Narmitaj

Recent Actions

• Commented on Pushing it back
  I wrote a short story, "Sandtrap", published in Interzone 187 in 2003, based on this sort of theme: explorers dealing with the implications of the necessarily limited evidence of a technological civilisation a billion years after its demise. http://www.nawaller.com/site/sandtrap.html ,...
• Commented on Dead plots
  "I remember reading somewhere that the USSR was run like a company" - there is an academic paper from 1961 about this that I think is or was fairly widely known: USSR, Incorporated Alfred G. Meyer Slavic Review Vol. 20,...
• Commented on "It'll all be over by Christmas"
  "How was the 30s for the UK?" Not brilliant - lots of unemployment. http://www.localhistories.org/1930slife.html But anyway my original point was less about the general misery various peoples might gone through than how used (and thus amenable) populations are to government-ordered...
• Commented on "It'll all be over by Christmas"
  And (sorry for replying to my own comment) even Donald Trump is not amenable to being told what to do by central government in a situation of national emergency....
• Commented on "It'll all be over by Christmas"
  “I am very curious as to how the local politicians and public in the UK and Europe are reacting to go home and stay there orders?” The Times had an article today about this for the UK: “Troublemaker or realist:...
• Commented on Yet another novel I will no longer write
  "People to travel might like to estimate how far they have" I came up with a very rough number for my father, to state at his funeral. He died aged 86, just 20 miles from where he was born. But...
• Commented on Yet another novel I will no longer write
  "Alas Babylon (1959) by Pat Barker" - It's by Pat Frank. Apparently it affected John Lennon who "spent all night reading the book, fueling his anti-war fervor and envisioning the world's population attempting to crawl their way back from the...
• Commented on Yet another novel I will no longer write
  @ David L "1/3 of all US aircraft losses in WWII were not due to combat." That proportion seems to be true of US aircrew fatalities, but according to this article, for aircraft losses it was the other way round....
• Commented on Yet another novel I will no longer write
  "But mostly there's a fundamental supply chain problem" - with toilet paper. There was a figure going round about 3 weeks ago that Britons had, apparently in a bit of a panic, bought £1 billion more stuff in supermarkets in...
• Commented on Canned Monkeys Don't Ship Well, the Remix Version
  Frank Landis @15 “no second generation astronauts.” Not fully official, but Richard Garriott was a private astronaut who flew aboard Soyuz TMA-13 to the International Space Station in 2008; he is son of 1970s Skylab & 1980s Shuttle NASA astronaut...
• Commented on Excuses
  Apologies for replying to my own comment - "I am 59, which is somehow still 50 to me" - but not to the chap behind the counter in the swimming pool this morning, who tried to charge me £3.80 rather...
• Commented on Excuses
  "Apparently, the UK police guideline is "10% plus 2mph"" I wasn't aggrieved I was done for 36 mph, but there was a chap on my subsequent Speed Awareness Workshop who had been done for doing 33mph somewhere, which seemed harsh....
• Commented on Excuses
  I am 59, which is somehow still 50 to me in the same way that £5.95 is magically £5 rather than £6 in almost everybody's minds. However, it turns out that 36 mph, for instance, is not actually 30 mph...
• Commented on Character and Exposition are Plot: Why most pop critical terms aren't useful to writers
  re: Kernighan & Ritchie - I used to work for Prentice Hall (the publishers of The C Programming Language) in the UK the 1980s and 90s and I am pretty sure (not that I saw the US stats) it had...
• Commented on Suspense is the key
  I suppose the movie Memento was kicking off a new in media res scene every few minutes! Slowly, the audience got to piece together what was going on, even if the lead character couldn't....
• Commented on Sometimes I don't know why I bother!
  Here's a couple of interesting lives that touch some key points of 20thC history, led by not-famous people but related to people I knew personally - Charles Sydney Gibbes, whose grandson (via adoption), also Charles, was my boss at a...
• Commented on Sometimes I don't know why I bother!
  Cecil Lewis had an odd and varied life of almost 99 years, from 5 years before powered flight to 25 years after the last moon landing. A fighter pilot in WW1 (starting while still 17, winning the Military Cross over...
• Commented on Writer, Interrupted
  I used to work in an office in a non-creative role and got used to it and quite liked it, preferring it to working alone from home in many respects. Later, I did once do a film-writing job in the...
• Commented on We'll all go together when we go
  And online (apparently legally) here: http://eidolon.net/?story=The%20Moral%20Virologist "Originally appeared in Pulphouse Issue 8. Reprinted pp. 7-17, Eidolon 11, January 1993. Copyright © 1992 Greg Egan. Reprinted with kind permission of the author."...
• Commented on Constitutional crisis ahoy!
  Funny if the "smart unionist PM" turns out to be Scottish-born Gove (or indeed Liam Fox)....
• Commented on Constitutional crisis ahoy!
  May "utterly loathes being constrained by human rights" - but she did say this morning (not in the speech but in answer to a question) that coming out of the European Convention on Human Rights was not on the table....
• Commented on Constitutional crisis ahoy!
  Kelvin MacKenzie, editor of the Sun and a big anti-EU cheerleader has, rather astonishingly, come out with Bregret within just four days! Buyer's remorse, he called it, though as a commenter somewhere said, you can't have buyer's remorse when you're...
• Commented on Constitutional crisis ahoy!
  If we're quoting lyrics (though this one is a different band playing different tunes), a couple of bits of King Crimson's "Epitaph" from 1969: The fate of all mankind I see Is in the hands of fools. [...] Confusion will...
• Commented on Metacommentary
  @ Vanzetti "Maybe we need a few permanent comment threads on the usual topics?" But will making permanent those "usual" topics, aka the standard off-topic strange attractors, create completely new attractors with completely new off-topic obsessions?...