Captain_Button

Captain_Button

  • Commented on The dog ate my homework
    Well, there is your answer. OGH's submissions are getting routed between slightly different alternate universe. Of course the software from Charlene Stross's universe isn't 100% compatible with the hardware in Charlie Stross's universe....
  • Commented on "You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!" 2017 continued.
    The whole point of having a health care system, according to him, is to have "competition" and a "free market." It doesn't matter whether the system is better or worse: what matters is that it's capitalist. What matters is that...
  • Commented on Why Should You Care About Virtual Reality? Because It's A Source Of Hope.
    At least with the doctor it might be in case you are one of those people who are illiterate or nearly so, but are very good at covering it up. Yes, it is very unlikely, but the consequences could be...
  • Commented on Constitutional crisis ahoy!
    So besides the question of "What counts as pushing the button?" we also have the question "What is the shelf life of the button?" Now I am imagining some science fiction story set centuries in the future where the button...
  • Commented on Constitutional crisis ahoy!
    Clueless about UK government here. Assuming Article 50 is going to be triggered, how exactly is that done? Can the PM just send a letter saying "I activate Article 50" to the appropriate EU official? Or does Parliament have to...
  • Commented on The unspeakable truth
    Because that sort of thing could never happen in a non-EU country....
  • Commented on The unspeakable truth
    Probably BANANA - Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything...
  • Commented on The unavoidable discussion
    Wasn't that the real idea underlying the Crusades? 'We have too many younger son knights. Civil wars are bad. If we send them off to the Holy Land they won't be fighting here, and they will either not come back,...
  • Commented on The unavoidable discussion
    In the good old days, wasn't it traditional British policy to prevent any one power from dominating Europe? Does the EU count as that?...
  • Commented on Deploying the monomyth in Space Opera
    Arthur C. Clarke hid something like that in the backstory to the novel version of The Songs Of Distant Earth. It is briefly mentioned that something really nasty happened during the first century of AI-raised humans on Thalassa, but all...
  • Commented on Defining space opera
    Years ago I was in a similar discussion at some con. I asked if In Conquest Born by C. S. Friedman counted as Space Opera. It has the basic infrastructure: A Very Evil interstellar Empire in a millennia-old war with...
  • Commented on Defining space opera
    While he doesn't call it that, a lot of David Drake's military SF involves PTSD. And he told veterans that there is help out there in one of his forwards (or afterwords, I forget.) But on the other hand he...
  • Commented on Defining space opera
    Spaceballs is at least as much a Star Wars parody as GQ is of ST, so it goes in as parody Space Opera also....
  • Commented on Defining space opera
    ... (there's the female variant, which is arguably all about leaving the family/tribe and creating/gaining a new family). This reminds me of my observation about Cherryh's science fiction, that a lot of it is built around losing your family and...
  • Commented on Towards a taxonomy of cliches in Space Opera
    rot13, a cipher where each letter is replaced by the letter 13 characters later in the alphabet. (We will now start the flame war with the fools who say it is replaced with the letter 13 characters earlier in the...
  • Commented on A world-building puzzler
    CJ Cherryh used something like that in Serpent's Reach. Every time two majat meet they "take taste" i.e. kiss and exchange spit. The spit contains either their entire memory or entire recent memory and after the exchange their minds are...
  • Commented on A world-building puzzler
    Since memorizing skills will be widespread, maybe complex directions will be done as a poem or song? So you pay someone to sing the route from the market square to the royal palace a couple of times, until you have...
  • Commented on A world-building puzzler
    Maybe use representative objects? An old withered apple on a post means this is the road to Appletown, and that it is one day's walk. Two apples means two days, etc. The problem here is when this system starts turning...
  • Commented on A world-building puzzler
    How essential was writing in managing large irrigation systems in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, etc?...
  • Commented on A world-building puzzler
    I am thinking that language will split into dialects and then separate languages based on subject area. The Mining language is very detailed and concise when talking about ores, geology, and refining processes, but rather vague and slow when discussing...
  • Commented on Fantasy shibboleths
    Making Uruk-hai grown in pods helps in two ways. It helps Saruman build a huge army in months rather than decades. And it ducks around the more nasty implications of the Uruk-hai being man-orc crossbreeds. Yeah conceivably all of the...
  • Commented on Fantasy shibboleths
    Playing various of the recent Final Fantasy games really brings out my inner Marxist. There seem to be dozens of monumental structures all over the place. And they aren't being used for anything except for hiding ancient relics. I get...
  • Commented on Magic, ecospeak and genre distinctions
    What about combining this setting with the idea from David Brin's Piecework: There is already talk of using goats and cattle to produce industrial products instead of milk, and possibly bringing to term organic machines, programmed in eggs to develop...
  • Commented on Magic, ecospeak and genre distinctions
    For this universe would the ultimate catastrophe be something like the thing in Greg Bear's Blood Music? The super-evolved white blood cells intelligence has to leave this plane of reality because having too much thinking is going to break the...
  • Commented on Magic, ecospeak and genre distinctions
    On Discworld you also have narrative as a force of nature, pressuring things to conform to story tropes. Getting a job as the Grand Vizer will make you become sly, sinister, and with a little well-trimmed beard you stroke while...
  • Commented on Magic, ecospeak and genre distinctions
    Cats have more to do with international politics than you realize: Cats take over G20 stage in Turkey...
  • Commented on Magic, ecospeak and genre distinctions
    The fantasy RPG world of Glorantha is mainly set many centuries after a catastrophe caused by the "God Learners". They turned religion/magic into pseudo-technologies and overexploited them until there was tremendous backlash that destroyed them and blighted much of the...
  • Commented on Magic, ecospeak and genre distinctions
    Also Blue Gender which is basically "War Against The Chtorr: The Anime" with the serial numbers filed off*. Though this is more over on the science fiction side than the fantasy side. (Watch the series, not the cut down movie...
  • Commented on Magic, ecospeak and genre distinctions
    If we are branching off into non-written fiction media, there is the anime Earth Maiden Arjuna about a magical girl who has to fight against supernatural pollution monsters threatening ecological disaster. While also enduring lectures about ecological lifestyles. And being...
  • Commented on <i>Hot Earth Dreams</i>
    Just to be pedantic, as I recall it, Civ II and IV* both had global warming as a way to screw up the late game, caused by pollution. However, pollution from fossil fuels and nuclear meltdowns was lumped together. Civ...
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