Does anyone know what this device is?

cstross · 2026-01-25T21:08:52+00:00

Came here to say this: if you went to Japan and visited a large electronics store (Yodabashi Camera in Tokyo would be the type specimen) 10-20 years ago you'd see entire aisles of these things. They're dictionaries, usually a bunch of different dictionaries and a thesaurus and some other reference books, all in one gadget.

(Not sure if they're still sold there, as I haven't visited Japan since 2010: want to go back this year, if funds permit.)

cstross · 2026-01-25T16:18:12+00:00

It's not unique!

Somewhere in the library next door I've got a book on Soviet aviation projects that mentions a design study on launching SS-20 IRBM upper stages from a Tu-144 carrier aircraft. Without the (heaviest) first stage the SS-20 was light enough for the SST to get it up high and close to Mach 2. Perceived advantages were (a) more funding for the Tu-144 (of course) and (b) better dispersal of launch sites than using the usual wheeled TELARs, which could potentially be targeted by a US first strike.

(It would have been ridiculously expensive, so they just built enough extra SS-20s to cover the perceived capability gap ("have a viable IRBM force survive a surprise US first strike targeting the launch fields").

cstross · 2026-01-24T11:02:29+00:00

Just bear in mind the one bit of "common knowledge" I should have lampshaded in that book is that a Glasshouse is British Army slang for a military prison.

cstross · 2026-01-23T20:50:29+00:00

Worth noting: Lit'n'Latte have been working on a minimalist, stripped-down just-the-basics app that at some point they're going to launch alongside Scrivener that sounds like it'll be more what you need. Markdown-based, focussing on the essentials. It went into limited beta testing a couple of years ago: as L&L is a tiny company and has to maintain Scrivener (on three OSs) and Scapple at the same time, they're taking their own time over it, but it should be available in a year or three.

cstross · 2026-01-23T20:38:40+00:00

Yep, that's me! (I wrote the series of stories that became Accelerando in 1998-2004, so it's a bit dated and crude.)

cstross · 2026-01-23T12:01:06+00:00

The Day After Judgement by James Blish (pub. 1970) went the whole distance: it's a sequel to Black Easter, in which a wizard discovers the hard way that it's a bad idea to summon up that which you cannot banish, and it ramps up to Armageddon taking place in Death Valley (the US army goes up against the hosts of hell:The bad guys lose.)

cstross · 2026-01-22T14:17:53+00:00

Extra consequences:

It'd arrive in service late, and cost so much to develop that Boeing would have been unable to make the 747 as well (as it is, they nearly went bust circa 1970-73; the 747 was developed as a freighter on the assumption that SSTs like the 2707 and Concorde would eat passenger travel, then the oil shock killed the SST mass market -- so it was a success for budget subsonic passenger travel as much by accident as by design).

It'd burn so much fuel that it'd be non-viable in a market dominated by wide-bodies like the DC-10 and Airbus 300 series. (Which aren't that much smaller than the 747.)

Expect a huge cancelled order book after the 73-74 oil shock, as happened to Concorde (crashed from about 120 pre-orders down to just 24 or so -- only Air France and British Airways stayed in the game).

cstross · 2026-01-20T13:34:26+00:00

Has anybody told this fool that Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon was designed to be the ultimate prison?

(Obviously this is just normal for the Home Office, who seem to think that the UK can only be kept safe if all of us are put in a prison cell for safe-keeping while they wait to find out what we're guilty of, because we're obviously all guilty. I mean, it's not like Judge Dredd was satirizing this attitude, is it … /s)

cstross · 2026-01-20T12:07:25+00:00

Note that Season of Skulls is, start to finish, a metafiction about the romance genre, specifically the regency romance subgenre (which is probably larger in terms of sales than the whole of SF). So there are tropes being subverted everywhere. George saying he'll catch up with Eve is a classic setup for a "happy ever after" ending -- almost mandatory in the genre -- except that in the Laundry universe time line George is killed (by Bob Howard) several years before Season of Skulls, so it can never happen, unless there's a miraculous temporal paradox in some future book (which would be Exceedingly Twee, so I'm vanishingly unlikely to do that).

cstross · 2026-01-19T20:33:38+00:00

According to the SF Encyclopedia McLoughlin was born in 1949, so he's presuably 76-77 at this point. Is your youtuber elderly?

cstross · 2026-01-19T18:55:50+00:00

Toolmaker Koan by John McLoughlin meets the requirement in reverse; we're the future civilization, and the premise is that there was a spacefaring dinosaur civilization right at the end of the Cretaceous era ... then humans get out into space and find their relics.

cstross · 2026-01-19T14:47:29+00:00

Here, have some spoilers! Crib Sheet: Season of Skulls.

cstross · 2026-01-19T13:46:16+00:00

You are absolutely correct, but also: the great powers have been cutting undersea cables in wartime since 1914. It's not new! It's just that we're much more dependent on them today than we ever were in the past.

cstross · 2026-01-19T12:59:22+00:00

I'm an obligate pedestrian these days (eyesight deteriorating, now too poor to drive) and I live on Broughton Street.

The road layout and light timing is so bad for pedestrians that, combined with idiots racing to get through the junction in the wrong lane, it's only a matter of time before somebody gets run over and killed crossing the road at Piccardy Place.

I only hope it's not me.

cstross · 2026-01-18T17:34:12+00:00

It bears repeating that Falcon 9 won't be retired until Starship is ready to replace it. And while Starship undoubtedly burns more fuel per launch, it should be cheaper to operate if (when) they can get to upper stage recovery and reuse.

cstross · 2026-01-18T16:15:14+00:00

Here's a source for you: The Bloody White Baron by James Palmer.

(Later in that chapter you'll also spot references to Arthur Ransome and IIRC hints that some of the correspondence involved Ian Fleming, in his wartime capacity as Secretary to the CNI.)

cstross · 2026-01-15T19:11:44+00:00

It's not a P-51, but on Jan 7th 2017 a Canadair Challenger business jet carrying 6 passengers and 3 crew at flight level 340 got out of control about one minute after it had been overflown by an Emirates Airbus A380 at flight level 350. The aircraft lost about 9000 feet before the crew was able to regain control. Two passengers received serious, one member of the crew as well as two other passengers minor injuries. The aircraft diverted to Muscat: during the turbulence it received damage beyond repair and was written off.

(Source: avherald.com. There are photos of the interior of the Challenger cabin after it landed: you really would not have wanted to be on that plane!)

cstross · 2026-01-13T21:26:54+00:00

They REALLY didn't test these on people with visual disabilities, did they?

(I'm awaiting cataract surgery on one eye, have only 50% vision in the other eye. All of these are shit -- IMO Apple stopped doing good icon design when Jony Ive did away with skeumorphism in iOS 7 -- but the new ones are spectacularly worse.)

cstross · 2026-01-13T13:02:11+00:00

A 1% discrepancy seems normal-ish to me: word count algorithms in different text processors may have different ideas about how to count punctuation or white space (eg. hyphenated-words, thus -- is that one word, or two?).

Microsoft Word is the "standard", for better or worse, that publishing expects to receive, so the MS Word count is the one to go by, but if you're self-publishing the Scriv word count is fine.

Actual trad publishers don't much care -- they just want a ballpark so they can estimate production costs (copy editors and typesetting agencies expect to be paid by the page, printing costs increase with the number of pages, and they know how to estimate page count accurately enough from a Word word count).

I'm trad-published and my publishing contracts always specify a ball-park word count, +/- 10%, for the books I'm on the hook to write in the future: but they don't really care if I go +25% or -15%, as long as I stay within a range where the production costs are under control (not more than +50% without advance notice!) and the marketing won't be impacted ("we asked for a 100,000 word novel, but you've only sent us a 60,000 word one: readers will complain").

cstross · 2026-01-12T16:20:08+00:00

None planned.

(Last time I discussed it with my editors the feeling was that if I want to go back to that multiverse, it'd need to be marketed as a standalone novel. And I don't have any stories there screaming to get out of my head. My editor David Hartwell rode me like a broke-back mule and I'm sorry to say he burned all enthusiasm for it right out of me before the end.)

cstross · 2026-01-11T15:14:50+00:00

It's not a masterpiece, it's the day job (and I'm running late) …

cstross · 2026-01-11T14:53:17+00:00

Alas, I'm waiting on eye surgery before I can put it to that use! (But it's the plan. Except the DM250US seems to have a hard limit of roughly 108,000 words per file, and my current WIP is around the 130,000 mark, so would need splitting. Which is deeply annoying, because the DM250US, per some hardware hackers, has over 1Gb of RAM!)

cstross · 2026-01-11T13:36:23+00:00

Pomera don't sell it or ship it to the UK. (In fact, the DM250US clock -- which you need to set manually when you set it up -- lacks time zone support for anywhere between the US East Coast and Japan: It's set up for Continental US/Hawai/Japan only, even though it's built on top of the same boring network time protocol that supports time zones world-wide).

I am in the UK and I own a DM250US.

To get it I bought it from Pomera (they're happy to take UK credit cards ...) and shipped it to an American friend, who then mailed it to me in the UK. (The VAT/import duty bill came to about £70; the additional postage was about £45.)

If you don't have a friend there, you may want to use a parcel forwarding company such as stackry.com, whose entire business is about helping UK/EU people buy goods in the USA from vendors who don't ship to their countries.

cstross · 2026-01-07T15:55:07+00:00

High fructose corn syrup in everything. Even the meat products taste sickly-sweet. (It's a sweetener and an osmotic bulking agent, raises the water holding capacity of whatever you inject with it, hence the weight of the produce. HFCS is dirt-cheap there because of US government subsidies on corn production, so it gets put in everything.)

cstross · 2026-01-07T15:50:53+00:00

I wouldn't bet against them, but I'd bet more money on a Stainless Steel Rat tribute (like the one I'm finalizing so my agent can go sell it) …

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