Chateau Lloyd

Greetings! Welcome to the Chateau!

Within its corridors you will find insight into the books I have written, the books I am writing and the books I am thinking about writing.

It is also a place where I can offer insights into my favorite authors and - in the case of my game Conqueror: Fields of Victory - I can explain my rules and offer new variants.

Scroll down or check the sidebar for my latest posts.

Nonfiction:

Walls of Men: A Military History of China 2500 B.C. to A.D. 2020

Long Live Death: The Keys to Victory in the Spanish Civil War

Fiction:

Three Weeks with the Coasties: A Tale of Disaster and also an Oil Spill

Battle Officer Wolf

Scorpion's Pass

The Vampires of Michigan

The Man of Destiny Series:

A Man of Destiny

Rise of the Alliance

Fall of the Commonwealth

The Imperial Rebellion

Wargaming:

Conqueror: Fields of Victory, Revised Edition

Other Writings

Bleedingfool.com features

 

Halloween: the other most wonderful time of the year

As it customary, Chateau Lloyd put up its Halloween decorations at the turn of the seasons.  Halloween may be spooky, is certainly commercialized, but it is in the main a celebration of autumn, and it is rich with its symbolism.

While religious in origin, for most Americans it's merely about candy, costumes and varying degrees of schlock horror tropes. 

It is the second biggest "retail holiday," with Christmas still reigning supreme.  Unlike Christmas, it is less emotionally fraught because there are fewer associations with family gatherings and/or religious associations.  For the vast majority of Americans, it's about pumpkin spice everything, dress-up and trick-or-treat.

Autumn is my favorite season, no doubt a function of living in a state where the change of weather is welcome but fleeting.  The humid heat of August is yielding to the warm days and cold nights associated with early fall.  Later, the air will take on something of a bite, but stay above freezing.  Halloween itself has seen everything from balmy temperatures to snow flurries.  That's part of the excitement of this time of year.

There is also the brilliant display of color before the trees go bare.  Every year the cycle is a little different, which is why it is so special.  The older I get, the more I appreciate it.

I suppose it is no accident that J.R.R. Tolkien chose to set his epic tale against the arrival of fall.  I'm sure I won't be alone and re-reading his classic as autumn takes hold.

 

The tri-annual release of a new edition or Warhammer 40,000 is here!

Apparently Warhammer 40,000 is celebrating its tenth edition this year.  I quite during the third edition, which makes me seven editions out of date.

In practical terms, this has saved me hundreds of dollars in what would now be useless rule books.

The game had its debut as Rogue Trader back in 1989, and the first major revision was in 1993.  This is the 2nd edition, which I still play.  The 3rd edition was release in the fall of 1998, and made significant changes.  I stuck with it for a while, but eventually quit, and later picked up 2nd where I left off.

I bring this up because as a game designer, I strive to create a definitive and clear rules set.  The more a system is played, the more problems are identified and subsequently corrected.  What Games Workshop has done is create a situation where the game sees significant revisions every three years.  These are not about correcting mistakes; they sometimes appear to be random design decisions to highlight new tactics or draw attention to new models or factions.

GW can do this because of a near-monopoly position in tabletop gaming, particularly in Europe.  I don't sense anyone else could ever be in that position, and as yet, GW has managed to stay afloat despite these changes.  Apparently, it works for them, though I can't help but wonder how long this will continue.

Gaming companies are uniquely susceptible to sudden failure.  SPI, Avalon Hill, TSR - all of these were industry leaders and are now defunct.  Some years back, I thought GW was close behind them, but so far, I've been wrong.  So maybe they've found the secret sauce.

Time to power-read this Ford Madox Ford biography

I want to be clear that I admire the amazing effort that went into Max Saunders' exhaustive two-volume biography of Ford Madox Ford.

The problem is that I want to read other stuff, and I've got to finish this first.  Not only that, this book is crushing my other hobbies.  Long-time visitors to the blog may notice that I'm not doing movie reviews and of course, other books go generally unmentioned.

I'm not hate-reading this book.  I enjoy it quite a bit, but it is very dense.  I take issue with some of the author's views on Ford, but it's well-written and informative.

But it is very, very long.  I tried to split my time with other books, but all that did is drag out the process.  The only way out of this is to go forward.  I've set an ambitious schedule of reading a chapter a day, which should see me finish in 10 days.  After that, I can finally turn to the growing backlog of reading material.

This is something of a return to form.  I always read one book straight through, but as I got older, some of my choices were super-dense and I needed to be awake and alert (not that they didn't put me to sleep!).

Hopefully in a couple of weeks I'll be moving on to other things, and at that point I will also be able to offer my thoughts on this truly massive literary undertaking.

But the old ways are often the best ways.  I just need to move the book as I used to do, from couch to bedside.

Too clever by half-elf: Dungeons & Dragons No Honor Among Thieves

Over the weekend I was cajoled into watching Dungeons & Dragons: No Honor Among Thieves. 

I did not enjoy it.

The problem was that I wasn't sure if I was watching a satire or a serious adventure film.  There were plenty of obvious laugh lines aimed at D&D players, and yet the pacing and general structure of the film indicated that I was also supposed to take it seriously.

This was impossible, because as the film itself demonstrated magic and do almost anything, and no sooner would this assertion be declared false than magic would in fact solve whatever problem was at hand.

This goes back to my repeated critiques of super-hero films and now Disney Star Wars, which is that if there is all this non-stop action, when am I supposed to find time to care about the characters?

The more wild and improbable (and unrelatable) the setting gets, the less invested I become in the outcome, because everything appears arbitrary and random.

At that point, if the good guys win, it won't feel like they earned it, they just happened to turn over the right card (or the game was fixed from the start).

This problem becomes doubly acute when the plot is built around a bank heist.  In the real world, I know that locks, walls of steel and massive doors covered by cameras present formidable obstacles.

But in the D&D world, there's probably a spell to circumvent all that - and then a spell to stop that spell, and a spell to the stop that spell, etc. 

As I said, arbitrary and random.

There's also the setting, which has no meaning to me.  Oh, I recognized some of the references from the game, but there's no overarching story of D&D World like there are of Narnia or Middle-Earth.

It's just a tale from the Land of the Knee-Walking Turkeys or something.  The Princess Bride felt far more grounded in that respect.  It make jokes about the genre, but not at the expense of destroying one's immersion in the story.  The fact that it was a story within a story actually amplified this effect - as Fred Savage became more invested, so did we.

Fans of the film have suggested that the digressions, asides and so on represent the course of the game, and in that case, I'd have loved to see a bunch of nerds sitting around the table arguing about what will come next.  Then we'd have to real tension because the story would finally be anchored in some sort of consistent reality.

Instead of being arbitrary and random.

The (partial) death of the reunion

The triumph of social media has destroyed the old way of celebrating anniversaries.  In previous generations, the arrival of a significant date would be commemorated with some sort of reunion.  Because such things happened at intervals of five or ten years, people would anticipate them, and make plans for travel, etc.

Alas, in our benighted age, people think that 'following' on various social media platforms fulfills this function.  It does not.  Partly because of Covid, there was no 30th year reunion for my high school graduating class, and the 20-year festivities had abysmal attendance.  Easier to just send messages on Facebook or something.

The problem is that social media is not real life.  People inherently seek attention, and so they manipulate the information they share about themselves, inflating accomplishments to bolster their self-esteem or highlighting challenges to gain sympathy.

Either way, social media serves as a form of performance art, and is no substitute for human contact.

Indeed, it amplifies the worst aspects of human behavior.

Happily, there are still places where people gather to meet face-to-face, and yesterday I participated in one of them.  My exact contemporaries were few, but the fact that multiple generations gathered and could still share common experiences and relate to one another in terms of life rather than politics or a need to find scapegoats was wonderful.  Indeed, attendance was unusually high, particularly among the younger crowd. 

This gives me hope that perhaps people are realizing that online relationships lack the fullness of a personal touch.  Far better to spend a few hours talking face to face than simply clicking thumbs up  or offering commentary.

Human were built to be together - to hear, to see and to touch one another.  After the lockdowns, maybe people are more sensitive to his.  We can only hople.

Collecting to collect or collecting to completion

The change in the weather heralds the arrival of gaming season, a major part of coping through Michigan's long, dark winters.

Over the years, I've noticed there tend to be two types of gamers.  The most common are those who collect to collect - that is to say, as long as they retain interest in their hobby, they never stop adding to their pile of games or figures or whatnot.

Such folks rarely "downsize" the collection, they operate on an all or nothing basis.  They collect right up until the moment they liquidate, and their collections very often include unopened kits.

But there is a second class, and that's the one to which I belong, which collects to a point and then stops.   We may also made a decision to cull the collection in order to focus it, or stick with the parts that we like best.

Another way to describe this is the difference between "getting" and "having."  Much of the joy of collecting comes from the anticipation of the next purchase, and there is always a next purchase.  I enjoy the having much more.  I may teak this item or that, but there's a quiet satisfaction to having a collection come to completion.

The first style is more prone to hoarding because of course there's no natural end point.  There's always something new to add, even if collection consists of a limited set of items, because if you have them all, you can always buy duplicates or variants.

Indeed, our consumerist society lives to support people like this, and companies like Games Workshop depend to a large extent on never finishing their game systems.  There are always more rules, books or miniatures to buy.

That's one of the reasons I went back to an out-of-print edition, because it is finite.  My collection is not yet complete, but it's getting there.  Certain factions are actually finished, and haven't seen new additions in years. 

This frees me up to enjoy and appreciate the things I have, rather than fixate on what I don't.  I think that's a pretty healthy way to approach life.

The Duellists - a great, intense little film

While I continue to crawl my way through the Ford Madox Ford biography, I'm also digging back into Joseph Conrad and came across his short story The Duel.

I then recalled that an excellent film of it had been made in 1977, The Duellists.  This was Ridley Scott's first movie and it's excellence gave a huge boost to his career.

The film is an excellent adaptation of a very Conradian tale - a rational, intelligent officer who inadvertently offends a hot-headed comrade and then is forced to fight duel after duel with him against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars. 

The film moves efficiently through the timeline, which runs from 1800 to 1816, and the costuming and atmosphere is superb.  The duels themselves are brilliantly choreographed.

It is also an example of using weapons to tell a story and the contrast between The Duellists and the decline and fall of lightsabers in Star Wars is pretty stark.

In short, it is a tight little movie of the kind that simply cannot be made today.

The Roman helmets of The Chosen are driving me nuts!

Okay, I'm a bit late to the party in tuning into The Chosen.  Sue me.

I'm only a couple of episodes into it, and I find it interesting, but...

those Roman helmets!

I hate being that guy who is always pointing out historical inaccuracies in movies, but given the attention to detail, I can't watch scenes with Roman soldier without gritting my teeth.

I mean, on the face of it, they're fine, decent copies of museum pieces.  The chrome shine on them is a bit unrealistic, but I'll allow it.

No, the problem is that the cheek pieces just flap around.  Um, hello?  No one can fight in that kind of gear.  The cheek pieces need to be laced together.

I mean, if an ultra-low-budget show like I, Claudius could get the right, surely The Chosen could have figured it out.  My hope is that some well-wisher got through to the production team and that withing a few episodes the troops will tie those mud flaps down.

A few more words about lightsabers

Earlier this week I posted an article about the decline and fall of lightsabers in Star Wars over at bleedingfool.com.

Right on cue, one of the new Disney Star Wars shows has a character take would should have been a moral wound and essentially walk it off.  Fans are not amused.

As I point out in my piece, the increasing overuse of lightsabers is illustrative of poor writing and increasingly feeble efforts to produce dramatic tension by substituting action for plot and character development.

People who don't know how to write a loaded conversation or create a compelling story will simply resort to extended fight scenes, but the more they resort to this, the less any of them matter.

Having characters survive mortal wounds completely unscathed is part and parcel of this.  Once that happens, the reader (or viewer) ceases to take the story seriously.  This is why in all of my fiction, not a single character has returned from the dead.  I have had characters who people assumed were dead come back, but that's different device which leaves the consequence of death intact.

I have to say that seeing how awful entertainment is these days is really shocking.  I know that the political scene is a disaster area, which is why I avoid it, but entertainment seems to be even worse.  Who approves this stuff?  Is there any concept of quality control? 

This is the consequence of three generations of nepotistic promotion, I suppose.  The current generation of studio heads have no real knowledge of life, art, or their audience - and it shows.

 

Another lesson from the garden: bait squash triumphant

Six years ago I contemplated how my plans to cultivate raspberries completely miscarried, and yet ultimately succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.

I'm now experiencing a similar phenomenon in regards to my garden.

This year I planted three crops within the fenced enclosure: carrots, snow peas and green onions.  The green onions never stood a change, the snow peas produced a little but are now on death's door.  The carrots seem to be doing well, but I'm in no hurry to harvest them.

But there's another crop that seems to be flourishing, and that is yellow squash.  I planted this outside the fence to act as something of a buffer.  Squash plants have tiny prickers so having a line of them (I reasoned) would reinforce my defensive line.

I also knew that one of the first crops I planted was squash and it did really well, with trivial losses to animals. 

Thus the irony: plants that I had no real investment in are now the primary hope for a successful year.  They germinated late because of the drought and I'd actually given up hope on them but now they're just taking off.  Last time we had so much squash that I had to give it away.  I'd love to have the same problem this years.