Stories That Don’t Belong [EP]

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Track 1: Grow Up!

Okay, so my “notes” for this consist of… one random deleted sentence and three (3) Nahuatl names and their incredibly tortured English sound-alikes. They do explain where the otherwise1 incredibly random reference to The Room comes from, tho’! – “Ehecatl” becoming “Oh hey Kate”. (And “Xolotl” became “Charlotte” and “Quetzalcoatl” became “Kestrel”, and I’m pretty sure the latter is also where the otherwise completely2 inexplicable feathered boa came from.)

No idea whatsoever where the Britney Spears allusion came from. I’m assuming that I saw “gills”, “lungs”, and – with the whole ‘growing up’ theme in mind – made the obvious3 link.

Other than that it’s… a pretty straightforward –

– straightforward, albeit modernized/urban-fantasized & gender-swapped, reskinning4 of the Aztec mythology surrounding Quetzalcoatl and Xolotl.

  1. And, honestly, still. ↩︎
  2. And, honestly, still pretty. ↩︎
  3. ↩︎
  4. Gotta get cute with the formatting because default WordPress doesn’t allow full-size images in the footnotes, and I’m not feeling like manually setting up page anchors in the HTML right now to roll my own footnotes although that’s absolutely the kinda thing I’ll probably do eventually because… footnotes; but, anyways, “reskinning”– ↩︎

this post will self-destruct† in 8 days

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† Assuming that I both remember and bother to do so1.

Here is a thing:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/parsecink/bad-romance-an-anthology-of-trash-couples

One story is a formal experiment of an in-joke for the crayon-eaters2 that accidentally morphed into an homage to… a(n — I’m assuming —) USENET post reprinted in the November 1998 issue of White Dwarf?

  1. I’m fully aware that the asterisk (*) is the conventional symbol for the first footnote, the obelus or dagger (†), the second, but I’m also more used to seeing the asterisk used to indicate a correction. Also, apropos of entirely nothing other than how cool typography and/or punctuation can be, I spent… several years chuckling over the “sic dagger”, where you would place a dagger next to a misspelling, solecism, or flat-wrong ‘fact’ as shorthand for sic — no need to belabor or scare-quote it, just shank ’em in the mistake and move on like nothing had happened like a good sīcārius should.
    It seems I was somehow confusing the Latin for ‘dagger’, sīca (whence sīcārius) with sīc.
    Dammit, I still like the idea, though. ↩︎
  2. Of course, I have a meme prepped and ready for when I finally hit 10k books in my library (“Cheevo Unlocked: CALL SIGN CHAOS”), so I’mma assume-don’t-@-me that the crayon-eater thing is due to PFC Crayons Georg.
    (Every source I’ve found lists Mattis’s library with a peak of 6-7,000 volumes; I have absolutely no idea where I got the 10k figure from other than OOH BIG ROUND NUMBER, but… stet.) ↩︎

Shelfishness

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A recent Miss Manners column1 discussed the “appalling”2 practice of shelving books “backwards”, with the spines toward the wall. Despite the column begging the question of using books for decoration to begin with, I was pumping my fist – despite my default reaction to the stuffy old ‘rules’ of etiquette being a good ol’ Bert stare3, I’ll pick cherries like Pac-Man – as I read her excoriation of those who would shelve by color4, until I realized that:

  1. She also derided shelving books based on height, which, well… look at fancy Miss “I Have So Much Wall Space I Don’t Need to Bother Using It Efficiently Or Else I Just Don’t Mind Having Hundreds of Boxes of Books Unshelved in Storage Or I Suppose More Likely Just Don’t Have That Many Books” Manners over here.
  2. And, uh, I currently have books shelved fore-edge out, and can think of at least three (good!) reasons why one might do that…
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“You keep using that example. I do not think it means in what you think it means.”

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(Alternatively, per Mencken, “[T]here is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.”1)

Prompted by a couple of recent letters to the editor in the Washington Post, referring to Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics:

Asimov’s three laws of robotics are:

  1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
  3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Asimov recognized and dealt with the challenges and dangers of AI that others are just now becoming aware of.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/13/brooks-robinson-orioles-mlb-speaker-day-game/
Continue reading ““You keep using that example. I do not think it means in what you think it means.”” →

PDF Dump (1): Star Courses 2018-2022

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So, after scanning in a bunch of old Star Course materials for OCR training, I figured why not toss them up here, too?

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(RWC 001) 2020̶1: The AAR Itself&Proper (4th)

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(Broken into four parts because while I was originally going to just cram it all into one post, I figured that at least three of the bits were distinct enough to warrant their own things and the fourth was… not so much really, but by this point it was halfway in-between two of those bits, so why not just go for it? And totally not because of anything like this… And oh yeah, maybe in honor of our getting 4th? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) So!

  • Post 1 (⇠You Are Here): RWC 001 AAR *4th* AKA We Was Once Again Beaten By the Best and Also Two More Teams As Well Who, While They Were Not By Definition “the Best” As They, Too, Were Beaten By the Doubly-Aforementioned (See DC 2019 AAR) “Best”, Were Nevertheless Solidly Better Than Us So Mad Props & Respect To Them For Sure Even Though I Don’t Know Exactly Who They Were (See Post 4…)
  • Post 2: A Brief Discursion into the Design, Construction, Functionality, and Market Targeting of the “Speed Rucker”
  • Post 3: RWC and/or/vs Star Courses – Exegesis, Eisegesis, and Comparative Anatomy Thereof
  • Post 4: WHAT THE EVERLOVING FUCKITY FUCK GORUCK I MEAN DO YOU EVEN MARKETING JUST HOW IN THE COUNTRY-STYLE CHICKEN-FRIED FUCK!?!?!?!

(And just to clarify for those too lazy to click on the link to Post 4 above [or, well, an inch or two ago], or the “Read More” below – the event was great. The stream-of-consciousness-profanity is about, well… let’s just say that if you didn’t sign up for the event when it was first announced in the middle of 2019, you would have had no idea that it was held this past weekend.)

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(RWC 001) The “Speed Rucker”: The Odd-Duck Platypus of Speedy Rucks?

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Because it’s kinda weird and a mishmash, not because of the venomous heel spikes.

So, I’m not planning on adding a bunch of pictures here eh fuckit there’ll be some pictures, because this AAR has taken way too long to finish already, because the Speed Rucker doesn’t seem to be available anymore, and because I’ve already got several in-depth ruck posts in the queue. That out of the way –

Continue reading “(RWC 001) The “Speed Rucker”: The Odd-Duck Platypus of Speedy Rucks?” →

(RWC 001) How Complicated IS It to Just “Run With a Rucksack”? ‘RATHER’, It Would Seem

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Wherein I go on and on about the formats of the Star Courses and Rucking World Championships, talk about how they’re the same, how they’re different, what I like or don’t like or simply prefer about each compared to the other, and – unless you’re super into that sort of thing – come off as a cross between Abe Simpson

and Jeff Albertson.

Only, like, for ultramarathon rucks, instead of children’s cartoons?
Continue reading “(RWC 001) How Complicated IS It to Just “Run With a Rucksack”? ‘RATHER’, It Would Seem” →

(RWC 001) Dub Tee Eff, GORUCK Marketing. I Mean Seriously, Just… I Have No Wo-… jk, Actually, It Turns Out I Have SO MANY WORDS For This:

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Just to be clear, the event itself was awesome, as’ve been all the GORUCK events I’ve done. (I’ve done somewhere between the median and the mean, I’d guesstimate.) Lots of fun, very nicely organized (even the parts that we initially thought were a bit iffy turned out to be actually quite solid) and a great – and tough – field. And, despite our occasional quibbles with particular pieces of gear, GORUCK makes very nice stuff – there’s a reason everyone in the family has a ton of it, from OG discontinued stuff like the Man Tie up to the latest pants and rucks.

I’ve also gotta give a special, specific shout-out to Cadre Mocha Mike – from chatting with him afterwards about differences between the Star Courses and the RWC, and the various considerations taken into account when planning the event, to how he went above and beyond the week afterwards, it was all a top-shelf class act, just amazing. (Seriously – he spent the weekend doing the event, then spent his birthday with his family, whom he hadn’t seen in a long time, and the very next day he’s reaching out to all the participants with the spreadsheet of official finishing times and all of the photos and videos he took.)

That said, the handling of this event by HQ – specifically whomever’s responsible for social media, publicity / promotion, and general coverage – was abysmal. Correction, would have been abysmal, if it – the handling of it – had in fact existed at all, in any form whatsoever.

BLUF
Continue reading “(RWC 001) Dub Tee Eff, GORUCK Marketing. I Mean Seriously, Just… I Have No Wo-… jk, Actually, It Turns Out I Have SO MANY WORDS For This:” →