DShomshak

I found this of considerable professional interest. Dean Shomshak

Likewise. Unless there is some specific reason to impose linguistic difficulties on the PCs, give them a common language. 600 years is plenty of time for "Old Imperial" to split into a clade of local languages, but there are also forces that could preserve it intact. For instance, it might still be indispensable as the language or religious ritual and scholarship (as Latin was, for more than 1000 years after the Roman Empire fell). If literacy is fairly common (and you are not obliged to follow the Quasi-Medieval Europe trope of books being incredibly ratre and most people being illiterate. In Classical times, papyrus was so cheap and easy to write upon that Rome had bookstores.) Or there could be more fantastical reasons. In the setting for Exalted, the world's chief languages are magical constructs that great mages of antiquity hard-wired into Creation, with gods appointed to protect them and oversee their use. And one language, Old /Realm, is the actual language of gods themselves, imposed on them by *their* creators. For something like this, modern folk still use the same language as the Old Empire, and whoever came before the Old Empire, because that's just what the language *is.* If it has ever changed, it's because someone very powerful forced the change. Dean Shomshak

Rivers of Life is a PBS series about, duh, notable rivers. The Zambezi in Africa sounds like it would fit well in a Fantasy world. Here's a link to the episode: Rivers of Life | Zambezi | Season 2 | Episode 1 | PBS Highlights include: *Headwaters are a spring in a sacred forest. *But the flow is intensely seasonal. In an exceptionally flat plains region, the rainy season turns the Zambezi from a river into an immense shallow lake, a cycle of wet and dry that shapes the lives of the inhabitants. Not magical as such, but this could be a cool location and culture. *Further downstream, the Zambezi flows through spectacular gorges with many rapids and Victoria Falls, the widest waterfall in the world. At least that's the case in the rainy season; in the dry season it's just a few trickles going over the cliffs. Local name is "The Smoke That Thunders." Obvious home for a god or nature spirit. *As the water level drops after the rainy season, there's one spot where an underwater ledge of rock creates a permanent standing wave -- a breaker that never breaks. One can surf the Zambezi Wave. Perhaps you must do so if you want a boon from the God of the River, or it's a gate to another plane. *The next stage is a broad river valley with abundant wildlife. The show visits a safari resort where the wildlife has learned that people won't hurt them. Watch the family of elephants troop through the resort's lobby to reach a mango tree. Temple of the Elephant God? (The next episode, about the Danube, did not have so much Fantasy potential. Though one might do something with the water-filled cave network beneath Budapest.) Dean Shomshak

I've never seen Night of the Living Dead, but a local college's theater students put on -- I use the term deliberately -- Night of the Living Dead: The Musical. A tiny theater, well, a room with folding chairs. I have seldom laughed so hard. Dean Shomshak

Getting away from the daily outrages, the "Lexington" column in the Sep. 24, 2022 issue of the Economist is titled, "In praise of the deep state." The specific topic is the dinner honoring winners of the "Service to America" medals, or Sammies: bureaucrats who make the bureaucracy work better, from restoring service at the Veteran's Administration to getting the JWST finally launched. A cohort of people in generally obscure jobs, working for a lot less than they could make in the private sector, because they believe they can use government to help people attain decent lives, and by cracky they're doing it. So my personal thanks to all the employees at every level of government who work to keep American society something better than Hobbesian anarchy. Geez, Marvel mutants thing thy have it bad? At least they get super-powers to compensate for "a world that hates and fears them." Dean Shomshak

Last night I watched Trilogy of Terror on MeTV and and though camp/horror host Svengoolie called it a classic, I thought it hadn't aged well since its 1975 TV movie release. Or just plain not that good. The third segment, best known as a pre-Chucky use of the "Killer Doll" trope, had my sister and me asking annoying nerdish questions such as, "Why was a Zuni warrior's spirit trapped in the doll in the first place? And then what is this potent supernatural object doing in a gift shop for any random idiot to purchase, complete with instructions not to remove the golden chain that keeps the spirit bound?" Possibly nerds just shouldn't watch low-budget horror movies. Dean Shomshak

Since the article is about Greene's incendiary claims that Democrats are murdering Republicans, and doesn't mention her divorce (first I heard about that), this might not be the clearest "headline" for the story. I wish I could say I was shocked that a politician would hector people that their lives, personally, are in danger from the other party, but I'm not. Another clear case of incitement by projection. Dean Shomshak

Because of course the heroes already died heroically repelling the first qliphothic invasion, or the first dozen. She chose the most competent people that were left. Sounds good. Speaking of Lacrimosa, have you read Thomas deQuincey's "Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrow"? Dean Shomshak

Better drill bits? Bah. Since lonsdaleite is found in meteorites and apparently made by colliding planets (OK, dwarf planets/asteroids, but still), obviously it is a source of limitless power! With such power, one could rule the world! Don't these NPR reporters ever read comic books? Dean Shomshak

The story of an Evangelical pastor who found his church subverted by Trumpism. The Pastors Being Driven Out by Trumpism - The New York Times (nytimes.com) Dean Shomshak

IIRC (it's been a few decades since I read this), he does. The microwave beam is already so diffuse that atmospheric distortion shouldn't matter much. (The rectifying antenna to turn the microwave beam back into electric current covers a cres -- a lot of land, but you can do other things with the land as well, such as farm.) The beam is also so diffuse that Stine claims it won't hurt anyone. Prolonged exposure...? Eh, I'm not sure I'd want to live directly in the beam, but it's no Death Ray. The system *is*inefficient -- solar cells still aren't that efficient last I heard, they were worse in 1981, and there's another loss in conversion back to electricity. The whole scheme is predicated on the input of solar energy being free, and low operating costs once the satellites and rectennas are in place. It would all, of course, be terrible for Earth-based astronomers. But once you have sufficient space-based industry to impledment the system, you put all the observatories in space, too. Dean Shomshak

Moving into pure SF, when I was building the wider background for my Planetary Romance campaign, I had nuclear batteries as the convenient energy source for any tech that never needed refueling. However, I didn't want to leave them as pure magic. For the rubber science, I invoked hypernuclear matter, or hy-matter for short: muonic matter (replacing electrons with muons), strange matter (particles incorporating the "strange" quark as well as the "up" and "down" quarks of protons and neutrons), magnetic monopoles, and the like. Some science speculation articles by, IIRC, John Cramer had suggested such materials might have novel properties that would be useful for SF-tech. And how does one make hy-matter? In very, very big particle accelerators -- so big they can only be built in space. Power them in turn with thermoneclear fusion reactors. And to fuel the banks fo fusion reactors, park the whole assemblage in syncronous orbit around a jovian planet, and drop an orbital tower pipeline into its atmosphere to such up hydrogen. I had the two big hy-matter factories at Jupiter and Barnard's Star. The Chinese extrasolar colony of Tianchi was building its own hy-matter factory to compete, but it was much smaller. The hy-matter factories had been major battle sites in the Cladist Wars... battles conducted very carefully, because nobody wanted to damage them. Dean Shomshak

G. Harry Stine's Space Power lays out a fairly detailed plan for shifting civilization to solar power using satellites equipped with huge panels of solar cells. The great problems with Earth-based solar power, after all, are that solar energy is diffuse and unavailable half the time. In space, though, it's always sunny and there's plenty of room. Of course, lifting all those satellites into orbit would carry a prohibitive cost... but you can make it all much cheaper by getting raw materials from the Moon. The greatest practical difficulties remain those Stine found when he wrote the book in 1981: Start up costs are too high for private industry or even any single government, and the legal issues for the necessary partnerships are not yet worked out. But there is no technological impediment, and Stine even works out how a solar power satellite system could benefit less developed countries that lack an electrical grid. It would be an excellent system for a nearish-future, hard-SF setting. Dean Shomshak

For a complete guide to human energy use, from the Paleolithic to the present, there's Vaclav Smil's Energy and Civilization. One thing he finds: Use of past energy sources hasn't declined in real numbers -- only in proportion, as new energy sources have eclipsed them. Thus, humanity gets just as much energy from biomass (burning wood, animal dung, etc.) as a thousand years ago -- it's just that we get so much more from hydro, fossil fuels, etc. We still burn as much coal (or nearly so) as ever, it's just that we also burn increasing amounts of petroleum, with natural gas use still rising. Nuclear is anomalous in its real decline, but it's also very new and so subject to political hiccups. It hasn't been around long enough for the normal pattern to have happened yet. Of course, this pattern will inevitably suffer an enormous exception as stocks of easily recoverable petroleum are exhausted. Coal and natural gas simply take longer, but they too are finite, even without taking climate change into consideration. Smil is not optimistic that civilization can decarbonize quickly enough to do so in a smooth and orderly fasion. The historical record also shows how long technological transitions take, and they aren't quick. The history of Bronze Age deforestation to support copper smelting is also not encouraging. Still, at least we've been told, and some people are trying to manage a speedy transition. Dean Shomshak

IIRC, "Strike Force: Morituri." Latin for "We who are about to die," from the salutation Roman gladiators gave the Emperor before the games. Dean Shomshak

Once again, Putin threatened nuclear escalation against NATO. How seriously should we take his saber-rattling? Russia and Ukraine military expert Alexander Vindman offers his opinion. tl;dr: Putin is not suicidally insane. His goal is to live to fight another day. US and NATO aide to Ukraine will not push him to the Big Hot One. But it is deeply not useful for national security people to be fretting about whether the US can restore peaceful and productive relations with Russia. Putin burned that bridge himself. It's Cold War II; deal with it. A former national security official explores what could be next in the Ukraine war | NPR Illinois Dean Shomshak

If I were a Russian general given this guy, and, y'know, Evil, I would give this guy a machete and a motorcycle with a full tank of gas, point him at free Ukrainian territory, and say, "Here's your buffet. Indulge yourself." He's off my hands, and makes more trouble for Ukraine. I suspect this is more or less the plan in the Wagner Group recruiting from prisons. They aren't seeking soldiers. They're seeking brigands to commit atrocities. Even the ones who desert are useful if they desert in Ukraine and prey on that populace. And even if they head back to Russia, eh, they aren't likely to rob and kill anyone who matters. Dean Shomshak

Well, on BBC today they interviewed a Russian who fled to Armenia at the start of Putin's war, in part to forestall any chance of being called up. As he deswcribed it, just about all Russian men do a year of compulsory ilitary service... but one could hardly call it "training." As a college graduate, he was rather arbitrarily made a lieutenant, and received less than an hour's "training" with automatic rifles. At that, it was more than most conscripts receive. So while Russia theoretically has millions of "reservists," in practice they are raw recruits being sent to slaughter: "Cannon Meat," in the Russian version of the English phrase. The poor bastards. (I'll post a link if I can find the segment online.) Dean Shomshak

September 2022 Scientific American has a set of articles on advances in black hole research. Necessarily mostly theoretical, but there's an article on imaging the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way. One group of theorists thinks they have solved the "Black Hole Information Paradox." Just like every other article I've read on the subject, though, their explanation of what the paradox *is* is clear as mud. (I *think* I've worked out what the information paradox is, but I can't be sure without bouncing it off a real physicist.) All I can figure out from the article is that there's so much quantum entanglement going on that it warps space to make wormholes -- so much that most of the black hole's inside is actually outside, but you can't say exactly where. Another article discusses the "Cosmological Event Horizon." Because the universe is expanding (and apparently accelerating), there is a distance at which the expansion hits the speed of light. Therefore, no signal can reach you from that distance or greater. The theoretical resemblances to a black hole's event horizon apparently run deep enough that physicists think studying one might help explain the other. The CEH should even emit Hawking radiation. Unlike a black hole's event horizon, though, the cosmological event horizon is personaql for each viewer. There's also some stuff about the Holographic Universe hypothesis, in which three-dimensional space everges or is somehow encoded in two-dimensional surfaces, but I confess I didn't understand much of that, either. Some subjects may just be too difficult to explain in the word count allotted to a magazine article. Dean Shomshak

Mechanics: OK, whatever. As a player, though, I'd want more information on what sort of things this magic can and cannot do, beyond "no Holy effects." And what is the nature of magic? Quasi-psychic power? Spirit invocations? A quasi-Hermetic system of supernatural forces, channeled through a system or symbolic correspondences? Elemental? True Names? This is what makes magic vivid and distinctive. Though I may be unusual in this interest. Dean Shomshak

Which prompted a furious editorial in my local paper, the Tacoma News Tribune. Not Happy to see the city being dragged, however incidentally, into DeSantis' sick, sadistic stunt and scheme. Dean Shomshak

I admit, I'm suspicious of any radical, utopian change, even the ones I would cheer. People are self-interested, self-deluding, and cunning at finding ways around rules: any political proposal that does not accept that as a given is folly. So about the most utopian proposals I can come up with are: -- Abolish the Electoral College and institute direct election of Presidents. -- Politically independent districting for state houses and Congress. Maybe even an element of randomness. I've heard some interesting proposals for multiple representatives from larger districts, to reflect a range of voter viewpoints instead of 50% + 1 and the other 50% - 1 is shut out, but the most inportant thing is that politicians can't pick their voters. -- Random selection of judges (from appropriate levels of the court system) to make up a new Supreme Court for some limited term. Make it harder to stack the SCOTUS with ideologues. Dean Shomshak

In a friend's adaptation of the Rise of the Runelords adventure path, he said the gods are bound by a law of balance in raising the dead. If one side raises a dead person, any opposing factions get an opening to raise someone on their side. So, one must be quite valuable for a god to grant the resurrection. I don't know all the details, but as a player I didn't need to. One of the confirmations that our PCs were involved in something very important was that gods were waiving the "You get one, we get one" treaty. Whatever it was, they all wanted us to succeed. In my own campaign, there just aren't that many people powerful enough to raise the dead. They are of course swamped with requests, but they can pick who they choose. When it comes up, I'm going to adopt my friend's rule: The gods raise the dead for their purposes, not those of mortals. Yes, some people might squyeal that this deprotagonizes clerics and druids. Tough patooties. You wanted to play a character who serves the divine, don't complain when you are expected to serve the divine. In D&D, resurrection magic also does not rejuvenate. (Resurrection and true resurrection specifically say they don't work on people who died of old age.) So even the most generous availability of such magic could let a monarch live a long life... but their reign still must end in time. If you really want to be the Eternal King or whatever, look into becoming a vampire. Hey, it works for Strahd. Dean Shomshak

In today's All Things Considered discussion of Ukraine's spectacular weekend advance, the reporter noted that Ukrainians are making a new round of jokes about Russia making big donations to the Ukrainian military -- the retreating troops left so much weaponry and ammunition behind. Dean Shomshak

Yeah, the part of the LotR Appendices that somehow leaped out at me was the brief mention of the captive human population in Mordor, around the lake of Nurn. For centuries they'd been slaves of Suron, forced to farm to support his orc armies. I always wanted to know more about those people, and what happened to them after Sauron's fall. Especially after the unraveling of Yugoslavia and the USSR, I suspected that the aftermath of Sauron's fall would not be Happily Ever After. One reviewer of LotR sniffed that "throwing a magic ring into a volcano is not a solution to the Problem of Evil." I suspect he never actually read LotR, or he might have noticed the extended epilog in the Shire, dealing with Saruman's takeover. Tolkien made it clear that destroying the One Ring ended *an* evil. But there are always more villains waiting for their chance. A Fourth Age series would be quite different from Lord of the Rings: a struggle to establish a just order after the destruction of war and the chaos after a despot's fall. But it could be an equally epic tale -- and all the nobler for the recognition that the struggle can never truly end. Dean Shomshak