Batman & Gunwalker - Arkham City Spoilers

So if you are wondering about my general lack of productivity, blame Arkham City. But that isn't the point here.

You can't be even kind of a gamer and not have heard of Arkham City. It is a masterpiece of a game, but that isn't the point here either.

Anyway, one of the things that Batman does in the game is try to track down where the Joker's men are getting their weapons. Apparently they are armed to the teeth with G36's and Grenades and have been wreaking havoc in the city-this despite the fact that Arkham City is technically a large open air prison. An open air prison with strict controls on importation and exportation, particularly of weapons.

Anyway, Batman being Batman, he goes down into the fucking sewer and punches people in the dick until he finds out where the weapons are coming from-none other than Dr Hugo Strange, the 'warden' of the city's grand experiment in civil rights abuses. Turns out he's been running this whole show for his own profit, naturally, and is providing the Joker with weapons because the predictable chaos that ensues in Arkham City will enable him to begin 'Protocol 10' which is a violent crackdown by the armed mercenaries serving as security forces. They tear ass up and down the city in helicopters firing rockets and chainguns and shit to purge the filth, and naturally Batman has to punch things until it stops.

Sounding familiar? A heavily but inneffectively defended border, guns paid for by taxpayer dollars being provided to dangerous criminals, a crackdown by overly militarized mercenary police on people that had nothing to do with the initial violence?

Game over, folks. The inmates are running the fucking asylum. And we ain't got no Batman to save us.

The Grandpapa Voice

So I know you, Internet.

You see some crazy heavily armed nerd on the internet talking about his large group of like minded riffraff and you think "Oh, sure, he has some buddies in his D&D group that love talking about zombies and the guy thinks he's some kind of high level Post Apocalypse aristocrat. How is he even going to control all these panicking fucks when the shit goes down?" (Internally, we almost never say SHTF-we say "When the shit goes down" as in the Cypress Hill song.)

Well I have probably given you nothing but reason to doubt my credentials, but fuck you anyway, Internet. I got the motherfuckin' Grandpapa voice.

My grandfather was well known as a word class bellower and snarler, a man who believed in that quaint concept called "The Fear of God." It was bad enough that I have had Tios beg a bail bondsman not to let them out so they could face a nice, quiet judge rather than The Old Man. Once, when we were gaming in the dining room and making too much noise, Grandpapa snuck up behind me in the DM's chair and for a few moments I could not figure out why everyone's eyes were the size of dinner plates and no one else was talking. The man could instill fear in someone with one sharp whistle. If you ever want to get a shudder out of Jared, ask him how fast he peeled out when Grandpapa was coming out to get him unstuck from the culvert at the end of our driveway; it came loose just as the old man came out and Jared's tires smoked all the way to the stop sign at the highway.

What does this have to do with me?

So lately, as Gracie gets over her tewwible twos and thwees in fits and spurts, I've started to discover The Grandpapa Voice inside myself. Mostly it's "GRACIE GOD DAMNIT GET THE FORK OUT OF THE LIGHT SOCKET" or "GRACIE PUT THAT DOWN BEFORE I BURN YOU WITH THIS CIGARETTE" etc etc etc. I'm a quiet guy. I don't like to raise my voice. But when I do have to yell at her, man, it is motherfuckin' Grandpapa the second. It is bad enough that my friends who grew up with him all look up for a moment with that deer in the headlights look. Hell, its bad enough that my own echo in the hallway sometimes freaks me out, and I always know it's coming.

I am the living reincarnation of that crotchety old bastard, and when the time comes to seize control of the group, like when the dead are rising or the Chicoms are dropping paratroopers downtown on 3rd & Rogers or, god help me, if the Heffalumps and Woozles are fighting it out in the streets, I am gonna bust out that voice at full volume and watch my homies jump. My homies will jump, my aunts and uncles will jump, my mom and cousins will jump-I'll go from "stoner with delusions of grandeur" to "stoner with a small army" in one bellow.

You better mother fuckin' believe it.

The Poly Pickle

God knows you all know too much about my sex life, but here goes anyway. Mom, again, this is one you might want to skip.

You wanna know something interesting about poly? Maybe something you hadn't considered?

You are still putting your heart out there, man. You're still risking getting it stomped on.

For some people a relationship is like a safe refuge; once they are "out of play" then they can sit contentedly on the side with their self esteem intact. In fact, some of these people cherish this sensation so much that they careen from one relationship to the other, eternally seeking not love but safety.

You don't have this luxury when you are poly, particularly as a Unicorn Hunter. You still have to go out there and face the possibility of rejection. Let me tell you, America-it still hurts. Even when you have the most wonderful, supporting wife in the world, going out there and being told no is still a hit on your self esteem. I've kind of been learning this lately, and it has hit me harder than I expected. Poor Amanda, who takes on duties that no good man's wife would ever have to, has been nothing but comforting to me during this period, and oddly it seems to make it worse. She is a good woman, and doesn't deserve to have to do something like that.

Long, rambling story short, I tossed my heart at the feet of someone I'm incompatible with and it hurts, and I think people forget that about the poly lifestyle, that there is no sense of spectator safety-that you are still taking risks.

I'm not planning on changing my lifestyle, repenting and joining the Westboro Baptist Church anytime soon...I can't change, I'm just wired wrong...but it has given me a lot to think about. And I thought it might be something you should think about too.

Occupy Bloomington: A Case Study

So I've wandered by Occupy Bloomington a few times. I truly expected it to be the same group of losers sleeping in People's Park but the parkies were strangly absent. There is a surprisingly large group (well, 35 tents worth) of protesters although the ones I talked indicated that the majority of them were "day trippers" and so were not truly "Occupying" the space. That isn't the thrust of this article, though-I just want to harp on a particular point.

One of the ladies, apparently an IU employee, has a sign that says "It's easier to buy a gun than my education." The IDS gave the gal a write up that you can see here. I don't know this lady, but I want to harp on the content of this sign for a moment.

Seriously, goddamnit-in what world should a gun cost the same amount as four, maybe five years of room and board as well as professional instruction in hundreds of subjects? A hunk of machined metal is always going to be cheaper than five years rent and hundreds of hours of professional instruction, and no law could possibly change that.

Furthermore, in what world can I get the government to pay for part of the cost of my gun, and float me a low interest loan for the rest? That would be pretty sweet; you put zero down on a firearm and rack up some debt against the chance of you using that gun to make more money in the future? Hell, unless you enlist in the army, the government won't even subsidize firearms training; you can't even write it off your taxes.

I don't mean to take jabs at people who hate corporate cronies who operate under color of law-I hate those fat cat fucks too. But this has nothing to do with the corporate crimes of the cronies receiving taxpayer bailouts because they threaten to crash the economy; it is a direct assault on my god given rights as a sentient human being in the name of a "right to education" that doesn't exist anywhere in the Bill of Rights. It makes conflict between the Liberty Sphere and the Occupy Wall Street movements inevitable.

Your focus needs to be on punishing the guilty-the cigar chomping bastards that robbed the taxpayers for billions-and nothing else. It shouldn't come part and parcel with a laundry list of entitlements, and it damn sure shouldn't be packaged with a hostility to my existing rights.

The cheap conservative snark would be "What was she smoking LOL" but let me tell you, America-I'm stoned as shit and that still don't make a lick of sense.

Completed Manuscript Boogie

Yeah, you read the subject line right. I'm boogieing. (Boogeying? Buggering? Buggering sounds right. We'll go with that.)

This book has a unique distinction among bedraggled three ring binder manuscripts cobbled together by stoned hipsters-I've already gotten paid for it. I wrote the whole fuckin' thing on the clock at work during down times. The call center biz is onerous and depressing, but not without advantages for the modern slacker.

You have all (hopefully) seen the preview of the Codex Kalachnikova below. I don't think it will be anything groundbreaking-a Conan novel with Kalashnikovs, a sort of Walter Mitty piece of derivative trash with a few Piers Anthony cheap plot puns and a lot of Watership Down references. I'm not trying to change the world, just cash a fuckin' check. I'm okay with straight to paperback for all three volumes of the prospective trilogy; that would be three more paperbacks than I have previously sold.

So how did I finish the fucker, with so many other projects left strewn behind me like discarded syringes?

I just wrote man. I just wrote 2000 words every night until I was done. And if something sucked, or I hated it, I kept it anyway and wrote on with notes written in the margins to change it later. I didn't get bogged down perfecting it while I was still creating it; I just created it first and printed it off at the end of the night and filed it away in a cheap three binder. And when I went back to work the next day I did the same thing again. It was...disturbingly simple.

In the end, even if no single person besides me ever reads this shit, it feels good to have finished something.

Thoughts Over Menthol

Joo know whas fucked up meng?

(I'm Mexican today, run tell your friends. This is good herb we've been blessed with lately, praises to the most high.)

So I almost always get 100's when I go get cigarettes. There are a lot of reasons, but mostly because Benson & Hedges only come in 100's and I'm used to it. And I mean, the price is the same.

Hold up, the price is the same? For more tobacco?

Think of this for a moment. The taxes on the product are so high, that the actual size and content of the product is irrelevant. And not six months goes by before someone else slaps a sin tax on the eeeeeeeebil tobacco companies.

Doesn't that just make you want to dump a bunch of cigarettes in Boston Harbor?

Thass fucked up meng.

Keep smoking, kids, or Grandma's check is going to run out and she'll starve. If the uptight bitch would have just smoked this whole time she'd be dead by now, but she didn't and you need to pay someone to wipe her ass for all 129 years of her life. You don't want granny to starve, do you? Buy your fuckin' friends a pack.

The Inverse Slippery Slope: Where Does It End?

So I was thinking the other day that those of us in the liberty sphere need to define when we will stop pushing for greater gun freedoms, as a sort of baseline goal. It is noteworthy that anti gunners do not do this-they just keep saying that this one piece of legislation is the one that will end the scourge of "gun violence" forever and ever world without end hosana hosana hosana amen. And then they go and spout about how those terrifying gun nuts won't be reasonable like the English or the Chinese. In any case, if you are wondering when Chris By-The-Throat considers his 2A rights to be complete, this article will discuss that issue.

Given that 2A is considered an individual right, let me give you a starting point: that means anything that is not crew served. Personal weaponry is the benchmark of individual rights, as in, how much power is the State willing to concede to the individual. So here is the laundry list.

NFA Law Reform - No unusual regulation on SBRs, SBS, Suppressors, AOWs or MGs, they will be bought and sold like all other firearms. The way the laws are structured now, especially with the pre 86 requirement, means that only the very wealthy can afford to get into machine gun shooting, and a right enjoyed only by the rich is generally known by the more accurate term "privilege."

Constitutional carry in every state. Sorry folks, but "keep and bear" means "own and carry." Criminalizing the carry of weapons at all does nothing to prevent street crime, but it does give the cops a good reason to hassle anyone they see carrying a weapon. Since that whole "blood in the streets" prophecy never came true, it is sheer idiocy to persist in this affront.

Mandatory firearms education in high schools. Frankly, this will do more to prevent accidents than anything that gun banners have ever done, with the added bonus of a zombie proof society. Even more frankly, if the system is churning out kids that can't shoot and don't know anything about guns then the education system is failing. Guns exist-even the most deluded anti gun zealot has to concede this point-and they are something that should be understood by everyone who wants to vote on public policy regarding guns.

An end to compliance parts restrictions, better known as "a good way to throw honest men in jail." Seriously, how does requiring US made parts in a semi automatic rifle curb crime?

A complete deregulation of non ballistic weapons with regards to both ownership and carry. Sorry folks, but there is no way you can rationalize allowing pistols and banning switchblades and sword canes.

Should all of these things come to pass, I will be drop my JPFO membership and instead donate to the non ILA side of the NRA, the one that focuses on education and safety instead of legislative action. Why? Because I will consider my 2A rights to be within the realm of "shall not be infringed."

Now, to all those anti gun types out there, I feel I have to ask-when will you be done? With a reasonable model like England's? Norway? South Africa? When will you say "We are doing enough to control gun violence, time to hang up the bloody t-shirt I've been waving all this time?"

Somehow I don't think we'll ever get an answer.