'Imperial Culture' (non-canonista)

[jason taylor]

Restricted games.

This is a custom of exploiting athletic events for revenue production. Tournaments will be restricted to restricted attendees often the entourage of a given state's cultural atache.

The purpose of this is to allow the games to be taped and released to the public in a controlled manner. Auctioning the right of broadcast provides revenue and incidentally provides gaming halls a soft incentive to abide by licensing requirements.

Adventures can involve sneaking into games to get an illegal recording, being hijacked on the courier carrying the recording, government intrigue around a tournament, underworld intrigue around a tournament (insert joke about similarity), etc.

[jason taylor]

Artemis Hall:

When the first Lunar Base on the South Pole of Luna was built, it was first a lone outpost. This evolved into Aldrin City. When artificial environment technology was satisfactory and transport regular enough to make luxuries available, Artemis Hall was built. This was a simple Cafe, Bar, and Diner. It's fare was attractive and became better recommended as time went on. It was also know for such gimmicks as a low-grav gymnasium.

As the owner grew prosperous he built Artemis Palace, a first class hotel. Later after the conquest of Nusku, Artemis Tower was built exploiting not only the friendly environment but the possibilities of grav archetecture.

Unfortunately the overhead outgrew the demand and the original owners were bankrupted. The chain was then purchased by a Terran public/private corporation to provide liberty for merchant and naval officers.

The original Artemis Hall, Artemis Palace, and Artemis Tower are still there, kept as cultural treasures. All three have had reproductions elsewhere in known space. Under Imperial Law a cultural landmark is trademarked and reproductions have to be licensed. As the original owner is not available to claim the official owner is the Emperor and as with other similar historic sites permission can be requested of the appropriate local noble.

[jason taylor]

Dataforest:

A term invented by the Nuskan social philosopher Dr. Enli Johnson during the Interstellar Wars era. It comes of the realization that the advent of modern computers made it no longer possible to separate packages of data as conveniently as when they were bound by the constraints of such mediums as paper. For instance any new literary production could have not only internal links but links with material outside it's supposed borders and they were mechanically indistinguishable. Enli used the analogy of an ecology, or of a family based society where the border between one family and another is arbitrary and imposed by custom as everyone is technically related. He distinguished from the concept of cyberspace (whatever name it went under on a given world), by accepting all media as part of the data forest not just electronic, and all genres, not distinguishing between fiction and nonfiction or the different genres of each in this regard. However Enli also created the useful concept of a "datagrove", which is material said to share the same characteristics such as sharing an author or publisher. The datagrove system is a matter of convenience as there are different ways to classify; for instance author X may declare two clusters of works that happen to be linked as one datagrove or two (and sometimes patent law specifies that, giving the author control over filing). Another common usage is the works of an author as published on one planet or another, or different publishers of the same author.

The custom has remained in place over the ages in libraries across the stars as it was so obviously useful. It remains a technique to give order as websurfers jump seemlessly from one publication to another.

Another metaphor used by Enli was the "databurg" and using "datahalls" in place of the sylven analogy.

Not coincidently it is common for the net on many worlds to create use an screen image of either a forest or a city as a representation of the navigation of cyberspace. Sometimes both images are used.

[jason taylor]

Web subscription:

Many worlds charge for the use of the web. Sometimes it is a state imposed tax for the straightforward purpose of gaining revenue. At other times it is similar to a luxury tax, or a tax on narcotics:it is meant to discourage immoderate use of something felt to be ambiguously moral or potentially addictive, or distracting from fruitful labor. Alternatively some governments are constitutionally forbidden to tax the datanet or bound to tax impartially to limit the infringing on free exchange of information. This has caused ideological conflict in many worlds.

Another source of subscription is the servers themselves who often charge ordinary users as well as advertisers, sometimes charging more for given sites. One of the services often paid for is secrecy. There are many ways to do this from elaborate cryptography, to roundabout series of cash transfers to paying in solid currency (some users go to the point of wearing a disguise when they do so; covert operatives are of course stereotyped as doing so but there are plenty of ordinary users who do).

On worlds with an elaborate code of hospitality, guarding a users secrecy is considered a point of honor. This is notably the case on Tizon.