There are cyberarcheologists who specialize in ancient operating systems, forgotten protocol standards, and dead programming languages. They exist because of archeonets, ancient corners of the network or long-abandoned but still operational data centers. When you live over 7 centuries and have a written history that stretches back to the dawn of your species you have to think long term when disaster-proofing a system, but stuff still falls through the cracks.

I have a few more stories, and may just put them on here since it’s pretty quiet.

no single farspeaker knows it from nose to tail”

What I was going for is this. In real life you have sysadmins, net admins, cybersecurity people, etc, that make up an IT team. They all have interdisciplinary knowledge but aren’t experts in every field, and indeed may work at cross-purposes on occasion. (How many times have I heard “It’s not the network!”) That’s not getting into the underlying hardware, and the stack that goes from hardware to firmware to OS to application. 99% of IT people nowadays probably can’t design a CPU from scratch, and if they can it’s likely not going to match an actual commercial CPU from AMD or ARM or Intel. Those are the products of thousands of man hours.

Then you have the differences in vendors (not really a problem for the Farspeakers at this point in time since they hold a monopoly on the network) but they DO have to contend with dozens of millennia of brown field infrastructure. The story takes place around 35 to 40 thousand years ago, when Earth was in the middle of the ice age, but the Farspeakers were founded around 95 thousand years ago when they invented the telegraph, soon (in relative terms) before achieving orbital flight. That’s a long time even if you scale it to account for the yinrih’s longer lifespan.

You might enjoy the book The Victorian Internet which is about the impact of the telegraph on society. The telegraph was the first time a message could be conveyed faster than a galloping horse or ship’s sail. A lot of the themes you mention are echoed therein.

In my own conworld there is a concept called the rLrsfBMr literally “realm of minds” which I translate as noosphere in English. It has different definitions depending on the religion of the person you ask, but in the Bright Way, sapience itself is regarded as a sacred gift, and the noosphere arises through the interactions between sapient minds (i.e. communication). Since sapient species are thought to be social, at least to some degree, in order for culture to develop, the noosphere eventually accretes a “body”, analogous to the brain and nervous system that upholds an individual sophont’s consciousness, which is the physical infrastructure involved in communication. A particular order within the Bright Way called the Farspeakers is in charge of building and maintaining this “body”, making them monks who are also network engineers.

More broadly, the Bright Way believes that there are other sophonts dwelling among the stars, and that they have been given a commandment to seek out these sophonts. Different corners of the Bright Way have their own ideas of what this means, but the Farspeakers believe they must bridge the respective internets of these far-flung sophonts, creating a galaxy-spanning meta internet.

I loved this story, first read it 10 years ago now. Never thought of it as HFY mostly due to lack of aliens, but it’s got that post-war optimism going on which I sometimes envy as a bitter misanthropic millennial.

Yes. This is part of a worldbuilding and conlanging project. Most of the lore is on this thread on the CBB forum. I have other stories, but this one was the most relevant to this community. A more or less comprehensive grammar of Commonthroat can be found here. Incidentally, Sunshine is not actually a native Commonthroat speaker, having grown up speaking Hearthsider and learning Commonthroat from consuming popular media from the Allied Worlds.

Cheap real estate?!

It’ll just get escaped by quotes.

EDIT: it might be a better idea to use non-ascii characters.

Thanks :D One of these days I want to draw the mech he’s piloting, but I’ve been doing all these with a mouse and I suck at perspective.

Are there other mechs for sale?

What is a fish hook mass? A giant tangled wad of fish hooks?

I know what it does, but “replacement” implies the original is no longer there.

I can purchase (a/the) mechagodzilla on the open market?

What prompts the market for replacement pineal glands?

So water is rare enough to serve as currency?

Does it require an internet connection or can it operate locally? Does it need an app/account?

I’m in the US.

Salamanders are amphibians, or do you mean the mythological salamander? If they’re amphibians, that would present some interesting logistic issues. Their skin would need to stay moist and they would need to lay their eggs in water.

My description was rather poor in hindsight. Their parrot-ness is mostly in the colorful feathers, large beak designed for crushing, and long macaw-like tail feathers. They’re not zygodactyl like parrots, and probably have longer legs like an ostrich. I’m not sure where they exist on the food chain, but they’re likely social as that would make them easier to tame. They are clever and possibly tool-users in the vein of corvids (or indeed parrots).

A mix of brands. Sonoff, Thirdreality, and Hue’s own motion/light/temp sensor. The current Amazon listing for the Hue motion sensor says the Hue bridge is required, so I don’t know if they’ve locked it down.

I’m not really familiar with Deseret besides the history and concept. It was optimized for typesetting, lacking ascenders and descenders that tend to break off of metal type over time. That makes it hard to read. It sure has an aesthetic though, and I fancy it would make a great arcane glowing script flowing across a magical obelisk. Shavian was made for the pen. Every letter can be written in a single stroke without lifting the pen, and it uses ascenders and descenders to make the coastlines of words more distinct. Shavian also strives for a “mid-Atlantic” accent in its spelling. This does create some issues if, like me, your dialect uses the same first vowel in cot, caught, father, and bother.

Of the two I think Shavian has a bigger following.