These are all too small for their own article, so I’m collecting out of context thoughts that keep recurring to me, most of which are inconsequential.

I didn’t used to believe in “Sick Building Syndrome” until the start of the lockdowns. In the office I was constantly suffering from upper respiratory issues and falling ill. Once I was forcibly separated from that environment, these all went away. Now that I spend no more than three days a week in the office, it has not returned. So it really exists.

In 40k, the secret of the Dark Angels should have been that after the dust settled from the Battle of Caliban, it was the rebel legionnaires who came to the Imperium and went “We were with the loyalists all along, honest”, becoming the foundation of the current chapter. That would be a secret worth keeping and a reason to hunt down the survivors of the other side to keep it secret.

The Carthaginian Tophet is argued to have just been a cemetery for children, and that the connection with child sacrifice were Roman propaganda. There are urns in these Tophets which contain only child bones, some which contain a mix of child and lamb, and some which are lamb only. Also there is one site which was hastily fortified in antiquity. The wall tore straight through a cemetery, but they routed around the adjacent Tophet, adding material and effort without gaining a tactical advantage from the shape of the wall. This indicates a higher degree of sanctity than a mere cemetery. Lastly, some have argued that there should be a bias in the sex of remains if there was a sacrifice involved. I don’t think this is the case, as in other societies with human sacrifice, children, especially infants, are undifferentiated in terms of sex for the purposes of sacrifice. Post-puberty, they end up in different categories. On balance, I’m convinced the Tophet was a sacrificial ground and begin to wonder about why there is whitewashing of the Carthaginian reputation. I suspect it has to do with Phoenician-Palestinian implied associations.

Archeology is never going to be able to explain everything because people are crazy. A prospector in the Rockies spent his entire life digging a tunnel through a mountain to extract the gold he was convinced he would find but never did. Because of the geologically stable nature of where he dug, the tunnel could last millions of years. A future archeologist, bereft of records coming across this hole through the mountain with no related sites to be found is going to have a heck of a time explaining it. How many current mysteries are the result of one nutter doing something that only made sense to them?

In Battletech, I could never suspend disbelief enough to accept the Clans having better tech. Not only are they described as having a socialist economy, but their culture not only does not incentivize innovation, it would incentivize stagnation. If anything, the ruthlessly capitalist Inner Sphere with its frequent large scale wars along the borders but protected core worlds would be better positioned to innovate. Repeated plot patches have been applied to try to explain the discrepancy. All they do is further strain suspension of disbelief. It doesn’t help that the creators’ pets are the boring factions.

While it is stereotypically the American who is ignorant of the rest of the world, I am often annoyed at the ignorance of foreigners about America.

“Git Gud” is not an answer to “Help!”

As a writer there are some times when in the act of creation, you think a line of dialog is more impressive than it is. Other times you can come back to a turn pf phrase years later and go, “Wow, I wrote that?”

“Will they/Won’t they” is the worst kind of plot. At best, the audience doesn’t care. At worst they will be frustrated with you until the end of the story. Commit and let the ramifications play out within the yarn. The consequences are bound to be more interesting than stringing everybody along.

I have used the saying “If it’s worth Engineering, it’s worth Over-Engineering.” This may have been over-edited into ambiguity. On reflection, I can see the other common use of over-engineering coming into play. I did not mean “complicated beyond necessity” but instead intended “more robust and reliable than strictly necessary.” Ragnarok-proofed, if you will.

I still can’t understand cities. They seem like storehouses for excess unproductive people yet somehow extortionately expensive. The math never adds up. Growing up, I knew nothing was made in cities – all the farms and factories were outside of the urban area. Work was a rural thing, stagnation an urban thing.

Also in BattleTech the question arises of “Why are these war machines designed to fire salvoes of small missiles instead of individual larger missiles capable of killing the target?” I think it comes down to the AMS. Anti-Missile systems would have an easier time taking out the single ‘Mech killer missile, but the salvoes and swarms can overcome it by sheer volume. In-universe the AMS became LosTech for a while, but the salvo design stuck around due to the period of technological stagnation it suffered. Firing a bunch of small projectiles became the way it was always done.

The Joint stock company has become the bane of good management. The “fiduciary duty” of ever increasing stock prices for the shareholders plus the number of transient upper managers who are paid in stock leads to a markedly short-term thinking. If this quarter’s numbers go up, things are good. But you can get short tern gains by selling your productive capital and leasing it back. This immediately hamstrings future endeavors because someone else now owns the key to your business and has an extractive incentive to drain as much profit from you as they can get away with. But hey, you had a bump in revenue for a quarter and cashed out anyway. I don’t know how to incentivize for long term thinking, but that’s what builds successful ventures. I’d even venture to say the short-term goosing of stock prices is counter to shareholder interests, and a failure of that fiduciary duty.

I think I’ve thrown out enough nuggets of thought to prompt some discussion.

You’re all already wrong. There got it out of the way.