Archive for April 13, 2024

Style vs Substance in the Navy

Posted: April 13, 2024 by navygrade36bureaucrat in Blame Biden Administration
Tags: , , , ,

When I reported to my first submarine, the torpedo division was responsible for the maintenance of all the small arms onboard. Despite having grown up in a hunting and shooting family, they took me to the range to show me how to shoot both pistols and shotguns in their style, since they needed small arms qualified people to stand watch. A few years later on shore detail, a group of us would regularly visit the nearby rifle range on “Warrior Wednesday” to keep our shooting skills sharp.

Since then it’s become harder and harder to find ranges where you can practice shooting, and there is less “gun culture” in the military now then even 5 to 10 years ago. That’s why this headline didn’t surprise me one bit:

My torpedomen would have never let me do this, at least not without cracking a joke at my expense. There’s even a rumor that the shell casings are photoshopped in, although at a minimum the scope and handguard are mounted incorrectly, plus he’s holding the weapon really high, like uncomfortably high, in his shoulder. Plus, why is there a hand on his shoulder? I don’t normally touch people that are firing automatic weapons.

Sadly, here’s the bigger problem: he’s probably my age. The folks like me that grew up with guns, love our country and care about being technically competent at their jobs have been run out of the Navy, replaced by those that care about climbing a corporate ladder and looking good. This picture captures this beautifully. We see a Navy DDG Commanding Officer, someone who should be technically savvy and have our respect, firing a weapon in what should be an awesome picture, but the minute we look deeper we see someone who has no clue about weapons posing for a cool photo, likely to move on to something else a few seconds later. Those that can do are replaced by those that look good doing and toe the party line.

The next time the DoD cries about money, remember this and start demanding that our Admirals get replaced by real warfighters.

This post represents the views of the author and not those of the Department of Defense, Department of the Navy, or any other government agency.

Abbreviated Pintastic NE 2024 Day Two Post

Posted: April 13, 2024 by datechguy in special events, pinball
Tags: , ,

Well the early day for day one caught up to me on day two and instead of waking at 5 I woke at seven so by then the bandwidth of the Hotel was at full tilt and files that uploaded in a few minutes took a half hour or longer but here is what I have up so far:

I got a VERY early start for day two as I woke up before 5. This allowed me to upload all my day 1 stuff and write yesterdays post quickly and got me down to play pinball by 6. I headed straight to the extra ball lounge:

This was also the first chance I had to play the custom Happy Gilmore machine and so I jumped at it:

It’s a fun game but not easy to play while using my camera.

Dave Marsden one of the organizers of Pintastic NE since the start had some free time early and we went to the media room for an interview.

Dave Marsden interview

A bit later after breakfast my son came down and we hit the homebrew room the game he wanted to play was Critical Mass which is about as rare as it gets but in the middle of the game the fire alarms went off and the entire Pinball crowd and the staff ended up out in the wind and rain:

By a very odd coincidence when we went in the first person we ran into was the person who found and restored the game Eric who granted us an interview:

There was apparently a lot of work to do to create this prototype as a playable game but not only did he do the work he wrote a manual for it:

At this point we headed to the homebrew room to finish our game, Eric joined us and filled us in a bit more

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We then took a peek at all the games in the homebrew room and talked to a man who brought a homebrew that developed some problems during the drive in;

Afterwards we checked out the interesting mechanical game setup. My son played the baseball game.

We had lost a half hour due to the fire drill and wanted to get more pinball playing in but then I ran into Todd Tuckey who was free so again it was to the media room for a long sit-down interview.

Todd Tuckey interview

And that’s when an extraordinary thing happened as we finished up a film crew came in who had press credentials for Pintastic. They spotted us and for some reason decided I would be a good subject for their interview. The irony of a film crew making a documentary on Pinball deciding they wanted me before Todd was not lost on me. I chatted with the crew and it was a United Nations of folks. the filmmaker from the US and his crew from Columbia, Argentina and The Ukraine.

I spoke to the young lady from the Ukraine at length before the interview which required a lot of prep just before we started I spotted my son who had been looking for me and he shot this brief video

They then wanted shot of me playing various games both alone and with my son. Ironically the Ukrainian Girl in her 20’s had never played pinball so before we let her leave us we insisted she try a game, we found a Cactus Canyon game open in the vender room and she got a game in.

Having lost an hour and a half of prime pinball time between the interview and the fire alarm the camera went away and pinball ruled the rest of the night interrupted only by dinner with my friend Hanna who you might remember from this photo from many Pintastics ago

Hanna came here as a refugee from Iraq. That was her first time playing pinball it would certainly not be her last.

I can’t believe that was five whole years ago.

I’ll update this post with the videos that have placeholders as soon as time and bandwidth allows

Update: For some reason the Todd Tuckey and Dave Marsden interviews won’t work in this post I’ll make an extra one with them.