OK I have been really trying not to post TLJ spoilers

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OK I have been really trying not to post TLJ spoilers all this time but I’ve thrown some in the queue and I’m putting this up to let people know that pretty soon the spoilery stuff may come through! I’ve tried to tag, as well, but I’ve been sort of bad about it, and, well– I’ve tried. Anyway. 

So– PRETTY SOON I’M GONNA HAVE UNTAGGED TLJ SPOILERS PROBABLY because I’m just figuring if you cared about that sort of thing you probably already saw the movie. And if not, I’m sorry. I just. I’m real bad at keeping track of stuff and this is in the queue and I shoved it back as far as the spoilers were, so it should post first. 
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Farmsister and family are visiting on their way back

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Farmsister and family are visiting on their way back through visiting Midwestern in-laws. 

Chita saw Farmbaby enter the house, froze, then slunk invisibly into the darkness. I found out where she’d gone at around midnight, when she slunk out from under my bed and crept up to sleep on my head.

This morning at 7:15 am Chita heard Farmbaby’s voice, picked up her head, then slunk back across my face back under my bed.

Farmbaby is now pretending to be Chita.
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sugarspiceandcursewords replied to your post

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sugarspiceandcursewords replied to your post “whoa goddamn, my google doc entitled “this is dumb” of the Found…”

Can they be in different units? I know the UCMJ about as well as…uh, a typical civilian, but I thought fraternization only applied if they were in the same chain of command.

I was trying to clarify this and couldn’t figure it out. None of the explainers of it go into that kind of detail. I should ask my sister, who would know for sure. I’m not sure you can date *anyone* in your chain of command *at all*, quite separately from someone outside your rank category. She ran afoul of this very slightly early on in her career– I don’t know much about this but I know she got hassled by her peers a bit as a cadet. (IIRC, she hadn’t done anything actually incorrect, but the person she’d been going with was someone Not Appropriate in the eyes of her peers, and she got shit for it, including mild vandalism of her car. And as it happens, when you look up the UCMJ, there’s a lot of stuff in it that was only formalized into written law *very* recently, that was “custom” before that. It’s not… all technically… rules. A lot of it is just Things That Are Not Done. I don’t think civilians as a whole really completely grasp how important customs and traditions, continuity and culture, are to the armed forces in general.) 

She met her husband in a group of young officers, part of an informal sort of expedition club in the European theater back when we had troops stationed there, but part of why she was so interested in going to these mixers and things was because that was how you met people outside your chain of command; he was of similar rank, but in an unaffiliated unit, so there was no conflict of interest. They were eventually deployed together, but still as part of different units, and they were just lucky to be near one another. Their second deployment was after they were married, and the Army tried to keep them together but did a worse job of it. There’s only so much they could do, and again, they weren’t in one another’s chain of command.

There’s a cultural divide between officers and enlisted, there just is– my father had all kinds of shenanigans in his career, enlisted into officer training and graduated a 2LT and made it as high as major before shenanigans forced him out for rank stagnation and, somewhere in his fifties, he re-enlisted out of sheer stubbornness, and went through a series of NCO ranks and wound up retiring as a warrant officer, after something like 37 total years of service. But at one point he was in a seminar, and at that point i think he was a warrant or might have been an NCO, and the person leading the seminar, an NCO of some stripe, had gotten ahead of him in acronyms, as often happens. Dad’s pretty good at figuring out acronyms on the fly, after decades in the Army and National Guard, but he just didn’t have enough context. So, finally, he had to raise his hand and ask what an “RLO” was.

The session leader knew who he was and knew his history and paused, shamefaced, before muttering, “Real Live Officers.”

(i.e. officers with commissions. NCOs don’t have commissions, and Warrants have a warrant instead of a commission.)

I don’t know for sure, it might be just fine to date someone outside your rank category if they were in a different chain of command or even branch of service– but it might not be. Especially as in this story Shara is an exceptional early woman to hold a position– she’d be under a lot of scrutiny. 

Either way, it allows me to do some worldbuilding in the story to have it be a concern– give them both external contexts, and tie in to the thing I’m like, #1 most excited about in this ‘verse, which is that in a world where there’s no Alderaan, I can explore the Organas’ role more. So. We’ll see what my further research turns up, if anything.
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chamerionwrites:If you ever want a headache, try to figure out how customs & immigration works...

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chamerionwrites:

If you ever want a headache, try to figure out how customs & immigration works in Star Wars.

#they have /smugglers/ which means they must have /customs/#except how do you do borders IN SPACE#rogue one gave us the shield gate above scarif which I appreciate#but it’s clearly not the norm and meanwhile we have rebel spies landing on occupied planets without having to deal with any security#anyway mostly this is just silly complaining but I do think it’s reflective of who writes these stories#(and who in our own world crosses borders relatively unimpeded)#that this is an issue the narrative takes for granted #star wars #worldbuilding#writers problems #my posts

(tags from OP)
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replacing our dodgy thermostat. dude, with power

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replacing our dodgy thermostat. 

dude, with power drill, muttering: “Please don’t be a stud.”

me: *swallows tongue trying not to make a joke that causes him to flinch and destroy the plaster wall*
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bomberqueen17: replacing our dodgy thermostat.

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bomberqueen17:

replacing our dodgy thermostat. 

dude, with power drill, muttering: “Please don’t be a stud.”

me: *swallows tongue trying not to make a joke that causes him to flinch and destroy the plaster wall*

spoiler alert: it was a stud

everything is terrible

plaster walls are the worst
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sugarspiceandcursewords replied to your post

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sugarspiceandcursewords replied to your post “sugarspiceandcursewords replied to your post “whoa goddamn, my…”

I mean, I can just…ask somebody at work, if you want. Don’t really need to have a reason other than “a friend was curious.” A couple of my best friends from my old office are NCOs who have been through Airmen Leadership School and all that noise, so they ought to be pretty clear on the USAF interpretation of that aspect of the UCMJ, at least. Your story will work regardless, but if you want the data point, I’ll try to get it.

If you can casually bring it up without sounding like a weirdo, I’d love more data points. I’m also curious as to how someone would be seen if they’d been an NCO and went to officer training. Like, would they get a lot of shit for it? But I know people do, it’s just not common. (I get that civilians sort of don’t grok the divide between enlisted and officers, and just sort of think that privates could naturally get promoted all the way up to generals if they were just Motivated enough, because that’s a reasonable assumption if you have no idea how it really works. But that’s super not how it works, and plenty of people serve long distinguished careers in the armed forces as enlisted personnel, and it’s perfectly respectable and the promotions work basically the same way, you just start and end in a different place.)

I’m sure I can casually broach it with my sister too, it’s just hard to get ahold of her, especially now that she’s not only Supermom but also working 40 hours a week. (How’s that going, I asked her, as we raided a Wal-Mart at dawn on Christmas Eve Eve for stocking stuffers. She grimly hauled the minivan about and said, uh, it’s going, but I dunno how long it can keep going.)

sugarspiceandcursewords replied to your post “sugarspiceandcursewords replied to your post “whoa goddamn, my…”

(Also, you wanna start some salty enlisted folks on a rant, ask ‘em why the USAF doesn’t have warrant officers, especially in this new world of remotely piloted aircraft, etc. Guaranteed entertainment.)

WTF why DOESN’T the USAF have warrants?!?!?! I just– assumed they– were a thing!!! Why wouldn’t they be?? The Air Force only split off from the Army like ten minutes ago ok 70 years ago why wouldn’t they keep the structure???

Dad loved being a warrant because nobody fucks with them. They’re not high up enough to be Political, but they’re high up enough that they know what’s up, and they’re rare enough that they stick together, and if you fucks with the warrants, your paychecks will go missing until the end of time and there’ll be Nothing That Can Be Done unless you figure out how to magically appease the Warrant Officers. He was like, a troublemaking little eldritch horror for the last five or so years of his very long career, and he was just in his glory the whole time. The enlisted guys thought he was hilarious and the officers just sort of tried to steer clear of him. 

(And, at retirement, he got a major’s pension, so in the end, he wasn’t all that bitter.)

(Also, at retirement, he got a very sweet send-off from a general who didn’t know him at all, but knew this was his very last exercise, and so had bothered to look at his file and find out who he was and why he was still around, and so gave him a very kind impromptu little speech at the general assembly thing, whatever that was called [he started off by asking the crowd how many of them had been born before 1967, because that was the year Dad got his 2LT commission; most of them hadn’t been born yet], and then they let Dad fire off all the about-to-expire machine gun ammunition at the range for the sheer hell of it. Not a bad send-off at all.)
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re: Holdo/Leia

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walburgablack:

I mean, yes to @bomberqueen17‘s thing about the hands and that touched me and nearly made me tear up in the theatre, but what really sold me on the ship was Poe’s “You’re not my real mother” reaction to Holdo.
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You can’t see it really in this photo but throug

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You can’t see it really in this photo but through that window a man is cramming a whole sweet potato through a wall-mounted hand crank Potato Mangler into an empty tin can prior to deep-frying it for me and I am freezing but this might be heaven. (at Hot Mama’s Canteen)
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