Huh

What Color Eyes Should You Have?
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You know, we all supposedly begin as blue-eyed people; us brown-eyes develop the colour only later in life.

An unexpected form of praise for Tripartite Alliance Earth

I've an alternate history on the Internet, Tripartite Alliance Earth hosted on the Alternate History Travel Guides website. Tripartite Alliance Earth is probably the most complex web-based alternate history out there, and although it's not finished there's a massive volume of information on that website in essay format. One essay is one I wrote on the Yucatán, in that alternate history an independent republic which fell under a French protectorate, modernized signfiicantly while remaining Mayan (as opposed to an odd kind of Mexican colony), fought a war with Guatemala (an evil dictatorship supported by the timeline's evil United States), survived a US air raid and the byproducts of the United States' unfortunate devastation in an ill-judged nuclear war, and generally did well in the context of a continent very badly damaged.

Just today I got feedback, a message from someone who read that page:

I was writing a speech on the Yucatan and began to read your "History of the Yucatan" and wasted about 30 minutes of my time in order to figure out that what I was reading wasn't history at all. It would be appropriate and polite for you to mention somewhere on the web pages that what is contained on those
web pages is not factual. Thank you.

This is good, eh?

Another compliment

I was in the English Lounge today, talking with ebeloic and some other people about things; the RPG project that me, ebeloic, and taem, among others will be participating in; the gruesome and rather pointless and boring violence of Thomas Harris' Hannibal (a bad childhood explains all) and de Sade's 120 Days in Sodom (why not just 40?); and the failure of the work we were doing to seem like it was enough, or that it was moderate, or that it accomplished anything. Here, I referred to a poem--one love poem by Samuel Beckett (yes, they do exist, and they are somewhat disturbing), and then to T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland.

It's at this point that someone said I looked to be the prototypical English student, with my quotations from poems (that and Bertolt Brecht's "The Whiskey Song"), by turtleneck sweater, my glasses, my short hair, and so on.

Thanks.

Big Ideas, Grand Vision and The Final Countdown

The Swedish transhumanist Anders Sandberg has some interesting roleplaying game settings: Big Ideas, Grand Vision is my favourite if only because of the sentient coral reefs which inhabit the Solar System alongside 26 billion other very alien humans and the Trahan at Lambda Serpenti. It's an exuberant hard-SF romp.

The Final Countdown is a rather darker one, inasmuch as the setting has placed human civilization in a life-and-death struggle against an interesting alien species and any attempt to communicate with them could easily mean the obliteration of humanity.

Just to mention.