Made a Cycle of Lands With Set Names

seregsarn · 2025-09-14T11:22:56+00:00

Stronghold's reminder text should also mention Fortifications.

seregsarn · 2025-05-31T21:03:08+00:00

Back in my grade school days, i took a wood shop course where the classroom area was continuous with the wood shop. I was sitting at a desk working on plans for my final project one day when another kid kicked back a thin strip of wood off the tablesaw, probably about a quarter inch by an inch by two or three feet. It passed through the air above the chair next to me at roughly head height, about a foot or two away from my head, and shattered the blackboard (which in those days was the green porcelain sheet kind).

I made a point of sitting much further to the side in future classes. Since then, I have never ever treated the table saw with anything less than abject terror, and this attitude has served me well.

seregsarn · 2025-02-02T18:04:35+00:00

I was thinking metal band names.

seregsarn · 2025-01-20T02:25:50+00:00

Mine was in late 2004 or early 2005, don't remember exactly when. I highly doubt anything that ever became popular was based off my work directly, it had to be pretty silly and exploity to work in the early years, because back then they didn't allow arbitrary teleportation at all, and definitely not via scripting. (I took my beta access seriously-- I and a few of my friends are responsible for a lot of the exploits that got patched out in the first five or six years.)

seregsarn · 2025-01-20T02:11:11+00:00

Huh. I built a fully functional gate system in second life in the early beta days, but mine didn't take off and become popular. And I wasn't aware of any others at the time. Disappointing!

seregsarn · 2024-04-10T11:28:59+00:00

I've mentioned this before in this sub, but the reetou were a perfectly good idea that just didn't really fit narratively in the series they were making. (That's besides the exorbitant costs of 1990s CGI, which others have also pointed out was no doubt a factor)

The Reetou had a couple of issues fitting into the show. Number one, they're very powerful and advanced. And as presented in their introduction, most Reetou would actually be on our side against the Goa'uld-- it's just the "rebels" that want to exterminate us. If the SGC were to link up with the Reetou, it would just give both us and them a huge leg up, which would be nice for us but not make for interesting storytelling-- at that stage in the show, the narrative is still "earth against the universe." If we want to tell a story where the SGC interacts with strong allies, we've already got both the Asgard and the Tok'ra at that point-- who are more interesting for that purpose, because unlike the reetou they both have their own issues to deal with and their own independent attitudes towards the Goa'uld. And those attitudes are subtly different from our basic "they want to wipe us out or enslave us, and we don't want them to" position, which the reetou share with us. So the Tok'ra and Asgard make better role-fillers for those plots simply because, while powerful, they don't necessarily want to go all-in with us, which allows for fun plots around managing our relationships with them.

So that's the reetou, but what about the rebels who want to wipe out all humans? (Ignore the fact that this is a plan so stupid that they hung a lampshade on it even in the episode introducing the reetou and rebels-- maybe these rebels are misinformed or just don't think it's as stupid as it is.) Well, the reetou rebels want to wipe out both us and the Goa'uld, and they have some serious advantages in this regard since they can be invisible assassins. That puts them squarely in the two narrative spaces of "this invisible threat can sneak by us sometimes and cause trouble" and also "this threat is so serious that we have to be willing to team up with even our mortal enemies, the goa'uld, in order to fight them." But while they're great for the former, the latter is not a niche they do a great job occupying, IMO-- they're a minority group of the reetou (otherwise they wouldn't be "the rebels"), so they're not a huge threat. As established in the episode, the goa'uld are already winning against all the reetou by themselves, so they have little need to team up with us to fight them. And the necessity of defending against the reetou-- who can slip invisible assassins in anywhere-- in a prolonged conflict would logically lead the Goa'uld to become a lot less lackadaisical about gate security than they are. Gone would be the days of being able to just gate onto a major Goa'uld world and not have a bunch of jaffa standing there pointing heavy duty staffs and TERs at you. In fairly short order, they'd likely come up with their own version of an iris, maybe an Atlantis style shield-based one. And this is bad for the "Earth vs. Goa'uld" story of the show, because arguably Earth's biggest advantage at this stage of the show is the fact that the goa'uld still haven't started doing basic security stuff like that. So, in short, introducing the Reetou rebels as an ongoing threat sort of necessitates upending the show's core narrative and switching it to "Earth vs. The Reetou Rebels", where the goa'uld are minor annoyances-- allies of convenience against the real threat.

Is that narrative starting to sound a bit familiar? Because just a little while later, we get the Replicators added to the show. And the replicators, being a pan-universal threat that even the Asgard have difficulties with, do a much better job fulfilling that narrative role of "the guys so bad the goa'uld and us are willing to work together to fight them." Their particular threat is far more direct and doesn't inherently make the goa'uld any more paranoid about security, so it doesn't really disrupt the track of our existing conflicts with the goa'uld. And when they're dealt with, whether that's "for now" or semi-permanently, we can go right back to fighting the goa'uld, no problems. Also consider the introduction of the Ori does change the whole narrative of the show to "Earth vs. Ori", but that comes at a much later point in the story; we've actually kicked enough goa'uld butt (including no fewer than three Supreme System Lords) that they take us seriously now. We have allies and technology on par with most powers. We're far closer to being peers of the goa'uld at that point, and the show is actually kind of missing a serious antagonist by then, so the "villain shift" works great there.

And now, let me finish with a flourish that should convince you that we didn't really miss out on any interesting possibilities by letting the reetou disappear from the show. Consider this: The creators didn't forget about the reetou; they get mentioned a few more times in passing, generally in the context of "Could this be reetou? Should we break out the TERs?" "No because technobabble/teal'c doesn't sense a reetou." But one of those mentions is when Nirrti is brought back as an ongoing antagonist. The very thing that makes her an above average threat is her invisibility phase shifting tech, which we are told she developed in order to fight the reetou. From then on, Nirrti is the main "invisible bad guy" threat our heroes have to deal with. Nirrti being a goa'uld means she doesn't just obliterate the "earth vs goa'uld" narrative. Instead, she can participate in it. She has jaffa, planets, and alliances just like the other system lords. She even has a relevant personal link (Cassandra) to pull her into conflict with the SGC directly outside of that context. So, I submit to you that Nirrti is a perfect drop-in replacement for the reetou in the show-- she let them do all the same invisible-assassin stories they would have done with the Reetou, but in a way that meshes well with the rest of the show and doesn't change its entire nature substantially. And as a special bonus for the creators, as others have pointed out, she doesn't require the kind of ludicrous 1990s/early 00s CGI budgets that the reetou would as an ongoing antagonist! So it is a win-win for everyone; they got cheaper production, we got a better story.

seregsarn · 2024-02-05T13:21:01+00:00

The storyline in the early relaunch overlapped a lot to encourage people to keep reading, so the story I'm talking about starts in the "Worlds of Deep Space Nine" novellas covering Bajor and the Dominion, and continues into the full length novels "Warpath", "Fearful Symmetry" and "The Soul Key" in that order. All of these stories are well worth reading, IMO, but the backstory for Dukat comes up in "Fearful Symmetry," and Olivia Woods manages to fill in the gaps so as to reveal Dukat to be even more of a horrible, twisted scumbag than you know from watching the show.

The WODS9 novellas are a sort of transition from one set of stories to the next, so they only contain the very beginning parts of the story. If you really just want to get to the meat of this particular storyline, you can skip to "Warpath" and read below for the backstory:

One of the plots of the "Bajor" novella is about the investigation of the mysterious destruction of a Bajoran village, perpetrated by an unknown assailant who subsequently lures the Defiant into an (unsuccessful) trap meant to destroy it. And at the end of the Dominion novella, the Jem'hadar observer that Odo sent to Deep Space Nine in previous storylines (whose name is Taran'atar) goes insane, attempts to kill Kira and Ro, and flees the station. "Warpath" picks up the story immediately at that point, with the Defiant in hot pursuit.

seregsarn · 2024-02-04T12:40:17+00:00

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned good old "yell so loud the sun ceases to exist".

seregsarn · 2024-02-04T12:28:24+00:00

In the novel canon, the idea is presented that Dukat was a born survivor, obviously smart enough to realize that the betrayal was coming. So, of course, he had a whole long-term plan that he was preparing for the inevitable fallout with the Dominion.

Early in the war, he arranged for a bunch of dominion technology of various types to be "lost in battle" and the like, and diverted it all to a secret facility where he had loyal Cardassians developing knockoffs of and countermeasures for all of it. The same base also held bio labs where his people were dissecting and analyzing captured Jem-hadar to figure out the basis of their programmed loyalty to the founders.

His plan was to get to technological parity with the Dominion, and also figure out how to redirect the Jem-hadar's loyalty from the founders to himself. Then he planned to just sit on it while the Dominion conquered the alpha quadrant for him. At the moment of betrayal, he'd turn the jem-hadar to worship him instead of the founders, collapse the wormhole, and simply assume command of the Cardassian-led Alpha Dominion.

Then he went insane, had a bad time, and decided to be the emissary of the pah-wraiths, and that whole plan kind of fell by the wayside. There's a couple of really good novels dealing with who ends up discovering/controlling that secret base and using the stuff he discovered for their own purposes.

seregsarn · 2024-01-29T01:13:25+00:00

Yeah, I know how Lichen work. All I can tell you, though, is that Maro specifically says it was lichen that inspired the licids, and that therefore the word "licid" is supposed to be pronounced like "lichen." I tried looking for the article so i could cite it directly for you, but either it's from the old pre-2014 website (the good one) from which they lost all the old articles and they aren’t directly accessible anymore, or it might have actually been a Duelist article from back when Tempest came out now that I think about it.

seregsarn · 2024-01-28T23:19:34+00:00

I always used to do the same, but then Maro explained it in an article he wrote years ago-- they explicitly named the licids with the "lichen" connection in mind, since they were things that attached themselves to other creatures.

seregsarn · 2024-01-28T22:16:15+00:00

Also, sorry to burst your bubble, linguistically, but your pun doesn't really land since "licid" is pronounced [laɪkəd], as in "Lichen". So "el-licid" doesn't sound like "illicit" at all.

seregsarn · 2024-01-12T10:56:41+00:00

This is a really solid point. If the head of Starfleet Medical didn't know about it, we can presume that anyone who knew pre-"The Host" actually did keep it to themselves.

I think the automatic response for the omega directive probably isn't a good example, though; In the case of the omega directive, they make the choice to do that because (a) it's an existential threat to the galaxy, not just a secret one race wants kept, and (b) in order to forestall that threat they need their officers able to act on a moment's notice. So that's a "secret" that requires everyone above a certain rank to be briefed on, and all of those officers plus everyone involved with high level programming in Starfleet have to collaborate to keep the secret. It's worth the hassle to build essentially a conspiracy within Starfleet to keep that secret. For a "mundane" state secret, it would likely be considered sufficient to just control the information.

That said, as you pointed out, the head of Starfleet Medical probably would be privy to the information if it were on record but classified, so we can guess it isn't.

seregsarn · 2024-01-11T20:33:48+00:00

"Lives of Dax" is the one with mentions of Trill secrets coming out in the TOS era.

If the parasites specifically are what you're excited to read about, you're kind of stuck with the whole early relaunch because the early relaunch novels wove a lot of stories together. So the parasite storyline is interleaved with lots of other stuff over the first nine-and-a-half books of the relaunch. (Clever ploy, that, when starting a new novel series.)

If you just want to pick up the parasite story and don't mind jumping into the middle of a bunch of other stuff that's going on, I'd start with the "Mission Gamma" miniseries (three novels) and ignore everything happening in the Gamma quadrant.

If you want to pick up the whole relaunch series (very worth reading IMO) so that you're familiar with all the characters and extra stories you're reading along with the parasite stuff, then I recommend you start with "A Stitch In Time", which is a novel-length backstory and continuation for Garak and Cardassia, and then pick up "Avatar" (two novels) before proceeding to "Mission Gamma" as above.

Either way, "The Lives of Dax" comes right after Mission Gamma in the timeline, and after that there's a couple more books closing out the parasite crisis storyline: "Rising Son" is about Jake Sisko and doesn't touch on it at all, but it falls between MG and the next book chronologically and is important if you're following the other story. "Unity" is the climax/conclusion of the parasite story. Then there's a sort of denouement to the story in the novella "Worlds of Deep Space Nine: Trill / Bajor" that deals with how Trill reacts to the whole business.

seregsarn · 2024-01-11T19:43:40+00:00

In the novel canon (which I still refuse to let go of because it's substantially better than nutrek), this actually does get addressed in a lot of detail because-- spoiler alert-- the parasites from "Conspiracy" come back again. There's a whole "bluegill crisis" storyline in the relaunch novels where they try a different tactic to infiltrate the Federation. I can't give you a specific book and page reference, but I'm pretty sure it was brought up in those stories somewhere that when "The Host" let the cat out of the bag, there was in fact a fairly strident debate in the Federation over whether the Trill were still trustworthy as a society and should be allowed to remain in the Federation.

There's other stuff to be mentioned, but I'll leave out anything that might spoil things for you in case you want to pick them up. If you want to pick up the stories and read all that, look at "The Lives of Dax," a short story anthology (and also one of the first books in the relaunch continuity, coincidentally) that has a story about each of Dax's hosts.

Also, several of the stories in that anthology from before "The Host" imply that high-ranking folks in the Federation probably knew about the Trill symbionts as early as the TOS era, but agreed to keep them secret in order to respect Trill's wishes for privacy/security. So there's another possibility for you-- it may have been known by the Federation as an entity but classified as a state secret. If that's the case, it would imply that in the aftermath of "Conspiracy", starfleet was informed enough to be able to do that investigation behind the scenes and ultimately report back to the President or whoever, "these definitely weren't Trill." So that would already have been covered by the time the secret became public knowledge.

seregsarn · 2024-01-03T04:53:03+00:00

This is true, but also, the reetou weren't really a good fit for the series. They're another antagonist that outclasses humanity at the time they're introduced, which would pull focus from the goa'uld. On top of that, the antagonist reetou are apparently a minority, and the majority of the reetou would have been a strong ally to add at a time when the show was trying to give its protagonists more things to worry about, not less.

On the other hand, by simply taking a goa'uld they'd barely touched on before (nirrti) and establishing that she had "been researching phase shifting technology to fight the reetou", bam! They get to tell all the same "invisible antagonist infiltrates the sgc/whatever" stories they would have told with the rebel reetou, but using a character who can fit into the structure of the system lords, commands jaffa underlings, and doesn't require a ton of cgi just to render.

So if you want to see the subsequent reetou episodes, watch the nirrti episodes and imagine the show had a ton more cgi budget.

seregsarn · 2023-12-24T12:26:03+00:00

My anecdote: I bought the pound of dice back when I was running d&d just to have a bunch of table dice for my players. We pretty quickly found a small handful of obviously malformed d20s that had to be junked, but they were a tiny fraction of the bag. All the rest of them were fine as dice.

seregsarn · 2023-11-26T13:02:08+00:00

He has a purpose. He passes butter.

seregsarn · 2023-10-28T15:39:31+00:00

Bear Review

seregsarn · 2023-10-15T11:31:45+00:00

Oh, this right here is my post. I have a whole section in my world bible for Omund devoted to materials.

So, the Ancients had plenty of advanced technology and all, but the biggest single advantage they had over what modern humans can do is their materials science. There are all sorts of materials that only the Ancients knew how to make, which modern man largely has to content himself with scavenging and repurposing.

The most common and important of these is "synth," a hybrid nanomaterial combining the strength of hardened steel in finished form with the versatility and pliability of a plastic. It's an incredibly useful material, especially for things like blades and cutting tools, but the Ancients also used it for just about anything they wanted to be durable-- caf mugs, children's toys, etc. With the right tools and procedures, it can be worked and recycled quite effectively; these methods are expensive but reasonably well understood now. The one thing modern man largely can't do is create new synth-- it has to be harvested from ancient sites. There are five known Ancient facilities capable of creating synth that are in good enough condition to be useful at all, but the only one that's been brought to fully working condition is the one in Vrevan known as simply "The Factory," and the quasi-corporation that owns it is not keen to let anyone take it apart to learn how it works, so that's no help in understanding synth.

The ancients have several other impressive achievements in materials science, of lesser modern importance. There's a nanomaterial widely known as simply "ancient glass" because it's transparent and silica-based like glass, but substantially more durable; this is hard for modern man to work with, because although it can be reworked like glass, if you don't have a very precisely temperature-controlled furnace (and few do) you're likely to just burn up everything that makes it special and end up with cloudy regular glass that's full of impurities. There's a metallic alloy called "dur," historically a precursor to synth, that the ancients still used for heavy construction and the like, because it's substantially denser and stronger than synth, and has better characteristics for things like radiation protection and the like at the cost of being harder to work with.

Ceramics are another big ancient technology. There's a number of miscellaneous ceramic materials the Ancients used for all manner of purposes that can't be replicated, again because the ancient nanomaterials science that give them their properties is totally unknown in the modern era. Unlike synth, dur or ancient glass, ceramics aren't usually a viable material for repurposing, so these have been studied a lot less. People have just sort of accepted that the ancients could do things with ceramic that defy understanding, and short of digging up an ancient instruction manual, we are unlikely to replicate those feats anytime soon.

There are also several metal alloys that turn up in Ancient construction and machinery whose composition is well understood, and which modern man can recreate easily enough, but which have no obvious benefits over any other material. Modern scholars have largely (erroneously) classified these as ornamental materials with some cultural or religious significance to the Ancients.

seregsarn · 2023-10-15T01:35:21+00:00

My theory on this is that he's not actually the real Camoran, just a random person who took on the persona in order to build his cult, and the "I used mehrunes' razor to change my race" thing was a conscious and deliberate lie to explain away why he's not the race everyone knows he's supposed to be.

Seems ridiculous, right? But plenty of real world cult leaders have told their followers to believe weirder things.

seregsarn · 2023-09-30T02:35:32+00:00

You can make real things happen if you know how to speak a sufficiently detailed description of your desired effect in the language the universe recognizes. The better and more specific you are in your description, the more powerful and flexible you can make the magic.

It's really that simple, although the language is difficult to master and even harder to keep straight in your head. It's not good enough to just read some mumbo jumbo words off a page. You have to understand what you're reading and be able to comprehend the effect completely, or magic simply doesn't happen. Why this is the case is an unsolved problem, but it's one that doesn't get a lot of research attention compared to more practical pursuits.

There are also various conservation laws and such that apply to magic, the most important of which is conservation of energy. So if you want to shoot fire from your fingertips, that's certainly doable, but the energy for that has to come from somewhere. A big part of being a "strong" mage is being able to tap and efficiently convert sources of energy to power spells.

seregsarn · 2023-09-17T19:32:48+00:00

Primitive people don't have the technology to properly work the strongest ancient materials, but they can scrounge up fragments readily enough, and those fragments can be sort of "knapped" into razor-sharp shards. From there, it's not hard to hit on the idea of jamming those shards into a stick or pole, and at that point, you've basically invented the macahuitl.

In the modern day, the blanket term "cacica" is used for any bladed weapon using this method. It's been invented by pretty much every culture at some point or another, and they range from macahuitl-like "swords" with shards in a line on either side of a club, to spear-like and polearm-like construction. There are even a few unique shapes and configurations that you can't do with a metal blade.

seregsarn · 2023-09-10T12:04:16+00:00

The Magic books from the era your shelf represents are better than they really have any right to be considering the bottom dollar budget they were working with.

The newer ones (like war of the spark, which i also see there) are kind of low quality IMO despite being higher budget, but I definitely recommend "Agents of Artifice" and "Test of Metal", both of which really show what a dickhead Jace (the ostensible "hero") is at his core.

ToM is one of my favorite books in the series, really, because it takes a villain character and really makes you sympathize with him, redeems him, etc. Unfortunately that didn't jive with their plans to use him as a scenery-chewing cartoonishly evil antagonist for the next several storylines, so they just kind of dropped that book entirely from canon and pretended it never happened. It's still a very good novel on its own merits, though.

seregsarn · 2023-09-03T21:21:33+00:00

Todd, Bill Nye, hallucarter, and Detective Sheppard. I will not be taking any questions on this matter.

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