So... like I said I would a few weeks back, I've assembled all the chapters of John Biles' Dance of Shiva and converted them to HTML, and that to MOBI format.  Right now I'm doing a double-purpose read-through and edit pass before a final MOBI conversion.  I've been fixing spelling errors, and I've been converting everything that's in ALL CAPS to italics (except SHIVA's speech) to improve the readability in HTML and on ebooks.  I'm two-thirds of the way through it as I write this.

Anyway, the reason I'm even mentioning it now is basically to ask itsune9tl to relay a query to Biles for me:  He's got a lot of mid-90s fansub-transliteration spellings of character names -- "Macky", "Celia", and "Wasyuu" in particular.  And he uses both "Macky" and "Mackie".  I would like to standardize the spellings -- which of the latter two would he rather see throughout the story?  And does he want Celia and Wasyuu converted to the modern accepted spellings?

Thanks.

Do you think the bigger body compared to the ring is better, or the smaller one? If I could have it both ways, I use the scaled-up one in robot mode and the other for the jet, but this isn't Transformers and I don't get to use that kind of space magic.

GERWALK is of course possible - fold up the lower ring, flip out the arms, drop the legs down with reversed knees - but not especially impressive due to having the arms on top of the fuselage, which just looks off. Of course, everything looks off due to being all cubes and blocks and would be subject to much additional rounding and filling, like what happened with the Crazy Bananas if you remember that. For blocking out the transformation, though, basic bounding box blocks are fine, and much easier to adjust to fit together precisely by putting the 3d position and editing numbers into the text boxes.

I could take the body even smaller, actually - the SPEX-09 Coleopter from Cruise Chaser Blassty where I stole that inspired the folding ring wing is still proportionately smaller, or at least looks it due to being a skinnier needle-feet style.

Wow. This simply does not happen... except that it just did.

Over a thousand bureaucrats - to be precise, retired bureaucrats, but the culture is strong - from the Department of Justice have called in public for the Attorney General to resign.

Quote:The Department has a long-standing practice in which political appointees set broad policies that line prosecutors apply to individual cases. That practice exists to animate the constitutional principles regarding the even-handed application of the law. Although there are times when political leadership appropriately weighs in on individual prosecutions, it is unheard of for the Department’s top leaders to overrule line prosecutors, who are following established policies, in order to give preferential treatment to a close associate of the President, as Attorney General Barr did in the Stone case. It is even more outrageous for the Attorney General to intervene as he did here — after the President publicly condemned the sentencing recommendation that line prosecutors had already filed in court.

Such behavior is a grave threat to the fair administration of justice. In this nation, we are all equal before the law. A person should not be given special treatment in a criminal prosecution because they are a close political ally of the President. Governments that use the enormous power of law enforcement to punish their enemies and reward their allies are not constitutional republics; they are autocracies.

We welcome Attorney General Barr’s belated acknowledgment that the DOJ’s law enforcement decisions must be independent of politics; that it is wrong for the President to interfere in specific enforcement matters, either to punish his opponents or to help his friends; and that the President’s public comments on DOJ matters have gravely damaged the Department’s credibility. But Mr. Barr’s actions in doing the President’s personal bidding unfortunately speak louder than his words. Those actions, and the damage they have done to the Department of Justice’s reputation for integrity and the rule of law, require Mr. Barr to resign.

Old thread is still useful.

I own a Canon EOS650 - a film camera built in 1987, that uses an electronic communication protocol between itself and its lens. It was the very first of its type - the promogenitor for all modern Canon cameras.

I bought a brand-new lens made by Canon - a 24-70mm F4 - with ultrasonic focusing and image stabilisation. This lens was designed in 2013 - long after Canon had stopped making film cameras - and comes with a 2020 manufacturing serial number - one of the first built this year.

I did this with both of them:




*Everything* works.

33 year of near pefect backwards compatibility is a thing to behold. When it would've been so easy to flip a bit somewhere in the lens's microcontroller so it wouldn't work on something this old - it was never done. And while I doubt any engineer at Canon ever had it in their mind that someone would buy a brand new lens for a 3-decade old camera, it's still amusing that it works.

Of course, the camera itself is running into its own limitations - it struggles a little because the focus sensor hardware wasn't as good. 

But the lens will probably work for another 2 decades - right up until 2D goes out of fashion and everything goes holographic.

As for why I did something this dumb? Someone bought be a voucher for Christmas and it was one of the few ways I could spend it.

The last thread hit 300 posts, so here's a new one.

Unexploded WWII bomb discovered in Soho, London, and prompts evacuations

I didn't catch Super Bowl LIV, and Super Bowl PR-RCORDD probably won't have the ads. Like last year, what were the best and worst ads?

I've noticed that the number of characters reserved to being in the social circles of particular SIs (i.e., each building's resident displacees) is probably larger than the number of characters that a particular writer wants to focus on. Which is okay, as far as I'm concerned... as long as everybody knows who the "super-reserved" characters are.

Here's my list:

• Akemi Zimmerman
  
• Ami Mizuno
  
• Hyoga Kazakiri
  
• Mii Konori
  
• Rei Misaka
  
• Rob Donaldson
  

Quote:We're fine, how are you?