unsupp0rted

I love my M1 16" but it's a giant heavy cinder block that I have dragged with me to more places than I can count, always grudgingly

Halo and Starcraft are both about the Terrans going to war with alien species.

Same old story, right?

But getting the balance of technologies, motivations (e.g. jihad-dynamics), and nitty-gritty details (e.g. the splinter factions) right is the trick: it's much easier to do wrong than to do right.

If normies understood that baby crying detection also requires everything-except-baby-crying detection, they would be up in arms about being spied upon... and here they are

Exactly: it would have to be like Band of Brothers, or like Space: Above and Beyond from the 90s, but with a 2027 budget and effects. Or screw the effects: just good 2027 talking-in-rooms writing is nearly enough.

The Halo universe offers a lot to mine from, just like the Star Wars Universe did for Andor. It's just waiting for the chosen one writer to be allowed to do the job. Who's the J. Michael Straczynski or Tony Gilroy for the Halo universe?

It seems that way, but it's not that easy. Starcraft competitions are still on tv in South Korea 28 years later because they got the balance just right, and all the dirty little details of that universe.

In theory you can make any sci fi show about future humans and a couple other species going to war. Should be straightforward.

But getting the balance of that universe right in terms of little details is tricky: Halo has done the heavy lifting already.

The majority of GOT isn't hot naked sexy people or swords: it's conversations in rooms. Most good shows are conversations in rooms, which is why it's so surprising we've lost the ability to produce and write them.

Babylon 5 demonstrated that you can keep absolutely everything else crappy (effects, costumes, heck acting and even cinematography), so long as you're good at conversations in rooms.

Halo could be (peak) Game of Thrones level in the right hands, which means the right execs, producers and investors just as much as it does creatives.

Unfortunately, the right hands potentially no longer exist. The current generation seems largely unable to produce good things, with few exceptions (notably Andor)

If America didn't practice restraint with regard to Canada, let's say cut off all diplomatic and economic ties, it would hurt for a while. Consumer prices would rise, there'd be a significant uptick to inflation, the expense of building housing would increase, the international community would be pissed off and sentiment against American would be at an all-time high, European, Asian and South American countries would form new trading blocs to leave America out, etc...

It would be pretty bad.

If Canada did that, 3 months later there would be no country left to call Canada. The EU and East Asia would be sending relief aid in the form of peace-keepers, heating fuel & emergency power generators, antibiotics and food rations in a humanitarian gesture to save what's left of what was Canada.

There's more to it: it's irrational to return a wallet to somebody you'll never meet/see/extract value from... but not doing that can injure your own self-image

Often doing "the right thing", in irrational circumstances, is nevertheless self-protective.

Otherwise you get friction in your social programming that you might never overcome.

> closed the border to American tourists or slapped on an expensive visa, and closed the airspace to American flights

None of those were ever viable options on the table. It'd immediately set off a Canadian national crisis that hurts the USA 1% and Canada 99%. Even Canada's current leadership isn't that politically suicidal.

It's like fighting off a mugger by cutting off your own arm and beating him with it, as you bleed out and weaken with every second that passes.

There's a plausible version where no matter what weird detours and dead-ends a human society takes on the tech tree, as long as there continue to be wars every few generations, the needed progress keeps getting made and the dead-ends or even just over-reaches get pruned afterward.

You can go down the wrong rabbit holes for a long while in peace-time (e.g. string theory), but war-time is a crucible for correct ideas.

I love this. My personal completely unsupported theory is we’re cognitively capable of conceiving of less than 1% of what’s true/accurate about the universe, and cognitively capable of understanding 1% of that 1%