300

Okay, I went into this movie (DVD, whatever) expecting to dislike it but vaguely hoping it would be tolerable.
Was it going to be an unsubtle glorification of illegal war fought by gallant white people against freedom-hating brown people? Or could I hope for a subversive tract about a tiny force of psychos defending their land against an overwhelming foreign invader?

But it was just crap.

Aww, that's so cute.

A Flash game, The Asylum : A Psychiatric Clinic for Abused Cuddly Toys.
A few years old now, in this game your task is to undertake the treatment of some seriously messed up soft toys.
There's a stuffed crocodile hiding in a box, a zipper-mouthed hippo autisticly trying to assemble a jigsaw and so on. Four cute, animated soft-cuddly-people who need your help. You can give them various therapies to tease out their unhappy stories of abuse, revealed through some charming animation, and make them happy again. Or you can make mistakes and cringe as the toys hurt themselves or retreat into the darkness of their minds.
As a game it is perhaps a bit limited, you pick options from a list, watch the resulting animation, then pick your next option. As a simulation of psychotherapy I assume it's total rubbish. But I found it genuinely involving, and spending a couple of hours making these scripted animations healthy certainly cheered me up.
An interesting gimmick is the option to "buy the patient". So you too can have a plush hippo with a zip-up mouth and some bits of jigsaw puzzle. My more cynical side wonders how high a priority the game designer put on this more mercenary side of the project, but the whole thing is just so charming I can't hold this against him.

Book Review: Thud!

The umpty-millionth book in Terry Pratchett's series of Discworld fantasies is another in the City Watch cycle. Normally among my faves.
So, I expected a lot from this story of the the Dwarves and Trolls of Ankh-Morpork tooling up to refight the Battle of Koom Valley, while the heroes of the City Watch try to keep the peace. And the writing is of Pratchett's usual quality.
But.
It's too safe. Like the life of Watch Commander Vimes, the Discworld series shows signs of becoming too rich and fat and comfortable. There's no real tension here. The usual characters, plus a couple of new ones, go through the motions but there's no hint that anything dramatic will happen to any of them. The themes of tolerance and equality may be worthy, but they get such a hammering in Discworld books that they're getting tedious.
Thud! is by no means a bad book, but it shows a series in danger of being played out.

Only thirty more years before I retire...

... and I can't wait.

Not the best couple of days at work.

You mean I should have done something?

New year and not enough done.

But I'll write something just to let my only reader, the Googlebot, know I'm still around.

Reviews: Navwar 1/3000 ships

I started naval wargaming with 1/3000 models, but soon abandoned the scale for 1/2400. The comparison with the far nicer models of friends in the larger size was more than I could bear, some of my 1/3000s were frankly appalling.
Later I moved to 1/6000 scale, impressed by their quality and their convenient size. I kept my assorted 1/2400s because they are nice models in their own right, and because they are more impressive when trying to enthuse other gamers.
But 1/3000 remains the scale with the most complete range. With Noble Miniatures' range of 1/6000 models apparently frozen, I decided the time had come to make a sample order of Navwar modern warships with the vague thought that I might start collecting ships for Pacific and Indian Ocean navies largely unavailable in 1/6000. Out of interest, I also picked up a few of their 1/3000 age-of-sail ships, though I have no plans to assemble a force of these.
I went for Navwar because they have the largest range and are easily available. The plan was that if these were okay I'd try a sample order from some other range next.

I ordered from British retailer Spirit Games. They have a solid reputation online for their service, while Navwar itself is intractably internet hostile. Since I ordered a couple of new releases Spirit hadn't previously heard of, they were a couple of weeks filling my order, but I was aware that I had complicated their lives and they kept me fully informed of my status.

Detailed reviews of the individual models to follow over the next few weeks...

On the Kitchen Table Slipways - May 2006

Actually one of the intended topics of this blogs...
Current works in progress in my world of tiny ships. Will I manage to finish them by the end of the month?
Most are 1/6000 ships by Hallmark/Noble Miniatures. A pair of supertankers, a sextet of Sir Lancelot class landing ships which, while nominally not finished, have already seen action in a Falklands War wargame and two Invincible Harrier-carriers, one of which (Invincible, the one with the Phalanx point-defence guns removed) has also been to war. Flying about is one of Noble's CAP Aero E-3 Sentry AWACS planes in 1/1200 scale while the bigger warship with the red decks is a 1/2400 scale Kynda class missile cruiser from CinC.

Book Review: Ramage's Challenge

There have been several commercially successful attempts to fill the niche left by C.S. Forester's Hornblower novels.
Most obvious these days are Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels, which generally have a better period feel than the competition, but leave me wondering if they're actually really good or just horribly pretentious.
Alexander Kent's Bolitho novels are less ambitious in a literary sense, and cover our hero's whole career as a clone of Nelson, but are, err, not all that good.
Then there are Dudley Pope's Ramage novels, following the adventures of Nicholas Ramage, son of the Earl of Blazey, etc from lieutenant to skipper of a 74 gun ship-of-the-line. Although there was always a touch of Conan the Sailor in the Ramage books, and his merry crew of loyal cliches were notable for never taking any casualties, I liked it that the stories individually covered only short periods of time and were in themselved relatively unambitious. (Although the death toll in French frigates over the series is quite absurd).
Then, over the last couple of days, I read Ramage's Challenge, one of the later books in the series.
Seriously disappointing.
I'm wondering if all the others are really just as bad or if Pope was just off his game here. The infodump on Italian history, Italian geography, how to load a gun and whatever is painfully intrusive (the writer clearly loves this part of the world). The sheer wonderfulness of the hero (and the way nearly everyone, from lowest seaman to admiral, recognises this) is tedious. The story lacks anything resembling a surprise.
Maybe I'm just complaining that the book achieves nothing but what it set out to do, be a simple Napoleonic War naval adventure.

Smithy Code Jackie Fisher who are you Dreadnought

Well, this blog was to be about my hobby interests, mainly teeny little ships for wargaming purposes, rather than me oozing opinions and comment on everything that comes to mind.
But, here I am, fluffing on about something I found on the net and found to be rather cool. Fortunately, in all likelihood no-one but me and Google's webspiders will ever read this.
Anyway, not long ago, there was a civil trial in Britain where the writers of some "history" book claimed that the bestselling religious thriller The Da Vinci Code was ripped off from their work. I haven't read the books, and have no plans to, but was vaguely amused to read that the the judge, Mr Justice Peter Smith, had inserted a coded message in his judgement as a gentle piss-take on those behind the case. Which turns out to be naval in nature (the heading of this post) and so perhaps not entirely off-topic for my blog.
But that's not what caught my eye. A link I followed reading the article turned out to be the actual judgement. And, err, it was quite good. Despite having a typical sneering attitude to lawyers (1) I found it readable, sensible and interesting despite my lack of interest in the subject and it showed a pleasing willingness by Smith to allow his personality and interests show through. (And I share many of his interests, it seems).

(1) Why do they now use lawyers for scientific experiments? Because there are some things rats won't do.

"This is Free Trader Beowulf, calling anyone..."

Not long after Dungeons and Dragons, in 1977 or so, came Traveller, a science-fiction role-playing game from Game Designers' Workshop, substituting adventuring across the stars for the D&D dungeon crawl. In time, over multiple editions and several publishers, it grew from a simple set of generic rules to detail the Third Imperium and its neighbours over thousands of years, and despite the occaisional nasty internal contradiction (never mind how this 1977ish world doesn't match the real universe) I remain fond of it.
Of course, I haven't played the game, or any of its wargaming spin-offs, for years. But this doesn't stop me buying the odd book and, this time, a starship miniature: a Beowulf class Free Trader, the sort of cheap and rugged transport Han Solo or Mal Reynolds might fly.
There have been Traveller miniatures before, even Free Traders, but this is a new model in (annoyingly) a new scale from Mega Miniatures. Mine came from Noble Knight Games, Mega don't sell direct, retaining a touching (and, I suspect, ultimately doomed) faith in the ability of the gaming distributors and stores to get their product out.
The master model is nice, casting is okay but slightly pitted in places and there is a slight miscast at the top of one of the fuel skimming intakes that will want puttying. And it's not particularly cheap at $USD11.99. But the Beowulf goes back to the original Traveller boxed set, with it's distress message "This is Free Trader Beowulf.." in white letters on the black box, and I wanted one...