Star Trek fan: Matter and antimatter are mutually annihilated in a fusion reaction that warps space-time sufficiently to drive the ship faster than light.
Star Wars fan: Hyperdrives use hypermatter particles to hurl a ship into hyperspace, allowing it to take advantage of wrinkles in the fabric of realspace to reduce journey times significantly.
One thing I find interesting is the concept people have of old things looking old. It comes up especially in reenacting where people describe somebody’s gear as being ‘too shiny’ and ‘too pristine’, and especially in combat reenacting, where people expect clothing to be covered in grime.
There seems to be a concept of a general state-of-being for clothing from earlier eras, to the point of wanting something that’s supposed to have been created four months before a soldier wears it for the first time in basic training, to have the same weathering you’d see on the same pair after four years of overseas service and combat.
People expect the past to be gritty and dirty. They expect old and faded, colours faded in the sun, fabric gone soft.Hence they expect not to see a pristine and ironed uniform even if that’s what it probably would’ve been. They want to see the rips, the dirt on the sleeves, the obvious wear and tear, because “that’s how it was” in their idea of what ‘the past looked like’.
Obviously clothing worked the same way now as it does then, it doesn’t come fresh from the factory with that weathered look. But that’s what people expect it to look like.
Reenacting exists in an odd sort of blend of reality and fiction where a reenactor is trying to be as close as possible to the real thing, while also bending towards the public, who perceive what the ‘real thing’ was different from a reenactor would. For example, the pyramids in Egypt – they look the same in movies that take place in ancient times, when they were new and pristine. But our view of them is the pyramids as rough and sanded. If you ask anybody what the pyramids should look like, they would point towards the latter.
This is the same reason as to why museums tend not to make mockups of the ancient buildings, but mockups of what the ruins look like. Because we probably know what the ancient buildings look like – they were fuckin buildings what do you expect. But we don’t know what the ruins look like unless we see them, and in doing this, museums can show those and not require you to go all the way to Greece to see them.
The soldiers of Saudi Arabia before the training shooting forgot to take out of the barrel tube cold shooting and fired. The tank was sent for repair, the victims were not reported.
I like how the statement, “The victims were not reported”, implies that there were casualties but they just didn’t care.
Any “knight in shining armour” who expects a reward for saving the damsel in distress isn’t a hero. He’s a mercenary.
Bitch pay me,
Now I want a comic where a princess tries to kiss the hero and he’s just like “yea that’s nice and all but I need gold for rent and food… and I chipped my sword.”
(Unceremoniously shoving princess of the back off my horse at the feet of the King)
“Let me see, that’ll be 100 gold for princess rescue, 25 gold extra because she has no serious injury, also there was a mimic in the tower I charge extra if a mimic is involved, you can check the fine print of my contract…”
I’m in for this.
“Miss, I respect your…uh…enthusiasm, but I have a wife. A wife who is very good with a crossbow.”
*Indicates the crossbow’d guardsman nearby.*
“Your prince charming is some dude who hired us.”
Plot twist, the prince charming is a really decent dude; but he couldn’t risk leaving the capitol while the evil plotting nefarious badguy was still around, but also was too morally upright to either leave the princess alone or just assassinate the badguy.
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