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Famous Last Words
27 Sunday Feb 2022
Posted In the news, them apples
in27 Sunday Feb 2022
Posted In the news, them apples
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26 Saturday Feb 2022
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I had never heard of Jack Reacher before the film (of the same name) was released. So, before I decided to watch the film (after it was released on DVD), I took in a number of articles combining review and commentary. Much of that surrounded the choice of the diminutive* Cruise to play the lead character, a distinctively massive man.
Series author Lee Child (a pen name, for what it’s worth) says the main character’s name came about after a grocery store trip with his wife. He was “between jobs” and had decided that he could write a novel as way to pick up some extra money. While taking a break from writing and during that trip to the store, a fellow shopper asked the 6′ 4″ tall would-be-author if he could help her to reach something from an upper shelf. His wife later quipped that, if the novel didn’t pan out, he might be able to find employment as a “reacher.” Once Cruise’s Jack Reacher film hit the screen (2012), the joke was flipped around. It was Tom’s Jack that probably needed assistance reaching items at the store.
Lee Child was interviewed during the film’s initial run. He said he was pleased with Cruise’s portrayal of his character, despite the failure to meet the book’s physical specifications. While I found the movie suitably entertaining, there remains a gap between what Reacher should look like and Mr. Cruise’s own, natural appearance.
This was something Amazon could fix.
I’ve whined a good deal, both here and in private, about what appears to be a crusade by Amazon to purge our culture of the old ways and replace it with the woke. Based on a single episode of the Wheel of Time, I decided they were (whether intentionally or not) ruining that classic work for posterity. Based entirely on a few seconds of “teaser” footage and a weird-ass photo spread in Vogue, they also seem to have it out for J.R.R. Tolkien. I suppose I noticed that they were bringing forth a “Prime Exclusive” version of the Reacher story but I didn’t pay it much mind. Given what else I’ve seen, it would not have surprised me if they had decided to deviate from the original wildly by creating a new and “challenging” version of the Reacher character. That said, I had read nothing about this effort one way or another; neither good or bad. Finding nothing else to watch one evening, though, I decided to give it a go.
If you trust IMDb as a rating source, the Amazon version of Reacher is better than the big-screen version. If you trust Amazon’s ranking (which I don’t), the two are both highly-rated and virtually tied. For myself, having now seen both, I would give Amazon’s Reacher the higher marks, if for no other reason than it did a better job bringing the book to the screen.
Reacher starts, sensibly, at the beginning. Over the course of an 8-episode streaming “season,” it dramatizes the first book in the Jack Reacher series, The Killing Floor. By contrast, the film franchise started with the 9th book in the series, One Shot**, and then jumps to the 18th book, Never Go Back. Besides allowing the character and his backstory to track written versions of their development, the decision to make this a mini?*** – series allows the full detail of the book to be brought to life.
In skimming some of the professional reviews about the series I saw critiques that this production was both not true enough to the book and too true. It can’t be both, but I’ll take the middle ground. Without going back to the books, detail by detail, I think this series did a good job of being faithful to its source material. For those that found the translation to be too true, their beef was probably with that source material itself.
The Reacher character and his series of books is a bit out of line with the kind of popular fiction that gets praised by reviewers at The New York Times. First of all, this is more gun porn; all fights and shooting and other toxic masculinity. Second, Reacher is portrayed as an (almost) entirely flawless hero. He is physically perfect, intellectually astute, morally unassailable, and keeps himself always at the top of his game. In this, Child goes beyond even Tom Clancy – although it’s less annoying because Child doesn’t feel the need to have Reacher ponder his own manliness on every other page. Another interview with Lee Child has him talking about the deliberateness of this characterization. He thought it would be a breath of fresh air to have a hero who was good and competent and, therefore, successful (in his heroics, that is, although Child was, I’m sure, also thinking book sales).
The desperately flawed (male) hero does seem to be a trademark of modern fiction. In this, Child would seem to return us to the Victorian hero; heroes so heroic so as to be annoying. Lest we get confused, though, the flawed hero is no modern invention. After all, isn’t Achilles defined more by his weaknesses than his strengths?
The problem for TV, beyond the deviations from successful formula, is a story about a man who does everything right, all the time, can get a little boring, can’t it? I really do like the choice of Alan Ritchson to play the lead but there were times where I felt that he was channeling David Puddy from Seinfeld. On the written page, there is a world of difference between stoic competence and shallow stupidity but the two may appear very similar on one’s TV screen.
Reacher’s lack of complexity, a key feature of the books, may limit the appeal of this, the first “season” of this series for many. It will certainly prove a challenge when continuing to future seasons. There was a time when the same old serious detectives would tackle a new case in each week’s broadcast and that was considered good TV. These days, we seems to expect (or at least the producers are convinced we expect) a “story arc.” A forward development of the main characters and the world around them to draw us through successive episodes and from season to season. This bigger picture might even be more important in an age of streaming, where the audience must be convinced to take up each new episode deliberately rather than simply tuning in (or not) when Thursday night rolls around.
Shortly after the first season began airing, a second season was ordered by Amazon. I am happy. I hope they continue with the books in their proper order and I hope they stick, as well as they can, to the original stories. I think they’ve got Reacher just about right and would like to see this show keep him that way.
*I shouldn’t be too harsh with my criticism of the man’s immutable characteristics. I myself do not have much, height-wise, over Mr. Cruise and he’s objectively got me beat in many other categories. He’s just short (cough cough) about ten inches and a hundred pounds of muscle mass if he wants to stand in for the novels’ description of Reacher.
**IMDb, at least, claims that Lee Child was heavily influenced by The Day of the Jackal when he developed his story for One Shot. “The Jackal” earned that name because a reporter assumed that the famous assassin was influenced by the copy of The Day of the Jackal that he was reading. Synchronicity, man, synchronicity.
***No, this is not going to be another Tom Cruise height jab. I’m thinking that a new designation is needed for the 8 (roughly) series run that seems to characterize developed-for-streaming series. Reacher is more than a mini-series (in contrast to the 3-episode Dracula or even 6-episode Perfume, which match the moniker) but less than the 24-show television series that I was raised to expect.
23 Wednesday Feb 2022
I really liked the movie when it came out, but that was almost 30 years ago. This leaves me with the impression of a very good film without any of the supporting details as to why I thought so. Therefore, when I saw that the 1995 version of Richard III was on Amazon Prime‘s streaming, I queued it up.
Very briefly, the film transport’s Shakespeare’s play to the 1930s into an imagined art deco, alternative history wherein England remains a monarchy dependent on “bastard feudalism” and divided by civil war. Ian McKellen plays the title character and also wrote the script based on a staging of the play in which he also starred. It is obviously “edited for content” to fit Shakespeare’s lines into a film that comes in under 2 hours, but what remains is fairly faithful to the original. Sometimes surprisingly* so.
When I was in High School, we read the play Othello in class. At the end of that lesson the class was bussed off to a theatrical production (starring James Earl Jones) along with an explanation from our English teacher; Shakespeare was meant for the stage. Reading through his plays may feel dry and uninteresting and, certainly to today’s reader, is experienced as a massive intellectual chore. Few would hold up one of Shakespeare’s histories as casual reading. Nonetheless, these works were not intended as high-brow entertainment. When performed, iambic pentameter aside, it was meant to be understood and enjoyed by an audience composed of the average citizen of the day. In watching a top-rate performance of Othello, we were meant to appreciate how accessible Shakespeare can be.
It was on this level that I appreciated Richard III when I watched in in 1995. As I explained, I was pretty ignorant of the actual history that Shakespeare’s play was trying to relate. My interest was how well it could keep me engaged using Shakespeare’s dialog by transmuting the setting into something decidedly un-Shakespearean.
At that time, I did not know Ian McKellen although I suppose I knew of him. I’d seen him in the occasional film (Restoration, for example) but he was mostly known for his Shakespeare stage acting, film productions of the same, and the occasional BBC drama. It would be a few years before he became Gandalf.
Now in 2022, the first appearance on the screen of Queen Mother Cecily Neville, Duchess of York was a bit jarring. She looks exactly like her similarly-titled Dowager Countess of Grantham persona. What caused my double take is that despite the Dowager Countess seeming-to-appear right there on screen, she is there 15 years too early. As an aside, Maggie Smith isn’t even five years older than Ian McKellen and five years younger than she would be when playing Professor McGonigal.
It doesn’t help me that Jim Carter’s Lord Hastings also doesn’t appear to be that much younger than his Carson. I’m left feeling like I’ve entered a time warp. Of course, other actors nail down the timeline to the mid-1990s. We see Robert Downey Jr. just before his fall. We admire Annette Benning at her popularity’s peak, before she passed beyond her sex-symbol years. There are a number of other recognizable faces from British film and TV that would no longer be on this earth by the time of Downton’s final Christmas special.
At least one on-line commenter has complained about the choice of actors and their ages. Of course Shakespeare, like opera, tends not to concern itself with physically matching the actor with the character. Any audience is probably is far more eager to see the greatest of Shakespearean actors reprise their 30-year-old role than be presented with an unknown but age-appropriate star. Obviously, there are exceptions – I don’t think we want to see children portrayed by old men.
So it is here. McKellen, a veteran stage Richard, makes his first appearance as the 19-year-old Duke of Gloucester sporting some 38 years too many. As a result, we must shift all of the characters towards their retirement years. The 17-year-old Edward, Prince of Wales is portrayed by the 36-year-old Christopher Bowen. Others** are adjusted accordingly. Of course, we can’t have the “Princes in the Tower” portrayed by old men, so the “children” in the production are historically accurate but almost anything else is on the table.
Before we get too critical, which should be more of a problem for the historical stickler? That the characters appear to be decades too old? Or that Richard III arrives at Tewkesbury in a tank? Or how about how the Tudors’ ascribed to Richard an ahistorical and, frankly, ridiculous level of villainy. For one, I am more than willing to take it all with a grain of salt and enjoy the show. Moreover, so many of these “inaccuracies” are deliberately chosen to enhance this production and (maybe, maybe) make a larger point.
The idea to make the Rivers clan American is, to my 2022 eyes, quite brilliant. Particularly post-Downton, the parallels between Annette Benning’s “White Queen” and Elizabeth McGovern’s Cora Crawley cannot be ignored. The “period” settings, lavish portrayals of a (albeit fictional) 1930s England are gorgeous. I could quibble with the Battle of Bosworth climatic battle, upon which the filmmakers spent some decent coin. Yet I’d also have to concede that the representation is not so far out-of-line with pre-Saving Private Ryan on-screen combat portrayals. If it looks a bit like a Battle of the Bulge circa 1965, that too may have some artistic merit.
In the end, I still enjoyed this movie, but for some different qualities than what attracted me back in 1995. I now know the historical characters and made an effort while watching to connect them to their historical (not necessarily Shakespearean) role. I was also trying to absorb all the dialog and appreciate it for its poetry rather than for its story (which, by now, I do know well). I have my suspicions that at least some of that fascism-comes-to-Britain look was inspired by Pink Floyd – The Wall, and that’s not a bad thing either.
*A friend and Shakespeare lover did not approve of the film’s direction after I had raved about it to him. “How can you stage Shakespeare without the ‘kingdom for a horse’ line?” He wondered. Well, the line is still in the film and meshes reasonably well with the dawn-of-Mechanized-warfare setting.
**There is one that amuses me due to the connections. Dame Kristin Ann Scott Thomas was unknown to me at the time. Movie-going audiences everywhere would come to know here as the love interest of The English Patient. Well, not me, because I was never all excited about that film. For me, in 2022, she was simply really familiar without being placeable. Anyway, she here (at 35) enters the stage as the 15-year-old future-Queen Anne who, despite twice marrying into the succession to the throne of England, died (probably of tuberculous rather than by Richard’s design) shortly after her only child. However, at 48 Thomas returned to the screen, once again embedded into the line of succession. She played Elizabeth Boleyn, mother to another Queen Anne, in the film adaptation of Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl
19 Saturday Feb 2022
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I don’t know how long I sat on Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage, but I could do so no longer. Valentine’s Day was my final chance to watch it on Netflix streaming.
The documentary is well worth watching for any fans of Rush. What if you’ve never been a fan of Rush? Would you still like it? How would I know? I can say it is a light and not-too-lengthy summary of the career of a very influential band. If you never “got” them before, this might be a way to try to see what it is all about.
Beyond the Lighted Stage is not an analysis of their musical style (video inserted below to close that gap). It is a quick summary of their career from childhood through sometime-before-the-2010-date that the film was wrapped. It focuses mostly on the songs that even the casual Rush fan would have heard (the hits, if such a term applies to this band) and includes a lot of casual footage (backstage, childhood home movies, etc) that is great to see. For the early years, there is some rare concert video of their iconic songs (e.g. 2112) from when they first released and performed them live.
This is no Dirt. There is almost a problem, here, with the subject of the documentary. Because the film isn’t focused on the music (so much) and the band’s antics are pretty much non-existent, what is left to excite the viewer? I’ll suggest that this may actually be one of the strengths of this feature. Yes, the band is boring. They married young and eschewed the “rock and roll” lifestyle for a quieter existence. They refused to “sell out” or even make an effort to become rock superstars. Instead, they worked their butts off making records and playing shows.
It’s nice to find out that a childhood hero was, in fact, a pretty good role model all around. Anyone who can get a teenage Sebastian Bach to read The Fountainhead, well, that’s just icing on the cake, isn’t it?
The missing final chapter story is one that we’ve all read by now; the one about Neil Peart’s death which is now a little more than two years gone. Instead, the tail-end of the documentary deals with Neil’s struggle with the death of his daughter and then his wife. It is a song of redemption. He finds his way through it and, as the movie ends, would seem to have found his way to be better than ever at his chosen craft. It is even more sad to know that he would be leaving us forever within a decade.
Back in the 80s, I was not much into drumming. It was just something to go on behind the music. The use of Rush as both a soundtrack and a plot point in Freaks and Geeks* struck a chord with me. An inconceivably-large drum kit simply does not equal musicianship. Being unqualified to judge the drumming, I figured Rush’s vaunted percussion was probably a little gimmicky.
Perhaps it is his passing or just the passage of time, but I’ve certainly come around. Neil Peart, no doubt, belongs in the pantheon of great rock drummers. He was innovative and he was a perfectionist. As Jack Black explains in the movie, he was rhythmically precise to the nth degree (although in a later scene Peart talks about his heavy reliance on click tracks – I’ll leave my drummer friends to decipher this).
The bass and guitar playing don’t get quite the same level of adulation as Peart’s drumming, but each of the three musicians are emulated by up-and-coming musicians as the virtuosos of their respective instruments. The songwriting is fantastically complex; both structurally and lyrically. Notably, the band admits in the movie that they may have exceeded even their own skill level with the album Hemispheres. Geddy Lee’s vocals, known mostly for their uniqueness, are no exception. Lee displays a mastery of pitch and control in the years before Auto-Tune.
As to the film itself, it was nominated for a Grammy under the category of “Best Long Form Music Video,” attesting to its quality as a music documentary. It actually ended up losing out to When You’re Strange, a Doors documentary. So if you never liked Rush? Maybe this one is worth an hour or two to help you understand what these guys are all about.
*If you haven’t seen it, one of the main teenage characters wants to be a drummer and worships Neil Peart. As the series progresses, another character’s father introduces the wannabe-drummer to the skill of Buddy Rich as a way to teach him about musicianship and dedication to craft. Coincidentally, Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage shows how Neil Peart, having played in a Buddy Rich tribute event, decides that he needs to go back to basics and study under jazz drummer and instructor-to-the-stars Freddie Gruber.
18 Friday Feb 2022
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Netflix has for a while recommended to me the German mini-series Perfume*. One problem is that its splash-graphic is a shot of three teenagers engaged in some sort of ménage à trois. By teenagers, mind you, I’m not talking eighteen or nineteen -year-olds (although the actors, themselves, must be this or older). The girl in the picture is thirteen and the two boys fifteen. Yikes!
As I said, it is German. They think a little differently over there.
So my problem is not so much a fear of the police coming to my house to arrest me for watching Netflix; it’s the fact that my mom might notice that my “continue watching” queue has something about teenage orgies in it. Without the salacious picture, I probably would have watched the show ages ago. The description is intriguing and it gets pretty good grades on IMDb.
What finally got me to watch it was a combination of disinterest for everything else in my Netflix queue and the fact that the splash graphic changed to a dead dog in a shallow grave. Say what you want about American sensibility and how murdering innocent animals is more “wholesome” than sex. Go ahead… I’ll wait. In my defense, the dog graphic was, well, less graphic. Until I saw how it actually fit into the plot, it was just a dog.
One might describe Perfume as a remake of a film treatment (no, not that one, this one). A more accurate description might be to call in an adaptation of the 1985 German novel Das Parfum: Die Geschichte eines Mörders. Even this is misleading as the TV series includes the novel as a plot device; most of the major characters have read it and it is frequently discussed. Perhaps that old marketing phrase “inspired by” is truly appropriate in this case.
In the end it was, indeed, worth watching. Yes, it was very racy and not, by any means, family friendly – but for all that, it was a pretty good whodunnit which held me through its twists and turns. In the end, it seemed to be about a very different subject** than what I assumed it was about throughout. I wouldn’t go so far to call in profound or groundbreaking but I will tag it as quality entertainment. To my chagrin, Netflix haphazardly replaced the dead-dog graphic with the threesome graphic partway through the series. This could have caused some embarrassment***, but didn’t. My mother doesn’t really have access to my Netflix account.
*The title on the show itself is Parfum which, without an umlaut over the u, is the French spelling. Was that just a style choice or is it deliberate? The book is written in German but the original story is set in France.
**I don’t know if this is going to ruin it for you, but the “real” theme (by my reckoning) is about how childhood sexual abuse begets sexual abuse in the next generation. This wasn’t apparent to me at all until midway through the final episode.
***Netflix seems to have added an option that they were dead-set against a few years back. As I was finishing up the series and, therefore, removing it from my queue, I noticed there is also an option to remove it from your most-recent list. Complaints about how Netflix advertises your proclivities to anyone who drops by for an evening of Netflix must have finally made headway.
15 Tuesday Feb 2022
Posted History of Games
inOne reason I hesitated to pick up Campaign Series: Vietnam was the scale. John Tiller’s Campaign Series, like the PanzerBlitz/Panzer Leader games that it seemed to be digitizing, worked best on the steppes of Ukraine or the open deserts of the Sinai. The same concept does not seem suited for the search-and-destroy missions of the Vietnam War. It is built at the wrong scale.
Then again, I’ve said pretty much the same thing about every Vietnam game I’ve played.
My very positive experiences with Vietnam Combat Operations excepted, attempts at operational combat seem to struggle when applying the tried-and-true hex-and-counter mechanics of the Eastern Front to counter-insurgency warfare. Getting small; the scale of the Squad Battles series would seem to solve one problem but experiences suggest it still can’t provide quite the game we want. The scenarios are either too confined and limited, leaving little of tactical interest, or they are too curtailed – trying (and, often as not, failing) to capture the big picture with a 45-minute snapshot. I’ve speculated that maybe the First Person Shooter is the ideal treatment, but have yet to find a game that I think does it well. Radio Commander gets the player’s command interface right but, at least in my experience with it so far, doesn’t come with the level of historical fidelity that I seek.
So if nothing gets it right, how wrong can Campaign Series: Vietnam really go?
I then further remembered how I belly-ached when looking at Operation Starlite. Each of the games I tried failed to capture the description of the battle that I read in The First Fight: US Marines in Operation Starlite. Tactical games were too fine and Operational Art of War too coarse. Might not this game be just the right scale?
I was about to crack open the Operation Starlite scenario in Campaign Series: Vietnam but then, I thought, maybe we should go further back.
The Campaign Series: Vietnam title, as released, is subtitled 1948-1967. The manual goes on to explain that the 1967 cutoff is not meant as an ending. “[T]his is not the final version of the game,” it informs. The manual illuminates further that this extended timeline, when it comes, is promised to be provided as free updates to the game that I’ve already purchased.
I do like the sound of that.
To me this means that the focus of the game is upon those battles that I’ve already looked at in other engines. It also means that the game provides something that I was previously-unwilling to purchase; a treatment of the French war in Indochina. That is certainly a plus and one I wasn’t really thinking about when I impulse-bought this title. It also isn’t something I’m in the mood for right at the moment, though.
The better place to start might be another battle which I felt Squad Battles: Tour of Duty gave short shrift. This is the 1963 Battle of Ap Bac, a fight that pitted the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (using American technology and advice) against the communist threat. Similar to so many of my Vietnam-era gaming experiences, the ARVN fell woefully short resulting in a defeat that not only preceded American involvement but may have been a major factor leading to it.
One of the problems I identified during my Squad Battles play is obviously solved, as evident above. Squad Battles: Tour of Duty focused on a late-battle attack by the ARVN mechanized infantry force which attempted (and failed) to reverse the tide of the battle. My complaint was that, with a small and tightly-focused scenario, the opportunities for trying out different approaches were limited. Furthermore, the key moment in the battle involved discovering where the enemy was hiding and what they had as weaponry. Subsequent exploration of any alternate strategy could not involve “unlearning” where the gotchas hid. The first play was a big loss; the second an easy win.
The Campaign Series: Vietnam, at least for this scenario, can be called neither small nor tightly-focused. It involves all the forces engaged at Ap Bac and spans the entire time frame from the ARVN’s pre-positioning through to nightfall and a little bit beyond. Now, there still remains the question as to whether the PanzerBlitz combat-resolution model works well in rugged (nigh impassible) terrain and extremely limited site lines, so I’m not ready to endorse the scale of this game wholeheartedly. One attempt at one scenario doesn’t answer all my questions but it does answer some.
One key factor that Vietnam brings to the table, even more so than the Arab-Israeli conflict within the same timeline, is the use of helicopters for transport and close air support. I tried to capture some of it in the above screenshot. If you can look at my “tooltip” near the bottom-center of the screen, you’ll see that aircraft live on the board either on the ground or at high, medium, or low altitude. Once in the air they can cover much of the board in a single turn. Unlike Steel Panthers or Squad Battles, where pretty much every hex can be a landing zone, LZs in Campaign Series: Vietnam have to be designated. The drop off points, prepared in advance by ARVN rangers, are marked from the beginning of the scenario. There’s no picking a choice-looking rice paddy on-the-fly in this game. This is probably the best treatment of helicopter support I’ve encountered yet in a serious wargame.
Air and artillery also seem to work a little better. Artillery is much the same as in Divided Ground. During the friendly-movement phase you plot your fire missions which are then delayed long enough for the enemy to take one of his own movement phases. Unlike the typical World War II game, spotting isn’t restricted to special units. Targeted artillery with line of sight – any line of sight, from any unit – will hit the hex for which it is intended. On top of the old, a new feature is the “close air support” which models directed attacks by aircraft and does so very similarly to indirect artillery. I’ve not played with it enough to know all the ins and outs. For example, can close-air redirect against a moved target as regular airstrikes do in this game engine? The manual seems to indicate not but I can’t say for sure.
Beyond some of the Vietnam-era specifics, the game engine benefited from a facelift since Campaign Series: Middle East. For example, as I illustrate above, my missing base-colorings are back and I’m happy to see them. The toolbar seems better organized and I think I’ve detected UI upgrades on the main map (although I haven’t tried to catalogue them).
Anyway, you’ve stuck with me through a seemingly endless wave of introductory text and I bet you want to know how my scenario went.
Well, just like my historical counterpart, I really fell flat on my face with this one. Besides running one of my transports out of gas (refueling takes place between turns, dontcha know), I also dropped the ball utterly on the timetable. Even if I had all my helicopters running, I don’t think it is possible to get the majority of the ARVN forces engaged without making use of hot landing zones. Failure to go this route meant that by the time I have actually engaged the enemy (again, see previous), it was about time for the sun to go down and the scenario to end.
Even recognizing some major mistakes, I didn’t quit and start over. Furthermore, I tried to follow the actual plan of the battle – holding reserves in reserve, and such – even though it is well known that the attack was under-planned and under-supported. From the beginning, I knew I was down and falling further behind.
Another factor. Reversing my tack from my Campaign Series: Middle East, I decided to play this one against a “balanced” AI. As I said before, relative to both Campaign Series: Middle East and The Seven Years War, giving myself a slight advantage resulted in me feeling way overpowered. Now back in balance, it feels again like the AI is operating with loaded dice. During the whole battle, I think I managed to push back a VC unit only once and didn’t see any destroyed units (fog-of-war caveats apply). On my side, my forces were frequently subject to disruption, retreats, losses, and destruction. Is the AI cheating?
The fact is, just as I wrote when I played this in Squad Battles, the nature of this battle is the VC were dug in to very strong positions and managed to fight for an entire day with very few losses. Are the VC buffed so they can match their historical performance? Or is this just really good modelling of terrain and defensive positions which then make it historically difficult for the ARVN to prevail? Maybe I’ll get this figured out before it drives me nuts.
Finally, I don’t feel like replaying the scenario using my “lessons learned” is a waste of time; not with this game. Part of it is that I did so badly, I haven’t discovered much about the hidden enemy forces yet. Another part is that the size of the board and the full-day scope of the scenario means that I can try some very different approaches. This should prevent the sense of retrying the exact same moves hoping for luckier die rolls.
Return to the master post for Vietnam War articles. Or you can continue forward to see what happens when I try, try the scenario again.
06 Sunday Feb 2022
From the opening credits, you know you are in for a 90s treat. The names are very familiar – at least to the viewer who has been watching TV for at least four decades. The theme has a special standing circa those last moments of the Soviet Empire. Hang on ’til the end and you’ll be rewarded with a fight over whether a cigarette is really a cigarette if it has a filter.
By Dawn’s Early Light (free, as I write, on Amazon Prime) was created for “airing” on HBO in 1990, six months after the Berlin Wall came down and only a bit more than a year before the Soviet Union would dissolve itself entirely. In many ways it was a rehash/mix-up of the stories from earlier (and better) films. Dr. Strangelove, WarGames, and Fail Safe are all obvious contenders. By Dawn’s Early Light updates the message for the post-anti-nuke eighties and the Cold-War-is-ending nineties.
In a twist on the WarGames theme, it explores the conflicting purpose of the the strategic nuclear arsenal. Enough weaponry to “destroy the planet five times over” existed (exists) as a deterrent, never to be used or pushed into use. As a deterrent it must be credible. If, in the end, those at the controls will fail to launch when ordered, the deterrent cannot deter. If those at the helm are too eager to push for victory then the whole purpose – the avoidance of the horror of a nuclear exchange – is defeated. The movie wonders whether mankind is up to the task of making the right choices when the metal meets the meat. It is also a criticism of the desire to keep a massive nuclear deterrent at time when the threat is obviously waning.
For those of us in 2022, the HBO tag often feels like a mark of quality. It doesn’t necessarily mean Academy Awards quality, but we do expect much more from HBO than we would from a made-for-TV movie. Not so much in 1990. Remember, we were still almost a decade away from the likes of Oz, Sex in the City, or The Sopranos. By Dawn’s Early Light was HBO original flotsam in a sea of forgettable titles, created seemingly to pass some down time in business trip hotel room.
For all that, though, it isn’t horrible. The film uses small sets – bunkers and airborne command centers – to keep the focus tight and manageable. Special effects and, for that matter, that list of acting talent, makes it clear this isn’t some Saturday Afternoon special. Occasionally the lower-quality of the production caused me to lose track of the plot, although it said plot is simple enough to jump right back on board a couple of beats later. Be warned that the script is loaded down with plot holes too numerous to mention – and so ubiquitous as to hardly be worth dwelling on. By Dawn’s Early Light is best watched as a morality play about nuclear weapons than any sort of meaningful depiction of the military capabilities of the United States in a World War III scenario.
To misquote from a better known role for actor Darren McGavin, the temporary president of By Dawn’s Early Light‘s story: You know, this movie was not bad. It wasn’t good either.
“You want a sip?”
05 Saturday Feb 2022
Lady of the Rivers may even objectively be a better-written story than Stormbird, but at least Conn Iggulden writes his historical fiction in third-person past tense.
As to the wedding*, considerably more prose was spent on the wedding ceremony than on the bride’s dress, although the latter did earn itself a couple of paragraphs. More was written than on both of these things combined about one character’s journey to get himself to the wedding; through the use of subterfuge, trickery, and outright violence; and despite the efforts of Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York to prevent him from doing so.
Conn Iggulden co-authored the The Dangerous Book for Boys (in 2007 with his brother, six years before 2013’s Stormbird) and this, his first book set in the Wars of the Roses, is also clearly for boys – an application especially apparent following on the heels of Philippa Gregory’s work.
I’ve dropped hints before about the trend I’ve noticed to push women authors. It is far easier for me to find the latest works (even if not Philippa Gregory’s books) if they are women-authored. I’ve not done a statistical comparison but there seems to me to be a distinct gender imbalance in the books that I can borrow from the library, even in those genres that have been traditionally male-dominated (e.g. Fantasy, Historical Fiction). As an unintended consequence, I have to assume that the books written by males are probably (on average) of higher quality because the process of acquiring them has, obviously, been more selective.
I’m pretty sure this all has been done to improve “equity.” Particular in male-dominated sub-genres, it would seem perfectly reasonable to give the underrepresented women authors a chance. The thing is, absent the obvious double-standard, there is no circumstance I’d avoid a book because the author is a woman. There is also nothing that says a woman must write “girly” books while man will write “manly” books, even if the accumulation of past works favor that bet.
For these two books, the contrast in style couldn’t be more clear. For example, in The Lady of the Rivers, when a battle takes place, the women retire to a safe place to await messengers to tell them of the outcome. In one or maybe two cases, I even missed out on the fact that a battle was already underway because the gals were just casually hanging out in a nearby village. Contrast that with Stormbird, where the blood, sweat, and tears of armed combat are described in loving detail. To be clear, I’m not saying that men can’t write in the style of the former and women in the latter but there must be some correlation between an author’s background and the style and subject of his or her writing.
For these two books, both styles have plenty going for them. Gregory’s focus on the political, especially when the political becomes personal, makes for a pretty good story. I’m still not to the halfway point in Stormbird, but I see this as a series as one I’ll want to continue. My point here is that enabling particularly-chosen voices (be they minority, women, or whatever) can wind up an issue when that favor comes at the expense of other, different voices. I hope we’re not canceling the world’s next Sharpe series before it gets a chance to be discovered just because it is written by and for a man. I hope we’re not trying to cancel entire genres because we detect a tone of “toxic masculinity” within the text.
Not to belabor the point, but if Gregory would only write in past tense like a normal boomer, I’d be reading the next book in her series right now rather than Stormbird.
*This time between Margaret of Anjou and King Henry VI.
04 Friday Feb 2022
Posted History of Games
inTags
Arab Israeli Wars, Campaign Series: Middle East, Divided Ground, Israel, Jordan, Middle East, six-day war
Almost two years ago, I sampled some of the Divided Ground scenarios which were set in the Six Day War. I concluded that post with a declaration that Campaign Series: Middle East 1948-1985 would not be for me. If you’re keeping track, though, you’ll know that I broke down and bought in a week or so ago. You may be wondering, now, if I’m glad that I did so.
You might also have noticed that, before I got to that years-old conclusion, I had played a scenario called The Hill of Evil Council. This was a small scenario covering the opening counter-attack from the Israelis after Jordon’s initial offensive around the city of Jerusalem. The positive qualities of that scenario really tempted me to buy into Campaign Series: Middle East, especially in combination with one other factor. The scenario takes place on a tiny section of map which covers the entire area of greater Jerusalem. The idea was to have a large scenario covering the Six Day War actions in and around the city. Instead, Divided Ground shipped only with the two smaller scenarios and the larger effort withered on the vine. Campaign Series: Middle East promised to pick up where Talonsoft left off.
In fact, among the new stuff delivered by Campaign Series: Middle East is a version of that unrealized scenario. For comparison purposes, that upper screenshot is from the current product and the immediately-following graphic is from Divided Ground. Your first impression might be similar to mine; the look and feel of the new is very much the same as for the old version*.
If you compare the two screenshots closely, you’ll notice many similarities and a few differences. You can see the map is obviously of the same features and at the same scale (although it is rotated maybe 60° for the redevelopment). Gameplay is, as I said, entirely familiar although those bugs and annoyances – an irritation when breaking out the old CD – are fixed, to the extent that I remember what they are. The 3D graphics and the experience playing with them are pretty much unchanged. There is the occasional feature that, to my mind, used to be better. One example is that the “stands” (not shown in the above Divided Ground screenshot but apparent elsewhere in the blog) lack the “flag” graphic that Divided Ground used, a flourish that I found appealing.
The biggest difference, though, is apparent when you switch to the 2D view.
This view has the look of a state-of-the-art board game. I find it easier to understand and interact with than what it replaced. It’s also worth noting that these graphics are moddable. For example, there is a mod that recreates the old Avalon Hill counters. Unlike The Seven Years War, however, I don’t find it necessary to play in the 2D interface. In fact, I prefer 3D. I’d say that the difference is the importance of battle lines and unit facing in eighteenth century warfare. The isometric, semi-3D view distorts perspective in a way that makes it difficult to accurately perceive those lines. In Middle East it is the enhanced 3D rendering of terrain (including a more intuitive representation of elevation) that I find more useful.
After opening the Campaign Series: Middle East virtual box, I also tried to address an issue that I’ve been harping on for my last couple of posts. It’s this issue of AI balance. Is the AI “cheating” by default? Is there a way to level the playing field?
I held out hope that this new version would explain the details in its updated manual. The guide has been rewritten and that rewrite is a clear improvement. Nonetheless, it still doesn’t go into the details of what advantages the AI might have and what advantages are configurable. There is (and always was) a slider to shift the advantage to one side or the other. The manual describes it mostly in terms of balancing a game between players at different skill levels but, even then, its effects aren’t quantified.
This is a part and parcel throughout the history of this family of games. Tiller was always guarding his “secret sauce” recipes against the possibility that someone would steal his equations and put out a competing game. At the height of Talonsoft and the Battleground series, this may have been a real possibility. These days, I can’t imagine much risk in detailing internal algorithms. Wargames as a whole have become more-and-more open as the years went by (see, as a counter example, Field of Glory II). The modding community from the less-serious side of the gaming house have set expectations for us all. The lack of quantification for the slider is a holdover from that closed and secretive past.
In this game and in my Seven Years War battle, I’ve decided to tweak the slider a little bit in my favor. I actually don’t know what my “setting” was and it is certainly inconsistent from scenario-to-scenario. I’m not really interested in doing some sort of “study,” and even if I did, I wouldn’t know how to measure the results. My impression so far is that, even with small adjustments to the balance, I seem to have gone too far in tilting the play the other way. My forces have a massive advantage over the AI in a straight-up fight; that on top of that inability of the AI to maneuver and attack intelligently.
So four paragraphs of “I still don’t know.”
Back to the big picture. Does the game work for me overall? Was my $19.99 well spent? To be honest, I think that will remain to be seen.
This is a fixed-up version of a game that was never fully-finished in the first place. If I’m going to continue to play Divided Ground, I’m going to be much happier playing with Campaign Series: Middle East. So the value depends on how much play time I plan to put in going forward. It is also nice to be playing a game that is actively supported by the developer and has an enthusiastic community of modders and scenario creators who are busy enhancing the base game.
*I thought that, for sure, I had written this in here before, but I don’t see it. The Campaign Series: Middle East 1948-1985 is not based upon Divided Ground. The source code is that of the World War II East and West Front products that preceded Divided Ground.
01 Tuesday Feb 2022
Posted presidential politics
inSomething just occurred to me.
I’m wondering how long until we start to see the Presidential hopefuls come out of the woodwork for 2024. It won’t be that long, unfortunately.
On the Republican side, the wild card is Donald Trump. If he chooses to run, it creates a problem for any of his primary opponents. Any Republican that defeats Donald Trump in the primaries may draw the ire of the Trump supporters, which would all but guarantee a loss in the general election. It’s something of a knee-jerk reaction from the true believers but it is also a strategy. Like me or not, you have to give me the nomination because, even in loss, I can take my voters and go home.
The danger is multiplied for those who align most closely with Trump and his first-term policies. Any candidate that might just appeal to Trump’s supporters becomes utterly unelectable if Trump runs.
I started thinking along these lines after reading Jason L. Riley’s piece in the Wall Street Journal (paywall advice continues to apply) this past weekend. He argues that, whether you believe Trump is a racist or believe that he is not, the statistics show that his time in office was good for blacks* and other minorities. Objectively the numbers show that Trump’s term was a boon for minorities specifically; while the rising tide lifted all boats, their tide rose the most. I happen to think that Trump’s changes to tax policy and emphasis on deregulation logically resulted in this outcome, but disbelief does not change the results. 2017 into 2020 showed bigger gains for poor and minorities than any other recent presidential term. It wasn’t until the imposition of lockdowns that the economic endowments again shifted to the wealthy and the privileged.
Indeed, I expect to eventually see data showing that the current administration had a similarly negative effect on the minority population and the poor, but that was not what the article was about.
My point here is that, given the contrasts we’ve seen over the past decade, I (for one) would like to see the best of the Trump-term policies reinstated and expanded. I hope the hard results of those policies would lead the majority of my fellow voters to agree with me. It is also prima facie obvious that it doesn’t take Donald Trump as president to return America to its 2017-2019 golden age. In fact, it might be better if it were someone else – someone not named Trump, if you get my drift.
Donald Trump is getting up there in age. He’s not much younger than Joe Biden and the downsides of having an octogenarian world leader become clearer by the day. He’s also a lighting rod for controversy. It’s part of his appeal, no doubt, but it also gets in the way of the work of directing the vast Federal bureaucracy, which is the actual task we elect our President to do.
You may have picked up hints that I’ve been a Rand Paul supporter. I’m still a fan and think he’s done yeoman’s work helping to reign in Fauci. I’m also not sure a Rand Paul presidential platform would fly in today’s environment, especially with the army of Donald Trump believers (or maybe it would after all). I think the Republicans’ best bet would be to nominate a Donald Trump proxy leaving Trump to be content with the role of Kingmaker, taking his satisfaction from that proxy victory.
Which brings me back to my epiphany.
Donald Trump would lambast Donald Trump for running again after suffering a loss. Imagining it said with that Trump voice and cadence, Trump is now a “loser.” Whatever he did right, he suffered electoral loss and let down his side. He should make way for a “winner” to take up his standard. The occasional Richard Nixon or Joe Biden notwithstanding, I think this is also the norm in American politics in general. Someone who try-try-tries again after a loss has not only everything that dogged him (or Her) the first time around but piles on the taint of that first-time failure. I’m saying it all goes double in the Trumpaverse.
This, I conclude, explains a big part of why he is so invested in the “stolen election” narrative. If he lost the election fair-and-square, he’s a loser. If the election was “stolen,” then he’s really a winner whose glorious reign was cut short by treachery. That, in turn, becomes not a burden but an asset in a future election. With Trump, one never knows how much is bluster and how much is belief, but he may need to believe he won in order to maintain his own self-image. Alas, the belief in “rigged elections” is only going to gain momentum as, now, President Biden is pushing a similar story.
I also read over the weekend that some people are egging-on Kid Rock to run for President. Now that would be a hoot. Queue the articles bemoaning how much better the country seemed when we had a distinguished statesman like Donald J. Trump as president.
*The New York Times style guide requires that the word be capitalized, in violation of the rules for the English language. By contrast, Mr. Riley – a talented and insightful writer who happens to be black – does not capitalize “black” but does capitalize “Hispanic.” I shall follow him where he leads me today.