Oolite Bulletins

In the Tom Baker-era Doctor Who story "The Talons of Weng-Chiang", Leela kills a potential assassin using a blowdart tipped with a Janis thorn, a poisonous plant from her home planet (one of several people she disposes of by this method, I think).

Have we arrived at a definitive answer here? I'm editing the witchspace & buoy pages on our wiki and am a tad unsure what to write! You could just say something like "The location in the system where inbound traffic emerges from Witchspace is marked by a navigation buoy", and leave it at that. Cert...

Thank you for this. I'll quote it in suitable pages on the wiki. I'm not trying to tell people what to think - just to show different versions where they exist and also provide possible material for those wanting to - for example - write stories or write missions. Oh yes, absolutely - if people wan...

Does anybody know any more - or have any ideas about any of this? Speaking personally, there are loads of different species in my head-canon. For example, the Blue Bug-Eyed Lizards of Atbevete are completely unrelated to the Black Slimy Lizards of Engema. They might be both more-or-less reptilian, ...

Does this Jameson chappy really exist? Or is he just some sort of literary fiction? "Jameson" was the default commander name in the original game, and is almost certainly based on Captain Alexander Lascelles Jamison , an example character from the late-1970s pen-and-paper RPG Traveller which provid...

ffutures wrote: ↑

Mon Jan 11, 2021 9:52 pm

Disembodied wrote: ↑

Mon Jan 11, 2021 8:27 pm

As I understand it he's currently trying to send tweets by carrier pigeon. This is what is known as an attempted coo.

Do you mind if I quote that on another site?

Go ahead, but I can't accept any responsibility!

As I understand it he's currently trying to send tweets by carrier pigeon. This is what is known as an attempted coo.

Xcode comes with all sorts of bells and whistles for editing .plists, and is free on the Apple app store.

Philip K. Dick's Martian Time-Slip has "Bleekmen", the original inhabitants of Mars, who aren't hostile and are pretty much persecuted by the human colonists.

An update on the £2 HG Wells coin: as well as depicting a four-legged tripod, it also carries a quote that isn't a quote:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/ ... alse-quote

In the steampunk RPG Space: 1889, Mars is inhabited by a number of different cultures. Some - e.g. the High Martians - will often attack humans (and pretty much everyone else), but first contact with the Canal and Hill Martians was at least non-hostile.

Just remembered another - Isaac Asimov's anthology I, Robot includes the story Reason (1941) Yup, "Reason" fits the bill - back to you for the next question! Some other examples include various robot religions from Futurama ; the short story "Adam Robots", by Adam Roberts; and Bruce Sterling's shor...

Quick side question:

How many legs does a Martian Fighting Machine - from H.G. Wells's The War of the Worlds - have? The Royal Mint's answer may surprise you:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/ ... new-2-coin

Battlestar Galactica (the remake series) - the Cylons have a monotheistic religion, one of the reasons why they dislike the humans who are polytheistic. That's one, definitely. H2G2, when Zaphod is in the universe (created, IIRC in a drinks cabinet in the Maximagalon Publishing Corpse Head Orifice)...

Ah, right, there is that … OK. Most SF tends towards the view that robots, computers etc. are coldly logical. So I want three examples please (down from the usual five, as I think this is maybe less common than some) of computers/robots/machine intelligences which hold, get, or otherwise honestly es...