The Musings Of The Consensus

  Some weapons are truly terrible and badly designed from the start, and doomed to incur the historical derision of anyone competent to appreciate firearms. Some are well-designed masterpieces that continue to hold honor and esteem as they did when first used by soldiers in combat, and some are not overly elegant yet reasonably functional. And then we have the Breda 30, a light machine gun that escapes being completely terrible, but sadly does not rise to the level of being of average performance, having to settle for being highly underwhelming. As the name implies, the Breda 30 (Fucile Mitragliatore Breda Modello 30) was officially issued for service for the Kingdom of Italy in 1930. It was the standard light machine gun of Italy until the end of World War 2, and while it did prove an effective enough weapon to be combat-worthy, it was a mix of odd design decisions that made it rather poor in terms of performance and ergonomics. * The magazine feed system was a fixed design, loadi...

 It's been a while since my last cheese review, so let's make up for that, shall we? This time I ordered a pound each of Asiago Pressato, green waxed Irish Cheddar, and Pecorino Calabrese The first, Asiago Pressato, this was something I got Mom (my fellow taste tester) because she adores the softer cheeses. In fact, this cheese is a D.O.P.-protected cheese of Italian origin made with pasteurized cow's milk. It's a very, very young cheese, barely almost a month old, and very, very soft. This is a super gentle, buttery-tasting cheese that very easily melts on the tongue and hardly resembles her harder and drier Italian cousins like Asiago D'Allevo. Mom considered it the kind of cheese she'd both snack on and use in cheese dishes, and I would have to agree. Its storage life isn't as long as most other Italian cheeses, so be sure to store it promptly and finish it within a week or two after opening. The next cheese we tried could not have been more different. Ir...

 My father just passed April 1, 2024 6:36 PM. For those reading this, I want to make absolutely clear the world lost a great man named John Edward Vaughan. I am Daniel Cullen. Legally, we share no blood, and legally he'd only be my stepfather, but our bond was beyond mere ties of blood. I must confess before he entered my life, I had no father. The worthless waste of a human soul who raped my mother is why I'm here, and she chose to not punish me for his unimaginable crime but to raise me as her son, for which my mother will have my undying loyalty. But until she married John "Johnny" Vaughan, I had no one in my life I acknowledged as my father. Even my grandfather, he was still just my grandfather. She married two other men earlier, both of which amounted to nothing and their departure from her life was one I have no regret over. When she decided to get married a third time, both he and her made a step that was quite unusual at the time but says a lot, more than I re...

 This will not be a long post, but I just want to make clear, as someone who was involved in the first go-round of Gamergate, I want no part of any notional sequel. For starters, I already found my niche as a games reviewer for ChristCenteredGamer, a place where I feel free to review games on their merits with no chains on my work save our Christian focus and my own conscience, and that is enough for me. My only service to the world as regards gaming is to continue to review games as honestly as possible on their technical merits, unbiased by anything else, and I'm pleased to remain doing so as a reviewer for CCG. That aside, I want to make perfectly clear I do not want to get in the trenches of any sequel (which appears to be on right now). For those that do, on any side, you do you, but I found my place in the world, I shall stay uninvolved.

 It's been awhile since I and my mother got some cheese to review, but we recently sampled four different types of cheese, two of Italian extraction, two being wildly different Gouda-style cheeses. First, let's start with the cheese I got free thanks to my regular cheesemonger Murray's tossing it in free with my order. That being a Parmigiano-Reggiano, aka that cheese most people have put on their Italian dishes in powder format. I got a fresh if aged by 5 years slice of said cheese, and the taste in general is not much different from the powdered variety. Like the powdered version, it is a raw cow's milk cheese given a protracted aging process and made with a high density of salt to promote the flavor of Parmesan-style cheese most are familiar with. However, in its fresh state, it lacks much of that concentrated tanginess the powdered, condensed variety often has, while still retaining a gentler flavor despite being a hard cheese. If you want to have Parmesan without i...

 In my last post on the Mormon faith, I established why I consider their doctrine heretical, inconsistent, and so full of contradictions I believed it and still believe it to be lies. In that post, I mostly pointed out where it contradicted the Bible it claims its own literature is deuterocanonical too. This post is going to point out the flaws in in it's "brick and mortar" arguments, specifically, the real-world facts it does not line up with as regards historical plausibility and where it cannot possibly make logical sense when compared to its own logic with real-world fact. For the Mormon reader, no, I am not going to going to go for the low-hanging fruit and attack Joseph Smith as a charlatan (though I believe he was). I will not go after any "picky points" about real-world Mormon practices, we could argue the validity of that for years and get nowhere. Instead, I'm going to show why, by Mormonism own logic and that of the Christian faith it claims to be...

 Recently, I had a little incident where I offended a devout Mormon by throwing shade on the Book of Mormon as a fanfic that does not withstand the light of scrutiny. Out of respect for the party in question, whom I apologized to for being unduly rude, I shall not name names nor discuss exactly where it happened or the circumstances. However, because this is my personal blog, I shall set forth my views on Mormonism, with no evasion or sugarcoating, just to clarify my beliefs. If any devout Mormon wishes to offer a rebuttal, I shall accept that maturely and welcome it.  The only caveat I ask is that the rebuttal give evidence for its views from secondary sources to back up the TANGIBLE claims made by Mormon doctrine (such as geological facts and historical events that should be provable by historical evidence of some kind or backed up by a secondary source). The reason I make this distinction is that Christians and Jews can easily meet this test with their holy books and belief...