Author Archives: James - Page 124
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Charlie Stross Rocks
I've just finished reading "The Jennifer Morgue", the second of Charles Stross's Laundry series (the first is the "The Atrocity Archive" and there is a third and a few more short stories as well). It is a fantastic read, I really didn't want to put it down, even though family life wouldn't let me read it all in one sitting. Avoiding spoilers the two books are both very readable and set in a sort of modern day techno-magic spy thriller piss take. The premise is that magic is just applied mathematics and there is a very low budget Government cover up, the British civil service meets Delta Green. Having been an official computer geek in the British civil service I can relate to some of this very well, which makes the humour very close to home, in a Dilbertesque sort…
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More snow
We're now on our second distinct period of snow this winter, although not all of the early December stuff had gone before Saturday's blizzard dumped another four inches on us in less than two hours. The reaction this time is noticeably different. Although road conditions are definitely worse there seems to be more of an attempt to carry on as normal. Shopping on Sunday was very busy and trains also appear to be running better than a couple of weeks ago, and the school is open
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The Atrocity Archives
A friend put me onto this book, saying that he was sure I'd like it. So I sneaked a copy of Charles Stross's The Atrocity Archives into one of my orders of Christmas presents. My only regret is that I didn't know about these stories before. Charles Stross has taken some lovecraftian horror, added geekery and then put it into a British civil service context for the conspiracy cover-up, although it is much more a case of hiding the cock ups as on a low The basic premise is that magic is just about doing mathematics, which makes using computers a serious occult capability. It sort of puts the sysadmin up there with sorcery, which given the jokes about getting SCSI to work needing black candles and a blood sacrifice makes some sort of sense. I certainly could identify a…
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Five Day Week – day one
This is my first official five day week for almost five years. Until now I've been working full time hours over four days, nine hour days (plus lunch) as standard. Now that Alexander is at school I need to be able to start work after dropping him off. So I'm on the train in right now (0857 from Merstham, although it actually left at 0910). Wonder how late I'll get in. I'm used to a late start being 0835 when the train after the one I normally get arrives. Right now it looks like a 1000 start (0950 actually).
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The Other Side of the COIN
Today was the September CLWG meeting. My game used the whole session and was looking to explore some of the things that might drive farmers to becoming insurgents in modern Afghanistan. I'm not quite sure that I achieved that, but it was a fun session and mostly worked as a game, although the economic model was quite broken. I'll leave it to some of the players to tell us the story of what happened. I had Jim, Mukul, Dave & Daniel as ordinary farmers, John R was the leading farmer and the acting Governor of the valley (not that he managed to persuade the others to do what he said much). Nick Luft was the local Chief of Police and Rob Cooper was the local cleric, and also a Taliban representative. On the whole the things I learnt from today…