Posts
All Comments
"If you’re driving on one of those streets and a mob comes and surrounds your vehicle and threatens you, you have a right to flee for your safety, and so if you drive off and you hit one of these people, that’s their fault for impinging on you. You don’t have to sit there and just be a sitting duck and let the mob grab you out of your car and drag you through the streets. You have a right to defend yourself in Florida."
R. DeSantis
Scammers Using AI Bots to Steal Financial Aid
The Lovely Harvey is on the front lines stopping this!
Her little college is getting very good at spotting them before they get any money and they've been approached by the Dept. of Ed. about their processes.
Got a promotion for it, actually.
I noticed that Vortex is discontinuing the Strike Eagle in the 1-6x power.
It's been replaced in the lineup with a 1-8 power.
In GURPS you get a +1 for each doubling of the power from 2x.
So you get the same +2 for 6x as you do for 4x.
But 8x is a +3...
Think one of their designers is a GURPS player and wants the extra +1 on their character sheet of themselves?
"Well, bye," C. Bill Brocious.
Puerto Rico would like to stop being a US territory and return to being a Spanish territory.
I am fine with this, with one proviso:
Every Puerto Rican on the mainland is deported.
They've long irritated me with their blatant nationalism and refusal to even visit there; having been born here and somehow not learning to be an American or speak English.
The worst neighbor we've ever had was some kind of Puerto Rican nationalist and they were loud, obnoxious and the yard was covered in trash. The empty lot is a far better neighbor. New Jersey plates on all the cars too, so that might have been the real problem.
But aren't ALL the Puerto Ricans on the mainland from New Jersey if you check their license plates?
They're the pricks whose kids took a bb gun to our windows one evening.
It still amuses me that the deputy who responded to our call couldn't do anything because Mom denied the kids were outside at the time and there were no bb guns in her house.
Bitter amusement.
But, with us glaring from the front porch, said, loud enough for us to hear, "You're in Florida now, not New Jersey. Shooting a gun at dwelling is a forcible felony, and the homeowner can shoot back. Any kind of gun. BB gun, paint gun, squirt gun, staple gun, are you following me here, Mom?"
They moved very shortly afterwards because they'd seen us with rifle cases coming and going from the range.
50 years ago was 1975.
Firearms made before then are C&R eligible, if you can convince the seller to ship it to you.
There's an astonishing amount of quite modern firearms that are Crufflerized now.
All five of my cheap, aftermarket, batteries for my camera are swollen.
Three of them are too bulged to go into the battery compartment. Two will go in and don't really want to slide back out.
The OE battery that came with the camera is still running strong.
I guess I know where my money goes when I buy genuine Canon now.
There are now more U.S. troops deployed to Los Angeles than in Iraq and Syria.
There are 4,800 activated Guard and Marine personnel in LA, compared to the 2,500 troops in Iraq and 1,500 in Syria.
--ABC News
Ever notice that the US military really only deploys to places where it's both a shithole and local government has utterly failed or collapsed?
I read this as California being collapsed worse than two notoriously failed states.
I just hope we don't try to nation-build there. That always seems to make it worse.
I've been playing Car Wars for a while. A long while.
It didn't take us very long at all to notice that our Matchbox/Hot Wheels cars would be perfect game pieces.
That led all of us to repaint our battered cars!
One of my favorite cars was the Hairy Hustler.
I don't know what nostalgia bug bit me to try and recreate my old car from my middle school days, but...
OMG, that looks like shit. That might even be a 100% accurate recreation of what it looked like for reals, but my mind's eye says it looked better.
So I gently pried it apart and stripped the brushed on enamel paint off with acetone.
It came out a lot better with a spray can than brushing!
I intentionally left the paint chips from the old paint intact because I had them on the original car. The color looks far better in person than my camera is capturing.
Reassembly went smoothly.
How it compares to the original car:
In the little tiff between Governor Newsome and President Trump about calling up the National Guard...
Not one mention of the National Guard being the militia.
Just like the pro-gun people have long maintained: The National Guard is just another grouping of the standing, Federal, Army with a special clause to allow the Governor to call them up for in-state use.
Also of note is the part of USC Trump cited in calling up the guard.
10 UCS § 12406.
Whenever—
(1)the United States, or any of the Commonwealths or possessions, is invaded or is in danger of invasion by a foreign nation;(2)there is a rebellion or danger of a rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States; orthe President may call into Federal service members and units of the National Guard of any State in such numbers as he considers necessary to repel the invasion, suppress the rebellion, or execute those laws. Orders for these purposes shall be issued through the governors of the States or, in the case of the District of Columbia, through the commanding general of the National Guard of the District of Columbia.
Our protestors should seriously consider finding some uniforms of the nation they are protesting for; because they're skating dangerously close to the definition of partisans and or espionage agents of a foreign power.
We know, from The Bell Curve, that, on the whole, Asians are more intelligent than white people.
We know, from history, that communism is one of the worst forms of government.
We are fortunate that so much of Asia has, stupidly, chosen this form of government to waste their superior intellect on.
Matchbox released a model of the Holden VF Commodore SSV in 2022.
As a South Australia Highway Patrol car.
In 2023 they rereleased it in metallic orange.
This year in metallic black.
The Commodore is a close relative of the Caprice.
The VE Commodore, lengthened, is a WM Caprice; like The Beast.
A VF Commodore, lengthened, is a WN Caprice.
Most of the differences are under the skin and in Matchbox scale, you can't even, really, tell a Commodore is too short to stand in for a Caprice.
The only VE Holdens Matchbox made were of the Ute. It's like an El Camino.
Harvey got me a neat dice set!
The dice are little bullets!
The "cases" are flat and you read the number at the top when it comes to a rest.
Our tardigrade is getting it tuned for when the LA rioters (2025 edition) start getting arrested and charged.
That's just the warm up.
The people funding these riots and providing material support for a foreign insurrection will get the full performance.
h/t FuzzyGeff for the image.
My thoughts about the riots in LA have already been published.
More than 19 years ago!
Nothing changes for the better in California.
For some reason it became policy to allow colonies in California and they're paying the piper.
This is not a case of overzealous law enforcement enforcing a controversial and blatantly unconstitutional law.
This is the long delayed enforcement of a law that's passed constitutional muster more than once.
They're rioting over that enforcement.
That there are enough people to get a riot going over this says there's far too many people who are affected by the deferred enforcement of this law.
It underscores the need to do more enforcing, not less.
To stand up to these non-citizens rather than giving in.
To de-naturalize the few protestors who are citizens of foreign birth. They took an oath to not do this kind of thing when they were sworn in as naturalized citizens. They were made aware of the penalties in the process of doing so.
So let it be written...
Scotland!
It's a lot like England, except the weather isn't as nice and the food isn't as good.
The first 'S' word is Sex. As we know from Phil and Dixie, they avoided talking about it while trying to get to talk about it.
Slavery is the other word.
Slavery was common in the way back.
For some categories of slave, it wasn't even a bad deal. A Greek tutor was a good deal for a slave in Rome.
But medieval slaves are laborers, not skilled experts.
Despite the medieval trappings, most D&D campaigns don't have slaves.
I think it's from the generally egalitarian nature of the players.
Most of the fantasy games I've played didn't have slaves and didn't discriminate against women.
The one campaign were slaves were prominent had my character leading a revolution to end slavery. That's the only time it stood out.
OG AD&D has a couple mentions of slavery in the Dungeon Master's Guide. Admitting it exists is a pretty big deal.
The World of Greyhawk has slaves. It also has some powerful abolitionists.
AD&D 2e has an admission that slavery could exist, but only in the context of humans being weak and other races being strong.
The evil nations of Forgotten Realms have slaves and a slave trade.
AD&D 4e mentions there's enslavement and suggests a campaign where the players free slaves and end tyranny and mentions being an escaped slave as a character background.
AD&D 5e mentions slavery as a tool used by the villain in a villain's methods random table.
GURPS: Banestorm, being a world setting rather than a game, has a chapter on slavery as does the 3e book of the same setting GURPS: Fantasy. (4e's Fantasy is for making your own Fantasy world and it explains all the tropes and let's you DIY a world from them).
With all the mention of slavery in the rules, why didn't more of us have slaves in our games?
Again, I think it's just our American egalitarianism being applied to a social order that was decidedly NON-egalitarian in nature. Feudalism isn't, generally, compatible with how Americans see themselves.
All that romantic liberty, freedom and equality (distinct from the French "Liberté, 'egalité, fraternité) seeps into most everyone's game and makes an almost unconscious decision to not go historical feudalism with it's attendant tyrannies and rigid social order.
The players don't like it when you put such things into the game. They never take any social status that makes them noble and when the restrictions of being a commoner hit them, they get peeved.
Enforcing the sumptuary laws on them was good for a laugh. But they really get umpty when they get told they can't buy a common everyday weapon, like a sword.
That first came up when I played a Togugawa Japan campaign in GURPS. A commoner might own a wakazashi with a permit; but only Samurai could own and carry a katana. The VERY rigid social structures confused the players and they didn't work to understand them. Not that I understood them well, but I was working at it.
Japan is interesting here because, while the structure was rigid, it was possible to break through it and move up. Not common, but possible. Toyotomi Hideyoshi being an excellent example.
In Europe it was much harder to break out of your lane. At least until the plagues...
If you have a strong opinion over Comic Sans and Papyrus fonts very existence, you are a hipster.
It's one of the surest symptoms of the disease.
Something about listening to Thomas Sowell always messed with me.
For a long time I thought it was just the accent.
Then it hit me last night what was wrong.
He has the same accent as Rocky Balboa, but he says smart things.
Some part of my hindbrain was rejecting it because of the similarity in their voices.
My garage door opener decided to quit in January.
It's been a minor irritation opening and closing it manually.
But I recently discovered it would OPEN the door, but wouldn't close it because I unthinkingly hit the button when I got in the car.
That made it slightly less irritating to use the garage door. Our security for The Boy's elopements is the main reason it's irritating.
The other day, not thinking like before, it closed.
I had noticed how smoothly it'd been moving up of late, so I got to thinking...
That got me to look up the instructions.
The instructions that I swear we followed.
We had not.
We'd reused the bracket that some previous owner had put on the door and it was mid-span of the top panel instead of in line with the top rollers.
The bar that connected the shuttle to the bracket was upside down.
Because of these two geometric mistakes, the connector bar was too long and at too shallow of an angle to the door while closed.
All of that all adds up to binding and that overtorqued the motor.
So I got on the ladder, moved the bracket, shortened the connector bar, hung it correctly and moved the closed stop switch.
It's worked three times in a row, and as we all know that means it's reliable for all time.
I don't entirely trust it, but it puts off replacing it a few more months and even if it fails again we're no worse than we were.
I think I mentioned being "in the club" before.
Willard puts in distinct levels, but it boils down to "are you a veteran or not?" and "have you been shot at or not?"
There's things you can talk about with other people in "the club" that you can't or won't with people who aren't.
This post reminded me of a time.
A car guy friend's dad was a Korean War vet.
We started comparing notes about how different our respective Army was and then we started comparing notes to decide which club membership level we were at.
Once that was established, we got to talking about shared experiences and such.
His wife, overhearing the topic of conversation wandered in to listen better to this part of her husband that was closed to her for the past... many years.
As soon as he spotted her, he changed topic to cars and didn't return to military stuff.
That ticked her off.
The son asked me about it and I told him it was a frame of reference thing.
You can't explain some of it unless you were there, and if you were, you don't need it explained.
So there's things you can't talk to most people about because they're going to need an explanation that cannot be supplied politely.
He and his step-mom didn't like that explanation, but they accepted it.
The new owner of the car formerly known as The Biscayne SS was down.
He's turning it into a phantom of a 1991 Olds Delta 88.
A worthy project.
But she's fighting.
I never did get the AC completely sorted out when I owned it. It works intermittently for him. Sounds like an electrical problem to me.
It will run great then die with no fuel pressure.
The connector in the trunk was showing signs of overheating and fuel could be restored by wiggling it.
Adam bought some Deutsch connectors and Marv and I replaced the trunk connector.
Fired right up once we jumped it, because the battery was dead from having the domelights on from removing the interior to dye them the Olds color (the reason that Adam came down).
So...
We're trying to troubleshoot things and there's stuff abandoned in place that creates a wild goose chase.
Adam tries to complain that it was my engine swap, so I must know all the ins and outs.
But nothing is where I left it. Everything is rewired from where I had it, and messy.
I gave him a thick folder with all the documentation of what I'd done. That's disappeared and Adam doesn't remember me even giving it to him.
He uses the interior like a storage shed, so the junk rolling around could easily have pulled a wire and intermittently break connection.
Then he gets mad at us for being frustrated because he's got Huntington's Disease and his emotions don't process like normal. He's in something of a hurry to get the car done before the disease progresses past the stage where he can no longer work on or enjoy the car.
But it was running when he left.
He made it ten miles before the fuel pump crapped out again.
I am taking the position, now, that it's not my project any more. It can't be. I have my own project that keeps getting put off for everyone else's stuff.
I wanna help, but there's too many people working the problem and the mechanic he normally uses does sloppy work. I know because I've cleaned up after him on The Beast.
Rioters are burning shit in LA because the immigration laws are being enforced?
I know the solution.
Belt fed.
The second you get organized and openly violent you stop being an illegal immigrant and become an invading combatant of a foreign nation. Combatants in an invasion means you can use the Army without worrying about posse comitatus.
Forget your the uniform of the home nation you clearly love more than the USA, judging by that huge flag you're waving, you're a partisan saboteur.
Partisans can be summarily shot.
So, gunner, coax, mob.
Especially since it wasn't the side of law and order that decided to be violent first.
I'm fed up with this shit.
86 81 years ago was D-Day.
If it hasn't slipped beyond living memory, that day is getting close.
It's up to us to remember now.
This is a car from Autoduel Champions and it's so very familiar looking.
I wanna say "Lincoln" but it might actually be a MOPAR.
Looks a lot like a Chrysler Imperial.
But not quite...
I know I've seen the car they based it on, but can't remember where.
Tam would know, but she's too good to bother with my little blog any more.
