It’s easy if you possess a suitable basilisk-filtration system for your sense-filter, or even a simple set of antibasilisk shades - “Only Ex. 14.99 at Touch-and-Go Constores, JSC! Buy two, get one free!” - which is why the galaxy’s militaries aren’t painting everything they own with Out-of-Mind camo.
But if you have a virgin field just waiting for an epidemic of practical jokes, go wild.
Today’s mental image, from the first joint exercises:
Before: snickering at the starship troopers’ body armor, complete with cuirass, pauldrons, vambraces, cuisses, and greaves
After: “They can bounce bullets? Why can’t my body armor bounce bullets?”
(No-one tell them that those pauldrons can put a laser through an incautious eyeball most of the way to the horizon while the occupant of the armor takes a nap.)
"…so, we started out with this rebuilt Hariven, named it Fullbright because of a cat I had at the time, and it was just the three of us doing the Gagarin/Collins run until we made enough money to upgrade the drive plate and then we started doing the Gagarin/Collins/Phobos runs for…four, five years. Good money back then, especially if you’re willing to spend lots of time on the float. We took luxury goods from Gagarin to Collins, hauled titanium rods to Phobos when they built the docks there, and finally anything we could fill our holds with back to Gagarin.
"Flight director made enough from one of his spec cargos to put money down for his own Harriven, and my share was enough to install a proper shadow shield and better tanks. Once we had those, we could do the CVPH (Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, Hygeia) runs from anywhere in the Inner System.
"First run to Ceres-and don’t let them tell you it’s ‘better’, it isn’t, just better hidden-our engineer got himself shived in a off-book bar/brothel because he was looking for Thai fake-meat while he was there. Died before they got him up to medical-no stack, no backups, no family to claim anything. They threw his body into organic recyc and we had to hire a new Flight Engineer toot-sweet.
"Fourth run to Ceres, that was fun. Got there just before the Rush riots, and it’s funny that they hired an Imperial security company to handle things after a whole lot of the local organized crime people ‘went away.’ Spent the entire time with the ship locked down, one of us having one of the two guns we had on the ship just in case somebody tried to jack us. Two ships did get jacked-one got shot down by Ceres PDS, the other ran into a USSF cruiser that boarded her and shot the jackers.
“Eventually…we got enough to buy shares in a second Hariven, got her upgraded, and started to do sequential runs out from Earth, Mars, and the Belt. Got and had rebuilt a third Hariven, fitted her as a reefer, and did food delivery all along the Belt. Made some damned good money, and that was enough to upgrade a fourth Hariven and buy it out for doing interstellar cargo runs.”
You’d think by the fourth Hariven they’d consider switching to Kalanthas or something
Entirely possible, which is probably further along in this guy’s story when he started talking about working runs where he’s landing stuff on local colonies.
In most of the galaxy, one of the few advantages of the Hariven is the lack of people interested in stealing one. 'Cause you’re basically driving this IN SPACE:
(Incidentally, I am totally into Only Fools and (Space) Horses-styled fanfic.)
Chicory is the classic, though of course it’s not quite as bitter and/or the wrong kind of complex. But the people (including me) who would normally put sugar (and/or lots of milk) in their coffee anyway might not necessarily want bitter, and then it’s close enough…
I used to have a can of really nice coffee substitute made of (quoted from label) “barley, rye, chicory, acorns”. Perhaps some combination of those could do a relatively close approximation of the bitterness profile - to a human palate at least if probably not to an eldrae one.
(I hadn’t heard of Coffea charrieriana but it definitely sounds intriguing! Not sure without looking that up if there’s enough of it around to let people who aren’t already studying it anyway try a cuppa, though.
I forgot - was coffee covered in the recent-ish post about the difference between Terran and Eliéran greenlife? IIRC esklav is made from a different plant entirely, though.)
OTOH I suspect that the eldrae might well call instant coffee, in general, a case of insufficient substitute/bizarre pretense as well…
Don’t threaten me with a good time!
Partially because it looks like a piece of cheap junk, and partially because any would-be pirate looks at a Hariven and figures that if the people flying it had anything worth stealing they wouldn’t be flying a Hariven…
Having just added a brief note to the FAQ on this point, consider the potential fallout from the first corporations to have the job of explaining to the state government of California (and indeed Congress in general) that no, actually, however much they may dislike the “gig economy”, as Imperial corporations they do not make use of wage labor.
Why?
Because it’s a form of labor organization that is best suited for those employing the untrustworthy and/or incompetent, and their corporate policy is that they neither hire the untrustworthy and/or incompetent, nor do they insult the trustworthy and competent by treating them as if they were neither.
…which, incidentally, has some rather unpleasant implications about how y’all think of your own population, now doesn’t it?
High fives all round for the first diplomat who says on camera “It is not and will never be the policy of this Empire to treat its own citizen-shareholders as ignorant, treacherous morons.”
I would imagine that the betting pool for how long it took to say that would probably pay for a month’s vacation at a really nice resort.
Observing the painstaking politeness of diplomacy on Earth between people who really, really do not want to, there may be some hilarity involved in explaining how things work between cultures of even greater divergence.
“Listen, I know you’ve been taught not to, but walking into the room and yelling ‘Listen up, you slime-fucked choss-gobblers!’ is just how opening talks with the Linobir Disarchy goes. For routine, unimportant matters, anyway.”
“What do you do for important matters, fire your gun in the air?”
“Good gods, no. Shoot the lowest-ranking member of their delegation. It’ll get their attention, hesh’ll heal up, and linobir interns are basically consular bullet-sponges anyway.”
I recently completed my rewatch of Star Trek: Enterprise, and this reminds me very much of the Tellarites.
It may be worth mentioning at this point that today’s executive order regulating AI development - apart from revealing that the White House has no-one on staff who knows how integers work - would, in the post-contact universe, result in the USG attempting to regulate computer clusters small enough to fit into earrings.
And I don’t mean the big dangly ones, either.
(Edit: sudden flash-back to the first Men in Black, as the aipol run around trying to find the giant cluster-o-doom only for it to be revealed that the office cat was wearing it all along.
Good kitty.)
Recently re-read Desperately Seeking Ranma and coming back here I get reminded of the Kw’lyn Industries Mark Nine Gamma secure communications and sensory system with a Synthetic Intelligence interface. Starting out at conversational level 6 in the interaction with the user they grow to level 8 and beyond. Where CL 8 is, in that story, the threshold above which you have a Sophont. Directly interacts with the user’s brain, albeit restricted to R/W of the visual cortex, auditory cortex, and R of speech centers. So, still way off an eldraic Bytegeist.
Searching … Introduction is in chap 39. Is kept in a Ki pocket.
BBC And Reconstructive Media Associates Release Of Lost Doctor Who Episodes Next Year
London, England, United Kingdom, Terra, Sol System (PC+12)-As a part of the BBC Revivial Year program, BBC and Reconstructive Media Associates will begin to release the fabled “Lost Episodes” of Doctor Who on both BBC iPlayer, Apple iTunes, Amazon Video, and IBN-2.
“We were extremely lucky to have the help of all of the fans of the series, a lucky break in finding archival materials at BBC London, and the help of RMA in ensuring that the episodes will be as close to the ‘original’ as possible,” BBC Head of Revival Programming Morgana Lee noted in the release statement.
As a part of the Revival Program, the Lost Episodes will be released in three formats-a “authentic” format that you could have seen over the air on the original release date, a “revised” version that would be equivalent to the 2005 revival of the series, and a “current” version that is equal to current BBC programming standards.
In addition, a compilation series The Sixteen Doctors, with The Doctor’s Christmas will be released for the Christmas special this year.
Rumors that the BBC has chosen the Seventeenth Doctor remain unconfirmed at this time.
Another possible sort of hilarity that may come up post- any admissions or annexations, given how popular attempting to ban books is these days, comes from the fact that public libraries in the Empire are managed by the Office of the Libraries (part of the Ministry of Progress and Prosperity) and the Curatorial Theme (of the Repository of All Knowledge), and they have absolutely no time for anyone in the business of denying people access to information.
This is the sort of thing which gets you a visit from one of the First Reader’s most severe minions to remind you that YOU HAVE NO POWER HERE, and if you really insist on trying to exert some, it is perhaps a really bad idea to make an enemy of the people with literally all the books.
Any bets on how long before some zero creates the Fighting Words Challenge where you go up to an Imperial and invoke one of these words? Given our track record I’d say a month, and a month longer before it abruptly stops when they realise that fucking around really is a ticket to finding out.
Did you know that commercial aircraft tend to limit their climb angles to no more than 15° or at most 20°, because passengers tend to interpret them as steeper than they really are due to the acceleration and tend to get all uncomfortable and panicky?
Man, some lucky human is in for a surprise the first time they fly Golden Skies Express Air, or other airline whose pilots are educated more in the fine Imperial tradition of “they wouldn’t give us a performance envelope if they didn’t intend it to be used”, and as such approach climbing to cruise altitude in a more “point this sweet machine at the sky - say, 45° - and give her the oof” way.
(If this happens on Earth, so is air traffic control.
“Imperial 437 Ermahgerd, what the fuck are you doing?”
“Ascending to flight level 350 like you told us, Tower. What do you want, lollygagging?”)
How long does it take for a video of someone desperately trying to hold their intestines in to go viral?
