megrimlocke

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Oop 🤭

[megrimlocke]

60 Minutes

In 60 minutes Donald Trump will no longer be the president of this nation. His ability to aggrieve the left will be so diminished as to be gone, and his legal worries will begin. Those things no doubt weigh heavily on the mind of a man who mady bullying the center of his cult of personality for five years.

I’m now fairly confident that the mob he stirred up earlier this month are getting no pardons from him. Even if he tried to rush them out right now, there’s no time to do the work, and he’s already reclining in Florida. I think this has to be it, surely. This has to be what breaks at last this bizarre spell of mindless loyalty he has over the right.

I was surprised when it wasn’t bringing back jobs he promised to bring back and I had settled into a depressed acceptance that the right wouldn’t see him for what he was as the coronavirus climbed to 10,000 dead Americans, and then 20,000 and 80,000 and 350,000. I assumed somehow that they’d continue to believe in him long after he left office.

Buy hey it’s a new presidency and maybe miracles happen. Maybe they noticed that after he whipped them into a frenzy besotted with entitlement and set them upon lawmakers, when he told them that he would be with them as they marched on the Capitol, that he was not in fact with them.

Or, maybe, they just took it to be “with them in spirit” and then further interpreted it to mean that he was fully behind them. And he was, until they failed to deliver his coup. He asked them to fall on a grenade for him and they did it, and failed because it turns out that a bunch of stupid old fat guys and gunbros aren’t really equipped to overthrow a government on a whim.

They assumed perhaps that loyalty was happening, that being Americans together was happening, but it was entirely transactional.

I’m probably ascribing too much introspection and awareness. But maybe, as some of them sit in a federal prison while he sits on a beach, it’ll finally come home to them. They were the “sheeple” all along, and they voted for the wolf. Why is it they and not we the left who are the stupid losers who got owned? Because we’re not in a prison for trying to overthrow the government. By the Trump doctrine there are winners and losers, and they lost about as big as you can lose.

Transactional. That’s the right. “I don’t care about your rights if it means I can get a tax cut.” That’s the right.

For what? Jobs? Can’t get employment as a felon under the legal system they voted for, doesn’t matter how many overqualified Indians you exclude from the market. Women? Sorry boys, it’s prison, get used to anal. Riches? Nah, with a federal conviction you’ll be lucky to pump gas.

Everything he promised them he put out of their reach with his pathetic policies and they followed him down into criminal ruin so he could vainly try to avoid his own prosecution with a second term.

If he were a car salesman this presidency would be a lemon. Sure, he and his rich friends made out okay, but they always make out of every administration okay. His mob is ruined. The ones not already in jail are getting ready to fall under the eye of an FBI that for the first time in 4 years can work without interference from the top. They are also going to be rolled up and jailed.

The ones not criminal are going to have to watch that happen. It won’t be like Mueller trying to catch Trump Jr. sucking russian cock, they won’t have powerful lawyers and presidential privilege protecting them. The right is going to watch it’s grass roots “heroes” tried, sentenced, and jailed. And in all likelihood they will then watch the same thing happen to Trump himself.

The profits of following republicans are ruin. It was that way in 2001, in 2007, and it has been over the past 4 years. I think the Trump cult is going to fold under these pressures, and I think it will take the republican party with it. I’m inclined to call them the Dying Old Party moving forward.

I really hope there’s enough salvageable American government and society and global influence to let us survive as a dominant superpower because that is very much in question after Trump’s disaster of a presidency. Our energies should be focused on that. There’s simply no time to spend soothing the egos of the right, our leaders must instead allow the legal process to attend and appropriately incarcerate them in the prison state they voted for, and focus on cleaning up the mess they have made of our global influence and economy.

[megrimlocke]

How We Are All Going to Die Laughing

The other day, I was looking at a post made by one of my favorite internet comic artists.  The guy used to be something I’d read in the army newspapers, next to the adds for cheap TVs at the post exchange, but these days it’s mostly a facebook feed I occasionally read.  The artist and writer behind “PVT Murphy” (though these days Murphy’s a sergeant, I’m aging after all it seems) was annoyed at Facebook showing him a shopping page offering what amounted to white nationalist (US neonazi, if you prefer) paraphernalia.

Now, I pointed out that this was what the robot had concluded he wanted to see, and honestly none of us should be surprised by this.  Military members lean right, and in the age of Trump this means that radicalization is around every corner- though for the record it always has been.  In some insidious ways with a cancer of racists and bigots among our ranks, sure, I know because being gay I was targeted by a few myself, but also in more subtle ways.

I once watched a man scream at some Iraqis who were emptying a waste bin nearby, screaming that they didn’t get him, because he’d been the target of an IED attack two hours prior.  Those men had no way in hell of having anything to do with it, but the guy that hit us got away free and the trash guys looked like someone he could defiantly vent his feelings of helplessness and victimhood upon in a vain effort to reclaim his power.  I’m not condoning it, I’m just saying that sometimes the path to prejudice isn’t paved with propaganda and privilege.

I have every faith in the artist who draws PVT Murphy himself, but if you attract the attention of a lot of white supremacists, then probably the robot is going to conclude that you might want to look at some of the things that all the people who like your posts are looking at.  Hence the shop page that offered a wall pinup of a templar knight preparing to smite the saracen to defend (white) Christendom with a few crass remarks about Islam written on it.

Now I explained, in truncated terms, how the robot made this call.  The artist wasn’t excited about this explanation, and in fairness no one is excited about the black mirror showing them something ugly, it’s almost like an automated attack.  But the machine was really just trying to be helpful.  It wasn’t programmed to be sensitive to racial issues, and certainly the people who took out the add didn’t take that into their considerations.  It identified a pattern and arranged the delivery of data that conformed with its instructions based upon the data input.

Now, some right wing dude decided to join in this discussion to point out that the robot didn’t know what it was talking about, included the terms “lib” and “snowflake” in his post, and suggested that if the robot had any idea who he was it wouldn’t keep showing him liberal content- after all he always used the laugh react on it.  I pointed out this part as well, but I’d like to go into a deeper analysis for this discourse.

The right, and perhaps a lot of people using the reacts on facebook, has decided that you can use the laugh react to express a dismissive chuckle to the words of others.  I think this has several sweeping, problematic implications.

First, the people using the internet are using it to each other, and are either unaware of the robots they share the internet with or ignorant regarding how they function.  The robots do not interpret Laugh as a dismissive gesture.  The data they gather from this is that you were paying attention to something and decided to put a reaction on it.  The Laugh react is not a downvote on reddit, the robot, innocent little helperbot it was made to be, assumes you are amused by the thing you clicked on, and so endeavors to further tickle your funny bone.  In short, it’s your good-natured wholesome friend who doesn’t understand the difference between you laughing with liberals and laughing at us.  It thinks we’re all friends.

This leads to the second problem.  If you are a conservative and you do not care to be bothered with leftist posts, then using the laugh react doesn’t help you at all.  It further engages you with the content that annoys you.  The stuff that caused you to try and put on your dismissive “ha ha tawdry communist drivel” mid-atlantic aristocrat voice is going to keep appearing.  If you’re the sort given to conspiracy theories (and you are my bro, you still hate Hillary for the pizza thing), you might draw the conclusion that you are being targeted by leftist internet operatives, spamming your feed with leftist propaganda.

The truth is you’re spamming yourself with leftist content because your socially clueless helpful robot pal is gonna go out and find more things for you to laugh at.  You’re not special or important enough for leftist internet operatives to target your facebook feed with propaganda attacks, and you have damned yourself to an experience on facebook in which you are bombarded with annoying or even blood-boiling content.  All of this guidance, by the way, is equally applicable to left leaning users of the laugh react as a dismissive gesture.

What this does is contribute to people’s paranoia.  It makes them believe that an enemy that doesn’t exist is trying to get into their heads.  It fills their electronic lives with incendiary content that makes them angry and it encourages them further to continue to have generally unproductive electric arguments with people that they disagree with, leaving them exhausted by a brain full of cortisol.

Personally, I think the Left’s electric sin is more to do with our frankly superior witticisms (sorry Right, you invented and stuck to Nobama, you’re just not witty) and the craving so many of us seem to have for delivering that sick burn one-liner so cutting and succinct that it stops the conservative dead in his rhetorical tracks seems to consume online political discourse on the left almost as aggressively as call-out culture does when arguing among our own.

In the effort to sell us more things by pandering to our professed passions, the capitalist internet has created an electric rage engine that wraps you into one heated argument after another among people who are not listening to one another and who are learning to disengage from hard discussions.  This last part is so dangerous to our democracy.

To be clear, I’m not lamenting the death of compromise specifically.  There can be no compromise on the income gap, healthcre, free elections, or the rights of people who are darker in skin than I.  But the electric rage engine makes it difficult to even have conversations about these things in the real world, and if you’re not talking to the people you disagree with face to face in the here and now, your chances of finding compromise are precisely zero percent, nevermind actually changing their views.

Have you noticed yourself having conversations with people that could just be copy pasted almost word for word off the tumblr where they “informed” themselves about this topic?  I’ll bet that you have.  Or else, more dangerously, you have begun to avoid having such conversations at all with people.  Have you ever been in a discussion turned friendly debate with your friend and realized after a few moments that the debate isn’t suddenly so friendly?  I’m willing to bet it’s been a while, so much so that you might even be shocked if it happens.

People like to go on about how fraught the holidays can be because of how politically charged family dinners can be, but I can’t remember such an experience within the past ten years.  No throw down arguments, no discussions about the merits of one tax policy or another- we can’t even seem to discuss weighty matters with people who are blood kin anymore unless we already know they agree with our own views- and thanks to the electric rage engine, we can know, in precis, what their views are and what we think about them as a result long before we ever think about what to put in our covered dish.  The opportunity for someone stepping into a landmine social or foreign policy issue at family and social gatherings has been eliminated, and with it the ability of the dinner table to serve as a place for families to reach consensus by resolving their arguments.  We don’t talk politics with people who disagree with us in the real world anymore, we all just avoid it and spit our venom on the internet, achieving nothing but our mounting unhappiness and dislike for one another.

I have a young colleague at work, maybe 25, who demonstrated the ability to just promptly end a discussion last week.  Now it was a nonsense discussion and in fairness the participants had gotten into trolling him for kicks, saying a blue shirt was green on purpose or some other nonsense, I don’t remember the particulars.  But what I do remember vividly was the ease and efficiency with which he was able to simply end the discussion, how disengagement came so very naturally to him.  I despise the phrase “agree to disagree” because it means that the argument hasn’t been resolved, but it is at least a sign that there was actual thought going on between participants.  No such gesture here.  My colleague put down the conversation and simply went back to his work with all the ease with which you might put down your phone when you decided you were done arguing with someone, and the ability to do this in realspace chilled me to the bone.

Moreover, there is a certain epistemological nihilism that has arisen among us, suggesting that no one can truly know anything because the sources of information, with whatever omissions or biases they may possess, are a matter of consumerist choice rather than objective fact.  We can’t agree on what is real anymore because if you dislike someone’s account of events, you can simply get someone else to present a more palatable story and declare the other people liars.

If you don’t like what you read on NBC, you can simply tune to Fox to hear it told in a way that you choose to consume, often playing to your appetite for validation rather than your need for actionable information.  We like feeling right, and the consumerist information economy has identified that as a means to get our attention long enough to upload some ads along with our news video of choice.

If the very identity of a person can be expressed by a computer algorithm and 4 or 5 hundred clicks across news articles, think pieces, and shopping pages, how easy will it be for the people who do understand how the machines work to begin influencing who we are?

In closing, I think every single one of us is developing a progressively more toxic relationship with the internet, particularly when it comes to political discourse, and I think that if we aren’t especially careful our ability to simply shut down and switch off, while healthy on the web, is going to begin invading our lives in the waking world in insidious ways that will hurt our ability to function as a cohesive society. I think that the marketing robots and the very act of making a profile and posting to it things that are important to you are dangerous influences on our sense of identity, and that by wrapping our sense of identity in the ideas and products that we consume in such a contrived, calculated fashion that we are restricting our ability to be flexible in our thinking, making us less able to get along with one another.  

I’ve been on a soft departure from Facebook for a good while now, making it my loose rule to stick to messenger and instagram because I like indulging my vanity but for the most part I want to be interacting with people directly and not selling myself for likes when I use these things.  Real attention from real people  is much much better.  

In 2020, I invite you to join me in kicking facebook or your own social media vice altogether and bringing our political lives and our debates back into the real world so that we can practice and re-acquire the skills of persuasion and discussion; not as a cynic call to begin trying to convert every conservative we can find, but for the sake of a political discourse that serves as less of a battleground with immovable ideological fortresses and more of a crucible in which the useless can be burned away and useful consensus and meaningful, mind changing-discussions can be had once again.  We cannot afford to keep unsubscribing from one another if our democracy is to survive. (<- leftist witticism addiction in demonstration)

[megrimlocke]

The MAGA Kids

I have chosen longform blog for this because back and forth dialog isn’t productive and because the narrative itself isn’t relevant, this matter of the kid and the elderly native man is a matter of fundamental principle and it’s a matter of symbolic speech, not a matter of who shouted at who first.

First, we have to clearly establish that what did or did not happen isn’t relevant.  In the past, it might have been, but it’s too late for that.  Whether this kid was harassed by unrelated black protesters prior to his altercation with this older man is not a matter of relevance because he was never a victim, he is not a hapless child who found himself at the wrong place at the wrong time after an innocent day of sightseeing.  By the very act of wearing the hat he was already shouting at everyone who laid eyes on him.

He is a young man who made a conscious decision to travel to Washington on a day dedicated to the struggle of people of color because his beliefs compelled him to do so.  His belief that that struggle is not relevant enough to leave it to its own day compelled him to do this and his belief that he, a 16 year old boy, knows better than a grown woman about how to handle her pregnancy compelled him to do this.

He volunteered to participate in a protest to tell all women that their autonomy is irrelevant and that where their pregnancies and health decisions are concerned he knows best and that every zygote that happens is to be carried to term regardless of the circumstance.  Now, because I’m an older man and gay, I know full well that this is very simply none of my business, and that whether or not a given pregnancy is a good idea is best left at the lowest level of decision making - a principle of smaller or no government intervention that people on the Right are very happy to invoke when it’s rights that they care about but perfectly willing to dismiss if their own logic leads them to the conclusion that 300,000 unaware cells with the vague appearance of eyes is a life to be saved.

But I’m not here to debate the merits of abortion.  That’s another kettle of fish for another day.  What I’m here to point out is that this kid went looking for trouble.

When someone dons a white hood or puts on a swastika we judge them because we know what those things stand for.  The trouble for people on the right is that they have not yet realized what that red hat has come to mean.  They think they’ve found this moment of catharsis in which they can proudly declare that they want to live in a restored nation that offers them and theirs greater opportunities and that the troubles of the recession are finally behind them, now that they have put back in power the party that orchestrated it.

I’m sorry if it makes you uncomfortable that a MAGA hat is understood by the rest of us to be a white hood worn by affluent suburbanites.  I’m sorry if you want it to mean something else because it won’t.  It’s the mark of a political radical who believes that the way forward to prosperity is a path of xenophobia, racism, and so-called “america first” international policy that has given rise to an ascendant Russia and all but assured that the Syrian government who gasses its own people will reassert itself fully within the next 3-5 years.

When Mr. Sandman decided to put on his hat, he made a conscious decision about who was going to be counted among.  He declared visibly that he was on the side of the greatest liar to occupy the oval office, he decided to stand alongside the disgusting likes of Stephen Miller and the marchers at Charlottesville.  He made a conscious decision that these were his people, the ones who made the policy for immigration at the border into an abattoir for children, the ones who have attempted to throw people out of the military for being born the wrong sex and the people who have made it perfectly clear that the truth is to them a matter of relativity and a question of which narrative you choose to subscribe to.  For that reason, of course we assume that he is lying because he is the follower of the greatest liar by raw number of lies and per-capita in American political history.

But most of all, he chose to be counted among the racists.  Not the “haha listen to my funny joke about fried chicken” racists either, the “we don’t need affirmative action anymore and what do you mean law enforcement disproportionately targets people of color?” capital-R Racists. That’s why it was so shocking when Kanye West put on the hat, and why he admitted to having been bamboozled when he took it off.

Putting on the hat means all these awful things, and it means them when you put it on as well.

Is Sandman telling the truth?  I don’t care.  This debate is a scene directly out of Indiana Jones, you, the perhaps-well-meaning-republican say “I believe in the Grail, not the Swastika,” and I reply “you stood up to be counted with the enemy of everything the Grail stands for, who gives a damn what you think.”

#MAGA

[megrimlocke]

In Which I Upbraid the New Years Naysayers

The simple turning of the year does not create some kind of clean slate that makes change or growth possible where it was not the day before.  There are some people who are interested in breaking out of patterns of stagnation and who take this to mean that they should begin immediately regardless of the hour and there are those who take this to mean that the magic of the new year is simply not for them and accept a continuation of the status quo.

Increasingly, I find myself disliking this second kind of person.  I understand full well that the new year creates a certain kind of unfair expectation, like a sort of annual high school reunion, especially now as we all see what one another are doing in the social media.  It’s the defeatist attitude that gets me, the notion that “new year same me” is simply the way that things are and if the magical new year cannot motivate one to grow then nothing can.

Truly, I have very seldom come upon a person who started with a new year’s resolution and followed it through entirely.  This doesn’t really surprise me because the kinds of fundamental things people try to change in their lives all at once demand some extremes in discipline that I have always found I had to sort of ease into, gradually.  If you cannot quit smoking cold-turkey, what leads you to conclude that getting suckered into the planet fitness bargain is going to stick?

I will touch on fitness goals (though not exclusively) in this discussion because it’s such a common pick that I have some experience with, but more because I feel that the Planet exploits this misled idea of the clean slate in order to profit from working people.  The average PF facility is designed to allow about 50 people to do cardio at once and has benches, ropes, dumbbells and so on to accommodate perhaps a further 30 or 40 to be training with the weights.  The average membership of a PF facility is expected to be between 800 and 1000 individuals.  If every one of you committed to lifting every day you’d be stumbling over each other and waiting 20 minutes for the lat pulldown.  Every gym has crowding problems at some time of day, but the PF solution is to set the membership fee so low that slacking off doesn’t feel like a wasted investment.  They hope you will forget about being slowly bled the same way you might forget about that recurring Spotify subscription you forgot to cancel.

Am I saying you ought to go invest 300 bucks a month at a crossfit gym to be successful in your resolution?  No, but if you make the investment in a proper gym you are going to be motivated to get your money’s worth even if all the right reasons to go to the gym fail you on some occasion.  If you want to succeed dear new years resolution devotee - and I want you to, I am rooting for you- take your time in choosing a facility that will provide you with all the things you need to get where you want to go.  Or, maybe you have no idea where to go but you know you want to start walking, in which case you should look for one that offers a knowledgeable staff that can introduce you to several disciplines or sports that catch your eye.  Another thing the Planet profits off is the idea that other gyms are not inviting or interested in your success, and this is filthy lie.

I reckon the new year where goals are concerned to start on the 1st of November, shortly after my birthday and after I have completed my offerings to the Halloween spirits. As the shadows grow and my birthday approaches in late October, my Hour approaches when I will look upon the goals I have set since last year and decide where next to go.  After a fashion, this is my new years resolution time.

These aren’t all necessarily fitness goals- I set out to become a homeowner in 2016 at roughly the same time I decided to miss no weeks at the gym, last year I made a decision to plan a salsa garden for the spring and pay off my car.  This past October I resolved to compete at bodybuilding next year, rearrange my finances to tighten up my spending, and go back to school to pick up some new job skills.

Which leads me to today, roughly two months after making those decisions.  Firstly, I have concluded that practicing the compulsory poses is the most boring work I have ever done in the gym, but I appreciate the precision of it.  Secondly, I have just made my first payment on my schooling for the spring term because the thirdly part of realigning my financial posture succeeded when my paycheck came through this morning and I paid down my credit balance, bringing an end to some 2 months of carefully moving money around and executing some deliberately planned transactions and payments instead of just mindlessly dumping money into the bank.  Reclaiming some 150 dollars a month.

Now the cash that I have reclaimed in this way is not disposable, it just is what is necessary to allow me to continue meeting with trainers and also pay for school at the same time.  The cash is not the end goal, it’s a tool to let me do the things I want, and it didn’t just miraculously happen on the first of January any more than did my school enrollment or my abs.  It was the result of meticulous planning and careful execution of that plan, with the guidance and input of many people in my support networks.  Proper investment of time, careful planning, and right guidance is needed to achieve the difficult things, so don’t be ashamed if you don’t see the fruits of your resolution until March.

Which brings me back to the “new year same me” crowd.  I could not accomplish all these things if I didn’t have a personal cheer squad in my friends and colleagues or without the guidance of my trainers and bosses.  Therefor, if you are looking to pursue some kind of transformation or change in your life (I refuse to use the very-quickly cliched concept of the fitness journey) there are two ways that these folks are hurting you that you need to take action about.

If you are one of these people but you long to change something, if you’ve decided that resolutions are too mainstream, that you’re too cool for the whole thing, or if you’re honest with yourself enough to say that these attitudes are just excuses for your fear of failure, then stop it.  Instead of focusing on how very far the distance is between where you are at 95 pounds squat or a shitty karaoke solo, think instead of what plan is going to get you to all the way to 225 in a few years, what singing opportunities you have to practice with.  You can do that thing you want, and you are not too old or whatever those other people say that has been holding you back.

You’re not just getting yourself down and robbing yourself of precious time to do something you are passionate about, you are affecting the people around you with that attitude of resigned passivity.  Your friends and colleagues who do want to make a change of some kind, even if you do not, aren’t looking down their nose at you, and you’d do well to stop looking down yours because it does have an impact when you try to impose on other people your excuses for why you aren’t trying that thing.  Don’t rob someone else of their chance to succeed at a personal commitment of some kind by infecting them with your tired, predictable and frankly quite gauche disdain for effort.

[megrimlocke]

Merry X-Mas!

[megrimlocke]

[megrimlocke]

A selection of chilling imagery from ‘The Folio Book of Horror Stories’ and 'The Folio Book of Ghost Stories.’

Haunting New Illustrations for Classic Horror and Ghost Stories

[megrimlocke]

TOLKIEN NINE-NINE [8/?]

[megrimlocke]

The Festival in the Forest 2018

So I’ve completed my feedback survey, and I thought it the best way to sum up my experience attending this event as a player.

“I appreciate that you drew a note of frustration from expecting to be countered, and I deeply appreciate that you did not notice that all my islands were already tapped.”

Q: what did you love or hate about the festival?

This was a treat for me getting to see the game from the player side of the screen.  Exposure to other DM styles is healthy and any DM should spend time playing, to observe where others hit and miss in their styles and methods.

I think that the DM team concept was a strong offering this year, while still somewhat disjointed this did a good job of unifying the experience.

That being said, you Need to sack the NPCs.  Unprofessional, unattentive, unavailable, and clueless to put it mildly and succinctly.  I see no use in this collection of bumbling hangers on that failed to deliver any of my rumors when I DM'd this event and were absolutely useless and maddening to interact with as a player.  The wizard was on nap break more often than he was available to consult with and when I finally did get him he helplessly leafed through a sheaf of papers and explained that he had no helpful information on any subject I wanted to cover.  It became very clear that I was quizzing the student who had not done the reading.  My friend offered a similar remark regarding consulting with the ranger NPC about a magical beast they encountered.  This is a logical character to talk to about that, but he was completely unprepared.  I did a roleplay with the hand of the king type character and secured some extra coin for our party, as our group of mostly introductory players went three sessions with no treasure to speak of, only to find that the man who spoke with the voice of the king was in fact impotent to pay out sums in the name of the crown.  If they aren't even going to be allowed to solve player grievances I don't see what point this cast serves.  I can bring you a dozen nerds who will happily put on fake ears and makeup and who will deliver a better performance gratis.  I dunno if bringing back Pasha is just not an option or whatever but this NPC crowd lacks the rules knowledge, has not studied the story or game, and is unprepared to deliver more to the experience than passing out candy.

I perceived from all the arcane sacrifices going on that the DM teams have worked to try and claw back the treasures and riches given out in past years.  This plan was a disaster for first time players who walked away from the weekend nearly empty handed, and deeply frustrating for several of the returning players I played with.  This wasn't just a gold penalty to go regrow a limb or bring someone back to life, there was a lot of hard-won treasure that some of those guys physically winced to part with.  The difficulty should have been managed and more ways for people to voluntarily part with wealth should have been used instead of a story-mandated item tax.  Say what you will about the deadliness of my encounters, I've never stolen an item from a player by way of plot or taken any limb that wasn't earned in strictly legal adherence to the combat rules, and frankly killing some of these PCs would have been kinder than nerfing them in this way.

Q: 3. How organized was the event? (Please provide examples of how you would like to see this improved)

The DM teams are on point, the management of facilities is solid, but while the Live NPCs remain integral to the story their continued underperformance will always hurt my assessment.  The DMs prepared for months to come to this event and put on a game, they deserve an NPC corps that knows the game, knows the rules, is knowledgeable about the story, and is behaving in a professional manner consistent with the expectations of a player attending a paid event.

Q How would you rate the DMs on your team?

Plane of Water - Clearly presented story, goals, and player expectations.  You knew what you were getting yourself into and you knew roughly what you'd be on about.  Your use of handcrafted terrain is clearly a joy and you should keep at it, your encounters are also planned in tactically interesting ways and you made use of survival mechanics which are a personal delight of my own.  I would caution you only that you weigh whether you're trying to entertain and present an interesting experience for your players or if you are over-accommodating in the fear that they might encounter difficulty and be turned off to the game.  Some players want that faceroll experience, personally when I play as a wizard or as a barbarian, I want to feel that the fights are genuinely dangerous and that I must make my choices with care.  In that fight with the big water demon at the beginning of the weekend, I felt that he went down like a bitch.  You can take off the kid gloves a little more, and I think that your players will get an adrenaline rush out of your style of play if you let loose a little and reduce someone to zero hp every once in a while.  I definitely felt the difficulty while steering the ship around the ice and managing our resources, if you can allow yourself the permission to hurt PCs and bring that kind of intensity to your combat encounters you'll have lightning in a bottle.

Plane of Air - Dealing with an evil PC in the party is not always easy when you have an expectation of heroism and your plot hooks are opportunities to be heroic.  I could see the "oh shit" moment when I decided that that mother and child in a burning building was not worth our time, and felt the relief when the warlock's familiar caught the slack.  That was an entertaining moment and also a good way to handle the situation in order to get to your critical encounter.  Your use of zombies delighted me, and I enjoyed using Magic Circle to simply shut them down as a combat threat.  PCs should get the opportunity to revel in their powers, but you also brought in non-zombie combatants that presented a new variable and that was a great move.  I don't know if they were planned or you were just sick of my shit, but it complicated a battle that would have otherwise been shooting fish in a barrel.  Well played either way.  I also appreciated the library and the way research was handled, doing those kinds of abstract tasks can be hard to adjudicate, especially when you are trying to create a sensation of limited time and the task is story-critical.  I would offer as constructive feedback that story-critical information and events are formatted more actively. Your mother and child for example were passively waiting for us to save them, and if I had had my way they would have burnt to death while I got the party to go about my business.  Instead, if they had come barreling out of an ally right into the party with a mob of zombies in pursuit, then, while a less interesting tactical experience, the party would have gotten the story critical NPC interaction regardless of where we decided to go.  If it really needs to happen, make it happen instead of expecting the players to stumble upon it, because some of us evil aligned players won't make the time to go looking for someone to do good to.

Plane of Earth - Oh Chip.  We disagree very widely regarding what makes good dnd.  This I need to just get off my chest, and I've already lambasted the NPCs elsewhere, but the first 40 minutes of our session in which no one in the party had a clue what we were supposed to be doing, why we were here, and how to go about finding out what to do were some of the worst minutes I've spent in the game.  I don't mean that to be harsh, I just need to clearly communicate to you that a 40 minute scavenger hunt at the beginning of the game was tiresome and should not have been necessary.  I should have to figure out where the thing I'm looking for is at the table, I should not spend a third of the time finding out what I'm supposed to be looking for in the first place.  Now I like investigation, I like intrigue- I enjoyed passing the dwarf off as a halfling, I got a kick out of breaking into the print shop, I had fun scrutinizing that fortune teller to check for fraud (for surely who knows fraud better than Evik-azul?) but interacting with the live NPCs was a waste of my time every single time I tried it, and while I appreciate the immersive experience you envisioned this cast of NPC actors is simply not up to snuff to fulfill your vision, and my enjoyment of your game suffered for it.  To a degree, I agree with you that combat should be fast paced and that people should not be deliberating where to center a fireball for 5 minutes.  We differ in that I expect them to know precisely which square when their turn comes or go to the bottom of initiative and i'll come back, where you have simply done away with the squares.  I don't disagree with you on technical grounds at all, I played theater for 15 years before I ever laid hands on my first grid, but the complexity of play available with it is a delight in my opinion.  I feel like you could have pulled fewer punches with that purple worm.  By the end of the session I still had significant spell slots and the warriors still had a lot of hit points, the combat could have been more exciting had it taxed our resources more heavily, but I did appreciate the coal collection task that added a good layer of complexity to an otherwise so-so boss encounter.  Apart from over reliance on these bumbling NPCs, the only feedback I have in terms of your story is that while I'm glad that the Shadow Lord is starting to appear in the game world, I found his cut scene at your table strange.  Why didn't he simply kill us all?  What's the point eliminating the forgemaster if you're not going to do something to track or tag the weapons that can kill you, or at least the fools that bear them?  The sensation felt very much like a video game cutscene where I neither had any agency nor did I feel that any truly relevant new information was gleaned.  Your portrayal of the be-grieved grandmother was a nice treat to take from it however, and you were the first DM of the weekend who actually paid out, which was a desperately needed thing for first years.

Plane of Fire - Ah now here was a dungeon after my own heart.  Clear goal and expectation, an instant death environment hazard out of the gate, swarms of ravening ghouls, a banshee that put half the party down, and horrible demon skulls that shoot fireballs at you.  I would have liked some chances to deal with the ghouls a little more, but your dungeon delivered the tactical experience I felt I was missing at the other tables.  Now, I don't know if you are aware, but towards the end of the altar encounter, the warlock and I had both gone through all our spell slots countering those fireballs.  You could have blown us all to hell and ended the session in fire and ruin.  I appreciate that you drew a note of frustration from expecting to be countered, and I deeply appreciate that you did not notice that all my islands were already tapped.  I enjoyed dropping a sailing ship on your hapless monsters, and look forward to future opportunities to match wits with you on the game board.

How well do you feel the DMs on your team were coordinated?

I'm only rating this so low because I got three differing answers regarding how to cure Blood Plague.  Now, I want to be clear, I loved the blood plague, and I absolutely loved contracting it.  My character was NE only because I wasn't allowed to submit one that was CE, and the blood plague gave me real motivation to solve the adventure for reasons relevant to my character.

That being said, when I went to water it was water elementals specifically infecting the people, then shadow on earth, and on air it was simply zombies.  Now these are not necessarily mutually exclusive answers, but there was no unified response or place where I could confirm my suspicions beyond the first session.  DMs seemed to be scrambling between themselves trying to decide what spells or methods other than Wish could be used to clear an infected individual, and there were no symptoms or further saving rolls I was required to endure.

The blood plague was a unifying element between tables, and everyone should have been closer to the same page on this, and fleshed out rules and ideas about what happens when a player is infected should have been worked out ahead of time.  When we get Contagion or Bestow Curse or even possessed in RAW 5E, the ways that a PC can get un-possessed or freed from a curse are clearly stated.  I'm not demanding that that should have been known off the bat, but I invested a significant amount of time in game (and out talking to those useless prosthetic-decked chumps) investigating the matter and should have been able to divine more than I was able to.  Again, the live NPC situation is a mess, and I'm willing to accept that you guys expected them to be on top of some information you gave them.

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On the whole I had a good time, and i’m thinking of coming back to DM next year.

#dungeons and dragons #ohio #events #camping

[megrimlocke]

[megrimlocke]

Newborn Prince Of Cambridge Begins Consolidating Power By Having Family Imprisoned In Tower Of London

LONDON—Ruthlessly moving to stake his claim to the British throne mere moments after his parturition this morning, the newborn Prince of Cambridge began consolidating power by having all other members of the royal family imprisoned in the Tower of London, those close to the Crown report. “In what can only be seen as an unusually audacious seizing of power, His Infant Majesty the Prince of Cambridge has systematically eliminated the entire sovereign line of succession by decreeing their bondage in durance vile,” said sources in Buckingham Palace, who detailed how the newborn prince moved to have Princess Charlotte, Prince George, and Charles the Prince of Wales taken into custody on suspicion of conspiracy against his royal person; stripped of their wealth, land, and titles; and left to rot in the bowels of the Bloody Tower. “As the prince’s—pardon us, His Majesty the King’s—scourging of the monarchy intensified, His Royal Highness has decreed in his mercy that his disgraced cousins, those princes and princesses who sought to oppose his ascension, will be allowed their lives, though their remaining years will be spent wallowing in the squalid Tower, subsisting on only gruel and what orts and leavings the ravens see fit to bring them; and, if they see their way to grace by confessing their crimes, they shall avert the torture of having their bodies stretched on the rack and excruciated with hot irons for their high treason against the Crown.” Acknowledging the popularity of the Queen among the British common folk, the as-yet unchristened king has decreed that Elizabeth II shall abide in the keep until her death, after which her head shall be set upon a pike as a warning to usurpers.

[megrimlocke]

Breakfast

I enjoy breakfast the most because it’s the meal of the day when I don’t feel like I’m eating as a chore.  More than that, it also has the best things to eat like ham and fried eggs and oatmeal and no one looks at you weird for eating fruit at breakfast like they do with pizza.

So lately I’ve had the weirdest run of interactions.  I slept with a dude a few times, told him I wasn’t into a long-distance monogamous relationship predicated on three hookups and a party, and his reaction to this was to go out buck wild and message me specifically to raise the subject of how much fun he was having fucking other people.  This person, who shall remain anonymous, reached out to me again regarding a minor STI he picked up along the way.

Following that rather tumultuous experience I decided on a focus on common interests.  Went well for a couple weeks, then he got invited to his ex’s grandmother’s funeral.  On the one hand I could be angry about “I am sufficiently close with my ex’s family that being a pall-bearer is a possibility” not having been said to me from the outset but I opted to be an adult and assume that I was dealing with an equally emotionally aware adult who could tell the difference between grief and romantic emotional connection.  Got dumped, reconnected with him friend-style last week, turns out gran didn’t take the old relationship problems to the grave with her.

Went on a couple dates lately, dude didn’t know what gentrification was when I mentioned the word on our first date.  “Okay” I thought “he’s from a rural community and has otherwise moved in white-collar gay circles so maybe he’s just not aware like that.”  I had a harder time justifying to myself how I was explaining to a 31 year old man what is bubble tea, and given that the shared interest was supposed to by lifting I was similarly scratching my head trying to figure out why things like volume vs. weight were alien to him.  I feel like in three encounters I should be on the other end of the learning at least once.  I’d also appreciate it if he made himself accessible in a predictable or at least transparent way.  He told me he wants another date, I don’t think he does and I don’t understand why those things are not consistent with one another.  I sense a pretty gay boy juggling dates with two or three dudes trying to decide which is the best investment of time.

I haven’t done as good a job as I ought to have done regarding holding others to standards.  On the one hand I’m cautious because I’m tired of being treated like a side dude or a plan B or an occasional sex partner.  On the other I’m adequately deliberative that I tend towards patience where I suspect it’s probably not deserved.  Certainly if we take my last three examples we can say that expecting adult behavior, being accommodating of strange circumstance, and giving the benefit of the doubt are not serving me well.

This is of course to say nothing of the yoga instructor who felt that not until after several sex encounters and two weeks of sexting was it appropriate to mention he already had a boyfriend.  This is of course horseshit.  If I have the time and courage to do an HIV disclosure the other dude can tell me honestly whether or not he’s single.

Then of course there was the man looking at the world through a wallet, who felt that telling me that he was an angry customer on the phone was a good way to open a date with a CSR.  Closing the date with an unsolicited ass-grab was also not the best choice, I laughed it off at the time but I was angry about it later on.  The laughing was the mistake I think.

I suppose the take-away here is that I’m tired.  I’m exhausted with first dates.  I’m worn out with introducing myself over and over and I’m completely burnt out on both analyzing behavior and guessing at intent.  I’m certainly over being the understanding and accommodating one in these affairs, and certainly I’m at the end of my patience with being the chaser.

I honestly have no clue about what I’m doing wrong.  I show up on time, I keep my commitments, I’m neither financially distressed or emotionally demanding I’m engaged in a diverse and active social life.  I’m skilled both at getting people out of the house to go be active and at showing up to offer some emotional nurture and fucking artisanal bread and I’m evidently pretty attractive.  I’m meeting and exceeding standards, and I don’t get why I’m still falling short in this dating game.

Meeting a guy tomorrow for a chest day, he’s actually pretty promising; immediately identified me as PC master race, was down with the star wars RPG books lying all over my house and he actually squats.  Also does social work for his studying, so he’s pretty exciting.  Or at least he should be.  I’m wiped out with all this to the point where I can only manage a wan smile and polite tilt of my head in response to the idea.  I should be excited about such a dude but I’m just exhausted with the idea of my 8th first date in 5 months.

Buuuut here’s to saturday lifting date #4, if the dude doesn’t work out then at least I’ll have a spot for bench presses ;)

#dating gay absurd

[megrimlocke]

How The Second Amendment Fails Us Regarding Tyranny

The argument that the second amendment is necessary to resist a tyrannical government is without practical merit, and I intend to demonstrate this by utility rather than arguing that the government is not out to get you or that it is morally wrong to kill people.  As such, this essay takes a somewhat dispassionate and analytic attitude towards murder.

Indeed, there are several cases we can document in which the government and its citizens have been at violent odds both locally and at a federal level.  The second amendment has not only failed to allow the citizens to overthrow the will of the government in these cases, it has in fact gotten them killed.  I will not therefore argue that violence is not the answer because I would like to have everyone join in a peace circle and sing Welcome Christmas, but rather I will argue that it is not the answer because it doesn’t work.  Then I will demonstrate the ways in which the second amendment enables and amplifies the curtailing of liberties for the American people.

The Waco Siege began with an initial FBI raid in which 4 agents and 6 Branch Davidians were killed.  Following this was a 51 day siege that ended with the Branch Davidian building burning down, killing 76 people inside.  Of the surviving Branch Davidians, of which there were eleven, all were arrested upon fleeing the flames.

The astonishing loss of life aside, the survivors still didn’t get their way.  For all their guns and the four FBI agents they killed, they either went to prison anyway or else died a horrifying death by fire.  The people stood up to the government for the sake of their (deviant) religious beliefs and they were prepared with violent means and they died or went to prison.  The second amendment failed to allow these people seeking religious freedom to resist the government.

More recently, the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge also failed.  In this case an armed militia seeking to assert land ownership rights over the government took possession by force of a national parks facility and engaged in a standoff with federal officers for a total of 40 days.  At the end of this time, seven of them, including Ammon and Ryan Bundy who led the expedition, were tried and acquitted of federal charges.  Most of the people they led into this crusade to enrich themselves did not fare so well.  Six were sentenced to 1-2 years of probation, some of those on house arrest.  Two were given 366 days in prison, with one of them given a further three years probation, another two were given 21 and 18 months in prison respectively.  One man got off with no sentencing and indeed no trial, for the perfectly sensible reason that he had already been shot to death.

Once again, a group of armed people in a relatively remote facility against the federal government purchased less than two months of resistance with their guns and paid toll in blood and prison time.  

And that’s just how it goes down if you’re white and dealing with the feds.

In 2016, we all watched a video with a good deal of tyranny in it.  Philando Castile was shot to death by a Minnesota officer who requested of him information about what arms he was carrying and asked him to present documentation for the weapon.  Mere possession of the firearm got Castile killed by the government, but the bloodletting did not end there.

Outraged as many of us were Mr. Micah Xavier Johnson decided to do something about his tyrannical government using his army training and some firearms.  To his credit (if one can credit a murderer), this is the case from my review in which the number of government agents killed exceeds the number of non-government citizens killed, perhaps owing to his training or perhaps the MOUT environment in which he fought.

Mr. Johnson succeeded in killing a total of 5 police officers and injuring a further nine officers.  Of all the anti-government combatants in my review, his is the only case in which there was not a person who believed that they were receiving instructions from God and also the only case in which claiming resources for himself in the form of child wives or land was not the goal.  To incite open armed rebellion against the government and overthrow it by force of arms and invert a longstanding system of racism, enabled by the second amendment, was his goal.

Mr. Johnson’s otherwise fairly successful attempt to injure if not destroy the government was brought to a historical end.  The local police force in Dallas killed Mr. Johnson by taping an explosive to a bomb removal robot and having the automaton hand-deliver the weapon to Mr. Johnson.  He is the first US citizen to be killed by police by robot.  It seems that anti-personnel assault rifles and MOUT tactics are not effective against a government killbot.

Bear in mind by the way that this was a local police force.  Had the same mentality been at play among federal agents a UAV missile strike would seem the scaled up analog.

What can we take from these case studies?  By taking up arms against the government you at a minimum ensure that you will be involved in a protracted legal battle, the chances of escaping that legal battle with your liberties intact are slim, and there is a very good chance that you will simply end up dead.

You cannot use the second amendment to beat the government and secure your liberties, no one ever has.  If you would argue that these case studies are not the same as the wave of citizen uprisings you think you could incite, let me remind you that the Bundys and Mr. Johnson intended to lead such uprisings themselves and failed to get them off the ground, and that further the only occasion of armed uprising on the scale you propose ended with the federal government on top on April 9th 1865 at Appomattox.

This isn’t a matter of opinion, it’s a matter of record.

Yet, there are more ways in which the second amendment inhibits our liberties.  As already mentioned, Philando Castile was killed because he possessed a firearm, but you don’t even need to possess one for the police to kill you.

Tamir Rice, 12, of Cleveland Ohio possessed a water pistol or the like and was shot by police twice, dying the following day.  The police officers suffered no penalty becuase the grand jury did not indict them because the video shown to them showed Tamir drawing his water pistol, which the officers involved believed to be real.

Because of the second amendment, there is a reasonable possibility that police officers will face armed assailants anytime and everywhere, and as such, the courts regularly give them the benefit of the doubt because officers are not necessarily wrong to fear for their lives when facing down a 12 year old boy.

The second amendment and the companies that benefit from it have flooded our country with firearms, and as such police can shoot people with impunity because of their reasonable concern of being shot themselves.  Who they are shooting largely comes down to a discussion of racism, but don’t imagine that fair skin will save you, as discovered by Australian Justine Damond.  It was in fact she that summoned the police to begin with, and she is now dead.  That her police killer was arrested is perhaps a matter of her being white, but there is also the possibility that it had to be done to attend to what was an international incident.  Australian citizens get more justice than American ones do in the matter of police shootings in our own country, it seems.

When a policeman can gun down a 12 year old boy and suffer no jail time, we are living in tyranny.  When a man can reach for his papers in his car and be gunned down we are living in a police state, and when we declare that the legal device by which these things are possible is critical to preserving our freedoms, we are wrong.

[megrimlocke]

The Regeneration Episode

New teeth.  That’s weird.

Man October is just getting to the good parts and I already feel like I’ve been on a big adventure.  This is a landmark month for me because it marks the 12th month since my new doctor changed my medicine.  It’s also my birthday in just a week or so, it seems appropriate to take stock of how 33 has been.

Let’s start from the beginning, 32 was rubbish.  Relationship went sour, got toxic, ended with a precipitous sensation of discard.  Has been explored elsewhere laboriously.  Doesn’t need further analysis here.  Job was looking shaky.  Rent was reasonable but heavy once I turned single again.  Mind you I adore my landlord and i’ll always remember that apartment as the place where I showed that I was capable of long-haul and nurturing, but it had become ponderous.

Social life was badly- perhaps even dangerously- contracted.  Arms were weak, cardio was nonexistent, joints were beginning to act like old people joints.

And then I turned 33 and my doctor switched me to a drug that didn’t depress me.  This was possible only because the job that was starting to feel like a trap became a critically important source of stability.  I could wake up in the morning unburdened by the sensation that my efforts were futile.

So, waking up at 4am I did the only sensible thing and went in to do deadlifts, as one does.  So now I was getting out of bed without feeling like some kind of ghost and i was starting to be able to move heavy things like I used to do.  Then heavy things turned into drills with a sledgehammer, turned into the climbing wall, turned into the obstacle course, turned into even heavier deadlifts including a personal best.  At the end of this month it will be true that I have trained a full year with no more than one break and that no greater than 5 days.  51 weeks of commitment to my goal.

I took the energy from the gym to the office and many things were easier than before.  I didn’t feel belabored so often.  My restlessness could be easily converted into the energy to pursue new work projects.  Turned my performance record (which was not awful but needed work) into one of the better ones on my team.

Brought that energy back home and made some plans for the future.  Engaged a realtor.  Toured lots of houses.  Learned many things about property and location.  Bought a house.  I planted a garden full of yellow and orange flowers and tomatoes and herbs and it was wonderful.  I built a garage gym so no snow drift may stay me from my goal.

I had already begun and now began accelerating a project to make one new friend in each month.  I reconstituted a new and reliable D&D group.  I had tea with friends.  I attended events and participated in things new that I hadn’t tried.  I saved a room full of people from a zombie using my karaoke portfolio.  I remembered that booze was useless to people who can sing in public without shame and discarding it has been immensely helpful in controlling costs and freeing up more money to spend on things like protein shakes.

And here we are looking at 34.  I’ve made a commitment to do a fitness competition sometime when i’m 35, because you really do have to lay such plans in terms of years.  I’m looking forward to new house improvement plans.  I’m pursuing exciting new opportunities at the office. My cat is happy, my house is secure and peaceful and comfortable.  I’m playing in a campaign as a player for the first time in years.  I visited with dear old friends in Florida and I went to a nude beach.  I promise, I’m not a woman in my 60s, I’m just experiencing the same relief because my brain is unclouded by a paralyzing mist of inertia and self-doubt for the first time in years.

I was out at the park training with the sledgehammer on the tires and I got invited to the rugby practice.  I decided that i’d spent enough time exercising largely on my own and that it was time to stop hiding myself away and get back out among other gay people so I joined up.  I might as well check off the one-friend-per-month rule because I figure that once I get over my social anxiety this will be a healthy thing for me as a means to rejoin gay society on terms I can relate to comfortably.  Aggressive, invigorating terms.

I think that depression, if it is chemically induced like mine or if it’s a normal thing for a person is just awful because it claims our time, it slows everything down.  I don’t think one can overstate the radical differences in a person, so to reiterate the difference between healthcare that gives access to modern drugs for me was the difference between being a self-defeating slave willing to put aside his own goals to be ‘supportive’ of someone who didn’t really see me as anything more than an accessory in his own saga and a reinvigorated man who hasn’t either felt so driven or felt as though so many goals were in reach in nearly a decade.  Sixteen inch arms seemed like a big deal back at 14.5 but now that i’m here it’s clear that I need to take a look at 17 or 18 and see how I feel about those.

I’ve spent the year practicing self-love and it’s a pretty wonderful thing.  I’m excited for 34 as the Year I Got Big and The Year I Stopped Living Like Some Kind of Pariah.

33 has treated me really well.  Apart from the new kidneys.  I don’t like the color.

#drwho #regeneration #depression #healing #he'sback #goals #ambition #healthcare

[megrimlocke]

Weregild

“I’m disgusted by another shooting.”  I feel like that’s an easy thing to say and that it doesn’t accomplish much, but it’s all our leaders are able to say or do.

I feel like I need to say it though because it’s so distressingly easy to let it just fade in the background as another mass murder.

I’m disgusted by preventable loss of life, doubly so because a 65 year old casino rat did the deed.  Similar to how disgusted I was that a little gollum like Dylan Roof could manage to murder anyone.  With these damned machines it’s possible.

This is not the cost of freedom.  No one is more free because these people have died or are dying.  The federal government is no less capable of crushing you because you have even weapons such as these.  Even the shooter knew that.

While we’re in shock or grieving others are preparing.  The stock values of arms manufacturers have already climbed as much as 7% because wall street is still as cold and calculating as ever when there is a bargain to be had.  The appropriate lobbyist snakes are already making the appropriate inquiries with the appropriate members of congress.

The murders of little children who can barely put on their own pants weren’t enough.  Shootings year after year worse than the one before it is not enough.  Even a congressman himself being shot was not enough.

I wonder if now that it’s white rural-culturally-identifying people if it will be enough.  I wonder if this constituency that values this amendment really is ready to bleed for it.  This is the nightmare that they have made, they just thought it would never be visited upon them.  The congress most certainly won’t act without the support of the people, and here are the people who swore when it was an abstraction that this was a risk they were willing to take.

I don’t think anyone has this kind of thing coming to them.  Maybe now these people might agree instead of saying things like “it’s a pity he couldn’t have shot more gays.”  It would be nice but it wouldn’t matter.

What the people want in terms of gun control is not relevant because they do not have power anymore, because the gun lobby, flush with cash from the stock jump associated with this horror, will pay a plump collection of campaign donations to the GOP and business will continue at a brisk pace for the people making the guns.

Those dead people’s lives don’t matter because they have been commodified and calculated as overhead.  The occasional infusion of political and PR blood price is built into the arms manufacturer’s business model.

Those lives are already bought and paid for by the time I post this.