Leadership Redux

A mere short example of Leadership in action:

My creative writing class has been evaluating student written short stories for the last week, and for the rest of the semester.  According to the teacher our class is the most critical, or more accurately, her previous classes have all engaged in something akin to mutual back patting and dick sucking while our class seriously discusses the strengths and weaknesses of each piece in an effort to make them better.

Why?

Me. 

I'm not patting my own back here. I didn't set out to be a 'leader' in the class, though I did set out with no fucks given about how people viewed what I did.  But I hate people blowing smoke up my ass and telling me how great I am without telling me what I could be doing better. So, when invited to critique a story about ball breaking bitches who take down serial killers like yesterday's news, despite my distaste for the theme, I do my best to make it the best damn story about a ball breaking bitch who takes down a serial killer like yesterday's news.

And I invite others to do the same simply by breaking that ice, being willing to take that first, potentially hostile, step.  I also do it by riffing off of others, spinning observations into advice and ideas, and helping them do the same.  

I set an example, looking for ways to make my points without making them attacks. 

That is Leadership. Its a small example, trivial on the face of it, but I am making my class better, and subsequently, hopefully, myself.  

And I don't find myself, after class, raging at the enforced politeness, the unearned praise for shitty writing and so forth... the pretty lies that we are all great and good.  I don't let those lies take root. 

I could probably skip every other day of class and the process would continue. I've set the ball in motion, and it would take a willful, deliberate act to stop it.  I can't claim I did it alone, as we have some insightful people in class, people with good writerly instincts... the manospherian might want to point out that the men are doing the yeoman's work of critiques, but I am reluctant to make that charge without caveat.  

It occurs to me that we find pockets of greatness in history.  A fine example is Frankenstein, written by Mary Shelley, who's husband wrote the first English vampire story of note, developing many of the tropes we now take for granted, in the presence of Lord Byron, who was himself a creative powerhouse.  The phenomenon can be found in almost every human endeavor, read the Wiki on Lord Keynes (even if you, as I, disagree with his economic theory), and you find he lived and worked among a cluster of 'who's who'. 

Why?

My belief is that one successful person passes on their wisdom and connections, they grow from the smarter but perhaps less creative voices, inspiration passes around and around, ever growing.  

I'm not saying my class is that sort of supercell of writing.  Not as it is now, and maybe not ever. But I'd like to think my own effort has improved it, and I've been, in turn, challenged by the writing we've heard so far. I've written my short story for class, but I will be rewriting it because it doesn't meet the standard I've been shown. 

If I believe I've been a leader so far in Class, why not see if I can continue to lead? Why not try to form a small writer's group with these people, continue our efforts outside the often ridiculous 'lessons' and exercises we are given by our teacher? 

Thus, I have two challenges for myself: To improve the writing I intend to present to the class, and to grow as a leader amongst my peers by helping create a more permanent (and useful) group.  

This does not eliminate my earlier challenge to more actively flirt with the girls I find attractive enough... it merely makes the backdrop more... interesting. 

Iron Kingdoms

So I've been playing in an Iron Kingdoms game, which is fun because usually I am the one running the game. Yes, Virginia, I am talking about the super nerdtastic Role Playing Games, D&D and all its many bastard offspring.

Iron Kingdoms is somewhat unique in that it is the first RPG to come to mind that calls back to the very origin of Role Playing Games in that it is explicitly an expansion of the Table Top Wargame, Warmachine. It isn't 'inspired' by the war-game, it doesn't merely share a setting with the war-game, it literally is Warmachine with some extra focus on individual characters over sweeping strategies, with what we in the know refer to as 'granularity'.

So, your Iron Kingdoms Character could, with very little effort, be imported onto the Tabletop Wargame and be used as written just fine. The most difficult aspect might be trying to determine his point value.

This leads me to some interesting observations: First of all the balance of the RPG is wacky as hell.  Player Characters tend to be portable murder machines, mowing through ranks of lesser men like a scythe through fall wheat.

Until a lucky roll from an NPC mercs them. That hasn't happened to us exactly but its been a close call a few times.  This results in an 'injury' table that makes it virtually impossible to actually kill anyone (literally: three 1's on 3 six sided dice....), no matter how hard you hit them.

"Oh, look! That dragon just totally bit of Joe's Head!!"

"That's okay, I rolled a six, he just has a broken arm. One good healing spell and he's back in the fight!"


Um...ok?

See, a wargame demands reasonably fragile characters or it will never end, while an RPG demands reasonably tough characters or people quit in frustration. Make no mistake, despite the pleas of the old-school grognards, lamenting the loss of characters who didn't deserve names until they'd survived a year of hard campaigning (Third level, however long that took to reach), D&D didn't really grow in popularity until "my Guy" because a reasonable possibility.  Sheafs of disposable characters might be a classic trope, but it isn't a fun one for the majority of people.

My second observation is that characters come in two unnatural categories: Those useful in a fight, and those useful out of a fight, and never the twain shall meet. Oh... given that players get 'two careers' they could try and split the difference (taking on combat and one non-combat career...), but that's just bad thinking. Recall how deadly the system can be and how common fights are likely to be if you have players who can fight.

See, your skills are sharply limited, with no real grasp of 'prior experience'. If you are playing a Man'o'war (Think Steam Powered Knight), then all you can really do is stomp around and beat things with your big hammer or axe. You can't talk to a pretty girl, as Seduction is an "occupational skill", and Man-o-war's occupation is 'Steam powered badass'.

So you were born in your armor, with a hammer in hand, and were never just a guy growing up desperate to get his (imaginary) dick wet?  Man, the Iron Kingdom's setting is HARSH.

The other option is to play an Investigator or Spy or something, in which case WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING ON A BATTLEFEILD WHERE PEOPLE CARRY FUCKING CANNONS AROUND!!!!!!

There does seem to be a lack of proper synergy in some classes too.  We've got a Stormblade (heavily armored Electro-Knight) Warcasters (Steam powered wizard), who doesn't have heavy steam armor because... not an option for starting war casters (despite, you know, Stormblade armor being, well, heavy. Also very distinctive to the class...).

Some of that is that our GM is still sort of new at all this, but he's got good instincts for the most part. A little antagonistic/competetive, but not abusively so.  

All and all, I rather enjoy playing the game, though I rather suspect I would hate GMing it. Not as much as I've found I hate GMing Rogue Trader, despite my long abiding love of the setting, but still. To steal another inside term, Iron Kingdoms is Rocket Tag at its finest, and everyone is a Glass Cannon. (well, maybe no my Man-o-War... He's tougher than the Giant Robot the party hauls along...).

Just a Shawty

It strikes me that every single element of western civilization that was true a hundred years ago has been torn down and decried as evil.  Yet, a century ago America, at least, was strong and powerful, and growing more so every day.

Since the rise of the Boomer Generation, and the modern incarnations of Feminism and all the other -isms, we have failed to win a war... which is not the same as losing... and squandered our wealth on projects designed to make a handful of wealthy, privileged (and amusingly enough, white) people feel better about themselves that have actually made things much worse for the people they were purporting to help.  We've coasted almost seventy years on the victories of the previous generation, the inheritors of the wealth and power of the great captains of industry.

And yet, despite the clear ruin of both our nation and our personal lives at the hands of these monsters, we still believe in all their lies about the evils of the past.

Despite the evils they perpetrate on even their own children, we believe their lies about what is best for families.

Oh what a piece of work is man.

An Observation

I realized, walking to and from class today, that if you were to pick a random woman on campus and describe her clothes to me, I could tell you with a reasonably high degree of fidelity what she looked like.  

This may seem obvious, but the actual results seem counterintuitive. 

For example: If you said she was wearing a dress that showed off her legs and had her hair done very nicely, I could tell you she was fat.  

If you said she was dressed fashionably, in jeans and boots, with layers up top, I could tell you she was skinny. 

There is more to it, pieces I'm still putting together.  I was noticing that all the pretty women that caught my eyes were largely 'butter-faces'. Then I realized it was the clothes. The skinny girls with nice faces dress more casually, more athletically (though not necessarily implying they are more athletic).  A cute but...ah... shapeless girl shows off more skin, almost perversely calling attention to their defects. 

That last bit might confuse you.  An example then: I saw a girl walking to class wearing four inch wedges (so not a fatty), but wearing hideous printed slacks that were shaped somewhat like pajama pants, a hot pink tube top that bared her midriff, but covered with a light jacket of the sort only women buy, you know the kind: It doesn't do a fucking thing to keep you warm. 

So, using science to predict what she looks like, you have a cute woman with decent tits, not fat but sliding there faster than she'd like to admit. 

Hm... yup.  Sounds right.  Flaunting her worst asset, the shapeless waistline, covering her legs and breasts with colorful shapeless cloth that is somehow fashionable... 

But it actually makes some sense.  The shapely but not pretty girls play up their femenity as much as possible, but don't feel the need to flaunt it, so they go for fashion, competing with the other girls and following the herd. The truly pretty girls go for more comfortable fashions, content that they don't need to try to get attention, while the fat girls who haven't given up maximize their attention by ignoring the fashionable look and flaunting their womanliness and interest... dressing for the boys instead of the girls. The average but cute girls... I dunno, I guess they're splitting the difference?  I mean: If they knew what they were doing they wouldn't be average.  With the big push for fat acceptance (though it is entirely a lie...) they don't mind flaunting, like they are daring you to judge their lack of concern for their looks (while secretly very concerned with their looks). They don't want to flaunt their actual assets for fear of being viewed as sluts?  That's my hypothesis, but I'm not a mind reader. 

Now, don't get me wrong: There are plenty of other looks on the girls on campus.  The plain janes that don't try abound. Mostly they dress in jeans and shoes instead of jeans and boots, with hipster layers up top. There are the dykes and soon-to-be dykes that have given up on me (or never wanted them), and plenty of fat, old, or old and fat women in shapeless swaths of cloth and so forth.  I just don't want to try and do an exhaustive list of what the predominant trends are for every woman I see. Besides: Heels, ugly print slacks and tube top girl sort of threw me for a loop until I realized what exactly was going on (see above).  Like the fat girls unconcerned with showing off their shapeless sausage legs if it means some desperate boys will flatter them, she flaunts her stomach but plays it more coy with her (large) breasts and (from what I could tell) attractive legs.  

No doubt some of this is the visible signs of position jockeying among the young and available women, status signaling for the herd. Other elements are compensating for flaws, which is why the plain or even ugly faced girls with tight bodies dress so nice compared to the more pretty tight-bodied girls. 

Ideally, that means if you want to pick a girl out from across the room, or blindly, go by her outfit. If its fashionable, somewhat tight but sporty/comfortable, chances are she's hot and pretty.  If its really fashionable and somewhat impractical (heels) she's hot but plain faced.  If its fashionable and hideous she's cute but lazy, and if its unabashedly feminine she's a fat girl. 

On Leadership

Yesterday I posted a longish bit where I exhorted the audience to become their own leaders and heroes instead of giving up on the entire institution.   I have a few issues with that post, not because I don't believe in it, but because I am all too familiar with people on the internet who seem to enjoy willfully misunderstanding anything not explained, as if to a child.

Rather than turn a long post into a longer post I thought I'd break off my sidebar discussions on various elements into separate posts spread out over a few days.

So lets talk about leading people.

First of all, what Leadership is not: It is not telling people what to do. Sure, a leader might order people around, but saying that is 'leadership' is rather like saying using high beams is driving.  Its something done under very specific circumstances that can easily be misused.

So when I tell you to be a leader, I'm not telling you to go around bossing people.

Likewise, Leadership is not Management.  This is something deeply and erroneously conflated in the modern corporate culture. Not that management doesn't have its role, its place, but its not leadership. People rarely look back fondly on that time their manager totally managed them at work, but scratch a vet and chances are he'll have a story or two about the time he got his ass chewed, and deserved it.

I suppose a remarkably banal way to express the difference is that a Manager makes sure you've checked the box on form ID-10-T, while a Leader makes you the sort of person who checks the box without being told.

I think that captures the essence in about the worst possible, yet still accurate, way.

Of course, in the military its easy. The military is explicitly a hierarchal system, as many male focused groups tend to be.  The leaders are appointed, usually with seniority, over the followers, and in many cases given specific training on how to lead. This training is reinforced by the use of creeds that summarize the leadership philosophy of their rank and role, such as the NCO creed and the Officer's Creed, which are memorized and recited during training.   Thats not to say every leader in the military is good at it, that wasn't my point. The point is that being a leader is easy if you have a clear code and followers appointed for you.

How does this translate to you, Joe on the Street, looking to make a difference in the world?

Well, start with the code.  What we are missing isn't really 'leaders'. We've got plenty of them, its just that they all suck, right?  Why do they suck? Because they are self appointed, smug assholes who use borrowed power to get their way. They have no moral center, no creed but power itself.  They are selfish, and if you read the other post you know that selfishness is antithetical to civilization.

And yes, I will probably have to do a post regarding selfishness and self-interest on another day.

In your personal life there are probably very few people you can simply boss around without looking like an utter tool, so begin a leader is a bit more challenging. That's ok, though: leaders should be able to rise to challenges.

I don't want to make this a simple listicle, and there are plenty of decent works out there that cover the finer points, so I'll try to keep this portion brief. Like I said at the top, this is a sidebar to explicate my terms.

To be a leader you have to be worth following, to be someone you, and others, can respect.  Emulating great men of history is a decent starting point, being solicitous of others, having a moral code and actually sticking to it... these are all good starts.

Know your people. Not your 'followers', but the people you interact with, up and down your hierarchal chain and outside of it.  Be an active participant in your life, and be reliable and helpful.

While I'm far from satisfied with this post I'm going to call it with a piece of advice that runs contra to the advice we hear so often.  If you are not naturally a leader, then don't be yourself. Be the man you want to be, not the one you are comfortable being.

It really is that simple.

Warframe, Modding and Weapons

In an effort to increase my posting, I'm going to keep hitting on Warframe a bit longer, though we are approaching the limits of experience unless you'd like an in-depth review of each weapon in the game (there are some hundred or so total, across the three main categories... at least. I myself have experience with well over a dozen at this point).

Rather than give an overview of the Excalibur (which I will), I thought I'd hit up how modding and damage works.  This is a rather complex topic, shockingly so, which is only appropriate for an MMO about shooting techno-ninjas. 

Weapons have base stats, and from what I can tell there is some effort to balance them out so that any given weapon is not, as a base, stronger or weaker than any other, though this is objectively not the case.    All weapons do damage, have rates of fire, magazine size, and crit and status chances, and we'll talk about those in turn.  For the most part, weapon damage seems to be strongly balanced against rate of fire, so that any given weapon produces roughly comparable DPS. Fast firing weapons hit weaker than slow firing weapons, etc, and two weapons of roughly equal rates of fire should hit roughly the same in terms of raw numbers, even the objectively weak starting weapons show this sort of trend line. *

However, all is not equal. Weapons, like Frames, have levels and mod slots, the higher the level the more mods you can put into the eight or so slots (all weapons have the same number), while polarities encourage or discourage certain choices. In general, a polarity slot is better than an polar-neutral slot, because it allows more powerful mods to be installed, but it can severely limit your choices if you don't have 'good' mods of that polarity.   Expanding this are 'Potatoes', officially known as Catalysts, and Forma. Potatoes can be added whenever, and buying weapons with Platinum starts them with the Potato, and should be your first choice to upgrade a piece of equipment, as they straight up double your number of mod points.  Forma is more tricky, as it resets the level (and can only be used on a maximized piece of gear) and alters the polarity of a slot to one of your choice, such as making a neutral slot polar.  Since good, leveled Mods can run well over ten Mod points (up to around 15 or so), and you have some eight slots, and a fully leveled, potatoes weapon only as 60 points, for high end play Polarity is a must, but relevelling the weapons must surely be tedious.  

Proper Modding seems to be the key to the success with a  weapon. My relative frustration with my Strun (a shotgun) is more likely due to a general lack of good Shotgun mods than a failure of the weapon itself, based on testimonials I've found online praising it (a 'starter' shotgun) as one of the best shotguns in the game.  And weapon Mods are very heavily broken down by type. All my good Rifle Mods are useless on the Shotgun, as I suspect they will by on my first Bow, despite all three weapons falling under the general category of "Primary Weapon" in the mod library. 

In order to explain how to Mod a weapon, in order to understand, it is necessary to talk Damage.

Damage can be broken into three main categories, each with subdivisions.  

There is base damage, or physical damage, which all weapons have (barring some exotic exceptions I haven't experienced yet). This consists of Impact, Puncture and Slash.  The Braton, for example, is balanced between all three types, doing a little of each (around four base, as I recall).  Among the diehards, Puncture is favored over the others, I think mostly for the 'bleed' effect it occasionally engenders, but possibly also due to enemy resistance.   That's right, even the vanilla physical damage causes status damage. 

Then you have your core elemental damage, Fire, Cold, Electricity and Poison. There are mods that provide for each of these, and a handful of weapons come with one built in.

Then you have Hybrid Elemental damage, caused by mixing two of the core elements. These include Blast (Fire+Cold), Corrosive (Poison+Electricity) and so forth.  Note that each is made up of only two elements, and with the right mods you could, in theory, get up to four hybrid elements on each weapon. The key to mixing is that the mods are read Left to Right, top to bottom, just like a book. 

Now, each elemental Mod has a percentage of damage done in elemental. This is straight bonus damage, and is calculated by the weapons' base damage (Adding the three physicals, I believe). 

Damage Mods more or less come in three main flavors: Weapon Damage (Serration for Rifles, Hornet Strike for Pistols and Pressure Point for Melee), that straight up adds to all damages (Even elemental), and generally takes a lot of work to level up, but provides massive damage increases (my 3/4 maxed Serration adds 125% extra damage, for example, so should top out around 200%, Effectively tripling my rifle damage!).   Physical damage mods (Increasing one of the IPS) and Core Elemental, with rare Mods mixing two mod traits (and being stackable with different mods with the same traits). Note that Mods are exclusive by name, not by ability, so Infected Clip (Poison damage) stacks with Toxic Barrage (Er... that's the shotgun mod rather than rifle, but the principle is the same), which increases Poison and Status.  This is where the breakdown of Damage really comes into play, as a weapon with all one damage type can get a much stronger boost from fewer Mods over a more generalized weapon like the Braton. On the other hand, Enemy resistances vary wildly (willfully denying any one type of damage primacy!), making a generalized weapon very strong when the enemy is unpredictable.  Note two that many enemies have two types of damage resistances, such as shields and flesh or armor and flesh, or the same with Machinery instead of flesh... so even against a single target there isn't truly an optimal choice.

However, if you just look at damage as numbers you are missing half the point. Status chances are like a second category of critical hits, and the nature of the status you inflict is actually somewhat important when planning your modding. 

Some, like Slash and Fire add a small but noticeable DOT to the target. Others, like Radiation and puncture debuff them slightly, making them less effective. Still others  (impact and Blast) provide a small stun effect. 

Now, one thing to keep in mind is that this game plays fast. Even boss fights rarely last a few minutes and most enemies die within fractions of a second once they've been targeted.  A DoT remains useful for finishing off an enemy that survived your attack as you moved to the next guy, but a rebuff seems pretty worthless, at least on a single target. Stuns still have use as they can 'lock up' a heavy enemy unit long enough to finish the job. 

So lets talk about the Elements, which is where things get confusing for noobs like you and me (if you ain't a noob, why are you reading me? Jesus, man, I'm probably not even playing the same game as you with my slow as shit computer and utter lack of Primes!).

The way I see it, at this noobish level of play, there isn't much call to worry overly much about speccing your gear for specific mission. First, you probably won't have enough gear to really do that until several months of play, and second, the marginal gains don't really matter until you're comfortable running a thirty wave endless defense, which you won't be.  That said:

Fire works great on flesh, and less great on everything else, but it DoTs, and that's cool. Also, I've noticed that fire mods seem somewhat more common than others. I still don't have electricity for my rifles or shotguns, but I've got fire for almost everything. 

Cold slows the enemies and seems to work well against shields, but is often denigrated by some players for being generally weak.  Hey, if you're like me and playing Lag-frame, then a slower enemy is an enemy you can actually aim at!  

Electricity is also an Anti-shield element, but one that is also strong against robotic enemies, and seems to have a stun effect, which is nice, making it slightly cooler than Cold. On the other hand, I suspect Electricity Mods don't drop until the outer planets, based on my own limited collection of them. 

Poison is another good anti-flesh power, and I believe it DoTs. I can't testify to its general rarity, as I got a nice collection of rares from the Cicero Event (one for every weapon type (bows? How do you mod Bows. I will research this, as I've built one, and get back to you...), that all had Poison as their theme, so I've been using it almost my entire game now.  

If you want full value for anything other than the raw damage numbers, you need Status, of course. Just a reminder.

The hybrid Elements are

Blast (Fire+Cold), which is a strong stun effect, but is somewhat weak due to resistances.

Gas (Fire+Poison), I'd avoid this one. Not only is it much weaker via resistances than Poison alone, but it's Status is a very small AoE effect that I can't say I've ever seen work. I can see it  being useful against infested at a choke point. Naturally, due to my mods, I actually tend to have this up a lot anyway. 

Radiation (Fire+Electricity), this seems to work well on everything, but its also a debuff power, making enemies slightly less accurate. Great for AoE spam and maybe boss fights, pointless against common mobs. 

Magnetic (Electricity+Cold): unpopular due to its weakness against heavy units and bosses, but does a number on shields

Corrosive: (Electricity+poison): Very popular for two reasons: First it is very strong (having no one resistant to it, but many mobs very weak to it), and because it lowers armor value as its status (and everything hard to kill has armor...), thus is the 'go to' element to shoot for. 

Viral (Cold+poison): This essentially does extra damage by reducing max health, but is second place to Corrosion as machinery is slightly resistant to it. 

Now, so far we're just talking more or less right off the Wiki here, but since you're reading me that means you probably struggle with some of the insider ball (is red good or bad in the chart? Bad. How does the chart work in the game?...). 

Now, lets get back to modding. Me? I'm a simple guy, I'm all for cramming as many damage mods into a gun as I can and calling it a day. This is actually a bad idea unless you've got one hell of a mod set.  As noted, upping Status is a good thing, as it gives you those neat extra effects, though recall you are getting percentage buffs, not straight numbers. Keep that in mind, every mod is a percentage mod, so the game rewards specialization. If a weapon has a low crit chance, the most powerful crit buffs will only make it slightly less crappy. If it has a high crit chance, even a low ranked crit buff mod makes you all the more crit-spammable.  I've heard that the new pistol, the Tysis, can hit 80% status chance easily, meaning that four out of every five shots will inflict Status damage.  Imagine that with two or more Hybrid Elements!   Also, most guns have a glaring weakness or two, which can be offset with Mods. The Strun, for example, has a very low ammo capacity and a very long reload time, but each shot (if well placed.... ugh..) is beastly. While trying to offset the ammo capacity is a fools game (gaining at best two more shots at the cost of both a mod slot and lots of mod points), reducing that long load time is dead simple (again: Percentages. Slow guns gain more from reload speed than fast guns.). Magazine size is a tricky issue. Generally, guns with a great capacity don't really call for modding, but they gain the most from it, while guns with shit capacity need each shot they can get, but get so very few.  Rate of fire is almost always a good call. My brand spanking new, unranked and umodded gorgon starts with a slow but steady rate of fire, equal to anything I've got but the Grakata, but spools up to an absolute beast mode (go Seahawks! Fuck yeah!) in short order. Fire speed actually reduces the spool time... and more illustratively, even a fast firing weapon gets deadlier by shooting even faster still!. 

I've noted a few weapons absolutely lack certain traits. The Sentinel weapons, for example, cannot crit, and gain nothing by adding crit chances. I'm not sure they can do status either. As far as I can tell, they never truly run out of ammo (they do have to reload, however) so increasing total amount of ammo carried is pointless.   Curiously, I noticed that adding a new element to a weapon that already does elemental damage (such as a Heat Sword) doesn't seem to hybrid that damage. However, with the Heat Sword (and the Amphis staff), the elemental damage only comes from a specific type of attack (Ground slam), and is not listed in the base damage.  I believe if the element is listed, it will hybrid with the first element added to the weapon as if it were a mod just fine. 

My point, since I've drifted, is that pure damage misses an important part of the equation.  You can't hurt someone if you're busy reloading, so if reload times are killing you, mod your weapon to reduce reload speed, or add more magazine capacity.  If a weapon (like the Vasto and Akvasto) seems to be a crit-monger, up its crit chances for maximum killy goodness. This may seem common sense, I know, but the game doesn't tell you the Vasto is a crit weapon. It doesn't tell you that putting Impact mods on a Boltor (Puncture only) is a waste of time, and you can't see the impact of a mod from the modding screen, only from the equipment screen, so you might not be looking at it. 

Lastly, there seem to be some specialty mods that do unique things. One is making arrows explosive, which seems to be less cool than it sounds due to the high end bows losing their special cool powers when explosified, and another is penetration.  It sounds a little like "armor penetration" but that's not it.   No, penetration (actually called "Punch Through") measures how many meters of obstructions you can shoot through to hit a target, to include things like railings, boxes and dead bodies that are still falling over (or for that matter: Your asshole teammates who run right in front of you, blocking your shots). I pretty much try to keep this one on at all times for two reasons: One, I can't aim for shit thanks to lag, so hitting through cover is a godsend, and two: Certain bosses seem to have special shields that, unlike the normal shields, can be punched through. I have a crap memory, so I can never tell if that boss I'm about to go kill is the right guy, so its just easier to keep the mod on (and again: Useful). Sadly, I only have the one Metal Auger, and since my DethCube Sentinel is a better shot than I am (but also stupid), I keep Metal Auger on the dethcube to maximize its killy.  Since I'm sure its putting out twice the numbers I am in any given mission this is just good sense. However, when I do tower or derelict runs the calculation returns to my favor, as my Boltor actually kills stuff, while the poor, weak Dethcube machine gun merely annoys them. 

And that's it for basic weapon modding for dummies.  My next Warframe Post will be the Excalibur, then I might return for Modding for Frames. If you catch me calling a Mod a Card, let it be, that's what the damn things look like when you're actually using them. 

*The Mk-1 Braton is nearly identical to the Braton, only it does roughly 15% less damage in every category. The Skana is identical except weaker than the Cronus. I haven't precisely determined the exact upgrade for the Lato. I moved to the Sicarus, which did similar numbers shot-for-shot, but fired three round bursts instead of slow semi-auto, a significant, if occasionally frustrating, upgrade. I suspect the similar looking Lex might be the 'stronger Lato', but have not tested this theory yet. 

Hierarchy, Leadership and Civilization

Ultimately, Civilization is the opposite of Anarchy, which is a modern and popular euphemism for savagery. Civilization requires a certain fundamental order, it requires rules, it demands  selflessness. 

What does that mean, exactly? 

When we are very young we are all a savages, as bloodthirsty and evil as anyone could imagine.  We think of the very young as innocent because they are helpless and harmless, but this is a comforting delusion.  Your infant doesn't care that you have to go to work in three hours, he is hungry NOW dammit!    

It doesn't really get better as they get older. Just observe how fundamentally sociopathic small children can seem when you remove their cherubic faces from the equation. Sure, that video is pretty funny, but only because you are told at the beginning and end what is going on. Stripped of that context.... well, I don't want to belabor the point. 

Humans don't naturally become civilized. Its a process, formally known as enculturation, but most of us know it simply as 'raising kids'. You teach them to share, to consider other people's feelings, to act appropriately. You civilize them, giving them simple, clear rules to follow.  And when you don't do it right you get Ted Bundy, you get a monster.  

When you have rules you have hierarchy. You have leaders and followers, you make demands based on roles.  Selfish men do not rush into burning buildings to save other men's children, but every civilization has firefighters.  Selfish men do not walk the mean streets at night to pacify them, yet we have police.  

And when Order breaks down, when Selfishness becomes the rule rather than the exception, men in those positions seek safety and comfort, the 'Anything it takes to get home to my family' siege mentality prevalent in our police today. It draws men to the 'blue gang' who want the power and prestige, the social cache and legal immunities, perverting the system from within, which we are starting to see increasingly every day.  

Aurini has an excellent examination of the current state of affairs rewarding Leadership today; regarding, essentially, the fallen state of Civilization.  If it has a major flaw, it is that it offers no real solutions.  We need to rust and respect our leaders, yet our leaders are not worthy of our trust... a true statement yet useless. 

Maybe its because I watched Space Battleship Yamato the other day, but I find that, in what appears to be a hopeless situation, that I find myself increasingly appreciating the value of a single lamp in the dark.  

The solution is obvious, even simple. 

Become the Leader, the man worth trusting and respecting.  If there are no Heroes worth emulating in pop culture, become the Hero worth emulating in your own life. Step up to the demand and ignore what the debased pop-culture says about you. Find your subordinates, the people who will follow your lead, and if you are lucky you may inspire the leaders you need. 

Not that this is an easy solution.  The good things rarely are.  

I found a metaphor for the state of our world that I rather liked the other day, that all civilizations pass through a single swing of a pendulum, at one end their foundation, the other their destruction. The Golden Age of such a civilization is the center, the nadir, beyond which it only gets worse until the end.  

I know we passed that point long ago.  I can think of few struggles more meaningful that putting myself in the path of that inexorable swing, of grabbing hold, digging my heels into the dirt and pushing back as hard as I can, for as long as I can.  When Thor wrestled the old woman in the keep of Utgard-Loki and lost, it doesn't merely show the futility of wrestling Old Age itself, but the value in trying.  The Giants are impressed, even scared of how well the Gods do in their impossible tasks. The struggle itself has meaning, has value. This is especially true when the cause is just. 

Civilization is better than savagery. Selflessness is better than self indulgence. Order is better than Anarchy. 

Good is better than Evil. 

My hope for the future has been that eventually the barbarians that will tear down our Rome will eventually discover civilization and rebuild, better than before, but that is just a hope. Plenty of barbarians never bootstrap themselves up, never learn. They destroy and feed, and look for the next host, forever parasites.  Civilization is Hard, and for the individual it can often seem unrewarding, at least in the short term. No one likes to be told No, after all. 

No. In order for that hope to become true, someone will have to remain who wants civilization more, who has the strength and will to bring it. Someone has to be the Light in the Dark.  Why not me? 

Why not you? 

Warframe, the Rhino

The Rhino is an appallingly good 'Frame, which is sort of funny. In a lot of MMO's, at least traditional ones, the 'Tank' is usually fairly pathetic, a professional sponge and little more, and requiring a healer to actually be viable.

Warframe, while an online, multiplayer game is not a traditional MMO.

The Rhino is both incredibly tough and ALSO incredibly powerful.

Lets go over the facts: The Rhino has the second highest armor value in the game, and unlike the Valkyr (number one), the Rhino also has a great base Shield value.  I'm still pretty noobish so I don't have all the best stackable mods, and some core mods aren't maxed out yet, and I still can top 1000 shields and health on my Rhino.

Curiously, I'd say that the Rhino's 'Polarity' slots seem designed for damage output, not input. At least... with the Mods I have available to me for Auras, the Rhino sacrifices to spam extra energy, but gains if he stacks on a damage boosting Aura, like Rifle Amp.  I've heard that the Rhino also naturally hits harder with melee weapons, but I've never seen any games stats that suggest one frame is better at laying smack downs than any other.

Also: The Rhino just looks cool.  Its not terribly flashy like the Oberon, but its a solid slab of muscle and armor. It is seriously the beefiest looking Frame I've seen by no small margin, easy to spot a player using one.

However, we can't truly evaluate a Frame's performance without talking about their suite of powers, so lets talk.

The first power is Rhino Charge, which is very like the Excalibur's Slash Dash. Cheap to the point of being spammable, you run forward and hit everything. Its best used as a movement power rather than a straight attack, however... that is crossing narrow, but unjumpable chasms, passing through laser gates and so forth.  Its not quite as beefy, damage wise, as Slash Dash. However, it does have some crowd control, as it knocks its targets down.  If you can aim well, supposedly the tactic is to run ALONG an enemy, rather than right at him, so you hit him multiple times.  Whatever.  I wouldn't skip this power, but I wouldn't spend a lot of energy leveling it either. Its a utility power.

The second is Iron Skin.  I'm tempted to call this power THE reason to take a Rhino, and certainly it is the most unique, signature, power the Rhino has.  Iron Skin is basically a very beefy pool of bonus Health that has to be chipped away before you start taking damage.  I've done entire missions, hard ones with lots of enemies, without having to refresh Iron Skin.  You start with fifty energy at the start of a mission, so as soon as you land, hit 2 and activate Iron Skin. Its that damn important.

No, seriously. See: In addition to more than doubling your health, Iron Skin also makes you more or less immune to crowd control. Run through a laser gate, no problem. Ignore poison, no problem. Forget being knocked down or scorpion tethered, Iron Skin ignores it all.  I did a nightmare mode run where no one had shields, but Iron Skin was still up. Honestly? If forced to chose between Redirection (The mod that boosts your shields) and Focus (The mod that boosts your powers... which I sadly do not have), I'd take Focus. Mostly my shields go unused.  

The third Power is Roar. I can't report well on Roar, because I'm a dirty noob who likes to kill shit instead of buffing, but people swear by this. Roar increases all friendly (including self) Frames to do moar damage.  I think it starts at +50% and goes to double, but I won't swear to it.  Look: This is a great power, no lie. I just don't use it. Besides, all dem power playa's running around don't seem to need it, though I can see its value in an Endless Defense once mobs start getting beefy.  If you're looking to grind, telling a potential group that you have a Rhino with a leveled Roar might get you laid, dunno.  The advantages for them is that they won't be constantly having to res you,  and you can make them tougher if you're not a spaz.

Finally we have Rhino Stomp, a power so cool that it can actually contend with Iron Skin for 'signature Move'. Its your Ultimate, and like a lot of Ultimates, its a bad-ass AoE damage dealing machine.  That factor alone keeps Iron Skin in first place for the win, as IS is unique while Stomp is merely... another cool 'kill every motherfucker in the room' sort of thing.  Stomp hits like a truck, once you've leveled  it (and you HAVE leveled it, right?), dishing out 1200 points of damage before buff mods (Like Focus...grrr...) to everything around you.  Unlike Radial Javalin (the Excalibur's Ultimate), Rhino Stomp will hit EVERYTHING around you, and to a pretty good distance. Also, unlike a few AoE killers, Stomp also knocks them off their feet and slows time. That's right, you stomp so damn hard, that Time Itself is stunned!   This means you can clean up a few really hard targets while they slowly drift to the ground in the aura of your awesome.

Look, just about every Ultimate is a killer, with the exception of the Nyx's Absorb (which is a killer on a long ass timer, meaning someone, maybe your own Sentinel, will probably have killed most of the potential targets before it goes off) and probably a few others I haven't seen yet.  Rhino Stomp is BETTER than Radial Javalin by any measure, for the same energy cost, and comparable with the Oberon's Ultimate (umm... Retribution? Gah... research! Where's my Intern?). Actually, I'm not entirely sure the Oberon's Ultimate hits as many targets (making it possibly more like Radial Javalin with cooler FX).

Now for the downside. The Rhino is NOT a caster Frame. You've got piddling energy (I think it caps at 150 without mod boosting, vs the Nyx's 300), and as noted earlier your Aura polarity doesn't support the Energy Siphon Aura. You can still equip it (and if you've got a potato on your Rhino you can afford the loss of mod slots this entails. Or Forma... changing the polarity). However, there are lots of options for energy gain in game, and if you run with a caster frame in your party you'll still get the aura benefit, making this a poor choice, I think.  Just realize that in Solo Play, you'll probably need your energy for Iron Skin, if you don't want to spam Team Energy doohickies... the lack of which cost me a solo Derelict run.

Thats... a pretty lame weakness, really.  Remember: Warframe is a shooter with cool bits tacked on.  Bring a good gun, a big axe and bring the pain the old fashioned way and you'll hardly notice how energy starved you are.

That said: It does mean that the Rhino has to pick his power use more carefully.  Casting Roar might mean skipping a vital stomp, using Rhino Charge might mean not having the energy to recast Iron Skin.  On the other hand, with overlapping energy siphon auras from friends, you can suddenly go a little nuts. I've done defense missions where my relative invulnerability let me stake out entry points and Stomp whole oncoming waves to death, and subsequently netted me the highest kill total of the run... something my lack of accuracy normally prohibits.

Before I close out I want to point out that the Armor of the Rhino makes every bit of the Rhino that much tougher. Even early on, before I could put many Mods on my Frame, and when I hadn't yet leveled my Iron Skin I noticed how much tougher the Rhino was than my Excalibur.  The Rhino is simply tough, it can't be stressed enough. This is the frame for you if you like running into the teeth of the enemy and laughing at his pathetic attempts to hurt you.

Wait? Did I say running?

Er....

Make that leisurely strolling.  All that beef is hard to move. In public games, I regularly missed out on the credit rewards for missions simply because I couldn't keep up with the other players and the mission ended while I was still racing to the extraction point.  Supposedly this also hurts in the free running, but I never found the Rhino to be that much less agile.  Maybe a little shorter on the jumping than the Nyx, but thats it.

So that's it. The Rhino in a nutshell.  Hands down this is my favorite Warframe so far, just like the Boltor is my favorite gun so far (though the Wraith Twin Vipers are a fun sidearm!). Given my lag, however, I'm not going to review guns in depth, as I can't give them the fairness they deserve.  I'd just automatically favor things with a good sized magazine and high rate of fire as that's about the only way I hit anything.

Warframe, the Nyx

So I've been playing Warframe quite a bit lately. I'm laggy as hell due to my cheap POS computer and my cheap POS internet connection, but that doesn't mean I can't tell you a bit about the game.

Warframe is a MMO shooter, in a sort of vaguely distopic future. Warframes are the powered armor worn by one faction, the Tenno, which is what you are. There are about twenty odd 'Frames, and you can pick one of three at the start.  Each warframe has its own attributes, abilities and play styles... with me so far? Good.

That brings me to the Nyx.  Its not one of the starting three, so officially it is an upgrade, though that's a sort of odd way of looking at it.  Supposedly the Nyx is hard to get, as you farm it from Infestation bosses, but given the number of advance players, even in random groups you can get the Nyx in a few hours as soon as an Infestation on a world you've unlocked (Mars, for example, seems to come up often, and with good computer you could, in theory solo your way to Mars, maybe only grouping for boss runs).  To get it you'd need a minimum of three Phorid kills (Phorid being the boss...), more if the RNG hates you. You'll also need a fair amount of Credits (easy enough to farm from the infestation missions), and some other crafting parts. If you were like me, you won't have everything you need when you first get the parts, but the really rare stuff is buyable with platinum for roughtly a dollar's worth of real money, so pretty cheap. Optionally, you keep playing with other people (do you have three friends? THen you can pretty much do everything in Warframe without ever playing with a stranger. Still, you might want to join a clan for the research and to trade mods...)

Now, actually making the Nyx will take about three and a half days. 12 hours for each component (this can be done simultaniously), and three hours to assemble them into the Nyx itself.

Note that the Nyx is not the ultimate Warframe of Doom or anything, its just the first one I ever talk about, which is why I'm talking so much about what happens in game to get there. The 'Ultimate' Warframes would be Prime war frames, though the Rhino (another easy, non-starter) is one of the most popular.

Once you have your Nyx you'll need to level it for a bit, like you do your starter frame, before you can unlock it. I'll assume you've learned about mods, leveling mods and so forth by this point.

The Nyx is an unusual frame. She's light (Frames have genders, which is an odd choice instead of letting players pick a gender and having two similar designs for each), with very little armor, but played properly she's anything but fragile. I've noticed that she also has fairly low health, but decent shields. She's a caster, which means you'll want to focus on your powers rather than run and gun play, and she's fast and nimble, for the Parkour in game.

However: For a caster, the Nyx only really has a couple of powers you really want to focus on. Of the four powers every frame has, two of the Nyx's are somewhat... lackluster.  Psychic Bolts seems like a good killer power, but while it can do some damage, and doesn't require aiming, the bolts tend to miss more than they hit. Absorb is... promblematic.  Its your 'Ultimate' power, but it's damage output is weak, and the timing sucks. I'd recommend not leveling either power until you've played with them and determined if you want to use the mod-space for something so... awkward.

Absorb DOES have one good feature, in that it renders you immune to damage for as long as its is active, which can be 15 seconds or so with some ease. That doesn't sound like a lot of time, but its more than enough time to get your shields back up and for friends to catch up to you if you're getting swarmed, and when it 'bursts' it does kill weaker enemies.  Just don't expect to get much use out of it in random games except defense missions, as the rest of the party will have long since left you behind.

Your bread and butter is Chaos.  Chaos stuns every enemy around you, then turns them on each other.  Unlike most powers in the game, it doesn't lose any power at the higher levels, and provided you aren't farming XP or worried overly much about killing every mob, its great.  Generally you spam it against large groups, and if no one interferes, half of them will be killed off by their fellows, and the survivors will be weakened.

Mind control is a cheap version of Chaos, single target. Its got one advantage over Chaos, and that's that the controlled mob will not attack you if you stray too close.  If you're energy starved (and you should be running Energy Siphon Aura for the extra mod space and the lovely, lovely energy it gives you), Mind Control can help you eliminate a hard target by making every enemy on the map see it as an enemy (and likewise, it will be attacking them back. I've used it on Corrupted Heavy Gunners in Tower 2 runs and just waited for energy to come back as mobs died taking down the gunner...).  If you're laggy, like me, then Mind Control is hard to aim and get off, though using the third mouse button can simplify things.

Curiously, with the exception of a rather nasty No-sheilds Nightmare run, the Nyx has proven somewhat more durable than my Rhino, despite being absolutely starved for Mod space in comparison. The rhino 'tanks' damage by, well, taking damage, but the Nyx tanks damage by making enemies turn on each other.

However: Never, ever, expect to see high kill and damage numbers at the end of the mission. You get no credit for the damage done by Chaos, and you lack a good spammable 'kill everything' power that almost every other warframe gets.   Trying to use Absorb for this role will disappoint you, and it seems to invite other players to abuse your aggro by coming over and AoEing the mobs you want to pop while you're waiting for Absorb to explode.  This can be especially frustrating if you're trying to collect thirty kills for a mini-mission for the bonus XP, but good weapons can offset it.

I don't see too many Nyx's running around, so it seems to me a lot of players undervalue it because of the low damage output and its relative numeric fragility.  On the other hand, I did a Mobile Defense with a second Nyx player, and with creative positioning and alternating our powers we more or less kept everyone else alive by just owning the Mobs, not that they were at huge risk.  

I suspect the Nyx shines in the Freerunning 'rank test', due to her speed and mobility, but I cannot attest to that due, in no small part, to my lag. I can't even quite run up stairs without occasionally spazzing out and falling off the map, much less handle multiple wall-runs at different angles in a row.  I may take that test on a friend's computer when it is due, just in case.  I have noticed that compared to the chunky Rhino, she does feel more nimble, almost too nimble for my machine.  While I am not constantly way behind the other players, sometimes I get left behind because I am so responsive that I wind up being unable to traverse an obstacle due to the fact that I overshoot and bounce off.

On that note, I've noticed that a number of 'wall run' paths in Warframe seem to deliberately run you into tight corners when you land, while a few others seem to force you to roll to a landing on a tiny ledge and overshoot.  For a game that want you to Freerun as much as you can, this seems an odd way to reward you.


Now: Simple advice for 'grinding' experience, or affinity as they call it.  Most people will tell you to run Defense or Survival runs, which are both good with a good, tight knit group.  The problem with Survival runs, aside from people wanting to leave as soon as possible (Ditto Defense), is that the map is big enough  and spread out enough that the high end players tend to roam off and kill solo, too far for you to gain experience from their kills.  Some defense missions seem to have this issue to. THis costs you both experience and loot drops.

Mobile Defense, however, tends to force the party to stay grouped in a single area and seems to send a similar number of mobs as several waves of Defense. I've done mobile defense runs and gotten 30+ mod drops and several midrange levels on multiple items of equipment, and the rest of the party can't really get selfish and wander off with the kills, going solo.  Well, a little on some maps, but not as bad as defense.  You're pretty much garaunteed a good six to ten minutes of hard farming on a Mobile Defense, compared to the less concentrated five minutes on Survival, or the five smallish waves in 'Endless' Defense.  For experience farming, try to find a group outside of any of the special events (Infestation, Invasions or Alerts), as anyone doing one of those is bound to do the bare minimum for credit for the mission and move on, while someone doing a Defense or Survival outside of an Event is likely to go for as long as they can, or at least 15 minutes on Survival (for the tower key), and twenty to thirty waves on Defense, which is concentrated awesome.  I've never seen a party handle more than forty waves, due to the sheer mass of health the Mobs have at that point, but from the patch notes I guess some groups regularly run to the Hundred Waves or more. Wether they'd be willing to do that with one underpowered Frame (since you are farming XP you are explicitly NOT maxed out, duh) is another question.

Reporting on mah failures

So I missed my chance to pick up one of the girls on Friday, because I overslept and missed almost the entire class.

I also only made it to the gym once so far and I haven't run. That part is probably good, given the state of my knees and the age of my running shoes, but a failure is a failure.

Obviously I haven't been doing my bit to socialize much either, so there's that, but that goes back to the first failure.

On the other hand, I'm still doing good on the metal work, go figure!  I still need to acquire some tin, and buy some copper, but I've got my fallback plan, so...

Oh and the dog is still alive and unbeaten.  He's doing well on potty training, inasmuch as he is doing better than before, but not as well as I'd expect for his age. I've heard pugs are smart but stubborn... that is he knows exactly what he's doing wrong, he just doesn't care... and I believe it.

So, I'm running two for five on resolutions so far. I'd feel pretty good about those numbers, but the last one's pretty much a gimme for the slow kids, making it a somewhat less inspiring one for four.

Of course I have my secret list of things that absolutely need doing in the next week or so, and I'm doing even worse on those... so.... yay?

Ciao.

The Hobby Post Follow up

Still without pictures, because I am, ultimately, a lazy fuck.

So, as anyone who has worked with wood could probably tell you, chosing Poplar for my first die was a mistake, one I will have to live with. Once.

However, I was thinking I wouldn't be casting before the first, due to money issues... namely the cost of trying to secure enough copper and tin (and maybe a cheap scale) to make my bronze, never mind the plaster for the molds.

However, the nice people who sold me the furnace (and I really must include a link in one of these posts... possibly the one with pictures) sent me an assload of 'green sand', which is a nice dun color, for making a sand mold. THey also sent some tools and a little box for making some sort of creepy indian head or a green plastic army man into a mold.

Well, the box is all nice and stuff, but its muy muy small, and I happen to have a lot of aluminum lying around in the form of cans. Who said I had to do my first cast in Bronze?  The point is to get practice, and it just so happens that bronze and aluminum casting are kissing cousins.

No, you silly things, I haven't gone and done it yet.  This is all about progress, process and lessons being learned, not 'look at me shiny'.

I got a very narrow plank of basswood the other day, roughly the same length as the sword should be, and the thickness I wanted for the blade. No, I didn't make a new sword die. I made a much smaller 'seven rivet' dagger die. Took me about an hour or so, again with just the chisels and hammer and the crappy, but muy muy sharp hand saw that you totally haven't seen the picture of yet.  Unfortunately, its supposed to be somewhat pear shaped, but the fat bottom of the pear fell off when the wood split along the grain from chiseling. I may need better knives so I don't try that again.  Anyway, I did wind up with a reasonably well balanced 'five finger' dagger shape in the process, so I said fuck it and sanded it down  and carved three future rivet holes for the handle.

Then I spent about two hours building a new mold box out of scrap wood from the garage. It was not my intent to stick to just hand tool for for this job, but the circular saw I own is an antique and utterly incapable of cutting more than four inches into a board without binding up.  Oddly, the cheap hand saw cut through 3/4" pine at a rate of about an inch and a half a second, when it didn't bow from the force of my muy muy manly works.  On the other hand, I had some seriously irregular rectangular pieces of wood.

Right away I made a mistake: the bottom portion of my mold box was floored, as if I was casting in plaster maybe... I dunno. I guess the process is to mold on top and flip over.  

The second mistake was actually a limitation imposed by my hasty and cheap tool set. The irregular box seams meant that 'fully packed' sand actually wasn't fully packed, it was just drive through the gaps between the top and bottom halves of the box.  Also: The halves were rather thicker than I think they needed to be, though without pouring in a thinner mold I have no way of verifying that.

Anyway: Four hours later I had a mold I couldn't pour into, and when separated to remove the die, crumbled in a way that was perfectly poised between being savable... and being not. So I tried to save it, failed and realized... I'ma have to make a new box. Luckily, I know a guy who knows a guy who has a seriously enviable workshop.  That failing, I'll drive an hour or so... nah, you don't need to know that part.

Anyway: With squared edges, proper lengths and a smarter design, I should have a proper 'sand mold' made by the end of the weekend. I may even have my second project (the third is the dagger...oddly enough) ready to go, and with some luck I may still wind up with my bronze instead of aluminum.

I would hang my head in shame for the sorry state of my first box, but honestly, I'm working with scraps, cheap hand tools bought for another purpose, and using my kitchen cutting board for a work bench.  For my next attempt I may take a fallen tree and a piece of knapped flint to carve out the boards before the water gets to it, so fuck your judgement of my woodcraft, asshole!

Also: From my first attempt I'd say that while the literature suggests that the sand mold will survive outside of its wooden form, my experiment suggests otherwise.  Again: I expect that as I move forward I will work more with plaster than sand, but right now I'll use what I've got and learn from it.

I'd like to report that the basswood was a much better choice than the poplar, but given the vastly simplified design of my dagger die (based on additional research into the field) over the sword's, I can't actually claim its the wood as much as the different thickness.  The basswood seems to be just as prone, more prone, to fracturing along grain lines as the poplar.   I can see possibly making a future die out of clay, as an experiment in construction rather than reduction. This goes well with what I've observed with the tangs of bronze swords, where they have a raised lip around the edge that seems ridiculously difficult to do in wood, but trivially easy to do in clay.  Likewise, I saw a Kopesh that I noted would be nearly impossible to do in wood (well, for me, anyways) that looked, again, trivially easy to model in clay, in part to the shape, and in part to the general design.

And yes: I will have the pictures up before I cast the mold. Prepare to be underwhelmed by their lack of interesting action.

Dem Gurlz

So I removed a post because I had a stronger post on the same theme I wanted to put up while it is still relevant, but I haven't actually written that new post yet... le sigh.

Rather than let this blog lie fallow and unsown while I gird my fingers for battle with the keyboard I thought I'd instead take a little time to, well, gloat I guess.

I've commented before that I'm something of a recluse, which is fundamentally true. There are stretches of several days where I don't leave my house except for my daily coffee run and walking the dog, neither of which really count.

That's not to say I can't be sociable and charming when the situation demands, merely that I naturally avoid such situations, to my detriment.

This last month I've been taking some classes at the local community college, one of which is Creative Writing. Not because I need it, per se, but because for me English Classes have always been easy credits, easy 'A's.  Frankly, I'm bored to tears with the teacher and the class for the most part, and subsequently I have taken to turning the classroom into my own personal domain, effectively teaching half the class.  I wish I was exaggerating, but I'm not, really.

That is neither here nor there, however, other than establishing 'scene'.

Its a small class, roughly a dozen people or so.  Of the women in the class we have three categories: The bored housewife who's kids have grown so they're back to school, the young and pretty college co-eds and the proto-feminists. Luckily, there is only one of the last, unluckily she seems to have a familiar history with the teacher and never gets called on her obscene fiction. Obscene in that every man is a kidnapping rapist/murderer, and every woman is a ball breaking karate expert who will teach him what for!   You know? One good story like that is enough. Every story like that is actually somewhat demeaning to men.

This is relevant.

Last week I put up a post where I said I'd force myself to make a minimum number of approaches a week to women. Not going to happen, much like the other goals I set, for reasons not entirely in my control, but...

The next day I made a snarky joke in response to something the teacher said. It was very mildly racy. As I left class I noticed one of the three co-ed girls give me a flash of interest. I wish I could remember exactly what she did, but I noticed it.  I decided I would force myself to approach her on Monday, even though I wasn't terribly interested in her.

For those of you paying attention, Monday was a Holiday. Oops.  She wasn't there yesterday either.

Curiously, however, after I called out the proto-feminist on her rather obsessive man-beating, I noticed another of the co-ed girls was actively engaging me. Rather than leap on that I merely noted it in the back of my head for later. When class broke, one of the 'old women' in class walked with me towards my math class, talking to me about some throw away story intro I had put forth.

Now: in the honest appraisal of things I am, at best, modestly handsome.  I am not stylish or fashionable, but I am tall. I am not terribly fit, but neither am I a frail waif or a fat slob.  I look rather what I am: an average man of somewhat modest age and accomplishments.  My most distinguishing feature is not actually indicative of anything about me, but merely an accident of genetics.

There is a taller, younger, fitter man in the class. There is a burlier man in the class. There are young and stylish (in the new, somewhat insouciant fashion) men in the class.

Yet, for whatever it is worth, I've got a third the girls actively looking at me like I'm god's gift to creative writing, and even the proto-feminist hasn't really challenged me when I called her out... though to be honest she hasn't set forth to break anyone's balls personally... no doubt she'd rather blog about it (burn? Yes, I burned myself. Ouch).

So on Friday I will have to decide between conventionally pretty but obviously a future fatty co-ed, if she returns, or the skinny freckly co-ed, make my approach and watch my ego burn and die. It could be fun.

For the curious: Third co-ed is more to my taste, and convention, in that she makes an effort to be pretty, to dress up.  I've gotten nothing from her, and I've seen her with what I assume is her boyfriend, so I won't waste my time.   Luckily for me, I seem to have aged out of the oneitis and infatuation stages, so the fact that I fancy her isn't distracting me from the girls who have expressed interest.

Every once in a while I wonder what might have happened if I'd taken advantage of that girl that was crushing on me when I was 13, instead of rebuffing her. I bet she went from gawky and awkward to hot in the next five years.  Ah well.

A little bit of Hobby on the Side...

Try to read the title with a bit of Mambo #5, if you can. 

If not, well, I never claimed to be a genius. Not on this blog, anyway. 

One of the few goals of the month of January that I am actually on track to fulfill is the bronze casting one. Well, that and not murdering my dog for shitting in the house. That one's still a go too. Anyway, I feel I should tell you all about what's going on while I wait for my molasses-pepper glazed chicken to cook. 

I have zero experience in casting. I'm not unfamiliar with metal work, but we're talking stuff like sheet metal, a bit of arc welding, riveting and stuff like that. Casting is not something I've done. Nor am I working with any experts in the field, so to speak. I'm something of an autodidact, I most teach myself what I want to know. At least I prefer to start by experimenting, then doing research, then, and only then, if all else fails, do I seek lessons, knowing exactly what my limits are before I go in. 

My primary interest is not merely casting for its own sake, nor chasing the almighty dollar... though both are good enough reasons for me.  No, I'm actually attempting to recreate bronze age weapons and armor, with an emphasis on Greek Antiquities. I'll probably skip the Bronze Panoply.  

Once I'm comfortable with my skills in bronze age armory, I plan to move quickly into iron and steel, blacksmithing essentially. 

Mind you, I'm not simply talking about a bit of notional modern interpretation. I'll learn on a modern propane furnace, and I'm using common steel tools to do the work, but eventually I plan to step back and get primitive. Clay and brick kiln, simpler, historically accurate tools... that sort of thing. When it comes to the Iron and Steel, I expect not simply to make modern steels into useful implements, but to actually cast and forge what I need from raw iron, turning out my own steel. Hell, I may even attempt the classic Japanese forging techniques.  After all, they can make a Katana cut a TANK in HALF!!!

Or, whatever.

So, that's where I'm going. 

Here's where I'm at.

To learn to cast bronze, you first start learning some basic woodworking.  This was a bit of a shock to me, mind you. I'm happy enough lashing logs together to make raft or a cabin or some shit, but whittling and carving have never exactly been my strong suits... and not for a lack of trying when I was younger. 

See, you can't just make a mold to pour your hot metal into, you have to have something shaped like what you're casting to make the mold out of. 

Now, I could go total, old school, primative on y'all and just carve a crude mold out of a chunk of soapstone, and skip the die, but that's trying a little two hard.

So, for the last month I've been carving a chunk of poplar into a rough approximation of the sword I intend to cast.  It has been a frustrating and difficult time, and I'm not done yet.

But, for the first time in nearly two weeks I feel like I've made real progress. 

Mind you, this is entirely by hand. No power tools.

For two weeks I've cut and rasped and chiseled away at this board and only just barely got something close to what I wanted. I bought a plane, and wept when I barely did what I wanted it to do. 

No, I didn't weep. That's poetic license. 

But, way back when I started this trip I bought a chisel, and a set of smaller carving chisels. And today I went to town on the part that's been holding me up the most.  It went shockingly well, astoundingly well. So good, in fact, that all my previous doubts as to my ability to make my own die, even just a simple one like this, have more or less evaporated. I am a new man.

Oh.. my sword is going to be ass, I expect that. I'm probably going to have balancing issues, and once I've cast it the real work actually starts, but for now I'm looking at having a chunk of poplar that I could legitimately shank you with, which is more than I had the other day. 

No.

I could shank you with it, but now it actually looks like a sword die, rather than a really awkward vampire stake or super short fence picket. 

Anyway: As a bit of tie in with previous posts, I'd like to comment that this is the sort of hobby, the sort of side activity I, and others, should be taking up instead of Television or Video Games, the sort of thing we used to do as a people that we've mostly forgotten.  

Not that I'm prepared to give up my games. If you see some laggy, stutter-stop motion guy running around in Warframe, say "hey!". It might be me. 

Fake Update: Check this space for pictures of the work in progress, once I've gotten time to get them up. 

Charity

The United Way is Evil.

When I was seven or eight, the United Way 'came' to my school and hit us all up for the sweet sweet cash. 

Maybe my teacher did it wrong, or maybe I simply misunderstood, but I didn't exactly bring cash from my parents to pay them off, so the few coins I stuffed in the little manila envelope came from my own very meagre allowance.   So instead of getting generic 'feel goods' from my giving, I instead resented the adults for asking me, a small child, for money.  I was, after all, only a year or two removed from saving up for weeks to buy a three dollar box of legos, and my allowance hadn't changed in the interval.

Now that I reflect back on it, it is clear that the intent of these yearly exercises are to build a habit of reflexive giving, unhampered by thought, and starting with other people's money.  You don't ask seven and eight year olds for their allowance money if you want to create a lifetime giver.  I can't see how this is anything other than extremely gentle extortion. If the parents don't provide the (to them negligible) donation, its the kids who feel the pressure to contribute and the shame of failure. Most parents would happily sacrifice a dollar to two, even way back in the early 80's, to save their kids that sort of trouble... especially in the name of a good cause.

But since it WAS my money that I was giving up I always had to wonder about it.  I mean, when they wanted me to buy books from the book club, I got something for my money, but what happened to the change that I stuffed in those little envelopes?  For all I knew (back then) the teacher kept it for herself. 

Oh, I knew it was supposedly going to Africa to feed starving, underprivileged children (but I ask you? What was I in those days?), but how did I KNOW that?  Year after year things seemed to get worse in Africa, not better. Year after year, more and more charities seemed to spring up, demanding more money, more effort.  My cartoons were interrupted by please for 'For as little as ten cents a day'... or whatever the going rate was back then... and by Sally Struthers, looking like she'd eaten all the food donated before going on the air demanding more, for the children.

I must not have been the only one asking 'how do I know that my donations are actually going to underprivileged kids?', because it wasn't long before they started sponsorship packs, where the one kid you were paying for would send you pictures and letters and shit. 

This was, to my young eyes, a monumental failure of an idea. 

As 'proof' went it seemed entirely inadequate to me, to easy to fake in the short run.  As a charitable idea it was lacking as well. At what point do you stop paying for this 'one child'?  

I had a dozen ill formed ideas about how silly it all was, but I simply shrugged and moved on.  For decades the only charity I have given is to bell ringers at christmas from the Salvation Army, and of my time and labor for local causes. 

Now, courtesy of Ace of Spades comes a story that warms the dark tarry cockles of my shriveled and useless heart. 

For those of you too busy to click a link, let me sum up: This journalist from... Australia?... has been sponsoring a child for ten years and in ten years the quality of the letters and art haven't improved at all, and actually gone down hill. A seventeen year old child is still drawing simple, off-kilter boxes and triangles with crayon to represent a house.

What I like is the never-stated subtext... that it is in fact unstated subtext... that there is some sort of fraud going on here.  The closest the story gets is to ask 'Hmm... that's curious', and a brief reference to another journalist who actually travelled to Africa (country unknown) to find the child she had been sponsoring, only to find said child had only dealt with the Charity* when they'd taken her photograph.

But even in that case, the term 'fraud' is never used, never alluded too. At worst, the Charity* merely used the money to do better good communally than the individual promise they offered.

Umm...

That's a lie. That's fraud. If I had sent several hundred (thousand?) dollars to support some named individual, I would expect THAT INDIVIDUAL to have received the money, or at least the goods and services it bought. Not some generic 'community' that in turn may or may not include said individual. 

By way of analogy: If I wanted to get my cousin Tim** off the streets of Detroit, so I sent him a few hundred bucks, I would be extraordinarily peeved to find that instead of going to Tim, the city of Detroit took that money for 'improvements' for 'all the Tims of the city'. 

I didn't send Detroit the money, did I? I sent it to Tim.  It doesn't matter if Tim is actual family, or just a name and a photograph that tugged at my heart from a book or commercial. I sent the fucking money to fucking TIM, and TIM better be the one who gets it!

But we musn't question the saintly nature of our charitable organizations. 

Bullshit. 

I've got a lot to say on charities, but instead I'll let you ponder this one case, and what no one seems to be saying... at least no one official, and not out loud. 

* by this I mean the organization World Vision, the charity involved in this case, and somewhat facetiously the idea of these groups being actual charities. They are large businesses with excellent PR, and what they sell are remittances. 

** I do not have a cousin named Tim that I am aware of. Likewise, while I have a number of friends from Detroit, I don't actually know anyone that lives there. If I did, the last fucking thing I'd do is send them money. I'd rather drive to Detroit in a truck and help them move out than send them ten bucks for gas. 

The Death of Civilization

I had a thought today.

Our civilization is already dead. Think of it like a tree, standing there all tall and proud, home to squirrels and birds.  Dead as a stump.

Its actually been dead for some time. Decades probably. It, we, have been slowly rotting from the inside ever since.    We keep expecting the end to come quickly, suddenly, and violently.

Have you ever seen a dead tree rotting away? Sometimes they don't fall over. There is no grand moment of violence, just a never ending series of minor collapses, and no recovery.

Now, by itself that is a slightly dark, but not terribly persuasive thought exercise. But of course, I haven't actually explained WHY I had this thought.

You see, once upon a time people valued ability, skill... hard work. They did things with their spare time that required significant practice, learning and were generally useful to a large number of people.

We play video games. Sure, if you play them long enough you eventually develop something resembling a skill...

... but let me back up. We'll touch on our free time in a moment.

Convienence isn't really the explanation for what changed. By the time of our grandfather's generation the industrial revolution had been going for generations, and all manner of mass production, labor saving and so forth had already been invented.

It starts with the Boomers.

No. I think it starts earlier. I can't prove it, not in time for a simple blog post, but I suspect that a large number of the progressive minded elites in this country, the ones who didn't go to war (I or II), were already showing signs of the decay, masked by robust and living body of the ordinary people.

But with the Boomers we see it clearly for the first time.  Ask any Boomer to sum up the zeitgeist of their generation, their era, and you will inevitably hear about Woodstock, about the Civil Rights marches and the Vietnam protests.

Those aren't accomplishments. At best they are participation merit badges, and I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the vast majority of boomers didn't really do any of those things.

If you ask a little more, you'll probably hear about Fighting the Man, Free Love and 'sex, drugs and rock'n roll'.

That's not to say that great things weren't done, often by skilled and talented people of their generation. We put men on the moon, invented the Internet and the home computer. We put the power of a million minds on your desktop for you to watch elf ass wriggle across your screen before you got bored and switched to porn.

But for the first time in our era, our civilization, we stopped caring about the great creations of the age, the masters of science and industry, the creators and workers and shapers. We began caring more about rejecting the rules, fighting the man. We didn't care about success, we cared about the Revolution for its own sake.

And most of it was a lie.  Woodstock was, by all accounts, a miserable experience created by its own propaganda. Even the music was second rate due to shoddy preparation and planning. Even the best stars struggle under the conditions they were forced to play in.  The Vietnam protest didn't really do much to end the war, which lasted twenty years. Its more probable that the US government finally asked itself what it was doing there, unloved by almost everyone, and just gave up.  Twenty years from now we'll hear how Cindy Sheehan single handedly brought the Iraq War to a close by that logic.

And the Civil Rights movement? Well... lets just say that things haven't exactly gone as planned and leave it at that, for today.

There is a theme here, not just in the lack of accomplishment required to take pride in being a boomer, but in how all the things they prize are effectively anti-establishment. The word "anti-establishment" has become something complimentary, hasn't it?  But think about it for a moment. Do you like having roads to drive on? Establishment built that. You like having relatively crime free neighborhoods? Establishment.

The Establishment, for all its flaws, is something of a defining characteristic of Civilization itself. Civilization is far, far preferable to Barbarism, which is also Anti-Establishment.

The curious thing was that this sort of attitude began manifesting everywhere.  The very tale end of the Boomer Generation holds power now, and yet they'd rather use that power to tear down the very country they rule, to destroy the last vestige of The Establishment, The Man, and remake it in their own image.  What of Art?  Have you seen most modern art? It doesn't require a heck of a lot of talent to create most of it. The irony is that the real artists, the craftsmen with skill and vision, all seem to work in the corporate sector doing 'visual design' pieces or as 'hobby artists' working on the web for bux.  The guy getting the grant is more likely to shit on a plate and garnish it, selling it for forty thousand dollars in the process.  Since skill and accomplishment mean less than marching for the Cause, than Fighting the Man, the shit-plate gets the money and the praise, while the guy painting a mural on the wall of a chain restaurant gets to eat the plate.

The ultimate expression of this is schools. Teachers have the easiest degree of all college degrees, and they have the lowest IQ of any credentialed profession. They give out awards for participation to students, they reject thousands of years of math to teach 'fuzzy math', where just trying really hard make the answer right.  And yet, because it is 'for the children' they are among the highest paid professionals in the country. Not that you'll ever get them to admit it, of course.  They wail and complain about long hours, about being underpaid and under appreciated...  then they call a six year old a rapist for kissing another six year old. They throw a kid out of school for eating a poptart the wrong way (so that it looks vaguely like a gun).... the litany of indignities they inflict upon our young seems endless.

And when they finally go to far, when their utter lack of professionalism, accumen or ability is revealed? They aren't fired, they are made administrators, which is why there are now schools with more administrative staff than teachers.

Participation and believing in the right things is far more important that actually accomplishing anything.

As an indictment of the Boomer Generation, I think that would be far more than enough to see the lot of them tossed out to make their own way, without vampirically bleeding the young dry so they can have a few more years of living it up.

Unfortunately, that isn't the goal of this post.

No.

Its to point out that my generation, by which I mean both the Generation X crowd and the Millennials (hey, the Boomers claim nearly 30 years of people in their generation, why have they divided up the following generations into mere decade lengths?), have been raised by people who are merely squatting in the carcass built by better men in better times.  Far fewer of 'us' are interested in hard work, in craftsmanship, in anything that takes years to master than the Boomers were.  We worship celebrity, even of the most crass and pointless sorts. Make a fool of yourself on the Internet, make a million dollars. Film a dog doing dog stuff, make a million dollars.

I'd like to say the Nadir of this movement is Girls, a show that is a crappy rip-off of an older, marginally smarter show, with less attractive people and far fewer fans, but all the critical praise due a great, moving peice of Art.  Lena Dunham is the new model Sexy for our age, the goddess of beauty our debauched and worthless age deserves, but I'd be reaching.

The Tree is dead, but that just means things aren't going to get better, just slowly worse. Girls is merely a vanguard of the new depths we will sink to.

Idiocracy was Prophecy,  our Cassandra.

All Hail President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho!

The Bechdel Test as Microcosm

In the last year or so there has been increasing fervor for applying the Bechdel Test when discussing movies. For those of you who have never heard of the test, congratulations on being a normal person with an exciting and active lifestyle.

Oh, fine... I'll explain.

The Bechdel Test is a feminist ideal that any given movie should have at least two named women characters who have a conversation in the film that isn't about a man.

If a movie passes the test, it is acceptable for feminist viewers, or something.

Of course, rather amusingly, it can be hard to determine if a movie passes the test, as if it isn't really adequetely feminist then all manner of excuses can be used to force it to violate one of the rules. For example, the Book of Eli passes the test on its face, as the female lead talks to her mother about their captivity (at the hands of men!), and the mother (Claudia... so officially a named character) only has two or three scenes in the film, yet is incredibly plot relevant.

The Book of Eli is almost entirely built around the male characters, yet passes the test, so women have to come up with marginal rulings to exclude it, you see.

There is a good reason for it. The only thing the Bechdel Test actually tests for is, in fact, itself. It literally has no relevance to the quality of the film, its relative merits as entertainment or feminism or pretty much anything.  At best it can tell you that, yes, two women have a conversation on screen in the film.

Compare that to the much simpler 'how much did it make' test.   That test is measuring only one thing, the actual number of tickets sold, yet it can give you a lot of relative information that is actually objectively useful for evaluating a movie. Not perfectly, of course, but still far more accurate than the test.

Let us explain by way of example.

Assume a movie that only includes a single character, a woman. This film is a deep meditation on the human condition, and follows the premise that a feminine perspective is more accurate and relevant than a male perspective.  Deep, meditiative, insightful and undeniably feminist.  Possibly even good and entertaining.

Fails the test on two points at a minimum, and all three on a technicality (with no other characters, we have no reason to expect the sole character's name to be relevant or revealed).

Assume a movie in the vein of Birth of a Nation, only from a manospherian/gorean point of view. THe main character is still a woman, modeled after Sarah Palin. She spends the entire movie chasing down, capturing and brainwashing other women characters to be little more than meek servants and slaves.  For the sake of argument, we'll assume that any number of conversations with the movies antagonist (a free, liberal feminist woman) do not, in fact, even mention men, but instead talk about what it means to BE a woman.

Passes all three elements of the Bechdel Test.  It might be entertaining, but probably not to people who actually tend to evaluate movies with "the Test". It is undoubtedly misogynistic, possibly even exploitative. We still don't need male characters, but we could assume that this is only a significant subplot to a bunch of men capturing and raping women and it would STILL pass the test with flying colors.

Hell, I don't even have to imagine that second film.  Ilsa, She-Wolf of the whatever (There were some three or four of these) passes the Bechdel Test. True, most of those conversations would be about torture and pain and so forth, but again... not about a man.

Not that I expect anyone to actually put that film on the Bechdel Test website any time soon. They may be willing to admit that the test is flawed, but I somehow suspect that such an obvious counter-example would break them.

Because, ultimately, the Bechdel Test is a tool... not for evaluating movies, which it singularly fails at, but for political power.  The strength of the test, in many ways, is that it is utterly unconcerned with what the movie is about.  Lots of movies beloved of women include multiple female characters talking about what so many women already love to talk about... their love lives. And these films fail the test.

Think about it: A genre of films that is made for women, catering to their tastes, and employing far more actresses than any other genre is just as likely to fail the test as a film like Riddick (or for that matter, Alien, which famously passes!), which is more or less a 'guy flick' from the word go.

Not that anyone is seriously attempting to evaluate Rom-coms and other 'chick flicks' with the test. I note that most, if not all, the Harry Potter films fail, despite being written by a woman, and with the female character (hermione) being the most competent and capable character of the trio, to an almost insulting degree, simple because all the scenes involve people talking to, or about, Harry Potter, and not about, say... their hair.

It is also notable that Allison Bechdel, the creator of the test doesn't actually think much of it. She created it as a punch line in a cartoon in 1985, and noted in that very punchline that only Alien passed the test (at that time), and the women are talking about the monster (technical foul: The monster is clearly a man! Penetration, phallocentric, yadda yadda, rape analog beast!)

Which brings me to the post title.

Here we have a test that measures nothing but itself, can be easily subverted to produce the opposite of its purported intent, was a punchline to a comic strip and is essentially disavowed by its original creator, yet is used and protected, as a bludgeon for political purposes.

It is essentially modern progressivism in a nutshell. Not just feminism, which is merely one facet of modern progressivism (and in fact may be described essentially the same as the Bechdel Test, as I just did...).

Modern Progressivism is literally about nothing but itself, though it purports to be about a great many important and good things. Civil Rights? Only useful as a tool for more progressivism. Feminism? Only  useful to shut down debate and quash the opposition... national health care? Only important in that it forces you to come to the Progressives to get life saving medicine, making you dependent upon them.

Progress? Don't make me laugh. The Progressive Elite would much rather rule over a village of dirty, dark age peasants than a vast space empire. The Global Warming Fraud is proof enough of that. So long as they have marginally better stuff than you, they're happy.

In short, we have a political ideology that describes nothing but itself, has been entirely subverted to produce the opposite of what it claims, is a punchline to one grim, dark joke on humanity, and would be eagerly disavowed by most of its original adherents if they saw what had become, and yet it continues to exist as a useful bludgeon for political power.

Thus endeth the lesson.