Meme Dump!

Book Report...

Just finished Doomsday Reef, the third book in Matt Bracken's adventures of Dan Kilmer, skipper of the schooner Rebel Yell.

The book takes place ten years after the worldwide societal collapse that was underway at the start of the first book. It begins with Dan and his crew in Beaufort, South Carolina, working as a coastal tramp freighter. A rudimentary society holds in Beaufort and a few other ports and the occasional small tanker brings refined fuel from Louisiana, so civilization is getting a toehold in some places.

Dan wants to head for Argentina to escape worsening volcanic winters in the northern hemisphere, and adventures ensue. There's a hurricane, a castaway, skullduggery aboard and Haitian pirates at sea, a wrecked cruise ship, and a glimpse of life in the post-apocalyptic Caribbean. It was a page turner.

.

Memes for the Midweek!

Tab Clearing...

• You Don't Know What You Don't Know (The Death of Expertise)


• Make Handguns Affordable Again


• Jim Grey republishes an older essay on why he collects cameras. It's interesting that the post was originally written back in 2012, which was about the time I was first toying with the idea of getting back into film photography. That happened to coincide with what was pretty much the bottom of the film camera market. You could pick up some very exceptional film gear for what were, in retrospect, bargain basement prices. The resurgence of film photography as a hobby among Millennials and Zoomers has seen prices on old film gear rebound sharply. You used to could get, say, all the Canon AE-1s or Pentax K1000s you wanted for twenty bucks a pop and now nice ones are going for well over a C-note.

.

Meme Dump!

Memes on Monday!

"All cities are walkable if..."

omg, ded...

All cities are walkable if you’re not a bitch pic.twitter.com/HkJ9ueRgUs

— Elai (@elaifresh) July 26, 2025

Mole Holes, Widebodies, and Head-Ons...

• If you use Google Satellite View to look at airbases that used to be used by Strategic Air Command back in the Cold War, you can spot the area known as a "Christmas Tree" where the Ready Alert bombers stood parked, prepared to do nuclear combat toe-to-toe with the Russkies. Look around the Christmas Tree, and you'll find the Mole Hole.


• While Colt has been selling 9mm 1911-pattern pistols since cars had tail fins (the 9mm Colt Commander debuted in 1950, IIRC), they were all single-stacks. It wasn't until Szabo and Polyzos at Para-Ordnance came up with the wide-body frame that you could get a double-stack with a Government Model slide assembly and lockwork. In fact, the earliest Paras were sold as frame kits; you were expected to use the slide and most of the lockwork from your own Colt. Jeremiah Knapp at American Rifleman wrote a good explainer on the difference between wide-body 1911s, the later chassis-style 2011 by Strayer and Tripp, and the latest Wilson X-style guns.


• Back in the days of the Model T, a lot of paved state highways were one-lane. Oncoming cars would have to put two wheels off the pavement to get past each other. As vehicle speeds and traffic volume increased, something needed to be done to fix that situation.

.

You know the saying about smoke and fire?

The saying goes "Where there's smoke, there's fire."

That's not necessarily true. An item can smolder and produce an awful lot of smoke without ever having actual open flames appear. And, if there's enough of it, it's the smoke that kills you.

Following Global Strike Command suspending use of the SIG Sauer M18 after an Airman was killed, the use of the P320 has been disallowed at Gunsite Academy unless the student is LE or .mil and it's their issue sidearm.

Ian's got an accurate take here. If there's too much smoke, at some point it doesn't matter whether or not there's a fire.

Meme Dump!

Modern Day Slave Labor

Lots of y'all are probably familiar with the story of Fordlandia, the company town Ford set up in the jungle of Brazil to operate their own rubber tree plantation. It was a failure and a fairly miserable company town to boot.

Turns out that Fordlandia was a downright worker's paradise compared to Volkswagen's farm in the Amazonian jungle.

.

Tab Clearing...

• Bobbi and I have been watching Ballard, the spinoff from the Bosch: Legacy series, and it's quite good. Keith Roysdon riffs off that to write about cold cases, a topic he's very familiar with, here.


• Cambodia's calling for a ceasefire with Thailand.


• Musk Starlink shutdown attempted to sabotage Ukrainian Kherson counteroffensive.

.

Close out the Week With a Meme!

Getcher Memes Here!

Land War in Asia

Thailand and Cambodia have recalled their ambassadors, closed their border crossings, and started shooting at each other over a stretch of disputed territory.

The Royal Thai Air Force has apparently performed at least one airstrike with F-16s on Cambodian military facilities, and Cambodia claims civilian casualties occurred. Thailand says Cambodian artillery hit a hospital.

A quick glance at the comparative military strengths of the two countries makes it look like things would be pretty lopsided if Thailand got serious. Let's just say that in any future wargame simulations of current events, the Thai player won't have to roll for air supremacy on turn one. Not only do the Cambodians not have any fighter jets or attack aircraft, they don't even have any combat helos, except in the sense that any helo can be a combat helo if it believes in itself hard enough. The Royal Thai Army has some reasonably modern armor, while the Cambodian tank park is a bunch of mid-Cold War museum pieces and who knows what kind of shape they may be in?

I was going to say that any Northrop F-5 Tiger II stans should get excited because this might be its last hurrah, but then I remembered that Iran and the ROK still operate them and who knows what’s gonna happen next on this cursed timeline?

.

Sticky

It cracked ninety degrees today, and it wasn't a dry heat. Checking the forecast, it looks like we're slated for another week under one of them "heat dome" thingies. It feels like we just left this party.

At least it's only supposed to rain on Friday and Sunday, so we've got that going for us, which is nice.

.

Meme Dump!

Glass Got Gooder

It was when the Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II came out that camera magazines started talking about it. That full-frame 16MP sensor had enough resolution to let you know if your budget lens was a little soft in the corners. Most 35mm film has a resolution roughy equivalent to 6MP or so, and early DSLRs had smaller APS-C sensors that only used the center of a full-frame lens's image circle, where things are sharper.

"Weaknesses? Well none that were really engineered into the camera, but the EOS-1Ds Mark II is a very unforgiving camera when it comes to lenses. That ultra high resolution and full size 35 mm sensor mean that not only does the camera use all of the glass in a lens but it can reproduce it in minute detail, warts and all. A direct A-B comparison with a cropped sensor camera (such as the Nikon D2X) soon demonstrates that you really have to be careful selecting your lens and stopping it down sufficiently so as to avoid soft corners. You'll also have to (generally speaking) spend more on your lenses than you would for a cropped sensor camera."

When the 36MP Nikon D800 came out, it officially became a Big Deal. A big enough deal that Nikon put out a list of recommended lenses. With cameras like the D800 or the 50MP Canon EOS 5DS, you want to keep shutter speeds fast, too, because the tiniest bit of camera movement will show up at those resolutions.

The EOS R came out in 2018 and has a 30MP full frame sensor. It uses the new RF-mount lenses, and lens design has really come a long way. The RF 24-105mm f/4-7.1 IS is an inexpensive zoom available in a kit with some of the mid-price mirrorless Canons (or by itself for a little over four hundred bucks, or less than a third of the cost of the 24-105mm f/4L pro zoom) and it seems to do pretty okay even with that high resolution sensor.

Meme Dump!

Memeday Monday!

Automotif DLXXXV...

A 1976 Ford Courier shot with the 50MP Canon EOS 5DS, so it can be embiggenated rather a lot.

.

QotD: Memetic Selection Edition

The things we now refer to as "memes" are actually things that were originally dubbed "image macros". Some image macros went viral and effectively became memes, however.

A meme is an idea, a behavior, a belief, a bit of information, that replicates itself from mind to mind the way DNA does from generation to generation. The term was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene.

Just because a meme propagates widely doesn't make it true.

The internet didn’t invent thought contagion. It merely accelerated it. What used to take decades of cultural transmission can now happen in hours. A tweet, a TikTok, a video clip, a slogan. These are the new vectors of cultural evolution.

Algorithms act as artificial selectors. Twitter doesn’t reward nuanced discussion. It rewards engagement. Instagram etc doesn’t surface the most accurate take. It surfaces the one most likely to generate a reaction. This creates a selection pressure on ideas: evolve to provoke, or die.

Memes that succeed online are those that survive this ruthless environment. They’re short, emotionally resonant, and easily shareable. They often include moral judgment or identity cues. They come with built-in calls to action: Retweet. Cancel. Like. Condemn.

Guarding against memetic infection can be tricky and nobody's 100% successful, similar to the way everyone says "Oh, I'd never fall victim to that particular internet scam" and then goes and falls for a different one. Stay vigilant and double check your work frequently.

.

Sunday Funday Memes!

Drip

It has rained six out of the last eleven days. It's supposed to rain four out of the next seven. This lengthy stretch of gray skies and wet weather is giving me the equivalent of Seasonal Affective Disorder in July and I am, to put it mildly, not a fan.

.

Meme Dump!

Thank God it's Memeday!

Things and Stuff, Bits and Bobbis...

• Well, I finished reading Echoes of Silence and not only did it fill in some background detail from the previous two Frontlines books, but I got downright verklempt at the ending.


• 1952 Chevy pickup truck!


• Bobbi made a thing.

.

Fresh, Hot Memes!

Meme Dump!

w00t!

Hot, fresh sci-fi!

A new novella from Marko, set in the Frontlines universe, just dropped!

Supposedly there's some background information in there about the Lankies. Can't wait to find out.

.

Automotif DLXXXIV...

I hate it when I juuuust miss a shot, like I did with this 1968 "Series 1½" Jaguar XK-E. I was panning with the Sony a700 and 16-80mm f/3.5-4.5 Zeiss Vario-Sonnar T* zoom lens. I started at the extreme end of the zoom range and had to back out a bit as the car passed, but didn't manage to back out far enough.

The "Series 1½" E-types have some of the changes mandated by the new FMVSS standards: Headlamp covers removed and non-winged wheel nuts are the most obvious.

.

Monday Meme Dump!