megpie71

megpie71

  • Commented on Down tools
    For those looking for "Cold Comfort Farm", it's by Stella Gibbons, and Penguin has the commonwealth publishing rights (or they did about a decade ago, and I doubt this has changed since). Which means if you're looking for it in...
  • Commented on Message for GISHWHES participants
    Would this be before, during or after Charlie does the work which is actually paying his bills? (Just asking out of curiosity). Also, is he able to report a bunch of nincompoops in a single bulk email, or does he...
  • Commented on Message for GISHWHES participants
    I'm busy looking at the page for "Random Acts", the charity group GISHWES is apparently supporting - and as far as I can tell, it's a charity doing nothing in particular for everyone in general. It certainly doesn't seem to...
  • Commented on Some rambling thoughts on region restrictions
    I don't buy ebooks with DRM (heck, I don't buy ebooks at present, end of discussion) mainly because the e-reader I own is a very cheap and nasty one which does not speak wireless. At all. It doesn't even mumble...
  • Commented on Some rambling thoughts on region restrictions
    As someone who winds up on the tail end of a lot of regional restrictions, I think they suck large planetoids through a one micron pipette at the very least. But then, I'm Australian, so I have a fair bit...
  • Commented on The Rhesus Chart: Chapter One
    The events of "The Fuller Memorandum" basically ensured Bob is now a mostly-untrained necromantic shaman. He knows the computational side of it well enough - that's practically second nature to him. But he doesn't understand the raw magical stuff. As...
  • Commented on Competition Time!
    Employee chose to sneak a friend interested in cryptography in to view the Reality Binding on a particularly dull wet Sunday afternoon. While, fortunately, the Adams hypothesis was correct (and the universe was indeed replaced with something even more bizarre...
  • Commented on World Cup: engage Grinch mode now!
    Here in Australia, it is actually football season (it's winter, winter is for footy). Of course, football here means either Australian Rules (if you're in Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, the Northern Territory or Tasmania) or Rugby (if you're in...
  • Commented on The Snowden leaks; a meta-narrative
    The thing about the War On Drugs is when it was launched, anyone who was serious about either drug hazard reduction or policing to lower crime levels knew damn well it wouldn't work. There was already another example within the...
  • Commented on A nation of slaves
    Ah. You probably shouldn't take the entertainment services this seriously. Yes, it's odious and offensive and a problem, but it's also not representative of the majority opinion. It's just representative of what gets eyeballs on advertising. People watch stupid things...
  • Commented on A nation of slaves
    When it comes to Centrelink, they're part of Tony Abbott's wonderful "cut 20,000 public servants" target whether they want to be or not. I've had a long standing joke regarding Centrelink (as a result of having worked for them both...
  • Commented on A nation of slaves
    So why, do you think, is it the unemployed person who gets blamed for this? I've been continuously out of work for over three years now, and mainly out of work for most of the last five. I haven't had...
  • Commented on A nation of slaves
    If benefits in your country are anything like benefits in mine, they come not with strings, but with steel hawsers attached. Here's a quick rundown on some of the steel cables attached to the money the Australian government (reluctantly) pays...
  • Commented on A nation of slaves
    I thought I was correct when I said the worst thing was looking for work. Turns out I was wrong. The worst thing, actually; the thing I loathe above all the others, is this particular unspoken assumption on the part...
  • Commented on A nation of slaves
    As someone who is unemployed (in Australia[1]) I'd point out this: the most demoralising, depressing part of the whole mess, as far as I'm concerned, is the expectation I must look for work. I'm required to look for five jobs...
  • Commented on Schadenfreude
    Something I suspect a few people are missing in this discussion: money (any currency) represents value in the same way numbers represent quantity, and the names of colours represent what we consider the visible frequencies of what we call the...
  • Commented on Beer, Brooklyn NY, this Thursday
    So, forty days and forty nights of rain, and nobody's started gathering animals in pairs? Put in an order with the local hardware store for lots of gopherwood....
  • Commented on How To Survive A Death March
    The forty hour working week had its origins in the union movement: it was based around giving people who had previously worked ten- to twelve-hour days in various jobs a balanced lifestyle. Eight hours work, eight hours rest, eight hours...
  • Commented on A likely tale
    reads story Nice, bit punful at the end there, but otherwise a bit of a giggle. reads comments picks up the bits about the RHPS references re-reads story starts groaning about the point where the feather colours are referenced as...
  • Commented on Catching a Blighty
    Chris Borthwick @ 61: By the time Gallipoli came around, Australia had been its own country for fifteen years. This was the first time Australians were fighting in a war as Australians (when they fought in the Boer war, about...
  • Commented on Catching a Blighty
    For all it was bad for the British, I would argue the colonial troops in some ways had it worse. I'm Australian. We use the battle of Gallipoli (a bloody, mismanaged, hideous atrocity of poor planning, incompetent generalship, and flat-out...
  • Commented on Making history personal
    The oldest place I've slept in? Probably a former convent in York, Western Australia (school camp). So that's probably around the 1850s. Yeah, I know. Look, we got European settlement here in 1829. There are outhouses in Great Britain still...
  • Commented on Why Microsoft Word must Die
    Gee, Charlie, don't hold back. Tell us how you really feel about it... I've been steadily getting more and more fed up with Word over the years myself. For me, the problem starts with the way I learned to type:...
  • Commented on Upcoming appearance: Frankfurt Book Fair
    So you're basically going to watch the trainwreck? Yeah, I can see the fun involved......
  • Commented on A deceptively simple question
    Charlie, these self-driving cars are being launched in our world, the one we're occupying at the moment, right? The one with the global warming problem, and the diminishing reserves of fossil fuels, yeah? Oh, and the potentially rising sea levels....
  • Commented on Commercial interlude
    Having just read this on Tor.com - Charlie, you are an eeevil, eeeevil bastard, and I love you to bits for it. I groaned, I yelled at the screen, I complained loudly about the references, and my partner thinks I'm...
  • Commented on Parasites
    "Christmas Tree" - it's a type of mistletoe which produces lovely golden yellow flowers anywhere from mid-October through to the end of February here in south-west Western Australia. Looks gorgeous as you're driving along the road at that time of...
  • Commented on What have we learned?
    One thing which amazes me - we have the internet here. We have the power to create a news service for spreading hopeful stories, for boosting the signal for stories about things going right, about people doing well, about the...
  • Commented on What have we learned?
    "We" (whoever "we" are) have learned that catastrophe creates a new normal. In that new normal, things which had been unthinkable become part of the background. For example, the new normal post-Hamburg-cell is that behaviours which only a few years...
  • Commented on The latest news
    We have to face this positively. After all, we have an unprecedented research opportunity here: are ordinary people's lives actually more interesting when they're written down? (As per The Diaries of Adrian Mole). Or are they equally boring to read...
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