Heteromeles

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• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  Why not make it something we've had hands on experience? Well, if the Brit-American yokai--gremlins--make a organized break for Freedom* From Cthulhu in America, should the laundry support them? We've got plenty of hands-on experience with gremlins, I think. But...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  A youkai is a spirit, usually evil but not always. The usual plot of youkai stories is that you mustn't engage with the youkai which can at first encounter appear human and even alluring. Refuse their attention, run away and...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  Well, no one has done a fossil yokai yet to my knowledge, so there is room for a mastodon yokai in the Laundryverse* (/shows himself out). *That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  Just wondering. Is the Laundryverse still some sort of simulation? I'm also wondering if it's possible to do a strange loop multiverse. Within the loop of the multiverse, every universe is simulated by another universe, but if you go far...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  I'm sure others of the problems Angleton left behind were more challenging. Great title for a monster-of-the-week series: "The Soul-sucking Bureaucracy." Bob inherits his dead boss's soul-sucking powers after Angleton gets offed by a vampiric sorcerer, and......
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  (For shits and giggles, imagine how His Dread Majesty would react to COVID19 ... if it even happens in that universe.) Um...I think Covid's a bad idea, mostly because a lot of people are ferociously pretending the pandemic is over...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  The amusing thing here is how often animism pops up it's fractalizing heads. So far as I can tell, yokai are an extension of the Shinto (Shin approximates soul/spirit, to is tao=Way) in the idea that everything has a Shin....
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  To do YA convincingly you not only need younger protagonists, you need a simple world -- adversaries that are personal, individualized, and possible to defeat by Punching Evil™. Institutions and organizations and committees are big and impersonal and hard for...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  Around the late '90s some demo orgs tried to segment the-then current NAm market into better (more cohesive) segments. They ended up with over 100 distinct segments. Way too much for your typical marketer/adman/retailer to keep track of and design...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  *'Governing the Sustainable Development Goals Quantification in Global Public Policy' https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-03938-6* Thanks! I'll check it out....
• Commented on Place your bets
  I really don't want to go on with this, but dear little Adolf's own writings go on & ON about being christian, ok? The entire US seems to believe, on zero evidence, that atheists are all evil bloodsuckers, & you...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  but the background of how it came about, the sequence of evil acts and boneheaded errors and math-as-magick, that's all a challenge in written form but just a bit too much to imagine explaining as a fast-enough-paced visual You have...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  Well yes, but I wasn't proposing an ABC book. Just one for the curious type of child, or those who grew out of this morph....
• Commented on Place your bets
  Which reminds me - the Nazis in general & Adolf in particular, always claimed to be christians. There's an awful lot of images of them & the RC church posturing together, aren't there? IIRC, this conflates at least two things....
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  Speaking of reinvention: A is for Azathoth, I is for Ia: The Curious Child's First Book of AI Games by award-winning author Charles Stross. The first book in the New Audience series....
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  I once read an interview with David Bowie in which he talked about the necessity of reinventing himself every decade to stay relevant. I realized in 2019 that I'd been writing the Laundry Files for 20 years, and while it...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  Dorian Gray showed up again in some newspapers (link to sales page): https://store.harrybliss.com/product/the-picture-of-dorian/...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  I wonder if someone is conducting similar surveys in Africa. Googling "Africa Lidar Archeology," yes, they found a city under a forest in South Africa. I'd like to see where all those pot sherds in the Congo came from, myself,...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  You're right, that should have been obvious. I blame the word 'pyramid' for my conceptual blindness. The meso-american buildings are strictly speaking not pyramids, precisely because they have a flat top with a temple on it (and also because they...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Do you know any essays on the differences between these categories? I suspect they exist but can only conjecture how they play out in practice. Sorry, I missed this earlier. To answer the question, I don't know any essays off-hand....
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  So "sequels" & "prequels"? Speaking of sequels and prequels, I keep having bad thoughts about a Palimpsest/Laundryverse crossover. Just a sample: a PHANG bites someone. We know that the victim will be dead in a few days due to the...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  I wonder if it would be possible to do "The Film of Dorian Gray", where instead of a portrait stored in the attic, a print of the actor's first film is stored in some dusty archive and progresses from a...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  I dislike retconned multiverse fic, whereby an author stitches utterly disparate milieux There's another way to read it: I otherwise agree with you that it would be nice if he pulled a Stephen King, blah blah blah, and used that...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  To paraphrase the old adage about big fleas and little fleas, I see symbiogenesis in in the Laundryverse thusly: Humans have Hungry Ghosts Inside their souls to ride them. Hungry Ghosts host Great Old Ones And so ad infinitum....
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  Tie them all together with the Freya-verse and the Palimpsest and the now-in-process space opera and make a really big boom. Another thought: it being March 25th as I write this, it is not inconceivable that Charlie will make a...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  Tie them all together with the Freya-verse and the Palimpsest and the now-in-process space opera and make a really big boom. Sadly, a little bit ago, I suggested that the singularity from the end of The Rhesus Chart was the...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  Weird thought: I'm now wondering if the Laundryverse is a spawning ground for Lovecraftian gods. Originally, I wasn't thinking of a "biological" spawning ground, meaning a prey-rich place where the Eldritch came to do their version of the wild thing....
• Commented on Place your bets
  Putin is simply the latest Tsar of a society where tributary corruption and family loyalties are so embedded, hardly anyone knows how to function in any other way. It's interesting to contemplate Russia as an "alco-state," in that taxes on...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Heteromeles, do you have any feedback on my post #1701? I am curious as to your opinion there. Sorry about that. I wrote a late-night response, watched the system eat it, went to sleep and forgot. The short answer seems...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Ever since humans began gathering in groups larger than Dunbar's Number, they needed someone to make decisions for the group, and psychopaths had been disproportionately over-represented among decision-makers simply because the job appeals to them more than to normal (e.g....