High in the mountains of CimonĂĂ« lies the black-spired citadel of the Aellakhassren, the Order of Beautiful Death, the finest students of ktenology the Empire has to offer. Not death-worshippers, they would have us be clear; their order takes Ithával and KalasanĂ© as exemplars, save those few who, by profession,
The Speculativism Index, under any of its names, is a crude clionomic hack used by free traders, weirdseekers, adventurers, and various other professions which necessarily interact with the starbound and minority civilizations of the known Galaxy in a more amateurish way than the Grand Survey or the Exploratory Service. The
Deus Est Machina: Done deliberately and intentionally. When you build a recursively self-improving seed AI, the kind that turns into, in the lingo, a “weakly godlike superintelligence”, then you have to know that you’re committing a willful act of theogeny, right there. Doubly so when you’re building a
In today’s random conlanging post – the Eldraeic terms for the six simple machines, just because I could: rijvas Inclined plane. rijsevas Wedge (“double-sided inclined plane”, more or less) saejas Screw (originally “circular inclined plane”, then worn down) chalél / charét Wheel / axle sekánlél Lever (“stick that moves things not itself”
The drone stood in the hangar, its blunt nose and forward-swept wings scarred with the black lines of kinetic strikes and near-misses with explosive-tipped missiles, the capped remnant of one sensory pod dangling uselessly from its side. “For great valor in the face of the enemy,” the Wing Commander read,
Hive Mind: The Transcend is not a traditional Hive Mind, it’s a collective consciousness, or group intellect. The difference, as it will point out to you at some considerable length, is that all of the members retain their individual personalities and perspectives as well as contributing to the whole,
Just throwing in, now it’s not on my nonexistent regular blog, a plug for the blog Women Fighters In Reasonable Armor, of which I approve thoroughly in the interest of not making my suspension of disbelief hurt any more than it does already when reading Generic Fantasy or other
“The models you can see in this room,” said the guide, “represent some of the first models of carbon organizer. Carbon organizers were the earliest and simplest form of dry nanotechnology, capable of building simple molecular structures from carbon and hydrogen atoms only. While this may seem trivial, they formed
Mental Fusion: See Hive Mind for the permanent version (Fusions and Self-Fusions). The temporary version, called a conflux, is a standard part of the arsenal for a variety of situations – merged fireteams for greater military efficiency and coordination (and, y’know, battlefield omniscience, when done really right), guard webs that
Touched By Vorlons: The thing that happens to you when you join the Transcend (see: Deus Est Machina, Hive Mind), inasmuch as the core of the process is taking a tiny piece of the metamind and grafting it into your own mind-state, where this soul-shard then assumes the role of
Okay, from today, it’s going to look like I’ve just given up on posting the trope-a-day in order entirely, I’m afraid, but in actuality, that’s not true.  The trouble is that the ones that would be today’s and tomorrow’s in linear order, Ave Machina
<Yellow-Starred Amethyne Motet in E Flat Minor>, Staff Writer “A sinister syndicate of crime and corruption, whose deeply-buried tentacles cast a grim shadow across the Associated Worlds.” – Mach Journalist-I’qar, Vonikar Times My Voniensan colleague’s taste for assorted alliteration and colorful metaphors aside, it must be admitted