You Know The Drill

@pst314, I graduated from there in 1980, so odds are likely that I missed the guy you knew.
Makes sense; he was class of 77. Went armored. Lost track of him long ago.
Not just service, but graduating from West Point: major respect to you.
There was almost always some team of people playing War in Europe while I was there
My friend was fascinated byWar in the East and played it a lot. That was the first game that I’m aware of that dealt with production and logistics. (As Omar Bradley said, “Amateurs talk about strategy. Professionals talk about logistics”.)

Weird to be looking back at that and wondering where that person went.
My TTRPG collection at one point comprised well over a thousand books (I used to joke that it was not only worth more than my car, it weighed more than my car). It’s been reduced to a couple of shelves of indie, out-of-print or otherwise interesting-on-their-own merits games.
In my case, “that person” grew up and realized that none of this stuff really mattered very much and that all that time and energy was better spent on friends and loved ones. I think many young men get into hobby gaming because it offers a promise of some kind of epic fantasy experience that it never quite delivers.
AH and SPI, on the other hand, delivered exactly what they promised but the fiddly rules engines were much better suited to implementation by computers, which is what replaced them. The Hearts of Iron, Total War and Europa Universalis video game communities are still going strong.
the overtly feminist all-girl line-up shot at the end of Endgame
I wonder if there’s some kind of directive inside Disney, because The Mandalorian did the same thing in the season 2 final episode, and had to mysteriously disappear a previously established male character to do it. But then I think it’s obvious that it’s a matter of priorities: they simply don’t care about writing a good and relatable character, the goal is propaganda. If they cared about good writing, you wouldn’t have had Cara Dune’s (literal) Chekhov’s Gun in the same scene. “Frak, my gun’s jammed! No, wait, it’s fine.”

I’m a Muldoon, and I approve this message.

@pst314, if he was class of 1977, there’s a chance that he hazed me. If you remember his name, I can look him up in my copy of the yearbook.
I do indeed. Should we, as a courtesy, take this private before mentioning names?

Thank you, David. Will do.

And when these things are injected into what should be an escapist fantasy … they’re usually done in such a cack-handed way that it disrupts the illusion.
Guess how far I made it into the recent Coming to America sequel.

I’m a Muldoon, and I approve this message
Who so ever asks me of my birth…I will tell them I am born of Irish Princes who ruled in Donegal a thousand years ago; that I am descended from the High Kings of Ireland.
Sláinte!

Remember when some New Age charlatan promised to deliver homeopathic doses via the internet? (Not sure how people thought substances were supposed to be transported in Ethernet packets, but it is technically true that an Ethernet packet can carry zero molecules of anything you wish.)
Nitwit into homeopathy: “The water retains the imprint of the molecules that were in it.”
Me: “Does it retain the imprint of the sewage that was in it too?”
Yeah, I know. It’s a gift.

FWIW, juniors were called cows. That terminology has probably changed by now…
Not by the early 00’s, according to a former colleague who graduated in ’99.

The Mandalorian did the same thing in the season 2 final episode, and had to mysteriously disappear a previously established male character to do it.
Yes. The gun thing was clumsy. It just looked badly done. I doubt many viewers are upset by the idea of female characters being physically effective – kicking ass, I believe it’s called. What grates is when said ass-kicking coincides with a sudden drop in logical, aesthetic and scriptwriting standards. You’d think there’d be ways to show women being competent and tenacious without resorting to cack-handed flummery and the suspension of aesthetic judgment.

whose relation to the franchise is somewhat fraught,
Heh.

Paris fashion week. That is all. Carry on.

Paris fashion week.
Yours for only 69.95…

“Human beings react to every rule, regulation, and order governments impose, and their reactions result in outcomes that can be quite different than the outcomes lawmakers intended.”
Whoa. My mind is blown.

a genuine desire to kill themselves is up

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
– Michael Crichton

…that I am descended from the High Kings of Ireland.
Begorrah, he waz kangz…
Meanwhile, as one holiday begets another, I was going to advise you to mark May 6 on your calendars in solidarity with the Association for Size Diversity and Health, which has “450+ Diverse Members” though judging from the photo on the main page “diversity” means sizes from “Ample to Zeppelin”.
Regardless, the “ASDAH partners with service providers, educators, and advocates to dismantle weight-centered health policies and practices, with a focus on people who live with multiple forms of oppression.”
The blog tells tales of some of the oppression, like being told to lose weight before knee arthroplasty (the bastard!), and that one can fight unhealthy messages of weight loss by, “…accepting weight gain as a form of body kindness…”
Except for the knees, I guess.

Especially the more corporate.
Once upon a time, I did compensation studies for a living. I quickly learned that the most powerful tool in my arsenal was a little home-brewed analysis tool that would project the effects over ten years of whatever compensation structure was under consideration. Time and again, I had to show HR professionals and senior leadership how their whiz-bang idea would discourage good employees and reward mediocrity, and what would happen when middle management goosed the ratings to try to make their teams look better.
It was terribly discouraging that none of these visionary leaders or seasoned HR managers had the first inkling of how their systems would be used and abused by the people in their employ. Seriously — you don’t think people are gonna game the system when paychecks and promotions are on the line?
That job was a struggle, because it’s hard to get references from clients after you’ve just showed them how counterproductive their super-cool new ideas are. I can’t say I miss it, though I’d like to think I saved some nice cubicle drones from needless suffering.

S2 of The Madalorian is when I finally admitted that, despite some truly gorgeous visuals, a great soundtrack, and some of my favorite genres being “borrowed” from, the show sucks.

“Human beings react to every rule, regulation, and order governments impose, and their reactions result in outcomes that can be quite different than the outcomes lawmakers intended.”
Thomas Sowell has been talking about this for most of his career. It’s a pity that so few Decision Makers pay attention.

Following up on my earlier note about The Report That Shall Not Be Named, I got a follow-up communication this morning from the Government Finance Officers Association which included a statement from one of our peers in South Africa, including the following:
“We weren’t aware of this acronym before GFOA brought it to our attention, but if we had been introduced to it earlier, we would have said something because it would not be tolerated.”
Which is to say, somebody went looking for a problem to solve, even though our overseas peers have gone 30-odd years without even knowing it was a thing.
Henceforth, I shall insist that GFOA stands for “Go Fuck Off Already.”

now I’m curious what you wrote
You won’t find it in any published DQ modules. Before they went out of business, they recruited contributors to their monster guide book, and I submitted stats for some from Australian folklore. They paid in product credits, which enabled me to score some free games before they closed.

Paris Fashion Week….
Why is there never a lighter around when you need one?

America’s clumsy Pravda news establishment. Link courtesy of Scott Adams. What the hell?

close up screencap
Thank you for that.
they have the power and they are rubbing it in our face
Agreed.

in the event of war my friends in the Fulda Gap would reenact the 300 at Thermopylae
By coincidence I’ve been digging through some 1980’s era 1/300 microarmor wargames of late and I have a sudden urge to refight WWIII.

I knew a few leftists in the 70’s and 80’s who expressed contempt for tankers as cowards hiding inside their steel machines.
There’s a very simple way to correct that notion. I call it the ‘Inverted Schrodinger’s Cat Gamble’. Sadly it is illegal in all 50 states. Probably everywhere else, too.
and I have a sudden urge to refight WWIII.
Will there be rules for man-portable atomic demolition devices?

Still no bickering…
Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.
If it’s not nanoarmor it’s crap!
I’m not trying to paint 2mm tanks, you nutter.
Will there be rules for man-portable atomic demolition devices?
You’re thinking of Ogre.

You’re thinking of Ogre.
No, SADM:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Atomic_Demolition_Munition

They figured their chance of survival was very slim.
(Stream-of-consciousness BS follows; hence my reference to “BORING” in an earlier post.)
Well, I wasn’t going to be deployed in the Fulda Gap but a different one somewhere else. (IIRC, unless that’s been declassified already, it wouldn’t be up for declassification until sometime in the 2040s.)
I still threatened one of my tank commanders that I’d kill him and his crew if he attempted to bug out for the Rhine and was within main gun range when I got to the motor pool. (Well, I said that I’d put a round through his turret. His driver could have lived through that.)
I’m pretty sure that the rest of my crew weren’t overly happy about my saying that, but I never asked. OTOH, fragging officers has been a tradition since at least the 1840s in my military. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican%E2%80%93American_War There’s a documented case of someone rolling a lighted shell into a general’s tent to kill said general.)
I also was amused about the claim that the “neutron bomb” was a capitalist weapon because it would kill people but leave the buildings and infrastructure intact. Totally unlike nerve gas, which would kill civilians (but not so many invading Warsaw Pact troops who had gas masks after all) and leave the buildings and infrastructure intact.
IIRC, the “neutron bomb” would create cascading radiation within large pieces of metal, killing the crews within them. Like BMPs, T-62s, T-55s, and M-60s (I would have been in one of these). However, civilians cowering in their soil surrounded basements would not be effected by the secondary radiation.
But, yeah, if the balloon had gone up back then, I didn’t see coming back alive out of it. It can happen, but I didn’t bet on it. (Try to find a copy of Storm of Steel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_of_Steel to read the accounts of someone who lived despite the odds.)
I have no knowledge of Britain’s view on the so-called “War on Terror”, but anyone in the US who has volunteered to be a soldier since 2003 knew damned well that they could be sent somewhere where they could be killed or worse (and there are things that can be worse).

I suspect there’s no question about “if” regarding injection of gratuitous racial issues, just a matter of when and how
And sure enough, my Google feed points me to Entertainment Weekly, in which the showrunner and head writer of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier announces, rather proudly, that his priority is “exploring a decidedly Black, decidedly American hero in the current climate.” The words current climate don’t exactly bode well. Presumably, we can’t have a superhero yarn without some deferential nods to Black Lives Matter and their racial conspiracy theories. The series, we’re assured, “is very honest and forthright and very unapologetic about dealing with the truth of what it means to be American, Captain America, Black Captain America.”
I wonder if the showrunners and head writers, people such as Mr Malcolm Spellman, quoted above, ever pause to consider the possibility that, for many viewers, the fact that Sam is black is not, in fact, terribly interesting. Many viewers may not be overly enthused by the prospect of repeatedly “exploring” Sam Wilson’s “blackness.” I mean, are we saying that being black is now a remarkable character trait, a basis for popular and inexhaustible intrigue? Especially when the head writer refers to anyone with dark skin as “our people”?
Again, when I buy an IMAX ticket and tie up half the day to travel across town to the local multiplex, I don’t do it to be reminded of the dogmatic and weirdly uniform preoccupations of leftist writers. And the same applies to committing time to a Disney+ TV series.

I still threatened one of my tank commanders that I’d kill him and his crew if he attempted to bug out for the Rhine and was within main gun range
Remember the women who accidentally got pregnant to escape service during Gulf War I/II?

“…anyone in the US who has volunteered to be a soldier since 2003 knew damned well that they could be sent somewhere where they could be killed or worse…”
And that could apply to anyone, not just combat soldiers and sailors and airmen, because sometimes the mission takes priority.

I persistently fail to learn the lesson of not starting to watch a series until it’s completely finished and the reviews are in, so as to avoid the bitter disappointment.
I was just now thinking along similar lines. But then you run the risk of spoilers, which are difficult to avoid.
Another problem, of course, being that much of media shares the same mindset and makes the same noises, not least film and TV reviewers, thereby rendering their appraisals less than useful. In many cases, the word appraisals, plural, is misleading, as the uniformity of these things – the failure of critical autonomy – is becoming hard to miss. (See, for instance, WandaVision, which received near unanimous praise from the mainstream media, despite it being a trashfire of overstretched ideas that didn’t really work, and some of the worst pacing and series structure I’ve seen in recent years.)

Or you could come here
[ Licks own eyebrows. ]

And that could apply to anyone, not just combat soldiers and sailors and airmen, because sometimes the mission takes priority.
This was my attitude in the summer of 2001. Cascading youthful foolishness however only landed me first a temporary medical disqualification, then by late 2002 a permanent hip injury.
Remember the women who accidentally got pregnant to escape service during Gulf War I/II?
It has been my understanding that this has never not been a problem when potentially dangerous or even inconvenient deployments come up, and that it is especially so with pilots.
It’s almost as if there were some fundamental aspect of human evolutionary psychology that we are failing to grasp.
Or you could come here
Too Late (2015) is a solid little Noir flick, for anyone who cares.

Well, maybe except for all that NERD gaming bollocks.
Hey now – I resemble that remark 😛
I’ll have to see if that movie is on Amazon Prime (which I only signed up for because they offered it half price to students, and I wanted the 2-day shipping). Since they raised the price on me and don’t guarantee 2-day shipping anymore, I think I will cancel, since I just don’t watch enough TV to justify the cost. Too much of the new stuff is exactly what David described above – all preachy boilerplate, and lousy storytelling, pacing, and structure. They can’t be arsed to produce a quality entertaining product, and I can’t be arsed to pay for their crap.

Well, maybe except for all that NERD gaming bollocks.
I don’t mind it, although I haven’t played since the 1970’s (due to growing responsibilities and declining interest.) The comments can be a interesting for nostalgia value (reminding me of things and people from long ago) and for segues into related topics. Likewise current sci-fi movies, at least to the extent that the comments relate to current affairs.

So…about that Joe Biden clipping video(s!)…why? I find no discernible reason to fake boom mics other than something to distract us while Russian relations rapidly deterio….oh, now I get it.

Well, I never saw that coming:
I, too, am overwhelmed by my lack of surprise.

I see an unelected bureaucracy is seizing the means of production. The Western collapse continues apace.

I don’t feel bad, but … should I?
I think this answers your question:
“The show addresses topics that most food programming shies away from: water scarcity, disability inclusion, indigenous foodways.”

“The show addresses topics…”
They were very careful to be completely apolitical and shied away from anything controversial (and believe me I was looking for it) in Ep1. First hit is always free with these people.

“The show addresses topics that most food programming shies away from: water scarcity, disability inclusion, indigenous foodways.”

shouldn’t we expect them to say more about America’s nutrition, hunger, and diet-based health crises—rooted in a fundamentally broken, exploitative, unsustainable food system

And the author just leaves that claim there … as if everyone reading should heave a sigh and nod in agreement.
Me? I want to know wtf she’s talking about. If it weren’t for the Green Revolution of the 50s/60s (by White Supremacist America) millions upon millions of people would not be alive today. Food is CHEAP and consumes a lot less of the family budget than it did 100 years ago. The “food desert” lament is a myth.
Indeed, Robert Heinlein lamented it was the one important thing he just hadn’t seen on the horizon (a lot of his early sci-fi assumes food shortages that help drive humanity off earth).

“Joe Biden appearance at White House is real say fact checkers”
But they offer no explanation of the anomalies noted in that video, do they. 😐

The thing is, Luke Cage had its crashing writing flaws but largely avoided the whole race-baiting crap. Nearly all the villains were black, and the consistent theme was “we are better than this”
That reminds me: Note Unbreakable starring Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson: I have heard that Samuel L. Jackson very much wanted to play the villain because it was an interesting part. He didn’t mind being a black man playing a villain, he just wanted to play interesting characters. [Caveat: I assume that other readers of this blog know far more about all this than I do.]

“…the relationship between Sam and Ralph.”
My God, I’d completely forgotten them. Fun to see after all these years.

“I’ve cancelled all the other streaming services and get all my media from Tortuga these days”
Tortuga is Spanish for “tortoise” which is a funny name for a service which require high speed.

But they offer no explanation of the anomalies noted in that video, do they.
Yes they do – it’s that effect you’ve all seem constantly in the low resolution, encoding-artifact-ridden high quality, professional camera fed news footage we’re all familiar with.
Why I remember exactly this story of footage showing Hilary Clinton calmly walking across a runway, when in fact she was running from enemy snipers.
Happens all the time!

Kingsman…His Bond-esque archvillain could have been an insulting stereotype but he sells it.
And with a green-agenda justification that would dampen Extinction Rebellion’s diapers to boot. Stunning, brave, and hilarious that movie.

“He didn’t mind being a black man playing a villain, he just wanted to play interesting characters.”
Actors, no matter what race, love playing villains more than heroes. They’re complex, they rant, they’re the focus of everyone’s attention. And they get a cool death scene to cap it off.
Let me stop with a couple of interesting quotes:
“American publishers are not interested in black writers unless they bleed from white torture.”
Chester Himes (1909-1984)
“To sell an extra hundred thousand books, depict a white person teaching a black person how to read. White people who love to read think everyone should love to read. Plus it flatters readers to show them a character who can’t read. It’s the ultimate way to make your reader feel superior and thus to sympathize with a character. … Whether it’s the movie Fame or Driving Miss Daisy or The Color Purple, teaching a black person to read is a plot device that never, ever gets old.”
Chuck Palahniuk (from his excellent book on writing, BTW)