Capcom’s 1990 Carrier Air Wing is a fairly standard side scrolling plane shooter. Except for one thing that elevated it massively in my eyes. That’s the surprisingly detailed and (in a visual sense) accurate depiction of military hardware. You can control either a Hornet, a Tomcat, or an Intruder (which is marked as an A-6F. Wonder if they knew of the never-was upgrade or if it was a happy coincidence because they chose the next letter after E.)
When I saw Tu-22 Blinders as enemies in the first level, I was in love. When I saw Yak-38s in a later stage, I was even more in love. This is quite possibly the most Fuldapocalyptic shmup there is, and I loved playing every second of it. Yes, there’s the sci-fi superweapons (such as a final boss that includes a Buran shuttle) but it’s otherwise very grounded-looking compared to other games of its time and nature.
This is basically a video game adaptation of a Mack Maloney novel. What’s not to like?
Officially, this was the second movie in the Ator series of Conan the Barbarian knock offs. But it’s as “Cave Dwellers” that it leapt into my heart as the greatest Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode I have watched. The small and sus company known as Film Ventures International took a questionable strategy of getting the rights to show clips from movies, changing the titles and credits, then calling the rest of the movie a “clip” for legal reasons. It only worked because they were small.
Anyway, the film started with an extremely blurry clip from a 1960s Italian Tarzan knockoff in its bootleg credits, and then only got crazier from there, following up with an action-packed climax featuring a hang glider and concluding with nuclear bomb footage(!). Joel and the robots excelled, especially because this is the kind of mock where the movie itself has enough great material to build on (for instance, it’s hard to do that much with a stilted, no-budget 50s movie).
Yeah. This is my favorite Mystery Science Theater episode of all time. It’s amazing, and the movie it’s mocking is amazingly bad.
It’s no secret that all kinds of fictional works change from their beginning to their final product. And a minor character in a classic video game embodies this very well. In the Kanto Pokemon games, Erika is the grass-type specialist leader of the Celadon City gym. Wearing traditional Japanese clothing, her characterization is that of a graceful flower lady (who has a tendency to fall asleep).
But apparently she wasn’t always that way. And some of the changes made to her were after her Gen I artwork had already been drawn.
Development and concepts assets that have emerged have shown a picture of the original Erika. She would have been placed in what would have been Lavender Town (which in the final version didn’t have a gym at all). And, unsurprisingly, she would have specialized in ghost types. The sole ghost specialist who actually emerged in Gen I was Agatha, portrayed as a normal person who just happened to use ghost types.
At least judging from her art design, Erika would, uh, not have been. Her eyes were closed and the Poke Ball in her sprite was in midair, which could be justified as her juggling it but which was likely meant to have her hovering it with supernatural powers. Finally, her clothes were folded in a way that was only used for the dead in her initial sprite. (A pretty big implication of this is that her design was changed in Yellow and all later appearances to be folded the correct way).
In other words, she was heavily implied just from the visual assets alone to be some kind of undead. Since no final text dialogue was made, there’s no 100% confirmation, but it’s pretty clear. Would this design carrying over really change much?
Probably not. Unlike a few other Gen I leaders, Erika did not become a superstar in her own right. At the time, not much would really change. Except for her prominence. See, spooky Lavender Town became a centerpiece of internet creepypasta campfire stories immediately. And having someone who was an outright zombie? Oh yeah, she’s definitely getting featured in them. So even if official media stays out, Erika the Zombie would become a star of the internet.
Since a multiverse canonically exists in Pokemon, Zombie Erika probably lives in some variant universe. Much as how creepy supernatural anime Sabrina exists alongside normal actress game Sabrina. Who knows, maybe this Erika starts conventional Fuldapocalypses as a hobby. Has the zombie sorceress been found?!?
Looking at the 1990s OPFOR documents, a “new” (well, newer in a formal sense) type of formation arises: The “armored group” (bronegruppa). It’s important to note the history of Soviet-style doctrine beforehand. The stereotype, often true, is of formations operating as entire units for a certain task. Thus a formation (generally a company as the smallest) will as an entire unit operate as one arm of an attack or another. In defense one formation will sit and fire behind fortifications while another will act as the counterattack/reserve.
The armored group is ad hoc by nature. Formed with a number of armored vehicles usually equivalent to slightly more than a platoon (although GENFORCE-Mobile mentions ones slightly smaller than a company if the parent unit is big enough to handle it), the key is the following:
The tanks operate away from their parent unit.
More crucially and importantly, the IFVs operate “empty”, with their infantry having already dismounted.
The use of an armored group depends on the situation, of course. Examples given in the GENFORCE-Mobile and Heavy OPFOR Tactical documents are:
Sweeping around to hit the side while the dismounted infantry and main force attacks from a different axis.
Serving as the base of fire while the dismounted infantry and supporting arms do the sweep.
Acting as a reserve/pursuit force, especially one that can quickly roar in and (however temporarily) block off a route from a retreating foe.
Acting as a counterattack force on the defensive.
The armored group’s origins come from the Soviet war in Afghanistan, where such formations were used in an irregular, nonlinear, frequently rough-terrain war.
Joan Ryan’s gut-wrenching nonfiction book Little Girls in Pretty Boxes is a beautifully written book about a hideously ugly topic. That is gymnastics, one of the most horrifying and least cost-effective sports ever. One horror story after another comes out of it. Fatal crashes, eating disorders, and girls forced into horrendous discipline and generally ruined by something that almost all of them see absolutely no benefit from. The aging curve is so ridiculously steep that at 24 , Simone Biles was considered the equivalent of athletes with freakish longevity like Jamie Moyer or Frank Gore.
Ryan’s only “problem” is that she’s so good at telling something where stage parents leave their daughters in the hands of a Ceausescu-vintage slave driver (and, with recent revelations after the book’s publication, someone far, far, worse). Most sports involve the participants getting bigger and stronger. Gymnastics forces them to stay small and underdeveloped. There’s been understandable talk of banning American Football, but Ryan makes a much better case for gymnastics.
Jeff Benedict and Don Yaeger’s Pros and Cons is a 1999 book about the massive instances of NFL players who had criminal records. These players were not just chosen in the draft in spite of their criminal backgrounds, but were often shielded by their teams to great extents. So far, that does not sound surprising, being just a few years removed from the OJ Simpson trial. But they deliberately avoid talking about the obvious “superstar power” and instead focus near-entirely on how the teams twist to protect criminal players who are not stars by any definition of the term.
It’s well-researched and has many harrowing examples. But it comes across as flawed for two big reasons. The first is that it ultimately feels sensationalist for the sake of sensationalism. This is of course a massive inherent issue for true crime books like it. But it seems to go further in that it assumes its readers are holding to a hopelessly outdated “Gee whiz, look at that Mickey Mantle, so nice and clean” mindset that I can assure you was not present even in children at the time of the book’s release (I know this because I was one at the time. I can tell you that I knew more about Dennis Rodman’s off-court antics than about what made him good on it).
Which leads to the second not-its-fault problem. This is like a book on unrestrained warfare-released in 1913. The internet was a paradigm shift in how these inevitable incidents were processed and viewed, and arriving just before it really broke out massively makes it horrendously dated.
I can’t really recommend this book. It’s a dated true crime book that’s basically redundant by this point.
Alan Folsom’s second thriller novel was 1998’s Day of Confession. Following the “big” so-bad-its-good shoes of predecessor The Day After Tomorrow, it stumbles. Badly. That involved a bizarre plot centered around giving Adolph Hitler a head transplant. This, like a 1990s technothriller out of Central Casting, involves Catholic Church higher-ups launching a conspiracy to take control of China.
(Look, this is what you get when you don’t have a definite opponent. You can get Cauldron or you can get stuff like this.)
Anyway, this more mundane premise dooms the book. It has all of its predecessor’s weaknesses, like so much of the book just being people going places. But by having a more boring thriller plot, it lacks the crazed strengths that made Day After Tomorrow such a good bad book. The writing isn’t the worst ever, but there are better thrillers out there.
Fitting the “lurid true crime” genre exactly, Forever and Five Days tells the story of female lovers and serial killers Gwen Graham and Cathy Wood, nurses aides at a Grand Rapids care home who murdered several patients. The story of a questionably run facility filled with dispirited elderly people, the description of Alpine Manor would be creepy even if there were no murders.
The saga of Graham and Wood is yet more proof that serial killers are not Lex Luthor evil geniuses. The two made so many unsuccessful attacks that their prospective victims openly claimed people were trying to kill them, only avoiding suspicion as long as they did because many old people were delirious.
While it has the weaknesses of the sensationalist true crime book, this also has the strengths. If you like historical stories of serial killers, I’d recommend this.
Koushun Takami’s Battle Royale is a classic horror novel about high school students being thrown onto an island by a totalitarian government and forced to kill each other until only one is left. I knew I had to read it. Although I think the timing is off. After this, the similar Hunger Games (whose author believably said that the similarities were a coincidence), and an entire popular genre of “one shall survive” video games like Fortnite and PUBG, it’s not as out-there as it would have been at the time.
One area that did not slow the gory book down is the translation, which is at the very least sufficient. The writing style, regardless of language, conveys the action very well.
However, the book is still kind of flawed. And I’d argue that there’s two main reasons. The first is that the setting is so dark that it’s hard to care about anyone, since even if their class had avoided “The Program” in the first place, it would be unlikely that they’d come to a happy end in such a ruthless state. The second is that the book is just too long for its premise.
It has the substance of a fairly short cheap thriller, which it still is in spite of its pretensions-which are a little too prominent. I had to groan at the main characters suddenly dipping into “As you know, Bob…” setting exposition at the worst possible moments. Not the book’s finest hour. Anyway, there’s a good 200 page novel there, but it’s 600 pages. And the bulk of those pages consist of kills that probably should have happened offscreen, so we could focus on the real protagonists.
That being said, I’m still glad I read this book. But it’s very much a “mean 51%”. And that’s fine!
The product of a large MIT study of the auto industry, The Machine That Changed The World attempts to tell the story of “lean production”. The two other production types of motor vehicles mentioned in the book are obvious: Handmade/custom “craft production”, only used for a handful of low-unit firms, and classic assembly line “mass production”. But what is “lean production”? This was and still is a hard question to answer. But in its attempt, the book is an excellent study of the car industry.
One hand, this is a masterpiece in many ways. It’s a very technical but also very accessible study. It shows the difference between the older and newer ways of auto production very clearly. And its anecdotes are good in and of themselves.
But it also has some pretty serious flaws. This book is not only dated, but also was released at the absolute peak of the Japanese market bubble. So its veneration of Japanese production when the industry had a huge tailwind and was yet to experience a massive stress test needs to be taken with a large quantity of salt.
That being said, while not the most definitive book on auto production, it’s still a great historical resource.
Fuldapocalypse Fiction 