From
http://www.youaredumb.net/
Memo to "The Talifan": BE BETTER... WAIT, YOU'RE HOPELESS.
This is a special, post-hoc, emergency edition of Be A Better Nerd, because at no point in the previous instances of the series did one important question get answered - at what point is a nerd unsalvageable? At what point are they so insane, so caught up, so trapped in a web of their own minutiae that they aren't just stalking their hobby, they've kidnapped their hobby, tied it up in their basement, and force it to watch while they masturbate to the Star Wars Holiday Special?
At what point are nerds simply incapable of being better nerds? At what point are exile, euthanasia, or chemical castration the only alternatives to a lifetime of sad nerditry? Here's a hint - when they decide they need to dispute the number of clones in the Clone Army. In Star Wars.
Of course, it's "sad nerditry" to argue against Karen Traviss' numbers for the size of the clone army in Star Wars, but it's
not "sad nerditry" to raise counter-arguments against those arguments, as our inadvertently self-contradictory moron friend is about to do:
The official number, which for the record is a factoid I now bitterly resent knowing at all, is "about three million". Which, to the very tiny extent that I can force myself for the purposes of this column to give a shit, seems like a lot. I mean, that's three times the number of people who showed up at the Million Man March, and that was pretty damn big.
Wow, it's so big ... it's ... like ... a small fraction of the Soviet Red Army. Donald Rumsfeld is being lambasted as an idiot and a liar for saying that he could hold the small country of Iraq with a hundred thousand men, but that's a
vastly higher troop-to-civilian ratio than anyone could achieve with 3 million men and just
one planet, never mind thousands or millions. If the Republic had to occupy just
one planet, they'd need more than 3 million men right there. And what about all these "Outer Rim Sieges" we heard about? How the fuck do you conduct sieges without large blockading forces? But I guess current events such as the Iraq War are
also too "nerdy" for our friend to care about.
This number was revealed in an article in Star Wars Insider, a fact which I hope prompted the same reaction in all of you that it did in me, that being "Holy shit, they're still publishing Star Wars Insider?" I mean, I know it's heavily subsidized by the sale of plastic Wookiees, but still. It was revealed by author Karen Traviss*, who writes Star Wars books. Hey, we all gotta make rent somehow. I'm told she also writes real books. I can't tell you whether they're any good or not, because to be perfectly honest, the last time I looked over the SF section at Barnes and Noble, the visual assault of three thousand uniformly awful covers** gave me a mild seizure, and as a protective measure, my doctors have warned me to stay at least 500 feet from midlist paperback scifi at all times.
Notice how he spends most of his effort trying to pretend he's way too cool to be interested in sci-fi literature, even though he obviously must be interested
if he even knows this argument is taking place. My
own wife has no idea that this argument is taking place, for fuck's sake. If you mentioned "Karen Traviss" to her, she'd probably ask if I'm talking about one of the other parents at my son's private school.
There is a subset of Star Wars fandom that thinks that all those movies and books about the banking space-plane flown by a light-sword-wielding magician whose dad was friends with a floppy-eared racial stereotype should be treated as "hard SF". Hard SF meaning grounded firmly in science and extrapolated technology and military reality. This is, on the face of it, patently insane. Because at the end of the day, making a movie is a collaborative effort. The product of thousands of tired, time-crunched people with a wide variety of motives. And while some of those motives may be the art of meticulous world-building, others of those motives are getting this fucking shot rendered because they haven't eaten in two days, slept in three, or kissed their wives in seven.
Under such circumstances, the center cannot hold. The numbers cannot, will not, ever add up. And every bit of creative mathsturbation nerds use to fill in the gaps is one more step down the road to Irrevocable Madness, and the aforementioned euthanasia.
For someone who claims to not care at all about sci-fi, he obviously cares enough to put forth arguments about the epistemology of visual sci-fi. But that kind of self-contradiction obviously doesn't bother him; this is a geek in denial. What's more tiresome is his idiotic notion that imperfections in the creative process mean that you can say anything you want. This would be like me saying that the Incredible Hulk is three inches tall because his size wasn't precisely consistent between shots, and the FX artists probably had marital problems on their minds. Never mind the fact that you don't need to freeze-frame movies in order to know that you can't possibly fight a war on a galactic scale with an army smaller than Stalin had. Anybody with military knowledge could walk into this argument and know that this "3 million soldiers" number makes no sense without even having seen all six Star Wars movies.
These nerds felt that three million was a ridiculous low-ball number for the amount of clone troopers required to perform the tasks hinted at by the Star Wars prequels. They may be correct. I don't know. I'm not the one stillframing DVDs and counting white suits. Which is bad, but not irredeemably bad. How several of them dealt with the results of their rectal Fort Knox of anal-retentiveness is what makes them the worst nerds ever. And I do not pass this judgment lightly. I've seen a lot of nerds in my life. Been a lot, too. But the level these feebs have achieved...
But that is a story for another day. And that other day is tomorrow.
What's more indicative of a problem? Attacking an author for writing a stupid number into her book, or attacking people for being "nerds" because they don't like that number? And doesn't he have a better criticism than "nerds"? How sophomoric is that? His entire article is nothing more than a rant that nobody with a life should give a damn about this entire argument ... mixed in with his attempt to argue the numbers himself. How dense is this clown, anyway?
