vatine

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• Commented on Roll the dice
  You want something like Magic: The Gathering, a collectible card game. - The publisher lays out the rules and the setting in advance. So the information it generates is well known in advance and limited in scope. - The...
• Commented on Roll the dice
  It is possible (although not necessarily likely) that Wizards of the Coast (the current owner of the D&D trademark) would be in trouble, simply from the name. It is entirely likely that people would have (somewhere in the 3-12 months...
• Commented on Yet another novel I will no longer write
  This seems to be a refinement of Wolfram's "it's all cellular automata all the way down" from, what, 10 years ago? 15 years ago? Disclaimer, I spent about 30 seconds skimming his summary....
• Commented on Yet another novel I will no longer write
  For the United States, it is a very different thing. Beyond having the roughly the same elections to be held, there is additionally a plethora of different elected officials at the state level (Superintendent of Schools? State Attorney? Treasurer?...
• Commented on Yet another novel I will no longer write
  With a fair chunk of "but of COURSE house prices are uncorrelated!" thrown in. I mean, it's not as if, with much more houses suddenly on the market (because recession, so sell your overpriced house and buy a cheaper one),...
• Commented on Yet another novel I will no longer write
  Collective housing is generally not a thing (co-ops in NYC sort of excepted) and where it is becomes very restrictive (co-ops in NYC). The more features you seek to add the more restrictive the entry criteria become. I think...
• Commented on Yet another novel I will no longer write
  I suspect it's a reference to Robert Peel, source of both the "bobby" and "peeler" nickname for UK lawmen....
• Commented on Update to Public Appearances in a time of pandemic
  There's still hope (although quite slim) that CooNZealand can switch back from a virtual format, but I would not bank on it. Annoyingly, I have both room and flight booked and paid for. Ah, well....
• Commented on In other news ...
  Excellent read. It also explains why there's been a steady trickle of kudos on "At the Mittag-Leffler Instiute", something that's definitely increased in the last few days. In keeping with the tradition of having Significant Cover Identities And Code Names,...
• Commented on Playtime is over
  Bear in mind that the English translation of the Swedish cognate of "heimskr" is "horrible"....
• Commented on Sometimes I don't know why I bother!
  I once attended a talk by the man, it was (partially) that, but partially His Thing. Adventurous Stuff simply wasn't worth doing unless you powered the Stuff entirely with your own body (he was looking at a trans-Atlantic rowboat trip,...
• Commented on Sometimes I don't know why I bother!
  If Swedish folklore is correct, he did, on one of his butt-cheeks....
• Commented on Sometimes I don't know why I bother!
  In the "quietly bonkers" camp, there's Göran Kropp, who didn't think life as a military officer was sufficiently adventurous and decided that becoming an International Adventurer sounded more exciting. As it is a fact commonly acknowledged that any International Adventurer...
• Commented on Writer, Interrupted
  I must say that there's a few small things that I miss in Scrivener that my alternate workflow makes trivial. I would dearly like a way of sharing research/character notes between projects, since it seems the alternative is "bung multiple...
• Commented on The iron law of development
  Digital computers require more than just vacuum tubes, they require working memory. That means core memory at that time...and it took awhile for core memory to be invented. Objection. There were two variants of delay lines in use prior...
• Commented on Administrative note
  There's probably in-canon ways (for both canons) to explain this and make a cross-over work. But, it would be at best a bit awkward. There's already priors for "some can work magic without frying electronics", the Rivers do, after all....
• Commented on What are you reading this summer?
  Finished The Nightmare Stacks which was good, but probably should have a re-read (possibly a "whole series re-read"). In recent re-reads, Williams' Drake Maijstral series. Because who doesn't love Jeeves and Wooster with aliens, and Wooster as a professional burglar....
• Commented on Competition Time!
  It's probably ℵ0, as I suspect the number of documents on the Internet is countable....
• Commented on Competition Time!
  Name: FCG (Field Containment Grid) Mk 2 Description: A large sheet of canvas, with embedded conductive thread and flexible components. This piece of equipment comes with a dedicated carrying bag / water-proof cover and is suitable for bringing along on...
• Commented on 5 Magical Beasts And How To Replace Them With A Shell Script
  There was a proof-of-concept wilderness survival assistance jacket made by (IIRC) a Finnish company in the mid-late 90s, that used various flexible fabric to track your breathing, sensors to check your pulse and skin temperature (and, possibly, blood-oxygen saturation), a...
• Commented on Markov Chain Dirty To Me
  I'm happy to chat, should we find ourselves in close proximity. I wouldn't say I'm an expert, but I used to spend quite a lot of time talking to people writing voice synthesis programs, so I know what the "state...
• Commented on The Invisible Library and its perilous Christmas obsessions
  When I was reading The Invisible Library, one of my co-workers happened to ask what I was reading, so I showed him. At that point he said "Oh, I remember Genevieve, I used to go to school with her". Sadly,...
• Commented on Introducing new guest blogger: Genevieve Cogman
  Having read both The Invisible Library and The Masked City, I can heartily second the recommendation....
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  I can't speak for anyone else, but my thoughts on the whole thing is that I agree on "a starfaring species need to be able to cause fire at will", but I don't agree that the method for that necessarily...
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  They already tried banning encryption by any civilian citizen (late 90s, if memory serves me right), no matter in the world they were....
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  I suspect that the occasional m/39B round won't to appreciable damage, but if you're in the habit of using overloaded ammo and do a lot of long-distance paper-punching, you will, sooner or later, be very very sorry....
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  The main reason the Swedish Army moved from a 9mm pistol to a 10mm pistol as the general service weapon is that people insisted on breaking the one rule of pistol firing, "never use the 9mm SMG ammo" (it's over-loaded,...
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  There's certainly some element of that. I guess it depends crucially on how good resolution you actually need for the sensor package. With a beam follower, you can probably get away with somewhere in the region of 30 pixels total,...
• Commented on Science-fictional shibboleths
  Well, we've had "terminal phase steered grenades" for roughly 30 years. This is grenades that are not communicating with anything for the steering, mind you. It's programmed with an approximate target IR profile and once it's in the descent part...
• Commented on Nom de Teleport
  If that becomes a recognisable (or even better, popular) name for matter transportation, there would be a great need for a short story called "Scaper Flow"....