Evil Is Petty: The eldrae are a proud race, and they intend to go on being proud – even the corrupt ones. As a consequence, historically, petty evil generally gets its throat slit by grand evil for letting the side down, and not keeping up the proper standards (reference the latter
Man Of Wealth And Taste: Played straight with Imperial renegades, all of whom play the villainous role of a man of wealth and taste to the hilt. Subverted, however, inasmuch as this is also true of heroes and bystanders of Imperial origin, simply because anyone brought up in the Imperial
Evil Detecting Dog: The smarter breeds of the already smart bandal (dog-analogs/evolutionary varieties) are well known as excellent judges of character. The more so for being better integrated into the local society. (Although there are no supernatural detection abilities here; just wits and very good noses/ability to read
So, I’ve been having fun with dogecoin recently, the cryptocurrency, which has a really awesome community vibe to it, and I’d like to do something to help it along.  And, of course, I’ve no objection at all to “doing well by doing good”.  So here’s what
The second stage of jump procedure using a Ring Dynamics stargate is obtaining a reference-frame trap, thus ensuring that you arrive in your destination system in the same sequence and association to the empire time frame that you were in when you left, thus preserving chronological consistency. In urban myth
Everything’s Squishier With Cephalopods: While also one of the more difficult candidates – because their biology is so weird – they were one of the primary candidates for uplift, because they’re already remarkably intelligent, they’re alien enough to have a really interesting point of view, and an underwater native
…is a question I’ve been asked recently. (Aside to the querent: sorry to miss your IM – was away from the computer.) Well, the few past references aside, it depends on what exactly you mean by beer. In the fine tradition of SF “translations” that avoid torturing the language too
IMPERIAL PATENT #S/1AA882B4 / issued 3092-11-10 METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR LIMITED-PARTY TEMPORARY GROUP MIND (“CONFLUX”) CONNECTIVITY Creator: Essene Steamweaver, <Adagio in Gray>, & Conflux Development Initiative (sub. Exogenesis, ICC) Holder: Cognitech, ICC Expiry: 3104-11-09 Ref.: Previous patents: #S/1AA8247A, #S/1AA85223, #S/1AA86386 Exogenesis internal documents: [redacted] Primary
It’s been a while, so here, have something that just rolled through my head today: “Get hence, wretch!”, I said. “You are no fit nemesis for the lady. An Excellence’s _mélith_ merits equivalent weight; I deem you narratively inadequate for the role.”  “An’ what can you do about
In answer to a general question elsewhere about “Third World” nations in your setting: Depending on whose perspective you look at it from, the Associated Worlds have lots of these. From the point of view of the Empire and the other self-designated “Core Economic Zone” powers – which is to say,
Today’s random snippet: “Select Committee on Long-Range Planning Perhaps better known as the committee on “excruciatingly long-range planning”, the SCLRP concentrates on planning for the long term defined as deep time – ranging from several kiloyears to matters of megayears and gigayears. Such matters include long-term secular stellar and planetary
Everything Is Online: Played entirely straight, including just about every piece of technology you can think of – infrastructure, houses, vehicles, appliances, even the simplest packaging will have at least an identity-location-and-v-tag beacon on it – and including people’s brains (which is where your modern chap keeps his PDA); all hooked