Posts Tagged ‘NG36B’

Star Wars deserves better: an Ahsoka Analysis

Posted: October 7, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in short films/interviews
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Note: I haven’t watched the Season 1 finale yet.

The latest Star Wars movies and TV shows suck. I watched Episode 7 with my son on opening night, and while I gasped along with everyone when Han Solo died, I was left wanting. At the time, I said “Man, Rey seems a bit overpowered and kinda dull.”

Well, she only got more overpowered and dull as the series went on. The Ahsoka TV series is, sadly, the same way. Now I should mention I love the character of Ahsoka that was built up in the Clone Wars animated series. She started off as a kinda-snotty little kid, and I didn’t care for her attitude, but when she lost a bunch of clone troopers by not following orders, as a military officer, I felt very much in her shoes. She grew on me as the seasons went on, becoming a more interesting character that worked hard to overcome her flaws. When she went on trial and was kicked out of the Jedi Temple, only to be found innocent and eventually offered to be readmitted, I shed a tear when she rejected the offer and walked away. She was a cool character with believable motivations and a character arc I enjoyed following.

I liked her so much I purchased her light saber set while at Disney, and they hang up in my office. So when Disney announced an Ahsoka series, I was thrilled, and quite willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.

And sadly, I wasn’t happy.

Ahsoka is nowhere near as interesting in the TV series as the Clone Wars. By far the best character is Baylan Shen, with Ahsoka a distant second, and almost everyone else far from that.

So I wondered, why is Ahsoka, a character I’m already primed to like, so bad? I think it boils down to two things:

  1. People taking dumb actions
  2. No consequences for the “good guys”
  3. Weak bad guys with poor motivations

Let’s start with dumb actions. The season opens with two dark jedi, Baylan Shen and Shin Hati, requesting to come aboard a New Republic jail vessel. The ships commander thinks their transmitter is fraudulent, so he personally plans to meet the ship with a security detachment and arrest them. Obviously, this goes horribly wrong, and Baylan and Shin lay waste to everyone and rescue a prisoner on the ship.

How many ways is this wrong? First, if you suspect a ship has ill intentions, why don’t you BLOW IT AWAY AT A DISTANCE??? Nobody, and I mean nobody, in the military wants to get close to the enemy if they have a safe way of killing them at a distance. This decision makes no sense and we’re only 10 minutes into the episode.

Then the captain brings a security detail with no armor and light weapons, which they don’t even have pointed at the ship. Baylan walks right up and gets within arms length of the captain, and nobody thinks this is a bad idea?? If you were to walk up to a military gate looking even remotely suspicious, you’d have at least one pistol trained on you. How are the guards not nervous and on-edge? Why would they let a potentially dangerous person, or at least a person that they don’t know anything about, get within choking distance of their captain?

None of this makes sense. It’s totally illogical and used to drive the plot forward. It would be more believable if Baylan snuck onboard, or boarded stealthily, or hired a band of pirates to hijack the ship. You’d still get a cool fight scene, and it would make far more sense. We get illogical decisions all throughout Ahsoka: stormtroopers don’t shoot at Ezra on site, robots trying to steal a map decide to try and blow it up instead, etc. etc. etc. None of these actions make sense, and it makes the show feel cheap.

There are never consequences for the good guys. Sabine runs off with the mystical map and eventually takes a lightsaber to the gut, but then she’s fine at the beginning of the next episode. Somehow a magic laser sword that CUTS THROUGH HARDENED STEEL only leave a tiny mark when its rammed into your stomach. Like, really? I don’t believe that at all.

Protagonists have to suffer consequences or else the audience doesn’t get invested in them. Look at Tony Stark in Iron Man. He’s a playboy millionaire in the beginning of the movie, banging hot chicks while riding around in limousines. And then in the first half hour of the movie, he gets captured, tortured, hooked up to a battery, and has to build his way out of a mess. Along the way, he loses a friend that is a far more ethical and moral person than him, all because Tony wasn’t strong or fast enough to save him. It’s heart wrenching. We got from thinking Tony’s a total loser to rooting for the guy to punch terrorists on his way out of a cave.

More importantly, consequences have to be permanent. Tony Stark has metal shards that must be held outside of his heart. He turns this otherwise bad turn of events into a power source for a suit to do good. He uses his bad consequences to grow and become a better person in the end. But Sabine, Ahsoka and Ezra never do. Nothing is permanent. Lightsaber gut stabs, isolation in another galaxy, getting knocked off a cliff…nothing permanently damages our heroes. They are never in danger, and thus they never need a reason to grow.

Lastly, our bad guys are weak. Grand Admiral Thrawn in the Timothy Zahn books is amazing. He’s cunning and smart. He takes over planets through trickery. He rebuilds the Empire. He defeats enemies by studying their art and understanding them as a person. Thrawn always has a plan B. He’s like Bismark, always scheming, always taking advantage of the situation, always one step ahead.

Thrawn in Ahsoka? Not imposing at all. Why even be scared of him? He lays mines for space whales…that fail. He uses some mystical Night Sister magic to try and ambush Ahsoka…which fails. He sends his troops to kill Sabine Wren and Ezra…fails (why didn’t he kill Ezra earlier, btw??). He’s not imposing. None of this plans come off.

In less than 15 minutes in Star Wars: A New Hope, Darth Vader lifts a dude in the air and chokes him to death. He is imposing and downright frightening. He never loses his cool, and he ALWAYS wins, right up till his last fight with Luke and the Emperor. He’s imposing, intimidating, and when he is finally defeated, we all sigh in relief at how HARD he was.

Thrawn in Ahsoka? Or even Thrawn in Rebels? Lame. It’s not significant when our heroes beat him because he’s just not imposing.

I wish Disney would stop focusing on “ooooo oooo we’ve got a female character!!” and instead build us cool protagonists and scary villains that interact in a cool setting with an intriguing story. That’s what we need now more than ever.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

The Navy…always ready with misinformation!

Posted: September 30, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in Uncomfortable Truths, war
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There was a time I truly believed that the Admirals in the Navy cared about Sailors and were smart enough to run the Navy efficiently and effectively. Early in my career I worked in an Admiral’s office, for a person who I grew to admire and felt could effectively fight our adversaries and win.

Nowadays, I can’t find a single Admiral that I would want to follow into battle. None. I’ve seen firsthand how our current Admirals obsess over minute details on PowerPoints that don’t matter, refuse to hold civilian employees accountable, and grossly abuse the military justice system. These so-called leaders got away with this gross mismanagement by running the infrastructure built up by previous generations into the ground. Well, that infrastructure is finally crumbling, with Navy buildings and ships rusting and rotting away, and the young people that once manned those buildings and ships leaving in droves. The Navy will miss its recruiting goals by 7,000, and you would think that would cause Navy leadership to think about all the surveys in the past that pointed to straightforward ways to improve the Navy.

Let’s be honest, you, dear reader, already know what’s coming next:

According to Franchetti, it will take “years” for the Navy to recover from these promotion delays, which have resulted in acting commanders leading Naval Surface Forces, Naval Air Forces, the U.S. Naval Academy, among other commands.

“As we look right now, our Navy is facing challenges all around the globe, threats from our adversaries,” she said. “We want to have the right people with the right level of experience in those positions. And as we continue to not have the confirmed people that we’ve nominated with that experience, we’re going to continue to see an erosion of readiness.”

It’s going to take “years” to recover from promotion delays? You mean delaying promotions of all the people that screwed up the Navy so far? That caused us to decommission ships from 2016? That broke our shipyards and crews? That continue to IA Sailors even today, so that they don’t get a shore duty break from arduous sea duty?

Never mind that the SOLE REASON for the hold on nominations was the DoD pushing commands to spend travel money (your taxpayer dollars) on abortion. ADM Franchetti fails to address that issue, and instead makes blatantly false statements about the effects of delaying promotions.

Which, BTW, aren’t delayed. The Senate could proceed and vote on each one individually, but that would open these people up to questioning about their past records…something most of them don’t want to do. Pesky Senators might ask “Hey Admiral, why did you run our shipyard into the ground?” or “Why did you make openly racist statements in the name of DEI policy?” These questions are pertinent, relevant, and totally undesired by today’s Admirals.

If you can, please write to your elected federal officials and tell them you aren’t happy with how the existing Defense Department Generals and Admirals ran our military, and ask them to do a bit of house cleaning. The media spins these stories totally one-sided. Much of the mediocrity in today’s military leadership cuts across party lines, so its an issue that both Republican and Democrat Senators and Representatives need to solve. Unless you write, and write a lot, its going to be swept under the rug.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency. According to those agencies, everything is fine, and the Defense Department is doing a great job! Nothing to see here, move along now peasant!

I’m tired of polishing turds in the Navy

Posted: September 23, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in Uncomfortable Truths, war
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When I first joined the Navy, I served onboard the USS HAMPTON, a nuclear fast-attack submarine. You would think that would be super cool. My non-Navy friends were certainly impressed. But the sad reality was that being on a submarine sucked.

I started in the shipyard, which was an absolute hell-hole of a place to work. Our submarine was torn apart, and we had to always be ready for the shipyard workers to stop by to begin working. Instead of scheduling a time, they would often come down early, and if we weren’t ready, would then tell their boss it was our fault they couldn’t work. They did this to score overtime work on the weekends or after hours, while making us stay late. My days started at around 5:30 am and didn’t end until 6 pm. That didn’t include the drive time either.

At least I wasn’t a woman…some of my fellow female officers would get constantly cat-called and risked sexual assault walking into some shipyard environments. We’re talking legitimate, in-your-face sexism, not the made-up stuff of college students at Harvard. On top of that, if you didn’t leave before the sun went down, you risked your car’s windshield getting smashed in. Good-ole’ Portsmouth, Virginia! Thieves would smash in your windshield just for fun and not even steal anything, and the shipyard and Portsmouth police did nothing.

If you wonder why I wasn’t surprised that Sailors committed suicide in Newport News shipyard…well, now you know.

That whole time, I was told to suck it up and make the best of it. The situation is a big, fat turd, and my job was to polish it and make it shine. The smart people above me, the Captains and Admirals of the world, assured me they were doing their best to make it better. I couldn’t possibly question them!

Image generated by Bing AI

So polish I did! And I made it work.

During my flying tour, I spent 10-11 hours in a plane that had no working toilet. They had a toilet, but the Navy wouldn’t send the equipment to pump it out, so we pooped in a bag and pissed in a tall cylinder that we hand-carried out and dumped in the grass. Even the ladies peed in the tall cylinder (and I have no idea how they did it). The Navy HAD pumping equipment, but the powers that be said we didn’t need it, so we never got any. Now, next to us was an Air Force plane that had pumping equipment and didn’t hand carry out their piss in a giant cylinder after every flight. We were flying out of Greece, so it’s not like the plane landed in a hard-to-resupply area.

Polish that turd, I was told, by the supposedly smarter Captains and Admirals. So polish I did!

At a large staff, I put up with a tyrant Captain who seemed to simply enjoy screaming at us over nothing. He played favorites with the staff and pitted people against each other until he was finally fired. You would think that would make it better, but it didn’t, because then I had to help restructure and fix everything he broke.

Polish that turd, I was told, and I did, a bit begrudgingly this time.

Later in my career, I ran a small detachment of Sailors and worked to fix their aging building. The basement ceiling would literally shake when we operated machinery, and the base’s engineering team simply added some scaffolding to hold up the ceiling.

Yup, scaffolding. “It’s a bad situation, that’s the best we can do. You’ll just have to polish that turd.”

Well, I challenged that notion. I worked an engineering study and eventually secured the $6.6 million to fix the building, despite the obstinate objections of the base engineering team. That’s when I realized I’d been polishing turds for no reason. The Navy HAD most of the resources to fix these issues, but they spent them on fancy Admiral events, attended by the smartest Captains, who smoozed up to Senators and Representatives to get their pet projects funded. Whether it was the Littoral Combat Ship, the F-35, or a host of poorly designed boxes whose primary job was to send money into the pockets of Lockheed Martin while claiming Sailors were too stupid to operate them, it was all the same: wasted money that would be better spent elsewhere. This is the same Navy that was happy to use command travel money to pay for travel expenses for Sailors to get an abortion, but couldn’t find the money to fix barracks room issues at the shipyard.

So now I’m at my last command. My hope was to do something useful on my way out the door. Instead I found myself being stuck with all the crappy jobs nobody wants to do, then getting told I’m an idiot by a Captain that definitely acts like he’s smarter than everyone in the room. “You’ll need to polish that turd” he told me the other day.

I didn’t join the Navy to polish turds. I’ve been constantly told to make other, stupid ideas work while the “smart” people get fancy offices and plenty of resources. I’m not alone in this either. All of the officers I looked up to, the one’s I would willingly go into battle with, are all leaving in droves. They tell me they are tired of putting up with mediocre leadership that won’t put in the time to build real solutions, but instead look for “quick wins” (oh how I hate that term!).

Nobody joins the Navy to polish turds. We should stop asking our Sailors to polish poop and actually put resources where they belong.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

AI will only take your job if you’re a crappy journalist, an Admiral or General, or a moron

Posted: September 16, 2023 by navygrade36bureaucrat in tech
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There seems to be a lot of angst about Artificial Intelligence stealing people’s jobs. Already there are reports of journalists and reporters being laid off and AI used to produce click-bait headlines and bland content. The Screen Actors Guild is still on strike, something I get constantly reminded of while I browse YouTube, and its partially over AI-created content. Even the anti-work subreddit has posts about ChatGPT affecting workers.

As someone getting ready to leave the military, I’ve been asked if I think AI will make it hard for me to find a job.

My answer is a resounding NO.

First, as an author, I’ve used ChatGPT 4.0 to generate content for an upcoming training book. While ChatGPT is great at condensing materials and giving me a good starting point for technical books, it doesn’t produce interesting content. I still have to tweak what it outputs to turn things into compelling stories that people want to actually read. If you’re an author that cranks out multiple crappy books, then yes, ChatGPT is going to replace you. But if you write compelling stories that are interesting to human beings, then its unlikely you’ll lose your fan base.

BTW, shameless plug for you to buy my book, or the audio version if you need something to listen to in the car on your way to work.

Second, as a guy that installs networks and WiFi in my spare time, AI is no-where close to doing the renovation work I do. There are some robots like Spot that can perform some functions, but these excel at things that are repetitive and mundane. Problem solving work, like figuring out how to run an ethernet wire from one end of a historic church to another, still needs a human being to both figure out the solution and manually put it in.

The same goes for plumbing, electrical, locksmiths, and even painters. Those jobs that the laptop class looked down on because they don’t require four-year degrees are still very much in demand and won’t be replaced by AI anytime soon. AI can’t wire an outlet, plumb a faucet or change your locks, but it sure can analyze spreadsheets, manage social media accounts and write poorly sourced stories, so if that’s your job, you might want to update your resume.

Funny thing, the same people thumbing their noses at Joe the Plumber and telling them to learn to code are now being replaced by AI. Perhaps they should learn to work with their hands instead of getting expensive manicures?

In the military, AI could replace the hoards of worthless Admirals and Generals we have. Hey, maybe Senator Tuberville should propose cutting 50% of our flag officers and replacing them with a multi-license copy of ChatGPT 4? If we add the PowerPoint integration, we’ll get better products in less time and are far more effective!

You think I’m kidding, but you haven’t seen the idiocy that hides behind the stars on the collars of our top “leaders.” While I was attending class at a nearby staff college, I used ChatGPT during a flag officer lecture to see if I could guess what that person would say next. By typing his words into the ChatGPT prompt and asking for predictions as to the content of his next paragraph, I got a 75% match. In many cases, what ChatGPT said was far more interesting! Weeks later at the same college, I used ChatGPT to generate actions that China would take in a simulated war game and asked it to generate speeches that particular Chinese leaders would make based on actions that other players took. It was amazingly accurate, despite not having access to classified data, and was better than many of the summaries I’ve received from senior officers.

Trust me, I’d welcome my new robot overlords over most of our current flag officers.

Your job will get replaced by AI if what you do is repetitive and monotonous, or if you are supposed to be creative but only generate junk, like say most of the so-called journalists. AI tools are incredibly powerful, and I use them to enhance what I do, but so far they are still well behind true human ingenuity.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, Skynet, or any other government agency.

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