John

been thinking about this guy from 2003 lately and well

My "Larry Hama tried to warn us T-Shirt" has resulted in a lot of questions answered by my "Larry Hama tried to warn us" t shirt

I do appreciate the scenario building settings so you can do stuff like "ok, yeah, the Nazi player gets fanatical elite SS troops but they're gonna show up with 50% casualties and malnutrition"

Look if you build a combat mission beyond overlord scenario and give the Americans historically accurate levels of air and artillery support it basically breaks the game

I'm never fucking upgrading from my five year old laptop am I

ngl I get overwhelmed by the newer games and go back to the comforting polygons and Nazi killing of the og Combat Mission Beyond Overlord more than the new stuff

I can state for the record and without equivocation that I love Batilda

waaaaaaaaay back in the 1990s there was a scene where a character in Snow Crash tries using smart glasses in a gunfight and almost gets killed because it overloaded him with useless information

why do I remember this

Someone on Twitter replies to me: "meh. buy american or stfu." Two hours later, in a separate thread, the write: "$30 for a single button-up is ridiculous unless it is decent quality silk."

This two-parter below is exactly why it's hard to make clothes in the United States.

Let's look at how much it costs to produce a button-up shirt in the US. 🧵

If you aren't careful, this can have very negative effects on your thinking.

We don't get many interactions with the person who got up at 5 am to get the kids to school or the kid who goes to school, goes to sports and goes home. We meet the guy who got up at 5am to steal things to buy drugs and the kid who skipped school to victimize his peers.

One of my constant refrains at work is that even the worst precincts are full of decent, hardworking people.

Cops don't get to meet those people. We get to meet the bad ones who do bad things. And when we do meet the nice people, it's generally because they've just been victimized.

Today is a day when arts degrees are worthless, but the product of those degrees is so valuable it would kill an entire industry if they were made to pay for it.

Seems like a good day for propaganda

Yes, I went and looked it up after my half remembered (and incorrect) memory of it.

Honestly reading a Stephen Hunter book about a spetznaz unit seizing a MX missile base and another Nhilist Tom Clancy book called Fire Lance by David Mace probably taught me more about nuclear warfare than most graduate level courses.

(Fire Lance is really good if you can get a copy)

Yeah, I think the theory evolved after seeing the loss rates / resupply needs of both sides during the Yom Kippur war. Or something. I am neither a professional nor a historian, I got exposed to these theories the traditional way: bad airport thrillers, Microprose manuals and weird RPGs.

I think (and it's a vague memory) but the theory evolved from "nukes are gonna wreck your industrial base so you won't build new stuff" to "we are gonna shred or expend all this high tech stuff so fast you won't be able to rearm with the same stuff"

I vaguely remember "Brokeback War" being a theory in like, the 1970s? Which later became the setting for Twilight 2000 but I digress

Toddlers are highly curious intelligent apex predators with opposable thumbs and zero impulse control

The Mechbuster aerospace fighter was 100% designed by Boyd

Nobody wants to play a flight sim where there are 40 P-51s lurking just outside AA range of your dirt airstrip waiting for you to land your Me262

I blame play balancing in tactical WW2 wargames for this

Every western front story by 1945 is like "Hans and his womderweapons who gets resupplied every other month by a 70 year old man with a horse against the US army who were civilians 12 months ago, backed up by more artillery and airpower than the entire Nazi army, also the Americans have fresh cake"

Homing torpedoes? Allies had a lot more. Sucks to be you U-Boat fritz, we got escort carriers, airborne radar, Leigh lights and fucking air dropped torpedoes. Eat a dick.

We could dedicate a lot of airframes to the mission. Guided airborme munitions? Neat, but they didn't work well and the Allies had them also. Electronic warfare? Allies crush the Nazis in this department (read up on the army Air corps airborne jammers during the battle of the bulge).

Panzerfaust? Neat solution for when you're conscripting old men and 13 year olds. Know what the allies used when their infantry needed to kill a tank? Another tank. We had a lot of them. And artillery. A LOT of artillery. And close air support, because since the Nazi air force got shredded, 4/

think what the Brits and Americans did to Germany was bad, imagine what would have happened if the Mighty 8th got B-29s. And oh yeah, this is one area where the Nazis could have developed proximity fuses but they didn't and even if they did I can't imagine they'd build a lot of them. 3/

built way better shit and for way better reasons. The Germans made some niche wonder weapons that didn't effect the outcome of the war. V-2? Very impressive, you had to build it because your strategic air arm didn't exist. The allies cranked out strategic bombers like it was nothing, and if you 2/