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Showing posts with the label Stormtroopers

Writing Again (and I'm done with themed anthologies)

Following a minor bout of cancer (featuring surgeries and 6 months of chemotherapy), I'm writing again! Having spent some time reviewing my writing career to date, I note with a degree of dismay that while I've had some material published, I'm not super happy with all of it. In the past I've pandered to the whims of the industry in order to get stories out. Well, I'm done with that. Now I'm writing what I want to write. No more < 5,000 word stories about "blue aliens on exoplanets", simply because a publisher somewhere decided that's what they wanted for their next anthology. I know it may seem a little hypocritical, given that I helped come up with the theme of A Hand of Knaves (and I stand by it), but I'm allowed to be hypocritical if the mood takes me. And the mood does take me.  From now on I'm writing whatever the hell I want. It might not get published, but it'll be mine and I think I'll be a lot happier with that.  Let...
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STAR WARS - IMPERIAL IMPRECISION

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I wrote the following post for Aurealis Xpress last year. With the release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens  imminent, I thought I'd re-post it here. So excited! It’s long been known that Star Wars: A New Hope contains examples of some of the worst marksmanship in the history of cinema, particularly with respect to the Emperor’s ‘elite’ forces. But how bad were they really? Wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a statistical measure of exactly how astonishingly bad imperial stormtroopers were at hitting their mark? Well, fortunately, there is. In the United States, where police forces undergo rigorous (well, at least annual ) firearms training, statistics are kept, and made available for, exactly the type of public scrutiny in which we are about to indulge. But first to the question of “How can we calculate the number of shots fired and hits scored by stormtroopers in Star Wars in order to make a valid comparison with real-world figures?” The answer is s...
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