I made an aside in another thread about how the wiki needs to be updated to bring the state of affairs up to Season 2. Yes, I know we still need to fill in a lot of Seasons 0 and 1.

Could folks please go through the wiki and identify their pages as to what season they apply to? (I'll have to do this as well.) Once the active pages are tagged and updated, we can assign the untagged pages to active writers...

(Maybe somebody could make some small, unobtrusive icons for this: S0, S1, S2, I, and A.)
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Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

http://m.technologyreview.com/view/4219 ... universes/

tl;dr: Astronomers find signs of concentric circles in the universal background radiation.

If you believe that the universe is cyclic - that there's been a series of Big Bangs starting off each cycle - then this shows there have been many Big Bangs.

If you believe the universe is always expanding, then this shows our universe has bumped up against other universes when they were forming...

Of course, the "evidence" might just be data artifacts. There's a better data set coming soon.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012

Hi,

seems to be that irc.sandwich.net is down. Someone knows what is going on?

This isn't fanfiction, per se, although you could call it a deconstruction, of sorts, of the planetary romance genre and particularly Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover stories.  The empire here has minimal interest in the natives' world.  So why are they here?  Enjoy it -- or laugh at it -- as you choose.
It's set, by the way, in a 'verse I originally developed as a customized background for the Traveller role-playing game ... that I wound up never playing.

In the waning days of the Terran Hegemony, Terrans (of no more specific ethnicity) colonized Dwimordene, third planet of a G0 V star.  It was decidedly Earthlike save for lesser gravity and thus a thinner but still breathable atmosphere, its sea level comparable to approximately 1.2 kilometers above Earth sea level.  The settlement was less than two centuries old when the Hegemony fell.  Not quite two hundred years after that, the government that had replaced the Hegemony cut Dwimordene off from interstellar commerce.  Though self-sufficient enough to not actually die out, the colony decivilized to a large extent in the centuries immediately following. 
When rediscovered just slightly less than three millennia later, Dwimordene had redeveloped a technology more-or-less comparable to Earth’s early Renaissance.  It had, however, nothing the Stellar Dictate particularly wanted … except for its location, useful for transshipments throughout a desolate portion of the Arm.  So the Dictate, in its 826th year and the 3373rd (T-standard) of the Dwimordene colony, otherwise 4568 of the Stellar Era and 6809 Common Era/Anno Domini, built its starport at Dwimordene almost completely in orbit. 
Only a few facilities were installed on the planet surface, their use restricted to port personnel — and they were as remote as could be managed from any centers of the society that had developed among the colonists’ descendants.  The Dictate had no desire to trade with the locals and, in keeping with its typical stance of benign neglect, no interest in “civilizing” them, either.  It confined the starport’s “Down” component to a barren island near the planetary equator.  The nearest Dwimordené population was some 1080 kilometers away, through reef-strewn seas, and the scorching climate at the port’s location made it seem improbable that explorers would ever venture near simply to “see what they could see.”What the Dictate failed to consider properly, however, was that although Dwimordene had lost (and rebuilt) much of civilization, it never fell so far as to lose language or literacy.  Even after three thousand years of isolation, its people retained traditions — and copies of old texts — concerning ships from the stars.  On top of this, their technology had by now recovered to the extent of constructing efficient telescopes and making astronomical observations with them.  It therefore came as rather more of a shock to the port’s local administrators than it should have when after 271 T-standard years (268 local) a small fleet of native ships approached the island on which Dwimordene Down was sited.  Stargazers in several Dwimordené nations had detected the orbital port and ships docking there; they’d also tracked the regular transfer of personnel to and from the surface installation and worked out a precise idea of where that facility must be.  Various native expeditions set out independently, but chose to cooperate when they encountered each other on the way (one satiric wit among the Dictate personnel commented that this proved the people of Dwimordene had ceased to be truly human).  Their captains jointly expressed the desire to open diplomatic and trading relations with the starfarers.  Unfortunately, the administrators were, perhaps, somewhat too blunt about the Stellar Dictate’s lack of interest in anything Dwimordene had to offer, and a great deal of wounded pride and bitterness resulted.  Later officials tried to be more tactful and conciliatory, but the damage was done, and most Dwimordené at best resented the offworlders.  At worst, they dreamed of overrunning Dwimordene Down with slaughter and pillage, and even pirating shuttles in which to raid the orbital port as well.Just over a century later, however, an unforeseen situation arose.  No one at the starport knew for certain whether the difficulty resulted from a vessel malfunction, some sort of foul play, or a combination of both, but a small group of Dictate civilians landed in Dwimordené territory, nearly six thousand kilometers from the port.  One of the Dictate’s covert agents, hurriedly briefed on local socio-political conditions, was sent to rescue the innocent and/or capture the guilty.  The briefing couldn’t, in the time available, be made sufficiently comprehensive to let the agent blend in with the local populace; the Dictate had to settle for passing him off as a minor functionary of one of the rare liaison efforts.  He was also to retrieve or destroy the landing vessel and all equipment it’d carried, lest the locals obtain technological knowledge for which the Dictate felt them unready.  Of course, no Dwimordené was noticeably inclined to cooperate with this mission….
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Big Brother is watching you.  And damn, you are so bloody BORING.

Apparently, I'm the only one on right now.
Happy Birthday, Bob!

Cartoonist Ed Piskor has been pre-publishing in the web the pages for a planned graphic novel about the history and evolution of hip-hop culture.It's well researchead, well drawn and never boring. Well worth a look.
You can find the whole collection here: http://boingboing.net/tag/hip-hop-family-tree . It updates (almost) every tuesday, there is a link to the latest one on the BoingBoing main page

As I suggested in a different thread, here's a topic where we can put titles (and maybe synopses) of books published in or about Fenspace.
To start off, though, how about a list of Fen publishing houses?  A quick troll through the wiki reveals only Hogwarts' Press and Library Alpha's little press.  Surely there must be others in a civilization so inspired by the written word...
-- Bob
---------
Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.

This is another aspect of the world we'll have to flesh-out.  I, for one, enjoy games with teen characters as they're still discovering who they are, which leads to scads of entertaining role-playing.
So, Bob, did you have a location where you wanted the Academy was located?

For those who don't remember, the old prop from Star Trek has bounced around various owners over the last couple of decades, most intending (or attempting anyway) to restore her to her television brilliance. And then the fans lost track of her, and at one point it was assumed she was lost forever, either destroyed or scrapped. Until someone found a familiar silhouette hiding under a tarp in a lot on an industrial property.
There were a couple of attempts to get in touch with the current owner... until the business owner decided it needed to go, and told the owner basically, "it goes, or it's scrapped". And she wound up being put up to auction again to save her.
Well, this time, she got herself an owner that properly followed through with restoring her to glory and finding her a home that will properly care for her. A heartwarming conclusion that balances out the heartbreak of the fact that so much of her had to be replaced because of all the years of neglect and outdoor storage, only her frame and "pontoon" nacelles are still original.

http://www.blastr.com/2013-6-25/marvel- ... os-shuttle
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"You know how parents tell you everything's going to fine, but you know they're lying to make you feel better? Everything's going to be fine." - The Doctor

-INFORMATION STRIPPED PENDING FULL REWRITE-