User:SpartHawg948

About Me
My name is William, I am 25, and I am a Staff Sergeant (SSgt) in the US Air Force Reserve. I live in Santa Clara, California, and I LOVE Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2!!! I aim to do whatever I can to improve this site, as I feel it's a great resource. Also, I am an admin, so if anyone has any questions or needs help with anything, please just let me know!

Also, not to put too fine a point on it, but I have no patience whatsoever with crybabies, whiners, speculators, and boors. If you are going to be rude to someone else, plant purely speculative info, or insult others but then start crying when someone calls you on it, you WILL be hearing from me.

Now that the seriousness is taken care of, it's my goal to make this the most informative site possible, while also keeping it a nice, friendly environment for users. Any assistance in furthering that goal is, of course, greatly appreciated, and I try to acknowledge people for their efforts as much as possible. So I hope you all enjoy the site, and hopefully you'll be hearing from me (for something good, of course!)

Big Project
Ok... not that big, but User:SpartHawg948/Sandbox/Entertainment- a sandbox of a proposed Entertainment page.

Words to live by

 * "Let him who desires peace prepare for war"- Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus (more commonly known as Vegetius) from De Re Militari
 * "An armed society is a polite society"- Robert A. Heinlein
 * "The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent vice of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries"- Winston Churchill
 * "Communism is the death of the soul. It is the organization of total conformity- in short, of tyranny- and is committed to making tyranny universal."- Adlai Stevenson
 * "The best laws cannot make a constitution work in spite of morals; morals can turn the worst laws to advantage."- Alexis de Tocqueville
 * "The world is not going to be saved by legislation."- William Howard Taft
 * "A man has to live with himself, and he should see to it that he always has good company."- Charles Evans Hughes

Featured Quote
This section will just be for quotes I like that aren't necessarily as concise and pithy as the ones featured above. They don't even necessarily have to be relevant to anything, I may just choose quotes from sources I like (such as George S. Patton, who provides the first of these) or works I like (such as the Anabasis by Xenophon). Good times!

So I've decided to go ahead and do a series of quotes from one of my favorites, one of the great thinkers of our time- that's right, you guessed it, Penn Jillette. One half of the magical duo (although they prefer the term illusionists to magicians) Penn & Teller, and cohost of Penn & Teller: Bullshit!, one of my favorite shows of all time. This guy is pretty great. He's a libertarian (which I like) and an atheist (which I'm not the biggest fan of) and he tells it like he sees it. Be warned- he's a rather profane guy, and his show (from which many of these quotes are taken) is on Showtime, so there will be some foul language. With that in mind...


 * "Since coming to power, the Chinese government have introduced to Tibet electricity, running water, secular education, and better health standards, so maybe life is better on the ground there. Of course they also have thrown millions in labor camps and prisons, stomped out as much free speech as possible, have death squads run amok throughout the country, and they have that whole fucked up Communist bullshit. But if you ask the Dalai Lama, His Holiness will tell you that he must return to power for the good of his people. In this case, "good" may translate into his people living in squalor and his government condoning slavery. Remember, the lesser of two evils… is still evil. And the enemy of my enemy… is not my friend." -- Penn Jillette, comedian, illusionist, inventor, writer, actor, and Fellow at the Cato Institute.

I have mixed feelings about this one, though it's still a great and thought-provoking quote. I cannot stand the People's Republic of China, and feel that they are a pack of murderous hypocrites for their constant harping about the evil imperialist West, given their own actions in, among other places, Tibet and the Republic of China (aka Taiwan). He does make valid points about both the significant pluses and horrendous negatives of the PRC's invasion and occupation of Tibet, and he is correct that, prior to the Communist invasion, Tibet was a very poor country (though they still all, just slightly less poor), although the slavery comment is a bit hyperbolic. He's basically saying that this is a touchy issue. I personally think that, no matter what the PRC has done to 'help' Tibet, they need to get out, and let the people of Tibet determine their own fate. And, given that Penn is a Libertarian, I think he'd agree with me on that one.

Random Fact
One more random fact, then I'm going to convert this section to something else. More on that later.

So, I just learned this, and found it incredibly interesting. It involves battleships. Now, I don't even know how many battleships were sunk throughout history, although I'd guess the number is fairly high. You have to figure, incidents like the attack on Pearl Harbor, the attack on Taranto, the sinking of Repulse and Prince of Wales, the Bismarck, Tirpitz, etc. Now for the interesting bit- how many of those battleship sinkings were caught on film? Answer- 2. Only two. Of all the battleships ever sunk, the only ones caught on film going down were the Austro-Hungarian battleship SMS Szent István, which was sunk in 1918 by Italian torpedo boats), and the British battleship HMS Barham, sunk in 1941 by a German submarine. Random and interesting, isn't it?

Now, on to the conversion. I won't lie to you people. I'm generally fairly lazy. And coming up with random and interesting facts on a regular basis is a bit much. I think I bit off more than I could chew on that one. So I'm going to start doing a 'Featured Bio' (or maybe 'Random Bio') instead. Every few days, add a new bio (more a brief summary, with a wiki link provided) about someone I admire, or find interesting, or maybe that I just read about, or maybe even a few people I absolutely detest. Don't worry, it'll be big names and historical figures. I won't be using the section to 'call out' editors here whose paths have crossed mine. I even have the first one picked out. He falls under the categories of 'Interesting historical figure' and 'Someone I just read about'. I'll give one hint- he was an Admiral in the Imperial German Navy in WWI.

Tongue-in cheek thought of the, ah, who am I kidding? I'm not gonna change this daily...

 * OPEN NOTICE TO ALL USERS: Just in case there's some confusion, this is not wikipedia. Nor is this site in any way, shape, or form affiliated with wikipedia. If advised by an admin that edits you made were contrary to the policy of this site, "well they do it that way on wikipedia" is not a valid response, nor will it be treated as such. Additionally, while wikia does have their own manuals of style and whatnot, they also make it quite clear that individual wikis (such as this one) are free to make their own policies on matters of style. Finally, please note, before citing it as the do-all, end-all authoritative source, the Manual of Style states quite clearly and explicitly, right at the top in a bright purple box, "This is a generic style manual which is not tailored specifically for the Mass Effect Wiki. For guidelines specific to the Mass Effect wiki, see the Mass Effect Wiki:Style Guide." Probably not best to try and contest an admins request with an unofficial MoS that isn't made for this site, especially if the section you use doesn't even say what you claim it does. So please remember, this isn't wikipedia, and just because they do things at other wikis doesn't mean we do it here, which in many cases is actually a good thing. SpartHawg948 04:46, April 6, 2010 (UTC)
 * This may seem silly, but I have a request. If you're going to use some sort of colloquialism or other saying to try to put someone down or belittle them, please do everyone the courtesy of getting it right. Don't be the guy who tells me that 'If I'll buy that, then you have some |"waterfront property in Arizona" for me' (when the saying is actually oceanfront property in Arizona, as waterfront property is fairly common... I even used to live along a river bank in Tucson), or the person who tells users to |"get the stick off your butts" when it's actually get the stick out of your butts. Please people, get the insults and put-downs right! It's the little things, people. SpartHawg948 05:16, April 8, 2010 (UTC)
 * Deleted 17 pages in the span of a few minutes. Take that, page count! And I've got some more pages in my sights... now it's a waiting game. In a week, they're goners! :P (In an aside, I got a little worried when it looked like I was going to stop with 1,666 pages on the wiki, but fortunately, there were 3 more that were good to delete. Crisis averted!) SpartHawg948 12:29, April 10, 2010 (UTC)
 * I really need to stop swinging by the computer for one last little check-up on the wiki before going to sleep. Nothing good ever comes of it. There's always some situation that has either happened already, or is on the verge of happening, and the end result is that I look at the clock and realize it's been over an hour, and I'm so freaking tired, but don't want to pry myself away yet b/c the issue isn't 100% resolved. I miss Tullis. Speaking of people I miss, where the f is JakePT? Or Silverstrike? Or Xaero? One of them needs to show up so I can deputize them as "substitute admins" and then take a week off to just sleep. Oh well, enough self-pity. Like you people want to hear me bitch and moan about how supposedly rough my life is (which it really isn't, in the grand scheme of things). SpartHawg948 11:50, April 11, 2010 (UTC)
 * Wow. Looks like I might have to conduct a lecture for new users on (of all things) there, their, and they're, and the proper usage of each. It's moments like this that I lose faith in humanity as a species. SpartHawg948 06:43, April 16, 2010 (UTC)
 * Random Gripe time- You know what sucks? When you need to do some readings for a class tomorrow, you go to the website, click on the reading, it's password protected, and the password your professor gave you in the syllabus to access the password protected material... doesn't work. Sorry Aristotle, looks like you're going to have to wait till Professor Le gives out the right password. SpartHawg948 04:43, April 19, 2010 (UTC)
 * A little pet peeve of mine- If you want to call someone wrong, do the damn research. Don't just make claims that are easily disproved to try and prove others wrong. For example, don't claim that Hebrew is just a language and not an ethnic group, and that the people are Israelites. This is, of course, not true. The Hebrews are/were (there's still some debate on this) an ethnic group that either preceded or actually was the same as the Israelites! Fact-check, people! Fact-check! SpartHawg948 20:49, April 19, 2010 (UTC)
 * Ok, so here's what hit me just a second ago, and is now bothering the crap out of me- so Alliance frigates are named after great battles in human history, right? So far we've seen the Normandy, the Hastings, the Agincourt, the Iwo Jima, and the Ain Jalut. Notice a pattern here? In every case, a warship is named after a land battle. Why no ships named after naval battles that actually involved ships? C'mon, BioWare! Get with the program! I've even got some suggestions. How about naming a frigate the Coronel, the Trafalgar, the Midway, the Tsushima, or maybe the Jutland? Or my personal favorites, the Lepanto, the Salamis or the Aegospotami. Those all seem like pretty good names. So how 'bout it? SpartHawg948 21:51, April 24, 2010 (UTC)