Howard NYC

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• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  Troutwaxer 194: Sorry, nothing I can share. There's dozens of authors who've taken on gigs writing "in-universe content" who were once prone to venting online but soon either were fired or stopped posting. Since then they've been self-censoring since the...
• Commented on Place your bets
  TRIGGER WARNING there's just too much temptation to actually buy this tee shirt... ...and it is just utterly wrong of me https://wearinggayhistory.com/items/show/803...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Escape from Yokai Land
  Ah, yes. Toxic Spell Dumps (hattip, Harry Turtledove) are a potentially unlimited source of grand booms and icky spewing monsters if-and-when Laundryverse gets headhunted by one or another of the streaming services. Indeed, that's a secondary spinoff series from the...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  Charlie Stross 188: Heh. I'd forgotten where I was headed with my snark. Punchline about that massive array of air-gapped servers filled with 21st century version of 'buried treasure' -- better than gold 'n silver -- leading to a covert...
• Commented on Place your bets
  palate cleansing moment ROFL... wait for it as woman in baseball cap gets arrested for the wrong reason https://youtu.be/XfsfDc55v-E?list=TLPQMzAwMzIwMjOIvXDsedyhLw&t=142...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  if an e-book retailer -- Amazon might be the biggest but not the only -- carefully accumulated snippets and clues and background of its customers there'd be a detailed profile... gender, age, sexual orientation, income, children count, et al... but...
• Commented on Place your bets
  and the shitstorm just got better documented... there'd been a sense it was getting worse so much worse but now there's statistics to prove it... anybody who ever mentioned it aloud in NYC (or online) was dismissed as a drama...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  Charlie Stross 152: SUGGEST: place a recurring reminder onto your phone so every six months you re-run this particular bit of tedious housekeeping as regards OS updates, it seems to be part of a general pattern, vendors say one thing...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  Charlie Stross 149: Oh. Good news. Compared to my concern, good. There'd been a momentary concern you'd had a 'knock on the door' at 3AM (GMT) along with a zillion other undesirables had been scooped up and were now on...
• Commented on Place your bets
  not exactly my opinion but a better written piece than I could do... "Why Kids Aren’t Falling in Love With Reading" QUOTE ==> "I recently spoke with educators and librarians about this trend, and they gave many explanations, but one...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  for sure the visuals from the Nazi-destroyed timeline of "Atrocity Archives" would be terrifyingly effective, what with an otherwise ordinary Earth knee deep in liquefied oxygen but the background of how it came about, the sequence of evil acts and...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  Damian 124: Any attempt to produce visual content based upon a richly detailed world runs into the problem of context. Not everyone has the patience to read of Middle Earth's conflicts; that mostly everyone on this blog recognizes the reference...
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  Pigeon 1836: What you're describing is much the same reaction 95% of tourists have upon seeing how cows are turned into hamburger and pigs into pork sausage -- the 'disassembly line' -- inside high volume slaughterhouse which sorts of tours...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  ilya187 121: this is me venting my spleen because you saw that joke before I did...
• Commented on Place your bets
  conspiracy of good... QUOTE ==> "Although Winfrey has enriched publishers, her declared goal is grander: ''To get America reading again.'' Her agenda extends beyond increasing literacy. She wants to expose people to books that matter, books that in some way...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  oh, good... old fashion religious ceremonies... a restoration of basic (Meso)American traditions with additions of Christian variants including such warming notions as "blood of Christ, flesh of Christ" not long now until there's a weekly church sponsored barbeque every week......
• Commented on Place your bets
  you cannot make this shit up... reality also exceeds imagination... for a nation struggling to keep the lights on and children fed, now this...!? quote ==> "The schism has led to jokes about “Muslim time” and “Christian time”, while different...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  Charlie Stross 98: Now that you mention it, I recall that now. What I laying out is some of those novel/saga concepts I've been gnawing upon for a decade, "bloodless vampire" as well as "deathless movie star". (Which has been...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Damian 1782: Obvious snark being "Short Attention Content" Video games are much more stimulating, with MMOGs offering immersive experiences and much greater choices. Only reason I've not been diving deep is a lousy data plan, a slow laptop and (worst...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  Heteromeles 94: Heh. Yeah, Heinlein did much the same, inverted, in "Job: A Comedy of Justice" (1984), in the very last chapter. Every known (and theoretical) ecology has drivers/motivators: sex, sustenance, safety ("3S"). Reproduction & rearing of the next generation....
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  Heteromeles 89: Exactly where things get fitted into an ecology based upon magic (rather than sugars and proteins and DNA/RNA) looks like the sort of arguments notorious amongst fans of Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel Comics, et al. Here's my...
• Commented on Place your bets
  As if it is difficult to find something in way of nasty shit for use in world building, here's a piece on 'genteel art of institutionalizing bigotry'... for anyone looking for creating a rich tapestry of cruel history in their...
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  Robert Prior 1727: Hospitals are just about forbidden to declare someone as 'unsaveable'... by all means available medical staff do what they can... besides how else can 'newbies' get hands on experience? best to let them make mistakes treating 'impossible...
• Commented on Place your bets
  I so wish politicians would add the following to their party's policy statements: avoid making any more extinction-level mistakes today's headlines are not as bad as on other days and that's a bit of delayed freaking when I felt momentary...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  paws4thot 67: There's a reason for why there's so many bars-taverns-liquor stores in New York's financial center as well close to office buildings housing companies providing support services. Institutionalized sadism and casual cruelty and human sacrifice are not limited to...
• Commented on Place your bets
  Charlie Stross 1706: add in a temporal wormhole or two so she turns out to be her own granddaughter thereby turning it into a swords 'n sorcery farce akin to Heinlein's "All You Zombies"...
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  =+=+=+= whitroth 1688: First time I read "Song Called Youth" trilogy it was a brain wrecking wild ride into an implausible horrid nearly-worst possible future. Now? If I re-read it I'll be taking notes on how to tip over neo-fascists...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  paws4thot 56: I was once chained by a contract (by way of awesomely horrid penalties) to a project where we all knew failure was not an option but inevitable... senior management having gotten into a turf war amongst themselves and...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  thing about PowerPoint is its ability to incorporate animation and various colors... it makes for 'fun' [1] slide decks and thus less tedious presentations... without some variance the resulting experience becomes a brain rotting experience leading to slipping rum into...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: Quantum of Nightmares
  https://www.nrel.gov/pv/cell-efficiency.html be really fun if there's an effort by New Management were to seek out objective measurements of effectiveness of competing algorithms (cost of spells crafted and minimized unwanted side effects of spells cast) and then someone prepares a tedious...