Book Review – The Stress of Battle by David Rowlands (Part 1)
Not exactly a book review, more of a synopsis of a great work of Operational Research by David Rowland. The Stress of Battle: Quantifying Human Performance in Combat is the end result of years of work by David Rowland and his team at the Ministry of Defence. Rowland was the father of historical analysis as a branch of Operational Research. This particular work looks at a combination of field analysis experiments in the 1980s using lasers, well documented WW2 engagements and a handful of battles from other wars. Almost every page in it is packed with evidence or explanations of the complex methodology used to ensure that you could get controlled results from an otherwise messy and chaotic environment. If you are playing or designing wargames then this is one of the books that you absolutely must have on your…
Writing Exercise – Bored Athlete meets Lovesick Witch
So the second part of the online tutorial for the creative writing course (A215 from the Open University) was to take the character that I made up in the first part (the lovesick witch) and then write a dialogue scene where she met one of the other characters. I had a choice of two others, either of which would have made a good scene. I chose the bored athlete because one of the other students had already posted a meeting between the lovesick witch and the introvert adolescent. The target word count was 200 and most of it needed to be the dialogue, no more than a third to be scene setting. I sort of broke that last rule a bit, but think it still works. So here it is. Bored Athlete meets Lovesick Witch Walking home through the park…
Writing Exercise – Lovesick Witch
I'm in the middle of a 10 day online tutorial for A215 Creative Writing (not continuously for ten days, thankfully, but in little bits posted to the tutor group forum over a ten day period). So the first task was to create a character randomly based on two lists, one of traits/conditions and the other of occupations. Being a gamer I rolled dice to choose my combination and got 'Lovesick Witch'. So here are the 200 words (199 actually) that I wrote to show that character (the rules being that it needed to be show in third person, rather than a descriptive tell and that we needed to avoided stereotypes). Lovesick Witch Her phone still had no updates. When he’d smiled at her, she felt warm inside. She’d re-read the message asking if she wanted to meet him for coffee…
Book Review: Watching War Films With My Dad by Al Murray
Watching War Films with My Dad by Al Murray My rating: 4 of 5 stars I really enjoyed reading Watching War Films With My Dad. The book plays off his fascination with military history, and that for him it stems from growing up in the 70s and 80s playing with Action Man and building Airfix kits. The thing I got from it is that Al Murray is quite different from the character that we most often see him as, the Pub Landlord. Al is a much more witty person than the Pub Landlord, which shouldn't really be a surprise if you stop and think about it. The book is a sort of autobiographical discourse on military history. It sort of argues against the fascination with it, cleverly taking us from his youth watching war films while his Dad points out…
CLWG December 2013 Meeting
Alexander and I went along to today's session of Chestnut Lodge Wargames Group in Anerley. Despite the engineering works we still got there in time to take part in both sessions, although we nearly missed Brian Cameron's Weird War Two. Weird War Two Captain Britain (Photo credit: Rooners Toy Photography) Captain America was the movie of this game, which has been played many times by CLWG (and others) and it is a regular favourite. All it lacks, according to Alexander, is a Green Lantern character, and perhaps a mention for Bucky on the Captain America card! We joining in with Jon Casey as the Americans and we more or less quietly stayed out of the way and developed our lightning spitting Tesla Cannons just in time to use them to shoot down the Italian Spaghetti Foo flying saucers. However the…