anonemouse

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• Commented on PSA: Why there won't be a third book in the Halting State trilogy
  There is a vigorously denied suggestion that Arthur Donaldson's opinions took "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" (or at least "every cloud has a silver lining") a little too seriously when things were looking bleak in for the...
• Commented on PSA: Why there won't be a third book in the Halting State trilogy
  Take Arthur C. Clarke's solution for the 2001 series' inconsistencies, and claim each is set in a very similar but discontinuous universe? (The Discovery went to Saturn in 2001 and was orbiting Jupiter in 2010, so we're not talking little...
• Commented on What scared H. P. Lovecraft
  He's frustrated because I refuse to let him buy 40K-based fiction (call it my aversion to early militarism) but I may let him read "Monastery of Death" :) Dan Abnett's "Gaunt's Ghosts" series is big on Poor Bloody Infantry and...
• Commented on What scared H. P. Lovecraft
  Not, it did not. That was a lie Overlords made up in order to explain their similarity to the devils of human imagination. The real reason was squarely in the realm of psychic powers, which Overlords were making humans forget...
• Commented on What scared H. P. Lovecraft
  I think that the key for a successful horror writer is to start with what scares them and create a story that can share the fear with others. Thus, I suppose, the incredible power of At The Mountains Of Madness;...
• Commented on CMAP: "Why do you use Microsoft Word?"
  (My filter bubble of) The Internet appears to settling on halping as the word of choice for that kind of situation. I'm regularly seeing it used as a closer to comments, to indicate the ludicrous misapprehension of the situation -...
• Commented on The revolution will not be hand-stitched
  The original statement said the geek would have a girlfriend because he had a job. Assigning mercenary motives to women is an old and deeply shit sexist behaviour (has anyone ever used "golddigger," without qualifying it, and meant a man?)....
• Commented on The revolution will not be hand-stitched
  It'd also mean the Dublin to Holyhead ferry dies a death. As it's a crossing that justifies the Ulysses as just one of the boats, that's a lot of business suddenly coming through Belfast....
• Commented on The revolution will not be hand-stitched
  I think part of the Strange Attractor nature of the Kennedy assassination must come down to how irreparably weird Oswald is as a cultural figure - a double defector who had a novel written about him before he became famous....
• Commented on The revolution will not be hand-stitched
  Consider the drives to prevent hospital-acquired infections and minimize antibiotic usage meeting spray-on fabric; giving doctors and nurses disposable scrubs is probably going to be an early market for this tech....
• Commented on Spook Century
  What impact does the USA's history of slavery have on the USA's foreign policy post-1945? You seem to have missed the point cahth3iK made about what perspective she was speaking from....
• Commented on Spook Century
  Off the top of my head: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Massacres_of_Native_Americans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_of_Indigenous_Australians http://www.boer-war.com/Details2nd/Camps.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mau_Mau_Uprising#Deaths_and_atrocities...
• Commented on The regular holy war ...
  And functionality trumps both: I was responding to a post which stated architects are looking for exactly these kinds of displays. In most areas, motion tracking as an interface is just a gimmick. In some, it genuinely improves usability. (See...
• Commented on The regular holy war ...
  You mean like this display, which fakes volumetric 3D? SpaceX apparently has something of similar functionality ginned up from consumer hardware: see Elon Musk show it off here....
• Commented on (Flash fiction) A message from the Laundry public relations office
  From desultory observation, most conspiracy theorists are right about one thing, then build a huge baroque structure including it. Icke's had his one thing....
• Commented on Why Microsoft Word must Die
  Conceived in the days of 4:3 it might have been, but by the time it was born the widescreen writing was on the wall. Why oh why couldn't they have made it possible to unpin and move to the side?...
• Commented on Blatant Advertising
  There is! See here....
• Commented on Polemic: how readers will discover books in future
  This is where putting adverts into books may come in as a misguided attempt by publishers to reduce book prices. I think few readers are that price sensitive and it would be a bad mistake to try this route. Stronger...
• Commented on Do Zimboes dream of Electric Sheep?
  Tolkien suffered the same problem as Milton - namely being a deep religious believer while their muses apparently weren't. Thus Tolkien's problems with an Adversary apparently creating life (orcs, giants; as has been pointed out, if orcs are twisted elves,...
• Commented on Why Microsoft Word must Die
  I hope that not just Word but all the fixed-page-size formats die out soon. It's horrible to try and read a two-column PDF on an ebook reader. Oh God yes. Does anyone have a Calibre recipe that converts two-column pdf...
• Commented on Polemic: how readers will discover books in future
  Of course, the real problem is that a lot of people prefer novelty and hate being bored by repetition. I suspect it's rather harder to find that sweet spot between something that's new and neat, and something that's weird and...
• Commented on A deceptively simple question
  When you have EOD robots (built to be semi-disposable, after all) being given funerals, I wouldn't bet against you....
• Commented on Polemic: how readers will discover books in future
  While spam is certainly generated I don't see much, gmails tech keeps it quite hidden, might at some point Amazon see diminishing returns and cut off the spammy fake books? GMail isn't paid per delivered mail, and therefore has no...
• Commented on Polemic: how readers will discover books in future
  If your e-reader includes a Javascript interpreter, you're boned. And as Javascript is part of the ePub standard, it's pretty much guaranteed to. Hell, if it displays the book cover you could be screwed. As OGH has noted, a secure...
• Commented on Another deceptively simple question
  Photography left a pretty big hole in painting. In fact you could say it destroyed "painting" and created "Art". I like Clayton Cubitt's phrasing of this idea (in this essay on the future of photography): "photographers quickly usurped painterly subjects...
• Commented on Another deceptively simple question
  You didn't come across the Waste Land app when it was released, then? I haven't used it myself, owning no iDevices, but every review I've seen is very complimentary. (I appear to be participating in this thread solely in "have...
• Commented on Another deceptively simple question
  an omniscient 3rd person narrative story where you can show/hide the thoughts and inner monologues of all the characters. Not quite already done, but Warren Ellis' SVK could be read as a first-person narrative or as a first-person semi-omniscient narrative...
• Commented on Another deceptively simple question
  I'm imagining a short story collection, with contributions from single-page to novellette length, titled "Rashomon 2.0"......
• Commented on Another deceptively simple question
  I'm reminded of Medium's comment system - there's a plus symbol (that turns into a comment counter once a comment is added) on each paragraph that allows you to add comments to that paragraph, with the option of highlighting a...
• Commented on Commercial interlude
  There's also the hope of not killing the Equoid's rider - which would go out the window, down the street, and into the corner shop if he fired a basilisk gun in their direction....