Yup; the blasters used in Spaceballs: The Movie were actual firearms, just rendered safe and using effects for the shots.
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Euthymic?
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Old weird days.
eta: The school down the street had a lockdown drill this morning. The principle got on the PA to announce drill over, and congratulated everyone: “Doors locked, no one in sight, silence. Good work!”
Welcome to our new damned weird.
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I still remember one of my “kills” from assassination in college, would’ve been 91 or so. The sign-up sheet had a “way you want to die” field that didn’t really mean anything, it was just there for amusement value.
One of the participants had something like “killed by a falling bear statue”, from an Agatha Christie novel. After a few rounds he was my target. I ended up dropping a teddy bear on his head while he was going down the stairs. Certainly not regulation, but he took it. Had to do it twice because I missed the first time. He started laughing and gave me a do-over 
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I think that the NYT is mistaken here. Steve Jacksons “Killer: The Game of Assination” came out in 1981* and the movie TAG: The Assination Game came out in 1982.
*and I suspect that inspired by people playing it and codified rather than created the idea.
NB a friend of mine in college was arrested playing something like this. His group got the idea of throwing little bags of flour at each other because they would leave a white mark, kind of a poor man’s paitball. The cops were called because of suspicious people sneaking around in the bushes at night and when they tried to explain, the popo just claimed that the bags of flour were “burn bags,” fake bags of dope.
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Stop the presses! 
I have the feeling the assassination game existed in the wild for years before Steve Jackson Games formalized it. Best place to check would be the intro to Killer.
Cops hate People Out Of Place. “You’re doing strange things that we don’t understand, that’s criminal!”
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Yeah I learned a new word today. Would like to feel euthymic more often.
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Agent Culpepper, pale in the screenlit darkness, finally found the perfect word for the report. A few clicks and it was sent. Culpepper leaned back, with a look of creamy satisfaction, only to bump into Agent Loring, who, Culpepper realized, had stood watching quietly for hours as the LARPer/Violent Extremist cheat sheet was prepared and formatted.
“She came into her own as a solo artist,” Loring said, eyes still fixed on the FBI seal on Culpepper’s desktop wallpaper. “But nothing came close to Love is a Stranger.”
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Thanks for the explanation.
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I was editor of a games magazine at the time. We were doing a cyberpunk special issue and it got delayed because Steve Jackson told us they couldn’t supply the promised material as they were being raided.
The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling covers that raid and others and it’s a great read.
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I don’t even want to imagine what they will do when they discover this game…
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Interestingly enough, the experience of being raided inspired Steve Jackson to create the game Hacker, which uses a variation of the Illuminati system. Both games are of course a thumb to the nose at the powers that be.
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It’s difficult to do with a real sword. I like to challenge people to do it, and watch them discover that a sword with any kind of breadth to the blade does not have the aerodynamics of an SCA stick.
But yeah, if you are using a baton, a wrap to the head or back of the thigh can be an extremely powerful blow. You could easily break someone’s skull or spine. Cops should not be throwing head wraps.
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Meyer (1570) has this to say:
“The flick or tag-hit is not actually delivered as a cut, but is rather flicked: it is executed in the middle of combat when one has occasion, namely when you make your weapon snap at your opponent from above or from either side or from below with the flat or foible of the blade, or flick it in an arc over or under his blade.”
Of course, Meyer was mostly writing for fencers using feders, which are generally more flexible and dynamic than combat swords.
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A report, which may be an urban legend (we have our own) says the Bureau assigned agents to investigate the SCA, and their report ended “We’re joining,”
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I do know several SCAdians who work for the FBI. When I mentioned to one of them that background checks for employees probably have made the SCA one of the most thoroughly investigated organizations, the individual claimed to have searched the relevant databases and while there are plenty of references to individuals who are members of the SCA, there is no file or report specifically on the SCA. Of course, that is exactly what they would say…
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