Spacetrawler, audio version For the blind or visually impaired, August 2, 2023.
It’s true. Galactic space battles aren’t quite the same thing as having to earn money for sweet cereal.
Spacetrawler, audio version For the blind or visually impaired, August 2, 2023.
It’s true. Galactic space battles aren’t quite the same thing as having to earn money for sweet cereal.
Aitana’s overqualified.
.
“Do you have any leadership experience?”
“Well, at 12 I led a multicultural team on a long-distance mission to rescue kidnapped and enslaved people who were drugged and forced to serve a rogue foreign power… What?”
Well, either you’re skilled enough for the job, or you’re a pretty good liar – welcome to the Shady Shin’s discount car sales team!
The boy who was to later become Admiral Farragut saw his first naval battle as a Midshipman at 10. And comported himself well under fire, with only one brief incident of panic when a headless corpse fell down the ladder and landed on him as he was attempting to retrieve another box of fuses from the magazine… This was hardly unusual at the time. Only slightly unusual was him getting his first command (returning a captured prize to a friendly port) at 11. Most of his contemporaries were at least 14…
Our modern idea that people should be given zero responsibility or trust until they turn 18 comes primarily from 19th century factory magnates who bought their way into the educational system with the deliberate goal of creating an army of mindless worker drones who would take orders without question and never try to think for themselves. To create the peasant class that the United States had previously been without. Sadly they seem to have largely succeeded.
It’s true, space battles are less stressful than determining which foods you can buy on a budget.
I remember thinking I was ready to go out into the world on my own. Wow, I was a dumbass back then. Rinse and repeat for five decades…so far.
One is never ready. One just improves one’s improvisational skills. I keep trying to reassure my (adult) kids of this, but somehow it doesn’t seem to help.
Youth is wasted on the young. The first 50 years are just practice and dumb mistakes.
I have bad news for you. Practice and dumb mistakes don’t stop when you hit 50.
In my experience the practice stops–I just choose to embrace the dumb mistakes and treat the rest like reruns.
@Chris, what is the reference to NZ pipfruit (ie: apples and pears) about?
@Pedrocelli, Heh. Hrm. Well, there is none really.
Originally I was going to have Stangor do the scene, but realized that Ciara was a better fit. So originally I had made up a fruit, a “Roybelen pipfruit.” And so when editing it from Stangor to Ciara, I wondered if a pipfruit existed on earth (since a pip is a seed in a fruit). And when I looked it up, it says that the term “pipfruit” is used in New Zealand, so I went with it since it sounded good. 🙂
Awesome! I’ve just learnt something about my own country!
I’m not sure the reference makes sense, though, our apples and pears aren’t especially drained of their vital essences. Maybe it’s different outside NZ; the hosts of the Apocrypals podcast have spoken disparagingly of imported NZ apples, so maybe shipping removes some of the flavour.
Ciara shows us a variety of Irish humor they don’t include in the tour books. With good reason; the wrong audience might just decide to toss the joker into the Irish Sea.
Aitana’s situation reminded me of a quote the grandmother of a friend of mine once told her. She said that you’re a virgin until your third baby. Childhood is a remarkably plastic state.
I had a friend in college who joked about being a born again virgin every time she got a new boyfriend.