nelc

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• Commented on Minor hiccup
  Oh, struth, I'd totally missed that. I wonder if I want to go back and try to find the clue.......
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  Will the new novella be appearing on the Tor site?...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  Well, Charlie is British, so on the principle of write-what-you-know, if he writes in depth about anywhere real, it's going to be the UK. And as Bob Howard is the heroic protagonist, the organisation he works for isn't going to...
• Commented on Minor hiccup
  The Bloody White Baron, by James Palmer. The Baron wasn't exactly a nice person in TFM. I'm not sure what his motivation was exactly for surrounding the Dead God with his zombie sentries, but his methods weren't out of character...
• Commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  25:1, eh? So you could move Jupiter or Saturn in, then have Earth and Venus in its Trojans, then maybe put Mercury and Mars in orbit about the gas giant? Mind you, if you're going to all that trouble, you...
• Commented on Crib sheet: Singularity Sky
  At one point I was sketching out a all-but-sequel-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off for Charlie's Iron Sunrise. In my version of the ReMastered, the upper echelons of the political class didn't want the Unborn God project finished. Because: they were doing well enough at...
• Commented on The Fumes of Mordor & Other World Building Models
  I think it's worth making clear to the uninitiated that, contra to the context in which it was brought up in this thread, Hangul was developed in Korea in the fifteenth century, by Koreans. It was designed to be easier...
• Commented on Press Release: Stross Uncloaks Secret Media Project
  Sadly, I understand liver cancer has a pretty low survival rate anyway, and since it seems to be non-operable and has gotten to his lymph glands, I think this means that Iain will be leaving the party a trifle early....
• Commented on The map is not the territory.
  Actually, if your verbal map of colours affects your ability to distinguish colours, then shouldn't my mild nominative amnesia affect my ability to distinguish people? Or for that matter shouldn't prosopagnosiacs have trouble keeping people's roles separate in their minds?...
• Commented on The map is not the territory.
  With a little tweaking, that could also be a great test for nominative amnesia. ("How come I can remember the phrase 'nominative amnesia' but I can't remember people's names?") This morning I seem to have lost my list of American...
• Commented on Press Release: Stross Uncloaks Secret Media Project
  Well done. It took me most of ten seconds of brain-freeze after reading the project title to remember the date. You tease....
• Commented on The map is not the territory.
  Speaking only from my own experience, I don't think colour-blindness was ever mentioned during my Print and Design courses, and it's never seemed to have come up during my subsequent career. I don't even know — and our corespondents here...
• Commented on The map is not the territory.
  If that was the same program I watched, I could distinguish the odd tile among the greens with only a little care (IIRC, the odd tile was a smidgeon warmer than the others). What made it more difficult was that...
• Commented on Why I don't self-publish
  Not to mention details obscured or plain lied about for the sake of security. I'm thinking of details of location of various Laundry facilities which Bob may be deliberately lying about, just in case the memoirs fall into the wrong...
• Commented on Project Stargate
  I think you must be linking the memory to the wrong story, since Bleriot had crossed the Channel some three decades before. Maybe it was something from the Victorian era, such as 'The Battle of Dorking'?...
• Commented on Status update
  The LiveJournal sign-up seems to be sensitive to case at some point in the process. I don't know if that's an LJ thing or what....
• Commented on I had a blog entry for you, but it eated me
  Money is something I don't have much of. I have a friend who is sure that money = gold. He says that paper money economies always suffer hyperinflation, though he doesn't seem to have noticed that even after hyperinflation economies...
• Commented on Seasonal flame bait
  Different music by different authors that sounds similar? You really think you can sue someone for that? That boat has already sailed....
• Commented on Upcoming reading in Edinburgh
  I don't think that's in the hands of the author. You need to write to the French publishers of the translations, I think....
• Commented on World building 201: Heuristics
  I think it will depend on how quickly the conditions change. If you're Britain, then you get some progress towards social egalitarianism and social mobility, then you get antibiotics, then you get the birth-control pill, then you get the Green...
• Commented on World building 201: Heuristics
  Re: alien and human points of view. What was the story I read a few years ago, that started as a tenured professor trying to assert his seniority over a newly arrived young rival, that gradually turned into something more...
• Commented on Cutting their own throats
  However, that doesn't actually mean that piracy isn't still going to drive the prices down to zero or near-zero over time. As a prediction, this doesn't seem to be holding for music. You can get music for nothing, but people...
• Commented on En route
  I recommend it. I never went to a con until late in my thirties, and then didn't go to another until midway into my forties, now I'm going to one or two a year and I wish I'd gotten into...
• Commented on Nanowrimo
  Well, I seem to be writing something, though I don't think it's going to be novel-length, and nor am I writing fast enough for Nanowrimo. But it's almost the first fiction output I've created for about five years that wasn't...
• Commented on Design changes
  My preference is for a single, flat thread. In my experience, hierarchical multi-threads are only useful for technical discussions where it's vital for the host to be able to follow discussions of a point to their conclusion (or trailing off)....
• Commented on Steve Jobs
  I don't think you know what a cult of personality is. You certainly don't know the proper behaviour for a memorial thread....
• Commented on Salt Beings
  Though not a controlled substance in the drug-related sense, the British during their rule in India did control the sale of salt, even going so far as to build a fence of sorts across the sub-continent (wikipedia). There was a...
• Commented on Sartorial semiotics
  That's an interesting thesis. I'm not sure I believe it, considering that Hirohito was left in place, China still hates Japan (at least among the ruling generation), and Japanese schoolkids are taught next to nothing about WWII. Three things that...
• Commented on The Wrong Trousers
  My experience of living in the future is that I buy my clothes from Primark, a dirt-cheap clothing store, owing to being both dirt-poor and fashion-unconscious with regard to myself. Why this is living in the future is that the...
• Commented on Zombies
  I was going to mention the Pterry option. I can't see much hope for a cure for degenerative brain disease that will bring back the same person, memories and personality more-or-less intact, unless it involves brainscanning the healthy brain, or...