Notices by Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop)

Looking at that photograph I see Elethiomel has been furnishing the Trump White House. Seems somehow appropriate.
https://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/world-news/jd-vance-ambushed-holiday-ukraine-31112271

@jzillw It's INCREASINGLY important to hook your reader's attention fast. Used to be you had a page to grab them, but current wisdom is that you do it in the first paragraph, or ideally the opening sentence. So I optimize my openings like crazy.

#WritersCoffeeClub 3/2 How accurately does the first line represent your style and voice?

"Skuld's salad days as a suicide bomber came to an end after her eighth successful mission, when she awakened in the reincarnation tank with orders to pursue a career in academia."

Current work-in-progress.

It's both a hook … and an indicator that we're about to dive into a science fictional take on the academic novel. (With assassins disguised as faculty wives.)

(It is 1989)

History: Bored with the Cold War? Here, have some democratic revolutions!

Everyone: thanks (still got PTSD, tho)

(It is now 2001)

History: Here, have some terrorism with a side of colonial wars!

Everyone: great, the end of history was getting boring /s

(It is now 2020-2025)

History: I heard you were bored? Here, have a plague and an ongoing climate disaster then an entree of nuclear-armed Nazis! They make EVERYTHING so much more exciting!

Everyone: 💀💀💀

Expecting NATO to re-form, minus the USA, seems logical right now, but it's not the biggest question: how long can the UN and associated international treaty arrangements and orgnizations survive under Trump/Putin? Note that this isn't just about the World Health Organization, it's also the World Trade Organization, International Court of Justice, World Bank, UNESCO, UNICEF, etc.

Trump obviously DGAF about any of this. He thrives of lawlessness.
https://mastodon.social/@AnnaAnthro/114089384697678697

Given that with Trump it's ALWAYS a case of DARVO, I think we can tell that Trump tried to blackmail or browbeat Zelenskyy and Z refused to get on his knees. Good.
https://mastodon.social/@glynmoody/114082993010139733

Why am I utterly unsurprised by this? Not by cops abusing access privileges, or even by other cops busting them, but by their dismal failure to tackle cybercrime that isn't right under their collective nose while the Home Office idiotically does the equivalent of trying to ban lockable front doors in order to prevent burglary.
https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/114077574926727980

@xanathar @andeux @timbray Yeah. Right now it looks like half the Project 2025 crowd mistook "The Handmaid's Tale" for a road map, and the other half read "Accelerando" and thought the cautionary tale was a utopia.

@lispi314 @Infoseepage @pluralistic @straphanger Not even that: Ireland's railway network was built and run along colonial lines prior to 1918 (Ireland wasn't seen as part of the British state, but as a dominion, by the folks holding the purse strings). It stagnated after independence then didn't catch up during the Irish economic boom of the 1990s-2010s (apart from Dublin's Luas (tram network) which was commuter transport in a crowded capital city). Belfast being in another country didn't help!

@mindpersephone @lxo Never mind Mars, they just pushed an update to Voyager 1 last year, 167 AU from Earth (1 AU = distance between Earth and the Sun; Pluto orbits up to 45 AU out).

@lxo Been there, done that!

No, I don't want to go back. But imagine if you released a piece of software and could *never* fix any of the bugs in it thereafter.

#WritersCoffeeClub 22 Feb
Is there a book you wish you’d written?

Yes: the BEST version of the books I HAVE written. Sometimes you run out of time, or energy, or ideas, or miss fine details. And once it's delivered and in print, it's gone (all of my novels are still in print, at least as ebooks: so I can't rewrite and republish them).

@Infoseepage @straphanger @pluralistic A besetting problem for efficient passenger rail is that it requires population density along the route—or at least, a lot of demand for travel between end-points. Ireland doesn't have that (except maybe Cork-Dublin-Belfast). The Scottish highland routes are similarly slow. But where you can connect major cities rail can out-compete air travel (on volume/price) and cars (on speed).

@Infoseepage @straphanger @pluralistic I wish Boris Johnson had gotten his bridge across the Beaufort Dike built as an LGV-spec rail bridge. Then we could have TGVs running from Dublin to Glasgow, on to Edinburgh, then over HS2 south to London and thence to Paris and Berlin via the Channel Tunnel and TGV network.

@straphanger @pluralistic Sllllooowww!

Here's the steel-wheel-on-rail speed record setting run from 1994: 574.8 km/h …

https://youtu.be/jJfDWtbioEM?si=Z012Tbb1rMcD7AmY

Donald Trump has been a KGB asset ever since the 1970s. https://bylinetimes.com/2025/02/21/donald-trump-was-recruited-by-the-kgb-under-codename-krasnov-claims-former-soviet-spy-chief/

Hitler issued his Enabling Act 24 days after the Reichstag Fire. Trump hasn't even bothered setting fire to the Capitol, he just horked up this decree 30 days after being sworn in. He's actually moving to dictatorship FASTER than Hitler.
https://infosec.exchange/@isotopp/114031098544111963

One of the many bad things about contemporary eugenicist bullshit: it's based on a misunderstanding of 1870s vintage ideas about evolution. Not 1970s, 1870s. It's all thoroughly debunked and disproven, but it plays to the cognitive biases of fascists (a 1920s-1940s political movement). And it’s what's driving RFK jr's attempt to wreck the FDA, CDC, and other healthcare regulators.

Thought for the day:

The media is constantly gaslighting us with the lie that our enemies are not our enemies and the problem is us; these are the same media that are overwhelmingly owned and controlled by our enemies.

And now for something COMPLETELY different:

Linux booting *inside* a PDF file. (Uses embedded JS to run a RISCV emulator and boot Linux to a command line prompt):

https://github.com/ading2210/linuxpdf?tab=readme-ov-file

https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/16/dev_linux_pdf/?td=rt-3a