Okay, I'm going to have to plug The Last Ringbearer. See download link for an english translation (which cannot be sold for money for legal reasons but can be downloaded for free).
Originally written in Russian, which pretty much explains the tone. The hobbits and the ring never existed and the Lord of the Rings is the long-after-the-fact mythologized retelling of a war as told by the victors. Aragorn was a power-hungry opportunist who stole the throne. Sauron was a ruling dynasty of the rich nation of Mordor, invaded by the barbarian hordes at its borders. Its trolls and orcs were human ethnicities, with the retelling of the war warping their portrayal into monsters. Saruman quit the council of wizards in disgust when he learned that they sided with the barbarians in their genocide of Mordor because of the fearsome power that Mordor's new industrial revolution could bring. And we get a glimpse at an 'industrialized' middle-earth 3,000 years into the future where, among other things, aerospace companies try and fail to replicate the ancient lost materials science of mithril.
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...From GTORangeBuilder (featured on /.):
...Consider the standard game of Rock Paper Scissors with the following twist. At the start of each round an independent judge flips a fair coin and tells your opponent the result but does not tell you. If the coin came up heads your opponent must play rock. Otherwise he can play whatever he wants. You can always play whatever you want and standard RPS rules apply (paper beats rock, which beats scissors, which beats paper). Your opponent is a smart thinking player and will adapt perfectly to whatever strategy you pl
Hugh Herr: The new bionics that let us run, climb and dance.
I have to say that this was the most blatantly transhumanist mainstream lecture that I've seen in a long time, with sentences like "a human being can never be broken - only technology is broken [because it doesn't allow us to remove all of the human's disabilities yet]". Also generally one of my favorite TED Talks so far.
Note that the implications of the technology go beyond just healing the physically disabled: the exoskeletons he mentions will do wonders to old people. We're looking at the possibility of people maintaining the mobility and ease of movement of a young person for potentially their entire lives, and this technology may become widely available within quite a short time. That means that countless of people might become capable of moving back from nursing homes to living independently with only limited assistance.
I've mentioned it before, but it's recently completed and hence bears bringing up again:
Embers, an Avatar: The Last Airbender fanfiction, is one of the best works I've read, fanfic or otherwise. At 750k words, it'll keep you entertained for a while. It features characters who are generally smart (at least some of them, and in ways generally more age- and culturally-appropriate than eg HJPEV) and significant fleshing out of the world, with the latter drawing heavily on the author's sometimes-cited research: see eg the author's notes at the end of chapter 30 (warning, slight spoilers, though nothing that will make sense out of context) or at the end of chapter 47 (somewhat more significant spoilers).
You don't need to have seen the show to know what's going on, but it'll help, and the show is worth a quick watch if you've got time on your hands anyway. Don't skip this work just because you don't have time for the show right now, though. Also, there's a prequel of sorts called "Theft Absolute", which is three orders of magnitude shorter and will not make much sense without the show; it's not necessary for Embers.
I enjoyed ember for 20 or so chapters while it did a great job of developing characters and justifying oddities about the fire nation in canon with new effects on bending and had a great novel perspective on Aang but then it really went off the rails in terms of adding too much non-avatar universe content.
This is the monthly thread for posting media of various types that you've found that you enjoy. Post what you're reading, listening to, watching, and your opinion of it. Post recommendations to blogs. Post whatever media you feel like discussing! To see previous recommendations, check out the older threads.
Rules: