sonofsanta

Bottas looks to be flying around Baku at the moment. That long straight is good for the Williams... Gets real tight at places, this track. Turns 8-11 past the castle are sloooow.

On a YA front (and YA is really good, don't ever believe anyone who tells you its inferior--it has different aims in its plotlines, but if anything its a more competitive market than adult fiction, and even higher quality) I really enjoyed Naomi Novak's Temeraire series. It's a retelling of the Napoleonic wars... with dragons. A British ship captain accidentally comes into possession of a rare egg being sent from the Chinese to Napoleon, and inadvertantly becomes a dragon rider. Marvellous stuff. Other good fantasy: Joe Abercrombie for yer new fangled grimdark fantasy; Scott Lynch's Lies of Locke Lamora is exquisitely constructed; Patrick Rothfuss' Name of the Wind and Wise Man's Fear are gorgeously written. Although it's now been a five year wait for book three, and still no sign, so, er, maybe not one for those of you fed up with GRRM's workrate. (Fun fact: Pat Rothfuss was a WotF winner about ten years back, and I discovered, during an anecdote related by Kevin J Anderson, that Rothfuss already had the trilogy finished then; he's just been revising it since... )

As it happens, I do--Krystal Claxton is an IT technician for a school district in the US, and her story from WotF31, Planar Ghosts, was just podcasted in two parts if you want to listen along for free Part One, Part Two

Sword of Truth is definitely fantasy by numbers. About par for the course for 80s fantasy I've been reading N K Jemisin's Inheritcane trilogy, which starts with The Hundred Thousand Kingdom's (which is good) and then the Broken Kingdoms (which is absolutely incredible). I devoured the whole thing in two days. First time in a long time I've done that. Just starting the third book now. Those of you with a Kindle, a spare evening, and a deep and abiding love for our Dread Lord Cthulhu would do well to read The Ballad of Black Tom. Only a short novella, but absolutely glorious. It's a retelling of The Horror at Red Hook (one of Lovecraft's most racist stories) from the perspective of a black man dealing with all the racism of 1920s New York. Superb stuff.

Got caught by this at my daughter's school earlier this week. Topped up for her lunch money, only to get an automatic email 18 hours later asking "did you finish your transaction...?" I can't fathom why they've made the change. I already have an account where I hold my money before I send it down as lunch money. It's called my bank account.

I thought Kylo Ren was interesting for being something different from the usual calm, controlled bad guy. We've always been told the Dark side is about passion and letting go, but had no-one who showed even the slightest trace of it. Yes, he's childish, spoilt and wimpy... as is the entire First Order. Hux is hardly old enough to be a general, especially compared to the bridge of the first Death Star, so I think it's deliberate. I also expect Kylo is going to have the biggest arc across the films, and he needs to start at this point to have room to grow. Personally I reckon he's made himself a Light Side agent, and is trying to bring down the Dark Side from within (hence his speech with his Papa on the bridge), and the trilogy will be about his redemption.

Ooh, excellent. I usually write to ambient noise. Music is too distracting, sadly. Cheers!

Amazing Might want the title updating to include a spoiler tag though, cos there's stuff from within the last couple of episodes on there. Tagging @elsiegee40, @witch

An article on Team 17, legendary Amiga developers of yore Worms or bust: The story of Britain?s most tenacious indie games company | Ars Technica (@Dos_Box: the Ars articles about the history of the Amiga that I was talking about at EDIT are linked above. They'll take you a while, but well worth the read )

Surprising no-one the repression in America is incomprehensible. But then is it a surprise that people try to hide their homosexuality, internalise it, and grow to hate themselves, when the country is so anti-LGBT the UK Foreign Office specifically warns LGBT travellers against going to certain states. On the topic of "was he ISIS", the FBI Director James Comey has said: It appears the IS link essentially boils down to inspiration, and radicalisation through reading material online, judging from President Obama's comments (in the linked article). Just a very sad, confused, and angry man, with easy access to assault weapons.

@BKW-SM--how do we go about getting the upgraded software for this? We've been using the grants feature for a while but have to phone up when we need a student removing, which is a bit of a pain. It also doesn't remove the unused portion automatically for us--was this added in? We're on 6.00.0052 (according to the properties of the .EXE, date modified 17/6/2013--which may be the install date, to be fair).

The point is not "whether or not they know for sure", it's about not putting barriers in their way. Who are we to know whether a trans kid "knows" or not? I've no experience of that particular dissonance. It may well be that this is one area where you can know from an early age, but unless you've been through it, you can't comprehend what that certainty feels like. Gender is complex. Humans are complex. Happiness is hard enough to come by in this world. If wearing a skirt is all it takes, that seems a pretty easy thing to allow.

Fair enough. /shrug Apparently so

My only mental defence against some of these is to hope they are specific youtube sketches people are looking for. That was my only explanation for "help i pooped my pants", cos if people are genuinely unable to change their kecks without asking Google first...

The attacker wasn't an Islamic extremist, it seems, in that he doesn't appear to have been trained, groomed or directed by ISIS. His relatives and his ex-wife have described him as very lacking in his religion. We can only theorise why he claimed it was an ISIS attack (and once he had, of course, ISIS happily took credit), but I suspect it was just to create even more terror. The guy was American and homophobic, and that seems more relevant so far than a last minute claim on the phone that the attack was in the name of ISIS. We don't know, but the anti-Islamic sentiment it's stirring up in America again is disguising the real issues and just leading to more hate. We had such a shortage, y'know. As to Owen Jones: the Sky presenter was needling him and trying to get him to declare if it was a hate crime or terrorism, and Jones was trying to point out it was both, and there is no need to pigeonhole. As he said later in an article, if it had been 50 people shot up in a synagogue, you wouldn't get a Jew on the show and ask them to decide if it was terrorism or anti-Semitism; so why get a gay man on the show and ask him to decide if it was homophobia or terrorism? It's pretty clear it was motivated by sexuality. His father has described how Omar became enraged when he saw two men kissing in Orlando a couple of weeks ago, and it was, after all, an attack a gay club on a Pride night at the end of an LGBT festival. It was clearly targeted. I don't understand why anyone should try to claim it wasn't homophobia--how does that help the situation? Why try and commandeer a community's suffering? (Not aiming that at anyone here, I should be clear, not at all. I'm talking generally.) And with regards to the "we're all humans" debate--the point is that American legislators have been trying very hard to make LGBT people feel sub-human, with all the idiot bathroom legislation etc. Homosexuals are not happy equals in the US right now, despite the marriage decision last year. That's why the Sky News presenter doggedly trying to ignore the sexuality of the victims was so enraging. It's like saying "9/11 wasn't an attack on America because we're all humans!". The context matters. I know too much about this from too much Twitter and it is making me sad and angry. (Oh, and Trump is a vile and terrible human being for using the murder of 50 innocent people to say "I told you so". that man.)

Do you mean the email from following the link in the block page? You can just set up custom block pages and then edit what you need to your heart's content. There's plenty about the custom pages in the Help files.

Er, not as far as I know--what's TYT stand for? Most of the above is from too much Twitter, as a lot of the people I follow from my writing are American and queer.

Felicia Day on Twitter: The most disgusting reaction to all of this are the politicians offering "thoughts and prayers" to a community they have repeatedly condemned and legislated against. They can rush through legislation overnight to stop trans people using the "wrong" bathroom for "public safety", but they apparently can't do anything at all to prevent this (says only nation where this regularly happens). There were 372 mass shootings in 2015. More than one a day. One tweet I read on Sunday pointed out that there have been 8 mass shootings in Canada in 20 years; there have been 7 in the US since Monday. It's not just the gun laws, which are clearly insane in prioritising a 250-year old concern about government tyranny over the lives of real people (as if a "well regulated militia" could do squat against the best armed military in the world; it is apparently without a sense of irony that the same groups of people supporting the NRA support the militarisation of police and the enormous growth of the US military's capabilities). It's the level of intolerance and hatred in the culture. I know we're not perfect, and have more than enough troubles, but in general groups like the EDL are looked down upon; in America, racism, sexism and homophobia seem almost the default for people in positions of power, from the police to the goddamned Republican nominee. For that level of hate to be that acceptable is not normal.

On the bright side, considering Microsoft's recent "success" with acquisitions, we can expect LinkedIn to be closed down within two years, thus putting an end to all the spam.

A few more winners to make me want to leave this planet and never come back. "is germany in europe" "is a chicken a bird" "is space real"

Warning: will make you feel old and depressed. idiots.win A browser game that types a few letters from the start of a Google Search and then offers you 5 of the top 10 suggestions--and you have to guess which one is the most popular. For example: You will feel old when you have to Google the answer to find out wth it's referring to. And you will feel depressed when you realise people are Googling questions like the above I started off selecting options like "what is jury duty" but soon realised people are idiots and are actually asking "what is justin bieber's phone number". Assuming maximum stupidity is a pretty safe tactic.

"Imperial Guard" is ok now, though

hnnggrhhh so many writing jobs on my list i can't i just hhnnnnnnnnngggggggrrrrrrhhhhhhh

DON'T DON'T DO IT STOP TEMPTING ME

If I'm in France, then I have bigger issues with Google Maps' navigation