Messages

1

General / Re: Sideshow Vote II: You are my second favorite son, son

« on: Today at 09:07:12 AM »

Not going to vote, because I work for several of those, but if Aftershock is on the list, can I respectfully suggest that so should Vault (for a great spread of non-cape books) and also Titan, who probably deserve to be on the list for their excellent Blade Runner titles alone…?

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Off Topic / Re: This is the News!

« on: 05 July, 2022, 11:35:12 PM »

We're up to ten resignations of ministers, party officials and PPSs (possibly more in the half an hour since I last checked), plus Lord Frost, chief Brexit 'negotiator' sticking the knife in on Twitter (and saying he'll have more to say in a Telegraph column tomorrow). Plus MP Andrew Bridgen saying he'll be talking to the 1922 committee about changing the rules on no confidence votes.

Given that Johnson has already announced replacements for most of the resignees, it's clear that they'll have to drag him out of No 10 kicking and screaming.

Which is fine with me.

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Film & TV / Re: Last movie watched...

« on: 05 July, 2022, 12:09:58 PM »

RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES.

It was my favourite movie of that year. Serkis should have won an Oscar for that role.

It's a really good movie. I recall actually gasping at both the audacity and the cleverness of the way in which they replayed the original movie's (second?) most famous line.

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Other Reviews / Re: Battle Action Special 2022

« on: 03 July, 2022, 10:40:04 PM »

Entirely nit-picking here, but the only thing that flagged up as odd was perhaps a font problem between computers, as the logo for Nina Petrova and the Angels of Death seems to have gone a bit wrong

Yeah… some fonts refuse to be embedded in PDFs and need to be converted to outlines to display correctly, There are various effects on the main part of the logo that would require the text to be outlined anyway, but the sub-header, being plain text, was probably (unintentionally) left as a 'live' font* — the upper/lower you're seeing is what's necessary to utilise variant characters in the intended font ('Soviet Bold', I believe).

I've been caught out by this little wrinkle more than once… :-(

*It'll likely have been outlined in the first example you show because rotating text like this can sometimes produce unexpected results if you don't outline it.

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Off Topic / Re: Thought Police: Are we allowed to query 'woke'?

« on: 01 July, 2022, 10:09:58 PM »

Hence me not seeing it, Jim?  Not saying it wasnt there, just I responded to Corinthian without reading all the responses that followed it.  Am I missing something (other than IPs message)?

Not sure how you responded to the message in question without seeing IP's request, given the timestamps. Whatever.

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Off Topic / Re: Thought Police: Are we allowed to query 'woke'?

« on: 01 July, 2022, 10:05:14 PM »

I confess I didnt see IPs sensible appeal to move the debate elsewhere Funt

Before you posted right under it, several hours later?

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Off Topic / Re: TV Adverts that make you wish for death.

« on: 01 July, 2022, 01:30:04 PM »

so saying the purpose of alcohol is to damage one's health seems incorrect.

No, sorry. What do you think intoxication is? It's poisoning. The aim of consuming alcohol (for the most part) is to achieve some degree of intoxication, whether it be gentle buzz, a little loosening of social anxieties, mild stress relief, not-so-mild stress relief, right through to getting throwing-up-blacking-out-and-waking-up-in-a-ditch drunk. All of those scenarios involve poisoning yourself, because that's what alcohol intoxication is, the difference is degree.

As someone who is almost certainly fonder of a drink than they should be, I say this not as some kind of prohibitionist puritan, simply as someone who's tried to make an informed choice about how much of a trade-off I want to make between inevitably shortening my life, and having a few vices that help to make life worth living.

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Off Topic / Re: TV Adverts that make you wish for death.

« on: 01 July, 2022, 10:54:47 AM »

hence the examples I suggested.

*SIGH*. Drinking serves no actual purpose other than to damage your health. As long as you only moderately poison yourself, the effect is a generally-pleasant intoxication without organ failure and death.

Transportation, for example, serves any number of societally important functions and deaths and injury arising are a byproduct of that, rather than the actual point of it.

(Once we hit reliable, fully autonomous vehicles the entire landscape of transport will change. I strongly suspect people will no longer want to drive — you'll just subscribe to a couple of on-demand services and just schedule a ride, or ping one of the services from your phone or watch for impromptu journeys. Hold-outs who want to drive themselves, I imagine, will rapidly be priced out of this habit by insurance premiums.)

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Off Topic / Re: TV Adverts that make you wish for death.

« on: 01 July, 2022, 09:24:23 AM »

And here comes Shark with more ludicrous false equivalence.

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Off Topic / Re: Thought Police: Are we allowed to query 'woke'?

« on: 01 July, 2022, 07:25:44 AM »

Again though as IP points out, trans individuals are just as likely to face the same sort of treatment and attitudes from the police, if not worse.  So the debate and rhetoric do a fantastic job of dividing two groups that share much in common with regards to discrimination and inequality.

Keep in mind that the entire 'gender critical' movement is a construct of the American Christian right. They felt they'd 'lost' the battle on gay rights (particularly marriage equality) so they re-grouped and specifically picked out trans rights as a 'wedge' issue they could use to re-open the door for a whole bunch of their regressive policies. Make no mistake, if they 'win' on trans rights, they're coming for gay rights immediately afterwards.

(Although, the noises coming out of the US Supreme Court these days suggest that they can probably skip this entire step in the States, since an assault on women's rights is already well underway, and Thomas, at least, has his eye on allowing states to recriminalise sodomy.)

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Off Topic / Re: TV Adverts that make you wish for death.

« on: 01 July, 2022, 07:19:51 AM »

So is there a case for advertising bans for alcohol?

Quite possibly, yes. Booze companies tend to use the same argument that the tobacco companies used: that advertising is to encourage brand switching,* not to entice people who don't drink into starting. That's probably as much bollocks now as it was when the tobacco companies argued it.

(Let's be honest, any industry that's taking cues from the tobacco industry playbook is almost certainly lying.)

* I don't think I've ever chosen one brand of alcohol over another due to advertising, apart from my early twenties when my choice of cheap draft lager (the primary aim being to procure the largest volume of beer for the least amount of money) could be swayed by whether I was enjoying the Fosters, Carling or Heineken ad campaigns the most at any given time. Even so, a difference of 10p a pint between one or the other in the same pub was more than enough to override any fondness I might have had for Paul Hogan, or whoever… :-)

12

Prog / Re: Prog 2288: Law versus Claw

« on: 30 June, 2022, 07:36:56 AM »

Again, I hate to be that guy, but calling Rowling a bigot is defamatory and untrue.

Rowling has explicitly stated that she regards the definition of women as "people who menstruate" and that's not even true of people who were born biologically female and identify as such. She's tweeted links to a site selling merchandise with explicitly transphobic slogans. Under her (somewhat loaded) Galbraith pseudonym, she published a book about a male serial killer who dresses up as a woman in order to murder women.

Whilst, on the spectrum of TERFery, she's not at the most extreme end, she absolutely does have form in this area.

(This is neither an endorsement of, nor justification for, any form of harassment or threatening behaviour.)

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Off Topic / Re: One Quick Question....

« on: 30 June, 2022, 07:27:14 AM »

There is no answer to this, given how subjective the question is. It's like asking "What's the best colour?"

Right now, I have (scurries off to check) 1512 active fonts installed on my system. I like some of 'em better than others, but they all have their uses and even the unattractive* ones will sometimes be exactly what a design calls for.

*Unattractive to me. There are objective metrics by which a font can be judged 'bad' (the terrible kerning in Comic Sans, to pick a famous example) but, beyond that, it's all a matter of personal taste.

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General / Re: Forum’s Fav Thrill - Firekind vs. Mean Team Rd 3 Heat 59

« on: 29 June, 2022, 12:24:58 PM »

I tell you what if this carries on I'm going to scrap all the votes that have gone before, start again and we'll do that until you all get it right!

Democracy in action! ;-)

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General / Re: Forum’s Fav Thrill - Firekind vs. Mean Team Rd 3 Heat 59

« on: 28 June, 2022, 11:30:44 PM »

Wow. A couple of draws have surprised me, but to see the (IMO) terrible Mean Team hold up against Firekind (which, I'll concede, is not Smith's best work and shines largely due to great Marshall art and because it ran in the company of some terrible strips in the prog at the time) is genuinely baffling…

Don't get me wrong — I'm not slating anyone for liking what they like, but I'm just, well, surprised that a chunk of certainly-not-terrible Smiffy is getting a run for its money against a complete pot-boiler that Wagner/Grant bailed on after the first series. Anthologies, eh…?