Archive for 2026 week 19
- Space pets: kuga - 04 May 2026
- Space wizards - 05 May 2026
- Tlikria Chiapre - 06 May 2026
- Replacing tumblelog - 07 May 2026
- Sentient, sapient, sophont, conscious - 08 May 2026
- Scraps - 09 May 2026
- Infopocalypse - 10 May 2026
The end of the "cat gap" on Terra is probably explained by the introduction of Pseudaelurus from the Zhdez homeworld, where cats appear continuously in the fossil record. If the Precursors did the same on the Inukari homeworld, they failed to establish. Instead, mustelids occupy most of the niches that felines do on the other two human homeworlds. Thus, the early Inukari chose a mustelid to domesticate for pest control: the kuga.
Yesterday was, of course, Star Wars Day. I couldn't think of anything useful to commemorate it, so I didn't mention it (though Weird Animal With Merch Potential is actually a very Star Wars thing now that I think about it).
Chiapre is a psionics school on Therbings (or Tlikria, to Zhdez). It is one of the smaller ones, but still quite influential.
Tumblelog is pretty neat but also everything goes in a single file. Which is also kind of neat (I can do a single ctrl-f to search everything) but can get a little unwieldy.
The comic Freefall had a recent strip (series of, really) that was a conversation between a starship, which asserts itself to be an unconscious intelligence, and a worker robot, which asserts itself to be conscious (and the starship describes their respective architectures such that both assertions are probably correct).
Some of the fiction bits I noodled around with last year involved a station disaster, told from the viewpoint of a conscious ship. Since then, I (1) decided not to kill off Ship's crew (I made them interesting characters, whoops), (2) decided that Ship is not properly a Zhdez ship (though its drives are), (3) decided the Ring was jointly governed, and (4) I settled on a name, but it's private. But aside from all that, here is a conversation between Ship and two tween Inukari ship crew who took refuge on it when the station came apart.
Answered a medical question for one of the kids and thought about how I'd learned that sort of thing, and realized a lot of it came about from the Internet. With the proliferation of slop these days, I feel like that window of (semi-)reliability was briefer than we would have expected.