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Pocket Universes By Ray Tabler Fair warning, there will be a lot of handwavium below. Because, we only know for sure about the one universe, so far. There may be others out there, or curled up into dimensions we do not perceive. Plenty of complex mathematics suggests such possibilities. But no hard…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/marriott-carpet Concarpetology By Ray Tabler Concarpetology – The science of identifying a science fiction/fantasy/comic/etc… convention from photographs of the carpet. I just made that term up, concarpetology. I’ve been to a few science fiction conventions. Or, “cons” as the cool kids call them. And one thing I’ve noticed about such…

Notes from the Booze in Space Panel, at Archon 47 This past weekend I was at the Archon47 science fiction convention, and was a speaker on several panels. By far the best attended panel I sat on was titled: Booze In Space! “The panel description states: Alcoholic beverages are frequently…