Dude, what is your deal, you don't have to write ALL the words!
Well I don't have to NOT write all the words either. Okay, I got this new job, it's not forever, but for the moment. You know how in the movies there's that one guy, some country type dude in a rural area by himself, and he hears a noise like he never heard before. So what does he do, he goes out to the barn with a flashlight. Not a shotgun or a hunting rifle, not a tactical kevlar suit with an assault rifle, not an armored exoskeleton with integrated rotary multibarreled plasma cannons and smart targeting, a flashlight. He walks out to that barn and he hears a weird noise so he shines the flashlight around and says something like, "hey, whut the hell is makin that sound? You better show yerself."
All the people in the audience are like, oh man I would be GONE, like hell you would catch me going out there alone, dude get OUT of there nobody else even knows where you are, call somebody, bring a gun, something! Why would you DO THAT?!? Ugh I can't stand when people act so unrealistically, it breaks my suspension of disbelief, this movie sucks!
That's me. That's my job. I do that stuff like Aquaman talks to fish. I got this old grandmotherly lady that I did some maintenance work for, and she has to go in for a bunch of medical treatments but she wants to still have all the cows and chickens she had when she started the treatment. Or maybe, hopefully, more. But there's all these coyotes and rattlesnakes, well, they feel the exact opposite. So my job is housesit the farmhouse and stand guard on the barn and the shed and the coop. I'm working hard, all the hours I can manage, sitting on my butt and looking out the window. When I'm on active duty, I have to be vigilant, so I can't get really involved in a videogame that demands intense concentration, but I can sure sit in front of the computer and type my thoughts on the forums and hopefully some of them may be of amusement or interest to other bored schmucks. And if I type a bunch of long meaningless bullcrap of no interest to anyone it is still a tribute to the Algorithm.
Near about every night, I hear some noise that ain't like no noise I ever heard before. If I'm feeling nervous (maybe I'm literally watching a horror flick where this exact thing is happening on screen), I may go armed with a flashlight (I'm not talking about standard Astra Militarum Imperial Guardman issue neither, I'm talking a keychain Maglite), if I'm feeling brave I will probably just go.
I'm self-conscious about being that character in that horror movie every time. I can imagine the audience, or even my favorite audience viewpoint characters from my favorite movies, heckling my decision-making skills to not pick up a gun or at least like a hammer or a shovel or something.
As a small child, I saw a movie, I didn't know how formative it was to my cultural and moral development until I rewatched it as an adult. This movie taught me two important things. The first thing, is, there are RULES. Anything you don't know, you CAN know, you just have to learn how it works. There are rules, and a small child can understand them, let alone a grown adult. The second thing is the second one of those rules. It was specific to the movie it was in, but it's also general to the Real Life Cinematic Universe. That rule is, the horrors of the unknown, the abominations of the imagination, can be vanquished simply by turning on the light. I am referring of course to the Gremlins. I don't care how small or helpless you were when you first saw that movie, you were Rambo compared to that little dude Gizmo, and when it counted even that cute little furry critter would man up and get down to business if he had to carjack a Barbie Corvette to do it.
As an adult, I read a book, and I knew instantly as I read it that it put in words something I had known emotionally since I could call myself an adult. Everybody remembers the Red Dragon saying DO YOU SEE, but to me that's only like the tenth most memorable bit of the Red Dragon. To me, the best bit of the Red Dragon is the moment the personality of the Dragon is born, before poor abused terrified little Francis ever sees that painting, the moment a frightened little child realizes, "I am not afraid of the thing in the dark. I am the thing to fear in the dark."
Why do I need a gun to go out to that barn? Do they got a pirate armada out there? There any Remnant Ordos out in that barn? I would need guns for those guys. I don't need a gun, I'm armed everywhere I go, this thing between my ears is registered as a deadly weapon. Whatever is out in that barn better HOPE it vanishes when I turn on the light, because I am higher on the food chain than anything in that barn, and that food chain was forged before ever a smith pounded rocks into metal. I am Beowulf, I am Gotrek The Slayer, I am The Crocodile Hunter with a 10% less goofy-sounding accent and the sense to stay the Hell away from stingrays.
It's unthinkable to me to actually do like the horror audience is calling at me. "Man them ain't your chickens, you must be some kind of stupid to go out there and die for another man's chickens, he could get more chickens!" Naw, man. Even if they're not mine on paper, if I'm being paid to take care of them, those chickens are MINE. Just like the crew in my videogame fleet, they're MINE and so I care about them. MINE is not about possession, it's about responsibility, and whatever that strange noise is, I'm responsible for protecting what's mine since it can't protect itself.
99% of the time, that strange noise is a rattlesnake trying to get in the chicken coop or a squirrel in the feed bins or at worst a coyote trying to mess with calves. Once in a great while I will see something truly unearthly that makes me think for a second I have got over my head and I'm really in a horror flick. Then when I turn on the light it is a barn owl or a strangely-colored possum. If I ever run into something that doesn't consider a round-pointed shovel to be optional overpowered mod content that breaks vanilla balance, well, you will be spared ever reading another of my long-winded posts. If I run into a werewolf with a chainsaw or a clown demon in a hockey mask or one of them tornado-assed cloudsnakes, I'll see if I can get some photos and post them on here for you jokers. Really, I give myself better than 50/50 odds against any of them, because I've seen all their movies.
Anyway, my point is, I'm getting nearly full-time employment to sit in front of my computer and specifically NOT play video games or watch movies but do anything else that I don't mind being interrupted. If I can't rack up credits in a double bounty system maybe I can rack up some words to amuse you or knock Alex a couple of points up on the Algorithm.
I will mash the overlong stuff up in spoilers by subject though.
@Xeno
As far as Star Trek goes, I'm a Picard man from way back. As a small child, I liked anything remotely sci-fi with no discrimination, but as I got older, I found that I liked the Next Generation stuff better and the Classic stuff less. There's a couple of entries in the Next Gen that I feel hold up as good today (dated special effects and all) as they did then. And without getting hateful, let's just say that I find the non-Trek related things Picard's actor does to be far more noteworthy than anything I can think of by the other guy. Which makes me proud and which makes me embarrassed, Professor X or the Solo Album?
I do have a Trek-related confession that would get my journeyman license revoked if the Bureau found out about it. I recently, in the year 2020, watched Galaxy Quest for the first time.
Regarding The Thing, I'm not sure what you mean by the flamethrower stunts looked impressive, they were all real. It wasn't like they added stuff in post back in those days. They might have used a propane flamer and let you think it was a jellied flamer, but all the flames were entirely physical. That one dynamite explosion was real, where Mac throws a stick of dynamite into a fire, just Kurt Russell surviving an explosion at medium-close range and being glad they got the shot the first time so they didn't have to do it again.
Regarding the environmental concerns, they drag trash out and burn it
right now in rural areas. Where I'm at, it's not illegal to burn trash outdoors outside city limits unless there's an orange or red fire warning from a drought. In the summer, a lot of the farmers around here set their pine woods on fire on purpose to burn off the underbrush, so then there's not uncontrolled wildfires during the dry fall season. I'm out here looking at woods blazing aflame all proud like, "I did that." Not literally right this minute, but like two years ago at a different job. Why am I riding around on a four-wheeler with a flamethrower? I'm not auditioning for the Mad Max sequel, I'm practicing responsible environmental stewardship and wildlife conservation. With a flamethrower. The Fish and Game people and the agricultural inspectors know about this and they don't disapprove. If I'm not spraying DDT or dispensing sheep dip as a cure for respiratory ailments they could care less.
Gas Town Racetrack Five Miles Long
https://imgur.com/AdQeXMZThis is not actually me, it is some random guy I saw on the Internet, but it's close enough that you get the idea. My 4x4 is green and I had a fuel tank strung on the front instead of the toolbox and I had the flame wand in my left hand instead of mounted on the vehicle. Also I was wearing a blue baseball cap instead of a hard hat. In 2021, there were a few weeks in the summer that I made more hours doing this than any other job. They PAID ME to do this like you get paid at your job. They coulda tricked me into paying them if they told me it was a Fury Road LARPing event.
Dune
I've read, what, the first four books in the series? I saw the oldest Dune, the one with Bowie, and I could have sworn there was a TV series in the late 90s or early 2000s that I saw when it was new. Sometimes I have these insufferable nerdlord nitpicks about something that keeps me from fully enjoying a franchise and I voluntarily confess to being an insufferable nerdlord about the Dune shields. Everyone that cares about Dune has had the argument already, and I'm not trying to harp on endlessly, I seriously don't want to troll Dune fans, but it's like Star Wars and 40K have better narrative justifications for swordfights on a battlefield where accurate firearms and autonomous drones exist. It's not even that I can lead an army of neanderthals or Roman irregulars to beat a Dune-shielded army, it's the suicide nuke thing. The idea of an invention that destabilizes society to that extent is more horrifying than all their AIs and personality recordings. On one hand, it's useful protection during squad-level combat actions from nearly all projectile weapons, the 25th-century version of Kevlar, on the other hand it gives every Pather or lunatic with a grudge an RNG suitcase nuke.
It's a shame, and I know it's my problem, not the franchise's problem, because the books that I read did have a lot of interesting things to say about the moral and social implications of AIs and personality recordings and artificial life extensions and transhumanism and whatnot.
John Wick
Now I am all about any movie where some kung-fu badass has a ninja fight with fifteen goons with once and kicks all their asses even though the goons have body armor and machine guns. I am all about some amazing stunts and some stunning sets and mastercraft camerawork. My own personal theory is that the estimable Mr Reeves saw that one Saturday Night Live skit that was a meme for years where Tobey Maguire was like "I know Kung Fu" and he was so mad about it that he went up in the mountains and trained with ninjas and took special ops courses with Jason Bourne type dudes and came back a legit kung fu badass. The major flaw in my theory is that Mr Reeves doesn't seem like the sort to get that mad about anything unless you kicked a puppy in front of him but he definitely put in some serious work between the original Matrix Movies and the modern day.
But once again, there's this insufferable nerdlord hangup on my part that ruins the entire franchise for me. I would notice this even if I had only read one book of ancient mythology or read one comic book with wizards in it. But like John said to the Terminator, "all of them, I think." I know what the [REDACTEDING] Baba Yaga is and I know the Baba Yaga ain't no [REDACTEDING] boogeyman. This ruins the entire greater John Wick mythology for me, I could watch a ballet of violence all day and preorder the DVD of the sequel, but I don't care the slightest bit about Al Swearingen's Assassin Hotel or the guild of assassins or the secret world or any of that. If they would keep making John Wick movies that were just about this dude doing a kickflip McTwist double 360 reload melee kill on five guys at once, I would love them, but they want to have this whole John Wick franchise when I only care about John Wick. I have only seen the first two.
There's this other Keanu flick that is right up my alley, and nobody has ever heard of it. Off the top of my head, the best movie I want to put on not only for spectacle but for style, is The Man of Tai Chi. This guy Tiger Chen trained Keanu for The Matrix so to pay him back once he became a big time star and could direct his own pictures, he made his own flick where Tiger is the main character of a Mortal Kombat tournament where Shang Tsung is using reality TV instead of evil magic to try to force Tiger to use his Tai Chi Peace Fatality. As a director, Keanu's command of the language of color and motion and light and violence is impressive, and I have to wonder how much of his own stunt work he did. The Man of Tai Chi is not trying to get me to care about their franchise, they already have that and it's called all the classic kung-fu flicks since forever all the way up to Kung Fu Hustle and plus all the classic kung-fu videogames since forever as well, or at least a fair few of them.
@Mortrag:
About the books, well, you didn't give me any titles to work with so I'll just come up with my own. You're reading my novel on autism right now. The only physical paper book I've read lately was a collection of Michael Shea short stories. I heard they turned one of my favorites by him, The Autopsy, into a show, but I haven't seen it. I thought having read that story that Shea was attempting to depict nonhuman intelligent life, but then I read the rest of his stories and I realized that is just how that dude thinks. That little sucker is the most terrifying and evil plate of spaghetti in literature as far as I know.
About the politics, I don't know of any discussion on here but it's not banned. Surely you can't get in trouble for mentioning without even saying how you feel about it. I'll go a little further. Without making any partisan statements for or against any real-life side or explicitly mentioning any real-life events from the past half-century, I will say that my father came to America as a small child, an immigrant from Latvia. So I do have some relatives in that region and I do have some strongly partisan feelings on that real-life issue which I shall not bring onto the forums, there are literally millions of places on the Net more appropriate for that. However, I can talk around corners and in fact explicitly relate it to StarSector.
Real Live Politics And Imaginary Moral Horror
In my life, I have spent a lot of time playing videogames. At this point, I have probably spent more hours playing StarSector than any other video game. StarSector is the greatest video game ever and it's not even done yet. There's media that attempts to make you feel complicit in evil acts it depicts. Cabin In The Woods, Funny Games, Spec Ops The Line are three examples I assume anybody is familiar with. But what those entries play at, StarSector does for real. Something with a linear story, I can watch Cabin In The Woods or I can not watch it, I can finish Spec Ops or turn it off, but whatever I'm supposedly "complicit" in has been chosen for me.
My latest campaign included the Xhan mod and Alfonzo's modset. Both of these mods have unfair overpowered optional bossfights in remote reaches, Lovecraftian abominations that violate not only the laws of physics but question moral precepts as well. Now these bossfights naturally have some sweet loot, plus I'm always wanting a challenge in a video game and I've beat the vanilla bossfights a dozen times each, more for some of them, so naturally I fly out to the corner of the galaxy and fight Cyborg Cthulhu.
Man, that guy's hard, I got my face kicked down my throat by that guy. Oh well, I'll come back once I get a flawless nanoforge and about six battleships. Okay let's try it again a few hours later. Man, that guy's still hard. Reload. Man that guy seems impossible. Reload. Good Lord how do you even damage this guy? Reload. Okay here we go I got this, what if I lead with my flagship and th- Oh never mind. Reload. This time we got 'im for sure. All right, got you. Sweet, I got both of the Gravity Blasters to drop this time. (But with more cursing.)
That's how it is to me in real life. I know that thing can be beat, it's got hull points the same as anything else, everything has rules and once you figure out the rules, it's not scary, it's just beautiful and you may feel sorry for it or not while you kill it and then you get sweet loot. (I feel sorry for rattlesnakes and not sorry for Thousand Eyes.)
I just straight up have a moral exemption for fictional acts performed in video games. Good thing, too, or I couldn't look myself in the eyes when I brush my teeth. What does going to fight a Hypershunt let alone the worse things in mods make me if StarSector was real? Hey there's this thing, and it might just be a powerful product of high technology, but then again it might be a fundamental refutation of all known scientific and moral laws, and I know when I signed you up you thought you were going to keep terrorists and pirates out of the skies of your family's planet, but I'm going to go fight that thing. It's not like I even know I can win this time, but I know I can win eventually, and I know it will cost a whole lot of casualties and the industrial output of this faction I'm ruling for years, and even though all those lives and money matter to me more because they're MINE, hey, sweet loot in the videogame. I can get more imaginary crewmen and more imaginary money, it's just a video game. My faction will replace my losses without me even lifting a finger, I can go make a sandwich and the game will keep going without me if I want.
This isn't even necessarily mod content, it's vanilla StarSector. You know, this faction is really getting on my nerves with these guys attacking my trade fleets. I think I'm going to go satbomb their planet, it's not like they can do anything about it and it will stop the attacks, probably. I know those imaginary pirates have imaginary families on that station, that's why I'm blowing it up, to wipe out all of them, not just the ones attacking my fleet at this moment. These terrorists over here, I can't ever wipe them entirely out, but I can certainly retaliate for this irritating -2 stability on my main industrial planet by with a few choice precision attacks against their infrastructure and food production. Serves them right, now they're wracked with famine and the value of my faction's trade exports are up for the next couple of months. Those millions of imaginary civilians that might be slightly inconvenienced (or die horribly) from my actions, what do I care about them? They're numbers in a computer, they're imaginary people in a videogame and they're not even MINE.
That guy you see on the news in real-life current events, that guy you hate whose name I'm not going to say, some people think, what kind of person could do that? I know. I know this guy Hugo Kaboom in this videogame, he's killed more people and committed more war crimes than that guy on the news. No, there's nothing evil about this game, you should play it, it's my favorite video game of all time.
