Der PigDog's PigBlog

Here is what happens to Odysseus: Right before the Trojan War, O and Penelope have a son, Telemachus. Penelope doesn't want O to go to war, and instead asks him to sail with her into the west. We learn that Zeus's Law is the golden rule, and binds a host's conduct to a guest, and vice versa. The penalty for breaking Zeus's Law is death or exile.  O makes a cunning plan to give the Trojans a gift, you know the one, which will violate Zeus's Law and defeat the Trojans. He tricks Eliot Page, who is on his side, because Eliot "needed to believe it", that the gift really is a gift. Eliot Page dies. Once O is inside the city, he lets Agamemnon and the Greeks into the city, and follows behind Agamemnon. The Greeks massacre the Trojans, including, especially, noncombatants and priests. O realizes he has broken Zeus's Law for everyone forever. He no longer wants to return home. He sees himself as a follower of Agamemnon, which makes him sick, and also as a sui ...

Watched those two movies this week. Never saw any of the Godzilla movies before. Damn this post would be better with pictures but it's low-effort late-night blogging and you get what you pay for. In Shin Godzilla, the monster just walks. People say this a couple times through the movie, and it's a great line, so it's worth repeating. The monster did all that... and it just walks. It doesn't want anything. It isn't angry and it doesn't hate you. It's not trying to hurt you. It just walks. That's a fantastic(al), alien portrayal of a monster. Monster as natural disaster. (Everybody else has already made the comparisons with the tsunami and nuclear incident, which is intentional, but none of the reviews on wikipedia talk about how the monster just walks.) (Ok it smacks people and shoots lasers when somebody is attacking it, but that barely counts.) Still from Shin Godzilla; the monster's first form, adorkable! I love how fishy it looks The monster is to...

The first half anyway. As is usual in these superhero movies, it gets worse the longer you think about it. 3/5. Sorry folks, this review is lower quality than you might be used to getting from this blog, it's been a long day.  The film lacks thematic unity; its first half sets up really interesting, incisive questions, and then the back half ignores them in favor of yet another "destroy a cgi city with little or no actual human cost" drearily familiar from Marvel. (Yeah there's also the invasion sequence in not-Palestine/Ukraine by not-Russia/Israel, but that's very clearly  not  the actual climax of the movie, just a bit of added stakes. Plenty of brown people die in that fight scene, off-screen.) Superman's interview with Lois was the height of the movie. I keep trying to remember the character's name, I know it's not Peter Parker. Clark Kent. Fuck. Great chemistry. Big fan of Rachel Brosnahan going back to House of Cards. This whole line of question...

I say "Part 1" because this movie is the first of a planned trilogy. The movie doesn't announce that anywhere explicitly -- I had to read about it on Wikipedia -- and if you don't know this, you'll be confused and annoyed by its final minutes. I give this movie a strong 3 or weak 4 out of 5. If you like this sort of movie, you'll enjoy this one, and you may enjoy it even if you don't normally like this sort of movie. Thematic summary This guy is desperately trying to find healthy masculinity I don't remember anybody's names, so I'm going to call them the kid, the mom, the dad, the grandad, the alpha, the Swedish soldier, the doctor, and Jimmy. The kid is presented with several conflicting archetypes of masculinity, all of which prove unsatisfactory. He rejects them and leaves society to establish his own values. In more detail: the kid goes on a rite of passage hunting trip with the (his) dad. He thinks he has failed to act properly and feels...

I watched the trailer for 28 Years Later  a few months ago. There's a eerie sample playing in the background, somebody repeating some creepy phrases. Today I looked up the sample. It's from a poem by Rudyard Kipling, "Boots". Here's a fantastic reading. Be warned, it's also disturbing. I read a lot of Kipling as a child. He (and Tennyson) wrote poetry a child can love, and short stories too. But I threw him down in disgust at "White Man's Burden" and never picked him back up again. Even so many of his lines echoed through my mind, all my life. Nowadays a lot of his stuff comes off as stodgy, over-serious, outdated. I won't read "If" again if I can help it. I'm glad to see he wrote at least one good poem. Orwell wrote a pretty good essay on him.  It's Orwell, so there's still plenty of bullshit to disregard -- "I don't say that it's a true thought, merely that every intelligent man who hasn't deluded hims...

Been reading Clausewitz, and his modern interpreters the US Marine Corps . Extremely interesting and useful. Here's a question prompted by reading MCDP 1: Warfighting, by the marines: when we go dungeon delving, are we using a strategy of annihilation or erosion? Let's back up a bit, because not all of my readers will be familiar with Clausewitz or Delbrück. A portrait of Carl von Clausewitz Clausewitz says that war is the continuation of policy by other means. (It's not the end of his thought, it's a stage in a dialectic. But it's right on the money.) We go to war to achieve something, and if we are wise, that thing can be achieved by going to war. Military action should serve policy. Our overall aims in war are achieved via the execution of military strategy. The marines outline two very general strategic approaches in war: There are two ways to use military force to impose our will on an enemy. The first is to make the enemy helpless to resist us by physically de...

If you only play with life and death at stake, you'll flatten your game and lose a lot of interesting scenarios. Defeat and death in the dungeon How often are these goblins going to fight to the last man? How often are they going to stay in a pitched battle when they're already losing? How often are your retainers going to do the same? In the second world war, the deadliest military conflict in history,  21 to 25 million soldiers died, out of 70 to 130 million mobilized. Yet nearly every fight in the dungeon is a fight to the last man. Ridiculous! In my game, if an organized enemy comes into contact with the players, they immediately send a runner to a strongpoint to get reinforcements. And they retreat long before they're wiped out; 20% casualties is a good time to turn around, if you can get away. (This requires a precise interpretation of morale. Morale can't just be "roll this to see if the enemy runs away'; the enemy must be played smart enough to retreat ...

Untitled Vampire Game with Martin. Martin played a refugee and orphan from a civil war between rival ethnic groups in a small east African country. I played a charismatic older boy assembling a gang of child soldiers among the refugee. Despite the oppressive subject matter, play was in a sense relaxed; we didn't drive towards any climax or conflicts, we simply narrated events as they struck us. In the end, the boy survived the gang, but his overall odds look grim, and I doubt he'll live much longer. I have complicated feelings about the ending of the game. It worked, as in, it felt right, that the boy should escape the gang by jumping off a bridge, and in the process breaking his leg. But I don't want things to be up whim like this in general; the chance of wimping out and pulling punches is too high. I want a resolution method with teeth. My current thought is that the Vampire should add a die whenever they take steps to feed on the Victim, and the Victim sh...

 I read A Practical Guide to Medieval Warfare by Richard Brooks and John Curry. Really enjoyed it, found it enlightening and surprising in many respects. You need to buy it on amazon in paperback or via kindle, which I intensely dislike -- I'd prefer to pirate books, or buy through alternate retailers. Sometimes the book gets lost in the weeds of (I think) irrelevant historical debates, important only to specialists. It also wastes time justifying the relevance of wargaming and reenactment to historical research. Putting those caveats aside, it was a worthwhile read, and I'd recommend it, supplemented by other readings in pre-modern warfare (I've also been reading War in Human Civilization by Azar Gat , the blog ACOUP , and the recommended books list on the Ask Historians reddit . Additional caveat: very little about war makes sense divorced from its historical context. You'll want to bone up on your regular history too!) Anyway, here are some takeaways from the book ...