Iron Man suits? Call it what it is!

Powered armor! Starship Troopers, Armor, Halo, Alien, here we come!

As cool as mecha are, I can see past my irrational love of all things super robot to know that they’re incredibly infeasible (if you’re going to build a giant mechanized one-person fighting machine, best make it a Bolo); one hit to the legs and you’ll knock the damn things right over. A giant tank would be far more effective.

And as far as infantry goes, powered armor is the holy grail!

Glenn Reynolds tends to reserve this phrase for medical and life extension technology, but I think I speak for all SF fans when I say, “Faster, please!”

The Time of Decisive Battle (決戦の時)

As popular as Final Fantasy is, it’s nothing compared to the Dragon Quest series (in Japan, at any rate); in the first two days after its Japanese release, more than 2.1 million copies of Dragon Quest IX had been sold.

The main character is one of the angelic Celestrians, who live in a city in the sky and protect humans from supernatural harm. They are invisible, and by helping humans behind the scenes, they also help the growth of the Yggdrasil. At last, after much work, the Celestrians finally see the result of their endeavors and the Yggdrasil bears fruit; before they can use this fruit to pass into the realm of the Almighty, disaster strikes!

The Space Train that was going to take them to the realm of the Almighty crashes, the fyggs are scattered all over the earth, and the player character falls to earth, in the process losing his/her halo and wings. From here, the player starts on the quest to collect the fyggs, find out what happened, and save the world (of course!).

It’s a pretty good game; the characters are highly customizable, and the Dragon Quest battle system is practically unchanged from previous games (just the way we hidebound reactionaries like it).

That’s some interesting logic…

Fast and Furious was a failure right from the beginning:

Five months into the surveillance effort — dubbed Operation Fast and Furious — no indictments had been announced and no charges were immediately expected. Worse, the weapons had turned up at crime scenes in Mexico and the ATF official was worried that someone in the United States could be hurt next.

The LA Times goes on to give a bit of background information on Fast and Furious:

Fast and Furious was a highly secret undercover program begun with great ambition. The border was out of control, and the new Obama administration wanted to stop U.S. guns from crossing into Mexico and arming drug cartels.

We had to arm the cartels in order to disarm the cartels, I guess.

I’m not sure if the article is an indictment of the operation or a cry for more funding for the ATF, especially with their claim that the only reason the ATF failed to track each weapon was because it didn’t have enough resources.

The piece does a pretty good job of highlighting the complete incompetence of the ATF at every step of Fast and Furious, from its conception to its implementation to the inevitable conclusion.