Matthew Bizer > Recent Status Updates

"To be quite frank with you all I am quite calm and un-nervous. After a while you get used to the idea of being watched and hated. Also I just don't have the goddamned time to be nervous or worried.... I am in the midst of a revolution. This is the greatest revolution since the American Revolution."

“Nobody reaches the end of their life and regrets even a single moment of creating something, no matter how shitty or unappreciated that something might have been.”

I don’t think I’ve devoured 100 pages so fast since I was a teenager

“By the third week of July, the tender wounds of violence were hardening into a callused defiance. The defiance showed in how volunteers joked about their lives.”

Starting to scare myself with how much I relate to Jeff Tweedy

“I think that may be the highest purpose of any work of art, to inspire someone else to save themselves through art.“

“At the very least, I wish everyone had a way to kill time without hurting anyone, including themselves.“

“Everybody wants meaning in their life, and we all find it in different ways. For me it was buying records.”

“I was never an outright enemy of any clique, nor was I ever fully absorbed and identified as a part of any distinct group. I was a misfit, but I was aware I had it better than the true outcasts. That didn't stop me from feeling alienated and irrationally repulsed by most of my classmates.”

“Some fastballs, properly thrown, will rise, or ‘explode,’ when they reach the plate. Skeptics maintain this is impossible, claiming it defies the immutable laws of gravity. However, such skeptics have never looked at airplanes.”

"Y'all gonna hear a lot of different stories from white folks about what these people are and why they're down here," Robert Miles said. "White folks are gonna tell you they're agitators. You know what an agitator is? An agitator is the piece in the center of a washing machine that spins around to get dirt out. Well, that's what these people are here for. They're here to get dirt out.”

"So it's hopeless?" asked Zhu Tao.
"Not hopeless," Guo Ming corrected. "Just hard. If this becomes a negotiation by diplomats, it will never be resolved. We need to keep this among scientists.”

I know how this ends. So why did a certain chapter make me so tense?

"The biggest threat is giving up hope. If he decides there's no chance to survive, he'll stop trying."

Look, I’ve seen the movie. I know how this thing ends.

Despite that, this is so far one of the most exhilarating reads I’ve ever experienced. A few chapters (or more) of this just brightens the entire day.

Mark Watney keeps calling himself a “botanist/mechanical engineer” but he appears to be a wayyyy better botanist than he is an engineer lol.

So far, I’m feeling more suspension of disbelief than I’d expect from a “hard science fiction.” But this is also very engagingly written, and darkly funny, and it was hard to put down.

“This is what the world looks like to me, like UN Plaza, full of half-forgotten victories and new catastrophes, of farmers and junkies, of mountains of apples and of people trying to change the world and tell the truth. Someday all this may be ruins over which pelicans will fly, but for now it is a place where history is still unfolding. Today is also the day of creation.”

“I grew up in that left encouraged to despise
‘rednecks and white trash’—the racism of some working-class white Southerners became a handy way for the middle class elsewhere to carry on class war while feeling progressive.”

“Environmentalists like to say that defeats are permanent, victories temporary. Extinction, like death, is forever, but protection needs to be maintained. But now, in a world where restoration ecology is becoming increasingly important, it turns out that even defeats aren't always permanent.”