Very Special Delivery

Alistair Young

Feb 4, 2016

“Ma’am, I am a bonded secure courier for the Midnight Runners, a subsidiary of Stellar Express, ICC. In accordance with the terms of our corporate tort coverage, I am required to inform you that, should a message recipient attempt to detain or interrogate me, or otherwise bypass my internal security systems, I will explode with a force approximately equivalent to 3,000 grains of octadetonite, with an associated gamma-range prompt radiation pulse. This is a fully automated safeguard, and one not overridable by my conscious will. I must recommend, therefore, that you permit me to be about my business.”

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Imperialism Wow!

(To be pronounced, naturally, just like "Catholicism Wow!". You may feel free to imagine for yourself Buddy Queen Victoria, Buddy Cecil Rhodes, Buddy Genghis Khan, or Buddy Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus.) In which I write in response to this comment back on "Nom": Are there any

Nom

“Consider, gentle reader, that even as the flesh of an Emperor, or of any man, is constituted of what he eats, so then is an Empire, in bones and sinew, constituted of what it eats. “Therefore, to maintain the health, and to avoid the manifestations of ill-nutrition, unseemly bloat, or

Shipshape

I saw this picture today, via an Astral Codex Ten post on distinguishing human art from AI art, but that is not the context in which I reference it: Instead, I merely point out that it would be an accurate representation of what the Royal Alatian (later Imperial) Navy would

My To-Fu Is Stronger Than Yours

Pressed bean curds are a common item in many Eliéran cuisines, in recipes both savory and sweet. I refer to them using this long description since, despite being identical in many ways and produced from the same small group of plants, they are one of the very few foodstuffs to