Megpie71

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• Commented on What happens now?
  Updates: 1) Trump has lost his tweeting privileges permanently. He isn't taking this well. Up to about five accounts banned so far in the game of whack-a-mole. 2) The US military is enjoined to follow "any lawful order" of the...
• Commented on Three pieces of news about the Laundry Files (UPDATED!)
  Aaron B @ 172 - I think it might be more along the lines of "how many times do we have to say 'I don't believe in fairies' to make sure we got all of them?"...
• Commented on Deaths and Deadlines
  To be frank, Charlie, it sounds like you've had a lot of stuff fall on you over the past couple of years, with more anticipated to come up in the future. With that in mind, I do hope you're taking...
• Commented on Crawling from the wreckage
  A few things which went right (in the sense of "not wrong")[A] in Australia over the past year: 1) We still have a mostly-working social security system, rather than having it dismantled. Which, given our current government, and their determination...
• Commented on Brexit! Means! Brexit!
  paws4thot @ 313: You're welcome. JBS @ 365: "You can come get him and take him back to Australia any time you want." You're assuming we want him. That's pretty courageous of you. David L @ 380: Having not seen...
• Commented on Brexit! Means! Brexit!
  Greg @ 250: The Australian right wing in politics can't find its arse with both hands, a map, GPS tracking and a pantomime crowd yelling "look behind you". They're busy bolloxing up ruining a country with a population of 27...
• Commented on Brexit! Means! Brexit!
  Elladan @92: They're bringing you an entire population who can not only stay awake through a cricket Test match, they can also remain enthused for the whole four-day duration. What more do you want? JBS@102 - I'm an Australian. They'd...
• Commented on Brexit! Means! Brexit!
  Charge a royalty for the use of the English language. It's clearly the most obvious British Intellectual Property out there, so clearly people from other countries should be paying a fee to use it, right? Maybe a bit of...
• Commented on Sitrep
  I'd like the superpower of being able to actually be neurotypical for a period of about an hour per day without it costing me a day's worth of stress, frustration and exhaustion. (Rather than being able to vaguely simulate it,...
• Commented on Sitrep
  I get the feeling Magical Girl Obsidian Heartbleed would probably fit in Just Fine in the standard underground anime circles. I mean, we're talking about the culture which brought us Legend of the Overfiend (parts 1 to I forget how...
• Commented on Happy 21st Century!
  Greg Tingey @ 55: Well, a lot of the damage was done between 1996 and 2006 (thank you so much John Howard and Peter Costello); some of the precursor conditions were set up between 1983 and 1996 (the Hawke-Keating years),...
• Commented on Happy 21st Century!
  As I was going to say the other day, we're starting to see this in Australia. We have the camps - safely outside the country, on Manus and Nauru (and in Nauru, the government there has a blanket ban on...
• Commented on Cthulhu Counterfactual
  About the only one of the originals I have any definite answer for is III - to which my answer is definitely "hell no!". Mostly because as far as I'm concerned, as a chronic depressive, the idea of eternal life...
• Commented on Test Case
  I'm not so much interested in the legal aspects of things as fascinated by the way the question you set up is very much a deliberate example of the way the nation-state is being gradually deconstructed at the end of...
• Commented on Why I barely read SF these days
  Joe Crow @44: The problem is, Tolkien wasn't a brilliant world-builder. He pretty much pioneered the multi-volume fantasy epic with the map in the front showing where everything was and so on, but he didn't build a flawless world. There...
• Commented on The crazy years
  Australia's ABC has suffered a similar gradual grinding away at their actual "news" capabilities since approximately the election of John Howard as Prime Minister (Mr Howard once got a rather snippy answer from Kerry O'Brien on the subject of "bias"...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  As other people have pointed out, mind uploading is based on the Cartesian notion of the mind/body (originally body/soul) duality. Unfortunately, this duality has been largely flattened out by medical science, which chased down more and more and more things...
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  SFReader @ 196: To clarify something you clearly seem to have made a category error about: A sociopath is a person with antisocial personality disorder. They are personality disordered. Personality disorders are not the same thing as autism spectrum disorders....
• Commented on Dude, you broke the future!
  Okay, this bears absolutely no actually connection to the main threads, mostly because a fair old chunk of it is stuff I wrote about a week or so back, after listening to Charlie's speech online. So, here goes: One thing...
• Commented on Silence is ending (soon)
  Largely off topic at this point, but for those who are interested, I picked up the game we were playing further up-thread (the "children's book" lines) and ran with it. The result is now up on AO3 as: A Laundry-verse...
• Commented on Silence is ending (soon)
  O is for "oh no!" - we say it quite often P is for PHANGS; they've come out of the coffin...
• Commented on Excuses
  I think petrol-driven cars will probably be around for a while, particularly down the "low income" end of the price range. For example: my partner and I are currently driving a car which was built in 1999. When it dies,...
• Commented on Trapped in the wrong trouser-leg of time
  Mirror Field @ 203: You are Mavolio Bent, and I claim my 5 Ankh-Morpork dollars. I'll take it in golems, thanks....
• Commented on Trapped in the wrong trouser-leg of time
  Greg Tingey @ 187: The "dual citizenship" stuff is a hangover from the mindset which gave us the White Australia Policy until about 1973. Our founding fathers were very worried about the idea of someone emigrating from say China, or...
• Commented on Trapped in the wrong trouser-leg of time
  Well, alternative timeline view for Australia - one seat changed hands in the lower house in the 2016 election, going to the ALP rather than the Liberals. The ALP formed a government, and we had a hung parliament (again). On...
• Commented on Unwanted Blogging Vacation
  Sympathies and condolences, and may their passing be as free from suffering as possible under the circumstances. I hope you get the chance to say farewell....
• Commented on Report on Seat 14C
  I'm sorry, I just have enough trouble trying to imagine myself as a passenger on a flight from Tokyo to San Francisco in the first place. The USA is not a place I want to visit at present, and even...
• Commented on 2117 revisited
  Can we all stop for a moment, and please remember we are still (modulo CRISPR, selective breeding programs, mass ennui-sparked die-offs and similar other such unlikelihoods) dealing largely with the standard Mk 1.0 Plains Ape anatomy, physiology and psychology we...
• Commented on Random excuses
  I was one of those who walked away from LJ years ago (I think the last time I seriously updated my LJ was back in 2007 or thereabouts), due to the way that SixApart were, at the time, attempting to...
• Commented on Placeholder? Placeholder!
  Heteromeles @ 103: Let's not forget the news from down under, where half the country is on fire (eastern half, this year) while the other half is getting flooded out (western and northern halves this time around). We've apparently had...