Adrian Howard

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• Commented on Do my Laundry
  +1 to Vicar Pete's fate & Pinky/Brain closure. I'd also like Iris's storyline to get closed off in some way. It's been a while since I read the whole set — but I don't think her allegiances and motivations are...
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  Oh! Big arse Dumas style saga. You've done fun things with narrative voice a few times… you've done the 1800s thing… but playing with that voice/form might be fun. Ada Palmer's Terra Ignota series, Brust's Khaavren Romances, that kinda thing....
• Commented on A fistful of tropes
  This may be covered by your in-progress stuff — but utopian SF. A Trek Federation / Banks Culture? Also — while kinda covered by some of the Laundry/New Management books — a good old fashion heist is fun. (I'm assuming...
• Commented on Summer webcomics
  Not mentioned so far: Lore Olympus — Modern take / retelling of some of the greek god mythos, focused mostly on Hades & Persephone romance. I love the way the author separated out the land of the gods (skyscrapers, social...
• Commented on Coming soon: Escape from Yokai Land!
  I for one am happily looking forward to getting my pre-ordered ebook since my bookshelves really cannot deal with any more mass! Cost wise, lucky enough to be able to not worry about a couple of extra quid — and...
• Commented on Lying to the ghost in the machine
  I think the big turning point was 1986, Rumelhart et al. They demonstrated that a 3-layer network could be taught by simple back-propagation to map common English written words to a set of phonemes ("the neural network learns to read!"),...
• Commented on Dead Lies Dreaming: Spoilers
  It doesn't bode well for Imp that he's Stage One of something that could grow into a competitor of The People's Mandate; even with no further training, as the background thaums (or a personal manna-source) increase they might get asymptotically...
• Commented on Editorial Entanglements
  As somebody who's spent some time as a slush reader — what makes a good slush reader for you? How do you get to be confident that there's a sensible balance between filtering out too little vs too much?...
• Commented on "It'll all be over by Christmas" (Part 2)
  Not to mention that Turing's work on A-Machines (what would later be called Turing Machines) was done in the mid 1930s — long before WW2, Colossus, etc....
• Commented on I ain't dead
  Simple question: in the UK, irradiated milk is common, and needs no refrigeration. How do they do that in that kind of quantity, and couldn't an identical facility be used to sterilize PPE? AFAIK milk is not a food that...
• Commented on "It'll all be over by Christmas"
  I think Johnson and the Objectivists (hashtag band name) are gonna get away with blaming the bad side effects of brexit on covid. They're already starting up the blaming covid-on-China line. The local tory-loving folk down our way are out...
• Commented on Infomercial Interlude
  I suspect a bunch of the bad reader reviews on "The Annihilation Score" weren't just from random misogynists but from people who couldn't imagine how a married couples' view of events prior to their separation could be so profoundly different....
• Commented on Infomercial Interlude
  Congrats on finally throwing Invisible Sun over the wall to the publishers for the (fingers crossed) final time :-)...
• Commented on So you think you can be a reality TV producer
  So I'm going to stand my ground. Stop hand waving, read the literature, light at least one fire, and figure out how something that's radically nonhuman in shape can make all four of these, can transfer a coal to tinder,...
• Commented on So you think you can be a reality TV producer
  Shhhh: Sixteen publicity seeking hate mongers (Katie, Piers etc.) shut in solo hotel suites for four months. Only interaction via custom mobile app — faked to convince each one they're winning. IRL none of this is broadcast — the show...
• Commented on Artificial Intelligence: Threat or Menace?
  And the headrest screens will go away, replaced by a mounting frame you can slot or clip your own device to, or rent a dumb screen from the cabin crew if you don't have a device to watch. This...
• Commented on Sucker bet (a thought experiment)
  Oh… just realised I managed to skim over the "You can spend up to 1% of your portfolio per year on whatever you like, without consequences for the rest of the portfolio. Above that, for every additional dollar you liquidate,...
• Commented on Sucker bet (a thought experiment)
  Okay — rough first stab: $25b for either purchasing the Murdoch media empire, or rebuilding one on the same scale. Because if the last 20-40 years has shown us anything propaganda is some powerful shit. Set a ten year timeline...
• Commented on CASE NIGHTMARE BLONDE, Part 2
  They've got ring-fenced state pensions and the NHS so they're buffered from the worst consequences of austerity They're not buffered from all of it tho… and the care/community cuts have hit many retired state pension folk I know very,...
• Commented on Someone please sack the script-writers
  4. Note that what killed Windows Phone wasn't the devices, but the lack of a viable app ecosystem. By running Android, MS will make an end run around this; and by encouraging third parties to plug into their API, they'll...
• Commented on CASE NIGHTMARE BLONDE
  Britain and Japan are reasonable sized countries. The US and Australia, not so much. The flip side is that I've encountered a fair few USA chums coming over for a five day break and wanting to know what to see...
• Commented on Normal service will be resumed eventually
  ...
• Commented on CASE NIGHTMARE BLONDE
  After the first month, don't bother topping it up unless you need to make outgoing calls—it'll accept incoming calls even if there's no credit on it, and you can leave it in a desk drawer with the ringer turned...
• Commented on CASE NIGHTMARE BLONDE
  Looking like Ruth Davidson may be resigning tomorrow. (fetches popcorn) I am finding it hard to see how Boris losing four or five days of Parliament scrutiny is worth this shit show…...
• Commented on Whoops Apocalypse!
  I find JRM's cavalier approach to punctuation … disturbing and, furthermore, pretentious. The whole style thing is typical of him though. It's a callback to "old" standards, and is wrong. It also plays into his eccentric Victorian bullshit — which...
• Commented on Ask me anything!
  An amoral weak-godlike entity runs overclocked sims of your good self + your publishers/editors and delivers complete final copyedited versions of all the remaining laundryverse + clan books to your laptop — then kills the sims. 1) Do you read...
• Commented on Story time!
  I know you're not a telly series person — but the recent DC Doom Patrol TV series impressed me. They went full on for the Grant Morrison-esque weird-ass Doom Patrol. Which shows some kind of fortitude by TV execs somewhere....
• Commented on Deaths and Deadlines
  I think the Independence chancers are a dangerous distraction at best and a fifth column at worst Another thing… they're not actually a party yet. They're not registered with the Electoral Commission. Why not I wonder? One reason might be...
• Commented on Crawling from the wreckage
  Clever folk successfully grew human esophageal tissue in the lab for the first time. Ethiopia & Eritrea finally made peace after twenty odd years of hot & cold conflict. Hopefully it will stick. Folk fold some evidence for surface water...
• Commented on Brexit! Means! Brexit!
  Royal Family merged with Disney. The Queen takes us to a unincorporated territory of the United States where the UK becomes half Disney World UK + half Epcot centre....