Archive for July, 2008
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
The first word of the Zombie Apocalypse reached us at approximately 10:30 this morning. Sal calls those of us who had driven to the site that morning into his office and informs us that the radio news is carrying reports of heavy rioting in Flint, spreading to northern Detroit. US123 and I75 are [...]
Posted in General | 5 Comments »
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008
Tuesday was Tactics Day. It opened with a class on ground analysis; how to match your tactics to the ground you have to fight on. We analyzed a particular area of the site for access and escape routes, cover, concealment, impediments to movement, and the way all these affect possibilities for attack and [...]
Posted in General | 12 Comments »
Monday, July 28th, 2008
Monday was the day things went bang. Firearms, basic and advanced. We began with safety instruction and refresher by the lovely Lynda, emphasizing three basic rules: (1) Always keep the muzzle pointed in a safe direction, (2) Finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot, and (3) keep ammunition separated from weapons [...]
Posted in General | 7 Comments »
Monday, July 28th, 2008
Tuesday was designated MacGyver Day — all about cleverness, improvisation, and thinking outside the box. This sounded like fun, right enough, but what I was really looking forward to was…holmgang.
Posted in General | 17 Comments »
Saturday, July 26th, 2008
Saturday was designated Skills Day. The plan had been for the Basics — the beginner-level class — to be taken in hand and run through a compressed version of the first six months of training while the rest of us — Intermediate and Advanced students — got to choose from a casual smorgasbord [...]
Posted in General | 6 Comments »
Saturday, July 26th, 2008
OK, so imagine you could go on vacation with a bunch of your best friends, all of whom are either (a) science fiction fans, (b) software geeks, (c) advanced martial artists, or (d) usually, some combination of the above. Now imagine that you get to spend a solid week with these people learning stuff [...]
Posted in General | 6 Comments »
Friday, July 25th, 2008
Blogging (and my responses to comments) will be light for the next two weeks. I’m on the road in Michigan, attending a week-long swordfighting intensive that starts tomorrow, then I’ll be at the World Boardgaming Championships for a week after that.
Posted in Administrivia | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
What, if anything, is the essential and unique talent of good programmers?
Posted in Firearms, General, Science | 33 Comments »
Monday, July 21st, 2008
Most what-kind-of-X-are-you quizzes are superficial jokes. I just found one that seems better constructed than the average, and as an old-time D&D fan I couldn’t resist it. Here’s the paste from my results, with a link:
I Am A: Neutral Good Human Wizard (7th Level)
Ability Scores:
Strength-14
Dexterity-10
Constitution-16
Intelligence-15
Wisdom-14
Charisma-15
Alignment:Neutral Good A neutral good character does the best that [...]
Posted in General | 14 Comments »
Saturday, July 19th, 2008
The Heller vs. D.C. ruling affirming that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms was a major civil-rights victory building on 15 years of constitutional scholarship. Accordingly, we owe a great deal of thanks to principled and dedicated legal academics including Don Kates, Dave Kopel, and the blogosphere’s own InstaPundit (aka Glenn [...]
Posted in General | 31 Comments »
Thursday, July 17th, 2008
It’s no news to any serious strategy gamer that Race For The Galaxy has rapidly become one of the most popular and frequently played designs of recent years. My gaming group plays it often enough that we’ve developed our own slang terms for certain frequently-occurring tactics and situations. In the hope that other [...]
Posted in General | 9 Comments »
Wednesday, July 16th, 2008
There is a belief abroad in many conservative circles that the U.S. is “a Christian nation”. This belief is found in perhaps its most extreme form in the Mormon doctrine that the Constitution of the United States is a divinely inspired document. Less extreme versions hold that Christian piety was an shaping influence on [...]
Posted in General | 182 Comments »
Wednesday, July 9th, 2008
Once upon a time, patriotism was a fairly simple thing. It was tribal identification writ large, an emotional attachment to a people and their land. In most of the world, where patriotism exists at all it’s still like this — tribal patriotism, blood-and-soil emotionalism.
A different kind of patriotism emerged from the American and [...]
Posted in General | 153 Comments »
Monday, July 7th, 2008
Thomas Disch committed suicide on July 4th. I wouldn’t bother writing about this, except that offing himself was a perfect correspondence to what he tried to do to science fiction (the art form with which he was most associated).
Posted in General | 67 Comments »
Monday, July 7th, 2008
I think I know how to save the music business. There’s a dead-simple business model that will funnel money to talent, work with the Internet’s capability for zero-cost distribution rather than fighting it, and allow the record companies a role without “intellectual property” protection or DRM.
I call it SPAT for short. This can have [...]
Posted in General | 47 Comments »
Sunday, July 6th, 2008
Comes word from Iraq that the Maliki government has just shipped to Canada 550 tons of yellowcake uranium that Saddam Hussein had stockpiled.
One wonders what the anti-war left thinks Hussein had been planning to do with it. Make cupcakes, perhaps?
Posted in General | 40 Comments »
Saturday, July 5th, 2008
Some time back I blogged on Hotness in Hollywood. In it I gave Angeline Jolie props for making a game effort at acting in a a movie with a script so execrable that her best effort was doomed, the original Tomb Raider movie. I also praised Liv Tyler playing Arwen, who became my personal [...]
Posted in Culture, Science, Sex | 9 Comments »
Friday, July 4th, 2008
Due to a fat-finger error on my part, the comments for several posts back were deleted a few minutes ago. Apologies to all commenters; those threads were of rather high quality and I’m sorry to lose them.
Posted in Administrivia | 4 Comments »
Friday, July 4th, 2008
Che’ Shirts, Fake Rebels, Acting Class Helped Free Betancourt
All I can say is “Heh”.
Posted in General | No Comments »
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008
A reader suggested that I should take a look at an article I wrote back in 1997, Five Myths of New Media, and consider how those predictions panned out. Good idea, here goes…
Posted in General | 6 Comments »