How the West Wasn't Won

Nigel Assbackwards writes "Finally, after years of being furtively passed between trusted friends, the legendary NASA satire "How the West Wasn't Won" is available at spacefuture. And Oh!, if only all space agencies were as loud and as totally ace as WideGroup's MirCorp intro."

Comments

The moral of the story

[ohboy-sleep]

Reading the little fable, I wished some of the "wagonauts" brought back some subtlety to give to the author.

Re:The moral of the story

[micahmicahmicah]

"It goes on for too long, and while amusing at first, quickly becomes tedious."

Which would run in a direct parallel to the Space Program.

annoying flash intro

[Anonymous Coward]

The mircorp flash intro needs to have an epileptic seizure warning.

My cat was looking over my shoulder and it is now vibrating across the tile floor into the other room.

Story needs compression

[jswinth]

Umm... Could I have my 30 minutes back? Couldn't the author have made is point in like 5 minutes worth of reading? Maybe this guy is ex-NASA and dosn't know how to be economical with words.

Re:Story needs compression

[toastyman]

Here... One of the few useful bits of Microsoft Word is the "Autosummarize..." feature. Insert wordy airbag story. Set desired compression level (in this case "10 sentences or less"). Read, and get almost everything the original had in far less time. Here goes:

NAFA got to work. NAFA called the people who were to go on these "missions" "WAGGONAUTS".

Then NAFA mounted a second "mission".

Then NAFA mounted a third "mission".

Then NAFA mounted a fourth "mission".

Then NAFA mounted a fifth "mission".

Then NAFA mounted a sixth "mission".

So NAFA mounted a seventh "mission". ONLY NAFA's (and FAFA's) "waggonauts" could go out into the desert.

Then NAFA had another setback.

Ok, so it doesn't quite have the same prose, but it's just as "funny" as the original and took 1/20th the time to read.

Better? :)

Any takers

[Anonymous Coward]

Wanna bet on how long before this is posted again.
My bet is 22H 43M

Re:space_to_desert.patch

[fruey]

All that freakin' text just to let us know that ONE word in that paragraph needs changing? You could have posted s/space/desert, quoted the paragraph once and emboldened the word space, or anything else you like, rather than wasting all that space.

Harrrumph.

Oh wow, you're accepting these?

[fobbman]

I get emails that are "passed between trusted friends" all the time. If I had known that Slashdot was interested in them earlier I would have sent them in!

Y'Know....

[Oloryn]

I would have more confidence in MirCorp if their tagline didn't abbreviate to 'The MCSE Company'.

Re:Nice but...

[zulux]

the metaphor falls short with the fact that you cannot send people to harvest the Moon

I don't know about you, but I sure enjoy this tasty moon-cheese.

Re:Nice but...

[redfiche]

Watch out for the coin-op, skiing robot.

Re:There is a real example...

[Anonymous Coward]

For those who don't know, North America was pretty well known to Europe before Colombo set foot there. I'll try up some of the data I knew a few years ago.

Makes sense... Columbo was such a dumb detective everyone would have beat him to it. Now Sherlock would have found America by sheer logic. "By seeing the toxic waste, the small of polution from inefficient autos, I do believe America is over the next hill."

Re:Full text

[jc42]

The monopoly immediately develops its own objectives, the FIRST one being survival, so it NEVER FINISHES ITS TASK, which becomes more and more complex and expensive. It also creates interest groups; crushes incipient competition in order to protect its prestige; and develops power to influence the government, the behaviour of whole industries, and eventually the perceptions of the whole population

Jeez, does every /. article have to devolve into Microsoft bashing? ;-)