"The Pig Who Bit Liberty Vallance", or something like that. You know the one, about legend and fact and what people believe.
]]>I've just had to replace the PSU on this computer. The old one was slowly failing, and when I checked I found that people were saying that the rated power was misleading. It didn't like running at full power, and when you look at the different outputs, the low-voltage for the CPU was rather low-power. You could only get the full rated power on the 12v line How many people ave over 700W of electic motors—fans and hard drives —in their computer.
The trouble is that the big-name brands do the same. though the 3.3v and 5v lines are a lot better provided for. Only the retailers don't bother to give you a full set of figures.
I probably paid more than I needed to to get a new PSU with sufficient oomph. I have a good margin over the rated load of this CPU.
tl,dr: Every wab page on a retail site is an advert, and economical with the truth.
Figure in inflation, and the cost per watt of a computer PSU has barely fallen. Maybe some stuff has become cheaper, but I doubt they are cheaper because they cost less to assemble.
And I reckon that would be one of the things you will be paying for with the Apple brand.
The old-style mail order catalogues are certainly advertising, but it's clear enough what they're doing. They rarely carried third-party adverts.
Every so often I look at some website doing something of dodgy legality. They seem to carry a lot of advertising for those lawful internet gambling operations. How long before the MPAA goes after an internet casino for funding movie piracy?
I think I might have done rather better buying stuff from China over eBay than getting the same things from some big-name UK retailer. Deliveries have been surprisingly fast.
]]>There's huge use of these things in both the USA and Europe, with higher crop yields in the USA—we're still learning the details, but European farmers seem less likely to waste chemistry on low-grade land, and when I was farming it was already routine to monitor soil nutrient level to avoid applying excess.
Heck, some of the earliest statistical science was for experiments in agriculture that are still running, and are visible from space.
The Green Revolution wasn't just the sudden spasm that got that name. Rather like the Wars of the Roses, there were a whole load of things happening, and maybe it will be seen as a part of urbanisation, which encompasses food production, transport in general, and waste disposal. And a lot else.
I have the viewpoint to see the farming, and I remember my father's slightly bemused account of ending up driving a combine harvester in the USA because the farmer, one of many cousins, hadn't actually checked the crop was ready. It was only a few yards before the frantic cry of "Stop!"
It's possible that labour is hugely more specialised. That might be the trend. When the pre-industrial masses worked, they routinely did so many different things. Farmers still do. But the domestic mechanisation which started to take hold in the Fifties, machines replacing servants, might be seen as part of the same pattern.
So the label might be different, but I shall plump for The Rise of the Machine.
]]>But the number of non-North-American worldcons is significant. I can see how, in the old days, fandom was dominated by a population immersed in the politics and culture of the USA, and that would change the cultural ocean they were swimming in. And now terrorism has replaced the Cold War (which might be reviving), and the habitual racism of society in the USA seems to be suddenly very apparent.
I can't say that I am proud of our politicians, and I was serious gobsmacked when they got re-elected in May.
I find myself wondering if the Puppies are reacting to changes in Fandom, or to changes in the USA.
]]>I have attended two Worldcons in 25 years.
When I walked into Loncon3 somebody recognised me some ten years after we last met.
You idea of the community is totally alien to my experience. You seem stuck in a pre-internet, pre-fanzine era. Which strikes me as bizarre for somebody with your experience of Second Life.
(And I checked some of the things you wrote about that. I know people you mentioned. You've been reasonable in this thread, but it looks increasingly like deliberate maskirovka. I have a context for what you said, all those years ago, and you seem like a potty-mouthed Potemkin village. And some of those people that annoyed you have annoyed me in Second Life.)
]]>But this year, unless I come across five better novels, that novel is going on my list. It will be my minimum standard.
I'll be completely gobsmacked if any Puppy nominee can write better.
I've other thoughts on nomination, but no fan can go far wrong if he nominates the best works he has seen. And it's not impossible that it turns out the be something the Puppies will like.
It'll probably involve flying pigs, but look at what Hayao Miyazaki did with that idea.
]]>But they can be putting people on their slate just to provoke the no-thanks response.
All the evidence is that the Puppies wouldn't know good writing if it bit them on the ass. This coming year I can't see any choice but walking, and then backing the rules-change for 2017.
I still have a tiny amount of sympathy for the Sad Puppies, but if they carry on that will vanish.
]]>[[ Yes. You did. As a known commenter you got away with it this time, but don't tigger too much next time - mod ]]
But I seriously wonder if conventional publishing models will be viable for long enough to be worth the efforts of getting noticed. There's some talented people in that business, picking books. They're worth watching. But there are problems. Can the publishing industry maintain a per-book average sales level that supports a search for new writers?
Some of the possible answers to their search problem, such as keeping an eye on Amazon for the self-published authors who rise above the sales median (which is staggeringly low anyway), are distorted by other features of the operation: is it sane to sell through Amazon, so being forced to sign up for the US tax system, for such a minuscule return.
It's a little too easy to feel like the exploited authorial proletariat, with Eric Raymond as Karl Marx (maybe not a good fit) and Amazon as Joe Stalin.
]]>And maybe the fan-fic model will work as a distribution channel. If there's no chance of being paid anyway, why not?
"I expect," said Arabella, "That if the pirates had succeeded he would have been ransomed. And a payment would have been made. It would have bounced around between banks a few times, maybe gotten changed to bearer bonds and faded from sight in the markets of Pallas or Ceres."
There were nods of agreement.
"The astrography is awkward for Pallas and Ceres from Mars. And there are a couple of interesting banking houses on Ganymede." Stagg steepled his fingers. "I'd like you to go to Ganymede. Saunders?"
"Boss... The thing is, Narcotics rather likes to have some funds in slightly dodgy banks, where our field agents can get hold of it, no questions asked. The sort of bank a real gangster would use. And those accounts need to be topped up from time to time. So you'll be selling a stack of bearer bonds on the Bourse de Ganymede. And, Ganymede being Ganymede, expect trouble."
"Of course," said Arabella. "But trouble won't be expecting us."
I need to do some more work on the story, I may change a few things. I was reading through some of it, and I am sure the Puppies won't like it. Should I care?
I saw enough of their storytelling in the Hugo packet. They ought to stick to NaNoWriMo.
And I might get lucky.
]]>The hardware would be a problem to produce and use-once; spaceflight is an expression of a huge surplus, but so is the space elevator.
]]>My personal summary of the problem: why is there no Bonnie and Clyde in Grand Theft Auto?
I think there are some things she criticises which are bad, but which are difficult to avoid within the limits of gaming methods. Without being on the inside, I can't see how much anyone struggled to find a fix. It's things such as the pursuit of a Bad Man who leaves a trail of dead bodies, and those bodies are always women. The idea of the trail might be hard to avoid, but why are all the victims women? Why are all the active characters men?
History?
That explains why all the pilots in a Battle of Britain game are going to be men, but there's a lot of bad history in the games, some hugely horrible assumptions about women.
And, on the Eastern Front, the Soviets fielded whole combat squadroms of women pilots. The numbers were small, but pilots are pretty rare birds anyway. And women who could fly were delivering Spitfires.
Knowing that sort of history is one of the things that leads me away from total acceptance of Anita Sarkeesian's examples. It doesn't make the gaming industry look any better. The story of Lara Crofts tits being the result of a typing error just isn't credible. There's an obvious difference between the early computer model and who real Page Three girls look like, and the people in the company made a choice.
The GamerGaters aren't trying to find any answers, they're just getting headlines through blanket denial and intimidation. And no true GamerGater would do any of that.
]]>The final Nominee, if No Award has not already been eliminated, needs more voters to have ranked her ahead of No Award than vice versa. And if you haven't ranked No Award at all, the nominees you explicitly ranked are ahead of No Award.
But if you have not ranked either the finalist or No Award your vote isn't counted in this test. So remember to rank all the non-slate candidates and No Award at the bottom.
I think I have that right.
And if you can't decide a number, if you have no strong preference between the last two non-Puppies, toss a coin or something.
]]>“Look at it like this,” Correia blogged at one point. “I’m Churchill, Brad is FDR. We wound up on the same side as Stalin.”
I can see what he's getting at, but if you try to look at the history, it soon gets messy.
Is he really saying we are the Nazis, or is he just an ignorant git?
I suppose he has some sort of plausible deniability.
]]>In a way, the sad puppies may be a good thing, if they kill off that sub-sub-genre by their actions.
But some of that comes from a different, almost un-American, perspective. You have had wars fought in your country, though it's too easy to point at your Civil War as a cause of trauma and racism. I think that gets cause and effect out of order. But it's plausible to me that the USA sees war as something that happens somewhere else, and that's not so easy in Europe.
I was checking something in Google Earth recently, and it's possible to see in England the signs of a Norman motte-and-bailey a few hundred yards from those of a WW2 anti-aircraft battery. It's harder to see war as something remote in time and space.
But I doubt I am typical.
Nevertheless, although it seems to be falling apart, Europe seems to be built on the idea of avoiding past horrors. And it shouldn't be a surprise that the label for the bad guys of the current economic crisis (mostly over Greece) has become "the Germans", when the cause seems to be yet another wunch of bankers.
In the early days, Amazon used to be fairly good at suggesting books. They suggested a lot of books I already had, but it was stuff I liked. On what I see now, they don't care to push books in the traditional publishing chain. They almost spam me with offers for self-published e-books. The good stuff, I didn't hear about from Amazon.
The book-marketing system, as a whole, maybe reached its best around the turn of the century, partly through the application of computer analysis. Direct sales gave a chance to build up pictures of individual buyers, and promote to them items they were likely to like.
But it depends on using good labels, on getting good links between content/product items that are more than just a brand (an author's name is just a brand), and suddenly it seemed that the content being sold was adverts rather than products.
I do get promotional material from publishers. Tor does good stuff. It's apparent that the people in the business care. I'm not saying other people in other businesses don't care, but it's possible that the sociopaths have won.
And if nobody is a person, it might not matter about your gender or race, unless it is a label they use in their model of the world.
]]>