So I kind of told Regina I'd do a political post today in honor of the Iraqi elections. But first, I'd like you all to witness Darth Fuzzy's pictorial debut. Woot.

That having been said, let's talk about Iraq for a bit.

I've got a whole host of things I want to say on the subject, but let's start by noting the vast numbers of Iraqis that showed up and voted in the elections with a considerable amount of pride, risking life and limb to do so. Pretty much no matter who ends up winning said elections, the mere fact that they showed up and did so is worth an awful lot. In the sense that our two biggest goals in Iraq are to do in as many insurgents as we can, and set up a working democratic government, this is very very good.

Switching to a slightly different yet related topic, I've complained a lot in the past about not really knowing what's going on in Iraq. As far as the specifics of Iraqi party politics and such goes, I still don't have a whole lot of clue or much idea on where to get one. On the other hand, it's a relatively unique feature of our war in Iraq that US soldiers can actually blog from there. So I've been reading a number of them on a fairly regular basis, including this one, this one, this one, and few others besides. There's a lot I could say about them, but for the moment I'll just note that, while none of them is exactly clairvoyant about what's going on, these people know more about it than I do, and so there's a lot to be learned from reading them on a whole variety of issues.

I guess most importantly to where I think I'm going with this is that most if not all of them feel completely screwed over by media coverage of the war, their roles in it, and what they're trying to accomplish - namely killing bad people and making Iraq safe for democracy. And to hear most of them tell it, they think they're honestly accomplishing something. Filter that how you like, but given the elections turnout, I'm inclined to believe that Iraq may well be going much better than one might otherwise think.

Which makes one wonder how many things get spun in a bad light in the media just because George W. Bush believes in doing them, and in the last four years we've just sort of come to reflexively bash Bush every time he opens his mouth.

Which doesn't exactly make me feel better about the whole election thing in any case, but.

Anyway. One of the interesting contrasts for me during this whole thing, and maybe this is just me being too much the detached historian, but how different this whole thing in Iraq has been from our last big adventure in nation building, Vietnam. A few things to note about that:

1. In Vietnam, the opinion of US soldiers of both military and civilian South Vietnamese was generally pretty low. In Iraq, for whatever reason, the opposite seems to be the case. We seem to be happy enough to work with the Iraqi police and army, and relations with civilians seem to be about as good as they can be under the circumstances, in the words of the forementioned US soldiers. Having read Vietnam/Iraqi vets talk about the subject, the attitudes are very very different.

2. I haven't got a whole lot of reference for this, but from what I can tell, Iraqi confidence in their own government/electoral process/whatever is reasonably high. Contrast this to, say, Diem, Ky, or any SVN leader you want.

3. I had a 3, but I forgot it. And since we're getting pretty long, I'll cut off here. Tune in next time for...we'll see, but probably Laurent guest blogging my adventures on the obstacle course, complete with pictures.

"Well, hopefully legless zombie pigs with knives don't work their way into porn."
---Whir

This one's a bit odd. I don't usually get all Livejournalish on here, but there are days, and then there are days. I've got a few things to say about RPGs, but I'll do that tomorrow or something.

Some of the best moments I had at OSU were, oddly enough, usually about 4am at night, in dense fog, walking campus. We all have our ways of relieving stress, of escaping it all for a little while, and that was mine. Campus at night was very quiet, very peaceful, and the MU lit up in the fog was spectacular. So every so often, I'd go out for a walk, and half an hour later I'd usually feel better.

I find it particularly odd that Spider-Man 2 of all movies should evoke that particular feeling, but somehow it did. Maybe I empathize with Peter Parker way too much for my own good. In any case, it turns out that the fog's particularly thick out tonight, and there's a nice bright moon. And I live in a forest. Peaceful, yet spectacular in a rather different sense from the MU, as it were.

Mirror in the sky, what is love?
Can the child within my heart rise above?
Can I stand through the changing ocean tides?
Can I handle the seasons of my life?
Oh oh, I don't know

I plead forgiveness for the title. But it's sort of appropriate.

Some time back, like in December, Tali says to me hey, you should come up to Portland, hang out, see Laura and me, and see Portland. Ok, I say, give me a date and some directions, and I'll show up for a weekend. The 15th/16th gets picked as the Days, and that's that.

So I leave about 10am on the 15th. It's a 2 hour drive to Portland down I-5, plus a bit more time to get to I-5 from my place, so I'm cutting it a bit thin if I want to arrive at noon, but ok.

As I'm getting in the car, I scrape a very very thin film of ice off my side windows. Well, I say, it's probably just from the higher elevation we're at. Ought to be ok in the lowlands.

Turns out that it more or less is, except that it's raining, and my wipers are only half dealing with it for some reason. Odd, but ok. Too, there's like nobody on the road north, so I'm making great time. This is good, I figure.

So I'm seeing these signs saying "No trucks past Wilsonville" all over the place, and I'm thinking that that's slightly iffy, but ok. And, then, quite suddenly, I hit the north edge of Wilsonville, and everything just stops dead. Trucks are stopped, and cars are getting through at like 5 mph. And there's, well, slush on the side of the road.

Danger, Dwip Robinson. Danger.

But I am, after all, me, and I did say I'd be there, so on we go. And the road's sort of slushy, and cars are going slow, and...whoops, that was a patch of ice. Hrm. And this is about the time when I have the presence of mind to glance down and notice that my wipers are covered in like half an inch of ice. Ruh-roh.

Danger, Dwip Robinson. Danger.

But I keep going, at the blazing speed of 20 mph, slightly down from the 75 mph I was doing earlier. And then I hit Portland. Which has, you know, a lot of people. And I've of course never driven in Portland before. So I get to drive over a lot of iced-over freeway bridges, through these like three-layer bridges and shit that nobody should ever need to build for any reason, and I'm still going like 30 mph even though it's just me and Randafool on the road.

Fortunately for me, the I-5 exit to get to Tali's is really easy to spot. Unfortunately for me, I read the directions wrong, turned wrong off the exit, and got lost. This became suddenly apparent when this shopping mall showed up, and I'm like "Um....no." So I got to try to find my way to the right street, hampered by the fact that there's no street signs like, anywhere in this part of town. But eventually I do find the right street, and I show up, and Tali is rather surprised to see me, figuring me to be much saner and smarter than I actually am. But I question the ability of engineers to check for sanity, so it's all good.

So all things considered, it's not like we were going to be going anywhere, so Monopoly was played and I broke my 10 year or so losing streak, we watch movies, and generally hung out and had a good time and hoped it would clear up in the morning.

The next morning came, and after properly waking up, we went out to observe the car damage. And the front of my car looked about like this. Wipers about like this. There were a few icicles on the mirrors. And of course the ever popular iced-over antenna. Tali's car, having sat there all night, was somewhat worse, and getting the ice off involved a bit of skating to accomplish. I realize you Midwest/East Coast types are all laughing at us by now, but I'd like to point out that our weather, ice or no, is still way better than what you people think of as weather.

In any case, Tali's car eventually worked, whereupon Tali took me through Portland, where we saw interesting things. We arrived at Powell's, which for the uncultured types in the audience, is a bookstore. But when you say bookstore, you have to think of it as like being THE bookstore. The Holy Grail of bookstores. The bookstore to end all bookstores. Floor to ceiling bookshelves as far as you could wander. I saw books in there that I hadn't seen in 10 or 15 years. It was spectacular. The 40 minutes we were in there cost me like $50, but it was worth it. You do not, however, want to see my reading list these days. You just don't.

Upon leaving, Tali expressed amazement with my non-overly browsing ways, whereupon I expounded to her my Theory of Shopping, which goes like this. Women, as we all have been taught from early childhood, love to shop. They will generally browse random stores if given half the chance, just for the dubious pleasure of browsing. Men, on the other hand, have been exposed to far too much of this. So when they shop, they pretty much know what they want, they go in, and they get it, with a minimum of browsing. Which isn't to say that there aren't exceptions, and we did of course browse a bit, but knowing what you want is a wonderful thing.

I should also point out that at random intervals during the drive to pick up Laura, I would perk up, clap my hands in glee, and exclaim things like "Bookstore! Happy! Good!" and "Books! Shiny! Glee! Happy!" in much the same tone as a small child being given a great new toy.

So we picked up Laura, and we went to eat at this random pasta place, which happened to be near the project Tali's working, so we saw that too, and that was neat. And then we proceeded to catch up on about a year's worth of noncorrespondance, which meant I got to tell all my good Europe stories again, which was fun.

And then I drove home, which since it had been warming up all day, was perfectly ok.

As an addendum to this whole story, I went out to run Tuesday, and was like "Say, it's fairly warm out here for January. Oh well. No hat and gloves today." Kept the sweatshirt. Did the whole running thing, whereupon I'm like "Goddamn it's hot out here!" If you were to picture me bursting through the door and going for the water faucet in much the same way as a dying desert traveller might, you wouldn't be far from the mark.

Later, Mom told me it was like 70 out.

So I need to post that entry about my epic trip to Portland, but the pictures are elsewhere, so I'll do it later. For the moment, I'll talk about some other things.

Things like this drawing of Suzanne's.

Also, something Regina said:

[17:16] starflier06: They're about mice, rabbits, and small forest animals banding together against evil small forest animals.
[17:16] TontoMarius: Hee.
[17:16] starflier06: They're right up your alley.

Yes, I went to Portland over the weekend and didn't tell anybody. I've got things to say about the experience, which I shall do later.

For now, all you Civ fans can go check out Epic 46, and the RomeoRedux SG over on the Civ page.

For the Rome: Total War fans in the audience, Marechal and I are working on an SG/story along the lines of Kings of the French, except betterer and gooder and stuff. Expect the first couple of chapters relatively soon.

Some of you may know that I applied to volunteer at the Corvallis Public Library, like, oh, months ago. Well, it turns out that I got accepted, and so now from 12:30 to 2:30 on Wednesdays I get to go in and do check-in, which is pretty much a lot of book sorting.

So I get there, and I feed the meter 2 hours worth of change, go in, and get ushered back and given the tour. There's like, a whole floor under the library I never knew existed. Got my parking permit, met a bunch of nice people.

Then they set me up where I'm going to be working. Got a computer, a bar code scanner, and a whole bunch of books. Scan the barcodes on the covers of the books, pile them up, then sort them onto a handy cart. 0-299 nonfiction in one section, A-C fiction in another, mystery/scifi/western/romance paperbacks under the table. Not so hard so far.

It's the little things that get you, though. Book has a dot on the spine or a green label? That's a new book, and they get sorted in order on this other cart. Computer spits out a hold slip? Circle the name of the person and sort in order on the hold cart. Pops up an other branch error? File with other branch books. There's maybe 4 or 5 other little things like that, all of which kind of break the rythm a bit.

So you eventually wind up with a cartfull of books. Wheel it back to these other shelves, where you then take your sorted piles and stack them on the shelves, which is pretty easy except the 600-699 and 700-799 stuff, which has two sections because there's lots of 'em. And then you go back and do it some more. For two hours. And it honestly doesn't seem like two hours, because you're busy. So it was actually kind of fun.

Then I got done and went out and found out I got a ticket in the like 10 minutes between when my time ran out and when I came out. Gah.

Yeah, ok. Not dead yet. Not much to talk about, but I'm not dead.

Pretty much accept that I've been doing a bit of reading, a bit of gaming, and a bit of random other stuff, like torturing myself on the hill out front.

So, the reading. Omar Bradley's book isn't bad. It's not like you didn't know all of the stuff he says already, but it's interesting merely because he's saying it. By contrast, Hans von Luck was a Wehrmacht officer who, amongst other things, was with Rommel a bunch, which is pretty interesting. He also had the misfortune to get captured by the Russians, where he spent 1945-1950 working in POW camps. Which sucks for him, but is interesting to me, because you don't hear about these things much. As it happens, treatment of POWs varied a bunch. The Americans and British released theirs soon after the war (say, 1946), while the Soviets and French weren't really all that interested in doing so, and kept their POWs around for years. Huh.

Having Mom take me to Borders is not conducive to shortening my reading list. We'll just leave it at that.

As to gaming, well, I'm still on the last level of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. There's a reason why Pacific Assault is a much better game, and that has a lot to do with a completely lack of one shot kill snipers. We'll leave it at that.

Speaking of one shot kills, Cole and I played some Mechwarrior/BT the other night, as part of our ongoing semi-RPG campaign. Previously, Cole's mechwarrior character passed his Trial of Position from the sibko, killing two mechs and gaining the rank of Star Commander. Then he got sent to the planet of Tokasha, where Clan Goliath Scorpion (him) and Clan Hell's Horses are fighting over mech factories. His very first mission is to take a cobbled together star of mechs out to delay the Hell's Horses advance. Keep in mind that everyone in the Hell's Horses 666th Mechanized Cluster has a heavy or assault mech versus Cole's mediums. So Cole ends up losing and falling back after inflicting fairly serious damage on the enemy. We then followed that up with Cole's cluster and the 666th going head to head over a factory, wherein Cole is responsible for pretty much the only things that went right for Goliath Scorpion. The remnants of Cole's cluster fall back and get incorporated into another cluster.

Which brings us to the latest game. Goliath Scorpion is pretty much getting run over by numerically and technologically superior Hell's Horses troops. The answer the Scorpion commander comes up with is to send Cole's mech star and a star of elementals to go take down the 666th's command elements. So Cole gets his guys together and goes. He starts by going under a river that bisects the front lines, which saves him from having to fight the entire Hell's Horses cluster. An elemental gets washed away, and some mechs get dinged up by falling, but ok. Cole then makes his way through the plains and hills into the mountains where the Hell's Horses base is. He gets spotted once, but he's able to take down the VTOLs before they can radio him in.

And then, almost directly in front of the base, he gets spotted again, powers down to hide, and they spot him anyway. The whole things ends up being sort of a mutual surprise thing, where Cole has to power his mechs up and blast his way into the base, and the Hell's Horses have to power their mechs up and keep Cole out. The battle itself is pretty routine, except how it came down to a couple of Cole's mechs versus the Hell's Horses commander's Warhawk. Which has a gauss rifle. Which proceeds to head shoot Cole three times in a row, forcing him to spend Edge points to make me reroll. As it turns out, Cole doesn't die, but he's only got 2 of his 5 mechs at the end of the day, and not a whole lot of Elementals. So he loads everybody who can't fit in a mech onto some flatbed trucks, pirates a couple of Gnome suits, and heads off to his lines. He almost makes it, except when a patrol catches him right before his front lines. He manages to ambush the patrol, kill them, and flee to his own lines.

So that was pretty fun.

On yet another note, Tonto came back from the dead, which prompted me to delve into the forum archives and salvage some of the stuff I wanted to save - namely all my Medival: Total War posts. So the Kings of the French, the Holy Roman Emperors, Philippe III's Guide to Rulership, and some pictures are now up on the MTW page. I encourage you all to read Kings of the French, because I think it's some of the best stuff I've written, never mind that it's game fiction. Maybe had Holy Roman Emperors finished, I'd be saying the same about that, but it never did finish, so. Go read that too, if you want. And then read Aethelstan, because I like it too.

Maybe one of these times we can get an RTW succession game going.

Or so says the shirt Laurent wore the other day, which was pretty appropriate considering what we were doing, but we'll talk about that in a bit.

I've been rather behind the times with my holiday blogging, for which I have few excuses. Christmas was, well, about the same Christmas as usual, except that Laurent came out and pretty much ran around dominating the gaming part of the evening in harsh, harsh ways. I also got a bunch of stuff, including far more books than I can concievably read in the next few days, and a variety of computer related stuff, which means that my computer is now happier, shinier, newer, and betterer than it was before. It's also rather empty, because part of moving from a 13 GB hard drive to a 250 GB hard drive involved reformatting both the 250 and the old 60. Fortunately, the only thing I lost in the whole operation seems to be my Morrowind saves. This is sad, but not as sad as, say, losing all my CC2 maps again.

Anyway. Leaping out of sequence a bit, New Year's was, rather like last New Year's, spent at Rema and Mel's playing assorted games and such. Whatever the pirate game was, it was fun. The entire other table, which was drinking and gaming at the same time, well, that was fun too. Good times.

This brings us to the part of the post where I reflect on the year a bit, and it can be pretty well summed up by saying that 2004 was pretty much my best year that I can remember offhand. Much happened. My roughest ever term in school. England, Europe, and Michigan. Graduating from OSU at long last. Meeting new friends and old friends. Gaming. The job hunting part wasn't so fun, but we're going to ignore that. In any event, it was a year well worth having. A number of people, incidentally, deserve some blame (or maybe some thanks) for this, including: Jan and Paul, for being the best host parents imaginable; Mike and the rest of the AHA group for being themselves; Stephanie for all sorts of things, but especially being a tour guide through London, Brussels, and Paris; and Whir for putting me up (and putting up with me) for three weeks. Thanks all.

Now then. So we're all sitting around at Christmas, and somehow or another the topic of the Army, Basic/OCS, and my possibly entry therein came up. From there, we moved to the topic of my being the most out of shape human being on the planet came up, and Laurent, as he likes to do from time to time, offered to help get me in shape. And, in a momentary lapse of sanity, I agreed that perhaps on that Monday we could do something about that.

Shit.

You want to understand at this point that Laurent is, among other things, a Sergeant in the Marine Corps. This is good for a whole bunch of reasons, but very bad when it comes to the part where I need to actually run and stuff. This will become apparent soon enough.

So, Monday I show up at his place, and since I lack the appropriate clothing, we drove over to Albany and hooked me up with a pair of shoes and some clothes, including the new winner of the Most Comfortable Pants In Existance challenge. That having been done, we drove over to Avery Park, where we ran through a few stretches (even I can do these!), then ran the 1.5 mile trail (jogged, maybe. Walked. Whatever. I tried though.), then jogged from Avery over to the obstacle course at OSU (which I had previously driven past and thought "Heh. Sucks to be those guys."), whereupon I got run through said obstacle course a time or two. Then we kind of ran out of light, and that was that.

We learned two things on Day 1. Firstly, there is a reason why we do not eat before doing all that running, and that is because when we feel like we're going to throw up, that's not really all that much fun. Secondly, being out of shape hurts. A lot. I wasn't really aware that my lungs and throat were supposed to burn like that.

Nevertheless, I went back on Tuesday, since, hey. How much more can I possibly hurt? Considering we went straight to the obstacle course, you can answer that for yourself.

The course looks something like this. At the start there's a fairly low log hurdle that you leap over, followed by a bar that's probably 8' off the ground or so. The objective is to run up to the bar, grab it, leap up, hook your feet over the bar, swing yourself over, and drop to the ground. That having been done, there are a couple more low log hurdles, followed by a rather larger one, which is part of a larger contraption which has a pair of bars perpendicular to you slanting away from you towards the ground. Objective is to stand on the hurdle, grab the crossbar, swing yourself up, hook your feet on the other bars, pull yourself up and through, then sort of crab walk your way down to this log, which you then walk down, fall forward onto a high log hurdle, bear hug it, and swing yourself over and down to the ground. Insert another hurdle, and then comes the wall. It's a bit more than head height, and the idea is to the leap up, grab it, and pull yourself over. You do that, drop to the other side, do some more hurdles close together, do a double barred version of that single bar up and over thing at the start, then climb some ropes.

So the idea was to sprint from one end of the course to the other, then do as much of said course as I could do in 10 minutes. Here's how it worked out.

Hurdles, well, I can't do them like Laurent, who can leap them using only his arms, but I can do them.

The bar, on the other hand, came close to defeating me. It was my best part of the first day's try, and I did it a couple times, but the second day I was reduced to trying to walk my feet up the side and doing it that way. Very sad.

On the other hand, I got way way better at the double bar-log walk-log hug thing. Swung up, hooked, pulled up, and away I went. If there is one part of that course I now feel good at, it's that one.

The wall, though. The wall kicked my ass. Leap up, hook with one arm, realize I haven't got enough upper body strength to pull myself up, fail. And so it went until Laurent actually lifted me over, except I screwed that up, and ended up in this bizzare position up top of the wall before dropping over. We'll endeavor not to do that again.

Needless to say, the double bar defeated me easily too.

We did that for a while, then did a few other assorted exercises. I still can't do pullups any better than I could when I had to do them in PE class. Dips, well, those are really hard, and just about obliterated my arms. I can do situps, but doing them when your muscles are screaming at you in pain is a tad different. Pushups? Wasn't happening at that point.

Somehow I agreed to Wednesday, despite knowing that we were going to run Bald Hill. About the only way I know to describe that is to say that one, Bald Hill is a hill, and like all hills goes up, and the going up part kind of sucks; and two, I WALKED this hill with Tali and Jesse freshman year, and it about did me in then. So I can't say I was looking forward to the experience.

I made the flat part mostly ok. Ran out of steam a couple times, but ok. Even did a little bit of the uphill part. But then my legs were like "Look. We're just not having any of this running business. You want to walk, well, we'll do that. But no running." So I had to walk most of the rest of the up part.

So before we go, Laurent's like "Well, we can run downhill. Downhill's not as hard." Little did he know that Bald Hill's gravelless trails were a mudslide. So instead, we walked downhill, and after a short little sprint once on dry ground, we walked back, and that was that.

But then I went home. And moved in tiny steps because my legs were killing me. And my pleas for the Hot Bath of Goodness were ignored by the water people, who came out to fix some stuff and turned the water off. And this was bad. But then they left, and the Hot Bath of Goodness became reality, and the pain of small forest animals was greatly relieved, and there was much rejoicing.

You know that thing about having muscles you never knew existed? That's true.

Thursday, fortunately, was nice and easy. We kicked a soccer ball around for a while, until Laurent (who not only worked out with me but on his own as well) couldn't do it anymore, and then we worked up a plan for me to follow, and it was home again.

And then I spent the last couple of days running up the annoying hill on the road, and there we are. And my neck hurts. I'm not sure what I did to make my neck hurt, but it hurts. Whatever, neck.

So happy New Year, boys, girls, and squirrel aliens.

Be all that you can be.
---United States Army