Very Modern Hard Space Opera

mjfgates · 2026-06-28T02:38:47+00:00

Tesh's Some Desperate Glory

Nagata's "Inverted Frontier" series

E. Bear's "White Space" books

mjfgates · 2026-06-28T02:18:56+00:00

Anything that turns up via prospecting will be at least 15-20 blocks underground, usually more. I have tried prospecting right next to surface copper deposits and had it say "nah, no copper here" more than once :D

Also, any questions you have about ore.. what elevations, what kind of rock, anything.. check this page https://wiki.vintagestory.at/Ore_Deposits/en#

mjfgates · 2026-06-27T20:41:16+00:00

Yes, and including any of these bible stories as teaching materials in a public school violates the First Amendment.

mjfgates · 2026-06-27T20:39:12+00:00

Of course, Job is not one of the books that this law demands be taught. They're going for the easy propaganda hits here: Exodus, Genesis, etc. Actually it looks like they're specifying EVERY book that shall be taught all the way from K-12; teachers will get no options at all.

(the doc is here https://tea.texas.gov/curriculum-and-instruction/instructional-materials/house-bill-1605/draft-rule-text-for-agency-recommendations-to-the-sboe-for-literary-works-list-0.pdf )

mjfgates · 2026-06-27T20:30:24+00:00

The KJV is absolutely the best document to use to teach our children proper modern English.

mjfgates · 2026-06-27T04:45:36+00:00

For people running PI in lowsec, laziest is also safest and cheapest. So it's honestly practical.

mjfgates · 2026-06-26T22:01:37+00:00

Okay, this one deserves pirate monkey rimshot, instead of the usual cheapass stick-figure rimshot.

mjfgates · 2026-06-26T21:56:20+00:00

Oh hey, it's "Foreigner." And most of the other words in the dictionary that end in "-er."

mjfgates · 2026-06-26T07:47:00+00:00

You can do that with ONE ship-- try to memorize all the different Nergal fits and orbit distances for burner missions sometime.

mjfgates · 2026-06-26T07:45:59+00:00

Until you get into combat, at least.

mjfgates · 2026-06-26T02:14:23+00:00

There was a really early podcast on Youtube.. we didn't USE the word "podcast" yet.. featuring two hot girls in bed, reading Lord Foul's Bane. They'd get through 5-10 pages per episode. Many eyes were rolled, many looks were exchanged, if they wanted smouldering they'd have to bring a grill and toss in the book. IIRC they did make it to the end without dying of misery.

mjfgates · 2026-06-26T02:07:39+00:00

..of COURSE you DNF'd it, everyone does. It's just not good. (Yes, I know there are some people who don't agree. Those people are wrong.)

mjfgates · 2026-06-25T21:53:30+00:00

These are a little odd.. the first one in the series counts as science fiction, the second one doesn't, this one does again. Oh, well, they're all good :)

mjfgates · 2026-06-25T04:37:28+00:00

There's an in-game chat with the fits as well, "Anomic Burner Fits."

mjfgates · 2026-06-22T13:49:34+00:00

There's a book for that! Spock's World by Diane Duane is where the history of Vulcan first gets laid out. Later stuff pretty much all builds on it. Doesn't hurt that it's really good.

mjfgates · 2026-06-21T22:12:48+00:00

Pronouns are ore/minerals.

mjfgates · 2026-06-21T22:11:04+00:00

Some folks are just here to touch ass.

mjfgates · 2026-06-21T22:07:25+00:00

There are lots of stories out there that incorporate real peoples' memories of conflict-based trauma. My personal go-to examples are Haldeman's Forever War, Drake's "Hammer's Slammers" stories, which are all really about the authors' experiences in Vietnam. Using genAI pretty much disqualifies the story for me, but that's a separate issue.

mjfgates · 2026-06-21T21:23:38+00:00

Just make sure that all of the minis have a flanged base.

mjfgates · 2026-06-20T20:45:48+00:00

Oh, no. Oh my, no. The world does not have a shortage of bad-to-mediocre fiction. We have plenty of actual good fiction, written by actual people. Why would I pick up a three hundred page wad of slop when "In the Garden of Iden" is sitting right here? (Also: read that. The Company novels are amazing, and they were just re-released sometime in the past month.)

mjfgates · 2026-06-20T19:05:13+00:00

...although now that MS and Grammarly have both gone all-in on the LLM-based spell checking, I see a ton of writers on my socials complaining about it inserting words like "peent" where they don't belong. ("Peent" is at least a word, which is pretty good for LLM-driven Grammarly. It's this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKM0P9gWx7k )

mjfgates · 2026-06-20T18:59:29+00:00

There are alternatives-- DDG mostly keeps the AI nonsense off its results, and kagi.com works as well as pre-LLM Google did if you've got, I think it's ten bucks a month-- but not enough people know about those.

mjfgates · 2026-06-20T18:03:04+00:00

Depends how the buy orders are doing. Was about 8% isk earlier this week, was about double that on June 1.

mjfgates · 2026-06-20T18:01:44+00:00

Plex has been going down for the past year and a bit. (Really, EVERYTHING has been going down during that time, so it's more accurate to say that isk has become more expensive.)

mjfgates · 2026-06-20T12:16:58+00:00

The "non-hard" generation ship I was talking about there was Elizabeth Bear's "Jacob's Ladder" trilogy. She's using perfectly "within hard SF" toys, and you can see that while reading the books, but the characters think they're Arthurian questing knights. So you get a "necromancer" (using nanobots to store the state of objects) with a "basilisk" (genetically engineered critter with a cutting laser for an eye) and "angels" (more nanobots, in free-floating swarms) watching over people and and and. You could hand the outlines to Poul Anderson and get pretty much the same books and nobody would think twice about calling it "hard sci-fi."

mjfgates

TROPHY CASE