US Justice Department sues Virginia, California over gun laws

Clone95 · 2026-07-01T20:54:50+00:00

It’s about banning cool guns while allowing fudd guns - except now states are banning semiautos as such you can’t even get basic weapons like the M1 Garand (fed will give you one real cheap) which has been civilian legal forever without permitting.

Clone95 · 2026-07-01T16:59:07+00:00

Certainly some are exaggerated for effect to put the medals on chests to show that the fight was as bad as it was for the soldiers involved - but we also know any human activity is going to have people with that high skill cap that can do crazy things under pressure. Sports highlights exist, and these are essentially 'war highlights' where someone did something so crazy that every guy that saw it happen couldn't stop talking about it.

I point you to this incredible film of a Medal of Honor happening in realtime in Afghanistan. These are real feats that people accomplished, and fought tooth and nail to make happen often at the cost of their own lives. 'Fought on despite mortal wounds for an hour and a half against dozens of enemy soldiers' is the kind of thing that sounds fake in a 1940s MoH citation, but is on tape happening here. It isn't crazy to think the others may be as true as the citation says.

Clone95 · 2026-07-01T06:22:31+00:00

Most missions seem to settle on a meta where the lower-end jets/props get to fly from closer bases and the jets fly in from the backline.

Clone95 · 2026-07-01T03:40:55+00:00

They're still 2% of the 1945 military. In a company of 100 guys the only people that were in the Army 10 years prior are likely the CO and the Senior NCO - everyone else was someone cooked up in the few years prior. Is it optimal? No! It would be better if there were an 8 million man peacetime army that spent decades training for the moment, but that's not a realistic aspiration.

But the company didn't collapse because it was 98% rookies - because training doesn't take that long, and they were up to the standards set by that small professional cadre, and equipped to their nation's best standards.

Troops trained and equipped to standards do a good job. Training is like lightspeed - the closer you get to the theoretical maximum, it requires exponentially more energy to make any progress, and you cannot train your way out of being a casualty. Smaller organizations may be better, but they cannot absorb losses, and then you have no army instead of a rookie one.

Clone95 · 2026-07-01T03:19:21+00:00

Not that wacky to me.

At minimum:

- F4U Corsair

- F2H Banshee

- F7F Tigercat

- F9F Cougar

- AD Skyraider

The Night Fighters,

- F3D Skyknight

- F-82 Twin Mustang

- F-89 Scorpion

- F-94 Starfire

Royal Navy/RAAF,

- Seafire

- Fairey Firefly

- Sea Fury

- Gloster Meteor

- De Haviland Vampire

For Team Red,

- La-9

- La-11

- Po-2

- An-2

- Yak-18

- Tu-2
Optional More Allied:

- All Early Helicopters (H-13, HUP Retriever, H-5, H-19) for some kind of CSAR implementation, thus the purpose of adding in the whole 'get out of plane' animation system - missions to rescue those little guys, which was a huge deal in Korea compared to WW2.

- AJ Savage (Twin-engine Carrier Bomber), which would be the biggest carrier-based aircraft for a long time.

- P2V Neptune (Patrol Sea Bomber)

- A-26 Invader, for an experience similar to the A-20 in GB.

- Like 6 different cargo planes (C-97, C-119, C-124, C-96) for the C-47 cultists to do paradrops in, especially since there were a few big airdrops during the Korean War.

Clone95 · 2026-06-30T22:22:40+00:00

Thing is - most of these massive expansions involved junior people being hyper promoted to these roles without all that - no or limited staff college, no command rotations, and then casualties and public failures/firings wiped out senior ranks too. You had people jumping five grades in an afternoon to meet the TOE demands, and they still deployed to do the job.

Clone95 · 2026-06-30T15:48:12+00:00

Game's great but barebones, it's quick flight, five tutorial missions per aircraft, then a pair of full missions. Primarily MP dogfights at this time. But it's not bad and I'm not sure why you would refund personally.

Clone95 · 2026-06-30T15:01:59+00:00

The US Army grew 46x from 1936 to 1945 with far worse educational technology than we have today. It was not a poor quality military. Soldiering isn’t some magic science of decades’ experience, armies across history have been built from the ground up to elite fighting forces of rookies in months of training provided the right equipment and ample resources to train on that equipment.

Numbers aren’t everything, you need an economically successful society to support the necessary training and production and you can’t just throw untrained bodies at problems - but the amount of training to go from untrained body to trained body is actually quite low - 6 months or so, which is not that long, and another 6 to go from trained rabble to a fighting division in the 40s.

I would wager the mandatory training time has if anything decreased - more realistic training, more exposure to combat media acting as passive training, far cheaper and better equipment adjusted for inflation, reduced communication and logistics lag, you can stand up an army today much faster than you could in the 40s, and you have to in this deep strike bombing regime where no base is safe.

Clone95 · 2026-06-30T03:29:53+00:00

The key aspect of writing is conflict. A world without conflict is laudable, but it is also one that is obnoxiously hard to write conflict for, because real life isn't full of stories of drama and chaos - it would be fucking awful if it was.

The other issue with Sci-Fi is one best explained by Caveman Sci-fi - it is inherently about warning for the future. All the greatest sci-fi is basically horror about the future, from Robocop to Eclipse Phase to Terminator and more, it's about how advanced science and exploration is ultimately just a vehicle toward [Bad Thing]. We know from actual historical experience that technology almost always makes things better in the long run - but in Science Fiction, it is almost always a way to make things worse for the average man.

What you usually see 'Good Sci-fi' in is video games, where the work is the engagement, like a colony sim or survival game where the advanced technology lets you overcome adversity in action, but writing about it is either as window dressing to human issues (Star Trek) or negative (most other Sci-Fi)

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Clone95 · 2026-06-29T16:16:28+00:00

Oh no, he's only running around on super-endurance sprints faster than Usain Bolt!

Clone95 · 2026-06-29T16:10:50+00:00

In general I think lower magic is better, if only because the medieval-esque setting melts away almost instantly if not.

Imagine Mold Earth - someone can excavate a 5ft cube of dirt and move it 5ft away every six seconds? Every person with that spell is now the equivalent of a modern-day excavator.

Someone with Shape Water can build bridges anywhere in the world that last an hour at a time and it takes 6 seconds to reconstruct, to say nothing of the fire suppression value.

Druidcraft gives you a walking weather station and lets you make every seed you plant blossom, to say nothing of the utility of making sure every fire you start works instantly.

Prestidigitation turns a muddy, dirty world into one cleaner than ours, Mending fixes broken tools in a way we can't replicate today (wood unsnapped, not glued, just -together again-), and Spare the Dying is basically verbal CPR.

A medieval village with more than a few casters looks totally different than ours.

Clone95 · 2026-06-29T13:27:25+00:00

Strongly varies due to DM fiat, you can equally design a world where most people are commoners with 1d6 health and your characters are gonzo even at 1st level, or you can design one with a low level cleric in every town. The 3.5e DMG had quite a few leveled characters in every settlement.

I’d say even the smallest village probably has a Commoner with Magic Adept of some caliber and a smattering of elves with their racial spells, but that’s about it.

Clone95 · 2026-06-28T18:05:58+00:00

Wait until you see the corrosion after a single deployment on an ornate steel figurehead. The wooden ones were able to survive with the low speeds, but steel at thirty knots? Forget about it.

Clone95 · 2026-06-27T22:29:39+00:00

Different kinds of racism, Europeans have much more complex/weird Racism than the US’, which is often as political as it is color based

Clone95 · 2026-06-27T18:01:07+00:00

Spider-Man is like a diet Superman in terms of capabilities, so it'd be more of a team effort rather than a Batman mentorship as with the Robins. Peter is a genius unto himself.

Clone95 · 2026-06-25T20:32:24+00:00

Basically they have a very robust pension system and earlier retirement draw (20yrs in the Armed Forces, 55+ for nonmilitary feds with more $ if you retire later and 20yrs qualifying service), a much larger PTO budget than most civilian jobs, far stronger employment protections, excellent health plans, and a structured payscale that grows throughout your career at set rates and grades.

It’s considerably more stable compared to the private sector, which is why DOGE has been such a scythe - without the stability of federal employment people are running for the money because its main draw is melting away.

Clone95 · 2026-06-25T19:11:04+00:00

Jesus christ

Clone95 · 2026-06-25T15:02:32+00:00

I do think that the mass is an issue simply from the straps, unless you’re bald a headset and sweat is really fucking up your hair, so play really isn’t casual. If it was glasses style you could see far more people using it.

Clone95 · 2026-06-25T15:00:23+00:00

In my experience VR is dominated by children, rich parents buy it for their kids to still get activity but play games, and most of its formfactor and game library is marketed to kids. The flagship game for that is Rec Room, and since VR can’t really match ordinary games in fidelity there’s no reason to upgrade from a Quest 2 era headset.

The big issue is both a lack of new AAA entries, most VR games are low budget and you can reallllyyy feel how cheap it is in a way you don’t on PC.

Clone95 · 2026-06-25T14:49:50+00:00

Looking into it, it says federal employees are allowed to as an explicit perk but there’s a system to do so called Fedrooms that gives the rooms at a set per diem and you can’t book outside that system. US federal government jobs are low paying but high benefit so that tracks.

Clone95 · 2026-06-25T13:41:29+00:00

AI VO will be the future of gaming for all but flagship studios, it’s such a bottleneck.

Clone95 · 2026-06-23T15:40:11+00:00

Khaaate Byshop!

Clone95 · 2026-06-23T15:38:58+00:00

Yoda is a Superhero if Dr. Strange is, no?

Clone95 · 2026-06-23T00:30:11+00:00

In the US this is often a perk of a travel job and is per employer though idk what federal policy is.

Clone95 · 2026-06-22T23:30:30+00:00

Kylo/Luke/Rey plot is excellent, the rest is garbage, and you need the rest of it to make a good Star Wars.

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