air805ronin

1. Bad story - Fair enough. Bad stories are bad stories. Some people differ in what they’d class as bad and good. 2. Personal views – Fair enough. I’m a huge Heinlein fan and he was fairly criticized for putting mouth piece characters into his books to espouse his own personal philosophies. The best science fiction, in my view, doesn’t just tell an excellent story but also allows the author to explore concepts. Think Isaac Asimov and the 3 laws of robotics. Would such laws, when combined with a robot designed to follow Turing-type logic, keep humanity safe from a robot uprising? Outright stating things with no subtlety is bad, but exploring ideas through the story of your book is classic, good SciFi. 3. tropes/clichés – This is generally a problem with movies and TV in general, you don’t see it in books as much from what I’ve seen. The best stuff tends to avoid them, though in some things you cannot avoid them. I love the show Justified and think it’s one of the best written television shows I watch, but it does suffer from some southern clichés from being set in Kentucky. They do their best to minimize it, but sometimes these tropes are easy to relate. 4. Bad characters – the main character of Pacific Rim, whom is only really known for this movie and Sons of Anarchy, is not exactly a stellar actor. His character has generally the same image and emotions as his Sons of Anarchy character. I didn’t exactly go into Pacific Rim expecting Oscar worthy performances though… I didn't recognize anyone else in that except his boss, the tough as nails dude who would die if he drove a mech again. That dude was pretty decent at the character he was given. It seemed to be written to have the same typecast characters as all the Japanese mecha animes, and if that was the goal they did an excellent job. Still, this is part of Hollywood casting. They examine a script, see a bad boy with an attitude problem and trouble past and go through a list of people who supposedly do that type of character well. 5. Bad casting -- This largely comes about through Hollywood not financing anything with a certain formula of known star power for television shows or movies. They tend to hand wave people in their 20’s being characters in their teens, or people in their teens and early 20’s being characters who should be about 30 or 40. That said, my expected age for someone to be called a professional soldier should be roughly 24 to 40. Younger is unrealistic, older is silly. There are exceptions, but America’s army at least skews very young. 6. Katanas – not a huge shadowrun fun? Don’t like Neal Stephenson? Katanas generally pop up in Cyberpunk treatments. Swords do help with the fact firearms can be impractical for close quarters combat. I understand your point, but swords can have their uses and for the most part can be much more quiet than firearms. Till you mess up and your victim is bleeding out loudly and an alarm sounds. 7. Martial arts – Meh. I can suspend disbelief for things like the Matrix. I used to be a soldier and I know what you’re saying. I totally get the action movie stuff, but when you go to see something with some of these actors you almost expect it. For the most part the Hong Kong style action film came about entirely because firearms were very hard to get there, and therefor Kung fu was the logical path for action movies. They couldn’t do what America does with firearms simply because firearms aren’t as big a part of the culture. There is an Extra Credits about games that tackles a similar concept: Anyway, martial arts films became a thing and people in America decided to emulate them. Cross overs happened. There is a reason behind it. I get your frustration and I know it doesn’t make sense, but at the same time there is a guilty pleasure there if you can get into it.

Take a note from George R.R. Martin. If your fingers take you towards mass murder, don't fight that urge.

Played the demo. Learned how to mine. Learned how to move around. Did not enjoy it very much, despite being a space nut.

Aston Martin DB9, just my favorite.

Interesting, and quite a bit of fun. My only concerns are somewhat shared with another poster. Did you maybe get straight to action a bit fast? I understand that you're setting up the survivors having to set up a colony without being prepared. Starting with a ship destruction set the Star Trek reboot on the fast track, so it can be useful in that respect. My bigger concern is that you have this alien vessel that outright destroys the ship they come from. What do they want? If they wanted to kill them, I'd expect them to follow the cryopods. Hunt them down. At the same time, a big part of me is left wondering why this outright attack happened at first contact.

It may not be a great zone out game though. If I get distracted by TV I either crash my truck into something or *gasp* roll it! Just saying. It is a great, relaxing game. I put in custom internet radio and listen to the BBC and Irish radio as I drive along.

From what I understand you're being generous. It flies like a brick in atmosphere. Out of atmosphere, it obviously has a fuel limit so it can be burning willy nilly.

I will read it when I get home from work, deviant art is blocked by our filter. I mean I could switch off the filter but that would be an abuse of my powers. with great power comes moderate responsibility.

My only issue is the dialogue. A general rule is when you have a new speaker, you give them their own paragraph. It aids the reader in knowing a new speaker is speaking and generally helps with clarity and flow. Helpful dialogue guidelines: http://litreactor.com/columns/talk-it-out-how-to-punctuate-dialogue-in-your-prose That said, I think you are much better in describing things than I am.

I do enjoy my free license for VMware Workstation. Nothing like having a Linux machine, a development machine, and my main PC all running at the same time on the same hardware.

The book doesn't throw the "chosen boy" stuff at you really until he's already been in the battle school for a little while. At least the way I understood it, at that point her was just another candidate that showed some particular promise. However as Battle School went on, they decided he was the guy and actually broke how the school normally worked to train him faster. Plus the big plot change was a bit more of a shocker in the book, so me. it played off our methods of dehumanizing our enemy in order to kill them easier and then reveals that big shock to your system. Its a pretty effective twist of the knife to the feels, man. I figure the movie made both these changes to bow down to time constraints. Personally I wonder how much material hit the cutting room floor...

I will admit that seeing the first battle room battle was a jaw dropping experience. I don't think my imagination did it that much justice...

Happy Cinco de Mayo. I don't tend to drink much tequila on these days but I will be making cochinita pibil (a pulled pork recipe from the Yucatan) and having a couple beers.

I understand what you're saying, but this isn't like one of those Facebook "What movie/book character are you?" This personality test has shown a lot of weight since it was created. There are two tests I've felt were completely accurate judgments of me, the Meyers Briggs test in this thread and the U.S. military ASVABS. Both haven't changed much in decades. Both tend to be dead on when they analyze people.

As usual with the Youtube world, don't read the comments. Edit: Just realized you might have meant IRL as in never heard them in person. If you can get to Edinburgh they always have bagpiping buskers scattered around the city.

No doubt that's my fault since its been about a decade since I last read it. I mixed up the memories. I do know Ender did a tour of that world, saw the fairy tower, and went to it. I also agree a lot about the subplot. You learn a lot about Ender when you learn more about Peter and Val. not seeing what they become while he goes on this journey takes away a lot of the story. It also means they only give a nod to the fact he was a happy medium between Peter and Val's temperaments.

In high school I got INTJ. In college I got INTJ. Just now taking the linked test, I got INTJ. INTJ Introvert(89%) iNtuitive(12%) Thinking(25%) Judging(78%) •You have strong preference of Introversion over Extraversion (89%) •You have slight preference of Intuition over Sensing (12%) •You have moderate preference of Thinking over Feeling (25%) •You have strong preference of Judging over Perceiving (78%)

I used to be a huge fan of Total Annihilation. This game is the successor to that series. If you can't wait to play it, you may dig up that older game. it should be pretty cheap used. I haven't tried running it on modern equipment, though.

Closest I ever came was squeezing a cat under my arm while blowing in it's tail. Some would say the sounds are similar. I, however, love the bag pipes. I was just in Scotland for a week and have a fondness for the pipes, haggis, and being cold.

The egg was on the home planet they destroyed, in the book. He communicated with the queens through that game, and they build up a representation of the fallen fairy world tower on their homeworld for him to find. My only big complaint is the same I have with every book turned into a movie. They left out minute details I felt were super important in the book but in the long run don't amount to much in movie format. I won't even both listing them out. That said, I felt like they time crunched the book pretty severely. Obviously they had to have the tension and the timing for a movie, but in the book I'm pretty sure his training took a year or two, not a few months. Very pretty movie, though.

I have only played on the official servers long enough to make a hatchet, which took longer than you think because of how overfarmed the resources are on those servers. Then I got mauled to death by a pack of wolves. Its ok though because I was starving to death. So if you don't mind someone who sucks, I'd be happy to try logging on and see if I fare better.

KSP, Dwarf fortress, Minecraft, and Prison Architect are my current GoTo games. I also love car racing, so I played Gran Turismo 1 through 4 religiously. 4 burned me a lot though so I swapped out to Forza. I have been firing up Forza 5 A LOT lately. I have played through Fallout 3, New vegas, Oblivion, and Skyrim roughly twice a year each. I also regularly replay Red Dead Redemption. If I could, I would play Dragon Age Origins over and over but my wife plays it through 5-6 times a year so I just sit back and enjoy the bloodshed.

I love Sins of a Solar Empire quite a bit, though playing the computer can get a little repetitive it usually shines when you play friends. You generally start viewing star systems in a way that various planets become chokepoints and you station fleets there. Once you get into expansions you can build huge Death Star-esque space stations, or in the lastest expansions huge titan ships.

48-hour apocalypse? My vote is for the Jurassic Park method. Clones of a nice meat eating dinosaur break free, breed, and then descend upon human cities one at a time, eating and then moving on. How I think it will actually happen? Constrained resources such as crude oil, water, food as the human race continues to overpopulate the globe. Wars happen. Life has to change as a matter of necessity. We go back to horseback, agrarian societies, technology goes on a backslide. Small pockets of technology survive where countries have figured out ways to do transportation and manufacturing without crude oil, coal, natural gas.

I've been known to play ArmA2, though for a long time I stopped because of my job. The job in question involved training people on making training scenarios for the military side of their offerings, VBS2. Interestingly, many of the scripts and modifications I made for VBS2 also worked in Arma2. If I needed to do something I could find an Arma modification, see how they did it, and apply the knowledge to VBS2. I did something like that to enable the call in of CAS on a grid coordinate you click on the map. that job kind of burned me out on playing Arma2 at all since I was in the VBS2 editor roughly 6 hours a day.