wyatt1048

I mean, I have a character to draw for Character Art Exchange, I have the 200th comic to do for DF, and I've volunteered to go into work to help out over the weekend. So why am I so drawn to trying nanomango next month?

yep, the garlic curse has spread and the tilde, tab, caps lock, shift and control keys on the left are all down now.

Luckily, I have a spare shift key. But I've never realised how much I use the control on the left. I'm hitting it all the time! and it sometimes has a toggle effect - have you ever used control as a toggle? That sometimes doesn't toggle off?

Plus, the stench is quite intense now. I seriuosly need to stop farting around and get a new keyboard.

Though it was a close run thing at times. There may be many valid complaints about the amount of health and safety regulations in the UK, but on the other hand, we don't have diggers on the side of roads flinging rocks at cars as they drive by. And it's not as if you could dive out of the way to the other side of the the road because that side had crumbled away.

And someone was overtaking us on that side, too.

Turkish drivers are crazy.

The trouble with Turkey is that everything is a very long way away. And the roads are falling apart and potholed to hell. And there are no maps - well, no good maps. So attempting to visit the greek ruins on the end of a peninsular that looks an hours drive ends up as being a three hour trip there. And then back.

The hotel that we stayed in was had started out rather nice, but - well, there was a tattoo parlour in the hotel itself. And they certainly knew their clientele. I think the whole area (Marmaris) was set up for the kind of person who wants to go somewhere warm, lie by a pool, and never leave the hotel, except maybe to do a bit of shopping. Which is fine, I just wish I'd known what it was like before hand so I could NOT GO. Besides, it was a little too chilly to do that (yes, I still managed to get sunburn, but I can get burnt sat indoors on an overcast midwinter's day).

So, it wasn't really as relaxing as I'd hoped. Mind you, I get rather stressed on planes, what with not being able to fit my legs in the seats, and I don't like being somewhere that I don't speak the language, so I'm just not all that keen on foreign holidays in the first place.

Portal 2 is going to be amazing.

Namely, the history of the space opera I'm trying to set up. Plot requires that a modern-ish level of technology Earth is faced with an extinction level event, and hollow out a few asteroids to get the hell out of there (no, the rest of the solar system isn't safe either. Or is too safe, depending on your point of view.) They travel to a nearby system, terraform a planet, move in, and then some set off towards another so that their eggs aren't all in one basket. However, at the same time, a few pockets of 'lucky' survivors on Earth are desperately trying to get out of there as well, having developed FTL travel as a result of the extinction level event.

The problem is, any timescale that's remotely realistic for sub-light edenship travel means those stuck on Earth should have a much greater population than is really possible for storline purposes. Even if I set the nearest habitable planet five light years away, giving five thousand years for travel seems awfully fast, (although this guy calculates that with 21 gigatons of fuel, they could get 25 gigatons of spacehip to Epsilon Eridani in under 750 years). My edenships can't have Orion propulsion for plot reasons, either, so they're stuck with Bussard's ramjets and fusion candles.

The problem is, how do I get them to the new planet and away (terraforming has a plot reason for going much faster than you might expect) without those left behind having enough thme to get into space, build a lot of space colonies and grow to a large enough number that it's difficult to get them out of there once FTL travel comes along. The Earth system is supposed to end up as a dead backwater, just a few miners in the asteriods, while the political, economic and social centres are elsewhere. It's hard to see Earth losing power unless there's both somewhere else for everybody to go, and enough spaceships to get everyone there - something Asimov's later stories have done.

The main solution I can think of is two stage - first, fudge the timeline by never stating it exactly. Second, details of governments during the extinction event and the subsequent expansion - since by definition, the genetic diversity of the surviving population will be much lower, in order to prevent massive inbreeding, there has to be some form of organisation that will assign parenthoods. Coupled with the small bunkers / space stations that a required for survival on an iceball Earth and cannot withstand inhabitants fighting amongst themselves, it seems inevitable that you'll end up with either a totalitarian government where a small ruling group chuck out any dissenters or a totalitarian government where a small ruling group pretend to be doing the will of everybody. That kind of government, based around preserving the status quo would still undergo upheaval every time there's a new ruler, and some would be expansionist, but since they'd want to keep a very close watch on any new colonies they set up, they'd grow slowly. An emphasis on using resources simply to survive and not having much left over for research etc would help a lot.

I suppose this stuff is all very far in the background of my story - which takes place thousands of years later once the first wave of settled planets are well established, and the second wave are getting on their feet, but there are a lot of tensions from that era that keep coming up - ancient prejudices and hatreds that won't go away, so I want to be clear in my head what happened.

I also want to be clear in my head without this damn cold! It feels like I've been punched inside my throat.

Why won't you take my money, insurance websites? Is it not good enough for you?

I woke up this morning with the sudden urge to go surfing. And it looks like tomorrow would be good for it, too. I wish I lived within striking distance of a beach with good waves, but it's a good three or four hours to Devon, and at least three to south Wales (it may only be a hundred miles or so, but the british road network is less of a transport system and more a storage solution for angry people in metal boxes. Sometimes with surfboards on the roof). That means it's a case of renting a place for the weekend (or camping, if it's the summer and not raining constantly, so that means renting a place), and the logistics of getting together people to go surfing is a nightmare. Just about the only people who I can go with would be my sister and her husband, who are busy most of the time. Wish I could go by myself, but that would be kind of dangerous to go out on my own.

Mm. It'd be bloody cold, but I just want to slide down the face of an unbroken wave again. When you get out of the water, if you've been in too long, you sometimes keep feeling the rocking motion of the swells passing beneath you, like breaths. I keep wanting that feeling now.

This encapsulates something I've been trying to get my head around for a while now.

For starters, she's made something worthwhile out of the Daily Mail, a feat of genius if ever there was one. Then, there's the simple beauty of fucking with perspective by creating a flat 3D image of something out of that thing. But the main thing for me is the information content has changed, despite the file size staying the same.

If you were to accurately describe where each letter on that page was, in terms of co-ordinates from a corner, the list would be the same length before and after rearrangement. The definitions would change - line one, column one, - T to line one, column one, - A, etc, but the list would be the same length. Given the list of locations, you could re-create either page from the differing lists, but the size of this data would be the same, because both have the same number of the same type of letters, and the same number of locations.

Except.

The first page, if re-created, would give you a message. A meaning (unless it's the Mail). The second, re-organised one, would not. Despite taking up the same amount of information, it carries extra data.

It's not that there is actual data, but just the convention that we agree that certain organisations contain meaning, while others don't. This fascinates me. There's probably a branch of philosophy based around it, but I don't know what it is, and I'm just stood here doing the typing equivalent of staring at the back of my hand and going 'Woah.'

Asked directly at the same forum whether TalkTalk would be willing to cut off access completely to BBC iPlayer in favour of YouTube if the latter was prepared to sign a big enough cheque, TalkTalk’s Andrew Heaney replied: “We’d do a deal, and we’d look at YouTube and we’d look at BBC and we should have freedom to sign whatever deal works.”

Yes, ISPs actually are threatening to cut off access to internet sites if paid enough by their competitors.

Of course, we could try routing traffic through countries with freedom of speech, but that would involve not being blocked at the source.

One of the problems I've been having with my space opera comic is the name. Every name I come up with is either too jokey and light, or as pretentious as fuck. While I don't want to give the wrong impression from the name, and it's definitely not a light comedy romp, at the same time I don't want to scare people off, and I need to keep the full-of-myself-ness to a minimum. So, with that in mind, I've been trying to make a list.

My present favourite (although that changes a lot): The Means. It does, however, fall on the pretentious side of things, but I can work in a good few references.

Alt one: Captain Thryach and the..., which changes according to the chapter title. Except the finale, which doesn't fit in that scheme. It sounds more like a pulp adventure, a lot lighter in feel, though.

Alt two: Last Chance To See. Extinction plays a big part in the plot, and the weaponised Boltzmann's brains are seeing rather too much.

Alt three: The Hopes of Doctor Fairchilde. Well, that's one hell of a mouthful. And I have to stick 'Fairchilde' on the end, to make sure no-one thinks it's about The Doctor, and it's up it's own arse, and - y'know, I'm gonna drop this one, I think.

The problem with names is that they're the first thing anyone sees, so it has to make a good impression. I have the whole thing plotted out in my head, and I can't look at it objectively. All the little references I get don't mean anything to you.

I'm ove rthinking this too much, I know. I end up getting paralysed with indecision over trivial things, and then end up rushing through the actual decisions.