January 27, 2026
I Did Not...
...expect the best take so far on the Minneapolis shooting to be by the AK guy.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at
11:34 PM
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January 22, 2026
As a Virginian, I Appear to be Screwed
The last few days of the Virginia legislature have been absolutely unsane.
I can't say I'm actually surprised, Abigail Spanberger went around the State doing her best Emperor Palpatine impression and not condemning the Murder of Charlie Kirk or the abhorrent remarks of her Attorney General.
Do keep an eye on Spanberger. in addition to being an apparent psycopath, she is exceedingly well connected in Washington circles. I suspect she is being groomed for a White House run in 2028, most likely using Gavin Newsome as chaff.
If that happens she will be everyone else's problem too, and the resulting national enshitification will likely be unrecoverable. Spanberger is very bad news.
Like another Virginia politician (Ralph Northam), she is one of the few politicos that I suspect is genuinely evil, as opposed to simply being wrong or silly.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at
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January 20, 2026
Schedule Update!
HAVING A FIRM DATE FOR THE SURGERY MEANS WE ALSO CAN HAVE A STREAMING SCHEDULE!
Tomorrow night, we revisit the wacky shenanigans of Disgaea 2 in an Item World run, Thursday's stream is dependent of a few external factors...but there *may* be zombies. Friday, we will try to unlock the Russian Nesting Doll that is the new Nod-Krai quests in Genshin Impact. Saturday night we revisit a strange movie fragment from early '20s Italy, the surviving footage of The Mechanical Man the first Giant Robot film ever made. (Legal disclaimer: Robot is merely big by modern standards). While much of the footage is missing, a script has actually survived so I'll be filing in the gaps. We showed this back when I first started streaming (as a PNG Tuber on an iMac) but that had no viewers and I do have some more information on the film now. This will be fairly short, (40 minutes or so with narration) so we'll do some gaming of some sort afterwards.
Times on the schedule are all EST (UTC-4) so top by, bully me in chat and check out all the shenanigans at https://www.twitch.tv/brickmuppet.
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Status Update
A short, banal update lurks beneath the fold.
more...
As compensation, here is a GMV from Calvin C. Shinobi, featuring footage from the online game Zenless Zone Zero.
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07:48 PM
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January 17, 2026
Nick Shirley Interview
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***STATUS REPORT: ***
Banality Lurks Below the Fold.
more...
Here is a very silly girl with epic boots as compensation:
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at
09:06 PM
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January 13, 2026
Scott Adams 1956-2026
Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, and a thoughtful and entertaining voice on the internet has passed away due to prostate cancer.
We knew this was coming, his cancer has been publicly known for over a year, but given that he streamed over the weekend, it still feels sudden.
Adams, a celebrity cartoonist, poked fun at the idiocies of group think and office politics, until suck poking became double plus ungood. He then continued poking until his publisher dropped him.
Entertaining and often infuriating, he was a voice of reason and above all calm during the crazy years.
He will be sorely missed as calm rational voices such as his are rare in the best of times, and sorely needed in times like ours.
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January 10, 2026
And Now For Something Completly Different
USN tests out and trains with its asw torpedoes fitted with inert warheads, thus nothing could possibly go wrong. U.S.S. Volador begged to differ.
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January 07, 2026
So Now is the Time That Everybody on the Internet Is Required to Become an Expert on Marine Engineering and Naval Force Structures.
Both above pieces of artwork by Tzoli.
Fortunately, I'm a weeb with a degree in history and a lifetime of wasted opportunities, so I'VE GOT THIS!
It seems that President Trump has announced that the U.S. Navy is going to start building BATTLESHIPS!
Also the Navy is getting frigates....in the form of Coast Guard cutters.
This has caused interest, excitement, outrage, and horror in various circles, the specific emotion seemingly depending on one's political preferences with apparently little input from strategic analysis or engineering considerations.
So: In keeping with the modesty we have come to expect from the current CinC, this group of warships will be called the Trump class.
....and the first one will be called the U.S.S. Defiant.
Ignoring for a moment that we don't name battleships for people, and that the first ship built in a class is the name of the class...and that Defiant is a name that U.S. naming protocols would indicate is for a minesweeper or coast guard cutter....what exactly are the various merits and silliness of this development.
First: the official Navy Art.
...'kaaaay.
Having the 5inch guns as wing mounts seems needlessly inefficient. However, it might be needed to free up space for more VLS cells.
It will reportedly have at least one railgun.
The inclusion of a railgun is interesting, as that program had been terminated. That it is included in a current design indicates that the railgun DOES work and its termination by the navy in 2021 was due more to the general policy of national enshitification by the Biden Administration than any technical hurdles facing the weapon. Certainly Japan, faced with an existential threat in the form of China, (and having leaders who want their country to survive and prosper) have had no problem getting one to work recently.
However, as we all know battleships are obsolete, and have been since the end of WW2. Also battleships are large armored vessels armed with large caliber naval rifles. This this is a death trap and is not even a battleship.
OK that last paragraph is a bit wrong headed.
Battleships in WW2 were effective escorts for the carriers with the added ability to stand up to any surface forces that got into range...they were not COST effective units in that role, but they were available and individually FAR more effective antiaircraft platforms that the cruisers and destroyers that were more affordable.
Being able to deal with targets that came within range was their downfall, because with an absolute maximum range of 25 miles, nothing was likely to get close to a carrier that could hit targets 400 miles away (and by the mid cold war could hit targets over 1000 miles away). So battleships largely left the fleet after ww2. Both the British and Americans toyed with the idea on new dreadnoughts immediately after WW2 that would be incorporating the lessons thereof, and the US drew up designs to convert its treaty battleships into missile ships as prototypes for large surface ships of the future. This was ultimately not done, mainly due to cost, but also because during the 'pentomic' period of U.S. tactical and strategic thought, it was believed that nuclear weapons would be used in any war and it thus, it was thought that a larger number of less capable but dispersed targets would be more survivable than fewer high capability vessels.
A postwar (1947ish) proposal to complete the incomplete U.S.S. Kentucky and Illinois as heavy AAA escorts for carriers. The 16 big guns are auto-firing 8inch guns (10-15 rds per barrel per minute) firing both fin stabilized APDS anti surface shells and a gun-launched sub-caliber radar guided missile. This was axed by both cost and the technical issues of gun-launched radar guided missile in the years before integrated circuits.
A mid to late 1950s proposal to convert the Iowa class into missile battleships, leveraging the armor to protect the magazines and the great reserve buoyancy to allow some limited degree of protection to the radar aerials. The Talos missiles were extremely hard hitting dual purpose weapons with 60-130 miles of range depending on the year of production, the Regulus 2 missiles could hit surface targets over 1000NM away with a multi-megaton warhead,
Large ships DO have advantages though. They can be more stable radar platforms, they have redundancy, space for command staff and electronics and can potentially have deep magazines and some protection.
To that end since the 1960s the navy has sought out large surface warships to reinforce the large number of smaller vessels. The most well known of these efforts was the strike cruiser project from the 1970s, which came very close to cutting metal. This would have produced a nuclear powered ship with 2x8 inch or 5 inch guns, an AEGIS combat system and a metric pantload of anti aircraft missiles as well as some Tomahawks.
Official USN art. Artist unknown.
This ran afoul of congress, which realized that the money could instead be spent on hookers and blow, and so the navy was forced to cram the AEGIS system designed for these ships into the hulls of the Spruance class destroyers. This produced a topheavy but serviceable radar picket destroyer, that was, then designated by congress as cruisers (the Ticonderoga class). While the Ticonderoga's hulls are a tad too small for their radars, their lightweight aluminum superstructures do have a lot of space for computers and command/control areas. They are still valued as command ships and have 32 more missiles than the tougher but more cramped Arliegh Burke class. They ARE very stressed hulls and at or past the end of their service lives and the navy has been looking for something along the lines of the strike cruiser they replaced since they hit the waster.
The 1990s saw the conceptualization of the arsenal ship, basically a cheap floating missile magazine for smaller, more electronically capable ships, and various designs of large surface warships in the mold of the strike cruiser.
To wit...