Fabian Giesen

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• Commented on That "Annihilation Score" spoiler thread you're all asking for
  Whole-series re-read done. (Well, the books anyway; I didn't re-read all of the short stories.) TAS is my favorite book in the series so far, with TFM a close second. I'll not make any excuses; I like my protagonists struggling....
• Commented on That "Annihilation Score" spoiler thread you're all asking for
  I'm in the middle of my re-read (about halfway through) right now and I've been noticing the "bleed-through" between Lecter and Mo in e.g. the busking scene much more this tiime through. It definitely goes much further than just the...
• Commented on Random thought for the day
  I think TTIP/TPP are the logical continuation of a process that has been going on for a while. International treaties are appealing to power brokers in that they are a back channel to establish national legislation without any parliamentary oversight...
• Commented on That "Annihilation Score" spoiler thread you're all asking for
  Is Boris, turned into cat by enemy action. Yes? (I'm not serious, but the thought entertains me!)...
• Commented on That "Annihilation Score" spoiler thread you're all asking for
  and some as-yet unresolved threads from TRC that I'm curious about: 1. Spooky Given TRC and certain incidents from TAS it seems pretty clear that Spooky can see the "spirit plane" (or whatever). Spooky also seems to freak out when...
• Commented on That "Annihilation Score" spoiler thread you're all asking for
  Re: Mo/Lecter vs. Bob/EoS Well, Lecter actually has its own physical manifestation distinct from Mo, namely the violin. Which seems to be binding a pretty vile extradimensional entity that Bob can (now) see. That entity seems to be extraordinarily powerful...
• Commented on That "Annihilation Score" spoiler thread you're all asking for
  So in my series re-read I've just finished TRC and am about to start TAS. Some notes so far: Re: What's going on with Mo ranting about the "vampire bitch from HR" etc. The prologues (and also early chapters) ever...
• Commented on That "Annihilation Score" spoiler thread you're all asking for
  3) I'm wondering as well! 4) Oh my, good catch! :) (The teapot stuff in your next post as well.) Currently re-reading TAC. Chapter 9, right before the two goons knock on Bob's hotel room door, there's this: In fact,...
• Commented on That "Annihilation Score" spoiler thread you're all asking for
  Yes, it's in the book that Angleton/the EOS is in the Laundry by consent, and that the geas would not actually stop him from running amok if he wanted to. (That Angleton can just clear Bob, his personal assistant, to...
• Commented on That "Annihilation Score" spoiler thread you're all asking for
  Random related thought: there's that whole geas mentioned in TFM that was supposed to keep the EOS under control. Bob already intimates that given the extent of the EOS's power, it's unlikely to be effective when push comes to shove....
• Commented on Two Thoughts
  @Jay: Yeah, and not just for surveillance. Those past 5 years of Moore's law have not exactly come as cheaply as they used to. https://ycharts.com/companies/INTC/r_and_d_expense Much as some would like it to be otherwise, Moore's law isn't a law of...
• Commented on Two Thoughts
  @Jay: Oh, don't get me wrong; I don't think those measures are particularly effective, security-wise. And in any case, I suspect what benefits there are have mostly been realized already, and adding more sensors amplifies data management/mining problems while being...
• Commented on Two Thoughts
  So far the trajectory has been that increasing computing power enables computers to do more things, not that things computers can already do keep getting more efficient. Three examples spanning three decades: Interactive text editing/word processing and spreadsheets were around,...
• Commented on That "Annihilation Score" spoiler thread you're all asking for
  even while doing Eater things or appearing Eater-like to people [..] Bob doesn't appear to feel particularly existentially dislocated or identity-shifted. That is to say, there is no sign that he feels like anyone/-thing else but Bob, during those times....
• Commented on Two Thoughts
  This is not about features primarily, just about idiosyncracies. If you use a cross-platform abstraction, you are less tied to one particular platform, but you're also tied to the common denominator, and you pay for it in friction: keeping a...
• Commented on Two Thoughts
  I'm talking about a different thing. The search/maps APIs let you integrate their existing products. The whole product. A search infrastructure API would be something that lets you index something other than the world-wide web (your own database, all source...
• Commented on Two Thoughts
  Re: monopolies and "where is this all going", one point to consider is that in 2015, we have a business model that didn't really exist 20 years ago: the "data utility". In the mid-2000s, Amazon realized that they had this...
• Commented on That "Annihilation Score" spoiler thread you're all asking for
  I guess what I'm really wondering is whether an Eater of Souls has special dietary requirements above and beyond the host's natural metabolic needs. Does Bob NEED to eat souls now? We've seen very little evidence in Bob of the...
• Commented on That "Annihilation Score" spoiler thread you're all asking for
  "Wondering why anyone would choose Bob, of all people, as a spokesman for the Laundry anyway. I mean, he's many things, but good at public relations?" It seems pretty safe to assume that the only way Bob would ever end...
• Commented on That "Annihilation Score" spoiler thread you're all asking for
  There seem to be a great many things that Bob, ahem, neglected to mention to Mo. Exhibit B: Persephone Hazard. She shows up in one of Mo's audits. ("Seph". The physical description matches.) Mo doesn't recognize her at all. So...
• Commented on That "Annihilation Score" spoiler thread you're all asking for
  One final remark on intelligence agencies before I shut up and get off my hobby horse: (I'll keep it brief) The biggest conceit in the Laundryverse is, well, magic. No doubt. But a close second is the Laundry as an...
• Commented on That "Annihilation Score" spoiler thread you're all asking for
  Bob and Mo just do very different things in general. Bob is a Laundry full-time employee. He does fieldwork but the majority of his workload (purely in terms of billable hours) is a normal office job. Mo by contrast is...
• Commented on That "Annihilation Score" spoiler thread you're all asking for
  Well, one of central narrative devices for the series is that it's being narrated by their protagonists, in-universe as part of the extended debrief, to be tossed into the appropriate case files. I think it's an appropriate choice for what...
• Commented on That "Annihilation Score" spoiler thread you're all asking for
  Intended or not, does it really matter, though? If I find it, I get to keep it! :) Does OGH have his own vision of what really happened, themes he wants to cover, points he wants to make? No doubt...
• Commented on That "Annihilation Score" spoiler thread you're all asking for
  Instinct vs. rationality is a different distinction, relevant to a different classical philosophical quandary, namely, what is consciousness? That's the kind of thing you need to tackle when you want to make a serious argument for why, say, eating animals...
• Commented on That "Annihilation Score" spoiler thread you're all asking for
  If they had bothered to actually define the relationship and discovered that they want different things from it, it would be fine. But at that point in the story, Mhari and Bob have been on-again off-again for several times already,...
• Commented on That "Annihilation Score" spoiler thread you're all asking for
  Okay, so I just checked the actual Bob/Mhari scenes way back in TAA, not the heavily edited "greatest hits" version that Bob keeps telling himself over the years. Short version: OGH got me pretty good there. Long version: the actual...
• Commented on That "Annihilation Score" spoiler thread you're all asking for
  I'm using "nihilist" as in the actual school of thought, not the Hollywood strawman version. In particular, in the sense of existential or moral nihilism. Existential nihilism posits an universe that is ultimately uncaring, indifferent, and devoid of intrinsic meaning...
• Commented on That "Annihilation Score" spoiler thread you're all asking for
  "Glowingly positive light" is overstating it a bit, I think, as is the characterization of Mo going nuclear at the sight of them. Ramona and Mo are fine, I think. There's the history with Bob, but Mo gets that out...
• Commented on That "Annihilation Score" spoiler thread you're all asking for
  What’s with the “Bob and Mo heartbreak hour”? Within the narrative it does not follow (to me at least). An overly literal reading of the text is that Bob and Mo get in a fight at the end of Rhesus...