The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Clifton Royston:

(Sign me up too for what Patrick said @203.)

I think the weak Singularity is well illustrated by some of Charlie Stross's comments - he noted drily while writing Halting State that he's been having trouble writing plots for near-future SF because by the time the book is finished, events alarmingly close to the book's topic have happened. (In this case, he was pointing to the Ponzi-scheme collapse of a bank in Second Life.)

People have trouble even remembering now that just 15 years back (1993) almost nobody in the general population used the Internet, many had not heard of it, and most of them could not conceive of why they would want to. Now most people in the "First World" can not imagine life without it. Compare that with how long it took for, say, television to be adopted and become an essential part of life. (It strikes me that someone coming out of a long prison term must feel like they've been air-dropped into the future.)

Because so much technology is now riding on the Internet, and can exist largely as pure software, technological rate changes have accelerated further. Where were "social networks" 10 years ago? But try talking to a teenager about the idea of getting along without MySpace, Facebook, and the like.

When the technological and acceptance cycles have gotten down to about 6 months, that's when things will become a whole lot stranger because they will be so far out of sync with personal human rhythms and cycles. Tune out the world for 6 months because you're depressed, or infatuated with a new love affair, and you might suddenly find you don't fit in any more, like a time traveler from the past.

I think we're heading fast into this zone.

clew: Have you thought of performing a negative example of Powerpoint use, as a learning exercise, incorporating all of the negatives? Then snap out of it for the second half, and explain what was wrong with your first half. I dunno, that just seems like fun to me.

My family got into doing Ukrainian style eggs when we were kids and we always blew the eggs out first. The hole it leaves isn't horribly big. We started with traditional designs but then got into doing more creative ones. Fantasy landscapes work quite nicely, going around the egg, and you can also turn them into planets, such as a lovely ovate Earth.

Thanks for the suggestions; I should have mentioned that she has been talking to the financial aid office - it was someone there who told her that she has to have the FAFSA, no ifs ands or buts - but it may have been an inexperienced employee, and she's planning to go back to talk to a supervisor or more experienced staff.

Being a geek, I have to compulsively blurt out that the song "Mr. Sandman" actually appears in one of the Sandman eps near the beginning of the series. In the crossover with John Constantine, it's one of the dream-related songs "playing" in the background of several scenes, before Constantine suddenly runs into Morpheus.

Note Nikolet's URL.

abi, great! Once I knew that my first guess was not it, I was
considering Jrfyrl as Gur Qernq Cvengr Eboregf (because of all the
cvengr references, as you said) but it didn't quite fit. It never
occurred to me to consider a different character!

I prefer imagining it was an earlier version of Danielle Dax's "Yummer Yummer Man" (a creepy little gem.)

Jinx!

Got my betatest email. Yay!

(Still no Farthing though, and I can't seem to find any place to contact Tor about the current giveaway.)

Rymenhild, that's certainly what I took it to be, also from looking at the hint. I like Eleanor's answer too.

That's a wonderful expression of his work.

Leigh, very nice.

I see others were ahead of me; I just saw on a mailing list. Sad news.

abi, Ohwbyq'f Oebguref va Nezf and Zveebe Qnapr? If it's not what you had in mind, it works beautifully with them.

Susan - I don't think there's anything tacky about a "tip jar" donation button. I usually prefer to support webcomics and such that I like by buying merchandise such as T-shirts, but sometimes I just want to kick something in and don't particularly want some object in return. Another option some places use is a public Amazon wishlist set up so that people who want to express appreciation for your posts can just order you something you've been wanting. That doesn't take the Paypal "cut" out of each transaction.

Hmmm. I still haven't gotten either my Farthing download link or a
beta-test confirmation. I don't know whether to blame my spam filters,
Tor's email provider, or something else. I got all the earlier download
links OK.

#144: Having digested Patrick's exuberant burble above, I think the
new Tor site is intended to be the Ultimate Fanzine from the
Transcendent Beyond, with everything that should accompany that,
including fan feedback and more.

For example, it will not merely include authors talking about
what their next books will be, but feature Transcended AIs explaining
what those authors are going to write in the following books which
hadn't even occurred to them yet, reviewing new genres which are soon
to appear in writing, and so forth. Now you'll be able to form opinions
on the literary successors of Slipstream and InfernoKrusher without
having to wait for those pesky writers!

Or something.

Cat, how delightful! Now you have me thinking of grabbing that ruleset and seeing if my 6 year old is interested, though I haven't played in ages. The teenager might be interested too.

BTW, for those who never read it, here's Charlie's 2006 essay which was referred to upstream:

Gary Gygax, World Dictator

Stefan: ... NPCs, yes, and also treating players' roles as Characters is most of what I meant by my comment up-thread about their shared invention of games as a medium for experiencing stories. If D&D didn't entirely invent that, it certainly took it out of hidden backwaters and into millions of people's lives, and eventually into popular culture.

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