The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Dave Bell:

They just need to employ the right sort of aviators.

There's this chap called Bigglesworth who would know how to handle hijackers.

Of course, you could just have a scarf with an antique coin weighting one end (though that detail may be unreliable).

47,418 words. Today was mostly good.

I've set up the black-clad ninja assassins.

PNH, all the restaurant particle needs now is the Downfall video.

The impression I get is that most "standard" romance is a short-life product. It's part of the modern equivalent of the pulps, and few writers get away from that.

(Now I'm waiting for a romance writer to start a new religion.)

From what I've heard, here and else-net, I also get the impression that publishers always have an internal tension between innovation and fear of risk. I recall one claim that standard contracts still contained clauses which had been rendered meaningless, possibly even unlawful, by the Copyright Act of 1976 (I think). Well, maybe you can blame that on lawyerly caution.

So something simple, like signing over the copyright for its entire life, might have started in the days of a 28-year life, in a market where is was worthless almost immediately. And it's stuck.

And some of the outrageous copyright grabs on the internet can be seen as attempts to deal with tech problems. How can an operation such as Facebook or Livejournal purge content from their backup system?

Besides, I know of electronic resellers (not books or videos, but still copyrighted sequences of bits) which advertise that customers can download replacement files, with no time limit.

So something such as the Ellora's Cave contract, I can see how it might come out of a system, even though the underlying assumptions are contradictory.

But Harlequin is not just guilty of sloppy thinking. This requires, somewhere in the chain of authority as well as in the planning, a degree of active immorality. This isn't "This sucks, but we can't risk changing it."

Carol @251

Storage underneath sounds good, but take into account the complications of a leak.

I've mixed feelings about the DW episode.

No spoilers, but don't play a drinking game where you take a sip every time the Doctor runs down a corridor.

And the Doctor Who Confidential episode has a bit too much of RTD explaining his own story. Trouble is, I think he did need to do that: there were bits where the script didn't get things over to the viewer.

Still, quite intense.

Fragano #36

I recall a fanzine entitled Marital Rats of Shaolin

36,618

Went reasonably well.

Doctor Who, I have mixed thoughts. After watching the Doctor Who Confidential which followed, I'm wondering why RTD felt he had to explain so much. Not that the story idea is bad, bur you could plat Spot the Cliche, and if you took a sip every time there was a shot of The Doctor running along a corridor you would have been well-oiled by the time the episode had ended.

Something similar happened to my mother, a long time ago. The doctors didn't communicate so well, but eventually it came out that she had suffered a stroke, and then seizures attributable to the damage from the stroke.

35 years ago, and she's still around.

This ain't good, but it's not a "Call House" weirdness. At least, the hoofbeats aren't likely to be passing zebras.

Wal-Mart does own the Asda chain in the UK, and the Wal-Mart name is now included in the signage, not all that prominently.

Several continental companies have expanded into the UK, where the supermarket industry apparently runs on better margins.

I recall reports that Wal-Mart were grumbling about the bad margins in the UK. They probably can't get away with some of the tricks they do in the USA.

I also recall reports of tricks that other British supermarket chains were pulling to reduce their tax bill.

One of the common tricks seems to be have wonderfully cheap own-brand products which only get sold in the larger stores. The out-of-torn malls rather than the shop just around the corner from the the market place which has been in existence since Henry V was a playboy.

There;s a trap in the idea of "Forty Acres and a mule."

You can't farm without the mule, so your small-scale farmer depends on the people who can provide mules. In the American South, just who do you expect the farmers would be? And who has the horses needed to produce the mules?

Stubborn mules are when things are going wrong with the relationship between man and beast. Mules were an effective working animal, ridden, carrying cargo, and for haulage.

I've even seen it suggested that, with the easy availability of man-packed anit-aircraft missiles, mules might still have a place in warfare, replacing the helicopters and aircraft which had supplanted them in the 1960s.

And the next year the Worldcon was in the Netherlands. I'm not sure there's ever been as international a worldcon, before or since. There was an open feel to the world that year, even tarnished as it had already become. Kuwait, anyone? I have a recollection that some Americans were already scared.

Maybe Japan? Did anyone get there using the Trans-Siberian Express?

The stories I hear, maybe it's just that they are so different to the image, but is the USA really such a dangerous country to enter?

There are people in the UK who would love to be still associated with a gopher.

Or a floor-cleaner of remarkable speed.

Running total: 18914 words.

It has been a good day. Good days and bad, I'm headed for 21 days for 50000 words.

Some of them might be good.

A chunk of this chapter needs a Morricone soundtrack.

The Dover Patrol, and especially the Dover Barrage, was not all that successful in terms of U-boats sunk, but the Germans held back from trying to pass through for a year. It was somewhere where the RN had a chance of finding and attacking submarines.

The Dover Patrol, and especially the Dover Barrage, was not all that successful in terms of U-boats sunk, but the Germans held back from trying to pass through for a year. It was somewhere where the RN had a chance of finding and attacking submarines.

Germany, in 1914-18, also had a much bigger problem getting their submarines into the Atlantic. While they had some bases in occupied Belgium, such as Zeebrugge, they still had to either get rhough the English Channel.

By the end of the war the Allies had escort aircraft, airships and flying boats, had a chance of detecting submerged submarines, and could attack them with depth charges. ASDIC and hunter-killer subs were in the development queue, though the R-class boats struggled to recharge batteries on their own engines.

Dieselpunk territory, like the Plan 1919 blitzkrieg.

And what's remarkable about WW2 is that the Allies never realised how vulnerable German battery production was. We know how stubborn "Bomber" Harris was about diverting long range aircraft from bombing German cities. That battery factory would at least have been a target of value.

Terry @130

Some of what my Grandfather did in that war was to train them not to be stupid in the trenches.

In 1916, the Somme, the British Army in the field was mostly pretty poorly trained. Some units could manage to carry out the fire-and-movement tactics that were in the pre-war doctrine, rather than the tactics most units used. Grandfather was a 1914 volunteer who first saw action in the later stages of that battle.

Even in 1916 the German Army was being worn down. They were the attackers in the Verdun battle.

I don't think anyone else could match the standards of the pre-war professional British soldier. It was the cooks and clerks of ordinary British regiments who ended up holding the line against the Prussian Guard at First Ypres.

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