The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Tim Hall:

Show all comments by Tim Hall.

Posted on entry Open thread 132 ::: November 16, 2009, 01:07 PM:
What's the best response to idiotic articles like this? Ignore the troll, expose to ridicule, or feed his address to the spammers?
Posted on entry Open thread 131 ::: November 07, 2009, 01:35 PM:
@Summer Storms #366

I've read the "Chat Room/Forum Problem" link and the associated comment thread, it's left me wondering whether the author has his head up his own arse, or whether he's just looking for something completely different out of social networking sites like Facebook than I am.

He's got a point about forums declining over time, but the problem isn't "Endless n00bs", but grumpy old-timers who think the community 'belongs' to them and only them.

Posted on entry Happier Halloween ::: November 01, 2009, 09:39 AM:
Going out to a gig on Halloween night, and then walking back to my B&B past many, many pubs meant I saw a lot of Halloween costumes.

What on earth (or sea) is the connection between Halloween and pirates? There were a *lot* of pirate outfits last night.
Posted on entry Happier Halloween ::: October 31, 2009, 11:26 AM:
@Nix

I'm off to a concert as well - Mostly Autumn at Burnley Mechanics. I have no idea whether it was my suggestion that prompted them to put the song "Ghost in Dreamland" back in the set for this tour :)

Second year running I've been to a gig on Halloween night - last year was Panic Room (who share two band members with Mostly Autumn). First encore was keyboard player Jon Edwards wearing a fright-wig and playing Bach's "Toccata and Fugue in A Minor".
Posted on entry Open thread 131 ::: October 27, 2009, 04:33 AM:
I wish some people would use an Oracle database rather than grafting tentacles on to already cumbersome spreadsheets.
Posted on entry Open thread 131 ::: October 26, 2009, 09:05 AM:
Last visited Edinburgh in July 2007 - I was there to see the support band at Bryan Adam's concert at Murrayfield Stadium, and decided to make a long weekend of it. It's a beautiful city with (as Charlie says) some great beer. Next time I visit, I want a native guide, though. I'm sure I missed the best bits.

The weather was glorious all weekend, *except* for the duration of the concert, when it pissed down all evening. As seen in the photos of the weekend.


Posted on entry Moderation isn't rocket science ::: October 21, 2009, 08:19 AM:
Raphael #230

Take a Made Tim Laugh Point for that one.
Posted on entry Tor.com ::: October 14, 2009, 05:50 AM:
"Halloween San Fransisco" looks pink, square and tinned to me.
Posted on entry Been lied to so long you wouldn't know the truth if it came up and kissed you on the mouth ::: August 14, 2009, 01:10 PM:
John Stanning #141

While calling GWB "Hitler" was childish, the parallels between Fox News and 1930s Nazi propaganda is much more disturbingly accurate. This is just Evil.
Posted on entry Been lied to so long you wouldn't know the truth if it came up and kissed you on the mouth ::: August 14, 2009, 12:46 PM:
Now Fox News is claiming Britains NHS is a terrorist recruiting tool.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2c-JEx-Kfvc

This crap makes me so fucking angry I want to kill someone.
Posted on entry Remember To Wear Your Brown Shirt ::: August 04, 2009, 04:29 PM:
Oops. Previous post should have read "...are they really planning civil war...".

Blame the think-faster-than-type demon...
Posted on entry Remember To Wear Your Brown Shirt ::: August 04, 2009, 04:13 PM:
It's difficult to judge the situation from the other side of the Atlantic - are the right really planning civil now they're frustrated at the ballot box? Because that's what you're making it sound like.
Posted on entry Montreal by train ::: August 03, 2009, 08:04 AM:
Steven M. Bellovin @ #15

To someone used to using cross-border trains in Europe, a 2 hour wait at the border for immigration and customs checks sounds like something out of the cold war!

In Europe the officials tend to board the train at the last stop before the border and work their way through the train whilst it's on the move. They'll check the papers of as many passengers as they can before the next stop, so quite frequently you won't see them at all because they don't get as far as your coach.

The only place I've seen them go through a train while it's stationary is at Chiasso on the Swiss-Italian border, and that's only because the train has to make a prolonged stop there anyway to change locomotives.
Posted on entry Robert A. Heinlein, technological nostalgist ::: July 30, 2009, 08:18 AM:
Fade Manley @ 125

I really enjoyed Verhoeven's movie precisely because I hated the book - it remains the only book I've thrown across the room in disgust. It was the obsession with corporal punishment rather than the militarism that really annoyed me; that's always been a fetish for the reactionary right in Britain. Reading it felt like being stuck in a lift with Lord Tebbit.

I still think the world of ST resembles the end-point of the world envisioned by Dick Cheney.
Posted on entry Robert A. Heinlein, technological nostalgist ::: July 27, 2009, 04:38 AM:
Re: broken-down trains:
Over here in Britain, due to a serious lack of joined-up thinking between train companies and train builders since privatisation, we've ended up with different fleets of passenger trains running over the same tracks that have incompatible couplers. Which often means that when a train breaks down, they can't just couple up the one behind to push it out of the way, because the couplers don't match.

As for rescue locomotives, Virgin Trains have a dedicated fleet of rescue locomotives, all of which are names after characters and machines from Gerry Anderson's "Thunderbirds".
Posted on entry Domestic Terrorism ::: June 25, 2009, 07:57 AM:
The trouble with terrorism is it's such an emotionally-charged word that almost everyone tends to indulge in ideological gerrymandering depending on which groups they want to include or exclude.

You could argue that if the purpose of terrorism is to cause fear and disruption for political ends, then John Reid (the British Home Secretary who started the War of Liquids) is a terrorist.
Posted on entry Open thread 125 ::: June 08, 2009, 01:24 PM:
LMB MacAlister #378, KeithS #376, Tom Whitmore #375

Thanks for the advice

Said individual is definitely at the level of an casual acquaintance rather than a friend. He responded to a strongly worded online comment of mine that said those who voted BNP insulted the memory of the dead of D-day by posting a boilerplate anti-immigrant rant in response.

He's vehemently denying that he's a BNP supporter or apologist, but he's defriended me on a certain well-known social networking site.

I don't think he's a hardcore nazi skinhead. If he was I would never have had anything to do with him in the first place. But I've found out something about him I would really not have known.

Posted on entry Open thread 125 ::: June 08, 2009, 08:29 AM:
Question here for the ML hive-mind:

What do I do about friends or acquaintances who support or at least act as apologists for the neo-Nazi BNP? Do I try to talk reason into them, or do I simply cut them out of my life?

Sadly this is not a hypothetical question.
Posted on entry "But this is good!" "Well, then, it's not SF." ::: April 24, 2009, 07:43 AM:
Ajay #257:

the local chain bookshop, which has an entire shelf stack labelled "Tragic Life Stories" (known in the trade as 'misery memoirs', apparently)...

Who on earth actually reads this stuff? Nobody I know will admit to it, but somebody must, or they wouldn't keep publishing them.
Posted on entry Wrong About Everything ::: April 20, 2009, 08:01 AM:
My cynical side wonders if one reason for the Bush administration's enthusiasm for torture was that it 'played well with the base', and was thus useful for Karl Rove's electoral strategy.

Just reading the trolls on this thread makes it pretty obvious that the wingnut right really loves torturing 'bad guys' because it feeds their power and revenge fantasies.

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