Brickbuild vs Anti-Lego

An anti-Lego is a genuine Lego that cannot be used as anything but what it is.

There's a lot of them, mostly animals.

The tauntaun from The Empire Strikes Back is a good example of an animal that comes both ways.

The dewback might be a better example because they made two anti-Lego attempts.

I will concede that the first attempt is a repurposed elephant body with a new head.

The brickbuilds I call my ChibiLego Star Wars critters.  They've never made an anti-Lego bantha, but they do have a ChibiLego one.  They need to make an anti-Lego one.  They have a great model for one in one of the Lego video games.

Barf

Shadow barfed up a black shoelace.

That's better than it getting tangled in her guts.

Now that the relief has faded a little...

Where the fuck did a black shoelace come from?

None of the shoes with such laces are missing any.

Damn cat is miracleing stuff into existence to endanger herself.

Stealth Works

I would credit the Hamas leader being killed to Israel using the F-35I, but I can remember them using F-16's with impunity in Syria despite a heavy integrated air defense system.

Israel has good electronic warfare stuff.

Global Warming!

I have found clear evidence of global warming!

It is about 3°C warmer today than it was in 536AD.

How did that happen?

Wikipedia has an article on it.

In a nutshell, it was volcanoes.  Ash and clouds from the ejected gasses blocked sunlight and that had a major cooling effect.

I know we like to blame mankind for climate change and the weather, but...

PS: This is also a stellar example of how colder weather is far worse than warmer.  Warmer, in general means more agriculture and bigger yields and less famine.  Famine marches hand in hand with the cold.

Life Is Just A Fantasy

I came up with a solid one-shot fantasy scenario the last time I was in Iowa.

One of the player's utter inability to get past a simple security measure at the city gates derailed the entire thing, so it never got played to completion.

That means I can still use it!

When FuzzyGeff next visits, I could dump him into it again with JT and Marv!

I've had fantasy on the mind lately with the new edition of AD&D coming out and the many gamer youtubers talking about it.

Not that I'm getting a new version of AD&D to play a fantasy setting.

I'm invested in GURPS and I'll stick with it.

Something I really like to do, if I had time and sufficient players, is to run the full ATDGQ series of modules from AD&D with GURPS.

They'd start at T1 - The Village of Hommlet with 150 point characters and we'd go from there and see if they survive to Q1 - Queen of the Demonweb Pits.

The whole series is;

T1 - The Village of Hommlet

T2 - Nulb and the Ruins

T3 - Dungeons of Elemental Evil

T4 - Nodes of Elemental Evil

A0 - Danger at Darkshelf Quarry

A1 - Slave Pits of the Undercity

A2 - Secret of the Slavers' Stockade

A3 - Assault on the Aerie of the Slave Lords

A4 - In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords

G1 - Steading of the Hill Giant Chief

G2 - The Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl

G3 - Hall of the Fire Giant King

D1 - Descent Into the Depths of the Earth

D2 - Shrine of the Kuo-Toa

D3 - Vault of the Drow

Q1 - Queen of the Demonweb Pits

UPDATE: Order fixed based on Wikipedia information that I looked up because Beans caught them out of order.

Since GURPS is capable of handling all the standard Fantasy tropes, I'd only have to make a couple of monsters and, maybe, translate a spell or three.  Simple.

Simpler than converting Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.  WFRP doesn't really need translating.  It just needs stats for some monsters and let the rules changes be changed and don't chase parity of effect with them.  Remember, you're changing rule systems for a reason!

Did You Know

I've been comparing what I can easily get from a Duck-Duck-Go search between the AIM-54C and the AIM-174B.

The AIM-174B is bigger and heavier than a Phoenix.

Millenium 7* History Tech has a speculative analysis of the newer missile giving it an ultimate max range of 364 miles.  That's more than triple the old Phoenix.

Color me impressed.

1854

S&W is entering the lever gun market.

Sure looks like a Marlin from here.

None of the articles I've seen, so far, talk about how the action works, so I'm going with, "looks like a Marlin, works like a Marlin," until proven otherwise.

Copying a Marlin is not a bad plan.  They're good guns.

Not Really How To

I've watched several "how-to" videos that skip steps.

Important steps.

Steps that I clicked on the video to learn how to do.

Dammit.

Good thing I'm mechanically inclined.

Overthinking It

I remounted the front speakers in The Beast.

Previously I'd mounted the spacer directly to the sheet metal of the door.

Today I mounted the spacer to the plastic basket the old speakers were mounted to.

The overthinking reason was the gaping hole in the plastic moisture barrier.in front of the speaker.  A hole that is nicely plugged by the basket.

I would probably have done this from the get go, but a lack of 1-1/2" long #10 sheet metal screws prevented it.  A trip to Lowe's solved the lack of screws.

An unexpected benefit of using the baskets is they change the aim of the speaker just a little bit and I can actually hear the slight difference.

The rear speaker holes are sealed by the spacers, so I might not go back in and put the baskets there.  Or I might.  Depends on how ambitious I get.  It's simple now that I have the right length screws.

So Very Brave

Looking at all the LGBTQ+ alterations of Christian themes in the 2024 Summer Olympic games and all I can think is, "Yes, yes, you're so very brave.  Now do Islam."

I fucking dare you, you fucking cowards.

But you know who will put up with your shit, and it's not Islam, is it?

Twice

I just replaced Moxie's left front brake hose.

Last year I did the right front.

I've never had a car that had more than one brake hose pull the "I'm a check valve!" trick before.

Moxie has done it with both fronts now.

Happily, all the things I need to reach are right there and accessible.  It took, maybe, an hour.

I wanted to get the brakes good and hot to make sure the dragging was the line and not the caliper; so, of course, I cannot hit a red light to save my life on a road that's normally stop and go 24/7.

So I just extended the drive until I knew it was hot.

All appears to be better!

Our Democracy

To be technical, the USA is not a democracy.  It's a representative republic with a democratic form of elections.

But "our democracy" isn't referring to democracy; it's referring to "we're not getting our way anymore!"

"This decision today has continued the court’s attack in recent years on a wide range of long-established legal principles in our nation, from gutting voting rights and civil rights to taking away a woman’s right to choose, to today’s decision that undermines the rule of law of this nation," Biden said.

Long standing?  Roe v Wade happened when I was five.

I've yet to hear a conservative advocate for preventing someone from voting.  Gutting voting rights appears to be code for preventing fraud.

Undermining the rule of law because they said Trump had immunity for official acts?  You'd better hope that's true, Joe, because I think you're going to come to count on it in a few months.

But let's go back to "long standing".  Bruen is informing us that we have to go a lot further than living memory to establish long standing.

Much of what is dear to a Democrat only dates to FDR, and the Supreme Court was poised to nuke nearly all of it back then, when they caved to the threat of packing the court.

Unconstitutional laws are unconstitutional from the moment they are enacted and do not become more constitutional with the passage of time.  The present court is simply undoing the injustice long standing.

Being forced to abide by the limits of the Constitution is something both sides are terrified of.

It's something I eagerly wish to see tried.

Reconsidering

I used to think that one should never attribute to malice that which is explained by stupidity.

I am coming to think that anything which is sufficiently explained by malice needn't be examined for stupidity.

It hardly matters which causes things, but you're better prepared to deal with it if you act like it was malicious rather than stupid.

Bluetooth

The Beast's radio has Bluetooth.

That means I can stream tunes from my phone!

I did so for the first time tonight with the new speakers.  The first time with MY music instead of whatever was on the radio.

Yes.  The new speakers are a big improvement.

I also did a full volume check.  As expected, the radio cannot overpower the speakers.  It's plenty loud.

Don't Vote The Election Is Just Going To Be Stolen Anyway

While this has been put forward as a reason for Republicans to stay home, I disagree.

The Party has things covered, Comrade.

No need to face the weather and vote for Kamala yourself.

Stay home.

Stay warm.

Everything is fine.

That's Gotta Be A Record

I've been reading Joel Rosenberg's "Guardians of the Flame" series since it first came out in 1983.

I'd missed "The Road Home" (1995) when it was published and have only purchased and read it recently.

However, I did purchase the next book, "Not Exactly the Three Musketeers," in 2000 when it hit the shelves in paperback.

I just finished reading it for the first time last night.

It took me almost 30 years to get around to reading the last book in the series with the original cast and I owned the next book in the setting for almost 25 years before reading it!

Wow.  Just wow.

GM Never Stop Being You

 

These four speakers are identical.

Holden assigned each one a different part number based on where it will be mounted in the car.

Is it any wonder they went bankrupt?

Of note: the paper speakers from GM are 4Ω, 20w.  That's probably peak wattage too.  They were replaced by 4Ω, 540w peak, 180w RMS.

Holden did not brag about the power of their stereo in their sales literature.

So You've Woken Up Undead

In the GURPS: Technomancer setting, being a lich or vampire means you're legally dead.

You don't have niceties like rights.

I don't have a lot of sympathy for a lich, you can't accidentally become one of those.  It's a choice and it comes with doing some nasty things to remain unalive.

But vampirism is a contagious disease.  A vampire could be the victim.

Legally, a murder victim.  "The victim testifies that..."

And once you've fully cooperated with the prosecution to convict destroy the vampire who created you; you get destroyed as well.

That led to some mind games.

If you wake up a vampire, you don't want to die (again?).  But you're not a bad person.

Can you run a moral vampire?

There's no dodging the human blood thing in this setting.  You need to get your sustenance from a sentient host.

There's nothing that says you need to drain someone completely.

But the contagion is carried by the vampire's saliva.  So to keep from infecting your supplier, you'd need to extract the blood mechanically.  It's not defined in the rules or the setting if this is OK.  The GM would have to decide how the Uncontrollable Appetite works.  The vampire might have to take the blood directly for it to sate them.

That'd make it nearly impossible to a moral vampire, because every meal leads to the chance of "birthing" another vampire.

But the survival instinct is strong...

Let There Be Tunes

Old, paper, speakers out:

New, polypropylene cone material and nitrile butadiene rubber surrounds with a silk tweeter, speakers in!

Loaded up The Lovely Harvey and The Boy for a test drive and they report a big difference in the sound.

"Coooool!" quote The Boy.

I think the adding a speaker to the center channel makes the most difference.

They're Democrats They Will Find A Way

FEC is looking hard at the $96 million the Biden campaign has on hand and if it can be moved over to Harris.

First glance says, "no," but we're talking about Democrats.

First glance says that just $2,000 can be moved directly to Harris' campaign and the remainder can be donated to the DNC, where it will be used just like it was hers.

That's Where You Get The Bad Guys For Your Story

This isn't just about bad guys.

A world where you can put your adult mind in a child's body is going to have a different kind of porn and kinks than our own.

If I was GM'ing, they'd be the creeper bad guys the players were trying to stop.

Let them decide if they're doing it for moral or legal reasons.

The Duncanites in Transhuman Space, particularly the Red faction would be where you'd go to participate or purchase such pornography and it's the obvious destination for someone looking to put a stop to it.

The sky is the limit on what kind of bot or bioroid you put a mind into.  Some places don't recognize you as a person anymore and there are varying degrees of rights a person who's moved their ghost has.

Furries are going to be actual furry creatures, not just suits.

But what's "fun" about talking about some of this technology are people who've already made a decision about their personal morality as if it was current rather than speculative tech.

Traveller, in the Interstellar Wars era, already has the medical technology for full, down to the genetic level, sex changes.  Gender dysphoria as a medical/psychological condition is fully treatable with a cure!  Multiple cures, actually.  The sex change makes the body match what the mind sees.  There's also stuff to make the mind see their body as it is.

There's folks who've made up their mind that one solution or the other is wrong and anyone seeking the wrong cure should be punished somehow.

In the game too.

Oh Ick

Something that occurs to me when I'm reading any of several science fiction settings, but in particular Ghost in the Shell and Transhuman Space, is the opportunity to change bodies.

There is no technological or physical limitation, most of the time, what form that new body takes.

Which makes me think there's going to be pedoroids.

A completely of-age ghost inside an undeniably child body.

There's some moral problems with this, of course, but does this society have enough of a problem with that to prohibit it?

There's some "libertarian" belter nations in Transhuman that would be fine with it.  After all, the person inside the toddler body is a fully informed adult.

And some of these artificial bodies are 100% biological.  That means fully informed adult in child body can do porn.  They can put that porn up for sale.  Possession of that porn isn't, technically, child-porn; but, also, it most certainly is.

Will it be illegal in your setting?

Ofharvey Serves

Honey do project:  Hang new curtain rods.

Mission accomplished!

Cookin'

The Lovely Harvey gave me a block of instruction on how to make tenderloins.

First, you gotta tenderize the pork-loin.

Then you grind down an entire box of crackers to a coarse meal.  I used a plastic mixing bowl as a mortar and a soup bowl as a pestle.  It works faster than lots of methods, but it's still tedious.

Dredge the meat in beaten egg then shake in a bag of cracker meal.

Give it a swim in boiling peanut oil and...

Iowa delicacy!  Comfort food level 10.

Schrodinger's President

There is a house in Delaware that might, or might not, house a living US President.

It cannot be determined until someone opens the house to make observations.

200 Watts!

I have added a speaker to the center of the dash in The Beast!

The Aussie radio has been set up for it since the day I bought it, I was just dragging my feet getting one in there.  The default Australian setup is a center speaker in the dash, tweeters in the outside corners of the dash and a speaker in each door.  The front doors and tweeters are driven by the same channels.  There was an option for rear deck subwoofers.

I'm going with a coaxial in the center dash and coaxials in all four doors.

There were no wires from the connector to the speaker, so I had to buy the terminals for the connector and run wires from the box to the speaker hole.

That means removing the passenger shin-airbag and glove box.  I'm getting better at it, but still needed to look up where the last two of seven screws holding the box in were.

The Lovely Harvey says she can hear a big difference.  To my bad ears, it's simply noticeable.

But noticeable in a good way.

It's a 200w, and 70w RMS.  Being run by a 30w radio.  The radio that came with the car was just 15w, so there's that!  The door speakers will be 540w/180w RMS).

The NVX brand NSP speakers are well liked by the Caprice PPV community, and the Aussie silverbox will never overpower them.

Speakers for the doors finally came off back-order and should be here Friday.

Preference Falsification

Borepatch is calling it a "preference cascade" but that term is a blurring of information cascade and preference falsification.

They're really intertwined concepts.

I've been hoping for whatever we're going to call it to hurry up and happen already.

I think we came tantalizingly close with the Tea Party, but we fucked up and let it be mainstreamed by the same people who were the other side of the coin of those we wanted removed from meddling with our lives.

I don't think we're vulnerable to that this time around.

I don't think he's wrong either.

Something shifted.  It's almost palpable.

It Never Ends

Moxie has decided that she needs both front brake lines to match.

The passenger side got replaced a while ago.

The driver's side announced it was done today.

The things I do to keep the unrivaled power of that flat-plane crank and all wheel drive.

But Can I?

They say to never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake.

They say to not stop your enemies from destroying themselves.

They are silent on popping popcorn.

I need a ruling here.

Say Hi To Dianne In Hell

Sheila Jackson Lee is dead.

Good.

Supply And Demand That's It

The Beast is a relatively rare car.

The parts supply comes from just as rare a car that didn't make it this far.

There are a few people who have the means to purchase several parts cars and are selling those parts.

They're being accused of being scalpers.

Nope.  Just businessmen.

They are also being acclaimed as being helpers.

Nope.  Just businessmen.

They're not really part of the community of enthusiasts keeping these things running.  Essential, but at an overlap of the Venn diagram rather than being within it.

The truth that I keep having to explain, over and over, is something is only worth what someone will pay for it.

It comes up when someone doesn't want to pay what everyone else is paying for something.

It comes up when someone is upset that nobody wants to pay what they're asking for something.

There's a lot of butt-hurt out there.

Suitable For Home Defense

Brenda with the D-60.  10.2 lb. as shown.

D-60 Deets

I took apart the D-60 to see the guts!

Simple to take apart and put back together.  It needs periodic cleaning.

I also timed loading the thing.

With strippers and an UpLULA: 3 minutes 33 seconds.

With loose rounds and an UpLULA: 2 minutes 22 seconds.

With loose rounds only: 4 minutes 55 seconds and a VERY sore thumb.

For some reason the strippers will stop with two rounds left and the ratchet won't drop the stack so you end up fiddling around and wasting seconds.

Standard 30-round PMAG Gen M3:

With strippers and an UpLULA: 20 seconds.

With loose rounds and an UpLULA: 1 minute 20 seconds.

With loose rounds only: 52 seconds.

Delousing

The cats have been given their wormers and a fresh application of flea stuff.

Linens is washed.

Surfaces are cleaned.

Fingers crossed.

Without A Thought In Its Pretty Little Brain

Despite being much larger than us, a T-Rex's brain is about the same size as ours. 

The average person takes the average 7.62 round to the CPU, we're dead right there.

10 HP, 24 points of damage to the skill, 22 penetrate and 88 points of damage is done for a clear auto-death.

But a Rex is a 53 HP monster.  The same 24 hit only gets 20 to penetrate and 80 points isn't even enough for a death roll!

I need to dig into the rules and find the disadvantage that makes them more vulnerable to a brain-hit because 80 points is enough to liquefy a brain this size.  They're not cetaceans with brains in proportion to their scale.  Or pachyderms.

Packing

I just noticed that I got my first Florida carry permit back in 2005.

Wow.

Turns out to have been a life changing thing.

Partying

The raison d'etre for political parties is to find, and nominate, a candidate who most represents your personal political views.

The theory being that a given party will consistently reflect the mores of the people who get together and support it.

I've seen a lot of commentary about changing from closed to open primaries to select candidates.

It's a double edged sword.

A closed primary means that only people who took the time to register as a member of that party can vote to choose a candidate.  It also means they give up the opportunity to chose a candidate from the another party.  Commitment.

An open primary lets anyone vote for any candidate.

In practice, open primaries have not gotten us better candidates, what they've done is eliminate decent candidates by supporting candidates who couldn't beat the other team.  The spoiler effect in full force.  It's a formalized version of how Bernie Sanders keeps getting elected.

You don't get the best conservative candidate by letting liberals choose who gets to be the conservative candidate.  You get the conservative least able to compete with the liberal candidate.

But none of this matters when we have the problem described in this video:

Note: The author of that vid has a solution (in a different video) he likes that I don't think will work better.  First past the post is the worst way of doing an election; except for all of the other ways.

Libertarians, take note, you need to take over a party to win and you need to take over one of the big two.  Socialists captured, gutted and killed the Democrat party; libertarians should do the same to the Republican party.

35 Miles Per Gallon

35 mpg now!

35 mpg tomorrow!

35 mpg forever!

(How's that for an inflammatory way to say it?)

Now that Chevron Deference is nuked, let's do the EPA.

Did you know that the fleet average fuel economy, as defined by law, is 35 miles per gallon for model years 2010 through 2020?

For 2021 through 2030 it's the maximum feasible fuel economy.

No definition beyond that.

So Biden's economy killing EPA standards have no definition in black letter law.

Without the power of Chevron, the lawyers for the automakers are going to have a field day saying that going past the current rating is infeasible.

Fingers crossed!

Parasites

Flea season is bad this year.

While our cats aren't outdoor kitties, they do have the, screened in, back porch.

It would appear that fleas can get through the screen.

With the fleas it seems came tapeworms.

Both are fairly easy to cure, but the double whammy sucks.

As does the scouring of the house and cleaning of the bedding all at once.

Good thing I fixed the washer, huh?

Quote

I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill them with a terrible resolve.

-DEI