trope-a-day
Fantastic Ship Prefix: Several. The Empire alone uses CS (“Coronals’ Ship”) for Imperial Navy vessels, CSS (“Coronals’ Service Ship”) for governance vessels that aren’t part of the Imperial Navy, CMS (“Coronals’ Merchant Ship”) for commercial vessels, IS (plain old “Imperial Ship”) for private vessels other than commercial… …and that’
ontotechnology
Elsewhere A term adopted by ontotechnologists to designate the not-space/not-time in which the universe keeps its metadata (a realm whose existence is implied by all three major theories of natural ontology, although with different representations and certain disagreements on the details), and which is also the realm that translocation
trope-a-day
Fantastic Arousal: As I may have mentioned before, not everyone keeps their genitalia in the same place, and likewise, not everyone keeps their erogenous zones in the same place. (Or even in the same plane of reality. Like, say, AIs with unusual cognitive maps whose erogenous “zones” include things like
first-in scout
“All I’m asking,” the younger one said, “is whether you think it’s a good idea.” “And all I’m saying is that I shouldn’t – can’t – tell you that.” “Why not?” “I’m a first-in scout.” “What’s that got to do with it?” “Because I’m
meta
Bad news, I’m afraid, gentle readers. …it looks like I’m going to have to start enforcing what I have been ignoring up to now, namely, treating asking questions as the one-per-$-per-month Patreon reward that I declared it to be, rather than as something freely offered when questions
trope-a-day
Exotic Extended Marriage: The only thing to note about these, really, is that they’re not all that exotic, what with the laws on marital contracts letting you hack together pretty much any topology you like. Still the minority choice, admittedly, but not so much so that everyone isn’t
worldbuilding
Clearing the decks on a scale that is large… So after many back-and-forth sessions involving questions and answers, I’ve gotten the impression that in eldraeic morals and ethics, there’s essentially a continuum with “coercion” at one end, “ideal enlightened self-interest” at the other, and in between a fairly
temporal mechanics
“I am confident, to more than nine nines of certainty, that not only has a fully-general means of causality-altering time travel not been invented, but that a fully-general means of causality-altering time travel never will be invented within our light-cone.” “Excuse me, Academician – but how can you be so sure?
trope-a-day
Extra Parent Conception: Leaving aside for a moment the issue of species which naturally have more than two sexes (which is extra from our point of view, but not from theirs) plus the issue of cladism and other deliberate modifications, this is the sort of thing which the same reproductive
spacer
“…and the vacuum is hard out today.” A joke so old it’s evolved sophoncy independently from the primordial slime, but interface vehicle pilots evidently have to say something about ambient conditions at the highport. It seems that talking about the weather comes pre-hardwired into every sophont species’ cognome – whether
eldraeic language
As a side note, that cautionary dictionary entry, if anything, understates just how spectacularly insulting uljíra is, adjective-wise. But then, it was written by a non-native speaker of Eldraeic, even if a native speaker of the Trade dialect. Its literal meaning is “choiceless1” – and not so due to external forces.
trope-a-day
Exposed Extraterrestrials: Averted entirely, for reasons as disparate as regulating temperature, protection from environmental hazards, etiquette, and perhaps most significantly of all, pockets. (Literally everyone in the galaxy who isn’t actually sessile has invented pockets, and arguably the ones who are have too, except they call them cabinets.) Even