Nevertheless, it was everywhere. The ubiquitous “The More you know” logo , though I believe that was the 90’s, G.I. Joe and “Knowing is Half the Battle.”

The problem is that it’s not really true. Power is power. Hell, even if where the line exists separately from power is gray, even influence isn’t really power. Money buys influence, but influence is only power insofar as people will do what you lean upon them to do… as I note the caution my father gave me to not issue orders I know will be disobeyed (or you cannot force compliance), as it further undermines your influence, and thus power.

Knowledge is an awareness of possibilities, facts on the ground, and known relationships. Knowledge can also be understanding, or wisdom. Wisdom, and yes, this is oversimplified as whole books can and have been written, is in having a bullshit detector, in choosing from the better possibilities, being able to accurately see the relationships, to validate the ones you were told, draw new ones, bluntly, to understand what things mean and imply. “Surprise is in the mind of the enemy” after all lies in the difference between what you believe can be done, and what actually can be done.

Wisdom is often hard earned and learned from fuckups.

As an aside - part of what catalyzed finishing this up and posting it was a similar point by the Brothers Krynn in his post on the movie “The 9th Gate” : “There’s also the theme of too much knowledge being a dangerous thing. Curiosity is good, wisdom though is required to disseminate between darkness and light.” You may remember the expression that there is a difference between an open mind and a hole in the head. Over and over we are reminded that knowledge, even in the context of “understanding,” and wisdom are two different things. If even such related terms are different, how could knowledge possibly be power, vice enabling it?

To the extent “Knowledge is Power” has any truth, it is that with a limited number of options in front of you, you are less likely to be able to choose a good option. In the end though, when two men have the same knowledge, it’s the person with the best ability to apply that knowledge that wins. Two people playing chess have perfect knowledge of the places the pieces occupy, if not what is in their opponents mind for plans. They can both perfectly see the possibilities, even if going beyond the first, second, and other orders becomes progressively more difficult.

This is where Sun Tzu applies as metaphorical truth. It’s not only those possibilities, but which ones your opponent is likely to take, and under “knowing yourself”, what your weak points are that he can take advantage of. This isn’t just troop numbers, and logistics, where the pieces are, but what it implies for constraints, or unforseen mobility. Who the generals or commanders are, and how they like to operate. Not just on their side. Not just on yours.

In the end, knowledge gives you options for applying power effectively. It can give you paths to avoid problems or find solutions. It is important - a force multiplier.

Knowledge lets you know where you can apply power.

But cunning and bluffing can only get you so far.

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Yes, I’m aware that Monopoly, at least, isn’t as bad as people think when you actually follow the rules, but even then it was designed to make a point, rather than be a fun game. Since the advent of bookcase/boxed wargames in the 70’s and 80’s and hobby games from Europe later on, there’s been an explosion and refinement of game mechanics and play.

So, here are some of my favorite games. Not all are still in print, sadly, but I’ll try to focus more on the ones that are readily available. Games I’ve offloaded over the years will not be on the list, so a few pretty good ones like Betrayal in the House on the Hill won’t be mentioned. Games I never owned but have played won’t be on the list either. That rules out Catan for this list. No matter how much I’ve enjoyed it, if it didn’t clear the bar for me to own a copy, it’s not really a favorite. That and being out of print removes Fantasy Flight’s excellent “Galactica” game from the list1.

Carcassonne: The Desert Island Game.

If you don’t have any hobby games yet other than the standard fare (chess, checkers, cards, maybe Monopoly or similar), get this one first. You take turns placing tiles, and with each one, also optionally place a “worker” to be a farmer, knight, or bandit, for scoring points as towns and roads are completed, and at the end of the game.

It’s actually not my favorite to play, but it is so very close, and if I only had one board game, I’d pick this one for a number of reasons. Yes, even over chess and go - though for the latter a patch of dirt, a twig to draw lines, and some stones are all you need. Ditto mancala.

One, it’s simply beautiful. Many euro and more modern “hobby” games spend a lot of time on graphic design and the sheer beauty of the presentation, and Carcassonne is no exception. It’s not just aesthetics - in the better designed games, the graphic layout clearly delineates and helps identify units, locations, etc. In more recent years, as hobby games have become more common in the US, the wooden pieces in some games have been replaced with plastic. I’m not sure I like trading off the heft for the ability to mold more detail, but you can also find replacement sets of “meeples” and tokens online.

Two, it plays anywhere from 2-5 players, and there is a solo variant of the rules. Some excellent games can only play two players - a number of wargames fit this mold - and a number of others need exactly four. As long as you have someone to talk to, you can play this game, and do so with a fairly large group of players.

Three: It’s short. Play time is typically 30-40 minutes. Even if you do have more people than can play at a time, or if someone wants to join, there’s not a long wait for another round.

Four: It’s compact. This means you can take it on that trip out to the woods (all you need is a picnic table or flat surface) or cabin or whatever without taking up a lot of space.

Five: It’s accessible. Pretty much anyone can learn the rules. They’re simpler than Risk or Monopoly, that’s for certain.

Six: It’s deep. You can play it over and over again. It is the epitome of “easy to learn, but takes a long time to master.” Experienced hobby gamers will not turn their nose up at it - though there are always asshole snobs.

In short, if you want one game to buy that you can play with as few or many people that come over or hang out, that you can take with you without throwing out your back (yes, I have the SJ Games Kickstarter version of OGRE…), that people will enjoy, that people who don’t know the game can jump right in, and people who do know it won’t get bored, this is the one.

It also has a number of expansions. You may or may not like them. I find the current starter set, which includes the original game and what used to be the “rivers” expansion, the best balance.

Aside

Carcassonne, Catan, Agricola, and many other euro hobby games are referred to as “worker placement” games. These, and others where you place pieces to claim territory like Power Grid or Ticket to Ride share similarities with go compared to more tactical games like chess, checkers, OGRE, and most classic wargames. It’s fairly ephermal in some games, but in Carcassonne, Ticket To Ride, Power Grid, much like go, placing a unit is about taking and holding a territory and denying it to others, as opposed to being about attacking and defending. In Go, you can seize territory from others, but it’s about strategic preparation of the battleground via the territory you claim ownership of.

Other Games

Ticket to Ride

A rail building game, with simple rules that are easy to teach anyone, but I still rank Carcassonne higher because TTR has a larger box and more pieces to manage. The game has a simple premise. You’re building and completing routes between two destinations, each completed route getting you points. The routes are random - you draw a few to start the game, and can draw more later. You complete these routes by connecting cities, for which you use the train cards. You get points for each city connected, and more points at the end of the game for connecting two destinations several routes apart. Each turn you must choose ONE action - to get more train “tickets”/cards that allow you to claim a route, to claim a complete route between two cities, or draw a new destination ticket. It is simple to learn , but learning to keep your options open so you’re not stuck when no cards of the correct color show up, or someone cuts you off from the city you were counting on, takes time to master. Luck is a factor, but like a good poker player, keeping your options open so you can choose a better vs worse path rather than none at all, helps you win more consistently.

For further challenges, there are expansions that provide new maps and routes.

Power Grid

With these next two entries we start getting into more complicated games. They can both be picked up fairly easily as long as someone at the table knows the rules - at the gaming club we had someone who had never played a hobby game before join in and not only understand the game but do pretty well - but playing well consistently demands more attention and judgement.

In Power Grid, you’re trying to power the most cities. You earn money each turn for every city powered, but this requires not only the city to be “connected” but adequate fuel available to power all of the cities. It’s very easy to spend too much on additional plants and connections, while not leaving enough to fuel them, leaving you with little or no income the next turn.

What complicates this balancing act is that while connection costs are set, someone can cut you off from the least expensive routes by getting to and powering a city first at any given stage of the game. Further - power plant prices are not set - you bid on them. That said, the turn order acts as a governing feedback loop making it more difficult for the player in the lead to keep taking the ideal locations or plants.

This is a game I’d not use as a gateway, but would be outstanding with friends who want a bit more of a challenge. None of the individual steps are difficult - there’s even a “Robots” expansion that provides a random algorithmic player that does a far better job than one would think it has a right to - but to do well it requires some thought and people can get locked into analysis paralysis, as it requires you to consider your probable future costs for your plant bidding budget, and again probable future fuel costs when adding new connections.

Castles of Mad King Ludwig

I consider this a successor to Bezier game’s “Suburbia”, and a superior one at that. It’s not locked into a hex grid, and the scoring and placement options are much less of a brain burner.

This one has a fairly simple premise- you have all been asked to build a castle. One player is tasked as the master builder for the turn - it rotates - a set of potential rooms are drawn, the master builder assigns a price to each room (one room per price slot), and players take turns buying rooms until everyone has had a turn, or pulled some cash if otherwise out. Rinse, lather, repeat.

The fun comes in the placement. As each room is placed, it is worth some points. It may score more points, or less, if adjacent to or connected to certain types of rooms. Completing a room by connecting every entrance gets you a special bonus for each room such as money, additional points, an extra turn, and so on. Needless to say, the layouts can get… interesting. To top it off, the final score also depends on both secret victory conditions you draw into your hand, and who best meets one of several public conditions.

Scoring is only half the game. When it’s your turn to be the master builder, you need to finesse the room prices. If you’re the only one with access to the basement/dungeon level rooms, you can make it cheap. Otherwise, it’s a balancing act to make sure the room you want is expensive enough to ward off other players, while having the rooms they want expensive enough to find purchasing that same room. Guessing what people are after accurately and making them burn resources on it, or blocking it, is half the battle.

The decision loop here is simpler than power grid. Room closure bonuses can effectively give you one or more extra turns if played right, but generally, the only choices most players make any given turn are whether to buy a room, which one to buy, and where to place it for the best score and future options, and it’s done all at once. If there are new or inexperienced players, they may need some guidance the first time through for a round, and help with the scoring. The biggest analysis paralysis bottleneck is trying to figure out optimal room placement to maximize points from interactions.

DUNE

You play as one of several factions - Atreadies, Harkonnen, the Imperium, etc., and gather spice and fight battles to seize control of a dominant number of critical cities on the planet Arrakis. Sadly, not available any more. Originally released by Avalon Hill in the 70’s, with an excellent reprint by Gale Force 9 games (the less said about the Fantasy Flight reskin as a space empire game, the better2), it is no longer in print, and GF9 has a stripped down version themed after the movie.

It is a masterclass in asymmetrical play. That said, it really needs at least three players, and plays better with four or five, and needs two to three hours to play through. Fortunately it falls short of Diplomacy as a way to turn friends into enemies.

That said, I love this game. If you can find the GF9 version, the art style is consistent and excellent. Also - the rules are organized so that you can learn the core mechanics first before introducing the more complicated options, and have been clarified from the original ruleset.

Thunder Alley

Most of my GMT games are flat-out wargames. Liberty or Death (a COIN game) as well as Commands & Colors: Ancients, Space Empires 4x and its expansions, and Talon. All are well designed, allowing complexity of action with relatively little fiddliness. Talon, for example, is a vastly simplified Starfleet Battles with all of the records kept on the oversized ship chit, but nicely captures the flavor of SFB, as well as the lighter Federation Commander, with a vastly smaller ruleset, far fewer pieces, and much less damage and component tracking. As someone who grew up with SFB and has a fair bit in FedCom, I’ve actually played far more Talon.

Thunder Alley is a departure - a stock car racing game. Like Commands and Colors, your available moves are out of a hand of cards you draw. There’s always a spare card, so you can hold a very good one over, or avoid one that would make things really nasty in terms of breakdowns. The goal is to win as a team - every player gets several cars on their team - by scoring the most points. Crossing the finish line first is worth quite a lot, but if the rest of your team is far back in the field, you may end up losing to the guy who crossed third.

Positions change rapidly - as the cards allow solo movement as well as draft and “following” movement, that can move entire rows of cars. cleverly placing units to allow multiple cars on your team to piggyback their movements off of each other and advance together is critical. Unfortunately, some of the moves you can play can cause tire wear, use up excess fuel, or damage other components. Too many of those and you need to “pit” - and you may suddenly lose your lead.

Like most of the games on this list it’s easy to learn and play. The action is fast and fluid, and positions change pretty fast, the car leading one turn may be at the end of the pack the next.

While GMT games have an odd publishing schedule that limits reprints until enough interest is shown, this one is currently in stock and available both through GMT and Amazon.

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As this gets posted, the Pilum campaign for their fourth anthology, “Prizes”, is still live. Go take a look, get a copy. They consistently put out good work.

Part of that is the music. I was very pleasantly surprised to hear a familiar voice as the new season started, as Mrs Green Apple is the only band I took time to track down a CD while visiting Japan that wasn’t available as an MP3 on Amazon or the iTunes store.

OK, the name is a bit silly, but aside from being massively popular in Japan they have an infectious pop sound with complex melodies and very capable and precise playing - their bassist is outstanding - and I’ve consistently liked their music since running across “Inferno” for the first season of the series Fire Force. While several of their songs have been used in Anime, they largely work as standard pop musicians, and I really like their work to the extent of buying a couple of their CDs and not just listening online.

Before I spend more time on them though, let’s go further back.

The first season had an opening track by a band new to me, Yaosobi, called Yuusha, or “The Brave.”

For the moment this still hits my feelings more than the new season’s opener, in part from the familiarity, but also in part because the English translation of the song so perfectly encapsulates the tone and main themes as the series starts. It’s also sung by Yaosobi, and a lot of work went into not only making it a faithful translation but also poetically flow well and scan with the rhythm of the melody. Given how dense that is, that was not easy.

Incidentally, they may have borrowed some art, but the animation is almost entirely new for the video.

The new song for the second season covers a broader emotional range, approaching epic in parts, and has a different feel. Where “Brave” looks back at the realization that time passes, and that feats and people pass into dust and are forgotten if not carried forward or memorialized, “Lulu” comes across as an ongoing conversation with a beloved memory. Brave looks at how this new Journey started for Frieren, as she realizes what she missed, Lulu recalls the constant flashbacks as Frieren constantly uses the past to inform the present, but also the present to better see the past.

While the above video seems to have subtitles, I like the flow of the translation a bit better below.

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Two, due to the controversy over its demons - more on that later - I was looking at this from a standpoint of good and evil, but that didn’t feel right, and then I recalled Alexander Macris, the creator of the OD&D-based ACKs (Adventurer Conqueror King system) RPG discussing inherently evil races, and how he mapped that to law and chaos in his rules. In the end, someone following Law may not be particularly nice or even good, but push comes to shove, he will fight for civilization. Chaos will side with disorder, entropy, the dissolution of rules and anything but raw power. Necromancy, human sacrifice, mass slaughter for its’ own sake - utterly inimical to civilization, and it cannot be coexistent. It must always be opposed, or your society falls. An “inherently evil” race like Orcs may have limited organization such as tribes, but in the end, they hate humans, hate civilization, and any temporary truce is just a means to gather strength and return to pillage.

It is, in part, recognition that they are not “just like you”, that “there but for the grace of god/the gods, there go I” does not apply to all. That there are sociopaths and the utterly alien, and yes, there is evil.

Lastly, I was spurred by a critique of a critique of an episode of Frieren, where it was obvious that the original critic was, as Jonathan Haidt would say, utterly blind to several moral axes.

So what is Frieren? On the one hand, at first glance, it’s a bog-standard fantasy world with magic, Elves, Dwarves, Dragons, and yes, Demons. There is, or was, a “Demon Lord”. The art is as close to “standard maga anime style” as you can possibly get.

And yet…

In so many stories, it’s not the tropes you use, it’s how you use them. The execution.

The artwork in hte manga and anime is clean, intricate, beautiful, with excellent use of perspective to move the story and set tone. Even the animation in the series is smooth, little expense was spared.

It isn’t a story of the plucky party building up until they can defeat the big bad…. the big bad is already defeated, before even the first scene or panel. We’re not saving the world. Our heroes, who spent ten years on this quest, a fighter (Himmel, meaning “heaven”), somewhat full of himself, a stoic Dwarf (Eisen, or “iron”), an drunkard priest (Heiter, or “cheerful”), and the near-immortal elf mage Frieren (“freeze”), who had been around a thousand years, are on their way into the capital to report their task is done. In the course of the very first episode, we see the celebrations, and the first hint at how alien Frieren’s view is, because to her, the ten years was a blink in her life, but she promises to join them in 50 years to show them a better place to see they meteor shower they are watching. Time passes, and she does return, the friends regroup, go hiking, kill some monsters, and enjoy the return of the meteor shower over a beautiful still lake.

Shortly after, at Himmel’s death, she breaks down, realizing that those ten years she earlier dismissed meant something to her, regretting the distance and not engaging with the people who turned out to be her friends, that she should have learned more about them. She sets out to learn more, and finds Heiter again after a couple decades, to check in on him. He is near death as well, and asks if she can take over the care and training of a young girl with potential to be a mage, Fern. She refuses at first, but Heiter convinces her to stay around by asking her to translate a grimoire.

That’s the first episode, spanning over 70 years.

What comes next is a journey to retrace her steps from several decades ago, with Fern, and later also Stark, Eisen’s apprentice, in tow. Over the next six or so episodes, we learn more about Frieren, Fern grows up a bit, and we learn more about magic. We also meet our first demon - Qual, one of the most powerful demons that, at the time, they could not defeat, so he had been sealed. He is killed with a refinement of the very spell Qual was known for, studied and improved over the decades.

The series constantly bounces back and forth - Fern and Stark’s growth, with Frieren’s flashbacks and illumination of what her journey decades ago really had meant not only to her, but to the people around them. Himmel, for example, had dropped by that village every few years in order to check on the seals, to ensure the ongoing safety of the villagers, for all of his vanity, also not abandoning his duty in attending to the problems caused by his solutions. While there are a few multi-episode arcs, many are just little slices of life along the way - and yet none are useless, as they all illuminate the different ways in which we connect. Not all of these ways are self-serving. The critique I mentioned could not understand why an old dwarf was still standing guard over a village hundreds of years after the human woman he loved had died, to the point that what he remembered was his promise, when he could not really remember her face or voice. The critique? That this, and other examples, are counter to one of the main themes of the story - the need for human connection. The dwarf could have done something better with his life. More self-fulfilling.

Yes, that a story about connection, in this case about the bond of a promise and duty, was not about running off and self-fulfillment.

It may be an edge case, but the dwarf found purpose in his promise, as a gift back to the woman he loved, and the village she cherished, even if neither he nor they fully remembered why anymore. He was fulfilled in doing what he saw as his duty, to protect that sliver of civilization, and did not regret his life. That too, is a form of connection, and a recognition that if we are to expect people to give to us, we must give in return. That relationships beget obligation, at least if you are not going to be a vampiric parasite of time and resources.

The promises we make and keep, what we give back, not tit-for-tat, to the people we love who give their time and attention to us, are also a form of connection. it’s not a one-way street.

Which brings us to the main reason critics call Frieren racist, the penultimate example of what it is to be disconnected. And the first arc with significant ongoing action and tension. The Demons, starting with the Aura (and later) Arcs.

Demons in Japanese stories map to several disparate concepts. Spirits, monsters, or even actual demons in the Catholic sense. So you get shows with “good” demons that are basically ogres and ore or less human, but you also have stories where the trope is demons, or whatever stands in for them, are predatory sociopaths. Not stupid - many are very controlled - but as in Frieren, having no idea what the connections of family and friends are. Their hierarchy is defined by pure power - and while they can mute that power as represented by magical strength temporarily for stealth, will never do so long term for that is to call yourself weak to all the predators around you. They are, in the definition, of Alex Macris, an evil race. Humans are their prey, and they use language, not with the purpose of communicating truth, but instead to manipulate their prey. A demon that looks like a child is asked why it said “mother” when about to be slain by villagers, and it flatly says that it makes people hesitate.

Again, for demons in Frieren, words are not used for truth; they are just a narrative used to ensnare their prey. I suspect that hit too close to home for people with a postmodern worldview, that and the fact that no matter how much the demons simply ate people or struggled to understand them, they were never anything other than an existential threat to civilization and those around them.

They were an “inherently evil” race. Or in Macris’ terms, chaotic. Frieren calls them “animals that talk to deceive,” and the demons acknowledge that.

The reason that distinction clicks is because, as you will later see, not everyone on the human side is nice or good. Many of the leaders do care for their people, but you have mages like Ubel (“bad”) who are at best borderline sociopaths themselves, but she still understands the need for people, connection, civilization, and will fight to protect that and her fellow mages. In a later arc there is a pocket empire that had created a secret team of mage killers, and since lost control, with the goal of killing all mages, including Serie (“series”) , the even older elf that taught Freiren’s master a thousand years ago.

In the end, it is an exploration of the different ways we connect, and the tragedies that occur when we cannot. It recognizes not just joy but sadness, gifts and duty and obligation.

The title translation also irks me, but this is an unfair judgment. They at least evoked what the story was about, and the source title wasn’t in the vein of “how I got this cool cheat skill in another world and was awesomer than everyone else.” Some titles do not lend themselves to literal translation , and this is one case, where the Japanese means both “Frieren at the funeral” - the instigation of her journey in the very first episode, and what the demons call her “Frieren the Slayer/Undertaker” - the mage that is the closest thing to John Wick they fear.

Addendum

To address a couple points re: civilized via antithetical to civilization (with a note that per Macris’ definition it’s more about antithetical to your society), no, the barest bit of language, coordination, and self-awareness do not make one civilized.

Wolves have language. Wolves organize in packs. Wolves are at least a little bit self aware. No-one would call that a civilization, much less a village or a polis. And when we were less able to fight them and drive them out, they hunted us and our livestock.

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I get it, it was supposed to be a shorthand that being strong doesn’t make you good, but the problem is, being weak makes you incapable of doing good. We like an underdog, but being a victim , or being able to be framed as one, doesn’t make you moral, principled, or virtuous.

Or right.

Not only does might make right, might defines right. The powerful get to define the standards of what is acceptable within their reach, and the weak, for better or worse, have fuck all to say about it. If the powerful are good and just, they keep the wicked in line, and if the powerful are wicked, then the weak suffer.

Of course, those who don’t wish to be held to account, and the weak, even if basically decent, fear power in other’s hands. We’ve been fed that “violence is not the answer” since before I was in grade school and had run ins with the attitude that if I hit someone back, I was just as much in the wrong. A lot of this can be blamed towards a feminized attitude towards direct violence and force instead of deniable passive aggressive backbiting (repeat after me, Mean Girls is a documentary), but the understanding that might defines what is “right” spans the political sphere.

Heinlein wrote in Starship Troopers, partly in response to the same accusations that “violence never solves anything”:

I was heaping scorn on an inexcusably silly idea — a practice I shall always follow. Anyone who clings to the historically untrue and thoroughly immoral doctrine that violence never settles anything I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. ”

Mao of course has told us “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” This lesson has not been lost on modern “pro gun” socialists like the John Brown Gun club and their ilk, who make no effort to pretend they believe in universal gun rights. When they win the revolution, they intend to be the only ones with guns.

Every real law ends in a bullet

A law, written and codified, means nothing if not enforced. Neither does a social standard. It’s just apiece of paper or an idea, and means nothing, even as a “here’s our expectations for what you need to do or not do,” if there are no consequences for violating those standards.

For minor things, those consequences can start simple. A reminder, a nudge, a “hey, you should/shouldn’t do that.” If they refuse to go along, that can become social ostracization. Shunning.

But what if he won’t stop? What if he keeps crashing the party? Getting in people’s faces and yelling at or shoving them? Playing music loud enough to rattle your windows at 3AM? Keeps stealing?

Attacks you with a knife? Or any other situation where “use your words” will no longer resolve things.

You can effectively declare the law null and void by not enforcing it, conceding the other has a right to do as he wishes no matter the harm it causes. This not only erases the law, but respect for those who passed it, if they do not have enough will and power to back what they say. “Never give an order you know will not be followed,” even in the military respect for rank only goes so far.

Or someone needs to use physical force to make him stop. Lay hands on him, restrain him, and if he fights, hit him until you can cuff or tie him, and if he renders that impossible, or grabs a knife or axe or gun, use deadly force. It doesn’t take much before milliseconds count, and you have to react to what may or may not be a guy reaching for a weapon, only to find out you were wrong, or you were right, but too slow, and now you are the one bleeding out.

In short, if someone pushes back on a law, the only options are to give, rendering the law moot, or to escalate, until someone blinks. Or can no longer resist. It’s why getting into a fight puts you in a position where one wrong move or misapprehension can leave dead and broken bodies. Doubly so when it comes to law enforcement. It doesn’t matter who is in the right, you’re entering a whole new playing field.

Pretending that’s not the case is idiocy.

Even a law as minor and petty as forbidding the sale of loose cigarettes from a pack, if enforced, can get someone killed from the interaction with the police if they resist , or have bad health, as in the case of Eric Garner. Incidentally, that particular incident is a picture perfect example of why having scads of petty laws is a dumb idea.

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Before I joined Substack, on my old blog, I’d written “Not an Intro to Anime”. The short version - a lot of what are considered the best anime by fans are likely not teh best gateway shows or movies. And so I suggested Psycho-Pass, and Spirited Away. Both are very solid. One a dark meditation on the costs of utopia, and how sociopaths can hide themselves as “normal”, the other a beautiful story of a little girl trapped in the spirit world, trying to save her parents.

But fairy tales and serial killers may not be everyone’s cup of tea. Many other options, especially more modern ones, are so trope-heavy and genre-referential that there are many good shows I’d hesitate to recommend as a “first".” That said, a friend asked the other day for a recommendation, and told me that he had tried Dragonball and a couple other series ( so basically no Shonen), but figured I could recommend something.

And I recommended Redline.

Do you like racing? Cool cars? Hot chicks? Do you want a movie that somehow embodies raw kinetic energy and speed like no other? A labor of love that cost over 30 million dollars to make and effectively killed the studio? Do you want something that hearkens back to the 90’s, when the introduction of OVA’s in the 80’s blew open the doors and kicked off over a decade of original stories and style that took what the 80’s handed it with Crusher Joe, Vampire Hunter D, Megazone 23, and numerous others, and turned it all the way up to 11?

You got it.

Redline is the story of Sweet JP, a racer out of prison in hock to the mob, losing races because he can’t afford not to. But he wants to win. And he gets a shot at the Redline, the deadliest, fastest race in the galaxy, this time being held on “Roboworld”, inhabited by militaristic cyborgs who, shall we say, have no desire for a race to be run on their planet. It’s a simple story - can he win the race? Does he get the girl?

You get racing, possibly the best impression of raw speed ever drawn, in a highly saturated line-heavy style closer to american comics than your more standard anime. The movie opens with a nine minute conclusion of the utterly bonkers Yellow Line qualifying race, introducing JP in his TransAm and one of his rivals and love interest, Sonoshee “Cherry Boy Hunter” McLaren and her hover racer.

It slows down in the middle as everyone gets ready for the final race, and JP’s and Sonoshee’s backstories get filled in, but then the final race itself starts, and well, as promised, things go completely off the rails.

There is some light nudity - there’s a scene of Sonoshee in her apartment watching the news where she’s topless.

At one point the entire movie was placed on Youtube for free by the studio, though that original link seems to be dead. You can still easily find the opening yellow line race, as well as the entire movie on Youtube. I recommend though, if your local library supports or you otherwise have access to Kanopy - it’s available there as well.

Here’s a link to the opening race :

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Sure, it’s not literally true in literally every case. It is however metaphorically true.

One of the things I’ve pointed out with the recent shooting, and in previous discussions of altercations, is the degree to which some people cannot actually put themselves in the head of their opponent, or understand the limitations of physics, logistics, and situational awareness and reaction time in anything more complex than a tabletop boardgame (and even some wargamers, oddly… and I make the distinction in part because many boardgames of the euro variety go out of their way to avoid all but the most passive-aggressive conflict).

They cannot even put themselves into the position of the other side and project their own feelings and thoughts into what they would do with the options. God forbid you ask them to take someone with a foreign - literally or figuratively - mindset seriously insofar as what they say or believe, rather than treating them as a replaceable and re-educatable cog. Haidt had a massive realization that many self-described leftists cannot model the attitudes of the right or guess what they’d actually say because they so predominantly emphasize two of the labeled moral axes that they cannot barely imagine the others. The opposite did not hold true. Self-described conservatives could pull a trick similar to “how do you write women so well?” in “As Good as it Gets,” and answer as a liberal with a much higher degree of accuracy.

In the Sun Tzu case, “understanding yourself” is about understanding your strengths, weaknesses, mindset, the triggers you can be played on, and in the army sense what resources you have, where units are stationed, how fast they can move and where they can appear, adn their capabilities. Ditto understanding your enemy.

It’s very difficult to understand your enemy if you cannot imagine how they would feel or respond to your own moves and actions. If you cannot even project yourself into those situations and how you would react wihtout an awareness of your own biases and baggage. If they’re just a cardboard cutout “evil guy from 1930’s Germany,” with no motives but a psychopathic joy of killing (that the “ICE observers” obviously don’t internalize given how they confront supposed sociopathic thugs with guns). If you do not understand their priorities, their resources, strengths, weaknesses, vices, and yes, virtues.

There is no such thing as a competent army or opponent without at least some virtues, no matter how outweighed…, and even an incompetent one can numbers on their side. Quantity has a quality all its’ own, and all that. And the left, even a lot of moderates who just consume too much mainstream news, have a cartoonish attitude toward anything labeled “right wing”, not helped by portrayals of anything resembling right wing ideology in the media. The immensely popular “Law and Order: SVU” is but one example, if you look at how they poison the well by using cartoonishly evil white men any time anything remotely antifeminist or pro-western is uttered, made easier because in that long running fantasy/parallel world series, the women and women are almost never at fault at all1. They dress it up as portraying both sides, but argument straying into worldview vice personal actions gets progressively more detached from reality as it departs from progressive orthodoxy, or is treated as having no basis in reality.

Anyone who insists that the officer in the Good shooting should not have shot is either a liar or cannot place themselves in the place of the officer. I know it’s a trope in a lot of Anime, as characters spend a minute thinking through the series of available moves, countermoves, and counter-counter-moves, and you wouldn’t do that in real time, but no serious person going into a confrontation with armed people should do so without understanding the likely trigger points to avoid, and being prepared to accept the consequences of said civil disobedience or worse. Or understanding people and verbal conflict well enough to spot them in real time, even if it’s harder and dicier.

This blindness is not restricted to one side of the aisle. “Liberals” may not model “conservatives” very well overall, and it’s easy to laugh at the weirdly morphed freaks one sees in antifa lineups, but whoever organizes the cells, distributes the supplies and pamphlets, is either much more aware of how the other side actually thinks in realtime, or has been well trained on the tactics of “Rules for Radicals” and similar resources that distill proven and working tactics and strategies. Someone has spent a lot of time putting the data together, setting up the funding and communication and logistics, as well as establishing ground rules such that the mainstream press can credibly claim “antifa doesn’t exist” unless they want to paint antifa as the only hope of salvation.

They definitely work hard to drive independent cameras and reporters out of anywhere they are acting - anyone who can’t be trusted to clip out provocations. It’s why many antifa clips feature a mob of people closely following people to drive them out, properly speaking assault, while not quite committing battery or aggravated assault. One of the ironies here is that is that many on the moderate left who buy these narratives and the media feed are just as ignorant of their own side’s actual beliefs and underlying worldview and behavior. Those who have seen the pamphlets as Good reportedly have have less excuse.

But in the end, there’s the quote you hear after Good is shot - shocked the police have real bullets. Someone trained up via propaganda and mainstream media coverage, unaware at best that ICE agents have been assaulted with cars, and that if their life is in danger, they are allowed to use deadly force. The fact that any path at all could even possibly lead to a lethal response, and that the agents, whether by default or policy due to the last year or two of protests, would be prepared to use lethal force, never crossed their minds.

Such ignorance will result in more dead bodies, though I think fewer are now truly that ignorant, no matter how hard they’re pushing the boundaries.

You have to know how the other side thinks, and what they have to bring to the table, in any conflict, verbal or otherwise.

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I’ve had a little bit too much, much (Oh, oh, oh-oh)

All of the people start to rush (Start to rush by)

A dizzy twister dance, can’t find my drink or man

Where are my keys? I lost my phone, phone (Oh, oh, oh-oh)

[Pre-Chorus: Lady Gaga & Akon]

What’s goin’ on, on the floor?

I love this record, baby, but I can’t see straight anymore (Woo)

Keep it cool, what’s the name of this club?

I can’t remember, but it’s alright, a-alright

I pointed out that it was the height of stupidity to celebrate:

• being too drunk to remember where you are

• being too drunk and lost to know where your friends are

• or you have shitty friends

• ditto losing your keys, your phone, etc.

In short, that it was a horrible example to glorify, irresponsible behavior, and not safe.

I was told I should stop “victim blaming.”

And I think to myself - if I get mugged in an alley, that is the muggers fault, but if I’ve been walking around all night flashing cash or counting it out in public showing large bills, in a nightclub or the part of town they’re likely to be, I’ve marked myself as a victim or someone worth mugging. The mugging may not be my responsibility, but that doesn’t excuse myself from putting myself in that position.

Predators go where the prey is. They prefer easy prey.

At the time I was still naive enough to think people could reasonably understand that point. The idea that a supposedly functional adult wanted a world free from the price of bad decisions, or at least to learn to minimize them, and would shame another for pointing it out as if the person noticing there were costs to their choices was at fault, hadn’t landed, even if I was no longer a teen. Also - the idea that people who were ever-concerned about getting raped, to the point of watching each other’s drinks for roofies and such, who would stick together and not leave a friend or their belongings behind, would then call applying that same sensibility to a song glorifying stupid behavior “victim blaming.”

I should have known, given the popularity of Sheryl Crow’s “Strong Enough.” Ditto Meredith Brooke’s “Bitch”. Yes, I had both albums. Liked them for some time. Ultimately, those songs caused me to stop listening to those singers.

I get it. Just Dance is a party song. It in part reflected an ideal of it being safe to just let go. I was also harshing the vibe. But there were a lot of party songs, dance tracks, eurodance, etc., that, while on deeper inspection often reveal broken relationships and life choices, were nowhere near as overtly glorifying stupidity in such detail in direct contravention to the very fears they’d turn around and look over their shoulders for at the very same clubs.

Hey, more clouds to yell at, I guess.

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The name for the blog comes from a novel called The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson. Written in 1912, it is an at times somewhat overwrought adventure tale, set up as the dream of a Victorian era gentleman dreaming of meeting his true love again in the very, very distant future.

It is arguably one of the earliest examples of the “dying Earth” genre that I am aware of, and for its weaknesses, it not only tells an interesting tale, but it also is full of haunting descriptions of this bleak, and frankly terrifying future, where humanity’s last redoubt is a massive pyramidal structure - what would later be called an arcology - that houses energy sources from deep within the earth, as well s factories, farms, and of course, what is left of humanity.

The world about is not a mere wasteland.

It is utterly dark. The sun is dead, the oceans are gone, what atmosphere exists lies only on what were once the deepest chasms that existed as the air bled off. Worse, are things, and spiritual threats. There are the watchers, massive beings, that slowly advance inches each year, year after year from many of the major compass points. There is the place where the silent ones kill, and the country whence comes the great laughter. Perhaps the creepiest, there is the house of silence.

Even if the earth, the universe, and humanity are to be extinguished in a final heat death, it nevertheless stands as a holdfast for preserving humanity and its’ culture.

And yeah, at the time I named my blog before coming to Substack, there was an element of that in 2016. Youtube and the major platforms were taking people offline for the wrong opinions, and we’ve yet to have the eventual pushback of the normies as the progressive weirdoes overextended themselves. So yes, a holdout, a place to try to preserve and present the truth insofar as I can. And I wanted to talk games too.

Did I justify it?

I think so. Part of my move to Substack was to spend less time discussing or replying about current events, and more time on games, and the philosophy underlying my worldview. Perhaps use recent events to elaborate on principles, but to minimize current-day bait.

While this last year especially has had more posts on current or recent events, and bluntly, I’ve not posted as much this last year - and thank you to each and every one of you who have subscribed - I think that even in those posts that weren’t related to wargames and were more culture/politically related, I was able to use them more as examples than simply ragebait about whatever the event was.

What would I call it Now?

While I wouldn’t change the name now, if I had to start now, there may be a more appropriate name to use: “Models of the World.” I think it fits both of my main themes - the models of the world involved in games and gaming - see my series covering both the Classic Traveller and Mongoose-Traveller based Cepheus rules - and the writing I do on everything else.

No model is perfect or complete. OK - maybe one is. what was that Stephen Wright gag? I’ve got a scale model of the united states… one inch equals one inch…..

In either case, no model is complete. But some are more useful or true than others. Even as I write here to clarify my own thoughts, I also hope I can clarify things for others as well.

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Since moving to Substack, I’ve been a lot less inclined to do “reacting to the moment” posts, but this deserves some attention. Like other events in the last few decade, and the last year or so especially, we’ve seen the mask ripped off more and more from those who deem themselves our kinder and gentler superiors. More evolved, as it were. The ones who act like history is at an end and all that is needed is to convince, or educate, or perhaps re-educate, the rest into understanding they were wrong.

This event is significant for one more reason. Where the more liberal people in the communities I personally reside in may have pooh-poohed gun violence over Charlie Kirk’s murder, relatively few gloated about it in person. For this shooting, I’ve had people with the understanding I generally lean rightward bring this up in person to myself and others as if it is so self-evidently and noetically bad that no-one could possibly disagree with them. The shock on their faces when you reply “she shouldn’t have tried to run over a cop” is entirely expected, though. Especially given they thought they had a moral checkmate.

Heads up - while my posts are rarely that short, this is nearly up to lengths. Hopefully I can make it as insightful as his are wont to be.

Ditto the other recent shooting that’s happened since. Any framing until more facts are known of “ICE shot a married couple”, given the utterly dishonest framing of the shooting in Minnesota, is to be treated with a grain of salt. There have been hundreds of car rammings, several outright armed - with firearms - assaults, one of which instead killed immigrants and not ICE agents, and a number of other attacks that skirt the appearance of obvious malfeasance to generate a reaction that can be mined for propaganda. These efforts are coordinated, with mobile apps and backend infrastructure and supply lines.

So, Why am I bothering.

In large part to get my own thoughts down in one coherent piece. To provide a grounding for others, with pointers to how things actually work, so that you can easier see when you are being manipulated or gaslit.

As to those who think this was ICE acting like a bunch of power-mad brownshirts, it won’t help convince them. A lot of people are captured, and captured in part because of past framings and Hollywood nonsense. People who frame everything in terms of Harry Potter are not likely to distinguish between how fights work in real life and rule-of-cool people blasted back ten feet from buckshot to the chest. Even if you can lay aside arguments on whether or not ICE agents are justified in doing their job, the simple fact of a man being justified in shooting because his life was in danger in that specific instance does not compute. They can look at the same video and come up with a thousand excuses as to what he should have known or done instead of shooting.

I can speculate as to how many talking the progressive line in this and other events are merely following the herd without thought, and how many know they are lying. Even with the specific goal of changing one’s mind if they’re just ignorant, it hardly matters much of the time, but at least in the ignorant case there’s a chance.

If one is trying to convince others, you’re more likely to find fertile ground with the undecided audience.

In the end, one of the best reasons is from Jupplandia, as follows:

Because there’s a certain kind of lie that pisses me off more than any other lie, and it’s the one that says we can do criminal shit and stupid shit and you are a monster if our actions end up with us dead.

Comments I’ve Heard

First were “I can’t believe they just shot a citizen like that.”

A common theme you’ll see through a lot of this, even the NYT “analysis” is the juvenile attitude of “but I/they was/were only just doing ‘x’ .“ At which point if you step back a thousand feet and squint, there may be some commonality or truth to the oversimplification that it could kind of be colored that way.

Cops shoot citizens all the time1. Much like people charged with murder, they may often not be justified in doing so, but like legitimate cases of self defense, they often are, to protect their own lives and others. Even fudging for “thin blue line,” nonsense the odds are that most shoots by far are justified. It’s sad or darkly funny that the controversial ones we’ve seen in the last decade or two are, given the facts, are often some of the cleanest - but people don’t like who was hurt, and by whom. See also Daniel Penny. Let’s return to the point…

If a person, citizen or otherwise, attacks a law enforcement officer or people around him using deadly force, they are entirely allowed to use deadly force to protect themselves and others.

Let me rephrase that. In the US, self-defense law entitles you to use deadly force if you are in imminent danger of grave bodily harm or death from an attack with a deadly weapon. The intentions of the “attacker” don’t really matter, insomuch as whether the person defending him or herself is subjectively in fear of their life or grave harm, and the objective facts of what they know can reasonably interpreted that way.

And a car is a deadly weapon, when used with such intent, or apparent intent. Just ask the people at Waukesha if you don’t want to believe the feds. There’s a reason Christmas markets have taken up bollards and checkpoints in parts of Europe, if not shutting down entirely. There is more than enough case law to support this, nevermind common sense.

Law enforcement gets a broader leeway. You or I cannot start the altercation, cops have broad leeway to do just that - because criminals or even those simply drunk and disorderly or disturbing the peace seldom come along meekly. In some states - Minnesota is one - there is a duty to retreat, though only if one can do so safely. This likely applies to you and me, but does not apply to law enforcement.

Then I’ve heard variants on “Why’d he have to shoot? He could have dodged! They’re trained!”

First of all, cops have a job to do. That includes stopping and detaining those breaking the law. Even an agency with a limited scope of authority has the ability to detain and arrest those interfering with their job. Some twitter layers doubt this, but it’s true. As more evidence comes out it is becoming clearer that she was deliberately working to hold up and stop the ICE agents, but even the position of the vehicles, with her across the road and in between two ICE vehicles is almost certainly not an “oops.” Just going on that alone they have reason to tell her to get out of the vehicle and / or question her.

Even if there wasn’t a cop in front of her, her speeding off like that after being ordered to exit the vehicle was a crime, and with the road conditions, a threat to the lives of others in the vicinity and down the road. I suspect they wouldn’t have shot in that case, as they already had her plate information, but they very likely could have.

Admittedly that doesn’t quite answer the question, but it’s not much of a stretch to say that they likely could have shot anyway and been in the right, even if the cop wasn’t directly in front of her.

Part of the issue though was the surface conditions. He was on ice, not the best footing. Fortunately for him, even degraded the footing was better for him than the traction was for her - you can see the wheel spin - so the car was much slower in getting started, and even then he was still struck.

And pedestrian strikes happen all the time, even with relatively slow moving vehicles. Insisting he could have dodged is to expect a consistently superhuman amount of agility and awareness out of ICE agents or law enforcement in general.

Worse, car rammings have been a common occurrence in these protests. At least one officer has been killed, and others struck or dragged. This one specifically had been dragged. Since the lady took off with the other officers hand in the window, there was a probability of him being dragged as well if she hadn’t spun the tires on ice first. That loss of traction may have prevented two officers from being more seriously injured.

That leaves aside that in the window where he had to decide, where the car started accelerating, the car was obviously still pointed at him. In that window, even any random passerby without a near-guaranteed safe avenue of retreat, was objectively in the way of a lethal threat, and had the right to shoot. Even at low speeds cars have a ton (or in this case, more than two…) of momentum.

“She was no longer a threat” - because he turned. Even assuming he wasn’t in the path, see the above discussion of context for law enforcement. If I had shot after the car had completely passed me and was obviously going down the road, then you could make that argument. If I made the decision to shoot when I was still ahead of the car in its probable line of travel, even without the additional duties of law enforcement, especially if I ended up struck, if the car is just starting to pass me, the car and its driver are not yet “no longer a threat.”

“But the tires were pointed away.”

From the position of the officer, difficult if not outright impossible to see - and the likely / possible path of the vehicle wasn’t sufficient to clear him even if he read - and more importantly assumed - that its path would miss him on the turn he couldn’t predict.

That said, he ended up struck. You can see the legs get shifted away from his center of gravity, and the limp he walks with.

“Why the head ?” - or some variants thereof. Have they even considered what a person in a SUV looks like? Even male drivers won’t present much more than shoulders and head above the hood and dash. If you’re shooting at what’s visible, that is the target. And that’s ignoring how the windshield will affect the bullet trajectory. .

“Why not shoot to disable” - Cops, and shooters in general, are taught to aim at center of mass and not aim for appendages, no matter what Hollywood tells you. Sure, snipers sometimes, and some special circumstances may require a more specific part of the body be targeted, but for the sake of simply hitting your target in the first place, will aim at the center of the available target - see above on “why the head”.

Shooting to “disable” is a fools game. Shooting a hand or “just an arm” is just not going to happen except by happenstance. Shooting at an arm you’re likely to miss, and either hit something else beyond your target, or hit somewhere lethal anyway such as the abdomen or chest. Consider for a moment how many shots miss utterly in a real gunfight or firefight.

“Why three shots? He was trying to kill her, one was enough” - You shoot until the threat is stopped.

Let me repeat that - because in the event you’re ever required to shoot in self defense, this mindset will do a lot to keep yourself from screwing yourself over.

You shoot until the threat is stopped.

If the person you’re shooting at bolts out the door and across the yard, headed for the street, shooting him in the back is a great way to go to prison.

If the person who barges into a restaurant deserves a shot, but once he’s on the ground and disarmed you walk up and put a bullet in him, you’re going to jail.

If on the other hand they’re circling around the house, back up to another room and not out the front door, are still shooting, or still advancing, or you have no way of knowing because they’re in the drivers seat and there’s no obvious blood or slumping or loss of control in that split second…. you keep shooting.

That mindset is a simple rule that will give you a fairly clean - prosecutors like the ones presiding over Rittenhouse will still find ways to argue otherwise - stopping point that makes it more difficult to argue that “you wanted to kill him.” instead of defending your life. That mindset reduces the chances you say something dumb to the cops during whatever minimum interaction you have when they get on scene before your lawyer is present, and you have to tell them enough about what happened to let them investigate and secure the scene.

In the literal second or so the officer had to decide to shoot, see what happened, and stop if justified, he got off three shots. He didn’t have time to consider “gee, is she still functional behind the wheel.” He didn’t mag dump. He didn’t keep shooting as the car drove past possibly further endangering others in or around the vehicle. Nor did he shoot at it as it drove away until it crashed.

“She didn’t mean to” - No-one knows her intentions. We can only read them however imperfectly from her actions. I for one doubt she set out that morning to run over a police officer. I find it much more likely that she panicked at the realization she was about to get detained and likely arrested, egged on by her “wife” who said to the effect of “drive baby drive,” than she saw the guy in front of her and decided he was the target rather than escape.

That said, she was looking right at him when she started moving forward.

In the end though, it doesn’t matter, even if she had been peaceful moment before - one reason no-one already had guns drawn. She pulled back, the car was pointed at the agent, she accelerated forward. He could hear and see it start to move, and a car is a lethal force threat. Even if she never screamed “I’m going to kill you” to broadcast intent,2 the actions she took were indistinguishable from a deliberate attempt to strike the agent with her car to cause harm.

And that leaves out the broader context of her previous behavior that caused them to note down license plates, other agents run over, that agent’s history with car strikes, and so on.

“You’d run too from masked thugs pointing guns.” - that you’d been following. Your “wife” or whoever clearly knew you were LE. So did the driver. You deliberately parked in the road for minutes. You were about to be detained. Running from LE when lawfully detaining you is…. a crime. They are allowed to arrest you. They are not obligated to be a punching bag or a crash test dummy.

Of course, the more recently released videos from the struck officer and door camera footage completely blows this narrative out of the water. They were parked there for minutes, even just from the external view. They were mocking the officers, “we’ll still have the same plates tomorrow,” and so on. It wasn’t until shit got real and they were ordered out of the car that everything changed.

Only an idiot believes that you treat masked unidentified thugs who are threatening you like that.

But then, even before the more recent video releases, only an idiot would buy that excuse, even as major media outlets and politicians made it. They may have masks - and as Asmongold and others have said, “I wonder why” - especially when many of the protesters are themselves masked, especially the ones pushing the boundaries the furthest or blatantly provocating over the legal lines. They also had multiple vehicles with lights, body armor, law enforcement markings. It’s obvious even in the original clips no-one thought they were random thugs. And that she didn’t take off until they tried to detain her.

This counts as not just ignorance of how things work, but a blatant lie for propaganda purposes. And the many politicians calling for blood and “accountability” are doubly vile for not only spinning variants of the story above, but also doubling down on labels they’ve applied (as many have said, they call you a nazi so that it’s OK to hurt you"), and worse, promising accountability, some of them the very politicians responsible for overlooking fraud and if whistleblower reports are to be believed, going after the people trying to prevent it.

The NYT and other sources have jumped in, spinning a narrative along the lines of “they approached her car and shot her” - without really explaining the steps in between. Handwaving the “he was struck” - you can see the legs get shifted separate from the body in several angles and him limping - ignoring the context of why she was there, and so on. As stated above, even if her intent was NOT to hit him but to escape, he had no way of knowing that while in front of a vehicle that suddenly accelerated toward him with a comrade exhorting “drive, baby, drive”.

If your best argument was “the shoot wasn’t justified because between how her wheel was turned, the ice that prevented her from accelerating faster, and everything else, she just barely missed him” I’ll remind you that a guy pointing a knife at you is a deadly threat and you’re not required for him to start swinging3 much less stab you before using deadly force. They don’t get a free pass because you dodged or “they were jsut kidding” and barely missed.

In Sum

This was sadly predictable. The tactic on the part of antifa and protesters was to be as aggressive as deniably possible to provoke reactions they can use for propaganda. As I said in a recent note, this may not be what we classically think of in terms of bombings and armed assaults - though the latter did happen in Texas - but it is the use of violence (even if it’s passive aggressive, barely over the line violence) to provoke government responses that can be used to drive political change by making the government so oppressive (or appear to be) that it loses the backing of the people.

They have the martyr they wanted. Accuse me of being ghoulish on that if you will. I’ll grant they likely would have preferred to have no-one killed on the protestor side, but they fully wanted a reaction they could use, rooted in a situation ambiguous enough that they could message it as tyranny in action. And any adult - sadly many involved in these are only so biologically - would know the risks being run in this game of chicken.

In the end it’s a tragedy a life was lost, but my sympathy to the lady is limited. In the Navy we used to say “play stupid games, win stupid prizes”. The same sentiment drives the schadenfreude engendered by the Darwin Awards. I feel more sorry for her kids, and if reports are that their dad had custody, in this day and age of family court systems presupposing the mother should keep the children unless something is horribly wrong, that also implies something about the dead woman’s common sense and empathy, or lack therof.

It was a good shot.

Update -

As part of the PR from the ICE protesters, with the new video out from the officer’s phone, there are memes going around that the last words from Good were "along the lines of “we’re not mad at you”, and the reply from the ICE officer after shooting her were to call her a bitch.

This is dishonest in the extreme, because the part in the middle where she gunned the car at him, whether with intent to kill or not, and struck him, is relevant. I personally would be pissed both at being hit by the car and the fact that he had to shoot her.

Of course, if you believe that the ICE agents are thugs who get off on hitting people, then you likely wouldn’t believe he’d be upset about being put in the position of shooting someone who could have walked away alive, if under arrest. But even in that context, can the left model someone’s thought processes enough through the supposed empathy they have to udnerstand why someone would be pissed at someone hitting them with a car?

Apparently not.

I don’t know if the meme of “I’m not mad” vs “Bitch” is a winner for the left. If someone doesn’t think he was hit in between those two moments, maybe. If they know the guy said it after being hit by her recklessly or deliberately driving into him - I think most will think it’s utterly human.

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The Future Belongs to Those Who Show Up

Any society that doesn’t ensure passing on their culture and ideals to their progeny, or worse, doesn’t care about or actively discourages progeny, is doomed to irrelevance at best.

There is of course one main way to do this. One is to have kids, and to raise them. Failing that, the alternative is to - reverse-cuckoo style - hijack someone else’s kids in parasitic fashion, to instill your worldview on them. Including the need or desire to hijack future generations. Any system of beliefs, any memetic worldview, if you will, that discourages the former, yet wishes to live on unto the next generation, must do the latter.

What are the ways we discourage children? This is hardly a complete list, but…

Pushing alternative sexualities

Homosexuality and transgenderism de facto take people and thus any possible descendants right out of the gene pool. Sure, some have kids first before “coming out of the closet”, but a society that not merely tolerates, but actively promotes, takes pride in, even, these things is chopping out a huge chunk of the replacement birthrate simply by sidelining a percentage that otherwise would have lived lives raising families, through peer pressure (no matter how astroturfed) if nothing else.

A guy fucking a guy cannot get him pregnant. A woman sleeping wiht a woman, ditto.

A guy cutting his dick off, or chemically castrating himself, cannot get a woman pregnant.

While it isn’t bad, relatively, if you’re already an adult and had kids, do this to a teenager, and you’ve nixed their chances of having descendants. And bluntly, I think it is bad to butcher yourself to fit a conception of self you’ll never achieve in reality.

Women in Careers

From a Christian perspective we were directed to be fruitful and multiply. From a utilitarian one, survival as a species leaves few things more important than birthing, raising, and passing on a legacy to the following generations. Women focused on a career instead of homemaking are not raising a family, something that only she can do. Getting pregnant gets in the way of working. Giving birth gets in the way of working. Bonding with a child for the first few months gets in the way of working. Working gets in the way of doing all of the above.

She ends up putting off having kids, and then having fewer of them.

Many do opt out of the career track after their first child, but many return to work before even kindergarten - which further causes parenting, abandonment, and bonding issues down the road.

Furthermore, a lot of women with this focus hate homemakers. A lot of feminists claim they don’t, that it’s a personal choice, but some are very open about it, and if you ever listen to what the rest say, there’s an underlying assumption that staying home and raising a family, working for your husband, has far less value than working for a paycheck and turning part of it over to raise your kids. Somehow getting paid to be a nanny and raise someone else’s kids is better than raising your own.

Hatred of Kids

I’ve lost track of the number of moms talk about their children as if they’re a burden. No, not the occasional bit of frustration. “I was cool/etc. until we had you,” said in anger, as one example. See also the focus, especially in women’s self-help material, on “self care” and realizing how amazing you always were if people and life weren’t keeping you down. Of course kids are a bummer if your main goal is taking care of yourself.

Taxes and Welfare

All the money sucked out of us to support the welfare state has to be earned somehow. As noted earlier, time spent in the office is time not spent at home raising children. And if the “life” part of work-life balance is to have any meaning regarding hobbies and friendships, requires time left over for both one’s other relationships, and one’s children.

Of course, mommy working as well doesn’t help here either.

Neither does massive welfare fraud to the likely tune of tens or even hundreds of billions, nationally. All of that money could have made our communities safer, or helped people who were born here, as were their parents (or they came over legally using proper channels).

Baby Seats

Mandated baby seats at older and older ages, and no more riding in the bed of a pickup truck. Everyone needs a seatbelt. Cars are now bigger, but have less suable seating space, especially for younger children. Plus the expense. I still remember a high school outing with three of us in the bed of a station wagon.

Oh, and airbags. I recall this is one the Detroit engineers actually opposed until more issues were resolved, but the marketers wanted it. It took a few deaths to put an “off” switch for the passenger seat in pickups, and automatic switches for the front passenger seat in general to calibrate deployment based on the passenger weight.

And yes, I have seen how people and things get bounced around in a nasty wreck.

Expenses in general

Cars are more expensive. Safety seats, several iterations as your kid grows, are expensive. Everything is more expensive compared to what we’re earning now.

Yes, I know in part this can be solved by deciding to do without luxuries.

In part.

Materialism Uber Alles

An attitude also found on the right, that material wealth and comfort are all-important, not more ephermal things like legacy, or despite a lot of blather about the importance of people, relationships.

Or duty.

So the focus subtly shifts every decision away from children as well. They don’t make line go up, except as consumers.

Social Media

Part of what makes “making do” harder is the ever-present faked perfection of social media. Gotta have that fancy trip to somewhere nice that makes Karen jealous. Sure, guys can be envious too, but….

Feminism in General

The main pusher of “we don’t need a man”, and “get a job”, and a number of other policies that have torn the family asunder as a whole, while importing people that further undermine a high trust and stable society, and in taking over the public space, the longhouse trying to quash any semblance of enforcement of standards by men, because said enforcement is not, and never will be, “nice”.

Hedonism

“He who dies with the most toys wins”. While laid at the feet of boomers with a lot of justification, and the X’ers who’s cynicism led them down the boomer path of I Got Mine, we also see the rise of Funko Pops, Disney Kid-dults, and, well, uniform abandonment of sacrifice or duty in the face of personal pleasure. See above with how I’ve seen too many moms treat their kids, or spend their kids inheritance.

With no legacy, it’s so much harder to build.

And if it’s all about “me”, I’m not helping my own kid get on their feet, or with their kids. One more nail in having a bunch of kids.

In Conclusion

The odds are not one single thing here is lethal or a huge problem even, in and of itself. But stack one on the other, and “nickled and dimed” comes into play. At some point, it suddenly is a problem. And as I alluded at the beginning, while I’m looking at this from the frame of any society that doesn’t provide it’s own continuity is effectively committing suicide, one ideological framework supports far more of these than the others, and willfully blinds itself through word-magic and post-modernism to believing that people are fungible and we can just import replacements, as if the culture those grew up in doesn’t casue issues interfacing with our own. As if people are blank slates.

Because if they’re not, we can’t just “teach” arbitrary replacements.

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OK, maybe not serve. Not yet, anyway. How and when this is going to be released is not yet finalized, but having been handed a copy of the rules alongside people like Jon Mollison over at The Joy of Wargaming, I couldn’t resist digging in, especially once a friend took the time to put together an admittedly bare bones Tabletop Simulator module.

So I went ahead and set up a table. The shorter blocks are tall enough to be partial obstructions, the larger ones block line of sight. All are some form of building and inaccessible without jump capability. The blue zone is water - none of it is deep enough to be impassable, but it’s rough terrain, and I’m using a tentative rule that a unit in water gains an extra level of heat dissipation. Green areas are forest - rough terrain that blocks LOS if there’s a full hex, and is a partial obstruction targeting units in it at the edge. Brown zones are rough terrain that does NOT block LOS or provide partial obstruction. You can consider it a park or similar with walls, terraces, or other things that make passage more difficult but none of it is tall enough to cause sighting issues.

Note - other than definitions of rough terrain, and the difference between a partial obstruction and blocked LOS, the decision of terrain effects here is entirely up to me, and whomever I’m playing with. You can decide woods always block LOS.

I did a random roll for each side. For blue - a peacenik, a broom, and a jalapeno.

For red, they also get a peacenik, but the medium and small are a shmanzer and a roo.

So I go ahead and deploy them, and take the first turn.

Red wins initiative. Moving first has the occasional plus - see the Oppenheimer rule as the sole exception to “damage takes effect after the fire phase” - but at least the Battletech style alternating-pieces initiative doesn’t completely disadvantage the side “winning” initiative and going first. On the blue side, I probably have the peacenik moving too far apart from it’s support units. For red, the ‘roo took advantage of it’s “Jordans” to advance forward over the river and first treeline.

The ‘roo sheds its heat during mindfulness, and the next turn blue wins initiative. The Peacenik corrects its mistake and closes with its’ allies, while the others don’t stray too far forward - the roo could otherwise jump behind them for a unilateral shot of missile or gatling love. Red closes, and the roo stays grounded, keeping under cover - and it can now jump to nearly any point on the board to get a good position.

Blue gets initiative again, and tries to watch it’s six, but the ‘roo finds a position that is partial obstruction from the broom - it’s partial obstruction because it’s in the woods, AND would also be partial obstruction as it’s on the knife edge of a full woods hex, so in either case - has LOS blocked from the peacenik, and is behind the jalapeno, so it jumps in. The rest of red is making it’s way up the river.

There are only two units that can fire, the blue broom goes first. It’s shooting at a small unit, in partial obstruction, at a range of four hexes. It would normally be at medium range (4-8 hexes) but with the range band shifts is considered at long range , needing a 5 or 6 to hit, and misses with all three systems. Two of the systems suffer no penalties from the miss results, but the chaingun suffers a misfire: runaway chain gun, resulting in ten (half of 19 rounded up) attacks against the ‘roo, needing a 6 to hit, and all ammo expended. They all miss.

Outside of the Oppenheimer rule, the combat is simultaneous, so even if the ‘roo had been taken down by the broom, it still gets a shot off. Shooting out of the woods at three hexes, at a small target, is in the medium range band due to the shift from shooting a small target, and needs a 4 or better to hit. The missile pod hits with a five. The result is a 6 - so we need to roll on the critical hit table, but the result is a 2, so we assign max damage, and that is it. The chaingun misses with a two (and no penalty). Ammo is marked off for both the broom and ‘roo.

As a note, we’re using regular damage so each square is “x”’d out, meaning the 6 points of max damage from the small missile pod only cross out three squares. Otherwise, that Jalapeno would be in even more dire straights.

Wrap Up

With the first set of turns done, we’re taking a pause. The broom managed to completely screw up shooting at the red ‘roo, and lost all of its chaingun ammo. The ‘roo in the meantime badly dinged up the jalapeno. Also, after chatting with the creator of the TTS module, they intend to provide an example terrain key, and also moved/shot chits that were overlooked. One feature of AESMAG is that there are not a lot of rules in place for terrain, but the basic language of rough terrain, and partial and full blocking of LOS allows for a lot of flexibility out of whatever is crafted. They also hope to have tiles and or more options / models available to place terrain on the table.

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Please also join the Pilum Press Discord and/or the Autarch Discord. Pilum is the publisher of several books and short story collections including Shagduk and Thune’s Vision, with a new anthology due soon. Autarch is the home of the Adventurer Conquerer King RPG.

In logic, OR means that either option or condition being true makes something true. When it comes to defining whether people are enemies, you can consider someone your enemy, someone can consider you their enemy, or the feeling may be mutual, but in either case you are enemies even if one or the other side is unaware.

AND means that both things have to be true for the result to be true. Applied to friendship, that means that you both have to consider the other person a friend to truly say you are friends. If person A hates the person B, or even simply doesn’t care, it doesn’t matter how much person B likes person A or is willing to rush to their aid, they are not friends.

The same is true of group membership. You can consider yourself to be part of, say, a gang, but if they do not accept you, you simply aren’t. Things obviously get interesting when the gang figures you’re a member, but you don’t agree.

Outsiders

What complicates the issue is of course, how does a third person perceive you? Are you part of group “X” or not? Because it is also a “friend” or “enemy” distinction, it’s “or”. It really doesn’t matter if you don’t consider yourself part of the Beetle Liberation Front because you’re a member of the Beetle Freedom Foundation and disagree with the BLF on the whether or not redheads have souls. If I consider you both sufficiently the same, then you’re both bugmen to me, and BLF or BFF is irrelevant.

And the only say you have is to try and convince me that the BFF is sufficiently different from the BLF that you’re not in my ‘enemy” group, or even possibly an ally. Keep in mind, the expression “the enemy of my enemy is my enemy’s enemy, no more, no less”, though they can be an ally of convenience.

So to an outsider, whether two people or groups are friends or enemies is also an “or” decision exclusively in the hands of said outsider.

This has a lot of implications. People will claim to be your friends or allies to take advantage of you, especially in low-trust environments. People are rarely lying when they declare themselves your enemy - oddly making that an inherently more honest position, or at least one with a lot lower chance of misrepresentation. A lot of drama in real life and fiction revolves around whether or not people’s allegiances are as portrayed, and if they are accurately perceived.

Way back in the mid-80’s, anime wasn’t a “thing” yet. Akira hadn’t been released, much less Spirited Away or Cowboy Bebop. Sure, there were oddball derivative shows like “Battle of the Planets” that had been massively redone from the original, Star Blazers, Speed Racer, and a few other mecha shows I recall from my summers in New England, and then Robotech based on Macross, Southern Cross, and Mospeada, but Viz hadn’t even released it’s first manga adaptations as standard comic books yet (Mai the Psychic Girl, Area 88, and Xenon, Heavy Metal Warrior).

But, if you were into anime, various conventions had tables and booths, with merch, illustrations, and so on, and they and would show movies like Lensman and Project A-Ko. And you could pick up books from other cons with playlists as well as synopses.

And you could get hooked into a ring of people swapping copies of movies and shows, mostly movies and “OVA’s” (shorter animated pieces roughly an hour long). Someone, somewhere, would buy laserdisks - not cheap - and copy them to VHS. You could “buy in” by supplying a few blanks, and get sent a copy of something, and once you had a few, start trading single copies. In this manner I saw Honneamise, Crusher Joe, Lensman, Grey, Iczer-1, Bubblegum Crisis, Vampire Hunter D, Arion, Urusei Yatsura, Megazone 23, and a number of other movies and OVAs, which because they were cartoons and I was blessed and cursed with the usual X-er latchkey upbringing, meant I got exposed to not only some amazing artwork and storytelling, but a level of tits and extreme violence that would shock anyone who thinks “cartoons are for kids.” Things like eyeballs exploding out as a metallic tentacled thing rips through a starship bridge , said tentacles plunging through people and out of skulls. Yeah, that was Megazone 23 part II.

One thing that you looked for though, was generations of copies.

VHS tapes wore out. The read off of the original tape could be flaky if the heads were out of alignment, or any of the analog circuitry was “off”. Even without that read loss, you had signal loss patching into a TV or another VCR, and of course, recording quality.

In short, every copy was worse than the original. Every further copy of that copy was even worse still. If you wanted a copy that was watchable, and you wanted to be able to further trade it, you wanted to make sure that the generational count of the movie you were swapping for was as low as possible. And you wanted them made with decent quality VCRs.

Entropy is a bitch.

The more distant you are from the source, the more you copy a copy, the more derivative and degraded it gets. It’s not just the physical too - but inhabits the realm of ideas as well. On a literary level, it’s why so much fiction, especially genre, is slop. Star Wars was an homage to Flash Gordon and the like. To something vital from the pulp era. Vance, Zelazny, Cook, Merritt, and others borrowed directly from myth and legend and folk t tales, from ancient literature. Modern writers all too often borrow from these, already second-order sources, and are shallower for it.

How many Star Wars knockoffs and zombie tales do we need?

It also doesn’t help that in knowledge, much like copying media and conenction/equipment quality, the quality of your engagement matters as well.

In my time as a nuke, it helped I’m smart - though I thankfully had most of my overweening pride in the primacy of said smarts knocked out of me - but what got me through my advancement exams was a pattern of: read the book and manuals, and highlight anything of note. Read through it again, slower, and write out every important point in my own notes. review the notes. It didn’t surprise me much later to find out about a series of studies that showed students who wrote out their notes instead of typing them had consistently better measured retention, backing up decades of theory that the more ways you engage yourself, including physically with what you’re trying to learn, the better you will learn it.

It’s also why being fit is important - the body carries the mind. A healthy body keeps the mind healthy. It’s great to build a model of an engineroom in your head, but sketching it out carves it that much deeper in your memory. The better you can move, the better you can engage all of yourself and bring it into focus.

And it is also why, for real understanding, you don’t just read a summary of “what it is”, but try to go to primary sources, or at minimum, take it apart and see what makes sense, and what doesn’t. If it doesn’t make sense, is it because you don’t understand something? If it does make sense- how sure are you about your assumptions?

If you just take it in as something drifting by, you don’t learn it as well. Cliff’s notes may give you enough to sound like you understand the point of a book, but it isn’t the same as reading it. It is someone else’s understanding, and perforce, simplified, meaning that your understanding of the book is by necessity even more simple. You have a second-generation copy of the story and the ideas in your head, not the first generation copy based on reading it.

It’s what I’ve discussed before as “tribal knowledge” from my Navy days. There are a lot of nuances to doing maintenance, or starting up a plant, that just do not exist in manuals. In most cases, following the manual or developed procedures blindly as long as you have some mechanical understanding will still work out, because the manuals aren’t usually wrong, they’re incomplete1. They presume at minimum enough knowledge about how the systems involved work to not shoot yourself in the foot2, but how they’re integrated can change how you do things in ways that differ from the standalone manual.

My issues with LLMs or “AI” is less that it will “take our jerbs” - in all too many cases it will because bottom line and stock prices, and the result will be slop - but instead revolves around the question of what makes us human. If we are thinking animals, but we offload the thinking, are we still human? If the machines tell us to do something and we no longer have the personal experience and expertise to go “this is not a good idea,” where does that leave us? If all we’re doing is “recognizing the correct answer when told” even as experts, how long before we stop really taking a close look and understanding the result?

It’s not just that study with the programmers, where everyone expected, and felt like they were getting a 25% speed boost, but instead were programming slower, I’m seeing this more and more in people around me.

I’ve tried using LLMs for scaffolding and code stubs. The results were mixed. I especially loathed getting deprecated methods in the results because they were more common, especially when you prompted to use the current method.

On the one hand, one of the people I work with has written up powershell scripts that he otherwise never could have because he never really tried programming. On the other, basic things like sanitizing user inputs, validating within a dialog box, or generalizing calls as functions or iterating over arrays with sets of input values instead of repeating code several times for each case were utterly beyond ChatGPT or Copilot, and he of course didn’t have the experience to realize it. In another example, an experienced web dev I know integrating new features couldn’t really explain to me how it worked when I asked for guidance on it (I rarely work on web programming projects, so I was knocking some rust off) because he was just letting ChatGPT handle it.

And I’m getting tired of “chatgpt says”, or responses to questions that were obviously copypasted from a LLM prompt. The tone and style - I refuse to call it a voice - are distinctive, roundabout, overly verbose, and grating, yet only minimally informative.

I want to know what you think. If I wanted a summary of a series of reviews, message threads, and opinions, I want it to be at least something that you read, processed, and cross-checked. Not a LLM summary, or your take on a summary, or even a set of summaries.

Of course, as I’m finally hitting publish, I’m late to the party. I can especially recommend “AI Bugmen” because it does an excellent job of generalizing what I was discussing in part above - how recycling our inputs, or limiting them to a “safe” subset, results in the inability to deal with the world around us.

Unfolding the World

The Real Gom Jabbar

I hold at your throat the Gom Jabbar—a poisoned needle. But there is hope: It kills only animals…

Read more

6 months ago · 27 likes · 12 comments · J. Daniel Sawyer

Always The Horizon

Urban Bugmen and AI Model Collapse: A Unified Theory

This is a longer article because I’m trying to flesh out a complex idea. Similar to my article on the nature of human sapience, this is well worth the read…

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6 months ago · 136 likes · 79 comments · Copernican

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Since I hate the long life story at most recipe sites, let’s get started. Any digressions will be because this is a mix of general guidance, and because the recipe I’ll present is a baseline. You don’t have to follow it exactly. Once you have some idea of how it works, you can modify it to your preferences.

Hardware

You don’t need much:

• A decent chef’s knife

• A cutting board

• A dutch oven or pot or two

• A stirring/cooking spoon

Bluntly, outside of a frying pan and a spatula, a paring knife, and a couple mixing bowls, that’s all you really need.

If you’re starting out, don’t spend a ton of money. I’d recommend avoiding plastics in the long run, and pretty much exclusively use my cast iron and carbon pans, but if you are on a budget, plastic Tupperware or the like storage bins vice pyrex, poly cutting boards vice wood, and teflon pans (do NOT overheat them, especially if you have birds…) are fine. While I have a Smithey smooth-polished 8” cast iron pan, my daily drivers are a larger and rough Lodge, and a $60 carbon steel pan. My two pots are a steel one and a Lodge enamel dutch oven knockoff of the Le Creuset-style ones.

Get what you can now, and when you can, find something a bit above the threshold of crappiness. It won’t cost an arm and a leg and will last you years. The pans I mentioned have lasted over a decade now, so I’ve already spent less than replacing teflon pans as they wear out. My standard chef’s knife I got in a set for what would be $60 or so now has lasted three decades with regular sharpening and keeping the wood handles oiled. The Wusthof santoku1 I got for something like $50 for the last five. And I’ll never need to replace them in my lifetime.

Pretty much any blade with OK steel and a handle that doesn’t cut your hand will last years if kept sharp and not abused. Oh, and learn how to use it for dicing, etc.

The Noodles

Any decent spaghetti will do. I’ll second what Opium said - to the extent you can, avoid anything with added ingredients, enriched flour, etc. - because those have been overprocessed. As much as you can, whole egg and flour. Also - if you have people around that are gluten sensitive, look for noodles using organic ingredients. It’s not universal, but I know a number of people who have “gluten” issues with standard US bread that can eat European breads and bread made with organic flour pretty much just fine.

The only noodles I make at home are udon noodles, which really only need a rolling pin, flour, and water, and a knife, but in a pinch, while they may be thicker than store bought dry noodles, you can absolutely make noodles at home without any fancy gear.

The Sauce

This one benefits from more simmering time but can be done, start to finish, in under an hour. You can serve it over almost any pasta, or even vegetables like spaghetti squash. .

Like I said, it’s only a baseline - it can be modified to taste, with some ingredients utterly left out or modified to taste or availability. I’ll give you my basic ingredients list and discuss why I use them, and substitutions in the instructions.

This is scaled to a fairly large family pot - my 5-quart Lodge enameled dutch oven - and can easily accommodate 8 servings with leftovers.

Ingredients

• 2-3 tablespoons olive oil

• 1/2 large onion, diced small

• 5 cloves of garlic

• 1-1.5 Lbs ground beef or ground sausage (optional)

• 2-4 tablespoons salt

• 1-2 tablespoons Oregano

• 1-2 tablespoons dry basil

• 1-2 teaspoons paprika (optional)

• 1-2 teaspoons rosemary (optional)

• 2 approx 28-oz can crushed tomatoes

Notes:

While nearly everything is to taste except the olive oil and tomatoes, you can make a decent sauce without the meat, rosemary, or paprika. You can also add mushrooms, garden vegetables, and so on.

For the measured seasonings - start at the lower end. You can add them once meat is browned, and then give at least five minutes for everything to simmer with the tomatoes before adding more. Add less than you think you need and give it five minutes - the flavor of whatever you added in the sauce will strengthen as it cooks out and has a chance to mix. This is especially true of salt, which, while it dissolves fairly fast and adds its own taste, also brings out all the other flavors.

My preferences in meat run towards uncased/ground sage/italian/hot sausage sausage, or ground beef, in roughly that order. Roughly 1 Lb is ideal, I’ve used up to 2 Lbs but that results in a very meaty sauce for most people.

One thing that I do is start with roughly 1/4 cup shredded carrots in the olive oil before anything else, adding a bit of sweetness.

Substitutions:

Powdered garlic will work - go easy on it as it’s stronger than the equivalent amount of fresh garlic.

I put crushed tomatoes because it’s nearly broken up to a sauce consistency but has more texture. Given enough time the consistency will break down so that you don’t have runny sauce which separates out, even if you started with whole tomatoes you chopped up yourself. A couple cheats are to:

• Use tomato sauce

• Swap in tomato paste and 1-2 cups water.

I’ll usually use paste instead of a second 28-oz can since it is already very finely ground. As the water cooks off it acts as a better binder keeping the sauce from separating as much when poured over noodles. I also often mix in 1-2 Tbsp of flour to the (cold) water before I add it to the pot.

With enough time, you can of course cook and crush up and simmer regular tomatoes down to a sauce as well.

Instructions

Warm up olive oil in a dutch oven or pot. Toss in onions and cook on medium-low for 3-5 minutes until they start getting translucent. Add garlic, and cook another 3-5 minutes. The garlic cooks faster so you generally want to add it after the onions when cooking in oil or over a pan.

Add the meat, break up, and brown. A dusting of salt or paprika can be added here, but presumably you picked the meat because it’s already seasoned the way you like it.

Once the meat is browned, add the other spices and herbs as desired. Start at the low end (forex: 1 tablespoon of oregano) because you can always add more later as it simmers. Then add the tomatoes. Mix in will, let simmer a few (5) minutes. Once the mixture is bubbling turn down the heat to low and leave it there.

This is a good point to take a taste. Figure out which flavors you want a bit more of (salt, oregano, basil being the most likely ones), add, mix in, simmer five minutes, and taste again.

The cooking should take 30-40 minutes for a decent result - though a longer simmer is always better if you have the time to check it every 5-10 minutes to mix it and keep it from burning. More simmering time means a more even consistency and less separation / runniness when served. If you’re using fresh tomatoes you will need to break them up somehow, preferably apart from or before adding meat. You can always break them up and cook them ahead of time.

For the last 10-15 or so heat up your water for noodles and cook them. If you’re doing something like spaghetti squash you’ll need to start 30 minutes before serving to adequately steam it.

The point is that you can start the sauce itself early, and once it’s in simmer mode it can be left there as long as you check it often enough to keep it from burning. Keep it on low and make the things that need to be freshly prepared like the pasta or bread or salad when it’s time. Not only does it keep well in the fridge once cooled off, but like chili, it makes the flavor a little less bitter the second day out and lets everything marinate even more.

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Please also join the Pilum Press Discord and/or the Autarch Discord. Pilum is the publisher of several books and short story collections including Shagduk and Thune’s Vision. Autarch is the home of the Adventurer Conquerer King RPG.

A friend of mine showed me this:

Since a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, I’ve heard people say things like “the Navy picks only the brightest” - so when I posted it in notes in Substack, I added the following:

To clarify a bit.

At least when I was in, the minimum ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) cutoff to be considered for the Navy Nuke program was 90. That score was somewhat on a curve - so that meant that you scored higher than 90 percent of the people taking the test. Mapping over (very roughly) to the IQ distribution in the US, that means that the Nuke program has a floor IQ of roughly 115-120.

Yes, it is true the Navy only takes the people who are trainable. Who have the ability to learn not just the rote procedures but have an understanding of why. And that means people who do well on IQ tests, even if the majority are rednecks with little love for computers that had issues in High School or College - mostly terminally bored - but can tell you in detail how to strip down an engine.

In practice, most nukes were in the 92-98 range, and from what I saw there’s a sharper than demographic dropoff at the upper end because of people not dealing well with the regimentation of military life. No, not just rebels, but basic things like bathing.

So, on the one hand, this is the pool of people being taught how to run reactors in three years. On the other hand, they are being taught how to run reactors. This includes specialized in-rate training for electrical systems, instrumentation, pumps, fluid , and steam systems based on whether you’re a mechanic, electrician, etc., heat transfer, steam cycles, electrical generation and distribution, radiation theory and safety and dosages, chemistry, the design of nuclear plants, safety systems, and the hows and why’s of everything in the plant. This is capped off by a roughly six month stint of practical training running an actual plant under supervision before going out to sea. In this practical stage, you have to be “checked out” on every system related to your rating, including drawing a functional diagram from memory, flow rates and operating pressures, safety features, and so on, down to details like how a speed governor on a turbine works.

It never stopped. All of this is continuously reviewed and tested in the fleet.

While you have the procedures out when doing plant evolutions, they are there more for reference. In practice, you have all of the standard evolutions and casualty responses memorized. It was the norm in watchsection training to walk through an entire startup or shutdown of the reactor and steam plant from memory, in sequence, every watchstander able to tell you what steps he would take when, by valve or switch number. Not just for his watch station in that section, but for every station he was qualified for. The expectation, which was usually met, was that you could explain the plant response to things like changes in rod position or seawater temperature.

And that’s not all.

A sub is too small for dedicated office drones. Everyone had collateral duties. Half of the mechanics division had universal freon certifications from the EPA for HVAC work. Outside of maintenance, people were delegated to order parts, schedule maintenance, and of course write up and grade weekly exams and qualification exams. I joke I had three parallel careers between all the HVAC work and instructor work.

And so IT

IT isn’t for idiots either, though 20-30 years ago it seemed like the “make good money in IT” push resulted in a lot of people taking MCSE/Cisco courses that could neither learn how things interacted nor memorize them.

In the end though, there’s a lot of IT work that can be done well that doesn’t require you to be a top coder and to be a network engineer, or in the pool of people who could safely run a nuclear reactor. It can definitely be done better than a guy with little understanding running off a script in a call center, who won’t deviate from it even when you tell him you’ve already checked whatever the next item on his list is.

And in the IT field, especially outside of the “get a good job in IT” crowd with no interest, most people in the computer and IT fields are into computers. Few nukes are “into” nuclear power - conversations when standing watch on a shutdown plant usually were about more prosaic things, or deep dives into history. We did shit like grilling, fixing cars, and computers for fun. Or played spades.

Hell, outside of a few specialties like the nuclear pipeline that they were desperate to fill, the rating you ended up with was usually “Needs of the Navy/military,” and the entire military runs on teaching people technical skills, not just college educated officers.

On the Gripping Hand

In the end it doesn’t matter if the nuke program is harder, and compensated for by cherry-picking more qualified people.

The point is that you can train people to do incredibly difficult and complicated tasks “on the job.” You don’t even need a college to do so. There is no excuse for going “Americans cannot do this.”

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But what of business?

I looked at the fiasco of NVIDIA’s recent graphics card launch, and noted that to all appearances, they now care about the AI/server room market, and the gamers that put them on the map are not just not a priority, but an afterthought.

But there are deeper issues at play across many companies and businesses. Yes, it’s popular to talk about the enshittification brought on by investment companies, but it points to a truth. Why do companies that built an amazing reputation for good products and services suddenly tank when money people are now in charge?

They forget who their business serves, or more accurately, their purpose. They have become a money farm that happens to do “X” rather than making something or providing a service being the primary goal - and all of the soulless corpo-speak mission statements to the contrary will not change that.

What is the difference? It’s focus. More to the point, it’s the second-order effects that play out over time as your primary goal guides your decisions.

Let’s say your goal is to produce toys. Die-cast car replicas maybe. You started out wanting to make awesome ones, and with luck and work you’ll end up in major stores, get tie-ins for NASCAR, and so on. Maybe you’re not looking to get into fine detail larger scale replicas right away, but you want to make sure you’re always providing something really solid for the money, even at a lower margin.

If your goal is to do this for five, ten, fifteen, or more years, and pass it on to someone with the same goal, you obviously have to make a profit. But it’s different when the focus is money, when you don’t care about what you make or provide, because the the business or product is just a means to that goal of making money.

What stereotypically happens when money becomes the goal, and not the product? Excuses are found to get rid of higher-paid and more experienced people, because cutting payroll makes the quarterly numbers look better. Cheaper materials are substituted that may be more brittle or less durable. Shortcuts are taken in design. Workloads are moved to places with cheaper labor, including moving support and manufacturing to other countries. The fact that customers are frustrated dealing with strange accents by people who have to follow a formalized script, who often cannot directly help them, is not something the people making these decisions have to deal with.

Investment companies also bring more requirements, often starting to focus on factors that have nothing to do with what the business produces. And yes, I know that as businesses grow, a degree of friction and bureaucracy unavoidably creep in to help manage things as they scale up.

All of that of course assumes that the company isn’t simply strip-mining the assets.

These are not new complaints. On the movie side of things you can look at Office Space, or Other People’s Money.

When the product, the business, the consumer is the one you serve, not mammon, keeping the guys who work for you sharp and happy so you don’t lose tribal knowledge to excessive turnover will have a higher priority relative to lowering payroll as a waypoint. Taking time to train people so that newer employees acquire tribal knowledge is expensive, labor wise, but necessary if you still want to be making the same awesome thing or better in ten years. You make sure the people buying from you have a good experience so they want to buy again, and have legitimate issues addressed quickly and professionally. You also make sure the things they buy are well designed, well built, and that corners aren’t cut.

Do people expect finely detailed titanium models with 50 pieces for $2?

No, but they want to think the toy they purchased is worth that $2 and doesn’t fall apart. And maybe they just don’t expect a lot from a $2 toy, but what if you’re charging $10, $20? Is it worth it? Or are you adulterating it to maximize profits rather than long term sustainability and quality?

Will you never take steps to cut costs?

No, but the goal of all of them will be more focused on making sure that you continue to do what made you successful in the first place. While you’re at it, also remember that not all people are your customers. If you’re making wargames, be careful about revising them into not-wargames to capture a “broader audience.”

A friend of mine told me one of the best days in his life was when the company who bought their company out took them private, and they no longer had to deal with justifying every decision in terms of quarterly numbers. In another line of business, it’s how people joke that Boeing got taken over by the company they bought out, and went from an engineering firm that cared about making awesome planes led by guys who could also sell them, to a bunch of accountants cutting corners.

We all know the difficulties Boeing has had the last decade.

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OK.

I’m positive a number of the videos were fake / performative, not taking actual Tylenol. I am also positive a number are not. I also hold recent news that at least one woman ended up in the hospital with likely terminal liver failure to be likely, but sufficiently on the nose to warrant caution before considering it to be utterly true.

Since I’m writing this up, I will make clear that I don’t know what the truth is regarding any link between Tylenol and autism or anything else. So why am I willing to entertain this?

Yet again we also see medical experts scoffing at anything said - though I don’t think their expertise immunizes them from hatred of and kneejerk skepticism of anything endorsed by Trump. I can state from personal experience, with people in my family in the medical field, that the tendency to “follow the consensus”, if nothing else, is strong, even in the face of direct observation.

So, again, if I don’t know, why am I willing to concede the possibility? Other than a “my team / their team” distinction?

Well…

• There are conflicting studies. One post I saw recently named at least one that supported the correlation to task for bad methodology, but my understanding is that there is more than one study, and more than one from relatively prestigious places like Harvard and Johns Hopkins find a correlation. On the other hand, studies are in conflict, we have years of experience with the drug, and the replication crisis helps no-one here.

• History in general has a laundry list of things we understood to work one way, and then it turns out, it didn’t. Given the things we have yet to solve in physics and electromagnetism alone, it’s a near certainty that our current (not intentional, but heh1) understanding is flawed.

• In medicine specifically, there’s a laundry list of drugs that were deemed safe, and turned out to be, at best, less so than originally supposed.

• While we’re at it - I’ve been reassured in a turnabout from previous published guidance that masks prevent the spread of airborne viruses by medical personnel even as my glasses fog up when I breathe out.

• In short, the experts have been wrong before. A higher probability of knowing what is believed to be the best answer on the subject is not the same as the “best answer” being correct, nor their recall. Especially when ego is in play.

• Tylenol has a known - and as I learned surprisingly low - overdose threshold that will kill you. It’s why even decades ago we were warned to both not overdo it as a daily dose, and to avoid long term persistent usage.

• A lot of drugs and treatments that are fine for adults or even children are bad for fetuses and the unborn. Radiation is but one example. The metabolic rate of the unborn and even children is so high, and the body mass so low, that both absolute and by bodyweight dosages have to be lower, if allowed at all, to not cause problems.

• Tylenol is supposedly one of the few that the medical profession considers safe for pregnant women - and even Tylenol the company urges taking their product under the guidance of a doctor on their own packaging. Yes, it’s likely CYA. That said, people have dug up posts from eight years ago by the company sating that they do not recommend taking Tylenol while pregnant.

• Even if it isn’t the cause - autism existed before Tylenol and most modern drugs - it may very well be a contributing factor, and one that only shows up at all at population level usage. Over time, minor skews can cause significant changes.

• One article I read debunking the declaration, especially addressing the Amish rates and dismissing them, still listed a rate much lower than typical for the population around them. The degree to which reporting and cultural pruning via those who elect to stay affect these numbers is unknown.

In short - maybe there’s nothing to it, but given the known failure points, the answer should likely be “given the varying study results, how can we test this ethically” rather than dismissing it outright (aside - I find it funny that the same people who tell us we should have a health system more like Europe dismiss the parts of RFK’s promoted policies that would bring our vaccination schedule, drug, and food standards closer to Europe’s as well…).

Like that old saying: “You may not be interested in war, but it will be interested in you,” you may think someone’s a swell guy, but he may not agree, and can decide to do something about it.

Things can go from bad to worse very quickly if you let your guard down in the false impression that you are safe, because you mean no-one around you harm, and you believe everyone else thinks likewise.

This doesn’t just apply to situational awareness at the tactical level, but also in the people you deal with in daily life. Who would want to screw you over? Or put a bullet in you because they don’t like who you voted for?

What opinions does your doctor have on people who don’t think like him, her, or it?

In the end the failure to read how someone feels about you is an error in understanding the other, your opponent, if you will. Of thinking they think just like you, and projecting your wants, needs, and priorities onto them. Of thinking that people from other cultures are not in a way truly alien in a deep and fundamental way, that the critiques by muslims in the middle east and Al Quaeda of western culture are superficial or just for show, perhaps just negotiative bluster.

Take Japan. Far too many weebs watch a bunch of anime and don’t realize that, no matter how many ways things map roughly to our understanding, there is something fundamentally alien there as well. There’s enough commonality in the human experience to understand most of what’s going on in their stories, and to those who think people are blank slates, that gives the false impression that you fully comprehend.

They also make no effort to respect the culture by blending in and harmonizing with it. It’s pretty easy to spot the ones to whom it’s just a veneer they ignore - especially when you see an idiot making a production of themselves on the subway, or in general standing out, and not acting with the awareness that they are making a scene and not acting as guests and a possible inconvenience who are struggling to fit in with the mores.

I recently saw a post from someone who’d seen more than a few sitting, broken down, realizing their fantasy of what Japan was was radically different from the image they built in their heads, in large part because they failed to take what they saw on its own terms.

You must understand and viscerally accept that someone’s impression of you can and will differ from that you hold for yourself . And also that what you see may be the mask they wear, may only be for public consumption, for appearances. Or that it is real, but they are projecting their own ideals onto you in much the same way, until you trigger the realization that you are not what they believed you to be. Different.

Don’t overthink it. Also, this isn’t a diatribe to suspect everyone and everything - that way lies madness. It’s a reminder to avoid solopsism. To not rely too much on projecting your mindset onto others. That the core assumptions others have may be radically different.

Unrecognized love projected one way is unrequited, unrecognized hate leads to betrayal.

Especially if you have problems “reading the room” - learn.

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Aside: these days, unless one has very specific needs or just really enjoys assembling things, the money saved on building your own workstation is more than made up for by the time spent. Even architects I’ve dealt with either buy a Dell precision or XPS or the equivalent, depending on their GPU needs and the computer role - don’t mess with Alienware, please - or they’ll go with a more boutique assembler. That said, be careful who you buy from even then.1

So I started digging, and discovered that it’s going to be a while before it’s worth spending money on an upgraded GPU.

Since my card was released, two whole generations of NVIDIA cards have come out, and as it happens, we were on the cusp of a third, the 50 series, being released. In the past that would have meant I could get the “old” series, save a few bucks, and get a major improvement in my graphics performance, or just waited a bit for prices to settle down after launch. And the existing AMD/Radeon cards wouldn’t cut it for work outside of games. 2

Sadly, NVIDIA has demonstrated they have lost their way, both in terms of understanding all of their markets, but also technically. They no longer respect the people who put them on the map. In short, I don’t see myself buying the new generation, personally, or recommending one unless there is literally no other viable option to meet performance specs. Sadly, the latter includes a lot of Avid and Revit users.

It’s fair to ask - how have they dropped the ball? if you feel like a video recap:

It’s not really a new generation

The underlying processor is made using the same process technology. Improvements in architecture will get you some boost, but that also means that the cards won’t be significantly faster for raw rendering speeds. To be fair, there’s a whole new set of AI-related computation infrastructure, and there is a slight boost, and they managed to make them more power efficient, but…

Price

My 2070 super was under $600. Inflation is an issue and prices have crept up, but each jump of the 30 and 40 series cards resulted in a large uplift, such that the 4080 could easily beat the previous gen “90” series card, the 3090, and so on. Even with prices edging up, performance was going up more. Not so much here. A near-mythical reference/ MSRP/baseline 5070 ti is now a $750 card, and barely faster than the previous generation 4070 ti. Leaving aside supply issues and scalpers, most of the GPU sellers such as ASUS, Gigabyte, etc., are adding “features” to justify much higher price tags. Notably - the supposedly MSRP card to be sold for $750 sent to reviewers was showing up on websites at a $900 price point until reviewers complained, because they had done their reviews on the presumption that the price they were quoted was accurate.

Worse, the flagship card, the 5090, is now $2000 for the reference “founders edition” model, a 25% jump. My entire computer cost me less than that. It’s direct predecessor was $1600. The cheapest, the 5070 if you can find it at MSRP, is $550. Keep an mind that an entire PS5 Pro is $700 (and I find that ridiculous price for a console already), and the Xbox series X is $500, and I’m not getting either of those because they too have gotten sufficiently large and hot that I cannot put them where my previous Xbox is.

These prices and the underlying bloat of AAA titles are more and more driving gaming on the PC out of the budget of all but the wealthiest. Some games are requiring ray tracing to even run - and that has a huge impact on performance at any price level compared to similar graphics without ray tracing.

Performance

Again, there is a slight bump in efficiency and performance, but a number of reviewers have pointed out that compared to the previous generation, the 50-series raw render performance was less a whole new generation than a revamped “super”, or perhaps “super super” variant of the existing series.

So why was NVIDIA boasting about performance boosts?

Well, the new cards are loaded with processors optimized for AI workloads, so NVIDIA leaned into that, and decided that instead of making the card render more frames, it was going to use “AI” to generate in-between frames so that visually, the games appeared to be running at much higher frame rates, with hundreds of frames per second. Granted, even if I was younger I never was in the class of gamer to tell the difference in responsiveness between 40 frames a second and 60 frames a second, but there are plenty of people who can, and did not appreciate the disconnect between the visual smoothness and the responsiveness. All in all, the anger over these “fake frames” would likely be less if the cards performed better in general raster performance relative to the last generation, or the marketing didn’t try to sell it so hard, or the prices hadn’t gone up so much.

Perhaps the worst example of this is the current 5070. It was literally proclaimed as “the performance of a 4090 for $550” and compared apples to oranges by highlighting the “fake” generated frames against the 4090’s raw rendering performance. The problem was that this “performance” was entirely visual smoothness due to frame generation, and not because the card could redraw the actual scene fast enough.

Physics Engine Removed

To add insult to injury, NVIDIA removed a feature of their cards that helped in processing particle and other physics, resulting in a number of older games such as Borderlands2 actually performing worse on the latest and greatest more expensive generation. It may not have been viable for the company to support what turned out to be a little-used feature set, but having older games that should have no issues run notably and at times unplayably worse on much more expensive GPUs is not what’s called “a good look.”

QA and power design

The new generation of cards suffered from not one, but two design and manufacturing issues. First, roughly 0.5% or one in two hundred cards had an entire rendering pipeline set (ROP) non-functional, resulting in an 4% 3or worse performance drop. You heard that right, NVIDIA’s factory testing failed to catch a significant number of manufacturing defects that left the cards performing worse than the generation they replaced. Keep in mind every chip is tested.

Or they knew about it but didn’t care. Most gamers wouldn’t notice, right?

Also, power supply issues returned. Not having learned their lessons from fixing similar issues in the 40-series cards, NVIDIA didn’t design the power connectors on the board to properly accommodate the high power draw, resulting in melted cables and connectors. It doesn’t help that the cards are in some cases drawing significantly more power than they are specified to.

Supply

Graphics card launches are always subject to scalpers buying up supply and reselling them at a premium, but this is alleviated by having a solid supply. Sadly, NVIDIA didn’t have enough on hand to satisfy demand, even with the ridiculous price increases not backed up by a raise in value.

First, NVIDIA let the supply of 40-series cards flush out. This had the effect of making sure their were no cheaper “last-gen” competitors to their new product, as well as freeing up the production lines for the new generation cards because they used the same processes and lines.

Second, for one reason or another, there were not enough processors available for graphics cards at the time of launch - supply was so constrained that many reviewers have taken to calling it a paper launch, as even they had difficulty getting their hands on a retail version if they could even get a hold of one. And the launch was at the beginning of Chinese new year, so most of the factories were shut down as workers went home for the month, meaning that there would not be a supply coming in to catch up with demand any time soon.

So

In the end you have a “new” generation of cards that isn’t really, giving the appearance of improved performance without actually improving it much beyond “AI” tricks to make it looks smoother, while costing much more, and not being designed or built well - not only not working as advertised but either not working at all or damaging other computer components.

Why?

I believe that NVIDIA forgot who put them on the map, and that gamers are now a total afterthought that NVIDIA still wants to milk cash and excitement from.

Yes, it’s speculation, but it is informed speculation. AI sales to server farms are now the mainstay of NVIDIA’s bottom line. So much so that instead of spending time significantly improving 3D rendering times and performance, they improved the performance of “AI” related computations - and so the founder stands up on stage in his leather jacket and tells us how, since GPU’s helped form the backbone of AI, NVIDIA is comping around full circle and AI is now making graphics cards better. Oh, and that the 5070 has the performance of the 4090.

Given where they spent their design time, I think they had no choice but to lean on the AI features to provide interpolated frames. These AI server farms are voraciously sucking up chips and power, so the number of chips left over that don’t meet the standards of the server grade processors is lower, so that’s almost certainly a factor in the limited supply.

With supply of chips not needed for their AI business constrained, and their focus primarily on that, it’s no wonder that a significant percentage of chips ended up with problems, whether by oversight or lowered standards is unclear. It’s also little wonder that power supply issues already addressed once have resurfaced - the engineers are likely busy elsewhere on what makes the company money.

In the end, the gaming card market wasn’t enough of a focus anymore to ensure the launch wasn’t a total shitshow. NVIDIA is chasing the money, not concerned with actually making good cards for gamers. The cards gamers are getting are an afterthought of their AI business.

So yes, AI is ruining yet one more thing.

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