With another break from tradition, I’ve begun watching the Netflix Original SeriesDracula to get into the spirit of the season. This is actually a (or, rather, another) British version of the classic tale, broadcast first on BBC One before taking its place on Netflix. The series certainly exudes a certain Britishness* and I mean that in a good way. The decision to watch was based, largely, on the prodding I received from Netflix. No surprise, this got me thinking about the business model.
Now, it would seem to me that the way Netflix makes the most money is to sell monthly subscriptions which then go unused. That way, they get all the revenue but they save on cost (minimal as it may be to support each individual view) and expense (I assume that they pay per-view royalties for their offerings).
If that is the case, why push shows on me? These days, I get blurbs and videos for films/shows that they feel might appeal to me whenever I’m logged on and then through email when I am not. I seem to get an email, every week or so, asking me if it isn’t high time I watched something on Neflix. Stranger still are the emails reminding me that I started watching something but haven’t finished yet (as if I hadn’t noticed). How does all this make them money?
Set aside, for the moment, it isn’t just one department running amok – creating technological solutions just because they can – I suppose I must have the business model wrong. Maybe part of the deal they make with any content creator (and even, perhaps particularly, in the case of “Original Content”, where contracts with developers and producers may be critical) has to do with guaranteeing a certain audience after they sign an exclusive with Netflix. Maybe its purely financial – more eyeballs means more royalties. Maybe it is a marketing thing. The creators of Squid Game surely will be making bank on their new found fame in ways that greatly exceed whatever it is that Netflix is paying them.
In any case, the combination of holiday spirit and Original Content incentivization meant I would see a splash for Dracula as I watched movie after movie on Netflix. Still, even this non-stop marketing blast probably wouldn’t have been enough to tempt me except that somewhere (maybe in print – Wall St. Journal?) I read a critical review of the mini-series that said it was actually worth my while. So, spirit of the season and all that.
This is a TV production and that means we should only expect so much. My initial impressions were of an over-reliance on jump scares and excessively-loud orchestra swells – a plague endemic to the genre and not just its lower budget corner. While much of Dracula strikes me as well-written, the sheer length of the mini-series format starts to expose a weakness stemming from repetition and the over-reliance on certain crutches. For example, the leading roles of Dracula and Van Helsing are written to make these characters far more clever than those that surround them. Count Dracula, in particular, boasts of his superiority by constantly proclaiming in only-slightly-veiled language the secrets which he must keep. Naturally, those around him are too naive, too unsophisticated, and just too dull to understand his telegraphed warnings of their approaching doom. It’s a nice device and one that has been used to great success throughout cinema. It worked here the first time, the second, and maybe even the third.
By the way, did I mention that Van Helsing is a woman? Van Helsing is a woman. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
The 2021 Dr. Van Helsing makes me wonder if there is some sort of checklist that specifies a strong female lead, a supporting homosexual man, a highly-competent black – and so forth. It may be that compliance with said list is just another hurdle to clear in order to get things produced these days. There is certainly a range of “wokeness” that goes from simply hitting all the buttons in the course of telling your story up-to-and-including the woke being the story. To some extent, I even understand and support a few of the goals here. Why couldn’t there have been a beautifully-intersectional homosexual black man living large in Victorian London? And, if we’re going to tell about him in our story, shouldn’t he be a positive character – so as to counter all the negatives his predecessors have endured? For someone in the biz who looks at decades of reinforcement of traditional norms and outright prohibition of art when those norms are violated, such treatment would seem long overdue.
For the rest of us, though, I think we are still more concerned about whether or not we’re getting a good entertainment return on our time and money investment. Do the politically correct extras detract from that? In this case, I don’t think they do. I have no doubt, however, that the current state of entertainment offerings is all over the map. In this example, today’s world looks upon the story of Dracula (the book, now, rather than this show) for its allegorical treatment of sex, race, and sexually-transmitted disease. It seems a certainty that any modernization of Bram Stoker’s tale would necessitate a more modern look at these issues.
I’ll also mysteriously add that the twist, when it comes, felt very rewarding. I’ll not say much more than that because it’s worth not ruining for you if you don’t know. I guess it is kind of hard to avoid ruining it although I managed not to figure it out until it happened. This “new blood,” if you will, was enough to make up for most of the sins the piece committed in getting us there.
There are dozens upon dozens of Dracula and vampire-themed films out there. A few factors need to come together to justify making one more. Better production values, an up-to-date look, and a bit of twist are enough to make this one worth a watch for me being, as I was, in the mood for something Halloween. It’s still not great cinema. It’s not even great by the standards of the BBC miniseries.
*One bit of surprise came as I am also continuing along with my Ripper Street viewing, albeit now on DVD. The actor John Heffernan, who plays Jonathan Harker, showed up in Ripper Street the follow night in a recurring part as a lawyer. It was momentarily disorienting.
The last time I wrote about the FTC notice, I was a little frustrated about some changes I was required to make. The short version is that I’m not supposed to let you click on any links which result in payments to myself unless I inform you of that relationship. This, of course, seems fair enough of a request. You may hate what you’re reading here and bristle at the thought of my actually getting paid real money to write this shite.
For this site, the links in question are from the Amazon Affiliate program. This actually adds an extra level of complication in that I’m not entirely sure how it works. In its straightforward implementation it is pretty easy to understand. If I provide a link here that says “buy this great new thing at Amazon” and a bunch of people click on my link and do just that, I get paid a bit for that referral. Easy peasey. However, if my readers don’t buy the think that I was pushing on them but, instead, go on to buy a bunch of other stuff – I might still get some referral money for sending Amazon the business.
So what happens, then, if you’re poking around on my site, click on a link, and end up at Amazon. Then, sick of my dumb ideas, you head over to a more popular site (say, for instance, Instapundit – which actively pitches paid links as a way to contribute to their site). Let’s imagine you enjoy what they do for you and so, unlike your disappointing experience here at et tu, Bluto, you figure you’ll buy some merch and send them a few bucks. But who gets the referral. Do I get paid because you clicked my link first? Does Insty get paid because you clicked theirs right before buying? Is there a “timeout” where one referral gets precedence over another?
Frankly, I have no idea.
And yes, that would kind of piss me off to accidentally pay money to one website when I was fully intending to send some money to another.
The flip side of this coin is that, to this day, I’ve never actually been paid by Amazon… still, going on two years from that original post. This is all fine by me. As I pointed out, my links to products on Amazon are entirely to help illustrate what the book, movie, song, etc. that I’m talking about is all about. I don’t recall ever posting a link as a “hey, go buy this!” and occasionally do the opposite (e.g. this link sends you to Amazon, but don’t buy it there!).
Also, the last time I talked about this, I was speaking with pride about the fact that I’d figured out the WordPress system enough to automate the required notification. This was important. I already had dozens if not hundreds of links through to Amazon and for me to try to go back to find then edit each one seemed like an impossibility. By programmatically inserting my notice I could comply both past and future all at once. Of course, I had very much impressed myself figuring out WordPress enough to actually get the thing working and I wanted to brag about that too.
The problem is that Big Bureaucracy never sleeps. The requirements continue to get a little more strict and a little more detailed as time goes on. I’ve updated my automated stuff to comply with the requirements as I understand them. I’m not sure, however, that it is enough.
Starting a couple of posts ago, I tried to go one better. I’ve now created hover-text for any link that is going to take the surfer through the Amazon Affiliate interface. I was going to do some weird additional character stuff (this is actually suggested in the Amazon notes), but it didn’t feel quite right. I realized that with pop-up text, I could have it look exactly the way I wanted it. Well, most of the time. There are probably various combination of device and browser that will not render pop-ups in a meaningful way. Nonetheless, I am sure it is an improvement but is it enough.
Just in case, I’m working on another variation that’s a little easier in its implementation but, I think, even more prone to getting messed up. I’m trying to highlight Amazon links in a different color (green for money – right?) so that they do stand out more. Next time there is an Affiliate link, I’ll give this a try. If I could programmatically change the color when detecting the appropriate link format, it would be fantastic. A programmed solution, as before, would be entirely backward compatible. This might be beyond me. The colors are done through HTML classes and to add/insert classes probably requires some theme-level programming.
So while I’m doing more and more, there is the obvious downside. Unlike my earlier, automated solution, this is all bit labor intensive. As far as I can tell, WordPress doesn’t provide a non-techie interface to the hover-text widget nor easy, variability for color. This means that I have to not only remember to do it all each time but also get all the steps in the multi-step process correct. I’m bound to mess it up every one in a while. Also, and unlike the automated solution, it will not be retroactive. The new look will only apply to links I provide going forward.
So one of these days I’ll be getting this wrong and, as I said last time, I’m hoping that the consequences will not wind up with me destitute and imprisoned. You’ve got to admit that holding an amateur (and amateurish) blogger personally responsible for poor web page design seems wildly disproportionate, especially for a system that I’ve never actually gotten any use out of. More likely, once Amazon decides I’m not jumping over all the right hurdles, they’ll toss me from the program. This would not be much of a loss (I won’t repeat it…) and part of me wonders if I shouldn’t just quit right now. The thing is, I really like the auto-generate tiny-links that the Amazon Affiliate program generates for me. That, I’m not going to give up until I have to.
Yersterday, the Wall St. Journal‘s feature on entertainment had three articles. One of them was about Journey, Don’t Stop Believin’, and the Escape album (1981); one covered The Beatles Let It Be (1971); and the third was about Michael Myers and the Halloween franchise (1978). Pundits wonder why Gen Z doesn’t engage with corporate media? C’mon man.
As I bask in the glory of all these IL-2 scenarios that sprung up while I wasn’t paying attention, it occurred to me that I also have not been paying attention to CMANO. I have been, more or less, keeping up to date with the engine but I’ve not really given a thought to the user-mods package. Clearly I had to have missed a few iterations and this seemed like a good time to check up on that.
I am on some shaky ground when it comes to my CMANO installations. I explained earlier how, shortly after my original purchase, I managed to get two different versions installed, causing me much anguish. This issue was finally resolved when I got my bearings and figured out how to do all the installations manually. Even in doing so I despaired that I’d forget how things worked by the time I had to do it all again. That was almost four years ago now and its been about three years since I’ve even played the game.
Boy, has a lot happened.
Let me, momentarily, ignore the elephant in the room and start from where I did. As I said, what I was after was an update to the user-developed package. This consists primarily of a set of “Community” scenarios covering, naturally, a much wider variety of situations than the official offering. I was happy to discover that new scenarios continue to be developed and, in fact, that there was one particularly relevant to my current interests.
The title of this post refers to an Alpha Strike, a term which denotes a mission using the full capacity of an aircraft carrier to engage a target. In Vietnam, the subset of missions assigned to the U.S. Navy were typically launched from carrier decks. An especially large mission, such as the April 3rd targeting of the Thanh Hóa Bridge, might include multiple carriers as well as aircraft from land-based airfields. Within the world of CMANO, this type of mission is explored by a scenario that I had not previously noticed, Yankee Team, 1966.
This user-made scenario was not included in the last Community package that I had, although it has been under developed since well before that time. Its design is that the player has 3 aircraft carriers with which to conduct 24 hours of Rolling Thunder missions. Targets are chosen by the player who also has control over load-outs, timings, etc. Scripting is used to shake up the starting conditions so that replaying the scenario should produce a different experience each time. Despite the the identification of the scenario as occurring on a particular time and date in 1966, it could be seen to function as a Rolling Thunder sandbox – a means to try various strategies against the North Vietnamese defenses to see what works and what doesn’t. Although it isn’t necessarily designed this way, the resulting player experience would have some parallels to those in charge of the actual air war – the strengths and weaknesses of the North Vietnamese infrastructure can be explored, learned, and overcome – albeit the hard way.
This was very exciting to me and so I eagerly downloaded the latest Community files. I had predicted that things would go wrong and surely they did. I got everything installed, went to run Yankee Team and – splat – an error message warned me of missing files on my system. I figured the problem was that my software version, despite the updater’s assurances to the contrary, was not up to the version used to create the scenario. In trying to fix this I managed to stumble across a beta release, associated with one of the DLCs, and thought that might get me where I needed to go. It didn’t. That didn’t fix Yankee Team and broke even the older scenarios that were working just fine. After much blundering about, I finally saw that elephant of which I spoke. I had been getting my links, not from the CMANO program that I own, but from a newer version that I don’t. That new version had come out during my “down time” and the support infrastructure had been reworked to pretty much make CMANO go away in favor of its replacement.
Now, I can’t say this totally took me by surprise as I did see various press releases along the way. Not actively playing the game, though, I didn’t pay it all too much attention nor try to figure out how it impacted me. In fact, if you readers take any kind of an interest in this game, you are probably far more up on what’s happened than I am. Nevertheless, I’ll share what I now know. Because it’s my page!
You see, an upgrade to the game, called Command: Modern Operations, was released in November of 2019. In many ways, this was a long time coming. The original Command release was in 2013 and six years is a pretty decent time for a piece of game software to receive continued support. That said, the new version is, in many ways, a facelift for the original rather than a new direction for the product. This was pretty much inevitable; the beauty of the Command system is that it covered the entire globe and the history of naval air power. There really isn’t a new frontier into which to expand so, at some point, the developer has to ask for you to purchase an upgrade just to keep playing.
Or maybe not. From 2015, Command began selling DLCs consisting of scenarios focused on a given era or subject. For example the first, Northern Inferno, depicts a NATO v. Warsaw Pact war circa 1975 by offering a complete scenario package including tutorials and a campaign, of sorts. The DLC business model offers additional value that is worth paying for, particularly because the entry price hasn’t been all that steep (especially if you bought through a Christmas sale or the like).
I’ll say that I was probably intending to buy one or more the DLC packages. I was still stuck in Vietnam when I was last playing around with CMANO and, with that focus, somehow passed over their Arab-Israel War DLC when it would have been relevant; much as two ships might pass in the night. Basically, I haven’t played CMANO since 2018 and just haven’t thought about it much. My (decidedly hands-off) impression was that DLCs seemed like an effective way to voluntarily extract more money from existing customers.
I guess it wasn’t, quite.
When Europa Universalis became EU2, I felt a sense of betrayal*. Despite the many extra years of support that backed the original CMANO release, the release of CMO in many ways feels like the same game sans version interoperability. Yes, the new version looks better and has a few shiny new features but you’ll have a hard time convincing me that it is a new game. If nothing else, the fact that you can load and play any CMANO scenarios tells you something.
Marketing material tantalizes the unengaged with pitches for the “professional version.” This is a business model that predated the rerelease of CMO but is obviously enhanced by the new version. The idea is to provide a better, more accessible, and adaptable simulation for military organizations. Some of the features of this professional version are truly features that wouldn’t appeal to the hobbyist – statistical analysis capabilities and interconnection with other military systems are two that spring to mind. In other cases, it appears that the professional version simply offers a one-up on what the gamers’ product has. A new feature provides a “tactical” display – a 3D version of the action. In the demo reels, this is used to illustrates air combat, wherein altitude is a critical component of combat tactics. In at least one blurb I was looking at (honestly, I forget where) a “better” 3D display was shown that was described as part of the professional version. As I said, it feels like a bit of teasing when I can’t tell if the really fine looking video I’m watching is what I will get or part of an unavailable (to me) military-focused CMO.
Let me admit, as an aside, that writing a “review” of a piece of software based entirely on the marketing material (plus a few reviews/on-line comments from people who actually do have the game) is a bit suspect. That I’m confused about what features are part of the roughly $80 purchase price of the new game (versus what gets included in add-ons and extras) says more about my lack of trying than anything else. You’ve got to grant me, though, that it can be confusing. That 3D visualization feature, for example, isn’t part of the basic package. It must be downloaded separately and paid for as an additional license – maybe. This software, called Tacview, has a demoware/crippleware version for nothing, a $30 version, and also a $70 version (assuming US based purchases and price stability). This is separate from the commercial/governmental licensing which appears to offer additional features beyond even the higher-priced “advanced” gamer version. Going all-in for the hobbyist runs some $320+ in purchase price and, for someone like me who is not paying too close attention, it is difficult to tell how much of that is stuff I really want, how much I don’t need, and how much is going to be left on the table because I got mixed up from watching a video from the “professional” version.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to say that the “upgrade” gets you nothing. One of the more substantial changes, to my mind, is contained in the title itself. The new version, absent the “Air” and “Naval” designators, promises to be a simulator of all the forces on the battlefield. That is, CMO features improvements to land-based combat. I am also assuming that the package will continue to well supported, given that strong support has been my experience with this game from its inception. In fact, the creating of a “professional” class of license should only enhance user satisfaction across the board. The software team will be getting a regular supply of money to chase down issues – some of which are going to be issues with the commercial version of the game as well.
Now, similar to what Paradox did when they came back to ask their EU customers for another payment, Matrix Games acknowledged that the existing CMANO player base might feel a little put out. The release announcement was accompanied by a FAQ which asked, essentially, what if I already paid for the game? The answer is that holders of CMANO licenses could get a 50% discount off the new version. These days I can’t remember – I may have even seen that offer at the time. If so, I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to pay even $40 for a new version of a game that I wasn’t currently playing. Or maybe the whole thing slipped by me unnoticed. But here’s the rub. That offer was good for a few months only. If you hadn’t claimed your discount by January 2020, you were back to full price.
I pissed and moaned quite extensively about a similar experience with HPS, John Tiller Software, and the aged Squad Battles series. While I can understand the business motivation for putting a time limit on a special offer, doesn’t such a short window upset rather than mollify many of your existing customers? I would think so. However (and more importantly), I guess the question is whether it will anger your existing customers enough so that they don’t continue on being a future customer. That is less clear. Although I haven’t paid John Tiller Software recently and am now even less likely to do so, I did keep on paying Paradox. Likewise, I’ll be surprised if I don’t eventually turn over a large amount of money to Matrix, Slitherine, and developer Warfare Sims. That doesn’t mean I’ll be happy about it.
There is a second downside. So CMANO has been pulled from the virtual store – you can no longer buy the old version from Slitherine/Matrix or from the Steam Store. That is reasonable enough, given that they’ve pulled support for the program. You can also continue to play the game on Steam if you bought the license before the CMO release. You can still get the final patch for the game – in my case, I got it through my registered purchase on the Slitherine site. It appears, as well, that if you buy the DLC campaign/scenario packs that were made for CMANO, you get both CMO and CMANO -compatible versions. I say “apparently” because its not clear to me exactly which DLCs support both games and if and when support for both will be dropped.
My biggest disappointment, however, comes in the area of user-supported content. It only makes sense that the developers back off in their support. The last patch is the last patch and making that available is about the best that they can do. For the user-made content, however, it looks like when development shifted to the new version, CMO-based updates entirely replaced the existing downloads. So while the CMANO version of the Community Scenarios (for example) was available for a time for CMO (and worked!), once the CMO-specific work started, the old versions disappeared. Again, nobody wants to deal with complaints and bug-fix demands over multiple versions but I, for one, did not have myself up to date when the shift occurred. Clearly, I’ve missed at least two Community updates that came in before the CMO release.
I’ll end on a positive note – a bit of hope. I said at the outset that (until I rectified the problem) I had two different installations on my machine. However, I actually own three different versions of CMANO. I made my original purchase and then received the first upgrade through the Matrix (or maybe Slitherine – same thing, really) site. The current policy is that purchasing any game directly from the publisher also gets you a Steam key. It doesn’t work the other way around, though. If you buy a Slitherine/Matrix game through Steam, you don’t get gratis download from the website. Point being, I also have a license (so far uninstalled) through Steam as well.
Here’s the good news. On Steam, the “workshop” files are actually frozen in time to back when the support shifted from one version to another. There is the Community package – hopefully a version newer than the last one I had. There is also a version of Yankee Team, 1966. This scenario had been under development for years before the release of CMO and there were versions released purely for CMANO. In fact, there were even two CMANO versions – one for if you had a particular DLC and one if you didn’t. My theory (notattempted yet) is that if I install the Steam version of CMANO, the user-made downloads will show up in Steam labyrinthine file tree – for use either in Steam or in my direct download version. It won’t be perfect – it looks like a lot of work (read, bug fixing) went in under the new engine and I’ll have access to none of that.
What this does do is let me sample that one scenario (and maybe a couple more I don’t know about) without having to commit some $360 in purchases. Baby steps.
*I was sure I whined about this in a previous post but I can’t find it. So I’ll do it now. I was an early adopter of Europa Universalis and thus struggled with the game as they worked out the kinks. Having paid the full price up front I felt that I was entitled to the updates that fixed any ongoing bugs. While those same patches also improved on features, this seemed to me a reasonable exchange for my custom and subsequent patience. A good chunk of that goodwill got trampled when Paradox said, more or less, that the next “patch” was going to be called a new product and required repurchasing. Obviously the loss of goodwill wasn’t too severe – I’ve paid for all four of the EU releases over the years (although I did wait for a substantial discount before buying III and IV). The situation with CMANO is obviously different… but it resurrects those old feelings.
The story in Whiteout would appear to be ripped from today’s headlines… except that the book was written in 2004. While the book isn’t new, this is my newest read from Ken Follett. It’s a techno-thriller of sorts, although more just “thriller” than “tech.” The story concerns a lab that is experimenting with highly-contagious and highly-lethal viruses in order to develop antiviral medicines.
Sound familiar?
The tech in this novel is mostly centered around the security of a facility that has to protect, not only the intellectual property stored therein but also its dangerous biological materials. The book enthralls us with just how dedicated criminals might go about breaching that security and the intrepid “good guy” who attempts to stop them. That and a bit of nookie because, well, it is Ken Follett.
In the end, I wouldn’t say Whiteout was in any way predictive of our problems fifteen years into its future. There was a tantalizing tie-in with some secret funding from the U.S. government (the lab is in Scotland) but that detail didn’t much feature into the nitty-gritty of the action. Whiteout is a good illustration of why Follett remains a best-seller as well as why he is often classified as an “airport” novelist.
To the 2021 reader, I wouldn’t think any of us could refrain from collating this story in terms of today’s news. For me especially because, at the same time I was reading Whiteout, I was digesting a few articles that paint for me a disturbing picture.
A Wall St. Journalarticle that came out about the same time as I started this read compares the modus operandi of Fauci and friends in our current crisis to his previous high-profile cock-up; the governmental response to the proliferation of AIDS. For those inclined to distrust Fauci all along, this is but more fuel for the fire. In fact, I’d surmise that for many, this isn’t news – its just the first time it managed to surface in a mainstream publication. For those who see Fauci as a modern-day saint, I have to assume that they saw his various missteps along his path as merely the fits and starts of an honest actor trying to do the right thing. One would think that seeing the very same feints repeated some four decades prior would make one questions one’s assumptions. Although I’m sure it does not.
Take this information along with a post from the website The Conservative Treehouse analyzing what we know so far. Or, maybe to put it another way, reviewing what we know so far and using that to speculate further. On the same day I was reading this, the Wall St. Journal had another editorial (sorry, didn’t save the link this time) that said there was (if memory serves) a 90%-or-greater probability that the ‘rona was concocted in a lab. The citations in the above-linked article are consistent with that.
Can we get closer to the truth by analyzing what we are being told… knowing we’re not being told the truth, of course, but assuming there is a grain of truth in every good lie?
The Chinese government has stated that they did not manufacture nor release the virus – which, of course they would say that. Their version, however, is that the virus was created by the Americans and was released by the US to harm China economically. So far, this could be dismissed as two schoolboys shouting “he hit me first.” So what is America’s version? Well, at President Biden’s direction, the intelligence community took a long hard look at the data and concluded – uh – nothing. “We have no idea how it got there,” the US offers. “It could be anything.”
Now, knowing nothing else, what do you make of this? You’ve got two kids standing next to a broken lamp. One points to the other, “he did it!” The other says, “I have no idea how this happened. Might have been the wind done knocked it down. Or the cat. Or that guy. No way to know really.” To which one do you lend more credence?
Cui bono
Now, add to the mix that the aforementioned citations tend to support the Chinese version of events. America did fund the research and does seem to own this technology. I’ve read an interesting analysis that goes into the why and how China might have deliberately released this virus as a weapon – I’ll not go into except to note how quickly the Hong Kong democracy protests wound themselves down once a virus was in the air. More recently, though, I’ve seen various theories about why the US (alone or in cahoots with others) might have thought a pandemic was a good idea.
I have a hard time squaring that the US was targeting China with a bioweapon, as China seems to accuse. It doesn’t seem to be worth doing – too blunt of a weapon to accomplish its purpose. There is also the theory that the US targeted itself – the Deep State taking on a populist insurgency. Anthony Fauci is on record, in 2017, saying that Trump would face a “surprise infectious disease outbreak” during his term. Was this in someone’s pocket from the 2016 victory just in case reelection looked like a 2020 possibility? Again, as a weapon to be used against our own government, a virus release in Asia seems a fairly haphazard attack. How to be sure this takes out your target without blowing back on you? A more plausible theory (although maybe not by much) was that the virus was targeting not the political realm but, rather, the economic.
In September of 2019, the financial markets were raising red flags reminiscent of the 2008 housing collapse. The Fed began a massive intervention via the “repo” market. By the end of 2019, Fed intervention had already exceeded even that of the proceeding “Great Recession.” The nature and magnitude of the response suggests that the Fed was pulling out all the stops in order to prevent an impending meltdown. There is a problem with stimulus and that is that the cheap money can cause any number of other problems, not the least of which is out-of-control inflation. The antidote for that would be if the financial wizards could somehow flood the markets with money while simultaneously throttling back the economy.
There are data suggesting that the corona outbreak started in September of 2019. While China did not admit as much, you can see officialdom reacting to something within this same time frame. Is the likely explanation that the U.S. wanted to put a “pause button” in place before flooding the world economy with money? Probably not. Is it a possible explanation? I suppose it is.
What makes this particularly hard for someone like me to swallow is America’s self image as the good guy, the beacon of democracy, the shining light on a hill. Surely we wouldn’t slaughter millions just to keep Goldman Sachs in the black? Would we? Is it just possible that WE are the baddies?
Throw into this volatile mix one last WSJ article. This past week there was an editorial opining about the diplomatic situation in Europe. It seems that both France and Germany are demurring in their backing of the United States in the confrontation with China. It is not helpful, they say, to be adversarial. Instead, they wish to remain above the growing conflict and engage positively with both sides rather than take a side. From a historical perspective, this is tantamount to switching their allegiance.
Still, on its face, this doesn’t sound so terrible. The leading statesmen in France and in Germany should consider the needs of, respectively, France and Germany. Nations should be acting in their own self interest – at least within reason. Starting a fight with China probably does not seem wise when you are a smaller player on the world stage. The French and the Germans, after all, are not actually taking sides against the US. Or are they?
The editorial piece argues that in failing to back the US in Asia, Europe is threatening the protective umbrella that NATO has afforded Europe since the end of World War II. If the major European nations start siding with China or with Russia, even if it is on a case-by-case basis, what incentive does the US have in backstopping the NATO alliance if things should turn nasty in Europe? The editorial (written by a Democrat, I should add) implores our traditional allies to see the big picture – to stand with the US in the traditional formation.
But who are the baddies?
Is it possible that France and Germany are starting to wonder what is the “right” side, what is the “wrong” side, and whether taking a side even makes sense. If America’s hegemony has really gone south, is handing the ball to China really such a bad thing?
Ahhhh… I should probably read more airport fiction and fewer editorials.
etflix original content film War Machine came out in 2017. I can’t say I remember the details of its release but I do remember that Netflix quickly began foisting it upon me. Their teaser is this torso shot of Brad Pitt affecting this odd-looking stance – stiff bearing and screwed-up face. Somewhere in the blurb it also pushes Pitt’s involvement.
The funny thing is I didn’t* recognize him. Despite looking directly into Pitt’s stare, I did not realize that was him. It’s not that he looks all that different. A different haircut and that weird-ass facial expression is about all there is to it. It’s also not a matter of acting – I’m looking at a still shot. In this case, it must say more about my social deficiencies than anything, or anyone, else.
Brad Pitt not only stars but he has production credit here. The film was made through Pitt’s company, Plan B Entertainment. Given my positive impression of all things Pitt, I was predisposed to want to watch this one. As I read through some of the comments on Netflix’s site, however, I saw that there were many that experienced the movie as simple, anti-American invective. I decided I wasn’t in the mood for that. While I left it in my streaming queue, I had little-to-no thought of watching it.
Things change.
Provided with our recent ignominious ending, we can now evaluate America’s Afghani Adventure (TM) with a genuine form of hindsight. The traditional lines of support for one position or another have been utterly shaken up over the last few years. Donald Trump was a proponent of ending America’s presence. This not only moved some conservative backing to the anti-perpetual-war position but ginned up support on the liberal side to #resist and keep our forces engaged. The old neocon crowd hasn’t changed their tune but the professional military, also expected to be hawkish, has long been influenced by the Obama/Biden administration and its appointments – lending another left-of-center voice to keeping the fight going in Afghanistan.
Since the end of August, however, it seems far less unpatriotic to criticize US policy when there are no troops to “support” in Afghanistan.
I lead in this way because many of the deepest criticisms of the movie were along these lines; that the film is anti-American and fails to “support our troops.” In some ways it is. It certainly might feel even more so if you had just come from Afghanistan or if you had friends still there. With passions cooling, now is my time to take a look.
In fact, this seemed an ideal time to take that look. If War Machine is indeed a critique of US Afghanistan policy circa 2010 and circa 2016, does that critical analysis seem different today than it did a few years ago? Were there phases of Afghan policy that were more right or more wrong than others? Is such a critique in any way predictive of what happened at the end of this summer? In other words, now we have tested the policies of doing more and of doing less (actually, nothing) and can objectively evaluate the outcome.
With all this in mind, it’s hard for me to call the film anti-American. Believe me, I would if I thought I could. The biggest accusation it makes is that General McChrystal leaked his report to the press so as to pressure President Obama into giving him the “surge” he requested. However, saying so is not anti-American – because this is true. McChrystal really did alter Obama’s policy by leaking his report. War Machine does portray 2010’s Operation Moshtarak as a ill-conceived failure – which in hindsight it objectively was. Although that failure was apparent in 2016 when the movie was made, it is even harder to argue for success after the Taliban not only retook Marjah and the contested Helmand Province, but the entire country. Beyond that, there is some lampooning of the military brass and their entourage, which may or may not be exaggerated. Of course, these are just fictional characters. They are not real people.
You see, Pitt doesn’t play General Stanley McChrystal, he plays General Glen MacMahon. Anthony Michael Hall isn’t General Michael Flynn, he is Major General Greg Pulver. Siân Thomas isn’t playing Hillary Clinton, even if she looks just like her. The shift to fictional characters offers a plausible deniability when engaging in speculation or stretching the truth. No, McChrystal didn’t actually say such-and-such, but MacMahon did!
It all leaves me a little bit confused as to what I’m watching. Is it a kind of docu-drama? Is it meant to be farce or satire – conveying its message through bits of absurdity. For example, I’ve tried to figure out Pitt and his stiff portrayal of the General. I watched some video of McChrystal and can’t see reflections of the character there. Did Pitt think he was lampooning McChrystal? Did the director? Is MacMahon supposed to be deliberately exaggerated to make him some kind of cartoon whipping boy – a generic caricature of a commanding general? I cannot tell.
That, in a nutshell, is what dooms this production to mediocrity. It attempts to do a bunch of things yet, while it may come close some of the time, really gets none of them right. The film has its laugh-along, funny moments – but it isn’t a comedy. It tries to show military action but does so by condensing the “largest operation of the war” into the actions of a single platoon of Marines. It purports to show the personalities behind the headlines but every character is entirely two-dimensional. As a Netflix Original, I’d like to blame its problems on trying to make a heavy-weight film on a fly-weight budget, but I’m not even sure that was the problem. The budget is about triple the well regarded (by me, at least) Danger Close. It is $10 million more than the masterfulBig Short, whose formula’s footsteps it would seem to follow.
I don’t hate it, and I certainly don’t hate it for the reasons that I was led to believe I would, but I can’t bring myself to love it either.
Watching the production credits I got one other* revelation. I saw that the music was done by Nick Cave (again). Maybe it’s not Brad Pitt’s name in the credits I should look for, but Cave’s.
I’ll dwell on one last credit. The voice-over narration for the movie is by “Sean Cullen” played by Scoot McNairy. He’s an actor I know from the (well-done using about 7% of War Machine‘s budget) indy film Monsters in which Scoot played “a cynical journalist.” Likewise here, Cullen is a cynical journalist from Rolling Stone who, despite his role as narrator, gets very little screen time. Yet, he may be the pivotal character in this particular story. Cullen is a swap-out for Michael Hastings, the BuzzFeed and Rolling Stone reporter who wrote the article The Runaway General, published in Rolling Stone.
As portrayed in the movie itself, it was the spotlight shown by The Runaway General that got McChrystal fired**. Hastings then went on to write the book upon which the movie is based. I haven’t read the book but I have read the article. As with the movie as a whole, I’m not sure I find it all that subversive. The worst thing that McChrystal did (by my reckoning) was to encourage a “f*ck Joe Biden” attitude among his staff. That men occasionally drink too much or speak disparagingly of diplomatic niceties and/or politics hardly seems scandalous. While it may have been that all of this smaller stuff was the final straw given the troop request leak, I’m guessing the ultimate sin was to vulgarly criticize the administration. At least until Obama’s own vulgar critique of his former VP (“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*ck things up.”) was leaked by an aide, criticism of the President’s people is criticism of the President.
Yet the story has another meta-twist to throw at us.
Following the release of The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan and then another exposé about the contractor-led war in Iraq (I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story), Hasting died aged 33. He died in a car crash one day after announcing that he was under investigation by the FBI in connection to a “big story” he was working on. Comments from his lawyer suggest his new target was the CIA. The nature of his demise, in a single vehicle car crash where the flaming Mercedes-Benz hit a palm tree at what appeared to be its maximum speed, fueled suspicions of murder. It has been speculated that the nature of the crash was indicative of a car whose computer controls had been hacked.
In the days that followed, witnesses offered evidence to support foul play. Hastings apparently received threats over his McChrystal book and was now “agitated” and “tense” – presumably with regard to his new endeavor. He is reported to specifically have been worried about his Mercedes and tried to borrow a friend’s Volvo – perhaps intending to “go off the radar.”
It is worth adding that his own family regard this combination of paranoia and erratic behavior as a sign of mental difficulties, perhaps related to drug abuse. This may be a more plausible explanation for the crash than a grand, high-level government conspiracy to snuff out a small-time reporter.
It remains worth considering that Netflix took on the project (already underway under another studio) after Michael Hasting’s death. Much of the talent, including the director/screenwriter came on in the years following the “accident.” It’s not an angle that is explored in the film in any way but the possibility that Hasting’s work resulted in being targeted for death certainly had to have had an influence.
I only found this out after I watched the movie. Knowing that last bit, it probably would have made me want to watch War Machine even knowing I would find the experience a tad disappointing.
*For that matter, I didn’t pick up on Anthony Michael Hall until I saw his name in the closing credits. Russell Crowe, as McMahon’s replacement “Bob”, I didn’t notice until after the fact. Crowe does not appear in the credits. I guess it pays to be Brad Pitt.
**Point of trivia. Until McChrystal’s predecessor, Gen. David McKiernan, was dismissed by Obama, no commanding general had been relieved wartime command since Harry Truman tussled with Gen. Douglas MacArthur during Korea (per the Rolling Stone article). After McKiernan, Obama sacked McChrystal and then McChrystal’s successor, General David Petraeus, left under a cloud after barely more than a year. Although cleared in an inquiry, General John Allen relinquished that same post days after being cleared of political misconduct related to one of Petraeus’ scandals. Finally, “Fighting Joe” Dunford, Allen’s replacement, seemed to manage being promoted upward and onward out of the Afghanistan mission. An indictment of the Obama presidency or maybe the war in Afghanistan as a whole?
This is the eighty-first in a series of posts on the Vietnam War. See here for the previous post in the series and here to go back to the master post.
Having not really mastered the A-1 Skyraider, I’d like to modernize a tad. Essentially, I’m taking on the same program as I did with that somewhat-more-WW2-like-plane but this time I’ll go to the Vought F-8 Crusader.
The F-8 has a particular distinction with regards to my timeline of Vietnam battles. They were the aircraft flown against the attacking torpedo boats in the initial Gulf of Tonkin incident. That mission is the first in the ‘Nam War user-made mission collection and, had I had access to it a few years ago, would have been my first Vietnam mission flown.
Since I missed that opportunity then, I’ll take it now. The series approximates (as far as I can tell) actual missions and their challenges. Through the experiences of F-8 drivers we can see the escalation of the war in a different way than we did doing the same via the Skyraider.
This time I’ll make it up! That afterburner can make up for a lot of mistakes.
It must go without saying that the F-8 is a very different animal than its prop-driven brother-in-arms. Also carrier-based, we are now talking jet propulsion and that offers a very different set of advantages and challenges. If nothing else, I can finally get my plane off the deck. Or I should clarify – some of the time I can. In one of my series of attempted starts with this scenario, my engine caught fire and the plane exploded on the deck – all while I was still hitched to the catapult. I still have managed to drop my ride into the drink a couple of times even though prolific application of afterburner can and has saved me from a lot of horrid launches. So… some of the time.
In this case, the difficulty of the in-game model mirrors difficulties with the aircraft. The Crusader was difficult to operate from a carrier, particular in terms of landings. On statistic shows almost 88% of all aircraft in service having been involved with mishaps of one kind or another. It nonetheless had good flying characteristics that made it, by some measures, the most successful fighter against the communist MiGs. It also had the distinction of being the last American aircraft to be designed as a gunfighter – to have the guns used as the primary weapon. The F-8 was flown during a time when it was thought guided missiles would make guns obsolete. The combination of an aircraft built for dogfighting and pilots trained to fly them as such claimed 19 MiGs down over the course of the war against only 3 losses.
Suppressing some anti-air. Naturally, I missed.
I feel a little better when failing to fly well a plane that gave even experienced pilots a run for their money. However, my level of incompetence goes well beyond that. The transition to jets takes some getting used to. While the ability to accelerate and rapidly gain altitude is wonderful, I’m being flummoxed with my lack of maneuverability. A couple of attempts at a wingover or an Immelmann introduced me to the helplessness of a flat spin. Yet my troubles go beyond mere bad stick handling. My ability to think strategically – to use my aircraft to its best advantages given the situation – is about null.
I’ve been playing with the default settings, mostly, when it comes to difficulty and player aids. Exactly how this is configured seems to have changed with each new installation of BAT. Two of the default settings I fondly remember from my beginning attempts with Pacific Fighters were the appearance of the enemy on one’s map and the color/text identification of the moving blips of pixels when looking out the front windscreen (see, for example). These are no longer the default setting with the current BAT. In fact, I’m not sure they are even an optional setting anymore in BAT. If so, this was done for realism reasons. I get that – but I’m having a terrible time translating the clues that are realistically available to me into a situational awareness.
I understand the design philosophy and part of me loves it. For a good simulation, I should be working within the confines of what the historical pilot had. Yet once I get more complex than a one-on-one encounter, I am almost certain to lose my bearings.
Oh, hello. There you are.
I took a few screenshots to help illustrate my problem. These are all from ‘Nam War portrayal of the April 3rd, 1965 Rolling Thunder attack on Thanh Hóa Bridge. It centers on the unexpected attack of the escorting F-8s by four MiG-17s. The battle resulted in the first North Vietnamese air victory* against the Americans.
At some point in my version of the world I realized I’d lost all my friends and so decided to turn for home. Almost immediately I ended up with two MiGs on my tail – identified only by the bullets flying past and into my aircraft (see above). Through abject dumb luck I made a horrendous energy-bleeding turn (note the Stall in the bottom right of the below screen) that caused the enemy to overshoot and land right in my sights. It was a fantastic opportunity for which I was not prepared.
… and here you come. I missed the shot, btw.
Now, the primary means of tracking the enemy, assuming one can’t actually just see them, is feedback from the targeting radar and the passive IR tracking systems. This is augmented by the perhaps even-more-useful-to-the-overwhelmed-novice-pilot aural feedback of the Sidewinder missile tracking system. In some quick-and-dirty searching, I can find neither a good illustration nor a description of the pilot interface for the aircraft’s systems. Some cockpit shots suggest there is an oscilloscope-like display mounted just below the gun sight. On screen, I get its feedback through printed messages (shown below, bottom right again). I didn’t fully appreciate it at the time, but getting one message from each means I’ve probably got one in front of me and one on my tail.
Trying to catch up.
The encounter ended in tears. Again, this isn’t quite the humiliation that it felt like. At this point I was engaged in four-on-one combat against a determined enemy. Although I’d lost track of them all, I was pretty sure they’d gotten behind me. Sure enough, that was confirmed when my aircraft was shredded by close-range gunfire. I’m obviously going to need a little more than a run through of a few scenarios to climb this learning curve. I’ll note further that this was one of the last big air battles before the proliferation of North Vietnam’s deadly air defense systems.
In my final seconds of life, a MiG on my tail with guns a-blazing
Fortunately, just as the simulation’s capabilities have evolved, so has many other areas of support for the user. I’ve found a nice series of instructional videos done for IL-2 – many for the WWII planes but jets are featured as well. This is in addition to the ever-proliferating fountains of written and video informational resources for sim pilots, model pilots, and history buffs. I’ve barely scratched the surface but, at the same time, I am looking at resources which help identify the F-8’s advantages and disadvantages of that time and place. Sometimes it feels like a degree program is necessary to be able to jump into a scenario or two. A minimum of competency is required to enjoy this wealth of historical scenarios. It is a level of competency that I need to find.
I wanna get better.
Return to the master post for more Vietnam War articles. To zoom out your view and see the big picture, click here.
*Based on gun camera footage, a MiG pilot claimed a kill on one of the Crusaders. Per U.S. records, all of the Crusaders were successfully returned by their pilots. However, one of the aircraft was indeed damaged and it was diverted from its carrier to Da Nang. Upon landing, it was apparently written off as destroyed. This would, in fact, credit the communist air force with a victory.
I’m beginning to wonder if reading too much third-person, present-tense story telling leads to permanent cognitive impairment. How would I even know?
Once again, though, after nearly putting aside a book in frustration, I am glad I didn’t. Though my mind was twisted and tortured by its present-tense prose, I discovered there was almost certainly a method to the madness. That is, I have to wonder if the discomfort of the writing is supposed to create a discomfort within the story. Or, at least, a dislocation.
Unless you’ve read the book, that last sentence or two probably made little sense. But if you haven’t read the book, should I really be explaining it to you? I’ve again been tempted by a recent best seller and went into with no foreknowledge nor preconception. This time the book is Dark Matter, a 2016 novel by Blake Crouch. Crouch is well known because he wrote something called the Wayward Pines trilogy which has been adapted into a television series. I wanted to tell you that I never heard of it but that can’t be true. I found the first episodes in my rental queue, although pretty far down on my priority list.
It’s not nothing that the Wayward Pines pilot episode was directed by M. Night Shyamalan. That may well be what drew my attention but who knows. I no longer recall any of what made want to see the show. I do know that picking out the book had nothing to do with the show – that much I’ll state with certainty.
Dark Matter is a techno-thriller (surprise) and, again, explores aspects of identity. I am tempted to try shoehorning it into my recent theme. The questions about the mind and soul are once again expressed through science fiction and a quick-and-easy page-turner. Make sense? Maybe, maybe not. Nonetheless, Dark Matter is a decent example of the genre (and again, without being too derivative of the Crichton formula) while serving as a very entertaining, if light, sci-fi mystery. In an interesting twist, the villain may best be understood as the technology itself rather than a given human character. Although, and dare I say again (again), I don’t mean this in the Crichton “didn’t stop to think if they should” sense. Oh, just go read the thing. It is a short book.
This is actually one of the criticisms. Not so much that the book is short*, but that it is written to be a quick read. One trick the author uses is paragraphs consisting entirely of single (and short) sentences, resulting in much of that page count being filled with white space. It works – I raced through the story very quickly.
Ironic when reflecting on the source of the title. The titular dark matter is a reference to the scientific conundrum that there should be far more mass in the universe than can be accounted for by observation. This has lead to the positing of a dark (unobservable) form of matter which balances out the equation. The book casually refers to a theory that ties the “many worlds” theory to this missing mass. Does the existence of infinitely many different universes** account for all that missing mass? I, for one, have never heard of such a theory before. Nor does the book enlighten the reader as to how that might work. I guess if you need a title, you need a title.
Especially if you’re an author that makes his bones by selling screenplay rights. A major reason why a 2016 book is “current” is that the project is also soon to become a TV series. The rights to the story were snapped up even before the book came out with the intention to develop a feature film. Within the last year or so, however, the project was reworked into a series format and is now being developed by Sony Pictures Television to be an Apple+ exclusive.
I honestly don’t expect much from the TV conversion of this one and, if its tied up with Apple subscriptions, it will be a long time before I ever get the chance to view it. I probably shouldn’t denigrate it before I’ve watched Wayward Pines. In fact, I should probably go ahead and read Wayward Pines too.
*I’m actually unable to comment to intelligently on the question of length. Having read the book in the e-format, I couldn’t tell you whether it was slight or substantial. Comparing the page count with other recent reads, it seems par for the course.
**Incidentally, “many worlds” is the tech explanation for Crichton’s Timeline. Just sayin’.
My foray into the war films of my youth has caused me to continue down that fateful path. Some web surfing focused my attention on the film Sink the Bismarck! and the book upon which it was based, C.S Forester’s The Last Nine Days of the Bismarck. I must admit that it was news to me that it was a Forester book from 1959 that was turned into this 1960s movie.
This is another flick that I watched on TV when I was a kid. Unlike Guns, it is an actual black-and-white production – so my memory of it as such is accurate rather than dependent on the TV upon which I saw it. Likely, as a kid, I found it a lot less interesting than I thought it would be. Again, I hoped to see massively-gunned battleships engaging in lengthy and dynamic battles (or so I would assume). Instead, much of the movie takes place in a deep basement in London, where the British Admiralty plans their operations.
As an adult, the I find the device brilliant. Until the arrival of modern CGI*, depicting large-scale battles was expensive and difficult. To compensate, the movie puts most of the action around a plotting table where officers frequently summarize the geographical and operational situation for characters that happen to wander in.
That is not to say this is a stage play put on film. The audience is transported between the command center, long shots of ships and aircraft on the ocean, and action aboard the various vessels. Technically, this is done with a combination of live action, sets, models, and special effects. The combination works out well, considering especially that it was done in 1960. Notable are the live carrier launches of Swordfish torpedo planes and a detailed sequence of the loading of the main guns on the British battleships. Yes, the models are pretty obviously such and the hand-drawn torpedoes running alongside live ocean shots was weak – but the effects aren’t weak enough to spoil one’s enjoyment.
There were a few criticisms that I noticed amid present-day discussions of this film. First, the movie was made 15 years before Britain declassified the work on breaking the German codes. The leading man, fictional Captain Jonathan Shepard played by WWII navy veteran Kenneth More, had access to “inside information” about the trajectory of the Bismarck towards the coast of France – or would have, were he a real person. The British had analyzed the exchange of coded information between Bismarck and Paris and had broken a Luftwaffe Enigma message about Bismarck‘s putting into port in France for repairs.
Kenneth More is one of many who, at least in part, “play themselves” in this film. In the opening scene, war correspondent Edward R. Morrow plays Edward R. Morrow, summarizing the world-wide situation and its context for this battle. Others are like More – not quite playing themselves. For example, the actor portraying Captain John Leach of Prince of Wales, Esmond Knight, fought the Bismarck from the very same ship as a gunnery officer (and was wounded in battle). Knight, when filming Sink the Bismarck!, was already 10 years older than Leach would ever be**. This gap seems consistent. I looked up several of the actors and found them to be older than one one should expect by 5-10 years.
To me, the age mismatch was obvious – that is why I looked them up – so many of the characters looked too old to my eye. However, to the audience of the time, that may not have been the case. By 1960, World War II was already something that the “older generation” did. Thus, it might have seemed more natural to see war veterans be just a little more mature rather than the obviously-too-young-to-have-been-there actors of the time. One character that I was sure was way too old was Czech actor Karel Štěpánek who played Admiral Günther Lütjens – he looked rather geriatric to me. It surprised me to compute that he was right in that same average. Lütjens died in the battle at the age of 52. Štěpánek was himself 61. Older, yes, but not outrageously so.
It says something about aging.
If I would have been forced to guess, I probably would have pegged Štěpánek in his 70s. Someone from 1960, however, probably would not have done so. Just for comparison – some actors that are 61 this year; David Duchovny, Hugo Weaving, BD Wong, and Antonio Banderas. To me, these guys look a lot younger than Sink the Bismarck!‘s Lütjens. Crazy. But do you know what else plays way off? Lütjens is portrayed as a comic-book style Nazi. He is motivated above all by Hitler’s attention and approval and glibly orders sailors to their deaths to advance the glory of the Third Reich. It’s all too over-the-top to seem true and, even worse, is counter-factual to who Lütjens really was.
The purpose*** of this character is to allow sympathy towards those who served under him. Unfortunately, that character is not Lütjens. He was not a Nazi and was known to have objections about Hitler’s regime. He famously refused to give the Nazi party salute when Hitler inspected the Bismarck, instead using the traditional German naval salute. It goes without saying that there are also records of Lütjens supporting Hitler, not so surprising given the simple fact that he survived in a position of senior command. Point being, the screenwriters may well have picked exactly the wrong character to put in the role of evil Nazi.
The movie, as I type this, is posted onto YouTube where I watched it without even being served up any advertisements. It is posted there, in its entirety, by multiple users. About halfway through I switched to a version that promised “the best quality” and, indeed, it was much better quality than the low resolution version that I started with. I’m even tempted to go back and watch the Hood get sunk again – the battle that I watched was a little blurry. Fortunately, as I explained, much of the film is command room character exposition and the having the sharpest image isn’t critical to enjoyment.
One image that stuck with me are the detailed depictions of the maps used in said command center. See, for instances, the images displayed on this professor’s web page, at or around the label “British Convoy Controllers.” A version of these maps are depicted in the movie and they reminded me of nothing so much as a new board game (released this year). I’m thinking this is no accident.
The game Atlantic Chase was released in March and has at its main playing board a map that looks very much like one from Sink the Bismarck!. The paths of convoys and squadrons are meant to represent the uncertainty of the actual location of the ships. For those back in the operations room, that uncertainty applies not only to the location of the enemy but also to the location of one’s own ships. Indeed, HQ might find themselves in the uncomfortable position that they’ve located the enemy but aren’t quite sure where their own fleet is, relatively speaking.
The solution is Atlantic Chase‘s trajectory system where the player plots the desired movements of their units rather than move the cardboard counters to represent actual position. Across the internet, this has been described as a revolutionary approach. It is, though, and approach to a long-time problem. One review described Atlantic Chase as a reimplementation**** of the Avalon Hill classicBismarck but for a couple of novel mechanics. This solution eliminates the need for paper record keeping, for hidden boards, and secret movement.
I first stumbled across Atlantic Chase when it was still in late development. I was tempted into putting in a P500 order but realized there was pretty much no chance of my actually getting to play the game – so what’s the hurry? I had pretty much committed myself, instead, to try to pick up the game in some kind of holiday-sale purchase. Have I told you that the board game business is another one that baffles me? Barely half-a-year after the game came out, it is sold out. Amazon has copies of the game but going for a blistering $140. The GMT site itself simply lists the game as sold out with no indication of future availability. It makes me wonder if artificial scarcity is the plan – a way to disincentivize purchasers from waiting for that holiday sale. Meanwhile, the game has a formidable 8.6 rating on Board Game Geek and ranks #110 for wargames.
Woe is me. Instead of having a new game to play this winter (and maybe even some gameplay photos to attach to this article), I’m stuck with only a theoretical musing about the game and its mechanisms. Let us call it a Schrödinger’s cat gaming mechanism. In addition to be a colorful descriptor, such a designation has the advantage of being connected to reality. That is to say, in some ways a probability distribution is a better way to describe reality than the classical idea of x-and-y coordinates.
Which gets me thinking.
As you know from my blog, I’m most interested in computer gaming as opposed to board games. My first thought on how this system might apply to computer gaming is that it would not. It is a elegant solution to implement fog of war, yes, but computers have other methods of doing so. Would it not be easier, in a computer game, to have definitive locations stored internally for each ship or squadron but then only share partial (that is, appropriate) information with the player or players? Maybe but maybe not.
The other problem the Schrödinger’s cat ship plotting solves is that of AI. In the context of a two-player game, it is own-side AI. The reason that even your own ships get lost occasionally is the distributed decision making that occurs during a sea campaign. While HQ has given instructions to the captain or admiral, that officer will choose to deviate or improvise as circumstances require. So a computer program which internally (secretly) tracks the locations of all your forces must have a competent AI that moves those forces according to the best information available locally. That’s no small problem.
The other thing a computer can do, however, is crunch numbers. Imagine a battlespace represented as probability distributions. The potential location for any given ship is limited by physics and the distribution is determined by intended outcomes. Those distributions would necessarily interact with each other but would only resolve to an actual event – a spotting identification or a battle – if that event was communicated back to headquarters. Yes, the math would be complex but would the logic be more complex than a good AI? That I don’t know. However, it could be a way to handle uncertainty, time delay, and the variability of decision making all at once.
*Which reminds me, I also had no idea that Greyhound was is an adaptation of the Forester book The Good Shepherd.
**Captain John Leach died later in the same year when the Prince of Wales was sunk by the Japanese off of Malaysia. He was 47.
***Controversy arose over the sinking of the Bismarck and whether it was necessary. There is evidence that Bismarck might have been surrendered to the British, sparing many German lives and delivering a prize to the English intelligence. It was also alleged (probably without merit) that the British fleet made insufficient efforts to rescue survivors. Thus, making Lütjens an evil character allowed everyone else aboard the Bismarck to be portrayed sympathetically.
****The comment, and the practicality of the comparison, should refer to Bismarck (Second Edition). The latter was a peak-Avalon Hill implementation of the original, 1962 game. The similarities are obvious once you look for them. Even the trajectories are there in the 1978 version – it is just that they are printed on the board. Surely it goes without saying that a 1962 Bismarck-themed board game was heavily influenced by a movie out in 1960.