oh, Challenger had a lot of immediacy for me too.

My dad teaches physics and astronomy at the local community college.  (or did, at the time.)  he was also instrumental in getting my entire school district new science books about the same time - the old ones talked about men one day walking on the moon.  My entire elementary school was one of the many that watched the launch live on tv.  I will never, ever forget the day I learned what "half mast" meant.  Or what it felt like to hear/watch all the grown-ups in such complete shock and horror.  and realize from the look on their faces/sound of their voice that something had gone horribly, horribly wrong.

and my little brother wanted to be an astronaut at the time.  desperately.

but 9/11 had a lot of immediacy as well.

the same brother was living in NY at the time.  I was at home, having quit grad school and not having found a job yet.  The first thing I remember from that day is hearing my dad say "Kevin's ok" and thinking "WhyTF WOULDN'T he be ok. I spent the day watching the news and attempting to relay messages between said brother and the National Guard, as they were paying for his school at the time.  aside from the phone systems being overloaded, the towers falling also meant the loss of key cell towers, so he could only im.  but, needless to say, he couldn't simply im the NG.

The following days and weeks and months were filled with stories from my brother about actually watching the towers fall.  of alums that came wandering in that day dazed and covered in ash.  of helping a friend open a care package a couple of days later - because it was from his mother, who had been on one of the flights.

But the bigger thing that makes me feel less connected to Gen Xers like my sister is how my sense of rootlesses colored how I saw everything.  There were always philosophical differences between my younger brother and I and our older siblings, but how we reacted to it all really highlighted that.  And while I think a lot of it was those differences that had always been there, I think some of it was also the extent to which we each felt "grown-up"
 and settled down - or not - at the time.

I don't feel like a Gen Y, but I don't feel like a Gen Xer either.  Just perpetually stuck between the two.

Which makes sense, as I'm right on that cusp.

(apologies if this is too much off topic.  mods, please feel free to move it elsewhere or ask me to repost in a new thread)

(I'm going to ask this both because I'm curious and because what you are saying doesn't seem right to me.)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but from making an educated guess based on what I know of physics, more firepower means one of two related things:

1) Bullets that fly faster* - and therefore have more power, and can therefore rip through more stuff.

2) Guns that fire faster - and can therefore get more bullets out in a shorter amount of time.

Assuming this is true, I don't see how anything but maybe minor adjustments from the norm are useful when it comes to taking down gammas.

I don't see that faster bullets would help any.  You are still aiming at a person.  Being a gamma does not give one armor, the bullet still goes through the same stuff.  The description, with regards to being taken down with bullets - plural, is that gammas are rather like regular people hyped up on PCP.  In which case the issue isn't so much the amount of damage that a single bullet can do, but that their bodies don't register the pain the way ours would, and therefore keep going when other people wouldn't.  The issue then would be one's ability to deliver pain or to cripple, not the need for the bullet to have more power kinetic energy than standard law enforcement issue.

Plus, in a situation where there is likely to be a lot of people around (cops and otherwise) you don't want the bullet to do more than rip into someone.  A bullet that goes all the way through a person doesn't necessarily do more damage than one that gets lodged inside.  But it is more likely to do damage to more people once it leaves the first person's body.  I could be wrong, but I'm guessing that standard law enforcement issue is meant to come as close to averaging stopping within the person, while still staying on this side of doing damage, as is humanely possible, given all the unknown/changing variables.

re: number 2, more bullets, I think you are misreading the text.  If you read Hafs comments to Chaz following their target practice, she specifically talks about adrenaline taking over after shot 2.  My impression is that AIM is the key factor, but that in a high stress, volitile, and variable situation, the best your non-sharpshooter can do - no matter the gun in his or her hands - is aim for the center of mass in order to make sure that the maximum number of bullets hit the target.  Not because you actually need every single bullet you have to stop the gamma, but that once adrenaline takes over, you want to make sure you still hold on to two things: keep firing and fire at the center of mass.  It's not so much the number of bullets per say that Hafs and Brady are talking about so much as not hesitating and not stopping to see if you hit what you were aiming at.

Just as it says in the portion of KoC you quoted:


The impression that gives me is that while it make take more bullets than normal to do enough damage for the gamma to realize he or she is dead, what the team already carries has slightly more bullets than it actually takes to do the job.

So, like wanting the bullet to average at just beyond stopping inside the body so that always still goes far enough into it to do damage, one would want the number of bullets one fires to do the same.  You want to have just a bit more than what it takes to stop the gamma, but not a whole lot more in order to minimize the damage to bystanders.

But, like I said.  I don't know guns. physics, yes.  guns, no.

*well, technically, bullets that have more momentum, which would also include bullets with more mass, and therefore more inertia.

(edited bc I cannot spell.  just ask my mother)

topic?  there is a topic?

 

No...but, the staff time might.  Or well, kill somebody else.


I am the LAST person to offer expertise in this area, but I don't see anyone arguing that.  That would be, after all, why the team carries guns.

What I see people arguing is that often it's better to outhink your opponent than it is to outgun them.  And that bigger firepower = /= better, necessarily.

Having been born in 1977 (me and Star Wars, it was Fate), but having not quite entered "the real world" when 9/11 happened, I've always felt in the middle.  I am so very much a child of the 80's.  But my reaction to 9/11 and events afterwards were more in sync with those younger than me, as I had literally just left school and most of my conversations about it were with people that were still in school.  I definitely feel old compared to most of my staff, but I have a hard time considering myself to be of the same "generation" as my older sister, even though she's closer in age to me than they are.  She's very stereotypical Gen-Xer in some ways, and I'm not so much.

Well, that's what "hispanic" usually comes down to anyway....it's just "native to south america" Native American.

I thought that might be the case, only based on the fact that while I am very white bread as far as upbringing, my entire family tans.  Not like Chaz does, but definitely more to a shade where (as long as our farmer's tans weren't showing) we would be called hispanic around here - if our features weren't so clearly "Western European."  Dad's side of the family is most recently from Florida by way of Oklahoma - so we are guessing there is some Native American in there somewhere.

Not quite, because the page is subdivided into parts 1-4 - and I think that's how it was divided up when it was originally aired.  I'm just not sure if linking to each part rather than just the whole would make the Reading Order more confusing or not.  So for now I vote let's keep it as is, but plan on thinking about it more and definitely noting somewhere on the wiki - such as the table jeffy was talking about - when the (approximate) airdates for each part was.

re:ambigiously ethnic - I was going to say I don't know anyone like that, but....living in socal, it's more that most people  (most white people?) just default to "(vaguely) hispanic" if one does not look like they stepped off the Mayflower, or is not otherwise clearly from one ethnic group or another.

Which is why what threw ME for a loop was when the Texans referred to Chaz as "black."  Not because I hadn't imagined him getting dark enough, more because "black" is a more sharply defined ethnic group in my mind; I - and most of the people I know - would be more likely to guess "hispanic" or just whatever if someone didn't look "clearly" black.

yeah, I wasn't really clear there, was I?  

I meant more that if we are going to focus more on it being a Reading Order and be willing to fudge some of the ordering in order to make stuff simple - like say, keep the WTFBBQ as one link rather than try to divide it out according to pub date (as opposed to simply acknowledging that we can't always find publication dates and therefore will need to guess at times) - then we might want to make that clear.  Just so that we aren't contradicting ourselves and therefore confusing people when we are trying to do the opposite.

"This page lists the events of the Shadow Unit series in near publication order. This ordering is meant to reproduce as closely and simply ( ?? ) as possible the experience readers had when the material was initially released."

So, yeah.  what you said.

Then maybe a sentence that says something like: "A comprehensive listing of all Shadow Unit episodes and extras, including author attributions, known airdates, and links to related wiki pages, can be found here."  With "here" obviously linking to the table.

(edited bc I hate it when programs change my punctuation to icon smileys. : (  )

haha!


Good point.  Although if the info isn't on that exact page, I think we may want to add a note at the top that explains why we think this is the best order to read them in.  Nothing too descriptive, just "the following list generally follows the orginal airdates, with some minor adjustments to move non-spoilery character building extras to earlier in the reading list."  Or, you know, like that, but better.  and possibly shorter.  and less confusing.


A table sounds perfect to me.  Especially since I mainly wanted to add the airdates to the Reading Order in order to make going through old board discussions less confusing.  "Wait! but it was mentioned in [blank] that [blank] happened back before [blank].  Oh....but that extra came out laaaaaater...." (I can't possibly be the only newbie whose done that.)

A table compacts all the information into an efficient and easy to navigate format.

I just don't know how to make one yet.    (makes mental note to look it up on wiki)


I tried that first and it did not look good in preview.  Was very confusing to read bc none of the chunks lined up by type, so everything just looked jumbled together.


I keep going back and forth on this, and I can't figure out why.

(edited bc grammar is not my friend.  or maybe the problem is that I'm not a very good friend to grammar?)

I mentioned this over in the other thread, but I figured it ought to be mentioned here, too:

I've added airdates and author attributions to season 1 eps in the Reading Order.  If people don't like it, I can take it off.  If you all do like it, I will add other airdates and author attributions when possible, as well as a disclaimer at the top that the extra content is not attributed to any single author - as per tPTB.

Personally, I dunno.  Reading through comments on the boards (the search button has been extremely invaluable in trying to pin down airdates for extra content) it looks like it was aired in pieces from March through May last year.  Which was pretty much the entire season.  (Which explains why it works as something that can be read earlier - because parts of it were meant to be read early on.)

On that note:  I have added airdates and authors for the first season episodes on the wiki.  If people don't like it I can easily take it off.  If you all do like it, I'll try adding the same for extra content and season 2, as well as a disclaimer at the top that explains that extra content does not have specific author attributions - as per tPTB.

Re: making a reading list for the lj entires.  The only way I can think to do it is to divide them up and actually go through them one by one.  (I call Chaz!  Ok, I'll share if you insist.)  And then discuss our notes as we go through them and decide how detailed we want to be.  But that's bc I'm one of those people that need to try something first - and then come up with a clear plan before doing it for real.  Any other suggestions on how to go about it are welcome and appreciated.

(Our illustrious PTB aside) It's not always a good idea to follow the recommendations of authors.

Reading the WTFBBQ earlier than near the end of season 1 is a good suggestion.  Reading anything before The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, is, imho, NOT.  No matter what Lewis himself said.  If for no other reason than that I don't know many fans of The Chronicles of Narnia who read The Magician's Nephew first.  It's just not nearly as good of a book.

(Although, to be fair, that opinion might have something to do with my age, the age of the other fans I know, and the date at which they decided to start messing with the order of the box sets.)

Sorry, I tend to go a bit overboard on the topic sometimes bc I worked at big box bookstore at the time the first movie came out.  And it was annoying as hell to explain to customers why the "second" book was being made into a movie first.  Even if I hadn't already thought it was the better way to read it, I would have started recommending they read tLtWatW first.  For the same reason they made that the first movie: "in media res" is usually the better way to get people hooked on the story.

(edited bc I'm so used to writing the code myself I keep forgetting to punch the buttons to get the proper punctuation for the tags.)

But the air date wasn't until late season 1, yes?

I thought I remembered there being some minor kerfluffle about some of the season 1 dvd extras being leaked onto the nets months before the actual dvd set came out...and folks getting all mad bc they thought it would be spoilery .....and how would they avoid the spoilers if everyone on the internets was talking about them....and then it turns out they weren't spoilery after all.

But I could be wrong.....

(ducks)

Hmmmm...perhaps a special mention though?  Like "This is the orginal order, but these particular extras can be read at any time.  We just don't recommend doing the equivilant of reading the Magician's Nephew first."

Yup.

That's what I thought and that's what I meant.

I've figured out some of the airdates for the haitus extras, but other than that I've just got the episode airdates.

I'll try to get to work on adding those then.

I need to go close up the library, so I won't get it done tonight unless the internet goddesses are smiling on me when I get home.  But hopefully they will be included on the wiki sometime tomorrow morning - or at least by Friday - as I plan out heading one of those days to my parents in order to do research on where I might buy a thingamajig to boost the free signal and get me internet at my home base.

you are funny.

and hey!  you are no longer a newbie.  YOU LEFT US!  when did that happen?