It's time again for my occasional political rant. As usual, these are the things I'd try to do if anyone were daft enough to put me in charge; they're also promises that would encourage me to vote for people who made them.
UK Games Expo is happening on the first weekend of June. I'd hoped to go, but having thought it over, I shan't be there.
Essen SPIEL are doing a better job than UK Games Expo did, but I've very reluctantly decided that I'm not going anyway.
So there was an old man who was known for his faith in God. Always ready to help out a neighbour, and just generally a nice guy.
UK Games Expo is happening on the first weekend of August. I'm really glad I'm not committed to going.
People over 50 are getting priority for second doses of COVID-19 vaccines, so we're told.
This time the plan to sell all your medical records to the highest bidder isn't even being announced, presumably so that you don't find out about it in time to prevent it the way people did last time.
Call of Cthulhu has a spotty history with automatic fire; it's one of the few rules that changed quite a lot between editions before the complete rewrite that was 7th. I don't think 7th has improved matters.
(Guest post from Gus.)
Put down your chow mein now. I only say that because the friend to whom I chose first to vent inhaled some of hers: apparently that's rather painful.
Someone sent me a link to a fan-made Traveller setting based on a USSR-derived interstellar power. And it's pretty interesting, except for the Cyrillic Thing.
I've been thinking about what it'll take to start running barbecues again.
Only without the mathematical literacy.
I vaguely wish I'd known that the most recent shopping trip I'd made would be the last one for the moment.
Officially last week it was still only possible to book a vaccination if you were over 55. When I'd tried it the week before (giving NHS number and birth date) I was quite properly told to come back later. But…
As of this week, I fall into a cohort eligible for the Covid-19 vaccine, one of the few things that makes me feel batter about being fifty-mumble. I like vaccines.
(Guest post from Chris.)
The Covid19 vaccine: it's a big deal, right? Right. But the actual vaccination, it turns out, isn't. Perhaps my experience will give anyone anxious about it a reason to worry rather less. If you have had a flu jab, it's very similar.
Shopping continues to be a bit strange.
There is obvious a certain Schadenfreude to be had in observing the flailings of the people who got caught during and after the failed coup in the USA. But I think one should go beyond that.
Buying drugs is more difficult than it used to be. I don't do it very often…
Shortly before I moved into this house, I decided that my pint Pyrex measuring jug was so constantly in use that I might as well have another for when the first was in the Sisyphean washing-up pile, and went out to the nearest kitchens shop (it was called Kitchens) and bought myself a second pint jug. I assumed, in my folly, that since it had the same function and was made by the same company it would be the same.
On the last day of the most recent isolation period, I went shopping. It turns out there were two separate panics on at the same time.
I think people just don't have the attention span to cope with something that goes on for months.
So it's to be a "lockdown" again. Only not.
The local council has issued a press release. Excuse me while I run round and round in small circles.
There is at long last an "official NHS contact-tracing app". Should one use it?
Mostly people continue to wear masks.
People have finally started wearing masks in the shops round here.
Haven't you heard? Masks are last month's thing.
Some personal behaviour seems to have improved since last time. (But I'm only taking one sample every two weeks…)
Things are mostly as they were last time in the shops; a bit better, a bit worse.
The "lockdown" has affected me relatively little: things I mail-order take longer to arrive, role-playing games have moved online, and I haven't seen my boardgame groups at all. But now it starts to feel as though people have gone into a kind of stasis.
Not that I shop in person very often anyway. But it's gone a bit strange.
So we finally got something like precautions being applied, though piecemeal and rather later than would have been sensible.
Well, we're fucked then.
It's election season again in the UK. These are the things I'd try to do if anyone were daft enough to put me in charge; they're also promises that would encourage me to vote for people who made them.
It is a truism that retail shopping is dying – and another that journalism is also dying. In both cases, the Internet is blamed. But I think it's worth looking a little deeper than that.
1999 mystery, eighth in the Robert Amiss series. Amiss is brought in to help an old, money-losing, right-wing weekly newspaper lose slightly less money. Which puts him in a prime position when one of the senior staff is murdered.
1997 mystery, seventh in the Robert Amiss series. "Jack" Troutbeck enlists Amiss to help the new but unworldly Bishop of Westonbury as his chapter suffers a rift between the high church gay traditionalists and the intolerant evangelical new dean. Murder is also involved.
Fantasy Flight Games has recently released Keyforge, a Unique Deck Game in which every deck one buys is different from every other. It's been getting mostly positive reviews. Why am I so comprehensively uninterested?
2010 Hugo- and Nebula-award-winning science fiction. Historians from Oxford in 2060 are visiting England in 1940, but things are going oddly wrong. Warning: this is going to be a bit of a rant.
Since December of 2016 I've been offering 3d printing services via 3dhubs. From the end of this month, it won't happen any more.
People continue to give directions to their houses, places of business, etc., but not to give the coordinates. Please fix this.
I have decided not to renew my membership of the RAC.
In principle I'd really like to have an electric car. I think burning fossil fuels is criminally irresponsible, but public transport isn't up to the sort of travel I want to do. So why don't I get one?
Just before the latest Snowpocalypse, I noticed this slightly odd set of roadworks and thought there was probably a sign missing.
2017 science fiction/investigation, 13 episodes; a tech billionaire, obsessed with finding the murderer of his daughter, builds a crowd-sourced crime-solving system.
A recent news story, the matter of Laura Plummer arrested and imprisoned for transporting a banned opioid into Egypt, has given me to think.
Even I (not the person most exposed to news media) heard Dire Warnings recently about original pound coins ceasing to be legal tender on 15 October.
In Marty Jopson's new book The Science of Food, he demolishes the idea of food pills by looking at the energy density of fat and working out the mass of fat-pills one would need to eat. But why would one restrict oneself to the energy that an unmodified human body can get from food?
I do actually like git. I find it needlessly obfuscatory and deliberately confusing in its syntax and terminology, but it basically does its job reasonably well. However, there are some popular blatant untruths that I think people would do well to know about.
There is a practice common to the road systems of many countries which we don't use in the UK. Why not?
I can't help noticing an obvious historical parallel which I haven't heard people talking about.
My customers on 3dhubs use a variety of software packages to build the models they send me; in theory, anything that produces files in obj or stl format will work. Some are definitely better than others.
I tried to give it a fair shake. Really I did. But systemd has now annoyed me to the point where I've been removing it from the systems for which I'm responsible and bringing back sysvinit.
A recent news item on Revolv home hubs made me want to revisit my feelings on the Internet of Things.
Many modern Linux systems assume that you will never have a root shell. Instead, you are expected to prepend "sudo" to every root-type command.
This has been a year when "Internet of Things" devices became relatively mainstream. Oh dear.
I have an idea for a relatively simple change which would remove some of my objections to the use of electric cars. This is less blatantly utopian than the last one.
Driverless cars, quite apart from privacy concerns, are solving the wrong problem. Here's what I want to build to replace the majority of transport infrastructure. It is unabashedly utopian.
There's a certain mentality in games (particularly wargames, but others too) which seems to be associated with tournament play.
The obvious story of woe of the recent General Election in the UK is that of the Liberal Democrats, who lost 66% of their vote share and 85% of their parliamentary seats compared with five years ago, leaving them about as much of a political force as the DUP. What went wrong?
Gresham's Law famously states that "bad money drives out good": if there are two currencies available, people will tend to hoard the one they trust and spend the one they don't. I think there's a different but allied process going on with items that are "good enough" driving out of the market ones that are good.
The Wycombe parliamentary constituency has been Conservative since 1951. It has often had candidates from obscure parties, but since 2001 there's been an Independent: one David Fitton.
It has become fashionable to claim that a remake or reinvention of a favourite book, film or whatever from when one was young "ruined my childhood". And inevitably it has also become fashionable to dismiss such overblown nonsense. I think there is potential for a useful middle way.
A small change to our numbering system would make daily use of numbers remarkably easier.
It's election season here in the UK – for the first time, since we've moved to fixed-term Parliaments, a protracted American-style election season rather than a few short weeks. These are the things I'd try to do if anyone were daft enough to put me in charge; they're also promises that would encourage me to vote for people who made them.
It was really useful to be able to plot arbitrary data onto a zoomable map. The only service to offer this was Google Maps; indeed, it was the last thing for which I was using any Google service.
Having recently had a truly appalling meal at a hotel that rhymes with Hark Hinn Hottingham, and heard more horror stories from people who were actually staying there, I thought about hotels' incentives to make things pleasant for their customers… and couldn't come up with any.
Accounting rules have perverse effects on real life. Here's an example dear to my heart.
Why does every large convention now seem to have an associated disease, the "con crud", generally a respiratory tract infection?
Homœopathy has some very strange ideas. But where did it actually come from?
A reader expressed surprise that I don't use a smartphone.
(Readers not in England, if any, please ignore.)
Have you even heard of care.data?