Jonathan Simcoe

The Hori key enters a Hori lock in such a way as to affirm your suspicion that every key you’ve ever inserted into every lock throughout your entire life was a sham. A false combination — jittery, sticky, imprecise. You realize how badly cut, forged by shoddy means, all the keys you own currently are. Using this Hori key and lock combination is sim

Faithful servant yet master’s bane, Lightfoot’s foal, swift Snowmane.

It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curve of a piece of furniture, or a ship’s keel, or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elementary purity of the curve of the human breast or shoulder, there must be experimentation of several generations of craftsmen.

We should say, “Prepare for trouble.”

This is not the same as saying, “Worry about trouble,” or a violation of Jesus’ command in Matthew 6 not to give thought for tomorrow. Our model here is Jesus, who warned his disciples over and over that their worst case scenario was going to come true. “He began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo gr

‘When I look back over the last 25 years, in some ways what seems most precious is not what we have made but how we have made it and what we have learned as a consequence of that,’ he says. ‘I always think that there are two products at the end of a programme; there is the physical product or the service, the thing that you have managed to make, an

He helped Halliday create some simple cover artwork for the game, and together, the two of them hand-copied Anorak’s Quest onto dozens of 5¼-inch floppy disks and stuck them into Ziploc bags along with a single photocopied sheet of instructions. They began selling the game on the software rack at their local computer store. Before long, they couldn

Because most of our gear was carried by yaks and human porters, my own backpack held little more than a jacket, a few candy bars, and my camera.

Of all the slaves of the Dark Lord, only the Nazgûl could have warned him of the peril that crept, small but indomitable, into the very heart of his guarded realm.

But we readers will tolerate all kinds of reading states, even negative-seeming ones: periods of boredom, of perplexity, periods during which we are really hating Character X and wondering if the writer knows just how much. What we are saying, essentially, is: “Well, Franz, that bug thing is excessive but I’m going to allow it. Proceed. What are yo