Delays due to Ingrams (wholesaler) taking their own sweet time to send Mike his pre-orders -- blame the trucker shortage/Brexit.
Also due to me having to schlep about 10kg of additional books a mile and a half uphill in Edinburgh (and I am very unfit after a year and a half of self-isolation and no swimming).
]]>Moz @ 43:
why not the "fireman's carry"?
Which one? Neither of the ones I've been taught match what I see people in the US doing. Mind you, I've seen the bride carry called a fireman's carry so I suspect a lot of the time it's more like "carry I saw a fireman use".
This is the one I learned in the Army:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fireman's_carry
Admittedly much of what I've been taught is in the context of lighter-than-average people, so the idea that a 70kg person is going to lift a 140kg person onto their shoulders then run up a flight of stairs and through a doorway was never going to fly.
In training it was more often an 80kg person carrying a 90kg person & vice versa. The instructors did try to pair up people of similar physique. But even the 50kg person could manage the lift & stagger a step or two. We went through the training as a platoon and I had a platoon that was half female. Every one of them managed it, even when required to lift & carry one of the male soldiers (who were all larger).
It didn't require running "up a flight of stairs and through a doorway"; you only had to stagger far enough to get them (and yourself) out of the line of fire.
In the context of world walking (as I remember it from Empire Games and Dark State) the carrier only has to be able to carry them a single step, when the trio of young world walkers who had aligned with Miriam were exploring new worlds - when they found the world with the dome and the door ...
But they were prepared for that with carrying harnesses & a plan how to jump over and back on the INITIAL entry. In an emergency - where a couple of world walkers might need to walk from 1 to 2 to 3 without advance prep - I think the "fireman's carry" would serve the purpose the same as it serves in combat.
]]>That was Chico's line.
]]>I do adore Kurt and his tradecraft.
I am hoping against hope that there’ll be a happy conclusion to the series.
]]>That was my point. The book is about people who are fighting a war. What do they do if they need to evacuate a wounded comrade? How are they going to piggy-back someone who is NOT able to "hold their legs together and help a little with their arms"?
"In an emergency - where a couple of world walkers might need to walk from 1 to 2 to 3 without advance prep - I think the "fireman's carry" would serve the purpose the same as it serves in combat."]]>
The two Wikipedia illustrations show the way I was trained:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Army_FM_3-21.75_3-40A-E.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Army_FM_3-21.75_3-40F-J.jpg
I don't think firemen generally use the fireman's carry to carry people up the stairs ... unless they're evacuating someone from a fire in the sub-basement.
Again I'm thinking of how would world walkers evacuate an incapacitated comrade or respond to an emergency where they needed to rapidly cross multiple time lines without access to the harness system they designed for exploring ... and without the electro-optical world walking systems ~USA developed back in the first series.
]]>Go to Waterstones... they don't have it. Useless buggers. They had one copy of Dark State and one copy of Atrocity Archive, and that was it for anything by Charlie.
Go to WH Smiths... they don't have it. Useless buggers. They don't have any of Charlie's books at all.
But they do have a big rack of Amazon gift cards, to encourage people who can't find what they want to order it from Amazon instead of from the shop they're actually in. And it seemed at the time that that would be an easier option than spending ten minutes saying things like "no, Stross, C.H.A.R.L.E.S. S.T.R.O.S.S." several times while sharing viruses with someone.
My Amazon account doesn't work. I haven't used it for ages, and now it keeps telling me it wants me to visit a link in an email it's sent me before it'll let me sign in. Only I forgot I was still using the domain of that email address for something I might care about, and let it drop. So the email cannot arrive.
I go to send an email to Amazon customer support. Only there is no fucking email for Amazon customer support. The only methods provided to contact them require you to log in first, which is no bloody use when it's not being able to log in you need to contact them about. So I end up searching the web and past emails for any vaguely useful looking possibilities and trying those until I find one that doesn't bounce. Still don't know if it actually works of course. Never got a reply.
Try the Amazon account again at random after a few days not expecting it to work, but am surprised to find it does now. Maybe my email did get through, or maybe someone at Amazon noticed the bounces from the nonexistent domain and had the nous to tell it to stop moaning, but I suspect it was just their computer system getting bored and acting the arse for no reason and then a few days later deciding to stop again.
I discover that if you can guess someone's Amazon password that's all you need to pinch their account. Having signed in, I can update my registered email address just by typing in the new one and visiting links out of a couple of emails it sends to the new one. It doesn't try to send anything to the old one to make sure someone's not trying to pinch the account, so I don't have to explain to customer service about the domain no longer existing. It doesn't even ask me what the old one was - it tells me what it was, instead.
At bloody last... so it appears. Put "Invisible Sun" into the search box, go to the listing, select "paperback", try to buy it.
Only somewhere in the sequence of clicks that follows on the way to the checkout, the bloody weasel bastard remote system signs me up to fucking Amazon Prime. I never told it I wanted that, and it never gave me any opportunity to tell it I didn't. It just happened automatically without my consent, and suddenly I found it was trying to have me check out using Prime and not letting me tell it to fuck off.
So I abort the checkout and try to cancel the Prime. Can't bloody do it. I discover several possible URLs hunting around the Amazon site, but they all redirect to one or other of two pages neither of which have any "cancel Prime" options even though it claims they do. Every possible path eventually leads to the same place, which is the "Update, Cancel and more..." link in the "Manage" menu. That link is mentioned several times, and even illustrated in screenshots, in Amazon's own help pages, but it doesn't exist any more. It's now changed to "Update your settings" and doesn't lead to anything except "manage your household", and there's nothing there either.
So to get rid of this thing Amazon forced on me without my consent and don't provide any way to cancel, I have to contact customer service and get them to scrub the mustelline odour off themselves.
Then at last FINALLY the account is back to normal and I can finish putting the order in. I now have an email sent to the new email address informing me that I have successfully ordered Invisible Sun, without Prime, and it is to be delivered on Monday 11th October. When I could have read it by now if Waterstones and Smiths weren't so useless.
Although it may be a useful delay, since like LAvery @ 54 I find I can remember the earlier sub-series better than the two books so far in the later one, so it would probably do me some good to read them again in the meantime. Probably because I inhaled the two later books too fast as soon as they arrived...
Moz @ 41: Miriam's chair was well within the range of sizes of objects that they knew perfectly well one person could carry through and did it themselves all the time, so there's no immediate reason for them to wonder how she got it through. Then they were vastly more interested in its occupant for other reasons and had far too much else to think about to worry about trivia like "why did she carry a chair with her?", and Miriam herself similarly had far too much else to think about on her own account. So I reckon it just rapidly evaporated from everyone's attention and most of them would probably go "what chair?" if you asked them about it now.
@ 44 "If you were doing that twice a day indefinitely I suspect you'd end up deciding that half an hour in the gym doing weights was worth while"
If you were doing it twice a day indefinitely you'd end up not really thinking about it before not really as long as you might expect. BTDT. Doing it all the time you adapt naturally, and not pulling yourself apart in the process comes as part of the package. So you can spend your free time in the pub instead (and your money on beer, instead of on renting a few square metres of someone else's floor to do stuff you could do at home for nothing with a knapsack full of bricks in any case.)
]]>Only if they don't use 2FA rather than (weak) username/password security. Their default 2FA mechanism is a text message to an already-confirmed-to-be-yours mobile phone number but they also support authenticator apps.
Only somewhere in the sequence of clicks that follows on the way to the checkout, the bloody weasel bastard remote system signs me up to fucking Amazon Prime.
The first three months are free, IIRC, which means free next-day home delivery. I'd wait for the book to arrive before you cancel it. Details are buried in the "Terms & Conditions" web page small print:
3.3. Cancellation by you and refunds If you signed up for your Prime membership directly through us, you may cancel it any time by visiting Your Account and adjusting your membership settings. You may also contact customer service. If neither you nor anyone authorised by you to use your account has taken advantage of any Prime benefits in the current membership period, we will refund this membership fee in full.
As for the chair ... consider the Clan has just come through a brutal civil war which killed somewhere in the range 10-50% of actual living world-walkers. It takes a generation to bounce back from that, and there's a loss of institutional knowledge. There's also a strong incentive for the Clan Security people to suppress knowledge of how to world-walk with extra cargo, because they want to keep the family talent a scarce (and lucrative) resource. Remember: they're not trying to maximize payload (like the Commonwealth) because they're stuck so deep in the development trap that they don't realize there's a problem.
]]>It just seemed weird that at no point did she ever think "you know, somehow the chair I was sitting on came through with me. What's up with that?"
]]>I mean, it sort of is, but in a minor side note that doesn't affect the storyline.
]]>For some reason Amazon wouldn't deliver the hardback to the local autoshelf system at the rail station, only the softback, so screw them. How big is the hardback? Is it leaking toxic fumes? Weird.
]]>