Tag: American

Review: T-10 Heavy Tank

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T-10 Heavy Tank

Stephen Sewell’s deep dive into one of the Cold War’s most enigmatic tracked cryptids was a book I knew I had to get. I was not disappointed. Now you have to be interested in tanks to read a very long book about a tank that was only deployed in anger once (the Prague Spring). Thankfully, I’m very interested in tanks.

What makes this fascinating besides the detail is how it represents the end of the road for specialized “heavy” tanks. Yes, MBTs grew to outweigh the heavy tanks, but we see the unified end to one intentional design path taken as far as it went, with quirks like how the T-10 had a heavy instead of medium machine gun for a coax.

I love tanks. I love obscure tanks. So it’s no surprise I love this book.

A Thousand Words: Friday The 13th Part 5

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Friday The 13th Part 5

Friday The 13th Part 5 is a very strange horror movie mixed amidst the conventional genre-making slashers that proceeded and followed it. See, Jason Voorhees had died in the previous film, subtitled “The Final Chapter.” So this was subbed “A New Beginning” and it tried to keep him dead.

The movie takes place at a group home for troubled youth, one of whom, a loser named Joey Burns is murdered by an especially troubled youth. This makes Joey’s father Roy, a paramedic, snap and become a Jason copycat, cementing his ‘fame’ as the Dimitri Medvedev of horror movies.

As far as the actual film itself goes, it’s a delightful mess. The director only knew “DO THE THING” so there’s one scene of murder or sleaze (or both of course) at a very fast pace. It’s not very technically good, but you probably weren’t expecting Citizen Kane from the 5th installment of a horror franchise anyway.

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.

A Thousand Words: Backyard Wrestling

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Of no relation to the Backyard Sports baseball/soccer/etc… games, Backyard Wrestling: Don’t Try This At Home, and its sequel There Goes The Neighborhood is the distilled nadir of human culture in the most vile time of mankind’s cultural output: The early-mid 2000s. (Don’t argue this with me, I grew up then).

It’s a video game that awkwardly tries to shift traditional wrestling games, Tekken-style 3D fighters, and Smash Bros style “environmental fighters”. All while doing none of it very well and reeking of nu-metal. This is a time capsule. A very very bad time capsule.

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.

Review: Labyrinth

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Labyrinth

An early Jon Land novel that somehow escaped my eye until now, Labyrinth has every note I know him for. There’s a super conspiracy with super weapons to take over the world, infighting within said super-conspiracy, and a crazy plot that ends in a crazier set piece (this one involves old warbird propeller planes).

This by Jon Land’s standards isn’t the best simply because it’s too conventional. If this was my first Land book I’d probably have loved it more, but I know he can do goofier (and thus better) in hindsight. Oh well.

What really brought down general aviation

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I was looking at histories and such concerning the post-WW2 decline of general aviation in America. Most of the stated reasons center around costs, regulation, lawsuits, and changing demographics. None of these I’m denying were factors, even major ones. But I came across something that was very eye-opening and was not mentioned in most of the usual ones.

That was the decline in its practicality. One amusing side-part of the “flying car” discourse is that in a way, in the early postwar period, flying cars in the way we think of them kind of existed. See, in the early postwar period, as long as you could afford something that still always cost at least the equivalent of six figures today just for the airframe (ie you were a rich professional), flying in your own aircraft over the Depression-adjacent countryside was frequently the quickest and most convenient way to get from point A to point B. Whether it was for the luxury of a getaway or the necessity of business travel, there was a practical use.

Later on this eroded with two big things, which I shall provide graphical illustrations of.

Yep, better roads and better, cheaper, and more accessible commercial air travel. Which meant a lesser actual need for private planes, which naturally had giant ripple effects. At the very least it’s an underappreciated piece of the pie.

A Thousand Words: NARC

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NARC

The 1988 Williams arcade game NARC is probably the most 1980s piece of interactive media developed. Playing as super-cops in biker helmets Max Force and Hit Man, you blast your way through a drug empire of hobos, dealers, weed-growing Rambos, prostitute-kidnapping clowns, henchmen who couldn’t decide if they wanted to dress like mobsters or construction workers, and attack dogs, ruled by a giant biomechanical head-worm. None of that is exaggerated or false.

There is nothing subtle or easy about this game. It’s meant to have you win solely by pushing in quarters. (Who’s the addiction inducing dealer now?) But it is fun and is well, incredibly 1980s.

Gaming’s Ford Edsel

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Looking at retrospectives for the infamously legendary recent video game bust Concord , I thought a lot of “wow, this really is the Ford Edsel of video games.” And I mean that specifically.

This video is as good as any for explaining in short terms what Concord was. That said:

  • It wasn’t actually that bad mechanically
    The Edsel was no worse in performance or safety than any other car of its era. Whatever issues it did have could be understood as it being brand new and not ‘broken in’. Likewise, Concord wasn’t a Memetic Bethesda Launch glitchfest with a lot of its immediate issues being… brand new and not ‘broken in’.
  • The timing was terrible
    The Edsel launched in a recession where the cars in its market segment were the hardest hit. Concord launched when hero shooters had gone from “hot” to “disco in 1982.”
  • The visual design was bad
    I don’t think I really have to elaborate here.
  • Expectations were far too high
    Concord was supposed to be a big merchandising and spinoff paradise as well as a tentpole franchise. The Edsel was supposed to be an entire division like Lincoln, the slightly above average in the brand ladder.

    Amazing how history can rhyme.

Review: Airlords of the Ozarks

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Twilight 2000: Airlords of the Ozarks

Twilight 2000 had the problem of reaching a good stopping point (escaping Europe) but then being commercially successful enough to continue. Airlords of the Ozarks is a very blatant example of how the style shifted, to the point where I once used the phrase “Arkansas vs. the Blimps” to describe other settings doing the same.

I feel now that GDW might have written itself into a corner and for better or worse had to change tack instead of copy-pasting classic adventures only in different continents. But to go from brutal survival to almost Jon Land/Mack Maloney level conflicts against airships with nuclear missiles? It may have been too far in the opposite direction. But I don’t fault them for trying.

Plus Airlords is still vastly, vastly better than the abomination that is Kidnapped!