Jim Toepel

“It’s difficult to assign value to discovery when you haven’t sorted out the parameters of reality yet.”
― Becky Chambers, To Be Taught, If Fortunate

“This is perhaps ZZT’s most impressive quality: its ability to transform, to become anything other than Town of ZZT. In 2009 Drake Wilson released Preposterous Machines, a collection of machines built out of massive systems of Objects interacting—often by way of shooting. Bullets were transmitted from Object to Object like electrical impulses. What are the machines? A sinewave grapher. A calculator. A machine that solves the Towers of Hanoi. A Mandlebrot visualizer. An implementation of John Conway’s Game of Life, the famously complex cellular automata that springs from a set of four rules.”
― Anna Anthropy, ZZT

“But there are none so frightened, or so strange in their fear, as conquerors. They conjure phantoms endlessly, terrified that their victims will someday do back what was done to them—even if, in truth, their victims couldn’t care less about such pettiness and have moved on. Conquerors live in dread of the day when they are shown to be, not superior, but simply lucky.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky

“I am an artist,” Wit said. “I should thank you not to demean me by insisting my art must be trying to accomplish something. In fact, you shouldn’t enjoy art. You should simply admit that it exists, then move on. Anything else is patronizing.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Rhythm of War