In this top-down sci-fi RPG, you play as Jake Stone, a bounty hunter in a distant galaxy. In the course of your regularly scheduled bounty hunting, you discover a conspiracy to suppress hyperdrive technology and prevent your people and their nearby enemies the Rigians from exploring beyond the local star systems. You and you alone (for some reason) must figure out who is trying to keep you locked in together and how you can escape.



I have intense nostalgia for one specific aspect of this game. Interestingly, in retrospect I think it is probably also the worst aspect of this game.

( Namely: in space everything is extremely far apart. )

Solar Winds is not commercially available, which is slightly surprising given the developer's later high-profile work. But if you are so inclined, you can play part one and part two in your browser. I've read that the game was heavily inspired by Star Control II, which I haven't played, but I would be interested to check it out and compare.

I have finished rereading all the Murderbot books.

I had a few little thoughts as I went along. ( Read more... )

The most recent book, the one where story saves the day, that made me feel kind of tired. Because I felt like the truest line was saying if the corporates made story at them first they would win. I have not of late been optimistic about the power of story, since I have been seeing people reading many things with the special lenses on, the ones that have decided the meaning first and only see the ways that fit. It's an excellent theory and a great development for the character and kind of a writer power fantasy. It should work.

The world could be nicer.

But the reread was good.

An intelligent ship crisscrosses space-time to track the progress of the colonies it established

A Maze of Stars by John Brunner

Gosh it's thunderstorming out there!

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Good lord, between my brain just refusing to shut off last night, and my cat, I feel like I got almost no sleep. I'm okay, just very tired. But it's okay, we shall deal. I don't have anything exciting scheduled for today. I'm just going to get through work, and then I shall be tired and maybe let Jess cook.

I got a bag from Ipsy last night. It's been fun, playing with makeup. I don't know how what I got is going to be in regular rotation, but it's cool. I found a couple of things last night that I picked up, including one last eye shadow palette. It's reds and blacks and silvers, which caught my eye. I'll give them a go and see how they look. This is possibly my cheapest palette, so we'll see what the quality is. If it looks pretty, I could use it for Ghost on Saturday. If not, oh well.

I cannot wait for the rest of my stuff to come in. Tomorrow, Jess' hair dye comes in. They're going to go darkest blue, which should look super cool.

I have an appt on 8/8 to get mine dyed again. I go professional, since most of my hair is grey, which takes dye differently. I wish she'd had something before then, but I just couldn't work it. I'm going like a dark blood red color. Not quite something you can say is unnatural, since redheads exist, but right on the line.

Torrid order #1 comes today, supposedly. When I looked this morning, the last tracking was in Kentucky, so I'm dubious. It would be really helpful if this one came today, but we'll see.

Yesterday, Jess' BPAL order came (in record time). We had so many smellies to go through. I liked a lot of them, especially the ones from the Gourmand imp pack. I do love my food scents. The Incense imp pack was less successful, though Cathedral was nice. My absolute favorite was a freebie they sent along. Scherezade. which lists itself as being red musk, Middle Eastern Spices and Saffron has an amazing scent, and I really love it. It's been on my wrist for almost an hour and has yet to go powdery, which, with my skin composition is fucking amazing. TweedleDee and Knave of Hearts are also really pretty, though I haven't tried them to see if they work on me. Knave of Hearts was a surprise, since I don't normally like rose perfume. But those currant tarts definitely shine in it.

We took Yoda to the vet yesterday. He of course, behaved like a little angel for the vet. The absolute only thing he took exception to was being lifted down after the checkup, when he shrieked in a little piss-baby tantrum. Oh, he also had a tantrum in the waiting area, because I would not let him go meet dogs. (He generally doesn't like dogs, but get him at the vet or the groomer and he's all about going to meet everyone.) It went fine, but was generally stressful, and I'm glad we don't have to do it again for a year.

Okay, time for me to go forth and get myself together. Everyone have an amazing Tuesday!

Okay, vid-source-assisting enablers, your reward is here. ♥



With every broken bone, I swear I lived. Team/family vid. (Contains some sci-fi violence as per the show, flickering/flashing lights in a couple of scenes, and canon pairings in the background, but it's mostly focused on team + Murderbot.)

Song: I Lived
Artist: OneRepublic
Length: 03:57
AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/67565471
Tumblr: here

Having made this in a fit of exploding feelings today, I plan to get subtitles/downloads up soon (as soon as I remember how to do all of that; it's been ages since I made a vid!).

Temp download: Download from Dropbox (286 Mb, it's huge)

I went to Winnipeg for a celebration of life of a cousin of mine for what would have been her fiftieth birthday and had pretty good conversations with my father's side of the family who I don't see much of because they view coming to my city two hours away as going to the godforsaken boonies where they will be picked off by forest people and eaten in stew but always expected us to drive to them at six am on fucking christmas morni--ANYWAY BACK ON TOPIC. It was a lovely celebration of life at one of my favourite places (a plant zoo called The Leaf) and I did not expect to show up in so many of the photos they were playing on the display.

So my relationship with this cousin was very much a 'and then we were adults and got along' but the fuller context is that I am the oldest of my siblings and the oldest of my local cousins and sometimes this cousin would come to stay with us for a week and she was ten years older than me and it was the closest experience I ever had to having an older sister or someone who pulled age authority on me and let's just say I didn't exactly handle the situation with grace.

Anyway, I miss her! She was great. I dream of her all the time.

The other thing we did in Winnipeg was go to the anime convention Ai-Kon under the initial idea of seeing a favourite voice actor of mine, SungWon Cho/ProzD before I remembered I have next to no interest in speaking to celebrities (no offence to Cho, he seems very cool but I have no idea what I'd say without a stronger pretext) so what we did instead was wander around in artist alley and go broke!

It was great! I got lots of nice art and stickers and some fun little plush toys.

Mom was determined to get a gift for my brother and all she knew that he liked was One Piece but she didn't know what anyone in that show looked like so she only zero'd in on the words 'One Piece' so I twice had to deter her. Once from buying a statue that was just Nico Robin in a very tight towel (she hadn't looked anywhere but the words One Piece) and the other time a knockoff Labubu of Luffy 'I don't think my brother would like that', I said. She did get a cat Luffy sticker and a One Piece cookbook because I had surrendered by then.

What I DIDN'T like about Ai-Kon was I was minding my own business trying to escape before I spent more money and this person walked right up to me in a fucking Harry Potter costume and much to my horror I made an audible 'UGH' noise that they heard and they looked genuinely hurt.

I'm working through my guilt by reminding myself that they were off topic anyway, as a British Book/Live Action Movie isn't exactly a Japanese Cartoon and I was ambushed. AMBUSHED where I thought I was safe to only have to wrestle with 'is Arcane an Anime? Are these all Genshins?' and a general 'read the room, jesus christ' as one of the things I noticed about Winnipeg is I couldn't turn a corner without seeing pride flags.

Turned out we knew some people with a booth there too! Did some visiting, saw other people we knew, la la la my province has 10 people in it.

Did I mention the other day that in the same breath I complained about Americans sometimes frustrating me about being overconfidently wrong/underinformed about my country (IT WAS ON TOPIC) an American called them Providences at me?

Turns out I can't wither someone to death with my tone, but I can try.

Authors have revealed!

I wrote: everybody's on the run, Cuckoo (2024), Ed/Gretchen and Gretchen & Alma, post-canon, 2k. This fic was a surprise. I matched on Creator's Choice of Fandom, which meant I could write whateverfandom I wanted, and fresh off finishing my 20k Re-Animator fic, I planned to write more Re-Animator. I came up with several ideas, managed to write a solid 1100 words on one, and just completely stalled out. Instead I wrote this entire fic on the day of the deadline.

I think it turned out okay, though! I enjoyed this movie so much when I saw it earlier this year, especially the messy worldbuilding, and the ending is very wish-fulfillment, I feel, for a certain kind of viewer (which I guess I am, lol). It was fun to try to imagine what the immediate aftermath of everything might look like for these three.

Meanwhile, I received: You, Me, and the Serum Makes Three, Re-Animator, by psychomachia. Dan/Herbert, mpreg, 3k. Absolute galaxy-brained way to knock Dan up, A+. Just a very fun series of relationship development and pregnancy vignettes.

The Back Room by Alicia Adams. A rock shop with a magic back room, and a teenager aching to find her way in.

Negative Scholarship on the Fifth State of Being by A. W. Prihandita. A doctor struggling with corporate control as she tries to treat a patient who is a member of an isolated minority.

1. Back to work today. Not too much going on. I got stuff done and was able to get home at a decent time, so that was nice.

2. When Carla was in Chicago she saw the Mitsuwa there was selling Tokyo Banana, which is really hard to get outside of Japan. She regretted not buying any, and didn't see it at Mitsuwa here, but when I googled, I saw people saying H-Mart was selling it, so she went to H-Mart today and they had it in stock! Alas, we'll have to wait until next year in Japan to have the sakura version again, since that's seasonal, but I'm sure the original will be just as delicious (we actually didn't try the original in Japan because the sakura one was too good and we just bought more of that instead).

3. Lately everyone loves to hide in this box. Only one I haven't seen using it is Jasper.

May the prison you liberate have more than seven prisoners.

These 545-million-year-old fossil trails just rewrote the story of evolution

A groundbreaking study suggests that the famous Cambrian explosion—the dramatic burst of diverse animal life—might have actually started millions of years earlier than we thought. By analyzing ancient trace fossils, researchers uncovered evidence of complex, mobile organisms thriving 545 million years ago, well before the traditionally accepted timeline. These early creatures likely had segmented bodies, muscle systems, and even directional movement, signaling a surprising level of biological sophistication. Their behavior and mobility, preserved in fossil trails, offer new insight into how complex life evolved, potentially rewriting one of the most important chapters in Earth’s evolutionary history.

dialecticdreamer is hosting Magpie Monday with a theme of "Surprises and Celebrations."

I write mostly gentle fiction (with warnings when I skirt more aggressive elements, of course) which doesn’t exclude drama. With the theme of “surprises and celebrations,” readers can offer negative surprises. The range for prompt ideas is as wide as the readers can explain. “Cold Cash is surprised when he is brought in for questioning by the Feds after the attempt to kidnap the Cort twins,” is a legitimate prompt idea. It is not, however, planned for the story arc.

I love YouTube Music — it's a great streaming system and gives me access to music that I could only have dreamed of when I was younger. But there's one thing about it — a small thing really, but still big enough that it bothers me: When you have a playlist, it should be a trivial thing for the software to add up the running times of all the songs in the playlist and give you a runtime for the playlist, and this works for shorter playlists, but once a playlist reaches 5 hours or more in length, the program gets lazy and anything over 5 hours is either "5+ hours" or "5 hours [XX] minutes," where [XX] isn't the actual number of minutes past 5 hours, instead the point after 5 hours where the software got lazy and decided to stop adding. Not a deal killer, not even that big of a deal, really, but it's annoying.

Based on an audience poll, this is the free epic for the July 1, 2025 Poetry Fishbowl. It was spillover from the April 5, 2022 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired by a prompt from rix_scaedu. It also fills the "communication" square in my 4-4-22 "Aspects" card for the Genderplay Bingo fest. This poem belongs to the series Arts and Crafts America.

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I thought I had a piece of popcorn lodged beside my front tooth since I saw Superman. It was annoying, and not responding to floss (slipping up beside it), but I could feel it move when I poked just right with my tongue. Went at it with a toothpick today and it turned out it was a filling falling out of my tooth.

So have an appointment on Thursday morning. Not looking forward to it. I remember when this one went in and it involved terrible needle placement requirements. but maybe they won't need numbing? Hopeful, but unlikely.

Smoke from a not distant enough fire turned the morning sky apocalyptic. Might also have conduced to the knives in the throat sensation, though I've been having that off and on for a few weeks now. Not covid because it comes and goes,  certainly allergies because I also have the itchy ears of prime allergy season. So stayed in until late afternoon when the worst of the mug was over, and then filled a bag with seedlets and stuff from the front walk. In spite of massage, back had conniptions at my daring to wear shoes. Have no idea what to do about this.

But I did rebook a dentist appt from Thursday to a week Thursday and immediately felt better, because this Thursday will definitely rain and next may not. If the weather's dry I might chance transiting to and from my dentist, but in any case I will not be trying to get taxis in the rain. I hope.

By the time we met at 8:30 the sun was out! Shocked us all.:) It was very lovely on Lower Packrat, somewhat quiet this late in the season but the Swainson's Thrushes were still amazing. One bird not far over my head went through what seemed like their entire repertoire of weird sounds, and they are very weird. We saw no nesting activity at the Lake but the local family of Black Phoebes was very active over the water. A very interesting thing that U noticed in her photograph of the hummingbird nest is that this year's nesting bird, whether or not she's the same bird as last year, built this year's on top of last year's! I thought the nest seemed unusually tall but hadn't looked closely. I guess the site is too well protected for the extreme disintegration I've seen elsewhere. I wonder what she will do next year? ( The list: )

This week there were five mallards on the Lake, of indeterminate (by us) sex, as the males are in what used to be called eclipse plumage, meaning they look just like the females. We saw no ducklings this year, for which there are many possible reasons.

We've now played four half-day sessions of our "Stars Without Number" campaign and I'm having a lot of fun.

Our party owns and operates a mining ship, and our first two sessions featured quite a bit of asteroid mining, and also a rescue mission and exploration. Then the space pirates attacked! Not us directly but the space station we are currently based at, so we helped fight them off. And then our latest session was mostly shopping & intel gathering & planning: it sounds like there's an entire fleet of pirates, likely from outside the system, and they've sabotaged and possibly taken over several stations/planets/routes. We'll find out more next time!, which sadly won't be until September because of vacations.

I really like my character. I'm a teleporter! (Talk about wish fulfillment.) Partial psychic/partial expert, because I thought being a full psychic would be overwhelming and I was mostly interested in one discipline anyway. Being able to teleport is so cool. I can teleport 1000 kilometres already and take three people with me.
I'm also really happy with my role in the party. In our main campaign I'm the youngest cat in a group of older and more headstrong cats, which I found difficult sometimes. This time I decided to play a character with more authority, and I've enjoyed it a lot. While all of our party members own the ship together and have equal say, on the bridge I'm the captain; and more importantly, I'm the one keeping track of our money and inventory. (Idk why our GM was surprised that I made a budget and business plan after the first session ^^ )
Our DM told us to prepare back-up characters in case we die, and I did, but I really hope I survive. I even ordered a nice mini figure for her :) As a party I think we've good odds of survival: we have a medic, a biopsionic (=healer), and I can teleport us out in emergencies. Fingers crossed.

I also really enjoy the system, both the setting and mechanically. Playing in a sci-fi world is a welcome contrast after around three years playing in a fantasy world as cats. And playing someone with supernatural abilities feels especially cool after three years as a non-magical archer.
One thing I didn't expect to enjoy this much is leveling up. In our previous system we earn adventure points and we can spend those on improving abilities/skills/etc., but it's more gradual, which tbh makes more sense in-universe. Buuut, leveling up just feels cool. Especially when I can pick new abilities.
What I like less is how ship combat works. So far it's been a little tedious as it seems like half the party always has very little to do; but I suspect that's also because our combat options as a mining ship are limited. We'll see how it goes. We just upgraded our weapons because of the pirates.

Once again our GM has underestimated how long it'll take us to get through his plot so we'll have to see how far we get/what happens when our fifth cat comes back from her year abroad. But until then I really look forward to our next adventures.

Wellington Library trials new shelving system based on Māori deities

Under Tangaroa, atua of the oceans, lakes and rivers - and all life within them, and the guardian of knowledge of carving - you can find books on bodies of water, fish, art/the arts and carving.

Rongomatāne, atua of peace, the kūmara and cultivated food is where you find te ao Māori books on peace, agriculture, gardening, food and cooking.

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