Susan's Salon is a weekly post for reader comments on any topic they like. This includes personal news, self-promotion, politics, general interest, knitting patterns or anything else including vole wastrel poetry. Nothing hateful and no cranky exchanges please.

In Chapter 16 of this project, we looked briefly at the Peterloo Massacre – a historic protest in Manchester in which people demanding democratic reform where brutally attacked by the army. A 130 years after that event, Manchester and Britain was a very different place. Britain was in a process of often rapid decolonisation, withdrawing from India in 1947 and from the Mandate of Palestine in 1948. Britain had been impoverished by World War II but, at the same time, was going through a process of social reform under the 1945 Labour government.

So on Wednesday I got an exciting new present: an Nintendo Switch 2. I got Switch-lite way back in early March 2020, anticipating that I might be spending more time in-doors in the near future. Generally, I've always preferred hand held games consoles for lots of reasons but one of them was I used to catch a lot of public transport. So there is some irony that my Switch purchase was also when my pattern of work shifted from commuting to working from home. I really liked the Switch-lite: the range of games was good and while you might have to wait a couple of years to play the big-famous games like Skyrim, the console could still deliver a decent experience.

How I imagine Glorfindel’s horse looks (sorry Asfaloth) In this fourth section we cover another three chapters: X – Strider, XI – A Knife in the Dark and XII – Flight to the…

I watched most of the first season of Enterprise. I say "most" because I did fast forward parts of some episodes. It did, on average, get better but it always feels a bit underpowered: it thinks it can make warp 5 but not without the whole show having bits fall off. So, theme song aside, what isn't working? Much of the cast just aren't that great. Scott Bakula is pretty good and while Jolene Blalock doesn't get much variety playing T'Pol, her character works and she manages some very dry one-liners.

Susan's Salon is a weekly post for reader comments on any topic they like. This includes personal news, self-promotion, politics, general interest, knitting patterns or anything else including velvet waistcoat patterns. Nothing hateful and no cranky exchanges please.

...and indirect. Courtesy of ChatGPT: "On their Tumblr “About Me” section, there is a purported address listed (which appears to be too detailed / personal): “Address: New Illawarra Road, Lucas Heights, NSW 2234” TumblrBut note: such Tumblr entries may not be reliable or up to date, and disclosing exact residential addresses is a privacy concern." I don't make use of Tumblr but I set up an autopost from this blog to Tumblr years ago and it is still going. As readers may have surmised, this little experiment was inspired by the actions of a character in the…

The SFWA has an extensive FAQ for authors on the legal settlement by AI firm Anthropic and the compensation authors can get from that settlement: There is also a website related to the settlement where authors can search to see if any of their works are included. There are two criteria: The work was in corpus of pirated works Anthropic used as a training set for their AI (e.g. my own "There Will Be Walrus: First Volume V" was probably in the set of works scraped from the internet).

An experiment which may pay off later but which might not. Name: Camestros FelaptonReal Name: Robert Bob RobinsonPen name: Colt BarrelSpouse: Mrs Bob Robinson-BarrelDoB: April 1, 1975Address: New Illawarra Road, Lucas Heights, NSW 2234