- While I’ve said it before elsewhere, I randomly remind y’all that sensha-do is a real sport in the Empire.
As it should be.
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Do they care about crew survivability? Or since it’s a sport and you don’t have to worry about replenishing manpower quickly (I assume), do the tank armours become paper thin compared to their battlefield-going cousins?
Oh, definitely. No-one wants to see a bunch of young ladies¹ salsafied - which is why they use older tanks, carefully modified with sport-legal weapons and armor.
- Sensha-do is, after all, a traditional feminine art.
(For reasons similar to those why astronautry is. And just like the inimitable Sgt. Johnson, they know what the ladies like.)
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- It is not strictly true that a Certain Lady at the ISS launched a long-running memetic campaign to preserve the taste for proper corsetry in the public zeitgeist on the grounds that, and I quote, “Seriously, I can hide a dozen throwing daggers in this thing, even if it weren’t a convenient excuse to wear body armor to formal occasions.”
It is, however, true that ISS agents find the legend hilarious and decline to confirm or deny it whenever the topic comes up.
- Since we’ve been covering the courts recently: in a Curial court, witnesses et al. are not sworn in before their testimony, or asked to swear or affirm generally. Why? Well, as the Code of Alphas says:
A person of teir deceives by neither word nor deed and shall have no cause to hide his face from the world.
i.e., a gentlesoph is expected to tell the truth under all circumstances anyway, and if you’re not a gentlesoph, you would be expected to lie anyway.
The closest it gets is the occasional stern “Your word, sir?” during questioning, which is the local equivalent of “May I remind you that you’re under oath,” and is, in any case, serious business.
Even then, I suspect the stern caution is often an implicit “be less poetic and more precise”; I can absolutely see a passionately angry eldrae getting a little flowery.
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- The Imperial Military Service doesn’t make use of dog tags. The vector stack, by virtue of containing the backup, also contains a PF instance that contains all the identity and medical information you’re ever going to need. And if you’re going to recover anything from a fallen comrade on the battlefield, it should be the marble. (Every legionary is issued a pithing knife for exactly this purpose.)
With thanks for inspiration to @zakueins :
- Wrapping paper in the Empire is distinguished by having a thin metamaterial layer incorporated into it to block things like terahertz deep radar, and suchlike. No sense in letting people’s enhanced senses accidentally spoil a special occasion, after all.
- Surprises await those in a post-contact world buying appliances from Roselle Better Living or similar brands. Sure, by Imperial standards, it’s the cut-down, downgraded export model, but so far as Earth’s concerned, it’s got all the features of the fanciest smart fridge imaginable, combined with the sheer solidity and robustness of a vintage 1950s model. All in glorious Streamline Moderne!
“It’s a fridge.
”It works.
”And it doesn’t sell what kind of beer I buy to some marketing company to pay some MBA’s supply of hookers and blow. You can call it a ‘cut-down, downgraded export model,’ I call it ‘the ultimate proof that you can fight enshitification.’”
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To be fair, while you can probably turn the feature off with some setting buried a couple of levels deep in the configuration menu and labeled “I Hate Being Offered Nice Things”, Imperial culture is such that an appliance that doesn’t report your preferences to Desire Effects Fulfilment, ICC, the marketing industry’s leading mesh preference aggregator, would be considered shockingly lacking in a key feature.
You want people to know what your preferences in goods and services are. How else will they know to make them for you?
(You humans are all racist have a weird kink about making your own lives worse and less convenient!)
Oh, no, no, no….
I fully want the Jeeves function (i.e. what you’re describing here) on-line and functional.
What I don’t want is my mailbox flooded with spam and junk mail and push advertising and all of the other crap that “good marketing” seems to involve these days. And the mysterious coupons that seem to cut costs enough that you feel like winning when you buy more than you need.
Or the feeling that all that marketing data is being used to create the cheapest and easiest to produce wallpaper paste everything, because trying to actually be creative and such is hard work and companies are allergic to hard work that might cost them money.
Admittedly, siding with zakueins here. I don’t mind being marketed to! I hate being harassed by raw incompetents that claim they’re marketing to me, while actually repeatedly insulting me.
Seriously, I have gone and tuned stuff in my Google settings and various websites and the majority of the “targeted” advertising is still anti-science bullshit, softcore pornography filled with my personal turn-offs, or stuff that isn’t sold on/doesn’t ship to my continent. The bulk of the useful ads I am exposed to, with products that I may look into, are from bus shelters and TV broadcasts!
These days I’m mostly baffled by how BAD businesses are at marketing, and wondering if the meta-strategy is some elaborate form of negging that doesn’t work on autistic people and is zooming over my head.
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