Schlock Mercenary VII: A T.A.D. Too Much Dialogue These Days

[eschmenk]

Petey is once again teraporting planets around for unknown purposes.

Once again?

FWIW, reasons I was angry at Broken Wind:

1) The previous update, especially the joke, but also the fact that it talked about Kaff failing to realize something while ignoring the fact that didn't realize it either and it had less of an excuse, made it seem like a complete jackass.

2) I blame Broken Wind as much for Kaff's death as I blame Kevyn. It's inexcusable that it had no STS missiles ready in the middle of a battle. I would think it would be SOP that it would have missiles on some sort of hot standby when away on missions and especially to not get some ready in the middle of a battle seems absurd. Yes, it didn't know that it would have anything to shoot at, but it also didn't know that it wouldn't.

A few other potential targets for STS missiles:

• The Esspies might have tried to use Gift Horse to ram Broken Wind.
• The Toughs might have somehow learned where the Esspies were teraporting from.
• Cindercone might have needed an STS missile fired at it, either to repeat McConger's trick or to simply blast a location the Esspies had seized.
• The Esspies might have had small ships hidden in the hollow TPU noodles or larger ones hidden under the ocean.
• The Esspies might have had something very valuable that Karl of Kaff could have threatened to destroy if they didn't cease their attack.
• Other things?

The fact that McCogner managed to get his STS missile ready in a timely manner makes Broken Wind's failure look worse, if that's possible.

The one possibility of making this a moot point wrt Kaff's death would have been if there had been no path to get the missiles from their launch bays (where the live missiles would have been) to where the Esspies were. I had rationalized that, even though it made little sense, maybe their weren't any hatches near the fabbers. The current update makes it rather clear that there are quite a few. Basically, then, the update reopened the whole issue of Broken Wind's inexcusable failure leading to Kaff's death and took away the last chance that Broken Wind wasn't one of those responsible for it.

3) Any reminder about Broken Wind's responsibility in Kaff's death is also a reminder of how stupid it was for the Toughs to be flying around in Broken Wind and Cindercone in the first place. (I've vented about that elsewhere.)

4) When I read the previous update, given how things have been lately, I anticipated that none of the characters in the comic would be smart enough to think of using water to help cool down Broken Wind. It was actually a pleasant surprise that Flinders did. But obviously Broken Wind didn't. I could live with that and, despite my reaction, I think the current update is much better than some of the other recent ones, but there is too much attached baggage for me to agree that it's "comic gold." And since I had already thought of water and steam explosions the day before, the joke wasn't as fresh as it would have been otherwise and that makes a big difference toward how funny jokes seem. I do agree that Broken Wind's facial expression was well done, though.

I think I'm so annoyed at the characters' apparent stupidity because it's a symptom of bigger problems. Basically, HT isn't bothering to come up with ways for them to behave that would be more intelligent and the readers are expected to just go along with it. For example, the Toughs are stupidly flying around in ships that people would want to steal (even though they could easily afford better ships that wouldn't have that problem) so that HT doesn't have to bother coming up with a different reason for the Toughs to be attacked whenever he wants that to happen. That really annoys me. I guess there is at least a couple of problems with these sorts of things.

1) I have trouble believing that HT can't see the problems with his stories. He's good at evaluating other stories and he's done much better in the past, so how could he not see the problems in his stories? He would criticize a movie that was as bad as what he's writing (there is no way the current book would cross his "Threshold of Disappointment" as a movie), so it seems like laziness for him to not do better.

2) I can't help but feel like he's insulting the readers' intelligence. It's almost as if he's saying, "I think you are too dumb to notice how stupid the story is getting and how many holes there are in the story."

Also, intuitive thought and rational thought are not the same thing, they're in fact mostly opposite (rational thought is reasoned, whereas an intuition is something where you are not consciously aware of how exactly you came to that thought). So pointing out a behavior you deem irrational as an example of non-intuitive thought is not really a cogent argument.

Yes, I should have said "intuitively," not "non-intuitively." I said the exact opposite of what I meant. Sorry about that. (Unfortunately, I can't edit the comment, probably because the thread is locked.)

The point I was trying to make still stands. They AIs often think as intuitively as everyone else. The may not go about it in the same way, but somehow they make decisions that seem as intuitive as what humans do.