Since I joined the group, we’ve been playing either Delta Green (check for kinnygraham’s Actual Play on rpg.net) or Gaslight Cthulhu. Michael’s RuneQuest represents the first game where we haven’t had guns and we are not playing characters who are completely in the dark. We’re playing inhabitants of a world where Magic and the Gods…
RQ: Something bad at Black Rock
Anaxippos removed his golden breastplate and greaves and started to unpack his kitbag. He opened the cap of the spiced oily lotion he had prepared and began kneading it into his tired limbs. Even from another building he could hear the raucous laughter of the men as they settled in for the night. Hesiod’s laugh…
Why we stay up late….
Okay, I got this from Michele Neylon’s blog: It explains everything. XKCD link
Explorer ISD
The Internal Security Department manages all aspects of security aboard an Explorer. In a 24 hour period, a security officer is expected to juggle his duties between leisure time, passive duty and active duty. While on Passive Duty, the security officer is on standby, expected to be available for duty quickly. They will constantly receive…
Cloverfield
I think it has everything to do with being a parent. I’ve never been a fan of Godzilla movies but I do like action/horror/disaster movies as a whole. Cloverfield is excellently executed and it left my head filled with “what would I do” thoughts (which all good horror/disaster movies do). As a parent you worry…
Jumper
From IMDB: A genetic anomaly allows a young man to teleport himself anywhere. He discovers this gift has existed for centuries and finds himself in a war that has been raging for thousands of years between “Jumpers” and those who have sworn to kill them. I enjoyed this movie. Hayden Christensen was pretty good though…
Space freighter given launch date
I never thought I’d live to see the day when the BBC News would have the headline: Space freighter given launch date Okay, it’s not quite as glamourous as all that but it’s still cool.
Religion in the far future…
This came in to the jabber channel from Aidan at an opportune moment. Religion survives in Frontier, writing about it now.
Short Stories
Jens Alfke pointed out The Loneliness Engine and also linked to his own We Had Black Boxes. Great stuff.
Promoting your book via blogging…
When Patry Francis was first diagnosed with colon cancer, she didn’t want anyone to know. “I wanted to be able to have lunch with people and not have them wonder if I was going to drop dead on the spot,” says Francis, the 52-year-old author of The Liar’s Diary, a sexy whodunit about self-deception, murder…
Strange Maps
This blog about strange maps is just fascinating.
We’re Space Marines, We’re Glorious…
I’m going to be writing a little more about Human Unity today and over the weekend concentrating on the space military. On Wednesday night, our gaming group chatted about old comics before we got stuck into DG. We indulged in nostalgia while stuffing our faces with Bhunas and Jalfrezis that were a lot hotter than…
Life on the Frontier
An Explorer ship can expect to be out of touch for more than two years at a stretch with only the most infrequent contact with other Explorers or with urgent messages delivered by fast-transfer Wormhole-capable ships. Due to the distances involved, direct EM transmission is simply not practical. Longer periods of time with no contact…
Wormholes
Unknown to most, Wormholes are naturally occurring tunnels through space. They allow, through the use of sophisticated detection and navigation equipment, travel from one end of the wormhole to the other and may conceivably be of any length. The problem that they must be discovered not created lends a peculiar topology to the universe. Mapped…
A Visit to Kumbu
There are various periods in Humanity’s history that can be legitimately called “The Dark Ages”. Any period where there is a lack of records represents the unknown. The period of Earth’s history two millennia ago was perhaps our darkest hour as records show that our advancement of knowledge not only slowed but crawled backwards and…
Ajinabi
We were startled by our uniqueness. The first Explorer craft took the time to catalog everything they encountered, well aware that it would be scratching the surface of the biosphere’s they encountered. Their samples, akin to descending on Luxembourg and taking that small nation as the representative sample of Earth, were recorded, preserved, ferried to…
Trade Talk: Tales of Sol
There is a world, twelve pipes from here, where the people are soft and covered in a very fine fur, from top to bottom. At first glance, they all look very alike except for pigmentation but some grow their fur longer or shorter in accordance with their religion. They are descended from animals who walked…
The Ant Hill
Swarm Intelligences were prevalent on Earth in the form of social insect colonies long before we encountered the Ant Hill. We knew that a set of relatively primitive individual behaviors enhanced with communication will produce a large set of complex swarm behaviors. This observation was instrumental in producing NIPS (NanoIntelligent Protection Systems) and our understanding…
The American Dream
It’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it. – George Carlin The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It’s over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now. -J….