Question: When is CoolQuotes most like a party conversation?

Answer: When it can’t seem to hear properly or when somebody dominates the conversation.

For example, I clicked on the word “concealed” when CoolQuotes gave me the line, “It’s hard to learn from a concealed mistake.” from Jef Mallet’s comic Frazz. Then CoolQuotes came back with “Where war is concerned, since accurate news is unavailable, rumors are prophetic.” from Lao She’s Rickshaw Boy. Why?

We don’t entirely understand the arcane algorithms at the heart of CoolQuotes, but our suspicion is that, when they can’t find an exact match, they make a guess. I’m half-deaf and I do exactly the same. In a crowded room with lots of background noise I could easily imagine someone saying “concealed” and me hearing “concerned” instead.

Sure, it can make party conversations confusing, but it can also uncover things human that persistently lurk below the surface. We all hear imperfectly, speak imperfectly, read and write imperfectly, we even imperfectly edit ourselves while vainly attempting to be perfectly understood.

What else might happen at a particular party? Well, there is often one loud mouth in the group who dominates the conversation. The same sometimes happens in CoolQuotes. Why? For one thing, there are some writer types out there that are just so quotable that we have captured a few hundred of theirs. As of mid 2026 there are some 8,000 entries for the algorithm to choose from so, for anyone out there, like Sir Terry Pratchett or the Bard of Avon, who we have quoted a few hundred times, chances are those folks will pop up regularly. On top of that, any one writer will have a favorite topic, so if I happen to click on a word associated with the favorite topic of a particular writer, and keep on clicking similar words, that writer may well dominate the conversation.

But then, some folks that dominate conversations are so doggone fascinating that we don’t mind. And, should we tire of that particular perspective, in face to face conversations, we can simply walk away. With CoolQuotes we can walk away from that conversation simply by choosing a different sort of word, and steer the conversation in a different direction (with the added advantage that we don’t worry about offending anyone in a virtual world. On the other hand, if we can build a better virtual world, we may hope that a bit of it leaks out into the world where we have to live and in order to pull anything like that off, we just may have to put up with the occasional disagreeable conversation. But let’s at least try to keep it interesting.

The best solution? Join the conversation yourself, and bring in all your favorite or the most challenging voices in your experience and expand all of our worlds just that much more.

The challenge that CoolQuotes sets before us is to show up anyway in our imperfection ready to meet the adventure of each other; to snatch more persistently at the clues that the next person carries in their heart.

Copyright 2026, The Proctor Charlie Collective