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But first, a brief note on Into the Spider-Verse: we watched this film recently and absolutely loved it. I think my favourite character was the one with the spider-themed powers, but Kaitlyn preferred the spider-powered one. ^^ ^^

So, the Lady Astronaut books. Minor spoilers I guess? But honestly I think the fact that they're referred to as the 'Lady Astronaut' series, and the fact that the cover of the second book literally shows a (lady) astronaut on a bright orange planet provides some pretty strong hints that there's space travel involved.

Anyway: I liked both of these books, but I enjoyed The Calculating Stars more than its sequel. The reason is that The Calculating Stars can be described as "What if punchpunk space travel, but also prejudice?", while The Fated Sky is closer to "What if prejudice in space travel (but also punchpunk)?". There are a few references to the technology in The Fated Sky, but you could update them to modern scifi terminology and not have any impact on the story. In contrast, if you got rid of the punch cards from The Calculating Stars, you would have a completely different book.

One knock-on effect of this is that the characters of The Fated Sky can feel rather more modern than their counterparts in the first book - or rather, the language they use to describe the actions and attitudes of prejudice feel like the language we would use in the 21st Century, not something from the middle of the 20th. It only shows up in a few places, but it did give me pause.

Which is not to say I didn't enjoy the book! I did, and I was particularly pleased that a certain Chekhov's Gun involving the number of spaceships launched did indeed go off - but in a totally different direction (do guns go off in directions?) to the one I was imagining. It was a brilliant balance between predictability and originality.

I'm delighted to know that Mary Robinette Kowal is working on not one but two sequels (The Relentless Moon and The Derivative Base, per Wikipedia). I will certainly be reading them both, and recommend that others do too.

hS

So, we now know know the Hugo winners.

One thing that's interesting to us is that AO3 won the award for "Best Related Work". Near as I can tell, this category is for stuff that isn't directly sci-fi (or related to publishing or the fandom), but does have something to do with it.

My understanding is that AO3 got nominated both for being a pretty important fandom space, and for having a really impressive tagging system (I think we can honestly say it's easier to search AO3 than Tumblr, let arone something like Facebook or FFnet).

I think it's pretty cool that the AO3 got this award, and it looks to me like they deserved it.

As to the other winners, I'm only familiar with some of them.

It looks like I might want to read Calculating Stars, between the award win and hS's enthusiastic plug for said wholesome disaster novel.

"A Witch's Guide to Escape was a quite good story that will probably stir up your emotions (thanks to Delta for making me aware of it).

The Wayfarers series is something I'd suggest to people - it's got some good messages about (found) family, personhood, what it means to preserve a culture, and things like thah while also being set in a fun universe with interesting aliens and cultural dynamics.

I don't think I need to say anything much about Into the Spider-Verse other than "I can see why they'd win".

So ... discuss? I skipped over a bunch of categories because I had never heard of the winner, and if anyone has, I'd appreciate knowing about it. This is also a perfectly good thread for "X deserved it instead" and the like.

- Tomash

I have no idea what this is. What kind of science is it?

I'm glad you liked the mission, and I'm especially glad you like the characters. As for adopting the kids, I don't recruit *every* badfic character I ever see (says the chick who's planning on adopting a character from the very next badfic I'm missioning... I really won't make it a habit, I swear), but I felt a lot of pity for these poor throwaway OCs, stuck in a badfic only to suffer. I plan a shining future for them in the PPC. :D

Definitely liking the dynamic between Ruxanda and Edith, the 'mini-city', adopting the kids instead of simply writing them off as Sue-and-Stu...

No typos spotted on this run (though I expect I won't be the only one making that check), so overall good work!

Thank you very much for writing. :)

It's just under 2000 words and features the introduction of a new character, as well as my existing agents. No canonical knowledge is required, although it would be useful if you've read both of my published missions.

Virtual cookies and sweets are on offer as usual!

Dang, I almost forgot to thank Tomash for betaing this mission. Many thanks, friend Tomash.

In which a vaping Romanian vampire and her new partner deal with a pointless Tolkien torture fic.
(Warning for Tolkien fans: I've bent Tolkien naming rules a little. I know Tolkien names tend to be composed of two or more words and have a complex meaning, but I liked the idea of bird names too much. It won't happen again. :P)

https://rc746.dreamwidth.org/1465.html

I wrote a thing! Specifically, I wrote Heather and Will 5: The Devil's Nest.

• Tomash, who is in the process of joining the Most Anciente Order, but still has a good few years of initiation to go before he gets his fancy robes

Do we know the actual bond lengths? The article claims alternating triple and single bonds, but it's far more likely to be some form of delocalisation between that and the all-double-bond structure, with bond lengths alternating between 2.5-le and 1.5-le bonds.

The pi-bonds perpendicular to the plane of the ring should all be able to overlap, like in aromatic rings. Obviously the ones in the plane of the ring can't, though - they'd be too far away from each other on the outside of the ring, which explains the alternating bond-lengths.

Is there an actual paper to go with this, hS?

-Phobos, wondering if you could form a Cyclo[18]carbon tube of some sort.

... what it could be used for; the image stopped me before I reached that far. But yes, it looks like they're viewing it as a graphene relative, with all the speculative properties that go with that.

Not that it's necessarily a good idea to stick an Elder God into your PC... the really cool stuff is definitely the experimental side of this:

1/ The molecule is made up of a whole bunch of carbon-carbon triple bonds. You don't often see a triple bond, because they're under intense strain just to exist; in this case, they've not only made them, they've bent them. It's the molecular equivalent of bending steel bars with your bare hands.

2/ They didn't do this by bulk chemistry, but by manufacturing a single molecule, one step at a time. That isn't even chemistry any more - it's nano-scale engineering, LEGO made of atoms.

3/ And then they took pictures! It's only a few years since we first got AFM pictures detailed enough to show single atoms, and they still fill me with appropriately-unholy glee. (Given the diabolical red and purple colour scheme IBM used on their 'Hellgate' image, I'm pretty sure they agree.)

hS

...even if a lot of the ideas behind it went over my head.

So this new compound could be used in computers? As a conductor or for something different?

Yea, the Oxides have aligned, and the Dioxides have been sacrificed; and in the Circle has the Binder appeared at last. Hail Its unbroken Ring! Hail Its thrice-forged bonds! Hail Its immaculate purity!



Hail Cyclo[18]carbon, Forger of Bonds, Breaker of Minds!

hS, Herald of the Binder

This is a general notification to the board at large that the Humble Bundle is offering a bundle of Jackbox games for a very good price.

If you're unfamiliar with Jackbox, they make party games—the kinds of things that you can play with a lot of people and have a good time, and are quite simple. If you've played Cards Against HQ with us, you probably get the idea. However, Jackbox's games are all digital (players use their phones to put in their answers, usually) so they can be a lot more intricate without putting too much strain the minds of the players (who, let's be real here, might be drunk).

A quick caveat here, by the way—as time went on, Jackbox found a lot of success on Twitch. It turns out that people thought it was great fun to watch streamers play party games. This isn't inherently bad, but Jackbox leaned into the success, and added audience participation elements to their later games. Sometimes this turned out great (Quiplash with a large audience is a sight to behold), but a few of their later games have a strong audience focus. Which means you may not get so much out of them (most of us don't stream).

I'm just going to go down a list of at least some of the games in the actual bundle, and ramble on about whether or not I've played them and what I think.

The bundle includes a ton of games in the "You don't know Jack" series, which are one-to-three-player trivia games. They are the least interesting part of the bundle. But if you like trivia games, I hear they're pretty good.

The real stars of the show are the various "party packs", which are collections of more interesting party games. A few of them are also in here separately, but the standalone versions usually have less features.

First of which is the single game that may be reason enough to buy this pack: Quiplash. Quiplash was the very first game Jackbox designed to be played with an audience, but it works just as well without one. Just... imagine Cards Against Humanity, except there are no cards because every answer is write-in, and it's two people choosing answers to each prompt and everyone else votes instead of there being a judge. Oh, and if you have an audience they also vote.

We played this game on Discord last night. It's great.

The other really really popular game in the set is Fibbage, which is all about trying to find the right answer to a question... while trying to convince everyone else that the lie you just made up is the real answer. Everyone lies, everyone guesses, most of the answers are wrong. If you haven't played some game that is basically this game, you still probably get the idea.

Other worthwhile games that I haven't played because I couldn't convince a bunch of people to get in include

-Drawful, which is a cross between Pictionary and Fibbage where someone draws a thing, people have to guess what they drew, and then everyone is shown all the guesses and the original prompt and has to figure out what the prompt was.

-Survive the internet, which is pretty much about taking people's answers to prompts out of context (making them answers to totally different prompts) to make them look ridiculous.

-Monster Seeking Monster, a game where you try to get hearts by successfully hooking up with other players but everyone is secretly a monster with monster powers that can affect the game in different ways and might mean that you don't want to hook up with them. And stuff.

The point is, if you want to have a fun time with some party games, you can't do much better than this. Also I may set them up more on the Discord. Quiplash was pretty fantastic.

I could just repaint Leonidas' Space Marine mini. Human agents would probably be trickier to distinguish.

From a mix of Humans, Amazons, Pro Elves, and Norse. Plus, well, whatever you wanted. =]

...(of the tabletop variety) one would use to represent a PPC Blood Bowl team.

I don't believe so, but I agree with Mirage on the archive searching. It should be easy enough.

I accidentally clicked "Post Reply" instead of "Return to Messages."

Does this kind of pasta qualify as fanfic suitable for a mission

Seriously, I owe more than a little of my headcanons on certain types of telepathy to the Star Trek fandom. I remember a whole lot of fics where Kirk's mind was gold (which sounds rather on the nose, but was played as relating to his personal character rather than 'haha, Command shirt'). I think some of it even made its way into my headcanons for the Reader, but hey, this time I was writing an actual Vulcan, so the idea of mental colors definitely had to go in. I'm glad you liked it! :)

~Z

No criticisms here.

I particularly liked the detail about Abbadon's mental color being a sunny bright blue. ^^