love. What touched him the most was sound of Sadie's voice, untouched and clarion, speaking to him through a game, across time and space.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“Sometimes, I would be in so much pain. The only thing that kept me from wanting to die was the fact that I could leave my body and be in a body that worked perfectly for a while, better than perfectly, actually, with a set of problems that were not my own”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“I knew your mother so well I could play her part. The same with my own mother and my grandmother and my childhood best friend, Euna, who drowned my the lake by her cousin's house. There are no ghosts, but up here-- she gestured towards her head-- it's a haunted house.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“She had once read in a book about consciousness that over the years, the human brain makes an AI version of your loved ones. The brain collects data, and within your brain, you host a virtual version of that person. Upon the person's death, your brain still believes the virtual person exists, because, in a sense, the person still does. After a while, though, the memory fades, and each year, you are left with an increasingly diminished version of the AI you had made when the person was alive.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“How do I go on when the person I love most in the world is in love with someone else? Someone tell me the solution, he thought, so I don't have to play this losing game all the way through.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“On the night Sam went missing, it occurred to Sadie that nothing in life was as solid-state as it appeared. A childish game could be deadly. A friend might disappear. And as much as a person might try to shield herself from it, the possibility for the other outcome was always there. We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn't chosen. And sometimes, this other life felt as palpable as the one you were living. Sometimes, it felt as if you might be walking down Brattle Street, and without warning, you could slip into this other life, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole that led to Wonderland. But it wouldn't be strange like Wonderland, not at all. Because you would have expected all along that it could have turned out that way. You would feel relief, because you had always wondered what that other life would have looked like. And there you were.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“We are all living, at most, half of a life. There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn't chosen. And sometimes, this other life felt as palpable as the one you were living.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“Sam felt a peacefulness come over him when he was playing Donkey Kong in his grandparents' pizza parlor. When he could time the little Japanese Italian plumber's jumps and ascend the staircases at the right pace, it felt as if the universe was capable of being ordered. It felt as if it were possible to achieve a perfect timing. It felt like synchronicity.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“She had, he thought, one of the world’s great laughs. The kind of laugh where a person didn’t feel that he was being laughed at. The kind of laugh that was an invitation: I cordially invite you to join in this matter that I find amusing.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“Sadie had often reflected that sex and video games had a great deal in common. There were certain objectives that needed to be met. There were certain rules that shouldn't be broken. There was a correct combination of movements---button mashes, joystick pivots, keystrokes, commands---that made the whole thing work or not work. There was a pleasure to knowing you had played the game correctly and a release that came when you reached the next level. To be good at sex was to be good at the game of sex.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“You couldn't be old and still be wrong about as many things as she'd been wrong about, and it was a kind of immaturity to call yourself old before you were.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“The boredom you speak of…that’s what most of us call happiness”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“It occurred to Sadie: She had thought after Ichigo that she would never fail again. She had thought she had arrived. But life was always arriving.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“Watanabe-san and Sadie exchanged gifts. She brought him a pair of carved wooden Ichigo chopsticks that their Japanese distributor had had made to celebrate the release of the second Ichigo in Japan.
In return, he gave her a silk scarf with a reproduction of Cherry Blossoms at Night, by Katsushika Ōi, on it. The painting depicts a woman composing a poem on a slate in the foreground. The titular cherry blossoms are in the background, all but a few of them in deep shadow. Despite the title, the cherry blossoms are not the subject; it is a painting about the creative process---its solitude and the ways in which an artist, particularly a female one, is expected to disappear. The woman's slate appears to be blank. "I know Hokusai is an inspiration for you," Watanabe-san said. "This is by Hokusai's daughter. Only a handful of her paintings survived, but I think she is even better than the father.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“Why do you keep coming?" she asked.
"Because," he said. Click on this word, he thought, and you will find links to everything it means. Because you are my oldest friend. Because, once, when I was at my lowest, you saved me. Because I might have died without you or ended up in a children's psychiatric hospital. Because I owe you. Because, selfishly, I see a future where we make fantastic games together, if you can manage to get out of bed. "Because," he repeated.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“When Sam told this story to Sadie, she laughed, though she barely seemed to be listening. He had framed the story in a humorous way, smoothed off some of the edges of his hostility toward the woman in the park. But as he told it, he could feel himself back in that dog park. He could feel the dry California heat and the murderous pounding of his heart. Without warning, an anecdote he had meant to be amusing did not feel amusing. Anyone, who had truly looked at Tuesday could not have possibly seen a coyote. But the woman had not truly looked, and the injustice of this hit him. Why was is it acceptable for apparently well-meaning people to see the world in such a general way?
Sam was put off by Sadie's laughter. He asked her what was funny. She was confused for a moment---hadn't he wanted her to laugh?---and then she said, annoyed, "You get that this a story about you, right? That's why you lost your mind at a dog park. You're Tuesday. You're the incredibly special dog that no one can classify." It was not long after their huge argument, and things were quite strained between them.
Sam told her that she was being reductive, and that her interpretation was insulting to both him and the dog. "It's a story about Tuesday," he insisted. "Maybe it's a story about L.A., too. Maybe it's a story about the kind of people that go to the dog park in Silver Lake. But it's mainly a story about Tuesday."
"The text," she said, "perhaps.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“How do you get into making video games anyway? Sadie hated answering this question, especially after a person told her he hadn't heard of Ichigo. "Well, I learned to program computers in middle school, I got an 800 on my math SAT, won a Westinghouse and a Leipzig, and then I went to MIT, which, by the way, is highly competitive, even for a lowly female like myself, and studied computer science. At MIT, I learned four or five more programming languages and studied psychology with an emphasis on ludic techniques and persuasive designs, and English, including narrative structures, the classics, and the history of interactive storytelling. Got myself a great mentor. Regrettably made him my boyfriend. Suffice it to say, I was young. And then I dropped out of school for a time to make a game because my best frenemy wanted me to. That game became the game you never heard of. But yeah, it sold around two and a half million copies, just in the U.S., so...." Instead, she said, "I like to play games a lot, so I thought I'd see if I could make them.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
“It isn’t a sadness, but a joy, that we don’t do the same things for the length of our lives.”
Source: Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow