A Thousand Words: Soylent Green

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Soylent Green

Soylent Green is perhaps the most early 70s movie of all time. Set in the dark far off future of 2022, the film is a documentary about life in a Warhammer 40k hive city, cautionary tale of overpopulation and societal breakdown as well as a grand mystery. The problem looking back on it in hindsight is that everyone now knows the big twist about what the titular food is made out of (human corpses). But there’s more to it than just that.

See, the movie is very early 1970s in that the characters dress and talk so similarly that sometimes I had trouble telling them apart. But it also takes the most ridiculous set pieces and expects the viewer to treat them with utmost somber seriousness-and I don’t just mean “ridiculous” as in later shown to be inaccurate ie the prison Manhattan in “1999” in Escape from New York. It shows a wildlife sanctuary consisting of one tree in a greenhouse bubble and a long scene where rioters are literally scooped up in bulldozers and expects both to be serious.

The movie isn’t badly made and you could do a lot worse than watching it. But it is ridiculously dated and belongs to the pretentious pre-Star Wars school of 1970s sci-fi.

On The Term “Thunder Run”

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One of the most curious military terms is “Thunder Run”. It originally referred to an armored push into Baghdad in 2003. It has since come to generally mean “any fast, tank-heavy offensive, especially into closed terrain where tanks are otherwise not the most suited.” Especially one that’s inherently high-risk, as this was. It takes nothing away from the skill and courage of the 2003 Thunder Runners to point out that the conventional Iraqi army in that period was massively flawed and worn-out and that it could have easily failed against a more capable opponent, as happened in a similar attempt in the Yom Kippur War.

However, I find it even more interesting in terms of etymology. See, the name “Thunder Run” is pretty self-descriptive. It’s an attack that’s swift like a thunderbolt and involves dozens of thundering-ly loud armored vehicles running towards the opponent. In other words, its something that even someone with little such experience can grasp the meaning of.

Review: Seizing Power

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Seizing Power

Naunihal Singh’s Seizing Power is a book about military coups and how they work. The timing of this review is a complete coincidence and has no bearing on recent events whatsoever. Anyway, Singh studies the basic three types of coups and makes an academic argument that they are in essence, “coordination games”-that is to say they have to give the appearance of inevitability instead of actual hard power (in most cases.)

Singh divides coups into three categories. The first is coups from the top, like say, the central party committee imprisoning the president and attempting to seize control. The second is coups from the middle, like say, a division-sized force dashing from its base on the border to the capital and hoping the rest of the army can join it. The third is coups from the bottom, like say, rioters in support of a parliament with no army on its own trying to sway the military and take vital television stations. (Yes, all three examples happened in Russia/The USSR. They were the 1991 August Coup, the recent Wagner uprising, and the 1993 constitutional crisis).

Singh spends most of his time covering all three types of coups that happened in Ghana in its history, and then ends with the August Coup of 1991, a coup from the top that should have effortlessly succeeded but in fact failed miserably. Like most academic histories, it gets a little too pendantic at times. But it’s still a great read.

Stable Diffusion Noita Fanart

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The protagonist of the Noita game, known as “Mina” (which essentially just means ‘you’ in Finnish), or “The Noita” (witch) is a deliberately ambiguous figure wearing covering purple robes. So I felt I needed to do a theoretical unmasked version in Stable Diffusion. This “Mina” is female, with hair in traditional Scandinavian braids.

A Thousand Words: Dave’s Redistricting

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Dave’s Redistricting

One of my internet hobbies has been using the Dave’s Redistricting site. It allows you to draw up hypothetical legislative districts and see their demographics. I’m currently using it to make hypothetical seats for a vastly expanded US House of Representatives. It’s both fun and illuminating to see how you have to balance various challenges.

It’s very illustrative of showing how it’s actually harder to make “fair” districts than you might think. You can get a nice sensitive block of counties-that are safe seats. Or you can take half of those counties, balance it with half of a large city, and then you can make an evenly bipartisan district-but how “representative” really is an obvious artificial creation like that?

If you like politics in any form, you have to check this out. It’s simple, easy, and is great for both counterfactuals and actual debate.

Review: The Bucharest Dossier

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The Bucharest Dossier

I knew I had to read a spy thriller when I saw the setting was Romania. So I eagerly snapped up William Maz’s The Bucharest Dossier. That the author actually grew up in said country during the bad old days made me want it even more. Sadly, what goes up must come down. Taking place in the obvious year of 1989, it uses this excellent setting and…. squanders it.

A clumsy moral equivalence between Ceausescu’s Romania and Reagan’s America and making many of the events of the 1989 revolution the actions of foreign intelligence makes this sour. The author to be fair labels it a work of fiction in the afterword, but I can still see how it leaves a bad taste. There’s also the characterization and love story not really doing it for me.

That leaves the main plot. Now I’ll admit I’m not the biggest fan of Le Carre-style grounded spy novels. So I may be biased in this regard. But it still amounted to little more than a 51% story that was dragged down by its other weaknesses. The book does portray its setting mostly well, which makes me think that Maz would have been better off writing a plain historical novel.

Oh well. This could have been a lot better than it was.

World War III Sports

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With the actual war done, the WW31987 blog turns its attention to the really important things: Sports! My personal hunches, since this is in July/August.

  • MLB stops the season and probably either voids it (sure beats the real life World Series cancelations of the 94 strike and the 1904 boycott), or goes straight to the playoffs after the war ends.
  • The NFL hasn’t started yet and won’t start the first game until the second week of September, and the war ends in late August. (Ironically, there was a disruptive strike that year, dunno how the war would affect that). Given its lucrative nature, I can see a wait and see approach followed by starting the season after the war.
  • The NBA and NHL start in the late fall and are thus largely unaffected.
  • For European soccer leagues, I’d say it depends on the country. The historical Bundesliga started several days before the war would have begun, though a crisis could have averted it. My hunch is that the countries not directly hit (ie, France, etc…, would just launch a delayed and possibly shortened season after the war’s end), while Germany, the nuke victims, and the Scandanavian countries that were invaded would wait and possibly cancel the seasons.

One footnote: 2020 was the historical season that Mike Trout qualified for the Hall of Fame (played in at least 10 seasons). With obvious fears of the season not being able to be completed due to COVID, there was talk as if it would count as official. The Hall responded by saying that 1994 counted for the sake of eligibility, and thus even a World Series less 2020 would as well. Or a World Series-less 1987.

Stable Diffusion Team Logos Part 1

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The Logo Project

So Action PC sports games let you insert custom logos. When making a draft league in the newest edition of Action PC Football, I felt “why not fire up the Evil Abominable Intelligence Art Machine”? And I loved the results. Logos were made for all teams in this American Football league. Some were tongue in cheek references to existing teams, some were original, some were multiple iterations that I’ll gladly show here, and so on.

Division A-East

New York

Yep, the pseudo-“Jets” have a knight standing in front of a fighter jet. This is the first “Roundel Logo”, which I ended up with a lot of. Maybe it was the prompts, maybe it was the model, but oh well.

Boston

This was the logo I had the most fun making. I wanted something with the “Don’t Tread on Me” Gadsden snake style, a tricorn hat, and something weird. The prompt was done in the style of eccentric artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, and I’m glad with how it turned out.

Miami

Not very surprising. Don’t really have much to say about this.

Canton

A maroon bulldog. This looks the most like an actual team logo. Probably the most fun “realistic” logo I had.

Jacksonville

Based on the USFL team and an ancient execution technique, the “Brazen Bulls” have, well, a brass bull and a shield on their logo.

Big Vs. Little Targeteering

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With regards to unguided bombs, one of those things that’s still a little iffy to me is what’s more suited for a few big bombs and what’s for a bunch of little ones. I can guess, with something like a strongpoint or large building being viewed as worthy of a giant demolisher while a group of enemy infantry/soft-skins is better suited for a large stick of small fragmentation ones.

I also have this suspicion that general purpose bombs are acceptable for most aerial targets. This is backed up by the data from the Gulf Wars showing the bulk of dropped bombs being Mk82s and derivatives. And of course, anything that can explode is not useless. Both of these below have uses and both can be deadly.