Breakfast of Champions

What Hacker News says

1. aunwickOct 2024
   Breakfast of Champions by Vonnegut. Like others could change any day you ask. Social commentary is probably at the top followed by well researched recent historical works.
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2. guggalugalugNov 2022
   An uncle of mine loaned me his abridged Vonnegut shelf, including Galapagos. Sirens of Titan also is good. Very strange. For people who do not read much but are desirous of learning more, I'm unsure of the best approach. Maybe Slaughterhouse-Five or Cat's Cradle? Vonnegut deals in Scenes. It is why we love him. Like Fitzgerald, he wrote of a Movie Age. And so I evaluate him based upon his individual scenes, not books. My favorite is from Breakfast of Champions. Kilgore Trout, who I believe was a trucker or maybe only a hitchhiker, walks onto the tarmac of a strip mall used car dealership. He has somehow warped thru various dimensionalities. He looks down at the ground. It reminded me of my father's description of walking the sidewalks of nyc after eating a brown paper bag of buttons: kicking a suddenly kaleidoscopic shard of glass. Or as Pynchon would say, you see "the warp and woof" of things.
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3. jakearSep 2022
   For the specific term “NPC” maybe, but the idea of “There is a main character and every one else is a machine” goes back much further - Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions (1973) tackles the idea in a particularly humorous way. (Not too much of a spoiler I hope, in classic Vonnegut fashion the bottom line is delivered up front and the rest book is about getting there)

   Note: don’t be tempted by the audiobook! The real deal features illustrations by the author

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4. labradorAug 2022
   I took a look at your comment history because I became curious if you yourself were perhaps an AI being tested on Hacker News. I noticed you said in another thread that you might have had enough of life. I doubt a non-sentient AI would say that, although Douglas Adams made famous a character he created called Marvin the depressed robot.

   I think depression in a person is a good test of sentience. You might be interested in Kurt Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions" (not the movie with Bruce Willis, which is an abomination) in which he feels everyone but himself is a robot and considers killing himself until he meets an artist who restores his faith in the creative spark and soul of humanity.

   Sentience is a scale anyway and apparently Elon Musk gets a low score, meaning he appears to be a bot - to Twitter at least

   https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/08/twitter-says-mus...

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5. labradorJul 2022
   Kurt Vonnegut "Breakfast of Champions": A yearly reminder that despite the terrible cruelty of human society and the awful behavior of many people and the indifference of most others, there are good people who shine love and creativity and it's worth staying alive to try to find these people to make life bearable.
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6. okareamanMay 2021
   Yes, we have become very efficient in doing things. What we are doing, we have become so efficient in doing that we don’t need any awareness to do it. It has become mechanical, automatic. We function like robots. We are not men yet; we are machines. That’s what George Gurdjieff used to say again and again, that man as he exists is a machine. He offended many people, because nobody likes to be called a machine. Machines like to be called gods; then they feel very happy, puffed up. Gurdjieff used to call people machines, and he was right. If you watch yourself you will know how mechanically you behave.

   http://www.pomyc.org/blog-details/55

   The exact quote by Gurdjieff is worth reading.

   Kurt Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions" dealt with this theme in an extraordinary way. He created a character who was going mad because he felt he was living among robots. At last, his character finds an artist that had a "light" in him, a soul, and the character decides everything is ok. At this point Kurt Vonnegut inserts himself into the narrative (which struck me as extraordinary) and says that he decided not to kill himself because he wrote this story (his mother committed suicide.) This book also helped me become more self-aware.

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