Meet the IWI Tavor TS12 Bullpup Shotgun
A semi-auto bullpup 12 gauge with 16 rounds on board in a rotary three-tube magazine? Yes, please.
Jan 272018
Jan 262018
Just out driving on the frozen surface of a river, as one does, when an old nuclear powered Russian icebreaker goes zipping on by…
Jan 252018
If you want uncritical videos about goofy subjects like monsters and UFO’s, YouTube will hook you up. Look at all the “Flat Earth” videos. Look at them. But if you want skeptical takedowns, you might have to dig a little further, and if you want skeptical takedowns that are well researched and explained, you have to dig a little further still. But Trey The Explainer does the job nicely.
Many of his videos are about paleontological subjects, but many others are about various “cryptids” (i.e. mysterious animals that people “know” to exist but can never seem to prove… Bigfoot, Loch Ness Monster, Honest Politician, that sort of thing). Some are better known than others, but two vids I found quite good are on the Black Knight Satellite and the Ropen. Both are relatively recent inventions; both are manifestly silly; both are easily and quite adequately explained away with clear video evidence showing them to have mundane explanations; and yet, both are readily believed by many.
Jan 252018
I’m poking away at the last two major unstarted (until now) stories for book one of “War With The Deep Ones, “Brass Valley” and “Amber Aspect.” And this (Ligeti’s “Requiem for Soprano, Mezzo-Soprano, 2 Mixed Choirs and Orchestra”) seems just about perfect for the mood I hope to convey:
No scene such as this occurs in book one, but if I were to pick the music for a hypothetical Lovecraftian movie, this, or something very like it is what I’d tell the composer to include for the scene where the hero, antihero, victim or whoever approaches the vast, incomprehensible cosmic horror. If you’ve seen “Oblivion,” that’s actually pretty much what happens here anyway…
Jan 242018
My plan for the first WWTDO book is to have a collection of short stories, each an incident set within the first few days of the Deep One invasion, each story being on the order of ten or more pages long. But *between* the stories I plan on including little short yarns, a page or three long, that give a chronologically sequential history of the doin’s with the Deep Ones and other relevant Lovecraftian issues. Most of these deal with the Office of Insight, giving a history of the secret government branch dedicated to studying and preparing for cosmic horrors.
I think what I’ll do is reserve the bulk of these little tales for the final book, even though I’ll probably release each of the major tales individually. So if you want the full back story, you’ll just have to get the book.
Also: the original trio of reviewers seemed to really like the historical backstory, enough so that sometime after finishing up Book 1, I’ll turn the backstory into a complete book itself. I’ve already written forty or so pages of that, set in the early 1990’s…
And after all that yammer, here are the first two of the tales. They start just after the raid on Innsmouth, and introduces some guys just doing their job who have received an unwanted introduction into a larger, weirder world. Rather than PDF or EPUB, it’s just blog-text, just click below. As always, comments, critiques and large sums of cash welcomed.
Jan 242018
A short test, apparently successful. Flight, hopefully, in about a week.
Jan 242018
This music video dates from 2017 and was made to promote “Guardians of the Galaxy 2.” It is by definition a product of the 21st century. And yet… and yet, they managed to accurately capture the screaming horror that was 1970’s disco. I was honestly torn between laughing my keister off and doing my best George C. Scott “turn it off, turn it off” impression and throwing the computer across the room. If you are too young to remember the 70’s and always wondered what it was like… behold, ye younguns, and despair.
Jan 232018
Currently winging their way from Ukraine to yours truly are two vintage brochures on the Antonov 225. These were picked up on ebay, purchases made possible by patrons of the APR Patreon. These brochures will in due course end up on the APR Patreon catalog, to be voted for as possible monthly rewards for the patrons.
If you’re interested in helping to preserve this sort of aerospace artifact, and also interested in getting high-rez scans of them, consider signing on to the APR Patreon.
Jan 232018
“So you’re saying” is often a way to tell the viewer that “you” are saying something other than what “you” are actually saying. When it’s used once or twice in an interview by professional journalist/interviewer, it might raise an eyebrow. When it’s used so many times that someone can edit together a complete interview of nothing but “so you’re saying” followed by corrections… well, that indicates that the interviewer might not be in the right profession.
Jan 232018
Tsunamis? Dunno, but there’s a warning out.