Howard NYC

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• Commented on Place your bets
  Troutwaxer 2017: Boredom. All I want is boredom. What I really do not want is to be right about efforts to trigger a semi-chaotic quasi-civil war fought by fools too disorganized to win and lacking central authority to formally surrender...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  Charlie Stross 75: I'm trying to avoid stepping on your toes, whilst at the same time seeking out a plotline to expand into a story worthy of reading. My limited experienced with the spook agencies is counterbalanced by misery of...
• Commented on Place your bets
  I'm bettering there's a certain amount of cool rational thought amongst Trump's current set of advisors-sycophants-family. With the other nine-tenths racing around with their hair on fire. The most likely topic each is considering: "What is too well nailed down...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  Charlie Stross 68: Damian 69: I'm spitballing 'n snarking. Not just bullshitting, I'm trying on the notion of being "an American author". Just wondering aloud if I can generate a plot sufficiently (uhm) eldritch within a spicy, snarky context to...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  Heteromeles 64: Only if you come up with a snarkier name than "Gremlin Underground Freedom Front". Perhaps something reverse-engineered to fit into "CROWBAR" or "MISDEED"....
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  Sack of hammers. That's what comes to mind as I read the last twenty or so entries. Nice to have a non-Western mythos as source material. But it's still a bit elitist. Why not make it something we've had hands...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  REMINDER: on-site backups protect against loss of files due to server failure and/or human stupidity and/or co-worker sabotage off-site backups protect against loss of servers due to building failure and/or human stupidity and/or terrorism involving fire-explosives-EMP please calculate the likelihood...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  typo ==> 36 correction ==>360...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  SUGGEST: prior to uploading to a cloud backup site, consider a combo of encryption and compression; PKZIP, WINZIP, et al; better yet an additional layering of encryption utilizing a distinct algorithm; you can 'roll your own' relying upon "one time...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  mention made of manifesting of eldritch horrors into human-originated mythos... there's already humans displaying godlike powers in modes not unlike comic book superheroes... why are there no eldritch horrors taking on the forms of characters from comics? not just the...
• Commented on Place your bets
  and goddess help us if T(he)rump escapes justice yet again... it would empower him and those GQP eager to install him and his dull-eyed idiot sons as President-For-Life given how easily manipulated each of 'em has shown themselves...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  well, we are chatting about eldritch horrors and hijacking of national politics as result of amoral monsters from the dungeon dimensions invading an oblivious Earth... so please no further mentioning of IRL born-human-monsters eager to burn the world rather than...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  Troutwaxer 194: Sorry, nothing I can share. There's dozens of authors who've taken on gigs writing "in-universe content" who were once prone to venting online but soon either were fired or stopped posting. Since then they've been self-censoring since the...
• Commented on Place your bets
  TRIGGER WARNING there's just too much temptation to actually buy this tee shirt... ...and it is just utterly wrong of me https://wearinggayhistory.com/items/show/803...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  Ah, yes. Toxic Spell Dumps (hattip, Harry Turtledove) are a potentially unlimited source of grand booms and icky spewing monsters if-and-when Laundryverse gets headhunted by one or another of the streaming services. Indeed, that's a secondary spinoff series from the...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  Charlie Stross 188: Heh. I'd forgotten where I was headed with my snark. Punchline about that massive array of air-gapped servers filled with 21st century version of 'buried treasure' -- better than gold 'n silver -- leading to a covert...
• Commented on Place your bets
  palate cleansing moment ROFL... wait for it as woman in baseball cap gets arrested for the wrong reason https://youtu.be/XfsfDc55v-E?list=TLPQMzAwMzIwMjOIvXDsedyhLw&t=142...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  if an e-book retailer -- Amazon might be the biggest but not the only -- carefully accumulated snippets and clues and background of its customers there'd be a detailed profile... gender, age, sexual orientation, income, children count, et al... but...
• Commented on Place your bets
  and the shitstorm just got better documented... there'd been a sense it was getting worse so much worse but now there's statistics to prove it... anybody who ever mentioned it aloud in NYC (or online) was dismissed as a drama...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  Charlie Stross 152: SUGGEST: place a recurring reminder onto your phone so every six months you re-run this particular bit of tedious housekeeping as regards OS updates, it seems to be part of a general pattern, vendors say one thing...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  Charlie Stross 149: Oh. Good news. Compared to my concern, good. There'd been a momentary concern you'd had a 'knock on the door' at 3AM (GMT) along with a zillion other undesirables had been scooped up and were now on...
• Commented on Place your bets
  not exactly my opinion but a better written piece than I could do... "Why Kids Aren’t Falling in Love With Reading" QUOTE ==> "I recently spoke with educators and librarians about this trend, and they gave many explanations, but one...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  for sure the visuals from the Nazi-destroyed timeline of "Atrocity Archives" would be terrifyingly effective, what with an otherwise ordinary Earth knee deep in liquefied oxygen but the background of how it came about, the sequence of evil acts and...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  Damian 124: Any attempt to produce visual content based upon a richly detailed world runs into the problem of context. Not everyone has the patience to read of Middle Earth's conflicts; that mostly everyone on this blog recognizes the reference...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Pigeon 1836: What you're describing is much the same reaction 95% of tourists have upon seeing how cows are turned into hamburger and pigs into pork sausage -- the 'disassembly line' -- inside high volume slaughterhouse which sorts of tours...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  ilya187 121: this is me venting my spleen because you saw that joke before I did...
• Commented on Place your bets
  conspiracy of good... QUOTE ==> "Although Winfrey has enriched publishers, her declared goal is grander: ''To get America reading again.'' Her agenda extends beyond increasing literacy. She wants to expose people to books that matter, books that in some way...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  oh, good... old fashion religious ceremonies... a restoration of basic (Meso)American traditions with additions of Christian variants including such warming notions as "blood of Christ, flesh of Christ" not long now until there's a weekly church sponsored barbeque every week......
• Commented on Place your bets
  you cannot make this shit up... reality also exceeds imagination... for a nation struggling to keep the lights on and children fed, now this...!? quote ==> "The schism has led to jokes about “Muslim time” and “Christian time”, while different...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  Charlie Stross 98: Now that you mention it, I recall that now. What I laying out is some of those novel/saga concepts I've been gnawing upon for a decade, "bloodless vampire" as well as "deathless movie star". (Which has been...