Oscar Saint-Just's office was two-thirds of the way across the city from the Octagon, and the office itself lay at the very heart of its own tower. Not even the eye-tearing brilliance of a nuclear detonation could penetrate that much alloy and ceramacrete, but the entire stupendous edifice trembled as if in terror as the shockwave rolled over it. The deeply buried landlines of the government's secure communications system were fully hardened against the EMP of the explosion, and Rachel Speer's image on his com display didn't even flicker.
Nor did her gaze, as she looked out of the display into his eyes.
"Detonation confirmed . . . Citizen Chairman," she said softly.
(From "Nightfall", by David Weber, published in the anthology Changer of Worlds by Baen Books.)
--- --- --- --- ---
Esther McQueen, once Admiral of the People's Navy and Secretary of War for the Committee of Public Safety, sat casually on a pile of rubble. She would have picked up rocks and tossed them at one of the other piles of rubble, but she couldn't: her fingers passed right through them, unless she concentrated on what she was doing. Which made it a poor choice of cure for boredom. What she really wanted to do was to go and throttle Oscar Saint-Just, but for some reason, she couldn't seem to get beyond the edge of the crater that used to be the Octagon. She thought it might have something to do with the piece of chain hanging from her chest, but she couldn't prove anything yet.
"Wow, they really did a number on this place." She didn't turn around, just yet. The voice was young, male, probably a teenager to judge by the sound, but that didn't mean much in a society with access to prolong therapies. Rocks ground against each other underfoot as he walked up to the hill, and then asked her, "Excuse me, miss... er," he paused, for some reason, then continued "Er, Admiral?"
Esther looked up and over at him at last. He looked just as young as his voice sounded, with slightly shaggy brown hair and dark eyes. The black robe was a particularly nice touch, she thought, and fit with the sword belted to his waist. "Can I help you, young man?"
"Ah, well, er," he said, reaching a hand up to scratch the back of his neck, laughing nervously. "Actually, I'm supposed to be here to help you, ma'am. Sorry, let me introduce myself. Keigo Asano, shinigami, eighth seat, fifth division." He bowed, one of the formal, archaic Oriental bows like she'd seen martial artists use.
"Admiral Esther McQueen, People's Navy," she offered in return. "Although I get the feeling that the rank is kind of meaningless now."
"Well," the 'shinigami' (whatever that was) mused, "It's not like we have a lot of space fleets... and I think your old boss kind of fired you."
"That's one way to put it," she agreed. "So what happens now?"
"Mmn. You can't stay here forever... you'd turn into a Hollow, or get eaten by one. That's what we shinigami do, primarily... escort souls like you to the Soul Society."
A bitter laugh escaped her lips. "I'm not exactly expecting to go on to Heaven, kid..."
He shook his head quickly. "No, no, it isn't really like that... at least, not right away. Not even we know if there's really a Heaven like you mean... Soul Society is mostly a place for people to live while they wait to be reborn. Of course, it might take a century or two... or longer... hehhe..."
That same nervous laugh again, McQueen wondered, What is he hiding?
"Are you, ah, ready to go on, then, ma'am?" he asked, slipping his sword easily from its sheathe. She eyed it for a moment, warily, then shrugged.
"I'd like to give Saint-Just his due," she muttered, "But I don't think that's going to be very easy in this state." She stood up, dusted off her uniform trousers - another meaningless gesture - and climbed carefully down from her perch.
"Don't worry, ma'am. Everything's going to be alright." And with that, the boy took his sword, and - did not, as McQueen had feared, slice the blade down through her ghostly body. Instead he simply touched the hilt, ever so gently, to her forehead, and whispered a single word, "Konso."
And then the world went dark, and she saw no more.
--
"I give you the beautiful... the talented... the tirelessly atomic-powered...
R!
DOROTHY!
WAYNERIGHT!
--
Sucrose Octanitrate.
Proof positive that with sufficient motivation, you can make anything explode.

Branching the Shuttle discussion off the TSAB thread, here's my incomplete proposal for the original NASA Shuttles (barring any replicas, mockups, new builds or whatever). I've tried to strip the wikicode out of this stuff to the point where it's readable, so bear with me.
The Three Graces
created by Sean Breen, with help from many others
Registry Numbers: OV-103, OV-104, OV-105
Base Hull: Rockwell International Space Shuttle Orbiter
Drive Type: Speed (handwavium impulse engine)
Drive Rating: Max velocity 0.05c
Owner of Record: United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration
Flag of Record: United States of America
Home Port: Kennedy Space Center, Titusville, Florida
Purpose: Scientific research vessel
Launched:
* 30 September 2013 (OV-105)
* 28 January 2014 (OV-103)
* 30 April 2014 (OV-104)
Crew: Varies according to crew rotation schedule
Supplementary Crew:
* $name (AI, MS-0, OV-103)
* $name (AI, MS-0, OV-104)
* $name (AI, MS-0, OV-105)
Faction: 'Danelaw (United States)
Status: Under Discussion
"The Three Graces" is the informal nickname for the handwaved NASA Space Shuttle fleet.
===== History =====
The three surviving operational NASA Shuttles (OV-103 //Discovery//, OV-104 //Atlantis// and OV-105 //Endeavour//) were grounded after the official completion of the International Space Station in 2010. Calls from the public, space industry experts, the astronaut corps and even certain Fenspace factions to have the Orbiters refit with handwavium were officially regarded as "not cost-effective." Unofficially, NASA management was interested in applying handwavium to the Orbiters as a way to keep their hand in the game. Unfortunately for NASA, the Transrationality Science Assesment Bureau controlled all government supplies of pure handwavium, and TSAB's Air Force patrons were unwilling to let NASA have access.
The three Orbiters remained in long-term storage at Kennedy Space Center until 2012, when an anonymous dontation(1) of 100 gallons of //Hephaestus//'s best structural handwavium and a pint of Memnosyne's Honey.
===== Known Quirks =====
The Graces, having all been handwaved (more or less) at the same time, with (more or less) identical equpiment and (more or less) the same handwavium strains, actually manage to approach something of a uniform consistency. The individual Orbiters have their own quirks, of course, but at the same time the Graces //as a class// have several defined quirks.
==== Class Quirks ====
* foo
* bar
* baz
==== Vehicle Quirks (Discovery) ====
* Falling Free: When the Orbiter is powered up, the crew cabin and main cargo bay are zero-g areas, even when //Discovery// is on the ground.
* foo
* bar
==== Vehicle Quirks (Atlantis) ====
* foo
* bar
* baz
==== Vehicle Quirks (Endeavour) ====
* foo
* bar
* baz
===== Stories =====
The Three Graces have been featured in the following stories:
* foo
* bar
* baz
(1): The donation coinciding with the Soviet Air Force visit to KSC on Yuri's Night 2012 being a massive coincidence, of course.
---
Mr. Fnord
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
http://www.jihad.net/
Mr. Fnord interdimensional man of mystery

FenWiki - Your One-Stop Shop for Fenspace Information

"I. Drink. Your. NERDRAGE!"

...on the DW FAQ question about crossovers with other fanfics, and realized that the web of interconnections was growing kinda big. So I sat down with a pad of yellow legal paper and started diagramming things.
And I realized two things -- one, that folks here might get a kick out of it, and two, I certainly don't know everything that crosses over with everything else on the diagram that I came up with, so maybe people could suggest additional series to add.
I've gone through a couple versions in different media, but so far this is the simplest and the quickest to modify. So may I present to you a little thing that I'm tentatively calling "The Twisterverse":

Er, yeah, so. I've been busy. I'll probably get some time to log in next week, largely because that's when my paid time runs until - but after that I'll drop off the radar again. As it happens the end of my current subscription time matches exactly when I'll be busy again. I'll probably be back in-game more regularly in October or so.
I've already got the game time card to activate for that. =P
-- Acyl

'Commercially unimportant' copyright infringement punished

Quote:

---

A software developer responsible for a copyright infringement described even by the copyright owner as insignificant still broke the law, a court has ruled. An injunction has been served even though the infringer has stopped using the technology. ...

---

Because of popular request (okay, Ebony asked and I had something on the go already), here's a draft of a TSAB gazetteer entry. I didn't make up any of
this; it's all from posts to the original Plotbunny thread. I've already posted this as a placeholder over on the wiki, but it's easy to edit the
wiki... Comments, additions, suggestions as to how many corners to fold it into and where to shove it, anything?

Amoung the many thoughts bouncing around my head, one decided to tap me on the shoulder. Whereupon I got mugged by a lot.
1) Do the Blue Blazers actually perform? Buckaroo likes his music you know...
2) Are there any bands in Fenspace?
3) Have any 'Dane-side bands toured Fenspace?
4) Should we make a soundtrack for Fenspace ala Undocumented Features? (I ask because I recently picked up the latest Darren Hayes album, and there are two songs back-to-back that to my mind exemplify different perceptions of The Professor.)

I had a thought about a world it might be fun to see Doug in, but after some more thought I wasn't so sure due to the difficulties in making a story out of it.
Which world? The Earth of Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex.
Good: Magical super hacking and having some nice ordered worldviews shattered. The world also has problems aplenty for Doug to help solve.
Bad: They already deal with super hackers that can realtime hack an image into a persons perception, and the potential leathality of Doug's field interacting with the cyberbrains most everyone has installed.

Karas: The Revelation is coming out in October.
English Language Preview Here- Grumpy Uncle Gearhead
- Grumpy Uncle Gearhead

Just thought of a couple potential additions to the TV Tropes Wiki, but I'm not sure if they step on any preexisting toes.
The Lensman Arms Race
If a military conflict goes on long enough in a high-tech setting, each side will be struggling to gain and keep a technological advantage over the other. Sometimes, this process of escalation goes way over the top.
The title and best example of this trope comes from E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman novels (making this one of the Oldest Ones In The Book). Over the course of a decades-long struggle (that was only the surface of a deeper, eons-old war between cosmic beings using mortals as pawns), Civilization and Boskone went from ordinary starship battles to star-powered lasers, antimatter bombs, planets used as missiles, antimatter planets, faster-than-light antimatter planet missiles...
A second, in some ways even more ridiculous example is Smith's lesser-known Skylark series. By the final novel in the sequence, our heroes destroy two entire galaxies by teleporting every star from one into the close vicinity of every star in the other, causing each pair to collide and go nova, meanwhile teleporting every non-hostile world in the area to safe orbits around stars in a third galaxy, all while they themselves are safe in yet another galaxy entirely...!
Anime Example: Mobile Suit Gundam (original Universal Century timeline). At the start of the first series, the Federation has just produced the RX-78 Gundam, a high-power prototype mecha with the armor and weaponry of a battleship of the time, granting them a significant advantage over the first-generation Mobile Suits fielded by the Zeon Archduchy. By the end of that war, only a few months later, Zeon has built MS's that can just about hold their own against the Gundam and its mass-produced siblings. Seventy war-filled years later, the Victory II Assault Buster Gundam is three meters shorter than and half the weight of the RX-78, and boasts an inertialess drive system, a force-field, and more firepower than every Mobile Suit from the One-Year War put together.
Literary Example: Honor Harrington series by David Weber. (I leave it to bigger fans to fill in the details on this one.)

DuQuesne Karma
Sometimes, The Rival's struggle is completely hopeless. No matter what he does, no matter how hard he trains, no matter what technological marvels he invents or steals, the Protagonist is always, always three steps ahead of him.
Named for Marc C. "Blackie" DuQuesne, villain and antihero in E.E. "Doc" Smith's The Skylark of Space and sequels. DuQuesne is driven by the desire to prove himself intellectually and technologically superior to the hero, Richard Seaton, but repeatedly discovers that Seaton has already surpassed every new trick he can bring to bear.
Anime Example: This trope could easily have been called "Vegeta Karma."
--Sam
"Oh, there's crime here. I can smell it."