Zompist Bboard Again

Anyway, my original post wasn't meant to seriously tell you to listen to classical music. Just pointing out that "sad women singing incredibly depressing things" is a staple part of the tradition. In particular, heartbroken, occasionally disabled prostitutes with tuberculosis are the core...

I can't, and they've had to dismiss me on grounds of incapacity.

mèþru wrote: ↑Mon Feb 25, 2019 8:45 am What do you guys think about Watson's new group?

It's not the same without Jezza. Man, that guy could orate.

I'm having to stay home from work today. This might not sound like much but it's probably the last chance I have to convince my employer that I can meet their hourly requirements.

(For optimum geek points, obviously)

Those of you who've worked out networks of postal routes for your conworlds: have you ever gone as far as creating postal codes or their equivalent?

In other news, Shamina Begum has questionably legally been stripped of her British citizenship. Whatever I think of her, this strikes me as a very bad precedent, and one I suspect is mostly intended by Javid to boost his cred for the Tory leadership race by throwing red meat to the right, knowing i...

1. Is it correct to assert that a trigger system highlights a particular verbal argument within a clause, by moving that argument's case marker to the verb and replacing it with the trigger marker?

2. Does every clause have to have an argument marked as a trigger?

what the seven actually have in common is that they're all right-wing and continually at odds with the left-wing policies put forward by the party. (mild snark, in case it isn't obvious): Sooner or later someone was going to accuse them of being unreconstructed Tories in pink disguise. I was actual...

Seven MPs altogether, according to the Beeb. Will they agitate for FPTP? Is this the start of the political fallout from Brexit? Or will it just be a storm in a teacup, or a teacup in a storm? Watch this space...

How will FPTP cope with post-Brexit politics anyway? I doubt it could take the strain.

In other news, Home Secretary Amber Rudd can no longer conceal from herself the fact that people are having to use food banks because of the way Universal Credit has been introduced.

Frislander wrote: ↑Sat Feb 09, 2019 3:33 pmbut honestly just the thought of JRM in the nude sends a bit of a shudder down my spine.

Aaargh!!!! Cannot unsee!!!!!

Consider: "Tora put her beer-glass on the table, and it broke". How many different ways of resolving the ambiguity of "it" are there, without recasting the sentence? I can think of at least these: - Context; try replacing "her beer-glass" with "a sixteen-ton weight...

Pedants might point that they're actually continuums between two extremes, but that's not the point. We all know of the Sonority Hierarchy (voiceless stops to low vowels) and the Animacy Hierarchy (first-person subjects to abstract nouns); there's also the hierarchy which Revouse identifies as "...

The main resource for this always used to be Geoff's climate cookbook . It's pretty detailed, though: often I think in a fantasy context it's fine to be merely fairly realistic, you don't have to worry about the finer details unless you want to. I still get nightmares: ... and here, once again, we ...

zompist wrote: ↑Wed Jan 30, 2019 1:17 pm At this point, I think there's only one practical option left to May, and that's to resign.

Unfortunately, if she was ever going to resign, she would have done it long ago. She's safe from a leadership challenge until December, don't forget.

Alright, Sal: What would *you* do if you were our PM? For that matter, what would anyone do?

Aren't there Good Friday-related legal issues with removing the backstop anyway?

Does anybody know of any conlangs which were created for literary purposes, but were intended for an audience which primarily spoke something other than English, and consequently had orthographies based on non-English principles?

One small thing, though: the government asked lorry drivers to volunteer, so our trial run for how we handle 8,000 lorries was only able to run a test with... 86 lorries. Yes, that's the same. This is beyond stupid; Reality will hit hard if they just did such a test. Has the UK really got that idio...