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• Commented on Gods and genre
  "Entertainment—just like religion—reflects culture rather than leading it." I'd rather say that all entertainment is culture, and always pushes it in some direction (be it strengthening common values, promoting the values one should strive for, challenging values and more, or...
• Commented on Competition Time!
  Paperclips are not suitable objects to use for piercings per division policy, and placing some of the piercings where very few else can see them is not a suitable remedy....
• Commented on Crass commercial interlude
  Two words: Angleton. (Also, I don't think Pete Seeger was a pacifist. He was however against starting wars, or joining them.)...
• Commented on Crass commercial interlude
  No mug with the text "This mug surrounds eldritch abominations and forces them to surrender"?...
• Commented on Schroedinger's Kingdom: the Scottish Political Singularity Explained
  Norway had several things going for it to help it avoid becoming another oil state dictatorship. First, when the oil was discovered Norway was a mature democracy - their constitution of 1814 was extremely democratic for its time (in part...
• Commented on A message from our sponsors
  A cake? (That's what I first thought it was on the picture.)...
• Commented on Heartbleed note
  Never. Computer systems are among the most complex things built by man, and security systems are among the most complex things among computer systems. Conceptually, things may be simple, but there is lots of complex math, oodles of things to...
• Commented on The latest Hugo awards storm
  Yes, it's true that he has hosted major award shows, and that's a major plus for Ross, no question about it. However, comics fandom (or the British comedy community, for lack of a better word) is not (literary) sf fandom....
• Commented on The latest Hugo awards storm
  "But a single fat joke at a convention? Is that really bullying?" Apart from what our host said, there is another factor to consider. A series of fat jokes can certainly be considered bullying. What if those jokes are spread...
• Commented on Dear Google, am I pregnant?
  There used to be an old joke about how to become a successful epideminologist in the US: you befriend someone in Scandinavia. That said, there have been quite bad problems here too on how to handle sensitive data, and something...
• Commented on The latest Hugo awards storm
  What silly-swordsman said. Fandom is no different than any other community. If you are to be a "full" member, people there need to know you and you need to know people inside. Nothing magical about it, and people do it...
• Commented on The latest Hugo awards storm
  Correct, you cannot make all the people feel safe all the time. Thing is, this storm was not only largely avoidable, it is also deeply tied to the here and now. If Ross had been proposed and acepted as MC...
• Commented on The latest Hugo awards storm
  Or, which is my preferred route, invite guest speakers who are known to not make jokes in bad taste or are exclusionary. I have some small stage and speaking experience, and if you are to MC a huge show it...
• Commented on The latest Hugo awards storm
  No. We should instead strive to laugh with each other. Sf fandom has a long history of "jokes" being used to belittle and marginalise certain groups. Women is one of those groups. Fandom is not alone in this, far from...
• Commented on The latest Hugo awards storm
  "Yes, but you have to admit that nobody important got consulted ahead of time so they didn't even know what a bad idea it was." On the contrary, the Chairs of Loncon were told by Farah Mendlesohn (the committee member...
• Commented on Miscellanea
  Michael Swanwick already went there to some degree with his elves in The Iron Dragon's Daughter and The Dragons of Babel, though they used fighter-dragons, not tanks. Just make sure you get the proper balance between sodomy and dinosaurs. The...
• Commented on Over-Extended Metaphor for the day
  Comparing Redmond with Islam doesn't really work here, since Islam very much belongs in the Abrahamic tradition. One could probably make a stronger case that NextSTEP and its descendants are Islam, an offshot of the Orthodox faith but now very...
• Commented on The cult of justice
  Oh, and another thing that can provide food for thought: the currently ongoing merry-go-round around Sture Bergwall (formerly Thomas Quick) here in Sweden. The latest development is from a book published this autumn which partially is a biography over the...
• Commented on The cult of justice
  Interesting parallell, but remember that it not only says things about the cult of justice, but also of the legal framework of religions. Several years ago I had an epiphany about the religious rite of confession, that the very act...
• Commented on Time tourism
  Exactly. Though the fits and starts go over in place as well as time. As I understand it, women were granted quite a bit more freedom in America compared to Europe during the 19th century, especially the closer to the...
• Commented on Time tourism
  I think you partly fall for the fallacy of thinking the past is increasingly sexist (or crapsack) the further back you go. One can make a case for that Western Europe was at its lowest for agency and opportunities for...
• Commented on Cheap Reads!
  It's quite possible to remove the FairPlay DRM that the iTunes store uses, even for books. Then you get a standard ePub file....
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Saturn's Children
  The issue with freeing slaves, or longevity research, or similar, all fall flat to me. The goal wasn't to make a Saturn's Children into a perfect utopian take on a post-human world, all it needs is a plausible take. Which...
• Commented on A Bad Dream
  There are at least two ways to look at this development, and at least one of them is quite old, going back to the leninist theories back in the 1910s. Basically, the classic working class managed to create a position...
• Commented on More on books
  The Sharing Knife series by Lois Bujold. While they have plenty of flaws, they are to me a hugely ambitious literary experiment. That it fails in a several of those is less important to me than that it really tried...
• Commented on Depraved nurses! - Langor! - Suicide! - Damn you, James Nicoll!
  Granted, managerial control is part of it, but I believe there are more factors that holds off telecommuting. One is the simple human need for social contact, and the workplace is one of the major ones for many people (a...