Xavier Onassiss

Urban Legends of the Fall of the Roman Empire Records Strikes Back to the Once and Future King of the Hills Have Eyes Wide Shutter Island of Dr. Moreau

Aren't we all?

This is why we have laws. This is corrosive effect of having a class of citizens who are above the law. And this is something everyone should have seen coming decades ago. Now it's probably too late to change course.

I actually thought it would be worse than this.

Regardless of how much a politician knows or doesn't know, as long as they keep voting "correctly", those big fat checks just keep coming in.

More like "Tell the entire world 'I got nothing'."

Understood. Actually everyone who uses FB should take care on some level. About a year and a half ago I "scrubbed" my FB feed of all references to my primary employer (the one on my profile is my own company) because of their draconian social media policies. Actually, I'm not sure they have a "policy" in any real sense; they tend to arbitrarily discipline employees for online activities, regardless of whether they're on their own time, using a private account, not speaking for the company in any way shape or form... you get the idea. Legally it's indefensible, but rank and file employees simply can't afford to take a billion-dollar company to court. So... no talking about work online for me. Everything else is fair game, including politics.

I'm not 100% sure that's a good thing. Maybe what we need is more real, reasonable people on Facebook (twitter can fall in a hole and die) to counter all the BS and misinformation. The Reality Based Community needs all the help it can get. Sometimes it's not easy, and sometimes it seems pointless, but these days it's more important than ever to keep control of the narrative.

From the "Name for a new campaign" thread over in Star Hero; I realized one of my suggestions probably belongs here instead: Space Bunnies and Edgar Rice Burroughs!

StarJammerFinder! uh, no... I mean... SpellFinderJammer, well, no... that's not right either. I've got it... Space Bunnies and Edgar Rice Burroughs!!! AHEM. On a more serious note... Wizards and Wormholes. Tripping the Astral Deeps Per Arcanum Ad Astra (Through Magic, to the Stars)

I don't recall exactly when or where, but I think Traveller might have hinted at a link between teleportation phenomena and jump space once or twice.

Funny how all these people with nothing to hide still close the stall when they're taking a dump.

As mrinku noted above, some sort of Vac Suit skill should be taught to all recruits. I would also include some training in Zero-G Operations. (Environmental Movement?) All Spacers/Astronauts need to be familiar with this. And depending on the technology level in the service, Spin-G Operations as well. Rotating habitat modules on spacecraft for simulated gravity can cause illness and disorientation; training and acclimation allows crews to tolerate higher RPMs at which smaller habs must rotate to achieve useful G-levels. But if your fleet has artificial gravity, just show everyone the safety videos and teach them to strap themselves down.

Am I supposed to be surprised that the latest version of the GOP's "kill all the poor people" bill was announced non-viable and quietly aborted on a Friday afternoon? Political theater is so predictable.

I just use the tried and true "astronaut."

Haven't watched it, probably won't. The reviews I've seen so far are mixed, at best.

Does anyone else remember the aliens from David Feintuch's Midshipman's Hope series?

Some co-workers joked about driving me insane tonight. I told them they were too late. So they threatened to drive me sane instead. I wasn't having it. "You do that, I'll have to go find a real job!" Speaking of going to find a real job, I have no idea what WTF he did at the White House, but Sebastian Gorka resigned today.

The survivors of Charlottesville have a few things to say about all the false equivalency between the Alt-Right and Antifa. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/08/what_the_alt_left_was_actually_doing_in_charlottesville.html?wpsrc=sh_all_mob_fb_top

To some degree, I think I'd beg to differ on this point. Science fiction has (IMHO) enough standard alien racial tropes to get by. I'll admit not as many as many as fantasy literature, but think about this for a minute. How many times has the "cat like aliens" thing been done, and how similar were they? (A: more than I can count.) You drop a race of cat-people into your SF game, the players will know what to expect. The same goes for "wolf-like" aliens, insectoid creatures with so-called "hive minds", space amazons, amorphous blobs, beings of pure energy, evil space squids (hurray, tentacles) and you might consider androids/robots to be a playable species. Your players know what all of those are. Or at least they should.

Has anyone else noticed how many states and municipalities have made announcements in the last couple of days that they're going to remove Confederate statues? It's like the whole country is saying Enough is enough!

Good poll. There's a similar scale with a bit more detail here: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MohsScaleOfScienceFictionHardness

Many thanks. I forgot to include the six o'clock news as a resource. I don't mean to say I blatantly insert current events into my RPGs, (I don't) but taking a bit of real-life politics or socio-economics here and there and using it in the background can really make a setting ring true. If you do it right, players will look at what's going on and instinctively "get it" without needing everything explained to them, because they've seen it before and they know how it works.

I'm posting a modified version of the reading list from my setting, since I've done some reading since it came out. Stephen Baxter; the Xeelee sequence David Brin; the Uplift novels Wil McCarthy; The Collapsium (and sequels) Alastair Reynolds; Revelation Space (series) Ken MacLeod; the Fall Revolution novels, Newton's Wake Paul McAuley; The Quiet War, and Gardens of the Sun Charles Pelligrino & George Zebrowski; The Killing Star John Scalzi; Old Man's War (and sequels) Allen Steele; Coyote (and sequels) Bruce Stirling; Schismatrix Charles Stross; Singularity Sky, and Iron Sunrise David Weber; the Honor Harrington novels Walter Jon Williams; the Dread Empire's Fall trilogy C.J. Cherryh; Chanur novels and Downbelow Station Kim Stanley Robinson: Mars trilogy Dani and Eytan Kollin; The Unincorporated Man series Larry Niven; Known Space novels and stories Non-fiction: Martin Beech; Terraforming: The Creating of Habitable Worlds Jack Cohen & Ian Stewart; Evolving the Alien David Darling, PhD; The Extra-Terrestrial Encyclopedia James Kaler; Extreme Stars John S. Lewis; Worlds Without End Eugene Mallove & Gregory Matloff; The Starflight Handbook Gerard K. O'Neill; The High Frontier Robert Young Pelton; The World's Most Dangerous Places Marshall T. Savage; The Millennial Project Peter Ward & Don Brownlee; Rare Earth* Nicholas Johnson; Big Dead Place Jerry Linenger; Off the Planet Television: Babylon 5 Firefly Battlestar Galactica (reboot) The Expanse Movies: I'm thinking... oh yeah, The Europa Report. On the web: http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/index.php http://www.orionsarm.com/ http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/Game/BigIdeas/index.html http://www.solstation.com/stars.htm *Yes, I've heard all the BS about "creationism" in this book. And no, there quite simply isn't any. Don't start with me again because I'm not having it.

Cats don't bark.