peteratjet

peteratjet

  • Commented on A Wonky Experience
    I put this story in the same category as the recurring Rubbish Christmas Wonderland Experience was Rubbish - Children Disappointed event. Although to be fair, the 1995 Glasgow Worldcon on did draw an Outraged Mums Want Their Money Back local...
  • Commented on Worldcon in the news
    One thing Fannish fans maybe forget is that WorldCons aren't all that big. Or rather, other SF related cons have got very big indeed. The London WorldCon, which was a great success, was maybe the third biggest SF related convention...
  • Commented on The coming storm
    ... from the Isle of Sodor, with added Matt Berry narration. A bit sweary, so not entirely SFW https://youtu.be/GtRrE5u6fu8?si=o9ZZTb1cFTW2tHrP...
  • Commented on The coming storm
    John Oliver did a bit on level crossings in the USA, and not just because the researchers got to play with trains and have crashes+ Freight trains are very very long and routinely stop blocking level crossings. Cue video of...
  • Commented on We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
    in Alanbrooke's war diaries, he records a flight home from a Moscow conference where the British officers were gifted vodka and caviar, which they divvied up and consumed . A day or two later the Soviet embassy inquired about their...
  • Commented on I should blog more, but ...
    Huey Long appears in Mike Resnick's Alternate Presidents anthology, where he invites Hitler to visit the USA and does not care for what he sees.At all. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_Presidents#:~:text=Huey%20Long%20escapes%20assassination%20in,and%20Republican%20candidate%20Alf%20Landon....
  • Commented on Pushing it back
    I had a dim memory of James Burke making the point that an early adopter of the printing press was the Church, mass producing papal indulgence forms ... https://pages.mtu.edu/~rlstrick/rsvtxt/burke4.htm...
  • Commented on Pushing it back
    Paul McCauley has uplifted Racoons doing deep time archaeology in Beyond the Burn Line, excavating very ancient cities once occupied by the Ogres ( that's us) and picking through their trash. Raising the questions, who uplifted the Racoons, and the...
  • Commented on A fistful of tropes
    In Dan Simmons' Hyperion/Endymion sequence, the Vatican has a monopoly on interstellar transport but are understandably coy about the technical details, which turn out to involve reducing the passengers to meat paste through massive G force on arrival, then re-animating...
  • Commented on A fistful of tropes
    Eminent Mad French Engineer PH Rebut, designer of the JET tokamak, presented this paper on a proposed fission fusion system on the occasion of his 2006 Alfven Award. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0741-3335/48/12B/S01/pdf ... or at least the abstract. IOP subscribers can download the...
  • Commented on A fistful of tropes
    it is certainly true that right now, by which I mean this Wednesday, right after Bank Holiday Tuesday (Meta-Civil-Service arrangements) it's all about Deuterium Tritium fusion. Nobody is even trying to make a D He3 reaction go. It's really hard...
  • Commented on A fistful of tropes
    On the subject of Sudden Russian Death Syndrome, one only slightly batshit crazy possibility. The plane went down with one of his body doubles on board. Faking your own death before Putin gets to you would be one way of...
  • Commented on A fistful of tropes
    how you travel faster than light is irrelevant. Here's a diagram http://www.physicsmatt.com/blog/2016/8/25/why-ftl-implies-time-travel...
  • Commented on A fistful of tropes
    here's a trope that I was reminded of reading Ian McDonald's latest, Hopeland, which features one of these. The vagabond fleet. Obviously,seen in Battlestar Galactica, original and reboot, but also ... The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica -...
  • Commented on Pass or Fail
    like this ? https://youtu.be/P6MOnehCOUw...
  • Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
    it's a joke, derived from the phrase heard from the deranged reaches of the current and former cabinet, "woke blob", where blob apparently refers to the I'll defined mass of people they find frustrating. Judges, journalists, civil servants, whatever. The...
  • Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
    remember, it's not just "woke" , it's "woke blob", which is to say, this guy from The Orville ... https://tldrmoviereviewsblog.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/blood-of-patriots-2.jpg...
  • Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
    .. maybe .. Flooding downstream of the dam and disrupting water supply to agricultural land is bad for both Ukraine and Russian occupied areas, Including Crimea. Arguably, Russian forces had easier access to plant explosives, and immediate tactical advantage by...
  • Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
    Fred Saberhagen's Empire of the East series had a wizard who was using a bound demon to pursue science experiments, rediscovering the ancient arts of physics and chemistry. On his command the demon magicked up a balloon that obstinately refused...
  • Commented on Shrinking the world
    on the subject of walking... https://www.stairwellbooks.co.uk/product/black-harry/ I picked up this small press edition at Eastercon. It's based on a documented case in Elizabethan England, when a deputation of tenant farmers walked from Glossopdale to London to register their protest against...
  • Commented on Signed copies of "Season of Skulls" available for pre-order!
    started reading... Many many years ago I had the exact same cognitive WTF that Evelyn experiences early on, although at the real location. "this place looks strangely familiar..."...
  • Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
    historically, the apartheid regime classified mixed race individuals as Coloured. Famously, South African cricketer Basil dD'Oliviera came to England, where we may have been a bit racist in places but not if got in the way of sports, and was...
  • Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
    seems to have been an omniclusterfuck. Lackey, while praising Samuel Delaney, referred to him as a "colored writer", deeply offending at least one blogger. She was virtually removed from the virtual con. Reactions varied from "I didn't get that memo"...
  • Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
    I wouldn't read too much into the names. Historically, once the political nation had decided to give up on a military dictatorship, and the Commonwealth navy had hastily swapped Civil War victory names for Royal Charles and so on before...
  • Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
    It didn't hurt Douglas Haig's campaign to replace Sir John French as commander of the BEF in the Great War that he was married to a lady in waiting to Queen Mary. Royal patronage has declined significantly since then...
  • Commented on Fuck the Monarchy
    there's a whole ecology of Royal "journalism" within mainstream media. Everything from the BBC down has Royal correspondents, wheeled out when the occasion demands to fill us in. Ok, maybe not the Morning Star. No organs specifically devoted to the...
  • Commented on Minor updates
    thirded...
  • Commented on Minor updates
    Very few of the target audience ever noticed the explicit Christian theme of the Narnia series on first reading. Too young and partially immunised against religiosity by the attenuated form encountered in primary school assemblies...
  • Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
    I'd say that Naomi Novik has done a bang up job drip feeding her YA readership the existential horror of the adult world in the Scholomance trilogy. It looks like a magic high school series. Ok, it's set in a...
  • Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
    Sean McMullen might beg to differ with his post apocalyptic passenger propelled railways....
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