DShomshak

Yeah, that was a bit more of a jump than I intended. I'll try to fill in the blanks.
 
I gather that attempts to explain dark matter using stuff that's known to exist have not gone well. As Cancer says, gravitational lensing studies haven't found enough MACHOS. IIRC there are also arguments that if there was enough normal matter in the universe to supply the needed gravity, this would have altered the proportions of helium and lithium produced in the very early universe, though such arguments are well beyond my Physics 101 level of understanding. Simulations assuming "hot dark matter" don't generate a recognizable universe, so that rules out neutrinos. And so on. So theoretical physicists have become steadily more speculative. WIMPS were one such. (There was an experiment to detect them, based on the premise that once in a very rare while two WIMPs would collide and make particles that could be detected... though it's beyond me how you know what to look for, when you don't know the masses or other properties of the WIMPs.) Or swarms of quantum black holes that are individually too small to be detected through gravitational lensing. Or let's try modifying gravity so it works differently on the necessary scales.
 
Okay, some of these are marginally testable, but the more ad-hoc the proposals, the more I think of how the properties of the luminiferous ether got steadily more contradictory. And when the proposed dark matters become even more otherwise-undetectable, I get impatient and mutter, "Yeah, but legions of angels moving the stars and galaxies would also explain the observations." Because the proposals seem less and less like science, and more like miracles clad in technobabble.
 
It isn't just dark matter. I'm annoyed by physicists making confident pronouncements about multiverses, string theory, what dark energy means for the fate of the universe, and similar speculations. As one of my friends puts it, they've slid from theoretical physics to theological physics. A faith that they can slip the surly bonds of observation and experiment to encompass the universe (and more!) by pure math.
 
Arguing for divine intervention wouldn't be scientific either, but it might be more honest. Not that the "God of the Gaps" hypothesis has a great track record either...
 
Or just admit that at this point, we don't know, and don't even know how to find out.
 
Dean Shomshak

DART mission altered target asteroid orbit rather more than planned

Angela Lansbury Dead At 96
 
Godspeed, dear lady.  Here's to a good life and a brilliant career.

The cover article for the October 2022 issue of Scientific American is "The Power of Viking Women," with the abstract, "Analyses of ancient North Atlantic textiles show that Viking and medieval women wielded considerable cultural and economic influence." No, the old Norse weren't matriarchal as such. But women ran the farms while the men were out raiding and trading for years at a time. More particularly, cloth-weaving was exclusively women's work (with taboos against men even entering the weaving-house), and cloth was of great economic importantce -- to the extent that standardized lengths of cloth were used as money. So not as simply patriarchal as one might think.
 
Dean Shomshak

I had thought it imodest to mention Loezen, but I see LL has done it for me.
 
The last story arc in my second Supermage playtest campaign had the PCs trying to save that world. (Not entirely altruistic: Some Loezenians were escaping to Earth and behaving like, well, D&D PCs.) This involved a visit to an oracle to find how to do this, a treasure hunt to acquire the three elements they needed, and various side-quests to deal with problems along the way. There was time travel (including at least one predestination paradox), allies recruited, enemies fought, and a terrible price paid, but ultimate success.
 
Among the problems the PCs faced were other Loezeniens with their own ideas how to save the world, or at least to save their own skins. In addition to the Loezenians invading Earth, the mage Naktorial had enslaved a whole country and numerous lesser sorcerers to build a Last Redoubt arcology that could survive the sun's death, while Norom Barcaldine, the Prince Who Never Was, sought to trap Loezen in a Groundhog Day time loop: The world would never end, but it wouldn't continue, either.
 
Dean Shomshak

I had thought it imodest to mention Loezen, but I see LL has done it for me.
 
The last story arc in my second Supermage playtest campaign had the PCs trying to save that world. (Not entirely altruistic: Some Loezenians were escaping to Earth and behaving like, well, D&D PCs.) This involved a visit to an oracle to find how to do this, a treasure hunt to acquire the three elements they needed, and various side-quests to deal with problems along the way. There was time travel (including at least one predestination paradox), allies recruited, enemies fought, and a terrible price paid, but ultimate success.
 
Among the problems the PCs faced were other Loezeniens with their own ideas how to save the world, or at least to save their own skins. In addition to the Loezenians invading Earth, the mage Naktorial had enslaved a whole country and numerous lesser sorcerers to build a Last Redoubt arcology that could survive the sun's death, while Norom Barcaldine, the Prince Who Never Was, sought to trap Loezen in a Groundhog Day time loop: The world would never end, but it wouldn't continue, either.
 
Dean Shomshak

Well, she made her point early on.  Particular fundamental problems have existed in subatomic physics, and those were solved by hypothesizing unknown particles; antiparticles in general, the neutrino, the Higgs; she doesn't mention the J/psi but that's another example.  Finding new resonances in the subatomic zoo, while useful for some cross-checks, has not been of such fundamental utility since the discovery of the Higgs.
 
There are fundamental problems now, but they are on a different level.  The Standard Model is incomplete ... but we have not been able to reach regimes to point toward hints of where the incompleteness lies nearest our abilities to explore via experiment.  And as much as theoreticians would like to tell you otherwise, it is experiment that has always guided theory toward more fundamental insight.
 
(If you need an example from a different field, go look at theories about planets and planetary physics from the 1950s.  Limited as we were back then to observations from groundbased telescopes with photographic or simple photoelectric detectors, there was lots we could neither know nor guess in that era.)
 
The phenomenon of whipping up speculative particle models from fragmentary accelerator data is practice by the particle theoreticians for when something real comes.  It's like practices in pro sports.  No one is all that interested in them, but you gotta do those in order to stay in shape for the real deal.
 
 

I had thought it imodest to mention Loezen, but I see LL has done it for me.
 
The last story arc in my second Supermage playtest campaign had the PCs trying to save that world. (Not entirely altruistic: Some Loezenians were escaping to Earth and behaving like, well, D&D PCs.) This involved a visit to an oracle to find how to do this, a treasure hunt to acquire the three elements they needed, and various side-quests to deal with problems along the way. There was time travel (including at least one predestination paradox), allies recruited, enemies fought, and a terrible price paid, but ultimate success.
 
Among the problems the PCs faced were other Loezeniens with their own ideas how to save the world, or at least to save their own skins. In addition to the Loezenians invading Earth, the mage Naktorial had enslaved a whole country and numerous lesser sorcerers to build a Last Redoubt arcology that could survive the sun's death, while Norom Barcaldine, the Prince Who Never Was, sought to trap Loezen in a Groundhog Day time loop: The world would never end, but it wouldn't continue, either.
 
Dean Shomshak

In various books such as Balkan Ghosts and The Ends of the Earth, writer Robert D. Kaplan coined a phrase for decrepit empires: "A corpse in armor." Enough military force to withstand threats from without and within, but also thereby insulated from any apparent need to reform themselves. Rulers enjoy the spoins of power while governance drifts, infrastructure decays, culture stultifies and the people become apathetic. Russia seems to be an extreme case: Even the military is decayed, because what does it matter as long as they have nukes?
 
One of Kaplan's paradigmatic cases for an imperial corpse in armor is the Assyrian empre. It was mighty and brutal for a thousand years, until it wasn't and fell. Two centuries later, as Xenophon was leading his troops on their Anabasis out of the Persian Empire, he couldn't find anyone who could read the Assyrian monuments he encountered. Assyria was that thoroughly forgotten.
 
But corpses in armor tend to emit cultural toxins as they decay. The former Yugoslavia was a smaller corpse in armor, the mutual resentments of its component nations repressed by Tito... only to erupt, more vicious than ever, when Tito died and Yugoslavia fell apart.
 
Russia's decay began long before Putin; in some ways he is a product of the USSR's longstanding rot. But I suspect he is leading Russia to a ruin more terrible than he can imagine.
 
Dean Shomshak

In various books such as Balkan Ghosts and The Ends of the Earth, writer Robert D. Kaplan coined a phrase for decrepit empires: "A corpse in armor." Enough military force to withstand threats from without and within, but also thereby insulated from any apparent need to reform themselves. Rulers enjoy the spoins of power while governance drifts, infrastructure decays, culture stultifies and the people become apathetic. Russia seems to be an extreme case: Even the military is decayed, because what does it matter as long as they have nukes?
 
One of Kaplan's paradigmatic cases for an imperial corpse in armor is the Assyrian empre. It was mighty and brutal for a thousand years, until it wasn't and fell. Two centuries later, as Xenophon was leading his troops on their Anabasis out of the Persian Empire, he couldn't find anyone who could read the Assyrian monuments he encountered. Assyria was that thoroughly forgotten.
 
But corpses in armor tend to emit cultural toxins as they decay. The former Yugoslavia was a smaller corpse in armor, the mutual resentments of its component nations repressed by Tito... only to erupt, more vicious than ever, when Tito died and Yugoslavia fell apart.
 
Russia's decay began long before Putin; in some ways he is a product of the USSR's longstanding rot. But I suspect he is leading Russia to a ruin more terrible than he can imagine.
 
Dean Shomshak

In various books such as Balkan Ghosts and The Ends of the Earth, writer Robert D. Kaplan coined a phrase for decrepit empires: "A corpse in armor." Enough military force to withstand threats from without and within, but also thereby insulated from any apparent need to reform themselves. Rulers enjoy the spoins of power while governance drifts, infrastructure decays, culture stultifies and the people become apathetic. Russia seems to be an extreme case: Even the military is decayed, because what does it matter as long as they have nukes?
 
One of Kaplan's paradigmatic cases for an imperial corpse in armor is the Assyrian empre. It was mighty and brutal for a thousand years, until it wasn't and fell. Two centuries later, as Xenophon was leading his troops on their Anabasis out of the Persian Empire, he couldn't find anyone who could read the Assyrian monuments he encountered. Assyria was that thoroughly forgotten.
 
But corpses in armor tend to emit cultural toxins as they decay. The former Yugoslavia was a smaller corpse in armor, the mutual resentments of its component nations repressed by Tito... only to erupt, more vicious than ever, when Tito died and Yugoslavia fell apart.
 
Russia's decay began long before Putin; in some ways he is a product of the USSR's longstanding rot. But I suspect he is leading Russia to a ruin more terrible than he can imagine.
 
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

In these grim times of desperate need, we do not rejoice in the violence but recognize it as...
 
Wait, it was on Putin's birthday?
 
BWHAHAHHAAAHAHA!
 
 

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

https://www.clevescene.com/news/the-breathtaking-emptiness-of-jd-vance-40568994

A friend of mine wanted to stage Alien: The Musical. Our favorite part was his idea for the insemination of Kane -- after the facehugger attaches itself, Kane would stagger dramatically around for a while, singing an aria with the libretto entirely consisting of "Mmff mmff mmff!"

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

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

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

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

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

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