A Thousand Words: Groundhog Day

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Groundhog Day

It’s Groundhog Day, and the holiday brings two famous events to my mind. One is the time that then-New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, in an event that symbolized his less than stellar mayoralty, fatally dropped a groundhog during a ceremony. The second is of course the Bill Murray movie that is the subject of this post.

The film has a simple time loop premise, to the point where, when describing any other work of fiction with such a cycle, you can just say “like Groundhog Day” and people will understand. Main character Phil Connors goes on a loathed news assignment to Punxsutawney, finds himself snowed in, and then finds it’s the same day again and again and again and again.

What makes it a classic is that it works as both a silly and profound movie. You get both spiritual self-reflection and a man stealing a groundhog before driving off a cliff. The cast of Bill Murray and Andie Macdowell is excellent, and the whole thing is probably one of the greatest holiday films ever.

Review: Earth Fire

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Earth Fire

The ninth Survivalist book and end of the de facto first arc is Earth Fire. It takes the “western Fist of the North Star” theme to its climax as John Rourke prepares his shelter for the firestorm engulfing the world and moves to stop the main Soviet antagonist from using the other suspended animation shelter in Cheyenne Mountain.

I’ve mentioned many times that this was an ideal stopping point for the series. Take this perfectly fine arc and the beginning of Book 10 where Rourke wakes up after the timeskip and sees the Eden Project spaceship lifeboat return and you have an excellent self-contained narrative. As it stood, the series kind of meandered on, becoming first a pet sci-fi setting and then hurriedly sputtering out after 1991.

In fact, later arcs would render this much less important via retcons. Here the Soviet Politburo is shot down as they attempt to reach Cheyenne Mountain because they don’t have a viable shelter of their own. Later on it turns out that the Soviets indeed had an underground city after all! And the Argentines, and the Icelanders, and pretty much everyone! How about that!

Still, this is a fine piece of ridiculous 80s excessive men’s adventure, and can be appreciated for what it is. The later sourness doesn’t make this any less sweet.

The Alternate Airliner

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It can be fun to put an alternate airliner into service, but unless it’s really big, really fast, or both, a lot of people wouldn’t notice much difference. That being said, the same can be said about a lot of things and it’s never stopped alternate history writers before.

I’ve even made a couple “formal” tiers:

Tier 1: Barely Noticeable

Planes like these (in this case the MD-XX and the An-218 “777ski”), are going to be barely noticeable to non-aviation afficiandos, however different they may be on the inside.

Tier 2: Standing Out A Bit

The dreaded propfan is one instance of these airplanes having one obvious standout in addition to their other more subtle features. Others include a distinct shape like the 747 fuselage or even a “four engines all in the back” like the VC-10/Il-62

Tier 3: Really Stand Out

LEAD Technologies Inc. V1.01

These involve strange but technically plausible shapes like lifting bodies or circular hulls of various nature. Their mere appearance makes them stand-out. This ironically applies to delta wings and civilianized early jet bombers.

Tier 4: Exotics

These are the ones that ascend into pure science fiction.

Review: Small Arms For Urban Combat

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Small Arms For Urban Combat

Russell Tilstra’s Small Arms For Urban Combat seems at first glance to be just what the title says. It’s a nonfiction reference book about various small arms and their usefulness in urban war. However, it turns out to be a lot more shallow than that.

Sadly, this is less an analysis and more of a “Basic first guide to small arms”. While not bad by itself, it would have been a lot better with a more honest title. The urban warfare part feels like an afterthought.

Squishy WW3 Issues Part 1

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So the World War III 1987 blog just posted “The Squishy Problem Facing World War III Writers“. And come on, there’s no way I can not write a post in response to that. Here goes. The original blog is in Italics. I’ll start with the opening.

World War III novels, movies and even blogs are as diverse and imaginative as their authors choose to make them. Even in instances where multiple works of fiction examine the same hypothetical theater or overall conflict there will not be many similarities throughout the bulk of the novels. Different writing styles, plots and points of view are guaranteed to keep the reader fixed on a uniquely original WWIII scenario brought to life in novels.

I would somewhat disagree with this. Yes, on a micro-scale they can be different on paper (ie, it turns out very few involve invading Iceland!). But even by the standards of cheap thrillers, it’s a very small and very narrow genre. This is not an insult. It’s just how it is and how a “normal” reader will look at them.

But when the final chapters and plot conclusions roll around, it’s a totally different ballgame altogether.  And so emerges the root of a squishy problem.

You see, the majority of popular NATO-Warsaw Pact, Cold War World War III novels, movies and other types of fiction end in either nuclear war or the overthrow of the Soviet general secretary and politburo just moments before the Kremlin decides to launch an all-out nuclear strike on the US and Europe. Other novels and fiction incorporate aspects of both options in their concluding chapters, creating an ending that is somewhat different from those above, but lacks the creativity to be considered entirely new and exclusive.

Ok. I’m going to argue that this is the most realistic and sensible part. Because the loser is likely to go nuclear. And if not, some plot contrivance is necessary to stop that. I guess you could have some kind of negotiated surrender, but I can understand why readers wouldn’t find that very satisfying. The alternative is either a Red Army-style clean OPFOR win or just making a horrible squash, the latter of which is not exactly appealing.

The squishy problem facing writers of the World War III genre is similar to what Zombie genre has found itself confronting in recent years: How to make an age old topic fresh and appealing when a good part of the audience or readership already has a good idea of how it is all going to end?

Good question and one that I will definitely come back to.

Asialink

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Here is a logo for Asialink, a fictional airline I’ve made headquartered in Singapore and focused on linking all of one continent (guess which ).

The yin-yang (Asia) and circular chain (link) were made seperately in Stable Diffusion XL and edited together externally. The text was manually added and uses the Shojumaru font.

Asialink flight attendant uniforms are the same combination of teal and/or light green with red neckwear.

A Thousand Words: Half Past Dead

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Half Past Dead

2002’s Half Past Dead was Steven Seagal’s final effort in mainstream cinema before he collapsed entirely into sus no-budget cheapies. Both a rip-off of the earlier and far better The Rock in the exact same setting (Alcatraz) and the general “Die Hard in a ______” trend that was several years out of date, it did not exactly breathe new life into his career.

A story of supervillains storming Alcatraz (see what I said about that other movie), the film is notable for two things besides just having a washed-up Seagal in it. The first is how desperately they tried to go for the “Edgy Extreme” trend of the late 90s and early 2000s, dragging in rappers and garish overcut camera angles to try (unsuccessfully) to put lipstick on the pig. The second is that this is one of the first appearances of the ubquituous Steven Seagal Stunt Double, used for as much as they could get away with. The “Stunt Double” would reach new heights in Seagal’s later films where it would be used not just for any mild exertion, but for things like walking peacefully.

Amazingly, one of the few highlights is “49er 6”, the femme fatale villain played by a 40 year old soap opera actress (Nia Peeples). She apparently relished doing her own stunts, and that is a far cry from Seagal the Double-Man.

As a time capsule/MST3K-style so bad its good, you could do worse than this movie. But I wouldn’t put it anywhere near the top of the cheap thriller pyramid.

Wither Boeing

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So Boeing planes have been in the news for…. issues. What’s surprising about it to aviation observers is how unsurprising they consider it. And as for why? Well, here’s the oversimplified and likely wrong in a few ways explanation.

So Boeing seemingly was a legend of Engineers until the evil Finance People ruined it. Anyone who has looked at the history of the auto industry will find this familiar. And while there is truth to nickel and diming, the context both on and above the ground is always more complex. If you look at the types of cars produced on both sides of the Pacific before the oil crisis/bubble popped, yes, there was a time when engineering was obvious-and obviously excessive.

In short and simply: Boeing was/is the last of the big post-WWII dinosaurs to encounter serious competition. There was no need for it to shape up because of the lack of a challenge, buoyed by their spectacular good luck concerning federal policy. The 747 came and was snapped up by airlines just in time for the oil crisis. But since the airline industry was a symbotic pampered cartel then, it was just passed on to customers to bail them out. Then came deregulation after that, with Boeing taking advantage of the boom. Then came the opening up of previously closed-off markets after 1991, and then…

…then the low-hanging fruit already got picked and the guys in Toulouse figured out how to make good airplanes. Oops.

Naming a Submarine Class

On By coilerxiiIn Essay, Weird Wargaming4 Comments

I’m torn with submarine names for the MX-SSB class, a real proposed design that I’m using in All Union

(Bottom picture made in Stable Diffusion from the outline of the sub above)

The problems are:

  • The class is large at circa 50 boats, so the naming scheme needs to support such a large class.
  • There is no historical precedent since the US never used diesel missile subs, much less in large numbers.
  • Both fish and people just don’t seem right to me (subjective I know)

I’m leaning towards lakes (ie, the Lake Tahoe class with some/all of the Great Lakes thrown in), but am wondering if there’s something that just can click. Thoughts?