Zompist Bboard Again

Imagine what would have happened if the Victorians had worked out how to use the telegraph to transmit porn. That would have been the major paradigm shift. :lol: Does it? I understand being in love with 1990s technology, some of it was good, it really sucked in the caveman era, trying to play Donke...

Oh, surely this here board has more functionality than a newspaper, old chap. What Moose said, yeah. Also, it's not that difficult, if you're willing to forego the fancy graphics purely mechanical displays aren't impossible. using such things, one can, for instance, send and receive text over vast d...

Well, the Internet is not a "no-man's land" where laws do not apply. Copyright violation is as illegal "there" as in "the real world". Get used to it. it still kind of is, tho, if you know where to look. I'm just sad to see mega leave the ranks of the forces of freedom...

I just noticed this, because both words appeared in the same Metafilter post, from two different people: cronch (for crunch) monch (for munch) Both applied to dogs. Interesting sound symbolism here... usually a more open vowel is less cute, not more so. Yeah, it's a thing. I'm pretty sure it's inte...

I totally agree, especially when I look at clockwork mecha. mother of god that is silly. then again, it's easy to discount things as unrealistic when they are indeed possible: not clockwork mecha <or any kind of mecha, for that matter, except *maybe*, *maaaaybe* stuff like battletech, minus the magi...

mega enforcing copyright? alas, the good old days are gone.

I don't know tho... the telegraph was huge, and very much used, but what it wasn't was a method to connect a number of brass analog computers into a vast network such that the messages could be used to coordinate the actions of the computers (as opposed to the actions of people, which seems to me th...

i think i agree with travis... steampunk and the other punks, i.e. atompunk a la fallout, are more side-looking that backwards-looking, at least in principle.

I don't think there's a lot of... carved wood scifi ? though I think I'd like to make some. I'd say there is, but we call it "RPGs". I mean, the bright idea of D&D and Elder Scrolls etc. is to treat magic as a highly predictable and exploitable new forms of physics. hmmm... disagree? ...

I can tell from reading this that you haven't read much fantasy. :D Honestly, not that much, no. I try, honest to Tolkien I try, but I just get... the word is not bored, but I need for a book to catch me, and tbh whether a book catches me or not is as much about me as it is about the book. But yeah...

Except that Heinlein's politics seem to be a major part of his appeal for him, judging from the conversations we've had and the types of pull-quotes from his work that he shares to his social. ah, then... if you find out how to abort someone's descent into the darkness let me know, i've lost a few ...

Which makes it even odder that one of my gay friends, a former academician and progressive activist, has a huge hard-on for his works. (He is a Boomer, though, and seems to be unreflectively drifting toward conservatism as he grows steadily more isolated and embittered.) well, there are more reason...

[quote=Torco post_id=69955 time=1682612341 user_id=100 Ironically, it's Chomsky who thinks that Chomkyan grammar, and the lexicon, are encoded in the genome. So you might amuse yourself thinking out what that stupid idea would predict. E.g. there should be mutants who are utterly unable to learn th...

*and* plenty of leftist soft SF, see the very good interdependency series by scalzi. I don't know if he's a leftist, but he feels like one as a writer, or at the very least progressive. I think Orson Scott Card politics moved frankly to the right sometime in the early 2000s? His early work was a lot...

I don't know, it gave me a good laugh: not exactly 0% at it. Can you detect the difference in practice? Yes, sequence the cat's genome. If it is the size of a solar system, it has an HLT. yes but like... we're talking about a pokemon here, they clearly are from some different, weird universe: assume...

the weird thing about heinlein and OSC is that their works are not that conservative, though they very much are. some of heinlein's work are fascist, others are kind of borderline pro-pedophilia, certainly many have a clear right-wing vibe, same with OSC, especially in the sequels to the ender books...

this comic made me think... is UG unfalsifiable? like... the cat's spiel could be countered by "okay, so what if instead your name is the entire lexicon of english, and just like pikachu has the freedom of saying different bits of its name in whatever order (pika pika, pikachu, pika chu chuu, ...

the struggle towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. that's easy for me to say: I'm not conworlding or conlanging like to write a book or whatever but, rather, just for the fun of it: i might write one if it ever comes to pass that I have money to survive and also ample free time, which...

the future is now old man

We had Kay-Bee Toy and Hobby. It was a sign of progress when playbooks and modules began to appear at Waldenbooks. names don't mean anything to me, but like... are they general-purpose bookstores? here RPG material can still only be found in game shops: you know, the kind of place where there's pro...