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Author Topic: Now That's Entertainment!  (Read 4076 times)

xenoargh

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Re: Now That's Entertainment!
« Reply #30 on: May 03, 2023, 12:08:51 PM »

I'm glad you found Eden fun!

Spoiler
On the lack of lasers / heat rays: I think that reflected the period this was written in. In 1958, the laser wasn't a thing yet (1960). But this was the period where both sides were developing tactical nukes and new weapons of all sorts, like that ridiculous Davy Crockett thing, the SPIW flechette rifles, etc., etc.; basically, everybody was developing all sorts of weird stuff, most of which didn't pan out.

The weapons in the novel are also an important plot device. Having no graduated way to respond, it's radioactive annihilation or nothing, which sounds pretty Cold War.

As for other Lem novels, I really like Memoirs Found in a Bathtub and The Futurological Congress, but they're both more amusing than Eden and more cynical. The former is one of the best books about Cold War paranoia ever written; it's a literary version of The Gulag Archipelago, which is a lot harder going (Solzhenitsyn is rewarding, but not fun).
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Sorry you couldn't make it through The Brothers Karamazov; it takes foooorever to get going, but it's worth it, imo. Then again, I thought War and Peace was mainly not a waste of my time, lol.
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Re: Now That's Entertainment!
« Reply #31 on: May 03, 2023, 03:18:32 PM »

Having no graduated way to respond, it's radioactive annihilation or nothing, which sounds pretty Cold War.

That explains it.  I was looking for an in-universe reason they didn't have any automatic rifles or grenade launchers, but the jump from "this improvised gas pistol should work on anything that breathes" to "these antiproton throwers destroy anything made of matter and if you cross the streams the yield is measured in megatons" was for editorial reasons, not tactical reasons.

I have not even tried War and Peace, it is THE definitive way too long book for serious eggheads only.  Quite frankly, I would probably finish Tom Jones and Karamazov if I went to prison or was marooned on a desert island or strange alien planet and had no Internet and nothing to do but read.  Here in the future I can play the video games I imagined when I was five, I can talk to experts about anything from anywhere in the world, there's more hours of video posted to YouTube alone each day then there are minutes in the day for me to watch them.  So if something doesn't grab me in a couple of hours of reading, there's just too much competition for the rest of the hours of my attention.

I haven't read either of those other two Lem books, but consider me a fan, Eden grabbed me in a way that the robot stories didn't.  I have read The Gulag Archipelago, and possibly for the nerdiest reason anybody has ever read it.  I was reading the comic Uber, and I asked somebody on a comic forum why does Maria call the peasant couple who rescued her "kulaks" and why does it sound like a cussword when she says it, and one of the posters told me go read The Gulag Archipelago and I would understand.  He could have just said "it means a hoarder or usurer" and saved me several hours, but I don't regret reading it.  Heavy, soul-crushing stuff, but if I was scared of having my soul crushed I wouldn't have been reading Uber in the first place.  Looking at current events, there's a quote from Solzhenitsyn (good lord that is harder to spell than "resuscitate") about "the worst thing in the world" that I can't help see where he was coming from.
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xenoargh

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Re: Now That's Entertainment!
« Reply #32 on: May 03, 2023, 08:22:51 PM »

War and Peace, which I put off trying for years, was surprisingly not long-feeling (well, other than Tolstoy's occasional habit of lengthy discursions about Napoleonic warfare, lol). It's basically just a very long soap-opera of a novel, but most of it's fairly light and his writing style's not overly dense (well, for a 19th-century Russian, lol). I've read much shorter things that annoyed me more.

It's much less intimidating than Moby *** or anything at all by Faulkner, or even stuff like the original Frankenstein, lol. I still have nightmares about Moby ***, which I was forced to read for a class; I haven't the slightest idea why anybody thinks it's actually good.

As for Lem, yeah, he's been one of the folks on my bookshelves for a long time. I get the impression that he wrote a fair amount of stuff for young people (Pirx the Pilot, etc.) but was much more interested in the serious stuff; you can sense his delight in riding right up to, but not quite across, the lines of censorship and jail-time, in the books he did that were pretty obviously critical of the Soviet system.

In some ways, he reminds me of Harry Harrison, but Harrison obviously saw his job as entertainment, whereas I'm pretty sure Lem felt his job was to edify. But they both have similar literary tricks: they keep things moving, the characters are pretty shallow but their actions largely drive the plots, they have some hard sci-fi interest in gadgets as plot leverage rather than mere MacGuffins, etc.
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And the number of his book was four hundred threescore and fifteen
« Reply #33 on: May 04, 2023, 01:25:08 AM »

Huh, I've read half of Faulkner, Frankenstein, and most of the classics.  I never really had a problem with Moby *** (wtf, the forum censors this?), but then I don't mind the chapter-long digressions into cetacean biology or marine navigation.  I read the Wiki article on it and half the discussion on there was over my head, I didn't even notice the themes of divine judgement.  Here I just thought it was a long wordy story about whales.  Read the Wiki article and you'll see why everybody thinks it's a classic, and you might actually have enough education to understand what all they're talking about.  But then, if I was FORCED to read it, I'd probably hate it.  Literally everybody I know except me IRL considers Lord Of The Flies and Animal Farm "garbage" because they had to read them for school, not because they wanted to.

I make Moby *** references all the time at my job when talking to potential clients.  Not one of them has ever understood what I mean by, "Hey you ever read Moby ***?  You wanna see my Queequeg impression?  Draw a line in the sand with your boot and call it a snake."

It was actually those digressions that put me off the Brothers Karamazov.  I will watch a movie or read sixteen trade paperbacks about a guy who's different than everybody else and wears a brightly-colored cape, but to me, Karamazov felt "unrealistic".  I don't know any 19th-century Russian peasants IRL but inertial accumulators or antigravity that works off willpower is easier for me to swallow than the idea that a bunch of illiterate farmhands (many of whom had never even seen a book outside of church) would have multiple-hour discussions over several pages about the reasons for life and the nature of the Divine and all that.  I understand that the author had Something To Say, but for whatever reason I can't really hear him.  I feel like if they would split up the "story" and the "Great Literature" into two books I'd be able to comprehend them better.  That would entirely miss the point and ruin the book, I understand.

Hey, you want to talk about "unrealistic"?  In Frankenstein, the monster taught himself to read and understand English by studying a copy of John Milton's Paradise Lost.  Pretty sure that sewing corpse parts into the shape of a man and bringing it to life with lightning is more realistic than that.  I have actually slogged all the way through Paradise Lost, just so I could have it prominently displayed on my shelf without being a poser.

Harry Harrison
Regarding Harrison, I read Harrison, but only really as light entertainment.  There's one story of his that I'd consider serious "first-contact literature", I bet you know what I'm talking about.  The one where some humans tried to help an injured alien but
Spoiler
ended up killing him because his unEarthly biology was poisoned by the disinfectant on the bandages.
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I don't remember the name of the story.  I have several copies of the Stainless Steel Rat series and the Deathworld books here.  My favorite line in all of Harrison is the last line of Deathworld One, but (like in Emperor Joker) you have to read the context to understand why that line means so much.  My favorite line to quote out loud is the insult Jim learned from watching 20th-century TV.  "You are what the cabdriver called the other cabdriver.  You are a joik and woise."  (edit) I just realized that the reason I know how to spell "resuscitate" in the previous post without looking it up is from that one scene where Jim escapes the morgue.

My main problem with Harrison is that there's this consistent and ongoing thing where his heroes always have the exact sci-fi gizmo they need to get out of any jam they get into, and it's hardly ever described or mentioned in advance or even foreshadowed, you just assume that Jim DiGriz or Jason Three Billion has more xenotech in his pockets than I have at the abandoned station at Asharu.  If I had Jim's magic pockets I could be one-man Ocean's Eleven mixed with James Bond as easy as the Rat.
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Here's one.  When people ask me what my favorite novel in the English language is, I tell them, "well I'm not sure if this counts as the English language, but I'm a huge fan of A Clockwork Orange".  I flatter myself that I am the leading non-Russian-speaking expert on ACO in the state.  I certainly figured out by context that the glossary in the 20-chapter American version that they were teaching in college lit classes at the time was wrong about a couple of the phrases.  I hope they're not still teaching that "ultra-violence" means anything but a science-fictiony way of saying "violence".  There is NO WAY it means that other thing.  Also, the "knives" in "milk with knives in it" is some methamphetamine derivative, not literally broken glass as they told us in school.  I told Rob Zombie on his YouTube that since they're making a remake of everything nowadays and he's not doing Halloween anymore he should remake ACO (since he's a huge fan and all) and get McDowell to play the evil psychiatrist (since they're tight and all) and say the speech about delimitation (since they left that out of Kubrick's classic version).  I also want to see his deranged hellbilly take on the conversation the droogs had in the bar after they had their street fight over leadership, Kubrick missed the point of that scene and Rob Zombie would shoot it correctly.  He hasn't got back to me yet, though.

I'm a huge mark for McDowell in general.  Back when Fallout 3 came out I ripped his speeches off the 360 disc and chopped them up with Audacity to make my own speeches, and I still listen to them to this day.  I stick them in custom playlists in games that allow that so one out of every 300 songs on the radio in GTA is McDowell talking nonsense about real-world politics.  I should put some of my best ones up on YouTube or something.  Ehh, neutral effort smiley.

Longwinded possibly true BS about Cobragator
Back to pulp sci-fi.  Has anybody seen the movie "Cobragator"?  Does it even really exist?  There's trailers for it, there's an IMDB page for it.  In theory it aired on the Sci-Fi network twice, but I've never heard of anybody that actually saw it.  You can't buy it online and it's not even available when you hack the Hegemony relay, so I must presume that it doesn't actually exist outside of Chuck Cirino's personal vault.  I literally saw them making it on and around my work zone.  I would have "been in it" with like an actual part, but I didn't believe my boss when he told me about the opportunity, I just thought it was yet another wild story to trick me into working over the weekend without overtime (or pay at all for that matter).  "Come the REDACTED on, there ain't no REDACTED Cobragator in no state park, there ain't no Roger Corman coming to no REDACTED farm, and there REDACTED sure ain't no REDACTED Michael Madsen going over to eat dinner at my mom's house, you're more full of BS then all the cows in yonder field."  In theory he's in it (under his real name no less, as his name was so perfectly "country" that they changed the script to accommodate it) as his sole pay for all the work he did on that movie, but I've never been able to track down a copy to find out for sure.  In theory, I'm in it for five seconds in the background because they were shooting on a set next to the lot I was working on.

The joke's on me, it was all true.  My mom had a picture of Madsen sitting at her dinner table (in my seat, no less) with his arm around her and I have a signed DVD of Sin City.  I helped them unload some equipment a few times because I was on the clock, what do I care if I unload rigging gear out of a van or chainsaw trees or herd cows, the pay's the same.  So I met Cirino and Corman, and I had no idea who they were until the next day.  One time back in 1971 my dad got a similar offer, they needed a motorcycle stuntman and so they flagged down some random dude riding a Triumph and offered him a six-pack of beer to be in their movie for the afternoon.  If you ever see the Z-flick The Night God Screamed (don't, unless you are truly desperate for very early home invasion horror, it's forgotten for good reasons), the hippie biker that rides menacingly around the tourists at the gas station, that's my dad.
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« Last Edit: May 09, 2023, 11:13:51 AM by Network Pesci »
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xenoargh

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Re: Now That's Entertainment!
« Reply #34 on: May 04, 2023, 07:15:12 AM »

Cobragator? For real? As in, "some form of lost Sharknado that's probably just So Bad It's Bad?" Now I'm curious, lol. <does Internet things>

Ah. Cobragator has never been released into any form of distribution, despite wrapping in 2015 (or 2017, depending on the news source). Roger Corman was 90 years old when it wrapped, but is apparently still living, so there's a chance that it'll get released, eventually, maybe? I found stills of the SFX shots here, but that's promo stuff from 2016.
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Are you gonna bark all day, little doggie, or are you gonna bite?
« Reply #35 on: May 04, 2023, 09:37:23 AM »

Yes, literally from the producer, writer, and director of Sharknado and approximately sixty others.  The film Corman is most proud of from this century is, no joke, Sharkansas Women's Prison Massacre.  He said something like, I don't remember the exact quote, "If you're going to make [REDACTED], own that [REDACTED], make the purest [REDACTED] you can and be proud of it."

(Patch Day edit)
https://i.imgur.com/LtlX4AR.jpg
HE LOOKED AT ME!  HE LOOKED ME RIGHT IN THE POST!  I AM AWAITED THIS DAY IN VALHALLA!  (And Corvus, and Sindria, and Culann, and Persephone, and....)

Sensation Is An Honor, Pain Is A Privilege
So.  First impressions on the new patch.  Finished the tutorial, went to Jangala, picked up a mission from an oddly...familiar party of adventurers.  I'm getting the idea that I may not actually be the protagonist of reality this time around.  That's not really what I'm here to talk about.  I, I, I, Me, Me, Me, that's what I'm here to talk about.  It's not like I can talk about you, I don't know anything about you that you didn't tell me.  Anybody else ever been to Jangala with no mask IRL?

I have tasted police-grade pepper spray and military-grade tear gas, by choice, not because I was rioting, but because my beer-drinking buddies were police academy cadets or ex-military and they dared me to try it.  I fix fences in piney woods despite the fact that I have severe allergies, what you call "hay fever".  I mow rye grass fields with a tractor-mounted mower, despite the fact that rye is the substance to which I am most allergic of all the plants on this planet.  If I walk through tall grass wearing short pants, wherever the grass touches my skin, I will have red welts for the rest of the day.  I don't have access to Sector-tech antixenols, but they make some pretty good second-gen antihistamines here in the twenty-first century.  If I take a Claritin and an Allegra (or the Wal-Mart brand generic) each, it doesn't bother me at all. 

One time I was helping my buddy out with some noxious plant removal.  He was getting worn out and asked me if I wouldn't mind raking the rest of the weed piles onto the fire.  What I did not know was that in these two little weed piles were all the poison oak and poison ivy that the dude had peeled off the shed before I got there, I just saw kudzu, privet, cedar, and smilac.  Burning urushiol does not destroy it, it converts it to war gas.  Cue my dumb ass standing in the smoke as if it was as harmless as a campfire.  Cue the next day me realizing that I had poison oak over 98% of my entire external tissue layer.  I spent a month looking like Deadpool but without the cool regenerative powers (and even more naughty language).  If you aren't getting reputation points with an important faction, I do not recommend the experience.  That said, water hot enough to be very slightly painful, but not hot enough to cause actual burns, will give you an hour's relief.  I believe the sensations of "heat" and "pain" reset your nerves from sending the "itch" signal or something.  Bleach straight from the bottle, if your skin can tolerate it, will reduce the blistering and itching better than calamine.  The best cure, however, is preventative.  If you don't have access to a Sector-tech medbay, the very best thing you can do about urushiol is to wash it off before it damages you.  It does not harm you instantly, it takes hours to do any real damage.  If you suspect you have touched poison oak or ivy, wash the affected parts in used motor oil.  Yes, this is highly toxic and will give you all kinds of horrible diseases if you leave it on.  Don't leave it on.  Everybody washes their hands after they touch poison oak, but then they catch it anyway, because they didn't get it all off.  The tiniest little trace left behind in a wrinkle or crevice in your skin will spread and seep into pores.  Used motor oil is almost exactly the same viscosity and adhesiveness as urushiol, but it has the advantage of not being invisible.  If you cover anywhere you possibly have poison oak in motor oil and then wash it off until not a speck of black is left, you got all the poison oak as well as all the oil, and you won't catch it.

The softest and most pleasant-to-the-touch plant in all of nature is the underside of a poison oak leaf, it feels like a high-thread-count silk sheet.  Did He who made the lamb make thee?  To go back to Stanislaw Lem, I should prefer to believe for moral reasons that it was not created intentionally.
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« Last Edit: May 30, 2023, 03:36:26 PM by Network Pesci »
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xenoargh

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Re: Now That's Entertainment!
« Reply #36 on: May 07, 2023, 03:44:45 PM »

BTW, if you haven't caught it yet, the Amazon production of The Peripheral is amazing. I don't know whether you've read that book- if not, read it, then watch, then gasp, largely with delight, because it appears that a lot of staff from The Expanse got to work on a William Gibson novel... and they found the perfect Flynne.
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We can't stop here, this is strato-cat country!
« Reply #37 on: May 07, 2023, 08:37:39 PM »

I have not read or seen that, the most recent "new" Gibson I have read was Idoru, but I just now Googled it and I'm pretty sure I saw that distinctive white cover with the blue eyeball at the library in the "Free Books That You Are Only Allowed To Pay For If You Have A Library Card Or If It Is Thursday" section.  I'm going to go back up there on Wednesday and if it's still up there I will snag it.  I'm not even going to argue with those fools like I did last time, if they DEMAND I take all the books for free, I will just take them.  I felt like the judge in the Fenton Allen case with those people.  Not that I'm going to be reading books in any reasonable amount of time with a new StarSector version to play.  About the time I get bored with this campaign, my favorite mods will probably have updated.

(Peplat, the Xhan guy, already updated his mod, so I already have a sequel campaign ready.)

Xeno, I seem to remember back in 2014 or 2015 that you were a gun guy IRL.  Anybody ever play Red Dead Redemption?  When I first tried to herd cows IRL, I already knew how to do it from that one mission in Red Dead early in the game, that technique is literally how it works for real as well as in the videogame.  But there's more fun ways of playing Red Dead.  Apart from the farm guard job where they pay me to sit here and post all night, I've got a new job that I can work whenever I want.  A relative of the EMPPG guy has told me that he will pay me $10 for every boar and $20 for every sow that I shoot on his property plus he will reimburse me for the ammunition.  I have made forty dollars so far for two nights' work, but I'm seriously considering buying an assault rifle because all of my long guns are single-shot break action or bolt action and I could have made $200 easy last week if I could have fired more than one accurate shot every five seconds.
« Last Edit: May 09, 2023, 11:15:10 AM by Network Pesci »
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xenoargh

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Re: Now That's Entertainment!
« Reply #38 on: May 07, 2023, 10:49:30 PM »

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Take Nerdy Tests, Win Valuable Prizes?!?
« Reply #39 on: May 22, 2023, 12:23:01 AM »

Well, I finally got around to watching that video now that I'm close to "beating" a campaign of the new version.  I'm not sure I entirely agree with all of his conclusions, but I can't argue he does a hell of a lot of research.  I never gave it that much thought, I always figured that the designs were "iconic" because I first saw most of them when I was five and they were easy enough to draw that a five-year old could doodle a recognizable "X-Wing fighting Tie Fighters" with his crayons.

Regarding your answer about video game killers, I think you might be onto something there.  I don't even know the character "Ghost" but I've heard enough of the ex-military rednecks I work with mention him, I thought he was a character from Band of Brothers.  Most of those guys would be honored to have Ghost, or the concept of Ghost, backing them up while "downrange" as they call it.  So if you consider any kill by a military man who claimed Ghost as his battle buddy, Ghost would be legally or morally an accessory to that kill, then Ghost is in fact implicated in at least hundreds of times as many human kills as the Space Invaders.  Good answer.

Walls of Text, yew ain't seen nothin yet
(edit)  The First Edition Hardback of True Grit has been claimed on a different contest.

(edit)  The autographed limited edition of The Autopsy And Other Tales has been claimed on a different contest.  A winning entry will get a different prize of similar value to be determined if I get any entries.

Okay so here's the rules, explicit this time since talking around corners didn't get me any entries from this actual forum.  I wrote a supervillain rant, a "hate speech".  But it's more than that, it's a test.  Only one person on this forum deduced the title of the original rant, but nobody's even tried to deduce the title of my rant.  I originally wrote it in an attempt to get actual AIs to reveal themselves, but I might have posted it fifty years too early or in the wrong Cinematic Universe. 

So I'm going to quit talking around corners and just say it straight out.  Every paragraph in that rant contains at least one question.  The questions don't have question marks at the end of them, they have emotional and cultural associations around them so you have to deduce the questions.  "Why did he invoke this but not mention that?"  Well, yes, that is a question.  Deducing the question is half credit, deducing the answer is full credit.  I will even give you the easiest question.  One of the paragraph transitions is missing something all the others have, why is that?  The highest-scoring answer from a poster with an actual account on this forum (and feel free to make a gimmick account to increase your chances, but for the luvva Ludd stay in character until you get the prize, I will ask you questions to prove you are who you say you are or can at least fake it convincingly, if you make a gimmick SHODAN Prime account I am first going to ask you for a custom YouTube video and second I'm going to ask for the cancer cure recipie, talking in broken text won't be enough to fool me) will get (EDIT)something awesome and valuable sent to them in the mail.  For that matter, I'd throw in those PS2 games I already mentioned and a much-loved, much-used, but still playable launch-day still-includes-Hot-Coffee-code copy of San Andreas.  Offers limited to actual paying customers of StarSector with a legitimate account on this forum, on the continent of North America, in the Real World Cinematic Universe in the year 2023 (because I don't have a way of conveniently sending large heavy packages to other continents or dimensions).  This contest is not in any way fair, it is intentionally and deliberately prejudiced in favor of being culturally and morally similar to, or superior to, me.  Also, please note that I have already described explicitly what it would take to consider something culturally and morally superior to me, while talking around corners in this very topic about half the answer to the next question.  That's a hint, son.
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Here's an easy one!
Since I started this topic, I've been talking around corners about two movies that I have seen lately and quite impressed me, but I've never mentioned them explicitly.  I literally CAN'T be the first to invoke their names, if you want the full Network Pesci Giant Walls Of Text experience, you have to ask for it.  For one commemorative portrait of Benjamin Franklin on a piece of paper, made "collectible" because it has my fingerprints on it, what two DVDs did I buy last month?  This question can be answered correctly by reading between the lines in posts I have made in this topic only, although it helps a great deal to have seen and enjoyed the same movies as me.

To make the other half of the question even easier, here's another one.  I also bought a green umbrella on the same trip to Wal-Mart that I got those DVDs, and I stopped off at Tractor Supply for a roll of Red Brand barbed wire on the way home, because Wal-Mart only had that cheap so-called "high-tensile" crap.  I'm not planning to keep dry with the umbrella and I'm not planning to use the barbed wire to fix fences.  For one commemorative yadda yadda et cetera et cetera, what extremely-unlikely-to-the-point-of-being-statistically-impossible jackassed plan have I come up with?  What feat am I going to be the first redneck idiot to pull off, never mind that I'm not in the right Cinematic Universe to do it?

If you believe I'm lying and want to answer anyway to jerk me around, fine, answer in this topic, I'll get a kick out of it.  If you know I'm telling the truth, send me your answer via PM so others can't copy off your work. 
(edit)  I answered this on the next page, so it is no longer valid, not that I was getting a pile of entries anyway.
[close]

Medium Difficulty
There's only one Man In The Sky that I truly consider a moral role model.  Who is it?  That's fairly obvious, I literally named him in a different topic.  To get a commemorative portrait of Franklin, though, you have to answer another question.  What do I consider my favorite quote by him, the character-defining quote that is only two short words, the quote that is completely meaningless without the context?
[close]

Moments of Great Ownage and Unbelievable Stories
Everybody remembers their greatest victories, not everybody remembers their greatest defeats, or wants to.  I don't mind.  Without the lows, the highs aren't as high.  Without the hopelessness of the ending of the Empire Strikes Back (as much as 8-year-old me was like WTF when he saw it in the theater), the triumph of Return Of The Jedi wouldn't mean as much.  I've already spoken on here in the Xhan topic about the first time anybody in the county saw Quan Chi's Fatality in Mortal Kombat 4, I've already told most of the story of the Reaper from Subnautica and why I literally HAD to kill it with a knife so that I could sleep soundly.

I want to tell a completely unbelievable story of critical ownage in real life.  I've had me some great victories out in those piney woods, one time I killed two rattlesnakes in three seconds and I didn't see the second one until I had dropped my axe (the ONLY time in my life I drew a bush knife faster than that Raylan Givens jerk can draw his gun, and you better believe I've lost some sleep over the fact that I can't outdraw Givens), one time I did Ultimate Hawg Fighting with only my wits and skill and prowess and a 2'x3' sheet of particle board for a shield, but I want to talk about the greatest failure I've ever had.

I've mentioned this Colonel Sanders wannabe fellow that I work for.  A few years back, his brother (I've referred to this guy before as "the EMPPG guy" in The Last Word topic) told me that he had a chupacabra on his farm that nobody could shoot.  I said some typical toughguy macho BS like, "that's just because you haven't had me try yet."  Come on, I'm Jody but 75% less of a REDACTbag, I'm Barracuda but slightly smaller and a lot paler, I'm Tallahassee but like fifty some miles to the West and with a lot less zombies.  Not that he knew who any of those people were.  He told me that if I could stop this thing killing his chickens he'd reimburse me for the ammo and pay me five hundred dollars cash besides.  Well I would have done it just for the challenge, but you offer me cash?  He said that him and all his relatives had shot it (and this guy has a BIG family and all of them have more guns than Rambo) and none of them could scratch it but I was welcome to try while he still had chickens.

First time, I went out to the shed with a .22LR bolt action and a scope that cost twice as much as the gun (forty bucks at Wal-Mart), a comfortable chair, and a case of beer.  I wouldn't normally be drinking on the job or around firearms at all, but I didn't believe the story at the time, I figured I was spending a Friday night in a shed for no good reason so I might as well enjoy it.  Sure enough, about 11PM, a coyote, maybe a little lighter-colored than a regular coyote, starts nosing around the chicken coop.  I perched up in the shed window with my gun pointing out and shot that furry sucker right between the eyes.  It made a little "yip" sound and jumped back, then looked around and saw me (I was drunkenly fumbling with the bolt action trying to get another bullet in the chamber) and took off into the woods.  I told the bossman that I didn't see anything that night.

Second time, I thought, okay, I don't know what happened there, was I really that drunk or is my scope set wrong or was I not accounting for elevation or what?  So Saturday afternoon I made a point to make sure my scope was zeroed on some paper targets and tin cans, and got it set to where I could consistently hit a three inch target at fifty yards, no great feat of marksmanship if you know anything about guns.  I'm not some Bob Lee Swagger master sniper, I'm nearsighted to the point I'm blind without my glasses, I compensate for my near-total lack of skill by only ever firing if I'm sure I will hit my target with an accurate shot.  NEVER in all my years of adult life have I had to track a wounded animal through the woods.  I make them stop existing, I don't make them suffer.  If I wounded a game animal and DIDN'T recover it, that would be like having an ND, it would be a dishonor that would make me never pick up a gun again.  I'd rather the other guys on the job with their expensive tactical assault rifles mock me all they want, oh, Network Pesci got buck fever lookin at them hawgs!  Whatever dude, you fired thirty rounds and I fired zero and we both killed the same amount of hogs.

My point is, I made SURE there was no factors affecting my accuracy.  I left the beer in the fridge, and I paced off the difference between the shed and the chicken coop, a hair over sixty-five feet.  Who can't hit a coyote-sized target, with a scope, at 65 feet?  Second time, not quite midnight, the coyote comes out of the woods and starts sniffing around the chicken coop, I took my time lining up the shot an inch behind his front shoulder.  The coyote literally filled my scope at that distance, I physically couldn't miss.  POP!  Yip.  Coyote runs off into the woods.  I was prepared the second time, I didn't flinch, I kept a solid sight picture when I fired and I could swear I saw a little fur fly.  I went out to the coop with a flashlight and looked around, couldn't find a drop of blood.

So for the third time, I got a different box of .22s just in case I somehow had a box of duds that only misfired when I wasn't shooting at tin cans or plywood with paper targets and set up in that shed again the next Friday night.  Once again, a little before midnight, coyote comes out of the woods, I line up a shot between his eyes, and I swear the sucker made eye contact with me through the scope right as I fired.  He didn't yip this time, he just shook his head and ran off into the woods.

I did a little Googling and found that according to some mythology from the Tex-Mex area, I wasn't dealing with a chupacabra, I was dealing with a were-coyote.  Now you don't use a silver bullet on a were-coyote, you use a blessed bullet, but the catch is, the guy who pulls the trigger on the gun has to be the one to get the bullet blessed, you can't just buy blessed bullets off the Internet, even if they were really blessed and it didn't just say that on the package, if you don't hand the bullet to the priest yourself (or I guess be a gun-toting priest) it doesn't work.

There's only one local priest around here and he didn't take this story any more seriously than you are right now reading it, he thought I had a hidden camera and was pulling a prank on him for my YouTube channel.  The joke's on him, the only thing I've ever posted on my YouTube channel besides wiseassed comments was a video of me playing StarSector, and it got taken down because I was playing music from Star Wars and The Avengers in the background.  But since I couldn't get a blessed bullet and I couldn't ever defeat that were-coyote, the joke is really on me.  So this might actually be the origin story for the chip on my shoulder the size of a Safety Overrides Aurora I have against fictional monsters.  I must fight ALL the fictional monsters to redeem myself, otherwise I'm just some irresponsible gun-toting Elmer-Fudd-with-muscles-lookin idiot that shot the same coyote three times and it still didn't die.  I didn't even realize how much this probably-fictional failure bothers me so much on a moral level until I typed all this just now.
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« Last Edit: September 03, 2023, 07:28:22 PM by Network Pesci »
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xenoargh

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Re: Now That's Entertainment!
« Reply #40 on: May 24, 2023, 01:01:04 PM »

You managed to hit a coyote with .22 rimfire three times and it didn't even break the skin? Sheesh.

Being coyotes, they probably traded vests and helmets for meth they've been cooking in the woods. I swear, if those suckers ever get opposable thumbs, we're all goners in about a month. They'll ride the deer and coopt the dogs; it'll be a much better movie than Cocaine Bear was*.

I'm afraid I don't have any stories as funny about encountering North American mammals. Although there was that one time with a moose... but who wants to talk about moose?


*Seriously? It was a movie that had been clearly Edited To Death, with writing and acting that failed to ever figure out what tone it was going for. Classic "made by committee" film. Sorry I wasted my family's time watching it; we were all dumber afterwards, lol.
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Network Pesci

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Re: Now That's Entertainment!
« Reply #41 on: May 25, 2023, 12:01:30 AM »

You managed to hit a coyote with .22 rimfire three times and it didn't even break the skin? Sheesh.

Coyotes
That's certainly a very short and sensible way of telling the story the way I remember it.  Now I freely admit, it was dark, I was six beers down and working on the seventh the first time, but I was cold sober and determined to do it right the second and third times.  Specifically it was Federal brand Automatch Target Grade .22LR, not exactly your John Wick assassin's choice.  If it penetrates a quarter inch of plywood or goes halfway through a gallon can of coffee grounds, it should still kill any coyote on the planet.  The way you tell the story, it sounds almost believable, it could well be that I just happened to pick the three dud rounds out of the 375 in the box for the three times I was firing at a live target and the other 372 worked fine when I was shooting at paper targets.

I was among the LAST to attempt to shoot the "chupacabra" as they all call it.  If I believe all the different rednecks that told me the same stories about the coyote, none of these jokers had any better luck than me with 12 gauge buckshot, 30/06, 5.56mm, or 7.62x39mm ammo than I did with 1200 fps plinking ammo.  These guys are not the type to tell lies about how they FAILED to shoot something, I'm talking about the crowd from Preacher_WTF_Chin.jpg but even more ignorant, I'm talking about all the enforcers on Candyland but without the charisma of Walton Goggins.  Colonel Sanders's brother finally gave up on having chickens at all, he got a pack of Weimaraner/German Shepard mixes and lets them roam the farm when there's not people there.  Those kill every chicken within five miles whether they're on his property or not, as happily as starving coyotes do, but they leave calves, sheep, goats, and human children alone, unlike the coyotes.

I know how this sounds, like some fool telling crazy stories, but I leave 99% of the craziness off the forum because none of you will believe it.  I had two different invitations last year to join the eyeholes in bedsheets brigade, I guess just because of my hairstyle makes me look like somebody who would be morally or culturally so inclined.  I had a third boss, not fake Colonel Sanders or EMPPG guy, tell me that my nearsightedness could be cured if I would attend services at his snake handling church.  I handle them with a round-bladed shovel or a machete, not for purposes of demonstrating my devotion.  If he told me that glyphosate exposure symptoms could be cured at his church, I would probably give it a shot, I've done crazier for less.

Fun fact about coyotes:  They are "gun-smart".  Well, the ones around here are.  If a coyote sees you a long ways away, it will watch you cautiously.  If you pick up a stick, any old stick, a dead branch off the ground, and raise it to your shoulder like a rifle, the coyote will disappear in less than a second.  I thought that was BS when I read it in a Jack London story, but I've since then seen it in real life a dozen times.  They know "two-legs plus stick equals danger" even if they can't identify a real gun from the kind that grows on trees.
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less interesting, more believable
I actually have a photo of the time I killed two snakes in three seconds.  Let me just use the "Dark Filter" here to blur this up so that nobody gets offended by the squishy red bits on display in the picture.  I ended up cooking these for dinner that night, not because I had to or starve, just because I could.  I wanted to, it was metal and badass, the third most metal meal I've eaten in my life.  They really do taste like chicken, it looks like breast meat but it tastes like drumstick.

https://i.imgur.com/U0mzPSU.jpg

I'd be keen to hear your moose story.  The last time I saw a moose IRL was at Yellowstone Park when I was like ten.  I've made some pretty extreme claims such as "nothing on four legs or zero in this state can kill me if I see them coming" and I stick by it, the bears we have around here don't even get up to 400 pounds, but I would be genuinely scared of a moose.

Now somebody on this forum, not trying to namedrop, expressed concern to me over PM that I should get a bigger gun.  I had a very similar gun to what he recommended and I might well have been using the exact ammunition he advised.  I didn't even shoot this particular hog to hunt hogs, I did it to wash the dishonor off this gun with honorable blood.  (The gun had been used for rather heinous purposes by somebody that had borrowed it, and the rightful owner wanted me to put it to legitimate use.)

https://i.imgur.com/uWGtjVE.jpg

I don't know, I could literally go buy a civilian-legal model of assault rifle tomorrow and probably make back the money I spent on it within the week if I devoted actual effort and time to killing as many hogs as possible.  Your Red Dead Redemption character probably has more advanced weapons than me, I just never have bought a "real gun" of my own because it doesn't seem "fair".  I've got all these break-action and bolt-action shootin irons of my own, everything semiautomatic I own is a pistol.  It's not like I can eat more than one hog at the time.  The pot of sausage, beans, and rice I made from the one in that picture is probably the second metalest meal I ate in my life.
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xenoargh

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Re: Now That's Entertainment!
« Reply #42 on: May 25, 2023, 11:50:57 AM »

Ok, fine, moose:

Spoiler
I actually have two stories about moose that are semi-amusing. Unfortunately, these both happened sans photos long ago.

1. On a trip to Isle Royale (a god-forsaken, black-fly-infested spot on Lake Superior that tourists like for some reason) with my family long ago, we all hopped out, got bitten by lots of flies, and ascended the paths to the hotel they have there for tourists stupid enough to want to get eaten alive (seriously, this was my least-favorite excursion ever- the lowlight was a four-hour fishing expedition where we caught nothing, I got seasick, and biting flies attacked us the entire time).

As we went up the pathway, suddenly, we found ourselves blocked by a moose calf. It was only 4' high at the shoulder or so.

We all stood there, a bit confused, and the moose just stood there, blocking the way. Eventually my dad set his bag down, walked up to it and shouted while waving his arms (this is a universal technique for communication with large mammals, apparently). The moose looked at him slightly curiously, but didn't move. Dad then walked closer and slapped its rump while shouting "go", and, after a pause, it took this suggestion and wandered off the path. Then it tried wandering back into the path in the way of my mother, and Dad chased the animal through the woods off the path for about a hundred yards, shouting at it good-naturedly.

This was my first up-close encounter with moose, and what I mainly realized is that they aren't very bright... or they're majestically unconcerned with little beings. I guess it's optional; other than humans, pretty much nothing eats them unless they're sick or very young. Bears and big cats and wolves don't like messing with them much, and Smilodon is long-gone.

2. A few years later, we were driving up the ALCAN Highway (which is apparently more pleasant now than it was back then, because back then it was mile after dreary mile of rough, graveled road).

The campgrounds on the ALCAN back then were a really weird place; the population was maybe half Ultra Redneck, add a bunch of Dippy Hippies, mix in a tiny smatter of middle-class people Having An Adventure, usually young wealthy people without kids.

I don't think I've ever seen a crowd quite like that ever since. You'd see a dozen folks exit three beat-up aluminum-sided trailers and then they'd either set out a case of beer or improbably colorful tarps covered with Grateful Dead paisley right next to Range Rovers with a couple that looked like a photo out of Lands End. Really, those groups had a lot more in common than not; they all liked beer, music around the campfire, getting up earlier than is natural, mean dogs and dirty children. The yuppies, naturally, kept to themselves unless they encountered others of their kind.

We rode our bikes in these places around out of sheer ennui; after 10 hours of nonstop gravel road, we were always a bit carsick and bored out of our minds (you can't even read on roads that bad, let alone play).

One evening, however, was interrupted by a full-grown moose cow. Fully 6' high at the shoulder, probably 1200 pounds of animal. She'd just casually wandered in, completely oblivious to all the humans making yapping noises around her. One of her calves wandered the periphery, so there were a lot of sudden cries from mothers to their kids to "get the heck away from her baby!", etc. I, of course, being dumb, was maybe 30 feet away from her, just sitting there on my janky Schwinn.

I'm still not quite what irked her- the humans yapping all around might have finally penetrated her skull, or maybe she'd just remembered which bog she was headed to next- but she suddenly made a turn and picked up speed, heading out of the camp. Problem was, there were three parked Harleys in her path, and me. Without even slowing down, she casually brushed against one of them and knocked them all on their sides before joining her calf and heading off. Thankfully, she passed 15 feet to my side on the way out, moving like an unstoppable force.

The Harley's owners, some tough-looking old guys who emerged from one of the agglomerations, laughed at their situation; luckily, these weren't giant Gold Wings and their saddlebags were off, so the damage done was relatively minor, other than needing to be put back on their kickstands. No blood was seen on the Harley, so everybody presumed the moose was unharmed by her misadventure. As for moose, that was the last time I saw one that close. In Alaska, I saw Kodiaks and elk and moose, but largely from safer distances or from within tour busses.

Anyhow, that's my moose story. I doubt I'll ever get around to seeing elephants or hippos in their natural environment, but moose are pretty impressive, in a sort of dull, mountainous way. You definitely get the impression that they simply don't give a hoot about humans, unlike all the apex carnivores. I've known a couple of people who've shot them, and apparently, moose isn't all that great to eat (imagine tough, gamey deer with very little flavorful fat, and that's moose) but apparently they're considered an important hunting species to manage, and one hopes that climate change doesn't erase them, so that tomorrow's kids may enjoy their majesty, if they can be bothered from looking up from their phones.
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Mortrag

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Re: Now That's Entertainment!
« Reply #43 on: May 25, 2023, 01:04:59 PM »

@Network Pesci, reread some of your older posts and

about your were-coyote and blessing-problem:
You mentioned your problem was that you needed blessed bullets, but the priest refused to bless them for you.

But in 1 Peter 2:5-9 it is stated two times, that all christians are part of a holy/royal priesthood. That's not only why my mother blessed me as a child when I left the house. But also why a lot of ... I don't know the correct english word, but let's call them just "unordained people" who hold certain ceremonies (because we have a big lack of catholic priests here in Germany) are allowed to bless the attending people at the end.

So, as long as you're a christian yourself, have you tried blessing your bullets yourself? Or do your were-coyote-sources state there something different?
Because if you also blessed your bullets yourself, you should have definitely fulfilled the part about "the guy who pulls the trigger has to be the same guy who gets the bullets blessed".
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Pesci Me Boy Don't Know, You Got The Perfect Voice To Invoke Inferno
« Reply #44 on: May 25, 2023, 09:46:57 PM »

@xeno

I found the first story scarier than the second, I'm always far more worried about the animal you can't see than the one you can.  If I saw a moose calf, I would assume the mother was around somewhere nearby.  Let me just chase this guy through the woods yelling at it, that will work out great for all involved.

Network Pesci's First Hog Story
I posted this on here the year I first made my account, a few days after it happened, but I don't leave old posts up for years, once my advice is two StarSector versions out of date I take them down.  No reason to have a bunch of my posts talking about how since ballistic weapons run out of ammo and energy weapons don't, you can take a Tempest with Emergency Combat Repairs and essentially have infinitely regenerating hull as long as you don't take too much damage at once so you can kite multiple System Defense Fleets to death over an hour in the one and only solar system Corvus.

Once and only once have I got charged by hogs and been in actual danger.  The first week I was fixing fences in the woods, I was out in the piney woods on the east side, just walking the fenceline with a roll of orange surveyors' tape to identify and mark all the wooden posts that were rotten enough to need replacing and count how many I'd need.  As I was walking up and down these gentle hills swivelling my head frantically in every direction like Beetlejuice looking for the rattlesnakes that I knew were out there, I came to this washout ditch nearly eight feet deep.  In a natural low area, the running water had washed the dirt out from under a wooden fence post such that it was hanging in the air, about six feet above the ground.  I couldn't reach the fence post from either bank of the ditch so I had to climb down into the ditch to put tape on the post.

Once I got down into the ditch, though, there was a mother sow and a few shoats in that ditch with me.  I suppose me looming above them and the ditch surrounding them made her feel cornered, so she charged me.  I ran back up the side of that ditch near about as fast as I've ever ran anywhere and went up the nearest pine tree, lack of branches for handholds notwithstanding.  There was plenty of vines all over that pine tree for handholds and they had the softest, most pleasant-to-the-touch leaves you ever felt, they felt like oiled silk and had lovely triple leaf clusters that were green in the middle and red around the edges.

So I'm looking down at the hogs (who had lost track of me, it's a myth that they CAN'T look up, but they DON'T unless they have a really good reason) and looking at these vines right in front of my face and realizing what I am grinding into my arms and legs and chest and groin.  Yeah, poison oak.  The hogs dispersed after about ten or fifteen minutes and I went back to the barn to (uselessly, as it turned out, you have to use a ton of soap) try to hose this crap off.

Second worst case of urushiol infection I ever got, but easily the funniest.  I can take being the butt of the joke, it was my own dumbass fault.  Since then I always go armed with my little cowboy revolver if I go out in that territory or out of sight of the work truck in general.  The first time I ever met hogs in the woods is the only time I ever felt remotely in danger from them.
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Frank Castle Is A Ditzy Dentist IRL
Off the top of my head, the most badassed guy I know is a pediatric dentist.  When he's not drilling, filling, and billing, though, he has this vacation every year where he charters a private plane to fly over Alaska or Canada, and he jumps out of the plane, parachutes into the forest with a pack full of gear, and then makes his way back to civilization, surviving off what he can kill out there like if Rambo was the main character of The Revenant.  If you saw this guy, he is a dead ringer both in his size and his face for that fellow who plays The Punisher in the TV show, but he's probably tougher.

For a guy who makes me look helpless and soft, though, he has some strange gaps in his education.  He would rather make me dinner and pay me fifty dollars besides, any time he wants a new video game installed on his computer.  He got a copy of Sid Meier's Pirates on CD at Wal-Mart, but he can't make the CD play without help.  So a couple of years ago, the dude gave me money and fixed haggis (the only time I've ever had that, it wasn't exactly GOOD but it wasn't nearly as bad as you'd think) for dinner to pay me for, well, putting a CD in his computer, clicking "Next" a few times, and selecting "C:\Games\Pirates" and then letting it install for a minute, because he doesn't understand all that complicated computer stuff.  This guy is Peacemaker multiplied by Deadshot, and he has all his application shortcuts on his desktop.

He also literally cannot balance his checkbook, he has his secretary do that for him.  He can do math, he just refuses to.  The dude has hunted game on five continents and is proficient with every rifle ever made, but he's helpless with any Windows after 95, the guy does surgery on little kids' faces, but he doesn't trust himself to add up numbers and get the right answer.

Anyway the reason I'm telling you all this is that he showed me how to make moose meat taste good and it applies to all forms of wild game, if you don't like the "gamey taste".  I don't, I find it disgusting.  You marinate your deer or your moose (or your rattlesnake if you killed it in late summer or early fall) overnight in buttermilk and it not only tenderizes it, it gets rid of most of the gamey taste.  Personally I mix a cup of black pepper in the buttermilk so it adds flavor as well as takes it away.  The dude gave me a pound of moose jerky (and some cash) in exchange for putting the Midway Arcade Collection on his computer so he could play Rampage and Sinistar.  Best jerky I ever had by a long shot.  I was trying to get him to play StarSector but the refit screen scared him off, he was all about fighting spaceships but calculating whether his flux dispersal is high enough might as well be hacking the Gibson as far as he's concerned.
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@Mortrag

Pesci Is No Priest
I'm flattered that you'd think enough of me that you'd assume I have the moral authority to do my own blessings.  The only moral code by which I am remotely a "good person" is my own.  If you look directly above the story about the were-coyote, I point out in "Medium Difficulty" (and I really am offering a prize to the correct answer) that there's only one character that I consider a moral role model, and I know he's fictional, though I pray to him sincerely.

I'm not remotely a Christian, and if I was, I wouldn't be doing a very good job of living up to my own precepts.  I haven't even said the words "Christian" or "Bible" until this post, I always talk around corners about it and say "a very old book that everybody's heard of" because I'm not trying to trash anybody's real-world beliefs, or even mock any real-world religion by comparing it to my own frivolous and ridiculous (but completely sincere) beliefs.  I don't have one coherent set of moral practices that anybody would consider a real "religion" any more than I only use one Tech Level of weapons on my ships, I put Autocannons and Mining Blasters on the same Medusa if Minipulsers and Cryoblasters aren't available, I just use whatever works without worrying about if I really "believe" in it or not.

I never considered that I could do my own blessings before.  I've had extraordinary luck doing my own exorcisms and abjurations by adapting a more standard ritual to use characters that everybody agrees are fictional.  There's NO WAY that I could bless a bullet in the name of my benevolent divine, he hates guns and wishes people didn't use them, he would consider my prayer an obscenity.

But then, there's dark blessings too.  You gave me an idea, I can probably adapt that dark baptism ceremony from Moby *** to invoke something almost as bad that I sacrifice to every time I shoot a hog or blast the pirates in StarSector.  Not that I'm ever going to get another try at that were-coyote unless I trespass to do it, like I said, the dude gave up on keeping chickens at all shortly after I failed just like everybody else that ever tried.
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@nobody in particular

Aww, Fer Cute!
Had a possum get in my freakin house last week.  I don't know if it crawled up through the cracks in my floor or snuck in the front door while I was bringing in the groceries from my car, but I was interrupted during my fight with the Red Planet Guardian by some scratching and thumping uncomfortably close to my right leg.  This is within arm's reach of my chair where I write these posts or play this game.  The babies weigh NOTHING, I had to look in the bucket to see if I got him in there.

https://i.imgur.com/z3wwHR4.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/LWKjamm.jpg

A while back I was weedeating a fence, and I scared up a little baby bunny rabbit.  He kept running over to the next clump of weeds on the fence, the nearest cover in sight was always the next place I had to weedeat, and I figured he would probably panic and run directly into the weedeater sooner or later so I picked him up and stuck him in a bucket in the shade (I only had it in the sun to take the picture) until I was done with the power tools.

https://i.imgur.com/j7wAtyF.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/NTraeP6.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/kxzR96x.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/LUputAW.jpg

Quick impression for you:  Milo of Croton, guest-starring on Ow, My Balls!  This picture was taken at the exact second my expression is changing from "confident smirk" to "pained scowl".

https://i.imgur.com/CPTo9rC.jpg
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