19th Level

Though it's an older book, Barbara Tuchman's The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914  makes for a very readable presentation on what the world of 1890-1914 was like. It is worth noting her focus was on the western world, centered around the United Kingdom, France, Russia, Germany, and the United States, as well their interactions with other countries. Tuchman noted that she deliberately does not discuss World War 1. It's an interesting choice, given how well we know it is looming over this book. As she explained it, given the people she portrays were not aware of what was to come, she wanted to present their world free of it. That's not to say they were totally ignorant of the possibility of the coming war - many times she mentions the feeling that various personalities she covers have about an upcoming war - often looking forward to it with a nationalistic pride. But clearly, none could know what a disaster for humanity the war would pr...

One of the advantages of being in grad school part time, from a gaming perspective, is it is awfully good at keeping me laser-focused on whatever game we are currently playing. Of course it does so by keeping me so busy that there's little time for anything else. For those keeping track at home, I'm enrolled at Brandeis University for my Master's Degree in Strategic Analytics. I'm learning all about data science, data mining, big data, predictive analytics, etc.  Right now I'm between semesters, with the next semester starting up next week (and running for ten weeks). With Port Henry having at least a skeleton (with a lot more mapping than required, but maps are a hobby) I've had a little bit of time to do a bit more noodling around in reading and thinking gaming thoughts. Reading I've done a little variety in my reading. As my previous class ended, I reread the audiobooks of The Passage and The Twelve  by Justin Cronin, in preparation for t...

I first read Michael Dobbs' One Minute To Midnight  when it was first published, back in 2008. Both due to my general enjoyment of history and that I have an RPG campaign in the late 1950s (a few years before this) I recently listened to the unabridged audiobook version of this book. The impression I'm left with is amazement that humanity as a species survived the Cold War in general and the Cuban Missile Crisis specifically. Throughout the thirteen days of the crisis there were multiple points where war between the USA and USSR could have broken out - from the USA discovering the presence of Soviet missiles in Cuba to a US spy plane getting lost near the North Pole and stumbling into the Soviet Union in the midst of the crisis. The horror of discovering it was Soviet troops, not Cuban ones, who shot down a U-2 plane over Cuba. Does the US retaliate? If so, where does it end? There were so many opportunities for things to have gone wrong that it almost seems unre...

Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, television North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe  Rosenbergs, H-bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom Brando, "The King and I" and "The Catcher in the Rye"  Eisenhower, vaccine, England's got a new queen Marciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye - Billy Joel, "We Didn't Start the Fire" It's a bit of an odd experience reading a history book and having it reach the period where I'm alive... My memories of the 1970s are pretty fuzzy, especially the first part of the decade, what with me being concerned with things like being born and learning how to use the toilet. In getting a game set in the late 1950s ready I decided to do a little bit of research. Given I enjoy history, James Patterson's Grand Expectations was already on my to-read list. Grand Expectations covers the period from the end of World War II in 1945 to 1974 as the economy began tanking after an unbelievable run. During the th...

A few years back I ran a brief Cthulhu by Gaslight campaign. It kicked off, as one might expect, in 1890's London. I was somewhat surprised when the game wound up relocating itself to New York City. Though I had some familiarity with late Victorian-era Britain, I discovered I did not know very much about the United States of that same period, typically referred to the Gilded Age. Having done a bit of homework as a result I found it to be an incredibly interesting era and one largely untapped in gaming. If an RPG takes place in the 1890's it is usually safe to assume it takes place in Britain (or is a globetrotting game with Britain as its base.) An excellent work of fiction detailing 1890's New York is Jack Finney's Time and Again , a novel I reviewed back in 2013. Erik Larson's The Devil in the White City  is a work of non-fiction about the construction and realization of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair - the Columbian Exposition, commemorating the 400t...

I've been on a bit of a philosophical journey over the past few years. Always of a scientific bent, I've wrestled with some heavy-duty ideas, the biggest of which being "why is there anything?". I can handle the fact that life exists. I can handle the idea of this being the only life - I don't recall existence before I was born as being unpleasant, but if this is it I have to confess to being disappointed all the things I'll not get to see. What I find the most challenging is the fact the universe exists at all. And if there was no universe, what would there be? What is nothing? That makes the end of one's consciousness seem trivial. The religious postulation of God as first mover, made most famously by Thomas Aquinas, is unsatisfying to me. Ignoring the question of the existence of a supreme being, it seems to just shift the goalposts. (And yes, I've spent time going over Aquinas' Summa Theologica .) In A Universe From Nothing  Lawrence Kr...

Stephen Puleo's book  Dark Tide  covers a remarkably forgotten tragedy. On January 15, 1919, a 2.3 million gallon tank of molasses collapsed, spilling its contents in Boston's North End in a wave traveling some 35 miles per hour. Twenty-one people lost their lives and some 150 were injured. It almost sounds comical until you consider the horror such an event would no doubt present. Consider how horrible it would be to literally drown in molasses. Yes this is an event that is not in the popular history of the nation or even Boston.  Dark Tide  is divided into three sections. The first, "A Monster in Our Midst" deals with the construction of the tank. Rather than being an exercise in engineering discussion it instead explains why it was built and what the nation and city were like at the time. Puleo explains how the United States Industrial Alcohol Corporation (USIA) distilled molasses in various plants, with one such plant being in Cambridge. A por...

I've been in a bit of a superhero mood of late. This summer has seen   The Avengers  and The Amazing Spider-Man  in the movie theaters and The Dark Knight Rises  is just being released to theaters at the time I'm writing this. My introduction to superheroes was through cartoons. Being born in 1971 I used to watch reruns of the 1960s Spider-Man cartoon ("Spider-Man, Spider-Man, does whatever a spider can...") as well as The Superfriends . We used to always mock the Wonder Twins. Now that I think of it, I also used to see a very silent Spider-Man on The Electric Company  television show. 1979 saw the release of Superman: The Movie.  To this day it is probably the Christopher Reeve incarnation of Superman that I think of when I picture Superman. You'll note I've not yet mentioned comic books. I began slowly discovering comic books after a bunch of us started playing TSR's Marvel Superheroes  RPG. We had familiarity with the characters from shows l...