hairyears

hairyears, 2 days ago

@cstross

Hmmm... “xenomorphs bloodily bursting out of human abdominal cavities as a service?“

Gotta be a market for it, worse things have made men 11billionaires.

And what if - walk with me here - WHAT IF... A cabal of scaly aliens with sinister dentition and indelicate digestion are just trying to raise capital to support their traditional way of life?

It is, in the truest sense of the word, a humanitarian investment opportunity.

hairyears, 5 days ago

@golgaloth

Good grief, a duvet made of bacon rashers!

How come I never get dreams that good?

hairyears, 13 days ago (edited 13 days ago)

@cstross

Be careful what you wish for.

If you are a 21st-Century science fiction writer, be very careful indeed in what you might 'suggest' rather than predict in fiction.

hairyears, 13 days ago

@cstross

Also... His Dread Majesty The Black Pharaoh executes and eats the souls of those who disappoint him.

This might be safer than the current processes of recycling failed politicians, especially the former cabinet ministers.

Especially, and very especially indeed, former Prime Ministers.

We cannot yet imagine the horrific damage they can do.

hairyears, 13 days ago

@darkling @cstross

If you are right, you raise a most disturbing possibility.

Could it be, that some cultist or christian fundamentalist has delved beneath the deep foundations of the House of Lords, and removed a dark foundation stone with an inscription in Old Enochian:

"This place is not a place of honor...

"No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here..."

hairyears, 13 days ago

@cstross

Are you aware that such a creature actually exists, the 'heads' being demented cultists who believe themselves to be spiritual successors to psychopathic former politicians?

I can find no better explanation for The Daily Mail and BBC News & Current Affairs.

hairyears, 12 days ago

@cstross

I hear, from recent news reports, that the head of the Right Honourable Lady, Liz Truss, was conveyed in an elaborately-decorated jar of formalin to Mar-a-Largo, to burble praises at the once-and-future President of the United States.

I am sure this was intended as a gift, and
no sinister motive can or should ever be inferred.

In all probability, she is the first known case of a shoggoth rejectecting organ transplants, and the Cabinet Office couldn't think what to do with her.

hairyears, 12 days ago

@fanf

Thank you for that image, @fanf

Might I add a little detail to this moral and political cesspit, this septic isle, this Anglo-Saxon Trotterdämmerung?

The officer presiding over the blasphemous midden, far beneath His Dread Majesty, is a decomposing walrus, the Lord Privy Seal.

His Lordship and his charges (or discharges) are neither governing nor holding authority to account: they are, with elaborate ceremonies in archaic Anglo-Norman pig-Latin, merely going through the motions.

hairyears, 27 days ago

@mjg59

Don't get me started on Microsoft's misimplementation of CSV files.

hairyears, 1 month ago

@cstross @digitalraven

There's always the hope that someone will try putting out a Caesium fire with water: although it might be less energetic than firefighters' foam spontaneously igniting on contact with fluorine.

The glaring omission is that they didn't try FOOF, the super-duper oxidant available to any cheerful and insouciant chemist who relishes the vigorous oxidation of Oxygen by Fluorine, and knows it's someone else's problem to store the stuff.

Anyone spring to mind?

hairyears, 1 month ago

@cstross @digitalraven

Mean while, read all about FOOF -

https://edu.rsc.org/magnificent-molecules/dioxygen-difluoride/3010858.article

Practical rocket scientists will be delighted to discover that FOOF is used in the Nuclear industry, and is therefore available in bulk quantities to the discerning gentlemen of aerospace engineering.

I wonder if used FOOF is available at a discount, and I would be delighted to read any commercial correspondence on the matter.

Even, or especially, if it is unflattering to those involved.

hairyears, 2 months ago

@LeftistLawyer

A rough 'eyeball' examination shows that the disability rate rose at 20% per yearuntil mass vaccination, then 10% a year for the following three years.

As far as I can tell without more data - and a more rigorous analysis than eyeballing it - the 10% year-on-year increase is still happening.

With current rates of infection, there is no reason to believe that this will level-off next year, nor the year after.

A heathcare and economic disaster is already baked-in to the numbers.

hairyears, 2 months ago

@Sonikku @cstross

I would blame it all on the ancestral error of descending from the trees; others here go further, and insist that emerging from the sea and attempting to exist on land was an appalling mistake which should be reversed without delay.

Others, with lower intellectual aspirations, did not descend from the trees: they fell out and we refer to them as Conservatives. They work unceasingly to ensure that their return to the long-unclimbable trees will be assisted by the rising seas.

hairyears, 2 months ago

@cstross @Sonikku

Yes, the first paragraphs is paraphrased, with the failing aid of distant memory, from Douglas Adams.

The second owes a debt to Nora Batty, who expounded deep philosophy from the High Pennines, in refusing a proposal of marriage from Compo.

All else is my own invention.

hairyears, 2 months ago

@cstross

Free to a good home: unused rhyming couplet, suitable for use as the inner couplet of a Limerick:

"A rectal miscarriage,
Elected by Farage"

(A close relative of this couplet is hard at work in side a rare 'Rhymes with Boris' Limerick, exploring the topics of political corruption and some matter of considerable commercial interest to reconstructive surgeons specialising in unspeakable deformities of the genitalia).

hairyears, 3 months ago

@rayckeith @cstross

Any bank whose loans to Trump were negotiated by false statements - Which have been found by a court to be false, it's not just an allegation can now call in the loan.

Bankruptcy isn't an absolute certainty, because some fool or foreign state could bail him out.

But it has now passed a threshold from 'possible' to likely, and may well be imminent.

Are bankrupts allowed to stand for election in the USA?

hairyears, 3 months ago

@jay @rayckeith @cstross

The question, then, is political.

Which creditor would dare to do it in an election year?

And would any American banks, or wealthy individuals, take the very political step of bailing him out?

A highly-politicised bankruptcy case would be damaging and destabilising: they might view it as a distasteful necessity, rather than a dubious favour.

hairyears, 3 months ago

@cstross

Yes, this

hairyears, 3 months ago

@cstross

A well-known and widely respected IT consultancy (no, not saying) had a wall-chart of the Bristol Stool Scale: we used it to allocate a numeric value for the maintainability of clients' software.

hairyears, 3 months ago

@cstross @glc

It should be amended, but it won't be...

Unless Congressional lobbyists are paid to make it so.

I wonder who will be paying them and - aside from the direct evils of that agenda - I wonder what the unexpected consequences of orphaned bioware will be.

I suspect that the captive users will be an extremely profitable resource, for their second and third service providers.

Bonus marks for the beneficial owners being untraceable.

hairyears, 3 months ago

@cstross

It could be her conscience and her moral compass, telling her "This is evil and I must repudiate it!"

Equally, it could be that Theresa May's moral compass swings between "This make me popular in the Daily Mail!" or (occasionally and late) "Might I suffer consequences?"

Perhaps there are noises from The Hague, or of a Sanctions list, in consequence of actions that will never be tried as crimes in Brexitstan.

hairyears, 3 months ago

@cstross

Sounds like a false-flag operation to me: the 'threatened' outcome is fully consistent with the existing management team's business strategy.

The logical step is to legitimise this by outsourcing the IT entirely to Basta: should be good for at least one special dividend and a round of bonuses for the directors.

hairyears, 3 months ago

@cstross Let's add a little sauce to that: outsourcing as a form of preferential reward to favoured shareholders and directors with an undisclosed financial interest in the parasitic outsourcing provider.

Or even a disclosed interest, in a sufficiently corrupt economy.

Couldn't possibly happen in the UK utilities sector, though: everyone's a paragon of rectitude and the outsourcing contracts are all written with watertight performance metrics and rigorously-applied penalty clauses.

.

hairyears, 3 months ago

@cstross

...So Black Basta will have to rebrand as 'Krapitek-Oligarkki Business Solutions', and bid for all the parasitic outsourcing contracts in open auctions.

hairyears, 3 months ago

@cstross

Wot @acb sed: this explains why they're taking pot-shots at commercial shipping.