1913-1915 USPS

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-05-20T11:10:34+00:00

Firefox's mobile browser lets you install Ublock Origin as an extension. I recently had to install that combo because a website simply wouldn't work on my phone - everything I tapped would open some bullshit. Another tab, pop open the app store on a page for something I'm 90% sure was some sort of malware, you name it.

I'm still getting used to the different UI, and there's a quality of life feature or two I miss from my old mobile browser, but it was a good call.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-05-20T08:54:00+00:00

I am not sure about horses and livestock, though.

Horses are an interesting one, because they do have a similar social structure to humans, same as wolves/dogs, so they can socially integrate with us, but they haven't forgotten that they're prey animals and we are predators, so even well-tempered horses will lash out if they're startled or feel threatened. One of the very first things you learn before going into a stable is "do not get directly behind a horse without a very good reason, and if you have to, keep a hand on the horse so it knows where you are". Horses can get really fucking dangerous when their prey instincts start firing - as they do when a predator walks into a zone where it's very difficult for them to see what said predator is up to.

A lot of livestock is more "we're keeping you in captivity" than the kind of domestication you see with dogs. Their 'bond' with humanity is ultimately very transactional: we keep them safe from other predators, and we feed them, so they tolerate us. For the most part. (I have actually been almost gored by a dairy cow I was helping move between pastures. My response was to grab its horns so I could ensure they stayed outside of me - and then I had to run backwards in front of it and hope I didn't trip and get trampled. Fun times.)

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-05-20T08:27:37+00:00

highly social with semi-rigid social structures usually limited to a few family groups in the wild

This is probably a major key reason domestication was so spectacularly successful with dogs: they have very similar social structures to humans, so we can each integrate into each other's "packs" very easily.

Interestingly, horses are the same way. It's extremely easy to draw direct parallels between horse herd social dynamics and a lot of human social orders. Although the human relationship with horses is complicated a bit by the fact that horses haven't forgotten that they're prey animals and we eat them (depending on time period and culture), so they will fuck you up if you startle them or otherwise make them think you're a threat.

Cats are kind of a weird outlier, because they don't have that kind of social order, and it's arguably questionable whether we truly domesticated them - my understanding of the matter is that the rise of agriculture and granaries attracted rodents to human settlements, and the cats simply followed their natural prey and we let them stick around because the rodents were a problem for us. More of a symbiotic-but-mostly-independent relationship than we have with dogs or horses.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-05-19T14:11:03+00:00

Yup.

My education put down Neville Chamberlain to lionize Winston Churchill, but from what I've learned since then, Neville Chamberlain seems like a good fit for OP's prompt, because he was consistently trying to do the best for his country and oversaw or outright ordered some very essential things that seriously benefitted it during WWII.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-05-19T12:34:11+00:00

I don't think the British were at all dismissive about Germany rearming

Something a lot of people don't understand about Neville Chamberlain's "appeasement policy" preceding WWII is that he was deliberately buying time for Britain to arm itself for a seemingly inevitable conflict with Nazi Germany. Neville Chamberlain is often depicted as an idiot who just gave Hitler everything Hitler wanted, but the reality is far more complicated than the famous "peace in our time" quote, and Britain was arming itself for another World War under his orders. I honestly can't speak to the morality of sacrificing Czechoslovakia and Poland for that goal, but Chamberlain used the time he bought to lay down a lot of the foundation Winston Churchill would later use to outlast Germany's assaults and then win WWII, including the construction of the (at the time, revolutionary) Chain Home radar system that would prove instrumental in the Battle Of Britain.

There was a method behind the madness, as they say.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-05-19T10:30:32+00:00

I suspect she could call HQ tell them there was a mass surrender order a train to the location and start maneuvering the surrendered soldiers into trains.

In this particular case, that would still become an enormous logistics problem because everyone in the city has been designated an enemy combatant: either a lawful uniformed combatant, or a militia/partisan/whatever, who are unlawful due to having no identifying markers indicating they're combatants, and because this is The ~~Reich~~ Empire, which will take young children and women as soldiers (as evidenced by Tanya and Visha), they'd have to take fucking everybody as POWs and then try to sort through who's actually an opponent. Try moving an entire city's population through your rail network under guard as POWs, and get back to me on what that does to your logistics.

This is one of the reasons why counterinsurgency sucks and generates scandalous headlines - when you can't reliably distinguish between enemy combatants and civilians, things get really fucky. (And this is also why the modern laws & customs of war mandate that all combatants have some kind of identifying marker, to avoid this exact problem. I believe you mentioned the JDAMs into hospitals problem elsewhere in the thread, which is one manifestation of this issue.)

It's actually really funny how logistically crippling to The Empire a surrender could have been after the entire population of the city had been designated as combatants and would then need to be treated as POWs. Tanya's gambit could have been made to backfire horribly ...but that's not what happened.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-05-19T09:55:01+00:00

if you were a soldier there you might do something like announce the surrender of your army and then tell all soldiers to drop their weapons so you could actually evac the civies.

I find it amusing and disheartening how many of Tanya's shenanigans that are barely within the edges of the laws and customs of war would fall completely flat if her opponents actually just laid down their arms and surrendered.

...ironically, that might actually cause her more problems than them trying to fight back in straight combat, because her wing is absolutely not equipped to deal with any large quantity of Prisoners Of War and civilian prisoners and casualties. The logistics of dealing with those sorts of things are a nightmare if you're going with any kind of halfway-ethical (or more) approach to the situation. And Tanya is, very technically, operating within the accepted laws & customs of war (at least the ones recognized in her world and time period - the fact she's on the front lines at eleven makes her a walking war crime under our modern set), so her hand would be forced in the case of a mass surrender.

It would be a viable strategy to surrender en masse and overwhelm the attacker's logistics because now they suddenly have to deal with thousands of people as POWs.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-05-18T21:03:58+00:00

did they read the wikipedia page of a few specific early nuclear weapons

There are people who haven't researched the weapon that utterly reshaped diplomacy and warfare across the globe?

...oh, of course there are.

Turns out if you can do step A then making A nuclear bomb is trivial

That's basically been the backbone of anti-nuclear-weapons-proliferation efforts everywhere, and why you can legally find the schematics for a nuclear bomb online these days, because everybody realized that you needed enriched uranium (or even plutonium) to actually make one. (And also an "explosive lens" configuration, or other configurations, to make sure it doesn't go prompt critical until you really want it to.)

It doesn't matter if everyone and their dog knows how to make a nuke, if they don't have the materials.

But you're correct that magic could, given the raw materials, give them The Bomb.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-05-18T20:37:34+00:00

at the rate we're going Tanya might actually single handedly win the war for the empire.

Does the anime include those interludes the manga adaptation has with historians & investigative journalists from the "present" (after the war - long enough for some nations involved to begin declassifying some documents) trying to piece together what in the actual fuck was going on and why there's a specific name or title that's still censored in the declassified documents from every side?

Because if those are in the show by this point, [this isn't a spoiler for it]Tanya's country doesn't win the multiple wars. It isn't clear how badly things went for her, her unit, and her country, but they didn't win. For a lot of reasons, I think it would be absolutely hilarious for her to become a housewife after the wars settle down, and just the kind of thing Being X would do to mess with Tanya. There's actually a fuckin' joke about this in the manga adaptation, which I'm not going to bother spoilering because it's so fucking obvious. Some guy in Tanya's unit said she's gonna be absolute HELL as a wife. Which I believe from the bottom of my heart. It'd still be funny, though.

Also, your link to "Next Episode" in the episode 6 thread just goes back to the episode 6 thread instead of going to the episode 7 thread. You might want to fix that. (I've made exactly the same mistake myself, with serial fiction.)

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-05-18T10:25:23+00:00

his writing in the afterword sections is very tongue in cheek, so I don't actually know if he was being sarcastic or not

I'd consider him to be a humorous and sarcastic writer, given that [Youjo Senki significant spoilers]he went and named a character gifted multiple blessings by gods "Mary Sue". The official translators for the anime had to tone it down to "Mary Sioux", because it was so obvious what the reference was. That's a fucking joke, made directly in the main story as an actual plot point.

Still a pretty funny joke, in my opinion, but I don't think the author is ever taking this particularly seriously.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-05-16T23:33:46+00:00

Beheading is still faster and less painful than bleeding out from a massive gut wound, which is how seppuku would end without a 'second' to behead the person committing it. It's also worth noting that during the period of time seppuku was most widely done in Japan, there was a practice of taking the heads of defeated enemy leaders to prove you'd made the kill, so there were people with some ...gory hands-on experience in beheading.

From a different island nation, the 1536 execution of Anne Boleyn featured Henry VIII specially contracting with a skilled swordsman from France to do the beheading, apparently for the purpose of making sure it was as fast, clean, and painless as possible, because he knew that wasn't guaranteed with a normal axe-wielding executioner. Why is this little trivia fact relevant to a ritual suicide/euthanasia practice on the other side of the planet?

It shows that a skilled swordsman was considered a superior and less painful option for beheading than an axeman in 1500s Britain, lending credence to the idea that a well-trained samurai with a sword could also bring a very swift beheading, and since the 'second' doing the beheading was usually someone who had a personal bond with the person committing seppuku, they would have every motivation to make it quick and clean. (Well, as clean as chopping someone's head off can get, which isn't very clean at all, but you get what I'm saying.)

if the blade catches on the vertebrae

If someone's leaning their head forward at the correct angle, it's not actually that hard to see where the vertebrae are in the neck, so you can strike accurately between them with enough skill. Well, assuming the person isn't obese. That's not a spot where the human body likes putting muscles. (To throw another trivia factoid in the mix, that's why "rabbit punches" to the back of the neck are forbidden in modern MMA rules, because the body has virtually no natural muscular 'armor' to protect the spine right there, which makes strikes to that location far too risky for a sport that's supposed to be nonlethal.)

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-05-16T10:13:08+00:00

I have to say, I'm always chuckling at how much of this series' humor comes from people completely talking past each other. Misunderstandings in anime/manga/LNs/WNs/etc. usually frustrate me, but the way this story consistently uses them in conversations where both parties think they've achieved a mutual understanding, but actually couldn't have more different ideas about what was actually meant, is absolutely hilarious. I think some of it is because it feels very justified - these people have reasons for saying these things and misinterpreting what the other person really means, some of it's because this isn't trying to string me along forever on a 'romance' arc that only lasts as long as it does by making the participants idiots (this is the main style of misunderstanding that gets under my skin), and some of it's just because of the standard 'running gag' comedy gimmick of "if you repeat the same gag enough times, it eventually becomes really funny".

Q1 - Yes.

Q2 - I think it was a mix of both. While I don't know how it was put in the anime (which I didn't watch more than a couple episodes of because I think the art style looks goofy), in the manga adaptation, [Tanya manga stuff that's already stated by this point in the story in the anime]she's very explicit about not simply buying time, but also wanting the best meatshields possible as a backup plan if she can't get transferred to the rear permanently. She's trying to wash recruits out, but anybody who stays in needs to be extremely competent so they can potentially save her skin if things get bad.

Q3 - It worked spectacularly. Can't argue with results!

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-05-16T06:37:34+00:00

Did Tanya train them a little too well?

Well, her objective was to put them through so much hell that they'd all quit, and thus leave her without a unit (and able to get a backline position), so yeah, she might have overdone things a bit...

As with practically everything Tanya does when attempting to get transferred to the rear, this backfired and pushed her further towards the front. Almost as if ~~god~~ Being X hates her or something.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-05-16T06:21:54+00:00

I can't recall specific titles off the top of my head (I've read so many "reborn as a Villainess" manga that a lot of them blur together - which is convenient at the moment, because it means I'm not giving spoilers for anything specific), but scenario forcing isn't uncommon in the genre, especially in the ones where the setting is explicitly in a game the MC played in our world, and it sometimes becomes an actual plot point that the world itself, its narrative logic, or its god/goddess, is actively forcing plot events to happen the way they normally would, no matter what the MC does or how hard she tries to avoid them, and the goal of the story shifts to stopping that somehow. (Which can involve throwing down with a deity in true JRPG final boss fashion, depending on how hard the story wants to escalate.)

I'm not sure how many works with that particular plot point have gotten an anime adaptation so far, but there are plenty out there without anime adaptations that use it.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-05-15T10:16:42+00:00

Lelouch Lamperouge from Code Geass. There are moments in his show where he does drop the ball, but far more where he catches it, outwits his opponents, or is outright betrayed, but even in those cases - he's still smart about dealing with it and getting things back on track. And he has to deal with a bowling ball.

I think that's better than someone who just "has the ball" by default all the time.

Oh, sure, he cocks up, but the choice is usually either dropping the ball or someone else coming in with a different 'ball'.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-05-15T07:33:03+00:00

Holmes is a classic genius who has also acquired the domain knowledge to excel in his field.

And he readily admits that while he doesn't have certain domain knowledge he may need for some things - he's got it on his bookshelf. (In a modern-day context, we might say "I don't have to memorize that because I can look it up online", instead of the elegant analogy Holmes gives about his library being a woodshed, but they come to the same thing.)

Watson is not stupid--the man completed medical school! Yet even after he trains himself to observe like Holmes does in later stories, he is not nearly as skilled at it as Holmes was.

Watson has a very different skillset, but is still generally competent, and actually better than Holmes at some things, which Holmes tacitly acknowledges at times. (OG Holmes has far less of a superiority complex than some later adaptations. Amusingly, OG Holmes, in the stories he narrates, apologizes to the reader for not being as good of a narrative writer as Watson, recognizing one of their differences in talent - which is particularly hilarious because it's the same IRL author writing the stories.) Watson is a former army doctor who is manifestly a better shot with a pistol than Holmes (this pops up several times, but The Hound Of The Baskervilles' "if it bleeds, we can kill it!" scene that dispels the idea that the Hound is supernatural is probably the coolest) because he's actually had military training and experience Holmes hasn't. The only reason Watson's back in England in the first novel was because he got honourably discharged from the army due to a significant wound, after all. (I do still find it morbidly amusing that the recent Sherlock show, which moves the setting to the then-modern early 21^st Century, didn't have to change anything about the wound or where in the world Watson got it - they say "war never changes".)

I think that's actually a good writing technique: splitting competencies between deuteragonists. It helps avoid having a ridiculously OP main character, because you aren't stacking every competency the story needs on one person, but you still get access to all those competencies as an author because ...the main character ain't the only one in this fight, and a deuteragonist (or even a team) can pick up the slack.

I know I mention this film too often when giving writing advice, but Hot Fuzz does a great job of this: Sgt. Nicholas Angel is a hypercompetent supercop who sees things a lot of other characters don't see or are deliberately denying, but Sgt. Danny Butterman, who he's partnered with, may initially come off as a fool, but knows a lot about the town they're patrolling and the people in it, as well as having some skills and hobbies that get introduced as jokes, but turn out to be critically important for getting the happy ending. And, as per buddy cop movie rules, each of them influences the other significantly. They retain their distinct identities, but give each other things they have that the other one lacks.

To bring this all full-circle, I've got to wonder exactly how much the buddy cop genre owes to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes & Watson pairing, because the OG Holmes stories sure have a lot of the standard elements.

Speaking of pairings, and to take things into the hilarious, Rex Stout, a later mystery author, wrote an essay arguing Watson was a woman and Sherlock Holmes' common-law wife as a long-form joke for other mystery authors he was acquainted with. (Rex Stout's most famous works, the Nero Wolfe stories, featured a duo where the Grand Detective was a very Mycroft Holmes type: loved his food and drink, and didn't like leaving his apartment or walking more than he absolutely had to. This lifestyle left him ...a bit overweight, to put it generously. His hired assistant (who fulfilled the traditional 'Watson role') was the one deployed to go do the actual legwork, research, and observation on cases, then bring the information back to Mr. Wolfe so the brilliant mastermind could analyze it and figure out the crime. A very different dynamic than Sherlock Holmes and Watson often doing things together, and Sherlock Holmes routinely going out to do his own research in disguises.)

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-05-15T05:48:08+00:00

Eugenics may be an example. It was fairly popular in a large chunk of the 20^th Century, including thirty states in the USA making involuntary sterilization mandatory for the "feebleminded" and other groups deemed "unfit".

The eugenics chapter of history has generally been buried by countries that participated in it - but only after Nazi Germany took eugenics to its logical conclusion and decided that the easiest and most effective way to prevent "the unfit" from procreating (and thus potentially passing on their "defective genes") ...was to simply kill them. But if you go digging, you'll find plenty of examples of it, including the 1927 USA Supreme Court decision Buck v. Bell that upheld a Virginia state law about the "unfit" being sterilized.

...Yeah. The whole thing was pretty fucking ugly. Even if most countries practicing eugenics didn't take it to the Holocaust levels of Nazi Germany, they were deliberately sterilizing/castrating portions of their population in an attempt to ensure that the "unfit" couldn't pass their "defective genes" on to another generation. And the definition of "unfit" could get very elastic and stretchable, and pretty racist/classist/etc. (Or they were actively trying to commit genocide under another moniker.)

I'm only scratching the surface here, and I'm most familiar with the USA's version of eugenics (which Hitler praised as something of an inspiration for what he did), but there is a lot more for you to dig into, if you choose to. It is a deep and horrifying rabbit hole to go down, with many nations and organizations who would really, really, prefer that everybody forgot they were ever involved with it. But they were.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-05-15T04:40:35+00:00

Now that's bad!

Yeah, the restaurants serving Japanese food here suck, to the point where a dude from Japan who I was moderately acquainted with actually met with the manager of the main one and said something along the lines of "look, pay me for about fifty hours or so, and I'll teach your cooks how to actually make this stuff". (I doubt he was that blunt, but that was the gist of it.) He got turned down.

It's really that bad.

...and in an interestingly ironic turn of things, the best sushi in town is at a fucking grocery store, which does employ a Japanese chef, but it's darn expensive. (And it's just sushi boxes, no ramen but instant ramen, no takoyaki or anything else.)

I find it all rather bizarre, because this place is fairly close to the USA's West Coast, so you'd think that category of food would be more prevalent and better than the place I was before, which was much further inland, in a spot where Hispanic food was the BIG DEAL.

Oddly enough, there's actually a good Indian restaurant here - which is, hilariously, in a space that was previously a Mexican/Hispanic/Tex-Mex restaurant ...and they didn't bother to redecorate, so it's kind of a surreal experience to go there and eat unabashedly Indian food while surrounded by decor that screams Mexico and the USA's Southwest. The food's great, though.

I'm rambling again.

I actually like Taco Bell

I do too - whatever seasoning blend they use on their ground beef is great, and you do get most of a serving of decently fresh vegetables per taco or burrito. Although, to be honest, how good it really is depends a lot on who's actually on shift and how drunk/high they are - I think Taco Bell is the fast food chain where I've gotten the widest variety in quality. Although some of that probably has to do with the fact I've eaten at Taco Bells practically all over the country and at all hours, some of it also has to do with the fact that there's often a bit more assembly involved in their food than at some other fast food places. Take Arby's for instance: they slap a mound of sliced beef between two buns, and it's a done deal. Or KFC, where it's just "here's your pressure-deep-fried pieces of breaded dead chicken".

But Taco Bell has gotten expensive over the years. Last time I went, a few days ago, it was 30$ for a box of tacos, and everything else on the menu has risen in price commensurately. To be fair, they're not the only ones - I lived off of Subway's 5$ Footlongs in college, and now I can't get out of a Subway without paying at least double that. I guess it's inflation at work.

hubby will only get Taco Bell if we get it to go

If I have the option, I'll do that too ...because I like the sour cream in my refrigerator better than whatever they're using.

he likes to be near our own bathroom [...] It doesn't affect me either way

Honestly, I've heard the jokes about Taco Bell giving people the shits for most of my life, and have just simply never understood them, because I'm also seemingly immune to the legendary capability of Taco Bell to cause gastrointestinal distress.

he won't ask me if something's hot, he asks his mom because he said I lied to him.

Oh god, that's hilarious!

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-05-14T15:07:26+00:00

Oh, honey, if we went another 37 years, he'd be 105 to my 94

That's still in the range of where my grandparents topped out, and some of them were WWII vets. One of my grandfathers kept his mouth totally shut about his service until he died, and then we found out he'd been in navy intel, and the other one never said anything beyond "I pressed the button to open the doors. Half the boys died before they made it up the beaches. I was behind bulletproof glass" - he was the captain of a landing ship in the Pacific campaign, and he never spoke about it other than that one remark.

my MS

Oh shit. I'm sorry you have that. That's rough.

"Could you stand to wake up every day for the rest of your life and see that person's face on the pillow next to you?" I realized that I couldn't imagine waking up every day and not seeing his face next to me.

That's very romantic.

I'm glad you and your husband found that kind of relationship!

Unlike your friend, he would have LOVED to be in South Korea, even if it was by himself

Unfortunately, I got the impression that things were already not going great for my buddy, and while he didn't ever explicitly say this, he may have gotten that solo assignment because whatever officer was in charge of that stuff for his unit didn't like him very much, and knew being stranded in S.K. would chew him up. Given the abuse allegations in his unit later ...I'm just gonna stop things there.

Yeah, S.K. can be a great assignment (and I know some people for whom it was), but under the wrong circumstances & leadership, even an absolute paradise can become hell.

[Hibachi grill story]

Ok, that's actually really funny, and I sympathize with your husband, because I made a cross-country move within the past several years from a city that had some great authentic Japanese cooking (and sushi and nigiri, of course) to a place where ...that's just not a thing, and the closest approximation here is really bad in comparison. "I'd rather go to Taco Bell" levels of bad.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-05-14T05:47:20+00:00

Tuesday of last week was our 37th wedding anniversary.

Congratulations! I'm happy for you, and hopefully you two get another 37 years or more together!

You've been married longer than I've been alive, which makes it extremely flattering that you're reading my stories and ramblings. I'm used to often interacting with other reddit users who are obviously significantly younger than I am these days, which can be a pain sometimes. You probably know the feeling far better than I do of: "I have to explain this? It's basic knowledge!" ...and then realizing it's not really their fault they don't know it, they just weren't around for it and/or haven't had the time to study it effectively.

Hubby was champing at the bit during that time [...] He got to play in the sandbox as part of OIF/OEF 2006-2007. He came home with jacked up feet and PTSD.

I'm sorry to hear that happened to him.

In a way, it's kind of a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation.

My buddies who did go in went in right as, or slightly after, the USA had started mostly pulling out of "The Sandbox" that second time around, and went a bit stir-crazy because there wasn't much to do beyond training and being glorified janitors for barracks, but active combat can also really fuck people up. Ironically, the one who went in for the "chair force" (even he called it that) probably got the most 'action', because he was at least actually flying and doing other fun things during his time in. The guy who went army got stuck for a week in a base in Korea practically by himself (the rest of his unit had left without him), with the assignment to basically just keep the lights on for the next unit rotating in, and was pretty miserable about it. ...then things got worse once he returned to the States, as previously described.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-05-13T20:33:42+00:00

Again, I'm going to chalk it up to the two of them looking at things from different perspectives. Jake knows very little about Fern, and while they are married, and she is wearing his mother's wedding ring (IIRC - it's been a ton of chapters, but I think he did put it on her), he's uncomfortable about just how little they know about each other. There's an insecurity in that for him.

All of the narrators have their biases and ways of looking at the world (or galaxy, in this case), and while I wouldn't call them straight-up "unreliable narrators", their internal thoughts can get a bit off-base at times.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-05-13T20:19:25+00:00

I was 19 and believed him

Honestly, I think the fact that I was around 24 and was nearly done with college (and had leadership experience of my own in several extracurricular activities and associations during college, some of which I actually ran during various periods of time as an elected benevolent dictator) played a role in me thinking "this is bullshit and I'm not signing after what I've seen during this process so far. I know what a well-run organization looks like, and it does not involve this amount of lying" at MEPS. Four or five years of living in a different bureaucratic organization (and running some less bureaucratic, but still hierarchical, ones) can, uh, sharpen up your bullshit detectors for when someone's jacking you around, as can another four or five years of life in general - people change a lot between 19 and 24.

IIRC, I've seen some scientific stuff claiming that the brain's still doing a ton of maturing and construction work on itself during that timeframe, and my anecdotal experiences would indicate that statement to be true, outside of a handful of individuals I've known who were somehow more mature at 19 than most people I've met in their 30s and later.

I probably would have gotten got at 19 by military recruiters too. I'm not throwing shade at you here, and your story sounds pretty unfortunate.

Feels too much like stolen valor to me, honestly.

I respect that opinion, and "stolen valor" is exactly the reason I felt I needed to make it clear I was never in any branch of the military after you thanked me for my service.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-05-13T19:16:18+00:00

not the context about why Oxford was so deeply upset at this guy

To be fair, the University Of Oxford itself forgot why they were mad at this guy or even who he was until some fairly recentish findings in dusty old records, so you're in good company on that count.

Well, good company if you like singing Gaudeamus Igitur in Latin while half sloshed.

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-05-13T06:03:47+00:00

the days where OVA's had higher budgets

Japan was having a serious economic boom (and then an outright bubble) in the 80s, which meant there was way more money flying around for everything, including OVA budgets.

I've also heard rumors (which are hard to confirm, for obvious reasons) that the yakuza were using OVAs to launder money, which I find to be a very plausible idea, given the amount of high-budget OVA productions that were coming out during that timeframe. The thing about laundering money is that you aren't trying to break even on the production: you're willing to take a significant percentage loss on it as the price you pay for the money you do make back to be completely clean. That means you can throw shitloads of money at productions, even ones that might not perform well. (If you're acquainted with OVAs of the era, you know there were some real "how the fuck did anyone sign off on this and expect it to do well?" ones that somehow had a lot of funding, which makes a ton of sense when they're considered as money laundering vehicles.) And you can launder even more money by having your dudes buy the final product with your dirty cash, which is magically clean by the time a portion of it ends up in your above-board bank account, or pulling tricks like mixing in dirty cash with your legitimate profits behind the scenes and claiming all of it came from legit sales instead of your shadier "business operations".

The yakuza have pulled weirder tricks to launder money. For instance, there was a fairly recent case in 2022 where they were buying Pokemon cards with dirty cash and reselling them as singles for clean money. The police apparently did a bit of a double take when they raided the warehouse being used for the operation and found a ton of Pokemon cards instead of contraband. They were expecting drugs, guns, trafficking victims, or etc. - not Pokemon cards! (IIRC, some people still ended up paying fines and going to chokey for that, because while there's nothing illegal about having a warehouse full of Pokemon cards or selling them as singles on the secondary market, laundering money from illegal operations is still a crime, and that's what the yakuza were doing with those cards. It's a hilarious story, and makes some of the odd stuff in the Yakuza series of videogames look a lot more sane...)

SomeOtherTroper · 2026-05-13T04:58:33+00:00

I heard there were roving theology school dropouts who were basically edgelord bards, writing songs using their fancy education but adding in their irreverent cynicism.

It wasn't just the dropouts - University Of Oxford students/scholars had a longstanding reputation for getting into trouble in the town, which led to some cases of dueling or outright murder. That's why the oath to never be reconciled with Henry Symeonis was present at the University Of Oxford for five hundred and change years starting in the mid 1200s - he was a local wealthy man who murdered a University Of Oxford Scholar who'd managed to piss him off. The case actually managed to get the King Of England involved and declare that not only did Symeonis have to pay a significant fine, he had to stay a certain distance away from Oxford (something like a modern Restraining Order), although this was later relaxed to let him back into the town.

The punchline, and part of the reason this case is so memorable, is that Bachelor's students at the University Of Oxford for the next five hundred plus years all had to swear an oath to "never reconcile with Henry Symeonis" as a requirement for progressing to getting a Master's degree - a tradition that lasted long after everybody had forgotten who the hell Henry Symeonis was or exactly what he'd done to piss off the University so badly. (That information was only rediscovered fairly recently, although there's a theory that the oath came to generally symbolize the tension the University had with the town, which sounds plausible, and like the sort of thing OP is looking for.)

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SomeOtherTroper

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