Gun Blog Variety Podcast #108 - This Is the Intro That Never Ends

Yes, it goes on and on my friend. Your co-hosts started bantering, not knowing what it was, and they'll continue talking forever just because...

• Do shooting ranges for women exist? Of course! But they aren't "Barbie's Dream Range". Beth speaks with Kim Condon, the owner of Boondocks Firearms Training Academy, about her female-friendly range.
• In Felons Behaving Badly, friend of the show George sends in a story titled "Two men accused of breaking into Union County chief deputy's home in custody." You'll never guess what Sean finds out.
• ITT Tech got their federal student aid money spout cut off, and Barron tells us what that means for its students and graduates.
• In our main topic, Sean talks with Bob Mayne of Handgun World Podcast, the co-founder of Self Defense Radio Network.
• We all love a good movie, and Tiffany tells us how sharing that movie magic can help us bridge the gap between gun people and non-gun people.
• Did you know it was National Preparedness Month? Prepping is going mainstream and Erin tells us how that happened.
• We all thought it was dead and gone, but suddenly, it's back! ... but not better than ever. Loaded Conversations drags a half-finished podcast off the ash pile and serves it up for another Patented Weer'd Audio Fisk™.
• And our plug of the week is for RoadID. See the show notes for a $5 off coupon.

Thank you for downloading, listening, and subscribing. You are subscribed, right? We are available on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, and now on Google Play Music!

Listen to the podcast here.

Read the show notes here. 

Thanks also to Firearms Policy Coalition for their support. Go to www.FirearmsPolicy.org to join.

A View From The Top

I've been on vacation for the past week, so have had little time for research, but I got some sight-seeing in. So on that note, have some pictures!

The main attraction - Sandia Crest

I have recently been informed that "Sandia" means "Watermelon." 

Authentic Cactus

Ducks and geese at the Tingley Beach on the Rio Grande

Miniatures at the Tinkertown Museum, halfway up the mountain

That's some real Wounded Knee shit there - Tinkertown Museum

I took this one specifically for our lovely editor (Thanks! -- Erin)

A kiln made of glass bottles - Tinkertown Museum

New Mexico busts ghosts in style

Traveller Tuesday: Heatflec

It's taken me a while, but I have finally been convinced that a reflect coating on starships is a bad idea.

Not only are these good points, but consider also the following:

• Reflec needs cleaning/polishing to maintain efficiency
• That polish would be damaged by the thermal effects of atmospheric exit and entry
• Micrometeorite impact would also damage the mirror coating
• After taking hull damage, the coating logically ought to be reapplied

So fine. This post is me throwing up hands up in despair about reflec. Let us eschew magically perfect mirror technology and instead embrace magically perfect heat dispersal technology. As was pointed out to me, most Traveller ships are heat traps and the heat has to go somewhere or else it'll boil the crew. So I'll go with the option that makes my life easier.

Thus: Heatflec. (I needed a word for it and it's catchy.)

My use of Traveller setting and dress falls under
fair use guidelines for both Mongoose and Far Future Enterprises.

Not that we're dumping heat* instead of redirecting light, that meant heatflec needs to work against fusion and plasma weapons as well. Just to keep things familiar, I'll keep the same bonus as reflec did for lasers.

Of course, this increase in performance needs to come with an increase in price as well. Let's increase it to MCr 0.25, which puts it at the same price point as 1e radiation shielding (which to my mind has always been too expensive for what it actually does. 2e changes it to MCr 0.025, which is a little too much in the other direction, I think; switching the numbers with 1e reflec -- MCr 0.1 /dton -- seems about right).

If a GM doesn't want to give armor vs heat but still wants to have a way to radiate heat away from ships without fins, I think it would make sense to steal the numbers from 1e's self-sealing coating and make non-armor heatflec MCr 0.01 per dton.

The delightful part of all is that since we aren't reflecting laser energy with a mirror but are instead absorbing thermal energy, heatflec is 100% compatible with stealth coatings and does not require my configurable hull workaround.

Therefore, we have this as the finished product:

Thermal Dispersion Coating ("Heatflec")
TL: 9
Cost: MCr 0.25 / dton of hull
Effect: This coating provides +3 armor against lasers, plasma and fusion weapons.
Restrictions: This coating may only be added once.


Additionally, I present you with this house rule: When the hull has taken 1/3 damage, reduce heatflec's armor bonus by one. This means that when hull has been dropped to zero (using 1e mechanics; I still like the difference between hull and structure), the ship has no bonus to resisting thermal damage. Of course, at zero hull points the ship has no hull integrity and is completely open to vacuum, so heat buildup is the least of its worries right now.


*No, I have no idea where it goes. I'm good at handwavium bullshittium, but I'm not that good.

Erin on the GGG Podcast

That's Geeks, Gadgets and Guns episode 111. We mostly talk about guns and Operation Blazing Swords, but we wander all over the place.

I expected this podcast to drop earlier, which is why I went shooting Monday instead of writing anything.

I have NO idea what is going on with the audio. Also, I apologize for some of my brainfarts; at one point I say "40mm" when I know I meant ".40 caliber and 9mm".

Download and listen here.

Gun Blog Variety Podcast #107 - Budget Little Black Dress Rifles on Campus

Top coat, top hat, and does this rifle make our butt look fat? Just come a-running just as fast as you can to this episode of the GunBlog VarietyCast, because everyone's crazy 'bout our podcast, man.

• Ladies, you have that little black dress. Beth asks, do you have that little black gun?
• Who kills a grandmother in a home invasion? Sean takes a closer look.
• Have you updated your iPhone yet? Barron tells you why you should.
• In our main topic, Erin and Sean talk about Walmart blowing out Ruger American Rifles for $200, and budget optics for your budget bolt gun.
• Tennessee just started allowing full-time faculty and staff to carry concealed on campus. Tiffany reminds us that this doesn't mean it's a great idea to broadcast that you're one of those carriers.
• What is GOOD survival TV? Erin tells you what programs she considers worth watching.
• Maura Healey goes on a local Fox affiliate for an interview. Is she lazy and stupid, or just a liar? In another patented Audio Fisk™, Weer'd reports and you decide.
• And our plug of the week is for the Parasol Protectorate and Finishing School series of books, both by author Gail Carriger.

Thank you for downloading, listening, and subscribing. You are subscribed, right? We are available on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, and now on Google Play Music!

Listen to the podcast here.

Read the show notes here. 

Thanks also to Firearms Policy Coalition for their support. Go to www.FirearmsPolicy.orgto join.

And a special thanks to our sponsors for this episode, Remington Ammunition and Lucky Gunner.

SHTFriday: Hurricane Hermine

TLDR I'm fine. To find out more, check out my post on Blue Collar Prepping.

The Current YouTube Debacle

YouTube is kind of a big thing for me. I'm a cord-cutter, and have been for a long time now: when I got my first solo apartment, I looked into cable prices and realized that a basic package was just far too much more than I was willing to spend for what I'd get and what I'd get out of it. It was at that point that I started looking into alternatives, and began the arduous task of downloading episodes of television shows over a dial-up connection.

To you millenials, this may sound shocking. You think the internet is your ally. I was born in dial-up. I didn't see high-speed, always-on connections until I was a man. (Obligatory Bane reference complete.)

I like YouTube because it provides a platform for a lot of voices, and a way for those voices to monetize their content so that they can continue to provide content as long as people keep patronizing, keep clicking, and keep viewing. It allows me to watch music, entertainment, and news from sources that are not approved by one of the few major satellite or cable content providers. Without it, I'd be stuck with Syfy or CNN, The Home Shopping Network or FOX News. Instead, I can listen to arguments from all sides of an issue, from rational to emotional to paranoid.

Recently, several prominent and many more obscure content creators have been hit with automated notices that their content has been demonetized. In other words, they haven't been silenced; they haven't been removed; they're just not making money anymore when people watch their content. Ostensibly, this is due to YouTube's concern over advertisers, as the pre-scripted message provided to the video producers indicates.

The Rules. So, really, nothing is monetizable anymore. 

The first major case was 10+ year veteran vlogger Philip DeFranco, whose video regarding the woman who claimed she was harassed by a Lyft driver revealed that she was being abusive and harassing because he had a bobble-headed hula doll (the kind they practically issue you when you step off the plane in "the continent of Hawaii", to use her wording) on his dashboard. 

There was a knee-jerk reaction, as his video did include the acronym "SJW" in the title and Google has publicly invited some of the more notorious "anti-harassment" advocates to their headquarters before, but the tide quickly shifted when a producer for The Young Turks (basically the FOX News of the Left and arch-rivals with Alex Jones) tweeted that they were hit by a massive demonetization wave that affected over 500 of their videos. 

That tweet, coincidentally, is now unavailable. I suspect it's because a progressive was referring to it as censorship when there was no government intervention and no one was silenced... just de-funded. Fortunately, the internet never forgets. 

Then came the smaller channels. One lost revenue on a video about depression, another over a video on how to conceal acne. Even videos about suicide prevention by Boogie2988, the Internet's nicest guy, weren't safe.

My theory here, as one of YouTube's support Twitter accounts will not shut up about, is that they're doing it to push YouTube Red. YTR is a subscription-based service that feeds money to participating content creators, based on their view-counts, from the subscription money instead of advertising revenue. By de-monetizing regular YouTube videos, Google hopes to force content creators to switch to using YouTube Red instead. 

Let me give you an idea of the impact this would have on someone who isn't a content creator, but merely a subscriber. I don't have a webcam, and I don't particularly like being on camera, so I watch, listen, and learn. I take in a great number of various voices and viewpoints by listening to scientific lectures, entertainment podcasts, and political rants from all around the spectrum while I play video games. One of my favourite things to do after work is to put my feet up, boot up something like Assassin's Creed or Fallout, and wander around the map picking up collectibles and climbing towers while learning new and different things. So while this doesn't affect me directly, it does upset me that YouTube is doing this because YouTube is probably the Google product that I use the most. 

My fear is that this demonetization push is going to reduce YouTube to cat videos and make-up tutorials, with content creators that want to discuss serious topics fleeing to smaller, less reliable platforms for fear of their livelihoods. After all, if regular YouTube did this to them, who's to say that youTube Red won't do exactly the same later on?

Google:  Please don't do this. If this was a bot, turn it off. If this was a conscious decision, reverse it. You don't realize how important YouTube is to some people's day-to-day lives. It's a more powerful information and entertainment platform than any network or cable television channel, and you're neutering it.