Over on my gaming blog, I'm doing the Character Creation Challenge for 2025. Let's see how long my motivation lasts.

In the spirit of Hollywood's tendency to strip-mine itself, I present my pitch for the next mega-million-dollar franchise:

A shot-for-shot, line-for-line remake of the John Wick series, altered only as needed to support one key change - the dog, rather than John, is the protagonist.

After John's death, the dog becomes anthropomorphic. This occurs out of frame. No explanation is ever given. Before John gets dropped, it's a dog. After John gets dropped, it's a dog with opposable thumbs, upright locomotion, and human speech.

Everyone recognizes the dog as John's dog. Everyone knows it's an anthropomorphic dog. No one comments on the sheer fucking incongruous oddity of this.

The dog inherits all of John's standing at The Continental and throughout the society of assassins. Everyone accepts this as a completely normal occurrence, too.

There are no other anthropomorphic animals in the film. Only the dog.

The dog is, of course, voiced by Keanu Reeves.

One good boy in a world full of horrible people.

One of my new co-workers is on the board of a local gun club. (He's trying to get me to join the waiting list for membership, but NRA membership is a requirement, and fuck the NRA's bigotry and corruption with a dead rat wrapped in rusty barbed wire.) He's one of the organizers of their monthly competition events. Six months a year, he's running pretty standard IDPA/USPSA-style matches - defensive pistol, holster work, symbolic cover garment. It's all very stylized bullet golf.

In the off months, however, he's mixing it up a little bit. March was a BUG match: backup guns. Yesterday's was a combination BUG and shotgun (in separate stages - three each).

In theory, the BUG stages are for semi-autos or revolvers suitable for pocket carry or deep concealment. Each stage is designed for six rounds, no reloads. Also, because some of these bicentenarian motherfuckers have never heard of safety and shake like a dog crapping a peach pit, no drawing from a holster or pocket - each stage either starts with the gun in hand at low ready or staged on a table in front of the shooter.

I ran the March and May BUG events with a pocket revolver - double-action only, 2" barrel, iron sights. It's a long walk from my usual carry guns, but in the four months before the move, I shot almost 500 rounds with it in training, so I'm fairly comfortable with it. If I don't rush my shots too badly, I'm getting very acceptable accuracy at normal match or defensive distances.

It's been interesting to hover on the periphery of the side conversations at these matches and hear the complaints of the guys who don't actually shoot their light-duty carry guns that much (or at all). Sights are too small, can't get a good grip, trigger is too heavy, gun isn't reliable... okay, so the latter is not all that surprising in light of some of the bargain-basement weapon selections I've seen on display.

All of these are lessons I've had to learn myself, sometimes through expensive fuck-ups. It makes me highly aware of much I still don't know.

I killed off my old Mindspring email account yesterday. bad_karma@mindspring.com is now a dead address.

To be fair, I hadn't used it regularly since about 2007. I got that account in 1997 as part of my dial-up internet service in my apartment in Bowling Green, but once I switched to Macs for home productivity and writing, I jumped on the mac.com/MobileMe/iCloud integrated services and switched over all my correspondence. The old Mindspring account had a lifetime's worth of saved emails, but they were all stored in Thunderbird, which won't even run under newer versions of MacOS. So with those only available to me on the backup laptop, I was paying eleven bucks a month for nostalgia and the someday-maybe thoughts.

With the events of the past couple of months, I've been looking at things from my past that I can afford to cut away. This was one of 'em.

Also canceled Netflix and my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, but there was a lot less introspection associated with those decisions.

Irregular (but more frequent than here) gaming-related blogging is happening at https://libellus.de-fenestra.com/.

You can't be promoted high enough to not be wrong.

One of the things I loathe about living in Iowa is the extended (compared to what I'm used to from Kentucky) winters. My last couple of years in Lexington, I was able to start bike commuting - about seven miles each way, with a great shower facility and secure bike storage at the office. The equivalent facilities here are much less satisfactory, and honestly, living less than two miles from work means it's not actually good exercise to ride in. Counting the time to prep riding gear and change clothes after arriving, it's actually more of a time suck than driving - whereas in Lexington, I was actually seeing no time loss compared to driving in.

In months that don't suck, and on weekends when the prairie wind isn't howling, my partial substitute has been to ride downtown to pick up mail. That's about an eight-mile round trip, but I usually screw around for a couple of hours and extend it to 20 or so by doing laps around downtown and campus. However, that's only viable on good-weather weekends about May through October.

This is one of several reasons that my general fitness level has been slowly but steadily deteriorating since the move.

I've been eyeing indoor bike trainers for a while, thanks to DC Rainmaker's site (which I originally started following just for reviews on Garmin watches, but dude knows his shit). Over winter break, I broke down and wandered into the FLBS. I came away with their entry-level option, a Saris Fluid2.

I've gotten in about a dozen "rides" since then, which is pretty good considering I hadn't been on my bike since last August. The mind-numbing boredom of pedaling for an hour and going nowhere is alleviated by my excellent foresight and planning fortunate but completely-unrelated random action of wall-mounting our smaller television in the basement on an oversized VESA arm. I have to crank the volume up to hear it more-or-less-clearly over the hum of the trainer, but I can quite readily watch an hour-long show while maintaining a simulated pace of about 10-12mph. It's helping me chew through my various streaming queues, which I otherwise kind of forget are there.

I hope to get back to Five Parsecs From Home soon. I paused progress on it this week to dig into the combat rules for the 4th edition of Twilight: 2000. My first impression is that this is both much faster and much more lethal than previous editions, though it has some idiosyncrasies that I'll probably house-rule.

I generated a party of six PCs with the life path rules (which are a separate issue begging for a better character creation system). I selected the most combat-capable three of those and put them up against three stock marauder NPCs with AKMs. At the start of the fight, the marauders were looting an abandoned farm when they spotted the PCs coming and tried to set up for an ambush. The PCs were just starting after escaping from Kalisz and hoping to acquire a vehicle; the marauders' HMMWV provided an appealing option.

The marauders' plan was to take the PCs under fire as they entered the open space between the two main houses. However, the opposed Recon check did not go in the ambushers' favor and combat played out without ambush effects.

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The defeated mercenary tells what he knows, but it isn't much. He was hired for the hit via an anonymous comm call. Flash smirks, holding up the data crystal. "I'll bet I can dig something out of this," she purrs.

[quest progress: +1 quest rumor, next quest mission remains on this world]

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A hive swarm invasion of Hunnistea IV is imminent. The crew of the Obfuscator has a little advance warning, but not much, and a maintenance accident has left them with a ship of questionable reliability. They need to get off-world before things go completely bug-hunt. Crane thumbprints the fuel invoice [-5 credits] and begins snapping out orders...

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