Graham

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• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  With four children capable of going toe-to-toe with adults, I'd be wondering about adding Timmy the dog. I've a feeling OGH's sense of humour might turn Timmy into an erotic furry cosplayer, but Enid Blyton fans should be able deal...
• Commented on WTF
  What shocked me recently wasn't on the internet, but experienced on Tuesday evening at Addenbrookes Hospital in Cambridge. For those that don't live round here, this is the flagship hospital for the East of England, a major teaching hospital, occupies...
• Commented on WTF
  Oh yeah, bodysnatching was big business back then, and medicine has generally always been interested in "unusual" bodies. The difference in Runyon's story was the victim still being a "futures commodity", as someone wonderfully put it above....
• Commented on WTF
  The original version of the story comes from Damon Runyon. The lead character was particularly tall (with a strange-shaped head, if I remember rightly), but not very smart and completely skint. A rich doctor gave him a stack of money...
• Commented on The ends of education
  Sorry Charlie, but your assumptions and reasoning seem to not only be starting from a false strawman argument, but they're not even internally consistent. The strawman is the idea that 30 years wasn't enough for anything to change. Unless you're...
• Commented on Crimes against Transhumanity
  Cashiers don't exist in any of the major fast-food chains. You order from the touch-screen menu, or you don't order at all. Supermarkets (UK anyway; couldn't say elsewhere) are increasingly going self-scan. Granted that's still a human holding the barcode...
• Commented on Crimes against Transhumanity
  You're kind of missing the point with that though. If you've designed/trained your single-purpose A-non-I, then "preferentially killing" isn't by choice of the A-non-I, it's by design or training of the engineers who set it running. Which in turn is...
• Commented on Crimes against Transhumanity
  One issue with uploading is the question of why we'd want to do it. A moderately dystopian version is something like The Tunnel under the World where the victims/subjects are used to test the effectiveness of advertising. It doesn't take...
• Commented on Books I will not write: BIGGLES!!
  Since we're doing the "how old are we?!" thing... My girlfriend is 27 (yeah, age gap!) and doing English Lit A-level. She's reading a TS Eliot poem that mentioned a yellow mist. She was interpreting that as a metaphor, and...
• Commented on Books I will not write: BIGGLES!!
  Honestly I think it's more acceptance that it's a fight he can't win. However much we know that Brexit is a fool's errand, there are enough people in the country who genuinely do want it. I have a friend who...
• Commented on Books I will not write: BIGGLES!!
  You don't even need to go for a jungle - any native wildlife a reasonable distance away is likely to be new to you. I was puzzled by seeing a blackbird with a russet front, the first time I went...
• Commented on Books I will not write: BIGGLES!!
  My son had a bit of a thing for the Biggles books a year or so ago, so I got to revisit my childhood slightly. So it's a bit more fresh in my mind. There's some very interestingly 1930s-50s stuff...
• Commented on Abolish the monarchy!
  since all the other available alternatives (viz, Communism and Fascism) had so manifestly failed. Insert bitter laugh here, having watched countries led by GW Bush, Berlusconi, Putin, Orban, Trump, Johnson, and so on. Fascism always wins for the leader and...
• Commented on Roe v Wade v Sanity
  Re the whole rights thing, a friend shared a fascinating meme on this on FB yesterday. Sure, that's a rare, rare event, but bear with me. The argument goes that whether a foetus is a child or not is irrelevant....
• Commented on Roe v Wade v Sanity
  Re "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s", I don't think there's any doubt on the context there. The point was trying to trap Jesus into saying "don't pay your taxes", at which point they could call in the...
• Commented on Roe v Wade v Sanity
  unless the objective is to criminalize being female. (Which is I believe the intent.) Honestly, I think it's more amoral than that. I don't actually think they care about the details of who you are. When you look behind...
• Commented on Roe v Wade v Sanity
  That's where the whole fundamentalist thing goes wrong, of course. If you want to nail the biggest abortionist, God's choice to stop most fertilised eggs developing into a baby 9 months later is clearly the biggie. (I know several people...
• Commented on Roe v Wade v Sanity
  Not really. The timing for the leak is driven by the timing of the judgement, which in turn is driven by the Supreme Court session ending in June. Meantime the timing of Putin's war is driven by the seasons (because...
• Commented on Roe v Wade v Sanity
  But that's kind of the point. The current rhetoric from prominent US Christians is that the "rights" of the "child" are absolute and trump any risk to the mother. Never mind that if the mother dies (and don't discount the...
• Commented on Roe v Wade v Sanity
  ...believing that I have no right to tell a woman whether she should bear a child or not... And that's the precise nature of the problem. All US-specific versions of Christianity which are the source of the problem state as...
• Commented on Yokai Land Q&A
  Not pastiche - that's got implications these days of not being serious. "In the style of"....
• Commented on Yokai Land Q&A
  One thing I never got about the Fred thing though was his disbelief that there were such things as zombies. We're told from the outset that everyone hired by the Laundry is there because they've stumbled into something they should...
• Commented on Yokai Land Q&A
  As a (now-ex) motorhome owner, I've installed one of those dual cameras. The important camera is a fisheye looking downwards to let you reverse accurately. The second camera has an undistorted lens to give you an electronic "rear-view mirror", which...
• Commented on Yokai Land Q&A
  The other problem with a Bob prequel ("How I was stopped from relandscaping Wolverhampton") is that it's not near-future or twisted-present - it'll be around 1995, and that puts it squarely into the category of historical fiction. The 80s revival...
• Commented on Coming soon: Escape from Yokai Land!
  Eek! Considering that's not dissimilar to the cost of the hardcopy of QoN, it's a bit steep for an e-book. As much as I dislike delaying gratification, I may have to wait for that to reach a more sensible level....
• Commented on Quantum of Nightmares: spoiler time!
  For "why pain", without using terms which will trip out anyone's workplace filters, I'm part of a subculture who do consensual hitty things and other related recreational activities. We can state as fact that there are people out there who...
• Commented on Coming soon: Escape from Yokai Land!
  Is this going to be available on Kindle in the UK?...
• Commented on Quantum of Nightmares: spoiler time!
  I don't think it's anything like the cost you think it is. Your personnel are free in this context, for starters. You've already got them, and they cost the same to feed and house regardless of where they are. One...
• Commented on Quantum of Nightmares: spoiler time!
  The thing is, every escalation does have to be considered potentially the invasion. Russia can mass troops on the border as many times as they like, and their neighbours have to take each one as seriously as the first time....
• Commented on Quantum of Nightmares: spoiler time!
  Can we have an extension of Rule 34? Hypothesis: There is mashup fanfic of it. No exceptions....