Nick Gibbins

Political guru, nerdy cult leader…

Choices, choices!

It still astonishes me that I vaguely knew Yarvin in the mid-90s.

Dare I ask what’s in them?

I think that you forgot the scare quotes around "art". Hope this helps.

Still, nice to see that Nathan Barley's still getting work.

Needs more Nathan Barley.

On the plus side, at least this time they're not (as far as we're aware) hiring private detectives to surveil dissident Warwickers.

Alas, they'd addressed that on a (now-deleted) page on their brand site. To quote:

"Using Beyond as an abstract noun captures the idea that ‘Beyond’ is a conceptual space where limits are exceeded."

Shall we just note that it's very on-brand for this rebrand and move on?

If it weren't for the fact that she's dedicated her life to making the lives of my friends more miserable, I'd be tempted to ask whether she was unwell.

N: Orkney, UK (59° N)
E: Chiba, Japan (140° E)
S: Margate, South Africa (31° S)
W: Victoria, BC, Canada (123° W)

Hah. Also my immediate thought.

And to think that I have been feeling guilty about the Inform 7 game based on the Traveller RPG that’s been a work-in-progress since 2022…

His father was a toolmaker?

But doesn't everyone have a London Transport photocard like that in their past?

Aw no! Very sorry to hear that.

That's lovely!

Oh yes, the David Roe covers. I wasn't keen on them when I first read the books in the mid-80s, but they've grown on me considerably since.

The cover of the Corgi edition of Anne McCaffrey's Dragonquest by Steve Weston. The cover painting features a gold dragon with distinctive double wings, viewed from the rear quarter.

Whelan's are certainly more faithful to the books, but I have a soft spot for Steve Weston's covers (for the UK Corgi edition) and the distinctive double wings that his dragons had.

That’s a new meaning of the word “huge” of which I was not previously aware.

Presumably “derisory”, “inadequate”, and “sub-inflationary” are not in the vocabulary they expect of their readership.

A demijohn full of fermenting elderflower mead. The label on the demijohn is barely legible, thanks to a slight overflowing incident which also liberally sprayed the sideboard next to the demijohn with sticky must.

And the next mead project: after the bread-yeast-redcurrant mead, I bought the elder teen more champagne yeast and a new hydrometer, as well as finings, yeast nutrient, and dried elderflowers. He set it fermenting while we were away, and it was lively enough to coat the sideboard next to it.

A belated update on the redcurrant mead. I helped the elder teen rack it off a week ago, and it’s actually not too bad. Fairly low ABV (he didn’t make note of the OG because he’d broken his hydrometer) which I’d guess was in the 4%ish range. A bit sweet, but otherwise drinkable.

I came here to say exactly this.

In the foreground, a small (20mm) common frog (Rana temporaria). In the background, a small unrepentant tortie (Felis catus) who really doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about.

Looks like it’s frog season. :(

#caturday

Honourable mention to the backers whose money they also stole.

In the grand scheme of things, losing £50 because I was foolish enough to back a Kickstarter from Unbound is just irritating.

The way that authors have been treated by Unbound/Boundless is unconscionable.

Scratch a transphobe, find a racist, etc.

The models underlying those LLMs and genAI systems are trained on far more data than just those books or images; the books and images merely provide context.

If the creators of those systems had no rights to use the data that was used to train the models, there’s still a breach.

When I was an undergraduate at Warwick in the early 90s, I took non-CS modules from maths, biological sciences and operational research.

It very much depends on your subject. STEM and medicine are worst for limiting choice outside their discipline, but there are exceptions. On the CS programme that I run, students can choose up to 25% of non-CS modules in their third and fourth years.