Recent content by Terminal Blue

The whole "why don't you see 71 year olds with 'full blown autism' (whatever that is)" thing is kind of infuriating because I'm not the head of a governmental agency specializing in health and I know the answer. They're dead. Some of that is unavoidable. People with more severe forms of...

I love bombers. They're big and cool and often some of the most striking aircraft designs, but I think they have long since reached the point of being extremely questionable from a cost/effectiveness standpoint. The vast majority of the time, whatever you would want a bomber to do could be done...

I've been on a bit of a world war 2 history binge lately, and it's been kind of interesting. Because I grew up in the immediate post-Thatcher era where teachers practically weren't allowed to mention the British empire it's a subject that was never covered in school, so other than those elements...

It's the delivery system. The UK's continuous at sea nuclear deterrent uses the trident missile system developed by Lockheed. The UK's submarine fleet is built to accommodate that missile system. The warheads are British, but the missile itself is under license which means that production and...

Any curved blade over about 20 inches would already be classed as a sword and thus would already be illegal in many cases. For blades under that length though, I don't think they're covered by any of the existing categories of weapons that are illegal to manufacture or own. I absolutely thought...

The labour party is there because just over a century ago a collection of trade union and socialist movements decided to form a political party in order to pursue their political goals through electoral means because they (correctly) recognized that expansion of the political franchise had...

The difference is that describing either of those parties as "controlled opposition" is, at its most generous, figurative. More accurately though, it's simply wrong. The labour party is not currently in opposition. The democratic party was not in opposition from 2021 until this year. If the...

"What I am talking about" is that, if you think that Russia and the US share much in the way of political similarity then you don't really seem to understand Russia at all, and it might help to actually engage to some extent with the real country that actually exists. Again, the barrier to...

Move to Russia. You can literally do so any time you want. There is a scheme in place that allows people from countries that "impose destructive neoliberal ideological attitudes that contradict traditional Russian spiritual and moral values" to fast-track the process of applying for a visa. All...

Since neither sex produces reproductive cells at conception, I'm pretty sure Americans are asexual. Unfortunately, that whole idea that fetuses are female by default isn't quite true, it's one of those things that gets simplified in order to make it easier to explain. A zygote at conception...

To be fair, this is not particularly unusual in real life. Many non-binary people (including me) don't really have a problem with gendered pronouns. At this point I actually go back and forth when describing myself. But I would say that if you're going to do it in a piece of media, you do need...

Yeah, having an iconoclast option to me is a sign that they kind of get it, because while 40k the game tends to exclusively focus on hyper-indoctrinated mega-heroes who praise the Emperor every 5 seconds, whenever you move away from that there's always a sense that most people in the Imperium...

I have also been hearing more positive takes on it recently, even if it still doesn't sound like a game I would enjoy. I've also heard a wider mix of views from trans/non binary people about the quality of representation. So while I find the examples I have seen unnatural in a way that...

So, I love the Culture series by Ian Banks. It's actually the series that got me into science fiction. For those not familiar with it, the Culture itself is a utopian anarcho-communist spacefaring society that serves as the background for the stories. The fact that the Culture is...

Yeah, I think that kind of nails what was interesting about it. It had a kind of emergent gameplay that most RPGs at the time didn't really manage, so it was fun to find all the weird broken combos the developers probably didn't intend. Another obvious one was that you were supposed to get...