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Patrick Smith @drpaddysmith.bsky.social · 4h

79 today

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Patrick Smith @drpaddysmith.bsky.social · 4h

Excited to think about which of the people I follow on here this could be. Have narrowed it down to a couple of dozen

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Patrick Smith @drpaddysmith.bsky.social · 4h

The Internet was designed to route around a nuclear strike because Starfish Prime gave everyone a bit of a think. Nice irony if those design choices mean that distributed attacks can do the same thing without the messy atomics

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Patrick Smith @drpaddysmith.bsky.social · 5h

Thanks to this thread I looked up Alembic House. What an amazing series of connections. Jeffrey Archer, John Barry, Bernie Ecclestone, Theatre of Blood, your actual MI6, Sweeney! etc.

A high-rise luxury Stella Street

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Patrick Smith @drpaddysmith.bsky.social · 5h

I've a nagging memory that the flexi disc that came with a Hornby train set was *very much like this*

5.25" floppies also sort-of were because they stayed in the sleeve. Could you have a record like that with a window in the sleeve for playing?

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Patrick Smith @drpaddysmith.bsky.social · 5h

Neuromancer has a physical key made of dumb metal as a plot point. Can't download that.

In Wim Wenders' Until the End of the World everyone's driving old diesels because they work after an EMP

Mid 80s cyberpunk still relevant

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Patrick Smith @drpaddysmith.bsky.social · 5h

Punch holes down one edge and you could put them in a binder

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Patrick Smith @drpaddysmith.bsky.social · 6h

Just turned round for a look, and behind me on the shelf are programming manuals for - among others - Ada and Occam

You never know

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Patrick Smith @drpaddysmith.bsky.social · 6h

I worked on a tiny bit of the Swanwick air traffic control centre in the 90s - at the time the "paperless office" was the thing. We thought the ATCs were awful dinosaurs for insisting our clean new workstations must have fiddly slots for paper flight-strips just in case

BBC NEWS | UK | Swanwick's troubled history

news.bbc.co.uk

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Patrick Smith @drpaddysmith.bsky.social · 23h

I think this goes here

An excerpt from a Goon Show script, reading:

Seagoon: The Red Bladder and his 50,000 bladders. Lads - we're outnumbered twenty-to-one.
Eccles: Twenty-to-one? Time for lunch.

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Patrick Smith @drpaddysmith.bsky.social · 1d

Once - completely by chance - drove through Culloden at exactly 1746

Thank goodness I thought to look at the clock

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Patrick Smith @drpaddysmith.bsky.social · 1d

Being a grandparent *to your own children*

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Patrick Smith @drpaddysmith.bsky.social · 1d

oh now I'm thinking about a time-traveller divorce settlement with retro-active visitation rights to the kids' childhoods

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Patrick Smith @drpaddysmith.bsky.social · 1d

Turns out the reason the first performance of Hamlet at the Globe isn't full of time travellers is they've all picked up their 7-year-olds from their younger selves and gone to the swings instead

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Patrick Smith @drpaddysmith.bsky.social · 1d

Thinking about this recently, I think the killer app for time machines might be babysitting your own children.

New parents are really busy, but who wouldn't love to go back and spend an afternoon with their children again?

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Patrick Smith @drpaddysmith.bsky.social · 1d

Doctor says, "Treatment is simple. Great cryptic crossword is in Guardian today. Go and solve it. That should pick you up." Man bursts into tears. Says, "But doctor...

A clue from the Guardian crossword reading "8 down: Like Pagliacci touching female star on date (3-5)"

Patrick Smith @drpaddysmith.bsky.social · 1d

Recent series have forgotten 2 things:

- it's not SF, it's moral philosophy. The space setting is how you get away with it
- it has to be monster-of-the-week for the tonal shifts. You can't interleave "Lwaxana fancies someone LOL" with "is torture ever justifiable?" That's mental

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Reposted by Patrick Smith

Dan McPainInTheKnees @danmckee.bsky.social · 1d

“What’s the charge? Eating a seal?”

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Patrick Smith @drpaddysmith.bsky.social · 1d

I haven't read Barthes. Did he have an opinion on whether all giants probably sound a bit like Bernard Bresslaw?

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Patrick Smith @drpaddysmith.bsky.social · 1d

Woe betide any ambitious parent who tries to individually characterise all the dwarfs in The Hobbit

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Patrick Smith @drpaddysmith.bsky.social · 1d

Have compared notes on this subject with other parents. I tried to do the mouse in The Gruffalo as a sort of David Niven. Given the lack of a strong trickster archetype in Britain, that at least - I felt - conveyed his sangfroid.

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Patrick Smith @drpaddysmith.bsky.social · 2d

Try to imagine how awful the cover might be, then look it up

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Patrick Smith @drpaddysmith.bsky.social · 3d

Mike Batt's Wombles theme is a clarinet isn't it? For me it's between that and Mozart's clarinet concerto

youtu.be/wTKMqPg4hM8

The Wombles - Season 1 Opening credits - 1973/1975 - BBC1

YouTube video by Classic TV Zone

youtu.be

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Patrick Smith @drpaddysmith.bsky.social · 4d

Smokey IS The Bandit

Patrick Smith @drpaddysmith.bsky.social · 4d

Future me, stepping out of time machine in 1996: "...in 2005, and it will surprisingly good. OK, it's going to get weird from 2016. Then in 2026 there's going to be this celebrity fall-out, and you won't believe which side you're on..."

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