A little window into "Real Life," aka RL, from The Black Knight, aka Vincent Shuta. Here's Shuta Multimedia Vlog 81.

In this video, I discuss the excellent Autisitc support program offered by the Mid Valley School District in Olyphant, PA, and how they are facing challenges due to funding cuts. The video is about the importance of these programs, and their impact on society as a whole.

In the video, I offered a pre-fab, cut-and-pastable letter that you can send to the representatives of your choice. It follows below. I believe it is generic enough to be appliciable to anyone with a voice in education. Feel free to use it unattributed, or to modify it as you see fit:

To (Insert name here)

I understand that these are times of increasing austerity. There are debts to be paid. We must get our house in order. The books must be balanced. The priorities we use to balance the books will determine our quality of life for years to come.

I have noticed that there have been initiatives to cut funding to education. This is causing school districts to reconsider what are considered essential services and essential personel. Sacrifices are being made in the forms of larger class sizes and reductions in staff.

Special needs programs, which absolutely rely on small classes and one-on-one interraction for their effectiveness, are especially hard hit. These programs are a deciding factor in how well these children will adapt to life.

They call it special needs for a reason—not special wants or special desires. These are needs.

The phrase "children are our future" gets overused to the point where we do not hear it. So let me use this phrase. "We will take care of our children—either now or later." They can be the well educated cornerstone of our society, or they can be an additional burden. In most cases, education will determine which path they take.

While I understand that we can chose austerity now or much worse austerity later, our children will need to have the best start to be able to deal with the challenges we know they will face.

If they cannot face these changes, we shall all face ruin. It is inevitable. Please take this into account as you develop policy. Ensure that funding is available for our schools. Our future depends on our children being able to contribute.

Thank you for taking this into consideration,

Sincerely,

(Insert Your name here)

In additon, here is a really great lik that will let you find contact info for almost any represntative:

http://consumeraction.capwiz.com/consumeraction/dbq/officials/

And on a more local note, here is how to contact the Mid Valley School District: http://mvsd.schoolfusion.us/modules/cms/pages.phtml?pageid=97536&sessionid=ad53df6555b24c839b90aaa01dd936d4

Related Links:

• http://consumeraction.capwiz.com/consumeraction/dbq/officials/
• http://mvsd.schoolfusion.us/modules/cms/pages.phtml?pageid=97536&sessionid=ad53df6555b24c839b90aaa01dd936d4

In this video taken by [bass]-The Black Knight, we see TBK and Grisha hunting Nomad Aliens with about 600 million credits worth of hardware on the 24/7 Freelancer Universe Server (Playing Microsoft Freelancer of course.) That hardware is of course [bass]-Rook-[BS} (A Battleship of Bretonian Manufacture that is the [bass] Flagship) and the [bass]-Athena-{GB] (A curiously named Rhinland Gunboat, that takes it's inspiration from the ship of the fan-fiction story "WTF is Humor," which can be found here:http://www.baseandsystemservices.com/neural-nets/wtf-is-humor-or-space-cade­ts.html

Now that's an odd piece of fiction with many different authors that...we'll its explained at the site.

As for the Nomad hunt featured in the video, for the most part it goes well...

Related links:

• http://www.baseandsystemservices.com/neural-nets/wtf-is-humor-or-space-cade­ts.html
• http://www.freelancer-universe.com