This is what I’ve been doing with much of my spare time over the last year or so. Teenaged me never thought this would see the light of day, and never dreamed that he’d be one of the people making it happen.

Proud to see a strong showing against the extreme far right in Southampton (and sad that we weren’t able to join them).

The most recent set of statistics on individuals referred to the Prevent Programme show that referrals due to extreme right wing concerns outnumber those due to Islamist ideology almost 2:1. 2/.

🧵Following the recent far right riots, it’s worth noting the existing protections we have against terrorism in the UK. While the CONTEST strategy was a reaction to 9/11, it has become an increasing important tool for dealing with far right extremism. 1/.

Name a film you’ve seen more than seven times with just a GIF.

The youngest and I were delighted to meet the lovely @CressidaCowell at her reading at @waterstonesWQ this afternoon. Alas, I was too busy nattering with her about Diana Wynne Jones that I failed to take a photo of them together - oh well!

Hey @RedDogSaloonN1 - do you serve your General Pinochet burger by throwing it out of a helicopter, or do you torture it first?

GDW’s account: . Wiseman, L.K. (1981) Trillion Credit Squadron Winners. Journal of the Travellers’ Aid Society 10, pp. 38-39.

Lenat’s account: . Lenat, D.B. (1983) Eurisko: A program that learns new heuristics and domain concepts: The nature of Heuristics III: Program design and results. Artificial Intelligence 1-2. pp. 61-98.

Keen to prevent a rerun of this, GDW changed the constraints of the tournament the following year. Lenat entered a new EURISKO-designed fleet - completely unlike his previous entry, and again very unconventional…and won again. There were no further TCS tournaments. 5/5.

Doug Lenat decided to use the TCS tournament as a test of his EURISKO. system. He presented it with the rules to High Guard and TCS, and let it design a fleet. This fleet was unconventional and quite different from any of the other entries, but it won the tournament easily. 4/5.

Entrants to this tournament were required to design a fleet of starships within certain constraints, which would then compete against each other. The design rules are relatively complex, so this was by no means an easy task. 3/5.

Traveller contains a number of subgames, including a set of wargame rules (High Guard and Trillion Credit Squadron) for futuristic space battles. In 1981, GDW organised a TCS tournament at that year’s Gen Con conventions. 2/5.

Very sad to hear of the death of Doug Lenat. While many know of his extensive contributions to AI research, my first exposure to his work was through a rather different route - the Traveller RPG, written by @TravellerNews and published by Game Designers’ Workshop. 1/5.

Perhaps none of this matters in the big picture of the Galaxiad, but rewriting Traveller’s timeline *again* ignores Traveller’s great strength: the rich background that’s been built up since 1977. Extending the canon seems better than adding inconsistencies for novelty’s sake.

If the start of Giant Days was set in 2011, Ed Gemmell would have been born c. 1993 and would be about 30 now. Nice lad, probably environmentally-minded, might try and get into politics in later life. @badmachinery, this is a remarkable commitment to realism in your writing.

With all the dead cat Tory rhetoric about "rip-off degrees", I note that my father still asks me when the university breaks up for the summer. Two decades of pointing out that we don't close for the summer, and that I'm still working hard between June and October. .

Also: three character usernames > eight character usernames.

I’m mostly still here due to bloodymindedness. While there are still quite a few folk I follow, the main reason I’ve stayed is that I’ve been here for a year longer than the fragile cis billionaire has, and I’m determined to outlast the johnny-come-lately.

It’s exam board season, and every time someone mixes up “mitigating circumstances” and “special considerations”, I’m reminded of the late, great Iain M. Banks.