Recent content by Autumnal

I’d read that thing, jian.

I finished Hailey Piper’s All The Hearts You Eat, and it remained amazing throughout. It won’t be for everyone, but it does its thing so very well. In particular, without ever compromising her anger at the perpetrators of cruel injustice, Piper didn’t make her antagonists into cartoons. They...

Some of the best scenes in S.M. Stirling’s To Turn The Tide, with time travelers from 21st century Vienna to the Danubian frontier during Marcus Aurelius’ reign, have modern historians in the library of a nobleman’s library, weeping as thy examine title and read works none of us now ever can.

That Matrix theory struck me as a very strange plausible possibility early on. Still does. I was here at The Thirteenth Floor, minus the very last scene so that the movie ends with the cop in the rain. And eXistenZ, of course.

Over the decades, I’ve known several fairly successful folks - George R.R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, Harry Turtledove, Barbara Hambly, Dan Abnett, John Scalzi - for whom this doesn’t seem true at all. Just the opposite, in fact. Most of these owe some of their fame and success to being opinionated...

Definitely still true.

It’s an oddity of my health that I have weirdly little retinal damage despite a diabetic catastrophe that led to me losing 120 pounds in 4 months. I have friends dealing with it, though.

Dashiell Hammett, who wrote The Maltese Falcon, was one of the really big figures in the field. Another of his books, Red Harvest, was filmed as Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars and Last Man Standing and others; the original is set in a contemporary-to-Hammett small California town. His novels...

@Ryujin as a fellow diabetic, let me encourage you very strongly to get your eyes checked, and regularly. We are vulnerable to damage that can’t heal, and serious diabetic retinopathy really, really sucks. Your eyes fill up with blood from burst blood vessels in the retina (which messes a lot...

One for my fellow Tolkien nerds.

The seven levels/frequencies of timelines play well with the Fare ladder of stat levels, too. Early work by Robin D. Laws, later famous for a lot of stuff.

This reminds me of Dad’s joke about health care during his Army Air Corps basic training, in 1943: You could have trenchfoot, in which case they’d swab your feet with iodine. You could have strep throat, in which case they’d swab your throat with iodine. If neither of those cured you...

This is really good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anarchy:_The_Relentless_Rise_of_the_East_India_Company So is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Age_of_Capital:_1848%E2%80%931875 That’s actually the second of what became four books in a series. I recommend them all - Hobsbawm wrote...

The “probably” part goes away if you check the names of TSR (and other) early RPG creators and the names of early computer gam designers. They’re…not exactly the same, but close. :) It’s not at all exaggerating to say that a bunch of the folks who left the tabletop biz continued to write RPGs as...

Oh yes. It’s one of the great tips for copyediting. (Another is to start at the bottom of the page and go up line by line. You can use a sheet of paper or something to cover the lines above your current one.)