Robot Bastard!

would

A comic-book style artwork, by Bill Watterson from "Calvin and Hobbes". A blonde woman in an orange-and-yellow jumpsuit yells "Well, toy with THIS!" and brandishes a pistol. An inset panel of a masked face, close-up on the eyes, has the text "the hyper-phase distortion blaster*!" An asterisked text reads "see ish #374!"

The "smiley" spaceship from the movie "Heavy Metal". A gray metal sphere with two small green domes and a large pink lower half hovers over a grassy plain against a blue sky. The perspective suggests that the sphere is extremely large.

bsky.app/profile/robo...

That's a pretty consistent effect of automation. When CAD programs got integrated 2D-drafting capability it didn't mean that design engineers now had 6-hour workdays, it just meant that the drafters all got fired and now the designers had to do the 2D blueprints as well as the basic design.

Damn, that's perfect!

they had to pay a lot of money for pipe upgrades to keep the lentils from gushing forth

People talk about how improved ag technology has made food cheaper but packaging is also a big part of it - being able to keep food from going bad has a lot to do with how cheap it is!

I know we're not supposed to use AI to do things but I would greatly enjoy seeing an attempt at Cormac McCarthy Robotech.

"this *is* the one for lads. the one for dads has him rape a girl first."

"it's about the tension between dedicating yourself to humanity and dedicating yourself to a life-partner, and how if you're strong and brave enough you can make those be the same thing"
"huh?"
"also a girl can't get into a robot because her butt is too round to go through the hatch"
"let's watch!"

when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail

David Drake's Gun: The gun uses some weird occurrence the author read an article about in Fortean Times to blow your head clean off.

Richard Stark's Gun:
You might think that if there's a gun on the wall in the first act it would fire in the second act. But the fact is - Parker doesn't need a gun to kill a man. Nor does he intend to wait for the next act.

also JRR Tolkien's Gun: In the unpublished notes are forty pages of attempts to work out a logically consistent sequence of events between when we first see the gun and when it appears again and is fired, and in the final draft the author just threw up his hands and declared it a Magic Gun.

Garth Ennis' Gun (comedic):
If in the first act you have hung a gun on the wall, then in the following one it should be inserted into someone's ass.

and *yet another* cute lil' droid dude!

(there was supposed to be a "because" in there somewhere)

hey remember when that guy said "if you're in the Strait and I send a swarm of inshore small boats at your carrier you probably won't be able to sink them all" and the Navy built a class of ships to deal with that and everybody got all mad and claimed it was a waste of money

One of the problems is that anywhere in North America that you could build a shipyard probably already has one, and that place has been turned into a shithole by 100+ years of shipyard activity...

I remember Ben Rich's book where he talked about Lockheed building a stealth ship on spec and the Navy saying it didn't meet their performance requirements, among other things, it lacked a paint locker.

I think Internet Atheism wrecked that latter, because you will never be able to say "the described mechanism for this miracle is nonphysical" without someone picturing you in a fedora.

As someone pointed out, the biggest joke of "Life Of Brian" is that it's not a joke, Roman-era Jerusalem really was Like That, with hard-line religious weirdoes battling street preachers who might accidentally become the leader of a cult.

The troubles

(actually it's titled "SEACLYSM" or some shit but it might as well be what I said)

The Chinese government also enthusiastically supported green-tech (because they needed a domestic solar-panel industry to support their military space programs). The American culture considers government support of industry to be A Handout and Cronyism and other types of moral error.

A fundamental expression of the American spirit is the montage where the A-Team builds a Contraption that explodes the bad guys. COVID uniquely struck at America because you couldn't just hack together something from the junk in your garage to solve it.

Ever since the VCR came out, American consumer media culture has been based around the idea that Copying Something Is Neither Immoral Nor Illegal, so people are having a lot of trouble explaining how all of a sudden that's not true.

People are like "how come these companies are saying copying is okay when back in 1997 they were saying copying was wrong," and it's like, the guys running companies now are the ones who were *doing* the copying back in 1997!

All the stories about American involvement in WWII involve at least a mention of How Much Stuff We Built and How Fast We Built Stuff.