Stuff and Stuff IV

Material culture thoughts, mostly fictional/speculative.

• I have been misled for years! I had always thought that one tried to catch an opponent's sword with the edge of one's own, but no, you use the flat (possibly the back, if your sword is single-edged). The term in German longsword fighting (the best-documented historic style in Europe) is "mit der Flech", literally "with the flat". I had been inappropriately analogizing from how you block with your arm in unarmed fighting, but steel is much more flexible than bone...except when it's been hardened to create a cutting edge, and then, because "hard = brittle", you can actually create fractures that will spread till your blade shatters.
  
  I guess it just goes to demonstrate the cardinal rule: research, research, research. I need to go have a look through several things I've written (also make it clearer that swordsman don't so much "block" as parry, i.e. deflect, more the sort of thing associated with, say, wihng cheun rather than karate—something I have always known, but been somewhat careless about conveying).
• Why do people act like caseless ammunition is some huge sci-fi innovation? The Franco-Prussian War was fought with caseless ammunition, the Dreyse and Chassepot "needle" rifles (named for the shape of their firing pins), whose cartridges had paper wrappers that burned up when the round was fired. I don't know how well the paper burned, or if it fouled the barrel, but plainly it worked well enough "to be going on with", as the British expression goes.
  
  I imagine, however, that the paper wrapper, which didn't keep the powder dry and could probably get messed up any number of other ways, was just another variable you didn't need on the battlefield, and so they replaced it with brass. Those were also single-shot guns, you couldn't load multiple paper cartridges from a magazine.
• Was thinking of maybe redoing my story so the zledo are using handheld railguns, but there are definite physical limits to that tech. And the metric-patching guns have far more wiggle-room, we know just a skosh more about magnets than we do about using the Casimir effect to create negative-mass exotic matter and patch together stress-energy tensor metrics. Also, I don't think we (or anyone else) are ever gonna have rail-pistols, again, "definite physical limits".
  
  One idea I've seen kicked around is a one- or two-shot anti-tank railgun, basically a purely kinetic recoilless gun. One problem, though: the means by which "recoilless" was achieved for rockets probably aren't available with a railgun. The exhaust, after all, pushes the gun forward as the projectile leaves it, keeping the shooter from being knocked back (which is why it's dangerous to stand behind someone who has one, unless becoming a demonstration of the Kzinti Lesson appeals to you).
• Know what the bike-helmet of the future might well look like? A stocking cap. We're actually making them in limited numbers now, for things like snowboarding. They have a layer of shear-thickening fluid inside them. I would really like to know if the shear-thickening fluid in question, trademarked as "d3o", has to be bright orange, or if they just chose to make it bright orange because they're awesome.
  
  Another idea that I'm definitely going to add to my book (the city where most of the first and third ones take place is at its planet's equator) is refrigerated clothes. The technology we currently only use in pro-sports mascot suits and movie costumes would be quite a boon to the populace of warmer climes—not only for the sake of fashion (and not getting your legs shredded by brush or bit by snakes) but also in terms of ecology. Coolant linings, if properly disposed once they wear out, almost certainly have less ecological impact than air-conditioning a whole office building.
• In the interest of pointing out to people that giant robots are not unrealistic (though their portrayal usually is), consider the following. Titanium alloy as used in armor plating is much less dense than steel, 4.45 g/cm³ to dense steel's 8.05. A known walking robot like Asimo is 48 kg and 1.3 m tall (a human as small as Asimo would weigh 30 kg, an Asimo the size of a human would weigh 165 kg). If, for simplicity's sake, we assume that all of Asimo except the battery (6 kg) is made of automotive magnesium alloy, density 1.8 g/cm³, then replacing it all with armor-grade titanium gives us an Asimo massing 103.8 kg. Making that 10 meters tall would give a mass 455 times greater ((10/1.3)³), which comes to 47.26 megagrams, the same mass as an M60 Patton tank.
  
  Of course, no actual military hardware is made entirely of armor; even most tanks are made, in many of their components, of the aforementioned automotive magnesium alloy, with only a relatively thin shell of armor. It's entirely realistic for a mecha to be 10 meters tall and mass 25-30 tons. Given that automotive alloy is only 70% denser than a human body (1.06 g/cm³), it may well be more realistic to model a walking robot as a man in a suit of armor. A human being averages 70 kg and 1.73 meters tall; a man made of automotive alloy would mass 119 kg. A suit of full plate armor made of titanium alloy would mass 11 kg (steel armor is 20 kg), bringing an armored magnesium man's mass to 130 kg. Making him 10 meters tall increases his mass 193 times, to 25.11 megagrams, the mass of a Bradley (which is a light-to-medium tank in everything but treads and lacking a big main cannon).
• So...a bunch of people think we're going to 3D-print our clothes in the future. I doubt it, since 3D-printers are never going to be "one in every household" affairs, any more than laser-etchers or lathes are, and there is more to fashion than "personal expression" (actually, "personal expression" is virtually nonexistent in fashion, the only thing fashion generally "expresses" is in-group identification). Remember how, parallel with electronic books, we were all going to get paper books printed to-order at bookstores? Yeah, that didn't happen either.
  
  Which is not to say no garments will come out of 3D printers. Custom clothes will probably expand well outside their current tiny market share, being so much simpler now. A certain amount of self-indulgence is probably likely at some point—all of society now being in the position of aristocrats with tailors on retainer. We may be looking forward to fashion-movements as weird as the ones that France had just after the Terror, like the Muscadins and the Incroyables, only probably without the political element.
  
  Also? We might print underwear, or more to the point bras—I have two sisters, do you my fellow dudes know what a hassle bras are? Apparently they are sized on somewhat the same basis as Eastern Bloc computer parts, only without the uniformity, and even the alleged authorities disagree with each other over how much to round a given measurement ("nearest inch? or two inches?" being apparently a hotly debated point). Plus manufacturers appear not to believe that certain size combinations exist, much like how in my youth I could never find pants that were long enough that weren't too loose at the waist.
• This article pretty much speaks for itself, and is extremely interesting. I know I unconsciously incorporated most of that "gestural vocabulary" when my characters interact with volumetric displays—even the alien ones. I'm a little ashamed of myself for not having consciously designed a gestural interface, but then again I probably would've gone with most of the same ideas anyway. I mean, how is an alien going to dismiss something, if he's using his hands (or hand-analogues)? Well, he's going to wave it off, dogs understand that gesture.
  
  Of course, when people complain that aliens have the same gestures as humans, it's almost completely beside the point to ask them if they know that a particular gesture is only found in a particular culture, or is unique to humans. Of course they don't, learning about other cultures and animal behavior is hard, and sometimes involves discovering that some things are universal. It's much easier to congratulate themselves on "knowing" that everything about their culture is only found in their culture, and everyone else's culture is completely different. That's why to this day nobody from Europe has even been able to gesticulate his meaning to a Korean, Zulu, or Zuñi, nor vice-versa, let alone actually learn each other's languages. Right?
• It looks like we're not going to be getting away from silicon as an information-storage material any time soon. Mostly because the next gen of optical storage, probably never be replaced, involves laser-etching nanostructural changes into quartz. And quartz, as we all know, is silicon dioxide (little pieces of it are called "sand").
  
  I kinda want to stab every single journalist who reported on this, as well as whoever decided to call it "superman memory crystal". A lot of stabbing to get through, I realize. But dammit, it's made of quartz, that doesn't mean it looks like a freaking trigonal crystal, so why did every single media outlet (and again, seemingly the scientists themselves) go out of their way to make the public picture the Fortress of Freaking Solitude?
  
  Besides, everyone knows that's Kryptonian sunstone, not quartz.

Uncorrelated, Not Uncaused VIII

Random thoughts.

• All those science fiction writers, especially in the 80s, who liked to call a certain island chain off the coast of Asia "Nippon", and its people and language "Nipponese"—do you, uh, realize that you still call that big country next to it "China"? Come come, let's be consistent. Zhongguo^Note. and...what, Zhongguonian?...if you please, not "China" and "Chinese"—and if you're assuming the current prestige dialect will be the same in the future, it's Putonghua (Putonghuan?), not "Mandarin".
  
  Also? That peninsula bordering China at the Yalu River, and separated from Japan by a narrow sea? Anything you assume would be its name in the future is going to ipso facto involve future-history decision making. Calling it Choson or Joseon means one thing, Hanguk another. In my books, well, I call the place Korea, because I also call them "Japan" and "China", those names are both a thousand years old by the time of my setting, and whatever is supposed to be proved by using "Nippon", I have no interest in proving.
  
  But in the context of mentioning Korea's native name I call it Goryeo, because at reunification they didn't want to go with either one's name—also because there was a Buddhist revival with accompanying (partial) repudiation of Neo-Confucianism, and Goryeo was a Buddhist kingdom. (In case you wondered, it's the kingdom Marco Polo visited; Corea pronounced the Italian way is very close to 고려.)
• Apparently, the chainsaw is a lousy weapon for combat. I read a news story about a guy who, jumped by a puma, tried to fend it off with a chainsaw...and gave it a little gash ("I might as well have hit it with a hockey stick"). See, trees don't move; living creatures do. And any animal that isn't H. sapiens is going to have way tougher skin than you. (You ever notice cats'll sometimes sit so close to a heater that you can smell burning hair? Yeah, heat becomes painful to them after their fur starts combusting.)
  
  A bigger issue is that there are bones and connective tissues in animals that aren't in trees, and they can actually separate the links of a chainsaw chain (just like hitting a rock can, sawing felled trees). A broken chain on an activated saw becomes a serrated whip that'll pop out and wrap around anything nearby, including your neck—there's a reason lumberjacks have an on-the-job mortality rate comparable to taxi drivers and prostitutes.
  
  That business with chains is also why electric turkey carvers are two blades moving against each other, rather than a chain. That's probably a more likely method for a space military's powered bayonets than chainsaws; the mechanism's also got fewer moving parts.
• Relatedly, people appear to have some strange bias against swords in science fiction, but actually, why don't more SF militaries use them? I mean, half the time, they're fighting some sort of space-bug that can survive dozens of rounds of rifle fire, but dies when it's cut in half—why not give those poor SOBs something that'll cut the bugs in half?
  
  It's useless to say "they have guns", because we have guns, and we also issue combat knives, and train with 'em. Those are adequate to the creature we're generally fighting. But the zledo, in my books, use swords—because they are the size of jaguars (i.e. small tigers), and if you tell any sane person "Here, kill this jaguar/small tiger with a trench-knife", he'll swear at you.
  
  The Peacekeepers they're fighting do still only have combat knives, but that is a deliberate worldbuilding choice: the kind of bureaucrat who runs the UN is also the kind of person who thinks combat-knives will never come up. You know, just like how there hasn't been a recorded use of bayonets on a battlefield in fourteen whole months. See also all that dogfighting the Air Force is gonna stop doing annnnnnnnny day now.
• What's with people addressing, or more often, attempting to debunk, cultural phenomena like Wendigo Sickness or Ghost Sickness epidemiologically? The cultures those things are from are cultures where "medicine" is a spiritual thing; "Ghost Sickness" is a curse, incurred by being in the presence of the lingering evil of the dead, but described by a medical metaphor. Ditto Wendigo Sickness: that's a medical metaphor for the cannibal's loss of his humanity. Speaking of illness, did you know not recognizing metaphor is a symptom of schizophrenia?
  
  Next I suppose you'll bring in meteorologists to talk about how whirlwinds' spin direction is not correlated with their moral character—since you like to take figurative language used by Native Americans completely literally.
• Did you see the trailer for Oblivion? The SF movie, not the game before Skyrim. Well I did, and I feel I can take a firm stance of "Cautious Optimism!" I like that they've managed to do future military hardware that isn't just knocked off from Halo. Also, Tom Cruise may be weird, but the fact is he's the second-most consistently good American actor currently working, after only Robert Downey, Jr.
  
  I have no inside information, just my geek's intuition, but I'm calling this ahead of time: the big secret everything is working toward is the aliens never existed. Let's all see if I'm right in April.
• Reading a few volumes of Sunabouzu (Desert Punk) has reminded me of something: why do Japanese people refuse to know about deserts? Sure, that one got that they get cold at night...but the thing is still the lifeless sand-waste version of a desert, a thing that does not exist. Even the Sahara has scrub vegetation, and the Gobi and the Sonoran (which my mother grew up in) are pretty much brush-covered prairies and hills.
  
  Worse, though, is this stupid, obviously political idea rampant in Japan that deserts are an unnatural thing, caused by environmental destruction. While environmental destruction can make deserts, natural phenomena, mainly rain-shadows, are generally responsible. And the people who live in the desert just north of me are currently raising hell about artificially increasing the moisture levels on one of their mountains.
  
  Incidentally, people who made Tekken? I'm talking about Indians—do yourselves a favor and stuff Michelle and Julia Chang in a big bag, and drown them in the river.
• I wonder where the crazy ideas about "sinister" meaning "spooky" coming from a prejudice against left-handed people came from? "Sinister" means "bad" because auguries were done facing east, and a flock of birds heading to one's left is traveling north. North is an unlucky direction in every geomantic system I'm acquainted with (yes, I know more than one—doesn't everyone?), and that includes augury.
  
  Speaking of, if you're writing a fantasy story with summoning, you might wanna give your summoning-circles a "safe" direction. Navajo sandpaintings—which, in their real form, are meters-wide ritual arrays painted on the ground—are bounded on three sides by a stretched figure of a god, to prevent intrusions by unwanted spirits, but the east side isn't bounded, because nothing evil can enter by the east.
• I have elsewhere made mention of the irrelevant piece of tokenism called the "Bechdel Test", which is passed when it can be said of a work that, quote, "It includes at least two women, who have at least one conversation, about something other than a man or men." It is, in other words, an irrelevant litmus test fetish, a box that can be conveniently checked, to spare us the heavy work of thinking and forming judgments based on thought.
  
  This particular standard, though, is unusually bad, because, aside from the fact most real conversations don't actually pass it, most lipstick-lesbian exploitation movies, pretty-girl anime, and jiggle-fest Aaron Spelling shows do. If your test says those things are less sexist than a work about women who are rationally concerned with their peers, at least half of whom will be male, your test is stupid and worthless, and so is anyone who took it seriously.
  
  Now get back in the lab and make me a higher-yield collectivized farm, woman.
• The Bechdel Test also ignores (as bourgeois pseudoscience) all those studies showing that women and men talk about different subjects—and hey, guess what, women talk about people (again, half of whom are male) more than men do. The question of whether that's "culturally determined" (i.e., arises from class-interest) or not is irrelevant to movies—because movies are about people as they actually exist, except when the point of the movie is asking "what if they were different?", so they'd be subject to any such "cultural determinant" forces that their real counterparts are.
• It occurs to me, the cardinal directions in the language of a primarily space-dwelling culture should be "spinward" for east and "leeward" for west (like how people often define the directions in the galaxy). Then north and south become, I don't know, "spinleft" and "spinright"? They're on your right and left, respectively, if you face east, which is the direction a planet spins toward (seriously, define "east" some other way—you have to arbitrarily pick a pole to be north).
  
  I wonder, what do you call the directions in a galaxy? Spinward and leeward, of course, and I suppose "rimward" and "coreward", but what about the third axis? And don't say there's no up or down in a galaxy; much as how one can define north as "your left when you're facing east", "up" and "down" can be defined relative to the other two axes I just mentioned—and they are objective things, like a sunrise.

Ideas on Bayonets

A revolution is an idea that has found its bayonets.
—Napoleon Bonaparte

Thoughts on weapons, wielding, and, uh...I can't think of another word that starts with a W.

• The "strong" position on the right to bear arms, that private citizens have the right to any weapon the government uses, "in order to resist government tyranny", is laughably false (as false as the "strong" position on gun-control, i.e. that banning firearms will magically make violence go away). In actual fact, there is no right to armed resistance against one's own government, until the point is reached that that "right" becomes a duty. Or in other words, the only government you have a right to resist by force is one you have a duty to overthrow by force. It is no use citing the constitution, since it is self-contradictory to appeal to the authority of an institution in support of a right to subvert that institution.
  
  The real—and incontrovertible—rationale of the right to bear arms has nothing to do with resisting the state at all. Rather, it has to do with a different understanding of what the state's role is. "When seconds count, the police are only minutes away"; also the courts have ruled that the police have no legal obligation to defend any one person. They couldn't rationally have ruled any other way, or else any person who was the victim of a crime automatically has a (legally actionable) grievance against the police. This necessarily means, however, that primary responsibility for the individual's defense rests with that individual (and his fellows).
  
  The primary role of the police, and the state edifice of justice generally, is not protective but vindictive—they mainly protect the civic peace by punishing those who violate it after the fact, not by direct combat with violators. Because, while the individual has an unquestionable, inalienable right to defense, "civilization" means, and has meant since it was handed down from heaven at Eridu, that the right of vengeance is delegated to the community at large. This is for two reasons. One, it frees up people's time from having to carry out vendettas, and being on the watch against others' vendettas; and two, it ensures (since there is some sort of adjudication-process built in) that whether there's actually a grievance to be avenged is somewhat more objectively determined than the feelings of the ostensible wronged party.
• You know how weapons used to wear out in Elder Scrolls games, something Skyrim finally got rid of? Diablo had it too, and apparently D3 still does. I wonder, is that RuneQuest's fault? RuneQuest was always the hipster RPG, the one for people who liked to attack D&D—generally straw versions of it, e.g. those people I complained about who said it was unrealistic that D&D's economy would be based on gold (which is why D&D's economy was based on silver, at least through 3.5E—adventurers are like drug dealers, throwing around Benjamins when everyone else is using ten-spots).
  
  I sorta understand the rationale for this in a tabletop RPG, though I think I prefer D&D3E's way of handling it (item durability is only an issue in unusual circumstances); but in a videogame, it's an unfortunate injection of realism that'll just make the unrealism stand out more. I mean, if I have to make sure not to break my sword by beating on rock monsters with it, shouldn't eating and sleeping be less matters of temporary bonuses, and more matters of not dying? And why do RPGs do it, when even the simmiest of FPSs don't bother with things like having to refill your magazines (tactical reloads don't result in only having one partially-full magazine, in real life), or the fact that guns jam?
• One thing that always bugs me about FPSs: why do the guns all use different ammo? Militaries standardize—there are whole books worth of standardization agreements—so that most weapons's ammo can be interchanged, with a minimum of work. Video games, on the other hand (and with the honorable exceptions of Dark Forces and at least the first Red Faction, where several guns had ammo in common), have every damn gun need its own ammo, even in the case of weapons like the needler and the needle rifle, in Reach, which were expressly made as variants of the same design. Why can't I shove one set of pink needles into the other gun, gentlemen?
  
  Come to think of it, I don't play WWII games. Can you, e.g., refill your M1911A1 with a dropped Tommy gun's ammo? In those games' more-recent-setting offshoots, can you refill your MP5 from your dead CO's spare sidearm ammo, or your M16 from an M249 SAW's belt? I'm given to understand SAWs don't like feeding from M16/M4 magazines (your guess is as good as mine why not—presumably they feed differently from the belts it's designed for), but the individual rounds are identical.
  
  As a general rule, in most modern militaries, the rifles and machineguns use one or at most two types of round (except for special purpose things like anti-materiel rifles), and then handguns, used by most officers as sidearms, use a third, the same type as submachine guns (which are mainly used by special forces). There have been exceptions, though—famously, the Winchester repeater rifle came chambered in most of the same rounds as the Colt Peacemaker and S&W Model 3, so you could load your rifle and your revolver from the same box, or use found (or "found") ammunition no matter what gun you carried. And the Warsaw Pact, for some reason, only really seemed to standardize on rifle rounds (the ones used by the AK47 and the AK74); their pistols and SMGs were all over the place, including in Western calibers. E.g., of the seven versions of the Czech Szkorpion SMG, only two were chambered in a Warsaw Pact round.
• So, trying to find out why the SAW doesn't like assault rifle magazines (turns out the spring in the magazines isn't designed to feed the whole mag at once), I come across an article saying that higher-capacity magazines for the M16/M4 might mean the SAW will be phased out. Only, A) presumably we're here talking about 50-60 round casket magazines, while a standard SAW belt holds 200 rounds, and B), that funny-looking handle on the front of the SAW doesn't just look cool, it's to make swapping the barrel out easier.
  
  See, many machineguns are carried with spare barrels, designed to be quickly swapped out, because prolonged firing on full-auto makes the barrels overheat. Not only does the heat sometimes warp the barrel, it can even conduct back into the chamber, and not only fire the chambered round without you touching the trigger, but even cause "cooking off", where the rounds in the magazine go off before being chambered, from the heat igniting their propellant. And while a belt-fed gun doesn't have to worry (as much) about cooking off, an assault rifle using a high-capacity mag sure as hell would.
  
  The modified HK416 the USMC is thinking of replacing the SAW with, the M27 Infantry Automatic Rifle, is A) still a light machinegun, not an assault rifle, and B) not capable of anything like the same sustained fire as the SAW, because it doesn't have swappable barrels. The Army, whose tactical approach requires sustained machinegun fire more than the USMC's does, is looking into either just getting new M249s to replace their old ones, or some newer, but still typical, machinegun (like the LSAT LMG), not even a modified assault rifle.
• I am torn, I really am, on whether I should rewrite the guns in my SF book. See, on the one hand, the zledo's current guns, based on the same inertia-control system as their ships, are awesome sauce, and I've done all kinds of calculations for them. On the other hand, I don't know if being able to miniaturize that technology to that degree is very realistic—nor if you'd want a gun whose mechanism needs recourse to relativity equations to describe it.
  
  I mean, my humans' guns are basically about as high-tech as a car cigarette lighter. Well, in terms of the actual firing mechanism, anyway; their feed-mechanism is basically like our guns, and they don't need ejectors except to clear dud rounds. Caseless, electronically-fired guns do require coolant systems, which are, as they say, "another thing to go wrong", but all told I'm guessing the simplicity of not having empty brass to worry about evens things out. Besides, caseless ammo is half as heavy.
  
  I don't know what I'd give the zledo instead, though—EM needle-guns, maybe, or flechette-guns—and your house is full of things whose mechanism needs recourse to Maxwell equations to decribe it (they're called electronics). Also? It's a hassle to rewrite entire scenes when you've already finished two 200K-word books and are half done with two more. So I ain't gonna.
• It is universally agreed among the gun cognoscenti that the whole idea of "smart" guns, i.e. biometrically (or, more usually, RFID) locked ones like in the Metal Gear games (where's it's just a game mechanic to limit when you can pick up which guns), is crazy. Again, "another thing to go wrong"—know how many people have been screwed by those RFID chips in their car keys (my parents' truck being exhibit A)?
  
  Also, it occurs to me, if you have those things, what's to stop, say, robbers, from jamming the RFID chips in the house of a potential victim? The possibility of getting shot is a major deterrent to home-invasions and "hot" burglaries (those committed while residents are present); let's not screw with a good thing, mmmkay? Admittedly the possibility of jamming the RFID in bank robbers' guns would probably make gun-control enthusiasts salivate, but criminals are, by definition, the kind of people who are willing to illegally remove RFID devices.
• So, you know what you never see in discussions of the sword, in things about knights or samurai? The fact the things are sidearms. Yep. Knights and samurai are a warrior class, not because they were markedly better fighters than anyone else, but because they could afford the upkeep on horses. Knights were heavy cavalry, and samurai, though they were armored like heavy infantry and fought as such on foot, were light cavalry. A knight's main weapon was the lance; a samurai's was the bow. Ever notice the odd way you move a bow, when you draw it, in Japanese archery—you bring it up above your head, then lower it as you draw back? Yeah, that move is designed to bring it clear of your horse's neck.
  
  And while, of course, if a knight or samurai for some reason lost his lance or bow and had to draw his backup weapon, he wouldn't shy away from hitting guys with his sword from horseback (and the katana is a variant of the same Central Asian cavalry sword that gives you the saber and the scimitar), swordsmanship was mainly restricted to foot encounters. Up till the Mongol invasion that the Holy Wind prevented, actually, the Japanese fought their battles in two stages—several horse-archer sweeps to soften each other up, then the samurai officers on both sides would fight a series of highly formal single combats.

The Earth Is Blue

...and if you were looking for God in space, your name better be Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, or you're an idiot. And if it is, A) holy crap are you like undead, or what? and B) you're still kinda a wacko.

That's a reference to something Yuri Gagarin said from space, by the way, presumably on orders from his government.

Thoughts upon religion, much of it related to SF and fantasy.

• There is a quote somewhere about the Peyote Church (as it's known where I live) to the effect that, "The white man goes in his church on Sunday and hears about Jesus, and the Indian goes in his tepee and meets Jesus."
  
  To which one might be tempted to add, "And the Mexican goes in his church on Sunday and eats the flesh and drinks the blood of Jesus, the act without which there is no life in you (John 6:53). I'm sorry, cabrón, were you trying to make a point?"
• Remember how I said I learned about Taoism from East Asian folk-religion? Yes, well, where I learned about Buddhism—whose philosophy I can coherently discuss, a faculty that seems almost unique to me—is just plain weird. Namely, from writing fight scenes with ninjas in them.
  
  See, I wanted the mantras that go with those hand-signs ninjas make. I found out that a book on Shingon Buddhist iconography had the mantras that go with each hand-sign; it also had an in-depth discussion of Buddhist eschatology, cosmology, and soteriology. I think it's also where I first encountered the allegory of the cart, which explains the teaching of anatman (Buddhist atomism), and the Mahayana commentary on it (atomism leads to infinite regress) that leads to the Mahayana version of advaita, non-duality (the Monad is the only existent thing).
  
  Then I got Yagyû Munenori's "Family Martial Technique Record", often referred to in the West by the title of one of its chapters, "The Life-Giving Sword": because I wanted ninja sword-techniques, and Munenori's father-in-law was an Iga ninja. Munenori was also a Zen intellectual, and he uses the technical terms of Zen metaphysics. E.g., "essence vs. function": basically Zen only has two Causes in the Aristotelian sense, essence being formal (though only with provisional reality, please remember the doctrine of anatman) and function encompassing material, final, and efficient.
• Eywa, in Avatar (Ewoks, not Aang), is really a very laughable nature mother-goddess; as several reviewers have pointed out, why do people who live on, basically, the island from Cage of Eden, conceive of their nature-goddess as omnibenevolent? That jungle is full of hypercarnivores, and at least some of them probably pursue the "kill as many prey animals as I can, whenever I can" strategy pursued by foxes. And some of them also probably eat Na'vi, despite their Overfiend tentacle mindlink; it's tough to get your mindlink-tentacle into an animal while it's eating your viscera.
  
  What's most irksome is, Pandora is just a bad knockoff of Perelandra crossed with Malacandra. Eywa's its orissa, and the Na'vi are Tor and Tinidril. They even have Adam's authority over animals. Only instead of being deliberate Eden-analogy, with huge swaths of shoutout to Milton, Avatar was trying to be neo-pagan. Only, like most neo-paganism, it only succeeds in being Liberal Protestantism. Eywa's omnibenevolence is the omnibenevolence of the Christian God, who, as Supreme Being, is also the Monad, the Form of the Good. No pagan god is omnibenevolent, because pagan gods can be hurt, therefore they must protect themselves—Zeus strikes down hubristic mortals (remembering his own usurpation of Chronos), Spider Woman spirits away weavers who show signs of becoming better than her.
• And seriously, no pagan gods are omnibenevolent; the Hindu gods (some of whom are described that way) are not purely pagan gods. Hinduism is not paganism, it is a pagan pantheon (the one described in the Rg Veda) being identified with the Supreme Being, usually either pantheistically or monistically.
  
  Say what you will about India, but they got a better answer than the Greeks or Romans did, to the cosmological yearnings paganism, by necessity, leaves unaddressed. The Greeks and Romans generally tended to the Stoic or Epicurean answers, neither of which is really an answer—both are really methods for dodging the question, just like Neo-Confucianism and the various "Enlightenment" attempts to discuss theological questions without reference to Christianity.
• This is an interesting article about primitivism and the "Noble Savage" idea, though I think I dispute her using "shaman" to mean "hunter-gatherers' priests" (I prefer the usage where "shaman" means "priests of the Eurasian shaman-complex who are primarily spirit-channelers", i.e. "the kind of person we get the word from"). But it has a very interesting point about how Westerners approach "shamanism" as a spiritual technology.
  
  Now, there actually is a technological element to that sort of religion—they're called "medicine men" for a reason—but the difference between a Navajo medicine man and an MD is, the MD doesn't have to be on good terms with anyone but a pharmacist and the medical association to effect his cures (and he doesn't even need that second one if he doesn't mind becoming a black-market physician). A Navajo medicine man's cures are effected by beings both he and his patient must be on good terms with—or they die, as both the medicine man and the patient (and one of the dancers) did when they let the Night Chant be filmed all the way through, in 1963.
• There is often used, by Christian writers too numerous to name, the analogy of Creation as a work of fiction and God as its author. Now, the analogy isn't perfect—fictional characters do not have free will, they do what their author makes them do (though, like God, a good author does not force them to act as they would not)—but it is certainly not without its value as a model.
  
  However, has anyone, using that analogy, noticed what a testament it is to the awesomeness of God? Namely, his self-insert character, who shows up people who disagree with him, has a cool secret parentage, and dies and returns from the dead, is excellent, not a Mary Sue at all.
• Boy, it's really too bad self-aware computer programs are logically impossible, and all. Got a patron saint picked out for 'em and everything. Well, okay, so there was a saint who was alleged, in the 1373 Rosario della Vita by Matteo Corsini, to have made a mechanical man, along with all the other kooky alchemical stuff he was supposed to have gotten up to.
  
  I refer, of course, to Albertus Magnus, the practice-grandfather of all Thomists, as he was the teacher of our own master (what, like a kung fu analogy don't belong in Scholasticism?). And to think, Anthony Boucher was so close.
• I know I said St. Barbara was the patron saint of hard SF, but as it turns out, Maximilian Kolbe was a rocket scientist, who designed and tried to patent a reusable space-plane.
  
  And not the most zealous of reductive demythologizers can deny Kolbe existed. So let's take him as the patron saint of hard SF writers. Interestingly, his Nagasaki monastery, that was famously spared the bombing, was apparently on land that was cheap because it was on the northeast side of the mountain—the inauspicious direction known in Onmyôdô geomancy (think Japanese feng shui) as the "kimon", or "ogre gate".
  
  The men of the East may spell the stars,
  And times and triumphs mark,
  But the men signed of the cross of Christ
  Go gaily in the dark.

Un colpo, un uccisione

Italian translation for "One hit, one kill" (一撃一殺, ichigeki hissatsu).

So a lot of fans of European martial arts get mad when you point out they're doing the exact same thing as Japanese martial arts. But...they are.

For instance, the "longsword", which is the thing most of us think of as a bastard or hand-and-a-half sword (slightly smaller than the great- or two-handed sword), works just like a katana. Half-swording, for instance, was probably involved in Okita Sôjirô's "three-piece stab" (sandanzuki); it's just too hard to stab someone quickly in both shoulders and the throat without the other hand getting involved. It's also used in some high blocks in Yagyû Shinkage swordsmanship.

Or how about this picture:

That guy on the left? Waki-kamae. Dude on the right is in chûdan kamae.

Finally, apparently a sword-fighting manuscript by Fiore dei Liberi (I don't know if it's his Flower of Battle, or something else), talks about using the longsword with one hand. Know what specific advantage he talks about?

Sudden. Additional. Reach.

That's right, Saitô Hajime's signature left-handed thrust, the surprise step-through and stab while taking your front hand off the hilt, giving you an extra 1 to 2.5 feet of reach.

Commentary 6

O-hisashiburi de arimasu. And a random thoughts post.

• Binbôgami ga! is finally getting an anime; it's about this girl who's too lucky (and is sucking up the luck of everyone around her), so the gods send a misfortune/poverty god to take some of her luck. Hijinks ensue.
  
  I'm curious to know how the hell the editors (it runs in one of the Jump family of magazines, average age of the readership is 17) let them get away with that many menstruation jokes. I don't really mind—I have two sisters and my mother teaches NFP—but I don't come from a culture with a gigantic blood-taboo.
• I recently read two of the New 52 comics (in collected form), and, uh, apparently we were misled. They've barely touched their continuity. Admittedly I read the GL and Red Lantern ones, the little bit of a Batman one I also read did have some more significant changes, but honestly, people were making a mountain out of a molehill.
  
  I suppose Ganthet returning to the Guardians' quasi-hivemind is something, but then again, I was always surprised they let him get away with founding the Blues in the first place. When half the stuff the Guardians ever did was designed to prevent the proliferation of spectrum-powers—i.e. stave off the War of Light—one of their number who personally creates a battery for one of the other powers is lucky to get off with just having his emotions stripped.
• Also, it's too bad the animated GL series made Atrocitus so one-dimensional; I like him better as the tortured anti-villain he is in the comics. And I suppose it's too much to ask that he be allowed to use his divination (drinking someone's blood, spitting it on the ground, and using the shapes as omens); there goes their TVY7 rating.
  
  Is that "hematemesiomancy"?
• Am I the only one who thinks they should've held off another year on making a second Avatar series? Korra isn't bad, but it ain't nearly up to the original's standard (and the original wasn't, I regret to inform its fans, near as good as it might've been). Plus, personally, I much preferred the first series' tech-level; going to the Taisho/early-post-Qing era was a bit too much of a skip.
  
  Personally I think I would've gone with a prequel, not a sequel—maybe explore one of those other avatars. And I don't know if I mentioned it here, but being the Avatar is, from a Buddhist standpoint, one of the calamitous rebirths that halts one's progress toward salvation. Then again, the hanzi around the title (降世神通) mean "world-descending god-passage"...because the Avatar is a god. So (if I mentioned it), I was wrong; being the Avatar isn't the eleventh calamity, because "being reborn as a god" was already listed as one of the ten.
• Incidentally, though the "there goes our TVY7 rating" issue would come up, I think Azula should've done Eagle Claw. It's a variant of Northern Shaolin, and it's always used by villains in wuxia films. Plus, their trademark eye-plucking becomes awesome (from a certain point of view) when you combine it with firebending. Just ask Envy (then again, "snap of the fingers" is an even cooler way to get fireballs than throwing Northern Shaolin kicks).
  
  One of the characters in something I wrote does Shaolin Eagle Claw, and, at one point, she and her brother combine "attempting eye gouge only to have it blocked by a palm-sweep" with the Three Stooges "attempting eye-jab, catch it on the blade of the hand" bit. Because, as Jackie Chan has demonstrated, kung fu and classic slapstick is like chocolate and peanut butter. Or oil and vinegar.
• Also—I speak with the authority of one whose total time reading shonen manga probably reaches multiple weeks—in that last fight, Zuko should've achieved lightning-bending. He should've redirected Azula's lightning, she mock him for throwing away his one chance, and then he throw lightning of his own at her. It could come from the serene ferocity he learned from the dragons.
  
  Then again, I admit that my version does partly stem from my preference that Katara have no screen-time nor story-role, since she's sorta the worst character ever, and all. And yes, I am including Batmite in my calculations when I say that.
• So, this comment, quoted on Superversive. The quote being criticized actually contains a truth, but states it poorly. The fact of the matter is that anyone who isn't committed to their dreams (or what they say are their dreams), is just going to go about it halfheartedly, and the world doesn't need more halfassed halfhearted half-work.
  
  Also? We've tried it the other way, it gives you the self-esteem movement, participant trophies, and Occupy Wall Street. Far be it from a Shonen Jump fan to diss dreams, but the other two themes that magazine is built around are friends and hard work (yes, even Binbôgami ga!). A dream you don't have to work for isn't much of a dream.
• Finally: there is an article (I'm not gonna link it) by some feminist blogger or other, about the creepy prevalence of rape-tropes in geek culture. Which is a criticism I myself have frequently made, and something that really needs addressing. Anyway she made a number of good points, but ended with a footnote to the effect that the "cultural assumption" that "all women have vaginas" is "problematic". Which, uh...someone plainly needs to watch Kindergarten Cop again.
  
  I have a refutation, by the way. People always try to cite various Native cultures, where there are men who live as women, in support of this idea. But...when First Man and First Woman quarreled (because First Woman thanked her vagina for the food First Man had caught, since she said he only did it so he could sleep with her), and the sexes separated, the men who lived as women went with the men. That is, not having vaginas, they were not women.
  
  As in all things, reading up on Navajo mythology prevents a great deal of stupidity.

Petits Essais

Random thoughts.

• Remember Jonathan Franzen? He's the Luddite subliterate hack, rage at whom occasioned my post "'Science' Is the Operative Word"? Well, the gent who wrote the Reader's Manifesto reviews one of his books here. Not gently. More gently than Franzen deserves, but I suppose an editor might prefer something more complex than "KILL!!" written 2500 times.
  
  My favorite part is the line, "Franzen clearly has little interest in the world of work. (The same applies, incidentally, to whoever edited the novel.)" It is not only highly indicative of the mindset of the lit-fic writer extruder, but an excellently compact little insult. I flatter myself my Megan's Law joke is better, but it's also less useful.
• Axis Powers Hetalia is, probably, at least as overrated as Code GEASS and Hellsing. Aside from the irritatingly hamfisted shipping, it shows the usual Japanese tone-deafness when it comes to other people's history—and at one point, it also has a Stupid Pollack joke played completely straight.
  
  Look. If you were going to do a manga/anime about history, it'd have to be a banchô (school gang) story. Every one of the country/delinquents, for instance, would remember having had their asses kicked by France, but then he gave up fighting to please his girlfriend, Socialism. England would be the villainous, cowardly guy who kidnaps other delinquents' girlfriends in order to lure them into traps. And so on.
• Also, aside from how Austria, not Germany, is the heir to the Holy Roman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was nothing like the love-marriage portrayed in Hetalia. 18th- and 19th-century Hungarians used "Emperor Joseph" as a curse, for crying out loud, and talked openly of returning the Holy Crown to its proper supremacy—i.e., secession.
• I keep returning to that concept, incidentally, the Holy Crown of Szent Istvan, I mean. The idea—that the crown is a mystic artifact in which sovereignty resides, and the king merely the people's representative before it—is marvelously suggestive; I could write you eight or nine fantasy plots using the device, and each one different.
  
  Another idea, from another country where surnames precede personal ones, has always intrigued me—the Japanese idea of seals. That rocks, trees, temples, and sometimes people (usually princesses with a religious role, due to an ancient Chinese record describing Japan, or Wa as it was then known, as being ruled by one) form a containment on dangerous powers, like nuclear cooling rods, is marvelously useful in generating story.
  
  A variant of it is actually involved in battôdô. A scabbard is not merely a mundane thing that keeps a sword's cutting edge from undesired cutting; it is a seal on the violence the weapon itself represents. Arguably a similar idea is the basis of the Gurkha custom of never sheathing a knife without it drawing blood (they cut themselves, generally on the forearm, when they sheathe a knife that hasn't drawn blood). One might interpret it pragmatically, as not wanting to get into the habit of drawing blades easily, or mystically, as the blade itself (as an aspect of the wielder's heart) becoming "thirsty"—but is there actually a difference?
• People always base things—homunculi, serial murders, etc.—on the seven deadly sins. But why not the Four Sins Crying Out to Heaven for Vengeance? You could get a lot of mileage out of characters named/themed Sodomy or Murder, though Denial of Wages and Oppression of Widows and Orphans would be tough to pull off without it looking like James Cameron.
  
  And yes, the thing called "sodomy" is the "sin of sodom". It's not inhospitality. Not even ancient Jews were so fond of parallelism that, merely because Lot's virtue is hospitality, the wickedness of his city must arise from the opposite fault.
  
  Incidentally, Lot's hospitality approaches the point of vice—fathers have more duty to their daughters than to any guests, sorry, just as it would've been wrong to have his sons throw their lives away to protect the guests. Nevertheless, 3rd millennium BC Near Eastern mores being what they were (the guest was a sacred being—still is in the various Afghan honor-codes, which are of Persian origin), Lot's act corresponded to the (partly relative) thing called "common decency". Which is different from actual morals.
• That's something that confuses people about totalitarian or radical Islamic states (radical Islam being a totalitarian ideology, that's actually redundant), by the bye. Absent some idea of natural law, a "good" person—the person least likely to lie, cheat, steal, or commit adultery—is all-too-often also, if that happens to be expected of him, the person who will perform honor-killings or inform on his neighbors to the KGB.
  
  Also, that people—who have never had contact with alternative systems of values—nevertheless stand up against such unjust practices is a powerful argument against morals being culturally determined. And it can't be due to outside influences, at least not much of the time; many reformers in totalitarian regimes are equally critical of the other systems that would be the only source of those influences. Does anyone care to seriously maintain that Solzhenitsyn was primarily influenced by American liberalism in his critiques of communism?
• Know what? Shut up about lobsters already. They're bugs. They do not have a nociception center in their brain—they do not feel pain, merely a highly generalized distress. And if it is that important to you that they not be cooked alive? You shove a chef's knife into the base of their big head-plate, cutting edge toward their antennae, and then swing it down like the arm on a paper-cutter. That kills the bug instantly by bisecting its brain—although it doesn't behave any differently, because again, it's a bug, it doesn't need its head to live.
  
  You can also put them in your freezer for a couple hours, which kills them slightly slower but less traumatically—if an animal that remains alive after having its head severed, and, again, has nothing in its brain for registering pain, can be said to experience trauma. Which it can't.
• Be wary of B. R. Myers' earlier stuff, apart from the Manifesto; while Bush was in office he was as batshit as the rest of the artsy set, and he also appears to fall for animal-rights nonsense (he was the one who reminded me of lobsters), despite it being philosophically vacuous. And if you speak respectfully at all of Cindy Sheehan, an anti-Semite psychotic who made a marionette of her slain son's corpse, you are either a partisan hack or a slackjawed retard. And Myers is plainly not a retard.
  
  Also, bullfighting is not a displaced homicidal impulse. It is a degenerate form of a very badass pastime—in its original form, it was one man, with a spear or shortsword, and just as often a bear or boar as a bull. Then again, I come from a place where the hunting-god is still worshiped (he's simply called Black God), and where it's remembered that any animal that can kill you might as well be a dragon, for all the pity you should show when killing it.
• Incidentally, Black God of the Navajo is also Raven.
  
  Talking God, incidentally, is probably Owl, although the association of owls with ghosts has caused the identification to be largely ignored; the Owl who warns one of the men off from violating a sexual taboo, when the men and women were living separately, is probably Talking God. The man gave him a liver in thanks—"Very well, my grandchild, but turn your back; I allow no-one to see me feed."
  
  That the women were not so warned off was the origin of the Hostile Gods the Hero Twins later had to kill. Given the taboo in question, one would wager that sex-toys do not sell well in the Dinétah.
• Black God is also the god of fire, probably due to syncretism with the Hopi god Masauwu the Skeleton, who is in turn a reflex of the Aztecs' Mictlantecuhtli. Talking God has a ludicrous number of similarities to Quetzalcoatl, although interestingly the Hopi reflex of Quetzalcoatl, Pahana, is very specifically a missing god who will one day return.
• Speaking of stupid things Myers says, you most certainly can joke about violence while taking it seriously. People whose job is to take violence seriously—cops and soldiers—are a non-stop font of gallows humor, however much chin-pulling blue-nosed Puritans like Myers might want them to make long faces and speak exclusively in solemn tones.
  
  Anyone who actually knew any psychoanthropology—so not Myers, who repeats some risible howler about early hominids being scavengers—would know why humor and violence are linked. Fear is the common element; remember, humor is an interrupted fear-response. It's only irrelevancies, like, say, art, we're serious about. Or to quote Chesterton, "Men talk for hours with the faces of a college of cardinals about things like golf, or tobacco, or waistcoats, or party politics. But all the most grave and dreadful things in the world are the oldest jokes in the world—being married; being hanged."

Commentary 2

Random thoughts. This is #350, by the bye.

• So in Watchmen, Ozymandias tricks Dr. Manhattan into leaving by convincing him that being around a radioactive exhibitionist is giving people cancer. Only, I know Alan Moore's an anarchist who thinks he's a warlock and probably considers science "patriarchal" or some shit, but Dr. Manhattan glows a rather familiar shade of blue. And sorry, but if you're anywhere near something that glows that color in the air (rather than in water), well, in the immortal words of Winchell Chung, "The good news is you can probably live long enough to write your last will and testament. If you write very quickly."
  
  Also, RE: Moore's scientific illiteracy, Dr. Manhattan is supposedly nigh-omniscient due to his insight into the behavior of particles. Only, Moore, seriously? Dude, it's not 1925, we've got quantum physics now, and Heisenberg Indeterminacy rules that out. The only demon science ever disproved was Laplace's. It's just as well, too; aside from determinism being undignified, that bunny is an asshole.


• I mentioned here, a couple years ago, how I don't like pacifist characters with guns or swords, because, realistically, those things kill people—it's what they're designed for, and if you carry them, you need to be prepared to end lives.
  
  Well, did you know you can't actually knock people out, whether by impact or drugs, without major risks, too? Yeah. The first-aid rules say if you're knocked out longer than 5 minutes by a head injury, you need to call an ambulance, because you have suffered some kind of brain trauma—a concussion is your best-case scenario.
  
  As for drugs, fuggeddaboudit. There's a reason cops don't use tranquilizer guns, and also one why anesthesiology is a highly dedicated medical specialty. Humans are delicate against drugs, and if you get the dose wrong, people die or have brain damage. I don't have a statistic for what percentage of "surgical complications" involves some hiccup in the anesthesia, but it ain't a small one, I'll tell you that for free.
  
  Of course, in an SF setting, you're more free—I realized that electro-stun rounds would only be as effective as Tasers (so, not very—even the strongest stun guns don't knock people out, they just immobilize them all-too-briefly). Thus, now, my characters use nanomachines, contained in darts, to knock people out. You can even program those to tell what species' blood they're in, and adjust their operation accordingly.


• Remember how I said I was doing my D&D setting all Conan, Hyborian Age-y? Well, for research purposes, I got every Conan book (by Howard) that my library had, and the Kull book they had, and two Clark Ashton Smith books that had exactly three measly Zothique Cycle stories. Incidentally, Smith totally looked like John Waters, the gay horror director who's always interviewed on IFC. Though I suppose, if you're a whisper-thin cadavaerous gent with a pencil-mustache, it's pretty much "horror fiction" or "embalming", as career options.
  
  And then I went to the Interwebs, and researched legends of lost civilizations, because seriously, there sorta seems to be Atlantis, and...nothing. Lemuria is a 19th century zoological theory based on an obsolete theory of continents, Shamballa is a Buddhist Pure Land that can be walked to, Hyperborea is basically an Ancient Greek version of Shamballa, and Mu comes from a 1920s esotericist misreading Maya syllabary as if it was letters (I'd dearly love to know the real reading of those characters, though).
  
  However, given Atlantis' role is similarly minor (it's a very minor reference in Plato), I figured the Meso-American idea of Tollan was roughly appropriate. So (given Mu's supposed to be the ancestors of the Maya), basically I went with Mu and Atlantis. Except my Atlantis is copper-age Indo-Europeans, and my Mu is basically Olmecs. Except I decided to use Proto-Mayan as their language, because again, Olmecs spoke a Mixe-Zoquean language (possible Proto-Mixe-Zoquean), and good luck finding dictionaries for that.


• Speaking of, Conan and Kull stories are solid, clean, adventure stories of the Zane Grey school. Yes there're some questionable race-theories in Conan, but A) that was called "science" at the time, and B) he's much less of a racist than Lovecraft and probably even Leiber. The Man Eaters of Zamboula has black guys who eat people, sure, but you'll notice that it's just the people of one nation; Conan specifically notices a different black guy who isn't from that nation, and is just some dude. And hey guess what, the reason "nation" is a thing is that groups of people do behave in objectively similar ways, due to having a common upbringing and temperament.
  
  It is just a little jarring that the cannibal tribe hails from "Darfar", though, I'm pretty sure nobody in the Sudan ever practiced cannibalism. Also, you know, the people of Darfur are currently the victims of others' predatory appetites.


• On the other hand, Howard's Kull stories are the only place where I have encountered the anthropology concept of "prehuman flux" in all of fiction. The Atlanteans' attitude toward tigers (which may be saber-tooths, I think Howard left it deliberately vague) is exactly the one you'd really encounter in a hunter-gatherer society.


• So my mother thought it was weird that I know, without checking, that the Roswell incident was July 2, 1947. But hey, I'd still have to look up the time of the crash, and, well, come on. It's a major pop culture incident.
  
  Incidentally, I was reading a thing about UFO incidents by a guy from the USAF, who basically said, oh, hell yeah there's cover-ups, but most of them involve planes and maneuvers you have no clearance for. The military understandably doesn't like people poking their noses into that, and if you get visited by Men in Black, well, they're probably AFOSI (or NCIS or Army CID, depending on whose plane you might've seen), or maybe plainclothes MPs. They probably don't flash badges because technically speaking it's not a crime to be a nosy jackass, and nosy jackasses always assume the involvement of officials means they're on the right track.


• Apparently people don't like all the bilingual conversations in Star Wars? Only, the two places you see it done is with Wookiees and with people who speak Huttese; everyone else needs 3PO to translate. And nobody but Han and Lando actually understands Chewie—who, again, anatomically cannot speak Basic, however fluently he understands it—while Huttese is pretty much Spanish for the Star Wars galaxy, everyone took it in high school. It's just that people who are, or work for, the Hutts don't feel the need to deign to speak Basic (actually it's debatable if Rodians can, since they have those floppy mouth-parts).
  
  Incidentally, remember that idiot who runs the site about how the Empire could totally beat the Federation, ubiquitous teleportation and realtime FTL notwithstanding? Yeah, well he also got all up in arms over his (deliberate) misunderstanding of one of the allegations that the Neimoidians are a caricature of Asians. See, the dude's Chinese-Canadian, and apparently the Neimoidians were described by someone as having "slitted" eyes. Our jackass interlocutor chose to be offended by that, deliberately misinterpreting it to mean that Asians are inhuman and have slit pupils, like cats, lizards, and foxes.
  
  Seriously, dickweed, untune your G-string. "Slitted" eyes refers to what is known, in East Asia, as single eyelids, and over here, as "slanted eyes". And I will bet his life he actually knew that, but chose to deny the knowledge—sanity, after all, supplies so few opportunities to work oneself into a lather.


• Which reminds me, I'll have to tread careful-like, but I can probably describe the people in my fantasy story according to certain East Asian conventions (remember how I was having trouble making that come out in the text?). E.g., there's a girl who's both from a poor background and sensitive about her looks, who I might describe as thinking she has small or narrow eyes. That's associated with lower-class people in Asia, and "looks high-class" is pretty much identical with "attractive" over there. Hence why ganguro gals are a counterculture, dark skin has historically meant "clodhopper" in Asia (actually, worldwide, many of the secondary things like pale skin and long hair that most cultures find attractive in women are associated with wealth).


• According to militaryfactory.com, the people of France/Gaul have had 168 wars in their history. They won 109, lost 49, and had 10 draws.
  
  As a Cracked article put it, "We might want to knock off the 'coward' talk now, lest we find the impeccably-styled death squads smoking their thin cigarettes on our doorstep."
  
  Ça c'est la vérité vrai, fils de putain.

Other Stuff That I Survey

...So I guess the previous one wasn't "all". Oh well. Random thoughts.

• You know Toujou, in Beelzebub? Yeah, his first name is Hidetora, i.e. one kanji different from Toujou Hideki. It's like if they went to school with Rudolf Hitler.
  
  Also, that doctor who looks like a grim-faced Wobbuffet in a fedora? Yeah, his name is Furcas. Furcas is actually one of the demons listed in the Lesser Key of Solomon. Why are mangaka always such nerds?


• I had thought that this post's number was prime. But no, as it turns out, 297 is 3³×11.
  
  Yes, I know I just said mangaka were nerds. I am aware of the irony, thank you.


• The "mass effect" in, uh, Mass Effect. It's the thing that gives them their artificial gravity, runs their guns, and lets them do FTL.
  
  Only, gentlemen, did you know you didn't have to invent a nonsensoleum-handwavium alloy to get all those effects? Repeat after me: "Casimir-induced exotic matter". Exotic matter has (or, uh, is theoretically predicted to have) negative mass, and it's fundamental to every version of Alcubierre warp as well as to David Waite's inertia-control by stress energy tensor metric-patching.
  
  But then again, what do you want from pretty-lights space opera that thinks sex and violence makes them mature?


• Speaking of space opera, you people who like Dr. Who need to get the hell off the internet. I refer to how I can't go a whole page on any of the Cheezburger sites without some reference to that crap.
  
  Again, Dr. Who makes Star Trek look like hard science fiction. It's basically Lost in Space but with a body count and slightly fewer obnoxious bratlings at any one time.
  
  Oh and by the way, remember that line somewhere about how most species pray to lesser beings than the Time Lords? Snerk. Uh, no, dude, the Time Lords went extinct because of bad luck. Not even Fate, not the Norns or the Moirae, who weave even the golden threads of the gods into their tapestry, but luck. Also, dude, Time Lords can die. Gods don't do that, except under extremely unusual circumstances (Ragnarok, Loki's curse on Balder, hind's blood, picking a fight with Shiva), and even then, they can be reborn...more than twelve times. I mean, dude, Vishnu has at least sixteen, some sources say thirty-nine, and probably actually innumerable, avatars.


• It suddenly occurs to me, are Time Lords just qhal with delusions of grandeur? That'd explain a lot, though it puts the Doctor's rebirths in a gruesome light.


• I noticed that the people who subtitle Beelzebub don't know their bad haircuts. Himekawa does not have a ducktail/duck's ass, he has a pompadour. A terrifying pompadour.
  
  Also, the Japanese invented something dorkier than a pompadour (terrifying thought!). It's called a punch perm. Basically you perm your hair so it's real kinky, and then you put it in a pompadour. I guess their thinking is "People will know I'm a badass because dude, I look like this and I'm still alive."


• Should you decide to watch the Beelzebub anime (nowhere near as good as the manga), I'll do you a favor and warn you off the fillers. Episodes 4, 6, 10 through 14 (!), 17, 27, and 28 are all filler.
  
  Remember when you used to be able to get a fair way into an anime before they'd hand you fillers? Nope, Beelzebub is marbled all through with filler-episode gristle.


• Kamisama Dolls continues to rock, but that flashback raised an unfortunate question. Namely, "Since Aki had his kakashi taken away for using it to kill small animals, why would you be fool enough to kidnap his girlfriend? There's no good can come of antagonizing a homicidal maniac."
  
  Then again, I think it's remotely justifiable on the basis of the seki's arrogance, and that specific one being a spoiled waka. Not terribly justified, but they had already established the dude as being a complete moron. So I think I'll allow it.


• Is it really that hard to write fight scenes? I mean, I suppose most writers don't really know that much about fighting (and when they do they often fall for the bullshit that's endemic to martial arts), but I think I can pass along a few tricks that'll help.
  1. Unarmed fights very frequently come down to grappling/throws, rather than blows; don't believe me, watch an MMA fight sometime. Indeed, most of the world's military fighting methods are almost entirely throws, and that includes jujutsu and most pre-modern European fighting, not just stuff like Krav Maga—throws were much more important in the heyday of full armor than now.
     
     Anyway, the key to understanding a fight is to understand the leverage, balance, and weight of the principals, and how they'll have to move to affect it. Their hips and footwork are more important than their hands. That even goes for fighting with strikes, since how someone shifts his weight will tell you how he's going to move.
  2. In fiction, fight-scene dialogue is at least as important as the fight itself. I have a scene in one of my SF books where an assassin 'droid takes down the creepy Foucaultian official. As he's bludgeoning him, he says, "Your" (wham) "kink" (wham) "is" (wham) "not" (wham) "okay!" (wham).
  3. Finally, the two most important things for swordfights is to plot out the spacing and to keep track of how the moves flow into each other. How do the fighters approach each other? Especially with single-edged swords (or more, with spears), getting inside the swing of your opponent's weapon is an excellent way to bring threat to bear on him. Turning the line of attack is always useful, as is one combatant shifting out of synch with the other, so that they are (for instance) standing side-by-side with their swords locked together (at that point, they should start elbowing or punching each other—if there are weapons involved at all, nothing, except betrayal of trust, is forbidden).
     
     When they pull their swords back from each other, they should very seldom just shift their weapons' position. Every change of stance, footing, or spacing in unarmed fighting should incorporate an attack, and the same is true of swordfighting. Consider the shape of the blades, the way they flow against each other, and how the fighters will maneuver them in and out of each other's influence.
  You're on your own in the matter of gunfights, though I will say study up on it. Also, I really need to use the line "Happy Explosion Day, gorgeous!" in something.

It's Like the Roving of the Dog in Tolkien

Yeah, Roverandom. I have, in fact, read pretty much all of Tolkien's fiction—I've even read Farmer Giles of Ham. Look, basically what I'm saying is this is a "random stuff" post.

• Chuck Norris has signed on to be a spokesman for the NRA. My first thought was, "Wait, guns really do carry him for protection!"


• So, Vic, the thief/information broker in Infinite Undiscovery. It's apparently supposed to be some kind of shocker that "he" is actually a girl. No, that's not a spoiler, you'll know the first time she shows up. Hint: if you're a girl trying to pass as a boy, don't wear garments that bare your midriff (or, more to the point, your hips). Apparently Cappell is an idiot; it kinda makes you wonder how many female impersonators he's unwittingly hit on.


• Why do so many RPGs have random missions you pick up in grizzled bounty hunter bars? Resonance of Fate and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance both do it, though the latter does have the decency to start off with story-motivated missions. I ask you, why? Some random assortment of "Honey Do" lists from thinly-characterized NPCs, some of which might advance the plot, is certainly not what I'm looking for in an RPG.


• On the other hand, many other RPGs have obnoxious grinding hack-and-slash right after major plot developments. Maybe the writers figure you'll be willing to do it in order to get to the next part of the story, but why bother? It's a fight with a hive of giant spiders (yes, Infinite Undiscovery again), not my math homework, so why make me force myself? Games are to be enjoyed, and you putting this meaningless crap in the middle of my story hampers my enjoyment.


• All of this would, of course, go away if there were only a market for Visual Novels in the US, but that ain't happening. I hate American video game audiences, I really do.


• Speaking of visual novels, The World God Only Knows is getting an anime. I for one plan to eat it with a spoon. Hopefully next spring? I'm not really sure how long the adaptation process takes for a manga of that type (mercifully there's relatively little action, and action sequences are often the most time-consuming). Here's hoping they do things smart, and realize that the show needs to be in the exact style of a dating sim. You should think it's the anime of a game, not a manga.


• Speaking of anime adaptations, Kurogane no Linebarrels is the example of exactly what not to do. They made Kouichi from "good guy who's a little bit of an ass" into "complete self-absorbed monster". The way they screwed up the time sequence makes the characterization bizarre, though they were probably doing it in order to justify their "Kouichi as Satan" portrayal. Worst of all, they changed the really interesting character designs into the generic Sunrise style (see also S-Cry-ED and Gundam SEED) and turned the mecha from things that looked like Metal Gear concept art (!) into a bunch of generic CGI. Let's not even discuss the hash they made of the later story.


• In the Linebarrel anime's defense, the opening by ALI PROJECT totally sounds like the black, decadent, goth polka that will be danced on the world's last day. Which is awesome.

Dessins Animés Japonais

So, thought I'd have a few comments on my recent anime (and manga) viewings.

• Rented Halo Legends—a sort of Animatrix thing based on Halo—and, well, to be charitable...you know those shallow Western attempts to emulate anime and manga? Turns out half-assed cultural appropriation sucks just as hard in reverse. There are three basic complaints:
  1. The usual Japanese alkie-who-doesn't-want-other-people-to-drink pacifist preaching has no place in the Halo universe. The time wasted on the usual war-anime cliches would've been better spent on the unique traits of the setting.
  2. Would it kill them to crack a story bible? Elites do not work that way, Jackals and Grunts aren't all that scary even to normal humans, and Spartans do not do spin-kicks. Also, girl Spartans probably don't wear their hair long, since Spartans spend so much time in their armor that their skins are bleached white: think of the hygiene!
  3. The whole thing was, in essence, the corpse of Halo animated by a Japanese spirit. Especially the last short, the CGI one: did you guys have to mo-cap unemployed Power Rangers stuntmen for Master Chief? Or make him deliver some cliched sentai line about "becoming stronger"? His armor's olive drab, not red, for a reason.


• On the other hand, Needless. How to describe Needless? "The unholy hybrid child of GunXSword and s-CRY-ed, raised by Maka's dad from Soul Eater"? Yeah, that'd about cover it. And it's awesome.


• So, Baka to Test to Shôkanjû—i.e. Idiots, Tests, and Summoned Beasts—is one of the more amusingly messed-up shows out there. I love how they deliberately taunt the audience, for instance by having most of the fan-service shots be of Hideyoshi, the guy who looks like a girl. Also, Minami is a great tsundere; I wish I wasn't sure she isn't gonna win.


• Considering that huge swathes of the point of Nogizaka Haruka no Himitsu is advocating tolerance of otaku, why does the show do such a bang-up job of showing everything that's wrong with the subculture? Also, seriously, what's with the maid-who's-also-a-ninjaesque-bodyguard becoming the standard portrayal? Am I the only one who thinks that's odd?


• Bamboo Blade is an excellent sports anime, and an amusing example of how flaws make heroes better—Tamaki would be insufferable if she wasn't a tokusatsu-otaku wallflower. It also has a very good portrayal of the limit of genius, how Tamaki can lose her focus because she's still a kid. But...the swordfighting sucks. Admittedly I'm coming from a battôdô background—kendo is a toy, battôdô is a weapon—but the counter to jodan kamae (the high guard) is not to use jodan kamae yourself, it's to learn to take advantage of the fact it exposes the user's belly. With her speed, Tamaki should have no trouble defeating jodan, at least once she gets past that mental block about her mother. Yes, jodan opening the belly is very useful as a false opening, to bait the opponent closer, but the weakness of using openings as bait is, they're still openings.


• Goshûshôsama Ninomiya-kun is not actually very good, but I'll put up with a lot to hear Sawashiro Miyuki (Shinku in Rozen Maiden) as a student body president. A tsundere student body president, who's also her school's self-righteous morals officer, in a harem anime. Does anyone need proof that casting choices can be divinely inspired?


• Speaking of inspired casting choices, Hayate the Combat Butler (there's that domestic servant/bodyguard thing again) has both Ries, Tanaka (Suigintô) and Kugimiya (Louise, Taiga, Shana). And they share scads of scenes. That's like the Van Gogh's sunflowers of the voice actress's art. Come for the unconscionably messed up gags, stay for the incredible talent.


• It occurs to me, Tanaka Rie and Ishida Akira should get some kind of prize for range. Tanaka's played Chii in Chobits, and Suigintô in Rozen Maiden—things don't get more different than that. And Maria in Hayate is almost exactly in the middle, so she can do anything in between, too. Similarly, Ishida's done Xelloss in Slayers and Gaara in Naruto, but he's also done Coud Van Giruet in Elemental Gelade and Dan in Bamboo Blade. Yes, I listed them in the order they go in, on his range.


• Talking of Ninomiya-kun and BakaTest reminds me, does anyone else wish we'd get better anime-based-on-light-novels over here in the states? The only possible reason that Haruhi Suzumiya has had an American release, and Kyôran Kazoku Nikki hasn't, is that some obscure economic principle is working to make quality inversely proportional to success. Aside from how KKN actually has likable characters (apparently those are considered an expendable frill in some quarters?), Haruhi is only omnipotent. Whereas Kyôka, as a marvelous fact...


• I forgot to say, Kishin Hôkô Demonbane. You pretty much had me at "Lovecraftian giant robot anime." Though maybe it's easier to put one over on Japanese viewers—when a lady with black hair, dressed in black, says "Call me Naia," I, for one, was shouting, "Oh crap, Nyarlathotep shows up in the first episode? Crap crap crap!"

We Trained Him Wrong, As A Joke

I find myself musing more, and more deeply, upon the martial arts.

For those who care, if I mention a Chinese art, I use the actual Hanyu Pinyin or Yale Cantonese romanization. If you think it should be Jeet Kune Do rather than Jiht Kyùhn Douh, well, you're wrong; don't let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya. Bruce Lee was coming up with something his provincial English-speaking audience could approximate, not something intended to accurately represent the language, and 截拳道 is jiht kyùhn douh. Conversely if you think I should use Jyutping rather than Yale: intentionally using J for Y means they think writing should be an active barrier to understanding, it's like rendering the Ts in Navajo with a C (leading to idiots pronouncing the Navajo word for "wolf" as maicoh rather than maiitsoh). Yes, Pinyin is weird, but most people know "quan" is pronounced "ch'uan", and where I come from Wade-Giles' beloved "hard breathings" are glottal stops, thank you.

Ahem.

• Why do people insist that taekkyeon and jujutsu/aikijutsu are from China? There's really very little evidence that either of them is—the descriptions of the fighting in the Silla kingdom, for instance, are quite similar to taekkyeon, and were apparently just the way Koreans fought. Jujutsu, similarly, is clearly related to sumo, and sumo is so devoid of continental influences it's almost creepy, a window into a world of antediluvian age. Of course, jujutsu's philosophy is definitely Chinese—it's basically Onmyôdô, which is a type of Taoism (though onmyôdô's "Fine, then, push things even further in the direction they're imbalanced and it'll force them to find a new balance" isn't terribly orthodox).
  
  On the other hand, why do people deny that taekwondo (even I'm not anal enough to bother writing "taegwondo") and karate (which would be karati in Okinawan, a language you didn't even know existed) are actually forms of South Chinese martial arts—taekwondo is karate, except with the kicks and jumps from taekkyeon and the Hwarang honor code. Karate, in turn, is basically Fujian kenpô.


• On the subject of people getting the origins of martial arts wrong, why the hell do people keep saying capoeira is African? I mean, I know why Angoleiros say it—their style's founder was a black nationalist who split off from Mestre Bimba's school because Bimba was teaching white people—but why do people who aren't raving racist loonies say it? All the martial arts of West Africa are either wrestling or boxing, or stick fighting. Yeah, maculele is African, but the fact it mentions Luanda should've been a clue to that.
  
  On the other hand, Palmares, the quilombo where Mestre Zumbi lived when he made capoeira (according to folklore), is fairly close to...French Guyana. Know what French sailors were using to fight in the 17th century? Jeu marseillais, the predecessor of savate. It has the following similarities to capoeira:
  1. It's done barefoot, and kicks hit with instep or sole.
  2. It is conceptualized as a game.
  3. Because it was done on the decks of ships, it involves a number of moves being done mains au sol—with the hands on the ground.
  4. It conceptualizes round-kick and front kick, if they swing from the knee, as the same move, fouetté. Capoeira also considers kicks to be the same—martelo, in the above instance—based on the type of motion they use, rather than their direction (French martial arts and capoeira also consider side-kicks the same as thrusting front kicks, chassé and chapa, respectively).
  Which is more likely: that Zumbi adapted the motions of animals and African dances into a fighting style that happens to work like the one done by the nearby French sailors, or he was taught to fight by French sailors, and added the animal moves and African dances as window-dressing?


• Why do people also feel the need to lie about the class of their martial arts? Aside from denying the street-fighting origins of modern savate and capoeira (cordãos were originally gang colors), why do people have to pretend ninjutsu and karate were done by some inherently virtuous, oppressed peasant underclass? It's true that Kôga ninja's main village was a peasant cooperative, but it owed fealty to the Rokkaku clan, who were normal daimyô—and the Kôga leaders had a normal bushi-master relationship with them. It's even more blatant with Iga ninja—you think the Yagyû clan were pretending to be samurai in Tokugawa's service? Their second head (Munenori) was married to an Iga ninja's daughter—that's why he had a reputation as a guy you did not want to cross, not if you had any secrets anyway—and samurai didn't marry peasants.
  
  And as for karate: it was illegal to do karate (or Nafati, as it was called at the time) unless you were a peechin. Peechin is written with kanji that basically mean "honorable peer"—as in "peers of the realm".


• Just...Chinese martial arts. On the one hand, are the people who think they're just the most unstoppable thing ever. It's bizarrely common in Japan, despite the fact there is no Chinese martial art more deadly than jujutsu, and most of them aren't even close. There are probably five actually dangerous martial arts in China—wihng cheùn, and the ones they picked for Avatar: The Last Airbender, which is just one reason to like that show (the main one being, "Wait, Westerners are allowed to make cartoons this good that don't involve Batman, talking bears, or Launchpad McQuack? When did that happen?").
  
  On the other hand are the people who think that Chinese martial arts, especially tàijíquán, are just exercises or meditation. You even get it with Hùhng kyùhn (aka Hùhng gà, the Fist of the Household of Hùhng), and that was typecast as earthbending for a reason: think karate as done by crazy Jacobites, one of whom was (no, really) Wòhng Feihùhng, as in Drunken Master Wòhng Feihùhng. Hey, hippies: the Taoist monks of the Wǔdāng mountains were able to compete directly with the (Buddhist) Shàolín monks from Mt. Sōng, in combat, and the Shàolín earned their reputation. Bāguàzhǎng, meanwhile, was used by the Boxer Rebellion, and they were so scary the Western powers pretty much destroyed the Qing dynasty getting rid of them. It is not, to quote a particular film, a @#$%ing tickling contest; these lads are out to hurt each other.


• Finally: the whole ninja vs. pirate thing really happened, and involved one of the big name ninja of all history. See, the Fuma ninja became pirates at the end of the Warring States era and supposedly, they killed Hattori Hanzô, jônin of the Iga ninja who served Tokugawa Ieyasu. Weird, huh?

That is Not How Fighting Works

...With a note about cultural setting.

Before I get to heaping contempt on the way thin-wristed little pusses like Joss Whedon portray combat, permit me to offer you a quote:

Wash: Psychic, though? That sounds like something out of science fiction.
Zoe: We live in a spaceship, dear.
Wash: So?

Now this is an example of why Whedon is the writing equivalent of phimosis, as in a schmuck who just won't leave. Assuming for the moment that the genre of science fiction still exists in the star-spanning 2500s—and hasn't just become a spacefaring culture's "traveler's tales"—spaceships would no more be a part of it than airplanes are a part of ours. Idiot.

Anyway. The way River fights—and it's not all Summer Glau's fault, she's much more believable in Sarah Connor—and the way Buffy fights...they hurt me, they wound me to a fundamental level. I realize Whedon spent most of his high school life in his locker, or fantasizing about Wonder Woman—or both at once—but maybe he should've asked someone who's been in a fight to choreograph his fights. Even a sparring match will do; hell, anything more combative than a slap-fight would be better.

I avoid Buffy if remotely possible, so my knowledge of the fighting in that comes only from brief scenes that I quickly averted my eyes from, ashamed to share a species with their choreographer. But I have seen Serenity several times, and permit me to say, "What the Hell, Michigan? Indeed, what the Putnam Township, Livingston County, Michigan, USA? What the entire universe allegedly run by consistent physical laws?!"

See, River's a teeny-tiny little girl. I get that Whedon, with his delusions of being a feminist, likes showing girls getting the upper hand of guys in a fight. Of course it suffers from the fatal flaw of most power fantasies: in real life, it doesn't happen. Not the way he depicts it, at least. He shows girls beating guys in fights with brute force. Sorry, that doesn't happen, especially not with a lady like Summer Glau, who's smaller than many eighth graders.

Fortunately, and actually quite intriguingly, technique is superior to brute force. A girl River's size could quite realistically hold her own, if she used jujutsu or aikijutsu. She could conceivably even pull it off if she used a hard style, if she hit the right spots. Gautama H. Buddha, Whedon, the girl's a ballerina: did it occur to you to get someone to teach her savate? It's a pressure-point-using martial art, that uses the feet! Nothing says "female empowerment" like using the pointe au foie on someone twice your size, girls—it's a fouetté to the ninth and tenth ribs. The force goes right into the liver. Let's not even discuss the reason fouetté à figure is illegal in sport savate (it involves the ending of Million Dollar Baby).

But no, rather than something that would actually look good—in martial arts, realer is better, always—Whedon's hack of a choreographer has her gently brushing people with her feet, while ridiculous meat-slapper sounds straight out of Cave Dwellers play. Really? And how come nobody told her to move her frigging feet faster? I get it, her conditioning lets her access the unused power in her muscles, like the woman who lifts the minivan (who, by the way, is sort of the "cow skeletonization time" of "adrenaline power-up"). Only guess what? She'd be moving different, wouldn't she? Also she'd hurt herself doing it much (Naruto knows that, Whedon, why don't you?).

But Whedon can't abide seeing women excel on men's terms—or rather, on the terms of the cold, hard world where physics is real, the world men have to cope with. He needs them to have superpowers, emphatically not because they enhance his story, but because he can't abide the fact that, in the real world, men are stronger than women. And that, in the real world, women make up the difference with guns. That's why his male characters are always far more offensively helpless even than girl characters who can be immobilized from the wrist. That's why guns are supposedly "never helpful", against creatures that die when you behead them (Whedon needs to meet a little thing called ".44 magnum hollow point"—I'm not picky about how vigorously he meets it, either). And that's why all his female characters have ridiculous superstrength, that's somehow greater than a man's would be with equivalent powers.

If I didn't know any better, I'd say Whedon was a troll-persona created by male chauvinists, to discredit male feminists. How the hell can you be a strawman of your own position?

Finally, why the hell do people fetishize Summer Glau's feet? She's a pretty woman generally (albeit in a very babyish, Kewpie-doll way that blows Whedon's feminist credentials to hell), but her feet are weird. They're sodding long; she's like a female Sideshow Bob.

Things I'd like to see

So I thought I'd make a list of some things I'd like to see in movies/TV. Doubt I will, but hope springs eternal.

1. How about one of those gun-toting pacifists' companions disarms them every time they point a gun, and says, "Hey, idiot, second rule of gun safety: never point a gun at anything you aren't willing to destroy."


2. How about a tiny chick, like River in Firefly, who gets her a$$ handed to her on a plate after trying to use brute force on guys twice her size? Yeah, tiny people can kick butt...but they better damn well use technique. And no, moving like a ballerina is not technique. How about jujutsu? It really works, and it looks utterly awesome, at least to people who know anything.


3. Vampires who aren't only dead, they're actually based on specific legendary types. How about Slavic vampires, with their long (and bladed) tongues, two hearts, rising at noon, and iron teeth?


4. Elves who aren't like the ones in Tolkien, but like the ones in legends. Actually I have seen that, but most people don't know Sesshômaru is an elf.


5. Shows that have learned the Kzinti Lesson ("There is no such thing as a disarmed spacefaring civilization"), and the law it's a special case of ("Anything usable as an interesting spaceship engine, is a WMD.")


6. Settings where the WMDs we call spaceships are really regulated like they would be—no "no formal training" people with mystical (and, ironically, sexist) intuitive skills with engines, like Kaylee in Firefly. Seriously, do we let nice little hippie undergrads use the LHC? 'Cause a decent rocket makes it look like a damn laser-pointer.

Yes, I used the abbreviation on that last one just to play with the acronym command in html. You can do it with abbreviations, too (Mlle.), and apparently definitions (slavery).