2010.01.19 07:35 - Guns, Magpul Masada/Bushmaster ACR, Internet Stupidity, Meatspace Stupidity, Whining
I hate to sound like all the ninnies that have been getting hysterical over the ACR rumours for the last three weeks, but it looks like the rumors are right and the basic version of the Bushmaster ACR is going to priced at $2700, or close enough to as makes no difference.
I've still got some checking to do, but unless I can come up with one for a lot less, my answer to that question is the following:
Screw. That.
A SCAR, ugly as it may be, includes a rail farm and a folding stock for that price, and the XCR is only a little more than half that. Someone on arfcom claimed that dealer price on the Remington version is $1850-2050, which might be do-able. I'll have to do some checking with my own contacts and see what turns up. I'm sure as heck not paying $3000 for one, though.
[Update: Checking complete. Unless something completely unexpected happens, I am not getting an ACR, at least within the current calendar year. C'est la vie. I hear SIGs are nice this time of year, though ....
I also feel like I should point out that Bushmaster's ACR shenanigans have been a pretty big bummer. I'll have a brief post on why in a bit.]
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2009.12.02 09:00 - Entertainment, Books, Movies, Television, Meatspace Stupidity, Whining
I have the RSS feed from theforce.net laying around in my Google Reader subscriptions. This morning, that feed included an announcement of the cancellation of an upcoming Star Wars novel by Karen Traviss.
I really don't follow this stuff very closely, and what's going on here is one reason why. Karen Traviss has been writing novels in the Star Wars universe centered around some characters that are clone soldiers and a handful of Mandalorians, either referencing or creating a lot of stuff concerning the previously established warrior culture of the Mandalorians. I've read a few of these, because they've crossed over nicely into the sub-genre of military sci-fi that I've recently found myself enjoying, and because I do still like the Star Wars universe, despite the fact that it is often so shoddily and inconsistently constructed. So, I've got two or three of the Republic Commando novels on my bookshelf, and I'll probably pick up the couple of novels following those characters at some point.
Traviss has decided not to write this last book because, among other reasons, the Mandalorians are being retconned into pacifists during the movie time period, which presents certain existential difficulties for many of her key characters.
Uff da.
[Addendum: I fired this off without putting a complete title on it, so I corrected the title.]
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2009.10.09 07:51 - Guns, Meatspace Stupidity, Whining
Seems like an AR isn't a proper EBR (evil, black rifle) without having more money in accessories than in the rifle. I'm darn near that right now: I mounted an EOTech holosight on it Monday, and am currently sitting on an EOTech magnifier to go with it. There's also a vertical foregrip and replacement flash hider/compensator due to arrive today. Either the grip and flash hider or the magnifier will bring the total cost of aftermarket bits over the cost of the base rifle.
Unfortunately, the magnifier arrived with bad threads in the rear mounting hole. It isn't going to stay on the rifle that way, so it has to be sent back to either the retailer or the manfacturer for replacement. While it's wending its way through the postal cloud, I'll have to track down a low-profile rear sight to replace the one that came with the rifle: not enough clearance to mount the current rear iron and the magnifier at the same time. I'd like to use a Magpul MBUS, as they're cheap and swoovy, but I suspect it's not low enough.
The good news is that all the latest junk can be transferred over to another rifle when the time comes.
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2009.09.30 16:24 - Meatspace Stupidity, Toys, Pens, Whining
I started cleaning up a handful of fountain pens languishing by the spare sink on Monday. Most of them seem to be fine, but I did find a lot of dried-out ink in the Namiki Bamboo, and some ink residue in the converters of the Waterman Phileas and Parker Vector. The Bamboo is still soaking, but the Phileas and Vector got filled with some Mont Blanc 'green', which seemed likely to be the safest and most detergent-rich ink available to me. I have discovered a couple things:
1. The Namiki push-button converter holds a lot of ink, but is still an enormous pain to clean out.
2. Mont Blanc's blue-black ink stains surprisingly well. Better than anything else I have, actually.
3. Based on (1) and (2), using Mont Blanc blue-black in the Namiki Bamboo is contraindicated, and any pen filled with the ink should be flushed out as soon as it is empty.
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2009.09.12 23:47 - Entertainment, Music, Internet Stupidity, Miscellanea, Whining
My iPod came with a default playlist called 'Classical Music'. Intuitively, it contains anything in my music library that has been classified as belonging to the 'classical' genre.
There are currently twelve composers represented in this list.
- J. S. Bach is from the Baroque period.
- Anton Bruckner, Georges Bizet, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Franz Schubert are all Romantics.
- Fritz Kreisler and Gustav Holst are Moderns (though I'm using that term rather more broadly than the music geeks in the audience probably like).
- Sergei Rachmaninov and Gustav Mahler are arguably Romantic and Modern.
- John Williams is late enough that I'm not sure he isn't post-Modern, but I don't know that he's Post-Modern, either.
- 'Traditional' is not a composer. And "The Star Spangled Banner" isn't classical, even if Sergei Rachmaninov is playing it on the piano.
And, for the record, that's about as music-geeky as I get. I can't particularly tell the difference by listening, but it turns out that I still remember a little of the music education I got in elementary/middle school.
Related: apparently, Frederic Chopin looked a bit like David Carradine (or so it seems to me). I had no idea.
[Edited: After much fixing of syntax, a terrible and over-used pun occurred to me, so I updated the title.]
[Edited again: Fixed some syntax.]
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