only a flash between two long nights

“To the barren dune and the desert sky Humanity is an irrelevance; In coiling and uncoiling like the sea, She manifests the same indifference.”

“My horizon of intent is defined not just by what I believe I can do, but also by what I believe I should do—my internal strategic constraints.”

“From what grace am I fallen. Tongues are strange, signs say nothing.”

“From the player’s perspective, it doesn’t make much difference if an internal constraint is a learned rule, an invented strategy, or a distillation of real-world knowledge. If it privileges one line of action over another, it is a meaningful constraint.”

“It seems a good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others. Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood.”