Image; Amazon.com By Ray Tabler It will not come as a surprise to some of you that a gallon of water tips the scale at 8.34 pounds. This is an immutable fact that I was first introduced to in engineering school, and it has lodged in my head like a…
Month: December 2024
So You Wanna Change the World
Image: https://www.reddit.com/r/heroscape/comments/k6rwba/roman_legionnaires_x_airborne_elite/ Perils of Temporal Activism. By Ray Tabler The other day I thought about a book I read a few years back, Accidental Warrior-The Unlikely Tale of Bloody Hal, by Colin Alexander. It’s a pretty good story, about an ordinary university student who stumbles through a portal to an…
Generation Ships
Image from The Starlost fansite By Ray Tabler I just finished reading Braking Day, by Adam Oyebanji, a hard science fiction novel set on a generation ship coasting its merry way to Tau Ceti. I didn’t realize before I started that it’s a YA book. Which I usually avoid, being…
Samizdat Goes Respectable
Image: Final scene of Fahrenheit 451 By Ray Tabler Samizdat is a single coin from the linguistic inheritance bequeathed to us from the cold war. Other questionable treasures of that hoard include words and phrases like iron curtain, gulag, overkill, and mutually assured destruction. It was a crazy time. In…
Tour Guides to Dystopia
Image: Office renovation in the movie Brazil by Ray Tabler This post seems to be appropriate for Black Friday, the day of the year when our flimsy veneer of civilization wears thinnest. Fair warning, the following is a catalog of real, historical dystopia, which could be used to model fictional…
Widely- Vs. Well-Read
By Ray Tabler Image: pbs.twimg.com Author Pam Allyn wrote that “Reading is like breathing in and writing is like breathing out…” It’s tough to live without doing both. Breathing, that is. Unfortunately, most people can get along just fine neither reading nor writing these days. But that’s a subject for…