Deep Forest
I had a dream last night.
I was at the edge of an old forest in Oregon. Wood Elves came out in a double file; sombre warriors, clad in browns, greens and red. They called me to come with them and two of them took me in to be fitted with gear and weapons.
I told them they had the wrong guy: I’m forty, I’m feeble, I’m no warrior, I have a wife and kids to take care of. With a look I knew the response.
I know the deep forest. I have been there.
40K Campaign- Week 2
I found one morning a display made for a studio Imperial Gaurd army. Renn’s force includes models based on BTP staff! I’m a banner bearer (with a bluetooth in his ear). If you look close you can see the BTP table logo here and there.
The Tyranids have played two games. Can’t tell you the outcome of the second game yet as the vids have yet to be processed.
Pits
Well, I’ve had a pretty crappy last few days. One thing after another. No, I don’t really feel like talking about it. My goal tonight: drink some hot chocolate and watch some Red Dwarf in my jammies. And do something nice for my wife and kids.
In related news, I’ll have three armies up on the block soon:
The Ice Elves ($1950)
Lizardmen (2500 pts or so, $1950)
Oceanic Eldar ($1850)
I have added a unit of Dark Riders to the Ice Elves that no one has seen. If you want to claim one of the armies, I’ll require a non-refundable deposit of $100 and total payment within 7 days. However, you get $100 off.
If it comes to it I’ll make vids and pics of the armies, but then they will cost more.
I’ve pared down the Oceanic Eldar a bit (less one unit of Avengers, Striking Scorpions, 2 Vypers).
Blarg
Today was insane. I was running all day.
Well, not really. I spent about four hours playing a campaign game of 40K. Nids v Guard. There are eight active players and I think every single one is on track for 800 points done by tomorrow. I have 1720 pts ready to go.
Battle report forthcoming. It’s a real wild ride.
My $900 clunker needs $1100 worth of repairs. That is the bad news I got from the mechanic today. That really just set me on edge.
I think I have ear infections. I got to go to the clinic tomorrow.
But when I got home I was sure to hang all that on the hatrack. I love my kids. They are a delight. I can’t get enough of them. Last night at the local shop the boys pulled some balls out of the rack and when we handed this pink one to Willow her little smile just cracked open the size of a yam. She was grinning ear to ear as she held this giant ball in the shopping cart. Of course we got it and she couldn’t get enough. She even wants to sleep with it.
She has two more teeth budding on the upper gum. #5 and #6.
The People… Incorporated
Here’s an interesting intellectual exercise. Watch the news or listen to talk radio.
As you’re doing it, think of what the opposite is. What if the opposite of what they are saying is the situation as it really is. It’s an interesting exercise. The article that follows will be the opposite of everything you are hearing on TV.
Many people don’t vote. They are “apathetics”. They rightly sense that they do not have any real power and that voting is all a sham. And they’re right. But if these apathetics, just for a lark, showed up and voted third party, it would sweep the cancer out of the system.
Two candidates, who follow the same basic monetary policy, are propagandized to victory. By the time the two people are presented you really have no choice. The Apathetics must rise up! Show up at the polls and vote for any third party candidate.
That’s my opinion. Who cares?
Recent Dispatch from Downsize DC:
You just won a big victory in the Supreme Court, but the media would have you believe otherwise. This message will explain . . .
* What you just won in the Citizens United case
* How and why the media is lying to you about it
* And what remains to be done to restore more of your Constitutional rights
Here’s the basic situation . . .
Governments spend nearly half of the money you earn. This means that politicians have more influence over your life than anyone else. But how much influence do you have over the politicians?
You have the power to fire any employee or company that doesn’t provide you with a good product or service at a price you’re willing to pay. But you have almost no power to fire and replace your most important employees — members of Congress.
Why is that?
The answer is disturbing. Incumbent politicians have erected campaign finance restrictions designed to protect themselves, silence taxpayers, and cripple challengers. The politicians and the media tell us these laws are needed to prevent corruption, but does government seem less corrupt to you? Here’s the truth . . .
If you’re an incumbent, and it’s virtually illegal for people to raise enough money to unseat you, then you’re free to do whatever you want. THIS is a recipe for corruption. THIS, and NOT campaign contributions, is one of the main reasons WHY we have such a Big, Wasteful, Corrupt government.
Many things must be done to achieve honest, Constitutional government, but among the most important is the need to restore your . . .
* Freedom of speech
* Freedom of the press
* And freedom of association
Doing this will allow you to associate with others to raise and spend the money required to FIRE incumbent politicians. At present, the campaign finance laws prohibit you from doing this. Ask yourself this question . . .
Can you afford, all by yourself, to run for office to unseat an incumbent officeholder?
The answer is clearly no. This means that you must exercise your freedom of association to join with others to raise the required funds. But first you will have to spend large sums of money to persuade people to participate. This is like starting a business, and that requires capital!
Too bad. This kind of capital has to be raised in chunks of ten and a hundred thousand dollars, but the campaign finance laws limit you to contributions of $2,100. That’s why its mostly the rich and well-connected who win election to public office. Meanwhile . . .
The established corporate news media can do something you cannot. They can raise and spend unlimited amounts to communicate about politicians, campaigns, and issues. The media constantly tells you what your choices are, and they never include, for instance, people like Ron Paul.
Media businesses have an unrestricted freedom of the press, but you do not. This helps to explain why so many in the news media . . .
* Love the campaign finance restrictions
* Tell so many lies about how these laws really work
* Constantly promote the need for more such laws
* Shriek whenever you gain rights similar to what they enjoy
It’s important to understand that the campaign finance restrictions not ONLY protect incumbents, but they ALSO give the established corporate news media privileged influence over public opinion. Fortunately . . .
DC Downsizers have worked for years to change this, and that work is starting to have an impact.
Most cases against the campaign finance laws have focused on the freedom of speech, but these challenges have always been denied by the courts, under the perverse reasoning that “money isn’t speech.” This is why . . .
Our attorneys were the first to argue that, even if money isn’t speech, money IS required to run a press or broadcasting effort. Our 2003 case, Ron Paul v. FEC, argued that the freedom of the press is a right that must be protected for all Americans, not only for those who run media businesses.
Our claim was denied, but the influence of our reasoning was clear during the oral arguments and in the dissenting opinions. But that was only the beginning . . .
A co-plaintiff in our 2003 case, Citizens United, renewed the fight last year. They challenged campaign finance provisions that prohibited them from broadcasting a movie they had made about Hillary Clinton, who was then running for President. We asked DC Downsizers to help us provide funding for a brief in that case.
Our attorneys once again made their signature freedom of the press argument, and were the only ones to do so. We believe this argument had a big influence on the outcome.
On January 21 the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment freedom of speech guarantee prohibits the Government from enforcing any financial restrictions limiting core political speech involving elections based on a speaker’s corporate identity.
This is a huge victory for YOU. It’s a great step toward restoring YOUR ABILITY TO FIRE AND REPLACE YOUR ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES. But the media’s self-serving response has been predictable . . .
They have screamed that corporations have been given the right to buy elections, even though the media itself is entirely corporate, and already has the ability to spend unlimited amounts to influence elections. You can better understand the real truth by paying close attention to the full legal name of our two Downsize DC organizations . . .
The Downsize DC Foundation, Inc, and DownsizeDC.org, Inc.
Both Downsize DC organizations are corporations. The Supreme Court has just restored some of your ability to use us as a way to join with others in order to better exercise your freedoms of association, of speech, and of the press. To gain an even better understanding of this please watch the following 3-minute video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Ms. Sampson and her friends (depicted in the video) are nearly identical to the kind of association Downsize DC is, except that we’ve already bowed to legal requirements that we must incorporate in order to more fully exercise some of our supposed rights.
We will have much more to say about this in future Dispatches and blog posts . . .
* There are many more self-serving media lies that need to be corrected
* We need to develop a strategy and tools for dealing with the media in the same way that we deal with Congress
* We need to educate taxpayers about the true causes of government corruption, and why campaign contributions are a cure, and not a cause
* And we will need to continue to make our case to the Supreme Court in order overturn all of the incumbent protection laws, enhance your ability to fire members of Congress, and allow you to regain all of your rights of association, of speech, and of the press
If you’re happy about this victory and the role we played in it, and would like to see us do more, please consider making a tax-deductible contribution to the Downsize DC Foundation, Inc.
Thank you for helping to make this victory possible.
Jim Babka
President
Downsize DC Foundation
& DownsizeDC.org, Inc.
P.S. The mainstream media sure had a lot to say about the Citizens United case, and much of it wasn’t true. We have some further analysis about this case at our blog, “Lying About the Citizens United Case.”
Pirates and Mercs
Just uploaded the spreadsheet for Mercenaries and Pirates for War Machine.
Oxidized World
Here is an army for the studio 40K campaign: a roughed up contingent of Guard on a rust-atmosphere planet. There are more figs, I just grabbed a few to take a pic or ten.
Hive Queen
Over the weekend I managed to get the Mesa Nids up to 1500 points.
See pics.
Note that these are taken under flourescent so it makes the skin look really yellow and all the colors are skewed. I also see some areas where I have to go back and touch up.
Here’s what was added:
1x Tervigon
40x Termagants (need a LOT more)
3x Zoanthropes
1x Doom of Malan’tai
And my Planetary Empires Tile.
I’m ready for my campaign game tomorrow.
On a side note, we rented a local warehouse (very small area) to make terrain in for two weeks starting tomorrow. If you need some terrain done now’s a good time.
Odiferous Bastage
The year is 1989.
I was a young man, just out of high school, I lived in the Plum Street House. It had aluminum siding, pale green on the top and white on the bottom. In the front yard were two sixty-foot Oregon pines overlooking a gravel driveway. The porch was a tremendous slab of concrete. It had three bedrooms and one bath. It was in (what I later found out to be) the equivalent of the “Medford Ghetto”. To me it seemed normal. And beautiful.
Rent was $250 split three ways with my two room-mates, Korey and Mark. My share: $83.33.
Getting home after work was a dark time, though, and I often felt a yawning chasm of coldness in my heart.
One day I opened the back door to find a dead calico cat on the back porch. In a senseless act of macabre fascination I reached down to poke the cadaver with my finger. The corpse kitty shook to life and stumbled to its feet, letting out a pitiful “Bleh!” noise.
I took the poor creature in, combed the burrs out of her fur, and nursed her back to health. She had a crooked tail (where I presume it may have been slammed in a door). She was missing claws and most of her teeth, the longest of which was a single canine that hung out over her bottom lip. Life had heaped misery on this scrawny stray, the worst of which were the mites that had eaten out her ears including her semi-circular canals. For this reason she was deaf and had not a sense of balance, often stumbling into the door frame or falling over.
She could not “meow” as other cats, but rather a long zombie-esque exclamation of “Bleh!”.
I named her O.B. “Off Balance”.
My roommate jokingly called her “Odiferous Bastage”.
It may seem that she needed me, but it was I who needed to serve her. Taking care of this forlorn animal gave me a flickering light.
One morning I awoke to hear her piteous cries just outside my window. I whipped on my bathrobe and saw through the window that two dogs had her pinned in the alleyway. I grabbed my baseball bat and flew out the screen door and leaped over the back fence. I chased after the mutts, yelling obscenities and causing at least one woman to get in her car and lock the doors. When I returned I found O.B. mashed into the rain-soaked ground, unable to even stand. I took her in and tended to her hurts.
A few days later, while we were watching a movie, I had her in my lap curled up on a towel and sleeping peacefully, gently combing out her mangy hair. Her purring was broken and gravelly. As the end credits rolled I noticed that she had stopped purring. She had passed away.
I buried her out in the back yard.
O.B. was a cat-angel who filled some divine purpose to humanize my soul. She made me softer inside.
Studio Beastmen
Well, it’s time. I think the strength of the Beastman list is not so straightforward. Crazy yahoos coming in from all directions. That’s it. So, with this list, I’ve abandoned the direct approach. Beastmen clearly aren’t a frontal assault army.
Here’s the preliminary list:
1x Khazrak One-eye (re-roll ambush)
1x Slugtongue
1x Moonclaw
40x Ungor Raiders
20x Gors
20x Gors (ambush!)
2x Tuskgor Chariots (maybe one Razorgor Chariot)
2x Jabberslythe
This army is going to be very effective, or a complete mishap. But it will definitely be fun.