Mind = blown

[Matuchkin]

On 03/12/2017 at 7:22 PM, qzgy said:

Please don't remind me about the passage of time. I'm enjoying being young.

I'm not. I'd rather have my life set, thankyouverymuch.

Edited December 10, 2017 by Matuchkin

[Matuchkin]

On 08/12/2017 at 2:21 PM, Earthlinger said:

I hope I live to see the day when people see violence and war as the tragedy it is, and not as some macho 'proving ground' where cool people get to tote around guns and live a life of adventure

But now that I've stopped homeschooling, I've realized that the current high school generation is still a fair bit off from that point

I'll share something from a year ago: I had a test, and finished it with something like an hour left (I had extra time, due to ADD). After sitting bored for somewhere around thirty minutes, I made a rough detailed sketch of an AK-47, along with its full firing mechanism. Somewhere around a week later, my parents (who were really indifferent to the situation) were called due to a single teacher suggesting that I may be violent.

The above incident is an extreme example of naivete. More specifically, the fear of the mention or thought of violence, because some paranoid moms clearly think that, if someone so much as knows what an AK-47 is, he must obviously be unstable and can blow over any moment in a psychotic frenzy. There were numerous times in grade school, where I was prevented from discussing any weapons/violent situations (i.e. "so the V2's engine works like this..." or "The anomalous aspect of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is...", etc) simply because they had to do with violence. Apparently, there was once an incident in which students were suspended for mentioning that a cloud looked like a gun (not sure if true, but it is totally feasible).

And yet, even though I dared to do all that, I am not a violent psycho, or a school shooter, or anything of the type. I believe that the first step to showing children that war/violence is an actual tragedy is to keep it in discussion, and actually show them real life, rather than doing your best to do the opposite. The first time I watched Saving Private Ryan, I was somewhere around 9-10 years old, for example. If children are shown these films, and read books such as A Long Way Gone (about a Sierra Leonean child soldier) or The Things They Carried (about the war in Vietnam and the following PTSD/suicide), et al, they would know what war actually does to a person. If we teach children about the downright insane bloodletting that occured in Stalingrad, the ways in which children were mutilated, executed, etc in the Sierra Leone civil war, then maybe the average teenager wouldn't view war with the idiotic views that are portrayed by COD, Battlefield, the Rambo series, and their naive and scared teachers.

Hope I wasn't ranting. Sorry for going on such a length.

Edited December 10, 2017 by Matuchkin

[Kerbart]

While it's exciting that technology changes so fast, it's also important to realize that the technology revolution we've seen has already peaked. Sure, we're still seeing a lot of new stuff appear, but the revolutionary aspect of it is long gone. The service live span of military aircraft used to be merely years, before they were completely outdated and needed replacement with newer ones. Now, our frontline aircraft are decades in service (and take equal amounts of times to be developed). Spacecraft, same thing. We've been spending double the amount of time, it seems, on SLS/Orion/Whateveritiscalled than it took to develop and complete three programs: Mercury, Gemini and Apollo. Compare the way cars looked in 1960 with how they looked in 1970. Now compare cars from 2000 with those from today.

The sad reality is that 50 years from now we won't say "oh, that is so old and primitive" but rather "yeah, that's when it came first into service."

[Matuchkin]

I would like to add to my above post by saying that the aforementioned "paranoid moms" are exactly the types of people who believe that world conflicts can just be hugged out, and that we can talk acceptance of belief into terrorists without having our heads lopped off in a YouTube stream within the next hour. These people are part of the reason why groups such as ISIL are spreading, and why 1st world superpowers can't get down in the dirt and simply go to work, you know, infantry, surrounding them, pushing the line back, being proactive, not feeding them stinger MANPADS because the Russians are in the country, not giving them RPG-7s because the Americans are in the house, etc...

[NSEP]

Okay so this is not related to the previous discussion. But imagine Le Voyage Dans la Lune as a child or read From the Earth to the Moon, and later in life you see humans landing on the Moon for real. Its these things that make me look forwards towards the future and what technology will bring us.

I am currently laughing about colonies on Venus and Mars but you never know...

100 years from science fiction to science fact is ridicilously short. I hope its true that if someone knows how to do something amazing in theory, it will actually be done in 100 years or less.

 

[NSEP]

On 10/12/2017 at 10:27 PM, Matuchkin said:

I'll share something from a year ago: I had a test, and finished it with something like an hour left (I had extra time, due to ADD). After sitting bored for somewhere around thirty minutes, I made a rough detailed sketch of an AK-47, along with its full firing mechanism. Somewhere around a week later, my parents (who were really indifferent to the situation) were called due to a single teacher suggesting that I may be violent.

Im also with you on this.

Although i haven't been 'caught' yet. I also make rough sketches of weapons all the time. I usually did it with my friends on our last few days of elementary school. I don't draw on my test papers, but im still waiting to get caught by a paranoid teacher.

 

[GoSlash27]

Yeah.. I *definitely* won't be around for that, and I'm old enough to have decided that it's probably a good thing.

100+ years is a long time. Empires rise and fall. Free societies collapse and become subjugated. Social mores change to the point where you feel like an alien in your own life. Living too long could actually be a curse. It could drive you mad over a long enough stretch...

Merry Christmas ,

-Slashy

 

[Matuchkin]

2 hours ago, GoSlash27 said:

100+ years is a long time. Empires rise and fall. Free societies collapse and become subjugated. Social mores change to the point where you feel like an alien in your own life. Living too long could actually be a curse. It could drive you mad over a long enough stretch...

Yeah, I know. The problem with a naive person like me is that I also don't share the same fear of war, change, etc, as all of you, because I never lived through anything that drastic. Literally, my whole life can be summed up in these lines:

 

1. Got born

2. Led an average life as an infant

3. Went to school

4. Now in high school

There you go. I sometimes catch myself thinking about this.

[Guest]

On 12/22/2017 at 7:20 PM, NSEP said:

Im also with you on this.

Although i haven't been 'caught' yet. I also make rough sketches of weapons all the time. I usually did it with my friends on our last few days of elementary school. I don't draw on my test papers, but im still waiting to get caught by a paranoid teacher.

 

I've straight up modelled a new mechanism for feeding and extracting mag-fed weapons on Blender (planning on building it when I have the access to the machinery needed, maybe patent it) with less moving parts, and I'm not a violent person. I'm really into FPS games and firearms but I almost never get in conflict with people.

Edited December 24, 2017 by Guest

[Nibb31]

When I get really old, I hope to live in an old persons home where they play Nirvana et let us play video games all day.