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" You can really find yourself at sea when you're becoming an adult and suddenly have to feed yourself for the first time. "
Robin Sloan
Find
First
Sea
Related Quotes:
" I was always a computer kid, and I grew up with the Internet and always found it fascinating. "
Robin Sloan
Always
Up
Kid
" When MUDs appeared, that was an entirely novel experience, and often an addictive one. Long before Twitter or Snapchat, MUDs inspired the moral panic of the moment: a 1993 'Wired' article titled 'The Dragon Ate My Homework' described university students losing themselves in these virtual worlds. Keep in mind: they were just words on a screen. "
Robin Sloan
Moment
Experience
Losing
" Everyone's lives are sort of a succession, almost like handing the baton of your life off from one person to the next to the next to the next. And hopefully, that goes on for a long time, and the changes are healthy and interesting and not, like, spiraling into darkness. "
Robin Sloan
Long
Life
Time
" When you're writing for the Internet, you have the analytics, and you know that people are bailing every second. But various people kept reminding me that once people have bought a book, they're in. You don't have to be selling them on every page. "
Robin Sloan
Book
Internet
You
" It turns out you can train a neural network on a big body of text. It can be Wikipedia; it can be all the works of Charles Dickens; it could be all of the Internet. They can use grammar and put words together in interesting and convincing ways - and, I think, unexpected and beautiful ways. "
Robin Sloan
Body
Beautiful
Words
" In the case of 'Fish,' I did the writing, design, and code all at the same time, so the form and the content were fused together. I'd change some words, get an idea, change some code, see if it worked, change more words, and so on. "
Robin Sloan
Change
Time
Writing
" I think I'm one of those people that kind of thinks everybody's got an identity, and maybe that's the core of their personality. But I think we change enough over the years that it's like a succession of different people. "
Robin Sloan
People
Change
Personality
" I got a bike - a fixed-gear with bright blue wheels, custom-made to my specifications. I am a San Francisco techno-hipster, so this selection was a bit of a self-caricature. But sometimes the predictable thing turns out to be the best thing, too, and you can't let that stop you. "
Robin Sloan
Blue
Bike
Best
" There's just no escaping it: The half-life of media on the Internet is super short. Tweets flow and fade; pages that look great today will be gone or, at best, riddled with broken links and outmoded code in five years, tops. "
Robin Sloan
Best
Today
Broken
" Primes seem to me to be these unarbitrary, unique, fated things. It cannot be coincidence that the mythical numbers of storytelling like 3, 7, and 13 are random. The lower-end primes have incredible resonance in fiction and art. "
Robin Sloan
Unique
Art
Like
" When I was 14, I spent a huge amount of time on the Internet, but not the Internet we know today. It was 1994, so while the World Wide Web existed, it wasn't generally accessible. Prodigy and CompuServe were popular, and AOL was on the rise, but I didn't have access to the web, and no one I knew had access to the web. "
Robin Sloan
Internet
World
Time
" You can go as far back as fifth grade, and you will find me tinkering with media and computers, making things that are a little off the beaten track. "
Robin Sloan
Back
Find
Me
" My parents live in northern Michigan, and every year, in the summer, we visit them for a few weeks. "
Robin Sloan
Michigan
Live
Parents
" This is what I think is fun about fiction - you get to use as much history as you want as scaffolding and then go beyond it and change it and mutate it. "
Robin Sloan
History
Want
You
" If you come from the Internet, as I do - I think of it as sort of my native country - there's a lot of great things happening on the Internet, but one of the things, one of the feelings you just can't escape is the sense that it's really hard to keep people's attention. "
Robin Sloan
People
Great
You
" The vision of the Internet as a vast digital wasteland isn't correct. Everything is awesome, and we have more stuff to read than we ever have in history. "
Robin Sloan
Internet
More
History
" 'Minecraft' is a game about creation, yes. But it is just as much a game about secret knowledge. "
Robin Sloan
Creation
Yes
Knowledge
" When you do something a little bit extreme or weird, it helps make it more interesting and more amenable to being written about. "
Robin Sloan
Interesting
Little
More
" When we talk about novels, we don't often talk about imagination. Why not? Does it seem too first grade? In reviews, you read about limpid prose, about the faithful reproduction of consciousness, about moral heft, but rarely about the power of pure, unadulterated imagination. "
Robin Sloan
Imagination
Moral
You
" Good writing is really meaningful, and it's one of the - it's still one of the best tools we have to get and capture people's attention. "
Robin Sloan
Best
Writing
Good
" If a shop has a neon Superman logo in the window, I will enter. If it has a neon Superman logo in the window, a Bat-symbol next to it, and a dragon under the eaves, I am already inside. "
Robin Sloan
I Am
Am
Window
" For so long, the model for writing has been, you sit in a room alone for a number of days or weeks or months or years and figure it out. But now, you don't have to do that; you don't have to be alone in the room anymore. "
Robin Sloan
Sit
You
Now
" People tend to think of the quest as a sort of fanciful or fantastical form, but actually, I think it's pretty realistic. I think that story of gathering allies to your side - recruiting your band of companions - actually matches the shape of most great careers, most great lives. "
Robin Sloan
Story
Side
People
" You can't think of technology as separate from all of our human drama anymore. "
Robin Sloan
Think
Drama
You
" Whether it's 'Fish' or 'Annabel Scheme' or 'The Truth About the East Wind,' I often find myself crafting custom containers to hold the kind of content I want to create. "
Robin Sloan
Find
Wind
Truth
" For me, writing in public is actually super energizing and so much fun. Especially when writing can typically be really painful and certainly hard, and often, you're staring at the page and thinking, like, 'Uh, is this any good? What am I doing?' "
Robin Sloan
Good
Me
You
" Prediction just means you saw where the world might be going: ho-hum. Influence, though - ah. Influence, direct and acknowledged, means you actually steered the world, even if only a tiny bit. "
Robin Sloan
Just
You
World
" I saw the short stories people were doing on Kindle and really liked the idea of seeing something I'd written on that screen. "
Robin Sloan
Seeing
People
Doing
" Doing research for 'Penumbra,' I read quite a bit about the early history of printing, and the more I did, the more it sounded like... the Internet today. There was crazy competition and upheaval; there were constant arguments about new techniques, new materials, new machines; and, of course, there were fortunes to be made. "
Robin Sloan
Crazy
Today
New
" If I am honest with myself, a not-insignificant fraction of my enjoyment of any episode of 'Game of Thrones' is delivered in its opening moments. I sit down, settle in, and... BUM-bum, bah-dah-BUM-bum. "
Robin Sloan
Sit
Down
Myself