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.