At midnight tomorrow (that would be midnight following 29 October 2024, Central Daylight Time), we’ll be cutting over to the new shiny Ghost-based site instead of this old, busted WordPress one.
Not everything is finished, because some things are very hard and/or impossible to set up without it running on the proper domain name. (Which includes, sad to say, the Discourse comments, which while they will be the first thing that gets set back up post-cutover, won’t be there immediately.) There’s a featured post on the new site that tells you what’s on the list and what hasn’t been put there yet. Feel free to make comments on this post (and its parallel on the community site) if you think I’ve missed anything.
Rather than import the mess of the old tagging system and images, I’m going back through all the imported posts and adding nice clean tags and images to them. There’ll be another featured post telling you how far I’ve got.
Fortunately, links to posts should not be affected by this migration, as I’ve tweaked the routes configuration to make them all match up.
So, for my birthday, which it is, I have decided to get myself freedom from WordPress.
(Why, you ask? Many reasons, like being sick of its breakage and security issues, not to mention that it takes a rather more expensive droplet – it’s hosted on DigitalOcean – to serve this site than I really think it ought to. So it sucks life, and it sucks money, about ¾ of the revenue that the blog subscriptions bring in. I would like to cure both of these things. Plus, it’s getting long in the tooth and improvements I want to make to this place keep bogging down in related difficulties.)
I would also like to obtain freedom from Patreon, too, which has been getting increasingly sucky for various reasons over the years. Of course, I speak now to the kindly gentlemen who have stuck with me over the years through thick, thin, and depressive writer’s block, this is contingent on having a replacement for it that people will be willing to move to and actually will.
Essentials for me:
Integration with Discourse for comments. As it’s also the FAQ host and the place for conversations that doesn’t suck as well as the commenting system that doesn’t make me want to spork out my own brain, this one’s non-negotiable.
A blog theme that puts entire posts on the front page, and allows scroll-to-navigate. Excerpts and click-in-and-out weary me immeasurably.
I would prefer not to self-host it because, honestly, this no longer sparks joy.
Apart from that, my considerations are entirely open, because I have no idea what the current state of decent blog hosting is, nor am I having a great deal of luck in my research so far.
So please, your thoughts, if you would be so kind?
The term “ring-magazine” refers to a design philosophy used in current-generation Imperial Navy capital ships, other than carriers, along with a number of the larger, quadruple-turreted cruiser classes.
To review, these types – unlike the smaller destroyers and frigates – share a common general plan dictated by the requirements of military starship design. The core of the vessel is a primary truss structure extending from the thrust frame at the stern to the bow, around which the habitable section is constructed. Above this, connected by the remaining structural trusses, the outer hull is a slender, rhombus-based pyramid, similar to the blade of a poniard, slightly flattened on the dorsal-ventral axis. This enables it to present a favorable glacis angle during engagements.
Current capital-ship design favors four primary mass driver turrets (secondary turrets if the class is outfitted with one or more spinal mounts), arranged one per face of the hull. In ring-magazine designs, rather than each turret feeding from its own dedicated magazine, a toroidal magazine is constructed surrounding the core of the ship and in close proximity to the hull at the turret access points, taking inspiration from the ring-main power feeds to both kinetic and laser turrets. Since standard mass driver ammunition contains no active explosive elements, there are no requirements for isolating magazines to prevent sympathetic or secondary detonations in the event that damage penetrates the magazine. Rather, damage-control concerns are limited to minor machinery, electrical, and fuel fires readily addressed by standard milspec compartmentalization.
While compartmented, this design permits a continuous ammunition-feed system to redistribute ammunition to any turret access point on demand; one which cannot be interrupted by single-point damage, since there are multiple feed routes to each turret (typically chained conveyors both fore and aft of the ammunition storage area).
Thus, ring-magazine design both enables capital ships to carry a greater total quantity of ammunition, and to use it with greater tactical flexibility, leading to its adoption as the present standard.
There is, in short, competence and competence. The Accord on the Law of Free Space is rather generously written, to cover all our polities at whatever stage of progress they may be and however much investment in training they can afford. The Imperial Navigation Act is rather more tightly written, on the other hand, insofar as reserving their spaceways for those who can meet a certain higher standard allows them to have nice things, sadly compromised by the realities of free trade and passage.
The Fraternal Order of Astrogators and Sailing Masters, on the gripping hand, considers anyone who cannot complete an interstellar voyage using naught but a printed ephemeris, slipstick, stopwatch, and sextant to be a disgrace to the profession.
In which we begin to discuss the arguments that are slotted into the predicates. Specifically we’re going to talk about érélar (from e, diminutive prefix, plus rélar, argument-word). You may consider these the equivalent of pronouns, insofar as they are words which stand in the place of full arguments rather than full arguments themselves.
But we aren’t going to give a comprehensive listing of érélar at this time, as you may have guessed from the fractional number of this chapter. Rather, we’re just going to sum up some of the ones you’ve seen already in past examples, and which will help make future examples make more sense, and these will be gone back into in more detail in a future article.
Personal érélar
The equivalent of personal pronouns in English and used in much the same way, the most basic of the personal érélar are these:
val
I
valén
I and those I speak for
anan
You
ananén
You and those you speak for
Letting us say things like:
val dalessár an-anan; anan dalessár an-val I love¹ you. You love me.
There are more personal érélar available to express the many variations of “we” and “you (plural)”, which we won’t get into at this time, so that’s really all we have to say here. You should note, though, that as expected these carry no miscellaneous information about their users, nor do they inflect for case; case tags are used as normal.
These érélar can be used as esprel and to form observatives in much the same way as any other word, leading to statements such as:
val valár I am me.
or, in the observative form
valár I am.
The latter is most useful when you hang a tense on it to indicate that you are in a particular place and time, but if you want to be philosophical, go right ahead.
It should also be noted that personal pronouns are most common in casual speech, and that to a certain extent, they should be treated as assignable variables; one should illeize on first use of the first person, and upon later valëssef shifts, in order to let people track the changes. This is done using the equivalence operator es which we talk about below (and the naming operator ádar that we will discuss in a later article), thus:
val es ádar Esitaríél Cyprium-ith-Aelies dalinár I, known by the name Esitaríël Cyprium-ith-Aelies, am a friend.
The second person is generally only used when one has not been introduced, and subsequent to that one should use the name, and assign a variable for ongoing use.
Demonstrative érélar
Among the simplest ways to define something is to point at it. For this purpose, the three demonstrative érélar exist:
pí
This, here
pá
That, there
pé
The other, yon
Usage, of course, is simple.
pí azikár This is a rock.
pá lórravár That’s a tree.
pé chalíëlár Yon’s the moon.
The demonstratives are not“sticky”, or rather, only as sticky as the moment of the speaker’s pointing. You can walk down a row of items and refer to each in turn as pí. If you want to keep one particular item around for future use, you can assign it a variable (again with the equivalence operator):
pí es sá azikár This, henceforth known as A, is a rock.
Note also that these are strictly used as demonstratives. No other English uses of “this” and “that” are encompassed in them; if you can’t point at the thing or if you’re identifying one thing out of a group (i.e. “this car”), you don’t use these. And if you point at a date on the calendar, you can’t say that this is Tuesday, you have to say that this represents Tuesday. Precision, good sophs!
Variables and the Equivalence Operator
Finally, the variables, of which there are six, which are the most general-purpose of the érélar:
sá
it, known as A
sé
it, known as B
sí
it, known as C
só
it, known as D
sú
it, known as E
sý
it, known as F
These érélar can stand for anything at all. Animate, inanimate, singular, plural, whatever. They carry no meaning except that which is attached to them using the equivalence operator, es, which is used to define that its operands refer to the same entity (i.e., it does not denote type or equality). So, for example.
val es sá … I, Mr. A., …
ádar Geffly min Torill es sú … Geffly min Torill, henceforth referred to as Mr. E, …
el azik es sé … A rock, B, …
pí es sí … That, C, …
And so forth. These variables retain their values as set until explicitly redefined, explicitly cleared, or implicitly cleared by the end of the chapter or conversation. They can be used as simply as any other érélar when defined.
sá cadairár It (A) is a throne.
The use of the variables without defining them first as a means of posing hypotheticals is an attested form of the language, but it’s considered courteous to let your interlocutor know that you’re doing so, so that they don’t have to quest through their memory for a definition that they missed.
If you find six variables insufficient for your needs, you can extend the list indefinitely by appending syllabic numerals to create the equivalent of A-prime (sáne), A-double-prime (sáto), etc. One convention that has arisen is that of setting the base variable to a group, and using its indexed variants to represent members of that group, as an aid to recall.
That’s all for now! We hope to be back later in the month with details on rélar themselves, not just their short substitutes.
Eldraeic is a much more specific language than English. To put it in Greek terms instead, daless refers to philia; compare, for example, dalin (friend).
A curious feature of Imperial academia is the antidegree (occasionally and unofficially referred to as the dishonorary antidegree).
One cannot, of course, simply revoke a degree obtained without fraud; it is a time-bound certification of ability which stands as testimony to the competence of its holder at that time. However, it cannot be denied that there are those who, in later life, fall from the path of wisdom, and who do not respond to the gentle correction of their peers.
Let it be stated first that our institutions of learning are chary of awarding antidegrees. It is not their purpose to harass those whose knowledge has become obsolescent with the passage of time and who no longer practice in their field, save that they continue to opine on current matters; nor are they intended to be other than a last resort when gentler measures have failed. Perhaps most importantly, they must not and will not be used as a stick to beat unconventional hypothesists and heterodox thinkers, from whom so much of our advancement ultimately proceeds.
But in those rare cases when one willfully leaves the path of wisdom and the quest for truth, be it for petty reasons of ideology, utility, or personal advancement, or for some imagined grander cause, and in the worst cases does so with the support of actual fraud, the antidegree stands as a last resort to prevent the propagation of lies and false paradigms under the color of abandoned integrity.
Apart from its direct effects (the antiqualification being deemed to cancel out the initial qualification), the antidegree carries with it social censure, including effective expulsion from the academic exultancy, and in legal terms immunizes the awarding institution from potential suits over the awardance of the initial qualification to a presumably unworthy candidate, unless it can be demonstrated that this could reasonably have been established at the time.
Rarely, an institution may issue an antidegree to an individual that was never awarded a degree in the first place (the ridiculously named honorary dishonorary antidegree) as a particularly pointed criticism of some unusually noteworthy proclamation of unwisdom. Such has no legal effect, but where the Imperial intelligentsia are concerned, has all the social function of the old custom of judicial incredibility.
Ladies and gentlemen, I take you now to – the calendar!
Specifically, I take you to the Harmonious Calendar, the standard calendar used by Imperial chronometrists ever since the Founding (although in its basic structure it required little adjustment, primarily the setting of a new base point/year zero, and the standardization – if not translation – of day, month, and season names into now-standard Eldraeic.
Its units are, naturally enough, dictated by the period and rotation of Eliéra around its star, and as such, it uses a 333-day solar year. That year is divided into 37 weeks of nine cycles – a complete planetary rotation, completing a day and a night¹, is referred to as a cycle – each; a convenience of this arrangement is that the year always begins (at the winter solstice) on the first cycle of the week, Amphimis, and ends on the last cycle of the week, Nyxis.
The year is also divided into twelve months of three weeks (or 27 cycles) each, a total of 324 cycles, and nine intercalary cycles are added (six at the start and end of the year, and three in the middle) to make up the full count. While the length of a month is not an exact divisor of the length of the year, it was taken from the period of Seléne, the major moon; however, the months no longer follow her phases, as they’ve been synchronized with the years.
Since Eliéra’s orbital year includes an additional 0.3 days, a “leap” cycle is inserted to calibrate the calendar² every third year, but omitting every thirtieth. Its name is derived from its function, and Calibration Day is added each year immediately after the intercalary day for the summer solstice, Midyear’s Day.
The twelve months of the year are also divided into six two-month seasons (shown by the color-coding and the key at the bottom), in accordance with the cultural tradition of dividing things into groups of six and assigning them correspondences with the classical elements.
(The above image is uncomfortably tiny, sad to say, when fit into the blog format, but if you open just the image in a new tab from the context menu, you should be able to magnify it back to its original size.)
Or a night and a day. For convenience, the cycle on the Upperside runs from dawn to the following dawn, and that on the Underside from dusk to the following dusk, and thus constitutes the exact same period regardless of your location.
Since Calibration Day is already an anomaly in the regular progression of the cycles, leap seconds and other minor temporal adjustments are traditionally included in the Calibration correction.
One question that is often asked by those newly come to the Empire is how, in a society which claims to value the liberties of the individual – and, indeed, specifically one’s freedom to associate and disassociate as one pleases – the Empire justifies its strict immigration policy. Does this not, they ask, vitiate the freedom of association of the citizen-shareholder who is asked to turn over his choices in this matter to the quote-better judgment-unquote of the Imperial Guard of Borders and Volumes?
The answer is that there is a specific means to address this. The V-series visa, which bypasses normal inplacement procedures, is based on the ancient eldrae custom of vouchsafe. Both as custom and as a matter of law, the tradition of vouchsafe allows someone to vouch for the good conduct of another; the one who takes the oath takes complete responsibility, both personal and legal, for the actions of the other, and suffers the same consequences if that person acts improperly. The consequences range from public scorn, if the person vouched for behaves rudely, to even death, if that person commits a capital crime.
So one need not simply accept that one has signed over all one’s judgment concerning freedom of association to the Imperial Guard of Borders and Volumes when one becomes a citizen-shareholder; if one sincerely believes that their judgment is superior than that of civilization’s appointed guardians, they may pledge vouchsafe for the admittance of anyone not specifically banned from the Empire, and they will be granted admittance – but by doing so, they accept the responsibility to their fellow citizen-shareholders that would otherwise be vested in the Empire for any and all social, civil, and criminal liabilities imposed upon the citizen-shareholder body by he for whom they pledged vouchsafe, even to the extent of wagering their citizen-shareholdership (forfeited should the vouchsafee require deportation) and even, upon occasion, life itself upon their judgment of their vouchsafee’s capacity for good behavior.
In this way, the freedom of association is maintained, but the externalities of unwise association are properly vested upon he who chose poorly in imposing them upon his fellows.
(And, of course, this system provides valuable feedback to the IGBV. Should the number of V-series visas issued and completed successfully – with the vouchsafee departing with a clean record or being upgraded to standard inplacement – rise, this will be and has been taken as a sign that inplacement standards are too strict relative to societal standards, and they will correspondingly be eased, to the aid of future potential immigrants.)
– The Aeonic Book of Practical Imperialism: A Guide for the Recovering Outsider
“What many fail to realize is that much of the art of diplomacy is not haggling; it is antihaggling. That is to say, it is not to clarify and define a price, but rather to obfuscate and obscure it.
“This is why we do not draw lines in the sand. That invites razorwalking and rules-lawyering. A man or a polity that has been set a limit to their actions will step right up to it, if not poke their nose across it. Even worse is to declare consequences to violations of such lines: one must then execute on precisely those consequences. To fail to do so is to be seen as weak; to exceed them as unfaithful to one’s word; and if one carries them through exactly, one is merely exacting a price that the buyer was willing to pay.
“Rather, the wise let it be known that ‘sufficient incivility’, as the charming traditional euphemism goes, will result in ‘such consequences as are appropriate’. The man – or the polity – whose perception of danger is clouded by fog walks much more carefully, and those who do not know whether transgressions will result in a formal reprimand, a bullet in the brain, or the Imperial Navy raining fire from orbit oft prefer not to gamble.”
– Calen Minaxianos-ith-Minaxianos, “Quantum of Discourse”
intagliated particle: An intagliated particle is a subatomic particle which contains more metadata than the universe-defined natural parameter set (position, momentum, mass, charge, spin, color, etc.). Such metadata can be strictly passive; can interact with other entities via the mechanisms of natural or artificial laws; or can be internally active. While simple intagliation can be carried out using a peeker-poker or particle graver, this last state is typically achieved by “infecting” the particle with a species of active femtotechnology.
For example, muon stabilization is achieved by a primitive femtomachine which attaches itself to the muon. In the most simplistic and metaphorical terms imaginable – and my editor has assured me, gentle reader, that he stands ready to intercept the letters from outraged physicists that will no doubt ensue – this femtomachine executes a script which is triggered when the muon enters a pre-decay state, and “reboots” the muon back to its initial parameters.
– sidebar, A Young Engineer’s First Book of Ontophysics
The problem of military intelligence being given away by social networking is a very old one. Directly useful OSINT (i.e., extranet social postings directly translatable to location) has become a rarity among contemporary military forces, due to greater technical capabilities and COMSEC discipline; however, negative social OSINT is still an issue. When extranet social postings from military-affiliated or -contracted individuals cease due to COMSEC, it is possible to infer that this is due to a forward deployment, and for a competent MILINT analyst to deduce from this such information as units deployed, specializations involved, possible deployment locations, etc., etc.
To address this issue, the Fifth Lord of the Admiralty created NATTER SPATTER.
Under the aegis of OPERATION NATTER SPATTER, the Stratarchy of Data Warfare maintains a team of AI forgers which monitor the extranet social postings of Imperial Military Service personnel and contractees, learn how to precisely model and imitate them, and are prepared to step in at a moment’s notice when COMSEC takes effect with a consistent stream of forged data – memeweave postings, imagery, slinky recordings, and even exomemories – indirected in such a manner as to be indistinguishable from the genuine article, and demonstrating a continued civilian life. A stochastic social event generator seasons the basic event stream with sufficient nonrepresentative variation to prevent NATTER SPATTER content from being identified by excessively consistent mundanity.
While NATTER SPATTER postings will not, naturally, survive a full consistency check against the complete event record, public and private, such a full consistency check is beyond the capacity of many intelligence agencies and serves, in other cases, to drive the cost of obtaining this type of OSINT higher in terms of computation and time than can be justified.
From: Kóris Marukanin (Director of Surreal Research) To: Irreality Vault (All Staff) Subject: Inappropriate usage of cystal universes Priority: Immediate Security: IRREALITY INTERNAL SURREAL
I should like to begin by once again congratulating Reizei Chíra’s team on their successful creation of a syntropic cystal universe. While further experimentation has demonstrated the necessity for a great deal of additional work to combine syntropy with time’s arrow moving in its customary direction, the magnitude of this achievement cannot be overstated.
However, I must also take a moment to remind all staff that while the construction and maintenance of cystal universes is an innately expensive business, those of a syntropic cystal universe is even more so. If the work of our infrastructure department has escaped your notice thus far, please be advised that the routine operation of the Vault consumes quantities of antimatter perhaps best expressed in terms of moonlets.
This being the case, please cease forthwith and do not resume the practice of using experimental syntropic universes, of any volume, as a means to repair broken items. This is literally multiple orders of magnitude more costly, in terms both economic and cosmic, than the most ostentatious normal repair process imaginable.
I am a reasonable sophont. I will consider applications for syntropic repair of unique and irreplaceable historical artifacts or one-of-a-kind Precursor archaeology. I will even see if it is possible to work damaged items of great sentimental value to their possessors and which wouldn’t survive normal repair processes into the existing experimental schedule.
But even if it was your favorite esklav mug that you knocked off the console, and you know who you are, put down the irreality engine and just take it into town.
Of course desire causes suffering. But only as a strict subset of the fundamental truth: desire causes everything.
The corollary to this of course is not merely that greed is good, but that greed is the universe’s only true anentropic force. In other words, greed is the Good.
– the Covalanites at the ecumenical conference (which they funded)
In formal Eldraeic, the modifier boz indicates that a word is being used in a vernacular (possibly referring to a local dialect or borrowing, although most commonly indicating a way the word has come to be used in Trade) fashion, rather than in accordance with its proper definition. The modifier boz is derived from the word bosh (“a mush or porridge; a soft, wet, pulpy mass”). This is in no way, gentle reader, a commentary on the Conclave of Linguistics and Ontology’s perceptions of the sort of mentality that resorts to vernacular to express itself, and if you believe any part of that sentence, please contact me for an exciting investment opportunity in the Three-Ended Wormhole Corporation.
Perhaps due to their unusually wide variability across a large number of trait-clines, the variety of ciseflish trade cants have no word cognate to race. When one is needed, they borrow the Eldraeic word kaelídárath, which is technically defined as “true-breeding phenotypically-distinct group taxonomically junior to subspecies”¹ and whose original roots mean “a group of people aesthetic in definition”. That neither of these definitions accurately reflects current usage of the word in Trade vernacular is perhaps a sad reflection upon the current state of galactic education.
Nor, consequently, do they have any word cognate to racism. Their closest equivalent is also an Eldraeic borrowing, which universally adds to the preextant -ehch “dishonorable” suffix the cant prefix for “fundamentally unprofitable”, placing it among the small and unusual category of double-condemnatories.
(This, of course, should not be taken to imply that the ciseflish are incapable of empathizing with racism in other species; merely of sympathizing with it. Ciseflish merchants can and will empathize with exotic racism for precisely the time and to precisely the degree necessary to wring the maximal profit from it, then go back aboard and laugh about the pathetic morons they just exploited. Not to do so, of course, would be inefficient, inopportunistic, and not at all in accord with the tenets of the Path of Ever-Growing Plenitude.)
– Words of the Profits: Implications of Ciseflish Trade Cants, Mirú Altúráldé & Toru min Forill, Imperial University of Almeä
That this same word is also the cognate to breed (of animal) in relevant translation matrices is something that has offended a remarkable number of cultures, not relieved by the official statement of the Conclave of Linguistics and Ontology merely being an assertion of self-equivalency².
Mentalics is a bastardized discipline, dating back to its origins. To be fair to the ancients, they lacked the knowledge and conceptual grounding to differentiate the farspeech family of disciplines, based around the EM-sensitivity of the liacoré complex of the brain, and the psychokinetic family, based around phased-array nanopicosomes interfaced with the peripheral nervous system. Both logically appeared to fall under “the will is the deed”. One may place more blame, perhaps, on more recent thinkers for adding mechanical enhancements via cerebroergetics and other aids and incidents into our field, and yet.
It is what it is. The breadth of our field requires like breadth of preparatory study, which we shall now begin.
– Academician Alder Kamini, Ellenith Cerebral Academy
burlies: archaic military slang for troops formally designated, at the time, as grenadiers; specifically, those equipped with a BRL (“Backpack Rockets Launcher”) as their primary weapon, specializing therefore in high-angle indirect fire. While the derivation from the acronym is obvious, a secondary cause was the effect of the BRL and its control package on the profile of those equipped with it.
(Just a random thought I had today. Incidentally, today I also learned a new word: flathatting.)
From: Thane Cíëng (Fleet Attaché [Vonis Prime Mission], Diplomatic Attachment WG, Active Operations PWG, Second Directorate) To: Altaní Toréjez, Voniensa Republic Navy WG Cc: Intentions Analysis PWG Subject: Command chain reorganization Authenticity: 4E11; SENDER, RELAY (4/4), RECIPIENT Security: EYES ONLY BLUE ICE SHADOW Distribution: Executive & Analysts Date: 7167 Cailmaen 7, Wineful rising 7
As you requested, I tasked appropriate assets to investigate whether the decision of the Republic Navy to put counselors on the bridge of every starship is as innocuous as it is claimed. The answer is yes and no. From the perspective of the Explorer Division, the counselors are advertised as highly trained empaths, psychologists, and memeticists, and their training is similar – allowing for the cultural delta – to specialists the Imperial Exploratory Service use in contact missions.
On the lesser hands, those counselors assigned to the support fleet and in particular to those primary units with the greatest military potential are assigned from rather different backgrounds (off the books), and while they do receive the same on-books training at the Fleet Academy, if I didn’t know better, I would be inclined to think that I am looking at political officers.
While the regulations permitting counselors to relieve captains and other officers in the event of “psychological or memetic incapacity” could simply be written broadly, as imprecise languages permit and indeed encourage, the ease with which it would be possible to find convenient loopholes may also imply that those are intended.
