worldbuilding
I commented onĀ this post of Charlie StrossāsĀ before now ā about when it was first posted back in ā16 ā on G+, but while I wait for compilers to compile and linkers to link, I thought Iād post a commentary on the giant list of hoary and terrible space
Senate
So, remember back last December I made this quick post, pointing out how the baroque formality of the Imperial Senate served as an effective Schelling fence against certain kinds of bullshittery? Well, given the fun that is the current 2,300 page-plus, two-hours-to-print omnibus spending bill, I feel the urge
sport
So, it occurred to me that in my comments on sports here I missed one very large elephant in the room that makes competitive sportsā¦ difficult. Namely, the number of species, and then the number of clades of those species, and thatās before we start getting into individual-level modifications,
freight container
Since the contract Iām working at the moment has gone into crunch mode, in the interest of keeping up some content this month, have an extra question answer: I have a questionā¦ As you say: aĀ Harivenās holdĀ is sometimes cobbled together from eight standard shipping containers. Are
worldbuilding
Yes, itās that time again. Before I get started on the actual Qs and As, though, I said to myself that I was going to link to this:Ā Current Affairsā āSome Puzzles For Libertariansā, Treated As Writing Prompts For Short Stories, over on Slate Star Codex, in which Scott
worldbuilding
I ran across this excerpt of a post onĀ one of the Fimfiction blogs I followĀ this morning, and while Iām using it out of context and off-topic ā itās actually talking about the Lex Luthor of DCās Earth-3, the morally inverted one, in the context of their
worldbuilding
Those of you who readĀ Slate Star Codex will probably have already seen this article; and those of you who donāt probably should read it, because I think it might be helpful in explaining the differences between Imperial āpoliticsā and Earth politics as we know them, including ā to pick
military
So, I gather moreān a few laser fans are coming to visit these days, so just to save time, hereās the canonical reason that lasers are the āverseās secondary weapons system, not its primary one: (It turns out that this is really a recapitulation of points raised
worldbuilding
For those mildly bothered by the ambiguity in the size of the Empire heretofore present, Iām here to relieve you of that ambiguity. It isĀ precisely 243 systems in size, of which 226 can be found in the list below, the other 17 being ecumenical colonies whose name and
worldbuilding
So Iāve been playing around a bit with nuclear reactor design, as one does. Thinking about the gap in the portfolio between the high-performance and high-unfriendliness molten-salt designs mentioned for use in power armor, and the low-power pebble-bed designs used for distributed medium-power applications, and wondering what exactly the
Senate
On this day in which we here in the US observe the attempt to make law a 497-page document issued too late to read before the vote, in the form of a non-searchable PDF with handwritten, barely-legible marginal annotationsā¦ ā¦an observer from a far distant land might turn to another,
ethics
A reader sent in a trio of interesting articles discussing the nature of property and wealth in a stateless society ā and while the Empire isnāt one, obviously, being a joint-stock diarchy, it draws from a lot of the same memeplexes. And so it seems that a discussion of these