Jazzman

I simply can't stand the image that this, this could have been the fate of mi own little son...

We're all here to do what we're all here to do - to live our own way. We're not 'their' drones anymore.

A Touch of Evil Nikita 'O' * 2015 ⚠ Radio Radroach-Free Wasteland on 88.3 MHz [ Heavy Metal ] │ In the night, please set me free. I can't resist a touch of evil...

Looking for FreeFlyCam for FO4 v.1.9.4.0. Version is no longer available in the ENBDev.com forum. Missed to d/l it right in time and wasn't in-game for a year. However, I'd just love to give the plug-in a try. Any help is appreciated.

Preorder a fuckin' Elder Scrolls game after the ESO debacle, huh? Holy mackerel! Before that I'd have preordered mi a new man or two fi mek mi bed go so "er-e-er-e-er", ey... that's for sure.

Wanna play the village idiot here? That's fine by me.

Clausewitz' has coined the Prussian style - the way of modern Western war. That war is a political tool isn't his invention, this was always the case. I question whether you have already read enough related to warfare tho but leave it at that atm. Gen. Clausewitz' work On War is conveniently subtitled 'about strategy and tactics'. Maniple and cohort are two different manifestations of Roman battle tactics developed along the timeline from Republic to Empire. They are rooted in the Greek Phalanx as was the Macedonian version with its longer spear, called sarissa. Cataphracts did exactly that - charging infantry with a lance (and the Romans didn't easily give up their formation). Unbelievable, huh? That's why they were infamous back then, heavily armored as they were, and their horses as well. This was the privilege of the upper class, a costly privilege. To understand it in full one should read the references in Roman sources, esp. in Cicero's letters (he was governor of Cilicia and thus within reach of Parthian cavalry) and about the Battle at Carrhae / biblical Haran in which Crassus the Rich lost his legions when trying to intervene Parthia to become even wealthier. The Romans never really could shed their fear of Parthians afterwards. The Parthians are coming! Sounds somehow familiar to our ears, no? Not by chance the so-called Parthian shot from behind (by mounted archers) became a negative metaphor in the West. In the 2nd CE Rome incorporated mercenary cataphracts as auxiliary in the legions in the Levant and Asia Minor. There they lacked the required support of mounted archers who indeed killed everyone leaving the broken up formation and who got permanently resupplied by camel trains that followed the cavalry hard on. Our cattle horses won't do that tho, not even for Hollywood. But that goes w/o saying. A special, year-long training is required, and a special breed as well. And knowledge of the number of files a hostile infantry information is made of - eight men deep isn't that deep at all, sixteen could be and many more is, most likely. So the combination of mounted light archers, cataphracts and supply on the fly was the perfect match for the invincible, yet slow moving Roman legions and their comparable weak foreign auxiliary cavalry (largely made of Gauls and Germans). Well, from symposia I know that Hanson is the leading American figure in ancient military history in the West and not just because today both Brits and French are just auxiliaries for the US army, I dare to say, but because he actually quotes the ancient tacticians verbatim and brings 'em into a convinient historical context instead of making things up by thinking backwards, always starting with the era of Queen Victoria or Napoleon... As much as I admire Hanson's military source knowledge and interpretation skills, I despise his political understanding of the US in the here and now. But I, at least, pay respect to a man of knowledge. That's no contradiction imo.

Now, we're all just Hollywood-hardened armchair tacticians, so what's epic or not in an ancient looking infantry battle is largely understood with the eyes and much less with our knowledge of tactics in antiquity. And warfare in pseudo-antiquity on screen is what we always see, the larger the number of combatants, the more epic it appears to us. We are easily to be impressed. Well, according to Clausewitz, the Prussian father of Western tactics in our time, firepower is everything - the major doctrine not just but especially of the US military since WW-2. On the surface of things there's thus no contradiction... However, that's not how an ancient infantry battle was actually fought on the ground, no matter if we look at a Greek hoplite phalanx, a Roman Republican maniple, later Imperial cohort or the more or less loose formation of so-called barbarians at the periphery of the Roman Empire, let alone those adversaries that had developed their own, unique military tactics like the Carthaginians (war elephants similar to the Haradrim in LotR and a cavalry worth the name), the much feared Parthians (mounted archers that could needle a Roman legionary literally to the ground and heavy-armed riders - Cataphracts - that swept trough an infantry formation like butter just as Gandalf rushing to the rescue in the battle at Helm's Deep... light-armed as he was). But how was such an epic battle in antiquity actually? How did it feel and what was felt before and after the run, the push and the collapse of the formation by the one warrior or another? The ancient tacticians tell us a lot about it cos they were still there where the action was, and that's not in the academic ivory tower. They didn't need any advice, instead they advised many generations in military strategy and tactics. The times they are a changin'. So I'd recommend reading the leading military historian in the West for an introduction into the mystified, sometime glorified world of blood, dust and tears: Victor Davis Hanson - The Western Way of War - Infantry Battle in Ancient Greece, Oxford University Press 1989, paperback (my birth year, yeah).

The smile on the face of my son. Then I know that I did good. Once he reaches puberty and thus having the revolution of the flies in his mind I can't be that sure anymore...

Agreed. In an interconnected virtual age undreamed of, the shopping mall, the Western import version of the Eastern bazaar (my value in camels is known to me) has lived out itself, both as commercial, originally tribal meeting place and mating (test) ground as well. Self-imposed restrictions (no smokers, no this, no that) have already culminated into the tax-free mall for members of the diplomatic corpse only as in Brussels, capital of the EU-bureaucracy. Gone are the days when young folk was eagerly awaiting the annual school trip, not so much excited about the boring museum tour in big town but the two or three hours at free disposal at the local shopping mall afterwards, smelling and tasting the alien and, of course, showcasing what one got, if you know what I mean. Those who directly came after me have Face- aka Fakebook instead and a keyboard not to move their (often obese) ass for an inch if possible. The end-sequence in Wall-E passes through my mind and I see the days of lasting blackout coming when these type of human is forced to move out into the real world to grow tasty pizza plants and quench their thirst at the legendary Cola River. And maybe, just maybe, folks again realize that they actually belong to the same species and thus think along the same lines after all.

Back in my day... ... I was much younger, an ugly duckling and a fence marked the edge of the known, doubtlessly flat world around home tree. Since I had already seen terrifying monster tornadoes on the horizon I was pretty much a fan of the novel The Wizard of Oz in which a little old man hidden behind the curtain of secrecy tells the people what to believe in via bullhorn mechanism. Guess the novel has politicized us girls at home, though in totally different ways. My big sister became a wonderful politician herself, whereas I reject politics as what it actually is acc. to the final confession of the Wonderful Wizard - nothing but humbug, sometimes even dangerous humbug, I must add. Just my 2 cts, many years later.

At least the youngsters among us could guess now how it must have felt to run Morrowind in 2002 on a tuned DOS computer of the Bill & Monica days with a rogue 500kb hamster inside and everything else on board.... by sheer fear of the little chairman in his squealing wheel. This is where the real lag fun starts, chiiiil'dren.

Aye man, mi a guh fi dis, soca ska, di gud riddim, nuh yuh know. When mi start to bubble an winin' up mi waist, wok wokin' on di table like mi gih a fok, dis gyal ah mashin' up di place, eh... ^^

Well, I for one don't share such a phenotype-related self-identification problem, the root of all racism and today the result of an almost omnipresent identity politics. Already in kindergarten I had the pleasure to get informed by the other kids, all of them mestizos more or less, what I'm supposed to be - a half-breed, the bastard. Wow! The 13th Warrior wasn't yet known for otherwise I'd doubtlessly answered with "I, at least, know who my father is... ." Lol.

Back in the days when we were kids, all kids on the ranch and beyond were equal (and most of the adults in the country most likely as well). We all looked like children you'd find today only in the slums of this world, dirty and half of the year barefoot that is, at least in the outback. Jealousy did not exist among the have-nots. The country had just recently defaulted under pressure from the outside, the local currency had thus no value anymore, and to make it worse, our gmo-free beef got sanctioned by the usual suspects on the international markets for allegedly being 'poisonous' (and Monsanto beef from Cowschwitz factories 'healthy' accordingly). Since we still had no economic contacts to non-Western countries in those days we were up shit's creek w/o a paddle financially. That's what a foreign regime change attempt looks like, folks. Luckily, we as a people rose from the ashes under the running government. Praise the Lord. As children we had no idea of these freaking things, inasmuch as we didn't attend to the discussions b/t the parents and the priest or police chief that came (and still come) to dinner once a week. We just realized that we didn't have to go to school anymore, instead school came to us for almost two years - for a good meal and some tasty beef for their own families, the 'poisonous' beef, you know. School's out forever thus didn't happen, too bad. Yet we felt free like birds behind the cattle fences with world's end at the main gate, and happy. Population 40. We were all family, the young and the old. One horse each and here we go. That was our motto as kids. Doubt that I'd ever grant my little son his adventures with friends some 20 miles away from home 'in the wild' outside of the tornado season, unattended and on their own. Am I perhaps getting soft? Don't think so. Guess it's because the country he was born into doesn't face the prospect of forced regime change and thus common poverty and lawlessness to make it possible in the first place. What's more, we have more than just one military reggae band to call the heavily armed ban... uh... clans to war if need be. Jamaica is as safe as in Abraham's bosom, Jah willing, as the locals say.