While We Wait: Writer's Block & Other Lame Excuses

[Symphony D.]

Someone explain why Homestuck was ever popular.

 

[Daftpanzer]

Indeed WW3 will not be nation vs nation. WW3 will be the 1% vs the 99%. I have come to this conclusion.

The rebels will use alternative economies and social structures more than guns and bombs. It will be a war fought through economics and global media. The new, robust, rebellious, ground-up vs the old, controlling, obfuscating, corporate, top-down. A battle for the collective consciousness of the planet, with the internet as the main battlefield.

10, 20, 50, 100 years from now. It will happen. You heard it here first.

 

[Symphony D.]

Excuse me, Charles Manson, I think you will find the Beatles already predicted this in their hit song "Helter Skelter," and they were really just stealing it from Marx who stole it from Jesus who stole it from Buddha and so you're about 2,500 years late to the party, pal. Step off the hot intellectual property before you get a DMCA cease and desist takedown, son.

goddamn futurists and their vague time horizons that give them easy outs for vague predictions that they'll never be held accountable for anyway

 

[Crezth]

Someone explain why Homestuck was ever popular.

I laughed for like five minutes when I read this. Yo, dude, the best part is going to nerd conventions and counting the number of "Homestucks" you encounter.

 

[Symphony D.]

In an unwise decision, I read the radioactive waste seepage that Andrew Hussie calls "writing" that he projectile vomited onto these fair digital passageways about "troll romance" and by pure happenstance I found myself extremely fortuitous in that there were no rusty screwdrivers within reach with which I could stab myself in the ear.

I was buoyant that upon reading his response to a fan's criticism that "It's really alarming how obtuse and granite-like some people's minds are," my immediate response was "Granite is porous, mike foxtrot." I hath censured the actual language that percolated into my thoughtspace for this innocent datasphere.

 

[Crezth]

Mike foxtrot is new code language on this website. You heard it here first, folks. *secret handshake*

 

[Symphony D.]

It art a Halo 3: ODST reference. The bravo kilos doth protest too much.

 

[Crezth]

I love that dude responded to a fan's criticism with his histrionic butt-hurt whinery. What a foxtrotter.

 

[Tycho]

Someone explain why Homestuck was ever popular.

Eh, the appeal of a coming of age world spanning story I guess, and kookieness I guess.

The majority of the fandom however are best kept at length, optimally at the bottom of a very spacious and deep well.

 

[thomas.berubeg]

Does anyone have any advice on how to do climates well on a map?

 

[erez87]

http://jc.tech-galaxy.com/bricka/climate_cookbook.html

Have fun

 

[Symphony D.]

If Israel was actually serious about stopping the transfer of materials into Gaza, they would occupy a say, 1/4 mile wide strip all along the Gaza-Egyptian border, extending perhaps 1/2 mile out to sea and perhaps 2 miles further along the Israeli-Egyptian border, and start digging. They could then emplace motion detectors, vibration sensors, ground penetrating radar, and so on. Perhaps dig microchannels every so many inches or centimeters and run lasers down them. Or they could literally just excavate the whole thing down to some arbitrary depth and turn it into a monitored ditch or canal. Hamas doesn't have the technology to dig through hard rock undetected 1/4 mile below the surface or something. Instead they're blowing up apartment buildings because there happens to be a tunnel under them. Somehow it's been 49 years since the start of operations against the Ho Chi Minh trail, and people still haven't learned that attacking the network instead of the points of access is idiotic. Search and destroy is so ineffectual and so wantonly destructive that to anyone else it really just looks like you're conducting a culling of the local population.

e: But why settle for just strategic stupidity when you can be tactically stupid too? Imagine that you have a target on the upper floor of a multistory apartment building you want to take out with extreme prejudice. Let's say the 5th floor of an 8 story building. How would you kill that target without committing ground forces? The simplest solution would be to deploy a gunship (or almost any kind of helicopter), run it parallel to the floor, and strafe the floor with guns. There would be some overpenetration depending on the exact weapon used and possibly casualties, but unless there was a heavy presence of man-portable rocket launchers, there'd be little risk to your unit and you would clear that floor or possibly even just that particular apartment. Israel's solution?

On July 13, 18 family members were killed in an airstrike on their home, and Tayseer al-Batsh, the Hamas police chief in Gaza, was severely wounded. Many other civilians have been killed in strikes on known Hamas offices or apartments that happened to be in their apartment buildings, and in strikes on homes with no obvious connection, Palestinian officials and residents say.

On Monday night, a strike hit an eight-story apartment building in downtown Gaza City — an area where Israeli officials had urged Gazans to take shelter. The building collapsed as rescue crews were inside, killing more people. The death toll, at least 13, was still being tallied.

Just bring the whole building down with a fighter-dropped bomb or rocket with probably a 500lb+ warhead. It's the only way to be sure.

 

[Kozmos]

Deploying gunships to such a low level of altitude and in an urban center seems very hollywood and a good way to get shot down. Besides, how can you be sure there are no 50 cals or a random RPGs lying around? I know Soviets used their flying tanks in that capacity to some degree but it just seems like you are inviting trouble.

 

[Symphony D.]

Deploying gunships to such a low level of altitude and in an urban center seems very hollywood and a good way to get shot down. Besides, how can you be sure there are no 50 cals or a random RPGs lying around? I know Soviets used their flying tanks in that capacity to some degree but it just seems like you are inviting trouble.

If your opponents are putting explosives in the equivalent of coffee cans for use as homemade rocket artillery, they don't have even heavy infantry weapons that constitute a serious threat to military forces. They're functionally defenseless. They're people both figuratively and literally grasping at straws for some way to conduct harmful actions. That's pretty self-evident. If you're happening to be conducting a ground invasion at the same time as you're doing this, then your response time to any aircraft downing is also basically zero, and your ability to suppress anything that might threaten them is pretty good. Helicopters can be shot down in an environment with such weapons, sure, but even when you operate them in such environments (Vietnam 1969, Somalia 1993, Iraq 2003, Libya 2011, etc, etc) their survival rates are often pretty good even with losses. It would be like being concerned about operating attack helicopters in a hostile fashion over Fargo, ND, because some yahoo might happen to have an M72 LAW in his basement he'd been saving for a rainy day.

The real reason that Israel is conducting this operation is to disrupt the merger of Fatah and Hamas, not because Hamas presents any kind of consequential threat with these stupid rocket stockpiles. Civilians and further envenoming of the situation are just the price to be paid for that aim because surprise, they were never actually serious about a peaceful solution anyway.

 

[Symphony D.]

303 Israelis died in road accidents in 2013. When will Israel invade South Korea? The world wonders.

 

[erez87]

Yeah because invading Iraq after 9/11 was done by Al-Qaeda makes so much sense.

While it is probably the political reason behind it, the actual reason for this outbreak was the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli children.

 

[Crezth]

 

[Symphony D.]

Yeah because invading Iraq after 9/11 was done by Al-Qaeda makes so much sense.

Presumes hypocrisy. My actual position is that 9/11 was a huge overreaction given 40,000 Americans die in car accidents every year and 30,000 die from gun violence. I would, in the present, heavily criticize spending $2.7 trillion and inflicting hundreds of thousands of casualties on the basis of the event, even if in a past life I was quite the Neocon. Just like I'm criticizing Israel for doing, proportionally, more, over less. (21:1 K/D The Dream!)

While it is probably the political reason behind it, the actual reason for this outbreak was the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli children.

"Children?" Teenagers. Ages 19, 16, and 16. Practically adults. For whose murders—a matter for civilian law enforcement—no one has been charged. In other words, three dead young adults that Israel used as an excuse to start a war that had nothing to do with their deaths. The flimsiest of flimsy cover. At least other countries' intelligence agencies nodded their heads in agreement when Powell went to the UN and Saddam did Bush the favor of acting extremely shady and playing right into his hands. I'm surprised one of the Alex Joneses of the world hasn't claimed they were killed by the IDF precisely to provide the pretext for current events.

Opinions were divided among Israel's security services as to whether or not the two had direct ties to Hamas.[22] Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that Hamas killed the teenagers.[21] On 26 June, the Israel Security Agency identified two Hamas members as key suspects in the kidnapping, whom Palestinian police noted, had gone missing since the night of the kidnapping.[16][23][24] High-ranking members of Hamas denied that the group had any involvement or foreknowledge of the incident.[8] The two named suspects hail from the Qawasameh clan which is notorious for consistently acting against Hamas's policies and its attempts to reach an entente with Israel.[25] Hamas political chief Khaled Meshal said that he could neither confirm nor deny the kidnapping of the three Israelis, and he congratulated the abductors, because 'our prisoners must be freed from the prisons of the occupation.'[26]

"The people we think were involved are known to act against Hamas and Hamas said some insensitive things, better go blow up 600+ Palestinian civilians and shell places we ourselves designated as refuges from shelling in reprisal. 200:1 is the minimum we'll go for in lex talionis. That'll learn'em."

 

[Masada]

While it is probably the political reason behind it, the actual reason for this outbreak was the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli children.

Sure, except pretty much everyone accepts that Hamas didn't order it and wasn't involved.

 

[Thlayli]

Even if it is a pretext, Israel destroying Hamas is probably a wise long-term move for them. Given how quiescent the PA is in general, replacing Hamas government with Fatah government would give Israel the security from random terror attacks that it has always sought. And the only Palestinian faction that still openly calls for their destruction will be gone.

There are strategic advantages to extinguishing Hamas as an organization forever or permanently neutering it, and I'd be surprised if that hadn't been Israel's goal all along.