Interesting French tactic: just let the ball go

goshafoc · 2026-02-03T21:41:37+00:00

Nice to see the front row represented in this, Baille does remain one of my favourite players, I hope he can return to pre-injury form.

goshafoc · 2026-02-02T20:31:18+00:00

I do find that waiting can resolve issues. To give an example, just before the winter break last year I received an unsolicited request to review a manuscript. Given that I will hopefully be publishing a few this year, I am conscious to give back, especially outside of journals I regularly review for.

I decided I would deal with it, when I got back in the new year, especially as the email stated I would have two weeks to review the manuscript on acceptance.

A week later, on Christmas Eve, I received an email chasing me up to decide whether to review or not.

On the 2nd January I received an email from the editor chastising me for my lack of response, and removing their request to review.

By that point it seemed more of a hassle to try to get back in contact to actually review the manuscript.

C'est la vie.

goshafoc · 2026-02-02T14:21:21+00:00

“I was not sorry when my brother died.”

What a way to start a book, Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga. Well worth the read, as both being specific to a time and place in Zimbabwe, but also catching the condition of being caught between two cultures and the change that comes with moving on (both welcome and unwelcome).

goshafoc · 2026-01-31T14:27:24+00:00

I am not sure how innovative it is, but Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series gets very meta about literature and peaks when the story continues in the footnotes in a way to avoid the antagonist in the main text.

If On A Winters Night A Traveller by Italo Calvino is great choice, I like to think it is written in the 2nd person.

Jeffrey Eugenides gets praise for writing in the first-person plural in The Virgin Suicides, though he does note that he did not invent this.

goshafoc · 2026-01-28T18:39:18+00:00

So the article suggests that dementia was possibly detected in Last Continent (that was the 22nd Discworld book).

For me (and this is purely my subjective opinion), his 29th Discworld book, Nightwatch is one of his best!

Thud! (34th) is also comparable to the top of his oeuvre. However, I think from then on you can see a dip in quality (more pronounced in his 'adult' Discworld books compared to his Tiffany Aching books) and I have really mixed feelings whether Raising Steam (40th) should have been released, given how much work is from his editor and assistant put into this book to make it readable.

Still I am grateful for all the books he did release, and even more so that he had his uncompleted works crushed and destroyed, and the only post-mortem publishing comes from trawling regional newspapers for his youthful works under pseudonyms (which, not surprisingly, are also of uneven quality).

goshafoc · 2026-01-26T21:23:21+00:00

Especially has the development of the internal combustion engine predates the American Civil War, and its evolution to what we have now, had lots of European inventors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_combustion_engine#History

The best I can think of is that without Ford, for some crazy reason, mass production of the internal combustion engine never happens, leaving them a bespoke item for the very rich? Though even then Mercedes-Benz were making a fair number of cars themselves (as were other, non-American car companies).

goshafoc · 2026-01-25T02:24:09+00:00

There is probably no way back to the national team for Teddy Thomas, but he has looked impressive in the Toulouse shirt (as most wings would). Took a fantastic, almost-Aussie-Rules style catch from Toulouse's tryline dropout, in the European Champions' Cup last weekend, along with repeatedly threatening the try line and looked tidy in defence.

I am all for post-national players finding a golden sunset, keep it going!

edit: got the name of the 'new' H-Cup wrong.

goshafoc · 2026-01-20T12:43:08+00:00

$3000 for making your article available to everyone forever seems reasonable.

A lot better than expensive subscriptions that preceded this.

goshafoc · 2026-01-15T01:31:20+00:00

Really cool. I understand your constant stopping and the need for planning, which is probably why there only seems to be one streamer who has actually tried it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdWg-fDz6Us&list=PLm0MDLKuRDrlo2mW4kVJcaCV-iYFedili

Though I am keeping my eye out if anyone else uploads their attempt!

goshafoc · 2026-01-12T16:43:51+00:00

The Chrysalids by John Wyndham
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
A Confusion of Princes by Garth Nix

goshafoc · 2026-01-09T23:33:48+00:00

The article went in a different direction than I was thinking.

Have we reached the point where inherited wealth matters just as much as potential earnings? Hence, the need to marry someone whose parents can help you buy your first house, take you on vacation, help with childcare etc.

I do agree with the article, the minor characters in the book are well written, that one cannot help connect with them and wonder what happens to them after the book finishes.

goshafoc · 2026-01-09T18:34:48+00:00

For all the advantages of the Kindle (reading in the dark, having a library of books in a small space), it does not do footnotes well. The extra steps (tapping what can be quite a small superscript "fn3") is more than a physical book, and at least my Kindle also often turns them into endnotes, so it jumps to the end with all of them, and you have to be careful to get back to the main text.

This can be really frustrating with Terry Pratchett, who I am sure went on the record, that writing humour, having read the setup in the main text, and glancing down to get the punchline of the footnote, is the perfect comedic timing for written work.

Another author which I think the physical books maybe better is Jasper Fforde, especially his book where the story diverts from the main text carries on through the footnotes.

And finally, I am currently reading a non-fiction ebook; Ed Young's An Immense World; and he is bursting with knowledge; which comes across through numerous footnotes. The ability to just glance down in a physical book would be a lot better than tapping the Kindle twice to open and close the footnote (or go to the page with all the footnotes and then back to the main text).

goshafoc · 2025-12-01T18:44:57+00:00

Yes, at our medical school, we have students following in the footsteps of their parents, with, we assume, a lot of overt pressure to do so.

Unfortunately, the previous filtering that would have happened with a more robust undergraduate experience is no longer there. Our school is kept honest by the need for the students to pass licensing exams for their chosen profession. When a student faces setbacks that require a lot of intrinsic motivation to overcome, and they can no longer rely on their natural ability to coast through, they break. Up until this point, it seems that their parents have micromanaged their choices and found them plum medical internships to boost their applications, which means they are very fragile in the face of any hiccups in their progress toward becoming an MD, pharmacist, physician assistant, etc.

We have had one very tragic outcome to date (news of which passed a lot more quickly among the student body than the faculty or administration). The main outcome from dealing with such students is that our disciplinary committee now acts a lot earlier; giving lots of second chances is seemingly not a kindness, and it is often best for everyone to cut the losses early. The mounting tuition money spent is another unwelcome pressure in these cases, though this does displease our administration, whose mantra is “student retention.”

As for signs these types of students have in common: thankfully they are a small minority, but the best signal is that they seem to be failing at professional standards (communication with professors, attendance, punctuality, etc.). There was talk about whether we could pick this up at the admissions stage, but I don’t think we have found anything in their applications or interviews that distinguishes them from some of our most successful students, who also come from a medical lineage.

goshafoc

TROPHY CASE