Caltrops - Jagged Alliance II - Our homeland may be a little too secure.

Forum Overview :: Jagged Alliance II

by jeep 04/17/2005, 7:01pm PDT

Never really all that concerned about invasions, myself. Never been robbed, never had my house broken into (well one time the landlord forgot I renewed my lease and sent cleaners, who broke in...to clean.)

When I was a kid, though, my parents were a little crazy, so I had to study all these martial arts and we moved a lot, so I had to go to different instructors all the time. Kenpo, jujitsu, tai chi, aikido, whatever, I just wanted to get home, watch Kung Fu, and play atari.

So now that I've long grown out of their paranoid delusions and realized how little combat you have to engage in on a day-to-day basis, I find the people who can't grow out of it to be fascinating. Don't get me wrong, I still operate under the delusion that I could kill someone if I had to, and the day I meet a spammer IRL I may find out, but the idea that I need to snap off a crescent kick at a moment's notice should I be assaulted by ninjas outside of the Dunkin Donuts over at Comm Ave and Babcock St seems a little farfetched.

So I run across a few people like this IRL, but not like you see on the internet. I was never trained to fight with knives (I guess my parents didn't take into consideration the possibility that I might run away and join the circus), so I was fascinated to find out that a big deal form of knife fighting called Amok has an unusual number of teachers here in Massachusetts. Where there's a hobby, there's a website, and where there's a website, there's a forum, and where there's a forum, there's nutballs.

One of my friends used to share with me that in some countries where there was some brutality involved with mass riot/protest and that civilians do not have safety gears/protection nor equipped to deal with riot police, some improvisation took place.
What they(civilians) did was they all came with a cat in hand & use them as projectile weapon. Cats could land safely and they all come with 4 limbed claws upon landing and imagined they come in masses.

So cats are weapons, but rats are dinner?

Onto a good object lesson. Today's object is a flightless bird:

Recently, one of our TLs went hunting Ostrich for the pot. The tastiest looking Ostrich was selected and shot, but refused to go down. It stood still in shock. Not wanting the poor creature to suffer, our TL immediately drew his Cold Steel Voyager (serrated edge) and slashed the victim (utilizing a #2) across the neck whereupon the victim went down (dead). To his amazement and horror, the blade had been badly damaged. The slash to the Ostrich’s neck had ripped a good percentage of the serrations off the edge of the blade. Basically, the blade is ruined.

Later in the thread it turns out Cold Steel's warranty explicitly excludes man-to-ostrich combat. Cold Steel Customer Support: "You did WHAT to a carcass with it? Hell no we don't want it back."

I too, have a rich inner life, but my bathing fantasies usually involve someone else, unlike this guy:

I train in and out of my shower in preparation to respond to any immediate threat. I soap my body and hands and leave shampoo in my hair to run down into my eyes and attempt to access my blade just to get a feel for the worst case scenario. Moving in and around a very confined, wet and slippery surface and in addition to my blade I will use my shower curtain / rod, shower head, water, soap, shampoo bottle, etc... to assist me in containing any crisis situation in a bath-room environment.

Dude, get the fuck out of my country.

Anyway I'd seen the MBC site linked over at POE once, but at least they're pros. Some of these guys are just not connected to reality.

I think that the main Amok website reads like it was written by a sane person, and it's interesting reading about the difference between combatives and martial arts.

/jeep/