Tag: American

A Thousand Words: Gone Home

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Gone Home

A 2013 game about a young woman exploring her now-deserted family home, Gone Home has been pretty controversial back in the day, being one of the first video games classified as the dreaded “Walking Simulators.” Now that I’ve played it, it’s weirdly better in terms of actual gameplay but worse in terms of central plot than I’d expected it to be.

So the game is not just “hold forward to win while listening to some pretentious narration” like too many of its successors were. It’s really atmospheric, you have to do some exploring even if it ultimately boils down to “go everywhere and interact with everything”, and it’s no worse in terms of kinetic gameplay or lack thereof than say, the classic PC adventure Myst. That’s the good part. It’s still just a short fun experience but there’s substance to it.

The not so good part is that the “secret” hidden is a melodramatic teen drama where I saw every twist and development coming despite not really knowing the game before I played it. The first world problems of upper-middle class America here just aren’t that intriguing.

That said, I have to give this a positive overall score. It is better than the firebreathers have made it out to be.

Review: Skygods

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Skygods: The Fall of Pan Am

Written by aviator and former Pan Am captain Robert Gandt, Skygods is the most fun I’ve had reading a history book in quite some time. First, I want to get the small negatives out of the way: This is very much a David Halberstam style ‘History as Narrative’ book, so I’d recommend taking specific claims with even more grains of salt. That said, everything important I did find corroborating evidence for.

The good part of this “history as narrative” is well, it feels great to read, flowing smoothly and going into the minds of people in a way that Gandt can clearly write from personal experience. And what he says about Pan Am is both interesting and dismal.

Pan Am’s decline, arguably inevitably terminal, started long before Lockerbie. It started long before deregulation. The impression I got from Skygods was that Pan Am was basically to airlines what Harley Davidson is to motorcycles: A wheezing lummox with poor fundamentals whose longevity was/is due to mystique over any practical advantage. There’s also the “British Industrialization” problem Pan Am had where being the first to do big international routes meant they were stuck with the most baggage.

So this is a great book I highly recommend for anyone, not just aviation/history enthusiasts.

Review: The Last Republic

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The Last Republic

The alternate history of the beginnings of a war between a US and an independent, Iran-allied Utah/Deseret, The Last Republic is one of those books that is only distinguishable by its premise. It would be a medium-grade techno-thriller if it involved real places. Granted, given the comparative scarcity of technothrillers today, that would be praiseworthy (mildly), but it doesn’t, of course.

The bizarre alternate history, which is very much a soft AH (Iraq with a surviving Saddam is similar to real life Saudi Arabia in terms of relationship with the US, both sides use historical F-16s, etc…), is what makes this stand out. Still, I just don’t think the author took advantage of it as much as he could. Could that have made it worse? Quite possibly. But would it have made the book much more interesting? Quite possibly as well. As it stands, it’s a 51% book with weird sauce.

Review: Airframe

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Airframe

Michael Crichton’s Airframe is a book I really, really wanted to like given my interest in disaster investigation and systemic failure. One of the issues is that I already knew a lot about the topic. But there’s two more.

The first is that has Arthur Hailey meets Herman Melville levels of “look how much I know/research I did.”. The second is that air disaster investigations, while a fascinating topic, are one of the worst main topics for a thriller novel, especially with the setup Chrichton makes. He has to use a large impending sale as a mostly artificial way to increase the stakes, race the clock, and create a conflict (said conflict is: The accident might cost the manufacturer a large order. Oh the huge manatee!) The reality is that disaster investigation is one of the least punitive or conflicting events there is, with the worst being various stakeholders understandably trying minimize their direct fault. Which can be problematic and difficult, but isn’t exactly Jon Land conspirators trying to rule the world.

Spoiler Alert: The problem is that it tries to shoehorn the Aeroflot “kid in the cockpit” disaster in, when a far more interesting and realistic method would be to have even the highly trained pilot making a mistake, especially given that what happened (tried to keep controlling it manually too long, which is what someone with a lot of skill would be more vulnerable to falling for.)

So yes, this doesn’t get off the ground. Metaphorically speaking.

Review: War Dispatches Volume 1

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War Dispatches Volume 1: Stories from the Front Lines of World War III

War Dispatches Volume 1 (note: not the most smooth title) is what is known in the anime/manga industry as an “omake” to Alex Aaronson’s 1980 World War III alternate history. It’s a set of stories that didn’t quite fit into the main books, but were/are still interesting enough to be told. These take place in the Middle East, from the Caspian Sea Monsters to MiGs in the sky to BMDs on the ground.

Being omakes, they are limited in scope. But this is no knock on their quality. In fact, they’re influential and good enough that I’m already starting work on a similar set of vignettes set in the Soviet-Romanian War. How’s that for a positive opinion?

A Thousand Words: Titan

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Netflix’s Titan

Netflix’s new documentary Titan is about the submarine that sank near the Titanic in 2023. It’s a well-produced film with many heartfelt interviews. However, I felt it wasn’t as good as it could have been, with one small thing the filmmakers did have control over and a much larger thing that they didn’t. Let me explain.

I think the film could have gone into more detail on showing what a proper deep-sea submersible looks, sounds, and feels like. It would have highlighted Rush’s obsession with making the nautical equivalent of the Bonney Gull even more effectively. While I can understand why they might not have wanted to get too technical, I also think i could have been explained in ways a non-scientist could understand.

The larger issue is that the cause of the disaster really wasn’t very complex. Disasters typically have a ‘swiss cheese phenomenon’ where a bunch of ‘holes’ in the countermeasures all align. So even if the initial catalyst was simple, the situation where it could become catastrophic was not. This isn’t the case here. The carbon fiber hull was fatally and fundamentally flawed, and Rush was a megalomaniac who believed his own propaganda.

That said, this is a worthwhile movie and some of the non-technical parts are actually the most interesting and telling. The CBS crew falling for Oceangate’s potemkin village is a perfect example of how the media can get strung along by people who seem like they know something. I found the host being assured by their safety checks interesting-it’s the kind of thing that seems right and would be if the hull was fundamentally sound, but the equivalent of an early Comet isn’t going to care if the fuel gauges are moving correctly. The other thing is how we see Rush trying to put women who had no seafaring experience into being the pilots of the submarines because he wanted to stand out in the media-another strike against it.

For all my nitpicks, this is a worthy documentary about a real-life terrible person who did terrible things.

Review: Bats

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Bats

The time has come to read William W. Johnstone’s Bats, an epic novel about… ok, you know what it’s abbout. It starts with the main character being a wanted badass who effortlessly killed a group of terrorists. Then come the BATS. See, evil superbats end up in Louisiana. That’s basically the book.

This is a William W. Johnstone book, which means it has pretentions of being ‘epic’ while having a complete inability to actually do so, a hatred of the media that makes even me defend them, and an inability to stick with its nominal subject matter. It’s fitting that I listened to GG Allin while writing this review, for he was to music what Johnstone was to authorship.

So we get about a 10-1 ratio of non-bat to bat scenes. We get devil worshipers (a favorite Johnstone horror villains) starting a rabies chain reaction among other animals. Then comes more conference room scenes than a post-1991 Tom Clancy novel. Then in the same military logistics skill that Johnstone demonstrated in the Ashes Series, a squadron of A-6 Intruders is informally acquired to firebomb the bats and then leaves. Finally the bats are dealt with via a device so lame and contrived that it rivals the end of the Jaws novel in terms of anticlimax. Hint: Imagine if the shark was attacked by a punch of gobies and barracudas and killed in front of Brody.

Well, at least I know now that Johnstone was as bad a horror writer as he was a thriller writer.

Review: Soviet Attack Submarines

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Soviet Attack Submarines: Cold War Operations and Accidents

Mark Glissmeyer’s Soviet Attack Submarines is a short book on a subject that should be pretty obvious. It covers all the bases on the Soviet submarine fleet. Though this doesn’t try to go much deeper, which is a problem for me because me being the CMO player I am has me already knowing almost all of what the book had to say.

That specific problem would not be an issue for many or even most other readers, but I still can’t really recommend this book. It’s just insubstantial for lack of a better word. Basically all it says can be found through trustworthy sources online with just a tiny bit of searching. So it’s kind of a glorified fact sheet and little more.

Review: Steel Rain

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Steel Rain

TK Blackwood’s Steel Rain continues his series of early 1990s alternate World War IIIs. It’s a little hard to review something that hasn’t noticeably dropped in quality and which you’ve already reviewed several previous installments. Note: This means I liked it!

Anyway, what this has done is inspire me. With my latest book done, I’m in the mood for more writing, and am thinking something. Namely, what about I finally write what I’ve always blogged about and make a conventional World War III or something similar?

Review: Red Bandit

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Red Bandit

Mike Guardia’s Red Bandit is a brief history of the MiG-29, covering its basic designs and all the conflicts it participated in. Do not expect a technical deep dive or a massive tactical overview. This is a short and small book.

It’s also a book that won’t surprise any serious scholar. The MiG-29 was really just a rich man’s Fishbed meant as a point interceptor first and foremost. It did not have the versatility or capability of western 4th gen fighters or the Su-27. In most of the conflicts it’s fought in, it’s suffered heavy losses, though not always by fault of its own. We see its service in the Gulf War to Ukraine in a short overview.

This isn’t the most illuminating book on the Fulcrum. But it is an excellent start for a plane I have a soft spot for.