|
The funny story I know about Heinlein is that apparently he spent some time figuring the safest place to build a house in the middle of the cold war because it'd be far away from every major population center and notable military target and so on, and then bragged about the location he'd chosen at some party with a bunch of government bigwigs attending. Then he went to actually settle and, oops, wouldn't you know it, that's where they decide to put NORAD.
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2023 04:58
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 27, 2024 13:39 |
|
|
Ferrinus posted:The funny story I know about Heinlein is that apparently he spent some time figuring the safest place to build a house in the middle of the cold war because it'd be far away from every major population center and notable military target and so on, and then bragged about the location he'd chosen at some party with a bunch of government bigwigs attending. Then he went to actually settle and, oops, wouldn't you know it, that's where they decide to put NORAD.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2023 05:16
|
|
|
e.fbAngry Salami posted:If this was what he was trying to communicate, he completely failed at it - there's no textual evidence to support the idea that Starship Trooper's society has any non-military paths to citizenship. When a character brings up the idea of a disabled person trying to enlist, the response is basically "Lol, how wacky, that's never come up." Service is almost entirely described in terms of physical ability and strength. Yes there is. it's explicitly stated by a recruiter that if someone blind and deaf wanted to serve, they'd find a job for them counting fuzz on caterpillars by touch. Heinlein makes it very textual that no one who wants to do the Service Guarantees Citizenship trade is turned away. Humbug Scoolbus posted:Stranger, Number of the Beast, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, I Will Fear No Evil, Farnham's Freehold, are all hard stops for me. Glory Road is where the cliff is. I have a soft spot for The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress despite its issues, but Glory Road and after is where Heinlein became a sex weird. mllaneza fucked around with this message at 05:28 on Jun 30, 2023 |
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2023 05:22
|
|
|
Glory Road is also, IIRC, just incredibly flagrant authorial self-insert. The main character is the most mary sue character I've ever read in a book, a completely flawless person (according to the author's perceptions of what that is). That was also the last Heinlein I ever read. Must have been in the late 90s I guess. It doesn't even have the excuse of being some very early work where an author is still learning how to not do that; he wrote like 20 novels before Glory Road and was already in his fifties. lol it got a hugo nomination e. from wikipedia quote:A review at SF Site by Peter D. Tillman thought the book was okay, but felt it had aged poorly in parts. While Tillman acknowledged loving the book while younger and it making a good "pulp" read, he felt that it wasted too much time on Heinlein's personal hang-ups and rants, and that the relationship between Oscar and Star was too much puerile wish-fulfillment. "Puerile wish-fulfillment" is perfect. 
Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 06:57 on Jun 30, 2023 |
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2023 06:54
|
|
|
Kwyndig posted:For once I'd like to see alien bugs depicted as something other than hostile communists, usually with a "hive mind". Where's my race of rugged individualist bugs like Goliath Beetles? Or peaceful rancher bugs like Ladybugs? Or even weird adaptive hunters like Mantids? One of the early all-CG cartoons Insektors had two factions of bugs, the ol' environmentalist theme with a bunch of hippies fighting off industrialised imperialists wanting to turn their beautiful flower forest into fuel for their industry. (and keep their queen warm) Also the Cirbizoids from Starslip are mostly pisstakes of sci-fi token aliens in general with their ridiculously complicated plot device anatomy, but also have the semi-hive mind mentality result in them being such doormats they're used as borderline slave labour just because they rarely ever say no. Bar Crow posted:This is correct. The elaborately rigged systems are just ways to keep their hands clean. They are designed to produce a single predetermined outcome. If somehow they don’t work as designed, the entire farce is dropped and the dictates of capital are enforced with violence. There is no amount of rules lawyering that let you win the rigged game. Yep, though it's hard to tell whether this is on purpose, or meant to be a good or bad thing in the mind of the author. The neat intersection of political correctness and authoritarianism where there's a facade of fairness hiding ultimately unaccountable authorities carefully preserving the status quo with the excuse that the underclasses just don't want it hard enough. Occasional outliers are allowed elevation in a manner that makes sure they become invested in said status quo. And of course it's also a system prone to collapse under its own contradictions as soon as it meets any actual challenge because it's institutionally incapable of actually recognising problems, let alone responding adequately to them.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2023 08:58
|
|
|
mllaneza posted:Yes there is. it's explicitly stated by a recruiter that if someone blind and deaf wanted to serve, they'd find a job for them counting fuzz on caterpillars by touch. Heinlein makes it very textual that no one who wants to do the Service Guarantees Citizenship trade is turned away. It is there in the literal text, but somewhere in Kyle Kallgren's 4.5-hour video essay series on Starship Troopers, Verhoeven, fascism, and his own relation to his family and the text, he notes that this is mentioned but not really the focus, and Heinlein's choice of attention and focus--on the military--is telling of what Heinlein intends to communicate.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2023 10:31
|
|
|
Also, "if you're stupid enough to want to participate in the government despite being one of those disableds, we'll find you a suitably stupid punitive job for your audacity" isn't really what I'd call a diversity win.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2023 10:44
|
|
|
Also rather timely given the recent Supreme Court decision. Social advancement being explicitly gatekept by submitting to a program of indoctrination designed to break down your personality as much as possible to make you obey orders above all else, and making your body a resource to be used and spent at the whim of a war machine's hierarchy.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2023 11:17
|
|
|
mllaneza posted:Glory Road is where the cliff is. I have a soft spot for The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress despite its issues, but Glory Road and after is where Heinlein became a sex weird. Friday is when he's fully off the rails, a friend in a polycule claiming that novel is what gives them a bad name, at least among sci-fi fans.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2023 14:22
|
|
|
Runa posted:Considering Verhoeven lived through the Nazi occupation of his home country and was able to smell fashy vibes a mile away, I'm willing to cut him a lot of slack on the topic. Funny you should say that, because per Wikipedia: quote:However, as development progressed, many aspects would be changed or removed, in part because of financial reasons, but also under Verhoeven's influence. Verhoeven tried to read the novel but "stopped after two chapters because it was so boring ... it is really quite a bad book ... it's a very right-wing book". He had Neumeier summarize the narrative for him, and found it militaristic, fascistic, and overly supportive of armed conflict, which clashed with Verhoeven's childhood experiences in the German-occupied Netherlands during World War II. Verhoeven determined that he could use the basic plot to satirize and undermine the book's themes by deconstructing the concepts of totalitarianism, fascism, and militarism, saying: "All the way through I wanted the audience to be asking, 'Are these people crazy?'"
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2023 15:34
|
|
|
There is also an interesting contrast in military technology and tactics between Heinlein’s fascist fantasy and Verhoeven's fascist reality. Heinlein imagines handfuls of wunderwaffen winning battles. Complex, all purpose weapons operated by a single person to minimize labor costs. Verhoeven shows light infantry dropped onto the battlefield to cause trouble and find targets for air strikes. Unlimited air supremacy is the required assumption to paper over the fact that privatization has rotted away the state’s capacity for war.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2023 16:45
|
|
|
Bar Crow posted:This is correct. The elaborately rigged systems are just ways to keep their hands clean. They are designed to produce a single predetermined outcome. If somehow they don’t work as designed, the entire farce is dropped and the dictates of capital are enforced with violence. There is no amount of rules lawyering that let you win the rigged game. I think this is how the system in Starship Troopers would work out, but not how Heinlein envisioned it working out. He imagined a democracy/republic where the voters were all Certified Responsible Citizens and would therefore know better than to vote themselves bread and circuses. I see a parallel there to Ayn Rand's vision of capitalism, which does not turn into a plutocratic monopolistic deregulated hellscape because she wrote the book and said so. Neither one was personally a fascist, but because they were writing characters who do not behave the way human beings seem to in the real world, they wrote settings that would devolve that way.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2023 17:33
|
|
|
The "vote themselves bread and circuses" line from people like Heinlein and Pournelle makes me grind my teeth. If you examine at the fall of empires, it was always because of the greed and sloth of the elites, not the masses. They take this very outdated "old British man smoking a pipe in an overstuffed armchair" where you just swallow whole the opinions of the Roman senatorial class.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2023 17:41
|
|
|
They were both already considered giants in their field at the age they were writing these novels, other authors and millions of fans in the SF community fawned over them. So while authors in the 1960s were not exactly racking in giant amounts of money, they were effectively elites within their peer groups at that time. It makes sense that a lot of them went hard on defending the supposed meritocracy in which they'd ascended (one which of course heavily discriminated against women and was practically devoid of people of color) and had Opinions about the dangers of the unwashed masses getting too uppity.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2023 18:09
|
|
|
How are they supposed to be like us, the super smartiest, if they aren't even reading Asimov?
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2023 18:27
|
|
|
Sorry to bumble in mid-derail, but Leperflesh has indicated that I might find some help here. I'm trying to sell some miniatures at a fair price, but I have no idea how to figure out said fair price. Some of them are on eBay at  prices, but that they're still there tells me the prices may be too high, so I'm hoping someone here can help. The second part is finding somewhere to sell; I'm open to SA Mart, but I've never used it. eBay is usurious with its 11% fees and I'd like to avoid it. To boot, I'm in Austria.#1 is a box of Reaper minis, unpainted, from their first Kickstarter in 2012.  This seems to be this pledge, minus the weird biker lady. #2 is a ton of the original incarnation of the Games Workshop Lord of the Rings tabletop game. German rulebooks.        Any help much appreciated - thanks! gschmidl fucked around with this message at 20:18 on Jun 30, 2023 |
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2023 20:14
|
|
|
Kwyndig posted:For once I'd like to see alien bugs depicted as something other than hostile communists, usually with a "hive mind". Where's my race of rugged individualist bugs like Goliath Beetles? Or peaceful rancher bugs like Ladybugs? Or even weird adaptive hunters like Mantids? Learning the World has pretty cool bug people.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2023 20:34
|
|
|
World Tree is a fantasy game, but it has a pretty good race of cricket-people who are also common and well-integrated into society, which is kind of neat -- I feel like even a lot of high-weirdness fantasy settings will tend to have insect-people as inscrutable outsiders, but the World Tree ones are only inscrutable insofar as they're kind of rural and very Minnesota Nice. I should probably just bite the bullet and F&F that game already. It's very dense and hasn't always aged well, but there's some interesting stuff there.
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2023 22:45
|
|
|
Antivehicular posted:World Tree is a fantasy game, but it has a pretty good race of cricket-people who are also common and well-integrated into society, which is kind of neat -- I feel like even a lot of high-weirdness fantasy settings will tend to have insect-people as inscrutable outsiders, but the World Tree ones are only inscrutable insofar as they're kind of rural and very Minnesota Nice. Is that the one with the clobberin' cephalopods?
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2023 23:08
|
|
|
Yeah, it's got the floating heptapods who are club-and-shield specialists, they're great
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2023 23:15
|
|
|
It’s technically been done : https://writeups.letsyouandhimfight.com/tendales/world-tree-a-roleplaying-game-of-species-and-civilization/ But that’s meant as warning and not discouragement. Please do!
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2023 00:00
|
|
|
Yeah, I saw that, but it looks like it didn't finish? I'll have to see how far that writeup got -- if it didn't get to the magic/gods, there's a ton there that hasn't been covered on SA at all.
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2023 00:22
|
|
|
Antivehicular posted:Yeah, I saw that, but it looks like it didn't finish? I'll have to see how far that writeup got -- if it didn't get to the magic/gods, there's a ton there that hasn't been covered on SA at all. O word. Yes, please do. I love seeing multiple takes on the same thing to compare and more is even better.
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2023 00:33
|
|
|
Yeah, I was a little disappointed that the writeup ended right before the magic section.
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2023 00:37
|
|
|
Kwyndig posted:For once I'd like to see alien bugs depicted as something other than hostile communists, usually with a "hive mind". Where's my race of rugged individualist bugs like Goliath Beetles? Or peaceful rancher bugs like Ladybugs? Or even weird adaptive hunters like Mantids?
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2023 00:43
|
|
|
gschmidl posted:Sorry to bumble in mid-derail, but Leperflesh has indicated that I might find some help here. I could not begin to help on this, but I want to say "those look good and I'm jealous."
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2023 01:06
|
|
|
Adding to the 'please do a writeup of World Tree' chorus
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2023 08:10
|
|
|
Halloween Jack posted:The "vote themselves bread and circuses" line from people like Heinlein and Pournelle makes me grind my teeth. If you examine at the fall of empires, it was always because of the greed and sloth of the elites, not the masses. They take this very outdated "old British man smoking a pipe in an overstuffed armchair" where you just swallow whole the opinions of the Roman senatorial class. That goes way back, a 'tyrant' in Greek parlance often meant someone who pandered to the masses rather than listening exclusively to the obviously qualified noble elites. Reigning in the greed and power of elites through debt jubilees was a regular thing in ancient times. Splicer posted:The bug people in wildsea are human sized colonies of spiders wearing people clothes if that helps. Spiders-man! (who is canon)
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2023 08:33
|
|
|
Hey goons! It's the PocketQuest 2023 Game Jam. If you're interested in a co-operative worldbuilding game set in a vast space-opera setting, please check out my entry: THE ODDER REACHES! (All comments/reviews much appreciated) Calico Heart fucked around with this message at 23:09 on Jul 1, 2023 |
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2023 23:06
|
|
|
Calico Heart posted:Hey goons! It's the PocketQuest 2023 Game Jam. If you're interested in a co-operative worldbuilding game set in a vast space-opera setting, please check out my entry: THE ODDER REACHES! Done. I'll read it later tonight (unless it's really big).
|
|
#
?
Jul 2, 2023 00:07
|
|
|
Hey TG thread, is there a name for the problem where if one of the players plays badly, it hurts the rest of the players in the game? Like if one player in monopoly sells all of their properties for a buck to another player, or if one person busts out early in poker and someone now has twice as many chips as everyone else.
|
|
#
?
Jul 2, 2023 00:08
|
|
|
i generally call it kingmaking, though that sort of implies a level of intentionality. the end result is the same though
|
|
#
?
Jul 2, 2023 00:14
|
|
|
ninjoatse.cx posted:Hey TG thread, is there a name for the problem where if one of the players plays badly, it hurts the rest of the players in the game? Like if one player in monopoly sells all of their properties for a buck to another player, or if one person busts out early in poker and someone now has twice as many chips as everyone else. You could just say they're hindering the game/part (in an RPG). Dan Olsen has a good video about how it's kind of rude to be bad at co-operative games (before going into a much deeper dive on the idea)
|
|
#
?
Jul 2, 2023 07:45
|
|
|
Heh, 'feeding' in MOBA terminology, for either blatant incompetence or active sabotage. Also fitting for the poker example where it specifically results in a single player gaining a large advantage.
|
|
#
?
Jul 2, 2023 10:08
|
|
|
ninjoatse.cx posted:Hey TG thread, is there a name for the problem where if one of the players plays badly, it hurts the rest of the players in the game? Like if one player in monopoly sells all of their properties for a buck to another player, or if one person busts out early in poker and someone now has twice as many chips as everyone else. Kingmaking is the term I've heard, although I believe that's actually a very specific term for a game that creates situations where a player has no chance of winning themselves, but can choose which other player will win (eg, like that monopoly player having no way to win, but a choice of which other player to sell their properties to for a buck). The original Mage Knight Dungeons I believe had this in spades - if a player was eliminated they could spend all their actions playing the monsters. Since they couldn't win, they'd just sic all the monsters on the player who eliminated them, which meant that the main part of the game became about politics.
|
|
#
?
Jul 2, 2023 19:19
|
|
|
gschmidl posted:Sorry to bumble in mid-derail, but Leperflesh has indicated that I might find some help here. Those LOTR minis are super sick and I really want them but I don't think I could afford a fair price.
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2023 03:14
|
|
|
Epi Lepi posted:Those LOTR minis are super sick and I really want them but I don't think I could afford a fair price. yeah, same especially with the shipping to the USA for me.
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2023 04:12
|
|
|
I'm also not sure how to sell any of those if you're based out of Europe. They look like really good nerd stuff, but packing those to send overseas so they don't break will cost a significant amount.
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2023 19:36
|
|
|
We do have some Eurogoons in TG, and pricing may come down to whatever you can get for them, e.g. ask for offers and then decide if you'll take one or not. Parting the collection out on eBay might be the maximally profitable option although eBay is rife with fraud these days. Is Facebook Marketplace active in your country? It seems to have taken over for craigslist and eroded into eBay for local sales and nerd stuff, in the US.
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2023 20:17
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 27, 2024 13:39 |
|
|
I admit, I read that as Australia, which would be a bit worse in shipping, but still probably a bit expensive.
|
|
#
?
Jul 3, 2023 21:37
|
|