Scott Sanford

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• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  Even more off topic, it's September 28th; today in 1066, William the Duke of Normandy arrived in England, with a whole lot of his mates, figuring they could put on the biggest football riot Britain ever saw. So I'm taking...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  Trump got hammered in court today in his New York Business Fraud trial ... The judge tore him a new anal orifice TL/DR: He tried the defense "Nobody in New York could possibly trust Donald Trump to tell the truth...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  ...deregulation of real estate development meets dream roads meets extraterritorial jurisdiction and suburban sprawl goes inter-universal ... at least until the hazards of commuting start to include things eating your brain en route to the office. This only amplifies the...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  So maybe the real reason Crossrail was so delayed was the thing they dug into that nobody talks about and survives Brains doesn’t talk about his encounter with CROSSRAIL SPIKE PLUTO but he’s collected far too many Tube maps and...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  Now imagine and octopus, a corvid, or a parrot making string... I expect an octopus would be really good at it, once the octopus got the idea. Birds would have more trouble, as it's a task made much easier by...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  ...here in North America we had Mt Saint Helens pop off in 1980s, spewed across hundreds of square kilometers... May 18th, 1980. And I was downwind of it! The ash fall is detectable over vast distances, and I'd expect geologists...
• Commented on Pushing it back
  String technology is highly likely. Very useful, doesn't require a lot of other tech to support it, highly impermanent. String is very useful for tying things together... for making fabric... And basket-weaving... You are 100% right on all of that....
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  the "cat" niche is presumably the one to be aiming for Obviously. Humans could continue for millions of years if they evolved to produce sufficiently humorous pictures for posting to OuterGodNet....
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  In a legal context, "vexatious" is the usual term. How well that would carry over to the context you have, I don't know. Hm, that might work. I like the phrase "vexatious crypto," as it describes something we've all encountered....
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  Completely a side note, but I was re-reading The Jennifer Morgue and got to the flashback of Ramona's briefing: "This part of west Texas, between Sonora and San Angelo, is just way too far inland for Ramona's taste... She doesn't...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  Now we get an interesting situation where they cannot resolve their disagreements peacefully. Perhaps they are Libertarians -- precisely because they refuse to cooperate. That fits. I mean, you've got a point; if there's nobody to tell them not to...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  Possibly of interest to those who enjoy watching crypto scams circle the drain, Rolling Stone reports that Your NFTs Are Actually — Finally — Totally Worthless. It turns out the market for ugly ape cartoons is basically zero, exactly as...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  I'd like to see some sort of resolution or nod to the other races that share this planet..Deep Ones and Blue Hades. How do they react to the surface being disturbed by the advent of Something Awful. Good question! BLUE...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  GRAVEDUST probably plays a pivotal role in the climax of TLLF, although I need to go back and re-read so I can work out how to deploy it. I was mildly disappointed to discover that the Laundry wiki doesn't even...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  Or was the "mishap" the computer suddenly deciding to eject the pilot? The plan to become an AI freelance fighter jet didn't work out well for May in Questionable Content. I doubt there's a good support system for AWOL military...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  ...it's the gravedust system from the Jennifer Morgue. It ran on special vacuum tubes that were made in orbit, and its purpose was to talk with the dead... Ooh, that's a new idea. Making vacuum tube electronics is one thing,...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  CASE NIGHTMARE-class civilizations with billions of human-class minds aren't grass. They're much rarer, both in earth's history (parallel earths) and out in Fermi Paradox land (exoworlds). This does seem to suggest that when something like the Prime Minister takes control...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  ... it's the main plot armature of the next book (which I'm gathering threats for here). That is a wonderful typo and can be kept just as it is. :-)...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  There's no body so he might have got away... If he's dead with a bullet hole through his head and he got away, there will be paperwork!...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  Bad Names for Taverns: The only problem with the Swan Dive is that it's a real place. (Really; I drove past a few hours ago.)...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  I just had a deep burrow in the drawer of this desk, the one the main screens sit on & I find: "Aristo" slide-rule, model 915E Multiple scales & cursor lines, with arc / sin / tan functions on the...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  I didn’t realize that I was asking about a key period in their development BTW, this page shows, about halfway down, four stages of development in what's basically the same model, from not before 1989 to 1911, illustrating some visible...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  As for magical slide rules, I have no idea what scales would be necessary to calculate a Dho-Hna curve and open a gate. But I’d speculate that the Laundry still has them sitting around. I couldn't build one either but...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  That said, I do have some questions about the development of slide rule technology ca. 1880-1920. If you can point me towards references, I'd appreciate it. To clarify, I'm not interested in what the collectible slipsticks from that era are....
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  If you could go on about the role of slide rules in railway design and operation, you could do a guest post that would keep most of the regular discussion participants occupied for days. It sounds like a joke now,...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  Might I request an epilogue in which someone actually reads all these scribblings and makes suitable comments upon finishing them? Kthx. Or a short where some unfortunate and possibly expendable team is set to extracting information from Angleton's Memex machine....
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  ...a cursor was originally a sliding indicator on a slide-rule, pioneered by Isaac Newton... A quibble (since of course there's a slide rule nerd here), Isaac Newton did observe that having some kind of pointer would make using a slide...
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  In one of the books (I forget which, sorry), you mention the strategic reserve of steam engines... Coincidentally, just the other night I happened onto a short Youtube video about the Soviet steam engine reserve; you might find that interesting....
• Commented on Do my Laundry
  Instead, the problem is, if a powerful being shows up and says he’s an incarnation of a particular god, how do you know he’s telling the truth? The Jesus Trump nascent cult is an example of this. It seems implausible...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  Off topic: James Nicoll wrote about Five SF&F Authors Who Debuted at a Surprisingly Young Age and, gosh, guess who was into Dungeons & Dragons as a teenager? Alas, it seems death knights, githyanki, and slaad don't pay any royalties....