Some say, he was taken from an elephant - others, that bureaucrats file in his name... all we know is, he's not The Donald, he's The Donald's European counterpart. 

And he hath unleashed a statement upon twitter which has managed to say what everyone sane has been thinking these last few months/years, inflammed the red-tops across the UK and basically left half a continement going 'what'.

It's rare for a politician to let slip just how utterly fucking pissed off they are. Especially when the stakes are this high.

This is brilliant. 

https://twitter.com/eucopresident/status...2293266435

https://features.propublica.org/navy-acc...ign=buffer

Quote:The collision of the vessels was the Navy’s worst accident at sea in four decades. Seven sailors drowned. Scores were physically and psychologically wounded. Two months later, a second destroyer, the USS John S. McCain, broke that grim mark when it collided with another cargo vessel, leaving 10 more sailors dead.
The successive incidents raised an unavoidable question: How could two $1.8 billion Navy destroyers, protected by one of the most advanced defense systems on the planet, fail to detect oncoming cargo ships broadcasting their locations to a worldwide navigational network?

As you may recall, I had Luna introduce herself as "Mauno Luna" to Motoki in chapter 2.  This was just me compressing "Mau no Luna" -- "Luna of the Mau" -- into something that looked like a proper name.

Well, in chapter 3, Luna asks Doug to get her identity papers like he obviously has.  And I said to myself, "Say, is 'Mauno' a real surname anywhere?"

Answering that question has suddenly turned a "utility" scene -- "Hi, Luna, here's your ID."  "Thanks." -- into something a lot more fun, as I get caught up in what has occasionally been the unexpectedly entertaining part of writing this story, the research.

And because I am a cruel, teasing author, I shall leave it at that.  <evil grin>

Good news, Rajvik!  The rest of us, maybe not so good…

For those of your who have been living under a rock, you may not have heard that the governor of the Commonwealth of Virginia, Ralph Northam, is in a bit of hot water for wearing blackface back when I was like two years old.  The photo in his medical school yearbook he apologized for being in, then he said he wasn't in the photo because he wore blackface somewhere else.  And his wife had to tell him not to moonwalk at the press conference.  So, things are not looking up for him, and the resignation seems like it should be coming soon.

But his successor, Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax, he has an accuser suing him for sexual harassment.  If this goes on too long, the Democratic party will start asking him to resign, so as to live up to our MeToo cred.

Which leads us to the next in line, Attorney General Mark Herring, also a Democrat.  Looks like he'll be moving up, and oops, today he also admitted to wearing blackface to a party back in 1980.  People are already calling on him to resign.


Which leads us to the next in line, the Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates.  Who is that?  Well funny story, back in the 2017 election, the 94th delegate district was very close, and was ruled to be an exact tie.  So a lots were drawn, and the seat went to Republican David Yancey.  This was enough to give the Republican party a bare majority in the House of 51-49, rather than a 50-50 split with a Democratic tiebreaker.  Because of this, Republican Kirk Cox was elected Speaker, and may find himself in the Governor's chair.  In fact, all three statewide offices could go to Republicans, now.

Statewide control of the entire government could flip because of scandal, and because of one single voter in the 94th district.  You know who you are, Scott.

It's the little things which make a difference sometimes.

Polar express: magnetic north pole moving 'pretty fast' towards Russia

Navigation based on magnetic north is going to be tricky for a while until the poles flip or it slows its movement.

And here is yet another reason to consider CNN fake news, because even when they are being factual, they are biasedly covering the democrat's asses.

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2019/02/03/us/ra...index.html

Look, it is no secret that I don't like CNN, I was around when they started and even then their bias was so apparent that we called them the Communist News Network. Then when they went all in on covering Bill's ass when his misdeeds were so telling that the only real reason he wasn't successfully impeached was that the crimes didn't reach the bar, but were a state issue, it became the Clinton News Network.

This though, this goes beyond the pale, an article that if you boil it down to basics is saying that its okay to be a racist, so long as you are a progressive. Yeah no, its time to call out their bullshit for what it is, and maybe the progressives at the top while were at it.

A boy in Indiana was arrested after posting Siri's reaction when he told the Apple digital assistant that he wanted to shoot up a school.

Fox News has the story, so YMMV.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/indiana-boy-1...o-shoot-up

This is encouraging because its possible that the kid was just being an ass, seeing as he made no threats to a specific school or person... but the threat was taken seriously by other people and reported to the authorities.

A thread for this year's Superbowl ads, and reactions to them.

It's a little early for this year's commercials as I post this, so a retrospective with a Canadian twist. (Yeah, we're really grasping at the Canadian content rules here...)

So I took a quick look at the rpg.net thread to which Evil Midnight Lurker linked in his "I'm back" message.  I'm not going to post there -- I'm so horribly embarrassed of/by City Beyond the Gate that I don't want to get into a discussion of it.  But I'm going to offer a few tidbits about it in case anyone wants to carry them back to rpg.net.

First off, it wasn't originally written for publication.  It was an adventure I wrote for my original Narth campaign at the old Simulation Games Union at Princeton University, which ran around 1981ish to 1984.  It's not written for Oerth.  What people don't really remember any more is that the initial books for AD&D1 were absolutely littered with throwaway references to Gygax's Greyhawk campaign with absolutely no context to them.  So when I created my campaign, I actually went through the books and found all these little details and wove them into my own world so I could just cite these things without thinking about it or juggling some kind of translation into my game world.  Cuthbert and his mace were two of these details.  Consequently, the adventure wasn't written for Oerth because Oerth as a setting that anyone else could use didn't exist yet -- hell, no one knew the name "Oerth" yet except maybe Gygax and his players.

One of the posters on the rpg.net thread said something about viewing the adventure in the context of the 1980s.  That's off by at least a decade.  The adventure was originally written and played in early 1983 -- and the Borribles books which inspired it were set in the 1970s, so technically that's the "current era" of the adventure's London.  Even so, some of the stuff I included, like the beerwagons, were probably still anachronisms.  But they were there to begin with -- because, you see, the original adventure was explicitly set in the world of the Borribles -- it was a crossover.

(As a side note, when I actually ran the adventure, I had friends who had read the Borribles books roleplaying some of the characters -- and the game sessions spontaneously became my first experience with LARPing when my players and my "cast" just fell into character and didn't need me for anything for hours.  I just sat back and enjoyed the improvisational theater.)

Anyway, that's where some of the weirdness came from.  Dragon's staff -- IIRC Kim Mohan was the editor at that point and was my main contact -- loved the whole thing (obviously), but they didn't want to get into the whole hassle of getting permission or worse paying to license the Borribles.  So I had to translate a whole bunch of stuff from copyrighted to arguably original material.  It was a lot of work, and I didn't change any of the world background that I didn't have to.  

Also, keep in mind that this was, well, not before the Internet, because it existed, but decades before the Internet became the world's instant reference for every fact under the sun.  Also, I was doing the rewrite after I'd graduated, and was no longer able to simply walk up-campus to spend an afternoon researching in Firestone Library.  I had no easy access to any kind of reference works to fact-check "my" London against the real thing.  (Other than maybe a 1984 World Almanac and a 1976 Webster's Geographical Dictionary.)  So the best I could do with the deadline I was operating under was to file the serial numbers off, blur a few telling details. and hope for the best.  Unfortunately that meant more than a few details that were appropriate for the Borribles setting became anachronisms and inanities in the final version.  And that on top of stupid errors like leaving pre-decimalization British currency in the adventure.

When these errors and inanities were pointed out, it didn't take long for the whole thing to become such an embarrassment that I didn't want to ever think of it again.  And it shamed me into making sure my research for all my future works, with only a couple lapses, was as rigorous and right as I could make it.

About the only good memory I have of the article itself is the check I got for it -- which I brandished in front of my mother as proof I could earn money as a writer.  (She had actually said that she didn't believe they would really pay me for something so "silly", so when I showed her the check for what in today's money was close to $6000 she was quite literally stunned into silence.  And for years afterward when I would complain about being short on cash, she would ask, "can't you write something for your games again?"  She never did quite grasp that there were usually many months between the writing and the paying...)

I just got a digital copy of a book as a Kickstarter backer reward. It's available in two formats: EPUB and MOBI.

That would mean something if I had an ebook device.

Any suggestions for decent reader software for either or both formats for Win7?