Quote of the Day
What kills me is as I get older and find myself yelling at clouds more, I’ve come to a greater empathy for conservatives. Now my wife texts me from the grocery store and says “The full-grown adult in front of me is wearing a tail” and I just think “these fucking idiots. No way we survive this. The answer to Fermi’s paradox is that the high order civilizations destroy themselves….”
John Schussler
Via email April 13, 2026
I understand what he is talking about. But I’m an optimist and am not as fatalistic as John. But I have an underground bunker in Idaho. Also, last month ago I added another ~50,000 pounds of dirt on top of the bunker. Just in case.
You might think I’m joking (well, maybe I am a little bit).
This is the blend from the field to the north edge of the bunker:
This is the bucket loader I used to move the dirt. The ground was a little wetter than it should have been, but it got the job done:
If you attend Boomershoot this year, I’ll give you a tour of both the inside and outside. Friday evening at 6:00 PM.
So of course the day after I send you that it turns out the Japanese are coming up with actual robotic tails that…might have an actual use for the elderly. The world is a weird place.
https://www.designwhine.com/japans-wearable-robotic-tail-arque/
Sigh
All my prospects for a shooting partner fell through. So I guess I’m not coming.
I learned my first year: no spotter means no adjustment. No adjustment means you’re shooting on forlorn hope. That means turning money into smoke, noise and no booms.
I even have a snazzy new spotting scope, too.
I’ve been idly wondering about rigging up some kind of system where you can attach a high def, high speed camera to a spotting scope, have a remote monitor the shooter can see, maybe a joystick to slew the camera, an attachment for the barrel or a rail to uniquely pick out the report/recoil from the rest of the booms nearby, and have the system replay the shot and pick out the landing point from the target. If you’re very clever, and have some way to calculate the velocity after firing according to time, and the camera can pick out the bullet trace… you could calculate crosswind by horizontal deviation, but you’d have to have the scope dead over the barrel and inline, unless you could dynamically pick out the offset and orientation of the barrel relative to the spotting scope at time of firing and do the math to calculate deviation from expected external ballistic path…
Well if you could talk Joe into letting you (and others) place one of these downrange you’d be ok solo. But of course it can’t be near anything blowing up….: https://www.longshotcameras.com/
Not so useful when your intended impact area is about a quarter of a mile wide by a quarter of a mile deep.
Even their Ranger+ is supposed to go 10-20 yards from the target, and 1000 yards from you. What I need should go three feet from me and up to 1600 yards from a target. Math on that is quite different.
Some years I’ve gone to Boomershoot solo and shot with someone else who is solo, alternating who is spotting for whom as the barrels cool. Met some interesting people that way.
Not sure if I’m going yet. I’ve got a school commitment at this end I’m not sure if I can get out of.
I suspect that the more “advanced” a civilization becomes the greater the prevalence of mental dysfunction and illness. Eventually things collapse and a restart is in order. Which is why there may be NO space faring societies. They always implode before they can leave the home planet.