Tag: 2020s

Review: Atomic Peril

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Atomic Peril

When I saw the words “A nuclear forensics thriller”, I knew I absolutely had to read Atomic Peril. That it’s about nuclear terrorism and involves a scratch-built bomb (a rarity in such cases) made me more eager to finish it. Given the legitimate qualifications of author Sidney Niemeyer, that was even more of a reason to keep going.

The issue is that I know too much. The bomb is a realistic but simple gun type, which is not particularly novel to anyone who knows anything about nuclear weapons beyond the basics. And as a thriller author, its writer is a pretty good nuclear forensics expert. Which is to say the book is a lot more Herman Melville than Tom Clancy. Unsurprisingly, it definitely goes into the “too realistic for its own good if judged as a cheap thriller” category, and even more unsurprisingly, this makes the attempt at a conventional action climax even more dissonant and clumsy.

While I sound like I don’t like this book, I’m actually a lot softer on it than my writing might indicate. Niemeyer had a story he wanted to tell, knowledge that he knew, and was earnest in telling it. And that is to be commended, however many stumbles there are. Besides, if I want a conventional cheap thriller there’s no shortage of “shoot the terrorist before he blows the nuke” books out there.

Review: The Occupation

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The Occupation: A John Warren Novel

My Amazon recommended reading list is filled with all kinds of postapocalyptic wilderness guerilla commando survival books. And none are portrayed as pulpy as Jerry Ahern’s Survivalist. While I generally had little interest in such novels, it got to the point where I figured I might as well try one out. So I chose WJ Lundy’s The Occupation.

Starting with a boilerplate Evil Woke Corporate Dystopia (complete with Evil Foreign UN Peacekeepers to round out the League of Evil), it of course ends up with rural guerilla resistance. And in what I suspect is a common theme even though I’ve only read a little of the genre, it’s very heavy on the tactical maneuver minutia. Like it’s mercifully restrained in detailing the various models of guns involved, but in terms of execution it’s rather different. Which isn’t the worst thing.

And neither is this book. It could be better, but in terms of 51% entertainment, you could certainly do a lot worse.

A Thousand Words: Rogue Trader

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Rogue Trader

I figured I’d beat all three main paths with the new Warhammer 40k Rogue Trader computer game before I formally reviewed it. Well, now all three are beaten and I can write this.

In short: Rogue Trader is the best and most fun I’ve had with an RPG since Fallout New Vegas. The grid RPG gameplay is good enough, the game does 40k’s setting justice, and the characters are incredibly memorable, from three-eyed princess Cassia to “Team Fortress 2 Heavy Weapons Guy only Scandinavian” Space Marine Ulfar.

So what’s bad besides bugs that have been (generally) fixed by the time of this review? First, one third of the route is tacked on. I refer of course to the Heretic route, which is a shoved-in mess that tries to either ignore or tiptoe around that zero of your characters would follow an obvious Chaos worshiper and where you do 97% of the same things as more heroic Imperial or independent characters without incident. Second, the endgame is a little worse in terms of plot and (more importantly) level design than the first act.

Still, this is an amazing game for those who want to be either uncharacteristically good for 40k or just want to boltgun down everything in their path. Either is possible.

Review: Interception

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Interception: The Secrets of Modern Sports Betting

Ed Miller and Matthew Davidow are two of the sharpest (word choice deliberate) and most experienced minds in sports betting. This made me have very high expectations for Interception, their most recent book on the sports betting ecosystem. I’m delighted to say that it only took a few pages for it to outright exceed them.

For me specifically, it was a little less of an experience in that I already knew most of the plain facts stated within (the tricks you think will work will not, sportsbooks offer far more markets than they can realistically handicap so they use restrictions to ‘counter’, etc…) But I still found it enlightening and illuminating. And for a newcomer it’d be vastly more so. The one thing I had against it was how its tone was a little snarky for my taste, but that’s a mild stylistic complaint.

Anyway, you need to read this to understand sports betting and how it’s going. This book has also made me ever-more convinced that a modest minimum bet liability law would be extremely beneficial to the sports betting ecosystem, but that’s a topic for another post. As it stands, it’s the best sports betting book I’ve read.

Review: Pilot Error

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Pilot Error

The first Fuldapocalypse review of 2024 is of a nonfiction book by pilot and aviation commentary Sylvia Wrigley. Pilot Error looks at the plane crashes where it was obviously the pilot’s fault. And not being unlucky or something, but just really, really bad.

There’s a reason why most of the crashes in this book are private light planes and why many are not fatal. It’s because Wrigley is by her own admission trying for dark humor and some of the most horrendous crashes like the pilot trying to land blindfolded for a bet/dare on a flight with dozens of passengers are not funny but just horrifying.

So in this you get drunks, idiots, and drunken idiots. It’s enough to make you glad that 99.9999% of the people in a very demanding role are not like the ones in this book.

Review: If We’d Just Got That Penalty

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If We’d Just Got That Penalty

The words “Sports Alternate History” got me interested in the new Sea Lion Press anthology If We’d Just Got That Penalty. I read it-and the result was sadly as disappointing as the New York Jets season. (Which Jets season? Answer is “Everything since 1968 is valid”). So in the interest of fair and honest criticism, I’m giving an honest and (hopefully) fair review.

I’ll start out by saying that sports AH and short stories are an uphill climb. Sporting AH tends to be fairly trinketized due to the end result often plausibly nothing more than different results on a trophy or standings chart and the divergences just “if the ball only moved three inches to the left.” That being said, at best this has middling short stories.

At worst, there’s ones like a really convoluted pure exposition “tale” involving changes to both Haiti and various forms of “football”. It’s a sincerely well thought out and well-researched premise that ends up being executed in the worst possible manner. Others have the impression of being benchmarked against internet alternate history, which is kind of like benchmarking your isekai story against jumpchains or your basketball team against the Washington Generals.

SLP has made some good alternate history, but this unfortunately isn’t it.

Review: The New Maneuver Warfare Handbook

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Say there’s a crusty football coach who ran teams back in the days of Jim Thorpe and leather helmets. You’re at a coaches analytics and strategy meeting. There’s Bill Walsh and there’s Paul Zimmerman, talking about the evolution of the NFL. Then in comes this ninety-something coach who says “You know, you can throw the ball if you have to”, because in his time and mind, the forward pass was a novelty. But even by the start of the Super Bowl era, even in run-dominant periods postwar, it simply wasn’t.

This is how I felt when reading the New Maneuver Warfare Handbook by the infamous William Lind.

It starts with a pompous retelling of the generations of war and has a paragraph where he says “4GW” is not insurgency or guerilla war, but rather war against non-state actors. In other words, it’s not COIN/guerilla war, just war against insurgents and guerillas. Ok.

One running theme in histories of this Pentagon Reformer is that Lind, regardless of merits, was a terrible salesman. And it comes across here, where he keeps referring back to some German general or another he met in 197X and generally coming across as loving the sound of his own voice. His dismissal of every small unit encounter in Iraq/Afghanistan as “bumping into the enemy and then calling for fire” with the implication that only the equivalent of a 100% perfect never spotted run in a stealth game would be good enough for him.

Only about eighty pages of the 200 page book are the “main event”, and the amount of actual substance there is less. Lind recommends the fellow Special Tactics press books in the style of an internet video maker getting the sponsorships out of the way. Which is ironic because those, with their small and clear focuses, are the antithesis of his work. Which here involves a lot of blathering and told-you-so with a huge dose of selection bias.

The many appendices, some of which are not written by Lind, are somewhat better. It’s important to note that the themes of realistic effective training, mission type command, and even maneuvering are not necessarily bad ones (even if I disagree with the particulars). The only problem is that this is about 3% useful stuff that can and has been said elsewhere and 97% self-important back-patting. There’s a reason why other maneuver war advocates considered Lind a liability.

Review: N’Oubilons Jamais

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N’Oubilons Jamais and Other Great Wars

Sea Lion Press published an anthology featuring alternate World War Is called N’Oubilons Jamais. Full of short stories, there is one that makes the anthology worth it all by itself. That is “The Modern Knight” by Jeff Provine, and it is amazing. The divergence is that instead of tanks, they go for people in Ned Kelly style body armor. The result is something that looks like a World War I version of GTA V’s “The Paleto Score”

Anyway, the rest of the anthology doesn’t quite come up to that masterpiece, but it’s still well worth your while.

A Thousand Words: Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator 2

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Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator 2

Have you ever wished that you could just throw two armies against each other? Have your playthroughs of Command: Modern Operations or other wargames largely just consisted of setting up artificial jousts in the level editor? Don’t want any of that pesky “tactics” or “detail”? Then Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator 2 is the game for you!

There’s a campaign mode and the ability to play it as a makeshift real-time-strategy game, but the true meat of UEBS is to just line up a pair of armies on a map, like a literal million ancient soldiers against an artillery brigade with a contemporary infantry company screen, and watch as they charge at it. It’s not exactly deep but it is very fun.

In fact, it’s weirdly informative about actual battlefield dynamics, because taking away any kind of tactical management means you can see the other factors at play. I was pleasantly surprised to see a small number of melee units I put in making an outsize difference as they fixed the opposition and let the ranged units fire on them more freely. You can see terrain effects as your giant hordes struggle to make it through bottlenecks.

So there are a lot worse things to get than UEBS2, especially since mods mean you make even more fantastical clashes.

Review: American Military Helicopters

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American Military Helicopters

E.R. Johnson’s American Military Helicopters is one of those giant encyclopedias of aircraft that appeal only really to a certain group of people, but which appeals a LOT to said group. This is a huge catalog of everything that has either had a rotary wing or a vertical takeoff feature that either entered or was considered for American military service.

So you get stuff like the UH-1 and F-35B. But you also get obscure projects from the 1950s and 60s that ranged from gargantuan lifters that challenged the Soviet monsters in size to literal flying jeeps. The history nerd in me complains that it didn’t go as far into the VTOL weeds as it could have, but as an expanded “coffee table book”, it’s excellent for what it is.