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Paradigm shift

By The Armorer on December 31, 2008 | | Comments (17)
Here's a nickel to go with your pair of dimes...

Paradigm shift.

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17 Comments

By Josh on December 31, 2008 4:10 PM
I could go the internet-nerd route and say you need a refresher in Demotivator-format...or I could go the logic route and complain that this presupposes an exchange at a precisely equal rate of fire...but I'm gonna be honest, I love it.  Right Click -> Save Image As... -> *thumbs up*
 
By J.M. Heinrichs on December 31, 2008 4:55 PM
 "But I have a Sterling ..."

Cheers
 
By John of Argghhh! on December 31, 2008 5:28 PM
If I wanted to go all demotivator, vice demotivator-like, I would have, Josh.

What part of "paradigm shift" was too subtle for you?  8^ )

I'll send you a larger, cleaner version.

John - what, no Leo?
 
By Rod Thorsen on December 31, 2008 10:44 PM
Reminds me of the '50s Robert Heilein novel where everyone was armed (and as a result were very polite to everyone else) and duels of honour were commen.  In a society where everyone had a laser pistol or ray gun, the smoke bulchin', bird scaring, big iron revolver got everyone's attention and respect.
 
By Casey on December 31, 2008 11:01 PM
Rod, if you like old iron, you should check out H. Beam Piper's stuff, if you can still find it. In certain respects, he developed a fairly realistic set of technologies for his future history.

In fact, 600 years from "now," humans were still using slug-throwers because they represented the economic and technological optimum for an expanding, frontier culture. No ray guns. :)

The highest-tech his starships deployed were self-propelled "torpedoes" which featured a combination of Predator-style remote operation and autonomous seeking mechanisms.

 
By John of Argghhh! on December 31, 2008 11:07 PM
Fuzzies!  And not the local Lioness version, either.
 
By Rod Thorsen on December 31, 2008 11:35 PM
And Space Vikings, my, ahum, personnel favorite of his.  Along the same vane and for the squids amongst us would be A. B. Chandler's rim books. 
 
By Justthisguy on January 1, 2009 1:01 AM
John is known to all little fuzzies as Pappy Jack. He helps us with the halberds for the land-prawns. Oh, and Rod? That was "Beyond This Horizon" and maybe pre-WWII. And it was a 1911! (also used to good effect by Alvin York and Honor Harrington, and other folks both real and unreal)
 
By Rod Thorsen on January 1, 2009 1:24 AM
Justthisguy - Thanks for being as my long term memory.  That's not a small thing BTW.  Pappy Jack, I'll hafta 'member that, it fits.
 
By Barb on January 1, 2009 1:31 AM
Ahh, Fuzzies!  I was introduced to them via a later book which was written from the perspective of the Fuzzyies, as a kind of tribute to Piper (book was called "Golden Dreams").  That led me to Piper's books, great fun.  John definitely fits my visual for Pappy Jack!  Although his beard needs to be a bit longer to hide Baby Fuzzy properly.
I think Beyond This Horizon was published post-WWII - a great read, and along with Starship Troopers, helped in forming many of my views on guns and the military.  Hmmmm, I haven't re-read either one in over a year - what HAVE I been doing?!
 
By Rod Thorsen on January 1, 2009 1:44 AM
Please reread the book, the movie was not Heinlein.  The biggie to me is Heinlein's concept of earning the right to vote by serving (even if by changing sheets at the local hospital) for however long your needed and however your needed to understand how society runs and the likely results of the choice's you make giving you the personnel experience to know how to vote.
 
By Barb on January 1, 2009 11:08 AM
Rod - yer absolutely correct.  The book is great -and the movie sucked, basically because it missed the book's point completely.  I re-read ST and several other Heinlein's periodically.  The Hubster sometimes wonders why he buys me new books ;-)
 
By Casey on January 1, 2009 9:46 PM
Meh. I should have known the Denizens would be Piper fans!

Myself, I have a special affection for Lone Star Planet. The politics there would give modern liberals conniption fits.

Barb, I think you're confusing Jack Holloway with Gus Brannhard. Gus is the big guy with the big beard who hid Baby Fuzzy.

I always pictured Pappy Jack as more along the lines of Charlton Heston, or Robert Duvall. Or maybe Gary Sinise forty years from now. :)

Wouldn't you just love to see at least Little Fuzzy as a movie, if not Space Viking?

 
By Josh on January 1, 2009 9:48 PM
The movie sucked because Paul Verhoeven fundamentally disagrees with everything the book says, and when he discovered what it was actually about, never bothered to finish reading it.  And yet he made the movie anyway...

Now, what I can't understand, (maybe because I'm a sci-fi nerd or maybe because I'm an engineer?) is that if you're going to ignore the whole point of the book and just randomly pick elements or ideas from the text, why leave out powered armor?????  I mean what could possibly be cooler on screen than powered armor?  The only explanation (other than that they were cheapskates) is that providing serious protection to individual infantrymen in the form of powered armor makes it slightly more difficult to tell a story about heartlessly sending poor innocent minority children out to be slaughtered for no reason because war is wrong and blah blah blah blah blah whatever.
 
By Argent on January 2, 2009 1:09 AM
Don;t know a damn thing about this book or movie.  However, power armour's coolness is a central part of the Fallout game series.
 
By Pogue on January 2, 2009 7:56 AM
Josh, I had the impression that he never actually read the book, someone described the plot to him.  That's the only way I can make any sense out of the movie just flat missing every point in the book.
 
By Josh on January 2, 2009 10:06 AM
Pogue - Well he read PART of it.  He said it "depressed" him.  So he put it down and made that garbage movie of his.