Reloading press update: I’m looking now at a Dillon XL750, which seems to hit the right balance between price, size, and capability.

Projects

• Lots of stuff around the house.
• Parvusimperator remarks that he’s been engaged in planning the plan for a committee to lay out the vision for the forthcoming plan for architecting a future project. $GOVERNMENT_CONTRACTOR life!
• The Glockblaster 3D project I wrote about earlier in the year is nearly done. I need to write a progress update. I’ve been sharing more frequent, less formal updates at a semi-private forum for a collection of centrist and right-leaning tech enthusiasts. It’s a pleasant place, and if you find the tenor of the less politically neutral grab bag pieces agreeable rather than aggravating, you might like it there too.

Defense

• How do you say ‘The Cardinal of the Kremlin’ in Mandarin? – Largely confirmed now, I think?
• James D. Hornfischer, of The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors, passes away at 55 – That rates a pour one out.
• It has been 76 0 years since American aircraft flew combat missions from a foreign carrier – Smart money on it being a British ship both times.
• China kills Apple Daily – Hong Kong’s generally anti-CCP paper of record, not some Cupertino-focused news outlet.
• RN destroyers to go from 48 VLS cells to 72 – These are for MBDA Sea Ceptors, which frees up the Sylver cells for Aster 30s exclusively. A nice little upgrade for a previously underarmed destroyer.
• Japan’s deputy PM… guarantees Taiwanese independence? – Or at least indicates that the feeling in the Japanese government is that an invasion of Taiwan is sufficient grounds for Japan to call going to war with China self-defense.
• Also, random tech people (not defense news followers) on Twitter are starting to recognize that Japan is pretty clearly turning to a more expeditionary doctrine.

Science and Technology

• Sagitarrius A*: not a black hole after all? – Observations suggest it might be a clump of dark matter. I, of course, am on record as a dark matter skeptic (or rather: dark matter strikes me as an ugly math hack), so I’m doubtful.
• Amazon’s Lumberyard engine is now Open3D, an open-source engine – I hope it doesn’t entirely knock the wind from Godot’s sails.

Guns

• 3D printers have led to all kinds of wacky ideas in firearms design – This one fires from a rigid toroidal belt.
• I have accumulated some Ruger knowledge, which I should lay out in text form. It’s on my Youtube channel, along with this year’s match videos so far, for now.

Grab Bag

• It took three-point shooting an awfully long time to catch on in the NBA – For the same reason, broadly, that it took baseball front offices so long to start actually looking at representative statistics.
• de Blasio prepares to depart the New York mayor’s office, broadly disliked – Of course, the nation still doesn’t know who won, because the New York elections board is perhaps the most incompetent agency of an already all-embracingly incompetent city government.
• Whither the ticker-tape parade? – Maybe not the ticker-tape parade exactly, but the mass celebration of major accomplishments? Somehow, I doubt we’ll see a series of nationwide parades on the return of the first person to walk on Mars, and that’s the phenomenon the article wonders about.
• Japanese zoning laws are simple and sensible – I’m not sure if I consider those Japanese qualities or not.
• Culture wars are long wars – Fought on the scale of generations.