Anime Summer 2023

by on October 16, 2023 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Anime

So, we’re just starting in on some new series, while still dragging out some others. Overall, the previous three months were quiet, with no new big surprises for us, watching-wise. That said, while this is technically in descending order of recommendation, everything here is very good, and gets a recommendation from me.

Vinland Saga — We’re still in the second half of the first series, though we’re pretty far in, and the plot is simultaneously unexpected, and inherently logical. Really well written, and well done, with a host of interesting characters. The history is also very good… other than those massive swords.

One Piece — Notably, the new live action series. The anime is waaaay too padded for me to suffer through. This is the best anime adaptation I know of, and while I have some production quibbles, much of the casting is perfect, and the writing is very good and well paced.

Made in Abyss: Dawn of the Deep Soul — The body horror, the body horror…. Woo, this one got pretty gruesome in a few places. But, we’ve finally seen the interstitial movie, which is good and is worth watching. I’m still not sure why they did it as a movie though. At any rate, Made in Abyss still gets a high recommendation, and we’ll be picking up with the second series soon.

To Your Eternity — We’ve gotten a fair way though this now, though there’s plenty to go. It’s being very good, though there are bits that I think could be handled better. At any rate, I don’t think I’ve seen any mention of this one, and it is deserving of a wider audience.

NieR Automata Ver 1.1a — We finished this up shortly after the season began, but then that’s when they finally finished. I’m also very happy to hear there will be a second season, because they did a surprisingly good job with this one. That said, it’s hard to guess where it’s going to go from here….

Ooku — Okay, this was an elaborate production. Alternate history, where a plague wipes out most of the male population of Japan, and then keeps the numbers low after that. It studies the changes in cultural dynamics, and is largely court politics based. As such, it is basically straight samurai drama, just largely gender flipped. The only real problem is this didn’t need to be animated (though the sets might have gotten expensive).

Path to the Peak — A four-episode Pokemon series dealing with the card game. So, real world, more-or-less. Not entirely my thing, but well done, and again, away from the main series, Pokemon keeps getting some really well-produced shorts and series. And I really appreciate that they did call out the CCG here, since all the tropes and such in other productions are definitely based on the video games, so it is overdue.

Jobless Reincarnation — I’m thinking I forgot to mention this one for the previous season it had. At any rate, we’ve moved on to a school arc, and some of the overarching plot seems to be left behind for a more “personal” problem. I can’t say I care too much for how some of the motivation for this was handled, but the writing was good, and it really is feeding into sorting out Rudeus’ personal life, and we do get a new aspect of the overarching plot come in from an unexpected direction.

Eden’s Zero — More turn your brain off fun from the creator of Fairy Tail. The main arc this time did get interesting with time-travel shenanigans, which did a good job with wrapping everything up, and opening up some questions that might actually get answered soonish (at least the minor questions).

Demon Slayers — I think we’re caught up now; we just watched the the Swordsmith Village arc. Again well done; I do wish some of the fighting was a bit less drawn out. That said, there was a lot of variety in what was going on in the action parts, and the overall plot got some important progress, though I’m worried it’ll take forever to play out.

Land of the Lustrous — Finished up the second half of this with the guys. It ended a bit more abruptly than I remembered, and I really hope we’ll get more someday soon. It’s being seen as ‘if Roger Zelazny wrote an anime’. I don’t think this is what such a series would look like, but it’s impossible not to think of his Lord of Light with the series, which is what causes the comparisons.

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Waterloo: The Campaign of 1815 Part 1

by on October 12, 2023 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

John Hussey’s two volumes are on the the Waterloo campaign as a whole, with this one stopping two days before with the twin battles of Ligne and Quarte Bras. It goes after everything, starting with peace process of 1814.

He doesn’t go into a lot of detail there, but does go into the problems of the Congress of Vienna, and points up that Napoleon was watching the emerging factionalism with interest. From there, we get a recounting of the flight from Elba, and then the allied planning at stopping Napoleon.

And that planning takes up the bulk of the book. The general allied plan was to line four large armies up on the German border, and advance into France in something of a repeat of the 1814 campaign. The northernmost armies, British and Prussian (plus a number of minor German contingents which caused a new round of wrangling) were ready first, while Austrian and Russian armies assembled and made their way towards the border.

Napoleon needs to smash each of these armies, at least enough to put the fear of a large French victory into the allies and cause the internal tensions to tear them apart. However, the immediate reaction to his reappearance was to unite once again, putting a strain on his ability to militarily prepare in a hurry. Wellington ends up as the leader on the spot for the allies, and apparently is entranced enough by the allied planning for an offensive to not consider just how offensively-minded Napoleon really is.

Therefore both allied armies on the spot only have the loosest idea of how to handle a French offensive, even as Wellington and Blücher contemplate their coming offensive moves. This helps lead to confusion and a slow reaction on 15 and 16 June from both allied armies.

In fact, breakdowns of communication are the running theme of the last part of the book, as Napoleon tries for a dramatic victory to eliminate the Prussian army as threat, while Ney is involved in an ever-escalating battle against the British. There is a lot of study of dispatch times, and the likely interval for them to get to destinations, which does a lot to show just how fragmented views of these two battles were.

I think on occasion Hussey isn’t quite up to juggling all the balls involved here, but its a really big ask, as there is a lot that he is endeavoring to handle, and in general he does it very well, despite me getting lost on occasion. This is a very good study overall, with a lot of awareness and reference to previous serious histories and the controversies they’ve engendered. Even more than these important elements, the study of the preparations on both sides leading up to the campaign are very important, if you want to read up on more than just a period of three days in June (Ligny/Quarte Bras to Waterloo) at all, get these books.

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F&E Vassal Module 2.1

by on October 8, 2023 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

At long last, the new version of the F&E Vassal module is out! You can download it from ADB here:
http://www.starfleetgames.com/documents/F&E-2.1.zip

Please save the zip package to where you keep your modules, and then extract everything. The extensions will then be seen by Vassal (as inactive) once you open the main “F&E 2.1.vmod” file through the module manager. There is also a new version of the User Manual PDF, which I recommend you look through.

Right after releasing 2.0 I started work on a 2.0.1 to fix some problems (most notably LDR ships initially reported as ‘Tholian’ in the inventory windows), and then went to 2.1 when I added some new features while playing “Konya wa Hurricane” with Byron. I got some feature requests that, along with the need to upgrade all the save game files, made the finishing touches drag out until the project backburnered itself. And then Tactical Operations came out.

I have, in fits and starts, spent much of this year adding all the new units from that to 2.1, finished off the upgrades, and a couple new extensions. The full list of changes is in version history file (look in the Help menu), but here’s the main highlights:

    • Each empire’s Home Fleet now has a bigger box, so they can take bigger collections of ships without all the fleet boxes chewing up screen real estate.
    • Reserve fleet boxes are smaller, but now have a grid to lay out your force in.
    • The large map now has sector and cordon borders that can be turned on/off, like the small map.
    • There is a new ‘Control Panel’ window where you can manipulate the scenario borders, Orion Enclave, and turn off unneeded ship capture dialogs.
    • Units from Tactical Operations have been added, including moving BBs from an extension to the main module.
    • There are new extensions for the Carnivons and Paravians.

Warning: Some changes require careful handling to use a 2.0 game in v2.1. Notably, I fixed the spelling on the two Kosnet fleet boxes, so units in there will disappear when going to 2.1. Just move everything out of them in 2.0, save, open in 2.1 and move them back. Also, sector borders will disappear from games using the large map, and fixing that is a little tricky. The entire upgrade procedure for a saved game is in an appendix of the User Manual, or just send me a message and the current saved game file, and I can do all the upgrading for you.

Another hidden change to the module is I ended up with an insane number of prototypes to handle all the variations in tracked stats. I’ve gone to a system that is messier on the piece side, but only needs a couple of prototypes. The old pieces still use the original prototypes, so cleaning that up is a long-term goal for the module. Past that, further set up files would be good to do, and I want to do an extension for the Romulan Civil War scenario in Captain’s Log #50.

I’ve also contemplated adding background graphics to the fleet boxes (like has been done for the reserve fleets), but a unique one per fleet would make the module size balloon even more (this is about twice the size of 2.0), though a common one per empire is possible.

I’d like to hear thoughts on that and any other features that could be handy. One that I need to look into is giving each fleet marker a command to open the appropriate fleet window.

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Wiz-SPANCing

by on October 4, 2023 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Boardgaming

Finally had a day of FtF gaming on Sunday. It’s been about half a year, with half the time wasted to me procrastinating, and the other half with me having projects that either chewed up weekends, or I was afraid they would spill over into the weekend. The plan was for four people, but Jason didn’t make it (not sure why), so it was me, Dave, and Mark to try out a set of lighter games I got through a SJG Kickstarter around June.

First up was SPANC—Space Pirate Amazon Ninja Catgirl, which I’ve wanted to get ahold of for a while, and Dave has been really eager to get to try. Each player has a crew of… space pirate amazon ninja catgirls who go on capers to get loot and poolboys, with the first to a combination of ten of them winning.

It went a little long as far as I was concerned, but that would shake itself out with some more play. Certainly, the loot (and poolboys!—my crew had three for a brief time) piled up at a good clip after a slow start. It was an amusing game, as you try to match your crew’s skills (as space pirates, amazons, ninjas, and catgirls) against the challenges of the caper and be the first through. The rules cover if no crew can make it through, but that was not generally a problem, and there were a couple capers that we almost passed in the first go (on the other hand, there was a suspicious kid who nearly bested everyone).

My main problem was not having anyone on the crew with a good catgirl score, nor toys that could help. I was too slow to try and do something about that, and never did solve the weak point. Dave and Mark tied at 11 VP… and the rules just say to ‘play another caper’, without specifying if it’s a sudden death round between them, or if it’s just a normal round. We tried the latter, and Dave and I tied at the end of that. We called it there instead of an endless set of two-way ties, with Dave winning for being the only one at 11 both times.

After that was Wiz-War, in the new ninth(!) edition, the main point of the Kickstarter. We ended up going two rounds, which both went very quickly; not bad considering I haven’t played it in well over a quarter-century (poof! another hundred grey furs), and the others had never played it. I miss the old three-player setup (with the curved warp), but the production values on the new version are great, though the box is an inconvenient 11-inches square.

I had a fairly good hand in the first game, and kept getting number cards to move faster… but not fast enough. Dave managed to nab two treasures for a fast win. The second game didn’t go much better. I had some nice spells, but couldn’t get enough number cards, and could never get line of sight to use those spells. (At the end, I had the ability to kill either of the other two, thanks to depleted health, and good spells—if they didn’t get countered.)

Mark and I tried to corner Dave, but he rotated my sector, and traipsed back to his home base for his third win of the day.

That brought us just late enough that we couldn’t reliably get another game of anything in, so we talked a bit, and called it an early day. We’ll have to try out Greed Quest at some point, but both Wiz-War and SPANC were successes.

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Summer in Orcus

by on September 30, 2023 at 12:00 pm
Posted In: Books

Ursula Vernon discovered while writing this that she had opinions about Narnia. I can’t blame her there. It also shows directly in the novel, as our ten-year-old protagonist, Summer, has also read the novels and is uncomfortably aware of the differences in her own adventure.

On one level it is still very much standard portal fantasy. However, Summer is just as aware of those as we are, so we get some commentary along the way. However, while Narnia is the main touchstone here (including the trope of larger, talking, animals), it lends itself to useful comparisons elsewhere. The main difference from all of these is Vernon’s adult take on the nature and aftermath of violence. Generally, portal fantasy takes the ‘boy’s adventure’ route where violence is part of the package of fast-paced action, and villains generally boil down to physical obstacles. They never completely go down that route, but the acceptance of battles and the inevitable sticky end for the villain is part of the genre.

Vernon subverts this last tendency, but doesn’t completely escape it. Both work really well, and the book is highly recommended on that basis alone. At the same time, everything else here is also excellent. As you would expect from a Kingfisher/Vernon novel, the characters are a delight, and the world is consistent and wacky.

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