10 Intriguing Star Wars Details We Learned From The Rise of Skywalker’s Visual Dictionary – There are a lot of interesting tidbits in here, but the strangest one is the decision by Lucasfilm to drop the Before/After Battle of Yavin (BBY/ABY) timeline reckoning in favor of Before/After the Starkiller Incident (BSI/ASI). While I can kind of understand wanting to place the new movies front and center, BBY/ABY has been the standard for decades. The change seems … ill-advised.
What if You Had a Four-Day Week? Why Don’t You? – “…the four-day workweek is the flying car of labor: a profound advancement that has seemed just around the corner for decades.”
One of the colleges I worked at experimented with a four-day workweek during the summers (as have a number of other schools I’ve heard of). In this case, we were working 10-hour days, with Friday off. While it was nice to have the long weekend, I don’t know that the added stress of 10 hour days was worth it. Then again, I had an hour commute each way to that job, so it suddenly made for a very long day. A four-day week with less (rather than the same) number of hours is appealing, but it would require a massive cultural shift.
Why the world is waiting for Betelgeuse to go supernova – The red giant in the constellation Orion has dimmed noticeably in recent months, possibly setting the stage for the star to explode into a supernova.
Welcome to Mystery Flesh Pit National Park, One Redditor’s Colossal Feat of Worldbuilding – “The Mystery Flesh Pit is the name given to a bizarre natural geobiological feature discovered in the permian basin region of west texas in the early 1970s.”
First off … gross. Second, damn, that’s impressive. It’s worth reading if only to inform world-building in your own campaigns.
Savage Star Frontiers – It’s no secret that I love Star Frontiers, even if I only got to play it two or three times. Savage Star Frontiers re-implements the system’s rules using Savage Worlds.
Rlyeh Reviews: Risk – A review of the classic board game Risk when an emphasis on the game’s historical context. Note that “classic” does not necessarily mean “good”.
20 Years Later, the Y2K Bug Seems Like a Joke—Because Those Behind the Scenes Took It Seriously … but not seriously enough, according to New Scientist: A lazy fix 20 years ago means the Y2K bug is taking down computers now.
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Starkiller Base from Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. Credit: Lucasfilm/Disney.