There’s also A Lonely Galaxy wiki with all the stories as well as other info, but updating it is slow going.

My stories are probably best viewed on the corresponding CBB thread

Here’s a rough timeline:

• 100,000 years before present (BP): The dawn of sapience
• 95,000 BP: Yinrih achieve spaceflight
• 67,000 BP: the Bright Way commercializes, start of the Age of Decadence
• The Farspeaker’s Apprentice takes place in the middle of this period
• The Artificer’s Litter is (likely) fictional, but the head referenced in the story is built during this time and the story was written after the War of Dissolution, which is why it clarifies that the Bright Way is headquartered on Yih and not Hearthside.
• 34,000 BP: the War of Dissolution
• RTFM occurs at the close of the war after the alliance between the Partisans and Pious Dissolutionists has collapsed.
• The Spacer Confederacy occurs some time around the mid 18th century AD when Wayfarers’ Haven is founded.
• Present Day
• First Contact which I haven’t posted here, takes place in the generic “present day”. Old lore had the Dewfall land in 2020 during the pandemic, and since 2020 was already such a crazy year everyone just shrugged and said “sure, why not” at the news that aliens have landed.
• The Angel and the Ape occurs a month or two after First Contact. The missionaries are still getting to know humanity and learning English.
• Beating the Heat and The Tornado occur on the same day, three to five months after First Contact.
• Are we as Mayflies? happens during that summer The missionaries still assume that it will take another 250 years for more yinrih to arrive.
• The Mass Router occurs about a year after First Contact
• The Ansible happens a few days later
• Everybody Poops Together and The House of Friendship occur years later after the mass router has made travel between Sol and Focus trivial.
• An Alien Through Alien Eyes is in-universe fiction written some time before the invention of the mass router, since Sunbeam mentions taking hundreds of years to travel from Focus to the bugs’ planet.
• Meanwhile, in an Alternate Universe… is, well, an alternate universe where Earth and humanity are the subjects of a yinrih’s conworld instead of the other way around. It takes place in one of Welkinstead’s floating cities, so it happens some time during the age of decadence or post war period.

This seems to have worked thank you.

I’ve tried holding the RST button but it does the same as a quick press. The on/off switch can’t be held.

Slightly off topic but I’m impressed you found this thread buried so far down. I was just complaining about how this style of consolidated long term discussion doesn’t work in Lemmy and other Redditlikes, which is why I abandoned this post in favor of just making new posts.

Now, on to your question. Commonthroat uses a base 12 number system because the majority of its speakers are surface-dwellers who primarily use their forefeet to manipulate objects. Outlander uses a base 24 system because there are far more speakers who are spacers living in zero-G who can use all four paws.

Quoting from the Outlander scratchpad thread on the CBB forum:

After reading the Wikipedia article on Classical Nahuatl, I was captivated by the fact that cardinal numbers are transparently derived from other words. I think this will be the case with Outlander. Further, since both Moonlitter and Partisan Territory have a large population of spacers, Outlander will have a base-24 number system for larger numbers, with numbers 1-24 clearly deriving from anatomical terms for digits and paws.

Here’s what I have from the auto-generated Swadesh list:

one: snl two: qdc three: rMn four: sMP five: rC

When Outlanders count, they start with the left forepaw curled into a fist, with the inner thumb in front of the other digits and the outer thumb behind. For each number from one to six, a digit is uncurled, starting with the writing claw, then each digit from medial to lateral. The inner thumb is opened next representing five, and the outer thumb last for number six. This process continues with the right forepaw for numbers seven to twelve.

For surface dwellers, that’s all the fingers they can practically use while reared up on the hind feet, but since the Outlands contains a large population of spacers, who use all 24 digits to count, the number system for the language as a whole reflects the spacer usage. When counting on the rear paws, the ankles are rotated 180 degrees such that the palm of the paw is facing outward (such a range of motion is common in arboreal animals).

The word for six is <rkg>, derived from <rKG> paw. For numbers seven-twelve, the numbers for one to six are suffixed with a chuff, from a reduced form of <smnr> (right)

six: rkg seven: snlr eight: qdcr nine: rMnr ten: sMPr eleven: rCr twelve: rkgr

For numbers 13 to 23, the corresponding lower numbers are prefixed with <geg(s)->. The etymology is obscure, but it likely relates to the word for the palmar pads, reflecting the state of the paws when counting higher numbers, with all four palms facing outward showing the pads. The prefix is a yip stem. The final yip is elided in front of another yip, and a huff or chuff of the following syllable is geminated.

The expected word *<gegrrkgr> for twenty four is sometimes seen when people are imitating puppyish speech patterns, similar to words like ninty-eleven for 101. The usual term is <qGq>, which is a transparent derivative of <qG> (palm). <qGq>, when used in the numeral sense, can itself be pluralized to yield <qGqql< “twenty-fours” to mean multiple sets of 24.

thirteen: gegsnl fourteen: gegqqdc fifteen: gegrrMn sixteen: gegsMP seventeen: gegrrC eighteen: gegrrkg nineteen: gegsnlr twenty: gegqqdcr twenty one: gegrrMnr twenty two: gegsMPr twenty three: gegrrCr twenty four: *gegrrkgr, qGq

For even higher numbers, the word <qgjr> (with/and) is used to join a lower numbers to <qGq>. 25 is <snl qgjr qGq>, “24 with one” 26 is <qdc qgjr qGq> “24 with two” and so on. <qgjr> is frequently dropped to yield <snl qGq> and so on.

So IT guys are antennas.

Regarding the uplifted chimps, since chimps are arboreal they may have a better conception of 3D space compared to humans, though perhaps not as much as the dolphins.

Yinrih are very arboreal but very not bipedal, so they don’t use artificial gravity in their spacecraft. I often describe their orbital colonies as being like a large shopping mall if it were a level in the game Descent.

Do the dolphins need to be underwater? How do they manipulate controls with no prehensile extremities? Nonhumanoid ergonomics are very much my thing.

Already do that via a custom domain and SimpleLogin/Proton.

Reject TV. Return to monitor. Yeah monitors don’t come in the same sizes as TVs, but if you just want something that shows you whatever you feed its video ports without any bloat than a monitor works great.

Nothing pops a vein quite like companies acting like a one-time expense should be a monthly fee. Paying monthly for heated seats in certain cars is where I first heard of this. They already put the hardware in the car. I guarantee they already charged you for the parts and labor to put in those heated seats when you bought the vehicle. No way they’re losing money on it in the hopes you start paying them.

But I’ll get off my owner’s rights soapbox now.

I’ll have to try that smart plug idea. I have some heavy duty Z-wave plugs I used for Christmas decorations last year and that would work great for the fridge.

For those who are saying I shouldn’t have bought these half-baked smart appliances, I agree. But I wasn’t always this aware of the privacy issues involved. The washer and dryer were purchased before I grasped how problematic cloud-connected always online IoT devices are, and as mentioned in the OP the ability to tell me when my laundry was done seemed like a genuinely useful feature. In the case of the fridge it was an emergency replacement and we took what fit the preexisting niche in our kitchen, and the complete lack of output on the fridge itself necessitated the app.

Washer dryer and fridge are TCP only

Oi! ya got a loicense for that walkin’ war machine?!

At Focus, Commonthroat is the most widely spoken language. It is the descendent of the administrative language used by the clergy of the Bright Way during the Age of Decadence, when the clergy ruled the entire system as a cyberpunk-esque megacorp. When the secular governments of the inner planets that would become the Allied Worlds (AW) re-asserted themselves after the War of Dissolution, they chose the already prestigious Commonthroat as a standard language.

As the AW grew from a mere treaty of mutual defense to an ever more economically integrated union, other languages were displaced by Commonthroat. At the time of First Contact there are only three “dialects with an army and navy” as it were. The holy world of Hearthside never joined the AW despite being the innermost planet, so they retain a unique Hearthsider language. The Partisans living in Focus’s Kuiper belt, who are the principle reason the inner planets formed the AW in the first place, speak a language called Outlander. The planet Moonlitter (really its many moons) also speak a different dialect of Outlander. Partisan Territory (PT) and Moonlitter are in a relationship analogous to Taiwan and the PRC or North and South Korea.

Outlander is the most vigorous language that isn’t Commonthroat, ironically thanks to the hyper-nationalist policies of the Partisan government which prevent the encroachment of AW popular media. Pups on both Hearthside and Moonlitter grow up consuming said AW media, and thus have a decent grasp of Commonthroat. Commonthroat is universally taught as a second language everywhere that isn’t PT.

Predating all of these by a hundred millennia is Primordial, the yinrih’s written-only language that evolved directly out of a scent-marking behavior. It fills the role of a sacred language in the Bright Way, and is taught in seminaries to aspiring hearthkeepers. Because yinrih evolved writing directly rather than inventing it, they have a written history that extends back to the dawn of sapience.

Meanwhile, the sociolinguistic situation on Earth at the time of First Contact reflects the conditions of today. English reigns as the de facto standard, with other languages like Spanish and Mandarin being regionally important.

Yinrih and humans cannot directly produce one-another’s speech sounds. That doesn’t stop Terraboos obsessed with human culture from trying though. Ideally, both parties in a conversation speak their own mother tongue (or native throat in the yinrih’s case) while the listener passively translates. If one party is monolingual, the bilingual party must use a speech synthesizer to reproduce the other species’ language.

And some lore for the curious

Both the switch and the WAP are Ubiquiti, a reputable brand. The AP does not use passive PoE.

Cat6 per the listing on Amazon, but I don’t trust it.