Some tangled threads here.

I want to design a game that replicates the feel of John Scalzi's "Old Man's War" books -- old-school military SF action with more modern sensibilities and written by a vaguely clueful author. Low emphasis on getting the crunchy bits right and a heavy emphasis on the action, but with a pleasing variety of familiar tropes anyway. 

The "Commonwealth of Human Remains" setting is stuck. I think I went too far to try and mirror Trek or Federal Space -- taking a step back would be good and having another look at it. The actual setting isn't quite as finely-grained in terms of polities so maybe I shouldn't try to make it be. I always viewed the Federation as an anomaly for the purpose of bringing different civilizations' efforts together. It should be bigger and more unique, and also less rigid and formally-binding upon members. Maybe more of a decentralized Network?

The Empire setting (space-mercs/pirates one) might conceivably be blended with one or more of the above projects. By itself it's merely "sort of neat" and I think I should try to focus on what material's interesting rather than fleshing all of it out and propping it up. Keep the Zombi, keep the "vast colonial-driven trade empire" and the Cutters and a few other neat artifacts like combat savants. The singularity-as-Precursors idea is cool too; keep that. Perhaps don't go out of your way to make this setting too hard in terms of science: you've got your vacuum-cavitation drive, your aliens that can live together and eat each other's food (mostly), and the general idea is perfect for a Scalzi-esque riff on total war with aliens and a questionably-moral "Colonial Union"-esque state.

That feels better.

--

I've been interested in Buddhism lately. I do this with religions sometimes; like a moth, I'll get drawn in by the bright and warm emanations and start circling out of interest. Which isn't to say it's entirely mercurial; I've got some kind of emotional need that is not getting fulfilled with my current palette of cultural and behavioral patterns. It's not just the interest in meditation either, or the familiarity from pop-culture with some of Buddhism's (particularly Japanese) trappings. The basic narrative as I understand it, of what causes suffering and how to be rid of it, seems starkly relevant given the amount of pain I've been experiencing. Moreover I'm coming to find that at least some strands of Buddhist thought contain insights I find...well, comforting. Religion and I do not have a terribly comfortable history together; almost invariably however much I resonate with some aspects of a given faith culture there'll be fairly foundational or just common ideas within that subculture that I find unpalatable, alienating or actually abhorrent. I consider this a feature, not a bug -- some of those cognitive chains are just not ones I want having write-access to my behavior, if that makes sense...let alone affecting my personal inhibitions and sense of what's ethical or desirable.  

Well, getting to know how sects of Buddhism differ on matters I find complicated helped in some ways. Mahayana and Theravada, I come to realize, are substantially different ways of approaching the same (very basic) philosophy. Some of my general points of friction with Buddhism make contact around a very Mahayana-driven set of ideas regarding vegetarianism and LGBT folk. Which isn't to say that Mahayana Buddhism and I cannot get along, simply that most of the questions and objections I've raised internally around some of these issues are nicely in line with the same discussions in Theravada. Not only that, but resolutions to those questions and interpretations I can fully support appear to be common there. I didn't entirely realize how much this had been covered (because until recently, I'd never thought to look), and it was both impressive and humbling to see that these exact trains of thought (which have bothered me ever since I became interested in Buddhism as a religion) aren't even vaguely new, or absent from the faith's internal dialogue. 

I'm not sure where this interest is going, but it is...well, *interesting* to watch it play out. At minimum I've been feeling the need for meditation (which, obviously, is not limited to or unique to Buddhism, but which is where I first learned what it was and how to do it). Lately it also seems I've been feeling a need to be more spiritual as well.

Never am sure how to handle that. I've gotten to the point where I don't think my basic underlying assumptions about how the universe works are likely to be overturned; yet, I cannot seem (and do not especially want to) shake the mental and emotional traits that drive me to spiritual behavior that, if taken at face value, would conflict with that world model. 

The struggle to reconcile two fundamentally-incompatible things appears to give me charge and focus, I guess. 

Testing post-forwarding from Deninet to Dreamwidth to LJ. If you can see this on LJ, please comment. 

Very bad news, for our long-term climate picture. Frozen methane in Siberia is now bubbling up as gas, and the total amount being emitted in this region is more than in the rest of the oceans put together. 

This is bad because CO2's effects as a greenhouse gas are minor in comparison with methane's. Major methane releases are linked in the fossil record with mass extinctions, and the phrase "climate change" almost doesn't do it justice. The long-term effects of such events have changed the very direction of life on Earth, with a lot of "losers" for every winner who gained a new niche.

Geoengineering -- the theory and practice of making large-scale alterations to the Earth's climates and ecosystems -- is both politically and ethically controversial, and rightly so. At the same time, it may well be our only chance at even maybe toning down the impact and just keeping our system going long enough to make the necessary changes to preserve it.

Some would say that it's not worth trying to save, and there are bound to be winners and losers among humanity as well as on the evolutionary scale. The problem with that kind of thinking is that a whole lot of people who are questionably or clearly not responsible will be paying the price, in the form of a massive boom of refugees, famine and flood victims worldwide, casualties of war and disease (both likely to be seriously exacerbated in such a situation), and people whose economic livelihood is destroyed by the changing of the world underneath them. 

This isn't about More Progress, or The Power of Science. This is about desperately trying to gain traction on a very big, vaguely-understood but not inherently mysterious system that, if allowed to run out of control, could do tremendous damage. Those of us living in the Global North should feel particularly obligated to give a damn about this -- our prosperity and good fortune CAUSED this, and we've set ourselves up as the standard of "civilization" for the people who we exploited to make it happen. China and India are pursuing paths toward development that lead to the same result: wealthy, well-fed, high-living middle classes with a sense of entitlement, a habit of consumption, and indifference to much of the world's problems as long as the good stuff keeps coming in. They learned that from us. What's more, we've made it pretty clear what we think of anyone who doesn't strive for the same end.

Now factor in Brazil. And Indonesia. And Malaysia. Don't ignore Russia, Japan, South Korea and Mexico. And for bloody's sake, let's stop pretending that Europe, Australia and Canada have any moral high ground here. 

--

We're on a train turning the corner of a mountain pass. In the valley beyond, we can see the track broken in the distance over a plateau. The engineer is missing and the staff are all too busy telling people to stay in their seats to do anything about it. We are not sure how many miles there are to the dropoff, how high the plateau is, who will survive (if anyone) or how to stop a moving train.

We have a bunch of tools we could use to at least try, though. And if someone can both get to the engine car, AND figure out where the brakes are, we can hopefully prevent it from going off. People might get hurt or whiplashed. The train might derail sideways off the tracks. But it's better than going off the plateau.

The passengers outnumber the staff, but all have different ideas about how to proceed. And the staff are most interested in keeping the passengers seated and quiet. In principle, however, all the pieces to solve this problem are already in place.

But the people aren't communicating, aren't willing to cross the staff, don't think they could do anything, aren't convinced this won't turn out okay, or think it's nonsense. Or, are accepting money from the staff to persuade the other passengers to keep still (even though it'll be useless to them after the train derails). 

Will they go off the edge? Stay tuned.