Thank you, Singulus and Nightmareriders! Nightmareriders, I have dated the midget, but only out of curiosity…
@WritersRT #alternatehistory
The beginning of a timeline from the archives of Today In Alternate History:
June 3rd, 2005
in 899, Pope Pius III met with King Arthur of Britain and declared him to be God’s Apostle on earth. He crowned him Pope Arthur I, abdicating his own position, and Arthur renamed his kingdom the Holy British Empire. It included many disparate areas of Europe at its beginning, but by Arthur’s death in 932, it stretched from Scotland to the Italian boot.
in 1851 AUC, Messianics attack Antiochus in the eastern half of the Roman Republic. In spite of a thousand years of repression, these cultists from the Judean province were still causing troubles for Rome; Senator Sentilus of Judea proposed a temporary lifting of the Republic’s guarantee of religious freedom in order to fight them, but the Senate didn’t approve his measure.
in 1902, the Vidalia Eddie is introduced. The Vidalia has a small movie screen on it that allows the user to see the output of the Vidalia prior to printing it. This innovation rocks the world and spells the end of Edison’s French competitors, who cannot match this technological advance.
in 1910, Jovian Mlosh forces engage Q’B’Ton’ran Q’Bar as they launch a desperate attack on Pluto. The Q’Bar had hoped to provoke the Congress of Nations into a more direct role in the conflict, but the Jovian’s swift response foiled them.
in 1923, Benito Mussolini’s extension of the right to vote to women backfires when his Fascisti are ousted from Parliament. He attempts to reverse the election results, but a general uprising forces him from office; far-right politics in Europe follow him into obscurity.
in 1937, King Edward VIII married his American fiancée, Wallis Simpson. Parliament erupted in a storm of protest, and Prime Minister Baldwin demanded Edward’s crown, but the controversy settled down after Great Britain got to know their new queen.
in 1989, the Communist government of China began unravelling as the rebellion in Tiananman Square expanded to the streets of Beijing. By the fall, the entire province was in open revolt, with many military units coming over to the rebel side.
in 2004, Mark Kettler, one of the hackers who had assisted Cindy Berenson and Marjorie Adams breaking into the Smartnet node at UCLA, breaks into a classified site at the Pentagon and downloads a list of passwords, including one for the mysterious site www.horus.gov. He calls Mrs. Adams and arranges to meet her the next day.
I’ve been away from the Linux scene since installing Windows 7 on my PC, but lately I’ve been looking over distrowatch and feeling the tug of using an alternative operating system. The PC enthusiast equivalent of being a hipster, I guess. Prior to my current version of Windows, I distro-hopped like a mother; I probably tried 30 or 40 different versions of Linux.
I liked several of the Linices - Ubuntu, of course, PCLinuxOS, Debian (my personal favorite, and the one I used the longest) - but eventually gave up and returned to the Windows world because it was the only OS I could install that would let me run The Sims 2. I’d also acquired Microsoft Office 2007 at that point, and really liked it and didn’t want to let it go to waste. So, I surrendered to The Man and stuck with Windows.
Which is not say my eye hasn’t wandered. Oh, no, there have been many lovelies that have caused my heart to go a-fluttering, and I’ve even downloaded the odd liveCD/DVD for a little test-drive now and then. Don’t worry, Windows, baby, I’ve always come back home to you.
The last few days have been one of those periods during which I’ve roamed and cheated on my Microsoft bride with a few Linux hussies. I tried the latest version of Ubuntu, of course, because everyone who uses Linux is contractually obligated to do so. But, the new interface leaves me wanting something else, so I burned a few CD/DVDs and saw what else was out there. Debian was as sleek and beautiful as always - you know I love you, girl - but not enough to make me want to leave my comfortable Windows home.
A couple of distros that I like c-blocked me, because they didn’t have live CDs, only versions you had to install in order to check them out. openSUSE and Slackware, I like it, but I didn’t want to put a ring on it.
PCLinuxOS was cool as ever, and the smoothest operating out of the ones I’d tried up to that point. Strange implementation of the multiple workspace feature of Linux, but I totally got where they were coming from with it. I get you, PCLOS, and I know you get me, honey.
Then, I found the one that turned my head and made me entertain nasty thoughts of leaving the Windows at home and running out for a life of Linux adventure. I’ve spent the whole night with her, and she was fast, fine and easy to handle. Gentoo, if only you had been this way when we first met, instead of being so hard to install. You reminded me too much of Sabayon, with her teasing way of crashing when I attempted to tie her down to my hard drive, and I thought that we would never get together.
But, these last few hours have been such bliss that I’m looking at Windows 7, whom I’ve come home to now, and seeing how ordinary and plain she is. I don’t know, Gentoo - could we finally make it work together? Or will you just flip out another error message on install, and leave me to crawl back to Windows’ smug, but welcoming arms?
Filed under linux os computer pc
@WritersRT
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@WritersRT #alternatehistory
A desperate time calls for a desperate measure in the archives of Today In Alternate History:
June 2nd, 2005
in 4561, General Ka-Liet of the Viet forces in Hanoi managed to draw a sizable portion of the Chinese forces into a trap; the Viet had managed to capture one of the Sun Bombs that the Emperor’s greatest scientists had been working on, and after drawing some 50,000 troops after him into the countryside around the city, he set it off. In one brief flash, the Chinese forces had been cut by a quarter.
in 1882, singer Carla Lambert was born. She caught the eye of Thomas Edison’s movie company, Dynamic Pictures, and starred in several films for them. Rumors of an affair between her and Edison were heatedly denied, but she did spend quite a bit of time at his mansion in New Jersey.
in 1886, Frances Folsom breaks the heart of President Grover Cleveland when she leaves him at the altar. Folsom, the daughter of Cleveland’s law partner and 27 years younger than the president, decided that she couldn’t bear the pressure of life as a First Lady, and fled Washington for New York City.
in 1910, a transport ship carrying almost half a million Q’Bar is blown up by Q’Barian resistance fighters. The genocidal attack horrifies all of the Q’Bar, draining the resistance of most of its support; those who remain, though, are the most fanatical of the anti-Mlosh forces.
in 1954, Washington Soviet’s grandstanding anti-capitalist Senator, Ted Astley, called a televised press conference to announce that capitalists had infiltrated the People’s Intelligence Agency. The completely unfounded charge gave Comrade Astley a lot of press, which he used to persecute the few capitalists of note in the country, as well as intimidate their fellow travelers.
in 1967, Pete Best’s influential album The Commander & His Wife premiered at the top of the U.S. charts and stayed there until knocked off by Best’s next album, Why Did I Fall In Love With You?
in 2003, the European Space Agency launched the Mars Express probe. Martian forces terminated it in December, prior to the invasion.
in 2004, Marjorie Adams attempted to find the Smartnet site www.horus.gov, since Cindy Berenson had given her last breath to tell her about it. When she enters the address, it asks for a password; when she is unable to supply one, it shuts down her computer.
… that is getting rave reviews, and people you know are gushing over, only to find that it leaves you completely and utterly unimpressed?
I had that experience with The Remains of the Day when it came out. Critics fawned over it, several of my friends whose opinions I trusted loved it, so I bought it and prepared myself for a profound literary experience. Instead, I was bored and only finished it because I wanted to see if it got any better at the end. It didn’t.
The same author, Kazuo Ishiguro, wrote a SFish novel that might be more to my liking, called Never Let Me Go, but I’ve been reluctant to try it because of how much I disliked Remains. Anybody read both and can compare the two for me?
capncarrot:
DC announces Alan Scott (the Golden Age Earth-2 Green Lantern) is gay
He can’t be! His powers don’t affect wood…
