Due to a variety of issues (Hospitalization, taking care of my mom after her stokes, kidney stones ) I had to drop most classes last semester. In order to catch up, I'm taking 9 credits in the first summer session at ODU, since this is one of the two short sessions this means 3x2.5 hour classes a day plus getting up at 3AM for work. I'm also studying for a placement test in July and working towards my online TESOL certificate on weekends.
 Posting will be light and largely restricted to weekends for at least the next month.
As partial compensation here is Rin...

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 08:05 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I probably could have led a happy, prosperous and productive life and never known that....but didn't so I do.

Mysterious Girlfriend X is a perversely engaging show. I'm not sure I'll be able to get past the squick factor, but I laughed out loud several times.


Certainly it delivers at least part of what it promises in that there is a girlfriend and she is sure as hell mysterious.

 
What the hell? Is he dating Nevada Tan?

^{"Excuse me. My name is Tsubaki."}

Anyway...

The two end up sitting next to each other and after a while romance blossoms oozes between them.

It is a very off-beat and rather cute show.

There is also drool...rather a LOT of drool.
I nearly wretched twice.
I laughed out loud 4 times..once while almost wretching.
Thus I find myself conflicted but holding at 2 to 1 in favor of continuing the series.

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That was unexpected...

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General Dynamics has announced a new machine gun at the current NDIA conference. It's an interesting weapon, weighing in at just over 3 pounds less than the army's current 7.62 mm machine gun the  M-240B. However, it's about a pound heavier than the recently fielded M-240 L (lightweight). Its overall length is slightly longer and it's rate of fire is slower.

Oh, and it's chambered for .338 caliber (8.58mm).

The .338 Lapua Magnum, an exceedingly powerful round of Finnish origin, has gained a fearsome reputation in the current unpleasantness.  The new machine gun is actually chambered for the .338 Norma a new round that is slightly shorter and fatter so that it can accommodate an even longer, more aerodynamic bullet. It's also optimized for belt feed. One interesting feature of the round is that the high ballistic coefficient means that at very long ranges its ballistics approach that of the .50 caliber BMG round. Reportedly, current weapons chambered for .338 Lapua can be adapted to fire this weapon via a barrel change.¹

 

^{I wonder how much 600 rounds is going to weigh.}

Anthony G. Williams has some thoughts.²

I’ve just been examing the gun at NDIA and talking to the GD people there (including the ammo designer, Jimmie Sloan). The gun isn’t based on the FN MAG / M240, it’s actually based on the .50 cal XM806. It uses the same soft-recoil technology, in that the gun fires as the barrel group is moving forwards. This smoothes out the recoil dramatically, allowing the gun to weigh about the same as the M240 (24 lbs) and to use a lightweight tripod. I’ve been watching a video of it firing and it doesn’t move – most impressive.

The 338NM was chosen to keep the length down with long, heavy bullets. The loading used for the MG is a 300 grain FMJ at 2,650 fps.

• .338 Norma Magnum
• 24 Pounds
• 49 inches
• 500 rounds per minute
• .338 Norma Magnum
• 300gr Sierra HPBT, FMJ, AP
• Muzzle Velocity 2650 FPS
• 24 inch barrel
• 1700 meters effective range
• 5642 meters maximum range
• uses M192 tripod

There's more at the Firearm Blog and on Anthony Williams forum.

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Pixy has found one.

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Friday night, for some reason, I went to 4-chan.
I noted that they had a new board. I clicked to see what it's topic was and to my utter astonishment and not inconsiderable dismay it was devoted entirely to...

The end times: they are neigh.

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I recently discovered when trying to add a course to the second summer session that that there is a 14 credit per semester limit on what I can take at ODU now. There is a 6 credit limit on summer classes. As I had already signed up for 9 summer credits this left me worried that I would be dumped out of the classes I had enrolled in.  Additionally this complicates my plan to graduate next spring. My own illnesses as well as the time I took off to deal with Mom's strokes caused me to drop multiple classes and the summer sessions were key to my making good on part of that.

My ODU G-mail account soon provided me with some clarification on this matter. It seems that the limit was imposed because of the fact that I'm on academic probation.

Well this is logical. It makes sense to limit the number of...

...wait....

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 05:52 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Sort of...
The last post was High octane nightmare fuel so here is something that is...merely wrong.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 10:19 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Browsing through the Green Room I encountered a link to this....

Health authorities in Asia are concerned that if the powdered foetus trade is allowed to continue the capsules will find their way onto the internet and be sold to gullible or sick desperate people in other parts of the world.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 09:26 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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Magical girl shows:
Someone has given ENTIRELY too much thought to the concept.

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Nearby Norfolk and our local paper are both in the news today because of a beating that took place two weeks ago.  However, no one was killed and the victims seem to have no permanent physical injuries and have returned to work, indeed, though badly hurt, they left the scene via their car. This ought not to be a national story.

However, it IS a national story and that is because the Virginian Pilot sat on the story for two weeks, despite the fact that the victims were two of their own reporters. The paper broke the story not as news, but rather in an OP-ED yesterday. It is here.

Read the whole thing. 

The fact that the paper did not report the story until the editorial staff could not abide the failure to report and broke it is causing understandable alarm. This is particularly true in the wake of all the examples of media malfeasance revolving around the terrible Zimmerman/ Martin  case.

It should be noted that this is quite different from that wickedness in that it seems that the Virginian Pilot staff aren't actually trying to gin up a race war. However, the size of the mob, and the police observation that such things are unremarkable in downtown Norfolk (which one would not know by reading the 'Pilot )are the sorts of things that a local paper ought to be reporting on. The public needs to know these things both to make informed choices about where to go at night as well as raising awareness of the problem so its on the radar at election time...
...oh wait Norfolk's elections were YESTERDAY.
This is something that ought to have been on the public's radar 2 weeks ago so that the candidates could have proposed solutions. Well, the paper did not wish to offend, so those elections did not deal with this issue.

There is speculation that there was a seedier rationale for this debacle beyond knee-jerk political correctness or a fear of fanning racial flames, namely that the president and publisher of the Virginian Pilot is now Obama's deputy HUD secretary. I heard this bantied about on the local radio this morning as well. IMHO the timeline on this does not quite jive as he was already confirmed by the time of the beating. I suppose there could have been some residual butt covering for the old boss. In any event the incident was not covered.

  The beating was terrible in and of itself and the failure to cover it is worrisome but is also of national interest interest because there are some  indications that it was another "Justice for Trayvon" racial assault. Da Tech Guy has a long post on this aspect of the case but it is in one of his updates that he hits the nail on the head regards the local implications of this.

  One other thing to consider, thugs aren’t only thugs when a person of a different race drives by. If an assault on their own journalists went unreported for two weeks how much less likely is the paper to cover non fatal beatings, robberies or intimidation within the community done by the same people? The paper and the police do the black community no favor by ignoring this stuff.

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^{We'll let this young lady comment on that for a moment.}

Well in this case summer is 14 days long as I'm taking a full load of summer classes next session. Of course I'm working too.

But hey...exams are over.

***

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Great googly moogly....
Episode 17 of Bodacious Space Pirates was full of all sorts of surprises...

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1 It's a good that a show makes you yearn for the next episode, but why do weeks have to have so many days in them? 

Posted by: Siergen at Sun Apr 29 12:37:02 2012 (3/gGt)

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XamCram...It's 2AM, my brain is fried...I'm gonna watch Bodacious Space Pirates, then turn in.
Monday is my exam day.
Blogging will resume shortly thereafter.


In the meantime here here is an important life lesson from HELVITICA STANDARD.

^{If you can figure out said lesson...please tell me.}

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 01:11 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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This is GREAT!
All those arrows on the Drudge Report point to ME!
Not only that, there's big red "L" hanging over me! ...oh wait.

Curse you Drudge.

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This episode of Bodacious Space Pirates was largely humorous with less adventure and more silliness than usual. There was a serious point though.There are no longer ANY training wheels. Marika is well and truly in command now. She OWNS this, and although she has a solid XO there is really no one to fall back on.

Also: I didn't see this coming.

^{The XO is shocked too! At what, we won't tell.}

Bodacious Space Pirates really is an intriguing show. Set in the FAR FAR FAR future, the story of a 16 year old girl, who due to an unlikely set of circumstances,* ends up in charge of an interstellar privateer is obviously a thing of whimsy. However, it is surprisingly down to earth and thoughtful in other ways.

One of the things that has impressed me is that it actually deals with leadership. I mentioned in an earlier post that Marika, the young CO, was initially thrown into a position not unlike that of a green ensign or "90 day wonder". That is, she had considerable skill, but zero experience and found herself in command of a small unit, virtually every member of which has been doing their jobs far longer than her. She had to learn to delegate, take advice and cope with the fact that the buck stops with her. It is upon her decisions that the crew will live or die (or go bankrupt...the privateer is a business after all). This has been handled with far more intelligence and subtly than one has any right to expect from a sci-fi cartoon.

Now they've turned this on its head and Marika is in a situation where SHE is the veteran and has to train, mentor and direct people who, while they are volunteers, have very rudimentary training, and not all of them have gotten their heads around the fact that this is a real job, and not just a lark. Marika and her acting XO handle this quite well. The writing on this is impressive.  It's like 12 O'Clock High with zap guns.

This show has a 16 year old female protagonist and it is (very occasionally) set in a high school, and yet it is not a teen angst show, or a show about slacking or raging against an unfair world.

If I had a daughter, I'd want her to watch this.

 This show actually has a lot in common with Heinlein's juvies in that it's is aspirational. Marika is a young adult who is dealing with life's challenges as an adult. She does not run from her responsibilities, and while she takes them seriously she does so with good humor.

  ^{...and humor is an important thing to have when things go all higgly piggly...}

...Because you fight your wars with the uniforms you have.

It turns out that the Letter of Marque requires the pirate ships go a-piratin' at certain set intervals. Due to a biohazard incident while Marika was off the ship, the entire crew is in Quarantine. In order to keep the letter Marika must pull off one piratical job...but she needs a crew.

Her solution is crazy, but inspired.

  Quite aside from all that, the premise is pretty clever....


The treaty loophole** that allows the planet to keep highly regulated privateers as naval auxiliaries, combined with the "official" synergy between the insurance companies, the Cruise Lines and the Privateers...is just inspired.

 The action is superb, the characters are likeable and 16 episodes in we haven't had a single upskirt shot yet. I'm quite impressed.

UPDATE: Slightly spoilerish explanations for * and ** added below the fold.

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I'm not really keen on magical girlfriend shows, but when the magical girlfriend is Nyarlathotep I've got to watch at least one.

^{An abominable, aberrant, anomalous, appalling, atrocious, and animated alien ahoge!}

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^{" Dekka Blue...Something about that dish we had at the White House is eating at me. "}

  I'm swamped. So swamped, that yesterday I missed the most important story in the history of stuff. The story that trumps Iran getting nukes, the crappy economy and the ungodly deficit.

Of course I'm talking about Bositang-gate.

James Taranto has an overview of how exactly it transpired that U.S. politics went to the dogs this week. Be warned though...there is a reason that he's a pun-dit.

More here, here and here.

  _{Disclaimer: Though I'm by no means a fan of his, I don't actually begrudge the President this but it made me laugh and it's rare to be able to so effortlessly work Doggie Kuger into a post.}  

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The internet has rules.

Posted by: The Brickmuppet at 11:36 PM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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Don is celebrating his ninth blogiversary in spectacular fashion.

Update 3: On the radio, I’m hearing phrases such as "stovepipe” and "half-mile wide.” I really may be communing with the spiders in my basement shortly.

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