Wouldn't dream, I'm eager to see how it all shakes out.

While Mina and Tuku are occupied with each other, Jett slides up to Aiko, leans in very close, and imparts:

"Chiki's story is, uhm, like mine. Almost exactly. I hid in a bilge. I broke out. Swam through the harbor. That's...well, you can tell...uhm...probably..."

Out of steam, Jett steps away rather suddenly.

[Fuck]

Castle looses a deep metallic whicker.

"Fuck."

"...gonna need a bigger woodchipper."

"....and a medical recovery module. Good basis for another trailer, or another config at least. Hmm. We have a team medic-slash-scientist? Or maybe we can get one assigned case-by-case?"

"But...yeah. Preparation, then bloody vengeance."

Though there is an advantage, amongst the many spectacular possible catastrophes: the big T is pretty stupid.
It's animal level intelligence, so it'll never negotiate a way out. It's got no real mind for tactics. Some animals do, "Wolf Pack Tactics" after all, but none of those are as directly built for aggression and destruction as the Tarrasque.
Mad, but not implausible.

[definitely]

I should say something.

"Uhm..."

Something!

"...I...sure?...I..."

Jett gestures lamely at her many sheathes and pouches, and the stained-but-enduring contrast they make to her nearly disintegrated clothing.

"I'm sort of...lacking...I still need clothes...I mean, it can wait...for...Auntie."

Jett turns to Mina looking somewhat bewildered. Her daggers are sheathed, her axe secured, her throwing knives tied in neat stacks, her armor bundled up -it's clear Jett has two major approaches to problem solving.
One's not quite clear, but the other is definitely violence and it's unlikely that neither she nor Shinju will profit much from her muddling around unattended.
The dogs might eat well, though.

"...it is really good to be clean. So...I have that."

"Thank you, Mina...yes, I'll come and help you and Chiki."

"But this is a personal fight as well, right mate? It's got hooks into you, I can tell that much."

Age of Dragons is a bad, but watchable take on Moby Dick where, in lieu of whales, the crews of land boats (don't know what else to call them) hunt dragons for their "vitriol" - a flammable substance that lights their world.

The movie is only worth viewing on TV if you have nothing better to do; however, the idea caught hold of me.  Humans (and other folk) hunting "monsters," not to rid the world of the dangerous things that go bump in the night, but to harvest the resources they represent.

It's only the kernel of an idea but I'm hoping to expand on it.  Thoughts are welcome.

There's a long-running action series from Japan by Capcom called Monster Hunter that's basically the same idea writ large. Everything is monster bits as nature in that setting is the most effective refiner of hard materials.
I kinda like it myself, though some people find it too heavy on farming.

I am picturing, and that's the most demented kind of youth servitude since selling blood plasma.
Genius!
Maybe renting for carnal encounters...? Don't quite have the stamina you used to? Not a problem Factor, I know just the guy...

Batmobile?! Batmobile!

MAG.
PS3 only title.
Great 256 v. 256 team battles on the upper end.
Gear has to be bought, but is weighed by point value so no matter how expensive your loot you can only carry as much as anyone else.
It's got light vehicles and APC's, air strikes are an event not a player in an A-10 spamming chaff, there are 3 different factions, and the usual modern shooter semi-RPG elements.
Downsides are that the knife is overpowered (skill weapon lol), there are some map glitches, and everybody who's already dominating and who still plays has rolled S.V.E.R. -though there are good clans with every faction.
You can get a copy for <$10, all the DLC for another $5, and while the dev studio Zipper Interactive's been out of business for a few years now the servers remain up as it looks like PSN has adopted it as a PS+ free play title.

I'd say to look for me on it, but I've put 800 hours in and I can't really derive pleasure from getting cornholed by S.V.E.R. any more. Which is too bad. The rest of the game's still kinda neat.

[FIFTEEN MILLION YEARS]

Yeah.
Prefacing what you say with "this is what I would think if I lived there" works better then "here's just my judgement and shit, work out my opinions from my commentary which also overlaps with when I was actually talking about my own real world circumstances. Or maybe I wasn't! Maybe I need $400 SPACE DOLLARS to try an experiment with an engine that exists....in the FUTURE!"

Because what we believe we know about human nature isn't at all prejudiced by our assumption that to be Merikan isn't the epitome of the human social experiment. If 99% are fed, secure, and satisfied than the center is pretty fucking stable.

Here's human evolution.
For about 15,000,000 years human existed a evolving hunter-gathers. They lived on the plains, maybe in trees, and dawn to dusk did whateverthefuck proto-humans did before murder was invented.
FOR FIFTEEN MILLION YEARS.
THE CENTER HELD.
THERE WASN'T FUCKING ANARCHY IN THE FERTILE CRESCENT.

I don't know if qualified as idyllic, but for FIFTEEN MILLION YEARS HUMANITY SURVIVED.
No God, no Guns, no Honey Boo-Boo.

You really think if we were naturally dispossessed towards unrest and self-destruction we'd have made it that long? Yeah, if you lock the apes in boxes and inform them they'll starve if they don't keep running on treadmills maybe that causes unnatural behavior and unhealthy emotional stresses.
That's kinda my theory, but on the plus side the whole hunter-gatherer thing has,
I bet you can guess,

FIFTEEN
MILLION
YEARS

of proof behind it.

I'm just gonna pretend I'm being trolled. There's no fucking way you just became so spontaneously dense as to believe that until this very passing moment human survival was just a fluke against all rational odds and now that someone is suggesting a setting in which without competition for resources in carefully deliberately constructed societies that could have plausibly engineered out any hereditary contribution to insanity and have millenniums, actual millenniums, of civilization and behavior to study have to face the Blankistani Truth:
THE CENTER CANNOT HOLD.
Maybe it's some ironic salute to Orwell?
THE CENTER NEVER HELD. THERE IS NO CENTER. THERE IS ONLY BIG BROTHER.
That would actually make more sense.
UMAD VAL?!!!11111 LOLOLOLOLOL

Holy CHRIST it's been a bad day for conversation. Gun politics, random galactic RP, Blankbeard's crazy, wherethefuck are the mods?

Rant deleted.
I'm out, have fun.

"...long standing correlation between receiving outside help and violence."
Really. News to me. Do inform, sir. I can accept that there are some people who find charity demeaning and insulting, but that makes them the problem, not the system. They don't have to change, but I'm not going to accept that their pride should keep me hungry.

And tell me about real world welfare nations that're failing from something besides implementing austerity measures as a form of financial rehabilitation or collapsed investment bubbles.

Pissing yourself? Really?
That doesn't even happen in Japan, a place where people actually work themselves to death.
Workers collapse and die, but they do get to at least hit the toilet when nature calls. Even in the Chinese Apple factories people get to take a piss during their 20hr shifts. Maybe even several.

As far as any Peter Principal goes in my working experience life is already like that. "Be at your job 15-30 mins early, because I say so" is nothing novel. That's the working life of the working poor in the United States. Working uncompensated out of a fear of termination is fucking happening, and it's only a greater fear of the kind of fines that come with government legal action that checks it. That's if the employer's stupid enough to be blatant about it. Far more likely is being scheduled just enough hours to qualify as employed, and being "on call" for the rest, all while keeping 40hours a week, overtime, and state-mandated medical insurance as out of reach as possible. Because profit.
The big difference is that the Authority also comes with healthcare, and the Union doesn't kill you if you become useless.

"When faced with working hard for 1.1 million dollars or getting a 1 million for just living...'
You know that the Union doesn't work like that, right? I know you know, you've read the thread. They get whatever the accepted minimum is, and they cope or they strive. That minimum is generous, but how people who don't have the motivation to better themselves are somehow going to become a threat to their own support state is hilariously assumptive at best. "I won't pass my Class E power loader's test, but fuck you I will make bombs"?

"So the Union is a shiny happy pleasant place full of hatred just waiting to explode and the Authority is a urine-soaked life under a constant spotlight."

"I'm sure I'm exaggerating past the intent of the setting but this how I see them as if they were real world societies."

Right, that's how you see them. Why?
Because "the hand you hold is the hand that holds you down"?
Because a man who can't support himself devoid of assistance (ignoring infrastructure, any technology he didn't invent, laws that protect his rights, the artificially suppressed costs of food, the vigilance of police, first responders to aid his emergencies) is a weakling?
Because somehow when we're past struggling and starving and betraying to survive we'll just pussy out and eat ourselves to death?

If Morg responds to your assertions about what those two societies are really like with "No; Word of God is that they aren't like that" what will you decide? That he's wrong? That's it's impossible in post-scarcity futures for human life to have intrinsic value? Or that hard work can actually reliably pay off?
That the only thing that's possible is that even removed from the need to fight for resources humans can't live together in peace?

This is the detail that perks my interest. Not that you find those places creepy and undesirable, but that they keep getting worse as this conversation goes on.
That they're not just not for you, they're hell-holes of resentment and paranoia soaked with the urine of the terrified and the sweat of the begrudging that shouldn't be for anybody.

Remember Jack Chick and his religious tract Dark Dungeons? Well, a guy in Portland wants to turn it into a movie.

Sounds like fun.

Goddamnit Portland.
I guess if it was going to be anywhere, it'd be here...
One of the best defenses against absurdity is visibility, so maybe illuminating the crazy on the big screen will help defuse it.

Yeah, I'd rather not either.  I would like to comment that any argument that relies on comma placement in handwritten copies of a handwritten document is dead on arrival.

There's some agreement. Shame the sentence structure is so wonky, and twice the shame for their being different versions.

Re: Plastic Guns and Forensics.
Because cooking up batches of plastic crap to fuel printers is so much more impossible then making plastic explosives? Or that identifying the printer means getting the distributors because controlled materials are never stolen or sold illegally? Or that the killer's all that concerned with getting away with it instead of getting killed after the fact (one trend that's been interesting me is the number of spree/mass killers who're killing themselves to avoid arrest. The psychology of that choice would be worth knowing). Or even that the police are all that efficient to begin with.