Antonia T Tiger

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• Commented on Crib Sheet: Equoid
  One of my Great Uncles was a policeman in South Yorkshire, and his advice to young recruits was to learn to type properly. This was at least 90 years ago. With the computer so commonplace, it's even better advice, but...
• Commented on Book Launch
  Cosplay is there, the Masquerade itself is a very old Worldcon tradition, but it's not overwhelming. It's one of those things which catches the eye of those responsible for news reports, and there may be occasional vikings and morris dancers....
• Commented on Second childhood?
  Second Childhood? The Clangers are back on the BBC, and that missing comet lander has also turned up. What a coincidence... (It feels like what I remember, but it's obviously low-gravity now.)...
• Commented on From the hemline index to the vampire/zombie ratio: SF/F by the numbers
  After talking with the Family Statistician... If you have enough data (this is why trials with small numbers of subjects can be so toxic) you can split it into multiple subsets at random. And if the patterns are real they...
• Commented on From the hemline index to the vampire/zombie ratio: SF/F by the numbers
  All that still ties in with the starting point of all this. And all gets into arguments about the significance of correlation. We're the species that sees patterns and tries to use them to explain things, and maybe some of...
• Commented on What's The Best Medium For A Storyteller In 2015 And Beyond?
  A small caution here: being a "creative" isn't cost-free. 3000 per month from Patreon is good. If you assume a 40-hour working week, it's a very good hourly rate, but you likely have to work far more hours. 1000 per...
• Commented on What's The Best Medium For A Storyteller In 2015 And Beyond?
  El Mariachi is one of the wild outliers. A decade later, with Once Upon A time In Mexico, they were using digital cameras, no film, and realised they could keep the camera running. (It's described in the DVD extras.) And...
• Commented on What's The Best Medium For A Storyteller In 2015 And Beyond?
  I am maybe the wrong age to comment on The Young Ones or Animal House, they never really grabbed me in their day, but how far is a web-comic like Questionable Content from the tropes of The Young Ones, and...
• Commented on Shieldwall: Barbarians! Writing and self-publishing an old school boy's young officer story set in Attila's invasion
  Guys, Tom Lehrer sang all that needs to be sung....
• Commented on Shieldwall: Barbarians! Writing and self-publishing an old school boy's young officer story set in Attila's invasion
  You missed something here. "Then let's put the tanks in warehouses over there, and we just fly the crews over in commercial airliners when we notice we need to. That's a lot cheaper. We'll tell the Russians we're doing that,...
• Commented on Shieldwall: Barbarians! Writing and self-publishing an old school boy's young officer story set in Attila's invasion
  The German Army was pretty bad in WW1 too. They were shooting civilian hostages and burnings town in Belgium. The evidence in plain to see in cemeteries. See chapter 17 of The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchmann. There's more...
• Commented on They Took Our Myths
  That is pretty much the standard argument on copyright life, with the mythic element added. Is Melancholy Elephants a Myth? Maybe it is. But I think I see a weak point. What has happened to the "realistic" movie? One basic...
• Commented on A product review, and some musing
  That sounds plausible, but I am a but sceptical about the original thesis. How old is the design of the aircraft in use today? (The Airbus A380 took around twenty years from a solid start to first delivery, nearly thirty...
• Commented on Shieldwall: Barbarians! Writing and self-publishing an old school boy's young officer story set in Attila's invasion
  I used to spend time (this was before home computers were good enough) playing the board games produced by companies such as Avalon Hill and SPI. Some were historical, some more speculative. There were games about a Soviet attack through...
• Commented on CMAP: "Why can't I find audio editions of your books in the UK?"
  Well what do you expect from this bunch? They can't write anything (with maybe one or two exceptions) that can end up being borrowed from a public library. It may be the same business of telling lies for money, but...
• Commented on A product review, and some musing
  The first computer I ever owned had a Z80 chip and 16 kB of RAM. Flight Simulator would run on it. You could run an assembler, no trouble. Making a chip without enough power to be a risk is maybe...
• Commented on A product review, and some musing
  That last paragraph is where things start looking crazy, rather than over-careful. If the charger can deliver malware by variations in the power-supply voltage it needs receiver hardware in the target. And that kills off all pretence at security for...
• Commented on A product review, and some musing
  It wouldn't be that hard to build a USB charger that used old-fashioned non-digital tech. The 5V requirement goes back to the era of TTL 74xx-series chips. You'd have a rather big and heavy transformer and smoothing capacitor, something like...
• Commented on CMAP: "Why can't I find audio editions of your books in the UK?"
  The last piece by Stallman that I saw seemed more than a bit crazy. I could see the chain of logic, but it quickly got into territory that makes him seem imperfectly socialised. It's not quite the same, but he...
• Commented on Shieldwall: Barbarians! Writing and self-publishing an old school boy's young officer story set in Attila's invasion
  Hmm... Somewhere in it's history I think this was an interesting comment thread. Now it's more the tailings from a gold mine, with odd nuggets of unlooked for chemistry lurking in the dross....
• Commented on CMAP: "Why can't I find audio editions of your books in the UK?"
  So Audible is Amazon, and is in some ways a bad thing for UK sales. Do the people who extol self-publishing as the answer to an author's problems happen to know which company handles most self-published books? (I think that...
• Commented on Shieldwall: Barbarians! Writing and self-publishing an old school boy's young officer story set in Attila's invasion
  You might hate me for this. There are all sorts of barely-known bits of history, if you're not into that particular narrow field. Some get a passing mention in TV documentaries, and are mostly forgotten. That's how I first heard...
• Commented on Interlude: Franchise novels, my writing process and why I self published my writing manual
  You don't have to spend money to see the core of Rachel Aaron's book on writing. It is one of those books from a real full-time writer, and the full ebook is cheap enough to be worth a look. It's...
• Commented on In defence of Traditional (Eurocentric Quasi-Medieval) Fantasy: #1 I'll read what I like
  I once got hit with an INT 3 fighter character (and it wouldn't astonish me if there was a fix in by some of the Oxford types involved.) Luckily, I had heard a few episode of The Goon Show. Seagoon:...
• Commented on Interlude: Swords! Or how I met Charlie, and became an author too
  There is an old story I have heard from people who could name the person involved: a viking reenactor returning home after a weekend of fun. The movie "An American Werewolf in London" has a werewolf attack in a tunnel...
• Commented on In defence of Traditional (Eurocentric Quasi-Medieval) Fantasy: #1 I'll read what I like
  Sure, their range has widened from the bog-standard burger, and I am old enough to know what Dirk means. A Big Mac is more consistent than fish and chips. Maybe neither gets the same sort of attention from foodies as...
• Commented on Interlude: Swords! Or how I met Charlie, and became an author too
  A stout walking stick has its merits. Sherlock Holmes was a practised exponent of singlestick, boxing and swordsmanship. Modesty Blaise and Willie Garvin have been known to use quarterstaves, successfully of course. There was a TV series, long ago, about...
• Commented on In defence of Traditional (Eurocentric Quasi-Medieval) Fantasy: #1 I'll read what I like
  The one thing I can be sure of over a MacD is that it will be consistent, wherever I am. That can matter for me. There is better to be had out there, but if I am in a strange...
• Commented on Interlude: Swords! Or how I met Charlie, and became an author too
  Put them against each other in a fight, and I wouldn't like to guess who might survive. But I think I know who made the history, and who wrote it....
• Commented on In defence of Traditional (Eurocentric Quasi-Medieval) Fantasy: #1 I'll read what I like
  I have had some of my writing published on an edited fan-fic site, so I like to think I've done something right. It's a furry world, with an alternate history, mostly between the two world wars. I have tried to...