I Am At TVIW

Posted on by accordingtohoyt

Sorry, guys I am at TVIW.  I meant to write a post early morning, but I took from 4 am to 9 pm to get here yesterday (plane delays, rebooking, etc.)
So, by the time I got to where I could write a post, I was a zombie.  And I failed to get up early enough this morning.  Better tomorrow.
Amuse yourselves!

156 thoughts on “I Am At TVIW”

      2. Really? I thought it was only Democrat VOTERS who were dead.

        Though if Madam Clinton gets her way, she’s going to keep holding Zombie campaigns until the sun goes nova.

          1. Saw a joke circulating:

            HRC calls Donald Trump in the middle of the the night

            DT: “So what’s so important that it can’t wait until morning?”

            HRC: “Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsburg just died, and I’d very much like to take her place.”

            DT: “Well, it’s alright with me, if it’s OK with the funeral home.”

            I’ve kinda-sorta speculated that a number of the Dem party stalwarts are zombies or animatronics. Still not entirely convinced that’s not the case.

          1. For my fellow MMO gamers, we were raiding last week when things went Very Bad and the raid leader called for everybody to just die and get it over with. “OK, everybody, just drink the Kool-Aid.” “…but I don’t VOTE Democrat!”

            Followed by a private message “It’s OK, we’re all about to die and then you will.”

          3. the long dead former head of the Missouri GOP was found to have been registered and voting the Dem ticket in East St. Louis IL. long after his death.

  2. Have fun storming the castle.

    Anybody have an opinion on which paint to use for re-doing the pool room? I’m torn between the pink-on-green polka-dot and the Royal Stewart plaid.

        1. If it were just one or the other, it would be easier, but as the case is the case… I’ll say with what TXRed said. It’s not like ox have fashion sense or anything anyway.

          1. Let’s not forget the transparent aluminum overcoat this time. Those cabers the swimmers have been using as cues damaged the last paint job something awful.

    4. Just don’t go to the Lovecraftian paint store this time. There’s a REASON man was not meant to see those colors…

      1. I am not Scottish and therefore am not required to know proper terminology for such things, but my understanding is that when it is a kilt it is a tartan, when a paint it is plaid and when it is a shirt in a LL Bean catalog it is flannel.

  3. I was a zombie.

    So, of course, you must have known it meant that someone was going to have to post a version of this.

    3. *pokes head out of third anti-room on the other right* Whee! She forgot to lock the door to the room with all her craft supplies. The yarn balls are MINE!!!!!! I bet I can make a tesseract. Let’s see, if I start with the orange strand over in that corner… *disappears again*

        1. don’t take a wrong turn and end up in Fluffy’s room. Fluff ate the last batch of mil-hardware someone was contemplating installing on The Fluffness.
          Think the wannabe installer got et too

                1. In the cool of the evening
                  When everything is gettin kind of groovy
                  I call you up and ask you if you
                  Would you like to go with me and see a movie
                  First you say no, you’ve got some plans for the night
                  And then you stop, and say, all right
                  Love is kinda crazy with a spooky PUFF bounty on you

              1. All the better to sneak up on deaf dear, hunting dogs, and gun control advocates? A one-dragon redneck ninja death squad? Say, how often does Fluffy get out for exercise, anyway?

        2. Sounds like an idea, but perhaps somebody might fire up the interdimensional gate to go and get a gryf or two from that universe where ERB’s Tarzan lives and Pal-Ul-Don exists? They have been trained to riding, at least some of them. I think they are also carnivores unlike their ancestors the triceratops, but hey, makes it more exiting. 🙂

    4. *reappears two floors sideways, door on the right side of the hallway, inverted, with blue tabby marks* Well that was interesting. *disappears again*

      1. *Looks thoughtful, holding ball of twine, duct tape, protractor and compass.* You know, if we can find a pair of connected rooms on different floors, we might just get the perpetual motion machine working again. With a sufficient number of ping pong balls, mumble, and if we reconnect the plus to the minus and the minus to the plus, mumble, it… Could… WORK!

        1. Good heavens, there are dozens of those. The thing is trying to persuade the brownies not to clean up after you.

  6. Amuse yourselves!

    Everybody remember that she will be returning so the Diner shouldn’t be “altered” too much.

    No Rex, Sarah doesn’t want the Diner to go faster.

      2. Wait! That’s perfect! We can paint it with paint that is red from one direction, and blue from the other, shading between the two as you change angle, so it will look like it’s Doppler shifting!

        That ought to mess with some people’s heads!

            1. I knew a guy that sprayed a couple cars with that paint. It was popular (for certain values of popular, everybody talked about it, and most had seen a car or two painted with it, but nobody actually owned one painted that way) about the time I graduated high school. Expensive and tricky to paint so that it comes out right. Which means not only is the paint very expensive, but that the application is very expensive also, because if the painter screws up, he knows that the replacement paint is coming out of his pocket. And you can’t blend that paint, or touch up a spot, you have to spray everything together.

  9. Can you check on the gravity tractor while you’re at the conference, ma’am?

    I’ll be sighting in the claymores along the final protective line. (Daisy chain or no daisy chain? Redundant fuses, check. Labels on the cords, umm….)

  10. Guns are bad and you should feel bad.

    Your guns should be taken away so they won’t make you bad.

    The guns shouldn’t be allowed to get silencers, because then the guns would go around killing people and nobody would know until everyone got shot and even you wouldn’t know when you got shot.

    Guns are bad.

      1. Yes, indeed. It’s well-known that two young black men can be standing in the street doing nothing in particular, and suddenly a gun will appear in the hand of one, drag it up until it’s pointing at the other man, and pull its own trigger. As these are virtual guns, carriers of the force of white racism, they will continue to appear until white Americans have properly atoned for the inherited sins of their ancestors. Social scientists all agree that this is so – you don’t want to deny Science, do you?

        1. Guns shoot people who are of color and then they tell you it is okay to shoot people who are of color and then the color goes out of them and they turn white so that is white supremacy. I know cause Michael Moore wrote an article and told me.

          If the guns were to go away then people would be good.

          But the guns show up and they shoot people. And that is bad.

        2. There are bad people who do not want us to make laws stopping the guns from shooting people. This is because the bad people have very small penises and the guns make them feel like they have big penises so they let the guns do what they want like have magazines with hundreds of bullets that all go out in a couple of seconds and shoot lots and lots of people.

          They like the shooting because it is like spraying semen only it’s bullets and they spray death instead because they have such small penises.

          This is called Patriarchy.

          1. “The gun is good. The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life, and poisons the earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the gun shoots death, and purifies the earth of the filth of Brutals. Go forth and kill!”

            1. Only the governments can make the guns be good. The governments will make the guns shoot the many many bad people like they should because there are way too many people and that is why the governments should have all the guns.

              When guns talk to white men from the west the guns convince them of supremacy and that is bad because they need to be shot instead. Guns even turn women and POCs into white men.

              Guns are bad.

          2. As I said in the last thread when someone brought up that particular bit of idiocy:

            One of these things has a 100% chance of being used to end a human life. The other one has a 0.0001% chance of being used to end a human life. Which one of them should be more restricted?

          3. Um…

            Abortions aren’t like that here in California. And doing that to gun owners would probably make it *easier* to buy a gun.

            And that’s before we start talking about the ammo background checks…

            1. Sooooooo… I agreed to tolerate a handful of weird liberal screaming at me and then they have to to pay for my and my daughter’s gone collection or their racist sexist misogynist hiccups

              1. Okay, WordPress is being unusually evil here. First it refuses to post my comment then when I tried to fix it and repost, it posted before I could finish correcting the typos, or for that matter, re-typing the original comment.

                Anyhoo, requiring all the liberals to be forced to pay for my and my daughter’s gun collection, in return for my getting called the occasional mean name and being screeched at while I go to collect my free guns seems like a pretty good deal.

          4. It would be even wiser if we enforced the same requirements for government ID and background check for voting as we do for buying a gun.

      1. You are speaking against your own voice because guns are loud. They are louder than womens’ voices so they talk over them and make women talk with the voices of the guns instead. This is a micro-aggression along with the gun’s macro-aggression of shooting people. That is why loud guns are bad

        Guns with silencers are also bad because then the guns will kill you and you won’t even know it.

        Guns are very tricky.

    2. I’d vote for King David’s Spaceship ; vintage Pournelle, multiple interesting worlds, tech and plot twists, and even a romance.
      I *would*, if the site would let me vote without signing up..!

    3. You know, it’s funny. The best works of Dr. Pournelle seems like they were all collaborations. Talk about a guy who worked well with others! My favorite of those is probably Footfall, with Larry Niven. My preference of his sole authorship was Janissaries.

  12. So, by the time I got to where I could write a post, I was a zombie.

    Perhaps, instead of *being* a zombie, you should have *had* a Zombie (or two). Then you could have channeled your inner Stephen Green while writing a blog post.

  13. It’s become sadly clear in recent days that America needs better Gun Control.
    So much of our country is evidently lacking the mere rudiments of proper Gun Control, or at times even the usual foundations on which it is built. Though some regions have long been models in this respect, others have been sinks of inaction and government foot-dragging, or at worst calculated obstructionism by isolated governments and their entrenched special-interest allies.

    It’s long past time to recognize that Gun Control is not only eminently practical and sensible, but something approaching a basic human right with clear Constitutional support. And to move in many ways and at many levels to enhance and expand what does currently exist, with creativity and traditional insight.

    Truly effective Gun Control involves a complex of physical, mental, even emotional and moral skills — once very common and even taken for granted except in a few, geographically-isolated backward pockets, typically centered on the largest and densest urban areas — which we must recognize and advance or remediate.
    Where the basic physical skills and knowledge are concerned, there’s an excellent argument that earlier is better. Children like to play, and like the young of many species, human children tend to instinctively play in ways that prepare them for later life. Traditional air guns and even water guns can now be supplemened with electronically augmented or even virtual shooting experiences (for instance imagine a long-distance shooting game accurately modelling all the relevant factors, up to gyroscopic effects and even Coriolis forces, for grade-schoolers on a game console). Schools can and should be enlisted to assist in this effort, laying the foundation of physical and mental skills needed for effective Gun Control (snd hopefully even the deeper moral skills as well).

    Many schools already have graduation requirements demanding such things as basic life skills, community service work, or even swimming competencies — shouldn’t we consider some reasonable minimum of Gun Control (or some reasonable alternative where physical, religious, or philosophical circumstances make that inappropriate) as a similar requirement? In an age where schools nationwide have already been threatened with loss of Federal funds over something as outlandish as gender-neutral locker rooms, surely some less-coercive measures will encourage progress on this front without inciting deep, widespread resistance and outrage.

    Even such a modest proposal as this one will doubtless provoke some considerable degree of opposition and counterreaction, from anti-Gun Control forces and their well-funded lobbies. They will work very hard, and talk very loud, to see that calls like this one are silenced. But we have reached such near-universal levels of Gun Control before, and we can reach them again.

    Forward Gun Control! Forward America!

    “Amuse yourselves.”
    Surely two of the most dangerous words in this or any other language.

            1. I haven’t heard of them since… forever.

              Back in the early ’80s I worked backstage security at one of their venues. It didn’t occur to me to bring ear plugs along… in retrospect, that’s about when I started noticing tinnitus.

              It was loud past the point of pain backstage; I can’t imagine what it sounded like in the front rows. And I don’t see how any of those performers don’t wind up deaf as posts.

              1. Dee Snider said he kept his ears plugged with wax intentionally so he’d not go deaf. Now I see a lot of bands wear the custom fitted noise canceling earplug/buds when on stage.

        2. Back when I went to school we had a class on car and truck control; although many of us already knew it before taking the class, we still had to prove our knowledge.

      4. Actually (and much less tongue in cheek) I *do* have an SF settting (2200s) where that sort of thing is a regular school subject, because duelling is legal (see “He had touched me…” from a few Sundays back for someone from this world) and assorted other things. (Hint: many hand weapons are *far* more dangerous by then, so cultural restriction to older ones is a *good* idea.)
        If you imagine a gym-full of late elementary / early middle school children doing Lt. Patton’s 1915 sword drills with wooden copies of his 1915-pattern final U.S. cavalry saber, you’d have it about right. (And there is a Japanese short polearm, whose name I ought to remember from L5R, which should sneak into this area of learning too.) If only real-world gym class had been 1% as fun…

          1. I think you’re right about that.
            And the character above, being from a Scottish-Japanese subculture, would know that too.
            I’ve designed a sword for her to use (like that 1913 Patton Saber but slightly curved), researched Japanese proverbs for her to quote (Issun saki wa yami etc.), but I’ve never gone back and figured out what the centuries have done to the genuinely Japanese weapons. And probably I should.

            BTW, the 1914 (not 1915) Patton saber manual is available online at [pattonhq.com/saber.html].

            1. A Patton style sabre is on my sword “to aquire” list; after a Cossack sashka and a decent katana.

              1. Back when I was first cooking up this world, a few years ago, I was lucky enough to have a friend volunteer to show me his collection of assorted swords (most “show” quality not “use” quality, but still) and make assorted useful comments; that “sword drill in gym class” idea was basically his. And I was rather pleasantly surprised to learn that young Lt. Patton had designed an edge-and-a-half sword, when that was *already* a design feature of my nascent “sgian geal” for, well, purely intuitive/character reasons.
                By all accounts, his pattern 1913 is a truly fine and practical design.
                Now all I have to do is guess what kind of fighting style really goes with my variant; saber, yes, like the Hungarian-style saber that seems to trace from the Patton one, plus some Japanese-style slice vs. the cut and thrust, but… it’s a fun but hard problem.

      5. Expert marksman with a rifle. Don’t practice enough with a pistol to get a lot of X rings, but I can usually put most of them in the black.
        Archery, <=30 yards = venison in the freezer.
        Pole weapon? Sticks, I'm a half-assed escrimador. Baseball bat? Heh. All Americans are semi-proficient with those. Quarterstaff? Any marine recruit would eat me for lunch.
        Sword Control? I'm just an E rate with epee, and probably with foil if I was competing in that. haven't picked up saber yet. Nor have I tried Historical European Martial Arts; although I think Boston Fencing Club has instruction for that if I care to drive an hour and a half in each week for it.

        1. I’d day there’s a big difference between sport fencing and using a sword in combat; specifically in combat you can’t expect your opponent to stay in a lane.

  15. Sorry, guys I am at TVIW.

    Why are you sorry that you have gone to a workshop?

    Or is it the horrid experience only confirming your already established dislike of travel?

    Or could it be you are worried about what we are going to do to the lair while you are away?

  16. Don’t mean to offend you, but…
    I’m trying to finish my revisions, and I’m finding the conversations here MUCH too distracting.
    For the sake of my book, better that you miss a day of posting.

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