For readers who are relatively new to the Eldraeverse and didn’t catch it first time around, have a little New Year’s fic: “The Darkest Night” (For those who are curious about such things, yes, the Harmonious Calendar very carefully sets the new year equal to the winter solstice.
Machine Monotone: Mostly averted. Who builds a speech synthesizer that can’t handle the subtextual channels, seriously? Bad design. People need to be able to relate even to the non-sophont machines, and that means a good emotional simulation is a fundamental part of UI design. (Played a little straight with
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 24,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it
…to all, and especially my Patreon patrons, for the dearth of fictional content over the last couple of weeks. I can only plead, as those of you who also follow me on Google+ will know, the saga of my ongoing computer issues – which both make it somewhat harder to write,
Machine Empathy: It looks this way – actually, it mostly is this way, thanks to those population demographics that made it necessary, due to lack of a large disposable workforce, for the Empire to adopt automation as early and as often as possible, and therefore ensured that lots of people not
Technopath: A ubiquitous talent in the more civilized Worlds (largely because Everything Is Online, including people’s brains – usually with both regular old WiFi and a high-bandwidth laser-port in the back of the neck that interfaces with any of a large number of comfortable chairs.) This is also how the
Luke Nounverber: Averted. While the third name, the attributive name, is often of Nounverber form, attributive names generally are epithets. Not all of them are to be taken strictly literally – there is some “mere puffery” going on, especially in, say, foe-names – but enough are that it is perhaps less than
I was yesterday sent a link to an interesting article, noted as “in conjunction with the eldraeic conception of religion”. Herewith, then, some commentaries and sparked notions. (Note: The blog this article comes from appears to be associated with the neo-reactionary movement. If that makes you want to comment in
Ludd Was Right: Severely and harshly averted. Low-tech societies aren’t even all that good at surviving the cataclysms of nature, much less the realities of galactic realpolitik, which, in its hotter moments, could accurately be summed up as “Hey, space is a tough place where wimps eat fiery plasma
Low Culture, High Tech: Happens an awful lot, due to the absence of any Alien Non-Interference Clause, and the common interpretation of general free trade statutes by free traders as “can (and will) sell anything to anybody who wants it”. If they don’t read the manual (or, in many
Loud of War: What the war pipes were originally invented for, and never mind their usage to rally and direct the troops. Also, if you recall the lampshading of the lack of battlefield stealth under Bling of War, what the speakers on the Powered Armor and Awesome Personnel Carrier are
candle (n.): A candle, or putt-putt, is the simplest transport spacecraft that can be devised, consisting essentially of a tank of hypergolic rocket fuel powering a thrust motor and a simple reaction-control frame. The pilot, supported by their vacuum suit, rides the candle – the tank itself – in much the same