Yeehaw, let's get that Mechwarrior/BattleTech Space Trucker country vibe going! One thing I love about the BattleTech universe is that they actually put some thought and love into logistics and that beans and bullets (and fusion fuel) are important. youtube.com/watch?v=-XEI8kdP…

A fun thing I like to do to make a sci-fi universe I'm enjoying to feel personable and lived in is to create characters I can then assign into my mechs (and I use them as recurring characters in songs I'm writing). So I'm giving them an 80s collectible baseball card treatment. I should develop Ricardo of Ricardo's Rangers as character as well, my MechTech (with the blues), and my long suffering Jumpship Captain, mister Hatchetman, and my Raven pilot that thinks he's Batman while tagging things for Arrow IV.

Was playing MW5: Clan tonight and got a bit too aggressive to start on the Final Santander campaign mission. Shadow Cat was down to 35%, Guass rifle blown off, all I had was two Medium lasers.... Then I only had one. But I was the backstabbest clanner ever, blowing arms off to take hostile weapons, and dodging everything I could while my entire lance went down and still managed to win the mission... I must have shot 200 times with those 2 lasers only to finally clear all those heavies. Missions like that stick with you!

Did some painting tonight, Clan Ghost Bear Mad Dog/Vulture mech. Color scheme turned out better than I'd hoped!

So, bought Mechwarrior 5: Clans last night. Initial thoughts after firing it up. Choosing Smoke Jaguars as the main faction for the base game was a terrible idea. Connecting to Clanners to start is a sell for the BattleTech community, and then making them the actual very unredeemable war crimes clan that has almost zero humanizing character growth in lore is stunningly bad. I wouldn't play it if not for the Ghost Bear and Wolf DLC. I might not ever play the Jaguars, and just do those two DLCs... The only reason I talked myself into trying it, is I remember fondly the 90s MW2 and Ghost games and wanted to see how it updated. If you've played MW5, you can instantly feel the improvements of Omnimechs over IS mechs. They run faster, cooler, hit harder, and take more of a beating. The cut scenes are pretty awesome, they don't expound too much, but for someone steeped in 30 years of lore, it's cool to see representations of people and events that in large part resolve quite favorably to mental images from reading the lore. Lastly, can we have a Jade Falcon Malthus/Pryde DLC just so we can laugh at how arrogant and over the top they are, pretty please?! Maybe give us a Red Corsair campaign where you can pretend to be a holovid pirate while secretly undermining the Treaty of Tukyyid and face off against the Wolves and Kell Hounds

I was playing around making songs last night and whipped up this track cover. My wife says this is the nerdiest song she's ever heard. But how else are kids these days supposed to understand the difference between nuclear fission and fusion when playing Fallout? Seriously!?!

A hidden gem if you can find 'em when passing through. It's long been a KY specific soft drink, but one of the better ginger ales in the continental US. It's mellow, vaguely citrus, ginger strong, but not like a Ginger beer or as strong as Vernors. I acquired a taste back when the Knob Creek Machine gun shoot was a thing.

Sometimes you need a proper unhinged baddy (who sincerely doesn't know how whacked out their are) to face off against, so I turned some spare mechs into a Jade Falcon force for my BattleTech collection for my Clan Wolf and IS forces to fight. "You dare to refuse my Batchall!"

Introduce yourself with 4 'Mechs.

"Yes, but what kind of American are you? Ah, I see, the kind who makes homemade cast iron open faced Apple pie..." And it's an old family recipe, I can't share it under pain of being haunted by my Grandmother! 😉

So my recent experiences with AI: Grok: "Grok is under heavy usage right now. Please try again later or upgrade your plan to get priority access". I usually can get it to work early morning and later at night. No more image generation. Starting to wonder if the monthly spend is worth it? It's unavailable more than it's up somedays... Gemini: "I'm sorry, can we try something else" Hit this twice recently, and had to tell it to stop lying to me and tell me what the real issue was. First time it was because a Warhammer 40k themed image about the Astra Militarum with a central heroic figure watching a parade apparently hit's the "you might be a fascist" guardrail. Image generation shutdown until you delete the chat. Second, don't ever mention you have a eidetic/photographic memory... Apparently Gemini's guardrails also flags this as having a 'mental issue' despite it being a normal but rarer human cognition ability (ooh scary, I can see pages from a textbook when I close my eyes), and will lock all image generation abilities and clamp down security controls until you remove all the offending chats. 'Tis all rather silly and annoying... Eh?

"The Hatchetman took his axe, Gave the Griffin forty whacks. And when he saw what he had done, He gave the Marauder forty-one." Occasionally AI gives you a fun generation!

To those debating about dropping $700 on a bipod. Shooting sticks are 'free' in nature and you can make some DYI ones with paracord and some grip wrap. They also double as nice walking sticks in bad terrain. Hunters have been using those for at least a couple centuries... Also, a nice Irish shillelagh can double as a shooting stick, and 'go away unless you want a headache' walking stick. Or for the fancy lads, a nice Bartitsu aid. Stay frugal, my friends. There are great, easy, and cheap solutions to almost every use case for hunting and shooting that doesn't require expensive gear. Our ancestors did it quite successfully with sticks, flint, stones, and a little ingenuity.

I know AI has it's detractors, it's never the same as a human artist. Fair enough, I prefer human artwork anyways, but sometimes it's hilarious when playing with an idea for a song. Like a BattleTech BNC-3E punch happy Mechwarrior delivering the righteous right hook of doom!