Is this a new trend?

[Batman]

OSF is 'Other SciFi' ,i.e. this forum.
And an acronym guide might actually be a worthwhile idea, especially for the non-native speakers.

[Wing Commander MAD]

Once upon a time Star Wars vs Star Trek was the primary forum, with Pure SW, Pure ST, and Other Science Fiction being subforums. At some point it was decided to rearrange the layout as SW vs ST was largely dead and didn't deserve such a prominent position due declining activity (compared to the others). I believe this was sometime during my hiatus from the site for college, so 05 - 09 time-frame*. Technically, OSF doesn't exist anymore, but hey I still remember when pure SW and pure ST were quite active and there still was decent traffic in the versus forum. Now one could seriously consider archiving the Fiction portions of the board.

Note: Technically, I lurked for quite awhile before joining, and I started lurking again during the months leading up to the '08 Presidential Elections. Compared to now, the site used see much more activity and was huge time sink, a bad thing for when your getting a degree in CompSci.

[BlissAuthority]

Oh, and it's "Laser." An acronym for "Light Amplification via Stimulated Emission of Radiation." Spelling it with a Z is incorrect. This is one of the things that gets me into Hermione-Level Pedantry Mode real fast.

They're two different things. Lasers travel at the speed of light, are only visible when travelling through a non-transparent medium, and are good for eye surgery and entertaining your cat. Lazers are big glowy globs that are plainly visible, travel slower than a bullet and make things go boom.

Don't call a rabbit a smerp and don't call a blaster a lazer, then.

[Sarevok]

LASERs were futuristic and only vaguely defined in the minds of the audiences of the past. Nowadays almost everyone has seen a LASER being used in real life. LASER- pointers, rangefinders, even fucking levels use them nowadays. At the same time, military applications have failed time and again and video of their tests is visually underwhelming. So yeah, I can't see why LASERs went out of style, at all.

Not exactly. Military lasers are now becoming practical. Popular science fiction is turning around to reflect what military lasers do in real world. Instead of glowy bolts "laser" weapons like the SPARTAN laser now correctly shoot lightspeed beams of short duration pulses.

Another impact of real world developments on science fiction is railguns. They are becoming popular as ever. In test videos they certainly look very impressive.