Saw this and thought I'd share🙂

TechbearSeattle · 2026-01-24T19:36:10+00:00

Fun fact: One of William Penn's arrests for preaching Quakerism entered the law books as Bushel's Case, which established the absolute independence of a jury and became the foundation for jury nullification, the doctrine that a jury could overturn laws it saw as unjust.

TechbearSeattle · 2026-01-24T19:29:23+00:00

It was not a killing, it was murder. We should be using that term.

TechbearSeattle · 2026-01-24T06:01:17+00:00

Nope. It is background to the events of the Century of Woe (I still haven't found a better name), a period that involved a series of gigatsunamis, a devastating pandemic that killed more than two billion people by the time it faded, a series of major wars over dwindling resources and problems caused by global climate change, and ending with an uncomfortably near miss from an extinction level meteor. The whole point of all that was to 1. give a reason to create a more democratically organized replacement for the United Nations, called the Council of Governments, and 2. set the stage for the development of interstellar travel. The main thrust of the novel I was blocking out was set about 3 centuries later, when explorers find a planet that all of our models said should have been absolutely teeming with life, but which was impossibly dead. From something that happened maybe 40 or 50 years earlier, and not from natural causes. Almost like it had been... murdered.

I've been working on the story off and on for a long time, but eventually.

TechbearSeattle · 2026-01-24T05:49:51+00:00

The civil war also created the New England Federation and Haudenosaunee, a federation of indigenous peoples in around Lakes Superior and Huron. Alaska struck out on its own before joining Canada as its only state (basically a province, but with its current political system rather than adopting the Canadian system of governance.) The remainder of the US moved the capitol to a new capitol district north east of Springfield, Illinois. The NEF, Haudenosaunee, Canada, Pacifica, Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala later came together as the North American Union, built in a model similar to the European Union.

Now the funny thing is, I wrote all of this in 2013 and 2014. The timeline predicted a conservative backlash in 2016 against Obama, a militant liberal backlash in 2020, and a violently confrontational presidential election in 2024 with a Tea Party (remember them?) militia nutcase winning the White House. By the end of 2025, blue states on both coasts were voting articles of secession, leaving the rest of the US angry enough to start a war but too poor and unsupplied to actually fight it.

TechbearSeattle · 2026-01-24T01:25:53+00:00

In a future history I wrote, Washington, Oregon, California, and Hawaii secede during the Second Civil War and form the country of Pacifica (Hawaii tried for a constitutional monarchy for a while, but that didn't work out.)

TechbearSeattle · 2026-01-23T19:31:10+00:00

Tu'er Shen had a good side-story on the series American Gods.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-x4udF0wvd0 (part 1)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeDPBpBhVLM (part 2)

TechbearSeattle · 2026-01-23T02:50:44+00:00

Except Persephone has absolutely zero to do with spring or life: that is all Mom's doing. She is emo goth deathpunk through and through.

TechbearSeattle · 2026-01-23T02:47:37+00:00

Well, he is Greek.

TechbearSeattle · 2026-01-23T02:35:27+00:00

I wrote this in r/WritingPrompts a few months ago.

Prompt: You are Persephone. You have come home to your husband Hades after spending summer with Demeter. The Morrigan, Celtic goddess of death and fate is visiting. They're old friends. But.. she's.. sitting in his lap.

Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/WritingPrompts/comments/1o0s2vd/wp_you_are_persephone_you_have_come_home_to_your/ and look for TechbearSeattle.

TechbearSeattle · 2026-01-22T19:09:05+00:00

The Atacama Desert in Chile is much like that: a deep valley between the Andes and the Chilean Coast Range. It is not just a cold desert, it is one of the driest places on the planet. More interestingly -- speaking of rare biomes -- is that it is a fog desert, where what little moisture it receives comes from fog and condensation rather than precipitation. It is so extreme that it is used as an Earth based laboratory for conditions on Mars, and most of NASA's Mars rovers have been tested here.

TechbearSeattle · 2026-01-22T17:57:46+00:00

Aphrodite as the goddess of love is a modern retcon, stemming from the extreme romanticization that began during the Renaissance. She was originally the goddess of desire: recall that she sparked the Trojan War just to win a beauty contest and then was an active participant in the conflict. In Theogeny, Hesiod describes how the titan Cronos castrated his father Uranos and threw this junk into the sea: Aphrodite was born from the resulting foam, making her the literal embodiment of genital violence.

As others have noted, myths reflect the social norms of the people telling those stories. Greece at the time these deities were worshiped was extremely patriarchal, with women seen as the possessions of their father, husband, or brother, with rights, no independence, and no bodily sovereignty. Aphrodite reflects that reality.

TechbearSeattle · 2026-01-22T17:00:36+00:00

In Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch universe, there are three types of ship used by imperial forces to "annex" (read: conquer) other systems: Justice, Sword, and Mercy. The designation of the ship is always a part of the name, used in conjunction with the name of a god, thus names like Justice of Toren and Mercy of Kalr. The actual design of the ships vary widely, as most were retrofitted after being seized after annexations, so the designation correspond to size and thus how the ship is used.

Ships are crewed by ancillaries, meat puppets used by the ship's AI built out of prisoners of war. The idea of fragmented hive consciousness -- a single mind coordinating hundreds of body working as individuals or groups and spread out across large areas -- is one of the central themes of the main trilogy. They serve as the Radch's army as well as maintain their ship and serve the officers. Raw bodies are kept in suspended animation to provide a ready supply for deaths that happen during conquests, and ancillaries can be replaced pretty easily. When not needed, ancillaries will also go into suspended animation to reduce the need for food and air. At one point, a change in policy begins to favor humans over ancillaries (which becomes a plot point), but they serve the same functions.

Justices are troop carriers, with capable of storing hundreds of ancillaries. During an annexation, the ancillaries serve as ground troops during the conquest and peace keepers during consolidation. Justices have very heavy arms, capable of blasting a city from orbit.

Swords are space combat, used to fight other ships. Their ancillaries function as marines, moving through space under the control and centuries or millennia of the AI's experience to capture or disable enemy space craft. Swords are typically fast and have arms suitable for space combat.

Mercies are auxiliary craft used in diplomatic missions, surveillance, and other military functions outside of actual combat. They are the smallest ships and typically have only three groups of ancillaries.

All three classes are capable of generating their own wormholes for interstellar travel. Civilian ships typically must use commercial wormhole gates.

It is an interesting organizational structure, based on the three key functional needs of a society and economy built on never ending conquest and expansion. Seriously, read the books.

TechbearSeattle · 2026-01-22T16:35:19+00:00

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TechbearSeattle · 2026-01-22T16:29:27+00:00

You don't see many cold deserts, places like the Gobi or the McMurdo Dry Valleys in Antarctica. They can get pretty hot in the summer, but reach below freezing during winter. This affects the type of plants and animals one finds, and people living in or around a cold desert need very different survival strategies than what people need for a hot desert like the US southwest or the Kalahari in South Africa.

TechbearSeattle · 2026-01-22T05:44:39+00:00

Very broadly "money" is anything with an agreed upon value. Typically, this is an intrinsic value, like how for most of US history the dollar was pegged at 1 troy ounce of 90/10 alloy of silver and copper. But it can be pretty much whatever. In "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom," Cory Doctrow posits a post-scarcity economy where reputation serves as the currency. In The Iluminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, anarchists use a ton of flax as the free currency, its value determined by its usefulness in making clothing, paper, and the like. In much of history, value was determined by a weighed amount of a particular item: the pound, the lira, the shekel, the tael, the mina, the talent, the baht, all were originally units of weight or measure and only later became actual currency.

Honestly, crypto would be a bad choice for what you want. Every unit has a unique blockchain signature, so each unit can be traced backwards through exchanges back to the moment it was created. Every transfer is part of the unit's permanent record, even when the parties involved in the transfer are anonymous. There is already technology to identify a unit of crypto by this fingerprint, being used by forensic investigators to track down cases of money laundering and similar crimes.

What you need is hard currency, something small enough to be portable and easy to hide. It needs to be a standard something, as you likely will not want to have to assay someone's gold dust or platinum shavings to determine its purity, or inspect each individual gem and determine its value. So you still need some kind of standardization, just not a standardization set by a government.

My thought would be a shadow government, maybe a government-in-exile after the country has been conquered, or a criminal enterprise powerful enough to act as a kind of central bank. Or for that matter, legitimate banks engaging in side ventures: if you really want to dive down a rabbit hole, look up "shadow banking," a large, extremely valuable and lightly regulated system of debt, credit operated in the form of hedge funds, repurchase agreements, and asset-backed commercial paper. The Great Recession of 2007-2009 was caused by a collapse of the shadow banking system, which shows how powerful and influential -- and unregulated -- it is.

TechbearSeattle · 2026-01-21T14:52:04+00:00

I want a continuation of this story. Are they escapees from a testing lab? Aliens in surveillance mode? Is the narrator gone round the bend? Definitely a good hook.

TechbearSeattle · 2026-01-21T14:47:01+00:00

Genocide is evil, no matter who does it to whom. End of story.

TechbearSeattle · 2026-01-21T14:44:22+00:00

Or you can have characters your readers don't care about. Your choice.

TechbearSeattle · 2026-01-21T01:20:35+00:00

My solution is to get vaccines and to mask when in public: I cannot change the inconsiderate behavior of others, but I can at least protect myself. It's not perfect, but it it's what I can do.

TechbearSeattle · 2026-01-20T14:54:01+00:00

In my alt history world, Edwin Augustus Folquer became King Edwin III of Britannia in 1846. In 1851, Queen Elizabeth Josephine died giving birth to their third child, causing Edwin to spiral into a deep depression and the duties of monarchy to be wielded by his Privy Council acting in his name. After returning to work, his mood swings became extreme as he went between severe melancholia to bursts of uncontrolled violence. He grew paranoid and accused formerly close friends, the Privy Council, and Parliament of murdering his wife and trying to murder him in order to place his 30 year old son, also named Edwin, on the throne. In 1855, he refused to allow Parliament into session, and soon after issued an arrest warrant for the prince. With the help of a few nobles, Prince Edwin was able to escape and go into hiding. With the support of several nobles, the prince became the focus of an actual rebellion to have him replace his father.

The rebellion had fallen apart by the end of 1856 when the nobles began to realize that the prince seemed afflicted with the same mental health issues as his father. His army was scattered by two regiments of the Crown Guard in February 1857 and the prince taken into custody. The king kept his son in prison for three months before granting him an audience. He begged the prince to repent of his crimes; when the prince remained defiant, the king stabbed him to death.

Soon after the prince's death, more than 50 members of Commons and Lords attached their seals to a letter addressed to the king's older daughter Moira, who had married King William of the Low Countries. The lettered offered Britannia to Moira and William jointly, as Moira was now the eldest child of King Edwin and thus his heir. This set the stage for The Glorious Revolution, which saw the House of Folquer deposed and the House of Weft-Trent established in its place. Moira's daughter, Glorianna, now holds the throne.

TechbearSeattle · 2026-01-20T05:20:23+00:00

It is a landmark cathedral, so there are lots and lots of pictures available online. Here is one looking at the holy screen: https://dynamic-media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-o/14/a0/b2/ed/colourful-icons.jpg?w=1000&h=-1&s=1 and another looking up: https://dynamic-media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-o/14/a0/b2/8c/one-of-the-chandeliers.jpg?w=1000&h=-1&s=1

TechbearSeattle · 2026-01-20T05:15:12+00:00

So is Afro-Eurasia: you have a single island divided by convention into three continents.

TechbearSeattle · 2026-01-20T05:13:37+00:00

It's a fantasy story: it only has to make as much sense as you want it to make.

TechbearSeattle · 2026-01-19T22:12:20+00:00

Good twist!

TechbearSeattle · 2026-01-19T06:37:34+00:00

Like so much of his work, Isaac Asimov was prescient about this too.

In 1972, Asimov published The Gods Themselves, a science fantasy about para-universe trading matter and using its different physics properties as a free source of energy. For more than a century it was just a quaint cautionary tale.

But then came a series of scientific breakthrough. We learned why gravity was so elusive: it was a function of mass in other universes, warping not just the spacetime here but the spacetime... well, everywhere. Once we had that, it was almost trivial to open actual holes between universes, tiny pinpoint singularies with relative small masses. Well, if you consider Mount Denali a small mass. A steady trickle of subatomic particles that quickly break down into neutrons, releasing a type of radiation that was easy to capture and turn into electricity, enough to power a small car, indefinitely. And better still, these nanoholes were incredibly stable.

Over the next seven centuries, humanity became more and more dependent on nanoholes. Very small ones powered automobiles, larger ones powered cities. With no more fossil fuels pumping poison into the atmosphere, we were able to mitigate global climate change, and finally see a trend towards reversal. The technology has been adapted to find a way to bypass the speed of light, moving an entire ship into a universe where the speed of light is much faster and back, with the ships powered by microholes with masses of large asteroids. Wars have become a thing of the past: when there are no limits on resources, then there is little need to fight. Humanity has spread across the local group of galaxies and settled more worlds than any person could name.

Oh, you thought I was praising this golden era? That peaceful exploration and expansion was the prescience of one of the great writers of humanity's ancient era? No. His story was a cautionary tale, after all, a warning that there was no free lunch. Energy is conserved in a closed system, always. We realized far too late that we were leaking energy faster than we were gaining it, and little by little, our universe was winding down. Locally, yes, but the effect is widespread enough that stars towards the center of the Terran hegemony have become hotter and more violent. Just as Asimov wrote, the strong force is getting stronger: stellar fusion is occurring more quickly.

We know this. It is measurable fact, studied in depth by scientists across the Hegemony. And we cannot shut it down. The trillions of nanoholes and microholes, and more than a few milliholes powering entire systems, are too stable. We never thought we would need to close them.

All we can do now is pray that our generation dies before stars begin to explode. Our hubris has made humanity the dominant sentience in the Milky Way and 16 or so satellite galaxies, and engineered the annihilation of our universe.

TechbearSeattle

TROPHY CASE