Sandy Petersen 🪔

Okay so I propose we start using THIS as our four-sided dice. It will teach us who is a real gamer, and who is just a poseur.

It's Veteran's Day! So here are tales of my family who fought for land, liberty, and love. Everything 1) one of my ancestors was at Concord. I don't know if he made it to Lexington afterwards, but he was there, firing one of the first shots of the American revolution. 2) another ancestor was a Union Captain in the American Civil War, fighting for freedom. So I feel we did our part in ending slavery. 3) My grandfather was at the Somme in World War I. Those who know about that battle know how horrible it was. He got shot in the arm & the leg and lay in a mudhole for 3 days until the German Red Cross found him and saved his life. Spent the rest of the war in a prison camp. When he got home, Jody was there, living with his wife. Remember friends, Jody is always waiting and watching. If you know you know. 4) My father in law fought on the front line in France in 1944-45. He fought through the Vosges (IYKYK), liberated one of the Dachau camps, and assaulted the Maginot Line (occupied by Germans). He said the most terrifying thing in the war was the mortar fire, and had lots of stories. 5) My uncle fought at Iwo Jima. Got shot in the legs and evacuated. He killed a sword-waving Japanese officer only a few feet from his foxhole. 6) Another uncle was in the invasion army for Japan, but luckily his job was switched to occupation army instead. 7) My father was a Captain in the air force during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He told me that during the Crisis there were crews in every bomber 24/7. Just in case. His image is below (obviously from a later date). Bless those men and their service.

Here is a video of my favorite anti-tank rifle, the Tankgewehr m18. It's from World War I. I absolutely admit it's not the "best" but hey that's not always why we like guns. It is really neato because it looks like a rifle instead of a techno-nightmare (look at the Japanese & Finnish guns to see what I mean). It has a pistol grip, because only Andre the Giant can wrap his hand around the stock. What's your favorite anti-tank rifle? Don't deny it. I know you have one.

Medieval castle owners didn't have interior decorators or a modern sense of style. Why would they? But they did love color. If you walked into a castle in 1290 AD, you might go into a room with one whole wall painted blue. The wall next to it painted ochre. The third painted red, and the fourth white. Striking but not anything we'd do today. Of course they didn't always use paint on the walls - they might have wall hangings, wardrobes, or tapestries. But the walls weren't just bare stone. We have this idea that the castles looked drab because they look drab TODAY. But they look drab now because the colors have worn away. A castle attendant in England told me that when the castle was acquired by Wales in the 1800s, they literally scrubbed all the remaining fragments of paint from the inside walls because it looked unseemly. Hey, they were Victorians. Also of course, their colors would fade over time. Sunlight would diminish them. Even their tapestries and other fabrics that survive today aren't as bright as they used to be. And, to be fair, their colors probably weren't as bright as what we have now. But they were as bright as they could get them.

To have the complete Doom experience, here is what to do: 1) THE PREQUEL: Watch The Black Hole 2) THE GAME: play Doom (1993). 3) THE SEQUEL: watch Event Horizon. Now you have the full sequence.

Major Hasan shot up Fort Hood while my son was stationed there. I nearly stroked out when I saw the news.

This is how Chinese military propaganda works. Check out the comparison in the image. Now examine facts. B-2 - operational. Proven effective. Has demonstrated immunity to Chinese air defense. Xian-Ho H-20: NOT operational. Might enter service in the 2030s. Anyone can make up stuff, pretend there won't be a cost or time overrun, and then pretend they're higher tech. If the Xian-Ho turns out to be higher tech, then yay China has a bomber in 2035 that is better than an American bomber that was fielded 36 years earlier, and is older than its crew.

I like the movie Tombstone a LOT. I love the actors (Val Kilmer's greatest roll), the scenes, the dialogue. All of it. But there are many superior westerns. Here are several I think are better: Shane, Unforgiven, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Rio Bravo, The Good the Bad and the Ugly, Once Upon a Time in the West, Stagecoach, Destry Rides Again, and High Noon. If you like Tombstone, it takes nothing away from your love of it to see one of these others.

Remember the famous "the evil Americans gave blankets contaminated with smallpox to the native americans" crime? Here's the truth. 1) It wasn't American. It was thought up by a British general in 1760, before there was any America. 2) it was never put into effect. It was rightly denounced as horrible policy. 3) smallpox spread on its own anyway, and Americans died from it too. The USA absolutely is guilty of sins against the Indians. The smallpox blanket wasn't one of them.

The deadliest trap I ever used: Here's how it worked. If the player falls into the pit, he can't see anything. Whipped cream is opaque. Even blocks darkvision. The other players also can't see him. If they try to use ropes to fish him out, the ropes float on top. Meanwhile they can't hear him talking and eventually the victim expires with no oxygen. In my game they finally attached a mace to the rope so it would sink into the whipped cream. But the victim couldn't SEE the rope and had to grope for it. Now I can see that you might say I'm too mean, but there are fairly obviously several ways to get him out of the pit (besides eating the whipped cream). How many can you think of? (And if you want to argue that whipped cream isn't "realistic" may I point you to Tomb of Horrors?)

Here was a case where the dub and the subtitles are DIFFERENT and it matters. In the subtitles, it says, "For them, words are a means of deceiving humans." In the dub, she says, "Demons use words to trick humans." These are not the same. The dub is saying, "Demons tell lies." Well, so do humans. So does everyone. The subtitles are explaining an alien, predatory mindset.