I've been working on the package for IST Embassy Staff again and was thinking that in an increasingly hostile anti-UN anti-IST world the IST's would put some emphasis on training their people to resist sieges and defend themselves against threats to the embassy proper. To that end I was thinking of some kind of IST Embassy Staff Boot Camp where they would learn the following skills:
Guns/TL8 (Pistol) (E) DX [1]; Soldier (A) IQ [2]; Brawling (E) DX-4 [0]; Electronics Operation/TL8 (Comm) (A) IQ-5 [0]; Electronics Operation/TL8 (Security) (A) IQ-5 [0]; First Aid/TL8 (E) IQ [1]-10; Guns/TL8 (Shotgun) (E) DX-4 [0]; NBC Suit/TL8 (A) IQ-5 [0].

Any thoughts? Suggestions? Comments?

Am I correct in assuming that the IST Embassy staff are all IST employees and not local contractors due to the often sensitive nature of IST work?

Regards,

M
Michael R. Smith (lastfreehuman@gmail.com)
GURPS IST Aleph Wordpress (http://istaleph.wordpress.com/)
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Hey Bob - saw something tonight I thought you'd get a kick out of. Check it out - 

This is a gazillionare who makes the case that income inequality is bad. Not from a moralistic POV, but from a business POV. I cannot disagree on any of the points he spoke of. I would vote for a politician who can craft policies of his talking points, regardless of party. I'll even hold my nose and vote for Rand Paul if he enacts policies like these. As he said at the end, if we let the trend continue, we either become the future version of the pre-revolutionary france or a police state. Then comes the revolution.

__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

How fast can Doug fly? Are we talking up to Mach 20? How fast can he move? Fast enough to leave an after image?
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

You Might be a Redneck If ... (January edition)
... you always take a penny but never leave one.... you think "loading the dishwasher" means getting your wife drunk.... your four-year-old grandson has ever said, "Mommy won't let me light the fireworks with grandpa's cigarettes anymore."... guests change their mind about needing to use your bathroom once they see it.... you think the stock market has a fence around it.... your boat has neft the driveway in fifteen years.... you think an instant message involves your middle finger.... you burn your yard rather than mow it.... the Salvation Army declines your mattress.... something hisses at you every time you peer into your crawl space.... you were shooting pool when any of your kids were born.... you never need a menu at Dairy Queen.... you have a script next to the phone for the kids to read to debt collectors.... you clean your fingernails with a stick.... your family business had to close down because the police found out about it.... there are more than five McDonald's bags in your car.... you've ever financed a tattoo.... you've ever passed a lit cigarette between moving vehicles.... no one outside of your family can understand a word your grandpappy says.... you are one armadillo away from a new pair of boots.... you've ever stolen toilet paper.... you've ever drunk box wine from a Pringles can.... you move your trailer fifty feet so you can use your neighbor's Wi-Fi.... you remember exactly where you were when you heard Hostess had gone bankrupt.... people hear your car a long time before they see it....you've never owned a vehical with working windshield wipers.
___________________________
"I've always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific." - George Carlin

They sending me to Chicago next week.
Brrrr!
__________________
Into terror!,  Into valour!
Charge ahead! No! Never turn
Yes, it's into the fire we fly
And the devil will burn!
- Scarlett Pimpernell

Nothing quite gets across both the sheer scale, intensity and creepy wrongness of a full-scale realistice Evangelion Unit, than full-detail CGI animation.

http://animatorexpo.com/evangelionanotherimpact/

Meeting one of these in person, would be the dictionary definition of awesome.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?

Massive project to sequence the DNA of bacteria and other microorganisms found on the New York Subway discovers that half the stuff they've analyzed was previously unknown to science.  Gizmodo article here.  Project report here.  The Gizmodo article has interesting side links, such as one to an interactive map showing what strains are where.

Oh, and this great quote:

Quote:Initial database searches with subway DNA, for instance, turned up false matches to the Tasmanian devil, the Himalayan yak and the Mediterranean fruit fly—all creatures highly unlikely to be found in a New York transit system.

Sometime early last year, an idea for a fanfic coalesced in my head.

When NaNoWriMo started, I started writing it for real. I had a few pages of notes before, but nothing else. It rapidly became clear that I wasn't going to make it to 50K, or anywhere close, just like every other time I'd tried NaNoWriMo. But this time, I managed to establish a habit: at least one sentence a day. Even that bare minimum was more than I'd ever accomplished.

In December, I expanded beyond one sentence, to a minimum of 50 words per day, more if I felt like it. On New Year's Eve, I managed to write more than a thousand words in a burst of enthusiasm and motivation. In January, I upped it to 100 words, despite everything else going on in my life (some of which is still going on) that left me feeling pushed past my limit.

And then, on January 21, that writing habit flickered and died, like so many of the habits I've tried to build. Now it's gone, like it was never there. Worse. It's always so much worse, trying to rebuild a habit after you've lost it, at least for me. The most important thing a writer's supposed to have, and I don't have it anymore. I've only written one day since then.

Even after January ended, with all the exhaustion it brought me, I was at a loss. Too many things that demanded my attention, both in Houston and in the Wired. Too many inadequacies.

And then on Monday, February 2, I read that a man approximately seven thousand times cooler than I'll ever be had died. A man who delighted, who thrilled, who awed, who inspired. A man who'd been doing so, showing talent and focus and a work ethic all far beyond my own, since he was no older than I am now. 160 miles away from me, though I'd never met him. I never would have, probably -- cons have always been too intimidating for me. This is what the people who knew him best said:

"In lieu of flowers or gifts, we ask that you simply do something creative. Use your imagination to make the world a better place in any way that you can. If you know Monty like we do, then you know he would certainly be doing that if he were able to."

I haven't done that.

In the past half-decade, what have I created? A few "In Which I Watch" threads on RPGnet. Index pages for Shadowjack's. Scraps of crossover ideas like my NanoStep or my snippets in this thread or this (which was more than a half-decade ago), not intended to be developed any further. The beginnings of a FanFiction.Net analysis. A single 7,000-word chapter of an Evangelion self-insertion in 2011 that I stalled on not long afterward, despite grand plans.

It's not lack of "natural talent" that's held me back. And it's not lack of time -- I've got the same 24 hours as everyone else, and I don't work more than 40 hours a week, with maybe a 45-minute round-trip commute (and that's only been over the past 16 months). It's been my own cowardice, my inability to manage the time I have, my lack of focus and self-discipline. Every project suffers, even watching a one-season anime series. Even starting this confession or whatever-it-is took an Internet outage for me to focus on it, and I'm struggling to finish it now that the Internet's back.

The story I started in November, under the title of "The Record-Keeper", is one I've hesitated to share. I haven't posted any of the 10,000+ words I've written online, though I've thought about it. I've thought that I could share it with a few people, in the hopes that they could tell me where my deficiencies are and how to improve, beyond the obvious matter of rebuilding the writing habit that I've lost.

Even though I hit a good dividing line at the end of the year, though, I've been too uncomfortable and intimidated to share. I've avoided the best motivational tool there is, by all accounts I've heard -- encouragement from others. The whole reason it's been three years since I've shown my face here is because I was too ashamed of not having another chapter of For the Future to present.

It's time I stopped the dithering. I don't have time for it. If Monday's news drove home anything, it's that I don't know how much time I do have.

An allergic reaction. Completely random. Might as well have been a lightning bolt. Who by water and who by fire...

Anybody who wants, I'll send a copy of the first chunk of The Record-Keeper. It's around 7,000 words long. I don't know if the whole thing ought to be the "first chapter", but the end is definitely a chapter break. I'd appreciate any and all efforts to diagnose its problems, so I can get a better grasp of where my writing skills are. In the meantime, I plan to get my FanFiction.Net profile up to date, and eventually start posting the fic online. FFN, AO3 if possible, maybe even Spacebattles and Sufficient Velocity. A new thread here, too. And maybe in the next few weeks, I'll be able to get my writing habit going again. God willing, I'll someday find what it takes to keep my better habits from collapsing at a stiff breeze.

It's not much. But it should serve as a start.

It's used, of course - and it's in Vancouver. But you know you want it...

1978 GMC G15 Custom Star Trek 'boogie' Van - $9500 (east vancouver)
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012