Category: cultural analysis

I’m in the process of filming my third extensive war game campaign using William Sylvester’s excellent “Solo Wargaming Guide”, and let me tell you, the process really gets the noggin jogging. Particularly at a time such as ours, when armies are on the march, and pencil-necked warriors declare themselves...

Remember in school when stupid teachers decided a quiet kid throwing down was ALWAYS the aggressor? Remember how they ignored the long periods of antagonism he endured before that punch? Man, that was crazy! As a friend on social media pointed out, that’s right now for setting my remembered...

There are two kinds of smart fellers in this world. Maybe more.  For the sake of today’s analysis of the culture of D&D, let’s lump the smart fellers into two groups, anyway. The first group contains the smart fellers who know they are smart, who make being smart their...

In the last two minutes of this film we learn that Anthony Hopkins’ character, ostensibly the good guy, murdered his young daughter. Now you don’t have to watch it. You’re welcome. The plot of this film revolves around a cat-and-mouse game between a psychic FBI investigator and an even...

Today, over on the channel, we offer up a bit of a rarity – a fourth generation warfare miniature wargame.  Sure, part of the motivation behind this particular installment of the Joy of Wargaming was tweaking the noses of Corporate Entertainment by lampooning coverage of violent unrest as “mostly...

Sat down with Red Pilled Fiction Factory, a literary YouTube channel dedicated to the best of non-converged fiction, for a lengthy interview. Richard Nichols is a great interviewer, with an insightful and easy-going style, and mostly just gets out of the way. However, he does make some great observations...

Let’s take a moment to bask in the majesty of this self-own. Dr. Bob here writes po-faced apologetic books about the American military that sell like sand at the beach.  Here, he criticizes a publisher who is guilty of committing the grave sin of preserving Western Culture by publishing...

We gotta talk about The Princess Bride for a minute.  It’s a book that gets a lot of praise for mostly the wrong reasons. Goldman’s tale of adventure and romance is one of those odd deconstructions that manages to recompile the genre that it is deconstructing, and it does so in...

Somewhere in the wilds of Social Media fellow sci-fi author and fellow wargamer AND fellow YouTube wargamer, Mike DiBaggio, posited that: “Oldhammer is best hammer, and it’s more than just nostalgia. At a small scale, too much and over-fine detail is bewildering to the eye. Just like the Heroquest...

Gave a BBC period piece a shot, and it was okay. If you know what it is, I don’t have to name it.  If you don’t know what it is, then I don’t want to name it. Speaking generally, it’s a spy show in which we are supposed to...