Bay 12 Games Forum

So, to create "interesting" military sci fi, you just create interesting characters and put them in the same uniform. Like all other career-based sitcoms and dramas.  Then again, I like military fiction a lot, so my taste might not be... normal.

The problem is that a lot of milfic authors, and mil-scifi in particular (David Weber is a notable offender here), tend to rely very hard on archetypes. They just drop in the Salty Noncom or the Shiny New Officer or the Chickenshit Asshole and call it a day.

Sci fi societies are often parodies or satire of real world societies at the time. I assumed Starship Troopers was satirizing the militant patriotism of the US during the cold war.

The original book (which bears only a passing resemblance to the movie) was basically playing with the idea of "instead of forcing people to vote, what if you only let people vote after they proved they cared". It is Starship Troopers partly because Heinlein was also interested in the then-current debate of conscript vs all-volunteer military, but mostly because Starship Government Clerks would have been a much duller book.

IIRC in the book it wasn't that only soldiers could vote, but only people who had done a period of service for the nation could vote. I think you could also do work in administration or some third branch if the military side of things didn't appeal or you weren't suited for it. It's also much less cannon-foddery in nature for the military stuff.

Yes. There's a specific scene that is in both the book and movie that had very different meaning in the book.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpX-vtW2f54

In the book the "mobile infantry made me the man I am today" guy had far more extensive injuries, and had extremely crude prosthetics... while working. He had very good artificial limb replacements, but wasn't allowed to wear them on duty because his explicit job was to be a "THIS COULD HAPPEN TO YOU, DON'T JOIN THE MILITARY JUST BECAUSE IT IS THE MOST DIRECT PATH TO A VOTE" warning. People who just wanted the vote were Strongly Encouraged to become a clerk or something instead.

It would also be a mistake to claim that the book was "advocating" that society. Heinlein wrote many books with many fictional societies, all of which were completely and utterly incompatible. Evan accounting for him writing them at different stages of life, it is very unlikely that anyone could sincerly advocate for the libertarian utopia of Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, the highly organized society of Starship Troopers, and whatever-the-hell Beyond This Horizon was.

The plan here is how they would interface with the regular staff, because they're required by law to provide a specific guard detail for any living person who's held the office of President.

Quote from: pisskop on April 22, 2024, 07:18:26 am

Whoa, lets get too fond of our current education system now.  The vast swathe of americans are sitting there making memes about how eager they are to forget basic algebra.

Why?

Though I once heard that you Americans don't like mathematics but it seeems strange to make memes about the basic algebra .

Tomorrow I had to catch up the school bus at 7 : 25 , today I finished a 3 kilometers' long-run test , the time I spent is 14:50 , interestingly, "1450" is a nickname for us to describe the traitors who works online to spread something harmful to our country .

I don't know how Chinese education works as a comparison, but US compulsory education (13 years from the age of 5-6 to 18-19) is deliberately built on breadth. You're expected to learn the fundamentals of all kinds of fields so that you can hit the ground running no matter what you decide to spend your life doing (and also so you have some basic literacy for just about every field). In practice, how well this works is extremely variable, but that's the intended ideal. This means that almost everybody will spend a huge amount of time learning something that is completely useless to them the minute after they've learned it, because they won't be going into a career that uses it. If you continue your future career in something that uses a given grounding then having it will be very useful to you, but if you don't the only value is satisfying intellectual curiosity. Most kids forced to sit in a room for six hours a day instead of going out to play have far more resentment about not getting to play than they have aa fascination with learning for the sake of learning. With algebra, pretty much the furthest most people are going to routinely use (and know they're using it - things like shopping or deciding if a streaming service fits into your budget or such are algebraic in nature but they don't fit into the little mental silo called "algebra") is area, something we typically learn about in second or third grade.

This results in a lot of "man, I'm so glad I learned that the mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell! That was sooooo useful!" type memes, combined with "If only they'd found time to teach us something useful like budgeting, but I guess that it was way more important to teach us how to find the volume of a sphere" ones. As it happens, most of the "real world" things people whine about not learning were in fact taught - the person complaining just wasn't paying attention to those lessons any more than their basic biology or algebra ones.

Johnson's genuinely tried hard to actually govern. It isn't his fault he's hobbled by somebody that even the far right deride as "Moscow Marjorie".

Thank you ,maximum spin and lord shonus !
Here is another interesting one and I thought it might be even more confusing :
  timing tim ing

Another idiom

The thing that stood out to me is one of the critters involved claiming their staff spent thousands of hours researching the account, but despite that no one has any idea what the hell it is.

That. Doesn't pass a smell test. Either they're lying about not knowing what the account is, or that research needs quote marks around it and the dude just admitted to thousands of grifted manhours doing sod all on gov't dime, heh.

If the paper trail is disordered enough, needing that kind of time is entirely possible. This is especially true if there was graft or other shady shit going into creating the account (in which case there would be a deliberate effort to hide where things were coming from), but even if it is "just" years of incompetent money handling it can be a cast-iron pain in the ass to dig it out.

Been seeing ads for concealed carry holsters lately and, like.

... they're some of the dumbest ads I've ever seen in my life. 90% sure they're just pictures of folks not actually wearing a holster at all.

They're literally being designed to not show the product being sold, emperor's new clothes style stuff. Presumably they're even working, for some ungodly reason.

Most of the brands I'm familiar with don't even use a model at all for that reason, focusing their advertising on things like weapon retention and drawability. To sell on concealment, it is mostly things like "this flange breaks up the outline" instead. You were probably getting ads for the very bottom tier garbage.