AKDragonFish3D

Survival News:  I recently read an article about a teen who had gone missing in LA County in California and I feel inspired to write about Outdoor Safety regarding this.  Outdoor Safety and Survival is always paramount in my mind anytime we leave Fairbanks city limits for any reason. It gets a bit annoying to my wife, but she understands. The Story Goes As Such... according to the news post below:  a non-verbal teen (meaning he can't speak) got lost in the wilderness in LA County in a heavily wooded area.  The Search and Rescue Team found him because he was clanking rocks together to get someone's attention.  This happened in Crescenta Valley Park (google map of the park below).  The Search and Rescue Team found the teen in a steep canyon and only found him because he was clanking rocks together and the sound echoed in the canyon.   Non-verbal teen lost in L.A. area woods found after clinking rocks together, alerting rescuers (msn.com) Nonver...

Family v. Alcohol - A personal experience/advice/guidance from a friend helping a friend with alcoholism. The past, and my regrets until now My friend, we will call him Dan for the sake of this article, has been drinking a lot, to the point where everyone has noticed that it has migrated beyond just "i like booze" to an addiction, or alcoholism, or however you want to put it. I've seen it coming since he moved back from the other side of the state for work.  I do not know what happened to him on the other side of our massive state, but something has pushed him over the edge and into a bottle.  I have mentioned it to him, my family has mentioned it to him, his family has mentioned it to him, and yet Dan just treats it as normal behavior and moves on.... but it's not normal. My regrets are not speaking my mind about this until now.  I had a chance to speak my mind last year, and the year before when he got back from the other side of the state.  Now things have escalat...

TO DM OR NOT TO DM That is the inner war in my head right now, and I'd like to make it my Friday Night Fight blog post this week. Recently I've been at odds with myself about continuing to be a DM and to continue to play Dungeons and Dragons altogether. What is a DM? To bring things in perspective, for those that don't know what a DM is:  A DM, short for Dungeon Master, is the game's administrator, arbitrator, and referee all in one, with the game being an interactive story where the players (everyone else but the DM) goes about the story as administered by the DM. This requires a LOT of planning, understanding the game, and having good repour with those at the table.  Some of the aspects of DMing include, but not limited to: ** knowing the game world's basic (and sometimes advanced) mechanics, such as the whos who of the world, the "relative to Earth" time setting, what is and is not in the game world, etc. ** general tabletop wargaming and board game con...

Today's Friday Night Fights blog will be more real-world, as I'll talk about my observations of the Ukraine War that is going on right now.  Needless to say I am none to pleased by how this is being handled, nor how my weird brain is predicting the outcomes of this.  This may sound like a rant or an opinion piece, and that's fine by me. ------------------------------------------ First on my observations of how it is being handled.  This is not 19-teens.  This is not World War 1.  Stop treating it like it.  Everything I learned in history class about WW1 growing up through the 80s and 90s, and everything I learned as an adult reading past wars as a hobby clearly defines this as a moment where we didn't learn, and now history is repeating itself. Russia invades Ukraine.  Russia tells its people one thing, but also cut off comms from the rest of the world.  From what I could gather from the web, the Russian people might as well be back in the early 1...