She Handles

We've a local road that's good and twisty.

I've long been the kind of hot-rodder that builds the car to handle rather than for the 1/4 mile.

Although all I've done handling wise to The Beast is fix the suspension, it's shown itself to be wonderfully sure footed.

The gigantic Brembo brakes from the previous owner's mods are a bonus to handling too.

Tonight I left a C6 Z06 in the dust on this twisty road.

He's a friend and he doesn't DO twisty roads from what I've seen.  He's modded his Vette to be very quick in a straight line and ignores the handling potential.

It means that I can get ahead and stay ahead despite fewer horses and more mass.

Once I'd gotten back on normal roads and set the cruise to 5 over, it took him 6 miles to catch up.

Bwahahahahaha!

For Entertainment Purposes Only?

Colion Noir tries to put a game face on it and insist on complete coverage.

But Donald really did say that guns are for entertainment purposes when he mentions the more important reasons.

Ooops.  That's a soundbite that we're going to be hearing a lot.

The thing is, he didn't really answer the question.

Explain his policies to the parents of the victims of school shootings.

I can explain it.

The reason your kids are dead is because people like the questioner demanded that schools be gun free victim zones where the criminal could shoot as many children as he wanted while the police impotently stand a safe distance away, in effect facilitating the murders.

That millions of Americans own guns that are identical to these murderous criminals is irrelevant to school shootings.  Millions of Americans don't shoot anyone every day.

Yes, I am getting fucking cold blooded about this.

It comes from being continually blamed for the failings of others.

High Middle And Low

Fantasy role-playing often has trouble with feudalism.

The games were written by egalitarian informed authors for an egalitarian audience.

Fantasy is right in the name of the genre.

Traveller is where I first noticed some of what I later learned.

Nobles in a feudal society can mete out justice without consulting a higher authority.  All the way up to and including the death penalty.

Only under very specific circumstances will their decision even be questioned, let alone challenged.  Judge, jury and executioner is the noble who can give justice high and low.

You get a lot for a simple dice roll in Traveller.  Your points can go a long way in GURPS, depending on if the GM has considered something I pondered a while ago.

The implications always hit me when watching The Four Musketeers when Athos, as the Comte de la Fere, sentences Milady to death without a trial.  He's empowered by his title to do so.

It's not really so clear cut in real life, there are, of course, rules for when a count can sentence someone to death.  Milady de Winter is a very clear cut case of someone, whom once caught by someone with the powers to do so, can be executed without trial because she's had her trial and condemnation years ago.

But in gaming...

A GM will have to spend a lot of time and effort figuring out the checks and balances of the society they've created and communicating it to the players.

I've played in several worlds where I understood the feudal power structure better than my GM and where they ended up deferring to MY judgement about it when they should have been telling be how their world differed from medieval France.

Beautiful Mess

The new, French, version of The Three Musketeers is beautifully shot, wonderfully acted, gorgeous camera work.

And it's a jumbled mess.

The divide the party and hopping back and forth needs more connecting tissue.

I found myself constantly focusing on remembering who is who and where they are and not paying attention to the closed-captions and having to rewind sections.

Reading a movie sucks, but this one is worse.

Worth the slog, but not twice.

Never mind the costuming and weaponry are about 100 years more recent than the setting...

Traveller vs Ogre

I've had a vision, in my head that an Ogre cybertank was the ultimate, invincible armored vehicle.

Without nukes they cannot penetrate the armor of a Third Imperium grav tank.

The fusion gun of the grav tank needs a lucky hit to penetrate the frontal armor of an Ogre mkVI, but it can.

If the Imperium uses proper combined arms tactics, and the Imperial Army normally does, then the most effective weapons the Ogre have will be nullified.

A battlefield nuclear damper field will put a... um... damper on the effectiveness of the normal nuclear projectiles from the primary and secondary guns.  Even without this protection, the VRF gauss gun on point defense mode is prolly sufficient to keep nukes from being effective.  The point defense X-Ray laser is even better at the job.

We'll just ignore the meson gunned artillery units that even the thickest bi-phased carbide armor can't stop.  A perfectly intact Ogre without a mark on it and no brain...

This assumes the Imperium wishes to land troops.

They could drop things from orbit.

Lots of rocks out there to drop from orbit.

The Emperor doesn't LIKE dangerously radioactive glass balls in Their Imperium.

Dangerously radioactive glass balls don't pay much in the way of taxes and are hardly a reward when you create a new noble and grant them a fief.

Again?

The Army is looking to find a replacement for the venerable Chinook.

Does SIG make helicopters?

They've been trying to replace the CH-47 since I was in the Army.  It never ends well.

Should Have Kept His Head Down

Apparently a criminal who hacked the Securities and Exchange Commission's X account got hissef caught by searching for, "How Can I Know for Sure If I Am Being Investigated by the FBI?"

Ooops.

It probably wasn't the Google search that got him.  They prolly were on to him and we know about the search from their monitoring.

A rare case of the FBI doing what we think we're paying them to do!

I Have A Better Plan

Failed Presidential Candidate John "Three Purple Hearts" Kerry considers the 1st Amendment a problem in combating "disinformation."

First off, WOW!

Saying the quiet part out loud that loudly is amazing.

Remember when Democrats were the staunch defenders of the 1st Amendment and the Republicans were the theocratic censors?

Me too.

But I have a 1st Amendment friendly solution to "disinformation."

Critical thinking.

I know we don't teach that in school anymore because people who are even passable with critical thinking are difficult to dupe.

Our current form of government simply cannot have a population that's difficult to dupe!

I'd love to see our public schools teach the Three R's for the first few years, with rigid pass-fail no-advancement grading; then progress to teaching personal finance, critical thinking and civics.

You want all that squishy, touchy-feely social studies crap: Go to college and pay for it yourself.

The public teat should only be dispensing useful citizens.

Beeep Weeeeet Booop Weet

I wonder how many times R2-D2 tried to warn people that Darth Vader was actually Anakin Skywalker before just giving up because only C-3P0 could translate and Threepio kept getting his memory wiped.

Why Do We Do It

It's been a topic of much conversation lately why do we Floridians live in a state that keeps getting hit with hurricanes?

That's why!

A perfect day.

We get a lot of them, actually.  Starting about this time of year and running into late spring, Florida has gorgeous weather.

In my 27 years of living here we've only had three storms that were noteworthy; here on the Sun Coast.  The typical named storm isn't as bad as a line of thunderstorms in the Midwest.  The Midwest gets one of those, at least, once a week.  Most of the named storms that hit Florida aren't above Cat 1, and people don't realize just how localized the damage is from bigger storms.

Ian devastated where it hit.  We didn't even lose power.  Milton was bad in Sarasota, but not so much here a mere 60 miles away.  Helene was far worse for North Carolina than here, despite being much further inland than I am!

In those same 27 years, the Midwest has gotten 27 winters.  The fun parts of winter are far exceeded by the bad parts and I am sick of the bad parts.  Yet I still own an ice scraper for my car...

Bleeding Hearts And Artists

I, sometimes, wonder if the accusations of fascism towards Starship Troopers is the thundering realization on the accuser's part that they would be excluded from citizenship.

Not many veterans in the Hollywoodland landscape or press rooms.

WE wouldn't get to vote or have any direct say in how the government was run?  But we're the highly educated (HA!  Not actors!) elite!  Any system that keeps US from being an actual elite must be fascist!

Even I would be excluded from the franchise, I took a medical before my term was completed.  I think, though, that if my vote was on the line I would have demanded alternate service for that last year (as is my right under the system shown).

I don't let it worry me.

I am constantly amused and worried that the things that are often cited in Starship Troopers as being fascist are present in our current mode of government, and the critic cannot see what they're doing.

So much for highly educated.

"Like most intellectuals, he's intensely stupid." -- Marquise de Merteuil

Stupid Idea

I am fascinated with the idea of an overhead cam, underhead valve engine.

And I don't know why!

Such an engine would suck.

It's still an interesting engineering exercise though.

ONE MORE TIME!

In my never ending quest to explain that the government in Starship Troopers isn't any more fascist than our very own...

Fascism is:

Any program for setting up a centralized autocratic national regime with severely nationalistic policies, exercising regimentation of industry, commerce, and finance, rigid censorship and forcible suppression of opposition.

First!  It's not an autocracy.  It's a representative democracy with a different eligibility requirements for both the candidates and the voters.  Not enough information is given in the text to determine how centralized government power is, but we can infer that it's not too different from 1959 USA.

No evidence is given showing that the federation is any more (or less) nationalistic than 1959 USA.

We have Juan Rico's own father as an example that the regimentation of industry, commerce and finance are decidedly not following fascism.

Emilio isn't a citizen.  He cannot vote.  He's, therefore, not a Party member.  Yet he owns a company that manufactures something.  He mentions, in passing, that his business is not on a war footing in a way that says that it's his decision.  He makes his own arrangements to leave the business to Juan should he not survive his eventual decision to join the Army; he even got to choose his own caretaker while he was away.

Free speech is mentioned in little different terms than we would in regards to censorship.

By the standards of the people attributing fascism to Starship Troopers, Stripes is also fascist!

Racism

The TLDW on this is the perpetrator blames the victims and police because they were racists.

Never mind the lengthy criminal histories of the siblings and extensive history of speeding, reckless driving and street racing.

The lack of remorse is a direct result of the race card working too well for too long.

There are racists in this case, and it's not the dead white people.

Scam

I've been reading in several places that the tank exchange places only give you 15lb in a 20lb tank of propane.

The local Home Depot wants $23 for an exchange and 3.6 gallons.

The local U-Haul sold me 4.5 gallons (18.5 lb.) for less than $17.

Because It Never Ends

It just hit me that we're three weeks from Election Day.

Almost snuck up on me.

Considering that it's been full campaign for...

For fuck's sake they've been in campaign mode since W was elected.

We used to get a couple of years off after every presidential election and the mid-presidential term House elections barely made the news.

Now it's all in all the time.

I want my peaceable years back.

Double Hurricane Reset

Going a couple days without the internet had the effect of making me remember there's lots of entertainment that doesn't involve being connected to it.

Despite using a computer to play the music, I've been sitting here doing pretty much what I was doing 40 years ago...

Listening to a playlist and reading a book.

The main difference is not having to have pre-made the mix-tape first.

Which means I need to actually get up, walk across the room, and remember what I wanted to blog about...

I find I've got a lot less material to blog when I'm not ramming my head against THE STUPID like I would be if I was scouring the intertubes.

Kinda relaxing.

Cover And Merge

Someone named Sable did a metalized version of "Just Dance" by Lady Gaga.

Someone else blended them together.

I rather like the result.

But They're Colonists Too

All the American Indian can say over us White people is they got here first.

They colonized the Americas from Asia over the Bering Land Bridge back before SUV's raised the sea level and made it the Aleutian Islands.

Humans are not indigenous to the Americas.  We did not evolve here.

Another thought about European colonization of The New World:

If it had not been for at least three back-to-back plagues (only one is European in origin) the Indians we're so concerned about today would not have existed.  They're the remnants of the survivors of those plagues.

Even more: Had it not been for Spaniards losing some horses, the plains Indian would never have risen to be what they were when French trappers and Voyageurs wandered into the area.

I doubt the horseless Indians of the vacant plains would have done any better than their Eastern relatives did against Western expansion.

I wonder, though, if the Aztecs would have collapsed on their own, or expanded North.

Prolly collapsed, they don't appear to have really recovered from the pre-European plagues.

Cahokia, for example, didn't survive to see the European diseases.  Their society collapsing is why the plains were vacant for the tribes which became the horse-based culture of the Plains Indian to occupy.

The Cahokia and similar societies are also, probably, why bison were so damn plentiful.  Like most agrarian cultures took a bat to the predator populations, leaving a relatively safe place for bison to breed.

Rowing My Own Or Not

Checking my records...  (read remembering).

I have had very few manual cars in my inventory.

I learned to drive on Mom's '76 Vega wagon.  5-speed manual.

The '73 Passat had a 4-speed manual.

The '83 Lynx had a 3-speed auto, first car with a locking torque converter!

Both Camaros rocked a TH-350, 3-speed auto.

The '86 Civic had a 4-speed manual.

The Biscayne had a TH-700R4 as a Caprice Classic and then a 4L60E later on.  Both 4-speed automatics.

The Precious had a 6-speed manual.

The Beast has a 6-speed automatic 6L80.

The Civic needed different gears than what it had.  I always wanted one between 2nd and 3rd.

Now that I'm old, I'm starting to appreciate the lack of pain from my left hip and knee in stop-and-go traffic.

I'm no good at being a car snob.

Better Make A FEMA Claim

Upon further review, we did not emerge from Hurricane Helene completely unscathed.

One of the downspouts failed, allowing the gutter to spew straight down.

We put a garbage can under it and it filled in about ten minutes from Milton.

I dropped the princely sum of $25 for a new section of spout and some straps to secure it to the wall.

As a bonus, it's finally being directed away from the patio instead onto it.  We should have fixed that years ago.

Build Sheet

We once sat down and figured out, exactly, what day in 1978 that Christine was destroyed.

It gave us no end of amusement to discover that was also the same day my 1979 Camaro Berlinetta was made.

I will be damned if I can remember that date, but it was funny at the time because The Silver Bullet definitely had a personality and she DEFINITELY hated Aunt The Bat (my girl friend at the time).

Ironically I sold her to Bat's boyfriend who let her languish.

I doubt he was aware of all the mods done to the suspension, and I hope he had to replace the brake pads on the rear.

Remember, I'd put a Jag XJ rear end under there...  I did not consider maintaining those inboard brakes when we did it.  I don't know if the calipers and pads were accessible without taking the entire thing back out.

After After Action

We're all put back together after Milton at Casa de McThag.

We even got our Halloween decorations up!

I felt bad that across the street is without power still while we have our garish lights on...

That bad feeling evaporated when several of our neighbors in the darkened section stopped by to tell us how relieved they were that we'd gotten our stuff out.

It turns out we're a local attraction that they look forward to seeing each year!

I am happy to be part of the healing with our display of normalcy.

Fucking Milton!

Because of the hurricane I missed Dead Che Day!

A victory for everyone everywhere!

57 years of being a good commie.

Yamaguchi Day

We've all thought about it.

 This one act probably kept Japan from going Socialist.

65 Years Of Sea Levels Rising

 

The angle is 90 degrees off from one shot to the other, but...  I ain't seein' no massive increase in sea level.

Are you?

Even better, the 2024 imagery shows that Bush Key has reemerged from the briny depths...

Checking stuff independently is how we counter the narrative.

Neither Is Front Page

The US just had two landfalls of some pretty massive hurricanes and neither is still on the front page of any, national, news site I've checked.

MSN was the only one that had any hurricane stories on the front page, but those disappeared when I shut off the location filter.  Isn't that odd?

I remember hearing about fucking Katrina for months.

Helene is already history and Milton a memory?

We're still digging out around here and, "Meh?"

Now The Floods

Most of the rain fell on places upstream from us, and it's flowing, or should I say overflowing, the river a couple miles from here.

It's crested already.

The roads that are closed every time it gets to this stage of flooding are closed.

We're well away from the flood area and not worried at all.

Prep Fail

I'm working on a GURPS character.

I forgot to copy the spreadsheet I'm using to the laptop from the NAS before we shut things down to save load on the UPS prior to the storm.

DOH!

If you're going to fail at a prep, forgetting an entertainment item is what you should forget.

On the plus side, I've learned how to silence the alarm on a Cyberpower UPS telling me that the power is off (I fucking know, you stupid machine) and all of the instructions for an Amazon Basics UPS call for more than one button or are just wrong about a double tap of the ONLY button does the trick.

We Have POWER!

We had a generator this time, so the return of the mains was a smaller thing than it might have been.

In fact, I was eating a waffle that The Lovely Harvey had just made... with an electric waffle iron, when the power returned.

Being the cynical Floridians we are, we waited nearly 20 minutes after the power came back before we shut the gennie down and plugged our stuff back into the wall.

Adding to the preparedness:  The in-laws have a generator now!  It was hard to find gas for it, but Home Depot had generators for sale and my father-in-law pounced on it.

He'd been borrowing Marvyn's spare Honda generator to that point and it felt nice to end that imposition.

He got to enjoy his new generator a whole hour before the mains were restored...

The new talismans list is to have ice in every cooler and a generator at every home.

Marv has two Hondas.  We have our Champion.  In-Laws have a... forgot the brand.

We're ready!