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USAA uses lube and cuddles after the fucking!
No where near what I'd need to replace her.
Actually, she cannot be replaced. The Precious was special and irreplaceable.
The Rust Monster was likewise special and was never replaced...
She might be supplanted, but will never be gone from my heart.
Looks like BATFE is going to legislate by regulatory fiat previously OK pistol braces into short barrel rifles in August.
I think we need to have some honesty about pistol braces.
The ATF is correctly interpreting their usage here.
How many times have you seen someone using their brace like a stock?
How many times have you seen someone using the brace to fire one handed?
So far I've seen the former a lot and the latter not at all.
Welcome to loophole 101!
A loophole that we wouldn't even be concerned about had we just said, way back when, that a "pistol" made from a rifle was a still a rifle, send in your $200.
The fucking headaches from people making rifle action pistols sure was worth it!
Like making all kinds of rifle ammo unimportable because it's armor piercing pistol ammo now.
Well, this ruling will be screwing the few people who needed that brace to fire a pistol, but...
PS: Making that stockless SBR legally a pistol is also taking advantage of a loophole.
I'm still of the opinion that we should be trying to repeal the NFA and putting far more restrictions, with teeth, on the executive branch doing legislation via regulation. Lawsuits more along the lines of, "the executive has no granted power to..."
Especially since what the law says about an FFL selling me a gun is very simple and someone can be charged for filling out the 4473 wrong as if they were breaking that law when they're not prohibited from owning a gun.
A long while ago when GM introduced the Atlas engine series I speculated that the new DOHC 24-valve inline 6 would be a really good swap into any of the numerous vehicles from the 40's and 50's that came with the old Straight-Six!
It'd be a significant upgrade in power over the 216 cu in mill. The 1947 motor made 83 hp @ 3,200 and 168 ft-lb @ 1,100. A 2006+ LL8 makes 291 hp @ 6000 / 277 ft-lb @ 4800. Hmmmmm, better upgrade the brakes...
I love the 47-49 Chevy Fleetmasters too.
Plunk in a 6-speed auto and it might even get good mileage. The Trailblazer with a 4L60E got 14/20 in the 2009 model year. God awful, but a much heavier vehicle, 4,356 lb. vs the Fleetmaster's 3,350.
The Lovely Harvey, being a former CNA explains that means no lifting of more than five pounds and several other things.
On the 1,000 mg of ibuprofen and 750 mg of methocarbamol every four hours, I'm sore but not in agonizing pain. I've got no energy and everything takes longer, but I'm doing well...
Intellectually I know not to push the limits hard. Those ribs are not knit and can break out of the cartilage holding them in place and puncture something.
Emotionally, however, I'm rearing to go!
It got rammed home tonight when I needed Harvey to move the pot from the sink to the stove for me.
My five pound limit covers the potatoes, but not the pot or the water.
It was good, though, to get to cook again.
The first three days were "do nothing but exist" by doctor's orders.
It's been nice to get out the house the past couple of days, even if I have to do everything at 1/4 speed.
Making potato soup, because it's the first real cold day and we make either chili or tater soup on those days, took way too long and far too much energy.
But I managed to make it and it came out GREAT!
My mom's recipe is near fool proof too.
Dice 5 lb. of potato into random sized chunks.
Chop a good sized onion.
Place in a stock pot.
Just barely cover the potatoes with water.
Boil until tender. I like to give it an aggressive stir just before they get tender to knock apart the smaller chunks to thicken the liquid.
Reduce heat to low.
Toss in two sticks of butter and 32 oz of Half-n-Half.
Salt and pepper to taste.
This is a base for anything you'd like to add too! I often add chicken and corn.
The more I look at the FNHP22 the less I give a fuck.
FN, what do I get for my $1,300 that I don't get from a $600 (or less) M&P 9?
I don't think a metal frame and hammer is worth $700+. Do you?
By the way, everyone pining for a redo of the S&W 3rd Gen pistols should pay attention to this thing's price point.
What happens if the S&W CSX turns out to wildly popular and they scale it up to service pistol dimensions?
S&W isn't going to have that $1,300 price point scaling up a pistol with an MSRP of $610. It might even get cheaper with more space to put components than the micro gun it presently is. Or be the same price, the M&P line is pretty consistently priced regardless of caliber or scale.
I just dunno what FN be smokin' here.
I can't even say I'd be saving money on magazines by buying one because it's pretty clear it doesn't take high-power mags.
I've reverted a post to draft because it doesn't say what I wanted to say the way I want to.
It's being worked on rather than being memory holed.
Thank you for flying McThag Air.
JT's slicer program will tell you how much filament you need to complete the print.
Setting it to 100% infill, we can use that amount as a proxy for the volume of the print.
My model of the Lighting class comes to 361g of filament. The Akkigish class comes to 349g.
My model will be losing a bit of filament as I get more greebel done too.
My main worry was that I'd made an error because the Lightning seems so much bigger than the Akkigish.
Rashomon did it first and best, and this is medieval French Rashomon.
Pacing is off.
When the pacing is off and you show the same story three times from each main character's perspective, it becomes jarring and I felt like I was gutting it out rather than watching it.
Something odd, I've seen about other people talking about it.
We get the Sir Jean de Carrouges perspective first, then Jaques Le Gris, then Marguerite de Carrouges stories.
Everyone spots how the first two are skewed in favor of the men, and assumes that the third telling is the truth.
Um...
Her story is JUST as skewed as the men's, and that's kind of the point of the way it's told.
What actually happened is not presented.
The other thing that sticks out is armor actually doing what armor is supposed to do.
In far too many stories you wonder why anyone ever bothered to wear the heavy shit for all the good it did them when the fight started.
While I am sitting here recovering from my injuries...
Willard has been in constant contact, which has been great! He even dropped off a couple of books and a donation.
I run out of energy very quickly. I viscerally understand why the sore area is called your core. You can't move anything without using some part of it.
Marv has been a mensch. He even ran me to Target to get some Legos after we'd just been to Target for him to get some stuff. He's also done some lifting duties.
JT has stopped by and lent a hand with the lifting, including disposal of our very worn out king-size bed to make room for a recliner I can actually get in and out of.
FuzzyGeff and Software Janitor lead the pack in donations using the donate button.
We're still not certain how much the medical bills will be, but optimism presently reigns.
The car was, SURPRISE, totaled. We have an offer from USAA on the web site, but the adjuster said to wait for her to call before doing anything with it. It is, of course, not near enough to replace The Precious.
Even paying for the replacement assistance would fall short of replacement.
Thanks for all the comments and well wishes! They do brighten my day.
I'm sore.
No doubt about it.
When the doc told me I'd broken bones, I didn't believe him because, surely, that would hurt at least as bad as my legs. Right?
My shins still hurt worse than my ribs when I'm positioned neutrally.
I can move so my ribs and sternum hurt way worse, but it's easy to avoid.
Thanks to everyone who stopped in to wish me well!
I'm lubing up to be fucked by USAA now...
My buddy, Ray, despite the tox report his dingbat ex-wife breathlessly shared... (she didn't know how to read it).
Did not die from an accidental overdose.
We have the coroner's report now.
Ray had Wu Ping Cough and was both obese and had high blood pressure. Dangerous co-morbidities.
I feel somewhat better that he didn't accidentally kill himself with pills.
He'd only started getting his weight under control to try to keep the cellulitus to a dull roar when it all went wrong.
An ignoble end.
Yes, I am kinda lucky to be all here.
Especially so since for three years the airbags were disabled because the driver's seat wiring was fucked up. I'd only gotten that repaired in April last year.
That airbag saved my life. I don't think the seatbelt alone would have.
It's a testimony about how much safer cars are now than years past.
The Lovely Harvey is presently having nightmares from October 1987 when a friend of hers was killed in an accident. Her 1975 Chevy Nova looks the same as my car from the firewall forward. Where they differ is the crease in the passenger compartment that shortened her car almost two feet and let the steering column crush her chest. My passenger compartment is intact.
Last night I managed to put The Precious into a tree.
The tree lived, The Precious died.
Typical cold tires, too much application of go-pedal, the pilot-induced-oscillations until BAM!
Can't even blame the other guy.
I am skinned up, broke my sternum and two ribs.
Pics later.
I feel lucky to be alive, but with life comes pain and I'm in a lot of it. So I'm going to not sit at the desk typing for a bit.
That donate button over there -->
Please hit it. The VA is my provider and this might get expensive.
Over and over I read book and film reviewers describing "Starship Troopers" as advocating Fascism.
It often inspires me to re-read it.
The society described in "Starship Troopers" is not a description of a Fascist state.
What these reviewers keep forgetting is we have historical examples of Fascist states and things mentioned in "Starship Troopers" are not allowed in Fascism.
Emilio Rico, a non-voting resident, was a wealthy, landowning, successful, businessman.
In other words, not a member of the ruling class or party.
Lemme look for examples of such in, say, Mussolini's Italy... Um...
Lemme quote wikipedia, it might not be unimpeachable, but it's accessible to even a liberal arts major:
State permission was required for almost any business activity, such as expanding a factory, merging a business, or terminating an employee. All wages were set by the government, and a minimum wage was imposed in Italy. Restrictions on labor increased. While corporations still could earn profits, Italian Fascism supported criminalization of strikes by employees and lockouts by employers as illegal acts it deemed as prejudicial to the national community as a whole. Similar to the Bolsheviks in Soviet Russia, Mussolini nationalized all independent trade unions into one government-operated syndicate, the Confistrada, which would be the arbiter of all disputes between labor and management. The closed shop was mandated nationwide in virtually all careers, where unemployed Italians were required to join the Confistrada in order to secure employment.
Show me where "Starship Troopers" describes Rico the elder operating like that. Give the page number.
What I finally realized about them seeing the society that Juan Rico is from as being Fascist isn't that it's a Fascist society but that THEY, personally, would not be citizens or allowed to vote if they found themselves transported to that world.
Because they would never make the sacrifice of doing something dangerous to earn that right to vote and learn the value of putting society ahead of ones own selfish interests.
I think their viewpoint of the novel says more about them than the story.
His presence is still felt in firearms design to this very day.
Happy 167th Birthday John Moses Browning!
Being of Scots descent, and being something of a technological history buff...
I'm aware of how far behind England Scotland was before England invaded and Anglicized the norther half of the isle.
Once that colonization had occurred, Scots hit the ground running with industry, inventions, medicine, and science.
Scots were Irish as far as Americans were concerned when my, now English, ancestors hit the shore.
But it makes me aware that a people doesn't have to remain backward.
Mom's side of the family is Italian and hit America at the height of Italian and Catholic discrimination in the US.
Their eventual success and assimilation to American culture makes me aware that a people doesn't have to remain oppressed from being willfully different.
But, do lecture me on the historical oppression of your ancestors while you reject American culture and education to be the backwards other who can never succeed.
But aren't deployed in Africa...
Any insight, Mr Fleetwood?
So I'm sitting here, watching Meat Loaf's 1994 rendition of The Star Spangled Banner at the Baseball All Star Game and I realized...
If the military flyover would drop a MOAB on any modern NFL team, not a single person I knew of cared about would die.
In fact, the world might be measurably better off.
The reason I came to this realization was the camera wandering down the 1994 MLB All Stars and there was no kneeling or political statements.
The worst you can say about them is an appearance of eagerness to get past the ceremony and get to the game.
Watch for yourself:
And Meat did a fine job with the song. Not every celebrity, living or dead, can say as much.
I am reading about how we're evacuating non-essential personal from our embassies in Ukraine.
This keyholes with how non-essential workers were furloughed when the government "shuts down" when Congress fails in their primary duty of making and passing a budget.
Pray, tell me, if they're not essential; why are we wasting money on them in the first place?
Seems we can get a much smaller government by just letting these folks find honest work. They might even find employment doing what they were doing before, but now as a private citizen providing a service for a fee.
I'm in favor of finding out how much of our government we'd pay for if we had to pay for it individually.
Wanna bet we wouldn't pay for much at all?
The cyan lines will be changed to shallow grooves so the print looks more interesting.
Thank The Gods for the mirror tool!
UPDATE!:
Got the top surface plotted out, now I need to extrude it into the surface and subtract it from the solid to leave a groove the printer can see.
I can see what's going on because I made the model.
The one on the right is the rearranged version.
Upper and lower cargo and being able to isolate the passenger section makes more sense to me.
Never mind the original seems to have forgotten an airlock...
I did a comparison between the fusion plants in Traveller: Interstellar Wars and GURPS: Transhuman Space.
The Traveller plant gives 2.5 times the power for the same space in the ship.
I think I know why.
Traveller has miraculous gravitics.
They're using gravity manipulation to smush the fuel to a fusion state.
Transhuman is harder, crunchier, science fiction and is constrained by real world theory for the physics.
Kinda neat!
Something else I realized is that a Traveller plant requires tremendous power requirements at start-up to create the initial state.
Even FN!
Sort of.
They made it ambi and increased capacity to 17 rounds.
Sure didn't come down on the price from the old version...
While it's interesting, at that price point I'm prolly not going to be the one writing a review unless someone at FN reads this and says, "Hey, Thag, we sure wanna hear what you think about it and we're sending one to you."
Simians may also issue forth from my alimentary canal with great force, taking on a ballistic trajectory.
What I want to know, though, is magazine compatibility with the old guns.
I noticed that the cargo bay as shown was too small.
So I extended it forward a lot.
Then I started looking at the layout and thought, "this is not set up well at all."
So I started rearranging components.
This got especially drastic when I found that there's no place to put the power plant in engineering as shown on the rules-as-written deck plans.
Fine, you're gonna make me rearrange, then lets REARRANGE!
Passenger staterooms have been moved to the lower deck.
Some of the cargo has been moved to the upper deck and an air-raft sized deck elevator installed there.
Passenger country can be isolated from the rest of the ship.
Airlock and companionway have been added to the port side so the passengers don't have to walk through the cargo bay or engineering to get to their staterooms.
Best of all, it all fits properly in the 3D model I showed the other day! Huzzah!
I've been stabbing unsubscribe on a lot of YouTube channels I used to enjoy.
Repetitious and boring sums up most of them.
But a couple of car channels actively shying away from interesting projects to stay on the repetitious, boring and predictable formula was the last straw.
That thing right there that you're refusing to work on? I want to watch you work on that you talentless hack!
No, there is no schematic or manual for this. You can't plug it into a computer to diagnose it.
I thought you were a mechanic.
But you pale compared to the idiot who keeps bringing these projects to you.
And idiot is an act.
He's flipping these cars for a profit and making a big deal about how he paid so little to get the car and so much to fix it...
But he shows his house in the vids. He's not hurting.
But he's got the viewers hooked that he's going broke doing this.
If that were true, it would have ended a long while ago.
I can make my hull shape work with some small changes to the deck plans.
Two corridors outboard and forward of staterooms 13 and 16 are crawl-spaces; but that's OK because there's a corridor aft of these rooms that connects to the inboard ones.
The corridors that go around staterooms 3 and 4 lose a little bit of headroom forward and outboard, but that's mostly up above the drop ceiling.
The cargo bay gets expanded out to meet the hull in the aft portion and extended under the staterooms almost to under the bridge with a 9' ceiling.
Staterooms 13 and 16 lose some headroom in the head because of the angle of the hull.
I think that, if it were my design, I'd have made the Lightning a bit less, well, slab sided and flat.
I'm modeling it as the artwork in the book says to do it.
And I just noticed that the cargo hold, as shown in the deck plans is a mere 78.5 dTon when it's supposed to be 162 dTon.
I assumed a 9' ceiling and to make volume it needs a 20' ceiling. Or it needs to be twice as long as shown on the plans.
That means a substantial redesign of my model... Grumble!
I got the bridge windows and the refueling scoops on! Coming up with an aesthetically pleasing and not wildly out of scale set of windows was a pain in the ass!
Greebeling is no darn fun when the feature has to have some real function that's identifiable.
Don't have a stand yet, but I'm having fun with using it!
In this case Liquid Garage's Backfire, passion fruit habenero sour
JT printed the Lightning without any greebling so I can do some drawing on the plain part to plan the greebling.
Notice that it seems to dwarf the Type-R?
The differences in volume can be illusory. I think the Type-R should come in a bit larger than the Lightning by volume despite appearing smaller here.
Now that the ransom has been paid, the hostage has been returned.
I have my Shield Plus, she has hers.
All is once again well.
I feel better that she's now packing a gun that she can fully operate and the upgrade to 9x19mm from 9x17mm is a bonus.
JT got a good print of the Type-R Subsidized Merchant and we made our first run of an un-greebeled Lightning Frontier Merchant in 1/270 scale!
Uh... Isn't the Lightning a 400 dTon ship, like the Type-R?
This is what happens when you use a GURPS book for the dimensions where a hex is 1 yard across flats. So this was scaled in inches... The slicer defaults to millimeters.
A scaled up version is printing right now!
For just $1400 the plumber came (um, phrasing), snaked the shitter (PHRASING!), and grouted the base of the commode.
He said he felt something solid blocking things and knocked it down the drain.
It appears to flush fine now!
He didn't even take the crapper off the floor, so we're being optimistic about it.
The Lovely Harvey shot her Shield Plus today.
She started off shooting quite a bit to the right and was getting a little frustrated when, suddenly, something went "click" and she pulled her groups back centered.
First target, pulling to the right:
Second target once things started to click for her:
Decent grouping too!
I am sure she's fighting the "I used to be a better shot" gremlins because she has not shot regularly for almost a decade.
No malfunctions from the gun in the first 100 rounds. A good sign. It doesn't preclude future failures, of course, but at least it appears to be made correctly from the factory.
I've got a nascent want for a first generation Glock 17.
Because I had one when I was in the Army and was forced to sell it before I returned CONUS because of the lack of years on my ID. Technically the gun was illegally purchased on a special dispensation from on high to get us equipped with 9mm pistols before we went to the Czech border.
I've told this story before. We'd turned in our 1911's and .45 ammo and drawn 9mm ammo only to be informed that the M9's weren't coming before we loaded the tanks on the train.
So we were turned loose on the rod and gun clubs in the area with signed waivers to buy anything that shot 9mm.
I chose a Glock 17 because, of course I did.
This purchase dispensation didn't allow me to bring it back, so I sold it to a fellow down the hall.
Once I got out of the Army I bought another Glock 17, this one having adjustable sights.
I should have hung onto it, but I was chasing some shiny chimera and sold it off.
Once I'd gotten myself sorted, I wanted to replace it and discovered that 1st Gen Glocks are rare collectable items.
UGH!
That's why I have a police-trade-in 2nd Gen. Close enough! Or is it?
The Lipsey's P80 Retro Glock might scratch the 1st Gen itch... Or will it?
A real one is still expensive. Too expensive, I think.
On the plus side, the Lipsey's don't appear to have become too pricey, and have come down a bit since they were first released. On the negative, it's marked P80 and not 17 on the slide.
My buddy Ray died of an accidental OD of oxycontin.
Dammit.
His family, of course, is using this as evidence that he was still a scumbag alcoholic who just switched to being a scumbag addict.
SIGH.
It's so damn clear that they had not spoken to him even remotely recently.
Trust me, The Lovely Harvey and I know from addicts and Ray wasn't. The tells were absent.
Especially when he called and talked to her about the topic of addiction. A road she traveled herself in high school.
We think that he was in a great deal of physical pain from his cellulitis and a bad back and he simply took too many pills too fast.
It happens.
A little too often, but it does.
Talk about SKS prices on Arfcom reminded me of a funny.
A friend, who shall remain nameless, decided they needed 7.62x39mm to feed their SKS.
They spotted a crate near the entrance to the gun show the moment we walked in. So they bought it immediately.
And lugged the heavy ass thing for the next couple of hours while we continued to shop...
It was only when we got to the car they said, "why didn't I just take it to the car right away?"
"Or buy it on the way out the door?" chimed in another friend.
The shitter in the main bathroom is flushing very slowly.
I wouldn't trust it with poop.
The toilet flange appears to have finally given up the ghost and that's a repair above my pay grade.
So we called a plumber we'd used before and had given us good service.
Got their answering machine.
That was at 11:40 this morning.
They have yet to respond.
I guess we will call a different plumber now.
Luckily, this is a two-hole house, so we aren't reduced to running two houses down to the inlaws to shit.
.30 Super Carry is actually a .313" bullet. 7.95mm.
A 100 grain 0.313" bullet at 1,250 feet per second comes out to 2d+2 pi- and 160/1,700 range.
That's less than the bog standard 9x19mm with its 2d+2 pi.
.30 SC vs torso will give an average of 4. 9mm will give a 9.
That's important!
Changing to HP ammo gets a bit better with the .30 SC changing to 2d+2(0.5) pi. That will give an 8 against someone wearing a t-shirt.
9mm becomes 2d+2(0.5) pi+ and gets 12 on that same shot.
Perhaps its better compared to .380 ACP?
.380 will do 2d pi with an average of 7 against the torso with ball and 2d(0.5) pi+ with an average of 9 against that t-shirt with hollow points.
Uh...
GURPS has been eerily good at predicting how well a gun will hurt someone and this is looking less impressive now. If only it could ditch the pi-... But if 7.65x25mm Mauser and 7.62 Tokarev don't make the "high velocity" cut for pi, neither does this!
Navient has agreed to cancel a shit ton of student loans.
I wonder if mine is in that pile.
I attended a school that got shut down for predatory lending.
As soon as she gets her new toy to the range to verify we don't have a warranty claim against S&W, The Lovely Harvey intends to use it to replace her SIG P232.
We're prolly going to sell it.
That will leave the old Colt pocket hammerless as the only .380 in the house.
We used to have several more.
I used to have a SIG P232 and P238.
Harvey's P232 was bought because she liked mine... Age doth betray us all.
Meanwhile...
She got to shoot Marv's S&W 459 and she proclaimed it "heavy". Which it is by comparison to the Shield Plus.
That reminds me that I haven't given a report on the S&W 59 I've been toting since the weather cooled.
Still carrying it. It's still a full-sized duty pistol in a shoulder holster.
I still shoot it well.
Marv's 459 shoots high, and we lacked a suitable tool to adjust the rear sight.
Next trip!
This also reminds me to find the little screwdriver bit holder I want to keep in my range bag because of the lack.
UPDATE:
Screwdriver located!
The Lovely Harvey foolishly generously and lovingly granted permission for me to replace the stolen Shield Plus.
So I did.
She promptly returned my old pistol and laid claim to the new one.
SIGH
Happy Wife, don't get killed in your sleep from multiple stab wounds to the chest and groin HAPPY LIFE!
She never really did steal my original. I got the new one as a gift as soon as I dropped her off at home to tend The Boy.
But never, ever, let the facts get in the way of a good story!
The Lovely Harvey had the day off and the afternoon free after running her mom to the eye doctor.
She suggested we go shooting.
So we grabbed some pistols and hit the range with Marv.
She's lost some grip strength as she's aged so the SIG P232 is getting to be a bear to operate.
I suggested she try my S&W M&P 9 Sheild Plus...
I shouldn't have.
She shot better with it than the other three guns I brought and she has not given it back.
I think she plans on letting me buy me a replacement.
I think...
That sound that a bullet makes as it passes nearby...
But you've got to walk over there and you're just sick of it so you keep walking figuring that if they finally figure out the sights and the range you get to stop walking.
And so does everyone else.
Fuck taking cover, if they were serious there would be mortars or something, right?
I have to agree that Johnny Cash did, indeed, make Trent Reznor his bitch when he covered Hurt.
Who am I agreeing with?
Trent Reznor!
My "buddy" who thinks he can outshoot anyone after 7 shots?
Give him something with sights that aren't regulated for any load you can still buy at any range we can actually go shooting at!
Like the SMLE.
You wanna hit center of the target with commercial .303 you're going to have aim about 50cm low at 100 yards.
If you had a standard Vegas die made from neutron degenerate matter it would mass the same as a 3 km sphere of rock. 3.36x10^12 kg.
Without a stellar mass to keep it compressed to degeneracy, it's going to explosively expand, though.
There's a couple of small moons around Jupiter that are this size. Lots of asteroids too.
I had to relearn how to calculate the fucking density from the numbers that physicists use back into simple shit like engineers use.
Prolly a web page that gives the simple 4.9x10^17 kg/m3 answer I figured out without needing to get as drunk as I did to kill knowing that math in order to retrieve it.
Oh, and don't fuck with me! I can do this math when I can't fucking stand!
This all comes from someone who's Mr Trivia at our local watering hole asking how much a die's worth of neutronium weighs.
Notice I called it neutron degenerate matter? We don't use nuetronium to describe it any more!
You're betting me that you're going to a better shot than me with anything after seven shots?
Meet you at the range, motherfucker.
I'll bring something that recoils brutally and see how your non-shooter ass does.
I know I can shoot that painful shit.
But it takes time at the range to learn to control flinch and that's where I will have your braggart ass.
You're going to be in pain. You're not going to be familiar with it and you will not shoot near so well.
It'd be worth borrowing Willard's 329PD and shoot full up .44 Magnum loads just to shut this guy up.
And I'm ready for him to shut up.
Especially since I pounded out this:
 |
| 50 yards, irons, 21 seconds worth of function test, not an accuracy test. |
That's with Willard's M1956A2 gun to make sure I'd cured the stoppage problem.
I've seen neophytes shoot .308 from a light gun like that before. It amuses me a lot. I wasn't even mad at them.
UPDATE: It just hit me. With range time, ammo and targets this was about a $3 a second shoot. I've gotten a better dollar to time value at a strip club!
In HBO's miniseries "Band of Brothers" some of the bolts used in the Ford GPW Jeeps did not have 'F' scripts on them.
Why won't Hollywood get the simple things correct?
Plus other interesting stuff.
For the record, if some paleontologist digs my ass up 5k years from now, they are free to experiment on my remains. I'll be long finished with them by then.
While that might be true, in a sense, I don't think it's going to literally happen.
The Dems will reinvent themselves into something that attracts voters again once a critical mass of losing elections finally gets them to clean house of the off-putting extremists.
The Republicans have done this a couple of times too.
We identify some of them as RINO today because they had to become more like unto Democrats to get elected at all.
But I welcome this shift.
It would be peachy if the choices between parties wasn't existential.
Republicans are just as bad as the Democrats when they get total control, but in the other direction.
It's why I was so happy watching Trump doing mean Tweets. He isn't really from either party. It disrupted the paradigm.
I want the difference between the parties to not matter a whit about essential policies, rights, freedom and liberty.
Sweeping through the halls of government with a, metaphorical, flamethrower to downsize it would actually attain that goal naturally.
If there's no power to be gained over your fellow man by attaining office, then the worst of them will not seek it.
It actually did work like that for decades, until FDR didn't let the Great Depression go to waste. We're still paying for that shit.
To quote the noted American Philosopher F. Geff: "The Constitution may not be perfect, but it's a damn sight better than what we have now."
Beeper needed love, so she stood on the laptop's keyboard to get it.
Somehow she managed to turn on the num-lock.
Hard to enter the password to unlock the screen when 14 keys are not doing what I think they should do.
While FuzzyGeff was in town we frog marched Marv into making a Traveller Interstellar Wars character.
We skipped trying to integrate him into the existing campaign, so everyone made a Promethian belter.
The quick, light, scenario was them prospecting in the inner belt and finding a poorly disguised UN Navy listening post.
The first person they encounter was a buck naked, dead drunk Lieutenant Commander.
As they were leaving the asteroid base, the commander was stone sober.
I did not explain it to them, but the drug he took is called "purge".
It's a standard med found in Ultra-Tech that nullifies alcohol and recreational pharmaceuticals in a couple of minutes taken orally, or in a few seconds injected.
GURPS Ultra-Tech 4e predicts a 7.5mm caseless round in a service pistol that has basically 9mm damage and range stats but a 30 round capacity.
So, .30 Super Carry still isn't there, but it looks like tech is advancing as expected.
TL9 is supposed to start in 2025 after all.
Bad luck can be catastrophic.
It will be pointed out that the better prepared always have better luck than the unprepared.
This is true.
There's an amount of luck in that too.
The luxury of nothing going catastrophic while you're getting ready.
Or a string of catastrophes which depletes the preps.
You can do everything in your power correctly and at the proper time and STILL get cut off at the knees if what's going wrong lasts too long or is something completely out of right field.
This should not exonerate those whom do everything wrong all the time and no amount of luck will lead them to any sort of lasting success.
Here at Casa McThag?
We've had a lot of bad luck. We're getting our shit back together as we can, when we can.
Every year has been better than the last as we rebuild. <-- That's tempting fate, ain't it?
But we look at The Shitheels and notice that we're living on our own, paying taxes, with occasional assistance from our generous friends (whom help voluntarily) compared to not paying any taxes and getting significant portions of their sustenance provided by taxpayers (whom help involuntarily).
Thanks to those who helped and are still helping!
Bollocks to you people who keep making it harder for us to dig out with your every shitty decision.
Something I hit over and over about student loans and the repayment thereof is "just pay them."
With what, sir?
Minimum wages?
Because the degree is valueless.
Not because it is a worthless field, like black women of south Toledo studies, but because degrees from that school are worthless.
Why would someone attend and graduate from a worthless school?
It happened while attending classes.
The small, reputable, business college was purchased by a larger education corporation and then that corp was bought by an even larger one.
Criminal proceedings around unfair and predatory loan practices happen. Students were encouraged to over-borrow thinking they were being loaned "just enough" to cover the tuition, books and fees.
Because of those purchases, the accreditation was in flux and even if the student was aware that the value of their degree was waning, there was little to no chance of transferring to a different school with credit for classes already taken.
Hello again, sunk cost fallacy.
So, at the end of four years, you have a degree that's got almost the same value as your high school diploma and a pile of debt you will never be able to service.
Not because you're a deadbeat, but because the decisions of others devalued the thing you borrowed money to pay for so much that all you got out of the deal was the debt.
A debt that cannot, ever, be cancelled via any normal means.
For fuck's sake, we let someone who takes out a mortgage for a house in a known flood zone cancel that debt via bankruptcy when the flood makes their house a plain again, but never student loans.
Why?
Because some rich fuckers took out loans, hid their wealth, and went bankrupt on them then went on to be lawyers and doctors.
There weren't many of them, but it got a lot of publicity.
The, "we must do something, this is something, we MUST do THIS," kind of publicity.
Did this fuck the rich people who started the problem?
Nope.
While it did force them to repay the loans, they could have done that without the job their degree gets.
Did this fuck most everyone else?
Sure did.
Something every single "work harder, smarter" person forgets while condemning lots of folks is that timing and luck are factors in success, and no amount of hard work can compensate for them when they fall the wrong way.
Your personal success is a factor of your hard work, smarts, timing and luck. It might not apply to someone else.
The situation that you succeeded in might not even exist anymore and they way you succeeded might be impossible, or even illegal, now.
Even if that path is still there, an accident or illness can, forever, derail you. It doesn't even have to be you who gets hurt or sick. Having to care for a loved one can derail it too.
Way back in 2009 was the last time I went to a drive-in movie.
Marv and I saw District 9.
I remember going frequently to drive-ins when I was a child and reasonably often as an adult.
Until the places started to disappear.
The place Marv and I went, the one time, has finally shut down.
It's partially our fault, we didn't go in the past 13 years. But it appears that we weren't alone in avoiding the place.
But we weren't alone.
One culprit, mentioned by the owners, was that land is getting to be dear and they could make a ton more selling it than they would in decades of keeping the theater open.
Someone has decided to convert their C6 Corvette to a Honda based K-24 inline four.
I dig on unusual engine swaps, but I found I got less and less interested in the project the more apparent it became that this was just a race machine and not a street car.
Otherwise, I think it's cool as shit.
It makes me wonder if a more modest power output more similar to the original power rating would be doable as a streetable machine.
A Vette sounding like a typical ricer's fart-pipe amuses me to no end.
JT has been fighting his 3D printer to make a Type-R Subsidized Merchant in 1/270 scale.
It's been a learning experience, more than the Energa.
That is not a forced perspective.
You can see the problem with the print here too. JT calls it "elephant footing" and he's working on a solution.
But what I really noticed is the 400 dTon Type-R's rear section is a lot bigger than The Falcon.
Since the Type-R, if being faithful to the deckplans, comes out closer to 500 dTon in size, and only the aft third is here, that means Han's ride is probably not even 100 dTon. It's especially apparent when you consider that the wedge shaped thing in front of The Falcon's mandibles is a 10 dTon launch.
Rents are through the roof in the Tampa area because of lots of people moving here?
We gonna ignore how landlords got shafted for a year and a half for their rent and are finally able to recoup it and how?
Lots of them are, I am certain, looking to make up for the missing rents by increasing them now because they've got costs associated with ownership that didn't stop when their tenants stopped paying.
The Coverking Neoprene seat covers I put in the car back in 2009 have finally given up the ghost.
The foam backing was turning to powder and the seams were separating.
They did their duty and protected the leather from wear though:
I dunno if I am going to replace them or save a bit for new leather. There's a fake suede that would be outstanding here and more durable than the factory covering.
I remember, way back, when I first read about electro-thermal guns for tanks and I immediately figured the technology would be applied to small arms.
I made GURPS stats for them long before GURPS had them for 3e in Ultra-Tech 2 in 1997. I wonder if I still have the weapons tables in a folder somewhere... FuzzyGeff printed several copies for my players and me.
Simply, they use a liquid propellant that's excited by electricity to a plasma state to shove the projectile down the barrel.
I also had dual-propellant guns with two stable chemicals that were hypergolic or would only light when an electrothermal impulse was applied. 4e doesn't even have that!
Electrothermal is a modification to the conventional slugthrowers with 1.5 times the damage and range for double the price. A fair cop!
One of the local breweries does a car show on irregular Sundays.
I am washed and waxed.
Still need to do the glass and interior.
Watching reviews of the HP clone from Springfield and I wonder:
Have we forgiven them for hiring people who supported gun control yet?
The excess of CO2 in the atmosphere tracks with increased crop yields per hectare.
We should be making more CO2 if we don't wanna starve. And stop burning food to make our cars have shitty mileage and fragile fuel systems.
Plants like more CO2, hotter and wetter for the most part.
They give us food and oxygen in return.
Everyone wins!
Of course the people bothered by this news also can't grasp that we're going to need to triple the power production in the US to replace gasoline cars with electric vehicles. I know they don't grasp this because they're opposed to any technology that will actually supply more power to the grid, especially if it's reliable power.
Right now your EV is powered by coal and natural gas. It could be nuclear powered. It will not be wind and solar powered. Not when coal and natural gas are banned or regulated as tightly as nukes.
We should have non-uranium nuclear plants all over the place already, but the fucking greenies don't understand science, let alone engineering, so they're scared of thorium and neptunium.
It's all the damn questions the cops have when you're at the zoo.
It's worse than the supermarket during turkey season!
The Falcon is in 1/270.
The Abrams and the Ogre are in 1/285.
It's really close enough.
Not once, not twice, but three times!
Sprey died on us last year. Good riddance.
My buddy's children (16 and 17) have chosen to ignore my warnings about his family and how they are going to treat them.
Well, Ray, I tried. You asked me to try and I did.
We both figured the attempt would end in failure.
Lieutenant Fowler marked where Allen had gone down, his horse carrying on without him.
"Wood! Jenkins!" he barked.
His sergeants were already on it, Wood going left and Jenkins going right.
The Googoo were sneaky to a fault, but slow. They were also clearly more familiar with the Sioux's tendency for hit and run.
They were clearly not stupid, but they lacked... imagination?
As Wood and Jenkins completed the wide circle and began closing in, one of the Googoos stopped trying to hide in the chest-high grass to stand and scream what must be a challenge.
A challenge answered in the sharp crack of a Krag from some private of Wood's. The Googoo's head snapped back and disappeared into the grass.
"Goo goo goo goo, to you too, fella!" he yelled.
Panic was starting to form in the encircled savages when one of them stood up holding Allen's limp form with some sort of stone cutter to his throat, "Goo gu ghan guh ghana!"
A ring of Googoo with spears stood up around Allen and his captor a moment later.
Watching Garand Thumb's Freezing Rifle Test.
Like the mud tests from InRange, it's kind of an unfair test.
But what I really wonder: What does this person do for a living that he can purchase not just the guns, but all the optics on display.
Truly I am jealous.
There's times when I wish I had the spark that others have to actually make money.
I know I don't have it and lack the ability to change despite that awareness.
I do love to watch though.
Chuck Schumer says he was targeted for his religion on January 6, 2021.
He's wrong in that he wasn't targeted and that he thinks the we hate him because he's Jewish.
We hate him because he's a gun-grabbing commie fascist.
Since communism is pretty much a religion, if he had been targeted, it would have been because of his worship of communism; thus targeting him for his religion.
I would like to remind the people who're still suffering from PTSD at the Capitol Grounds Incursion that had this been a real armed insurrection, the mob would have taken the capitol and a large number of the congress creatures present would not be here to have PTSD about it.
But changing the meanings of words to make things seem worse than they are is par for the Dem course.
Here's the artwork in Interstellar Wars:
Here's the deckplans I'm working from:
Already you can see they don't quite agree.
Here's my nearest approximation of this design that accounts for the deckplans and the overall displacement of 400 tons of liquid hydrogen.
No greebeling yet, and I can't quite get the same angle as the artwork.
I am becoming more and more convinced that the art came first, then a game stats THEN someone tried to make deckplans off those stats while looking at the artwork.
I am pursuing the willow-the-wisp of making a 3D model that confirms to the deck plans and looks like the artwork in the book.
Compromise is the word of the day.
I think the artist did the initial work, and probably even used a 3d rendering program to make the ship.
The artist is not constrained to making it 7,474.87 cubic yards to conform to the 400 dTon displacement of the design.
A different artist looked at the overall shape and made deck plans that have most of the non-fuel equipment on them and this gives some overall dimensions that should be adhered to.
These two things don't match well enough to just draw the outside matching the art with the same overall dimensions.
The art will come up well short of the desired 400 dTons. Like 100 short of 400.
So I'm making a compromise design with features of both which will be recognizable as the ship from the art that will also be the correct volume.
Just so I can print a 1/270 scale one to sit next to my X-Wing game Millennium Falcon.
I've taken one design all the way to beginning grebbeling, and started over again twice.
It's a lot more tweaking than I imagined it would be at the beginning, but the rust is falling off and I'm starting to have fun again.
There's only so far I can take it because I need the stand and turret dimensions from the Traveller ship stl files I got from Kickstarter so I can leave space and holes for them.
Olga and Valentine.
FuzzyGeff settled on Olga's configuration and stuck with it with just minor changes. The back-up irons changed a bit and the muzzle device shifted some, but she's pretty much as first assembled in early 2007.
Valentine has been in about five configurations before I finally decided I wanted M16 A-nothing through A4.
These are the heavy girls in our collection. Olga, in fact, has a heavy barrel and not the narrow under the handguards gov't profile that Valentine has.
All up, as shown:
Olga is: 11.3 lb.
Valentine is: 10.7 lb.
Tried out FuzzyGeff's sky tracking mount with my camera and tripod.
Took pictures of Orion with several settings.
 |
| Canon M50, EF-S 55-250mm; f/4.0; 55.0mm; 62.9'; ISO 100 |
He says we could probably get slightly better with a more precise alignment, this is the best pic of Orion I've ever taken.
Previous best from last year on a stationary tripod:
 |
| Canon M50, EF-M 15-45mm; f/4.0; 23mm; 25'; ISO 100 |
I hate watching the people who hurt my friend the most get away with it now that he's dead.
Been reading the hive of scum and villainy which is Arfcom and there's some massive amounts of unrealistic expectations with regards to gun prices.
Supply, demand and inflation are all at work to make that $80 Tula arsenal refurb SKS an $800 rifle today. Numbers matching, bright bolt carrier Tula will be a $1,500 gun.
No, you cannot buy a Glock 20 Gen4 for $475 new unless you're eligible for a Blue Label gun.
For fuck's sake, even the lowly Mosin is over $400... if you can find one for sale. Everyone is out locally.
I paid $70 whole dollars for my SMLE Mk.III*. I've seen similar guns sell for $650 not all that long ago.
$400 Finnish Kiv.28/30 have risen to $800.
Except for the Glock, they're not making any more and what supplies that aren't already in the states are in places which are on naughty lists and can't ship them here.
One of the casualties of Ray's fall into the pits of alcoholism was his guns. Many of them were his father's guns.
Normally, you'd think they were sold off to pay for booze, but this would be wrong.
Early in his homelessness stage he was bumming from friend's house to friend's house.
One of these friends has his guns.
He was too embarrassed to try to get them back.
Just because he was a guest, didn't stop him from getting black-out and he made an epic mess of the guest room from all orifices.
They kicked him out and, rightfully, demanded he replace the bed.
He was fairly certain that the guns were still there, and he'd gotten enough income that he could have replaced the bed now that he'd gotten sober and was staying sober.
He just hadn't gotten the nerve to face his friends after they'd seen him far lower than he wanted to be seen.
He didn't get a chance to make the amends and I don't think I can track the friend down.
I'm not even sure his kids want the guns, and I'm damn sure his ex would only sell them.
And I don't fucking care.
If I ask why I should care, I get shouted down and called a bad person.
No explanation, of course.
Mr Yeager was nobody to me but a pro-gun dancing monkey. A pro-gun dancing monkey that did some seriously stupid and dangerous things in firearms instruction.
Someone to be avoided even if they agreed with me about gun ownership.
I'm getting sick of the idea that we have to forget the stupid shit he did just because he's sick and there's a large following who don't understand that he was teaching stupid shit.
Never mind his endless tirades that did not advance our rights a bit and helped convince the undecided that the restrictions we already have should remain or be expanded.
So you're going to have to explain to me why I should hope he gets better when he's not doing us any good alive.
Today, in the wee hours, I learned something about AutoCAD.
A polyline will be in plane with the viewport and it will ignore the UCS.
That made it possible to make the windscreen on the Lightning look the way I wanted.
Happy dance!
I did a Kickstarter for to get some 1/270 scale STL files of the OG Traveller ships.
The same scale as the X-Wing game.
It did not include any ships from GURPS: Traveller Interstellar Wars.
But I know how to make my own STL files...
Really dusting off the old CAD skills here!
The next step is to begin greebling so it looks more interesting.
I have art from the book to guide my digital hand.
Who the fuck are you?
I've expressed on my real-name Facebook page my feelings about Ray's family who've let him down time after time.
Someone who has both of Ray's accounts has asked who I am.
Like I need to explain myself to them?
OK.
I've known Ray longer than you. I know this because I've never met you and I've met everyone who knew him longer than me.
I was the friend who picked up the phone when nobody else would. Including his brother and sister.
I was the person who forgave him for failing and falling.
I was the person who did the networking to get him a replacement phone for the one he'd lost; and didn't make him feel stupid about it. FuzzyGeff did more for Ray getting him that phone delivered than this unknown on FaceBook.
I don't need to explain myself to them.
I think this schmuck need justify themselves to me.
High Speed Wobble, a Belgian tripel from The Liquid Garage.
My mom's father's old pipe.
A Belgian triple of FN designs.
Happy New Year everyone!
