Ummagumma

The opening of the scenario in The Forgotten Battles .  The Soviets need to attack the German garrison at Gorodok.  Meanwhile, a half dozen partisan units do what they can in the German rear. The end of the Soviet first turn with some stacks spread out so you can see the units. I haven't had much time to devote to wargaming recently. I continue to occasionally acquire games that are in the wheelhouse of my interest, mostly stuff in the various series lines from MMPGamers that I have followed for over 30 years. The Operational Combat Series (OCS) is in the midst of a multi-year project of connected games depicting the war on the Eastern Front in World War Two from September 1943 to April 1944. This features aspects of the war that I have been interested in all my adulthood. This is the moment the Soviet forces surpassed the Germans in military prowess. They were more numerous and they had learned much from three years of fighting the vaunted Wehrmacht. Though the German panzer...

I have lived and am living through multiple transformations. Born in the late 1950s, I watched the sixties unfold, survived the seventies, and made it through the eighties and nineties. I was there for all of it, paying attention, participating in the culture, reading the news, listening to the debates. You'd think someone who was present for the whole show would notice when the language itself started changing underneath us. But I didn't. Not until about fifteen years ago did I realize that somewhere along the way, people had stopped saying "politics is" and started saying "politics are." I don't recall the precise moment, maybe it was several separate moments, but suddenly it seemed that politicians on television, journalists, commentators, and academics were all doing it. "The politics of this situation are complicated." "Politics are broken." "These politics are toxic." The disorienting realization hit me gradually. ...

The beautiful first victim taken from below the surface.  John Williams' iconic music theme is "half the film's success" according to director Steven Spielberg. [Read my previous review of Jaws for more insights.] Fifty years ago today, a broken mechanical shark accidentally became a revelation to Hollywood. Steven Spielberg's Jaws may or may not have created the summer blockbuster, but it most definitely created the definitive shark movie. It remains my favorite Spielberg film in spite of it only being one small step taken at the beginning of what would become one of the greatest directorial careers of the twentieth century. As I posted in 2012, I was there on opening night in Dayt ona Beach, Florida in that sold-out theater when an entire audience screamed in unison at a mechanical fish that seems by today's standards exactly like what it was - a mechanical fish. But in 1975, we brought completely different eyes to the movies. If something appeared on sc...