The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Ross Smith:

Lee @ 24: Are you sure it's the same Ron Miller? It's not exactly an unusual name.

Although, come to think of it, that would explain the Clarke quote.

Ingvar @43: I suspect that the mail manipulation syntax that is more truly directly from the Old Ones is the original sendmail.cf syntax.

There's a quote I came across somewhere (from memory so this probably isn't word perfect): "It is not true that sendmail configuration syntax resembles line noise. In fact it resembles the result of banging one's head against the keyboard for five minutes. Anyone who has worked with it will understand why."

I think Jim, and Kathryn @ 21, have it right. The fundamental truth behind all conspiracy theories is that chaos is scary.

Kennedy's assassination traumatized the western world because it was so public and he was so prominent, but we all know that equally pointless and tragic things happen many times every day. And as the world becomes more media-saturated, it's getting harder and harder to just quietly ignore that fact; it's shoved in our faces more and more. Hence the popularity of conspiracy theories in recent decades.

We might not like to admit it, but deep inside most of us there's a small, chaos-fearing creature that would rather believe evil people are running things than that nobody is running things.

don delny #5: I wonder why firefox doesn't default to trying to connect to sites using https first, and then falling back to http if that doesn't work?

That would be because it's not unusual to have different sites set up on the http and https ports on the same server. Always defaulting to https would sometimes get you the wrong one.

Jon @ 666: Correct!

Bryan @ 617: Terra Rttf naq Unz ol Qe Fhrff

Eleanor @ 630: Gnemna?

Looks like nobody recognised mine (360), so here they are:

Qrkgre va gur Qnex ol Wrss Yvaqfnl

Znggre ol Vnva Zvqqyrvavgvny Onaxf (and now I'm kicking myself for forgetting to mention that she was accompanied by a robot that transforms into a dildo)

Let's try a couple more, from older books that might be more recognisable...

Beautiful warrior queen summons unholy powers to murder her rival, then has second thoughts and fights her way across Hell to save his soul.

God-fearing imperialist hero battles sinister Russian agents, murderous Aztecs, even more murderous crosstime-travelling Amazon warriors, and rebellious native Americans before failing to prevent the creation of our world.

Jon @ 567: Ubgubhfr ol Oevna Nyqvff?

Nobody seems to have had a go at my two (360) yet. (Now that I think about it, I suspect at least one of them is too recent for many people to have read it.)

Fragano @ 456: Puneyvr Fgebff'f Zrepunag Cevaprf frevrf.

Ginger @ 181/396: Zvqavtug ng gur Jryy bs Fbhyf?

Debbie @ 231: I was thinking maybe N Sver Hcba Gur Qrrc (abg fher nobhg gur vapyrzrag jrngure ovg, hayrff vg'f n zrgncube sbe jung unccraf gb gur Mbarf).

Joel @ 390: We surrender. You and the SFBC win.

Zeke 344: Fvathynevgl Fxl ol Puneyvr Fgebff

Let's see, the two most recent books I've read are...

Heroic psycho killer encounters inexplicable murders, mind parasites, a rogue cop with mechanical limbs, and a pair of mentally twisted children, while simultaneously trying to save the world from the vengeance of a mad god older than life on earth, and make it to his own wedding on time! In a hurricane! (Really.)

Princess abandoned to aliens by her father and turned into a super-human cyborg, battles her way across a four-dimensional planet, on the way to saving the galaxy from a prehistoric alien monster locked in a crystal prison! (No hurricane, but only because nobody would have noticed it among all the fireworks.)

One of the things that disappointed me was that Lily remained pretty much a cipher right to the end. Apart from a few fragments where her life intersected Snape's, we're told almost nothing about her. We know much more about James, even though it seems fairly clear that Harry took after his mother more than his father in many ways.

Did anyone else get the distinct impression that all that aimless wandering about in the middle chapters was there mainly to stretch the plot out over enough time for Lupin and Tonks to produce a sprog?

Greg London #88: So, I've only read books one and two so far. I read a spoiler describing all of Deathly Hallows

I'd like to gently suggest that it may not be entirely productive to attempt to deconstruct the plot of books you haven't actually read. While I'd be the first to agree that the books have flaws, I think you picked very bad examples.

Now, as I'm reading this whole business in Deathly Hallows about the wands, and the "master" wands, and how Harry is the master of Voldemort's wand, because draco failed to kill dumbledore, confused the hell out of me.

Well, it didn't confuse the hell out me, because I'd read the book. It's true that Rowling sometimes pulls stuff out of left field, and it's also true that the Elder Wand and its associated lore were never mentioned in earlier books, but she does provide a fully adequate explanation (I thought) in this one, well before the fact. When Harry explained why he was the rightful master of the wand, I wasn't confused; my reaction was more along "Of course! Why didn't I think of that?" lines.

When Harry stumble into the spider's den in the dark forest, or more accurately, get carried off to the spider's den, and meet Hagrid's old pet, by all rights, they're dead. That the magic car shows up right at that moment is pure "cavalry to the rescue" out of the blue twist.

Again, you're judging somebody else's version of the story, not Rowling's. That was one place where I thought the movies left out something important. In the book there's more back story about the car, and the rescue makes a good deal more sense.

I'm not trying to claim the books are flawless, just that you should either read them and be able to discuss their actual faults, or at least stop blaming Rowling for what a Hollywood screenwriter or some anonymous online dude made of her story.

MAO (#72), recently I watched the DC of BTiLC with commentary from John Carpenter and Kurt Russell, and Carpenter said (and Russell agreed) that "This is a movie about a guy who thinks he's the Action Hero, when he's really the Comic Sidekick."

Of course, there are many who would argue that that sentence would still be true if you remove the words "a hamster does".

In the 1980s, before "wanker" was widely known in the US (see NelC #74), the writers of the TV series Married With Children decided that Peggy Bundy's maiden name had been Wanker. Her relatives were frequently mentioned and sometimes showed up in person, and by the time the studio realised what the writers had done, it was too late to retcon it out of the series.

Linkmeister @ 56: Let's just hope nobody tells them about the Diet of Worms.

I don't know anything about Ron Paul (never having heard of him before today), but to me the obvious interpretation of the South Africa blood-in-the-streets quote was "invest in SA while it's still run by Smart White People, before the Evil Brown People destroy it".

BTW, what's with the links to Jim Henley? I was under the impression he'd stopped blogging several months ago. All the linke to his site on ML today give me the same 404 error his site has been giving me all along.

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