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Given that he sees his opponent as a cow, this would seem to be a high steak environment.

I feel very tired. Trans visibility day always falls on March 31. Easter happened to fall on March 31. Certain Republican douchevolcanoes decided to pretend to be angered by this and demanded an apology from trans people in a blatant attempt to stir up outrage among their voters. This is offensive in so many ways. Just to mention a few: 1) They are demanding that trans people apologize for existing. They know perfectly well we won't and plan to use our refusal to further outrage their befuddled and frightened voters. 2) Their pretense that it is somehow the responsibility of trans people that a holiday that falls on a different day EVERY YEAR happens to coincide with an unrelated holiday this year. 3) Their use of a holiday meant to honour a man who preached tolerance and acceptance as a tool to further promote hatred and intolerance. 4) Their assumption that their voters are so blisteringly dim-witted so as not to know how calendars work. 5) The possibility that a number of them actually are that dim offends me personally. Sigh.

Natural disasters are particularly inconvenient for countries overwhelmed by man-made disasters.

Sack of Rome by Goths, 410

Armatures discuss tactics. Professional discuss logistics.

I am thinking that an Immortal who marks a person leaves some detectable trace behind, so they effectively have Pandora’s “fingerprints” on them.

Shouldn't those boxes be classifed as Hope Chests?

I was wondering how they became virginal in the first place. Then I decided they were probably baptized in extra virgin olive oil, which presumably has virginity to spare.

Today we honor the men of Taffy 3, the Light Brigade and the men of Henry V army,

Mrs. Prof with two of our cats, Baker (sleeping) and Pretty Girl (we didn't pick the name, bugging Baker). The phone doesn't have a name.

Oh, since Leonard Nimoy was brought up on the Listening thread, I thought I would mention that Nimoy provides all of the narration for Civilization IV.

You don't need to resort to anything as primitive as a pile of dirt. There is a Swiss company that creates vehicular decoys to order. Ukraine bought dozens of them made to look like a HIMARS. So the Russians ended up expending a lot of very expensive missiles on some quite cheap decoys, which is optimal only in a universe where you can convince Putin that they were actual HIMARS. And might help explain the Russian claim that they had destroyed more HIMARS systems than Ukraine had actually received.

/me keeps throwing stars around like a ninja on speed

Worst of all, he could be sentenced to The Chair.

I spread that strip in a thin mist over the parts of the internet I interface with on a regular basis.

The Canadian armed services often joke that their army and air force is only good for attacking the US, given their total lack of long ranged transports.

Rule one about doing crime. Don't write down your crimes https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/08/26/marine-vet-arrested-after-self-publishing-book-about-storming-us-capitol-jan-6.html

Unless, of course, you realize in a century or so that you can retrofit the sunken Yamato into a Space Battleship

Sorta like being an organ donor. They don't expect you to bring in any.

Would make the presidential debates a lot more interesting. Plus we would find out who get's the firemen's vote, based on which ass flames they put out first.

"The Human went out on the wheel thing this morning. He's still breathing heavy and making grunting noises. He needs help and I'll jump up on the desk and give it to him" - Explorer the Cat.

We now have to specify "1st Battle of Kursk" or "Battle of Kursk (1943)".

A fallout of a generation that grew up with and is (overly?) comfortable with technology is an attendant cavalier attitude toward the hazards associated with said technology. I think us old timey tech aficionados have a healthy skepticism for the cutting edge claims we've heard all to often that also all to often have failed to deliver. Thus 'upgrade' does not equate to 'better' for us.

Made this earlier today out of another meme I had on hand:

Well, duh, cheese season is in the fall, after all the baby cheeses have had a chance to mature.

At the rate the Russians have been digging old weapons systems out of storage, I think pretty soon they will be looking for that stuff.

Ah. But still concerning, and I just realized that this actually makes it more convenient for foreign agents looking for chance spills of vital information. Then again I wouldn't expect them to loiter on Total War: Rome forums hoping to obtain vital information about the latest generation of onagers or siege ballistae.

Meanwhile in California https://sfstandard.com/2024/07/11/nudists-save-tourist-attack-castro/

Gullible Thimblewits is a good name for a rock band. Marjorie, the Green Tailor is an Orc NPC that owns a shop near the village square. When you visit, she will regale you with worthless rumors she imagines in the moment. The village is full of half wits, and even they know she's crazy. How can you tell if the Space Lasers are Jewish? Is there some covering they remove for a bris? Do they require an astronaut rabbi to perform the honors? I did not realize Israel had such a space program.

Yeah, that was a major dumb decision.

Around that time I had bigger troubles with the 1998 problem. Yes. The 1998 problem. At the time -- July 1997 to be exact -- I worked in a small branch office that served as a connecting point and legal advice for a lot of bigger office. We had a LOT of mail going in and out. I had just finished reading another depressing article about the Y2K problem and my eyes landed on our old and cantankerous postage machine which was very much mechanical all the way through and thought, "Thank God we at least won't be having any year 2000 problems with that." On an impulse I opened it up to see how it worked. And to my astonishment the wheel that stamped out the dates ended at 1997. If we wanted to be in business after new year, we would need that entire wheel replaced. Really terrible design. So I went into the office of the engineer who was running the place and told him, "Boss, we have a 1998 problem." He replied, "We have a WHAT?" After I had explained he assigned me the job of finding out how to upgrade the darn thing. I soon learned that this would cost so much that we could very nearly buy a brand new machine for that much money and told him so. He got so mad that he assigned me a new job: finding the best possible new machine that would not have this problem. I spent about a week comparing offers and we finally decided on one. Incidentally, during that I found out that normally people who used our old model didn't find out until just before or right after new year, and were always in a terrible bind as a result. My idle curiosity saved our office a lot of trouble and frantic effort.

Lincoln at Gettysburg: "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth." Trump at a rally near Gettysburg: “Our nation was saved by the immortal heroes at Gettysburg. Gettysburg, what an unbelievable battle that was. The battle of Gettysburg, what an unbelievable. I mean it was so, was so much, and so interesting, and so vicious and horrible, and so beautiful in so many different ways — it represented such a big portion of the success of this country. Gettysburg, wow! I go to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, to look and to watch. And uh the statement of Robert E. Lee, who’s no longer in favor — did you ever notice that? He’s no longer in favor. ‘Never fight uphill, me boys, never fight uphill.’ They were fighting uphill, he said. Wow, that was a big mistake, he lost his great general and uh they were fighting uphill. ‘Never fight uphill, me boys,’ but it was too late.” It may just be me but I feel Trump's Gettysburg Address kind of lacks a certain je ne sais quoi compared to the original.

"This is MY Human!" - Explorer the Cat.

Seems reasonable. He looks like a poorly made ventriloquist's dummy with really bad hair.

Or a billionaire who has too much confidence in his own skills, no matter how much it's shown he doesn't have those skills.

I saw a Tesla Cybertruck in the wild for the first time yesterday. Good lord, those things are ugly. They look like something a first grader would come up with when tasked to draw a vehicle.

If it worked, Hope built the deck with Pandora's suggestion. As it did not work, Pandora built the deck. Haven't you ever been through a change in management?

Yeah, not rotating coils on a motor. My bad.

So, I am going to grumble about logistics for a bit. For large armies logistics are everything. Without supplies they cannot fight. It is entirely possible that they cannot even reach wherever they are supposed to go. This rule is even more important for modern armies but even for medieval or fantasy armies this holds true. Now Tolkien was completely aware of this and did it right. He had both the strategic and operational scale covered. Strategically in that while Mordor was a terrible place for growing food, Sauron also controlled more distant and presumably more fertile nations who paid tithes in the form of food and valuable materials. Presumably this allowed him to keep large stockpiles of food in Mordor so he could keep his armies supplied. What is more, when he did move his armies he split them up and used different routes before they converged on their target (as seen in the battle for Minas Tirith). This made them much more manageable supply-wise; moving all his troops in a single column would have been unmanageably difficult. (David Weber also did this well in his Safehold series where he not only describes the logistics very realistically but also has them be the deciding factor in at least three or four of the campaigns described.) Unfortunately -- and this is where my ranting begins -- not all authors are very concerned with this. Especially the Tolkien ripoffs have a tendency to have huge armies but not spend even a moment of thought on where they get their food from. A particularly egregious example would be Robert Jordan's massive The Dragon Procrastinating series in which Totally Not Morgoth™ has a massive army of Absolutely Not Orcs™ and I Can't Believe It's Not Nazgul™. This army somehow emerges fully equipped from a country described as being as about as welcoming as a WH40K hellworld and where you take your life in your hands if you try to travel as much as half a kilometer. There is certainly no possibility of growing food there for even a small settlement, let alone for a massive army on the march. Apparently Totally Not Morgoth™ pulled this huge army straight out of his arse. There are of course numerous lesser offenders. They typically create a Mordor ripoff which can at least credibly serve as an industrial base for their not-Orcs but where the only vegetation consists of maybe two thorn bushes and a cactus. It is blindingly obvious that this country cannot sustain an army let alone the population needed to recruit it from. It is so frustrating to me and often destroys my immersion, changing my read from enjoyable relaxation into sneering at the writer's ineptness. (I can get fun from the latter, too, but it annoys me when the writer does not even try.) In short: Armies need food. This isn't hard. Sigh.

Politicians make excellent subjects for beginners’ anatomy classes: they have no brains, no spines, no hearts, no guts, and no balls.

https://www.egscomics.com/comic/hope-035 I am seriously wondering how much of a mess Pandora left her memory, expecting Hope to sort it all out later. Pandora left the keys to her brain under the mat and Hope walked in without getting the realtor or landlord to sign off on preexisting damage.

The sensei thwacking the student scene is a staple of martial arts movies.

The King formerly known as Prince?

The currency she uses is good enough to pass inspection by a kid working retail. But still I wonder . . . . Perhaps world economics are run by inhuman forces that are unconcerned with human law, ethics or morality.

"The Human has stopped coughing and is sorta up an moving. And he wants to sit in this chair. Meh, might as well let him" - Explorer the Cat.

Whatever you send the human, make sure the box fits the cat.

She has said that her flight was from telekinesis.

Oh, one other thing - Mrs. Prof strode out of the computer area Saturday afternoon and pronounced, "Someone loves me, and it isn't you," with a grin on her face. She then showed me a pair of silly-looking cat slippers that someone for whom she had done a favor had sent her as a gift. Nice, comfy looking. Still, not a challenge one should allow to go by if at all possible, and in this case, I had a retort. You see, I had ordered her a birthday gift - a pair of lab-grown diamond earrings (small diamonds, but that's all I could afford) - and I'd hoped to give them to her at Friday's family Thanksgiving get-together. Well, UPS thwarted that with late delivery, but they did deliver while she was out running a cat errand Saturday morning. I'd opened up the package and was ready to spring it on her at the proper time, and wouldn't you know it, she presented the proper time with her little "someone loves me" remark. So, after letting a few comedy beats pass for effect, I went and retrieved the Zales box and brought it over to her. I then pronounced, "Someone loves you, and it's me," and handed her the box. The look on her face was priceless. She appreciated the gift very much, especially after I reassured her that I didn't break the bank in purchasing them (they were $59 plus tax - like I said, they were small). I had her try them on, and she looked lovely in them. Mission accomplished, on both fronts.

Due to living alone and not wanting to go out and make some one work on a holiday (i.e. waitstaff) I got my self something special for Thanksgiving. I'm having steak later today!

I remember one time when we were visiting a friend, a sudden ruckus came from down their hall. Which I was in position to look down. So they asked "What's that noise?" I replied "Your cat is fighting with a box. The more intelligent one is winning." Immediate response: "Oh, poor Misty, is that box beating up on you?"