Tag: 2020s

Review: The Quiet War

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The Quiet War

I must confess by this point I read The Quiet War just because I wanted to see just how far down Mark Hewitt’s Duncan Hunter series could go. Two chapters in, I was not disappointed. We get a padded flashback chapter where every single technical name is spelled out in full like it was a late Gold Eagle book, and then an example of the gargantuan homophobia the series became infamous for. And another. And another. The “flashback” chapters reach double digits, treating us to such horrors from the main character’s perspective as The Beatles.

This is not a book about a super-plane, even though there’s a chapter where it effortlessly crushes its opposition (like it has always done in the series). This is a book about gay communists. This sounds like some online insult, but it’s actually the factual book subject matter (besides said squash and a past article about the main character finding a treasure chest.) Tirades about how a cabal of gay communists were steered by the USSR into sabotaging America make up most of this. And the previous book. And…

So this isn’t even amusingly bad. It’s just on repeat.

The Dumbest Air Disaster

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In 2024, Air Serbia Flight 324 (barely) made it off the ground and sailed into history as quite possibly the dumbest pilot error air disaster of all time.

The crash thankfully didn’t result in loss of life, although it could very well have been catastrophic.

At first glance, this was like Comair 5191 or Singapore Airlines 006 where a plane moved to a wrong, too-short runway and tried to take off from it. Except here the ATC caught them having moved to the middle of the runway instead of the end and warned them. They acknowledged-and then decided to try and take off from the half-runway anyway.

At least PIA 8303 was already in the air and trying to land. This was safe on the ground when the crew decided to do something as risky as it was dumb. Fortunately, the only casualties were the hull of the plane and the lessor airline’s contract with Air Serbia.

Review: History, Force Structure, And Tactics of the Russian Airborne Troops

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The Russian Way of War: History, Force Structure, and Tactics of the Russian Airborne Troops.

Legendary Kremlinologists Lester Grau and Charles Bartles have a new free gargantuan book out on the Russian VDV. It’s hosted/sponsored by the Polish General Tadeusz Kościuszko Military University of Land Forces for pretty obvious reasons. While an excellent book, there’s a part I found extra amusing.

See, the OPFOR used to be as Soviet/Russian as possible. In the 21st Century, it slowly drifted away (even as high-intensity war took re-precedence post Iraq) from its roots understandably. Now Grau and Bartles are criticizing it (at least in terms of fidelity to Russian doctrine) for not being bearish enough. It’s just an amusing footnote.

Review: The Surge

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The Surge

After seeing the recommendation from Rocky Mountain Navy, I cracked open Adam Kovac’s The Surge. While realistic literary fiction is not normally my cup of tea, 1: The review was excellent, and 2: The book was short, so even if it wasn’t for me, it wouldn’t wear out its welcome.

Well, the book didn’t wear out its welcome. Nor did it really excite me as much as the gushing reviews said it would, I’m sorry to say. The descriptiveness is excellent, but it also acts as padding for what’s still a very short book that, for all its praise, held essentially no surprises, high points, or twists worth mentioning from my perspective.

I just don’t find narrow roman a clef fiction like this particularly interesting, whether at peace or war, so it was going uphill, but even from that baseline it never was more than middling for me.

A Thousand Words: Death Battle

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Everyone since the invention of fiction has wondered “who would win in a fight between ________ and __________ “? For over 15 years and 3 management changes, a web animation series called Death Battle has attempted to ‘answer’ just that. The characters are introduced, quantified, and then an animation plays depicting the fight. The outcome is then explained.

While vs. debaters online can take themselves way too seriously, Death Battle does not. Besides the good and growing quality of the animations, the best part is that the showrunners view it as entertainment and not a “how many Saiyans can dance on the head of a pin” philosophical argument.

If I had to list one current weakness of Death Battle, it’s becoming a victim of its own success. Because it’s gone through most of the obvious pop culture clashes, they either have to do fanservice-y repeats or increasingly obscure characters. The quantification has also gone from “Blastoise’s Hydro Pump is the equivalent of an industrial water cutter in terms of PSI” to a physics lecture. That said, even 2-3 weeks I look forward to seeing each episode.

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.

The Betting Machine

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There’s a great Youtube documentary out on so-called “sports farms”

These are those bizarre table tennis and truncated other sports leagues that appeared in public consciousness in 2020 when everything else except a few Y-tier soccer leagues shut down. The video is great and shows OSINT geolocation coupled with a knowledge of how offshore books love to sponsor big-name teams for the sake of advertising.

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.

The A Button Challenge

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Mario was originally known as “Jumpman” in the first releases of Donkey Kong. Super Mario Bros. defined the platformer. What I’m trying to say is that Mario jumps. Until now.

For 20+ years, an array of gamers dug deep into the code of Super Mario 64 to see in how few A presses (jumping) they could beat the game. Last year, a successful run with zero presses was finally accomplished.

Numerous stars and even entire levels had to be skipped entirely as they required jumping. The centerpiece that enabled the final “A”-less run to be performed involved playing on Wii Virtual Console and using an emulator/porting glitch that had platforms in the Bowser in the Fire Sea stage moving sloooooowly upwards over time. The game had to be run for three real-time days to let them get into place.

Yet in the greatest human accomplishment since the moon landing, the A Button Challenge was finally completed.