Anyhoo - I got back into the Alan Turing biog I left late last year. Was a techie thorny section but I've got through that now - wasn't as baffling as I was finding it at the time - was probably just tired.  I can see the scene being set for some targeted brute force attacks on the Enigma codes so I suppose Collosus was built to conduct those.  At the point I am at they have done some brute force using relays but they are limited re speed.

Interesting reading how the Polish mathematicians had made all the early running - ingenious work - had made a great deal of headway which the British were building upon.  That wasn't mentioned in that bloody awful Cumberbatch film.

aye.....fuck that.


Clearly wasn't in it for the money at that point.

One could probably find isolated pleasing phrases but they would have no context.

Long time to be pissed out of your head!! 

Other way round I think.

Kow wrote:

Other way round I think.

Oh.

1. Thrawn - Timothy Zahn
Pretty good Star Wars.
Like most of the pretty good Star Wars it happens to be Star Wars but could also be reskinned to not be a Star Wars and still stand up. The Star Wars is an extra coat of polish.
This one covers politics, hierarchy, war tactics and how they interplay.
They should be making this in the Andor mould and with someone other than Elon Musk playing Thrawn.

How They Broke Britain - James O’Brien
A Christmas present I wouldn’t have bought but took the unusual step of reading. Instead of plonking it on a shelf, never touching it and hoping I was never asked about it. It’s not very good. 

I confess to watching the occasional 4 minute clip that pops up on my Twitter feed of O’Brien eviscerating some politician or slicing away at the foundations of some caller’s entire belief system. I don’t know why but I stopped finding it satisfying or cathartic when I realised how pointless it was. The callers keep coming. The politicians keep getting grimmer. John from Tooting isn’t racist but. No one wins. 

The book focuses on 10 people from politics and the media, mainly using them as a way of illustrating the relationships between politicians, journalists and lobbyists. How each sector infiltrates and corrupts the others. There’s nothing new here. That’s the main problem. If you’re the sort of person who is algorithmically targeted for James O’Brien content on Twitter, you’re the sort of person that probably knows all of Boris Johnson’s scandals, has read the famous excerpt from his school report, has heard about all his journalistic sackings. It’s all here. Murdoch, Cummings, the whole gang, their scandals, their famous quotes. 

I read it out of obligation and it wasn’t often that it felt like more than that. If you’ve wasted less of your life than I have scrolling through Twitter, refreshing your feed when each of the past decade's scandals has broken, then it’s probably quite eye-opening. It’s written well enough. It's the sort of book John from Tooting should read but never will.

The only interesting inclusion is Andrew Neil - here less from his impact and behaviour (although he is a prick) and more about the double-standard that his BBC presence highlights. The one non-Tory inclusion is Corbyn - present because he was useless and did nothing to oppose Brexit and the right-wing dementation of the country, when opposing things was his actual job title.

Anyway, if I’m asked about the book, I don’t need to lie and say I’ve read it. I need to lie and say I enjoyed it.

Ah balls, bought that for my dad for his birthday.

It's not a bad book, I just knew it all.

13

You are the problem.

acemuzzy wrote:

The correct answer was 41. Or about 14 years worth at my current rate of reading.

I think I might have a problem...

Actually on your bedside table?

What a fucking slob

GooberTheHat wrote:

70% through Hyperion and loving it. It took a little while to get into, but I always find that with a new Sci-Fi world. Until I become familiar with all the invented jargon I find it hard to hook into to story.

This was going so well, up until the non-critical depiction of a pedophilic relationship. The ages aren't even core to the story, so it's just bizarre that the author decided the female should be 15, when she could easily have been 18.