diplomacy
kchellis> So, what’s the problem this time? socularios> Cleaning up the diplomatic fallout from last night’s dinner at the Isliar Primarchy embassy. kchellis> What could possibly happen at a Primarchy dinner? Those things are so boring that you’re tempted to shoot yourself in the
Repository of All Knowledge
The Alathciera (lit. “weave-of-knowledge”) is the great encyclopedia published by the Repository of All Knowledge. It is a hypermedia encyclopedia containing 3×1218 bits of information, making up 2×1211 articles, based on the Repository’s 9,000 years of scholarship, and making up an abridged set of the full
ethics
…is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness. For he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost
military
Cirys superzorcher (n.): A hypothetical weapons system in which the various elements of a Cirys swarm (q.v.) are equipped to function as the radiative elements of a phased-array laser. Such an array, with an effective aperture equal to the diameter of the swarm, would theoretically be able to deliver
eldraeic language
el tramĂ©zashĂĂ«l eslĂ©vár (n.): Empire of the Star; the largest and oldest eldraeic polity. Broken up, this phrase reads: tra (DESCRIPTION OPERATOR) – mĂ©z (METAPHORIZATION OPERATOR) – ashĂĂ«l (star) — eslĂ©v (empire) – ár (PREDICATION OPERATOR), which is to say in long-gloss, “the empire which is like unto a (metaphorical) star”. Replacing this with
death
Inspired by this comment: I’ve always been of the opinion that, given the Associated Worlds’s existing tech base and attitudes towards continuity of personal identity and such, there must be a “small” subculture of thrill-seekers who deliberately expose themselves to lethal danger purely out of curiosity as to
paracoercion
“…as to your avowed intention to institute a Universal Income, we welcome such systems – as evidenced by our own Citizen’s Dividend – as an excellent answer to paracoercive states. (Para-, in this case, meaning “not really”, but having initially solved the ethical problems of true coercion, which is to say
PhĂlae (Thirteen Colonies)
There were people on PhĂlae who had a sense of caution in the face of nature. That was amply evident from the architecture of Lower Landing, which was all in the classical style of the first colonists; long, low, heavy buildings of stone and vitredur, aligned from sea to land,
Cultural Crossovers
You know how this works at this point… * Ooh, glowy cube. Wonder if it’s an actual tesseract inside? * Yeah, you can see where Tony got it from. * And this, gentlesophs, is what we call estxijir. * Ooh, we like her. * The culture that makes a point of the importance of
Resplendent Exponential Vector
Turning to the Vector itself, it is, as we have said, the eighth planet of its primary, hot white Enlightenment. Ordinarily, one would not expect a planet so distant from its sun to be warm enough to be habitable, but the energetic history of the system and the star-forming region
Cultural Crossovers
Y’all know how this goes by this point in the series, so let’s get right into it… * I love the smell of science in the evening. * Ooh, Asgard is shiny! And flat! When did they start filming in our neck of the woods? (Seriously, feels familiar.) * Oh, that’
worldbuilding
It’s known that the eldrae (and Imperial culture generally) place a premium on rational belief, but they also place a great amount of value on preserving extant diversity of beliefs and opinions inasmuch as they can be reconciled with rationality. Given this, what do they make of Aumann’s