Time got away from me this weekend, so I wasn't able to finish my planned post for this week's RPG Saturday column. So let me leave you with this excellent video from Seth Skorkowsky giving advice to game masters on how to get your players more invested in their characters and the NPCs. If you like the Monster Hunters Inc. books by Larry Correia, you will probably enjoy Skorkowsky's "The Valducan" book series.
VIDEO: "Getting Players Invested - Running RPGs"
Seth Skorkowsky (16 min.)
The Declaration of Independent did not come out of nowhere. It was not simply a revolt against taxes imposed without any representation. Rather, it contains a long list of grievances which had been brought before the British King and had been ignored or punished:
We could draw up a similar list of grievances against the federal government. For instance:
Some longer and more involved reading for the weekend:
Your shooting should always be a separate intellectual decision. Your shot should never be part of a presentation or reload or stoppage reduction. Tap, Rack, Bang! is wrong, on many levels.
It's fine to make the decision to shoot before the presentation. It's fine to make the decision at some point during the presentation. But the shooting should never be part of the presentation. So, shooting every time you present is WRONG. Because such practice engrains firing when you decide to present. And if you have engrained such, it is impossible to present and not shoot. That's why the NRA and many gun schools do not teach Tap, Rack, Bang! Instead they teach Tap, Rack, Assess.
And some schools teach presentation without firing. At Front Sight, they taught to present to the target, sights lined up, slack out of the trigger. Getting up to that point should be fast. But a lot can happen / change between your decision to present and the attainment of your sight picture. So automatically shooting when presenting is not a good idea.
A few articles to which Jon linked that caught my attention in particular:
Two details stand out once the shooting started. People saw the rifle from a distance and were already moving before the first shot, which is awareness doing its job. And Green returned fire while moving instead of standing flat-footed in the open. I don't know if he was trying to close distance for an easier shot, get a better angle that removed innocent people from the background, or perhaps something else.
Be honest about the matchup, though. A pistol against an attacker in body armor carrying a rifle is not a fair fight. The rifle reaches farther and hits harder, and the armor covers the high-percentage targets. What carried the day was not gear. It was a defender willing to move and put rounds on the threat instead of freezing.
Don't chase the bad guy! Your goal is always to get away from the bad guy. The victim got body slammed. She could have gotten killed or permanently disabled. Don't chase the bad guy.
Don't get angry. Getting angry makes you do stupid things, like chasing the bad guy. If you have the chance to run away, RUN AWAY!
"What a cowardly thing to advise."
Running away is the smart thing to do. Regardless of how cowardly it may appear. Chasing the bad guy is stupid, no matter how brave it may appear.
If you are accosted by a group, the loud, mouthy one is the Double-D. He’s there to take your attention from the quiet one hanging back and looking around. If anybody has a gun, the quiet one does. Don’t get so tunneled-in on the loudmouth that you miss the others fanning out around to cut off your escape routes.
A good kit gun isn’t meant to replace your deer rifle or defensive handgun.
Think of it more like a quality pocketknife.
You may not use it every trip, but when you need it, nothing else is quite as convenient.
A kit gun should be lightweight enough that you’ll actually carry it, accurate enough for small game, reliable enough to ignore until needed and durable enough to live outdoors.
Those four characteristics matter far more than caliber or barrel length.
You might think that you are most likely to be attacked by bears when in the woods, but according to this article, "The animal behind most aggressive wildlife encounters may surprise you," elk may pose more of a danger. It notes that "[o]ut of nearly 3,000 wildlife incidents in Canadian national parks, more than half involved an elk, researchers report July 2 in Frontiers in Conservation Science."
Landles and Balakrishna analyzed 2,878 aggressive wildlife incidents from 2010 to 2023 involving five animals: black bears, grizzly bears, elk, coyotes and mule deer. Aggressive behaviors included chasing, attacking or bluffing a charge. The analysis identified which animal–human activity combinations were especially risky.
Elk topped the list, involved in 62 percent of all the incidents. One of the riskiest combos was elk and camping — the animals turned up in 84 percent of campground incidents. This may be because Canada’s peak camping season aligns with when the animals mate and give birth — times of heightened aggression for the species.
“Elk are herbivorous herd animals that don’t immediately inspire fear like a carnivore does,” Balakrishna says. Visitors may underestimate how aggressive they can be.
Grizzly bears and black bears accounted for 14 percent and 13 percent of the total, respectively.
The first desecration was discovered on July 12, 1957, by a groundskeeper at Roberts Cemetery on Creighton Road. A half-ton slab protecting the grave of a recently deceased woman had been moved to the side and the grave was opened. The woman's clothing was, according to reports, "disheveled."
Authorities converged on the scene and found that the body of the woman, a 22-year-old who died during a recent child birth, was soaked from the previous night's rain. Her right leg had been pulled up and was dangling over the edge of the coffin.
On July 15 at nearby Whitmire Cemetery, a man went to visit the grave of his recently deceased wife, clutching flowers for her grave. When he arrived at her burial site, he was horrified. Her grave's slab had also been removed. Her pajamas, the report said, had been pulled down.
The local sheriff called a press conference and ordered sex criminals rounded up and his deputies to "check all haunts or dives where odd ball character congregate." Patrols of the cemeteries commenced and things quieted down.
But on Feb. 23, 1958, a woman visiting the Whitmire Cemetery found the desecrated grave of a young girl who had been killed by an automobile on Nine Mile Road only a few months earlier. The slab, this time 1,200 pounds, had been moved, the lid of the casket smashed, and her clothes tampered with.
A reward for the ghoul's capture rose to $1,500, nearly $17,000 in today's money. But that was not the end.
On March 8, 1958, a woman visiting her husband's grave found a nearby gravesite had been disturbed and notified authorities. The body of an 11-year-old girl was missing, removed by the ghoul.
A team of deputies and other law officials began searching the cemetery and found nothing. A city patrolman arrived on his horse Trigger to search near the cemetery, which was surrounded by thickets of brush and bushes and swamp land to the northwest. About 250 yards away, in that swampy area, the body was found on the edge of the swamp. Her clothes were described, again, as "disheveled" but this time matches were found next to the girl's body.
Her body was taken to a mortuary for an examination. Doctors found that lipstick and rouge that had been applied to the girl before burial had been wiped away.
They also found that her body had been burned, and authorities speculated that's what the matches were used for.
No one was ever prosecuted. Jacki Wilson, a retired archivist for the University of West Florida Historic Trust, who has relatives buried at Whitmire Cemetery, "has heard whispers and theories too, though no suspect was every publicly named."
"There was some lore that it was a prominent person, though I never heard a name," she said. "It was all hushed and I have nothing to back that up, but it was just something that came down through the years. Either way, it was horrible if you have family members here."
A file obtained from the Sheriff's Office by a local newspaper showed that the Sheriff had, over the years, investigated several leads, including a similar incident from Feb. 18, 1965. In that case,
Dirt had been removed down to the casket boards and the casket of Maxine Cooper, a Black female around 47, opened. Investigator Otis Davis wrote the clothes had been disarranged, and her slip “had been pulled up exposing the pelvic area,” and the “area of clothing around the breasts apparent molested.” A shovel was found near the grave. Cooper had been buried four days earlier.
The Benboe Funeral Home told the investigator that the woman had been sick a long time and had died at home. No jewelry had been buried with the body. An additional examination found the body had no indications of being mutilated or disfigured. The file had no additional information on the crime.
No more reports of grave robberies were in the folder, but the documents did contain a sheet of paper with this note—“This case has not been cleared—it is filed with murder cases—do not destroy. Ghoul of Whitmire Cemetery.”
They could have made a small fortune auctioning off tickets to participate, but instead the state will be using experienced law enforcement officers that volunteer to be part of the firing squad. From the article:
Beginning July 1, Idaho became the only state in America where condemned inmates will, by default, face a hail of bullets instead of lethal injection—a dramatic policy shift prompted by last year’s botched attempt to execute convicted murderer Thomas Eugene Creech.
Republican Gov. Brad Little, who seeks a third term this November, signed both firing squad bills into law. The 2025 bill delayed implementation so IDOC had time to rebuild its execution chamber.
I would point out that Creech is a serial killer and seriously evil. It is an affront to all that is good that Creech is still alive. Anyway, after an attempt to execute him with lethal injection went wrong--the doctor spent over an hour unsuccessfully trying to find the vein, which sounds a lot like the phlebotomist at my doctor's office--the legislature and governor had enough and a bill was quickly passed changing the preferred execution method from lethal injection to firing squad.
Of course, being the government, they had to waste as many tax dollars as possible. Law enforcement insisted on a special facility to conduct executions at a cost of $1.2 million. And for some reason also insisted on the latest and greatest rifles: "five Daniel Defense DD5-P [sic: probably the DD5-SBR] rifles chambered in .308 Winchester, fitted with scopes, suppressors and bipods, at a cost of more than $24,000." I'm pretty sure that five Ruger American bolt action rifles would do a better job at a fraction of the cost. And bipods? And scopes? Seriously? It's in a room at a distance of only 10 yards, not hundreds of yards across a canyon up in the mountains.
From the Daily Mail: "Indian migrant murdered wife at $1.3m mansion just six days after he arrived in Canada." He claims he only "accidentally poked" her in the stomach once and has no memory of how the other six stab wounds happened.
"Minnesota's Democrat Governor Tim Walz pardons illegal migrant PEDOPHILE who raped girl aged 10 to stop the predator from being deported"--Daily Mail. Tou Lue Vang had "admitted to repeatedly sexually abusing the child for four years when he pleaded guilty to first-degree criminal sexual conduct in 2006, and at the time he justified his actions by claiming it is a 'cultural thing' to 'marry and have sex with girls as young as 12.'" Vang, it should be noted, had initially entered the country illegally.
A headline from the New York Post states: "NYC bakes as Central Park hits 100 degrees for first time in over a decade amid blistering heatwave." How can it be the hottest in decade if every year for the past decade has been the hottest on record? The hottest temperature recorded in Central Park was 106° in 1936, and the other big years for heat with 4 days each where it was more than 100° were in 1953 and 1966.
Following up on news earlier today of a transgender shooter who was apparently stopped before committing a mass shooting, we have another incident where a transgender killmonger, "Teha Delaruelle, who briefly volunteered on the campaign of Wisconsin Democratic Socialist Katrina deVille, who is also transgender, sits in front of a dry-erase board scrawled with 'kill your local Republican' in black marker" and "vowed to unleash 'trans jihad' against the 'animals' in the MAGA movement in a series of unhinged videos on social media."
Time got away from me this weekend, so I wasn't able to finish my planned post for this week's RPG Saturday column. So let me leave ...
