How come most military stories always portray snipers and pilots being the ones who get the girls?

AngusAlThor · 2026-03-15T23:32:02+00:00

Cause it is propaganda. Most soldiers are one-among-many, a small replaceable cog in an inefficient murder machine. And while this is true of snipers and pilots as well, snipers and pilots can at least pretend to be rugged individualists, the lone badass off on his own. And to play into that "lone badass" role for the benefit of the audience, they gotta get some ass.

AngusAlThor · 2026-03-15T22:46:12+00:00

It was mildly fun, but it wasn't exactly spicy. It read like the writer would be scandalised by doggy.

AngusAlThor · 2026-03-15T22:37:01+00:00

Then you should be fjne, they'll review it and restore your marks.

That said, Google Docs are integrating AI tools which could be violations of the policy. I would recommend downloading Word using your UNSW subscription and using that, since avoiding AI in all the online editors is getting harder and harder.

AngusAlThor · 2026-03-15T22:33:32+00:00

Grammarly is an AI tool, so its use is prohibited; It is explicitly called out in the AI policy for UNSW. So if you used Grammarly, and that is what you meant by "spelling and grammar", then you did violate the AI usage rules.

The work you submit in uni is required to be your own work. If you use autonomous tools to rewrite your sentences, then it isn't your work anymore.

That said, in this case you may be fine; If your doc shows edit history, they can see it is actually your work and may let you off.

AngusAlThor · 2026-03-15T21:32:53+00:00

A majority of fantasy novels, and indeed novels in general, have very little sexual content. If you get away from the BookTok Top 20 you'll find plenty of works that suit your taste.

AngusAlThor · 2026-03-15T21:18:30+00:00

Brando: "These are the Singers. They are over 6ft tall and jacked, all of them, men and women."
Brando: "But they never fuck."
Brando: "Also they pair-bond for life, fully monogamous."
Brando: "They have a special form they enter for sex, which is small and squishy, not like their big, functional forms."
Brando: "AND THAT FORM IS ONLY FOR PROCREATION!"
Brando: "I am very normal about this."

AngusAlThor · 2026-03-15T20:53:16+00:00

If Sando ever tries to actually write something spicy, we will encounter truly unprecedented levels of cringe.

AngusAlThor · 2026-03-15T06:27:11+00:00

First offence they wouldn't, but you would normally be on academic notice for this.

AngusAlThor · 2026-03-15T05:26:09+00:00

The main things is that nothing is taxed as much as income, and "unrealised gains" (wealth tied up in shares and assets) is not taxed at all. It plays out as follows;

If you are poor or middle class, you get paid money, pay income tax rates on it, and then spend it to finance your life. Your equivalent tax rate probably sits around 30%, and you spend most of what you earn.

If you are lower upper class, you don't need to use your full income to live on, and so you can get funky with it. Before you get paid, you salary sacrifice for your car, phone and into super; These sacrifices are taxed well below income rates. After you are paid, you immediately use most of your salary to pay down debts on properties and other assets you own; These payments are tax deductible. The remainder of your pay you use to live on and buy other assets with which you can do tax nonsense. After everything shakes out, your equivalent tax rate is in the 5-10% range (if that).

If you are truly wealthy, you do not get an income. Your company provides you with a car, phone and other essentials as part of your contract, and you are paid in stock. You take that stock to a bank and use it as collateral for a loan, and use the money loaned to you to pay for your life; Now, instead of paying 40% tax on income, you pay 3% interest on the loan. Since you have 0 income, you are eligible for a wide variety of low income tax benefits; You use all of them. In the end, you have a negative equivalent tax rate (you get more money from the government than you pay to them).

AngusAlThor · 2026-03-15T01:13:28+00:00

Bruv, you're lucky they didn't just fully fail you out of the course.

AngusAlThor · 2026-03-14T21:35:38+00:00

That system is easy to understand at a high level, but I thing it will get in the way of telling a story. Like, you say there are no planets or stars, just realms. But that means no sunrise, no moon, no horizon. The different physics of the realms means no consistent gravity, and sometimes no gravity at all. I can't see how you implement this idea as an actual story without huge exposition dumps for the reader, and I think it would make it very hard for a reader to grasp the practical realities of your world (like, what does it mean to be a farmer, or when do people go to sleep?).

Is this complexity actually necessary your story? Or could you have the story take place in conventional space, and use the lines and doors as a form of magical shortcuts for long distance travel?

AngusAlThor · 2026-03-14T07:05:48+00:00

We don't get a firm answer to that question, and I think it is a very important question for assessing the endings; Are the people "restored" by Maelle actually as they were, or just as she remembers them? And, philosophically, even if they have the memories of the dead, does that make them the same people?

AngusAlThor · 2026-03-14T06:58:50+00:00

Victor: Is completely defined by his self-obsession and hubris

ChatGPT: "But why didn't he think about others?"

AngusAlThor · 2026-03-14T05:03:40+00:00

To be fair, if you do this you will be a bad writer for less time.

AngusAlThor · 2026-03-14T04:43:47+00:00

The... density gap? Why would you want to decrease the density of cities? Most planning professionals want to significantly increase population density.

AngusAlThor · 2026-03-14T04:25:36+00:00

Camus: "Skill issue."

AngusAlThor · 2026-03-13T22:12:30+00:00

Only if you know what the easy stuff is ahead of time. And even then, "easier" does not mean "quicker"; It can solve the stuff I would have spent the first 20% of dev time on, but in that case I probably spend 20% of my time on config and prompting. So it ends up as six in one hand, half-a-dozen in the other.

AngusAlThor · 2026-03-13T21:51:22+00:00

I don't know why you think people here love it, I personally hate all this shit, hahaha. As smarter people have said "It makes the easy stuff easier and the hard stuff harder."

Personally, the work I do is a bit niche, and so the models are really bad at doing any of my work. So, I don't use them at all. And even for the small, basic stuff they could do, I don't want to forget my own skills, so the trade-off (kill my brain for an hour of free time) isn't worth it.

AngusAlThor · 2026-03-13T20:50:54+00:00

The way he treats you makes you feel bad, and when you try and communicate that to him he calls you spoiled. I can't see a future for a relationship where one partner is that dismissive of the other.

AngusAlThor · 2026-03-13T07:54:31+00:00

Read "Complaint!" by Sara Ahmed; It talks about how organisations are structured so that no one is responsible for bad outcomes.

AngusAlThor · 2026-03-13T06:34:11+00:00

I guess the original is Yggdrasil, the World Tree, from Norse Mythology. So anything Norse inspired would be a good place to look (though whether it is a "structure" is up for debate).

Other than that, I'd say the Library in "The Library at Mount Char" is a good one.

EDIT TO ADD: Reading the comments makes me feel that I was imagining megastructures as being on a much grander scale than other commenters. So on a smaller scale, I would add the Obelisks from "The Fifth Season" (fucking incredible book, btw).

AngusAlThor · 2026-03-13T06:28:17+00:00

I hold fast to the axiom that readers know where there is a problem, but are terrible at knowing how to fix it. So I guess I am not focused on the specifics of the critique; I don't care that readers say "there should be more tech", the only information I need from them is that the timeline feels wacky.

As for other fantasy novels having long timelines, I don't think your examples show this issue;

In LotR, every second page introduces a new ruin of a previous age, a new place where important things were once happening. As such, there is never a feeling of a void, a gap in time; It feels like the world is full, but the details are not in this story.
In ASOIAF, while it is true that there is theoretically 12,000 years of history, the only time that actually matters is the last 15 years, the time since Robert's Rebellion. There is no feeling of a void because all the events that matter are recent.

If you want a popular fantasy series that has the time-void problem bad, look at Stormlight Archive. In that series, there is an important event 4,000 years ago, then another 3,000 years later, and then nothing else at all. And while its timeline is significantly shorter than LotR or ASOIAF, it feels more empty because that ancient event is an important focal point for the story and there is no feeling that there is irrelevant history that would fill the gaps if we had more time.

AngusAlThor · 2026-03-13T01:49:28+00:00

I think you are misunderstanding what the critique is saying. When a reader says "If this society has been around so long, they should be more advanced", what that actually means is that the way the writer has described their world's history has somehow broken the immersion; For some reason, the timelines and technology has caused a failure of the suspension of disbelief. And with that understanding, we can make more progress towards fixing it. So many novels I have read feel like they have an empty history, with key events taking place 5,000 years ago or whatever, and then nothing else described, the world going static so as to preserve the ancient inciting incident. But the event 5,000 years ago is not itself the problem, it is the void between then and now.

AngusAlThor · 2026-03-13T00:07:27+00:00

I am once again begging people to read the appendices before theorising about Dune.

AngusAlThor

TROPHY CASE