The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Christian Severin:

Thinking while riding the bike to work or back home again: Yes. I find that there's a huge difference between thinking in a car and thinking on a bike. A friend of mine took the next step and now walks to work. He says going by bike still didn't give him enough time to ponder stuff.

A.J. Luxton @ 31:
"Power and Social Responsibility"

I guess Sparrowhawk would have had some enlightening anecdotes to tell, wouldn't he?

Sorry, but this looks much too small for an ordinary Roman camp. This looks like any small fortified settlement: big wall all around, small rooms with individual fire places, probably under a single roof all along the wall. You can find the pattern everywhere in the world: Peru, Israel, Italy, the British Isles...

Now, a Roman city would have houses the size of this settlement. A temporary Roman army camp would have wooden palisades and tents, not stone buildings, so there would only be the ditch and earth wall to find. A permanent Roman army camp of stone again would have had room for hundreds of soldiers and some of their families, so it would have been more of a city than this fort.

The only way I see that this could have been Roman is for a single Roman unit in the Eastern Provinces to desert and flee to Siberia (!) to settle there. But that would have made some waves in Rome, and the names of unit and centurio would be known.

But by all means: don't let's be discouraged from speculating. For instance, I pose that Aleksandr Karelin, the Siberian wrestler, descends from a long line of Greco-Roman champions that ruled that very settlement.

@abi:
Oh, do visit Carcassonne -- preferably in bad weather when there are fewer tourists in sight to break that medieval illusion...

dave @82:
While we're picking nits, shouldn't those be thermophiles?

Aaaaand back to work.

Xopher @ #13:

"Josh, I can think of several ways in which teleportation would make sodomy more fun, too."

You weren't thinking of something along the lines of Douglas Adams'

"I teleported home one night
with Ron and Sid and Meg.
Ron stole Meggie's heart away
and I got Sidney's leg",

with a cast of Ron and Sid and Jock, did you?

#60 is Uveb Cebgntbavfg from Fabj Penfu.

A fine addition to the Legion of Super Pets would be We3, cybernetically enhanced soldier animals. Armored mine-layer rabbits, anyone?

It's just a matter of time before we see remote controlled suicide bomber critters, you mark my words.

This stroke stuff reminded me of "My Year Off" by Robert McCrum, where he describes his stroke and recovery. Haven't read it yet, but plan to.
First chapter here.

Note that McCrum came home sick and wobbly in the evening and in the morning woke up half paralyzed -- definitely not your 3-hour window...

Hooooh boy... sounds like I was pretty late in refreshing my browser, huh? So many "me too!"s...

So how many is "a few dozen", Mr. Nielsen Hayden?

If I may delurk for just a second:

I don't know if the threats of disemvowelling were needed to achieve it, but I'm delighted at the civil tone and well-worded arguments in this discussion. There has been much food for thought and quite a few quotes which made this thread a joy to read.

Thank you all.

Re: bicycles:

I didn't want to post this on the First of April, to make sure it
retains at least a shred of credibility in the eyes of the poor USians
reading here:



Münster, "Bicycle Capital of the World", has about 270.000 inhabitants and about half a million bicycles.

Every street wide enough for a line down the middle also has at least one bicycle lane on the side.

Every traffic light at a street with bicycle lanes has separate bike traffic lights, often with separate green times.

There often are special bike lanes for turning left, where cars stop somewhat behind the bikes, so that the drivers have the bikes well in sight when the light turns green.

There are several hundred kilometers of bike lanes in the city, and
a total of eleven streets where cars are tolerated, but bikes have the
right of way -- kind of like pedestrian streets for bikes.

There are two big bicycle parking garages, one in the middle of the city (for shoppers, mostly), the other at the railroad station.
Commuters arrive by train, check out their bikes to ride to work, and
return in the afternoon to check in their bikes and take the train home.

Within the city, 35% to 40% of all trips are by bike.



In my eyes, there's a lot to be said for old cities with narrow,
crooked streets that never were adapted to the kind of traffic you get
in a modern US city.

I'm a bit surprised that nobody mentioned SKZB's Vlad Taltos as a contender in the Morally Ambiguous Hero category.

OK, he tries to do good, but he's nonchalantly killing people (well -- Dragaerans...) left and right, at least in the first couple of books.

OK, het Abiveld stuck with me.
Abi, do you have offspring? If so: does the gift get passed on? Maybe increased in effectiveness?

Just asking...

I had this vision of highly trained High-Yield Technology Disruptors sneaking close to the enemy HQ (they abandoned paradrops after a few unfortunate accidents), just laying low at the camps perimeter, watching as trucks stop, generators stutter, ammo and fuel dumps go up, communications go down...

Of course, in peacetime, they'd have to be stationed out in the wilderness, far from civilization, with supplies carried in in backpacks.
Until they manage to breed in a little more control into these walking anti-technology bombs, that is.

Is anyone else reminded of a truck driver rain god?

Abi, did you ever get offered money not to use some system or lean on a desk?

There are lots of games with active rules tweaking communities:
the games by Doris & Frank, for instance, usually get supplemented by additional rules invented by the playtesters or, later, the players in the wild. "Igel ärgern" ("Hurry up, Hedgehog") has more than three dozen rule variations built in, and their "Primordial Soup" has been spiced up by several dozen new genes.

Then, of course, there is the active playing community for Klaus Teuber's "The Settlers of Catan" or for, well, a whole lot of other games, really.

So the idea of letting others join in the creative process of tweaking a game isn't all that new -- but games like Fluxx or "Knightmare Chess" et al. allow the tweaking during the game, which adds a whole new dimension.

Chasing squirrels through
th'insulation foam,
dodging the poo-poo
where the pigeons roam,
watching kitties flee
from my softest pad,
all this is not half the glee
as back when I still had
(my)

Jungle hills, jungle hills,
jungle all around,
oh what fun it was to run
the Tricers to the ground, hey!

Re #27 & the German kidnapping case:

A short recap, just for comparison:
Magnus Gäfgen killed a bankers son, hid the body and demanded of the victim's family a ransom of EUR 1 Mio. The police followed him after he got the money in hopes of finding the boy's whereabouts, but in vain. When Gäfgen booked a flight the next day, they took him into custody. Gäfgen freely admitted to the kidnapping, but refused to disclose where he hid the victim. Fearing for the boy's life, the Chief of Police Wolfgang Daschner ordered a subaltern to threaten Gäfgen with torture (something along the lines of "pain you've never felt before") and, being a dutyful public servant, made a remark in the case file to that effect, knowing full well that this might cost him his job.

Gäfgen broke at once, admitted to the killing and led the police to the body. Daschner was removed from active duty, transferred and, two years later, sentenced to a EUR 10,800 fine.


The court's verdict basically said:
"What you did was wrong, and it will always be wrong. Nothing justifies torture, and besides, there were other means you could have used. Thus, you are guilty.
However, you were in a desperate situation and had the best of intentions, and you did not try to hide the fact that you overstepped your legal bounds, so we give you just about the lowest possible sentence and a stern talking-to."

If some German Jack Bauer pulls another stunt like this, I doubt he will find the courts to be this lenient a second time...


So what we have here is a narcissistic perp who knows that his game is over and that he has nothing to gain by holding out except for a few years extra time. If his victim would still have been alive by the time he was interrogated, he probably would have disclosed the hiding place at once to win a few points in court. As it was, he tried to remain a kidnapper, the center of a whole lot of frantic attention, for as long as possible, to keep his value high, so to speak. As a murderer, he all of a sudden becomes much less interesting.

So the one reason he held out long enough to be threatened with torture is also the one reason torture (or the threat thereof) would have been pointless in the first place.

Basically, it's like the terrorist saying: "Sheesh, it's not a bomb anyway, it's just a box with some wires and grandma's old alarm clock! It was a joke, OK? No need to come at me with the pliers, OK? Come on, I'll show you where it is. Sheesh..."
Doesn't really sound like a case for torture, does it?

@ #28, Martin G.:
I imagine it's because lots of medications need cool storage, and thus the EMTs will look in the fridge for clues to the medical history anyway. Might as well make it easier for them.

*inquiring glance in Jim's direction*

Of course, when Mrs. D said something along the lines of her feeling "not as guilty because she tried to kill herself before", she was just trying to justify herself to herself. However, since a suicide attempt does not mean certain death at some point in the future (as some here can attest), her justification does not come across as

"Well, she was doomed anyway"

but rather as something like

"Well, she was teetering on the edge anyway -- all I did was shove a little. What do you mean, 'pull her in'? She was mean to my daughter!"

-- which, if this ever makes it to court, will not look good in front of a jury.
Apart from all the other goodness and kindness, of course.

Annalee @13:
Driving a motorcycle on snow is possible, if not, er, particularly relaxing. At least, that is my experience from a new year's morning in the '90. I was on my way home after a party when the temperature dropped and it started to snow. By that time, I still had a few hundred kilometers to go, so I went on, slowly and carefully, just like all those thousands of tin boxes all around me. It worked.
But then it started to rain, and within seconds, the highway was covered with a millimeter of ice, then a centimeter, then two centimeters. By that time, I had managed to slide/ride/push my bike over to the emergency lane. 200 meters ahead of me up the hill was a rest area. It took me the better part of half an hour to reach that point, because I could hardly keep on my feet myself, let alone push the bike. Whenever I tried to walk the bike while slowly releasing the clutch lever, the rear tyre would spin wildly and my 200-plus-kilo bike would end up sideways in front of me. Fortunately, the ground was so slippery that I could just as easily swivel the whole thing back to point ahead, provided I kept it on its wheels. When it fell down once, it took me half an eternity to pick it up again.

Yeah, great fun.

Comment statistics for Christian Severin on the Making Light blog

Total: 19 comments. View all these comments on a single page.