On 5 November 1940, the British armed merchant cruiser Jervis Bay, a commercial ship hastily fitted with not-quite-obsolete 6-inch (152mm) guns, escorting a convoy of 37 almost-completely-unarmed vessels, encountered the German pocket battleship Admiral Scheer – a heavy cruiser hull with not-quite-battleship-sized main guns.
Even the pocket battleship’s 150mm secondary guns, being more modern, had longer range and greater destructive power than the AMC’s armament, in spite of their slightly smaller bore. 
Ordering the convoy to scatter, Jervis Bay’s captain trailed a smokescreen and attacked the German.  Admiral Scheer’s captain kept beyond the range of the AMC’s weapons and blasted the British ship apart with his 280mm main guns, killing most of the crew.  It took just 22 minutes once the German vessel began firing.
Because Jervis Bay had bought time for the convoy to disperse, however, Admiral Scheer was able to sink only five of the other 37 ships.

“The convoy had scattered in safety while Jervis Bay, outgunned and ablaze, matched shot for shot with a German battleship.” — Douglas Reeman, Rendezvous—South Atlantic (novel, 1972, page 8)

Was in CoH this evening and checking to see who's been on recently I noticed something hilarious. I'm not sure when or why but once more Terrence is 'Leader' of the SG. The running gag continues apparently .

Seriously though I'm guessing its because Mag Flashlight hasn't been on for a certain amount of time. I could be wrong though.

Starting a thread because this is a "meta" topic, not limited to any one country or any one election.


Things fall apart in the United States — and Canada takes a hard look in the mirror

Quote:Now, at the conclusion of another presidential election campaign, the ability of the United States to fulfil even the basic requirements of democracy — free and fair elections and a peaceful transfer of power — is in doubt.

Quote:As Mettler and Lieberman write, differences across political parties can be good and healthy. There's a downside to fetishizing centrism or bi-partisanship. But the system can start to break down when politicians and citizens view each other as enemies rather than rivals.

Quote:American politics is Canada's second-favourite spectator sport. And we have long defined and measured ourselves by how unlike the United States we are. Though the term fell out of use during the Obama era, it used to be that accusing someone of participating in "American-style politics" was a grievous charge in Canada.

That oppositional tendency might serve Canada well now. But this is hardly the time for anyone to feel smug. The United States is reminding us now that nothing is guaranteed, nothing can be taken for granted.

Democracy can be silly and entertaining and a wonder to behold. But it is not a game.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to come up with a Truthful but Misleading description of a famous work, preferably in a single sentence. You are not allowed to lie about the content of the work, but the description has to give a completely wrong idea about the story. Put the name of the work in a spoiler tag after the description, so that we can try guessing what work you've described misleadingly.

As examples, here are descriptions about two films:

Transported to a surreal landscape, a young girl kills the first woman she meets, then teams up with three complete strangers to kill again.

Spoiler

The Wizard of Oz (1939), as described by the Marin Independent-Journal

Spoiler

The Exorcist (1973), as described by Wrong Hands

Trumpty Dumpty wanted a crown

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13563676/1/...ert-forums
Just posted a new chapter of something I have been screwing around with for ideas and had one with doug that I had to write up in him being talked about way. 
Its a worm story about taylor or many different versions of her or him.

https://www.fanfiction.net/s/13563676/1/...ert-forums

I just wrote a chapter of a story that deals with WORM and had to include Doug showing up as teaching a couple of young ladies how to use his power of magic that they show how ended up with a copy of. I have some other stuff with weird powers but I had to Doug show up again in one of my stories. Please leave a comment Bob and have to hear a comment from Doug himself on this step.
I have not done a lot of background, just something tossed together for an idea.

Forged letter warning about wolves on the loose part of Canadian Forces propaganda campaign that went awry

So let me get this straight, the army is running domestic propaganda campaigns against Environment Canada.  Y'all need to stop taking advice from Trump about how to run a government.

I've been holding off on posting about this because things were up in the air for a while, but Peg and I are going to be spending a week in Cape Cod starting on Friday.  We'll be staying at a resort in Dennis Port and making the best of what's likely to be the last of the pleasant fall weather up that way.  As has been usual the last ten or fifteen years, there's wifi so I won't be dropping off the grid just because I've left NJ.

One of the common features in VRMMO novels/anime/etc. is having days pass in-game in just a few real world hours, whether as a standard feature or during special events. The exact method by which this is accomplished is of course hardly ever even touched on, the genre as a whole only uses technological trappings as the excuse to have relatable modern characters in a sword-and-sorcery fantasy setting; the actual hardware might as well be magic itself and sometimes does explicitly verge into "sufficiently analysed magic" territory such as with SAO/Accel World "fluctlights" aka quantified souls, or various fanfics which cross over with Fate/whichever.


However, I feel that a closer look at this provides the opportunity for a few interesting premises all on its own, from a slightly harder sci-fi approach, because human brains already operate at a trade-off point between how much information they can receive and how much they can focus on any one thing to process and make decisions about it. That's why an important part of military training is getting soldiers to keep calm and keep thinking in dangerous situations instead of getting wrapped up in an adrenaline rush using the body's own means of speeding up reaction time to physical threats, evolved in a world without beyond-visual-range threats let alone worldwide political consequences to what may be the most immediately practical solution in the immediate sense.

Relatively recent studies (don't ask me for a cite, it's just something I saw in a few uSpud videos a couple days ago and promptly web-grazed away from, definitely no more than "some guy on the internet said" reliability at this point but it serves to frame my literary argument. Maybe it was Thoughty2? I'm writing this in a text document offline specifically to avoid information-blitz distraction, so...) have also found that the average amount of time people can concentrate on something without a stray thought or glancing away fell from from twelve seconds to eight over the course of several years of research during the rise of smartphones that allowed constant internet access, which as one video brought up makes modern attention spans shorter than a goldfish's.

So, some options:

It could be some kind of literal mind-magic, awakening RL mental acceleration and possibly other ESPer type abilities. RL ensues as tens or hundreds of thousands of gamer geeks and the occasional filthy casual suddenly have superpowers and various government and corporate entities want to cash in. Social misfits are apt to be disproportionately represented among them due to self-selecting for people who think the idea of spending their free time living in a literal fantasy world sounds better than real-life options.

It may instead be some kind of mind read/sim/write technology, copying the minds of of players into digital hardware, running them through the faster virtual world, and then overwriting their original brain-state, which has presumably been in an induced dreamless sleep-state in the meantime. Exactly how many may be hardware-limited, if it has to happen with a central server rather than at the user end, allowing for the common impossibly low for commercial viability user numbers like SAO's 10,000 as a limited participation special event rather than total installed user base.

But what if there's a glitch in the process? With the mind sim locally hosted in user hardware, that still leaves loads of room for nasty mind control possibilities with the explicit ability to overwrite the user's consciousness in play. A little dark for my taste so I'm not giving this the full attention it probably deserves, but there it is.

Still in identity-horror territory ix an obsessed stalker or grieving lover/parent/etc. who creates a mental clone of their target in another person's body, or perhaps in a fast-grown "blank" clone. Less direct trouble results from the general transhumanist angle of being able to create mental forks but that's leading away from the VR-game aspect I'm trying to work around.

Someone switching a pair of users' helmets as a prank while they're playing and somehow avoiding any features designed to prevent it leading to the ever popular body swap incident is a lighter-toned possibility from this kind of scenario as well.

Server-side mirroring has its own questions - what if the connection is lost at the game end, allowing the RL players to wake up while their mind-states continue operating. Will the server side versions just be "killed" by shutting it down to reboot without being written back to their bodies? Will the divergent selves in their original bodies be overwritten by the selves who were in-game?

The former seems more likely than the latter, politically if nothing else, but if the forked mind-states are not considered actual persons what else might be done to or with them? Lots more dark possibilities here, many of which have already been explored from slightly different angles in classic cyberpunk.

From another angle, what about players who suffer some kind of bodily injury while their minds are away, either as a single case or as a result of some mass disaster like an earthquake or bomb attack that affects a significant number at once? This kind of scenario is far more likely to see political considerations treating them as still real persons to cut off a lot of the less palatable options, but still has a wide range of possible paths to take.

What if there's some external event that shuts the game down unexpectedly, but some unknown time later the data is recovered and player mind-states are restored in new bodies, needing to cope with the changes from the world they knew when they logged in? Anything from days to centuries could have passed in the meantime, they could even have been extracted by friendly or simply curious aliens or a post-human civilization of some kind who want to know what these ancient beings were like.

The androids from NIER spring to mind as an example for possible outside actors, or a situation like Mass Effect where the gamers are effectively in the position of Protheans discovered in stasis. Touching back on the more mystical explanations, this could be the justification for an Overlord (LN/anime) type situation rather than the canonical lack-of-explanation for why a player and some characters from VR game being shut down suddenly exist bodily in a new magical world.

A more specific situation I thought about in the early stages of this was that the servers might be in some kind of protected bunker with game development being a budget-recouping measure while developing the technology for RL military training purposes, and the players are now the main survivors of a surprise attack, but that case and more are included above already, and I'm trying to leave the field open rather than adding limitations at this point. I'm sure there are still more than I've laid out here, but my well of inspiration seems to have been exhausted for the moment.

I ended up just posting in new Index threads on SB/SV/QQ since DWF was down and they didn't have anything that wasn't specific to one series, but hadn't had any comments last I checked.