I’m very surprised that you haven’t heard of Ghost of Tsushima; it has been a highly successful game.

But maybe I am mistaken? I would swear that I had to accept EA terms and conditions to play, but it’s by Sony and Sucker Punch. I dunno.

Eh, I dunno, I’m currently really enjoying Ghosts of Tsushima, although strictly in off-line mode. And I enjoyed the first Jedi: Fallen Order, again, solely off-line.

FWIW, Ray Bradbury used to argue that Fahrenheit 451 wasn’t about censorship at all, but the dumbing down of society.

Once work leaves the hands of an author, the author no longer controls the narrative, or how the narrative is interpreted.

Huh. Karlach was easily my favorite.

I always liked hanging out with the punks and metalheads though.

I’ve known entirely too many people that had the real life personality of Shadowheart and Astarion to really like them though. Gael and Wyll just seemed like entitled shits; not the worst, but not great people.

This would be worth upgrading my PC for. I’ve already got a PS5 and PS VR2, so being able to use it on my computer also would be a huge deal.

(The biggest issue with it for PS5 is the distinct lack of games that are fully supported; for a non-VR game, it’s just a really, really big display.)

Where are you from, exactly?

There’s no classes of licenses like that in the US. If you are 18 and meet the minimal legal requirements, you can buy a long gun of any type in most states. (Some states are trying to move that age to 21.) That means a single shot, break action, lever action, bolt action, pump, or yes, semi-automatic. Once you hit 21, you can buy handguns. Again: that includes break action, revolvers, and normal semi-automatics.

The only real restriction in all of this is machine guns; to get those, you need to come up with the $20,000+ that a legal one will cost, and file a transfer application with the BATF, pay a $250 fee, and wait to see if your application is approved or denied. There are some states that prevent individual ownership of machine guns entirely.

You need to be 21 to purchase a handgun from a dealer.

This was not a handgun.

720p? Pfffft. 240i. Rip them in ‘2014 YouTube over 2G’ quality.

I don’t think Starship Troopers really describes an utopia

I disagree. Rico’s family was quite well off. They lived a very comfortable life, and his dad didn’t see any reason to go to the effort of gaining citizenship, because it earned him nothing more than what he already had. They had basic rights, they just weren’t citizens with the right to vote. Rico joined because he had a more civic-minded group of friends that was joining. TBH, Rico isn’t shown as being particularly bright; when he did his aptitude tests, mobile infantry was the very best that he was qualified for, and… That wasn’t really that great. (That would be like getting a 36 on the ASVABs right now; juuuuuuuuuust enough to get into the Marine Corp, and not high enough to do anything other than the most basic jobs.) As far as a human population goes that we see in the story, there isn’t any obvious underclass, which is a requirement for fascism. Yes, there were non-citizens that had no vote, but there was always a path for them to get their franchise, if they were willing to put in the effort. (As far as I recall, there wasn’t a specific requirement that you serve in military; given that Heinlein goes out of his way to say that a position would be created for someone that was profoundly disabled, I think it’s pretty clear that it was never just military service. But Heinlein was a military vet, and he was writing science fiction for a YA audience at the time, and military service was more exciting than, say, civil engineering.)

Moreover, Heinlein goes out of his way to say that no one that is currently in their term of service has the franchise. By choosing to become career military, Rico is giving up the ability to exercise his franchise unless and until he retires. Fascism is often–if not always–characterized by military control over large areas of civilian life. But if the military has no direct political power, that’s sharply undermined.

And the democracy-accustomed reader is expected to understand the horror of these practices,

…But it was a democracy. It just wasn’t a birthright democracy. Every person had to affirmatively choose to work for citizenship, rather than citizenship being granted based on where you were born, or who your parents were, but the right to work towards citizenship was afforded to everyone regardless of parentage, etc. I think that’s a pretty positive thing, TBH. I think that the US would likely be a lot better place politically if everyone had to be personally invested in the system, and if everyone had to actually pass civics and history tests before they were allowed to vote. I know, I know, it’s crazy, but maaaaaaaaybe a basic understanding of civics would mean that someone like Trump never would have gotten elected in the first place, since he’s so bent on undermining and destroying the entire system.

I think that Heinlein gets some things very right; people value a thing much more if they have to put in some kind of personal effort to get the thing than people who simply have it handed to them. I also think that he gets some things very, very wrong, like his ideas on corporal punishment. (Which, TBF, were not that out of line for 1959.)

And this, in my opinion, is Starship Troopers’ greatest and most unique trait.

I think that you haven’t read very much Heinlein if you think that he was writing satire at this point in his career. Stranger In a Strange Land had elements of satire, and Job was absolutely satire, but things like The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is very straight forward. Heinlein is remarkably consistent in a lot of his writing; he’s largely libertarian and believes people should be able to be self-reliant, but he still mostly believes in the gov’t as a positive force. He’s deeply distrustful of religion though; any time religion shows up in his books, it’s a net negative.

We’re also not given any circumstances behind this war. We can’t draw any definitive conclusions about it.

Heinlein was a WWII veteran, and WWII was where the concept of ‘total war’ was pioneered. (And later demonstrated to be a pretty bad idea, but that’s still not accepted by everyone.) We firebombed Tokyo and Dresden, knowing that it would cause massive civilian casualties, with only the barest military excuses; civilian casualties were the point, because we believed that it would break the will of the people of Germany and Japan to keep fighting. We can look back now and see that this was a dumb idea, esp. since Hitler was doing the same thing to England, and it was stiffening the resolve of the English. But unless you argue that the Allies were fundamentally fascist during WWII–which seems plainly false–then it’s not reasonable to argue that the idea of total war was a fascist idea.

At a minimum, we know that it’s a failed idea now.

Couple points:

Verhoeven didn’t even read the source material. Starship Troopers (the book), is only fascist if you assume that anyone that’s pro-military is fascist. Heinlein was a very unlikely fascist, given that he was largely libertarian. The point of the book was that people needed to be directly, personally invested in a society for it to function; the bugs were a plot device that he used to flesh out his social concepts. It was closer to utopian than fascist.

Secondly, Lucas directly based Star Wars off Kurosawa Akira’s “The Hidden Fortress”. Ideas about the rebels and the empire might have been echoing US imperialism in Vietnam, but the overarching narrative structure owes a lot to Kurosawa. Ben Kenobi, Princess Leia, Darth Vader, C3PO and R2-D2 are very clearly present in the Kurosawa film. It’s a fun movie, if not terribly deep or meaningful compared to Kurosawa’s later films, and I would def. recommend it.

When I open Tor browser on my desktop–not in Tails–that site doesn’t even load. So either it is fooling it, or it requires javascript to run, which I have turned off by default in Tor.

I’m going to leave it at that.

Requires a log-in. That means that there’s absolutely no way to anonymize your searches. At least if I want to do an anonymous search, I can open my laptop, boot up in Tails, and search DDG on Tor. With a required log-in (and billing that presumably doesn’t include a Monero option), you can’t make that work.

Pass.

Huh. I’ll be damned. I thought it had been longer than that. I remember buying and playing Arena when it first came out. I think that only one that I’ve missed entirely was the MMO and Redguard.

As far as story, I still think that Morrowind was the strongest; I’d like to see them go back to that style of play–with the vastly more complicated leveling and deeper lore–but with an open world and non-shitty graphics.

Microsoft Edge is actually good, so I sure hope the team building it isn’t about to resort to more tricks to get Chrome users to use it.

No. No it is not.