But They're Colonists Too

All the American Indian can say over us White people is they got here first.

They colonized the Americas from Asia over the Bering Land Bridge back before SUV's raised the sea level and made it the Aleutian Islands.

Humans are not indigenous to the Americas.  We did not evolve here.

Another thought about European colonization of The New World:

If it had not been for at least three back-to-back plagues (only one is European in origin) the Indians we're so concerned about today would not have existed.  They're the remnants of the survivors of those plagues.

Even more: Had it not been for Spaniards losing some horses, the plains Indian would never have risen to be what they were when French trappers and Voyageurs wandered into the area.

I doubt the horseless Indians of the vacant plains would have done any better than their Eastern relatives did against Western expansion.

I wonder, though, if the Aztecs would have collapsed on their own, or expanded North.

Prolly collapsed, they don't appear to have really recovered from the pre-European plagues.

Cahokia, for example, didn't survive to see the European diseases.  Their society collapsing is why the plains were vacant for the tribes which became the horse-based culture of the Plains Indian to occupy.

The Cahokia and similar societies are also, probably, why bison were so damn plentiful.  Like most agrarian cultures took a bat to the predator populations, leaving a relatively safe place for bison to breed.

Rowing My Own Or Not

Checking my records...  (read remembering).

I have had very few manual cars in my inventory.

I learned to drive on Mom's '76 Vega wagon.  5-speed manual.

The '73 Passat had a 4-speed manual.

The '83 Lynx had a 3-speed auto, first car with a locking torque converter!

Both Camaros rocked a TH-350, 3-speed auto.

The '86 Civic had a 4-speed manual.

The Biscayne had a TH-700R4 as a Caprice Classic and then a 4L60E later on.  Both 4-speed automatics.

The Precious had a 6-speed manual.

The Beast has a 6-speed automatic 6L80.

The Civic needed different gears than what it had.  I always wanted one between 2nd and 3rd.

Now that I'm old, I'm starting to appreciate the lack of pain from my left hip and knee in stop-and-go traffic.

I'm no good at being a car snob.

Better Make A FEMA Claim

Upon further review, we did not emerge from Hurricane Helene completely unscathed.

One of the downspouts failed, allowing the gutter to spew straight down.

We put a garbage can under it and it filled in about ten minutes from Milton.

I dropped the princely sum of $25 for a new section of spout and some straps to secure it to the wall.

As a bonus, it's finally being directed away from the patio instead onto it.  We should have fixed that years ago.

Build Sheet

We once sat down and figured out, exactly, what day in 1978 that Christine was destroyed.

It gave us no end of amusement to discover that was also the same day my 1979 Camaro Berlinetta was made.

I will be damned if I can remember that date, but it was funny at the time because The Silver Bullet definitely had a personality and she DEFINITELY hated Aunt The Bat (my girl friend at the time).

Ironically I sold her to Bat's boyfriend who let her languish.

I doubt he was aware of all the mods done to the suspension, and I hope he had to replace the brake pads on the rear.

Remember, I'd put a Jag XJ rear end under there...  I did not consider maintaining those inboard brakes when we did it.  I don't know if the calipers and pads were accessible without taking the entire thing back out.

After After Action

We're all put back together after Milton at Casa de McThag.

We even got our Halloween decorations up!

I felt bad that across the street is without power still while we have our garish lights on...

That bad feeling evaporated when several of our neighbors in the darkened section stopped by to tell us how relieved they were that we'd gotten our stuff out.

It turns out we're a local attraction that they look forward to seeing each year!

I am happy to be part of the healing with our display of normalcy.

Fucking Milton!

Because of the hurricane I missed Dead Che Day!

A victory for everyone everywhere!

57 years of being a good commie.

Yamaguchi Day

We've all thought about it.

 This one act probably kept Japan from going Socialist.

65 Years Of Sea Levels Rising

 

The angle is 90 degrees off from one shot to the other, but...  I ain't seein' no massive increase in sea level.

Are you?

Even better, the 2024 imagery shows that Bush Key has reemerged from the briny depths...

Checking stuff independently is how we counter the narrative.

Neither Is Front Page

The US just had two landfalls of some pretty massive hurricanes and neither is still on the front page of any, national, news site I've checked.

MSN was the only one that had any hurricane stories on the front page, but those disappeared when I shut off the location filter.  Isn't that odd?

I remember hearing about fucking Katrina for months.

Helene is already history and Milton a memory?

We're still digging out around here and, "Meh?"

Now The Floods

Most of the rain fell on places upstream from us, and it's flowing, or should I say overflowing, the river a couple miles from here.

It's crested already.

The roads that are closed every time it gets to this stage of flooding are closed.

We're well away from the flood area and not worried at all.

Prep Fail

I'm working on a GURPS character.

I forgot to copy the spreadsheet I'm using to the laptop from the NAS before we shut things down to save load on the UPS prior to the storm.

DOH!

If you're going to fail at a prep, forgetting an entertainment item is what you should forget.

On the plus side, I've learned how to silence the alarm on a Cyberpower UPS telling me that the power is off (I fucking know, you stupid machine) and all of the instructions for an Amazon Basics UPS call for more than one button or are just wrong about a double tap of the ONLY button does the trick.

We Have POWER!

We had a generator this time, so the return of the mains was a smaller thing than it might have been.

In fact, I was eating a waffle that The Lovely Harvey had just made... with an electric waffle iron, when the power returned.

Being the cynical Floridians we are, we waited nearly 20 minutes after the power came back before we shut the gennie down and plugged our stuff back into the wall.

Adding to the preparedness:  The in-laws have a generator now!  It was hard to find gas for it, but Home Depot had generators for sale and my father-in-law pounced on it.

He'd been borrowing Marvyn's spare Honda generator to that point and it felt nice to end that imposition.

He got to enjoy his new generator a whole hour before the mains were restored...

The new talismans list is to have ice in every cooler and a generator at every home.

Marv has two Hondas.  We have our Champion.  In-Laws have a... forgot the brand.

We're ready!

After Action Report

We've survived!

Power is still out, the trees the crew from Texas half assed cleared for Helene finished the job they'd started. 

The roof looks fine.  No leaks. 

The cute Halloween flags we hung on the fence gates provided enough wind resistance for then to force the latches. 

All in all, we came out fine.

Generator is making coffee and charging batteries as I swipe.  Cell phone connectivity only.

Is Same

Looking back at past and current hot-rods...

The '76 Camaro Type LT, affectionately known as "The Rust Monster" came to me with 235/60R14 tires.

The Beast has 235/50R18 tires.

That tickles me that they both have the same treadwidth; but are very different tires.

The Camaro's tires were 25.1" in diameter and needed 804 revolutions per mile.

The Beast's tires are 27.3" in diameter and need 740 revolutions per mile.

Too Soon?

I hear that the disaster response in North Carolina has been bungled so badly that even the dead aren't voting Democrat now.

Glad It's Not Me Sad It's Them?

Go hit someone else!

Ooooooh!  I hope they're OK.

Sitting here worrying about the people whom are getting the direct hit from my hoping that the storm wouldn't hit ME head on where I am...

Florida is strange that way.

Home And Looter Defence

Brenda and Valentine are the hurricane defense pair.

Brenda is handier, but Valentine has that extra couple feet per second and 5x magnification.

One is better at looters, the other better in the immediate AO.

I'm set for what comes, even if it's not as bad as originally feared in my AO.

Of course, if REAL looting happens, if I can see it, I can pretty much hit it.

Peace be upon Jack O'Connor.

A Talisman

In addition to me getting ice this time, Marv has made a plate of cookies.

It's worked before...

Optimism Increasing

At this moment, I am outside the cone of uncertainty!  Just barely.

With the track 36 miles farther north, peak gusts were expected to just get to 62 miles an hour, which we've survived before.

Still might be hard on trees and power lines, but I am thinking we're prepared for that.

Bonus!  We're expecting overnight lows in the high 60's afterwards.  That will make not having power a lot more survivable.

Confusing Guidance

Erin contacted me and wondered how to calculate her Droyne sport's mass.

The various sources mostly agree on the height range, but the definitive source for mass is GURPS: Traveller Alien Races 3 which does a good job of giving the height and weight, in 3e terms, for the standard sized Droyne.

The problem is the sport caste and warrior caste are bigger.

Sports are 50% taller.  Warriors are twice as tall.

I did some back of the napkin calculations and, assuming a constant form factor, got her a weight for her character.

4'-10" and 97.5 lb. (1.5m and 44.2 kg) using the stuff from 3e.

4e is not quite the same in the build chart.

Interstellar Wars says a Nugiiri (what the Vilani called the Droyne down rimward near Sol before everyone realized that all those enclaves of gray, bug-eyed sophonts were actually the same race, Droyne) should be 50% the height of a person, but using the ST 7 line ends up with characters who are too short for the racial range.

So I cheated.  They are 50% the average height for their ST+3!  That puts the height and weight in the correct ranges when you apply the skinny modifier.

Huzzah!  Solved for all time!

Well South

 

If this track holds it's as good as the news can get with this storm.  It keeps the surge out of the mouth of Tampa Bay.

It's bad news for people that have had too much of it lately, especially the Port Charlotte area.

Oddly, being on the North side of this storm is going to be worse for the winds thanks to the expected wrap around of shear and dry air causing disorganization to the South side of the storm.

We've been ordered to evacuate.  But to where?  With what?

I hate to break it to the local authorities, but we don't have the means to live anywhere but where we live.  We don't have the funds to plan a vacation let alone take an unplanned one!

But I know something the local disaster officials don't seem to.  The lay of the land.

We're not in a flood zone.  Our worry is wind.  We're not looking to get wind worse than Irma, which we survived just fine here, so...

The evacuation zones in Florida are clearly broken.  There's people who need to get out because of storm surge.  There's people who don't and they're both in zone A.

There's been ample evidence that the state and counties are not following their own rules for defining the zones thanks to regulatory capture from the insurance industry.

These zones have become politically defined not practically.

So people who SHOULD evacuate don't because they can see someone in the same zone who will be OK not evacuating.

They Come And Go

I once had three .45 ACP handguns...

Not anymore!  I sold the M&P 45C.

Now I just have, uh, three .45 ACP handguns.

Something's off about my math...

Cash Purchase

The place that I saw the .300 Savage, Shooter's World in Tampa, is teh suxxor for privacy.

I don't shop there very often.

They want your ID and phone number to make ANY purchase.  Regardless of how you pay.  And they are entering your info into their computer.

I don't know if they're actively sharing the data, but I've noticed that data collected is data shared by hook or crook.

There's so many places that, even if they ask for ID for ammo, are just glancing at your birthday and not entering anything on the computer.  Then they happily take cash.

Embrace The Suck

When you can't avoid the suck, embrace it.

Pretty sure this is gonna suck.

Putting It Out There

Saturday, Shooter's World in Tampa had several boxes of .300 Savage.

I, manfully, resisted and did not buy any.

I got some 5.56 ammo instead.

Slightly Better Track For Me

Going far enough south of me that our level of preparedness will suffice.

The problem is the spaghetti models are all over the place.

Eyes crossed.

It's Just Evacuation Once Again Running Away With Me

When we bought this place, we were Evacuation Zone C.  The border with B ran down the middle of my street.

West was B, East was C.

At some point, the line got moved to my fence in the back yard.

This year, I note, the line is in the middle of the next street East of me.

Our elevation above mean sea level did not change.

What changed was the flooding the next street West would get.

That was caused by developers WAY upstream from me putting impermeable houses and streets and drainage systems in that fed into the waterway downstream from me.

Exacerbating the problem was neglect in clearing the channels in the rivers that we drained into in the next county over.

And the local drainage system assuming that nothing had changed since 1969 when my 'hood got built.

Since 2019, they've addressed and fixed all that.

But since we had flooding that got within X distance EVER, we're downgraded.

I don't think we're gonna evacuate.

This doesn't look to be carrying the surge needed to get to us.

I can tell because I have a topographic map!

The people who make the zone boundaries don't.

There's places in that C zone that are lower than me and more directly attached to a waterway that could get water to them.

Hunkered Down

Got gas in Moxie and The Beast.

Got all our gas cans filled with gas.

Got the shutters on.

Even have a deck of cards.

Got 8 books left in a series I'm reading.

Got everyone's meds except Harvey's weekly shot and we don't need it until Friday.

Hopefully the Legos I ordered will show up tomorrow so I have them to build if the power's off.

I Am In This Picture

And I don't like it!

At least they're showing it Cat 2 or less at landfall now.

A lot depends on a cold front coming down from up North.

If it makes it in time, it shoves it south of where I am.

If it doesn't make it all, we get the rough stuff.

New Information

A while ago I speculated about why the T-64, T-72, T-80 and T-90 would, routinely, have catastrophic ammunition fires.

The Cheiftan has a chat about that.

The ammo scattered about the turret and basket unprotected and among the crew would do it.

Sons Of Vandals

There might be a shit ton of overlap on the Venn diagram about how the outlaw biker clubs got started, but the film The Bikeriders remind Harvey and I far more of the Sons of Silence than The Vandals in how they got going.

The book is most definitely about The Vandals.

The film doesn't seem to be.

Slam Fire

This is really me writing it down so I can remember it later.

Normal rate of fire fore a pump shotgun in GURPS 4e is 2xn.

Guns like the Winchester 1897 and Model 12 don't have a trigger disconnector so they will fire just by pumping the action.

That's RoF 3xn.

It's in the description of the 1897 in High Tech 4e on page 105.

Magic

Just like you can't play a character who's smarter than yourself, you can't portray technology past your understanding.

I've watched a lot of ultra-tech space settings where the GM kept presenting problems that would be definitively solved by technology listed in the game.

One of the most famous fiction examples is how Star Trek conveniently forgets all the replicator and transporter accidents.

The two most important words in science are, "that's odd," and NCC-1701 sure found a lot of them.

Not least of which is a fountain of youth.

Since I played Traveller the most, it's where I see tech concept blind spots most often.

You don't even have to get to Traveller TL 14 to make some of the errors and I blame Hollywood.

If you encounter a back-pack nuke ticking away, how do you disarm it?

Hollywood tells you that you have to find the red wire.

I says light it up with your rifle.

The explosives surrounding the core might still explode, but they will do so asymmetrically and no fission boom.  If it's a fusion bomb, you've made sure it's not going to get fusing.  You're going to have a problem with explosively scattered fissile materials now, but not near as spread out as if you'd let it go high-order.

Starting about Traveller TL9, they don't even bother with the fissile materials!

Gravitic technology is sufficient that you use artificial gravity to collapse your fuel to fusion pressures.

The minimum size to do this gets smaller and smaller as tech advances and for a bomb or warhead, you are skipping the hardware that siphons off power from the unit, and keeps it from exploding.  Exploding is the point.

But it shouldn't make them less susceptible to being bashed on to the point they don't work anymore.

Getting something to fusion is difficult.  Slight asymmetries cause failures to go boom.

How did I conceptualize all this?  Having a high-school education and being resistant to math when you have a, no shit, doctor of astrophysics and two people who do calculus for fun in your gaming group means your assumptions about a tech WILL be challenged.

Physics is, regardless of how you achieve them.  Traveller technology is astonishing on many levels.

How the meson gun MUST work is a terrifying level of control over subatomic particles.

But back to the Traveller TL 12 equivalent to a backpack nuke.  It's going to need a powerpack (some sort of super-science insane rate of discharge capacitor) to fire off the gravitic node that collapses the fuel, holds it for a swish then lets it go.  Ripping that pack off the side of the node-core means no-boom.  It might discharge spectacularly, but it doesn't detonate.

Likewise, a couple light armor piercing explosive rounds into the node will keep it from forming a symmetrical wave-front and no boom.  It might not be a good idea to stand next to it as it collapses from it's brief attempt to be degenerate and then fly apart again when the powerpack tries to fire the node...  But it will be a much smaller explosion than firing correctly.

But the point is... it's easier to keep nukes from going off than to get them to go off.

Ideally, you separate the powerpack from the node without the pack discharging.  Demolitions, Engineer or Jack of All Trades skill should get you there.  Mechanical or Electronic should get a roll with penalties.

Dangerous, no skill required, methods are chancy, but are better than letting a nuke go off.

Old Grognard

I, jokingly, commented on a Traveller session that Erin participated that the Aslan player's pronunciation of Trokh (Aslan primary language) was atrocious.

I said he had an atrocious accent, riffing on the old meme of someone not being able to speak French well because of their accent.

It hits me that I've been doing Traveller a LOT longer than they have.

I knew it was Trokh without looking it up.  Just as I know the most common Vargr language is Gvegh.

I started in 1979 with little black books and kept up with it through MegaTraveller.

I translated both LBB Traveller and Megatraveller to GURPS 3e.

Then GURPS: Traveller.

Then translating that into 4e.

Then GURPS Traveller: Interstellar Wars.

I corresponded with Loren K Wiseman when he was still Traveller line editor at SJGames.

I have watched the setting develop from nothing to the crunchy mass today.

I have not done much with Mongoose's version of the rules.

But the setting remains the same.

It amuses me that the Aslan's player has no idea who I am or how long I've been at it when they replied.

But I'm only teasing.  It sounded like he's got the essence of being an Aslan male in command from listening to the session.

Tricking The Technology

The internet is the phone here.  That's true most everywhere now.

When the power goes out, the internet provider provided box has a battery to make sure we can still call out.

That battery lasts for days.

But the box kills the internet after 15 minutes.

So we have the battery box plugged into a battery backup to make it think the power is still on so we retain internet.

This is paired with UPS's on the routers.

We got almost 2 hours of internet with a dying UPS.

I'd like to upgrade that capability.  I'd love to get 24 hours of up time without touching the generator.

Historocity

The 2023 version of The Three Musketeers (Part 1, D'Artagnon) is set in 1625.

There sure are a lot of flintlocks in 1625 France.

Even worse than on a c1600 Dutch privateer trading vessel (cough cough Shogun).

The weaponry in this new version of Dumas' work is decidedly 18th century, and so is the costuming!

There are ample paintings of many of the historical figures to guide the filmmakers...  But, nah!

17th century costuming is... elaborate (and expensive).

Even so, they missed on how elaborate the 18th century stuff was as well.  The 1988 version of Dangerous Liaisons is an excellent example of getting the costuming right.

But no, let's have everyone dress like a commoner from a century too late.

When Richard Lester does a better job with weapons and costumes...

But with that out of the way, was it any good?

I cannot say if the new version is closer to the book or not; it's been too long since I've read it.

I will say it was a good version of the story.  I enjoyed it a lot.

Eva Green did well as Milady.  Francois Civil was a decent D'Artagnon and Vincent Cassel a solid Athos.  Aramis and Porthos are present, but not prominent.

I liked it, and look forward to seeing part 2.

Rebuilding

The tried and true APC BX1500G battery backup lasted for two hours when the power went out on Thursday.

It appeared to come back to life on Friday but, alas, on Sunday it shut off and displayed error code F02.

I cycled the power and it appeared fine until early this morning.

Same F02 code at 0330, 0430 and 0500.

Time for something different.

We've had the APC for years and years.  I've replaced the batteries three times, the first time in 2013!

Wal Mart opened at 0600, and I got a replacement.

So far, this is our only casualty from the storm.

Branch Color

According to this page, purple is fair game for the magic branch in 1899.

I had planned to have the magic branch be purple with silver piping.  But reconsidered.

The piping color is the color of the branch they're assigned to.

Purple with yellow (yellow orange if you wanna get technical) for cavalry.

Purple with white for infantry.

Purple with red for artillery.

Purple with cadet gray for commissary.

Purple with emerald green for hospital/medical.

Purple with crimson for ordnance.

Purple with buff for quartermaster.

Purple with black for signal corps.

Branch insignia are a lightning bolt crossed with a star tipped wand.

There are a bewildering array of non-commissioned officer ranks that appear to be outside the chain of command, like specialist or tech ranks.

Commissary sergeant is a thing.

There were still color sergeants in the US Army in 1899.

Step Into The Light Already

Today is Jimmy Carter's 100th birthday.

You can quit now, Jimmy.

What Good Has Come From Them

Extortion and greed are all I see when I hear "union" and I fail to see any benefit to having them around.

As a customer of the places they extort, all I see is increased cost and decreased quality.

USW 8888 got a large raise and a 5-year contract in 2022; now we're hearing that they didn't do a significant amount of welding correctly.

Who won there?

The people who unload the ships are on strike on the east coast.

Who, besides themselves, is this helping?

They want MORE and can extort the entire nation to get it.

They're fucking everyone else.

Then their leadership donates to the Dems and...

Just not seeing the upside to unions for anyone not actually in one.

Triple this for anyone in a public employee union like teachers and cops.  Nowhere is the corrosive effect of union membership more visible.