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Submarines are visually boring

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I've been interested in submarines since I was a kid; it's the fault of Microprose's Silent Service (I'd post graphics from the game, but it doesn't have any.)  This is a 1/700 Los Angeles class I built a long time ago. Like many modern subs, it is a tube with a sail. It is, mind you, an incredibly successful class of submarine, the American Military-Industrial complex at its finest.  Like the USN Gato-class subs or the Fletcher class destroyers, it was built in vast numbers (62) with the later 23 being the improved 688i, which is still in service now; not bad for a basic design from the 1970s. Still, though: Toob.  So when I bought some small submarines a while ago, I decided to paint them like sea creatures  Painted normally: Delta III The Delta 3 is a Soviet ballistic missile submarine (SSBN or 'boomer' depending on who you are) that is fairly distinctive. Its humpback shape conceals the missiles with the canned sunshine inside. The Delta series (1-4) was...
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Book review: The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam

 So the truth about “Technowar in Vietnam” is much like the Vietnam War itself: you can really go nuts on the details, but the basics are quite simple. America got involved in Vietnam due to  overwhelming arrogance, one that assumed with enough force, materiel, and firepower, politics could  be ignored. “The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam” by James Williams Gibson is a book with a very good core criticizing how and why the war was fought, but when it steps away from that core, it can be atrocious. The book’s cardinal flaw (or saving grace, depending on your point of view) is that this core  and the halo of mostly confused nonsense around it never link together; the methods of one have nothing to do with the other. If the postmodern jank took over it’d be just another gibberish academic  book to be filed and forgotten; had an editor managed to cut out the extraneous bits, Technowar might  have been a classic.   So...when the book is good, it is ...
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Spooky Halloween: The Swarm

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 So in my "long day's journey into emotional sterility" I watched a few 70s disaster films. In 1975, Jaws became the first blockbuster of a young Stephen Spielberg, and the Jaws-like subgenre was a kind of disaster film, except one where the disaster had intention.  Rob Hill  of the Bad Movie Bible has you covered if you want to know more. For Spooky Halloween, I thought I'd do another favorite...horror? film of mine, which is definitely a disaster: the Swarm, from 1978.  The Swarm is about swarms of angry killer bees, and it was directed by Irwin Allen, the producer/director of The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno.  In fact, the cast and crew are all recognizable names, especially if you know period disaster films. It stars Michael Caine as a  heroic entomologist,  Dr. Bradford Crane, and in the first sentence of description, it has already gotten silly. This movie is basically an alien invasion film, where the aliens were replaced by bees...
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