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The code that the "Insert Image by URL" button generates is:
Click to embiggen.
That gives this result:
If I just copy-paste the image I right clicked and "copy image" it gives this code:
And this result:
The images look the same, but the html is completely different.
Isn't that odd?
The work around works well!
Huzzah!
Dunno why the normal way of doing it broke, but the html for the work around, when you look at it, is MUCH simpler code.
Interesting vid:
Essentially all that training that makes a warhorse is undone by the first time it gets hurt during the battle.
If I use this, there's going to be some pissed players.
A saddle horse is G$1,200. A warhorse is G$5,000.
It would appear that when the photo insert button on Blogger isn't working, copy pasting the image right into the text does!
Good to know.
A rifle needs a sling like a pistol needs a holster.
I don't think most rifles need a fancy, expensive sling. Just something to hang it from your shoulder is enough.
I have several sitting in my box that are nothing special. Since Dottie
doesn't adhere to any historical recreation, I can use anything I found in
there.
I decided to see how the M5 RAS would look on Dottie.
Pretty good!
If Valentine wasn't my M16A4 clone that required it, I might be tempted to
leave it on despite this adding 1.3 lb. to the mass; for a total of 9.9 lb.
This "let's swap the handguards for a picture" turned into an adventure.
The allen screw that holds the handguard cap on blocks the nose of the top half of the RAS from seating. Plus, it didn't want to unscrew.
The front sight base is not threaded. They gave it some epoxy and hammered it into the gas tube hole.
Lazy.
I pried it out and took my pics.
It's not needed to hold the handguards in place, it just makes getting them on easier.
Putin has declared a 3-day ceasefire for WW2 Victory Day.
This is because he only has enough army left to do the parade OR keep up his invasion of Ukraine; not both.
I'm here all night, try the veal, tip your waitress!
(Serious comments will be deleted)
A modern, electronically controlled, automatic transmission is objectively better than a manual.
Turbochargers, which use waste energy from the exhaust to work, are more efficient than a supercharger, which puts drag on the crankshaft to work.
But a stick is still cooler than a slushbox and a supercharger is cooler than a turbo (literally as well).
Hot rodding is chock-a-block full of impractical but neat things.
It's been almost 10 years since I gave up on the shit.
Yet I had a small bottle in my range bag.
The mint scent is long gone and the "I'm vegetable oil!" scent is prominent. Pretty rancid vegetable oil now.
Every place where air could get at it was brown and very sticky.
I dumped it out, cleaned the bottle and have Klenzoil in there now.
Would anyone be interested in a "will it GURPS" description of the Tienanmen Square Massacre?
Because I hear that people in China really love to read about it.
So much so that the traffic to your site from China drops to zero almost instantly from what can only be their servers locking up from all the traffic trying to reach the site.
Nothing censorious there at all.
My blog is, apparently, actually popular in Singapore.
That shocks me beyond belief.
The hits go up when I post GURPS content and down when I talk about cars.
This isn't like the Russian and West Tiawanese bot traffic that was steady until Google finally got sick of them.
OLD GURPS posts are getting traffic from Singapore too.
I'd read that GURPS was popular there relative to other games before, but this is interesting.
Welcome to my larger audience!
The plywood I use as a workbench and a photo back-drop on the back patio has succumbed to the ravages of Florida weather.
Let us welcome a newer piece of plywood!
It'll develop some character as time passes.
As I get balder, I notice that I am growing thick luxurious hair out of my ears.
It's really irritating.
There's pronunciation of a couple words that drive me nuts.
But two rise to the top frequently.
Cache is pronounced the same as cash. It is not said the same way as cachet.
Cyclic is pronounced sigh-click. It is not pronounced sick-lick.
The mispronunciation comes from bicycle and the occasional motorcycle being bye-sickle and motor-sickle.
In the case of bikes, that's slang.
Even worse, the origin of saying cyclic wrong comes from a movie.
The Jackal with Bruce Willis.
Richard Gere's horrible fake Irish accent and improvising saying some words differently to underscore his Irishness is how we got here.
Do you want to emulate a dancing monkey?
Civil War was not as bad as I'd seen it reported. It's not great, but it's got its moments.
FuzzyGeff and I have oft discussed how religion would be different in a fantasy setting as opposed to the real world.
When you can ask the Gods a question and they not only answer, but do so where others can hear it as well...
You don't need faith for that.
So we figured that since the Gods were undeniable, they wouldn't be denied.
I just realized something.
Denial is so totally human.
From flat-earther to "the Holocaust never happened"...
The cleric's spells won't work on them, but they will fervently believe that's because the Gods don't exist, not because the Gods are simply denying them for their lack of belief.
Cue the leaders of Hy-Brasil...
I've managed to make a workable set of stat conversions from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay to GURPS.
It utterly falls apart when going past the humanoid character level, but by that point I have other benchmarks to compare with.
It took too long.
The average Warhammer human fails stat checks at a different rate than the average GURPS human.
Once I scaled around that...
CLICK!
The work progresses.
I will at least get the humanoids converted. Most of them, like elves, dwarves, and the lot, just get the default racial stats GURPS already provided.
Reading about how Star Wars: Andor has an attempted rape in one of the episodes and watching lots of places trying to make it an allegory for... something.
Maybe they're just showing that the Empire is evil and employs evil people and there's no hidden meaning or equivalence to Donald Trump and illegal immigrants into the US.
Try to remember that this universe dates from when Jimmy Carter was president and if we're trying to make an allegory that the Empire is the USA then it's got to viewed from a 1977 lens as well.
Watching a video of two guys talking about the changes made in the new edition of D&D.
Right at the beginning they mention that if you don't actually read the new book, you're not going to see those changes.
Dur! I says, then... Oh wait.
It's something I'm guilty of.
I have no idea if some of the characters I made for Champions were actually compliant between the boxed set (2nd edition) and the spiffy hard cover (4th edition); but they worked.
LBB Traveller and The Traveller Book are not, entirely, the same thing either. Not sure if we even noticed at the time.
I've dealt with big changes in GURPS and trying to get the players to update their characters. At least one player would use older characters as a template for newer ones and that included stuff that was different in the new edition.
I've also been the player trying to get my head around the new rule set when I joined an AD&D 2e game and just did not understand the explanation for THACO. It's actually quite simple, but the GM did a bad job explaining and I was used to looking up that information on a table in the Dungeon Master's Guide.
At the time I didn't have the books, so I couldn't figure it out on my own.
I think the YouTube algorithm is offering it's opinion about the difficulty level of my HVAC job by suggesting this one:
Actually it was Marv that sent it to me.
The algorithm would send the Panama Canal if my theory was valid.
Turn off the sound. Trust me.
Part 1:
To match his speed I'm going to need lots and lots of meth.
This is completely within my skill set, I just need patience.
Yeah yeah, patience, how long does that take?
"There is no Cloud. There is only someone else's computer."
The tariff thing is really revealing some things about some paradigms many businesses were working under.
They didn't actually make what they were selling.
They designed it, then farmed out the manufacturing to someone else because they have no in-house manufacturing at all.
The put all of their manufacturing in West Taiwan and are now freaking out because it sure looks like they cannot economically make their product elsewhere.
Even worse, they don't sell anything that people MUST have to live.
Entertainment products are high elasticity demand.
But something these game companies lost when the prices on custom dice and miniatures dropped through the floor from West Taiwanese manufacturing is we used to play these games without any 3D elements at all.
Little square counters punched out of cardboard were universal. Those can still be printed in the good old USA economically.
They could go back to that.
We didn't use figures to play any of the roleplaying games I played for a really long time. The only figures I had of characters were because it was fun to make and paint them, not to bring to the game and put on the map.
Even now, my figures are Lego Minifigs.
But it's rare that I unroll the hex-map and have people get out their little dudes.
I think that gaming companies could recapture a lot of market by just going back to imagination.
I say this and realize that I know several GM's who never did make a world of their own, they just ran the pre-made modules.
Maybe there's less imagination out there than I think...
But, maybe, that's why I was always welcome as the GM. They couldn't buy the adventure I was about to put them through and get some pre-knowledge. I noticed that my players were doing that with T2K. So I increasingly used those modules as world building rather than running the adventure.
Completely changing Operation Reset is a pretty decent example. I should write that up sometime.
Watching one of the podcasts I run on YouTube in the background and they talked about how SCCY owes Volusia County, FL about $250k and there's tax seizure notices on all the entrances to the building.
Now that I know to look, there's been a lot of forum traffic from people complaining they're not getting any response about getting their lifetime warranties honored.
The misidentification of the M203 from Pew Pew Tactical, for some reason, has reminded me of something.
Somethings...
We had two experimental weapons changes to our M1A1(HA).
The first was a single tank in the company that General Dynamics Land Div. had changed the coaxial MG from an M240 to an M134 mini-gun.
We took turns with it at gunnery, giggled like little kids, got debriefed by the GDLD reps and they took it away and nothing appears to have come of it.
The second was to replace the Ma Deuce on the wing tanks with a Mk.19 automatic GL.
Again, we took them to Graf and did a couple of full CALFEX with them. Finding room for the more bulky ammo was an issue and we weren't really certain when to use them.
The .50's were back on the tanks when I left the unit.
Funny story about our first range trip with them:
The guy training us didn't effectively communicate to us that the flight time of a 40mm grenade is a LOT longer than any other weapon we used.
It didn't really show up until we tried to fire at the hulk of an old APC at a decently long range though.
What happened was we lined up the sights, fired a round and, in our minds, nothing happened down range. Figuring we missed, we carefully aligned the sight again and fired another round. Nothing. In frustration, we let loose with 10 rounds.
All of the above did not take very long at all, but it seemed like a long time subjectively.
About the same time as the last of the 10 rounds had left the barrel, the first round hit the M114 we were using as a target.
"COOOOOOOOOOL!" we says!
While we were admiring the explosion, the 10-round string started to arrive and range control starts screaming for us to stop shooting.
"We haven't been shooting for a while!" we protest.
As an almost psychology graduate, some aspects of research make me wonder if I could have gotten the grant and done the study.
I was reading this article when I wondered: In the absence of racial differences, will groups create their own divisions to mistreat in the same manner as racism.
What made me think of it was my experience in high school in Iowa.
Iowa, at the time, lacked minorities.
But we had many "out" groups in the school.
It'd be an interesting field of study.
My first AR was made from a kit I bought from Del-Ton.
Their web page now says:
Thank You For Your Support - Del-Ton is Closing.
As Del-Ton prepares to close its doors, we want to take a moment to express our deepest gratitude to the incredible people who have been part of our journey.
To our loyal customers: Your trust in our products and support of our mission has been the cornerstone of our success. Every purchase, every kind word, and every moment spent using our products has meant the world to us.
To our vendors and partners: Your collaboration, innovation, and shared commitment have been invaluable in helping us deliver quality and reliability to our customers.
To our dedicated employees: You are the heart and soul of Del-Ton. Your hard work, passion, and unwavering commitment have shaped our legacy and built a company we can all be proud of.
Together, we’ve achieved so much, and though this chapter is ending, the memories, partnerships, and friendships will remain. Thank you for being part of the Del-Ton story.
With heartfelt appreciation,
The Del-Ton Team .
I had not done business with them since, maybe, 2009.
They decided they were a rifle company and that meant they stopped selling parts and kits during all of the AR panic buys.
So I found other sellers for the parts I wanted.
Sad to see them go, though.
The parts to do the evaporator core arrived today from Rock Auto.
I need to read up on how much oil I need to put into this thing and I might end up doing what it says and removing the compressor and seeing how much oil is in it.
Yaaaaay! More work!
When verifying that Bushmaster is who coined the term "dissipator" for a 16" barrel with a rifle length sight and handguard, I encountered this article from Pew Pew Tactical.
In this article is a photo:
|
| Colt 605 with suppressor, Vietnam 1968 |
They identify that rifle as an R605.
It is not.
That's an M16A1 or an R603.
The HEL E4 suppressor overlaps the barrel, it doesn't attach right at the front sight base.
Then there's this photo:
|
| “New York” with Colt 605a and suppressor and “Jackie” with M-16/M79 grenade launcher |
Again, not an R605. That's an M16A1 with a HEL E4 again. Notice the forward assist? But the caption contains another glaring error, that I replicated above. Did you spot it?
I think we can skip citing Pew Pew Tactical as an authoritative source...
Every once and a while I do a "what's still out there" for the alternate calibers.
Widener's has posted about 6.8x43mm!
It's a good summary of what's still being made and some honest consideration of the pros and cons of the round at this, rather late, point in the game.
I'm giddy that they have someone who appears to actually read the blog!
In turn, I'll give them a link.
They've given me a couple of free boxes of ammo here and there to review and Harvey has bought ammo from them.
It's a pity that I cannot crank the AC and Heat at the same time with my entirely too modern house thermostat.
But what I can do is leave Moxie idling all day while I drive around in my six-liter V-8 hot-rod!
The AC doesn't even work in it, but I can run the fans at full tilt just to waste some extra energy doing nothing.
All the lights will be on all day.
FTW!
Often times among my friends I am just the MOST socialized.
That doesn't mean I'm well socialized.
I routinely get the signals wrong.
With depressing regularity, I will end up depressed about how someone said something and take days or weeks to come to grips that it was just an offhanded remark.
You'd think I would be better at this by now.
The U.S.S. Robert A. Heinlein Campaign!
We want the new Secretary of the Navy – John Phelan — to name a future DDG-51 Flight III
destroyer for Robert A. Heinlein.************************
It is the prerogative of the Secretary of the Navy to name Navy vessels. Navy policy is to name destroyers for deceased members of the Navy.We want the new Secretary of the Navy – John Phelan — to name a future DDG-51 Flight III destroyer for Robert A. Heinlein.
This would happen if lots of people write asking him to name a future Arleigh
Burke-class destroyer for Heinlein.Phelan’s address is:
The Honorable John Phelan
Secretary of the Navy
Room 4E686
Defense Pentagon
Washington, D.C. 20301More information may be found at the Campaign website.
I'm a pretty firm supporter of adult LGBT stuff.
I've been confronted about it here too.
But something else from that Lazerpig diatribe stood out.
I will try to be gentle, but there's no real way to candy-coat it.
Trans folks, if you're looking in the mirror and the face you see doesn't match your self image you've got a wiring problem.
Where I differ from a lot of the conservative folks is what to do about it. I prefer compassion, they prefer trauma.
But it's a mental illness. A mental sickness. A mental condition.
Those all mean the same thing.
Saying, "it's not a sickness, it's a condition!" as he does, is a non-sequitur.
You didn't redefine it. You rephrased it.
"She's not pretty as Hell, she's hot as fuck!" is the same sort of thing.
"I'm not stupid, I'm dumb," is as well.
Stating that there have been transgender people leading secret lives for centuries doesn't really bolster your argument. Yes, and?
Weaseling around it doesn't do your side any good.
Especially since, most of the time, it makes no never mind.
But I can see the corrosive effect that the Lazerpigs are having on my position. The loudest advocates are tending to be the craziest. I want to be against the craziest and be supportive of the people trying to be normal as they can be.
It's getting more and more difficult and I don't like it.
I never posted a pic of Olive as a 6.8?
She's only been this way for a year and a half...
It's a very comfortable configuration.
The dissipator upper came with an 'F' marked front sight base. Those are slightly taller than the normal front sight base and are tailored for flat-top uppers and the rear sights that clamp to them.
I deliberately didn't use an F-marked sight on Linda because I was using the A1 upper. She zeroed no problem.
Most of the time a normal front sight base zeroes no problem on a flat-top. Occasionally, you run out of elevation adjustment before you're on target.
Likewise, you can run out of adjustment in the other direction using an F front sight and a carry handle.
Because the non-F and a carry handle worked fine with Linda, putting her back that way meant returning to a known good condition.
Dottie will have a flat-top and the appropriate F-marked front sight base, which should work fine.
When I, finally, get a bolt carrier group I will zero Dottie and we'll find out.
That Lazerpig diatribe forgot something very important when he went down the list of bad things that President Trump was doing with regards to our military posture.
US interests.
Our withdrawal from several places which have European and United Kingdom interests and no US interest are mentioned at length.
Perhaps Europe and the UK should have done a better job of convincing us that we needed to remain?
Ukraine, it seems to me, is a prime example of a place that we don't really have an interest in whether it's run by a corrupt Ukrainian government or a corrupt Russian government or some hybrid of both.
Poland? We have an interest there. But notice the difference in spelling?
Not the same places.
Syria?
I think we've done all we could have been expected to do there.
Israel, with our support, seems more than able of handling that.
Europe is going to have to come to grips that Russia is THEIR problem and we're far more concerned with the Pacific region because it affects us directly instead of through third or fourth parties.
Pacific region, ie China.
I know he doesn't want us to look after ourselves at the expense of HIS interest, but here we are.
If you have two and a half hours to waste, you can watch his vid too! If you find something besides TDS by the time you're done, let me know.
PS: He's totally engaged in the methods he's accusing neo-nazis and the KKK of using. see if you can spot it.
