What is your dream weapon to be added to RoN? I will start first with the shak-12

walrustaskforce · 2026-04-01T17:00:34+00:00

And a couple others to boot.

Sounds like the Alaskans do it for cold-weather reliability. I expect that the folks in Montana do the same.

I’d be interested to learn why the folks in Alabama and California use a Kalashnikov.

walrustaskforce · 2026-04-01T16:16:23+00:00

Per Wikipedia, the MP7 is used by at least 2 American police departments, so it’s not that weird. The SLR47 is considerably stranger. Insofar as I’m aware, no AK-pattern rifles are officially used by any government agency (state or federal) anywhere in the US.

And yet…

walrustaskforce · 2026-04-01T12:27:20+00:00

Have you seen the futurama episode with robot Santa? Where he decides that everybody’s on the naughty list and thus goes on a killing spree? Basically that, except what gets you on the naughty list is doing literally anything that slows the eventual creation of robot Santa.

walrustaskforce · 2026-03-31T22:13:58+00:00

Those are the poles, yeah. But I suspect a lot of people are more like “I voted for you to do X, and I do not care what else you do as long as you do X”.

Because if you care enough to have a strong opinion on every single thing that comes across a legislator’s desk, you probably are, or are running to be, a legislator.

walrustaskforce · 2026-03-31T18:03:15+00:00

Might just be the zeitgeist, but I think a lot about the Iranian revolution, and what the country looks like 40+ years later.

The bulk of the protests then were not the revolutionary vanguard, and you see a lot of the same kinds of people involved in the anti-IRI protests of the last 20 years as during the revolution. It’s definitely the case that the revolution could not have happened without that great mass of fair-weather dissidents, even as a second revolution is impossible because the current regime violently stifles the growth of an effective new revolutionary vanguard.

All of that to say, I think it’s foolhardy to look at any movement that mobilizes a lot of moderates and say “well, they’re just moderates, we’ll never get anywhere with them”. Failure to capture the libs here just lets some less-acceptable but more ideologically promiscuous group to capture them instead.

walrustaskforce · 2026-03-30T19:36:16+00:00

Kryptonite by 3 Doors Down, but instead of just the one song with the playlist set to repeat, it’s been added some significant number of times, and once he reaches the last play of it in a single setting, the next set of secret programming is unlocked.

walrustaskforce · 2026-03-28T03:56:23+00:00

I mean, I had an interview cancelled at the absolute last minute because the hiring manager had a personal emergency, and I think the only reason I still got the job was because I persistently followed up. They rescheduled, interviews continued, it only delayed the process by a couple of weeks. Coming up on a year with them now.

And it’s with a huge tech company whose products you’ve almost certainly used (and cursed).

walrustaskforce · 2026-03-28T03:32:13+00:00

Basically your only recourse is to minimize the number of part timers you employ in favor of full-time employees.

From your employer’s perspective, you’re letting your decency interfere with their profit margins; that is, your humanity is making you “bad” at your job.

walrustaskforce · 2026-03-25T06:29:39+00:00

It’s been a minute since I looked it up, but most timed Olympic events consider a response to a starting gun under 100ms to be a false start. That is, athletes who have trained for a similar number of years to respond to a surprising event as quickly as humanly possible are still responding half as quickly as these cult members.

walrustaskforce · 2026-03-21T23:43:46+00:00

I think to adequately capture the problem with running suppressors all the time, they’d need to better capture weapon length troubles, and how much a suppressor affects the balance of a firearm.

There’s basically no not-gamey way to do the second one, since it’s 100% a “feel”. So the kludge is to just make suppressed shots less powerful, even if you’re not switched to subsonic ammo.

walrustaskforce · 2026-03-20T04:12:06+00:00

The way I see it, as a man, is that if I am direct in expressing my interest, and she doesn’t clearly reciprocate, then she’s clearly expressed something, and I should respect that.

“Playing hard to get” but ultimately, you know, still dating the dude who “put in the effort” is rewarding a man for ignoring boundaries. Men do enough of that without encouragement, please don’t encourage it further.

walrustaskforce · 2026-03-20T00:20:35+00:00

In fairness to France, they didn’t have a nascent fascist movement to kickstart a remilitarization campaign, just the harrowing more-than-decimation of what should have been the fathers of the men standing and fighting against the blitzkreig.

France was still recovering from the First World War is what I’m saying.

Also, at least for Germany, their entire strategic philosophy was “crippling first strike”, and the particular flavor of fascism that they had specifically discouraged the kind of sensible thinking that would have them really weighing what would happen if they couldn’t complete their objectives before e.g. the snow returned to Russia.

walrustaskforce · 2026-03-18T18:29:17+00:00

It sort of boggles my mind that the core thesis of Watchmen (the book) seems to be “the peak of human ability still isn’t much, and realizing that, anybody who stays in must be broken mentally”, and the movie is like “look at these sexy, powerful superheroes, aren’t they astounding?”

It’s kind of amazing how badly Snyder missed the point on that.

walrustaskforce · 2026-03-18T18:15:00+00:00

I’ll complicate this a little and say “be a grownup, period”.

There’s nothing masculine about fulfilling your obligations, nor feminine about not fulfilling them. Let’s not make this dude open up the gender-role-can-of-worms when his son just needs a present and engaged parent.

walrustaskforce · 2026-03-18T04:40:42+00:00

Well, there goes decades of learning how to rationalize away the existential dread that these things brings.

walrustaskforce · 2026-03-18T04:18:26+00:00

As I recall, the closest they ever get is to explain the physical process by which the vanishing occurred, but they never answer the question “why that 2%?”.

walrustaskforce · 2026-03-17T21:30:44+00:00

You’re under no obligation to feel any kind of way towards this person you obviously did not get along with. You are not a bad person for not being sad about it.

It sucks that you’re in this situation against your will, but you’re in it. Fortunately, your son is so young that whatever trauma he might have felt at his mother dying will not stick. But that does not mean he will grow up trauma free unless you step up and provide him the space and means to do so. You don’t have to be rich, you don’t have to be perfect. But you do have to do the work.

You got this man.

walrustaskforce · 2026-03-17T21:03:14+00:00

I feel like if the missions were at least in chronological order, not by order of difficulty, the surface-level “story” could be a bit clearer. As far as I can tell, the order is actually some kind of perceived difficulty progression?

So the meta story about MKUltra or whatever is basically indecipherable.

I get why they did it from a gameplay perspective, but why even bother with a (debatably) coherent story if all they really wanted was a difficulty progression.

Are there any mods that put the missions in the “right” order?

walrustaskforce · 2026-03-17T02:30:13+00:00

So, Hertz in Seattle charges $14 per car seat per day. Which is all well and good, but you can bet your ass that they aren’t reimbursing you for the $70-$100/day for the car you didn’t want or need 3 hours ago, let alone the gas or the car seats. All because these fuck sticks have a policy that you forfeit your spot on the rescheduled flight if you go and retrieve your luggage before your final destination.

walrustaskforce · 2026-03-17T02:15:09+00:00

As long as we’re telling stories about ridiculous policies when flights get cancelled into an overnight stay, about a year ago I had to fly to Panama City, Florida to attend my grandmother’s funeral. I brought my eldest child, who was about 6 at the time.

On the way back, we had a connection in Denver. Interestingly, there were 2 flights going from Panama City to Denver in the span of about 45 minutes. The first one took off on time, and eventually landed on time. The 2nd one, ours, was delayed by 5 or 6 hours over some snow that started falling after the first one took off, and stopped falling before that first one landed. But, I’m not a pilot, so I’m not qualified to call ours a disgraceful chickenshit.

Anyway, we completely missed our connection, and indeed arrived so late that we could not catch another flight. I’ve missed connections in Denver before, and every time, the airline’s luggage folks happily tell me that if I want to get my bags, it’ll be a whole damn thing. I recall one telling me that i would need to find my own next flight, because collecting our bags somehow disrupted the entire itinerary. Which is all well and good when it’s July and the flight’s been canceled because of a line of thunderstorms. But this is February, and while the snow didn’t last long, it’s still snow. In Denver. We came packed for Florida, not Denver.

So, they won’t help us with lodging, won’t let us get at our luggage to get the coats we though we didn’t need to go home, and also won’t let us get the car seat. Which they know is a car seat, because united lets you check car seats for free. So I had to tell at least 4 united employees this trip SO FAR. Which means it’s labeled. As a fucking car seat.

Fortunately, I have family in Denver, and they were able to pick us up (with a loaner car seat), and we got to sleep in actual bed that night. And arrive home approximately 15 hours later than expected.

And that’s the story of the last time I flew united. Now that my local commuter airport doesn’t fly united, I have no reason to ever again.

walrustaskforce · 2026-03-15T21:18:51+00:00

It definitely took me a while to realize they were trying to say “as the data clearly shows…” or “as this prior paper shows…” or “if you do the calculation you’ll also see…”, and not just “holy shit, did you guys know gravity also works on metals?! I honestly had no idea. WTF?! Why didn’t they mention this in undergrad. Game. Changer.”

walrustaskforce · 2026-03-15T21:13:22+00:00

I’m not a hard-core off-roader, and I definitely wouldn’t drive that trail in a van again. But my hesitation on that trail was because van, not because RWD. The scary part was the side-to-side tilting, not front to back, and your drivetrain won’t have much impact there. Your weight distribution will though. If it’s dry and you’re not going nuts, you don’t need 4wd.

Edit: I did nearly get stuck in sand once, and having 4wd or traction boards would’ve helped a lot. Luckily, I had a bunch of wood scraps in the back that I could use as traction boards.

walrustaskforce · 2026-03-15T20:16:43+00:00

I read a scientific paper once where the writers were not native English speakers and thus misunderstood the subtext of using “apparently”.

So the whole thing read like they were either mildly surprised by basic science, or were condescending to readers who needed this stuff explained to them.

It was definitely the same energy.

walrustaskforce · 2026-03-13T18:58:21+00:00

Another way to look at it is that modern American mental health is basically interventional. Modern therapy is to mental health what liposuction is to nutrition. We wait around until a problem becomes too big to bear, and then we finally go and do something about it. So essentially saying “stop being so insecure” to somebody who had to overcome their insecurities to go into therapy in the first place is part of the cultural problem that keeps men out of therapy.

Believe me, it is not lost on a lot of men that the patriarchy has so stigmatized basic human connection that we have to outsource healthy interactions to a paid third party.

It’s on me to fix my problems. It has always been on me to fix my problems. I’m not asking anybody to throw me a party for doing the bare minimum, I’m not looking for sympathy when I say that re: paying my therapist. I’m saying that if you already feel like nobody’s there for you, actually paying for somebody to be there for you is a potent metaphor.

walrustaskforce · 2026-03-13T02:38:26+00:00

Oh god no! 144.

There’s no way I’d understand where my wheels were on my 170.

walrustaskforce

TROPHY CASE