This Could Be Good

I am cautiously optimistic.

But I doubt it will head where I want.

An Honorable Alternative To Military Service

When I say the USAF is not the military, I cite today.

15Sep47 is the Air Force's ETS date.

After your exit the service date, you are no longer in the military.

I have to admit, their NFA collection is way more impressive than mine.

Happy Birthday, Zoomies!

108

Today marks the 108th anniversary of the first use of tanks on the battlefield at The Somme.

Death before dismount!

UAW And Caterpillar Part Two

The minimum wage is always $0 an hour.

It doesn't matter if your contract says you get $70 an hour plus benefits if you get zero hours because the plant is closed.

Title reference:  Back when Caterpillar was almost the entire construction equipment market, the UAW demanded a big raise.  The company said they could offer a raise, but only about a third of what was demanded.

So the union went on strike.

Caterpillar said to them, we can't afford what you're demanding, we'd go out of business.

So they started shutting down plants and letting orders go.

Pretty soon customers started buying imported construction equipment and once those companies got a toehold, Caterpillar's market share contracted dramatically.

The workers decided they'd starved long enough and accepted the 1/3 as big raise.

Caterpillar pointed out that market share contraction and offered them jobs at all at much lower rates than before the strike.  With fewer hours and some plants would remain closed.

Bravo, UAW.  Bravo!

Bonus: Try finding any information about this strike on the internet!  I remember it happening because my step mother's brother was a union worker at Caterpillar.

On Strike For A Bad Look

When the company you work for is under a microscope about the quality of your workmanship, it's not a good time to demand a 25% raise.

IAMAW voted to strike at Boeing because they didn't get a 25% raise.

No word if the union is at loggerheads about the inclusion of "how to secure a plug door" class.

Quality control at Boeing is in miserable shape and that's the fault of the people on the production line who just decided to go on strike.

They don't deserve a raise.  Honestly, I'll bet Boeing wishes they could fire a bunch of them, but once you're unionized the NRLB decides if you can shit can the dead wood.

"I'd do my job better if I got paid better," is bullshit.  It's what they're saying.

I Have The Powah

I like to read Instapundit.

Apparently, I don't read it fast enough for their web designer, so about mid-page it auto-refreshes.

This reload would not be a problem if, once it had reloaded, I could keep scrolling down the page.

What it does is keep skipping around and jumping right where it refreshed and I'm trying to read.

Well, it turns out that I can disable auto-refresh.

That I have to do so means they need to fire their web designer.

Such A Clever Kitten

 

Shadow has managed to activate sticky keys on the desktop and has discovered all manner of keyboard shortcuts on the laptop just by laying on the keyboards.

Sigh.

Sticky keys, now that I know what it is, is a stupid design.  You get it active and the keyboard just makes a clicking noise through the speakers.  A reboot fixes it, but there's no on screen indication that it's active and there's nothing to click to disable it and return function to the keyboard.  Good job M$!

Nerd!

I just made a spreadsheet for keeping track of all my GURPS characters.

Since there's a "date created" line on many of them, I can even sort them chronologically.

My first, ever, GURPS character was a Car Wars character.  December 26, 1986 for 1e.

I never played that character.

The first character I ever played was an elf when I cajoled FuzzyGeff to run the recently published Yrth (then GURPS: Fantasy).

Never looked back, honestly.

Even as early as 2e, GURPS solved problems I'd been having with made for the setting games.  The one that really sticks out is getting a genuine sword in T2K.

LBB Traveller was an awesome setting with a mediocre system.

Generally, we simply liked the feel of the GURPS magic system over AD&D and there wasn't really anything special about the D&D rules to keep us using them with the worlds we were making ourselves.

The World of Greyhawk was the only published setting I knew anything about and we weren't dropping our hard earned on that when we could make up our own shit for free!

No Tides Today

25 years ago, today, a massive explosion blasted the moon out of orbit with Earth.

Sigh.

No moon base.

No flying cars.

But we got smart phones!

Well That's An Interesting Take

Arfcom often gives us philosophical gems.

Is it better to starve under a communist dictator who's the same race/tribe as you than to live under a racist "democracy" and be well fed?

It's Rhodesia, again!

The argument being put forward by one poster is that a racist nation that keeps its people fed is worse than a non-racist dictatorship that doesn't.

They're not saying it exactly that way, of course.

They're arguing that since the government in Salisbury wasn't perfect, and could not be made perfect in a very short period of time then it needed to be completely discarded instantly.

Which is kind of what did happen.

What he's avoiding looking at is what was waiting to fill the power vacuum when the Salisbury government was discarded.

One man, one vote, one time.

He also avoids looking at things from a white perspective with regards to what happened in other African nations when majority rule was implemented without any kind of preparatory education of that majority.

The kind of massacres that wikipedia doesn't make note of because white people did the dying.

It can be debated if Rhodesia was going to actually educate the majority and, eventually, let them have proportionate electoral power.  We don't know if they were just mouthing the words or not because they ceased to be the government before it could play out.

And majority rule of unprepared and uneducated people with no tradition of republican democracy got a choice between communist candidates; USSR supported on one side and West Taiwan on the other.  Once.

Then what the whites feared was going to happen, pretty much did.

Forced upon them by decisions made by the US and UK while mouthing the words about stopping the spread of communism...

Slow clap.  Just fucking walk into the gorram light already Jimmah.

Matched Set

I had money left over on the character sheet and realized that a ronin isn't going to have a lot of coin in his sleeve.

So I upgraded the wakazashi to very fine and both swords to +1 styled.

Then I made a note that they are a matched pair.

Omi used to be from a wealthy house, to be sure.

The swords were inherited.

I almost went with a tachi for the main sidearm until I decided to go with the matched daisho.

Then I reconsidered, he's a mounted archer after all, and changed the katana back to being a tachi.  Tachi use the same stats as katana, so I don't even have to change them!

I even looked up a famous sword maker for them.  Sadamune Hikoshiro.  That makes the blades about 240 years old in 1570 where Omi is from.

Anxious

Well, the anxiety is not getting better.

It's affecting my enjoyment of going out for a beer and that, in turn, is affecting the enjoyment of the people I'm out with.

The depressing solution is two birds with one stone and remove myself from the situation before I ram into it.

I'll prolly be missed... at least I hope I am... but it might be best for everyone.

I'm not quite to agoraphobia levels.  I feel like I'm a long ways from THAT.

But I'm unhappy about it and very worried it's dragging friends down with me.

They deserve better.

For Tat

President McThag, around noon on 11Sep01 would have been talking to a boomer captain and targeting a couple reentry vehicles to 21°25′21.0″N 39°49′34.2″E.

Then I would direct The State Department to ORDER the Saudi ambassador's ass to my office.

Whereupon I would inform him that he and his family had exactly 72 hours to gather up everyone involved or I would begin using my expansive nuclear arsenal on Islam's holy sites until there weren't any.

I checked, the oil is far enough below the surface that it will not be affected by radiation from the blasts, especially air-bursts.

I'd then have taken to TV and informed the rest of the world that, no shit, you're with us or against us.

The least support I would accept is staying out of the way.

Since the experiment of letting these places run themselves has spectacularly failed, every nation involved in this bullshit, who doesn't immediately get VERY cooperative, gets to be a province of the USA and once enough time and education is applied, perhaps their great grand kids could earn second class citizenship.

Lots of places would hate this, but I'm OK with hate, so long as they fear.

But that's just me.

I'm a vindictive cuss.

Didja Know

Back in 1980 a court ruled that the Black Hills were illegally taken from the Sioux in violation of the Fort Laramie treaty.

The Sioux, having won, refused the money granted them from the case because they wanted and demand the actual land in question.

So a trust was established and it's waiting for them to come get it.  It's up to something like $1.3 billion now. 

This is a fascinating legal moment.

You don't really get an appeal if you win.  And they did win.

So their choices are sit there like it had never happened, or take the money.

Well, they didn't take the money and are holding their breathes until the turn blue waiting for...

A different legal system to come along?

Having studied this little piece of history and geography in moderate detail, I think the 1980 court is wrong and the Fort Laramie treaty was invalidated by the actions of the Sioux themselves long before settlement of the area by whites began in earnest and before gold was discovered.

Picking at this thread and demanding a better settlement might just get them facing a historian who will detail their unforced violations of the treaty they signed and invalidating the deal they'd made by not abiding by their side of the terms.

Plus, if they chose to go back to court they will be risking what they've already won.

That they don't makes me think they DO understand this and not getting everything they wanted and refusing what the did win is a badge they can wear and use to get sympathy from people who can't read this far in my posts, let alone more than one dry ass history book on it.

Even more fun.  Let's say they get what they want.

It will establish precedent for the Cheyenne and Crow to sue THEM to regain the Black Hills!

Remember, the Sioux are originally from what's now Minnesota, they're not from the Black Hills.

Ever wonder why the Crow were such keen allies of the Army and why they constantly identified peaceful Sioux encampments as hostile when "scouting"?  The Black Hills are at the core of the feud.

I Stopped

I stopped commemorating 9/11 when it became obvious that we were fundamentally unserious about keeping it from happening again or seeking retribution on the people who were responsible.

It simply pissed me off all over again to note the date and that leads to seditious thoughts along the lines of, "if they won't fix it, maybe we should..." then a list of illegal thoughts that lead nowhere good as I quote Martius, "O, me, alone?" when I start the rebellion and nobody follows.

It's not like I can follow someone else!

So we do nothing about any of it and I get to be bitter about that.

Worse, we've squandered the ability to do anything about it most places now.

My Local Tattoo Shop Is WAY Different

Watching the 2024 Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo...

My local tattoo shop plays totally different music and doesn't have dancers.

Just sayin'.

Woof!

Were doggies the killer app of cro-magnon man?

It's strange to think of dogs as a technological development, but domestication is a technology.

There's evidence that suggests that a neanderthal did about 10% more calorie burn than we do.

If we're burning fewer calories doing the same things and dogs make it easier for us to get more calories...

Neanderthal gets out competed.

Then there's the interbreeding...

I've sometimes wondered if hybrid vigor is going on and the cro-magnon appearance is a REALLY dominate gene leaving us with a magnathal who looks a lot like a cro-magnon but out competed them all.

I'm A Gunowner But... ULTIMATE LEVEL

Kamala Harris (a known liar) has said she owns a gun.

First off, any politician must own more guns than me for that to matter.

Second, she keeps talking about bans and severe restrictions on ownership and purchase; so the fact that she owns a gun is irrelevant.  Those bans and restrictions never apply to the politically connected.

Third, Donald was a gun owner too.  So was George Bush Sr.  It doesn't matter for us if a politician owns A gun.

Like I said, a politician cannot be reliably considered to be pro-gun unless they own more guns than I do and they MUST be used for something besides hunting.

Wax On Wax Off

The Beast is now clean.

 

I'm just making note to remind me to do this every week instead of every other month.

It will mean less than a 1/4" of brake dust on the front wheels.

Trying out a new to me product to attack that accumulation.  Adam's Wheel and Tire Cleaner.

It works, but there's a learning curve I haven't mastered.

I'm too wiped from the heat right now to hit them again.

Bury My Heart In Bullshit

"There is no Sioux word for that.  For owning the earth."

I don't speak Sioux.

It might be that they don't have a word for land ownership, but they certainly do have the concept in their culture.

All of the plains Indians understood territory and the idea of excluding others from theirs.

That's ownership of the earth, with or without a word for it.

Real Inflation

You can measure it yourself.

Example:

If there's a 4% annual inflation rate then something that cost a dollar will cost $1.04 next year and $1.17 after 4 years.

If there's a 19% annual inflation rate then something that cost a dollar will cost $1.19 next year and $2.01 after 4 years.

Which of these inflation rates better corresponds to the prices you're seeing at the store?

Economy

There's two good things from converting Omi from 3e to 4e.

First is knowing that Sengoku Japan is TL4.  That ups the starting wealth to G$2,000.

This is a good thing because they changed the cost of many things upward, I can still afford them.

That very fine Katana is G$13,000.

If he'd stayed the original TL3, with the G$1,000 starting wealth, my Very Wealthy would only have given me $20k to spend.

I'd have been about G$10k short for the character as written.

GURPS Japan's armor was already a bit more complicated than the basic set, but it went from five lines on the character sheet to 13!

This brings us to the second good thing.

The increase in wealth also let me take armor that was more appropriate to the time period I'd selected.

Lamellar armor has some issues that period writers made note of:

When soaked with water the armor becomes very heavy and cannot be quickly dried; so that in summer it is oppressive and in winter liable to freeze. Moreover, no amount of washing will completely free the lacing from any mud or blood which may have penetrated it, and on long and distant campaigns it becomes evil-smelling and overrun by ants and lice, with consequent ill effects on the health of the wearer.

– Sakakibara Kozan, Chukokatchu Seisakuben

-- Taken from GURPS Loadouts Low-Tech Armor p.32

Different kinds of armor started to replace it by the Sengoku.  More protection for less mass.

But, also, for more G$.

The armor I pieced together comes to G$4,220 and 52.4 lb.  Protection is the same, or better than the 12th to 13th century ensemble from Loadouts which is G$3,615 and 81.2 lb.  Protection is slightly better than the 14th to 15th century set at G$2,539 and 62.8 lb.  Oh, and I remembered my mempo!  The example sets don't have one.

I might have ditched lamellar altogether for mail and plates, but the example photo I was using still had it.

RIP Mr Jones

I'm late, but we'll miss you.

James Earl Jones has departed the chat.

Haramaki Do Dame

Although lamellar armor looks so very Japanese...

By the Sengoku period, plates were starting to come into vogue.

So Omi's haramaki-do has been replaced with a hotoke-do.  This is the benefit of being a medieval Japan nerd.

Going from DR4 medium lamellar that's DR3 vs crushing to DR 6 medium plate that's DR6 all the time.

I saved over six pounds doing so and got better protection.  For almost four times the money...

I realized that I inserted a joke into the character.  The very-fine quality Katana is the least likely weapon to be employed.  It's almost half of what I spent on equipment.

But having a real heirloom item is something this character would have, even if the naginata is every bit as effective in combat and FAR cheaper.

Watanabe Ieyasu noh Omi

Art by Christopher Rich-McKelvey

Omi is a retread of a 3eR character.

I'm accustomed to characters not being too different in 4e, but a Sengoku era Ronin...

There's been some changes from the old Japan book and the new rules.

The Katana is no longer a two-handed fencing weapon.

The Teppo is a much lighter gun.  Though a tanegashima is more apt.  I'm not sure I want to keep it, it's more of an ashigaru weapon.

All the special arrows have different names.

A couple of skills have been replaced with techniques.

Armor...  Armor was expected to be difficult.  But I have it figured out, the character drawing has always been wrong.

Tunage

While Marv was wet sanding the headlight lenses, I suggested some music.

We're both Pink Floyd fans so I fired up The Beast's radio, cranked it to 45 and played Wish You Were Here off the thumb drive.

45 is the max volume.

It was sufficiently loud too.

Very loud inside the car when I played with some of the audio settings.

By the way, if you don't know where to set the volume to be audible outside the car, Shine On You Crazy Diamond Part 1 is a bad choice because it starts so quiet and takes a bit to build to where you can set the overall volume.  That's why I was cranked to the max!

Max output from the head unit is incapable of causing distortion in my speakers.  Woot!  Though the dynamic distortion limiter indicator did flicker on the screen a couple of times.

We've All Kinda Been There

I am more down on the Wehraboos than a normal person might be because I dealt with different flavors.

First was making 1/35 scale models.

German armor is very popular.  I've made my fair share.  Panzer IV and Panther are my favorite tank subjects and the early sdkfz 232 8-rad armored car with the big cage radio antenna being my wheeled fave.

Boy howdy do you get to hear about how great the Tiger was.  Mostly from the spectators who come to model shows.  And if you, yourself, have German tanks on display, you get to hear why the Tiger was better than Panther and why Panther is better than T-34 and so on...

Then there's TTRPGs.

There's a couple of WW2 German guns that are ahead of their time.  The MG.34 and MG.42 are modern GPMG's.  The 42 is still in service and production as the MG3.

The FG.42 is an FAL eleven years early in most game systems stats.

The StG.44 is an AK six years early, with a weight penalty.

Clever players grab this "too soon" kit if you let them.

But you get subjected to the "as good or better than the..."

No.  No they were not.  Even the milled AK is better than an StG.44 (aka MP.43, aka MP.44).

The FG.42 is nowhere near as good as the FAL and is much more fragile.

Most games don't account for the fragility factor.

I've taken an FG.42 on a couple of characters to get something like an FAL too soon, but the truth is the first of any class of gun tends to suck but hard especially when compared with what comes after it.

Absolutely Green With Envy

Marv's garage/shed/workshop has air conditioning.

It makes doing things like sanding on headlights far more pleasant than doing it in the driveway.

If you have the means to climate control your work area, I highly recommend it.

Marv Is Better At This

Marv had great success at getting his headlights clear, so I asked him his secret and he volunteered to do mine.

How they started:

This is after a year and a half of the Cerakote kit.

The mistake I made was following the directions to the letter and only sanding for 3 minutes per sanding pad.

Marv didn't even use the sanding pads that came with, he used his own supply of various grits (240, 600, 1000, 2000, 3200, 4000 then 6000) and kept going until it stopped making slurry.

Sanding done:

Cerakote clear coat applied:

I'd say the results speak for themselves.

Mea Culpa

Yes, the Wannsee Conference happens in 1942.

It codifies and serves as documentation of the goals.

The atrocity that it is codifying did begin far earlier, as early as 1933, and there's even more documentation showing that.

I cited the Wanness Conference because it's easily accessible to people who don't know any of this history and its a great example of how deliberate The Holocaust was.  I used wikipedia because it has links to supporting material that anyone who can read the blog can access.

It might even be the truth that gives the lie power.  Some of the topics on hand at Wannsee was the pace at which the eliminations were proceeding and deciding on more efficient means of providing that eradication.

Prior efforts were hitting logistic walls, but it wasn't an accident they were murdering people.

People in the camps didn't just die.  They were being killed, on purpose.

That the intake of the condemned was bigger than planned was incidental, not causal.

Are all you history fiends happy now?

Decreased Value

Journalists trying to figure out why restaurants are having troubles and talking to someone who's more politician than economist.

Everything boils down to supply and demand.

In the US there is an abundant supply of restaurants.  Lots of choices.

Lots of supply.

Abundant supply should lead to lower prices, yet prices are going up.

Prices went up from many factors, but the biggest ones were artificially induced.  Increasing minimum wage on top of the stupidity of the CDC are still moving through the industry.

The prices went up more than the wages of the customers.

That reduced demand...

Reduced demand and high supply SHOULD cause prices to fall.

But the restaurants can't reduce labor costs very far legally.  They have no control of the costs of food, and the government has that market thoroughly muddied from vast culls to prevent the spread of disease... which might not even be effective.

Labor costs are up.  Food costs are up.  Real estate is up, and that always makes rent go up (most franchisees don't own the land their custom building sits on).

So, prices cannot go down without going negative on the balance sheet.

There's also a threshhold price on going out.  A customer might happily pay $25 a plate but not $25.01.  Prices jumped a lot farther than a penny per plate.

Inelastic costs, elastic demand in a high supply/low demand environment...  Means places go out of business.

I Beg To Differ

Here's the money quote from this article:

“Nazi Germany,” Cooper said, “launched a war where they were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war, of local political prisoners. [They] went in with no plan for that, and they just threw these people into camps, and millions of people ended up dead.”

Don't know much about history, I see.

There very much was a plan.

A plan to round people up.

A plan to kill them off.

They didn't accidentally end up there.

The Wannsee conference is how we know that. 

The National Socialists, being Germans, documented everything.  Almost all of it survived.  I dare say most of it survives.

We know they did it deliberately from their words and deeds.

He Went There

Cue Jan Hammer!

Bren Ten!

Dwight Brown mentions the Bren Ten to make one feel better about the $200 magazines for the S&W 1076.

He's right!  At least you can GET magazines for a 1076!

If you've got $12k you can get yourself a Bren Ten magazine.  *PLUS* it comes with a FREE GUN!

I'm only exaggerating a little...

Prolly Not Bidenomics

As I expected, the S&W 1076 runs about $1,500 give or take.

What I did not expect is the magazines to be running $200!

It makes the Delta Elite look downright affordable at $1,200.  Genuine Colt mags are under $42.  Springfield runs $20ish.

Bad USB Port

One of the USB ports on my laptop causes the trackball to act like it can't see the ball.

It's fine on the other two.

Odd.

Wish I'd noticed before ordering a new trackball.

Well, one is none, I guess.

Color Me Jealous

They wouldn't even issue us a 1/2" drive ratchet for doing the track.  We had a breaker bar for that.

I Did Not Know That

A friend of mine is trying some home brewing.

He said he was writing down recipes and I decided to be facetious and quote the ingredients from the Bavarian Reinheitsgebot of 1516.

Water

Barley

Hops

You need yeast too, but I guess Zie Bavarians assumed it would happen on its own, brett style beers use whatever yeast is flying around the kettle after all.

To make sure I got that list right I looked up the law and I discovered that the 1516 law had less to do with the purity of the beer and a lot more to do with keeping brewers from competing with bakers for grain for bread and thus to keep the price of bread down to something the normal folk could afford.

I didn't know that!

Essentially In The Clear

I just double checked and the statute of limitations for what I was charged with ended in 2022.

They cannot change their minds and proceed with the prosecution now.

Though it was vanishingly unlikely they'd have done so after dropping the charge, it was possible until the five year time limit expired.

I didn't even mark the date when it happened.

One nice thing about being actually innocent is you tend to not worry that your lies get discovered or hidden evidence unearthed... because there isn't anything!

Thanks again to those who supported the cause morally and financially!

I am sure the lawyer like their boat too.

On The Brain

I've been watching videos about the newest D&D edition talking about things I only half understand because I ejected from D&D at 2e.

But, apparently, Warlocks get their powers from a deal made with some shadowy entity.

It occurs to me, if I were writing this game that such a deal might seal you off from clerical intervention.

I end up GURPSing the ideas that come to my head about making non-wizard magic users and when clerics come up it gets different.

A cleric's spells are granted by their deity.  There will be people that god will refuse aid to.  It might even be temporary.  Hera would certainly deny a follower of Zeus assistance during her anger at finding him fooling around on her... again.

And that's just within a pantheon.

A cleric of Hermes is probably unable to lend aid to some Godless Persian, regardless of if Zeus has been busted humping mortal women.

I know that players are going to rebel at being forced to obey the strictures of their character's religion.

Even more so, long time players of D&D are going to be confused at how the spells work out.  In D&D a cleric is a healer.  Most polytheistic religions have a god of healing, so you'd have to be a cleric of THAT god to get healing spells.  The god of war prolly doesn't have much to offer for healing...

The spell set will be greatly limited compared to a wizard.

But, depending on the rules I pick, a cleric might not use fatigue to cast their miracles, it being granted by the power of a god.

I often stop world design at the gods and clerical magic because it's a lot of work and limited reward.  But if I keep picking at a list of quasi-Greek gods and their spell lists and effects...  Eventually I will have it done and ready to play in the ACLF Harvey puts me in.

Sticker Not-Mod

A sticker mod is when you put on a sticker that alludes to something your car doesn't have.

My car does have a six liter engine.

I also noticed that the E in my Caprice badge is damaged.  Time to get the expensive Australian Caprice-V badge!

Still A Pet Peeve

Anon comments are going to be deleted unless signed unless I recognize the commenter's style.  And sometimes even then.

I might let it fester in the cache to give you a chance to say, "that was me -name".

Even if you DO sign it, I'm nuking a comment telling me to do something I've already declined to do.

I do not care for Springfield's XD, regardless of caliber.

It's ineffable.  I've even said so in reply to another comment.  The Anon commenter should have bothered to read those comments before advocating for the XD.

It just doesn't fit me.

Never has.

That's my opinion.

For facts I've had two friends with one who managed to get it thoroughly locked up putting it back together.  I don't like guns that get fiddly during maintenance.

But if it's working for you, go for it!

If everyone liked the same gun, it'd be damned boring writing about them.

Well Fuck

Paul Harrell has departed the chat.

Job Requirement

A tedious thing I have to stab the skip button for on YouTube is the fundraising ads.

With a kitten on my chest, sometimes I can't reach the mouse and resign myself to watching the ad.

Barack Obama and Joe Biden are smooth.  One take.  Done.  Let's get ice cream!

Kamala Harris?  At least four OBVIOUS cuts, one mid-sentence.  In a 30-second ad.

She did at least five takes to get this in the can, and one wonders how many didn't get used.

Being able to, smoothly, beg for money is a fucking job requirement for politicians!

This alone disqualifies her for the post!

Perhaps Cat Proof

 

 

Displaying your Lego minifigs is a challenge when you have furry assistance.

Hopefully, this cheap Chinese display case will keep them from scattering them to the wind.

10mm The Other Kind

I wrench.

That means that I'm missing a few 10mm sockets.

What's interesting is that I have not lost a 10mm socket since I moved to Florida.

I felt like I was single handedly keeping the Sears at North Grand Mall in Ames open with my constant replacing of a 1/4 drive 10mm 6-point.

I suspect it was the people I was wrenching with causing the loses and not simple misplacement.

I've dropped a 10mm or three down here and knew the moment it fell.

In Iowa, I noticed it was missing the next time I went to wrench.  That makes me think it was lifted from the box rather than fell into the engine bay.

Fucking thieves who claim to be buddies.  GRRRRRR

I Don't Need To GET One

An anonymous commenter, remember we don't allow that here, suggested I get me a Glock 21 and convert it to 10mm.

The short answer is: I don't wanna.

If I'm going to have a 10mm gun, I want a complete one and not a pile of parts I need to swap back and forth.  It's the same reason I don't have a .22 conversion for the AR's or 1911's.

An additional wrinkle is my Glock is from the very first batch made.  Not sure of the parts compatibility with the, more common 3rd gen guns.

Pay Attention

Hit Bass Pro for some 9x19mm.

200 round box: $64.99.

100 round box:$29.99.

50 round box: $15.99.

That's $0.32495, $0.2999 and $0.3198 per round respectively.

You just have to think to do the math while you're in the aisle.

Complete

At the overlap of Lego and D&D on the Venn diagram, we find...

Four named characters from Forgotten Realms, one monster and seven non-human PCs.

JT and I hit the Lego store in Brandon right at opening to make sure I could snag a complete set.

It's also Harry Potter day, so there was quite a line formed behind us when they unlocked the door.

Going to the Lego store and getting an unmolested case is the fastest, cheapest and best way to get all of them without duplicates.  Lego packs the case in groups of three, once you know the packing order, you can get them without scanning the QR code.

I do want to get two dupes.  I want another pseudo-dragon from the Tiefling and Harvey wants her own witch.