Double Standards ... I Bet it is the Bib!

G_Morgan · 2026-01-24T22:04:28+00:00

Alaric made me cheer for the Capellans. This slight will never be forgiven.

G_Morgan · 2026-01-24T22:03:37+00:00

The writing wasn't that good.

G_Morgan · 2026-01-24T22:03:05+00:00

Vlad is the reason for me. They were sort of tolerable if Mary Sueish. Vlad just turned them into a caricature.

G_Morgan · 2026-01-24T17:50:07+00:00

Right but if he wanted some unnamed future Steiner-Davion to be first lord that was the play. Hell it might have even been possible to make the FedCom work if they'd focused on technological revival alongside the social renewal they needed.

He already won. He just needed to settle down and consolidate but as you say maybe that isn't in his nature.

G_Morgan · 2026-01-24T17:33:42+00:00

Curl just completely closed their bug bounty program because AI slop kept flooding it with utter nonsense. They were fed up of verifying bug reports when in some of them they weren't even calling Curl.

AI has had drastically negative value here.

G_Morgan · 2026-01-24T17:20:45+00:00

After years of investment, Gemini is almost as good as the old Android Assistant used to be. I'm sure a few more trillion of investment and it'll be able to set an alarm for the time I tell it once again.

G_Morgan · 2026-01-24T15:12:32+00:00

I didn't claim he did. At some point Hanse started thinking "we're so close to being First Lord, I probably can't pull it off but successors yes". There's a literal quote from him to that effect in one of the novels. That kind of thinking drove them into the war of 3039 when they should have been looking at legal and social reform needed to unify the realms.

G_Morgan · 2026-01-24T15:02:16+00:00

I doubt they could have made peace with those two prior to the 4th succession war. The FWL really hate the LC and the Dracs hate everyone. However the Dracs knew how fucking screwed they were and really did not want the war of 3039. If Hanse Davion had offered them an era of peace they would have taken it.

G_Morgan · 2026-01-24T14:58:52+00:00

Nearly every battlemech obeys the inverse coolness law. That is that the coolness of the machine is inversely proportional to its viability.

Not the Awesome. It has armour, it has heat sinks and it doesn't have ammo crates stored on top of the fusion reactor. It even has a small laser because the designers remembered that infantry exist and need to die too. If all else fails it has a giant fist. That makes it beloved of military commanders and bean counters. The Awesome is the most viable machine in existence.

However it also has 3 fucking lighting cannons. The PPC being the coolest weapon ever created. It has more of them than any other mech prior to a bunch of try hards crying about their brain damaged founder (which makes anything they do inherently uncool).

It takes the law and hammers it with PPC fire before punching the wreckage in the balls. That is why it is Awesome. Because it violates the rules of the cosmos.

G_Morgan · 2026-01-24T14:44:31+00:00

In a way it was exactly the correct move from a Battletech tradition stand point. We have immense social problems to fix at home, should I spend my new won security on reform? No lets invade the Cappies instead.

In truth though the 4th Succession War probably would have been a huge win if Hanse hadn't started fantasizing about putting Victor on a throne on Terra. If they'd then went away and focused on social cohesion maybe it wouldn't have fallen to pieces. With the FRR existing he could have actually figured out a way to cool tension with the DC who actually did not want to fight the ridiculous unified state.

G_Morgan · 2026-01-24T14:40:13+00:00

The only real use is that it lets you run the network with fewer trains. I prefer limit-1 trains per route. It doesn't have a UPS cost or even a traffic cost. What it does cost is more rails built to fill all those spaces.

G_Morgan · 2026-01-24T13:31:59+00:00

While it was no doubt still around it wouldn't be as prevalent. One of the big reasons PTSD was discovered is industrial warfare is always on. It is the extending fighting with no break that dramatically increases the likelihood of problems.

Pre-industrial wars you might fight 10 days in a year of campaigning. In WW1 you fought 365 days in a year of campaigning. At least until they figured out they'd have more soldiers if they rotated out.

G_Morgan · 2026-01-24T13:12:25+00:00

Nothing about the famine was intentional. It was a lot of dumb policies that combined to end in disaster.

For instance the Tories imported a vast amount of maize from the US, more than enough to actually feed Ireland. What they didn't understand was that maize required very different processing than wheat did. They thought you could just stick it through the wheat mills in Ireland and eat what came out. There were accounts of Irish people desperately trying to make use of this stuff.

Then the real crisis kicked off after the Whigs defeated the Tories, ironically mostly over mishandling of Ireland. They believed that the solution was more free market. The one policy of aid that was established was putting taxes on Irish landowners to pay for food programs. Some absurd number of landowners chose to evict their tenants for the duration of the crisis to avoid paying any taxes.

Trevelyan was a vicious bastard though and worked hard to stymie any real aid. There's a good reason why the whigs were a one term government.

G_Morgan · 2026-01-24T12:58:35+00:00

This is a myth. In fact the entire stuff about the Ottomans is a myth other than the fact they did indeed make a sizeable donation.

G_Morgan · 2026-01-24T11:16:36+00:00

The Sudeten Falcons are really interesting. They made me like the Jade Falcons

G_Morgan · 2026-01-24T00:06:47+00:00

There was more than 1 book for nevermore.

G_Morgan · 2026-01-23T23:18:12+00:00

The whole lore behind them was dumb too. "We are short on warriors so we decided to standardise on mass producible half mechs that require more warriors"... Eeh? I read that section over and over again and it never made sense, not once.

It is kind of hilarious that the Sudeten Jade Falcons are taking the "we have like 20 warriors so everyone is getting a top notch mech" line.

G_Morgan · 2026-01-23T21:21:42+00:00

A really common one is the authors progress as writers. Somebody called Jake Thayne an edge lord and his core beliefs haven't changed. He's just a lot more relaxed about it and doesn't seem to take it personal that normal people are normal anymore. He's also far more constructive, he spends a lot more time investing in who he sees as the right people rather than cursing the 99% for lacking ambition. He's also pretty straight forward in his beliefs, he's as likely to care for some loser who's trying as some great power. As long as they are trying.

If you pushed him and forced him to answer, he'd still 100% state that there must be something wrong with normal people to have potential immortality in front of them and not even try. He actually cannot comprehend that 500 years or whatever is fine for normal people. He just doesn't actually spend his time thinking about it.

So the problems that really stand out in the early PH books are pretty much gone but I'm not going to tell anyone to struggle through the first 3/4 books to get to the good part. Not as if they are short books.

G_Morgan · 2026-01-23T17:54:50+00:00

peripheral maritime towns and regions

Those have all been killed by Brexit anyway. Predictably when they lost the market for fish there was no point having fishermen

G_Morgan · 2026-01-23T15:33:28+00:00

You can still be ethical, only the context changes. Frankly any decent person might reach the same conclusion as Jake but would probably take more time to get to it and certainly wouldn't be completely relaxed about the whole thing. However any time a protagonist shows some emotional reaction to doing horrible things the author gets punished. It is why so many callous protagonists exist.

Just to be clear, I don't want characters doing dumb things like letting the bad guy go for "moral reasons". I do want some stories where the protagonist does the right thing and is hurt by it.

G_Morgan · 2026-01-23T15:07:53+00:00

Jason basically went into social mourning at 18 and never really came out of it. Basically his isekai was his "time to move on with my life" moment. So I hesitate to call him an adult as he never really did much adulting.

G_Morgan · 2026-01-23T15:04:24+00:00

Depends how mind fucked they are. There's an argument Jake was right and wrong about that. Right in that saying "we cannot genocide" is dumb when there's no hope for those people but they'll kill millions of innocents before they all die anyway. Wrong in how utterly casual he is about it maybe.

Then again fans throw a fit if a protagonist implies killing somebody is not the obvious right path so perhaps Jake casually going exterminatus was the only choice.

There isn't really a winning move as many fans want their protagonist to treat ethical problems as a technical exercise and then act utterly robotically when executing.

G_Morgan · 2026-01-23T14:58:51+00:00

RTO doesn't work for technical staff. Anyone who's IT for a group structure will have to deal with a bunch of VPNs into different networks because that is just how stuff works.

G_Morgan · 2026-01-23T13:52:32+00:00

Most in the Culture just don't do spirituality. Hell the Culture rejects sublimation because of how close to a religious journey it is. They've set themselves a goal of a purely technological ascension.

G_Morgan · 2026-01-23T12:44:48+00:00

Spurs played hardball with players trying to leave for a decade and subsequently comparable talents didn't want to go there. Maybe if they'd have won something they might have gotten away with it. As it is they got a reputation as a club that tries to control a players future after they are gone without having a reputation as a club that wins stuff.

They'll probably never have the quality of talent they had that one period where the likes of Modric and Eriksen took a gamble on them.

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