Keithmasterson

Keithmasterson

  • Commented on A Wonky Experience
    "comparisons between the US Civil War and the 1866 Austro-Prussian War are pertinent." Seems like comparisons between Lincoln and Napoleon are also pretty apt, since each made their environments safe for capitalist development by removing obstructive feudal aristocrats from power....
  • Commented on A Wonky Experience
    https://youtu.be/8RTIJroRhh4?t=640 I promise if you watch till the end of the "Crab Jesus" shtick you'll thank me an unintentional laff riot The Crab Jesus bit was, okay, funny. I can't help feel slightly conflicted about it though; on the plus...
  • Commented on A Wonky Experience
    "If (well, when) Putin intervenes again in the US it might be to arrange some non-obvious poison in Don's Big Macs." Easter is end of this month, still time for a gift 16 ounce foil wrapped Novichokolate bunny...
  • Commented on A Wonky Experience
    Got the name wrong, Mick, not Nick....
  • Commented on A Wonky Experience
    [1] Insofar as every free man of Rome served in the army back then, and you didn't get to be a general much less a consul unless you were popular with your legion, Caesar was most certainly a populist leader....
  • Commented on Same bullshit, new tin
    Pigeon wrote: (Again this is less of a concern with alcohol, because it tends to make you do things the state already doesn't want you to do, so there's less need to invent new instances.) My reaction is partial disagreement...
  • Commented on A message from our sponsors: New Book coming!
    Sounds like big overlap with a terrible 1982 film "Rona Jaffe's Mazes and Monsters" starring 26 year old Tom Hanks, had similar steam tunnel scenes. Only reason I remember it was a single line voiced right at the end by...
  • Commented on Same bullshit, new tin
    "By the way, what’s the good reason to.settle Mars? I mean, I’ve got a Torment Nexus class reason, but what’s an optimistic one?" In the sense of any species just being a delivery vehicle for dna, then it's life doing...
  • Commented on The coming storm
    Damian writes: " All of which was beyond the Japanese translator, who apparently rendered it literally, to considerable confusion." Way back in the seventies I took a history course from an instructor named Hwang who'd been in the Korean army...
  • Commented on Crib Sheet: Season of Skulls
    Earlier thread gone quiet, therefore: PLEASE DON'T INVENT THE TORMENT NEXUS As Nicol Williamson so ponderously intoned in the movie Excalibur, "Too late, too late." https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/03/human-existence-will-look-more-miraculous-the-longer-we-survive/554513/ But if this observer selection bias applies to bizarre disasters like vacuum decay it...
  • Commented on Made of lies (and more lies)
    JohnS@341 wrote: "It's NOT legal, but whenever has that stopped a corporation from doing something. OTOH, I don't think Starbucks would have the might to stop a developer from leasing to some semi-competitor ... especially in a shopping center food...
  • Commented on Made of lies (and more lies)
    "the new Science papers, also found that most of the cell types were located in evolutionarily ancient parts of the brain." Sounds similar to the way greater genetic diversity within human populations reveals which groups have been around the longest....
  • Commented on Made of lies (and more lies)
    Rocketpjs@294 writes: "I use the in-room 'coffee' maker as a way to approach wakefulness, then go out and get real coffee when I can. " That's harder than it used to be. Arby's quit selling coffee entirely, Burger King only...
  • Commented on We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
    @540 writes "on that train all graphite and glitter, Undersea by rail" I recognize that lyric from the Steely Dan tune I.G.Y. Donald Fagen explained it to Paul Shafer in a youtube interview as being strictly ironic, looking back to...
  • Commented on We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
    @150 writes: "I caught a brief video clip when an American was saying with apparent sincerity and certainty that "Europeans envy Americans' Freedom". Speaking from the UK, I don't think we do. We are not aware of what this unique...
  • Commented on A fistful of tropes
    Our Gracious Host wants the Do My Laundry topic focussed on his specified area of interest, so I will try to sneak this unrelated comment in here before the thread goes dormant: proposed names for a tavern... bad answers only......
  • Commented on Do my Laundry
    proposed names for a tavern... bad answers only... I'll start [[ DELETED BECAUSE OFF-TOPIC -- mod. ]]...
  • Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
    Elaine at 622 said " The current best-solution-so-far is not to rely on charity for such things but to mandate their provision by law from the state." Coming up with a workable scheme to replace much of the wages and...
  • Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
    Some random thoughts re: magical fantasy versus scientific realism discussed earlier in this thread. A recent Nova program on PBS (or maybe it was Nature) explored how the human brain assembles a composite ersatz "reality" from various sensory inputs. Most...
  • Commented on Shrinking the world
    Riders through Central Asian steppes needed ingenious survival strategies, and the Mongols pretty much figured it out. Meat was kept fresh by storing it between the saddle and the horse's back, since the combination of horse sweat, heat and constant...
  • Commented on Read an Excerpt from Season of Skulls
    Marketing analysis for new products designates consumers as early adopters, on trend, or late adopters. The fact I only started reading or even being aware of Discworld, Girl Genius, Neil Gaiman's Sandman and Rivers of London in the last few...
  • Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
    The national debt being 32 trillion means the government borrowed that much through sale of debt instruments, mostly bonds. If the owners of those bonds seriously think there'll be a default due to Republican interference with the debt ceiling, they'd...
  • Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
    "The Fifth Elephant" plot involved a maguffin called the Scone of Stone, now at last I understand the reference. Buh-haw!...
  • Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
    Could be a rare coincidence, or just the end of learned obliviousness on my part. Either way it seems unusual: the same disastrous weather system that brought tornados to the southern U.S. a couple weeks ago briefly caused intense fog...
  • Commented on Place your bets
    Pigeon@1366 suggests "you get a partial polymerisation that very slowly turns the whole mass of fuel to jelly" Sounds like a threat risk assessment on the order of Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle" in which a Marines commander sick of slogging troops...
  • Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
    What I've read here about ChatGPt suggests productive uses for it in theological schools, generating scholarly works based on training such machines with centuries worth of PhD thesis arguments from divinity colleges like Harvard, which was founded as a diploma...
  • Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
    JohnS @450 asks how u.s. national debt got to 32 trillion. That's how much Fed. Gov't operating expense exceeded tax collection over the decades, but they could always in principle have hiked tax on the uber-wealthy and just paid for...
  • Commented on Make Up a Guy
    "Reports of flocks covering the sky for days sounds unnatural, like a Biblical plague of pigeons." I dunno, sounds bloody great to me. Indirectly it was sort of like each Native American killed by smallpox turned into ten thousand pigeons...
  • Commented on Make Up a Guy
    So.....Thunder the Wondercar?...
  • Commented on Make Up a Guy
    If slice-'o-life depictions of Asian farmers entertains you, don't overlook Nobel literature prizewinner Mo Yan's "Life and Death are Wearing Me Out", a farcical fable of a 1950s era Chinese landlord who is multiply reincarnated as various farm animals. I...
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