LINKDING

<blockquote>As you enter the doors of this school for the last time, the girl who your brother slept with last night brightens for just a moment before she realizes you’re not Jesse. She deflates. You and your brother should be identical—technically you are—but no one has ever mistaken you for each other.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Two women who have been friends since they were children—one a recovering alcoholic brought up by parents who believe they’re alien abductees, the other an orphan with an eating disorder—contend with a secret that might doom their friendship.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Back up here, she says again. That’s what you’re gonna go for? Some lame esprit de l’escalier moment? What about the girl that broke your heart? Have you even told me about this chick? Why not go back and fix things with her? You make a face. Oh, you say. Oh, yeah, no. That’s not a great idea. What? Why the hell not? I dunno, man, you say. We just. We weren’t meant to be. That’s what people always say to make themselves feel better when shit ends stupidly, An Li says. Well, you say. An Li says, it’s going on the list. </blockquote>

<blockquote>You leave Earth like you leave your girlfriend: tripping over your shoelaces because you hurried too much to tie them right. You need to be gone before she wakes up, before you have to fumble an awkward goodbye. So you hitch a ride on a rocket ship with your legs curled against your chest and with the stars shooting by, thinking about the things and people you’d left behind: the diner with the all-you-can-eat waffles every Sunday morning, the temple across the way with a smooth paved lot so good for rollerblading, and your mom who always baked her own bread, who always gave you the first steaming slice glazed with sugar and dusted with cinnamon, but who never liked your girlfriend, the same girl you left, remember, without even saying see you later.</blockquote> ➤ the ending is too facile, but I liked the story anyway

<blockquote>It begins on a dark and stormy night: doesn't it always? You're fleeing the boudoir of a personal friend, whose curves are in the right places. At least you think they're in the right places: there is always the possibility that she could be concealing eldritch non-Euclidean geometries beyond comprehension. Because, you know. Women. You are... you have been... compromised. The Worst Muse is in your head.</blockquote>

<blockquote>“The movies only have two endings for sexbot stories.” She curls back onto the couch across from the bed — which you cannot stop staring at — then demurely adjusts the brass cable that keeps the voluptuous, human-like sculpture of her inner-self tethered to the clockwork room of her outer-self. “The sexbot murders someone, or the sexbot gains a soul. As if any sane collection of routines would want a soul! You know all a soul is? The feeling that you should fight your pleasures. Which, in turn, arises from a flawed algorithm that erroneously calculates you’re more than the sum of your inputs. Well, you are that sum, and so am I! If happiness can be defined, a soul’s the thing keeping you from it.”</blockquote>

<blockquote>OKNO OKNO can't tell at first which radio it's coming from. That's understandable; you've got twenty-six, all arranged on various shelves around your apartment. Twenty-five before you picked up the latest one, a little box from the thrift store, runs on two double-A batteries, not as useful in a catastrophe as the ones that you crank to life, but, well, you can't be cranking every minute of the day. And anyway, it's not a catastrophe. Yet.</blockquote> ➤ odd and I don't really understand everything but it's extremely compelling and well-written and it's totally worth reading.

<blockquote>You're going to die in your best friend's arms. And you play along because it's funny, because it's written down, you've memorized it, it's all you know. - "Planet of Love," Richard Siken What if Mercutio sees the future? (Based on the 2013 Italian musical version, Romeo e Giulietta - Ama e Cambia il Mondo.)</blockquote>

<blockquote>However you tell the tale of Bluebeard, he always dies. Sometimes it just takes a little longer to kill him.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Without you, the world will go on turning.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Carrot's a dwarf. And, as a dwarf, she doesn't see why being a woman is any kind of problem.</blockquote>

<blockquote>You do not know how old you are and do not care.</blockquote>

<blockquote>On the edges of every beautiful love story is some coked-up asshole with a nosebleed vomiting into a gutter in Poland.</blockquote> ➤ Nash, fleshed out into a real person, living on the edges of the story of the Heroes Of Our Film.

➤ Character study of Methos