{"id":42870,"date":"2018-06-03T06:00:30","date_gmt":"2018-06-03T10:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=42870"},"modified":"2018-06-03T02:35:12","modified_gmt":"2018-06-03T06:35:12","slug":"return-to-tim-island","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=42870","title":{"rendered":"Return to TIM Island"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m sure most of you remember <a href=\"?p=27792\">that one time<\/a> I did a massive, 50-part retrospective \/ critique of the Mass Effect series. As part of that critique, I had <a href=\"?p=30943\">an entire entry dedicated to tearing apart the notion that a terrorist organization could recruit, train, equip, and deploy a fully mechanized military force capable of waging war on a galactic scale, and furthermore that doing so in secret wasn&#8217;t just implausible, but laughable<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Imagine my surprise when I ran into <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=tJ3vN22KFYg\">this video<\/a>, detailing how the US Government did exactly what I said was impossible. From 1942 to 1945 they hid an entire city of 75,000 people &#8211; the fifth largest city in Tennessee &#8211; and used it to build a superweapon in complete secrecy.<\/p>\n<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/tJ3vN22KFYg\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=tJ3vN22KFYg'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>To be fair:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>This was done by a world superpower, not a terrorist organization.\n<li>The city wasn&#8217;t COMPLETELY secret. I mean, people knew it existed and knew how to get there, it&#8217;s just that the goings-on inside the city were secret.\n<li>This secret city was only secret for 3 years, not a generation.\n<li>They only needed to build 2 weapons, not fleets of tanks, ships, or supplies for tens of thousands of space marines.\n<li>The people signing up were serving a country they loved and fighting against a regime they hated, and not joining a sketchy mass-murdering megolomaniac with no coherent goal that would appeal to the masses.\n<li>While the US government did many things that would be considered sketchy or &#8220;renegade&#8221; by today&#8217;s standards, they didn&#8217;t casually kill their own people by the hundreds for trivial reasons.\n<\/ol>\n<p>So while this doesn&#8217;t exactly excuse the limitless power of Cerberus, but it does make it very slightly less comically implausible.<\/p>\n<p>But now I&#8217;m wishing we could have gotten more details on Cerberus. Previously I&#8217;ve said they should be excised from the Mass Effect series. Now I&#8217;m thinking you could tell a really cool story about some sort of alternate version of Cerberus that was like a scaled-up version of Oak Ridge: The government deliberately makes a secret project and then looks the other way, leaving the (sigh) Illusive Man free to tackle some sort of galactic-level Manhattan Project without much in the way of supervision. Nothing could justify the way Cerberus stole so much of the limelight from the Reapers, but you could tell a really cool story about a secret city with a doomsday weapon and an &#8220;Ends Justify the Means&#8221; mindset. <\/p>\n<p>Still, interesting bit of history. I can&#8217;t believe I&#8217;ve lived my whole life without hearing this story. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m sure most of you remember that one time I did a massive, 50-part retrospective \/ critique of the Mass Effect series. As part of that critique, I had an entire entry dedicated to tearing apart the notion that a terrorist organization could recruit, train, equip, and deploy a fully mechanized military force capable of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42870","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=42870"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42875,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42870\/revisions\/42875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}