Anonymouswizard's Astoundingly Assonant Random Banter #240

[Anonymouswizard]

Ultimately the point of Warhammer 40K is that it is functionally parody. "The grim darkness of the future" is not a line that should be taken seriously. That said, people like the setting and want to treat it seriously, so we get people like Celeste who want to make her cool heroes that'll make the world maybe a little less Awful. I think that's cool.

40k is basically what happens if the British make Paranoia. It's a giant mess of parody and satire tied together with a ton of black comedy and aggressively marketed towards teenage boys. It's the less mature but also less restrained spinoff of Warhammer. I don't know anybody in real life who's into it and can take it seriously.

Space Marines aren't Paladins, they're Judge Dredd put on Steroids and pointed at anything alien. Sisters of battle are what you get when you cross the Paladin archetype with a hefty dose of crazy and a lot of nun fetishism. There's a planet that mass produced John Rambo, and another that guards hell and is certainly not lead by any deceased Prime Minister's. The Orks sing football... actually Orks chanting football songs just makes too much sense. Space Marines have a special suit of armour that they need to wear a different suit of armour to put on.

I really don't see how you can take this stuff seriously. I say bring on the robot armed gangers wielding flame pistols!

[LaZodiac]

40k is basically what happens if the British make Paranoia. It's a giant mess of parody and satire tied together with a ton of black comedy and aggressively marketed towards teenage boys. It's the less mature but also less restrained spinoff of Warhammer. I don't know anybody in real life who's into it and can take it seriously.

Space Marines aren't Paladins, they're Judge Dredd put on Steroids and pointed at anything alien. Sisters of battle are what you get when you cross the Paladin archetype with a hefty dose of crazy and a lot of nun fetishism. There's a planet that mass produced John Rambo, and another that guards hell and is certainly not lead by any deceased Prime Minister's. The Orks sing football... actually Orks chanting football songs just makes too much sense. Space Marines have a special suit of armour that they need to wear a different suit of armour to put on.

I really don't see how you can take this stuff seriously. I say bring on the robot armed gangers wielding flame pistols!

I mean "wearing armour to wear a different armour" is actually pretty normal. You can't very well put on plate without a gambeson underneath for padding. Is it ridiuclous that they wear layered powered armour? Yes. But that kicks ass.

Orks are just entirely normal football hooligans, yeah.

[Lord Raziere]

what. no. Space Marines aren't the thinly veiled judge dredd ripoff, thats Adeptus Arbites.

Space Marines are not paladins, this I agree. they're KNIGHTS, and not the shining armor type either. the Black Templars are a literal eternal crusade, in the sense they dress like the Knight Hospitaler, don't stop moving and kill everything they hate. the closest thing to paladins are the Grey Knights and they do things like literally give up their original names and former identities by mind-wiping themselves to become nothing but a pure weapon of the Emperor after undergoing 666 grueling trials that like, kill you if you fail, oh and they kill anyone who sees them because they must always remain secret because the whole "demons exist" thing? not supposed to be known to the average person in the Imperium and neither is the people fighting them. there is literally a chapter called Marines Malevolent that seemingly only exist to ruin the Salamanders day, who themselves only stand out as a chapter from the rest of the space marines for caring about innocents at all when most space marines only care about their mission and not about saying, protect a civilian or organizing an evac.

they are also kind of based on the roman army, being recruited from feral worlds and sometimes being more loyal to their commanders than some distant Emperor. the culture of Space marines has numerous flaws: they're supposed to just be weapons for the Emperor, but the end being things like glory hogs and glory seekers, many of focus on some impractical ideal of honor to the point where they don't use camouflage on their armor to sneak through terrain even the Codex Astartes explicitly allows them to do so, many of them swear oaths to protect particular worlds or agencies.

like the Space Marines were originally just Warhammer Fantasy's order of imperial knights recycled in space. they are a knight/roman legion parody, not a judge dredd parody.

[Rater202]

That feel when you're playing with a cat and he steals your capacity to speak coherant words.

[Bartmanhomer]

So anyway the woman that I talk to on Facebook Dating turns out to be an E-begger. It turns out very smoothly that we have so much stuff in common. However, things went completely downhill when she was begging me for money that she claims she lost her wallet. That was my social cue by saying Girl, Bye and I block her for good.

[DataNinja]

Yes, in the same way that Eldar are feminine coded. The bigger issue is having half the bloody factions Space Marines. There's no escape from them!

Excuse me, as an Eldar player (well, not like I've played for years, but this critique was valid back then!), I take offense to that. I wish they were more feminine-coded. All I got for female representation was a couple bodies in the standard box set, and then the "all girl (usually extremely hypersexualized) units." Plus maybe a few special characters. Across all the Eldar. T'was very much not enough!

(But, yes, Trazyn is awesome, and was where I was planning to go for a Necron army so many years ago until University kicked me in the schedule and the wallet. )

[Lord Raziere]

I don't really see why people want female space marines myself, the Space Marines and Primarchs literally are made to be tools made by the Emperor for war and oppression and given how he treated the Thunder Warriors before them, they'd probably be eliminated as soon as he had no need of them. The Emperor considered all the superhumans he made to be nothing but lesser evolutions of himself, steps on the path towards the evolution he planned to be used then thrown away, the Space Marines in particular were created on a time crunch, and he had no intention of making them independent and self-sustaining. he just wanted an army to stomp everyone that opposed him that would be unable to stop relying on the very species they were created to conquer for and make dominant, so he went with the male thing because it was convenient for his purposes.

like, Space Marines aren't a badge of honor or anything, they're just some science project to make shortcuts for some immortal dictators vision of ruling the galaxy true, that since his glorified lighthouse coma, has been repurposed into defending a nightmarish feudal theocracy in space.

like. why would you want to portray that more positively by making it gender-equal? GW has explicitly said that the Imperium are not the good guys, not even a little bit. and like, aren't there tons of badass female characters in 40k who DON'T have complicated genetic enhancements and still kick ass? I'm not even talking about the female only factions. there are/can be female storm troopers, imperial guard, Inquisitors, Rogue Traders, Imperial Knights, the Officio Assassinorum, and of the actual female only factions the Sisters of Silence and the Adepta Sororitas. doesn't that kind of say that women don't need genetic enhancements from the manipulative space atheist genocide-dictator to be awesome?

and if you really need a genetically enhanced woman in 40k to kill a lot of things, Eversor Assassins exist. they are literally one person armies that are more powerful than Space Marines and meant to kill things in droves, all the while having no gender barrier.

but then again I guess if you can make something like the Eversor for both genders it calls into question how you can't for something like space marines, hm.....

[enderlord99]

I may have mentioned this before, but the tomato is both a fruit and as vegetable. For things that are truly "a fruit, not a vegetable" one need only look at this list.

[Rater202]

Question for the more science-minded.

Someone has a power that makes them a living nuclear fusion reactor, allowing them to generate energy which can then be released as heat and nuclear radiation.

This same person later gains a separate power that makes any energy that is generated, stored, or absorbed by their body into its 'purest and most perfect" form.

...What's the purest and most perfect form of nuclear radiation? I've asked this elsewhere and the suggestions I got in return were "pure, concentrated sunlight," "100% efficient energy confusion, fusion with no waste," and "replace nuclear fusion with matter/anti-matter conversion."

[halfeye]

I may have mentioned this before, but the tomato is both a fruit and as vegetable. For things that are truly "a fruit, not a vegetable" one need only look at this list.

No, those are just inedible, or even poisonous. Fruits that are not vegetables are not served with the main course of a meal, but may be served as dessert or pudding, or eaten as treats without being part of a meal. The other meaning of vegetable is plant, and there are no fruits which are not misnamed that are not plants (Sea anemonies and sea gooseberries are examples of misnamed non-plants).

[enderlord99]

Question for the more science-minded.

Someone has a power that makes them a living nuclear fusion reactor, allowing them to generate energy which can then be released as heat and nuclear radiation.

This same person later gains a separate power that makes any energy that is generated, stored, or absorbed by their body into its 'purest and most perfect" form.

...What's the purest and most perfect form of nuclear radiation? I've asked this elsewhere and the suggestions I got in return were "pure, concentrated sunlight," "100% efficient energy confusion, fusion with no waste," and "replace nuclear fusion with matter/anti-matter conversion."

Still nuclear radiation, but now they can choose which type(s) they emit and in what ratio.

They could probably also control whether or not it counts as "sunlight" for the purposes of mystical effects where that matters. They would not gain anything related to antimatter; while such abilities could be considered a stronger variant of nuclear radiation, they aren't a purer one.

Also, none of this is science.

[Rater202]

Still nuclear radiation, but now they can choose which type(s) they emit and in what ratio.

They could probably also control whether or not it counts as "sunlight" for the purposes of mystical effects where that matters. They would not gain anything related to antimatter; while such abilities could be considered a stronger variant of nuclear radiation, they aren't a purer one.

Also, none of this is science.

Answering the question requires a better understanding of nuclear science than I possess.

[enderlord99]

Answering the question requires a better understanding of nuclear science than I possess.

I dunno, I managed to answer it (in the first two paragraphs) and my nuclear physics education is "One high-school chemistry class that only touched on it briefly plus a modest amount of Wikipedia binging"

[Rater202]

I dunno, I managed to answer it (in the first two paragraphs) and my nuclear physics education is "One high-school chemistry class that only touched on it briefly plus a modest amount of Wikipedia binging"

Well my Highschool chemistry class only talked about three of those kinds of radiation so... Still better than what I got.

[enderlord99]

Well my Highschool chemistry class only talked about three of those kinds of radiation so... Still better than what I got.

So did mine, because that's how many there are.

EDIT: Oh, never mind. Neutrons aren't given a Greek letter, so there's technically four.

Which one did you not get told about?

[Rater202]

So did mine, because that's how many there are.

EDIT: Oh, never mind. Neutrons aren't given a Greek letter, so there's technically four.

Which one did you not get told about?

We did not cover neutrons.

Nor did we cover Electromagnetic Radiation. We were told about Gamma rays, but X-Rays weren't mentioned.

[enderlord99]

We did not cover neutrons.

Nor did we cover Electromagnetic Radiation. We were told about Gamma rays, but X-Rays weren't mentioned.

Same, actually. I mean, we discussed (a little) stuff related to neutrons, but they weren't explicitly called out as "a type of nuclear radiation" so...

[Rater202]

Same, actually. I mean, we discussed (a little) stuff related to neutrons, but they weren't explicitly called out as "a type of nuclear radiation" so...

High school chemistry might actually suck... Which kind of sucks because he was one of the good teachers.

...You know, I don't think we spent all that much time discussing the properties of the elements in either college or high school, nor did w spend much time on anything practical. It was mostly just memorizing formulas and solving them by rote broken up by experiments with limited practical value and no understanding of why we did it.

High School was better though. In High school chemistry, we learned how to make ice cream without a mixer and got to play with fire and oobleck In college chemistry I almost died becuase of a combination of a mistake on the forms detailing the experiment that day and two girls ignoring the safety instructions when told to just clean up and then getting yelled at and failed for the day, along with the rest of the class, over it despite it being solely the fault of two specific people.

It got reversed when the student-teacher actually overseeing the Lab portion of the class told the teacher about the mistake on the form, but it wasn't nice in the first place.

...Never did get to do the experiment. Our lab groups were based on where we sat the first day which meant that since I sat in the back in was a group of one. I finished the pre-lab work around the time the fumehood started filling up with enough toxic gas to kill everyone in the room had it not been on at the time. By then not only had the whole class be chastised for the actions of two dumbases who refused to take responsibility but there were no more reagents to use for the experiment.

[Peelee]

I may have mentioned this before, but the tomato is both a fruit and as vegetable. For things that are truly "a fruit, not a vegetable" one need only look at this list.

Vegetable is a cooking term more than anything.

[Anonymouswizard]

what. no. Space Marines aren't the thinly veiled judge dredd ripoff, thats Adeptus Arbites.

It depends how far back you go, originally they were Judge Dredd in Chaos Warrior armour.

[Rater202]

It depends how far back you go, originally they were Judge Dredd in Chaos Warrior armour.

Thats a bt like saying that humans are fish because if you go back far enough one of your ancestors was a fish-like organism.

[Lord Raziere]

Question for the more science-minded.

Someone has a power that makes them a living nuclear fusion reactor, allowing them to generate energy which can then be released as heat and nuclear radiation.

This same person later gains a separate power that makes any energy that is generated, stored, or absorbed by their body into its 'purest and most perfect" form.

...What's the purest and most perfect form of nuclear radiation? I've asked this elsewhere and the suggestions I got in return were "pure, concentrated sunlight," "100% efficient energy confusion, fusion with no waste," and "replace nuclear fusion with matter/anti-matter conversion."

Purity and perfection are not scientific concepts, technically.

radiation of any sort is basically a wave/particle. at such miniscule levels of physics, the distinction gets quite blurry. it is the most basic of building blocks of reality. you can't really "refine" or "purify" it further than that (technically its made of neutrinos but you can't really make use of those in the amount of time they exist which is like less a second). its like asking how you make the purest most perfect form of a lego, you just end up with the same lego because legos are just a thing used to build bigger things, and breaking it down any further results in destroying the lego.

It depends how far back you go, originally they were Judge Dredd in Chaos Warrior armour.

Yeah, okay, but welcome to Not The 80's.

[Keltest]

Purity and perfection are not scientific concepts, technically.

This is the real answer. Its like asking what the square root of fish is. Youre either going to get a sarcastic reply about how when a mommy fish and a daddy fish love each other very much, or youre going to be told the question makes no sense because fish isnt even conceptually a number.

[enderlord99]

Purity and perfection are not scientific concepts, technically.

...and that is exactly what I meant by

Also, none of this is science.

[Metastachydium]

Purity and perfection are not scientific concepts, technically.

Technically, purity can, in fact, be used as such to, for instance, describe the measure of homogeneity a particular substance has (or with reference to the presence/absence of contaminants or impurities therein). I likewise have my reservations about applying the concept to radiation, however.

[Rater202]

"Free from pollutants, flaws, and impurities as well as refined and distilled into a form that is easy to use efficiently to the point that maximum efficiency of use is reflexive" is what it means in-context.

The "purity" power is meant to be used for things like Ki but it explicitly applies to any and every form of "internal energy" someone possesses. Which, if the person also possesses the "living nuclear reactor" power, would include nuclear radiation.

I ask simply because I'm legitimately unsure how to apply such a mystically based concept to a more scientifically based form of energy.

[Keltest]

"Free from pollutants, flaws, and impurities as well as refined and distilled into a form that is easy to use efficiently to the point that maximum efficiency of use is reflexive" is what it means in-context.

The "purity" power is meant to be used for things like Ki but it explicitly applies to any and every form of "internal energy" someone possesses. Which, if the person also possesses the "living nuclear reactor" power, would include nuclear radiation.

I ask simply because I'm legitimately unsure how to apply such a mystically based concept to a more scientifically based form of energy.

The easy answer is that you dont. Energy is energy, you dont have "impure" energy in any meaningful sense of the word. The comic is just saying interesting sounding nonsense that means nothing.


In a comic book context, I suppose it could mean that when their powers activate and generate energy, you dont have any of it "spill over" so to speak and manifest as heat or light or some other form of radiation other than what youre specifically intending to manifest. So you just get the nuclear radiation and drop the heat, or vice versa in your original example.

[halfeye]

neutrinos

I suspect you might mean "quarks", because neutrinos get here from the sun, amongst other sources, and they couldn't do that if they only existed for a very short time.

[Rater202]

The easy answer is that you dont. Energy is energy, you dont have "impure" energy in any meaningful sense of the word. The comic is just saying interesting sounding nonsense that means nothing.

It's not a comic. It's a Jumpchain thing—a single-player Roleplaying Game/Writing Prompt type thing.

Which consists of thousands of documents written by dozens of people.

Part of the fun is figuring out how stuff works together and what the various knock-on effects of various perks and powers.

One Perk 1: makes your energy pure and perfect. 2: Makes you able to use it at maximum efficiency.

The other, you're a living Nuclear Fusion reactor, generating atomic energy which you can then release in focused blasts of heat and radiation.

[Lord Raziere]

"Free from pollutants, flaws, and impurities as well as refined and distilled into a form that is easy to use efficiently to the point that maximum efficiency of use is reflexive" is what it means in-context.

The "purity" power is meant to be used for things like Ki but it explicitly applies to any and every form of "internal energy" someone possesses. Which, if the person also possesses the "living nuclear reactor" power, would include nuclear radiation.

I ask simply because I'm legitimately unsure how to apply such a mystically based concept to a more scientifically based form of energy.

Well.

In a superhero-fantasy context I'd guess its perfectly possible to have like.....demonic nuclear radiation or dark nuclear radiation, evil nuclear radiation, or nuclear radiation combined with some other energy or concept and the power that you speak of just.....purify it so that its just nuclear radiation or some platonic nuclear radiation in some vague supernal sense that is somehow more nuclear radiation than nuclear radiation in some spiritual way that no one can quite grasp?

which would be horrifying and dangerous, as you'd be emitting horrifying Platonic Nuclear Radiation (PNR) that would affect other platonic objects. Thus in a realm of platonic concepts, if your PNR melts a shovel, all shovels in existence that run on that platonic of shovel now become pale reflections of that melted shovel from the beginning to the end of time, for example, effectively retconning all instances of anyone inventing or using a shovel. the changes to the timeline and reality would disastrous.

but other than that.....