Sean Carter

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• Commented on Announcement time!
  I think my favorite part of the Hugo Finalist announcements is that Bigolas Dickolas Wolfwood both received enough votes for their promotional tweets for "This Is How You Lose the Time War" to qualify for the final ballot under "Best...
• Commented on A Wonky Experience
  For some reason, people struggle with the idea that what may seem to be linear/logarithmic/etc. growth trends are actually just an S-curve. Thermodynamics do not allow for infinite growth in anything (I'm just hoping that collective foolishness/stupidity will start levelling...
• Commented on We're sorry we created the Torment Nexus
  A God Who Loves You? Warhammer 40K sort of did that with their plague god (Nurgle) who loves all living things. It's just that there are a lot more bacteria/fungi/parasites/etc. than humans....
• Commented on Announcement: 2nd edition Laundry Files RPG is coming
  Wasn't this the sort of dragon that Terry Pratchet described in Guards! Guards!? Not the big dragon, but Errol the swamp dragon ....
• Commented on Pass or Fail
  Iron Widow is fantastic and I second the recommendation. I mostly commented because I wanted to note: (1) that their name is Xiran Jay Zhao (not Xinran) and (2) they specifically ask that people use neutral pronouns for them. (Source:...
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  That might've been it. I read the first book of the series back in 2010 or so....
• Commented on Go away, Muse, you're drunk (again)
  Anyway, much as I like ecosystems based on who munches who, humans aren't a great food value: we grow too slowly and aren't efficient at turning cheap food into good meat. You'd want pigs for that job. This is assuming,...
• Commented on Minor updates
  This dovetails nicely with the observation that if the ritual of transubstantiation was real, the Catholic Church would likely have a long history of Creutzfeldt-Jakob outbreaks....
• Commented on An AI app walks into a writers room
  I haven't signed up for a ChatGPT account, but I'm wondering what it would do if asked to draft a chapter from an outline. I personally struggle with the initial act of getting ideas from outline form into narrative form,...
• Commented on Make Up a Guy
  I would imagine that the lots-of-launches option isn't used because it makes it harder to spread money around to lots of congressional districts....
• Commented on Strong and Stable!
  That's pretty much what I figured. The good servers that I'm in have a sufficiently well distributed moderation team that someone is always awake enough to warn/kick/ban people when needed. And discord that regularly has discussions around contentious subjects like...
• Commented on Strong and Stable!
  A well-moderated discord server might actually be a decent substitute for the comments section of this blog. You would need to have fairly proactive moderators and well-defined channels, but the format can work very well for rambling discussions. Which shouldn't...
• Commented on The gathering crisis
  Specifically, I think, the size of lumber used to construct a truss in a wood-framed house....
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  And then they do lock up the money - most of the economy is in stocks, and they play musical chairs with them, not actually create products or services. Which gets to something that OGH regularly points out: money is...
• Commented on The impotence of the long-distance trillionaire
  But not anticipation of anticipation of anticipation of growth. That would just be silly....
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  In this case it's not so much that security for bitcoin is bad as it is that people fail to understand that pseudonymity is very different from anonymity. Bitcoin is not, and has never been, anonymous. There is always an...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  Shoot. double post. Mods, can you please delete @950 and this one? Thanks!...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  My biggest complaint with a lot of modern board games is that there's usually only one or two optimal strategies. If everybody is playing those it often comes down to a question of who has better luck (and since nearly...
• Commented on Behind the Ukraine war
  My biggest complaint with a lot of modern board games is that there's usually only one or two optimal strategies. If everybody is playing those it often comes down to a question of who has better luck (and since nearly...
• Commented on Yokai Land Q&A
  @168, I operate on the assumption that the dwarves of cryptocurrency mining are on their way to unearthing the Hidden Fun Stuff of Dwarf Fortress fame. This is, of course, the beginning of the current timeline turning into the backstory...
• Commented on Crib Sheet: The Labyrinth Index
  I know that I'm responding to a really old comment, but I wanted to flag that Portland sadly ended the fareless transit service in city center back in 2012. It's particularly annoying because it made traffic there a little bit...
• Commented on Submarine coming through!
  jcandiloro @ 1021: Can you lay off the hate for people with MBAs For what it's worth, I read the complaint not so much as about MBAs per se as about those who think that because they have an MBA,...
• Commented on Dead plots
  Completely off-topic, but apparently David Graeber passed away yesterday. Debt was a really, truly remarkable book and he was still relatively young. https://twitter.com/nikadubrovsky/status/1301504647769792512...
• Commented on I ain't dead
  Re OGH @ 16: Even if it falls short, it's going to be spectacular My understanding of rocketry is that generally, given the energies and/or velocities involved, any sort of failure tends towards the spectacular....
• Commented on "It'll all be over by Christmas"
  I know that this blog's commentariat isn't filled with too many sport enthusiasts, but the combination of pandemic-driven lockdowns ending seasons prematurely (see also, the Olympics) and the economic collapse tanking the net worth of owners, there's going to be...
• Commented on Update to Public Appearances in a time of pandemic
  Not surprising to me to hear that Asher is climate denialist/brexiteer. His Owner trilogy felt like a pretty big giveaway about his personal political views. But it's a real shame because the Polity setting has a couple really interesting ideas...
• Commented on So you think you can be a reality TV producer
  RE: Charlie @488 Something has gone very, very wrong when the government has been captured by the mining lobby so effectively. I have a sneaking suspicion that the something is named Murdoch and is also largely responsible for government capture...