Review: Is There Life After Football

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Is There Life After Football: Surviving The NFL

A look at life as an American Football player by sociologists and former NFL player James Koonce, Is There Life After Football is a very interesting and evenhanded tale of how football players (and to a degree many other athletes) struggle culturally. While very few of its points are surprising or shocking, it’s well-written and handled.

The authors are eager to debunk some of the skewed and sensationalist claims of football players recklessly spending piles of money and then ending up as brain-damaged hobos. Careful to cite formal studies, they point out that there isn’t a disproportionately high amount of either financial or legal trouble amongst NFL veterans (a point others such as former player Merrill Hoge have made)-but that it still can and does often happen, with a look at the cultural dynamics to see why.

Indeed this manages to mostly avoid the twin sportswriting perils of what I call the “Johnny Manziel” and “Colin Kaepernick” paths, to use two quarterbacks who both got (in?)famous for things that had nothing to do with their play on the field. The Manziel route is classic media focusing on the freak show excesses, portraying the players as overpaid, under-mature babies, often with moral scolding. (Spoiler alert: Some players are just that). The Kaepernick route is the more modern “sensibility” in which every single player is an underpaid exploited victim of Evil Capitalist Society.

If I had to quibble, I’d say that they lump NFL players too closely together. The stats are skewed by short-career replacement level players, and the compartmenalization of different positions and paths is well-known. Their talk of the “conveyor belt” should have brought more attention to hyped prospects who flame out. The authors mention old-timers who had to work in the offseason and bubble fringe players who knew very well that they were living on the edge. But I’d be curious to see the end result of the worst of all worlds-a sheltered pampered college stardom followed by just legitimately not having the talent to match at the pro level.

But these are minor concerns for an excellent book.

A Thousand Words: Double Dragon 3

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Double Dragon 3: The Rosetta Stone

Double Dragon basically made the brawler what it was. Unfortunately, its position at the height of beat em ups was very short lived. By the third game, an externally developed one called “The Rosetta Stone” that replaces the postapocalyptic streets with a world tour, it had been left behind by the likes of Final Fight. Really far behind.

If Final Fight has fluid controls that only seem slightly worse or clunky now than they did over thirty years ago, this feels like someone at the time who played both would have noticed it. The characters just move like they’re pieces on grooved slots (maybe it was even programmed like that). On top of it, being able to buy power ups with real quarters made this one of the first games with microtransactions.

So yeah, there’s a reason why Double Dragon fell out of favor. It didn’t make good games, and this was definitely not a good game.

Review: Trial By Fire

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Harold Coyle’s Trial by Fire is about a…. second Mexican-American war? Uhh? Oh, it was published in 1992. That explains everything. Besides the (long) setup and (shorter) conflict, we get one of the most controversial cheap thriller characters beginning here: Female infantry commander Nancy Kozak, who has a less than ideal reputation among Coyle’s readers.

Sadly, the book once against reinforces my view of Coyle as a one-hit wonder whose Team Yankee, magisterial as it was, could not be exceeded or equaled by any other book by the same author. It’s a weird anti-Goldilocks mixture of either too fast or too slow, and the understandable but contrived background does it no favors. Hate to say it, but… just read Team Yankee again, IMO.

Making vehicles in Stable Diffusion

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Simple guide to how I bash together vehicles in Stable Diffusion.
First assemble the shape. In this case it’s the bottom of a tank, a suitcase (!), and a line drawing of a large-caliber field piece.

Then load up Stable Diffusion with a controlnet, in this case, depth.

Use the model and prompt (In this case I use Helloworld 6.0), make sure the controlnet is enabled but not too high, and you get…

One self-propelled AH vehicle!

Wither Fuldapocalypse?

On By coilerxiiIn Blog Stuff3 Comments

As you may have guessed from my seemingly declining post time, I’m just losing steam on this blog. I’ve thought it’s things like games/writing/etc… and there’s some truth to that. But I feel there’s more to it than that. Like it’s harder to get the urge to blog even if I have the time.

If this blog fades away, so be it. Six years, one thousand posts, and totally changing my perspective on fiction for the better is completely worth it.

And if this can reinvent itself as something other than a review blog, than so be it as well. Either way, starting Fuldapocalypse has been one of the best decisions of my life. I just don’t want to force anything.

BTR-92 Squad

On By coilerxiiIn Essay, Weird Wargaming1 Comment

First I did my past piece on Mobile Corps squads, then came the BTR-92. Now the most ahistorically Soviet part of All Union’s military can be made with the two mixed together. In-universe, the creation of this squad was an extremely involved and controversial process.

  • Unlike previous examples, including the mobile corps own BMP/IFV squads, this operates two organizational fireteams. With lots of teeth-gritting, the doctrine emphasizes that “if necessary”, it can operate as a unitary squad or simple overall fire/overall maneuver element. In the Soviet-Romanian War, many did.
  • This has a full-time deputy squad leader for dismounts, whose job is pretty obvious. An emphasis was put on out-of-vehicle operations as these units were designed to spend more time outside.
  • The PDW is the A-91M. The LMG is the “Vepr”, one of many bullpup RPK proposals. The light RPG is in real life the South African (!) Denel FT5 (since a post-apartheid government would be very close to a surviving USSR, and since a post-apartheid arms industry would be very desperate, a license deal for this Goldilocks Rocket Launcher is not impossible).
  • This can be detailed in the Kestrel Publishing entry: Clash: Soviet BTR vs. Romanian TAB . Despite the name, about 80% of that book is just devoted to the Mobile Corps BTR reformation. The pieces on the Romanians basically amounted, cruelly but not inaccurately to “They just followed 196X BTR doctrine, had the equipment to match, and lost”.

Review: Blood of the Ancients

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Blood of the Ancients

Like Jerry Ahern, John Schettler decided to take the Kirov series into outright science fiction. Gone are the purely terrestrial squabbles, replaced with sci-fi spaceship battles against aliens and, in this case, an attempt at a John Carter of Mars Homage in Blood of the Ancients. Although much of the book takes place on Earth as the ancient “Sons of Ares” change the past in secret alternate history, this is obviously John Carter through and through.

The issue is that Schettler is not the most inherently suited to write this kind of flowery planetary romance. It would be like a fluffy romance author writing a technothriller. Despite this, it’s a sincere and well-appreciated effort. Who knows, maybe Kirov will turn to nonviolent romantic drama next…

The BTR-92

On By coilerxiiIn Art, Weird Wargaming1 Comment

Stable Diffusion has given me the chance to bring a vehicle from All Union to life. Now I had a vision of what the “BTR-92”, the wheeled mainstay of the Mobile Corps, looked like, but on the pages it was described only as “blocky” (and wheeled).

So how I made it: I first smushed some elements together externally. The top and turret came from other APCs, while the bottom (possibly meant to symbolize it being built on that truck’s chassis) came from a Ural-4320. Then I used it as the outline for a controlnet to avoid the “AI doesn’t know what shape to make it” issue.

It’s of course not perfect and with some nitpicking/hindsight, I’d probaby make something that looks less like a low-end APC/MRAP and more like a futuristic advanced one. But it’s still the general shape I wanted, and it was still very fun to make.

How the Fuldapocalypse Skewed Artillery

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Fair warning: This is done by an armchair enthusiast with absolutely no practical experience and whose sole experience comes from reading things. I could be totally and completely wrong about many things. Now that that’s out of the way, a look at how a Fuldapocalypse-centric doctrine has skewed perceptions of artillery to the point where Ukraine came as a surprise to many.

To put a long story overly short, the current paradigm in Ukraine is:

  • Largely static front
  • Lots of drones flying around on both sides (which translates to deadlier air power, which in turn makes it a bigger threat)
  • Limited resources

So you can see why smaller, easier to conceal towed guns are liked more.

Now compare this to the Fuldapocalypse:

  • Mobile front
  • Less threat from air but extremely good counterbattery fire
  • Lavish (prewar) spending to afford SPGs.

See the difference?

Now the interesting thing is Caesar-style “truck SPGs”, ie artillery pieces on open wheeled chassis. They have shown the weaknesses of both-ie they’re soft like a towed gun and big like an SPG (and even less maneuverable). However, they’re not really designed for either kind of large-scale war.