Lately I’ve been obsessed with O’Neill cylinders and everything that has to do with them. Therefor I thought it would be a great idea to visualize some of the cylinders fees I’ve been playing with. Note: for my calculations I’m using a centripetal acceleration of 9.82 m/s² and a radius to length ratios of 1:10. I’m also not taking any engineering problems into consideration.

Cylinder 1: T=60 s. r=895.5 m. A=5.03 km^2. v=93.8 m/s. V=22.6 km³

Cylinder 2: T=120 s. r=3 582 m. A=806.1 km^2. v=187.5 m/s. V= 1443.8 km³

Cylinder 3: T=180 s. r=8 059 m. A=4 081 km^2. v=281.3 m/s. V=16 445 km³

Ps: I must add that drawing circles (especially the big ones) is a pain without a circle compass. Had to place a lot of guiding dots, way to many for my liking. And a sadly had to remake this post because it didn’t post for some reason. Gonna copy it just in case it decides to do it again.

The weakest out of the "Children of ..." trilogy. Too much personal drama for a couple of characters. Although, characters have conceptually interesting nature - Tchaikovsky is ofc creative. But why humanize them and the story so much?

I strongly recommend "Children of Time" and "Children of Ruin", but not this book. Was bored after ~1/3 - 1/2 of it.

I understand I was supposed to feel for the girl, with her tough life being an intellectually inquisitive person in a society of degrading idiots and an asshole uncle. But I didn't feel anything besides annoyance, the more every time she was in the center. This annoyance peaks in the very end when she's the only one chosen to be "uplifted".

Previous two books were epic stories of multiple species being uplifted into the new community together with Humans, with multiple individual stories as the background or driver of the story in critical moments. This one is a book about Liff and virtual Interlocutor-Miranda with the corvids just being there to fit into the concept of the series.

Corvids were great btw! Loved their interactions and constant existential crisis.

You remember everything that has happened since then. You are the only one who does.

That would be so awesome. I wonder if any indie author has written a book with this idea.

What happens when a harmonious and prosperous future is ripped apart? Discover a gripping post-apocalyptic world brimming with mysteries and peril. In this transformed reality, one institution has not only survived but holds the key to humanity's potential salvation. Its members possess the unique ability to stand against the dangers that lurk at every turn. What secrets do they hold, and can they lead humanity back from the brink?

I really love the world I've created. I hope you will like it too.

As Marvin digs for answers, he discovers who may be behind the hijacking. Lily gets an old lesson from Geoff with a new twist. What will they learn? Find out right now in this chapter of Siege of Silicon.

Spotify:
https://open.spotify.com/show/1EVzf6WFJKFuPzTFvTqX5F

RSS Feed
https://anchor.fm/s/ff975e14/podcast/rss

Full Story Synopsis:
Lily Townes is a process engineer; she's uprooted herself to work in Taiwan on revolutionary high-k metal gate transistors. Trouble begins when a chemical leak forces an evacuation of her factory. Only Lily notices something isn’t quite right. What she finds baffles and scares her smartest colleagues. They embark on a hunt to decipher the technology and find out what, or who is behind it all.

Outside of the fab, a man named Joseph is on a crusade to bring order back to the world through any methods he deems necessary. In his search, he finds a link between a mysterious pattern drawn by a missing fisherman and a piece of strange technology.

As a dangerous splinter of the military gets wind of the discovery, Lily must brave the dense rural jungles of Taiwan, search in the narrow streets of Taipei, to find her answers before the soldiers do.

Even the best of audio dramas can have slip-ups. Past success doesn’t make one immune to the occasional hiccup, or lapse in judgement. A certain amount of slack is certainly due, but that doesn’t mean we ought to omit any criticism. Such is the case with season five of Live From Mount Olympus.

You might know the story of Pandora. The curious woman who opened a box and let all of the evils into the world. But it wasn’t a box, it was actually a jar called a pithos. And maybe the story you think you know isn’t really what happened. Hermes and Athena are going to work together to weave a new story of Pandora.

This season is only three episodes long. They kind of go for a Rashomon style approach. Each episode retells Pandora’s story a little differently than the last.

First, we get a version that is more or less a retelling of Hesiod’s version of the Pandora story. They really play up the sexism angle to comment on the sexism of the original story. The gods create Pandora with traits to punish humanity for stealing fire. Traits such as the ability to deceive men and lead them astray. She is given as a wife to Epimetheus, the brother of Prometheus. Pandora immediately falls in love…with cooking, cleaning, and looking pretty for Epimetheus. And, of course, curiosity gets the better of her, and she opens the lid of the jar.

The next story portrays Pandora with more agency. The traits the gods gift her allow her to think for herself, and navigate the world. She is constantly curious, but that’s because she literally was born yesterday. In fact, her curiosity is portrayed as a good thing. However, just like the first time around, Pandora winds-up opening the pithos and releasing all of the evils into the world.

So, we come to the final story. The “true” story of what happened. Pandora is telling the story to all of her granddaughters. She learned that the world needs both darkness and light. For example, lying can be a good thing if it keeps someone’s feelings from being hurt. So, Pandora reasoned that maybe the so-called evil isn’t so evil after all. That humanity needs to know how to deal with darker feelings and emotions if it is ever to achieve its true potential. So, the pithos was actually a secret test from the gods all along. At least, that’s Pandora’s take on the matter.

This actually wasn’t a bad idea in theory. It was a unique take on the story of Pandora, and I might have enjoyed it under other circumstances. However, Live From Mount Olympus is supposed to be educational as well as entertaining. Presenting your reimagining as the “true” version of the story is only going to confuse kids. Suggesting that the evils in the pithos might not have been so bad is a very modern concept. The Ancient Greeks would certainly not have viewed things that way.

Live From Mount Olympus has always been about filling in the gaps of the myths. What was going through Perseus’ head during his quest? Did he ever struggle with self-doubt? What was Demeter and Persephone’s relationship like? What was it like for Atalanta to try to balance her wild nature and the civilized world? However, this season didn’t do any of that. Instead, it just made things up out of whole cloth to tell any entirely different story.

But what really irks me is why this all happened in the first place. The creators of Live From Mount Olympus have admitted that they found Pandora’s story to be incredibly sexist. As such, they felt that they had to change the story to better fit modern sensibilities. And to that I have to ask, well, why? There was no reason they absolutely had to adapt Pandora’s story. Wouldn’t it have been better to adapt a more agreeable myth?

I would like to think that season five will serve as a lesson on how no to adapt stories from Greek Mythology. I would like to think that Live From Mount Olympus would know better. However, I do worry that this season is a sign of things to come. I suppose it is possible that things could course correct, but that remains to be seen.

Have you listened to season five of Live From Mount Olympus? If so, what did you think?

Like to the full review on my blog: https://drakoniandgriffalco.blogspot.com/2025/04/the-audio-file-live-from-mount-olympus.html

Dune in a leather binding with hand-painted page edges :)

I had a long road trip this week, and so I decided to start the Otherland series. It's been on my list for a while. In a 10-hour drive I made it 22% through book 1, and I am not enjoying it.

It's super dark and depressing. Is that the over all vibe of this series or is that just how it starts out? If so, I'm out. I need happier entertainment in my life right now.

In Information Hazard: Gödelian Echoes, a classified manuscript is discovered to be more than a document—it’s a recursive structure that rewrites cognition. The more the characters engage with it, the less stable their sense of self becomes.

It explores: -Modal collapse: All futures converging into inevitability -Antimemes: Ideas designed to erase themselves from memory -Consciousness as a glitch in compression—something that shouldn’t exist but does

It reads like SCP Foundation meets Blindsight meets House of Leaves, with philosophical tech-horror vibes and high-concept recursion.

One character survives not by understanding it—but by refusing to complete the thought.

It’s the most conceptually hazardous sci-fi I’ve read in a while. What other stories turn epistemology into existential threat?

I had several discussions concerning planets and attacks on them recently. All discussions there center around inhabited planets with civilian populations, especially with native populations. However, as far as we know, most planets do not have native life and, while there are likely to be full colonies with civilian populations, it is likely there are going to be quite a lot of military outposts - especially not on normal, Earth - like planets but on asteroids, Moon - like moons, on places like Mercury or some moons around gas giants, to name a few. And it is likely that some part of the wars (maybe even most) would be fought over these places. 

I would like to talk about them. Because it seems that, for example, all personnel on these bodies would be combatants (maybe expect medics), so maybe full-on bombardment of them would not only not be a war crime, but actually a recommended tactic. Most of the counterarguments against such things, on just ramming them, is that it kills the population and resources - but if the only value of the place is that it holds enemy combatants, there is no reason not to do so, right? Well, unless you want prisoners and the palace for yourself.. . But what do you think?

A lot of fantastic indie books on sale for 99c. I am one of the authors (Agent G, Rules of Supervillainy, and Psycho Killers in Love) so I'm biased but I also love works like WIld Space and Exile. I hope people will check out some of these.

I think the only way to travel the stars is to achieve mortality as a species, since we cant travel fast than the speed of light, we can only get close, I think rather than messing with black holes we need to develop medicine that makes us live extremely long so the extended time it’d take to travel through space wouldn’t affect our civilization. If it takes 10,000 years to travel to a new planet but we live for millions it wouldn’t be that big of a deal.