Category: Review

A Thousand Words: Death By Lightning

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Death By Lightning

The Netflix historical drama Death by Lightning is a four-part look at the presidency of James Garfield. An obscure piece of national history that’s even referenced in the intro when workers nearly a hundred years later find Charles Guiteau’s brain and don’t know who it was, this depiction is an excellent melodramatic epic.

First off, there are numerous inaccuracies and dramatic exaggerations here. One must adhere to the maxim of Death of Stalin director Armando Iannuci: “It’s not a documentary”. That said, the characters judged in their own right are largely excellent. Largely. Garfield himself is a shallow, too-good plaster saint and his wife Lucretia is a little anachronistic “serious woman played by serious actress”, although in her case it’s made up for by one spectacular scene in the finale. Everyone else from brutish Chester A. Arthur to Clay Davis before Clay Davis Roscoe Conkling to, especially, Guiteau himself is wonderful. (Guiteau’s actor played a supervillain in a past role and it showed).

The series is very smooth flowing, and although most of the time it’s a madcap retelling of events, there’s some possibly unintended depth. Arthur’s recognition of himself as an underqualified person who fell upwards into power is a yin-yang contrast from Guiteau’s insane belief of himself as a transcendental genius. It doesn’t hurt that antagonists Conkling and Guiteau both fall into one of my favorite character archetypes: Schemers who are a lot less intelligent than they think they are.

So yes, don’t expect much realism, but this is an amazing show.

Review: The Untold Story of China’s Nuclear Weapons Development and Testing

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The Untold Story of China’s Nuclear Weapons Development and Testing

This book with a very long name is a very good look at the often-underlooked Chinese nuclear weapons program. It’s a scientific chronicle of all its tests from the initial blast in 1964 to the latest known ones in the 1990s. And it’s very good. Without getting too technical and being willing to admit what he doesn’t know, author Hui Zhang sheds a lot of light on the secretive program.

Some of it I knew, like a nightmare when a bomb being tested on a Q-5 (light ground attack aircraft) got stuck to the launch rail and wouldn’t drop. Others I didn’t, like a failed test not due to anything physics related, but simply because parachutes failed and the bomb broke against the ground before it could implode. Either way, it’s extremely detailed and effective.

It does have the nitpicky intra-academic arguments I see weirdly often in books about nuclear weapons, talking about how the Chinese have had the capability to miniaturize warheads more than other sources have claimed. Since Zhang’s claimed shrinking is not particularly unreasonable, it feels a little-strange. My reaction was “so what?”

This is ultimately still a small nitpick of a very good nonfiction book.

A Thousand Words: Backyard Wrestling

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Of no relation to the Backyard Sports baseball/soccer/etc… games, Backyard Wrestling: Don’t Try This At Home, and its sequel There Goes The Neighborhood is the distilled nadir of human culture in the most vile time of mankind’s cultural output: The early-mid 2000s. (Don’t argue this with me, I grew up then).

It’s a video game that awkwardly tries to shift traditional wrestling games, Tekken-style 3D fighters, and Smash Bros style “environmental fighters”. All while doing none of it very well and reeking of nu-metal. This is a time capsule. A very very bad time capsule.

Review: Hitler’s Miracle Weapons, Vol. 1

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Hitler’s Miracle Weapons, Volume 1

I had to get a book that claimed the exact opposite of what every other serious piece of scholarship on the German nuclear weapons program said (it was not even close to making a bomb). So I read Hitler’s Miracle Weapons. The art and models are very nice and if this was an acknowledged alternate history, I’d have little but praise for the book.

Unfortunately, the book makes tons of leaps of faith (to put it mildly) and makes the claims that:

  • Germany had built and tested nuclear warheads but didn’t use them for “reasons” even though it intended to
  • Said warheads ranged from small suitcase nukes to 20 megaton monsters
  • The American nuclear bombs were taken at least partially from German technology.

It does provide a lot of sources, but they feel circular. Moreover, it simply moves on with absolute confidence to the next wunderbomb, speaking as if it was an acknowledged fact that Germany had an arsenal more diverse than a postwar nuclear power. This is a kooky book, but it’s the detailed kind of kooky book. Make of that what you will.

A Thousand Words: Red Ape Family

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Red Ape Family

NFTs, or “Non-Fungible Tokens”, were one of the most shameless fads of all time. Unlike previous market bubbles like tulip bulbs or Death of Superman comic books, these offered no practical value. In fact, what they even are is hard to explain. The closest normal person equivalent is a receipt.

So normal cryptocurrencies are “fungible” in the sense that as long as they’re in circulation, one dollar bill is functionally the same as another. Non-fungible means distinct, like say, an explicit receipt. Why would you spend a million dollars on a receipt for a transaction of a picture of a badly drawn monkey? The answer is a combination of get-rich suckers and wash trading (despite the name, not directly money laundering).

But I digress. So Red Ape Family, about a family of bored red apes who steal a drive full of the most valuable NFTs and go to Mars, is…. to call it a toy commercial would be an insult to toy commercials. More like a get rich quick infomercial made by someone with no talent whose sense of humor was a single episode of later Family Guy.

The existence of this is more interesting than any of the “gags” itself.

Review: Labyrinth

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Labyrinth

An early Jon Land novel that somehow escaped my eye until now, Labyrinth has every note I know him for. There’s a super conspiracy with super weapons to take over the world, infighting within said super-conspiracy, and a crazy plot that ends in a crazier set piece (this one involves old warbird propeller planes).

This by Jon Land’s standards isn’t the best simply because it’s too conventional. If this was my first Land book I’d probably have loved it more, but I know he can do goofier (and thus better) in hindsight. Oh well.

Review: Speedrunning

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Speedrunning: Interviews With The Quickest Gamers

David Snyder in Speedrunning tackles the titular way of playing video games. It looks good on paper, interviewing numerous champion speedrunners and explaining how the basics work. The problem is its format and layout. It’s like trying to play Dark Souls on a drum set, and he doesn’t quite manage it.

So this first consists of explanations of speedrunning, which are a little cookie-cutter but still essentially accurate for an absolute beginning. Then Snyder gets to interviewing speedrunners, which isn’t really the best way to go about it. I might be a little stereotypical, but speedrunners are a group not generally known for their wit or sociability. More importantly and specifically, the interview subjects go straight into huge technical details which contrast with the basics given elsewhere in the book. I don’t blame them, but I blame Snyder for not integrating it better.

A bigger problem is that it’s using text to describe a visual medium. There’s no shortage of speedrun history/explanation videos , and almost all of the record speedruns themselves can be easily seen. Reading a book about it simply can’t compare, even if Snyder was a lot better. So that’s why I can’t recommend this.

A Thousand Words: NARC

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NARC

The 1988 Williams arcade game NARC is probably the most 1980s piece of interactive media developed. Playing as super-cops in biker helmets Max Force and Hit Man, you blast your way through a drug empire of hobos, dealers, weed-growing Rambos, prostitute-kidnapping clowns, henchmen who couldn’t decide if they wanted to dress like mobsters or construction workers, and attack dogs, ruled by a giant biomechanical head-worm. None of that is exaggerated or false.

There is nothing subtle or easy about this game. It’s meant to have you win solely by pushing in quarters. (Who’s the addiction inducing dealer now?) But it is fun and is well, incredibly 1980s.

Review: Initial D Volume 1

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Initial D Volume 1

Note: The specific thing I reviewed was Initial D omnibus Volume 1 which is actually the first two manga volumes in one book. But whatever.

Reading the legendary racing series in original manga form made me think that… the anime kind of superannuated it. Ok, I already knew what happened from seeing the anime (spoiler alert: Takumi wins), and while the manga has some distinct diffferences (like the order of races), it’s not all that different. Certainly not different enough to be easily better or worse. This isn’t a “behind every good 1970s movie is a bad 1970s book” type of deal.

But it’s pretty self-explanatory how much better in motion picture form a car racing series works. Having one large panel (even if well-drawn) of two cars at a turn with a huge comic “VROOOM!” sound effect just isn’t the same as watching two cars (even if they’re from PS1/N64-era CGI) zip around the same turn. I don’t blame Shigeno for anything. It’s just the format is a lot inherently less capable.

Review: Airlords of the Ozarks

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Twilight 2000: Airlords of the Ozarks

Twilight 2000 had the problem of reaching a good stopping point (escaping Europe) but then being commercially successful enough to continue. Airlords of the Ozarks is a very blatant example of how the style shifted, to the point where I once used the phrase “Arkansas vs. the Blimps” to describe other settings doing the same.

I feel now that GDW might have written itself into a corner and for better or worse had to change tack instead of copy-pasting classic adventures only in different continents. But to go from brutal survival to almost Jon Land/Mack Maloney level conflicts against airships with nuclear missiles? It may have been too far in the opposite direction. But I don’t fault them for trying.

Plus Airlords is still vastly, vastly better than the abomination that is Kidnapped!