Maybe I am becoming a luddite, but I have a bad feeling about this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/01/techn...mazon.html

And its not only the jobs issue, which is a big part of my worries with these "advancements", but also the reams of information which will be collected.

Post them if you spot them! EDIT: Links, not re-posts - as usual for the threads here.

Wikivoyage's latest travel guide entry

(02-22-2018, 08:47 AM)robkelk Wrote: Guessing is one thing, but the freebie wiki is actually becoming the trusted source of information about 3D-art freebies. I need to do better than just guess.

alright, i'm going to open a general "I need help with [this] thread, that way things like @Jinx999 's request for a quick once over for mistakes or in my case a beta for a particular situation/scene.

Author Needs Assistance:

 

 

I need someone familiar with psychiatry and psychology to Beta read a section that discusses character’s mental states. I ask this because while I have a layman’s understanding I am in no way overly familiar with the subject matter and need my current antagonist to at least have a jurist’s understanding of the mental state.

 

In short, I need her arguments to at least make sense against the main character. Can anyone help me?

 

anyone that is interested in helping please PM me and i'll send you a GDoc link once i have the section finished

John "Boom" Scalzi (I knew him before the butter dripped off his noodle) would be sharing the Hugo shortlist even if he weren't on it, because he's just that nice a guy by nature:
https://whatever.scalzi.com/2018/03/31/2...finalists/

Also, the Nebula nominees are up, and there's the usual level of overlap:
https://nebulas.sfwa.org/award-year/2017/

So this movie happened.

First off, if you're the kind of person who finds a three second visual cameo by a popular culture reference to be the lowest most despicable kind of trite corporate mass market appeal... don't go see this movie. Because you will be spending 90% of the run time hating it.

On the other hand, if you are the kind of person who likes the hero suddenly busting out the hadouken on a bad guy or someone summoning a Gundam to fight Mechagodizilla... go for it.

The movie is very different from the book. Where the book is about memorized fan trivia the <i>movie</i> is about how all that is just window dressing and the true connections we have are with each other and to that the secret to understanding each other is empathy and decency. The climax is also much more climactic, in a way only Speilberg can do.

Plus, you know, it was kind of cool seeing squads of Master Chiefs and the Iron Giant blowing shit up. Yeah, all the VR stuff was ultimately 'a game' but the point of the movie is that the game is a way to connect for all these people so they're fighting for something and their are stakes not in who lives or dies but who wins and loses. If you can like a sports movie you can like this movie.

On the bad side they kept some of the more... cliche bits from the book. The female leads big secret being that she is Hollywood Homely rather than a stunning anime elf girl with technicolor hair and skin was not handled well. Though they did make her into more of a character with agency in the film with an actual motivation rather than just a rival/love interest. Also, the above mentioned references per second quality and they kept in some of the smugly superior 'characters showing how up on pop culture they are'.

Also, the entire second key sequence was... gratuitous. And bad.

I was kind of put off that they didn't kill a major character, but I guess this movie is firmly aimed at the under 16 crowd.

Overall, a firm 'rent' movie.

The thread for bad jokes (SFW, please) that are not photoshop memes.

Q: Why did the wizard build an edible clock?

A: I don't know, but I bet it was a very time consuming endeavor.

Arya froze. The guards on the storehouse where they'd taken Gendry remained in place but others were pointing towards her. For two heartbeats she thought she'd been spotted, then realised they were pointing to a strange figure rounding the brambles. She froze, not wanting to draw their eye by moving. The figure walked forward, into her view In the afternoon light she could see that it was a woman, holding one hand to her cheek and muttering to herself.


Even from behind she could tell that the woman was young, with a messy mop of brown hair. She was clad only in a short jerkin and tight britches, the only concession to modesty a length of cloth draped loose around her hips. And she'd walked towards the armed men in the village with a blind confidence that astonished Arya. The idiot seemed to think she was in one of Sansa's stupid stories.


“Another wrecked village. You guys hunting whatever did it?”


The men didn't bother to answer, beyond obscene descriptions of their plans for the woman. Two of them approached, towering over the short woman who'd casually wandered into a village of armed killers. They reached to grab her, but others kept a watch out. Arya could only hope they didn't spot her.


“Oi. Hands off, jerks.” Somehow the woman had grabbed the wrists of the two men and shoved them back.


Arya could see the angry snarl on the face of one one of the men under the shade of his helmet, until his vicious backhand had been pre-empted by a shove that had left him on his back several feet away.


The men's laughter and obscene suggestions faded away as they armed themselves. Soon the lone woman was facing some twenty armed men.


“Sounds like you're a bunch of scuzzy bandits. I guess it's you who've been attacking the villages around here.” Arya could see metal gauntlets on her hands that hadn't been there before, which rang as she clashed them together in front of her. “In that case, I'm bored and angry, so bring. it. on.”








Arya had seen things that had shaken her to her core before. She had felt like she was looking through a transparent wall as if the world had turned on its side and “this can't be real” before. So when the woman jumped nine feet in the air and a kick had unleashed a burst of yellow light that tore into the ground and scattered grown men like a thrown ball had scattered Bran's wooden knights, for a moment she could feel the square outside Baelor's sept under her feet.


Landing among the shocked men she lashed out with wide sweeping blows that hurled men to lie broken on the ground. For a moment Arya remembered Syrio's precise movements and disdain for wide flashy blows, but this demon woman had strength and speed enough that she could fight like this. A bearded man was thrown into a hut wall here, a crossbow bolt was batted out of the air there. In a matter of moments there was nothing moving, the armed men cowering or fallen.


It was then that the door of the largest village house burst open and a gigantic armoured figure stepped out.


“So trash enough mooks and the boss appears. So Mr. Bandit Chief, are you going to fight or make a speech?” The woman looked over at the gibbet. “I'm not in the mood for talky rationalisations right now.”




The huge armoured figure charged. A massive sword swung down. And the woman deflected it with one armoured fist. She stepped forward and, with a noise like a blacksmith's hammer, drove a series of punches into the breastplate and jumped back to avoid the backswing.



“You are already dead.” and she laughed and stepped forward again. However the next swing of the massive sword was a feint and the giant figure grabbed one thin arm and threw the woman in the air. With both hands on the sword he chopped into her bare midriff and sent her body flying into the wall of a hut. And Arya recognised the crest on his surcoat. The night of the tourney at King's Landing, all the knights had hung their shields outside their pavilions. “That one belongs to the Hound's brother,” Sansa had confided when they passed the black dogs on the yellow field. “He's even bigger than Hodor, you'll see. They call him the Mountain That Rides.”




And the woman stood up. The edge of a sword, driven by the brute strength of he Mountain That Rides had . . . left a welt on her bare skin. A few drops of blood could be seen, but that was all. She nodded toward her opponent.


The Mountain had obviously recovered from the shocking impossibility faster than Arya and charged the outlandish demon woman. And she disappeared into thin air. A load bang from behind the huge knight revealed her location as an inhuman punch knocked him forward. Then she was at his left, his right . . . and the mountain crumbled.

Spoiler

The woman is Kawara from West Wind Brigade in Log Horizon. The Round Table Council has been experimenting with dimensional gates to try and get home and created a permanent rift to Westros, to be precise the Riverlands during the war of five kings. They decided that the West Wind brigade (consisting almost entirely of women) would be friendly and harmless looking and non-provocative for making contact with the locals. Gregor is, strictly speaking, a more skill swordsman than any adventurer, but a level 90+ adventurer is so ridiculously strong fast and tough as well as having f***ing magic powers it doesn't help much.


Incidently, the Adventurer gold piece is considerably larger than the Westros gold dragon.

...Or are things at a REALLY low ebb in the Other People's Fanfiction forum?  I've been going through and making sure everything's 'been read' by either actually reading them or just marking them as such, and I barely see any activity beyond the Batzulger and the regular update threads.

"Drassians? Yeah, I know about them, I was junior sensor tech on a merchant cruiser stranded by engineering faults when the invasion hit. Not a one of us were all that unhappy about it except the skipper and the wrench-jockeys; it's a beautiful planet and the Drassians are fun and funny, even if some of them will go a little too far for a joke. If you're ever over that way, don't miss taking in some of their vocal music, too. The males - they're all male as kids, turn into women later. Weird to us, but that's aliens for ya, right? - the teens get up to some crazy violent games and what would be outright riots if not for having a sanctioned league with scoring and trophies, but it's all among themselves and their biology kind of mandates a high homicide rate or they'd be overpopulated in no time, since they've suppressed natural predators and disease as much as any other developed civilization does.

Anyway, the invasion. Let me tell you we were all pretty shook up when the bastards arrived in orbit and started offloading troops... right up until the giant fucking dragon flew up into space and ripped their ship in half. Then the cute, friendly, joking lizards turned their teenagers loose on the ground, and it was all over but the screaming. So yeah, Drassians? Nice people but don't piss them off, and a hundred-thirty light-years is just about enough room for my peace of mind from that Matriarch of theirs."

--Unknown spacer overheard in Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grill, on the opposite frontier from Drassia




Drassians are seven-limbed, bilaterally symmetrical, amphibious, endothermic, reptillian/avianoid mammals with blue hemocyanin based blood. Their tongue could arguably count as an eighth limb, as it is long and flexible enough to lick their eyeballs and is equipped with a pair of short, cartilaginous "thumbs" on either side, allowing for fine manipulation of food, easy cleaning of their teeth, and operation of the bellows sac behind the scent-pits on their snout, which are not true nostrils in the sense of being part of the respiratory system. Their lungs connect to the larynx and to breathing tubes in the crest on either side of the head and the nearby ear gills. They have two distinct melanin-analogues generated at different rates in different stages of their life cycle, making individuals tend to red, blue, purple, or darker tones depending on age and lifestyle.

Modern Drassians typically wear a skirt or pants (without a particular gender bias toward either) fastened in the rear to accommodate their tail more easily and an apron or halter-style top cut low enough not to interfere with their ruff or wings to keep the weather off and to provide additional pockets and/or body modesty for those who feel the need for it. Their tough feet require no footwear except in extreme environments. Drassian space suits tend to be an involved affair by human standards due to the need to accommodate wings, a tail, and the large bone and feather crests on their heads. With wide mouths and thin, barely articulated lips they have a difficult time forming the P and B sounds of human languages, and F or V tend to be a bit slurred, though they can also direct sound through their breathing tubes, which resonate like a flute or clarinet. Their mouth is not very expressive beyond being closed or opened to expose some teeth, rather expressions are based on the eyebrows and feather crest. Their teeth are generally similar to a human's aside from having almost three times as many to fit their jaw, and having two prominent fangs top and bottom of each side. (That's eight total, though only the front upper pair is long enough to extend past their lips with the mouth closed.)

Their society is shockingly alien in some respects (most notably the general disregard for the lives of their young, even to the point of commercial fishing and consumption of the pre-sapient stage) but follows generally recognizable lines and a compatible sense of humor allows them to bond socially with humans, laughing off minor offenses that might otherwise build up and sour relations.

They have no natural limit to their lifespan - Great Revered Elder Chrysolanth the Resplendent is over 21,000 years old and estimated to be within three generations of descent to at least a fifth of the individuals on their home world, reckoned genetically. The Drassian notion of family has very little to do with genetics, however, as all family groups are formed by adoption.

The young spawn from a detached pouch like some sharks, pre-sapient and aquatic. They are pale grey with a trace of blue from their copper-based blood, similar to horseshoe crab blood. Spawnlings have book gills on the sides of their head with a quartet of tough but blunt spines to protect them, six flippers, a flat vertical swimming tail like a sea snake, poor vision and very simple brains. About a dozen surviving from the hundreds of fertilized eggs in the pouch. They eat each other and the pouch from the inside until a hole is formed and they swim free, originally into the ocean or pool where the pouch was dropped. Subject to predation from each other, wild animals, and until they begin to turn pink and their scent changes older Drassians.

After about two years a spawnling will begin to produce ferrotonin, the color of the hide under their thin, clear scales rapidly shifting to a dusty pink and continuing to deepen as they begin to develop a more advanced brain, improved vision, specialized limbs (two bipedal legs, two wings, two arms with manipulating hands, feathers, and male sexual organs. They instinctively move from the reef or deep-pond habitat of the spawnling stage to shallows and shorelines, to exercise their new physiology and escape predators specialized for one environment or the other during this awkward transition. Their gills remain present and functional for life, also serving as tympani that provide an exceptional sense of hearing, and the four protective spines develop into proper, hide covered bones, the longest and uppermost hollow to act as a nostril when the passage behind these ears is close to avoid being deafened by their own breath. The new feathers maintain a natural coating of oil like many sea birds which also gives them a slight iridescent sheen.

During the period when their limbs are no longer optimized for swimming but not yet suited to rapid movement on land young males are roughly equivalent to a bright dog or a human toddler mentally and may be adopted by an older female or more commonly a family group of two to five with developed maternal instincts; both the physical care provided and the nutritional and immunological benefits from breast feeding give the adoptees a much better chance of survival than their wilder kin. Male Drassians have a short feathered crest on the top of the head, a much more pronounced ruff around the neck and chest and for some ethnicities on the chin or snout around the scent-pits, typically of a brighter hue than their scales. The crest is articulate like a cockatiel's, and two similar feathered structures form on the sides of the tail to provide added stability in the air.

The scales thicken and harden to provide a significant amount of natural armor by seven years, by which time wild Drassians become extremely aggressive and even those adopted into a family constantly wrestle and compete with each other and their peers. Full sexual maturity usually requires another five to seven years, by which time the number of wildlings have significantly reduced themselves and most of the survivors will have integrated into the peer groups of nearby settlements. Their wings and flight muscles develop slowly, with few able to maintain even a few seconds of flight before this point. Even so, the Drassian word for "war" is the same as "festival" or "tournament;" young males feel a constant urge to fight and engage in dominance displays for the next decade until their biochemistry begins to enter the next stage.

This change is heralded by increasing cyatonin levels that first see new feathers growing in purple or blue, followed by a moult of the heavy red scales to be replaced with a new coat of glossy, semi-flexible ones which are once again translucent, showing the color of the underlying hide as cell growth slowly changes its overall tone. Bright blue stripes commonly form along growth zones while the rest changes color over the course of several years. Within a season of scale moult beginning, the Drassian's penis will be absorbed and their gonads will retract as the developing female organs form, changing over from producing mobile germ cells to eggs. The "beard" or "mustache" extensions of the neck ruff will be lost at this time and the chest part of it will also be somewhat depleted, while the head crest grows out in time with the adult wing pinions. The bones in general also become more avian, with the thick and heavy structure of rough-and-tumble males hollowing and becoming lighter, their typically broad and muscular build lengthening to a more svelte appearance as adult height is reached without adding more bulk. A Drassian female will become fertile within a year of the end of scale moult, producing four to six egg pouches per year whether fertilized or not. The development of breasts and instinctive maternal urges takes another one to two years, as the chemical balance in the brain resettles. A healthy Drassian female at physical maturity can easily carry one or two males of adoption age while she flies.

The final stage of development occurs around the century mark, though the exact age tends to vary widely by circumstances and general health. Speaking in terms of evolution, an individual who has survived so long in the highly competitive environment of their early home world is probably a winning combination of genetics and habits, so with ferrotonin once again rising to roughly even levels with cyatonin and other hormones a Drassian Elder's gonads resume production of limited numbers of sperm, allowing perthenogenic reproduction if no suitable males are available to do the job while still allowing sexually-introduced genetic material the opportunity to fertilize some of the eggs in a pouch to produce new combinations. Drassian Elders gradually turn a darker and darker blue-purple until they eventually become as black as interstellar space with only the occasional glint off their scales or irridescence of their feathers for stars. They resume slow overall physical growth, and also begin to develop active psychic powers including telepathy, telekinesis, and remote sensory perception, though their flight ability is generally recognized to be partly telekinetic in nature due to the relatively small size of their wings and flight muscles compared to what simple aerodynamics would require.

This enhancement effect also increases over time, keeping the increasing body mass from eventually collapsing under its own weight and allowing truly amazing feats for upper tier Elders. Again taking the example of Great Revered Elder Chrysolanth the Resplendent, she is over 500m from snout to tail-tip and has proven capable of engaging in physical combat with a modern starship, withstanding its weapons and puncturing its shields to inflict decisive damage on multiple occasions when space conflict spilled over to the Drassian homeworld, flying through space unassisted at observed velocities up to 0.6c for durations of several hours without apparent distress. Rumors of precognition, teleportation, or innate FTL travel are unconfirmed and regarded as highly dubious; Chrysolanth herself declined to comment with an amused snort when asked.

---

Why? Because I doodled a cute lizard head on an envelope this morning and then backstory just kept on appearing. Also, I am amused by the idea of a young, purple Elder with an eye patch and one breathing tube broken short who is right fed up with needing to explain that no, she and any other Drassian she is aware of do not eat humans, but if they stick around she's about to sing some rock'n'roll music through the horn on her head.

What do you think, sirs?