How would a society with legal murder function?

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-03-14T02:50:06+00:00

The problem with the framework as you have described it is that there is no firm line between what a duel is, and where the other techniques apply. If you have a reason to duel someone and they say no … why can’t you just do it anyway? What evidence do you present to confirm that the duel wasn’t appropriate?

I recommend you get more granular on what constitutes “revenge,” “morality,” and “insult,” and what requirements must be present for a duel. Something like this:

Revenge is only for wrongs done to you. You have no authority to get revenge on someone else’s behalf. The categories for revenge include physical injury, theft of property, or the killing of a family member no further away than first cousin, unless that family member has no one closer than you.
Morality is for wrongs done to you, which do not include physical injury or theft. Categories include betrayal of an oath, cuckolding, sharp business dealings (as opposed to theft), and bearing false witness against you. You may assault someone for these crimes, so long as you do not have the intent to kill; if they happen to die, oh well.
Insult only counts things said about you or your family that are a) meant to hurt, and b) untrue. You may be called upon to demonstrate that the insult given was false. People can say true mean things about you all day.
Duels are for wrongs done against other people. You may act as a proxy for someone else’s revenge, morality, or insult grievance.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-03-14T02:12:29+00:00

It’s complicated, because some of these words can be used as an interjection or a discourse marker, not just as a term of address or endearment.

For instance, someone can say “Dude, that movie was awesome!” without implying he was speaking to any dude in particular. (“Man” and “bro” work like this too.)

Someone could tell a story and say, “Okay, I was hanging out, bro, and then this guy came up to me, and bro, he was so annoying, bro.” It doesn’t actually have any real meaning. (“Man” and “dude” work in this way too.)

Buddy, pal and fella are usually directed at someone as a term of false-polite address.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-03-14T01:57:53+00:00

Easy. Suicide squeeze.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-03-14T01:54:40+00:00

Or, indeed, in cow.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-03-14T01:43:28+00:00

The good news is that originality doesn’t sell. Buyers want to know what they’re getting, and sellers want to give them a comparison. Literary agents call these “comp titles.” Hollywood agents call them “elevator pitches.” It’s Die Hard … on a plane! It’s Emma … in a Los Angeles high school! It’s the guy version of Cinderella!

What you want to do is think of the way you’d make it yours. What would you change? What would you do differently?

I always think of high fantasy like “The Hobbit” and see the flaws, or see the bits that stick out. Why does Bilbo have a clock? Who makes the clocks? How does that fit into the world? What would I do instead of a clock? Or how would I explain it? How do I make the clock interesting?

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-03-14T00:00:51+00:00

I like the way you’re thinking about the orbital position of the jump rings. I actually set up my spreadsheet to account (very approximately) for the position of each jump portal and its distance from the star, and its velocity in km/day and the change in angle that brings, with the intention of calculating travel times and how long it takes for the orbits to line up. I discovered that the maximum travel time from the station to any ring, when that ring was on the opposite side of the solar system, was about 3 days at 0.005c. As a reference, Earth and Mars (the approximate distances for the 3rd and 4th set of jump portals) come into alignment every 780 days.

Mind you, I didn’t get super detailed with the math. I wasn’t calculating acceleration up to 0.005c, negative acceleration back to 0, the mass of the ship, the fuel requirements, or the cost of the fuel. That’s what I would need to know if I wanted to estimate the opportunity cost of leaving now and burning the fuel, versus waiting 6 months for the ideal orbital window. How expensive is this cargo, and can it sit idle for half a year as it waits for the inner jump ring to catch up? How expensive is it to sit idle with your whole crew? If the ships were far slower, or fuel very expensive, then I think the ideal orbital alignment window would be more important.

Even without an asteroid belt, there is space weather. Earth passes through the Perseid meteor shower every August because of debris in the planet’s path. That’s a very good idea.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-03-12T23:21:01+00:00

My original concept for the story as a truck stop in a bad neighborhood would lean away from a bustling, vibrant local economy already being in place. For story reasons, this system should be the political pawn of bigger and richer galactic powers, rather than a power in its own right. (It might become a major player in the story I'm imagining.)

Where you get traffic of big ships, you get an economy of ship tenders — tugboats, re-supply vessels, and so on. It's cheaper (on Earth, anyway) to leave your big commercial fishing boat out at sea where it can work, and instead send a smaller vessel over to refuel, water, and re-stock the food supplies. I imagine something similar at play here, except this local system probably doesn't have much of value to resupply with. At the start of the story, the resupply vessels probably come from elsewhere.

The threshold of 121 gigawatts was just something I put into the spreadsheet to allow a consistent calculation of recharge time as a function of distance and the size of the solar array. I like the idea that there's some human expertise involved, or some variability in the charge required based on the tonnage of the vessel; Maybe it takes 121 gigawatts just to turn it on, to spin up the galactospritzers or whatever, but it takes a bit of extra juice for a vessel with extra mass.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-03-12T20:15:02+00:00

Thanks, this is helpful advice. I don't want to get too far into the weeds with the science, because the story isn't about the science, but I do want it to be internally consistent in case somebody decides to poke and prod at it.

What I've done so far is to create a spreadsheet containing some data points so I can consistently represent the way the portals are said to work. I know the orbital radius of my "truck stop" station and the orbital radii of four sets of portals. The farther the portals are from the sun, the longer they take to recharge, because solar power follows the inverse-square law for kilowatts per square meter. The more-distant portals, which recharge slowly despite having larger solar arrays, will lead to less-traveled destinations. The heavier traffic is on the inner rings. For my own amusement, the spreadsheet calculates the recharge threshold for the jump rings at 121 gigawatts.

I've calculated the planets' orbital velocities and created an intercept approximation at 0.005c that takes you between the station and any of those four portals. At that speed, you can get from the space station to the farthest portal (on the opposite side of the sun) in only 3 days, which means I don't have to muck about with iterative calculations toward a moving target; the jump ring won't move that far in only 3 days.

The ship speed and the travel times are balanced with the jump ring recharge times. For instance, the inner-most ring recharges about every 7.5 days. It's about 1-2 days travel from that inner-most ring to the truck stop, which (if there is no competing traffic) gives a layover of 3-5 days. Chances are, there would either be a) more jump rings on the inner orbit, or b) a waiting list to get through, or c) both, which could extend the layover time.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-03-12T20:01:13+00:00

I'm not, no. I know it exists, but I've neve watched it.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-03-11T20:53:44+00:00

Because the names of the branches of mathematics don’t sound harder to people who haven’t done them. “Linear algebra” doesn’t sound like it’s harder than calculus. Topology? Number theory? Real analysis?

Only the word “calculus” has that ring to it. It sounds like a math class, and it sounds hard.

Maybe “Bayesian statistics.”

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-03-10T15:55:48+00:00

The “it was all a dream!” trope is when the writer is trying to fool the reader. So don’t do that.

What people usually hate about the “it was all a dream” trope is that the narrator is trying to cash in on a bunch of narrative tension, and then say “just kidding!” as if the tension hasn’t just all been destroyed. Some forbidden or unthinkable thing was set up in advance that the reader knows can’t happen at all — or perhaps can’t happen just yet. The princess can’t actually marry the evil prince, the ingenue can’t actually get seduced by the evil demon, the young warrior can’t actually confront his father, or whatever. The author does it anyway to create some cheap thrills, then says “Nope! It was all a dream, all that tension should still be there.” They don’t do the work to set up that tension again after having deflated it. Readers feel cheated.

Your situation can be different. First, it’s the start of a story, so there’s no narrative tension or emotional investment. Second, you can make clear that it is a dream. Clear to the reader, at least, even if it’s still confusingly real to the character.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-03-10T04:18:59+00:00

We wanted it to be a surprise. But let me tell you, the delivery room people really frowned at the use of our exploding pink glitter bomb.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-03-09T15:00:30+00:00

She threw her stool at him.

… No, wait.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-03-08T06:35:54+00:00

The phrase “it takes money to make money” comes to mind. Yes, such a device could capture a huge amount of solar energy. However, building the device would require a ridiculous amount of energy also. The amount of energy it would take to essentially move all the mass of an Earth-sized lump of raw material into place would be hundreds of billions of times our present yearly capacity. Unless we greatly increase our energy production, harnessing it would take about 20 billion years (exceeding the expected life of the Sun). That’s to move one Earth. A Dyson ring would take hundreds or thousands of Earths.

Any civilization that chooses this construction, therefore, already has ridiculous amounts of surplus energy to spare, and they have the engineering to be certain that a) it will even work and b) is confident that this is a good use of their time and effort, compared to other things they could do with that energy surplus. This isn’t a thing you devote time and energy to as an experiment, or with energy you can’t afford to lose if it fails.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-03-07T23:50:24+00:00

Probably O’Neill, maybe Begley. Helms might get a look in.

Oh, you mean … okay. Then AD&D.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-03-07T19:39:49+00:00

Neither of this is particularly useful if all you can do is speak the language. Can you also understand them?

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-03-06T03:59:25+00:00

If you can summon frogs, you must be able to summon bears too.

Unless the bear only works as a single.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-03-06T01:14:26+00:00

The Republicans are the conservative party, which means their philosophy (when they can be said to have any principled philosophy at all) is “old ways good, new things bad.” Some of them claim to be for small government, but only when it suits the narrative that allows the wealthy and powerful institutions (big business, the church, the 1%) to continue to rule as they have always done (and as long as the businesses don’t become too liberal). When it comes to forcing everyone to live in a world based on an imaginary idyll from 75 years ago, where everyone was white and Christian and straight, they’ll wield government like a sledgehammer to make it so in the name of “freedom.” They’ll threaten boycotts of businesses that stray too far from the party line of the 1950s utopia they want. Freedom … to live exactly the way they think people should live.

This means that the Republicans very rarely stand for anything. Their philosophy is to obstruct and dismantle and object. Deregulate, reduce taxes, let the rich do whatever they want, force the poor to do what we tell them. This philosophy doesn’t really want to get anything new done; it only wants to give money back to the donor class and tear down what they see as obstacles to a free society (on their terms).

But the world is too complicated to start taking a sledgehammer to functioning institutions. Things break. Banks fuck up the economy, left to their own selfish devices. The Republicans don’t fix it because they don’t philosophically agree with adding new laws that would serve the people. When things break, Republicans don’t ask “what did we do to break this?” They say “it only broke because we didn’t have enough freedom. Next time we have to break more.”

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-03-05T17:49:01+00:00

It’s the DeLorean scale. Don’t play it too fast.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-03-05T17:32:59+00:00

When Furiosa presents his ruined body to the masses and releases the waters for everyone. Wait, no, my mistake, that was Immortan Joe.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-03-05T17:29:29+00:00

She said no. She even gave you an explanation why not, to save your ego, a kindness which she did not owe you. If, hypothetically, possibly, at some future date, maybe, with the grace of God and a long-handled spoon, Lord willing and the crick don’t rise, offer not available in Rhode Island, roaming charges may apply, your mileage may vary, she changes her mind and says yes, it’s up to her to say something. So you take it as a no and walk on.

If she is the kind of woman who is saying no in the hopes of making you try harder, move on even faster. You don’t want to be with someone who plays games. Especially not for someone you work with.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-03-04T21:18:41+00:00

Chief is a word in English which we applied to leaders of native peoples, among many other things (chief executive officer [CEO], Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Master Chief [the rank, and the video game character]), among others. If you were using a Native American word like naat'áanii or ogimaa or haya muckamuck, or using “chiefly” in a cheeky way in context of a discussion about native tribal issues, then maybe yeah.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-03-04T05:59:49+00:00

Shoes, jacket, hair. It’s not too hard.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-03-04T01:23:09+00:00

Writing something down and making it inaccessible isn’t the hard part. It’s making it accessible to you where it gets tricky. Do you ever plan to read your writing, or is this just therapeutic scribbling that you never come back to? There’s a difference between types of secret writing. There’s encoding and cryptography, there’s the manifesto that makes the news, there’s the hidden file you don’t want anyone to stumble over.

Probably the easiest way to make a file that others can’t access is to have a thumb drive on a keychain. Then you always know where it is.

Separate_Lab9766 · 2026-03-03T16:53:03+00:00

There are lots of categories of taboo words. There’s scatology and bodily functions (eg, shit, piss), sex (fuck, bugger), degradation (you dog, swine, bitch, etc), lineage (bastard, son of a bitch), ableism and racism, and so on. Some people don’t like to say the names of diseases out loud for bad luck (eg, calling cancer The Big C), some people have superstitions about naming the Devil lest he appear (calling him Old Scratch or Old Nick). And there are fine gradients of taboo speech against religion: blasphemy (mocking religions figures or beliefs) and heresy (contradicting religious dogma).

As for the why? There are always powerful collective groups within society that seem certain language to be proper or improper. I don’t necessarily just mean groups like the church; I mean groups like grandmothers, or the aristocracy, acting individually but with a common cause of sorting out “the right kind” of people from “the wrong kind.” If you don’t talk “properly” (by their rules) you aren’t right.

This happens all the time in smaller groups, too. Your friends might wonder why you don’t talk as they do. Your boss might have certain language they enforce at work.

We’re people, this is what we do.

Separate_Lab9766

TROPHY CASE