HouseDobromil-Monalisa Foster THE Author

Science fiction. Human drives, not hyperdrives. Ravages of Honor Series. Threading the Needle (Baen 2023). Knows the difference between sentience and sapience.

[HouseDobromil-Monalisa Foster THE Author @HouseDobromil]

I write science fiction, mostly space opera, with a smattering of hard sf, space western, alt history, and romance. I do it all because I can.
Books: https://t.co/OUNAwc5p02 and https://t.co/62QQTxikj5
Newsletter: https://t.co/hHsmTjN0Nd
Writer's Substack: https://t.co/RExyGZQrBL

[Gabriele Corno @Gabriele_Corno]

Officer Tanya Reeves had been at Mercy General in Denver for nine days after being injured during a call. Her Malinois partner, Scout, refused to eat for the first three days. Her temporary handler said Scout paced constantly and wouldn't settle. The hospital approved a visit after Tanya's captain submitted a formal request. Scout entered the room, moved directly to the bed, and laid himself down along Tanya's uninjured side with complete precision.
Her captain said: "Scout avoided both injury sites without hesitation. That awareness in that moment was something l've never seen before." Tanya said:
"That's when I knew I'd be okay."

[Orson Scott Card @orsonscottcard]

In writing science fiction, how do you introduce new language without tedious explanations?

1. You don't need new words for already existing concepts. If it looks like a rabbit, call it a rabbit. If it's an alien rabbitlike creature, say so once and then keep calling it a rabbit with no further qualifiers. That's why American robins are not the same bird as English robins, yet we don't respell it or qualify it unless the difference is important to the story.

2. Future slang? Go to town. The Russian word “horosho” (great, terrific) became “horrorshow” in A Clockwork Orange — pronounced almost identically in England. Foreign words can easily be picked up and adapted, as I did with Battle School slang in Ender's Game. Isolated groups inevitably develop private argots or cants, and you can raid other languages, famous or common names (who could have predicted the harsh transformation of “Karen” in recent English?), archaic words (why not resurrect forsooth, forthwith, wight, or gaunt with new meanings, which may or may not be related to the old meaning?), and completely made-up words — like the origin of copacetic or atone or tintinnabulation? Historically, the once-endearing, now-offensive “pickaninny” came from the Portuguese “pequenina.” I used the same root for the name of a sentient alien species in Speaker for the Dead: pequeninos, augmented by the more derisive term “piggies.”

3. Newly invented objects or processes can become new meanings for old words, like the “desk” that's really a holographic tablet computer in Ender's Game (which I wrote before there were tablet computers). Or you can use a great word that other writers have introduced into the language, as has happened with robot, android (which Lucas deftly turned into “droid” though it referred to Artoo Detoo, which was decidedly not at all an android), or ansible, which Le Guin had used for the identical concept, so I paid her the respect of not renaming what had already been introduced.

4. Shortening of words, like “facsimile” becoming “fax” and then becoming a verb as well as a noun. (And now becoming obsolete along with the machine.) Or trade names becoming generics like kleenex, aspirin, tampon, statin, scooter, Vespa.

Explanations are not tedious if you first show us the thing or process in action and then have a character refer to it by your target word.

[Matt Van Swol @mattvanswol]

🚨#BREAKING: A German soccer fan who flew to the USA but was fearful about coming because of news about criminals and people being mean...

...breaks down into TEARS, live on air saying he has FALLEN IN LOVE with America after a random man named "Bob" in Boston gave him a ride home after he was stuck at a game with no way back to his hotel

The German soccer fan's name is Sebastian, he said after meeting Bob, he extended his entire trip.

He said leaving America will hurt worse than watching Germany get knocked out of the World Cup.

"I fall in love with America. I'm sorry, it's just so emotional. Americans are not rude... if we are together, we can achieve great things."

THIS IS THE AMERICA I KNOW!!!!!! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸

[HouseDobromil-Monalisa Foster THE Author @HouseDobromil]

@SarahAHoyt Watched it last night. If one doesn’t like message fiction one should definitely avoid this. The message : The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

[JeffXmemes @JeffXmemes]

Marco offers a temporary solution to the reflecting pool vandalism

[Taylor Day @TABYTCHI]

Standing at the Polish border launching Citizen Vigilante flash drive balloons towards Berlin

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

https://t.co/yvJOwOS4xE

[Dustin @r0ck3t23]

Elon Musk just proved that ownership in America is a legal fiction.

Musk: “You get taxed on what you earn, you get taxed on what you buy, and you get taxed on what you own.”

Think about what property tax actually means.

You worked for decades. Paid it off in full. The deed is in your name.

Stop paying the government its annual fee. Watch them take it and sell it to someone who will.

You never owned that house. You were leasing it from an entity you never signed a contract with.

Income tax tells the same truth in softer packaging.

The government does not take a portion of your earnings. They decide how much of your own labor you are permitted to keep.

That is not semantics. It is a confession of who the system believes your time belongs to first.

Sales tax buries itself in the receipt. Two people exchange value voluntarily. A third party who contributed nothing takes a cut simply for allowing it to happen.

Now stack all three.

Taxed when you create. Taxed when you spend. Taxed when you hold. Taxed again when you die and try to pass it to your children.

At no point in that cycle does the system recognize your output as yours.

Because money is not an abstraction. It is crystallized human lifespan.

Every dollar taxed is an hour you already lived, already bled for, already gone.

The state is not managing an economy. It is claiming dominion over time you will never get back.

And spending it on systems you never asked for and actively oppose.

The institution extracting all of it faces zero obligation to perform. A contractor who delivers nothing gets fired. A bureaucracy that burns through trillions gets a budget increase the next fiscal year.

SpaceX pays taxes to the agencies that obstruct its launches. Tesla funds the regulators drafting rules to shield its competitors.

The builders are not subsidizing government. They are financing their own friction.

The tax code is 74,000 pages long. Not because the economy demands it. Because the extraction had to be buried in enough complexity that you would stop asking who it was designed to protect.

The past belonged to the people who taxed the world.

The future belongs to the people who build it.

[Justin Thomas Watson @JustinTWatson]

So I went and did a thing. I have started a Patreon.

If you enjoyed my alt Indochina War stories in the Phases of Mars anthos out from @CKPBooks , in Hooves Tracks and Sabers from @raconteur_press , or in @Youngblai James L. Young's Arc of Ares Anthos--I will be releasing new editions of those stories, each with a new B&W cover art piece. I'm going to release one short story a quarter until the entire American-Indochina War story is concluded before moving onto another serialized fiction story.

I will also be posting weekly progress reports on my current novel, right now that happens to be Romanov III.

If you'd like in:
https://t.co/UWK3MXZw5Q

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Karl’s Dad was cool

[Baen Books @BaenBooks]

What's going on this week at Baen Books? We've got convention appearances this coming weekend at LibertyCon!

Join @HouseDobromil, @holowriting (Masters of Ceremonies), Griffin Barber, @DavidJohnButler, @WarpCordova, @cegannon1, @ThingyInBrainy, Bjorn Hasseler, @thewriterike, Chris Kennedy, Wil McCarthy, @JodyLynnNye, @MelissaOlthoff, @GrayRinehart, @Jringo1508, @LydiaSherrer, @GameOverStation, @JustinTWatson, @DavidWeberBooks, Toni Weisskopf, Michael Z. Williamson, and @Marisa_comeaux at LibertyCon (https://t.co/cmmVg4dfcv) from June 26 - 28 in Chattanooga, TN.

#BaenBooks #AuthorAppearances #LibertyCon

[HouseDobromil-Monalisa Foster THE Author @HouseDobromil]

https://t.co/UJ85WujNuM

[HouseDobromil-Monalisa Foster THE Author @HouseDobromil]

An LLM can only help you if you already know enough craft to recognize its mistakes.
Garbage in, garbage out still applies.
In this article, I break down exactly where the "AI" succeeded, where it failed, and why writers cannot skip learning the fundamentals.

[HouseDobromil-Monalisa Foster THE Author @HouseDobromil]

My pack!

[Cynical Publius @CynicalPublius]

“Elon Musk is a trillionaire.”

As a securities law attorney, please allow me to explain how anyone who says this is basically lying to you:

1. The Securities and Exchange Commission has a myriad of laws that prevent founders and other large stockholders of publicly traded companies from dumping their shares. There are substantial holding period requirements, volume of sales limitations and public reporting obligations for stock sales. Basically, Elon holds largely illiquid shares, he is a “trillionaire” on paper only, and the best analogy is when people peg your net worth based on your home’s market price. That’s not money in your pocket, that’s the house you live in.

2. All that money raised in the IPO? That’s not going into Elon’s pocket like the lying socialist idiots want you to believe. It’s a capital influx that will be used to make more rockets and get more payloads into orbit. It’s a CAPITAL investment—that money is like a business loan, it’s not your money to keep, it’s your money to grow the business.

3. If it WERE legal for Elon to dump his shares, the share price would crash basically instantly and the company could very well fail.

If you bought SpaceX shares in the IPO, congrats. You just bought a lottery ticket, just like Elon. May the odds ever be in your favor.

So the next time someone screeches about how unfair it is that Elon Musk creates wealth that benefits all of humanity, throw the truth back in their faces.

[Popmemes by Jon 🚀 @JonCovering]

👑⚽ When House Targaryen Delivers the World Cup 🐉🏆

[Dume @gietzschean]

>Be Elon
>Get bullied so badly as a kid that you end up in the hospital
>Escape into books
>Read more than 8hrs a day
>Teach yourself programming
>Sell a video game at 12
>Leave South Africa
>Sleep on couches
>Work odd jobs
>Get into America
>Build a startup
>Get fired from your own company
>Start over
>Build another company
>Merge it into PayPal
>Get removed as CEO
>Your company gets acquired
>Walk away with nearly $180 million
>Instead of retiring at 31, put almost all of it into three impossible ideas: Electric cars, Solar energy, Rockets
>People tell you you're insane
>Start a rocket company with no aerospace degree
>Learn rocket science from textbooks
>First rocket fails
>Second rocket fails
>Third rocket fails
>Divorce
>Public humiliation
>Cash running out
>One launch away from bankruptcy
>Launch anyway
>The fourth rocket reaches orbit
>NASA signs a contract
>Survive
>Tesla is weeks from collapse
>Save it at the last minute
>Get mocked for wanting reusable rockets.
>Land one.
>Then another.
>Then dozens.
>Turn science fiction into engineering
>Get mocked for betting on EVs
>Turn electric cars into status symbols
>Force the entire auto industry to follow
>Build the most valuable car company in history
>Launch astronauts into orbit
>Create a global satellite internet network.
>Buy Twitter
>Fire most of the staff
>Rename it X
>Walk into politics
>Risk your reputation
>Risk your companies
>Risk your fortune
>Become one of the most polarising people on Earth.
>Get attacked by the media, politicians, competitors, and activists
>Keep building anyway
>Become a TRILLIONAIRE

[Tiffany Fong @TiffanyFong]

SpaceX is now worth more than Canada

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

That water clarity is an engineering decision, and the math behind it is wilder than the video.

Roman aqueducts ran on gravity alone. No pumps, no pressure systems. Engineers carved channels with a gradient so shallow it borders on absurd. The Pont du Gard in southern France drops 2.5 centimeters over 275 meters. That's roughly the thickness of a coin over the length of three football fields. They surveyed that accuracy with plumb lines and wooden leveling instruments.

The clarity you're seeing is a direct product of flow velocity. Too steep and the water erodes the channel walls, picks up sediment, turns brown. Too flat and it stagnates. Roman engineers targeted a slope of about 20 centimeters per kilometer, which kept the water moving fast enough to stay fresh but slow enough to stay clear. Before the water reached the city, it passed through multi-chamber settling tanks where velocity dropped near zero. Suspended particles sank. Clean water flowed out the top into the next chamber. Repeat three or four times.

Pliny specified the minimum slope in writing. Vitruvius published the exact mortar ratio for hydraulic cement: one part lime to two parts volcanic ash for underwater work. The pozzolana from Pozzuoli reacted with water to form a calcium-aluminum-silicate compound that actually gets stronger the longer it sits submerged. Modern concrete degrades in water. Roman concrete bonds with it.

Scale the whole system and it gets harder to process. Eleven aqueducts fed Rome at its peak. Combined output: roughly 1 million cubic meters of water per day. That works out to about 250 gallons per person for a city of one million. Modern New York delivers about 125 gallons per person per day. Ancient Rome had access to double the per capita water supply of the largest city in the United States, running entirely on slope and stone.

The Trevi Fountain in Rome is still fed by one of them. Two thousand years, same source, same gravity, same water.