worldbuilding
As a brief cultural note, today, I happened to be looking something up on the Atomic Rockets Future Mythology page, and was reminded of Crazy Eddie. (The one from Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye, obviously. Even if, sad to say, that
Harmonious Calendar
Ladies and gentlemen, I take you now to - the calendar! Specifically, I take you to the Harmonious Calendar, the standard calendar used by Imperial chronometrists ever since the Founding (although in its basic structure it required little adjustment, primarily the setting of a new base point/year zero, and
culture
When they refer to Ochale as the Masked Empire, for those of you who don’t know, it’s not some tired cliché about inscrutability. Ochaleans quite literally wear masks from the day of their birth to that of their death. Their spouse will see their face, and their children
Harúnet (Promegi Matrix)
A phenomenon ever worthy of note is how much the overall culture of the Worlds has been shaped less by the direct influence of the Great Powers, or indeed by their cultures in themselves, but rather by misunderstandings of those cultures, in which others grasp the surface forms but not
culture
“Look, if your reaction to a sophont doing psychotically bad things is focused on the instrumentality they used, rather than why on you have a culture prone to psychopathogeny, you are wrong on a level that… well, starshit, you don’t need me to explain it; you need a metaphysicist.
culture
“Every year, since I was old enough to read them, more books have been published than I can read in a year. My reading speed has increased many orders of magnitude in the millennia since then – I have a submind which does nothing but read, continuously – and yet the authors
worldbuilding
It has been asked in various places what scares Imperial sophonts the most. Herewith is the answer: As a side-note, you will observed that the answers here are mostly existential, not physical. Physical fear never had much hold on the eldraeic psyche in the first place (none at all, for
uplift
In this course, we cover one of the most interesting branches of exosophontology, the exosophontology of uplifted species. While we will touch upon the minority uplift cultural movements (the integrationists, who attempt to become indistinguishable from their creators; the separatists, who would divorce themselves from civilization to find their own
culture
… referring to any of the Empire’s citizen-shareholders, is valmiríän in the original Eldraeic; curiously, it is not cognate at all to that nation’s formal name. From its roots, it could have the meaning either of “ordered self” or of “self that sets in order”. When asked if one