Profile: cada5bcd...
nostr:npub1hpcdfjpxrawnmu6ryh36ce7xu4qd54pu6xca394yhvmyzlery0tqvghjn3
Very much so, but the whole New Weird thing was, well, quite a thing. Good interview here with MJH in which some of this stuff comes up:
https://www.bigecho.org/m-john-harrison-interview
nostr:npub1yyx7sllvsrr0fauh2rdlqk5rakf3963g9xk4a7j5uhfcs00lr3kq42qa5g
nostr:npub1vg3pzw7vy669d57hczed0ssfgs3rcxvnuhkcjrl328hcme76u0fqn3fvc9 nostr:npub1hpcdfjpxrawnmu6ryh36ce7xu4qd54pu6xca394yhvmyzlery0tqvghjn3 It's hard to find a good genre writer who isn't influenced by Harrison. I had a chat to the lovely Julia Armfield recently about him and she related a lovely tale about how he encouraged her (his review of “Salt Slow" was how I found out about her work).
nostr:npub1hpcdfjpxrawnmu6ryh36ce7xu4qd54pu6xca394yhvmyzlery0tqvghjn3 Definitely – I have a feeling he mentioned this himself, but I might be wrong!
Finished reading: The Centauri Device by M. John Harrison 📚
I first read this when I was about ten years old and I’ve loved Harrison’s work ever since. It showed me that SF could be something different, that spaceships didn’t have to mean macho hero figures. MJH doesn’t like it, but I do. https://micro.blog/books/9780575088054
There's been a big kerfuffle about Cnet deleting old content, but I think most of the criticism is overblown and doesn't really understand why they are doing it. I kind of know quite a bit about this area, so I wrote a post about it.
https://ianbetteridgecom.wordpress.com/2023/08/14/on-cnet-deleting-its-archive/
Hmmm, now what's the phrase I'm looking for? Oh yeah – the record labels are parasites on creative people and should go to hell.
Casey Newton's description of Elon Musk as “Ric Flair without the charisma" made me proper laugh out loud.
nostr:npub1yyx7sllvsrr0fauh2rdlqk5rakf3963g9xk4a7j5uhfcs00lr3kq42qa5g Governments suck at it; they tend strongly towards that which gets them reelected. And people - absent a personal link between risk and reward - suck at it too, even if you can sort out the coordination on a shorter timescale than general elections.
Neither seem capable of letting a million flowers bloom, and both struggle under sunk-cost delusions.
There is a compelling argument that modern banking is society's way of laundering risk to avoid those issues.
nostr:npub1zdeyn9kskejzqunz4nxyzpmv87pa4eg7grwdc98w9lwlf798tu2qss75ft Governments by and large are not truly democratic. The US system is explicitly and by design a republic, not a democracy. The UK system has two unelected elements (the lords and the monarchy). Democratic government sounds great – if only someone would try it. Plus – there is no link between risk and reward in capitalism, as the last few years have proven.
nostr:npub1tpdrwck9a8vqgka9lnl33awyx0m5klfeqk5m74hqulu3exdhq9sqej3r9c Indeed. And the contrast is always made with revolution, which is presumed to be "the violent option" compared to "peaceful" capitalism!
nostr:npub1yyx7sllvsrr0fauh2rdlqk5rakf3963g9xk4a7j5uhfcs00lr3kq42qa5g Discouraging to see 'managed decline is best we can do' - I respect the sheer scale of the inherited mess but they're missing a solid commitment to improve it. I don't see how a claim they can get "on top of the backlog in six months" next to "The shadow minister refused to give a timeline on when a Labour government would stop using the barges and bring down the backlog from a record high of more than 172,000 cases" does that. "on top of" looks like it's doing heavy lifting.
nostr:npub1wc2gjg9unytkcawydvu39zvev0sq70e0gca3dg5as5nku3hqrv0qsdt4wa I think part of the problem is it may not be 172,000 when they take over - it could be 200,000, or 250,000. It's too early to say how long it might take.
nostr:npub1yyx7sllvsrr0fauh2rdlqk5rakf3963g9xk4a7j5uhfcs00lr3kq42qa5g Not in the UK so have only seen mention of these barges in passing, but it immediately made me wonder if there’s a plan somewhere and one of the steps that follows is ship them here to Australia. Feels like someone’s trying to repeat history 🙄
nostr:npub1q952el7nd9rqvrm2lp6y7q0k3x33zeq6k0z4ljgazvs58ers3x8q9s3uh5 Oh we're already trying to ship them to Rwanda.
Does this include the people at Twitter he fired because of what they posted about him?
nostr:npub1yyx7sllvsrr0fauh2rdlqk5rakf3963g9xk4a7j5uhfcs00lr3kq42qa5g Which Chromebook are you using?
nostr:npub1t8cgkdzewy9qudg4awxu35zeuyx9x2qu7dlpjet446ajuu59sd8qkmu7kl PixelBook Go. Lovely lovely lovely keyboard, long battery life too
nostr:npub1yyx7sllvsrr0fauh2rdlqk5rakf3963g9xk4a7j5uhfcs00lr3kq42qa5g Ian, how's the experiment with micro.blog going? I wanted to do the same (migrate to it) and wondered if there were any gotchas, etc. TIA.
nostr:npub1yt9s4ca7gxkpczzulh2wh6nk7hmfay7xr92vspqp4kdrjhwpfqlsrwpehg Going well! I'm impressed with it, and I'm seriously thinking about switching the main blog to it.
nostr:npub1yyx7sllvsrr0fauh2rdlqk5rakf3963g9xk4a7j5uhfcs00lr3kq42qa5g Labour will need to come in with exceptionally clear messaging about how bad things are, what their plan is to fix things, and how they will communicate progress.
Unfortunately they are more than likely to fail at the above.
nostr:npub154qfhr8r8qgdffypfl0jydk8ufrcmtrpam2ey6h5hzppg7s0u3ksa2evek Yeah, and I think that Kinnock was pretty clear - although they can't say how long it will take to clear the backlog (because who knows how big it will be by then?) they want it coming down within six months.
I’m critical of a lot of Labour’s approach but Kinnock is right: they’re going to inherit an absolute mess from the Tories in many areas and it’s not all going to be fixable on day one. The Tories have destroyed a lot of things, and messed up what they haven’t actively destroyed.
It's really fun being able to run the full on Linux version of LibreOffice on a Chrombook.
nostr:npub1yyx7sllvsrr0fauh2rdlqk5rakf3963g9xk4a7j5uhfcs00lr3kq42qa5g very small problem in comparison but every time I go to a xitter link my lizard brain tries to close the browser tab by clicking the X in the top left corner 😑
nostr:npub1dhwlpuzdgwqh6aga9vqwtw28d2lq9rf7mjeg587dtem4sjpeh64qlpp9mq You're not the only one!