@pauldrye@spacey.space : Unbuilt crewed space projects, phantom islands, alternate history, Muppets, Atomic Age design, weird-looking galaxies, temporary moons of Earth, languages, cartography, the Ediacaran biota, old cutaway diagrams. Canadian with malice aforethought. Baggage Books on DriveThruRPG.

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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: December 11th, 2024

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  • The EU already has a land border in the Americas. French Guiana is part of the union and it touches Brazil and Suriname. So the gate is already open to work it from the south up instead of the north down.

    I read somewhere – great source, I know – that the existing rule is that the country has to be in Europe, though, not that it has a border. Otherwise Malta, Ireland, and Cyprus would not qualify, and the UK too back when they were in.

    Oddly enough, the Canadian/Danish border is a questionable one for this purpose anyway – Hans Island (where the border is) is part of Greenland and Greenland is not in the EU. It left in 1985 and is now one of the “Overseas countries and territories” that have special rights in relation to the EU but are not actually in it.




  • I haven’t been able to confirm precisely, but the Midori browser appears to be from Spain or at least Europe. Their website only comes in English/Español and the only events they have listed as attending have been in Germany. It’s Gecko-based, so it’s “Firefox-ish”. It also takes Firefox add-ins, which is nice.

    I’ve been using it for a couple weeks now and it’s been working fine. Spotify hiccups on it, but that’s the only site I go to regularly that doesn’t like it.



  • The key word in “constitutional monarchy” is “constitutional”, not “monarchy”. The monarch must follow the parliament’s requests, and not doing so is unconstitutional. Parliament is sovereign, at least in all of the countries that derive their monarchy from the UK’s.

    Outside of the UK there wouldn’t be a fight anyway: in all the Commonwealth countries (except the ones that have since gone fully republican), the monarch has a representative called “the governor general” who is selected by the Parliament and recommended to the monarch at which point see above. The monarch has to take the advice of who is to be their governor-general. Issues basically never get to the monarch for them to mess anything up. The loyal-to-his-country deputy gets first crack at everything the monarch does in theory and has no reason to go against Parliament. If somehow the g-g or the king did speak out, it’d be a legal mess but everyone would ignore them. Practically we’d either get ourselves a new monarch or just say to hell with it and become a republic.

    To answer your specific question then, yes, it’s pro forma. The monarch’s role is to be the embodiment of all legislative, judicial, and executive power, in a fairly close analog to what the American Constitution is. But the Constitution can’t exercise any of those powers and the monarch can’t either. It’s just a historical oddity that they can walk and talk, unlike a piece of paper.










  • He’s written some “Notes” on the story when it was printed in his first short story collection and said that it has the same theme but that he wasn’t inspired by it directly. The roots were Paul Linke’s play “Time Flies When You’re Alive” and the principle of least time in optics – if you treat light as a ray, it has to know its future destination in order to know the path with the shortest time it will take to get there (though not if it’s a wave). Then there’s a bunch of diagrams and discussions about the principle’s implications for free will that will stretch your brain. It’s pretty fun.