War in the Vendée

A Mass at Sea, 1793,  by Louis Duveau, first exhibited in 1864. 

Catholics were persecuted during the French Revolution so if people wanted to celebrate Mass, they had to do it surreptitiously, hence going out to sea where they would be out of sight of the revolutionaries and their sycophants.

My parents were atheists. One of my mother's homilies was that religion was the root cause of all wars and was therefore bad and very possibly evil. Reading today about the War in the Vendée I am reminded that the religious don't have a monopoly on murder and mayhem, atheists in the French revolution and Communists the world over have trumped the religious wars of the past. Of course, you could say that revolutionary zealots have their own religion, they are 'true believers' after all.

Combat de Quiberon en 1795, by Jean Sorieul

Sombreuil and a handful of royalist fighters (left) are trying to push back the Republican forces and protect the flight of non-combatants trying to take refuge on English ships.

War in the Vendée

Inspired by a post from Marcel.

Doge2048

Doge2048 Low Score Success

This is a very silly game, and fairly mindless. I play it several times a day. Sometimes I win, mostly I lose.

I have a technique that allows me to make rapid progress but if followed diligently it inevitably leads to failure. The technique is basically to repeatedly press the down arrow until no more moves are available in that direction and then press the left arrow once. Repeat until you die, no more moves are available or you sense impending doom.

The idea is to keep your highest value piece in the lower left corner. It doesn't actually matter what corner you choose, any corner will work, you just need to stick with it.

Following these instructions will often bring you to a situation where neither the down arrow nor the left arrow keys will have any effect. My next step in these cases is to press the right arrow. If the bottom row is NOT full, then the next key press should be the left key. In most cases this will put your high value piece back in the lower left corner.

If there the bottom row is full, and pressing the right arrow does not open any spaces, go back to the original sequence of down-until-stopped and then one-move-left.

The advantage of this technique is you can make rapid progress without having to do any thinking. The disadvantage is that you will eventually get into a bind.  The trick is to recognize when things are about to get sticky and then stopping your automatic play to apply a little critical thinking to the problem. If you have enough room left (3 empty squares might be enough), you should be able to make a few moves that will cause enough pieces to collapse that you have enough room that you can resume automatic play for a bit.

A problem I often encounter is that pieces will often collapse unexpectedly, and if you are not watching carefully this can lead to a hole in the bottom left corner that gets filled in with a low value piece, and that just screws up my whole plan for world domination.

Since my technique involves charging ahead without too much regard for consequences, when I do succeed I often end up with a score well over 20,100. I don't know what the minimum score for successful completion is, but this is lowest I have gotten, and it was just a fluke. On occasion I have tried going on and once I got up to something like 76,000. I have not repeated that feat. My head was like totally in tune with the game, but after that I kind of lost interest.

Post about similar game.

Chernobyl

Elephant's Foot, Chernobyl Reactor

Detroit Steve sent me a link to a good story about the melt down at Chernobyl. It's a good story because because it is short and it gives clear overview of how and why radiation is dangerous. It's also three years old, which means it was written before the new shield was erected over the site. The new shield is an enormous steel structure that was erected next door and slid into place over the old sarcophagus.

Line-X

Indestructible Coating?!
This stuff got its start as spray on coating for pickup truck beds, i.e. bed liner. Now the Pentagon uses it for wallpaper.

Wheelz n Smoke

Wheelz n Smoke Maputo vs Joburg Spinning Session
Episode 2 of The Grand Tour takes us to South Africa where they send James May out for a ride with the locals.

Battersea Power Station

Opening sequence from Alfred Hitchcock's 1936 Thriller Sabotage
Rereading The Mission Song by John Le Carre. Most of the story takes place in central London and when our hero flies out of town on a helicopter, the Battersea Power Station is a landmark worth mentioning. I've heard of it before, it's quite the imposing edifice. Rooting around I found it has a small role in an old Hitchcock movie. It quit making power a while back. now it is being turned into condos.

Battersea Power Station in its heydey

To Infinity . . .

Aerospace & Defense | Paper Airplane
The American Arrow is an electronic component distributor. One of their divisions is Aerospace and Defense. There is also a European Arrow Aerospace that makes interiors for airliners. Near as I can tell they are not related.