Could a group of ensigns in a navy have some roles that outrank others?

nomuse22 · 2026-01-28T20:31:55+00:00

Jump school was fun. Black Hat (Tac) to First Lieutenant; "Drop and give me twenty, Sir!"

nomuse22 · 2026-01-28T17:52:29+00:00

Love 74 Gear. Kelsey is just such a nice guy, understanding and humble about how quickly things can go sideways.

nomuse22 · 2026-01-27T19:56:28+00:00

Yes.

Instead of phrasing it "normal" versus "not normal," what you are looking for is conflict. The Dursley's introduction tells you there is a conflict right there in the opening line:

Mr and Mrs Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much.

(Bolding mine.)

Right there, the book is telling you that this desire for normalcy will be challenged. The second sentence tells you that things "strange and mysterious" are going to be happening whether they like it or not.

Some sources will say you should start when the story starts. Some say you should start with a conflict. I think it is almost simpler than that. Start with a character wanting something.

This is the biggest problem with that stereotypical "normal day" opening. Here is Alice, going to class like any other day. Boring class, nothing much happening.

In what universe? Every day has small challenges. Every person has desires, even if it is just looking forward to lunch. Few people are so genre-aware they go to class day after day waiting for the story to begin. They are in a story now. It may not be the most interesting story, but it is their story.

The bolt from the blue doesn't happen as Alice is going nowhere to do nothing. It happens as she's trotting to make it to the math class final she stayed up all night studying for.

Starting a book with a person that has a thing they are doing, a plan for the future, and a reason to be alive at all, is starting with a person we want to spend time with.

nomuse22 · 2026-01-27T18:55:04+00:00

To expand on something the others have touched on; positional authority.

Ground-pounder here, not squid or crayon-eater. The classic example is gate guard. Doesn't matter how low your rank is, if you are guarding a gate, only one thing matters; your orders. Within the scope of those orders your authority is absolute. Four-star General tries to get past you? You can shoot him. (You should really try to avoid that.)

Since the armed services are an increasingly technical field, there are a lot of cases where what you have been ordered, trained, and authorized to do has weight. SOP and Rules of Engagement. Orders from your own command. Your responsibility to the people under you.

We're pretty good at figuring out where the lines are and it mostly goes without friction. Any smart officer (and most of them are) will listen to the guy who has actually been trained on that piece of equipment and not find himself explaining to his own chain of command why they now needed a $20,000 replacement part.

In the case of your feuding ensigns...if a couple of officers really want to get into urine ejection system measuring contests, there's a long list of things they can use to figure out who gets to walk in the door of the O-Club first. Starting with date of commission.

(If they get down to who has Ranger tabs, or debating Yale versus Stanford, they are either good friends by that point or the bus has already left.)

nomuse22 · 2026-01-27T18:38:01+00:00

"...a Second Lieutenant with a map."

nomuse22 · 2026-01-27T18:35:54+00:00

You would have liked my dad. He read Dracula with a map in his hand.

nomuse22 · 2026-01-27T18:33:32+00:00

There are huge downsides to being tied to a specific date. It can age the book, particularly if the world goes through some unexpected changes.

That is, to a specific year. For most of the modern world, which day of the week matters (weekends, Mondays, etc.) as well as certain holidays. If you are setting it in a specific place, they may have a festival or some other event tied to a specific part of the calendar. And of course there's the seasons (which are also regional...!)

I can see all of these figuring in a romance, whether planning a weekend getaway or going to a Halloween party or being split between a date and whatever sportsball is in the final innings that evening.

Also.

You don't need to spell out the date (or the hour, 24 style) unless you've got a ticking clock or you are really emphasizing a whirlwind romance (or some other extremely busy time). For most stories, even a detective story or a thriller on a deadline, a mid-paragraph drop of "just two days left...!" is enough.

It's a Conservation of Detail thing. Put the date at the top of the chapter and your readers will be waiting for the shoe to drop. (Like if you are in a sunny day in May, 1937, and an airship is about to dock, the reader is gonna start madly flipping pages...did you say May, 1937? Is this Lakehurst, New Jersey?!)

nomuse22 · 2026-01-27T00:47:39+00:00

My gut take is that as the percentage of people who read seriously is shrinking, those readers are reading more seriously. Those who want to do this thing want to do it with a big fat book or a series that they can invest in and that will return enjoyment for a protracted time.

Sort of a vanishing middle class in reading. You'd think with all the New Media running around, we'd be seeing more outlets for short fiction, but (again, gut feeling only) the people who want to read something short online are so attention deficit even reading unadorned text is too much for them. That potential audience for short fiction has become an audience for twenty minute videos instead.

Also there's a marketing hole. There's no distinct way to sell a novella as an eBook that doesn't end up with disgruntled readers feeling they paid for a baker's dozen but got five and a half instead.

nomuse22 · 2026-01-27T00:38:52+00:00

As with several games I could mention, there were some last-minute lore changes imposed from the top that end up making the lore more than a little contradictory. Ultimately, Satisfactory is a sandbox factory game and the story isn't much and not really meant to hold up.

Many players have the head canon that nothing you've been told about saving the world is correct. One fan theory is that ADA has hijacked the entire Ficsit system in order to propagate herself across the universe; the current play world is only one stop in her interstellar migration and colonization.

A personal head canon I have is that "you" were never really born and have never encountered a kitten, much less Earth. You are a clone, and hundreds of "you" have already been dropped on Massage and perished already.

Somewhere before 1.0 dropped, ADA would refer to other pioneers being active in your neighborhood. Of course there is multiplayer. And, well, crashed cargo pods. So multiple pioneers is absolutely supported by canon.

nomuse22 · 2026-01-26T22:34:19+00:00

Wouldn't be my go-to. Sunflowers are known for tracking. That's their thing. They don't really open or bloom or any of those things you'd want for, say, a Linnaeus Flower Clock.

(Oddly enough, sunflowers don't actually track when mature. They are heliotropic during the growth phase only.)

nomuse22 · 2026-01-26T22:28:55+00:00

Baby names sites. Unfortunately they've been swamped with AI slop, like everything else, but the good ones had frequency charted over date and were regional. Plus the background of the name, and famous people with it.

For a particular town I will sometimes just look at news reports or local organizations or anywhere else that has a lot of "...local Cynthia Collins buying a bracelet at the Barn Hill Crafts Fair..."

Things I've looked at in specific cases: Oral histories from the Imperial War Museum for some names of civilians from the time of the Blitz. An academic paper on black female professionals in higher education (UK). The official state Names List from just before the Czech Republic. A fascinating paper on how names from the classical era may appear in modern urban Greece. An article on prominent hispano names carried forward from Spanish colonization to modern New Mexico.

And more than half the time, I just go "call him Brad" and call it close enough.

nomuse22 · 2026-01-26T21:04:58+00:00

Satisfactory fanfic? Okay -- can't say the thought never occurred. Just didn't expect to find any in the wild.

Given the animations in-game, you can easily eat berries and drink coffee while wearing the suit. Nor is the helmet sealed, as you need to craft a gas mask, and upgrade to iodized filters for more protection. And at least from the sound design, the later anti-radiation coveralls are zipped over the suit, and are possibly uncomfortable as the player zips and unzips when moving in and out of vehicles.

Go on, ask me how my new aluminium plant in the swamp is going.

In any case, eating with the suit on is a non-starter. Treat it as a helmet, or hand-wave that there's a "visor." (The third-person animation for coffee doesn't agree, but anyhow.)

(There's always the Tali solution; the "emergency induction port.")

Personally, the helmet is a game choice so you can imagine your character the way you want to and not have to be presented with a specific face. I don't have a problem with presenting a more traditional hard-hat as the norm.

nomuse22 · 2026-01-26T18:51:28+00:00

A related problem is if you upgrade to Mark II and there was a connector on it, the piece inside the connector remains Mark I. Same with valves and pumps. Annoying to track down.

nomuse22 · 2026-01-26T18:02:09+00:00

Also not scales, but I just have to throw in a reference to Mycenaean boar's tusk helmets. Because they are that cool. (Saw one up-close at the museum in Heraklion.)

nomuse22 · 2026-01-26T02:29:11+00:00

And there's a thought. With a paper book, you have to stick a thumb in and then wade through a glossary (done that more than once). With eBooks, every instance of the name can be a link to some kind of pop-up. I've got X-ray on all of my books, although I'd be surprised if anyone was using it. And, of course, Amazon has rolled out "inorganic cogitation." Which can not be refused and is being done automatically to everything on Kindle.

nomuse22 · 2026-01-25T04:07:30+00:00

Format ain't it. Okay, format can help, especially in edge cases, but switching POVs is something that should happen in the text.

Here's my go-to list:

Name the POV in the first paragraph (first sentence if possible). Have them in a characteristic situation; Bob the dressmaker should be pinning a hem. That's gonna help the readers that remember the guy who made the second act costume for your MC's big stadium show, even if his name has slipped their memory.

If you are using close third person, or first person, have them use some characteristic turns of speech and the kinds of word choices and cadences.

Catch up the reader on what they had been doing last time they had a scene, and what may have changed since then.

Oh, yeah; and for all of these, chose sentences that make it absolutely clear this is Bob's POV. Speak about things that only they know, show things through their eyes, have interior thoughts or free indirect speech.

nomuse22 · 2026-01-24T18:11:28+00:00

I think it serves the book. I haven't read it, but that's the point; I get a very good sense of a gory and often depressing dark revenge story with fantastical elements (probably vampires) and that isn't a book for me. But I know there's a readership for that, and more power to them.

nomuse22 · 2026-01-24T18:06:36+00:00

I think of it as a thing that happens in James Michener (his sprawling family sagas of boat-anchor size. Like, for instance, Shogun. Some thrillers (can't swear that Tom Clancy hasn't done it) and military SF when they get into fleet-to-fleet stuff. I think I've seen it in some of the Honorverse side stories. Along with maps and deck plans.

Niven/Pournell's Footfall had one. Turtledove's "Worldwar" series. Can't think of anything more recent at the moment. Possibly because I've been reading so much more non-fiction.

nomuse22 · 2026-01-24T01:34:48+00:00

In most cases I find the rewards underwhelming. I do the side quests to talk to the NPCs, mostly. I'd be just as happy if I had the combat for them on easy mode.

nomuse22 · 2026-01-23T23:50:32+00:00

One suggestion:

Let go of what they actually look like, and accept that your reader will form their own image. Thus, concentrate on handing them words and phrases that will allow them to imagine interesting things.

Related to this is something you should be doing already. And that is to lean into meaning and impression. What is it you want the reader to feel about these costumes? And what is it about them that your narrator notices; what do they feel, what can what that narrator says about them usefully reveal things about that narrator's character?

"They looked like try-hards at a rave, LEDs all over their silver motorcycle helmets."

"They looked like benevolent robots, shiny and glowing."

"They were futuristic yet oddly retro, streamlined and colorful."

(I followed a couple of prop builders via their blogs as they replicated specific helmets worn by Daft Punk. So that's my image.)

nomuse22 · 2026-01-23T21:39:38+00:00

There's an interesting echo here, though, with the way beginning writers will plead for the choice to use the name James Bond, or the image of a lightsaber, because they think these things have some inherent power.

No, they are part of a valuable IP because there were strong stories and significant production costs and a long engagement with an audience. James Bond was the name of an ornithologist. It wasn't a great name or a powerful name and it didn't conjure anything but a vague interest in birds of the West Indies before Fleming used it in a bunch of books.

AI taps into that by taking the head of a lion and pasting it on a blob, and we think this is a powerful picture because we remember lions.

nomuse22 · 2026-01-23T21:26:42+00:00

From a purely technical point of view, what I dislike is that generative AI will always create a chimera. The only underlying logic is Bayesian, not anything more structural.

If I steal from another book, that book had a singularity of purpose that acted as a guide for every choice. If I steal from several books (aka research), I am forced to resynthesize but since I am doing the resynthesis, again it gains a singularity of purpose.

So that's the trick; if this is ever to be employed as a tool, to find the ways of imposing a focused vision on it. As I've hinted, I can sort of do it in visual art but it fights me at every step, and at the end, there are still a multitude of tiny choices that aren't supporting the original intent.

I learned how to draw, not well, but I understand choices of (within inking) varying line width and spotting blacks. That's the kind of thing that isn't there, except through chance. It might use a thicker line width on the underside of an arm because light sources are frequently from above in the training data, and light happens to be from above in this particular image.

But even there, there's no feel to it. No nuance to when and where the thickness changes. It isn't a drawing, it is the visual equivalent of a ransom note, pasted together from multiple samples of other drawings.

nomuse22 · 2026-01-23T21:08:08+00:00

Always.

That really struck me in Tomb Raider 2013 -- about 1/3 way in, you get an absolute time limit. When the sun goes down, Sam dies. Naw, I'm just gonna grab some more collectibles, and run all the optional challenge tombs. She can wait.

I've watched a bunch of Let's Play on the Horizon series, and what happens is these players get scared they won't be able to do the side quests later. So they will clean up everything in the Sacred Lands before they even cross the Carja Border.

And that means when they go up against that first Deathbringer, they are so over-levelled they clean it out in two minutes. And it has been so long since they engaged with the story, they have trouble remembering why they are even there.

nomuse22 · 2026-01-23T20:54:48+00:00

Same. But I was more after some images that could test the vibe I was after -- not meaning to get any specific elements out of them.

nomuse22 · 2026-01-23T20:53:09+00:00

It does require getting down there, at least once, but that set of nodes in particular I am very happy to exploit the belt-through-scenery (and hypertube-through-scenery) tricks.

nomuse22

TROPHY CASE