He has reverted, in other words, back into a pure balls-to-the-wall nerdism rivaled only by his early game-coding days back in Seattle. The sheer dep… - Neal Stephenson

There’s no way to get from the point in Hemn space where we are now, to one that includes pink nerve-gas-farting dragons, following any plausible action principle. Which is really just a technical term for there being a coherent story joining one moment to the next. If you simply throw action principles out the window, you’re granting the world the freedom to wander anywhere in Hemn space, to any outcome, without constraint. It becomes pretty meaningless. The mind — even the sline mind — knows that there is an action principle that governs how the world evolves from one moment to the next — that restricts our world’s path to points that tell an internally consistent story. So it focuses its worrying on outcomes that are more plausible, such as you leaving.

— after that it's just a chase scene.

...he was fascinated by the mid-western/middle American phenomenon of recombinant cuisine. Rice Krispie Treats being a prototypical example in that they were made by repurposing other foods that had already been prepared (to wit, breakfast cereal and marshmallows). And of course, any recipe that called for a can of cream of mushroom soup fell into the same category. The unifying principle behind all recombinant cuisine seemed to be indifference, if not outright hostility, to the use of anything that a coastal foodie would define as an ingredient.