justjohn

justjohn

  • Commented on World building 301: some projections
    Speaking of "afraid of the sky," I theorize that our aversion to looking at the Sun may be at the root of some people's religious thinking. In the wild, the problem with looking at the Sun is that your eyes...
  • Commented on Rudy #2. The Nu Yu Lifebox.
    If the object of the exercise is to try to emulate the experience of conversing with a person now gone, how does one properly present an individual's ignorance and cussedness? Instances of cussedness: Outside of examples like this, I never...
  • Commented on Seasonal flame bait
    "Flame bait"? Mr. Stross, the only thing in your post that I have the slightest disagreement with is that description. Seriously, excellent summary....
  • Commented on World building 101
    Pratchett did a nice job of showing us that sort of thing in his recent Unseen Academicals. You think the University's candles dribble themselves?...
  • Commented on World building 101
    My worldbuilding experience is all for gaming. So you might count it as game-board building. For tabletop RPGing, what I concentrated on were things like making the names internally consistent and pronouncable by the players, and providing the world with...
  • Commented on Cooking in zero gee
    That's some bad winter indeed! Where was this?...
  • Commented on Cooking in zero gee
    I just hope some enterprising sort uses this post and comment thread as inspiration for an animation or two. Y'all have Leonard of Quirm's hooked zero gee frying pan beat by miles, or even parsecs....
  • Commented on Evil social networks
    Weirdly enough, your for-pay product feels more interactive. That's not a complaint about the blog, but just me marking out* about how many of your books give me a feeling of melanoia (which I've heard is the converse of paranoia...
  • Commented on Another trick question ...
    Let's see ... How many blowjobs would it take to kill Dick Cheney? Add five for good measure, divide in half, and you have my first wish....
  • Commented on Three wishes
    (answering original post) The revelation that magicians / gods / witches existed, and that I'd only found out about this after living for half a century would be so devastatingly profound that I can't predict my actions afterward. And as...
  • Commented on Twitter
    I use the RSS feed into Google Reader to alert me whenever there's a new post....
  • Commented on Twitter
    Ah, well. I'm still not going to join Twitter. I figure anything truly Strossian in terms of reading enjoyment will still take more than 140 characters. (And I'm currently too pissed off at Diaspora* to plug them at the moment...
  • Commented on Because I am a glutton for punishment ...
    (Wow, this thread's still going!) A couple nights ago, I had a notion of a challenging bit of fiction to write, so I'm passing it on to you. Have you ever been tempted to write a "New York City" novel?...
  • Commented on Because I am a glutton for punishment ...
    ... does whatever an iron can. Creases, pleats ......
  • Commented on Because I am a glutton for punishment ...
    (Apologies for the offtopicality -- my excuse is the constant mention of The Baroque Cycle here leads me to suspect this might amuse all of you.) I just read a review of Stephensen's latest book Reamde at Salon. The reviewer...
  • Commented on Because I am a glutton for punishment ...
    At the semiconductor plant, there's a lot of "just in time" part replacement that makes heavy use of private cars (including mine ... I'm sort of a glorified sneakernet among sites that are six miles apart.) It's similar to Wallmart's...
  • Commented on Because I am a glutton for punishment ...
    You wouldn't be in the market for a full-time, live-in sysadmin, would you? I pine for my old city-based life. I used to have this sweet efficiency in downtown DC ... Ah, well. Enough about my bad choices....
  • Commented on Because I am a glutton for punishment ...
    I bought Rule 34 in hardcover. Tho I'm in severely reduced circumstances from earlier decades when I could go to, say, Yale's bookstore and drop $300 in one trip, I still believe in authors' and artists' Getting Paid. So this...
  • Commented on Because I am a glutton for punishment ...
    ... and what would I use to pay for my food? My job is in and around a semiconductor manufacturing plant, and its supply lines would be gone if cars were gone. Speaking of supply lines, if a disruption happened...
  • Commented on Because I am a glutton for punishment ...
    If I had any idea of how many horses per person there were in 1900, I might be tempted to suggest that a hitherto-unanticipated development of the 20th Century was the rise of economies based on mobile climate-controlled isolation boxes,...
  • Commented on Because I am a glutton for punishment ...
    X' "Someone's Watching" has just shuffled into play, and that reminds me of what I think will be the Next Big Unfortunate Development in the growing surveillance situation. Somewhere, somebody watching a monitor will sue the subject of surveillance for...
  • Commented on Because I am a glutton for punishment ...
    ... and mentions of the Baroque Cycle remind me of something I've heard asked: What if Newton, Leibniz and Descartes had been able to copyright or patent their bits of the calculus, so that their heirs were owed a bit...
  • Commented on Because I am a glutton for punishment ...
    One thing that's been teasing my mind but that I'll never have the perseverance to write myself is a conceptual cross between Riddly Walker and Tristram Shandy, or maybe John Barth's Letters. This probably comes from my continued reading of...
  • Commented on Because I am a glutton for punishment ...
    Re: "Eschaton is closed." Darn!...
  • Commented on Scary Monsters (and Super-Creeps)
    Horror as a genre seldom works for me when reading. My willing suspension of disbelief usually gets shoved aside by sentiments like, "Well, you live in a world where biologists have been deliberately lying about matters of life and death,...
  • Commented on Storm warning
    I thought "Church of England" first, too, even though I listen to Harry Shearer's frequent comments on our Army Corps of Engineers on his radio show....
  • Commented on Storm warning
    I'm in the Hudson Valley in upstate New York (just re-read that bit in your Merchant Princes series about how Angbard got his place near Rochester -- I'm southeast of that.) We've been getting far more hurricane-related rain than we...
  • Commented on 9/11
    Re: If the media really wanted to mark the occasion respectfully, they'd do so by holding a minutes' silence at 8:46am EST this Sunday. Exactly! And they could get all the top network pundits to liveblog the whole thing. As...
  • Commented on The Wrong Trousers
    Cripes, you rich people and your fashions! I wear blue Levis, mostly 'cuz I'm too lazy to go look for a brand to switch to. I wear the same no-name sneakers I did a decade and more ago. Every time...
  • Commented on Zombies
    Charlie, I don't think what you describe in your post count as zombies. They sound more un-alive than undead. I imagine you might be able to write a good story around the subject, and people might read it as a...
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