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In April, my "favorite" climate "scientist," Michael Mann, predicted 33.1 ± 5.8 named storms for the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season.
The total stands at 18.
We have just under six hours to get to the low end of 27.3 storms before hurricane season ends.
That's about a storm and a half per hour.
This prediction was roundly mocked by several of the local meteorologists too. They were saying 16-20.
Weathermen 1.
Climate scientists 0.
This is a, finely crafted, link that I guarangoddamtee to be good at the time of posting.
From the EPFUCKINGA.
Notice: "Starting as soon as January 1, 2025, restrictions will take effect on the use of higher-GWP HFCs in new 1) aerosols, 2) foams, and 3) refrigeration, air conditioning, and heat pump equipment."
The EPA is enforcing it as a hard deadline rather than a soft phase in.
On January 1st your air conditioner becomes obsolete.
Not by design.
Not because it doesn't work.
Not because a better system is supplanting it.
Because the government is mandating a change to a different refrigerant.
Again.
I am fascinated that with all the talk of democracy from some corners of politics they didn't even ask if I wanted the cost of a new system to triple.
They didn't even check to see if the average citizen could afford such a change.
I plan on writing my congress creatures about this passed-in-the-dead of night tree-hugger law.
Because we can still step back from the mandate, the companies are still allowed to make legacy components and refrigerants to get past existing warranties.
I don't think we will because the existing refrigerants are out of patent and the new stiff is still under one.
It's regulatory capture in the name of global warming.
Again.
Google is wonderfully inconsistent about how Blogger works.
BUT!
I remember us pledging to defend Ukraine back when we encouraged them to give up their nukes.
I also recall that everything was going OK when the corrupt leader of the Ukraine was a Russian mouthpiece.
It also seems to me that we got involved with Ukrainian politics and got that corrupt mouthpiece replaced with a different corrupt politician who was more beholden to the Delaware Crime Family.
That appears to have triggered Russia a great deal and has led them to test the waters by annexing Crimea, waiting to see if the world would do anything, then going for the rest of the place.
That they did it when the Delaware Crime Family was in office was shitty timing for Russia.
No corrupt leader beholden to them in office, no carefully laundered foreign aid gets filtered back to "The Big Guy."
I think that is the crux of the matter.
Nothing I've read makes me think I want either side to win; but rather that it'd be best if they both, as nations, lost.
It'd really be best if it'd never started and all the innocent people caught up in it were spared.
But the innocent never do seem to avoid it, do they?
When noticing that the average hit from a middling trained gunner only got 14 hits instead of the expected 28 when firing an M494 105mm APERS-T round at 50 yards with muzzle effect selected...
I have to also remember that the 3d cut per flechette will average 10 points raw damage each that becomes 15 once its through their uniform and that is 210 total points of damage.
The average 10 HP human is automatically dead after taking 60 total points of damage and cannot be resurrected past 110.
He's not less dead because he only took half the expected number of hits.
Prolly got a couple of his buddies too.
If you were to observe my sister and my father, you would get the impression that she's the only child of his second marriage.
I don't exist to them.
My aunt has made mention of it several times.
It upsets her a lot more than me.
Someone doctored this picture of Willard:
Into something from the SM Sterling Draka novels (Probably "Under the Yoke):
That's interesting!
The M494 is a fletchette round that bursts like a shrapnel round making a cone of death.
A person's silhouette is approximately a square yard.
At 50 yards, with it set for muzzle effect, the cone of fletchettes has expanded to a circle of about 176.7 square yards.
So one would expect that person to absorb 1/177th of the 5,000 little bees.
That's around 28 fletchettes.
Many fewer than I expected!
Skill 11, 3-seconds of aiming.
That's a -8 to hit for range.
+11 for number of projectiles, +5 for Acc, +1 for Braced, +3 for the targeting computer.
23 or less to hit.
Average roll of 10 means that 14 hit. Critical hit of 3 just gets 21.
About half of what you'd expect with the average roll. 75% with a critical hit.
GURPS doesn't simulate large numbers of projectiles well.
It's the gut buster holiday, though we eat more on Christmas here.
The last three years we've pawned the cooking off on Bob Evans, and saved a little money and a LOT of time.
I'm thankful for the little stuff because the big stuff is, presently, handled.
Sadly. There is no hockey.
Also: So far I have not checked the mail box. At some point I will forget, I am sure.
Flechette rounds keep coming up in science fiction stuff, but they're an ammunition technology that keeps failing to live up to the hype. At least in small arms.
Shortly after the introduction of the M79 grenade launcher, a round firing 45 of these teeny darts was fielded.
Notice the lack of even an XM number.
They didn't stabilize and would often hit sideways. Their light weight meant that they barely raised a welt, let alone hurt anyone.
If they did land point first, they rarely did any substantial damage.
GURPS gives them 1d-3 pi-. So whatever small amount penetrates gets halved!
The average hit will do a mere 0.25 points (min 1). So you're going to need lots of hits for it to matter.
45 projectiles means you get a +6 to hit.
Using the same Skill 11 grenadier from last time...
At 20 yards they have a 11 to hit so, average 2 fletchettes scoring. For 2 points of damage.
At 7 yards they tend to get 5 hits. 5 points of damage.
Not quite as good as a M576 buckshot round.
The history of beer!
I'll drink to that!
Beer is civilization and a polity that claims to be a civilization without beer is savages aping the forms of civilization.
In the discussion about tariffs and Mexico, I am only seeing remittances being talked about in the comments sections.
Taxing remittances at some insane amount, like 90%, removes a gigantic incentive for illegal aliens to be here in the first place.
It's also around $65 billion a year removed from the US economy and injected into Mexico's.
Mexico stands to lose far more than we will in a protracted trade war; especially if we figure out that despite the price of goods here going up from the tariffs, so do wages and wages earned here get spent here and that spreads out to other parts of the economy.
The current system of cartelization does get cheap goods, at the cost of domestic jobs and stagnant wages. Goods NEED to get cheaper in this paradigm because wages are, defacto, falling as inflation eats them before they're even earned.
If were to two-prong our attack on fixing the economy we'd talk about how the NLRB is unconstitutional too. Breaking the unions would go a long way towards making manufacturing affordable again.
Mr Musk might not be the paragon of liberty many people are making him out to be.
Being a car guy, I noticed another side of him with Tesla.
If you buy the top of the line super duper Tesla, get bored with it and sell it to someone else; Tesla will audit the sale and decide if the next owner paid enough for all the features and if they decide they didn't: They disable the features.
That's at least adjacent to "you will own nothing and like it" territory.
I have a hearty mistrust of places that rent you something under color of selling.
HA! Thag know some basic HTML and I can trick it into showing me the picture without using their interface!
Take that Google!
#4 Buck does 1d-1(0.5) pi- and gives 27 pellets in 12ga 2-3/4" 00 Buck does 1d pi and you get 9 pellets. For the record, a .22LR from a pistol does 1d+1 pi-
Coincidentally, the M576 multi-purpose round for the 40mm grenade
launcher also uses #4 buck, but just 20 pellets. 40x46mm is a much
larger round than 12ga 2-3/4"!
The #4 gets a +5 to hit from one shot and +6 for two; 00 gets +2 for one shot and +4 for two due to the number of pellets flying.
More hits could mean more damage despite the halving of the damage after penetration. For a single shot the same roll means 3 more pellets hit.
Range is kinda pathetic, so let's keep it to 20 yards, -6 to hit.
A skill 11 shooter will have a 7 chance to hit with a single round and 9 with the RoF of 2 of a pump shotgun shooting 00 buck. On average, they're gonna miss with both.
The same shooter will have a 10 with a single round and 11 with two. On average, they'll get one pellet to hit with one round and two with two.
Our grenadier gets a +4 to hit with his single M576 round and will likely be missing...
Hits do more damage than misses regardless. (1 point or 3 points is more than zero).
If we let the enemy get much closer, like say, 7 yards... it's only -3 to hit.
That means rolls to hit of 10 and 12 for the 00 and the average roll will now land 1 or 3 hits.
#4 needs 13 and 14 to hit and will land 4 and 5 hits respectively.
40mm needs 12 so the average roll lands 3 hits.
00 buck will do (on average) 3.5 hits per round; so 3 or 10.
#4 buck will do (on average) 1.5 hits per round; so 6 or 7.
40mm does the same average damage so 4 points of damage from its three hits.
At longer ranges #4 is going to work better because you're going to be hitting more.
For some reason I can insert this picture of The Beast with my laptop and Ubuntu, but not my desktop and Win7.
Odd.
Two weeks ago, the opposite was true.
Update: Now that I have inserted this pic with the laptop, it will recognize it and let me insert it again from the desktop. This appears to be true of any photo that has already been linked.
Nice VW Type 3 wagon cruised past while I had my camera out taking pics of The Beast.
Big brakes and multi-piston calipers often come with copious amounts of brake dust.
Big brakes also mean you can't really reach between the spokes to get the inside of the rim clean.
But boy howdy do they look AWESOME when you clean them up.
That means taking the wheel off.
I decided that was too simple and rotated the tires too.
I should have taken a picture. Maybe I will later and edit this post.
Figured out how to make the bar at the top of the blog to remember I was logged in.
Gotta make an exception for the enhanced tracking.
That's Mist and Shadow pausing just before play resumes.
I read this article and am immediately struck with a possible cause.
Almost all of the recalled foods are in sectors where the food is handled extensively by human hands and those hands are attached to "migrant" workers.
Also known as illegal aliens.
Hygiene is not the same with those south of the border as it is with us.
Can't even suggest that cleanliness standards aren't even being given lip service because the workers aren't from around here.
E-coli in lettuce? Can't be from the workers shitting in the fields!
E-coli in hamburger? Can't be from workers not washing their hands!
Can't suggest that the owners and operators of the places with the problem are complicit in the crime of illegally entering the country.
It makes one wonder why we have an FDA if they don't randomly and frequently inspect the places making our food.
Did they spend their entire budget on DEI and LGBT outreach?
Ever since I read "The Caine Mutiny" I've been off and on obsessed with the US 1,000 ton/4-piper/flush-deck destroyers.
Those are Caldwell, Clemson and Wickes classes.
I used to watch a lot of World of Warship videos and noticed that destroyers and torpedoes could be devastating.
In the game, the tubes reload and you can try over and over.
In the real world, even if you had spares in the hold, there's no means to reload them.
So a flush-deck gets 12 torpedo shots then it's a gunboat.
Then it needs to get to a dock or a destroyer tender to get reloaded.
This might not be true of every destroyer class, but it's common.
Honestly, it surprised me.
2024 sees the departure of the guys from Top Gear/Grand Tour and the demise of Roadkill.
It's a sad time to be a car guy.
I want my right to open carry back.
I am also unlikely to exercise that right.
There's lots of good reasons to keep it concealed and many reasons to not advertise that you're toting.
Those reasons are not the point.
I am being denied a right.
That alone would be enough, but the people who are politically powerful and denying my that right are dishonest about it.
The consistently fail to compellingly communicate why I shouldn't be able exercise my right.
They very rarely cite the reasons I alluded to above.
I reject, out of hand, "officer safety." That bat has been used to beat me too many times.
Very often the spokesweasels for the police and their professional organizations bring forth the hoary old, "It will make our jobs harder."
So?
I think it's within a citizens rights to demand that their civil servants life be made more difficult. Did you ever think of that, Sheriff? That we WANT you to work harder for the vast sums of money that your agency consumes?
But does it really make their jobs harder?
I guess it would. If open carry is legal, then they can't just arrest everyone without the Seal of the King* on their chest they see with a weapon.
Ever notice, while they are not citing the solid reasons to not open carry I allude to near the top of this rant, cops, deputies, chiefs, sheriffs, police unions and law enforcement organizations and lobbies never advocate for LEOs to stop open carrying?
Wearing of arms, historically, is a badge of rank. A divider between the nobility and the commoner.
Well, Sheriff, there ain't no nobility in a Republic; or rather we're ALL noble because we're all sovereign.**
This is all about political power and elitism. If I can openly carry, then they aren't special. They are not elevated above me.
The truth of the matter is they are beneath me. They're supposed to be working for us not telling us what we can and cannot do.
*Badge
**Not to be confused with the Sovereign Citizen Movement
I have two votes for making some progress with the Traveller Interstellar Wars campaign we started, harrumph years ago.
JT is in.
FuzzyGeff is in.
Gotta get Marv roped in. He's not a serious gamer, but he's been entertained so far with other adventures.
If I run out of material, I want them to make characters for Funny New Guys, which is set in Merlin/Technomancer's Vietnam war.
A military campaign with magic!
The time to overhead did matter once in a GURPS game.
I recreated the movie "Tears of the Sun" and set it in the more appropriate time, during the Nigerian Civil War when Biafra tried to secede. February 1968 to be precise so I could have USS Oriskany be the jumping off point.
The players would be a SEAL team catching a ride home on Oriskany. Why didn't they fly home? One of the team had angered an admiral so the ride on a carrier was punitive.
So we have our carrier and SEAL team in position to rescue the missionary, just like the movie and...
It went really well! I even wrote a properly formatted opord!
Better than the movie, in fact, because the captain of the carrier actually understood his orders to support the teams and the players remembered they had radios and called in air support at an appropriate time.
In my notes I have:
Expected air support is mostly withdrawn after VF-111 Crusaders engage and shoot down a Nigerian MiG-17. RA-3B provides intel that pursuing force did not stop for the night on day two.
Emergency CAS: F-8Es can be on station for CAS ten minutes after being called, they can only loiter for about five minutes. A-4Es can be on station in twenty minutes after being called and can loiter for half an hour. A-1Hs can be on station forty minutes after being called and can loiter for an hour and a half! Party leader will be made aware of this and must make the call. Political situation prevents attacking pursuit before 10km of Cameroon border OR 1km of party whichever comes first.
Party could force the situation by calling for CAS and laying an ambush. Waiting for the bad guys to break the 1km boundary makes the support legal...
So the party, seeing the bad guys were catching up, made the call when they were about 15 minutes from crossing the 10km line AND ambushed the pursuit just about the same time the Skyhawks were overhead. They told Dr Kendricks and Ibo refugees to keep going when they stopped to set up the ambush.
Better than the Hollywood version, I thought!
I watched this so you don't have to.
He shows you the "reverse Hi-Power" method of taking a 1911 apart, but never once explains why you should deviate from the Holy text of John Moses Browning (PBUH).
The proper, or GI, method of taking one apart relieves the recoil spring so you're not fighting it all the time.
The why, that he never mentions, is belled muzzles and extra tight barrel bushings. He thinks he explained it by showing how tight his was, but he didn't explain.
In my mind fighting the spring once is the way to go and moving the slide slightly to the rear to disengage the bushing and barrel from their fitted positions and then rotating the bushing is better.
Wait until you lock up the barrel link in the dust cover trying to put it back together his way and you'll see what I mean. Assuming you could get the gun back apart to try again.
When I was researching a couple of military campaigns for use in GURPS I was struck by how long it would take to get fire or air support.
Minutes.
In a game that is famous for resolving combat in seconds.
I think that says a lot that, in the real world, that real troops in contact were able to fight for five to twenty minutes waiting for support to arrive. Sometimes even more minutes while the aviators got themselves aligned with the situation.
I think I know how to make it work, but it will impact the player's expectations about modern combat.
I bumped into it before when trying to explain that the 3e rules let far too many hits happen unless you tossed in some of the, unpopular, optional rules.
They'd become accustomed to the world acting like a shooting range and the bad-guys being the paper targets.
Extending the ranges that contact begins at would go a long ways towards making the entire battle last longer in game time rather than table time.
I see running it in combat turns in small spurts to simulate the pulse of the battle.
I don't see a chance to test my idea any time soon, but...
My tank of deal with it energy is a bit low.
I have my choice of three events that friends have invited me to and it means choosing between friends and...
I'm feeling all or nothing about it.
First event will be, essentially, hanging out by myself because those friends are super social and will be flitting around like butterflies chatting with everyone else the whole time because this socialization shit is easy for them.
Second event is a bit of a haul and although I've been invited, I'm an outsider to this group now. I put myself there, and it's been difficult to summon the energy to get back inside.
Third is a celebration of a business friends put back together after a partnership exploded. It's got much the same trouble as the first event for me.
Normally things don't line up like this and two of the friend groups attend the same event and that means not either being alone or feeling like I'm intruding.
And I can never quite shake the feeling that I'm intruding and unwelcome.
That follows naturally from watching group after group continuing on as if I'd never existed when I depart.
You want to really feel like you don't matter? Check up on a social group you left behind and see if they were more than mildly affected.
Better not. You may discover that they were relieved and happy you finally stopped showing up.
At least I know I did one thing good for them.
The Florida Sheriff's Association owns the Florida Senate.
They don't like us unwashed citizens carrying guns, and therefore nothing ever comes to a vote.
The sheriff to the south says, "[I am a] staunch opponent of open carry. We don’t need open carry in Florida."
Yet he and his deputies open carry.
It's not open carry he opposes, it's US doing it.
Fuck you Bob.
Also, The Florida Sheriff's Association claims 73,566 members against 22,537,160 citizens.
0.327% of the population is dictating what the other 99.673% gets to do.
That smacks me wrong.
Our new senate president, Ben Albritton, says, "“Let me be clear about this: I’ve supported law enforcement my entire life. It’s the way I was raised. And I’ve been super consistent as a legislator to support law enforcement in Florida, and I encourage you to check that record. And I stand with them today in opposition. They oppose it. And I trust my law enforcement officials. And that’s where I stand.”
Fuck the voters as long as the Kings Men are happy.
I'm getting sick of this state of affairs.
I love how the internet keeps expanding our knowledge of obscure firearms.
Part One:
Part Two:
Because I actually hit the FCC "report this caller" web page, a while ago I got a letter and an email from a law firm suing a robocaller.
I gave my assent to join the class by checking the box and returning their self-addressed stamped envelope.
Then I promptly forgot about it after joking about where I'd spend the whole dollar I'd get from the, estimated, $100 per member.
Today I got a check for just over $50.
This breaks the record for class settlements for me. The previous record holder was Remington and the $20 I got because of something about 870 shotgun barrels. I got that check because excluding myself from the class was not an insignificant effort. I spent it on a hat from Remington that I have since lost.
The people I was exchanging emails with from Operation Blazing Sword have gone silent.
This has happened before.
I sometimes suspect that once they learn that I am not actually gay they decide they'd rather not learn about guns.
I've fired off a, "hey, you still interested?" message. If I don't get a reply...
Have you seen the new Jaguar ad?
Here it is:
Krusty says it best:
All I can think is, "Do you still sell cars?"
It just occurred to me that if SJGames isn't going to do more GURPS and Steve is someone I don't want to have any of my filthy, deplorable, garbage lucre:
My rules interpretations and house rules are now the official rules.
I'm the only person I am in contact with who games who even tries to do GURPS anymore.
Pathfinder is what the group who discovered they were happy to be rid of me is playing now.
So if they were to allow me to come back in some form, they'd be playing my interpretation of GURPS because I'd be the GM and my word would be law.
All things considered, I am not even certain that GURPS would be better than Pathfinder for traditional fantasy settings.
I trend to non-traditional stuff, so...
Hell, from what I've read of the newer versions of AD&D, I'd pick 2nd edition. It's stripped down AD&D and if I'm going simple, I'm gonna go all the way.
SJGames, in the process of abandoning GURPS resurrected The Fantasy Trip. If they wanted my filthy, deplorable, garbage lucre it's just $35 to get the rules in pdf form. I remember playing Melee back in the day. Pity.
I went looking for GURPS 5e rumors and encountered several links to this from just before election day.
Steve.
Remember when you got raided by the Secret Service? I recall you being displeased by that.
What you are advocating for is a more powerful Secret Service and a weaker court to extricate you from your alleged criminal activities.
Yes you are.
I'm posting his tirade below in case he decides to memory hole it:
I keep goofing around with GURPS shit and I never get to play.
If I am very lucky, I get one or two sessions when FuzzyGeff makes his annual pilgrimage to Florida to visit Marv and I.
I loved tabletop role playing games once.
It was my main social activity at one time.
Now?
I do some reality checks and make characters that will never be played.
I polish the cannonball of converting Twilight: 2000 to GURPS 4e.
And...?
It's a little depressing.
Especially when I learn how woke and TDS the people who make and sell the games I still love are.
According to the Tech Level and Starting Wealth timeline in GURPS: Basic Set (Characters) 4e on p.27 in 2004:
TL9 begins in 2025.
That moves us from the digital age to the microtech age.
I'm not seeing it.
Back in 1996 and 3eR TL7 (modern) ran from 1951 to 2000 and TL 8 (Spacefaring) ran from 2001 to 2050.
I've heard rumors that GURPS 5e is under consideration. It might even find a footing with Wizards of the Coast being so entirely too woke now.
SJGames is pretty woke too, so... Steve's post about Roe v Wade made me stop looking to see what's new at SJGames. I expressed my concerns back then too. Might not be a viable alternative.
Especially since 5th editions are often massive clusterfucks. Both Hero and Traveller have massive tomes of dross masquerading as their 5th editions.
In Traveller's case, so much so that Mongoose made what is effectively a LBB 2e that's far better than the game that Marc W Miller published.
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| I'm not a prisoner, I'm a free cat! |
Mist had her follow-up appointment today.
Her ear infection is all better!
It's confirmed that she's deaf. The vet says that this will not bother her much as she's already very visual to compensate.
Her cocked head and slightly wobbly gait are likely from an illness her mother was carrying while she was in the womb. Again, this shouldn't bother her much and she will adapt.
We can spend a shit-ton of money to find out exactly why she's got that cocked head, but it won't cure it so we're opting to skip it.
Nothing about being deaf or having this mild neuro problem really affects how happy and full her life will be.
Just to prove that point, she spent the entire day chasing, first, Shadow and, then, Beeper.
There was much scampering and everyone involved seemed to be having fun.
If only Beeper and Shadow could interact so. They still hate each other for no apparent reason.
Australia has alps.
I learned this because a trivia list about Australia mentioned that the Australian Alps get more snow than the Swiss Alps.
The image that we get of Australia here in the USA is not a place that has green growing things or snow.
I blame Hollyweird.
Technology does not advance evenly.
For example: Afghanistan lacks almost all of the infrastructure we take for granted in the US and their manufacturing base is, maybe, GURPS TL4. TL5 tops.
Yet TL8 electronics abound.
This made me rethink a lot of things in a Traveller campaign. The TL3 non-industrial agricultural world with a feudal government is going to have state of the art consumer goods because some free-trader is going stop off and trade a load of the stuff in exchange for whatever the they can get.
Free traders are experts at arbitrage.
A non-industrial agricultural world might (almost certainly) have the wealth to purchase modern farming equipment even if they cannot be manufactured or serviced with local know-how. The Imperial equivalent to Allis-Chalmers will also send teams of people to do that service post-sale for a fee. It might even be appealing to these people to live in a pastoral, low pressure, low-tech environment between jobs. They won't really be giving up much in comforts, consumer stuff is widely available!
Compact, self-contained, fusion generators are going to be prime trade-goods.
I don't think there's a good real-world model for the kind of trade that operates on the fringes and free-traders serve.
It also hits me that someone from that TL3 world, as a citizen of the Imperium, has the right to enlist in the Imperial military. That heavily implies that the Imperial military has a remedial program that brings these volunteers up to speed on modern technology.
YouTube disagrees with GURPS.
It happens.
I've watched several videos where cloth and linen armor does better than expected.
There's a bit of an explanation in an optional rule... I'll get to that.
But one claim that comes up, over and over, is that the linothorax was lighter than a similar level of protection from bronze.
In GURPS a linothorax is either reinforced medium layered cloth, DR 3 with DR 4 vs cutting; G$437.50, 25 lb. or reinforced heavy layered cloth, DR 4 with DR 5 vs cutting; G$750, 35 lb.
DR 4 bronze is medium segmented plate for G$3,600, 24 lb. Very similar in protection and weight with the medium reinforced cloth!
DR 3 bronze light plate is G$4,000, 8 lb. No bonus against cutting, but MUCH lighter than reinforced medium cloth.
DR 6 bronze medium plate for G$10,000, 20 lb. Lighter and better protection than reinforced heavy cloth.
Linothorax is much CHEAPER than bronze armor and probably a lot more comfortable.
Now, that optional rule: On Low Tech p.102 under Blunt Trauma and Edged Weapons you need to get a hit that punches more than twice the DR to get the bonus from cutting weapons.
So reinforced medium cloth would need a hit of 9 or better to cause actual cutting damage. A hit of 5-8 is just crushing; it will also fail to reach the skin so no effects from poison and the like.
This optional rule helps explain why cloth armors are performing better in youtube tests than we expected.
DR 2 light layered cloth prevents a cut from up to 4 points of damage, even if the wearer took 2 points of crushing damage from it. The testing media almost never has a way to measure the impact under the armor and would rule that a no-penetration hit is complete protection.
A ST 12 person swinging a short-sword will do 1d+2 cutting damage and that averages 5 points of damage, so most of the time they're penetrating the light layered cloth and getting the cutting bonus and doing 4 points of damage. That same hit against reinforced medium cloth will just get one point of crushing damage through (and be ruled as didn't hurt on YouTube).
Silicon Graybeard pointed out that the goal isn't delegislation, but deregulation.
There's a lot of stuff going on that's black letter law and most of that is working for us, because we get to vote on the cocksuckers that pass law.
Regulation, on the other hand, is created and implemented by people we never get a voice in whether they are hired or fired.
Nuking nearly all the regulations and retaining the laws, in most cases, leaves us a best case scenario. In the places where it doesn't there's an opportunity for a congresscreature to make law to address the lack created by killing a good regulation. Odds are they'd have the backing of the populace.
Deregulation, also, has a much smaller and much slower effect on all the jobs that exist because you need specialists to navigate the minefield of regulation.
You can't make utopia because it cannot be made.
Impossible.
Socialists don't understand this while they also fail to account for human nature.
Libertarians don't understand this while they also fail to account for human nature.
They just head opposite directions in misunderstanding people and allow evils of similar stature.
It was L. Niel Smith's rants about anarchy that convinced me that the libertarians were off the reservation and never coming back. They were a stopped clock that used the fact that they were right twice a day to pitch that they were never wrong.
There was one group in America that had figured out human nature.
The Founding Fathers.
Ever notice they didn't do democracy? They did a republic.
They didn't seek unfettered liberty in what they'd done. They sought to maximize liberty, knowing that it needed some restriction to truly flourish. The tree of liberty needs to be pruned carefully, as it were.
Without such care, it kills itself.
This is why libertarians and globalists don't understand tariffs.
The lowest price is meaningless to a consumer who doesn't have a job.
International Socialism, Libertarianism, and Globalism all reject the nation-state model.
Yet the nation-state is the only proven model running. Yes, it's the worst way to do things; except for all the others. Just like republican government.
Deleting entire cabinet agencies might be a worthy goal, but...
You need Congress to play ball and the margins don't support that mandate.
Especially when you consider the reality of making thousands of normal citizens unemployed from their decidedly non-government jobs.
Those folks are going to be on the phone to their congress creatures.
Making government smaller is never as simple as it seems.
I, for one, am getting fed up with unintended consequences from do-gooders who don't really understand the problem.
Killing a government department might do good, but doing it all at once will produced a kick-back that guarantees that department will be back with gusto.
Never mind that doing it all at once would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Libertarians and globalists are really bad at people.
The TV aerial is up.
It's not, yet, connected to any TV.
The coax cable we'd intended to use turns out to be the feed for the Wi-Fi router.
So we need to run a second coax cable down to the living room TV, and we're hoping we can utilize the existing cable in the bedroom.
I've been thinking about the Tollense valley battle of late.
It really looks like a native TL0 area had some imported TL1 weapons, but that's not what stands out.
TL0 is stone age.
Cavemen.
American Indians.
My research into Neanderthals and the Sioux put some blinders on with regards to another aspect implicated in Tollense.
Culture.
It appears that the culture of the area was more similar to what would later be called Gauls.
More emphasis on agriculture and domesticated animals than the two stone-age cultures I've been dealing with.
In the real world, the tech level doesn't just change one night. Some things advance faster than others and wool is a TL0 fabric. Lacking domesticated sheep, the Sioux never developed wool clothing. Prehistoric Germany did.
It's really made me want to make a TL0+1 fantasy setting where the native TL is 0 but TL 1 equipment is available at double price.
We are embarking on putting up a broadcast television aerial.
Turns out there's lots still being transmitted over the air and the inlaws want to watch it.
They cut the cord and find they miss a couple of shows from the "local programming" section of cable.
Mist had a rough morning yesterday. After a night blasting out both ends, she looked like she'd slipped back to as bad as when we took her to the vet on the 7th. We cleaned a bunch of gunk out of her ears and have been making sure the ear drops are going in, rather than AT her ear canal.
It seems to have a had a positive effect and she flat REFUSED to be contained in the carrier for the evening. She might be deaf, but she can meow and howl. So she spent the night on a nest of blankets in one of the stools at the dining room table.
As you can see, she's still looking contented at being distributed to our door.
We have no footage of her and Shadow tearing around the house playing because they're moving too fast.
Beeper, on the other hand, has no idea what to do about an intruder that's not intimidated by her in the slightest. I think it scares her a little.
But she will allow herself to be consoled and chill between my legs on the recliner when I read.
Bear just hides in the linen closet. He's like The Dude. He abides.
There was an old BBC show called "Connections" and it was fascinating.
They'd tell you how two, seemingly, unrelated items or events led from one to another with lots of steps in between.
It really colored how I looked at technology and it's why I notice some things that some people don't or I question things that others don't examine.
Today's connection: Are the meson gun and nuke damper related?
Yes.
It's explicitly stated in GURPS: Traveller.
It isn't in LBB Traveller, but I'd speculated that they had to be related because the meson gun is keeping the mesons from decaying until they're at the desired distance; and that implies we're manipulating shit like a nuke damper does.
The Traveller nuclear damper works by weakening the strong nuclear force and causing the nuclei of the warhead to, kinda, fall apart at a molecular level.
It stops fission from the shed of neutrons, that prevents the chain reaction.
It stops fusion by keeping the two hydrogen nuclei from sticking together well enough to form a helium atom and that prevents the release of energy normally associated with it.
In a real world nuke, that'd keep it from working because all of our fusion weapons use a fission explosion to get the heat/pressure up far enough to force the fusion reaction.
In Traveller, many warheads dispense with the fission stage and use the insanely miraculous gravity manipulation technology to say to two H atoms, "now kiss!"
Under a damper, they bump into each other and...
Well the grav pinch is still happening, but where's the kaboom?
Since the grav pinch is designed to happen once and briefly, I speculate that you end up with a warhead with dead capacitors and burned out grav plates with a capsule of tritium in the center.
"On a long lonesome highway, East of Omaha," is in Iowa.
Probably Iowa Route 92.
Though, Bob Seger said it was in Dubuque, that's on US20.
Considering that the US government is designed for grid-lock, making it efficient is probably unconstitutional.
Something you can say about actual fascism is that it's efficient. Tyrannies do trend that way.
One of the warts of liberty is inefficiency in government, but letting the invisible hand loose to find what efficiency the people want for themselves.
I am holding my breath here.
The sharp eyed might notice that I changed the font at the top of the page and the post titles.
I'm whimsical that way.
Every time I make a font choice I am reminded of a couple of acquaintances who were VERY judgemental about fonts.
Papyrus and Comic Sans drove them absolutely insane for no reason that I could ever discern. But I think those people were hipsters and secretly wanted to use them, but they were popular and therefore beyond the pale.
Can't do anything that everyone else does... unless it's toe the liberal line in a college town.
Ever notice that about hipsters? They're joiners, but they're hypocrites about it.
Costco is recalling, and destroying, 79,000 pounds of butter because someone forgot to mention that butter might contain milk on the label.
MIGHT?
Bear in mind that the ingredients list says "cream," already.
This is why we're fucked.
The morons with food allergies can't fucking read and need to be told, special, that something made with something they're allergic to is something they're allergic to.
I say this as someone with a food allergy!
I'm allergic to mushrooms. I've made it MY job to find out what has mushrooms in it and avoid those things. I read the ingredients, I know the fungus byproduct names.
It's my ass on the line.
But for fuck's sake.
Butter is dairy. If you have a fucking milk allergy, you're allergic to dairy!
DON'T BUY BUTTER REGARDLESS OF THE SAFETY WARNING!!!
We need to restore some common fucking sense to food and cut off the FDA's nuts.
Crispy IV is the result of an older hard drive starting to fail.
For me, that brings not importing problems from the older machine by copy-pasting it and installing everything from base principles.
That means that years of accumulated gurfle are discarded and some things need recreated.
Today's struggle was fonts.
I use a couple that aren't normally included with Ubuntu and I needed to remember how I'd gotten them installed when I first installed 20.04.
I managed to figure it out, but I'm not certain I did it the same way with 24.04 as I did back then.
Who knows?
Next mission is to figure out how to get the keyboard shortcuts for things like "Ö". Again, I remember it being simple, but I also remember FuzzyGeff hand holding me through it.
I will concede that the United States stole all of the lands formerly owned by the American Indian...
If...
IF...
IF!
If the people accusing the US of the theft concede that it's a fait accompli and the US now owns the land by right of conquest.
That right of conquest, by the way, is why you acquire a big military and glare across your borders at the neighbors.
It's also why you take great pains to intertwine your economy with the neighbors so that conquering them is more harmful to your interests than helpful.
But, if you lose the war, you've LOST the war.
The losers don't get to dictate the terms.
Cheap melee weapons have been part of GURPS since the beginning.
They're 40% the price of the good quality default, but they're more likely to break...
I just watched a video talking about iron vs bronze weapons and remembered that bronze is treated as if it were cheap when used against iron or steel weapons.
The video didn't seem to think it made much difference for composition with iron vs bronze, so I looked up the GURPS rules.
B376 says you only check for breakage if you try to parry a weapon that's three times heavier than yours.
So a short sword against a short sword isn't going to show a difference when parrying, like his demo, but unlike the "demonstration" from the film. A short sword against a broadsword, on the other hand...
Weapon quality isn't even mentioned with regards to striking at and breaking
cheap weapons, at least that I could find readily.
I've offered to teach basic firearms skills to the LGBT crowd via Operation Blazing Sword since its inception.
My fifth and sixth pupils have made contact.
I have found that doing this has been divisive with some people, particularly since there's a faction of people where being communist agitators is their real motive and LGBT is a convenient cover to deflect criticism of their activities.
The, typical, idiots on the pro-gun side go for the bait and attack the LGBT shell and tend to neglect condemning the commie shit.
I have to admit, these groups are playing the pro-gun idiots brilliantly.
They're getting screenshots of them being intolerant bigots, when they really aren't... but they got pissed off and rose to the bait.
The internet is forever.
Saturday I brushed against greatness!
The comic shop in the strip mall where JT and I had lunch had a special guest!
I know! Me too!
Well, actually...
I recognized Cousin Oliver from The Brady Bunch on the sheet the barker was handing out, but none of the other roles he's played.
I looked into the antechamber they'd tucked him into, for better to control the traffic and to make sure we'd paid for the autograph session... But I did wave at him and said "hi!" He, likewise, waved back and said, "Hello."
That was all the handlers would let us do, but I get that he's appearing to make some extra money. It's cool.
A neat thing was a couple of teenagers came in while we were looking at comics and they were STOKED to meet him! He's done a lot of voice acting and he portrayed their absolute favorite character, judging by how excited they were. I'm guessing it's his role voicing Choji Akimichi in the Naruto series.
Great for him to still be relevant to new fans after 52 years of acting!
Mist has an ear infection.
Last Wednesday we noticed she was walking around like she was drunk. Literally falling down drunk looking.
We looked up a couple of causes and, of the three most likely, only an ear infection was life threatening.
The other two would be conditions she'd just have to live with for the rest of her life, but neither would shorten it nor really cause her any suffering beyond it being harder for her to get around.
So we took her to the vet and they diagnosed an ear infection.
She HATES the drops, but doesn't mind the liquid antibiotic we put on her food twice a day.
Two days into the course of her meds, she's got her balance back and is scampering all over the table. The floor is still lava to her, but she's playing with toys, exploring and chasing her tail vigorously. She still holds her head cocked to the side of the bad ear, but that might clear up as the infection clears.
She's steadily putting on weight too, up to 1 lb. 15 oz. now.
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She is a totally binary creature. She's either 100% up or 100% down...
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She's been having peaceful interactions with Shadow too.
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Notice the states which don't make you prove you're an eligible voter are also the bluest states?
h/t Marv for the screen pic.
But "armor of proof" isn't supposed to protect you from a musket.
It's to protect you from the opposing cavalry whom will be using pistols.
A pistol of this period is a wheellock doing 2d-1 pi+ or a petronel doing 2d+2 pi+. That's 6 and 9 respectively.
That's a much easier target goal to hit achieve.
More importantly, DR 6 is affordably available for the average adventurer and demi-lancer.
How many times did you look at Ben Shapiro and wonder who did such a bad job on his hair before you realized he's wearing a yarmulke?
Today, in the USA, it's Veteran's Day.
A day set aside for those who went in and came out.
It seems odd to have to say it, but today is not for the fallen in the USA; that's Memorial Day.
It isn't for those whom are still serving; that's Armed Forces Day.
If you know a vet, buy them a beer, take them out to dinner, get them laid.
Remind them of all the freebies available!
When you hit the places giving out freebies, be gracious and buy something that's got big margins (like a beer) because it wasn't so long ago that nobody but us and the post office remembered Veteran's Day at all.
Plus! Tip the wait staff like you'd paid for the meal, not on just the cost of the beer.
Also, let the stolen valor people go. This is the only validation they're getting in their pathetic lives, can you think of a harsher punishment than letting be what they are? Don't save them!When I tromped it to get around traffic that was going 5 under behind you, signaled then changed lanes in front of you...
YOU created the dangerous situation by stomping it from 5 under to faster than me as I was changing lanes.
You made you mad, not me.
When you blasted around me on the right then tried to take my front bumper off by snapping back into my lane you created a second dangerous situation.
You, also, almost wiped out and created a third dangerous situation when you didn't stop your lateral motion and put two wheels in the grass.
Interestingly, if you'd been going the fucking speed limit rather than leading a parade, I'd have not passed you. Heck, I wouldn't even have gotten back into your (our?) lane if I had not been overtaking someone going ten under in the right lane.
The American Legion has put out their list of places offering deals to Veterans tomorrow.
Please, if you take advantage of one of these deals, make a point to visit at least two more times when they aren't to show you appreciated it.
They don't have to do anything on Veteran's Day, be gracious in return.
Something you cannot get from SIG is a P320 Pro-Carry with a safety.
Turns out, it's something you can make, and Marv did so!
First you take the gun completely apart!
THEN you take it all apart!
Then you follow the instructions that you saw in the video and cut a kidney shaped hole in the frame of the pistol using the provided jigs and cutters.
This is what allows you to insert the safety into the gun and it's cleverly designed to compress the spring detent as you move it up into its final position.
Then you put the gun back together!
Now you cut slots in your grip to let the safety stick out the side of the gun.
You can just barely see the outline of where Wilson would have put an insert into the mold to keep the slot from being filled with plastic. It's even more prominent in an OE SIG grip.
Because the jig fits a bit loose on the Wilson grip, you start small and work your way out, doing lots of test fits.
Almost there...
Viola!
...And done!
It wasn't even me this time! This was a Marv project.
I think the people in charge of stealing Arizona for Harris are stuck in an error loop where they're trying to figure out how many fake votes they need to add to make Maricopa county's results miraculously give 44 electoral votes for Arizona instead of 11.
Journalism, Poly-Sci and Woman's and Minorities Studies majors don't typically do well with math, so they can't see that you cannot get there from here.
We engineering types are, generally, contemptuous of such innumeracy.
They're the product of the education system they wanted, so I don't offer any sympathy either.
Before The Election
After the Election
I think it's safe to say the pollsters were wrong, again.
The window in the side of the magazine wasn't silly enough!
Magpul has released the TMAG!
17.3 oz. loaded with 30-rounds of 5.56x45mm Winchester Match 69gr Matchking HPBT.
Unlike a conventional GenM3, it did not come with a dust cover. It will accept one, however.
The white spring loop lines up with numbers on the side of the magazine telling you how many rounds you have left.
Why would you need the spring loop to tell how many rounds are left in a clear magazine?
Because some of them will be hidden by the magazine well!
How it compares to a PMAG30 GenM3 window.
Same overall length. Same spring and follower. Same baseplate. Same 1.1 lb.; well, almost the same: TMAG is 17.3 oz, PMAG is 17.8 oz. Both round to 1.1 lb.
The PMAG has a rough texture and ribs for gripping.
The TMAG is smooth. It's a completely different tactile experience.
It's neat seeing how the spring and shot column work.
Update: This is my 16,000th published post! WOW. I'm chatty.
Crispy is my laptop.
Stage I was with Win7.
I've been running Ubuntu on it for a while.
Bionic Beaver lasted all of an hour while we discovered that its version of Thunderbird wasn't compatible with the configuration file from the one I had installed on Win7.
Focal Fossa (Stage II) ran for three years until I got fed up with the nagging to update to...
Jammy Jellyfish (Stage III) was running fine until something went wrong with the WD Green SSD I was using.
Today I replaced the hard drive with a WD Blue of the same capacity and am running...
Noble Numbat, aka Stage IV!
Running fine on a 2011 made Lenovo T420S.
About once a month, Blogger will, helpfully, mark one of my replies to a comment as spam.
Even more puzzling is the comments it so marks are usually about a month old.
I dunno why it's doing it, I've never marked any of my replies as spam.
Unless it's learning it from other bloggers marking my comments as spam...
That's harder to check. Especially since I tend to do a drive by in comment sections and never go back to see if anyone replied to me.
President-Elect Trump has made history as only the second president to have a split term.
I see we have a narrow margin in the Senate. Not filibuster proof by a long ways, but a lead.
Eyes crossed in the house races we get a majority there too.
Because it's easy to postulate two years of cleaning the swamp if both houses of Congress are red.
I got it working and I wish I hadn't.
It's like watching the decline at Little Green Footballs. Remember them?
Misha's gone.
One of the county commissioners is running unopposed.
She was responsible for the irresponsible wave of construction without supporting infrastructure; like enough road to get all those people to and from their new residences.
So I wrote in Bill Gerber.
Yes, I know he's dead, but he's still more qualified for the position than Kathryn Starkey.
Yes, I know he was never a resident of Pasco County. That's not always a problem for our commissioners... Yeah, I know.
So, Gerber for Pasco County Commission!
They're very expensive, but I love the idea.
I stole the video from their site, I hope they don't mind.
Lots of choices there, check it out.
I do believe I outlasted Emperor Misha at The Anti-Idiotarian Rottweiler.
The main site is dead and an alt site stopped updating in February. It appears that Misha himself just quit caring and the people keeping it going for him couldn't get him to stir to get the access to make critical updates to the site.
Bummer.
It used to be a daily read.
UPDATE:
Because others can reach the site, and I was getting a solid ping return...
I tried to open it in a private window. Viola! It works again.
Odd that it don't in normal mode.
Donald Trump "targeted and minimized" Kolin Kaepernick.
I'm not even going to check to see if he did. He probably didn't because there's lots of things disconnected from reality in Kaepernick's mind.
If Trump didn't, he should have!
If there was ever a dancing sportsball monkey that deserves it more, I cannot think of one.
Did you know that Nazi is, period, derogatory, slang for NASDP?
Did you know that NASDP stands for Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei. That is German for National Socialist German Worker's Party.
Because if you didn't know those three facts, you can be convinced that the Nazis are right wing.
That lets a parallel be drawn between any right wing idea and the evils of Nazi Germany.
That is on purpose.
Something else that gets blurred is the parallels between fascism and communism. The break really is as simple as nationalism. Fascists are nationalists. Communists believe that the nation-state should be abolished and abandoned for international communism.
There are also strong parallels between labor unions and socialism.
History can be eye opening and terrifying.
One reason this ruse can be pulled is socialism is treated as a single political idea when it's really a family of them.
Communism and fascism are both socialist. The Nazis were socialists.
Those three branches of socialism have murdered how many people to date?
That alone should disqualify their teachings and ideas.
The idea that we should all look out for each other gives of warm fuzzy feelings.
The problem is the implementation always leads to starvation and murder.
Socialism is a utopian scheme; as such it's impossible to achieve.
If it was possible, it would have happened and been a shining beacon to the rest of the world to emulate.
Hint: Shining beacons don't need walls to keep people in. They need walls to keep people out.
Years ago I started converting the GURPS: Traveller character templates from 3e to 4e.
I stopped somewhere in the middle of First In and never got back to it.
Tonight I summoned enough motivation to open the file and see where I'd left off, but not enough motivation to remember where I was at in the last template I was working on.
Maybe tomorrow.
Florida to drown, women and minorities most affected.
I remember them talking about this back then.
FuzzyGeff and
I debated it extensively, usually sparked by discussing the grain blight of
the Car Wars universe.
I remember that they were saying that, if nothing was done immediately, then in 50 years Tallahassee would be ocean-front property and the entire Florida peninsula would be submerged.
Well, they didn't do anything immediately, and have hardly done anything since...
To get the effect they were talking about 42 years ago, we'd need some dramatic heating in the next couple of years and even the poles would be uninhabitable.
But that's not going to happen. I think that serious scientists are aware of it too.
But it's not a question of science. It's a matter of politics and rational thought has no place with politicians as long as irrational panic can get them votes and power.
PS: Notice it's Dan Rather? I rather think his credibility is shot these days.
PPS: Maybe Dan hadn't gotten the word from his predecessor, Uncle Walt:
I've often wondered why we target a certain percentage of inflation and think of it as normal and good.
The official goal is 2%, in case you're wondering.
The reason they are doing this is to prevent deflation.
Why is that? If you ask most people they'd be happy with lower prices on goods.
The answer is historical. The great depression had massive deflation as prices dropped to get any return on investment at all. Because prices were falling, people deferred purchases, lowering demand in the face of sufficient supply and caused prices to fall further... Until prices were well below costs and the company closed.
It's a vicious thing.
I am willing to bet that, if we looked into it, we'd find that people stopped buying goods they didn't NEED because they'd lost jobs and had reduced incomes from the recession that became the great depression. Deflation USED to be how the economy righted itself in the face of recession. For some reason (cough cough cough FDR) it failed that time. One reason was how easy it was to obtain credit (credit is another word for debt in case you're not up to speed here) and deflation kills you if you owe.
Inflation causes people to defer a purchase when their wages stubbornly refuse to keep up with inflation.
You might notice a lack of LS3 cam in The Beast? That's because we're buying groceries. The cam purchase is deferred.
Explain again why deflation is bad?
Worse, we can tell that they're lying about it because of how selective they get when calculating inflation. They don't count "volatile" goods like energy and food.
You know, the stuff that everyone HAS to buy and cannot readily be deferred.
Those goods are crushing us.
My, long held, theory is that inflation is good for people in debt. Economists LOVE debt.
If we take the official inflation rate against my house payment...
The $458.61 I've been paying on my mortgage every month was $458.61 when I started. You need $765.49 today to match the buying power of $458.61 then. Put the other way, our payment has fallen to the equivalent of $274.76 over the past 20 years.
Inflation is GREAT if you're in debt. My loan is getting cheaper the longer inflation goes on.
What entity is in the most debt in America today?
Personally I'm good with 0% inflation. I can afford what I have and knowing that it won't be getting more expensive to keep it on an unpredictable schedule would be GOOD for me, even with my meager debts.
Some deflation would also be good for me. Especially if wages hold firm.
I think I know who benefits from the Fed's scheme, and it's not The People.
How do I know that I am better than others?
Because when someone slings an insult at me because of my race, religion, sexual preference or gender I am expected to bear it.
I am held to a higher standard and I meet it.
I am better than they are by an objective standard that they established to show they were as good as I am... and they failed!
It's insane.
Mist makes progress in the form of us noticing she's doing something normal and us realizing that she hadn't been doing it before.
That's how close to death's door she might have been.
Like holding her head up.
Like having the energy to clean herself.
Like being able to balance well enough to do a good job cleaning herself.
Like a good, full-body, stretch.
Like moving from the last place we set her down.
The day by day improvement is remarkable and I'm remarking on it!
She's still too skinny for my tastes, but she's eating. She's also getting full and stopping. I think she's starting to realize that she's not living meal to meal anymore.
Who has four horses to do the quartering?
People who torture animals should be likewise treated.
The Lovely Harvey had her knee fixed today.
After her shoulder replacement a couple years ago all I can think is:
They can build her better than she was. They have the technology. They have the capability. Better than she was before. Better... stronger... faster.
The procedure was textbook and she's home with it propped up.
17 year old suspect in custody after another mass shooting in Orlando.
Gee, Rick Scott's gun control law keeping people under 21 from buying guns is sure working!
Never mind that you're not allowed to conceal carry until you're 21.
Never mind Orlando is most gun unfriendly locale in the whole state.
And, the suspect is exactly the demographic we've come to expect to be doing such things.
