Moptop with a Laptop

It started when he was a kid and he was trying to help everyone get better at hockey including the opposing teams players, he would say something like “your stick grip is weak” or “you’re slow on your right” (idk i don’t know hockey very well ESPECIALLY little kid hockey) but he says it totally deadpan because little Shanebug doesn’t understand tone yet.

This makes the other teams so mad! They try and fight him constantly! Little bitty baby hockey fights and then Yuna sits him down in middle school after the first fight that he actually gets hurt (black eye and bloody lip) and asks him what he is saying to make everyone fight him?

“Nothing mean I swear mom!!! I’m trying to be nice and help correct their form”

And suddenly Yuna gets it and explains to Shane that not everyone but especially not the opposing team likes to have their flaws pointed out to them even if it’s coming from a good place and how that could be seen as chirping.

So he stops for a while, then his coach for world juniors tells him to try and piss off Rozanov enough that they can draw a penalty. So Shane does what he does best and points out a flaw at each face off. Jokes on him though because Ilya is actively changing those things and getting better every face off because he is taking it for what it is, advice.

Which pisses Shane off, he thinks his chirping tactic won’t work now that he is older. So he points out at his first scrimmage at practice in Montreal that the center who has been there for years (who he is probably replacing) is favoring his left side is staying too far left to compensate (again I don’t know hockey so I am trying to translate things I know about soccer lol)

And the center loses it on him! Immediately yelling about the lack of respect and how a rookie makes it to the MLH and thinks they are hot shit.

So Shane realizes his chirping DOES work just not on rozanov and becomes a menace he studies game tape specifically to find holes in his opponents game and pre prepares chirps and it fucking works because all these men are so far up their own asses that they just get mad instead of using the advice.

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

And because i know people won’t even bother to click and check the article itself i’m gonna screencap it, it’s fairly short, give it a read:

State alchemists can be fired for underperforming. We know this up front from the likes of Shou Tucker. And this makes a ton of sense from the homunculi's standpoint since the state alchemists are sacrifice candidates, and the homunculi would want to cull the weakest candidates and focus only on cultivating the strongest ones who stand the best chance of opening the portal.

........Then there's Edward. Who's already opened the portal.

There's no need to cultivate him. No gamble taken on whether he's good enough to open the portal. He passed the final test already. Graduated 4 semesters early.

And as such, has a free pass to do Absolute Fuck All.

And I'm imagining how funny this is from like an outside perspective.

Some newish state alchemist who'd only ever read up on the stories of Edward Elric, ready and excited to start their career of being paid handsomely with endless freedom to research and travel and do anything they want in the pursuit of science... surprised and confused to find themselves put on probation their first month for things like "ignoring orders." Which is, as best they had thought, a famous Edward Elric pastime.

Roy showing a slight bit of stress about his yearly state alchemist report, and Ed just snorting and rolling his eyes at Roy because every year HE just hastily does his on the train ride over (canon in the manga, a travesty it was left out of the anime) and it gets rubber stamped. Ed not realizing that other alchemists' reports get genuinely scrutinized and torn apart while Ed is free to turn in whatever absolute bullshit he thinks of 36 hours ahead of time. One year his report was about whether alchemy could be done via dance (conclusion: no it can't) and no one cared. Roy WANTS to tell Ed there's some kind of unknown favoritism around Ed making him literally bullet-proof but Roy has no way to phrase this that doesn't sound like he's just in denial and mad at how good Ed's train-reports are.

Guy from the Internal Amestrian Affairs sector who's responsible for auditing other internal military personel for any suspicious activity hitting about 1 million red flags for Edward Elric, issuing a STRONG and URGENT recommendation to suspend the alchemist pending further investigation into things like "literal bunk-buddies with two members of the Xingese royalty (enemy nation)" and "spent $10,000,000 of his stipend on a librarian to make her re-copy (what he seemed to interpret as?) military records in some extremely transparent effort to unearth state secrets (it was a recipe book but he was literally asking her about state secrets)" and "literally has never once obeyed an order, ever, not even once in his career, and is on public record having said 'I do not care about the goals and protections of the Amestrian Military. I am in fact only pursuing my own interests several of which are diametrically opposed to the safety and well-being of the governing body of Amestris'"

The issued recommendation is intercepted before it even reaches its intended desk. President Bradley himself has taken issue with it and denies it before a single set of eyes has seen it. The President's veto stamp is a terrifying hammer, used rarely, and it is now sitting on the auditor's desk.

Stratt was a historian. She wasn't just pirating for the sake of entertainment for the astronauts, she was doing a full historical backup of the planet. Who knows how much knowledge and communications ability, how much art and culture and history, how much niche knowledge of how to make specific pieces of modern technology or modern medicines, was lost as the wars for resources isolated everyone, as the death tolls led to the deaths of specialized trade workers and scientists, as the power grids failing across the planet (or cut off, potentially) led to all the cloud servers going dark. Stratt was facing methods of combating extinction and she did her best to ensure that if/when the Hail Mary worked, it would send back not just the hope of the future in the solution to the astrophage, but the restoration of history and culture and knowledge.

everything, and put it all

on the Hail Mary.