On the Passing Scene VI

This is kinda stream of consciousness. Much like Augustine's Confessions.

• It occurs to me, Niven knew what he was saying, when he said he wasn't qualified to write military fiction (thus making the Man-Kzin Wars a shared universe for other writers, who were). I hate to kick someone who's already being humble, but in a sense the Kzinti Lesson is an example of this. Why? Three words.
  
  Fire-and-forget.
  
  See, it might make sense for the Kzinti to have been hampered by the Kzinti Lesson initially—"the monkeys believe they have no weapons but they keep blowing us up with their comms and exhaust"—but, since they are not actually retarded, they should, fairly early on, have simply said, "Screw it, whether they know it or not they're definitely armed", and then they would have moved their fleets to the shelter of various Kuiper-belt masses. Then they would proceed to bombard their targets without line-of-sight, the major weakness of all Kzinti Lesson "weapons".
  
  Apache helicopters do it all the time.


• I don't think I mentioned it, but my felinoids' latest dental formula results in them having 23 teeth.
  
  Incidentally, in a short story I'm writing about their first contact with humans, one of the first orders their commander gives is to tell some of his ships to get a targeting lock on the human ship and then keep it covered, from behind something that'll give cover from fusion rocket exhaust. Just in case.


• Another thing in that story RE: just in case, the leader of the human expedition (the only really military guy on their ship) forbids the scientists from telling the aliens the location of Earth. Because, he points out, you don't know they're not hostile.
  
  Seriously, why are people a bunch of idiots? All these SETI advocates and SF writers, just blithely announcing where Earth is? No, no, no. Forget the Cole Protocol, apparently we can't trust these noobs with a Facebook account. You never reveal your home address to someone you don't know!
  
  Please, Sagan, even 8-year-olds know that.


• So Britain rated a Wii game based on Truth or Dare "appropriate for ages 12 and up." The only possible thought process would be assuming that "appropriate for" is identical with "of interest to".
  
  Again, this is so boneheadedly self-destructive I can't even Schadenfreud, and it's happening to English people.


• And of course, endless numbers of people are saying "if you don't want your kids to play it, don't let them." Sigh. My usual response to the statement "if you don't like it don't watch it" is "it's not that much of a hassle to walk to the back of the bus or find a 'Colored' lunch-counter, but you all seem to think we can legislate morality there", but this is actually a different question.
  
  Namely, the ratings systems only exist so parents do not have to follow all forms of media as closely as people like me with no lives. Therefore, there's a problem whenever something gets passed with an incorrect rating. There actually are things kids shouldn't see until they're old enough, and since—in order to keep your all-holy machinery of capitalism running—the parents do not have time to vet all possible media their children might consume, there has to be a system, whether private and voluntary as in the US or state and mandatory as in the UK, to inform consumers as to media content. Passing things with ludicrous ratings, as in a game with Wii-mote spankings and stripping being passed with a "12 and up" rating, is just as bad as an error on a food's nutrition label; I hardly see how requests for more accurate labeling constitute calls for censorship.


• Of course it comes from UbiSoft, but then, who's surprised? I've honestly hated that company since "Thirteen" named a weapon the "minigun" that turned out to be an SMG. Nota bene: This is a minigun. What you have there is more like an Uzi.


• Which reminds me of an interesting point about a game where you actually do get a minigun. I refer of course to Halo. Or, basically, Metal Gear, as made by a sane person. The Spartan program is Les Enfants Terrible; both series are named after apocalyptic death machines; both protagonists are special forces and periodically have conversations with odd girls through cyborg implants. The "Cortana Moments" in Halo 3 are sorta like Rose in MGS2, except they're less annoying—also they're due to neural and psychological trauma, not Kojima's neurotic need to shoehorn in soap-operatic emoting.
  
  Also, Halo doesn't have the stupid preaching about nukes or nonsense like America and the Soviets being "friends" during World War II. Oh, and by the way, Kojima, the Cold War's problem wasn't that it split the world into two, it was that it united the world into two, when it had been two hundred.


• I realized why I find Japanese raunchy comedy less disturbing than American. It's because of Japan's tradition of manzai comedy, the two man, "Abbot and Costello" approach where the angry guy (tsukkomi) reprimands the dumb guy (boke).
  
  See, in Japanese raunchy comedy, the pervert-character (say Adam Blade in Needless) is a type of boke, and others' reaction is the tsukkomi. It's funny in large part by asserting basic principles of decency, even if it's playing around with people who contravene them. That's a hell of a lot less creepy than, say, American Pie, which is an all boke, no tsukkomi type of act.
  
  In the immortal words of that one girl in Maho Sensei Negima, I want to tsukkomi the world.