Mikko Parviainen (he/him)

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• Commented on Made of lies (and more lies)
  'Bullshit generator'. Bullshit as the point is to produce text which looks fine at first glance but the text producer has no capability to judge the validity of the produced text and cannot care about it either. So, in my...
• Commented on We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
  [Hot daughters of leaders] I am not really keen on other people pointing them out. Yeah, I also think that they are really not part of any discussion, much less here. Sentences I thought I'd never write: 'I'd prefer it...
• Commented on We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
  How weird. It's as if they wanted people wiring houses to be qualified to do that. Next you know they'll want the gas people to qualified too! I have an EE MSc (an engineering degree really), and while my major...
• Commented on We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
  So you're saying that the engineers have done their part, what's left is for the humanitarians to solve their part? How's that going? I'd maybe say that scientists have done their part, now politicians should solve their part. Humanists could...
• Commented on We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
  ESP wasn't at all thought of as a fascist theme, people who persecuted telepaths and such were analogous to antisemites. This seems a bit strange to me - being of a certain culture sounds to me a tad different from...
• Commented on We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
  Maybe somebody should found the Sirius Cybernetic Corporation. Or not, come to think of it. I also have mentioned elsewhere that I recently read Banks' 'Surface Detail' and the antagonist there is basically scifi Musk, up to escaping via a...
• Commented on I should blog more, but ...
  I am deploring the effective loss of the gateway to learning and understanding that results from building crystal sets and the like not being something youngsters do. Me, too. I think I have enough stuff to build a crystal set...
• Commented on I should blog more, but ...
  Why is everyone here utterly ignoring the people who have, right now, lived in space over 1 year? Like the Soviets on Mir who came down as Russisns. Or the American astronaut who'd been on the Station, and there were...
• Commented on I should blog more, but ...
  A paper target on a shooting range is just not the same as a combat situation with your adrenaline pumping and the bad guys not clearly marked with a big sign on their chest and back. I did my conscription...
• Commented on I should blog more, but ...
  CDN I found, but smol is what? 'Smol' is a collquialism for 'small'....
• Commented on I should blog more, but ...
  But, yes, Brother printers seems to JUST WORK. All my experience is with lasers, color and B&W. HP used to be that way but that was over a decade ago. Yeah, our HP network laser printer is over 15 years...
• Commented on I should blog more, but ...
  Better than that, it's a loan word, meaning it's been borrowed. I kid you not. Yeah, I think that's why I often confuse the words. Though passing things from one person to another for various reasons seems to often be...
• Commented on I should blog more, but ...
  loaned from English. I think the correct expression here is borrowed from English. Again, not a native, and this loan/lend/borrow thing is something I never seem to learn properly......
• Commented on I should blog more, but ...
  So, while you may drive on your parkways, we misunderstood your idea and put trains on them instead. This reminded me of something we have here in Finland, loaned from English. We have obviously personal cars, and they need to...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  I think you're underestimating the duration of european houses. Depends on the house, obviously. I live in a 60-year old concrete building, which seems to be doing fine, but window frames are wood and not particularily well cared for, so...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  In the face of crisis, double down on bad behavior. Well, I think at least some of it is 'let's do this thing while we still can', which is somewhat understandable but not acceptable. Goes well with the tourism and...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  You can't just leave industrial softwood plantations, they have to be harvested at a certain point This reminds me of the funny attitude some people have here in Finland, mainly that our forests need maintenance, otherwise they wouldn't survive. Maintenance...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  I always thought Banks' Culture had hints of darkness in the corners that could be teased out by a good writer. Much as I'd love to see a Culture ship in orbit, I'd also love to see what a good...
• Commented on Announcement: 2nd edition Laundry Files RPG is coming
  I will take another look (it is decades since I last did). I cannot stand the Rogue/Nethack interface, but I hadn't realised that Zork had freed itself from Infocom (yes, it's that long ago) and Dwarf Fortress is new to...
• Commented on Announcement: 2nd edition Laundry Files RPG is coming
  Yeah, the West End Game has a lot of stuff which was originally concept art for the movies and then they wrote them up for the RPG. Some of the art even is the movie concept art. Much of the...
• Commented on Announcement: 2nd edition Laundry Files RPG is coming
  Ah, sorry, my mistake! I read it wrong. I think I’ve grown too sensitive on the internets. It seems to me there are a lot of D&D, especially 5e players, who take it as a personal affront if somebody dares...
• Commented on Announcement: 2nd edition Laundry Files RPG is coming
  Hey, what's wrong with character levels? Objectively, probably nothing. I just feel that they are a good fit for certain kinds of roleplaying games and not so good for others. It depends on what you want to do. There are...
• Commented on Announcement: 2nd edition Laundry Files RPG is coming
  I have most of the stuff for the Laundry Files 1e, though I've run it only for one short campaign. It worked okay'ish but the CoC rules are a bit too fiddly for me and there were some unclear things....
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  I'll try to assume that you asked that in good faith, for now. But yes, book which fails the Bechdel Test can be a good book, as in a book (or another type of story) which passes it can be...
• Commented on Finding true love in the cosmos
  If the queen dies, the workers will change the diet of some of the larvae so they develop as queens. They do a batch of them, but they only keep one in the end. Soo... at what stage of the...
• Commented on Finding true love in the cosmos
  Well, to my understanding seahorses (scroll down for reproductive behaviour) do this: the female uses an ovipositor to insert the eggs into the male's egg sack where they are later fertilized. So... in vertebrates quite close to us, relatively. At...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  Computers... I have had a self-built desktop since maybe 1997, so I'm firmly in the niche 'build your own, not a laptop' crowd. I like that I can get mostly what I want instead of getting a laptop. A big...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  If you look around, we're trying to use climate change to make the entire world look like the Australian Outback No, no, no, the point is to make Number Go Up! Anything else is not important and besides is helped...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  Finland has saved money and solved their homeless problem by simply building and giving homes to homeless people. Well, not completely, there are more than 3000 homeless people and maybe 500 who live completely with not roof. Low numbers, but...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  I don't feel particularly nostalgic about those days. I grew up in the 8 bit and 16 bit era. The excitement of doing something new is something I miss, and writing physics code for my Atari ST while doing my...