Daily Entertainment:

[boston_bruiser]

God, I'm freaking starving. Stupid grocery shopping. Stupid bicycle. Stupid American industrial revolution which shifted the majority of the American populaton from rural farming homesteads to urban tenements and factories. Stupid 1950s post-war suburban boom that brought the upper middle class out of the cities and with it made everything just that much more goddamn expensive. Stupid history.

I'm gonna become a Luddite, just you wait.

In the meantime, have a DE in honor of my CHEM 2A midterm. GO AGS.

How does (or did) your pup prepare for tests, academic or otherwise? How is (or was) their track record? Feel free to list any particularly noteworthy triumphs or failures.

Comments

[boston_bruiser]

I get the feeling when we do the whole "handcuffed together" thing, Voodoo's gonna be like how the fuck did you pass high school? at some point along the line.

[gavin62truck]

To which he'd respond, "I HAD A.D.D., ASSHOLE."

There was this moment in canon where his dad, all sad and disappointed, told him something along the lines of, "You had such a great future ahead of you. You were bright-- well, not bright, but you were...popular."

[boston_bruiser]

For his part, I've decided that Voodoo was an AP student, never got anything lower than a B while in high school, and turned down a full-ride from UMass Amherst to join the Navy. Mostly I was just sick of the trend of SEALs being portrayed as these all-muscle no-brain grunts (which doesn't make for a very interesting protagonist and doesn't mesh at all with real life - over a third have college degrees, the majority probably in engineering, and there's a shitload of math involved in diving, demolitions, and sniping, not to mention all the political science that goes along with a job like theirs).

Damn that was long. It doesn't take much for me to ramble, does it?

[camwyn]

I had something similar in mind when I went to put Shephard's background together. Even if the retired Navy chaplain who used to be my mother's boss told me 'Marine' stood for 'Muscles Are Required, Intelligence Not Essential' I still didn't see a whole lot of grounds for calling the guys I'd been reading about on Badass of the Week stupid. The paragraphs in the OpFor manual just reminded me very much of my classmates' writing, and all of them got into multiple colleges- so I knew I wasn't dealing with someone stupid. Hell, the man used a semicolon correctly! That counts for something. He could've attended a reasonably respectable college if his family could've afforded it (five kids take a lot of raising), but he didn't want to go, I figure.

[boston_bruiser]

I think most of the guys who go into the Marines and the SEALs and other parts of the service that're more selective and "gung ho" than others decide very early on in their lives that joining that particular branch or that particular unit is their ultimate goal. And to that end, they begin to adopt a mentality that'll enable them to not only survive, but thrive in that unit. This can start with simple things like doing their homework right or paying attention in class, and when they do that their grades, more often than not, skyrocket. But the bottom line is rock-stupid types don't last long in the military, at least not in any rating over, say, E-4. You do dumb shit and your peers will likely fuck you up for it.

I just don't understand the "dumb military guy" stereotype. Some of the smartest people I know spent some time in the service.

[camwyn]

I suspect that at least part of it amounts to military men obey orders, which people who buy into the stereotype see as a sign of not thinking for themselves and/or not wanting to think for themselves. Add in the general image of 'if you have muscles, you must be one of those obnoxious people who spends all his energy on them instead of on intellectual pursuits' and the assumption that smart people don't want to fight and would find a way to get out of having to do so, and it all kinda stacks up regardless of accuracy.